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comments we've ever heard -- not just from a candidate for office, but especially a candidate seeking the nomination for president of the United States," House Democratic campaign chairman Ben Ray Lujan, the first Hispanic to hold the job, told CNN.
For Democrats hoping to cut into the GOP's 58-seat majority in the House -- the largest since the World War II era -- the unpredictable 2016 political landscape is bolstering electoral prospects in key races from Texas to New Jersey. They see a Trump candidacy driving up turnout among women and minorities, while turning off moderate Republicans in swing areas and suburban districts, moving them closer to the 30 seats they need to recapture the House. Both sides acknowledge it's an uphill climb, but a lot can happen over the next seven months.
Former Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, a two-time chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, thinks the GOP is at risk of losing 20 seats, but says the way districts were drawn gives Republicans the upper hand in avoiding a wave that could sweep them out of the majority.
But he added that Trump's candidacy could further roil the landscape.
"It's something you have to worry about if the Trump campaign keeps deteriorating in some of these areas," Davis said.
'Deeply personal'
One of the most at-risk Republicans in the country is Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Miami-area Republican who represents a district with a huge Latino population. Curbelo is quick to stress he won't vote for Trump, and tells CNN that voters in his community recognize he doesn't share his views.
"He's just been so offensive to so many people in our country. I think that maybe after two decades of division, so much partisanship in our country, to go to someone who is even more partisan and more divisive would do harm to the country," Curbelo said.
But one of his Democratic challengers, Annette Taddeo, said her community feels "like a punching bag for some of the presidential candidates on the other side and that's been, I think, encouraging a lot of the people in my community to be more participatory in the process."
Pointing to increasing Hispanic voter registration in her Miami-area district, the Colombian-born Taddeo cited Trump as the key factor.
"Many of them that have become eligible to become citizens are becoming citizens so they can vote, so I'm seeing a lot of enthusiasm for our race, but it's also because it's just so deeply personal and not OK," she said.
Lujan admits the rise of Trump has created an environment no one expected in 2016. While he won't predict he can flip enough GOP seats to retake the majority, he confidently told CNN his party would pick up seats this fall.
"Speaker Paul Ryan and House Republicans cannot be separated from Donald Trump right now, and House Republicans know that," Lujan said in an interview in between meetings and fundraisers for a more than a dozen top-tier Democratic recruits visiting Washington recently.
Ryan is aggressively working to insulate rank-and-file House GOP members from Trump by launching an effort to draft a positive policy agenda for them to run on. He dismissed any talk that he could lose his gavel, saying House Republicans are "in control of our own actions."
"That means we are putting together an agenda to take to the country to show what we need to do to get this country back on the right track," Ryan told reporters. "We are doing exactly what people sent us here to do."
Testing a variety of themes
Democrats are testing a variety of themes to try to frame a nationally driven race with Trump as the standard-bearer for the Republican Party -- branding GOP candidates as extreme, anti-immigrant and unwilling to stand up to a bully.
Former Democratic Rep. Pete Gallego is running to win back the Texas border-area district he lost to GOP Rep. Will Hurd in 2014. In an interview with CNN, he took a shot at Hurd for not strongly denouncing the billionaire mogul for remarks about immigrants and his plan to build a wall along the border that he said business owners and ranchers oppose.
"I think he has kind of been cowering in the corner and staying away. For me, I think the issue isn't Mr. Trump. For me, the issue is if I'm your advocate, if I'm your representative, my job is to stand up for you and talk about you and defend you," Gallego said.
Justin Hollis, a spokesman for Hurd's campaign, told CNN the congressman has said "100 times that building a wall from sea to shining sea is the least effective and most expensive way to do border security," and added, "the only reason Pete Gallego is talking about Donald Trump is that he has no policy positions of his own."
In New Jersey, President Barack Obama lost the northern suburban district held by GOP Rep. Scott Garrett in 2012, but Josh Gottheimer, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton, thinks he has a chance to defeat the seventh-term Republican, who is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservatives. Gottheimer repeatedly links Garrett to Trump, who he says voters in his area reject because he doesn't get the concerns of suburban voters, who are sick of partisanship and gridlock in Washington.
"They don't want the extremism anymore, they don't want the tea party. And Garrett and Cruz and Trump, they are all bundled up in this extremism, out of touch. They want someone who is going to come and get things done," Gottheimer told CNN.
But Garrett's campaign manager, Sarah Neibart, told CNN that Gottheimer is "lying about partisanship" saying the congressman has "supported over 90 percent of bills signed into law by this Congress, and 100 percent of the bills that passed the House from the subcommittee Garrett chairs had bipartisan support."
Neibert argued Democrats have their own problem at the top of the ticket, saying "everyone who runs for Congress alongside Hillary Clinton while she is being investigated by the FBI will have the stink of corruption on them."
Challenging in more districts
Lujan initially planned to recruit candidates to run in 60-70 House districts, but Trump's candidacy is prompting him to find candidates in more places, and ramp up the effort to put them on the ballot through the filing deadlines, in some places into the fall.
David Wasserman, a non-partisan analyst with the Cook Political Report, shifted race ratings on 10 House districts earlier this month, all indicating that the GOP's grip on those seats is now less firm because of Trump. In a report explaining the moves, Wasserman wrote, "so many assumptions have been wrong this cycle that it's difficult to be definitive about another: that the House majority won't be in play in 2016."
Republican members and strategists publicly tout the math advantage they have: Democrats would need to pick up 30 seats to win back control. After redistricting efforts in 2010, the vast majority of House districts became more solidly red or blue, so the map for contested races is limited.
The National Republican Congressional Committee brushes off the notion that the battle for control of the House is at all competitive.
"House Democrats have been pushing their far-fetched fantasy about a wave election sweeping them to a majority every cycle since voters rejected Nancy Pelosi's speakership in 2010," Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the NRCC, told CNN.
And in areas with working-class white voters, Trump can potentially help House GOP candidates. His supporters argue he will boost turnout with new voters and unite the party to defeat the Democrat at the top of the ticket.
"There's one person we know that's going to keep America safe and strong and put America first and that is Donald Trump," New York Rep. Chris Collins, one of just seven House Republicans to formally back Trump.
Top GOP party officials and analysts also agree that despite Lujan's boasting of new recruits, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has failed to land top-tier candidates. They also point to weak approval ratings for Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' likely nominee, as a factor that could put their hope of taking over dozens of Republican seats out of reach.
But privately, Republicans acknowledge those members in swing districts across the country -- which are largely in suburban areas -- are increasingly at risk to lose with Trump likely at the top of the ticket in November.
Recently, Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock, a Republican whose suburban district is right outside Washington, donated $3,000 in campaign money she received from Trump to veterans groups after taking offense to Trump's comments about prisoners of war.
Davis, a Kasich supporter, said Republican incumbents in suburban or urban areas are in for a "tough ride" this fall if Trump is at the top of the ticket. He told CNN candidates in those areas should develop their own brand and avoid being on the same platform or being linked in any fashion to the controversial billionaire.
Illinois GOP Rep. Bob Dold, who is running a rematch against former Democratic Rep. Brad Schneider, who he unseated in 2014, admits his district, which includes suburban counties north of Chicago, may be the most competitive one in the country. And he's quick to disavow Trump.
"I've said before, I'll say again," Dold told CNN. "This is not someone that I support."Long-time Democrat and retired preschool teacher Marsha Cozart waits to get into an Asheville rally Monday by Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine. (Photo: Joel Burgess/jburgess@citizen-times.com)
ASHEVILLE - Tim Kaine's appearance Monday was a rally for the party faithful, but it was also meant to sway the fence-sitters and even the skeptical.
The stakes for all those North Carolina votes are high. Polling information shows Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump in a statistical dead heat, putting North Carolina's 15 electoral votes up for grabs.
Kaine, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, spoke to about 300 people at the Arthur R. Edington Education and Career Center in Asheville's Southside neighborhood. His speech was supposed to focus on jobs and the economy but also veered heavily into criticism of Trump.
Among those who came to hear Clinton's running mate were the die-hards, converted Bernie Sanders supporters and even self-described "Republicans for Hillary."
Retired pre-school teacher Marsha Cozart of Fairview said she'd supported Clinton "probably from the beginning. I’m a Democrat. I feel like that is my party."
"I think that tax changes they're proposing will create more jobs as opposed to not taxing the rich. I think Republicans seem to think that will create jobs but it hasn’t been the case," Cozart said. "Reagan tried that."
Retiree Jewell Wilson of Fairview was a field director for some former top Democrats, including Sen. Terry Sanford and Gov. Jim Hunt, and said she attended the rally as long-time Clinton supporter.
The ex-secretary of state and former senator was “best qualified,” had the “best experience” and had “honesty and integrity,” she said.
In terms of jobs, Wilson said Clinton’s campaign has “a real plan.”
“It’s not just pulling something out of the air, and I really think it is going to work,” she said. “I think they have economists who have helped them work these things out...They have experts giving them information they need, and it’s not just a dream.”
Lisa Davis, a part-time resident of Asheville and Naples, Florida, said she too had been decided for a long time. "That's like the Rock of Gibraltar decided," said Davis, a retiree who worked in magazine advertising.
"There is no ambivalence about this election. And anyone who has any needs a checkup from the neck up," she said.
But for some it was less clear cut.
History teacher John Martin of West Asheville voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. Backing Clinton now wasn't too difficult, he said.
“Because I agreed with 90 percent of what Sanders said and 80 percent of what Clinton said, and that’s a small difference to me.”
Martin joked that Kaine needed to work on his Trump impersonation and said one of the best speakers on the importance of job plans was Justin Tweed, a graduate of the nonprofit Green Opportunities who introduced Kaine’s wife Anne Holton with a story about his personal financial struggles and how he improved his life with GO’s job training.
Martin said he liked the plan described by Kaine to use increased corporate taxes to fund debt-free college education.
“As an educator, that really struck home for me.”
Others were less sure.
Alaysia Black-Hackett of Candler is director of diversity and multicultural affairs at Mars Hill and said she was undecided.
She said she was looking for "a productive" set of policies that would help make the country more financially stable and unified. She also said college debt needed to be reduced. But Black-Hackett said she was wary of plans that could cut money coming to colleges.
"I do know it takes finances to run a college."
The event even drew disaffected Republicans. Joe and Karen Scheliga of Weaverville said they are registered Republicans but came to the event because they don't want to vote for Trump.
"I just feel like the more we know about each one, the easier it will be when we get in there when we vote," Karen Scheliga said.
"We’re kind of Republicans for Hillary at this point," Joe Scheliga said.
"Basically, no thinking person could vote for Trump, even being a lifelong Republican," he said. "It’s a depressing race this year. I want to find out if this is the lesser of the evils. I’m very cynical."
Read or Share this story: http://avlne.ws/2bw60yLInvestigators do not believe man's death is suspicious
Body found by volunteer in pond at McKinley Park
A man's body was found Monday morning in the pond at Sacramento's McKinley Park by a community volunteer, police said.The woman was cleaning in the park with a group when she spotted the body floating in the pond.Police brought a boat to pull the body from the water.The man was in his 40s, but his name has not been released, Sacramento police said.Investigators do not believe the man's death is suspicious.An investigation is ongoing.Stay with KCRA and KCRA.com for more information.
A man's body was found Monday morning in the pond at Sacramento's McKinley Park by a community volunteer, police said.
The woman was cleaning in the park with a group when she spotted the body floating in the pond.
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Police brought a boat to pull the body from the water.
The man was in his 40s, but his name has not been released, Sacramento police said.
Investigators do not believe the man's death is suspicious.
An investigation is ongoing.
Stay with KCRA and KCRA.com for more information.
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Tombstone is a small Old Western town in southeastern Arizona that primarily flourished from 1877 and 1890. The city quickly became a center of tension between law enforcement and outlaws, with the most well-known conflict being the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Because of such confrontations, the Old City Cemetery was used after 1883 to only bury outlaws and a few others. The cemetery eventually became known as Boothill Graveyard, referring to the number of men who died with their boots on.
During my Say Hello To America 2016 road trip, I had a drive that would take me from Las Cruces, New Mexico to Tuscon. Knowing that my grandfather had a few photographs from Tombstone, including one of the famous Lester Moore epitaph, I made the decision to take a slight detour to visit the Old Western town. A bit turned off by the throngs of tourists in town, I expected to feel the same when I reached Boothill. Boy, was I wrong! Instead, I found myself very entertained at reading the unique — and sometimes humorous — grave markers and trying to imagine the circumstances of how these outlaws had died.
Despite being an obvious tourist attraction, I still highly recommend taking the time to visit Tombstone — specifically Boothill Graveyard. But if you don’t find yourself in southeast Arizona anytime soon, enjoy this collection of the quirky grave markers that hold the stories of the men that gave the cemetery its name!
A photo posted by Christian Carollo (@sayhellotoamerica) on Jul 19, 2016 at 8:53pm PDT
Which marker was your favorite?
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SaveA Muslim group in Germany has been asked to voluntarily disassemble their information stand at a local Christmas market after a significant number of complaints about their presence were lodged at the local town hall.
Best known for mulled wine, beer by the stein, and pork sausages, the typical German Christmas market may not seem like the obvious place to establish a Muslim information booth. Yet in the picturesque tourist-friendly town of Rüdesheim on the Rhine the traditional association of Christmas markets with Christianity has been challenged.
Some locals have expressed their concern at the presence of the stall, while others yet have expressed their concern at their neighbours who object to the Islam and Pakistan information booth. While the town hall has no power to require the stall to be closed down, following the complaints and meetings with local police it has been decided the stand may constitute a security risk.
Members of the Ahmadiyya Islamic community who established the information booth at the market, and are generally considered heretical and made the target of persecution by mainstream Muslims who object to their liberal interpretation of the Koran, were invited at the weekend to visit the town hall. Local paper the Wiesbadener Tagblatt reports they were asked to voluntarily remove themselves from the market.
The paper reports the remarks of one local who said of the Islam information stand: “This does not belong at a Christmas market!”
The mayor of Rüdesheim, who made the invitation to the Muslim group to leave, said he had done so because he believed there was a “potential of danger” posed by “violent public reactions” to the presence at the Christmas market. The negative reaction by locals was one he clearly did not share, telling the paper: “I am absolutely amazed there is so much intolerance.”
Members of the Ahmadi Muslim sect are gaining attention across Europe for being members of a rare and persecuted group, noted for its peaceful outlook and approach to other religions and cultures. Considered apostates and deserving of death by some other Muslims, Ahmadi Muslim and Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah was murdered earlier this year by Muslim Tanveer Ahmed.
The Sunni Muslim taxi driver drove more than 200 miles to kill Mr. Shah, a man he’d never met, because he felt he’d disrespected “the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, Allah, and Faith”.A dinosaur dig team has unearthed the skeleton of a massive triple-horned triceratops just east of Drumheller, Alta.
Palaeontologists took 12 long days unearthing the 2,000-kilogram — or 4,460-pound — herbivore earlier this summer in a location that's about a 30-minute drive from Drumheller.
Dr. François Therrien, curator of dinosaur palaeoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, said it looked like a huge “log jam” of bones in the dirt.
Therrien says a former employee noticed the 65 million-year-old fossil that was poking up after being exposed by erosion.
Once unearthed, it was discovered the vertebrae measured more than 60 centimetres and the ribs nearly two metres.
Therrien says triceratops bones are more common in Saskatchewan and Montana.
“It will allow us to compare the Alberta triceratops to those we find in Saskatchewan and those we find in Montana and see if there are some differences,” he said. “Maybe that discovery will provide us some information as to why triceratops is much rarer in Alberta than in Saskatchewan and Montana.”
Plans are underway to display the skeleton at the Royal Tyrrell Museum later this year.
“If visitors come during the winter they'll be able to see that triceratops being prepared,” he said. “As to when it will go on display, that's a big question. It will all depend on how long it takes to prepare the find.”
Until now, the Royal Tyrrell Museum has only had fragmentary triceratops remains in its collections.
Drumheller is located about 135 kilometres northeast of Calgary.List of prime numbers and notable types of prime numbers
A prime number (or prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. By Euclid's theorem, there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Subsets of the prime numbers may be generated with various formulas for primes. The first 1000 primes are listed below, followed by lists of notable types of prime numbers in alphabetical order, giving their respective first terms. 1 is neither prime nor composite.
The first 1000 prime numbers [ edit ]
The following table lists the first 1000 primes, with 20 columns of consecutive primes in each of the 50 rows.[1]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 1–20 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 21–40 73 79 83 89 97 101 103 107 109 113 127 131 137 139 149 151 157 163 167 173 41–60 179 181 191 193 197 199 211 223 227 229 233 239 241 251 257 263 269 271 277 281 61–80 283 293 307 311 313 317 331 337 347 349 353 359 367 373 379 383 389 397 401 409 81–100 419 421 431 433 439 443 449 457 461 463 467 479 487 491 499 503 509 521 523 541 101–120 547 557 563 569 571 577 587 593 599 601 607 613 617 619 631 641 643 647 653 659 121–140 661 673 677 683 691 701 709 719 727 733 739 743 751 757 761 769 773 787 797 809 141–160 811 821 823 827 829 839 853 857 859 863 877 881 883 887 907 911 919 929 937 941 161–180 947 953 967 971 977 983 991 997 1009 1013 1019 1021 1031 1033 1039 1049 1051 1061 1063 1069 181–200 1087 1091 1093 1097 1103 1109 1117 1123 1129 1151 1153 1163 1171 1181 1187 1193 1201 1213 1217 1223 201–220 1229 1231 1237 1249 1259 1277 1279 1283 1289 1291 1297 1301 1303 1307 1319 1321 1327 1361 1367 1373 221–240 1381 1399 1409 1423 1427 1429 1433 1439 1447 1451 1453 1459 1471 1481 1483 1487 1489 1493 1499 1511 241–260 1523 1531 1543 1549 1553 1559 1567 1571 1579 1583 1597 1601 1607 1609 1613 1619 1621 1627 1637 1657 261–280 1663 1667 1669 1693 1697 1699 1709 1721 1723 1733 1741 1747 1753 1759 1777 1783 1787 1789 1801 1811 281–300 1823 1831 1847 1861 1867 1871 1873 1877 1879 1889 1901 1907 1913 1931 1933 1949 1951 1973 1979 1987 301–320 1993 1997 1999 2003 2011 2017 2027 2029 2039 2053 2063 2069 2081 2083 2087 2089 2099 2111 2113 2129 321–340 2131 2137 2141 2143 2153 2161 2179 2203 2207 2213 2221 2237 2239 2243 2251 2267 2269 2273 2281 2287 341–360 2293 2297 2309 2311 2333 2339 2341 2347 2351 2357 2371 2377 2381 2383 2389 2393 2399 2411 2417 2423 361–380 2437 2441 2447 2459 2467 2473 2477 2503 2521 2531 2539 2543 2549 2551 2557 2579 2591 2593 2609 2617 381–400 2621 2633 2647 2657 2659 2663 2671 2677 2683 2687 2689 2693 2699 2707 2711 2713 2719 2729 2731 2741 401–420 2749 2753 2767 2777 2789 2791 2797 2801 2803 2819 2833 2837 2843 2851 2857 2861 2879 2887 2897 2903 421–440 2909 2917 2927 2939 2953 2957 2963 2969 2971 2999 3001 3011 3019 3023 3037 3041 3049 3061 3067 3079 441–460 3083 3089 3109 3119 3121 3137 3163 3167 3169 3181 3187 3191 3203 3209 3217 3221 3229 3251 3253 3257 461–480 3259 3271 3299 3301 3307 3313 3319 3323 3329 3331 3343 3347 3359 3361 3371 3373 3389 3391 3407 3413 481–500 3433 3449 3457 3461 3463 3467 3469 3491 3499 3511 3517 3527 3529 3533 3539 3541 3547 3557 3559 3571 501–520 3581 3583 3593 3607 3613 3617 3623 3631 3637 3643 3659 3671 3673 3677 3691 3697 3701 3709 3719 3727 521–540 3733 3739 3761 3767 3769 3779 3793 3797 3803 3821 3823 3833 3847 3851 3853 3863 3877 3881 3889 3907 541–560 3911 3917 3919 3923 3929 3931 3943 3947 3967 3989 4001 4003 4007 4013 4019 4021 4027 4049 4051 4057 561–580 4073 4079 4091 4093 4099 4111 4127 4129 4133 4139 4153 4157 4159 4177 4201 4211 4217 4219 4229 4231 581–600 4241 4243 4253 4259 4261 4271 4273 4283 4289 4297 4327 4337 4339 4349 4357 4363 4373 4391 4397 4409 601–620 4421 4423 4441 4447 4451 4457 4463 4481 4483 4493 4507 4513 4517 4519 4523 4547 4549 4561 4567 4583 621–640 4591 4597 4603 4621 4637 4639 4643 4649 4651 4657 4663 4673 4679 4691 4703 4721 4723 4729 4733 4751 641–660 4759 4783 4787 4789 4793 4799 4801 4813 4817 4831 4861 4871 4877 4889 4903 4909 4919 4931 4933 4937 661–680 4943 4951 4957 4967 4969 4973 4987 4993 4999 5003 5009 5011 5021 5023 5039 5051 5059 5077 5081 5087 681–700 5099 5101 5107 5113 5119 5147 5153 5167 5171 5179 5189 5197 5209 5227 5231 5233 5237 5261 5273 5279 701–720 5281 5297 5303 5309 5323 5333 5347 5351 5381 5387 5393 5399 5407 5413 5417 5419 5431 5437 5441 5443 721–740 5449 5471 5477 5479 5483 5501 5503 5507 5519 5521 5527 5531 5557 5563 5569 5573 5581 5591 5623 5639 741–760 5641 5647 5651 5653 5657 5659 5669 5683 5689 5693 5701 5711 5717 5737 5741 5743 5749 5779 5783 5791 761–780 5801 5807 5813 5821 5827 5839 5843 5849 5851 5857 5861 5867 5869 5879 5881 5897 5903 5923 5927 5939 781–800 5953 5981 5987 6007 6011 6029 6037 6043 6047 6053 6067 6073 6079 6089 6091 6101 6113 6121 6131 6133 801–820 6143 6151 6163 6173 6197 6199 6203 6211 6217 6221 6229 6247 6257 6263 6269 6271 6277 6287 6299 6301 821–840 6311 6317 6323 6329 6337 6343 6353 6359 6361 6367 6373 6379 6389 6397 6421 6427 6449 6451 6469 6473 841–860 6481 6491 6521 6529 6547 6551 6553 6563 6569 6571 6577 6581 6599 6607 6619 6637 6653 6659 6661 6673 861–880 6679 6689 6691 6701 6703 6709 6719 6733 6737 6761 6763 6779 6781 6791 6793 6803 6823 6827 6829 6833 881–900 6841 6857 6863 6869 6871 6883 6899 6907 6911 6917 6947 6949 6959 6961 6967 6971 6977 6983 6991 6997 901–920 7001 7013 7019 7027 7039 7043 7057 7069 7079 7103 7109 7121 7127 7129 7151 7159 7177 7187 7193 7207 921–940 7211 7213 7219 7229 7237 7243 7247 7253 7283 7297 7307 7309 7321 7331 7333 7349 7351 7369 7393 7411 941–960 7417 7433 7451 7457 7459 7477 7481 7487 7489 7499 7507 7517 7523 7529 7537 7541 7547 7549 7559 7561 961–980 7573 7577 7583 7589 7591 7603 7607 7621 7639 7643 7649 7669 7673 7681 7687 7691 7699 7703 7717 7723 981–1000 7727 7741 7753 7757 7759 7789 7793 7817 7823 7829 7841 7853 7867 7873 7877 7879 7883 7901 7907 7919
(sequence A000040 in the OEIS).
The Goldbach conjecture verification project reports that it has computed all primes below 4×1018.[2] That means 95,676,260,903,887,607 primes[3] (nearly 1017), but they were not stored. There are known formulae to evaluate the prime-counting function (the number of primes below a given value) faster than computing the primes. This has been used to compute that there are 1,925,320,391,606,803,968,923 primes (roughly 2×1021) below 1023. A different computation found that there are 18,435,599,767,349,200,867,866 primes (roughly 2×1022) below 1024, if the Riemann hypothesis is true.[4]
Lists of primes by type [ edit ]
Below are listed the first prime numbers of many named forms and types. More details are in the article for the name. n is a natural number (including 0) in the definitions.
Primes that are the number of partitions of a set with n members.
2, 5, 877, 27644437, 35742549198872617291353508656626642567, 359334085968622831041960188598043661065388726959079837. The next term has 6,539 digits. (OEIS: A051131)
Of the form (2n−1)2 − 2.
7, 47, 223, 3967, 16127, 1046527, 16769023, 1073676287, 68718952447, 274876858367, 4398042316799, 1125899839733759, 18014398241046527, 1298074214633706835075030044377087 (OEIS: A091516)
Of the form (3n2 + 3n + 2) / 2.
19, 31, 109, 199, 409, 571, 631, 829, 1489, 1999, 2341, 2971, 3529, 4621, 4789, 7039, 7669, 8779, 9721, 10459, 10711, 13681, 14851, 16069, 16381, 17659, 20011, 20359, 23251, 25939, 27541, 29191, 29611, 31321, 34429, 36739, 40099, 40591, 42589 (OEIS: A125602)
Where p is prime and p+2 is either a prime or semiprime.
2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 47, 53, 59, 67, 71, 83, 89, 101, 107, 109, 113, 127, 131, 137, 139, 149, 157, |
European women care little about your wealth. “What they really care about in men is whether they have a good character and their attitude toward family,” he said.
Yuan is dating a Ukrainian woman, and he’s not alone.
“In recent years, more of my friends are also going to [Eastern Europe] to find wives. Some of them already have,” he added.
While stories of Chinese men finding love in unexpected places have appeared on Chinese social media and the international press, they belie a darker reality: rampant sex trafficking in China and its neighboring countries.
Marriage in China has been upended by a mix of demographic changes, traditional customs, and market forces. At the heart of the problem is a greatly skewed gender balance with significantly more men of marrying age than women. As a result, men have resorted to different extremes when it comes to finding a bride – some far more sinister than others, whether they know it or not.
As some middle-class Chinese men have turned to Eastern Europe, poor bachelors in rural areas have resorted to mail-order brides from Southeast Asia, which has fueled sex trafficking.
Last month, the U.S. State Department labeled China a Tier 3 human trafficker, stating the country “does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so.” China was downgraded from previous years and now joins countries like Mali, Iran, and North Korea on the Tier 3 list as the worst traffickers in the world.
A Generation of Bachelors
A significant driver of sex trafficking in China is the lingering effect of its greatest social experiment: the One Child Policy. Introduced in 1979 and only eased in 2015, the One Child Policy has saddled China with serious demographic challenges.
Traditionally a patriarchal society, Chinese families have long preferred to have sons, but the introduction of the One Child Policy and sonograms led parents to undergo gender-selective abortions. This resulted in a yawning gender gap. According to government estimates, by 2020 there will be at least 30 million more men of marrying age than women.
Adding to the gender imbalance, the One Child Policy put fertility rates below replacement levels. So China is now faced with a rapidly shrinking and aging workforce, a crippling economic and social trend.
By 2050, the number of Chinese older than 65 will climb to 329 million – roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States. As China’s seniors age out of the workforce, there are fewer and fewer people to replace them. Currently, there are five workers for every retiree, but by 2040 that ratio will shrink to 1.6 to 1.
In light of these demographic trends, getting married and having children has become a national imperative, which is why the state has taken to issuing propaganda encouraging men to go abroad and find wives.
One infographic published by the state-run Beijing News urges young bachelors to look beyond China’s borders and includes a chart detailing the countries where they have the best prospects. According to the graphic, Ukraine is a good option due to the economic downturn and the number of beautiful women. Other promising countries include South Korea, Japan, and Russia.
Ukraine in particular has captured the imaginations of Chinese men after pictures began circulating online of a man from Hebei who failed China’s notorious college entrance exam, moved to Ukraine, and married an 18-year-old woman there. One commenter wrote, “Already in line in front of the Ukrainian Embassy,” while another said, “Ukrainian women sure are enchanting, drool.”
More recently, an Anhui man caused a stir on social media when he returned to China for a traditional wedding with his Ukrainian fiancé.
For Richer, For Poorer
Going abroad to find a partner may be an option for well-heeled Chinese men, but poor, uneducated bachelors in rural villages have few options.
In China, families see marriage as an opportunity for daughters to advance by marrying someone who is wealthy and educated. An online survey found that nearly 75 percent of women hope their future husband’s income is twice as large as theirs, and over 70 percent hope their future husband owns property.
With much of China’s wealth concentrated in cities, women have left rural areas in the hopes of finding more eligible bachelors. This urban migration of women has given rise to “bachelor villages,” towns in China’s countryside with disproportionately large numbers of single, unmarried men and few unmarried women. In some villages the situation is so extreme boys are expected to begin looking for a wife when they are 10 years old.
By favoring men at birth, Chinese parents have made women far more valued in marriage. In China, grooms are still expected to give their bride’s family a dowry. With so many men competing for a woman’s attention, these “bride prices” have increased dramatically. A recent study found that men in Beijing pay on average nearly $30,000 plus an apartment, up from $1,500 just four years ago.
Bride prices in rural areas have also seen sharp increases. In Guizhou, the cost rose to $13,000 from $3,000 four years ago, and in Shaanxi it rose from $4,400 to $14,700. These amounts are well beyond the means for poor farmers and their families, so many have turned to marriage brokers to find women from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The trend has been well-documented, and in some areas fairly common. In one remote village deep in the mountains of Henan, more than 20 Vietnamese women have wed local men. Marrying a Vietnamese bride costs $3,200, less than a quarter of the bride price for a local woman.
While many Vietnamese women willingly get married and move to rural China for love or economic reasons, others are forced.
Last year, doctors at a hospital in Xuzhou were alarmed by a pregnant 12-year-old Vietnamese girl. The authorities were alerted and police discovered that she was a victim of human trafficking. She had been kidnapped, taken to China, and sold to a 35-year-old man for $4,400. Hers is not an isolated case.
There are few statistics that detail the full extent of the problem, but over a year-and-a-half period, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security reported rescuing 17,746 trafficked women as part of a special campaign.
In 2015, the Cambodian government helped 85 trafficked brides return from China. They were the fortunate few who managed to escape and make their way to a Cambodian consulate.
“You can be sure that for every woman who escapes her captivity in China and returns to Cambodia, there are dozens more that never make it out,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
Vietnam, which shares a rugged and isolated border with China, has been hit particularly hard by human traffickers. In some areas in northern Vietnam, so many young women have been kidnapped and smuggled into China that residents live in perpetual fear.
“I worry so much about it, as do all the mothers in the villages, but it has happened to a lot of girls already,” said Phan Pa May, a community elder. “I’m worried about my granddaughter. We always ask where she is going, and tell her not to talk on the phone or trust anyone.”
Swept Under the Rug
China’s efforts to crack down on human trafficking have been inconsistent. Over the last several years, the number of arrests has fluctuated wildly. In 2012, the government detained 80,000 human trafficking suspects, but just two years later, authorities reported arresting 194 alleged traffickers. The following year, the number of arrests increased to 1,932.
According to the U.S. State Department, these dramatic variations in enforcement numbers are “due to the government’s continued conflation of human smuggling, child abduction, and fraudulent adoptions with trafficking offenses and its lack of judicial due process and transparency.”
More damagingly, inconsistent enforcement and penalties are a weak deterrent against potential traffickers and shows the government is not serious about putting an end to it.
“This problem has largely been swept under the rug by the Chinese authorities,” Robertson said.
The likelihood of making significant progress to combat sex trafficking in China is small. The pressures fueling the demand for foreign brides are too strong, while the incentives for the government to crack down are too weak.
The massive gender gap, intense cultural pressure to marry, traditional dowries, and China’s embrace of unbridled capitalism has created a highly-competitive market for brides. Monetary values have quite literally been assigned to women. Economic pressures encourage those with lesser means to “shop around” and find the lowest price, which provides ample opportunities for human smugglers to exploit.
If China is serious about stamping out sex trafficking it will need to do more than just prosecute criminals; it must change the cultural norms around marriage. No effort to stop trafficking will be successful until marriage is no longer seen as a financial transaction.
Even if China has the ability and the will to change its marriage culture, the country will still have to grapple with the social implications of 30 million bachelors who will never find a wife. But with the future of China’s workforce, economic development, and long-term stability at stake, the government has little motivation to clamp down on sex trafficking. China’s neighbors best be wary.
Eugene K. Chow writes on foreign policy and military affairs. He has been published in The Week, Huffington Post, and The Diplomat.Involving your fans in your creative process will not only build engagement and trust within your community, it will likely become one of your best marketing devices. The more included your fans feel in your process, the more likely they are to tell their friends about you and help grow your audience.
On the flip side, leaving your community in the dark or not listening to them can tarnish your reputation as a creator and keep you from growing your fanbase. If your existing audience doesn’t feel like part of your community, you will have an increasingly hard time welcoming newcomers into your circle.
Whether you’re a creator on Patreon looking for some cool reward ideas or simply interested in trying out new ways to engage with your audience, keep reading. Below are five fun and rewarding ways you can involve your fans in your next project that’ll help you boost engagement and deepen your relationship with your audience.
Have them create content around your work
Patreon creator Happy D has perfected the art of fan-generated content. She starts by creating a high-resolution line drawing, then sends it out to her patrons to color in using whatever medium they’d like. They’ll post the final piece to her activity feed, where she’ll select a few fans to feature each month on her social media channels.
Just one of many coloring submissions on Happy’s patron feed.
A capella group Pentatonix also knows how to take advantage of fan-made creations. They regularly include Pentaholics (yes, their fans gave themselves a name!) in music videos, and a couple band members once even took it upon themselves to act out a story written by a fan on their personal Youtube channel.
Not only does this give existing patrons a fun way to interact with a creator they love, but chances are featured fans will reshare the posts to their own communities. Getting your fans to talk about you to their friends is one of the most effective ways to grow your following, as it carries with it a sense of trust and validation in your authenticity.
Ask them for feedback (and utilize it!)
One of the best parts of having a community of your most loyal fans easily accessible to you is that you always have a great place to go for feedback. If you’re not asking for feedback on a regular basis, you’re missing out on a ton of valuable insight into how you can improve and continue growing your fanbase.
Whether you’re just starting a new project or knee-deep in an existing one, consider what questions have been circulating in your mind and what decisions you have to make. Now outsource them!
With Patreon’s new polling feature, it’s easier than ever to quickly ask your fans questions about your work. If you’re hoping to dig deeper into what your fans think or get a better sense of how they consume your content, what they eat for breakfast, etc., sites like Typeform provide survey templates and analytics that’ll give you a quick understanding in how your community feels about you.
Keep in mind, you don’t need thousands of fans to make feedback worth it–even just asking a few people what they think of something you did will provide you tremendous value and save you a lot of guesswork.
Give them a sneak peek
Your bare-bones audio track or your scribbled-in notebook may not seem very appealing to you, but chances are your fans would be stoked to get a glimpse into raw, unfinished pieces of your work.
Artist and Patreon creator Kate Fox had no formal training in art before taking up drawing and illustration as a hobby. Now, she regularly shares timelapse videos of her works in progress so interested fans can learn the methods she uses to create.
A screenshot from one of Fox‘s timelapse process videos.
You don’t need to commit a lot of time to giving your fans a glimpse into your process. If you’re a visual artist, start by taking a photo of your canvas at the beginning of a new piece. Musician? Share a rough recording of a song you’re working on. Writer? Let fans see the cover of your upcoming book a little early or share an image that inspired the story you’re working on.
Giving fans a peek into your process will help get them excited about seeing the final piece! Not only that, involving your fans early in your project can be a great motivator for you to finish it. Chances are, some superfans will be asking about the finished product later down the line. How’s that for accountability?
Feature them
Whether it’s a big “patron of the week” spotlight or a little shoutout in the credits of a video, there are few better ways to show your fans you care than by publicly announcing it to the rest of your community.
Creator Joel Watson gives his patrons a special shoutout in a video posted to his Patreon page.
The team behind Kurzgesagt has a fun way of showing appreciation for their fans. At a certain pledge level, patrons receive customized bird avatars that they can then use anywhere on the internet. In addition, Kurzgesagt will feature the birds in upcoming videos, as well as add the bird to a digital “patron tree of thanks.”
Comic book artist and podcaster Joel Watson sketches avatars of some of his fans as well. He also makes sure to give regular shoutouts at the end of his videos. Musician Nate Maingard takes a portion of his earnings each month to plant trees in their names.
However you decide to do it, featuring your community is a great way to create a lasting impression on the fans who matter most and give potential fans an idea of just how amazing you are.
Host a monthly livestream
Invite your superfans to join you in an online video hangout where you share sneak peeks into your work and give updates about where they can find you next (this is a great place to promote any upcoming gigs you might have!)
Ask fans ahead of time what burning questions they have that they’d like to see answered during the livestream and save a section towards the end to answer them thoughtfully. Invite some other creators or superfans to join you every now and then.
Patreon CEO Jack Conte and Taryn Arnold have fun on Hangtime.
We host a monthly Crowdcast (join us for our next one here) for creators on or interested in Patreon that follows this formula, but feel free to get creative and be YOU. There’s no need to create a script for your stream but you probably should have an idea about what sort of things you want to talk about or share ahead of time. This way fans have something to get excited about and saves you from awkward moments of silence.
If you already regularly make videos for your fans, a livestream is a fun and easy way to make them more interactive. If you’ve never hosted a livestream before, don’t fret! Sites like Huzza make it easy to offer the video as a special perk to a certain patron tier. Google Hangouts and Skype work well too.
What other fun ways have you involved your fans in your work? Let me know in the comments!Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports
In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.
A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.
"I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes," Ashcroft said.
Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, "Frankly, I don't. That's the answer."
Earlier this week, the Justice Department leased a NASA-owned G-3 Gulfstream for a 6-day trip to Western states. Such aircraft cost the government more than $1,600 an hour to fly. When asked whether Ashcroft was paying for any portion of the trips devoted to personal business, a Justice Department spokeswoman declined to respond.
All other Bush Cabinet appointees, with the exception of Interior and Energy with remote sites to oversee, fly commercial airliners. Janet Reno, Ashcroft's predecessor as attorney general, also routinely flew commercial. The secretaries of State and Defense traditionally travel with extra security on military planes.
The Justice Department insists that it wasn't Ashcroft who wanted to fly leased aircraft. That idea, they said, came strictly from Ashcroft's FBI security detail. The FBI had no further comment.
©MMI, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights ReservedIn her first major policy move since taking office, Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx is dramatically raising the bar for charging shoplifters with a felony crime.
Prosecutors were told Monday that retail theft charges should remain a misdemeanor unless the value of the stolen goods exceeds $1,000 or the alleged shoplifter has 10 prior felony convictions — a significant leap from the current standard of a single felony conviction.
Illinois has long had one of the lowest thresholds for filing felony retail theft charges in the Midwest, leading critics to argue that too many nonviolent offenders — many of them older and with significant mental health or addiction issues — were locked up at taxpayer expense for months or even years.
State legislators in 2010 raised the standard for felony shoplifting charges from the theft of goods worth $300 to $500, but have not acted on efforts by politicians including Foxx's predecessor, Anita Alvarez, to raise the bar to $1,000.
Under the new standards, prosecutors in the felony review unit remain free to approve felony charges if they believe the circumstances call for them.
"The move clarifies guidelines for how felony retail theft cases will be handled to ensure consistency in charging and to prioritize limited resources," spokeswoman Tandra Simonton said in a statement. "Prosecutors will retain the discretion to review cases and take appropriate action on a case by case basis."
It remains to be seen what the practical effect of the shift will be, but supporters of the move have predicted it will lead to a significant decrease in the number of shoplifters locked up in Cook County Jail. Nearly 80 percent of felony retail theft cases charged in Illinois between 2010 and 2012 were for a loss of less than $1,000, according to an analysis by the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council.
As of Wednesday, there were 101 people at Cook County Jail on felony retail theft charges, many of whom have spent months locked up because they can't afford even a low cash bail, said Cara Smith, policy chief for Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart.
Last year, 76 defendants charged with felony shoplifting spent more time in jail than their eventual prison sentence, serving a total of 4,159 "dead days," she said.
The extra cost to taxpayers? Nearly $674,000, according to county estimates.
"They're a population we've long advocated should not be in the jail," Smith said.
A representative at the Illinois Retail Merchants Association could not be reached Wednesday. Some prosecutors and police wondered how the new procedure would play out and if storekeepers would call police knowing the alleged shoplifters likely won't be charged with a felony.
Illinois law now allows for Class 4 felony shoplifting charges even in cases in which the loss is less than $300 if the suspect has a prior conviction. Class 3 felony charges are filed in cases with a loss of $500 or more.
A study this year by the Pew Charitable Trusts that reviewed crime trends in 23 states that loosened felony theft thresholds found that crime dropped, on average, roughly the same in those states as in other states, and that there was no correlation between the felony threshold and property crime or larceny rates.
In Wisconsin, the felony threshold is a $2,500 loss, and the figure is $1,000 in Michigan and $750 in Indiana.
"I think this is a really positive step," said Ali Abid, staff attorney at the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, who said keeping nonviolent offenders locked up only increased their chances of drug abuse and committing another crime.
Public Defender Amy Campanelli also welcomed the new procedure, saying it was a step toward achieving a larger social goal of providing nonviolent offenders with treatment to keep them from re-offending.
Freelance reporter Nick Swedberg contributed.
sschmadeke@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @SteveSchmadeke“We’re not pulling the rug out from under anybody,” said Tom Price, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. The goal of the House’s and the Senate’s health plans, and the Trump administration’s goal, he said, is “ensuring that there are more individuals who are insured under the new plan than under the old plan”—the old plan being the Affordable Care Act.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, however, has estimated that under the American Health Care Act introduced by the House, the number of uninsured people would increase by 23 million. (There is not an estimate for the Senate bill yet.)
Price was interviewed Sunday by The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. If the goal of the bills is to get health insurance to more people, and the CBO score says the House bill, at least, will not—how to explain that discrepancy? Goldberg asked. “Is the CBO wrong?”
“Yes,” Price said. “The CBO does a great job on budget; they do a relatively poor job of what the coverage consequences of a healthcare plan are. Their ability—anybody’s ability—to predict what human behavior is going to be without looking at the entire construct, is difficult. I would suggest to you that the numbers the CBO had before with the ACA, and the numbers they have now, are not accurate.”CLOSE IndyStar's Curt Cavin discusses Indianapolis 500 qualifying, culminating in James Hinchliffe's last-run surge to the pole position. Clark Wade/IndyStar
Buy Photo IndyCar driver James Hinchcliffe (5) celebrates with team owner Sam Schmidt,right, winning the pole position100th running of the Indianapolis 500 on Armed Forces Pole Day Sunday, May 22, 2016, afternoon at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (Photo: Matt Kryger/IndyStar)Buy Photo
Two minutes. That’s all James Hinchcliffe had before dying in the shock room of IU Health Methodist Hospital. That’s what his surgeon, Dr. Timothy Pohlman, was thinking after he lost Hinchcliffe’s pulse on May 18, 2015.
“Come on, Hinch,” Pohlman remembers thinking. “Give me two minutes.”
It was the week of the 2015 Indianapolis 500. The right front suspension of Hinchcliffe’s car had failed during practice, sending his Honda into the wall at about 220 mph. The right side of the car broke apart. A piece of it went into his left thigh, puncturing the artery on its way out the other side of the leg.
Hinchcliffe had two potentially mortal wounds, both spewing blood, and in the ambulance on the way to the hospital Pohlman was wadding up rolls of gauze and stuffing them into both holes. The gauze kept filling with blood. Pohlman removed it and shoved more in there.
Come on, Hinch. Give me two minutes.
* * *
CLOSE Meet the field for the 100th Indianapolis 500. Clark Wade/IndyStar
Two-and-a-half minutes. That’s all James Hinchcliffe had to finish this weekend the right way. That’s what he knew as he climbed into the cockpit of his car on Sunday, the last qualifier in the Fast Nine shootout, the last IndyCar driver with a chance to unseat Josef Newgarden for the pole of the 2016 Indianapolis 500.
“You know what you have to beat, which is an advantage,” Hinchcliffe said Sunday. “But when it’s a really quick time, it’s a disadvantage because sometimes you can get into your head.”
Newgarden averaged 230.700 mph for his four-lap sprint around the gusty IMS oval. One lap into his turn, Hinchcliffe was running faster. The scoreboard showed his Lap 1 speed at 230.885 mph.
On pit road, Hinchcliffe’s father started to hyperventilate.
“I was afraid I was going to pass out,” Jeremy Hinchcliffe told me Sunday. “My heart was beating so fast.”
On the track, Hinchcliffe was churning out pole-worthy laps. He went 230.940 mph on Lap 2. Then 230.765 on Lap 3. When he was finished with Lap 4, barely 2½ minutes after he started, the clock showed his average speed at 230.760 mph — six-hundredths of a second faster than Newgarden. Only three times in the previous 99 runnings of the Indy 500 was the gap smaller between the pole and the No. 2 qualifier.
On pit road Hinchcliffe climbed out of his car, pulled off his helmet and flame-resistant hat and looked for his parents. There was his mom, Arlene. He hugged her. And there was his dad. Hinchcliffe squeezed Jeremy on the shoulder.
“We did it, Dad,” he said. “We did it.”
Buy Photo James Hinchcliffe (5) celebrates with his father Jeremy, left, after winning the pole position for the 100th Indy 500. (Photo: Kristin Enzor / for IndyStar)
* * *
The best laps of the day absolutely belonged to James Hinchcliffe’s team. The question is, did they belong to James Hinchcliffe?
Several hours before Hinchcliffe’s ride, his boss had gotten behind the wheel of a 2016 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and taken it for a spin around IMS. Sam Schmidt, co-owner of Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, drove that thing around the oval at an average speed of 108.642 mph.
“Frankly,” Hinchcliffe was saying later, “what I did today pales in comparison.”
Maybe so. Hinchcliffe had been driving with his hands and his feet. Schmidt was … not.
A January 2000 crash at Walt Disney World Speedway in Florida left Schmidt, a former IndyCar driver who won the 1999 Vegas.Com 500 on the old IRL circuit, paralyzed from the neck down. He always did want to drive again, though. He wanted to do a lot of things after becoming a quadriplegic. He wanted to own a team — check. Wanted to drive again. Check. He also wants to walk again. Hopes to accompany his daughter, now 18, down the aisle whenever she gets married.
On Sunday he drove that 2016 Corvette — modified into a semi-autonomous motorcar (SAM) developed by Arrow Electronics — at speeds reaching 152 mph. He turned his head to steer. Breathed into a mouthpiece to speed up or slow down.
Drove 152 mph with his head.
“I can’t wait for next year,” Hinchcliffe said, “when he makes it 175.”
Buy Photo James Hinchcliffe fans cheer him on as he won the pole position for the Indianapolis 500 on Armed Forces Pole Day Sunday, May 22, 2016, afternoon at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. (Photo: Matt Kryger/IndyStar)
This was a day to dream, because dreams clearly were coming true. All three Schmidt-Peterson drivers — Hinchcliffe (first), Mikhail Aleshin (seventh) and Oriol Servia (10th) — earned places in the top 10 for next week’s Indy 500. That put Schmidt Peterson on equal terms with the biggest, baddest teams in IndyCar, teams with bigger names and deeper pockets, teams named Penske and Ganassi and Andretti.
Leading the way was Hinchcliffe, who didn’t race again in 2015 after his wreck, but who was saying even from his hospital bed that he would be back.
“They said he’d be in ICU for 10 days — he was out in three,” said his dad, Jeremy. “They said he wouldn’t walk for 14 days — he was walking in four. They said he wouldn’t get into a car for nine months. It took him four.”
He was behind the wheel to open the 2016 season, he has finished in the top 20 in all five races, and he is getting better by the week: 19th in St. Petersburg, 18th at Phoenix, eighth at Long Beach, sixth at Birmingham and third last week at the Angie’s List Grand Prix of Indianapolis.
Now this. His first career pole. At the 100th Indianapolis 500. Almost one year to the day when he was two minutes from dying near this same track.
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Neither Hinchcliffe nor Schmidt are satisfied, of course.
“I think it's a huge story,” Schmidt said. “I’d like to have a better one next week for sure. That would make a movie.”
Who, Hinchcliffe was asked, would play you?
“There’s still one big thing to check off the box before we start talking about movie rights,” he said.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyelA few decades back, television sets were considered a high tech and luxurious item. However, the manufacturers wanted to make them look as beautiful and futuristic as possible. There was a craze for space technology at that time as well and this motivated the leading television manufacturers to incorporate this aesthetic into their products. Here is a list four such television sets that feature space age designs:
1. Orange Sharp Portable TV # SW-11W
The Sharp 3S-111R is a portable retro television that comes with a unique orange color. It has a black and white small screen that is made by Solid State. The product comes along with a coaxial cable and an AC adapter as well. You can see a retractable handle in the front of this television, which can be used to transport it. You can also find a telescoping antenna on top of it. This television sits on a swivel base as well and it is connected to the AC adapter.
2. Rodolfo Bonetto, Linea 1 Television for Autovox, 1969 –
The Linea 1 comes with a unique design, which came from the mind of an Italian industrial designer named Rodolfo Bonetto. In fact, this television contains elements of many different modernist design trends and influences. Common to this period, the developers have introduced a new plastic material to this television to enhance its durability.
3. JVC Model 3240 (3250) VideoSphere Television
The JVC Model 3240 looks like the helmet of a spaceman. The unique design contributed a lot towards its popularity during 1970s. The controls of this television are located on top of it. In addition, you can see a chrome chain on top of the television, which can be used to carry it. You can also use this handle to hang the television from your ceiling. At the base of JVC 3240, you can see an alarm clock that is paired with a sleep timer. The power plug is located on the rear panel.
4. 1980s Philips Disoverer Space Helmet TV
The Philips Discover became extremely popular during the 1980s. In fact, many boys and girls wanted to get a one for their bedrooms. This television looks like a space helmet and it is paired with an anti-glare pull down visor. You can also see some several wheels at the back of this television, which can easily be used to position it.For most of my life, bologna—that flabby, flaccid mystery meat most often spotted between two mayo-slathered slices of Wonder Bread—was something to be avoided at all costs. So imagine my surprise when I learned that in its native town of Bologna, the Italian counterpart commands the same reverence as a fine prosciutto, with top specimens fetching up to 20 euros per kilo. Known as mortadella, this subtly seasoned delicacy made of lean pork speckled with lumps of lard is a far cry from the stuff found in the deli aisles of American supermarkets.
It also boasts a rather distinguished history. Two millennia ago, it fed the Roman army, as stone tablets contained in Bologna's Museo Civico Archeologico attest. In the Middle Ages, roughly 10,000 people, a quarter of the city's population, were involved in its production at around 280 salumerie. Foreigners—from Napoleon, who brought it back to France, to Buffalo Bill, who flew to Italy to promote it—took a shine to the stuff over the years. Sophia Loren's character even attempted to smuggle one past US customs in the 1971 film La Mortadella.
A massive mortadella at Caffe Zamboni. All photos by the author.
piadine
Today, mortadella is ubiquitous in Bologna; it's whipped into a savory mousse, ground into meatballs, grilled with aged balsamic vinegar, stuffed into tortellini, and piled into. For the past three years, the city has hosted MortadellaBò, a festival in its honor complete with food trucks, competitions, and public tastings. Such obsession would be noteworthy anywhere, but in a place nicknamed "la grassa"—literally, "the fat one"—for its gloriously calorie-dense cuisine, it had to mean something.
Intrigued, I book a flight to where it all started. My first stop in Bologna is the Quadrilatero, a web of alleys dating back to medieval times, where a plaque marks the former site of L'Arte dei Salaroli, an ancient guild of charcuterers dedicated to protecting the integrity of their product. Founded in 1242, the organization was once so powerful that its symbol was part of the official city crest. In 1661, the papacy officially laid down the legal definition of mortadella, threatening dire consequences for those who dared to go against the guild.
Davide Simoni.
"Why mortadella? Because it was difficult to cook it and difficult to cut it finely, so it required a lot of patience and skill. The people who could cook mortadella back then, they were like Ronaldo or Messi," Davide Simoni, whose family has been in the mortadella business for three generations, tells me. His shop, Simoni Laboratorio, is just up the street from the historical site of the guild. An energetic man in his thirties, Davide is determined to keep the mortadella-making traditions alive and to preserve the history behind them. He shows me the copy of a decree from 1720 framed on his wall. "This says if you make fake mortadella without the approval of the Salaroli, your body will be stretched on the rack three times, you will be fined 200 gold coins, and all the food you make will be destroyed. It makes you understand how important it was."
As he tells me about his father Nino Simoni, who at 69 is still running the Salumeria Simoni up the street, as well as his two years studying under Ennio Pasquini, the city's legendary 80-plus-year-old mortadella master, I munch on a panino crammed with mortadella. It has a supple, silky texture and a flavor that quickly banishes grim memories of Lunchables past.
Silvio Scapin's mortadella.
bollito
These days, La Società di Mutuo Soccorso tra Salsamentari—the successor to the Salaroli founded in 1876—is less about torture and more about celebrating a shared gastronomic heritage. Several times a year, over a hundred members, ages 19 to 94, gather to swap stories.
"We mostly get together and eat," Davide tells me. "At our last party we had a with 20 different dishes from all different parts of the pig. Cheeks, tongue … the whole thing,"
Silvio and Francesco Scapin.
How big a feast was this, exactly?
"Oh, we had three ambulances at the ready, just in case. We were way out in the countryside, so you have to be careful."
To find out more, I head down the street to meet a former president of the Salsamentari, Giovanni Tamburini, at his eponymous shop, A. F. Tamburini Antica Salsamenteria Bolognese. The current store dates back to 1932, but the location has been a butcher shop for much longer. Metal hooks used to hang pig carcasses line the ceiling of the main room, where mortadella was made until 1973. Francis Ford Coppola swings by when he's in town and 1,000 Places to See Before You Die dubbed it |
:"vs ATLANTA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180408" }; vars.relatedProjects[44] = { name:"Celtics vs CHICAGO", shortname:"vs CHICAGO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180406" }; vars.relatedProjects[45] = { name:"Celtics vs TORONTO", shortname:"vs TORONTO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180331" }; vars.relatedProjects[46] = { name:"Celtics vs OKLAHOMA CITY", shortname:"vs OKLAHOMA CITY", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180320" }; vars.relatedProjects[47] = { name:"Celtics vs WASHINGTON", shortname:"vs WASHINGTON", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180314" }; vars.relatedProjects[48] = { name:"Celtics vs INDIANA", shortname:"vs INDIANA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180311" }; vars.relatedProjects[49] = { name:"Celtics vs HORNETS", shortname:"vs HORNETS", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180228" }; vars.relatedProjects[50] = { name:"Celtics vs MEMPHIS", shortname:"vs MEMPHIS", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180226" }; vars.relatedProjects[51] = { name:"Celtics vs LA", shortname:"vs LA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180214" }; vars.relatedProjects[52] = { name:"Celtics vs Cleveland", shortname:"vs CLEVELAND", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180211" }; vars.relatedProjects[53] = { name:"Celtics vs Indiana", shortname:"vs INDIANA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180209" }; vars.relatedProjects[54] = { name:"Celtics vs Portland", shortname:"vs PORTLAND", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180204" }; vars.relatedProjects[55] = { name:"Celtics vs Atlanta", shortname:"vs ATLANTA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180202" }; vars.relatedProjects[56] = { name:"Celtics vs New York", shortname:"vs NEW YORK", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180131" }; vars.relatedProjects[57] = { name:"Celtics vs Orlando", shortname:"vs ORLANDO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180121" }; vars.relatedProjects[58] = { name:"Celtics vs Philadelphia", shortname:"vs PHILADELPHIA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180118" }; vars.relatedProjects[59] = { name:"Celtics vs New Orleans", shortname:"vs NEW ORLEANS", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180116" }; vars.relatedProjects[60] = { name:"Celtics vs Minnesota", shortname:"vs MINNESOTA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180105" }; vars.relatedProjects[61] = { name:"Celtics vs Cleveland", shortname:"vs CLEVELAND", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20180103" }; vars.relatedProjects[62] = { name:"Celtics vs BROOKLYN", shortname:"vs BROOKLYN", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171231" }; vars.relatedProjects[63] = { name:"Celtics vs HOUSTON", shortname:"vs HOUSTON", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171228" }; vars.relatedProjects[64] = { name:"Celtics vs Washington", shortname:"vs WASHINGTON", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171225" }; vars.relatedProjects[65] = { name:"Celtics vs CHICAGO", shortname:"vs CHICAGO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171223" }; vars.relatedProjects[66] = { name:"Celtics vs MIAMI", shortname:"vs MIAMI", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171220" }; vars.relatedProjects[67] = { name:"Celtics vs UTAH", shortname:"vs UTAH", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171215" }; vars.relatedProjects[68] = { name:"Celtics vs DENVER", shortname:"vs DENVER", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171213" }; vars.relatedProjects[69] = { name:"Celtics vs DALLAS", shortname:"vs DALLAS", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171206" }; vars.relatedProjects[70] = { name:"Celtics vs MILWAUKEE", shortname:"vs MILWAUKEE", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171204" }; vars.relatedProjects[71] = { name:"Celtics vs PHOENIX", shortname:"vs PHOENIX", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171202" }; vars.relatedProjects[72] = { name:"Celtics vs PHILADELPHIA", shortname:"vs PHILADELPHIA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171130" }; vars.relatedProjects[73] = { name:"Celtics vs DETROIT", shortname:"vs DETROIT", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171127" }; vars.relatedProjects[74] = { name:"Celtics vs ORLANDO", shortname:"vs ORLANDO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171124" }; vars.relatedProjects[75] = { name:"Celtics vs WASHINGTON", shortname:"vs WASHINGTON", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171116" }; vars.relatedProjects[76] = { name:"Celtics vs TORONTO", shortname:"vs TORONTO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171112" }; vars.relatedProjects[77] = { name:"Celtics vs CHARLOTTE", shortname:"vs CHARLOTTE", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171110" }; vars.relatedProjects[78] = { name:"Celtics vs LA", shortname:"vs LA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171108" }; vars.relatedProjects[79] = { name:"Celtics vs SACRAMENTO", shortname:"vs SACRAMENTO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171101" }; vars.relatedProjects[80] = { name:"Celtics vs SAN ANTONIO", shortname:"vs SAN ANTONIO", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171030" }; vars.relatedProjects[81] = { name:"Celtics vs NEW YORK", shortname:"vs NEW YORK", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171024" }; vars.relatedProjects[82] = { name:"Celtics vs MILWAUKEE", shortname:"vs MILWAUKEE", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20171018" }; vars.relatedProjects[83] = { name:"Celtics vs CLEVELAND", shortname:"vs CLEVELAND", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20170405" }; vars.relatedProjects[84] = { name:"Celtics vs CLEVELAND", shortname:"vs CLEVELAND", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20170301" }; vars.relatedProjects[85] = { name:"Celtics vs LA", shortname:"vs LA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20170203" }; vars.relatedProjects[86] = { name:"Celtics vs PORTLAND", shortname:"vs PORTLAND", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20170121" }; vars.relatedProjects[87] = { name:"Celtics vs Oklahoma City", shortname:"vs OKLAHOMA CITY", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20161223" }; vars.relatedProjects[88] = { name:"Celtics vs Golden State", shortname:"vs GOLDEN STATE", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20161118" }; vars.relatedProjects[89] = { name:"Celtics vs New York", shortname:"vs NEW YORK", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20161111" }; vars.relatedProjects[90] = { name:"Celtics vs Brooklyn", shortname:"vs BROOKLYN", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20161026" }; vars.relatedProjects[91] = { name:"Celtics vs Atlanta", shortname:"vs ATLANTA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20160428" }; vars.relatedProjects[92] = { name:"Celtics vs Atlanta", shortname:"vs ATLANTA", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20160424" }; vars.relatedProjects[93] = { name:"Celtics vs Hawks", shortname:"vs HAWKS", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20160422" }; vars.relatedProjects[94] = { name:"Celtics vs Nets", shortname:"vs NETS", url:"https://celtics.fancam.com/20151019" }; vars.query = {}; vars.query.s = "court-view"; /* ---> TODO add more startup settings/variables here */ /* stored options */ vars.options = {}; vars.options.show_splash_onstart = false; // type=boolean vars.options.more_fancams_enabled = true; // type=boolean vars.options.share_view_enabled = true; // type=boolean vars.options.video_booth_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.ecard_enabled = true; // type=boolean vars.options.wally_comp_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.banner_enabled = true; // type=boolean vars.options.banner_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/celticsLogo-20181010175248.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.banner_website_link = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('http://www.nba.com/celtics/');// type=string vars.options.side_banner_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.side_banner_image = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/side_banner.jpg?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.side_banner_website_link = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('');// type=string vars.options.favicon_image = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/tag-icon-310x310-20181010175343.png');// type=favicon vars.options.favicon_html = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('');// type=string vars.options.email_header_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/emailLogo-20181010175426.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.login_facebook_enabled = true; // type=boolean vars.options.login_email_enabled = true; // type=boolean vars.options.main_font_family = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('gotham-black');// type=string vars.options.main_font_url = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/fonts/gotham-black.css?family=gotham-black');// type=string vars.options.second_font_family = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('gotham-medium');// type=string vars.options.second_font_url = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/fonts/gotham-medium.css?family=gotham-medium');// type=string vars.options.loader_bg_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.header_txt_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.title_txt_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.subtitle_txt_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.header_icon_color = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.footer_icon_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.footer_btn_bg_color = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.footer_tag_color = "0x004f25" ;// type=color vars.options.btn_close_color = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.btn_close_color_hover = "0xc80f0f" ;// type=color vars.options.btn_txt_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.btn_color = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.btn_color_hover = "0xbb9754" ;// type=color vars.options.btn_color_disabled = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.btn_color_disabled_hover = "0x004f25" ;// type=color vars.options.splash_btn_txt = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.splash_btn_color = "0xf0f0f0" ;// type=color vars.options.splash_active_color = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.splash_btn_txt_hover = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.splash_btn_color_hover = "0x004f25" ;// type=color vars.options.splash_btn_cs_color = "0x004f25" ;// type=color vars.options.splash_btn_cs_txt = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.menu_txt_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.menu_main_btn_color = "0x004f25" ;// type=color vars.options.menu_btn_color = "0x004f25" ;// type=color vars.options.menu_bg_color = "0x000000" ;// type=color vars.options.menu_close_color = "0x047940" ;// type=color vars.options.menu_divider_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.header_bg_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.popup_bg_color = "0x000000" ;// type=color vars.options.popup_txt_color = "0xffffff" ;// type=color vars.options.backdrop_color = "0x000000" ;// type=color vars.options.tagging_enabled = true; // type=boolean vars.options.multitags_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.sharetagtofacebook = true; // type=boolean vars.options.neutral_tag_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/me-tag-20181010180258.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.team1_tag_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.team1_tag_image = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/team_1.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.team2_tag_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.team2_tag_image = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/team_2.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.tagcounter_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.tagcounter_min = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('200');// type=string vars.options.tagging_disabled_scenes = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('putnam-club-suite');// type=string vars.options.seperate_tags_per_scene = true; // type=boolean vars.options.tags_load_mode = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('mixed');// type=string vars.options.tag_sensitivity = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('5');// type=string vars.options.tag_min_update_time = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('2000');// type=string vars.options.tags_max = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('50');// type=string vars.options.tags_max_fov = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('50');// type=string vars.options.tags_fov_distance = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('5');// type=string vars.options.tags_persistent = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('50');// type=string vars.options.tags_per_update = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('25');// type=string vars.options.scene_switcher_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.scenes_in_menu_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.scene_labels_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.scene_slideshow_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.same_view_position_for_scenes = false; // type=boolean vars.options.scene_switcher_menu_button = true; // type=boolean vars.options.scenes_slideshow_speed = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('3');// type=string vars.options.scenes_slideshow_blend_time = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('1.5');// type=string vars.options.interface_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe53dbfcdfc2144f24346e/interface_celtics-20181013065959.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.tutorial_zoom_image = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/tutorial_zoom.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.tutorial_move_image = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/tutorial_move.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.tutorial_mobi_image = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/tutorial_mobile.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.menu_buttons_show_icons = true; // type=boolean vars.options.menu_buttons_width = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('185');// type=string vars.options.video1_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.video_url_1 = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('42oLZhRq3nA');// type=string vars.options.video_image_1 = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/videoThumbnail_1.jpg?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.video2_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.video_url_2 = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('42oLZhRq3nA');// type=string vars.options.video_image_2 = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/videoThumbnail_2.jpg?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.video3_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.video_url_3 = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('42oLZhRq3nA');// type=string vars.options.video_image_3 = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/videoThumbnail_3.jpg?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.video4_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.video_url_4 = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('42oLZhRq3nA');// type=string vars.options.video_image_4 = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/videoThumbnail_4.jpg?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.video5_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.video_url_5 = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('42oLZhRq3nA');// type=string vars.options.video_image_5 = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/videoThumbnail_5.jpg?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.comp_hidden_object = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/comp_object.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.comp_prize = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/comp_prize.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.mob_comp_btn_image = "%$THEMEPATH%/assets/img/comp_prize.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.options.age_gate_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.age_gate_age = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('21');// type=string vars.options.tel_number_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.address_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.address_country_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.comp_hotspot_1_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.comp_hotspot_1_ath = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-108.48');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_1_atv = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-2.02');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_1_scale = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0.04');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_1_crop = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0|0|300|300');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_2_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.comp_hotspot_2_ath = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-128.48');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_2_atv = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-2.02');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_2_scale = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0.04');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_2_crop = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0|0|300|300');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_3_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.comp_hotspot_3_ath = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-118.48');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_3_atv = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-2.02');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_3_scale = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0.04');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_3_crop = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0|0|300|300');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_4_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.comp_hotspot_4_ath = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-100.48');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_4_atv = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-2.02');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_4_scale = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0.04');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_4_crop = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0|0|300|300');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_5_enabled = false; // type=boolean vars.options.comp_hotspot_5_ath = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-100.48');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_5_atv = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('-2.02');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_5_scale = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0.04');// type=string vars.options.comp_hotspot_5_crop = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('0|0|300|300');// type=string vars.options.custom_actions_xml = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString(' **u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a**');// type=string vars.options.on_scene_loaded_custom_xml = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString(' **u000d****u000a** if(currSceneTaggingEnabled == true,**u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** set(plugin[menuBtn].visible,true); **u000d****u000a** showTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** if(device.mobile == true, set(plugin[ui_tag_txt].html, get(options.string_tagyourself_button_mobile) );**u000d****u000a** txtadd(plugin[ui_tag_txt].css, get("data[footer_tag_txt_mobi].content"), get(footer_tag_color), get(main_font)); **u000d****u000a**,**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[ui_tag_txt].html, get(options.string_tagyourself_button) );**u000d****u000a** txtadd(plugin[ui_tag_txt].css, get("data[footer_tag_txt].content"), get(footer_tag_color), get(main_font)); **u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[ui_tag_txt].onclick, removeActiveActions();**u000d****u000a** login(navpanel_onLoginSuccessful, navpanel_onLoginFailure);**u000d****u000a** xml_log(tagging, tag-yourself-button-clicked,,); **u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a**,**u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a** set(plugin[menuBtn].visible,false); **u000d****u000a** hideTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a** if(device.mobile == true, **u000d****u000a** set(plugin[ui_tag_txt].html, get(options.string_return_to_fc_button_mobile) );**u000d****u000a** txtadd(plugin[ui_tag_txt].css, get("data[footer_tag_txt_mobi].content"), get(footer_tag_color), get(main_font)); **u000d****u000a**,**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[ui_tag_txt].html, get(options.string_return_tot_fc_button) );**u000d****u000a** txtadd(plugin[ui_tag_txt].css, get("data[footer_tag_txt].content"), get(footer_tag_color), get(main_font)); **u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[ui_tag_txt].onclick, removeActiveActions();**u000d****u000a** goToScene(court-view);**u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a**');// type=string vars.options.on_scene_loaded_end_custom_xml = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('if(currSceneTaggingEnabled == true, **u000d****u000a** showTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a**, **u000d****u000a** hideTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a**);');// type=string vars.options.on_startup_custom_xml = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('');// type=string vars.options.on_startup_end_custom_xml = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('if(currSceneTaggingEnabled == true, **u000d****u000a** showTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a**, **u000d****u000a** hideTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a**);');// type=string vars.options.on_interface_loaded_xml = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('loadInterfaceUpdates();**u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a**if(currSceneTaggingEnabled == true, **u000d****u000a** showTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a**, **u000d****u000a** hideTaggingInterface_new();**u000d****u000a**);');// type=string vars.options.on_window_resized_xml = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString(' **u000d****u000a** if(currSceneTaggingEnabled == true, **u000d****u000a** set(plugin[menuBtn].visible,true);, set(plugin[menuBtn].visible,false);**u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** set(plugin[brand_logo].y,0);**u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** set(plugin[fancam_title_text].x,20);**u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a**if(stagewidth LE 450, **u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** if(device.mobile == true,**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[brand_logo].scale,0.4);**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[Putnam_logo].scale,0.3);**u000d****u000a**,**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[brand_logo].scale,0.3);**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[Putnam_logo].scale,0.25);**u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a**,**u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** **u000d****u000a** if(device.mobile == true,**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[brand_logo].scale,0.5);**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[Putnam_logo].scale,0.4);**u000d****u000a**,**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[brand_logo].scale,0.4);**u000d****u000a** set(plugin[Putnam_logo].scale,0.3);**u000d****u000a** );**u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a**);**u000d****u000a** ');// type=string vars.options.head_html = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('');// type=string vars.options.body_html = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('');// type=string vars.options.footer_html = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('');// type=string /* in an application browser (Facebook/Twitter) */ /* * i18n (international) strings for krpano. */ vars.i18n = {}; vars.i18n.en = {}; vars.i18n.en.site_title = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Celtics Fancam');// type=string vars.i18n.en.site_description = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Putnam Investments presents every fan at selfie level in the Celtics Fancam! Explore every part of it and share what you find with the world!');// type=string vars.i18n.en.share_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bc51e5f88bb2208f710d3eb/20171018_shareImage-20181017091723.jpg"; // type=image unescaped vars.i18n.en.site_title_fb = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('See every single fan at TD Garden in one BIG picture!');// type=string vars.i18n.en.site_description_fb = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Explore the crowd at TD Garden in the Celtics Fancam. Proudly brought to you by Putnam Investments.');// type=string vars.i18n.en.site_title_twtr = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('See every single fan at TD Garden in one BIG picture');// type=string vars.i18n.en.site_description_twtr = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Explore the crowd at TD Garden in the Celtics Fancam. Proudly brought to you by Putnam Investments.');// type=string vars.i18n.en.twtr_handle = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('#fancam #putnam #celtics');// type=string vars.i18n.en.share_title_email = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Check out my selfie from the Celtics Fancam!');// type=string vars.i18n.en.share_description_email = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('See what TD Garden packed with passionate fans at the Celtics game looks like! **u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a**Prove you were one of them with the Celtics Fancam brought to you by Putnam Investments. **u000d****u000a****u000d****u000a**Zoom, tag, and share your photo with your friends.');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_splash_notify = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('');// type=string vars.i18n.en.siteloader_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/site-loader-20181010185632.gif?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.i18n.en.overlay_default_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bc51e5f88bb2208f710d3eb/20171018_ecard-20181017091741.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.i18n.en.overlay_sview_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bc51e5f88bb2208f710d3eb/20171018_ecard-20181017091744.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.i18n.en.overlay_tview_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bc51e5f88bb2208f710d3eb/20171018_ecard-20181017091748.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.i18n.en.ecard_frame = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bbe3bf8fcdfc2144f24221c/ecard_frame-20181010190903.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.i18n.en.overlay_ecard_view_image = "https://s3.amazonaws.com/in3sixty-project-media/in3sixty/5bc51e5f88bb2208f710d3eb/20171018_ecard-20181017091753.png?v=%$NOCACHE%"; // type=image unescaped vars.i18n.en.string_tagyourself_button = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('TAG [div style=**u0027**font-size:20px;**u0027**] YOURSELF [/div]');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_tagyourself_button_mobile = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('TAG [div style=**u0027**font-size:30px;**u0027**] YOURSELF [/div]');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_return_tot_fc_button = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('[div style=**u0027**font-size:20px;**u0027**] RETURN TO [/div] [div style=**u0027**font-size:30px;**u0027**] FANCAM [/div]');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_return_to_fc_button_mobile = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('[div style=**u0027**font-size:25px;**u0027**] RETURN TO [/div] [div style=**u0027**font-size:40px;**u0027**] FANCAM [/div]');// type=string vars.i18n.en.more_fc_title = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('MORE CELTICS FANCAMS');// type=string vars.i18n.en.more_scenes_title = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('More Scenes');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_videobooth = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Video Booth');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_ecard = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('SHARE YOUR SELFIE');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_ecard_instruct = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Use the controls to find yourself and snap your selfie, then share it with friends!');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_ecard_confirm = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Snap it!');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_ecard_shared = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('SHARE YOUR SELFIE');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_next = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Next');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_cancel = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Cancel');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_tag = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('TAG');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_showtags = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('SHOW TAGS');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_hidetags = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('HIDE TAGS');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_selectatag = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Select a tag [br/]to tag yourself!');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_resend_email = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Resend Email');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_sending_email = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Sending');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_sent_email = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Sent');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_error_sending_email = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Error Sending Email');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_verify_email_address = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('Please check your email');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_tutorial = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('TUTORIAL');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_termsandconditions = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('TERMS AND CONDITIONS');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_removemytag = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('REMOVE MY TAG');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string_viewthetutorial = decodeSingleQuoteSafeString('VIEW THE TUTORIAL');// type=string vars.i18n.en.string |
in assembly language, but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in C.[10] Version 4 Unix, however, still had many PDP-11 dependent codes, and is not suitable for porting. The first port to other platform was made five years later (1978) for Interdata 8/32.[17]
Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as "Research Unix". In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science.[18] UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson, who had worked on the UNIX kernel at Bell Labs, was instrumental in negotiating the terms of the license.[19]
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix (BSD and System V) by commercial startups, including Sequent, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, and Xenix. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 (SVR4), which was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors.
In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity as BSD and Linux distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers. In 2000, Apple released Darwin, also a Unix system, which became the core of the Mac OS X operating system, which was later renamed macOS.[20]
Unix operating systems are widely used in modern servers, workstations, and mobile devices.[21]
Standards [ edit ]
In the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort now known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the common structure of the major competing variants of the Unix system, publishing the first POSIX standard in 1988. In the early 1990s, a separate but very similar effort was started by an industry consortium, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative, which eventually became the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) administered by The Open Group. Starting in 1998, the Open Group and IEEE started the Austin Group, to provide a common definition of POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification, which, by 2008, had become the Open Group Base Specification.
In 1999, in an effort towards compatibility, several Unix system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among Unix systems operating on the same CPU architecture.
The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard was created to provide a reference directory layout for Unix-like operating systems, and has mainly been used in Linux.
Components [ edit ]
The Unix system is composed of several components that were originally packaged together. By including the development environment, libraries, documents and the portable, modifiable source code for all of these components, in addition to the kernel of an operating system, Unix was a self-contained software system. This was one of the key reasons it emerged as an important teaching and learning tool and has had such a broad influence.[according to whom?]
The inclusion of these components did not make the system large – the original V7 UNIX distribution, consisting of copies of all of the compiled binaries plus all of the source code and documentation occupied less than 10 MB and arrived on a single nine-track magnetic tape. The printed documentation, typeset from the online sources, was contained in two volumes.
The names and filesystem locations of the Unix components have changed substantially across the history of the system. Nonetheless, the V7 implementation is considered by many[who?] to have the canonical early structure:
Kernel – source code in /usr/sys, composed of several sub-components: conf – configuration and machine-dependent parts, including boot code dev – device drivers for control of hardware (and some pseudo-hardware) sys – operating system "kernel", handling memory management, process scheduling, system calls, etc. h – header files, defining key structures within the system and important system-specific invariables
– source code in /usr/sys, composed of several sub-components: Development environment – early versions of Unix contained a development environment sufficient to recreate the entire system from source code: cc – C language compiler (first appeared in V3 Unix) as – machine-language assembler for the machine ld – linker, for combining object files lib – object-code libraries (installed in /lib or /usr/lib). libc, the system library with C run-time support, was the primary library, but there have always been additional libraries for such things as mathematical functions ( libm ) or database access. V7 Unix introduced the first version of the modern "Standard I/O" library stdio as part of the system library. Later implementations increased the number of libraries significantly. make – build manager (introduced in PWB/UNIX), for effectively automating the build process include – header files for software development, defining standard interfaces and system invariants Other languages – V7 Unix contained a Fortran-77 compiler, a programmable arbitrary-precision calculator ( bc, dc ), and the awk scripting language; later versions and implementations contain many other language compilers and toolsets. Early BSD releases included Pascal tools, and many modern Unix systems also include the GNU Compiler Collection as well as or instead of a proprietary compiler system. Other tools – including an object-code archive manager ( ar ), symbol-table lister ( nm ), compiler-development tools (e.g. lex & yacc ), and debugging tools.
– early versions of Unix contained a development environment sufficient to recreate the entire system from source code: Commands – Unix makes little distinction between commands (user-level programs) for system operation and maintenance (e.g. cron ), commands of general utility (e.g. grep ), and more general-purpose applications such as the text formatting and typesetting package. Nonetheless, some major categories are: sh – the "shell" programmable command-line interpreter, the primary user interface on Unix before window systems appeared, and even afterward (within a "command window"). Utilities – the core toolkit of the Unix command set, including cp, ls, grep, find and many others. Subcategories include: System utilities – administrative tools such as mkfs, fsck, and many others. User utilities – environment management tools such as passwd, kill, and others. Document formatting – Unix systems were used from the outset for document preparation and typesetting systems, and included many related programs such as nroff, troff, tbl, eqn, refer, and pic. Some modern Unix systems also include packages such as TeX and Ghostscript. Graphics – the plot subsystem provided facilities for producing simple vector plots in a device-independent format, with device-specific interpreters to display such files. Modern Unix systems also generally include X11 as a standard windowing system and GUI, and many support OpenGL. Communications – early Unix systems contained no inter-system communication, but did include the inter-user communication programs mail and write. V7 introduced the early inter-system communication system UUCP, and systems beginning with BSD release 4.1c included TCP/IP utilities.
– Unix makes little distinction between commands (user-level programs) for system operation and maintenance (e.g. ), commands of general utility (e.g. ), and more general-purpose applications such as the text formatting and typesetting package. Nonetheless, some major categories are: Documentation – Unix was the first [ citation needed ] operating system to include all of its documentation online in machine-readable form. The documentation included: man – manual pages for each command, library component, system call, header file, etc. doc – longer documents detailing major subsystems, such as the C language and troff
– Unix was the first operating system to include all of its documentation online in machine-readable form. The documentation included:
Impact [ edit ]
The Unix system had significant impact on other operating systems. It achieved its reputation by its interactivity, by providing the software at a nominal fee for educational use, by running on inexpensive hardware, and by being easy to adapt and move to different machines. Unix was originally written in assembly language (which had been thought necessary for system implementations on early computers), but was soon rewritten in C, a high-level programming language.[22] Although this followed the lead of Multics and Burroughs, it was Unix that popularized the idea.
Unix had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems: treating all kinds of files as simple byte arrays. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as printers, terminals, or disk drives), providing a uniform interface, but at the expense of occasionally requiring additional mechanisms such as ioctl and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. The Plan 9 operating system pushed this model even further and eliminated the need for additional mechanisms.
Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of the era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they had a fixed number of levels, often only one level. Several major proprietary operating systems eventually added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSX-11M's "group, user" hierarchy evolved into VMS directories, CP/M's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's SSP and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems.
Making the command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The Unix shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting (shell scripts – there was no separate job control language like IBM's JCL). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) their own shell. New commands could be added without changing the shell itself. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating modular chains of producer-consumer processes (pipelines) made a powerful programming paradigm (coroutines) widely available. Many later command-line interpreters have been inspired by the Unix shell.
A fundamental simplifying assumption of Unix was its focus on newline-delimited text for nearly all file formats. There were no "binary" editors in the original version of Unix – the entire system was configured using textual shell command scripts. The common denominator in the I/O system was the byte – unlike "record-based" file systems. The focus on text for representing nearly everything made Unix pipes especially useful, and encouraged the development of simple, general tools that could be easily combined to perform more complicated ad hoc tasks. The focus on text and bytes made the system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time, text-based applications have also proven popular in application areas, such as printing languages (PostScript, ODF), and at the application layer of the Internet protocols, e.g., FTP, SMTP, HTTP, SOAP, and SIP.
Unix popularized a syntax for regular expressions that found widespread use. The Unix programming interface became the basis for a widely implemented operating system interface standard (POSIX, see above). The C programming language soon spread beyond Unix, and is now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming.
Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix (and programs that ran on it) established a set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the Unix philosophy.
The TCP/IP networking protocols were quickly implemented on the Unix versions widely used on relatively inexpensive computers, which contributed to the Internet explosion of worldwide real-time connectivity, and which formed the basis for implementations on many other platforms.
The Unix policy of extensive on-line documentation and (for many years) ready access to all system source code raised programmer expectations, and contributed to the 1983 launch of the free software movement.
Free Unix and Unix-like variants [ edit ]
In 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU (short for "GNU's Not Unix") project, an ambitious effort to create a free software Unix-like system; "free" in the sense that everyone who received a copy would be free to use, study, modify, and redistribute it. The GNU project's own kernel development project, GNU Hurd, had not yet produced a working kernel, but in 1991 Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel as free software under the GNU General Public License. In addition to their use in the Linux operating system, many GNU packages – such as the GNU Compiler Collection (and the rest of the GNU toolchain), the GNU C library and the GNU core utilities – have gone on to play central roles in other free Unix systems as well.
Linux distributions, consisting of the Linux kernel and large collections of compatible software have become popular both with individual users and in business. Popular distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Mandriva Linux, Slackware Linux, Arch Linux and Gentoo.[23]
A free derivative of BSD Unix, 386BSD, was released in 1992 and led to the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. (USL v. BSDi) by Unix Systems Laboratories, it was clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD Unix for free, if it so desired. Since then, BSD Unix has been developed in several different product branches, including OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD.
Linux and BSD are increasingly filling the market needs traditionally served by proprietary Unix operating systems, as well as expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop and mobile and embedded devices. Because of the modular design of the Unix model, sharing components is relatively common; consequently, most or all Unix and Unix-like systems include at least some BSD code, and some systems also include GNU utilities in their distributions.
In a 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie voiced his opinion that Linux and BSD operating systems are a continuation of the basis of the Unix design, and are derivatives of Unix:[24]
"I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be the among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as the more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers."
In the same interview, he states that he views both Unix and Linux as "the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago."[24]
OpenSolaris was the open-source counterpart to Solaris developed by Sun Microsystems, which included a CDDL-licensed kernel and a primarily GNU userland. However, Oracle discontinued the project upon their acquisition of Sun, which prompted a group of former Sun employees and members of the OpenSolaris community to fork OpenSolaris into the illumos kernel. As of 2014, illumos remains the only active open-source System V derivative.
ARPANET [ edit ]
In May 1975, RFC 681 described the development of Network Unix by the Center for Advanced Computation at the University of Illinois. The system was said to "present several interesting capabilities as an ARPANET mini-host". At the time Unix required a license from Bell Laboratories that at $20,000(US) was very expensive for non-university users, while an educational license cost just $150. It was noted that Bell was "open to suggestions" for an ARPANET-wide license.
Specific features found beneficial were the local processing facilities, compilers, editors, a document preparation system, efficient file system and access control, mountable and unmountable volumes, unified treatment of peripherals as special files, integration of the network control program (NCP) within the Unix file system, treatment of network connections as special files that can be accessed through standard Unix I/O calls, closing of all files on program exit, and the decision to be "desirable to minimize the amount of code added to the basic Unix kernel".
Branding [ edit ]
In October 1993, Novell, the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, transferred the trademarks of Unix to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group),[25] and in 1995 sold the related business operations to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).[26] Whether Novell also sold the copyrights to the actual software was the subject of a 2006 federal lawsuit, SCO v. Novell, which Novell won. The case was appealed, but on August 30, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the trial decisions, closing the case.[27] Unix vendor SCO Group Inc. accused Novell of slander of title.
The present owner of the trademark UNIX is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called "Unix-like").
By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear the UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group.[28] Systems licensed to use the UNIX trademark include AIX,[29] HP-UX,[30] Inspur K-UX,[31] IRIX,[32] Solaris,[33] Tru64 UNIX (formerly "Digital UNIX", or OSF/1),[34] macOS,[35] and a part of z/OS.[36] Notably, Inspur K-UX is a Linux distribution certified as UNIX 03 compliant.[37][38]
Sometimes a representation like Un*x, *NIX, or *N?X is used to indicate all operating systems similar to Unix. This comes from the use of the asterisk (*) and the question mark characters as wildcard indicators in many utilities. This notation is also used to describe other Unix-like systems that have not met the requirements for UNIX branding from the Open Group.
The Open Group requests that UNIX is always used as an adjective followed by a generic term such as system to help avoid the creation of a genericized trademark.
Unix was the original formatting, but the usage of UNIX remains widespread because it was once typeset in small caps (Unix). According to Dennis Ritchie, when presenting the original Unix paper to the third Operating Systems Symposium of the American Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps."[39] Many of the operating system's predecessors and contemporaries used all-uppercase lettering, so many people wrote the name in upper case due to force of habit. It is not an acronym.[40]
Trademark names can be registered by different entities in different countries and trademark laws in some countries allow the same trademark name to be controlled by two different entities if each entity uses the trademark in easily distinguishable categories. The result is that Unix has been used as a brand name for various products including book shelves, ink pens, bottled glue, diapers, hair driers and food containers.[41]
Several plural forms of Unix are used casually to refer to multiple brands of Unix and Unix-like systems. Most common is the conventional Unixes, but Unices, treating Unix as a Latin noun of the third declension, is also popular. The pseudo-Anglo-Saxon plural form Unixen is not common, although occasionally seen. Sun Microsystems, developer of the Solaris variant, has asserted that the term Unix is itself plural, referencing its many implementations.[42]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
General
Books
Television
The dictionary definition of Unix at Wiktionary Media related to Unix at Wikimedia Commons Commands at WikibooksThis past May, I rode along with Mario Andretti at 200 mph in a two-seat Indy car at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was a huge thrill, for sure, and made me think back to when I drove that speed myself a few years ago at Texas Motor Speedway, a smaller track.
Recently, friends have asked which experience was scarier. It's a good question. In one situation, you are in control of the car, a big comfort to some people. In the other, of course, you relinquish control to a pro, more reassuring to others.
At the end of this story, I will answer the question as I experienced it. But first, here is the way I remember my speed thrills at Texas.
When racer Tom Sneva broke the elusive 200 mph barrier in 1977 at Indianapolis, I lusted for his experience. What does it feel like to watch the world flash by the length of a football field per second in an open-cockpit car?
After attending racing schools including Skip Barber and Bertil Roos, I got my chance. Dressed in a fireproof driving suit, I arrived at Texas Motor Speedway where I met my coach, Robbie Buhl. An Indy 500 competitor-turned-race-team-owner, Buhl ran on the Verizon IndyCar circuit for more than a decade.
First, he took me out on the track in a rental car, giving pointers on the critical racing line. While I had done many laps at Texas in smaller cars, it was always a lead-follow situation. This time, I would be on track by myself, and at higher speeds.
When the crew finally strapped me into the claustrophobic cockpit of the 700-horsepower machine, owned by Sam Schmidt, my heart was racing. The clutch, brake, and throttle are within inches of each other. Good thing you don't much need the first two. Unlike passenger cars, once up to speed in an Indy car you rarely shift. And you use the brakes only when coming into pit lane.
With thick helmet padding, I couldn't hear much other than sporadic radio communication via my earpiece. I closed my eyes and envisioned the 1.455-mile, quad-shaped oval I was about to drive as safety and fire crews were put into place. Because of the heat that day — 120 degrees F in the cockpit — I was quickly drenched with sweat.
When the starter was inserted into the back of the car, I flipped up the ignition switch, depressed the clutch and put the beast into gear. I ran my first laps slow, to get a feel for the twitchy thing and to check the track for debris. When I came in, some adjustments were made and it was time for the test.
I figured it would take at least 10 laps to work up to 200 mph, so my plan was to gradually pick up the pace by a second or two each lap. That way the speed comes gradually, almost hypnotically. On the fifth lap, I saw the speedometer touch 200 mph at the end of the front straight. That boosted my confidence. But the goal was to average 200 mph, and that meant keeping the speed through the corners.
After a few more laps, I heard the words, "199.4 Clash, don't do this to me again," crackle over the radio. From what I had seen on the dashboard — over 205 mph — I knew the number was an average, so I was almost there! I matted the throttle between turns one and two and held it down the back straight and well into turn three.
With my body pulling 3.5 Gs, my vision narrowed. I was on the edge and had no time to focus on anything but a videogame-like track ahead rushing toward me. After flashing by the start/finish line, I heard the words, "Pit, pit, pit — you did it!"
I backed off the throttle and was overcome by a powerful combination of joy and relief. When I brought the car to a stop in the pits, everyone was smiling. Buhl gave me the thumbs up, and people were clicking off photos.
My dream had begun in 1977 with Sneva. Who would have thought that, decades later, I would run a lap slightly faster on a shorter track? Computer telemetry showed that my fastest lap was 26.03 seconds or 201.2 mph, and my top speed was 207.7 mph. Sneva had averaged 200.5 mph on the 2.5-mile Indianapolis oval.
A few weeks later, in Indianapolis, I met the town’s mayor. When I mentioned my 200-mph Texas test, he explained that he had met many pro racers at Indy who had gone that fast, but I was the first “normal” person. What was it like, he wanted to know?
"Like being an overgrown kid," I said. "And someday I want to do it at your track, too." He smiled and replied, "Hey, you never know."
Well, of course, eventually I did, with Andretti behind the wheel.
But the bigger question: Which experience was scarier? Definitely Texas, where I was in control of my own destiny. With Andretti at Indy, the confidence that I was in the hands of a legend more than offset my fear of car-control loss. After all, even at 76, he is the seasoned pro - me, just an overly brave amateur.
(Editor’s Note: For video of Jim Clash’s 200-mph run at Texas, click here. For a first-person account of his 200-mph experience at Indy with Mario Andretti, click here).Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption President Obama was speaking at a Muslim Iftar dinner at the White House
US President Barack Obama has staunchly defended controversial plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York.
Opponents have protested against the construction of an Islamic cultural centre and mosque several hundred feet away from the site of the Twin Towers.
Mr Obama acknowledged "sensitivities" surround the 9/11 site, but said Muslims have the same right to practise their religion "as anyone else".
"Our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable," Mr Obama said.
I suppose that in the land of the free, people are free to build a mosque Len Day Have Your Say
Since a New York developer announced plans to build a 13-storey Islamic community centre and mosque about two blocks from the former World Trade Center site, prominent Republican politicians and a host of conservative pundits have attacked the project.
Some relatives of people killed in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 are also opposed to the plan.
'Stab in the heart'
In a speech at a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, Mr Obama waded into the row, saying:
"We must all recognise and respect the sensitivities surrounding the development of lower Manhattan, Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground. But let me be clear, as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practise their religion as anyone else in this country.
"That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are."
Image caption The site of the proposed mosque is about two blocks from the former World Trade Center
He told the group of US Congressmen, government officials and foreign dignitaries that America's tradition of religious tolerance distinguishes it from "our enemies".
"Al-Qaeda's cause is not Islam," he said, "it is a gross distortion of Islam".
Until now Mr Obama had not commented on the mosque row, with the White House saying that the matter was a local issue.
In voicing his support for the right to build the centre, Mr Obama joins New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had been the only prominent politician to endorse it.
Opponents of the building project have called for investigations into its backers and financing. In New York, opponents sought unsuccessfully to have the building currently at the mosque site granted landmark protection status, in an effort to hinder development.
Former US House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich dubbed the plan an "assertion of Islamist triumphalism" and has denounced it in speeches.
Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin wrote that "to build a mosque at Ground Zero is a stab in the heart of the families of the innocent victims of those horrific attacks".Mirrors for princes (Latin: specula principum), or mirrors of princes, form a literary genre – in the loose sense of the word – of political writing during the Early Middle Ages, Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and are part of the broader speculum or mirror literature genre. They occur most frequently in the form of textbooks which directly instruct kings or lesser rulers on certain aspects of rule and behaviour, but in a broader sense the term is also used to cover histories or literary works aimed at creating images of kings for imitation or avoidance. Authors often composed such "mirrors" at the accession of a new king, when a young and inexperienced ruler was about to come to power. One could view them as a species of self-help book – a sort of proto-study of leadership before the concept of a "leader" became more generalised than the concept of a monarchical head-of-state.[1]
One of the earliest works was written by Sedulius Scottus ( fl. 840–860), the Irish poet associated with the "Pangur Bán" gloss poem ( c. 9th century). Possibly the best known (European) "mirror" is The Prince ( c. 1513) by Machiavelli, although this was not a typical example. Some further examples are listed below.
Classical texts [ edit ]
Super Physicam Aristotelis, 1595, 1595
Greek and Roman [ edit ]
Eusebius of Caesarea's Life of Constantine may be a mirror for princes. This text's precise genre, audience, and aims has, however, been a subject of scholarly controversy.
Indian [ edit ]
Chinese [ edit ]
Western European texts [ edit ]
Early Middle Ages [ edit ]
Augustine of Hippo, City of God V.24, "The true felicity of Christian Emperors."
Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks which warns against internal strife.
which warns against internal strife. De duodecim abusivis saeculi, 'On the twelve abuses of the world' (7th century), a Hiberno-Irish treatise by an anonymous author sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Cyprian. This work, though not a'mirror for princes' per se, was to be of great influence on the development of the 'genre' as it took place on the Continent.
, 'On the twelve abuses of the world' (7th century), a Hiberno-Irish treatise by an anonymous author sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Cyprian. This work, though not a'mirror for princes' per se, was to be of great influence on the development of the 'genre' as it took place on the Continent. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People specifically states that the purpose of the study of history is to present examples for either imitation or avoidance.
Carolingian texts. Notable examples of Carolingian textbooks for kings, counts and other laymen include:
Irish texts
see De duodecim abusivis saeculi above. The vernacular mirrors differ from most texts mentioned here in that the ones who are described as giving and receiving advice are commonly legendary figures.
above. The vernacular mirrors differ from most texts mentioned here in that the ones who are described as giving and receiving advice are commonly legendary figures. Audacht Morainn ('The Testament of Morand'), written c. 700, an Old Irish text which has been called a forerunner of the'mirrors for princes'. [3] The legendary wise judge Morand is said to have sent advice to Feradach Find Fechtnach when the latter was about to be made King of Tara. [4]
('The Testament of Morand'), written c. 700, an Old Irish text which has been called a forerunner of the'mirrors for princes'. The legendary wise judge Morand is said to have sent advice to Feradach Find Fechtnach when the latter was about to be made King of Tara. Tecosca Cormaic, 'The Instructions of Cormac', in which the speaker Cormac mac Airt is made to instruct his son Cairbre Lifechair about a variety of matters.
, 'The Instructions of Cormac', in which the speaker Cormac mac Airt is made to instruct his son Cairbre Lifechair about a variety of matters. Bríatharthecosc Con Culainn 'The precept-instruction of Cúchulainn' (interpolated in Serglige Con Culainn ), addressed to Lugaid Réoderg.
'The precept-instruction of Cúchulainn' (interpolated in ), addressed to Lugaid Réoderg. Tecosc Cuscraid 'The instruction of Cuscraid'
'The instruction of Cuscraid' Senbríathra Fithail 'The ancient precepts of Fíthal'
'The ancient precepts of Fíthal' Briathra Flainn Fína 'The Sayings of Flann Fína'[5]
High and Late Middle Ages [ edit ]
Renaissance [ edit ]
Byzantine texts [ edit ]
Islamic texts [ edit ]
Slavonic texts [ edit ]
Neagoe Basarab (1512–1521), The teachings of Neagoe Basarab to his son Theodosie, one of the earliest literary works in Wallachia
In popular culture [ edit ]
Mirrors For Princes is the name of a 2010 cinematic work by Lior Shamriz. Parts of the text were based on the Instructions of Shuruppak and other Sumerian literature.[16]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Small Business Saturday is an American shopping holiday held during the Saturday after US Thanksgiving during one of the busiest shopping periods of the year. This Saturday is always the last one in November, so falls between November 24 and November 30.
First observed in the United States on November 27, 2010, it is a counterpart to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which feature big box retail and e-commerce stores respectively. By contrast, Small Business Saturday encourages holiday shoppers to patronize brick and mortar businesses that are small and local. Small Business Saturday is a registered trademark of American Express.[1]
The first event was created by American Express, in partnership with the non-profit National Trust for Historic Preservation, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and Roslindale Village Main Street. In 2010, the holiday was promoted by American Express via a nationwide radio and television advertising campaign. That year Amex bought advertising inventory on Facebook, which it in turn gave to its small merchant account holders,[2] and also gave rebates to new customers to promote the event.[3][4]
American Express publicized the initiative using social media, advertising, and public relations. Many local politicians and small business groups in the United States issued proclamations concerning the campaign,[5][6][7] which generated more than one million Facebook "like" registrations and nearly 30,000 tweets under the Twitter hashtags #smallbusinesssaturday and #smallbizsaturday.[8]So Louis van Gaal lives to fight another day after negotiating the FA Cup banana skin at Derby, though accepts the pressure and public scrutiny will be just as intense when Stoke City visit Old Trafford in the league on Tuesday. The Dutch coach insists he intends to see out his three-year contract and while that may depend on whether his team can finish in one of the European positions at the end of the season, he only has to stick around for another month or so to be at Manchester United for the same length of time he spent at Bayern Munich.
That may come as a slight surprise, given his fondness for recalling happy days in Bavaria. Van Gaal was widely considered a success at Bayern, but images of him prancing around in lederhosen with the Bundesliga trophy or narrowly missing out on a treble due to the brilliant efficiency of José Mourinho’s Internazionale do not tell the whole story, otherwise he would have lasted longer than 21 months.
Louis van Gaal urges Manchester United fans to get behind players Read more
The whole story is remarkably similar to the one currently playing out in Manchester. At Bayern, Van Gaal was brought in for his experience after a calamitous attempt to replace a veteran manager with a younger man, in this case Jürgen Klinsmann’s ill-fated attempt to follow Ottmar Hitzfeld. At first, neither he nor his football were popular, but the Bayern chairman, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, told supporters the nasty medicine had to be swallowed. “If we had wanted to sign everybody’s darling we would have gone for George Clooney,” was one memorable soundbite.
Another, towards the end of Van Gaal’s period in charge, was provided by the club president, Uli Hoeness. “Football should be enjoyable, but there has been nothing enjoyable about FC Bayern for a while now,” the former international said.
United fans have been saying the same thing all season and when the former chief executive David Gill admitted he preferred the cinema to watching his team on television because the football was so unattractive, he mirrored Hoeness’s criticism almost exactly.
Louis van Gaal looks forward to bottle of wine after win over Derby Read more
Yet for all the parallels there are two stark differences between Van Gaal’s spells in Munich and Manchester. One is silverware, for in Germany the Arrogant One (his own words) undeniably confounded his doubters. The other is Hoeness, or rather the contrast between the most powerful man at the German club at the time and the considerably more emollient Ed Woodward, the executive vice-chairman at Old Trafford.
Hoeness never liked Van Gaal from the start and was not afraid to say so, believing he promoted himself too much at the expense of the team ethos and the club’s good name, a bit like the reservations Sir Bobby Charlton and others seem to have about Mourinho as manager of Manchester United. He doesn’t think he’s God, he thinks he’s God’s father, Hoeness once remarked, prompting Van Gaal to counter, probably with some justification, that the only person with God-like status within the Bayern set-up was the club president.
When the time came to stick the knife into Van Gaal, Hoeness did not hang around. “He’s advice resistant,” he said. “It is difficult to talk to him because he doesn’t respect other people’s opinions.” Explaining the coach’s dismissal in April 2011, Hoeness said: “To say he had the players behind him was a myth, problems were created which were totally unnecessary and which have ripped the club to pieces.”
Wayne Rooney eyes record after Manchester United break free in FA Cup Read more
Returning to the here and now it would be surprising if some, if not most of the United hierarchy have not |
yet Christian, because there is so much that is within your control, here is some unsolicited, but hopefully useful advice for you with whatever precious, fleeting moments you have left on this planet:
Stop spending so much time and energy trying to make gay people “not gay” or transgender people “not transgender”—it isn’t going to happen.
Instead, try spending that time and energy, making:
hungry people not hungry,
hurting people not hurt,
lonely people not feel alone,
victimized people not feel victimized,
invisible people feel seen.
bullied people feel protected.
grieving people feel comforted.
Those things you actually can accomplish and Jesus did explicitly call you to them.
He states that this is his business and so it should be yours.
Love is the language he commands you to speak.
This is how he said he would determine your love for him; not by the signs you hold,
the insults you hurl, the coldness you deliver, the relationships you sever, the protests you mount, the havoc you wreak. Just look around you.
Possibility for goodness is everywhere.
It’s right in front of you.
You’ve been given this time and space and your heartbeat all as priceless gifts.
Don’t miss the chance to use them and don’t waste them. There are hopeless situations that you can step into, blessings you can provide, people you can care for, paths you can beautifully alter, healing you can accomplish, prayers you can answer, wounds you can mend, kindnesses you can extend—right now. The question is, do you really want any of that or are you married to this ultimately fruitless cause that is doing nothing real but damage? The clock is ticking.
The sun is fading.
Time is wasting.
People are waiting. Christian, do something worthy.
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EmailNew river funnel that formed on 28 June 2017. Picture: Yamal Region
Startling details have emerged of last week's methane gas blowout on an Arctic riverbank: a sudden and deafening bang from a large explosion of the ground near a reindeer encampment, fire shooting into the sky and raging for several minutes from the eruption, huge chunks of charred permafrost blown out of the ground, and a deep, eerie crater forming, some 50 metres deep which immediately filled with water.
Reindeer and dogs fled in fright. Sand and grass was blackened by the intense heat of the eruption which was described as 'a flame of fire and then a rising pillar of smoke'.
Scientists rushed to the scene on the Yamal Peninsula to examine the site in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, amid expert warnings that many can be expected as a warming climate leads to thawing permafrost and the release of potent methane gas which has lain frozen under the surface for thousands of years.
The ground is'swelling' at more than 700 sites on Yamal - known to locals as 'the end of the world' - have been identified as potential explosion sites, but these are seen as the tip of an iceberg.
Many are hillocks or knolls, some are pingos.
A reindeer herder tells about witnessing formation of a new crater. Pictures: Yamal Region
Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky, Russia's leading expert on this recently-noticed phenomenon of blowout craters, rushed from his Black Sea vacation to examine the debris.
The explosion and the resulting hole near Seyakha village is the latest of a dozen or so substantial known craters to form in Arctic Russia, mainly on Yamal, since 2014.
Mikhail Okotetto told TV channel Yamal-region of a fellow herder who was close to the eruption.
'The reindeer fled to the south, but he had newborn calf (in his hands),' he said. 'So the reindeer and dogs, all ran away, and he was just left there standing with the newborn calf.'
Two new craters formed on the Yamal peninsula. Video courtesy Aleksandr Sokolov and Yamal Region
Previously known funnels, according to Professor Bogoyavlensky: F1 - famous Yamal hole 30 kilometres from Bovanenkovo, F2 - recently detected crater 10 kilometres to the south from Bovanenkovo, F3 - crater located 90 kilometres from Antipayuta village, F4 - crater located near Nosok village, north of Krasnoyarsk region, near Taimyr Peninsula. Picture: The Siberian Times
Dr Anton Sinitsky, director of the Arctic Research Centre, Salekhard, admitted to being startled by the force of the eruption.
'I am still slightly shocked,' he said.
It was 'beyond any doubt that there was an explosion because charred sand and charred grass are visible by the funnel'.
He expressed the fear that such funnels 'can pop up anywhere' in permafrost Yamal.
Dr Anton Sinitsky. Picture: Yamal Region
Alexander Mazharov, deputy governor of Yamalo-Nenets autonomous region, said: 'It is very important for us also to know what to do because such an eruption can occur anywhere.
'It might hit a technical facility, a residential settlement, or a linear object (a pipeline or railway).'
Yamal has the biggest concentration of natural gas fields on the planet, and these can be threatened by exploding ground.
Dr Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of the Oil and Gas Research Institute, Moscow, sought to use an echo sounder to measure the depth of the submerged crater - but it was too deep.
He resorted to casting a fishing line into the water, and it is close to 50 metres deep.
Strong degassing of the subsoil is occurring in the bloated and thawing tundra, he said.
Professor Vasily Bogoyavlensky interrupted holiday and rushed to check the new crater. Pictures: Yamal Region
In other places it can seep through the surface, but here the unevenly frozen surface layers can mean pockets of methane collect with explosive force.
Such explosions can scatter a large tonnage of rocks hundreds of metres away from the blowhole, said one Yamal report.
'Actually (degassing) is happening in all countries of the world, onshore and offshore,' said Dr Bogoyavlensky. 'Strong degassing is occurring in the Arctic.
'But what we have just seen is a drop in the ocean of this global degassing of subsoil.'
Warnings of new Arctic explosions at some 700-plus sites in Yamal due to thawing permafrost. Pictures: Yamal Region
Seismic sensors timed the explosion at 11am on 28 June some 30 kilometres north west of the remote village of Seyakha.
The site is around 100 km of Russia's new state-of-the-art Arctic port of Sabetta.
A second new crater - which exploded into being earlier this year - was also located this month by a group of scientists led by Dr Aleksandr Sokolov, deputy head of the ecological research and development station of the Institute of Ecology of Plants and Animals, in Labytnangi, Tyumen region.
A mound of land along edges of the funnel confirms the fact of the explosion, he said.
'This plot of land was absolutely flat just two years ago,' he said.
'A year ago in 2016 it bulged and we could see that soil has cracked there.'
A second crater that formed earlier in June 2017. Pictures: Aleksandr Sokolov
It is believed the eruption was in the early part of this year.
'The Nenets native people told us they saw fire in winter 2017, but it might mean January to March or April.
In other words, it exploded when snow was still lying.'
This crater is around 30 km east of the Yerkut scientific station, and some 230 km north of Salekhard.
New river crater formed on 28 June 2018. Pictures: Yamal RegionBy Alex Moss
22 MAY 2017 • 10:36PM
Jonny Clayton put himself in a provisional spot for the World Matchplay after a successful few days on the PDC Pro Tour at the weekend
The Welshman, who made his debut in the PDC World Championship last December, is in contention to secure a place in July’s World Matchplay for the first time.
Clayton enjoyed runs to the quarter-finals of both the Players Championship events held in Milton Keynes at the weekend, with his results pushing him into a provisional qualifying spot for the major tournament.
The qualifying criteria for the World Matchplay is set at the top 16 on the PDC Order of Merit and then the next 16 highest ranked players on the Pro Tour Order of Merit.
With just three European Tour events and four Players Championship events before the cut off, there is still plenty of time for the chasing pack to hoist themselves into a qualifying spot for the Blackpool tournament.
Darren Webster currently occupies the 16th and final spot up for grabs via the Pro Tour Order of Merit, but the Norwich thrower is only ahead of Chris Dobey on count back.
Robbie Green, Justin Pipe and John Henderson are all within £2,000 of Webster with seven events to go, while Terry Jenkins, a two-time finalist at the World Matchplay, looks set to miss out on a visit to the Winter Gardens for the first time since 2005.
The 53-year-old has not took part in any PDC ranking event since the UK Open in March, but is still only £3,250 adrift of Webster.
PDC Order of Merit (Only top 16 qualify) (as of May 21, 2017)
Pos Player Prize Money 1 Michael van Gerwen £1,722,250 2 Gary Anderson £743,000 3 Peter Wright £674,250 4 Adrian Lewis £391,500 5 Dave Chisnall £372,250 6 James Wade £370,500 7 Mensur Suljovic £333,500 8 Jelle Klaasen £330,500 9 Phil Taylor £327,250 10 Michael Smith £321,250 11 Raymond van Barneveld £319,500 12 Kim Huybrechts £295,250 13 Ian White £291,250 14 Benito van de Pas £275,500 15 Robert Thornton £274,750 16 Simon Whitlock £255,250 17 Gerwyn Price £236,250 18 Alan Norris £233,000 19 Daryl Gurney £231,500 20 Mervyn King £178,500
PDC Pro Tour Order of Merit (Excluding players already in the top 16 of the PDC Order of Merit) (Only top 16 qualify) (as of May 21, 2017)
Pos Player Prize Money 1 Alan Norris £72,500 2 Daryl Gurney £64,500 3 Gerwyn Price £58,500 4 Joe Cullen £52,750 5 Stephen Bunting £49,000 6 Rob Cross £48,750 7 Cristo Reyes £48,500 8 Mervyn King £44,500 9 Steve West £43,250 10 James Wilson £39,250 11 Steve Beaton £39,000 12 Kyle Anderson £38,750 13 Christian Kist £33,000 14 Ronny Huybrechts £31,000 15 Jonny Clayton £30,000 16 Darren Webster £29,250 = Chris Dobey £29,250 18 Robbie Green £28,500 19 Justin Pipe £27,500 20 John Henderson £27,250
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AdvertisementsWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Factory activity jumped to a two-year high in July and first-time applications for jobless benefits hit a 5-1/2-year low last week, bolstering views economic growth would accelerate in the second half of the year.
Corporate recruiters (R) gesture and shake hands as they talk with job seekers at a Hire Our Heroes job fair targeting unemployed military veterans and sponsored by the Cable Show, a cable television industry trade show in Washington, June 11, 2013. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The burst of strength in the economy as the third quarter started keeps on track expectations that the Federal Reserve will start reducing its monetary stimulus later this year.
“The future growth outlook remains on a highly positive trajectory, keeping the September tapering timeline firmly intact despite the Fed’s nod to below-target inflation,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, an economist at TD Securities in New York.
The Institute for Supply Management said on Thursday its index of national factory activity rose to 55.4 last month from 50.9 in June, buoyed by a surge in new orders and production.
A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the sector, which hit a soft patch in the spring.
The pick-up in manufacturing was also corroborated by financial data firm Markit, which said its U.S. Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index rose to a four-month high in its final July reading.
Measures of factory jobs rose in both reports, with the ISM employment index reaching its highest since June last year.
The improvement in employment dovetailed with a separate report from the Labor Department showing initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 19,000 to a seasonally adjusted 326,000 last week, the lowest since January 2008.
While claims are usually volatile in July due to auto plant shutdowns, economists who had expected new filings to rise to 345,000 said the general tone of the report was consistent with a pick-up in job growth.
The four-week moving average for new claims, which irons out week-to-week volatility, fell 4,500 to 341,250.
“This suggests the labor market is still expanding. There is no sign that it’s slowing. It might actually be picking up a bit,” said David Sloan, senior economist at 4Cast in New York.
Automakers traditionally close assembly plants for retooling in July but they have now either shortened the shutdown period or forgone closures altogether, throwing off the model that the government uses to adjust the data for seasonal variations.
Stocks on Wall Street pushed higher, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 index topping the 1,700 level for the first time. U.S. Treasury debt prices fell, while the dollar rallied against a basket of currencies.
GOOD START TO THIRD QUARTER
Last week’s claims data has no bearing on Friday’s employment report for July as it falls outside the survey period. The government is expected to report nonfarm payrolls increased 184,000 last month after rising 195,000 in June, according to a Reuters survey of economists.
The jobless rate is seen ticking down a tenth of a point to 7.5 percent. However, there is a risk payrolls could surprise on the upside after a report on Wednesday showed U.S. private employers maintained a high pace of hiring in July.
Overall job gains in the second quarter averaged 196,300 per month.
In another report, consultants Challenger, Gray & Christmas said planned layoffs at U.S. firms fell 4.2 percent in July.
The factory data and steadily improving labor market conditions suggested the economy got off to a good start in the third quarter. Gross domestic product grew at a 1.7 percent annual rate in the second quarter, up from a pedestrian 1.1 percent pace in the first three months of the year.
New orders in the ISM survey touched their highest in two years and a drop in inventories suggested further strength in order books was in the cards.
“We have been arguing that manufacturing growth would strengthen in the second half of the year as the drag from Europe diminished and as capital spending picked up,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York.
“This report is consistent with this view and, given the size of the gain in new orders and the drop in inventories, it suggests the faster growth rate will be maintained into August.”
Manufacturing could get a boost from robust demand for trucks, thanks to a strengthening housing market. General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler Group reported strong truck sales in July. However, low inventory of some popular car models slowed automobile sales.
While Federal Reserve policy-makers on Wednesday after a two-day meeting offered no indication they planned to reduce the U.S. central bank’s monthly $85 billion in bond purchases at their next meeting in September, economists said the silence on that issue was aimed at keeping market-set interest rates tamped down.
“For the Fed, it clearly wants to taper (bond purchases) reasonably soon. We are still on a path toward tapering,” said Pierre Ellis, senior global economist at Decision Economics in New York.
A sixth report, from the U.S. Commerce Department, showed an unexpected drop in construction spending in June. Economists were little concerned about the decline, however, noting that May and April’s construction outlays had been revised higher.
“Significant upward revisions to May and April left an overall positive picture for the second quarter, consistent with the solid growth in residential and structures investment seen in yesterday’s second-quarter GDP report,” said Peter Newland, a senior economist at Barclays in New York.
Construction spending dropped 0.6 percent to an annual rate of $884 billion, the Commerce Department said.Angelina Jolie is surprised she didn’t die already, after her wild younger years
Angelina Jolie wasn’t always the saint-like charitable mother of six she is today. In fact, the 36-year-old actor opens up during an interview airing on 60 Minutes this Sunday about how she was so wild when she was younger, she’s thankful to be alive.
“I went through heavy darker times and I survived them,” Angelina admits. “I didn’t die young, so I’m very lucky. There are other artists and people who didn’t survive certain things.”
When pressed about the “darker times,” Angie laughs it off. “I was hoping you’d miss that!” she says. “Nothing I want to go into a lot of detail about, but I think people can imagine that I did the most dangerous and I did the worst—and for many reasons I shouldn’t be here.”
She adds, “”You think of those too many times where you came close to too many dangerous things, too many chances taken too far.”
Be sure to catch Angelina’s full interview when it airs this Sunday on 60 Minutes.Erik Spoelstra made the concession in advance of his team's eight-day All-Star break.
"Everybody is aware," he said of the standings and the Eastern Conference playoff race that resumes Friday for the Miami Heat. "We earned the right to at least be in the discussion right now."
And they are, after a 13-game winning streak left his team as winner of 14 of 16 going into the break.
As the Cleveland Cavaliers, Boston Celtics, Washington Wizards, Toronto Raptors and Atlanta Hawks have distanced themselves at the top of the East standings, the next seven teams remain bunched within six games of the No. 6 seed, with the top eight teams advancing to the postseason.
And yet the metrics remain daunting for the Heat at 25-32.
CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson CAPTION Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. CAPTION Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. CAPTION Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns.
According to ESPN's Basketball Power Index, the Heat have only a 19.3 percent chance of advancing to the postseason, compared to the 74 percent chance for the Detroit Pistons, 72.5 percent chance for the Chicago Bulls and 67.5 percent chance for the Indiana Pacers to round out those final three playoff berths. The Heat had been up to a 29.7 percent chance according to ESPN before the recent losses to the Philadelphia 76ers and Orlando Magic.
"There's no easy way with this basketball team," Spoelstra said.
Playoffstatus.com also paints a sobering picture, utilizing its schedule-strength computation to place the Heat with a 1 percent chance for the No. 5 seed, 4 percent for No. 6, 8 percent for No. 7, 13 percent for No. 8... and a 74 percent chance of missing the playoffs.
So if you go by logic, the Heat will not make the playoffs. But what exactly has been logical about a season that saw the Heat fall to 11-30 at midseason and then emerge as the league's hottest team since?
When it comes to remaining schedule, the Heat have 11 games against teams above.500 and 14 against teams below. But those 11 feature three against the Cavaliers and two apiece against the Raptors and Wizards.
According to Playoffstatus.com, the Heat face the third-most-difficult remaining schedule of the seven teams vying for the final three playoff berths in the East, easier than only the Pacers and Milwaukee Bucks, but tougher than the Bulls, New York Knicks, Charlotte Hornets and Pistons.
What Spoelstra said the Heat have in their favor is an urgency that has defined their past month.
"When you win," he said, "you can start to get soft in the mind."
Instead, the Heat are expected to be stronger in body, with guard Josh Richardson likely to return in Friday's resumption of the schedule against the Atlanta Hawks at Philips Arena.
Though it is possible the East playoff race could be further expanded, it appears the 76ers again are looking more toward the future, with their protective approaches with the injuries of Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons, while the Magic also appear to be taking a future-thinking approach, with the recent trade of Serge Ibaka.
During All-Star Weekend, Cavaliers forward LeBron James warned not to sleep on the East.
"My assessment of the East is the East is playing great ball," he said. "I mean, excluding us and you got Boston, you've got Washington, who has hit a hot streak and they've been playing great ball, not only at home but on the road. Boston has been consistent all year. You've got Atlanta who has been playing really good ball. You've got some other teams that are like -- Miami who hit a hot streak, too, and they're trying to make a push into the playoffs."
Now the question is which teams step forward over these final two months of the regular season, perhaps attempting to emulate the Heat's recent success.
"The way the East has been," Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said, "Miami wins 12 or 13 in a row, so our thoughts are, 'Why can't we suddenly roll off seven or eight in a row?' You win seven or eight in a row all of a sudden you climb that ladder pretty fast in the East."
A look at how the playoff race shapes up among the seven leading contenders for the final three playoff berths in the Eastern Conference:
NO. 6 PACERS
W-L: 29-28
No. 8 GB: 2 games ahead.
Remaining home: 11. Remaining away: 14.
Remaining vs. over.500: 12. Remaining vs. under.500: 13.
NO. 7 BULLS
W-L: 28-29
No. 8 GB: 1 game ahead.
Remaining home: 13. Remaining away: 12.
Remaining vs. over.500: 11. Remaining vs. under.500: 14.
NO. 8 PISTONS
W-L: 27-30
No. 8 GB: At No. 8.
Remaining home: 13. Remaining away: 12.
Remaining vs. over.500: 10. Remaining vs. under.500: 15.
NO. 9 BUCKSTreasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said that he sounded the alarm four years ago to regulators about problems with the benchmark interest rate known as Libor.
But Geithner, who was then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, did not communicate in key meetings with top regulators that British bank Barclays had admitted to Fed staffers that it was rigging Libor, according to people familiar with the matter.
Instead, regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Justice Department worked largely without the Fed’s help to build a case against Barclays. That work has culminated in a massive scandal rocking the banking industry on both sides of the Atlantic.
As Geithner prepares to testify Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill, he returns to a familiar position as a lightning rod for critics on the left and the right who find fault in his work as a banking regulator before he joined the White House and as a bailout architect under President Obama.
He will face a key question from House and Senate members this week: Did he and others at the New York Fed, the country’s most powerful banking regulator, act urgently enough to stop fraud at Barclays and potentially other banks?
Geithner has said the New York Fed did everything in its power.
“We moved quite quickly to try to get the British to address it and make sure that we brought it to the attention of the full complement of U.S. regulatory agencies so that they could take a careful look at it, which they did,” Geithner said Monday night on Charlie Rose’s interview show. “And to their credit, they’ve done a pretty strong enforcement action right now, but there’s more work to do on this.”
Focus on Libor
Documents released by the New York Fed show that the agency chose to focus on structural problems with Libor rather than help to bring corrupt actions at Barclays and other banks to light.
“At no stage did he [Geithner] or anyone else at the New York Fed raise any concerns with the Bank that they had seen any wrongdoing,” Bank of England governor Mervyn King said in testimony before a British parliamentary committee last week.
Geithner was aware there were problems with how Libor was calculated because it relied on self-reporting by the world’s biggest banks. But it’s unclear from the documents whether he knew about numerous phone calls in which Barclays employees admitted to New York Fed staff members that the bank was manipulating Libor.
In a phone call from April 2008, a Barclays employee made such an admission to New York Fed staff member Fabiola Ravazzolo: “So, we know that we’re not posting um, an honest Libor.” Then in October again, in three separate phone calls, Barclays executives told Fed employees that Libor was “unrealistic” and “absolute rubbish.”
Throughout the spring and summer of 2008, in the midst of increasing turmoil in the financial world, the Fed studied what was wrong with Libor.
Two weeks after the April phone call, Geithner held a meeting called “Fixing LIBOR” with senior New York Fed staff members. A few weeks later, in a meeting with U.S. Treasury officials, New York Fed staffers, including Ravazzolo, presented slides saying there are “questions regarding Libor’s accuracy and relevance.”
Then, on June 1, Geithner e-mailed recommendations to King, the British central banker, on how to improve the process for setting the rate.
The New York Fed also says that it raised the Libor issue in a meeting around this time with the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, which consisted of top officials from Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the CFTC.
But two people with knowledge of the matter said senior officials and investigators never heard an appeal from the New York Fed to investigate possible wrongdoing over Libor. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely about the ongoing investigation.
Geithner, through a spokesman, referred questions to the New York Fed, which declined to comment. The New York Fed, in response to requests from lawmakers, is set to release more documents.
The Fed seemed unsure in the summer of 2008 whether it could prove that Libor was rigged. In a presentation June 5 given to staff members to other regulatory agencies, New York Fed employees said: “These claims are difficult to evaluate.”
Bailout paybacks
Still, the Fed proceeded to use Libor as a benchmark to determine how much insurance giant American International Group would pay back the government during its bailout. The measure also was used in the fall of 2008 to set the interest rate for the emergency lending program called the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or TALF.
“That number [Libor] determined how the taxpayer would be compensated,” said Neil Barofsky, who was the chief watchdog of the financial system’s $700 billion bailout. “That’s putting the Federal Reserve’s imprimatur on a rate it has suspicion to think was fraudulent. The Federal Reserve’s use of that and Treasury's use of that in the bailout sends a powerful message to the market: ‘Hey don’t worry about this, we’re endorsing it.’ ”
He added that the Fed’s response can be measured by the fact that no one has reformed Libor.
Libor is critical because it is used worldwide to set the rates for trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgages, student loans, auto loans and many other financial contracts. It was an especially important metric during the financial crisis because it was a key indicator for the health of the banking industry.
Congressional pressure
Congress is ratcheting up pressure on the New York Fed over its handling of the manipulation of Libor.
Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Tex.) on Monday sent a letter to the New York Fed requesting all of its communications from August 2007 until July 2012 with staff at the 16 banks involved in setting Libor, British regulators and U.S. regulators.
The documents already released by the Fed failed to show what actions were taken after Barclays’ admission, he said.
“We know the New York Fed eventually briefed Treasury, but what was the follow up? Did anyone ask if folks were still manipulating the rate?” said Neugebauer, who serves on the House Financial Services Committee, which is questioning Geithner on Wednesday.
A group of Senate Democrats earlier this month sent a letter to Justice saying that “regulators who were involved should be held to account for any failures to stop wrongdoing that they knew, or should have known about.”
Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) said nothing was done by the New York Fed to inform Congress, an oversight he considers negligent.
“You can make the argument that Libor was permitted to run its course so as not to add to the questions that were being raised about the health of international banking,” he said.President Barack Obama talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office Monday, May 18, 2009. Pete Souza White House Photo
Today, the eleventh anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, I was struck by the news in Haaretz:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday launched an unprecedented verbal attack on the US government over its stance on the Iranian nuclear program. “The world tells Israel ‘wait, there’s still time’. And I say, ‘Wait for what? Wait until when?’ Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel,” Netanyahu told reporters on Tuesday.
Eleven years ago on this day, as the world looked on in stunned horror as the towers came down in New York, the same Netanyahu was already thinking strategically. Here’s how The New York Times reported it:
Asked tonight what the attack meant for relations between the United States and Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, replied, “It’s very good.” Then he edited himself: “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.” He predicted that the attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
Even after generously allowing Netanyahu to “edit” himself, the Times did not conceal that Netanyahu was not thinking in terms of sympathy for the victims of 9/11 and the United States, nor what a “friend” could do to help America. Rather, he was already thinking on the day it happened about how 9/11 could be manipulated to get America to do more for Israel.
9/11, Zionism and Islamophobia
The 9/11 attacks happened at the height of the second intifada and Israeli propaganda went into full gear – with some success – in portraying Israel’s war to steal the land of Palestinians and suppress their rights as a “war on terror” – often a code for a “war on Muslims.” And in the years after 9/11, prominent Zionist propagandists adopted or legitimized Islamophobia as one of their main discourses, something that helped newly virulent strands of Islamophobia enter the American mainstream today.
Now, Netanyahu – once again prime minister – and Israel’s supporters in the US are apparently indignant that the US won’t go to war for Israel in Iran (at least not yet, and I do not put it past Obama).
But here we are eleven years later to the day, and Netanyahu’s approach is the same: ask not what Israel can do for the United States, but what the United States can do for Israel – regardless of the cost to the United States and the rest of the world.There's more drama from the high seas coming your way!
Bravo is thrilled to announce Below Deck has been renewed for a third season. The Season 2 finale hit a season high in the ratings, with over 1.4 million total viewers.
But before the cast and crew return to sea, they're sitting down to hash out all of the drama so far. Andy Cohen will host the Below Deck reunion with the Ohana crew: Captain Lee Rosbach, Chief Stew Kate Chastain, Chef Ben Robinson, Boson Eddie Lucas, Stews Kat Held and Amy Johnson, Deckhands Kelley Johnson, Jennice Ontiveros, Logan Reese and Andrew Sturby.
No topic is off limits, either: the gang will open up about everything from Kate's "rocket ship" blanket art to Andrew's shocking dismissal from the boat. Plus: are Kelley and Jennice currently an item? Tune in November 4 at 9p ET/PT to find out. And stay tuned to Bravotv.com for more details about Season 3.
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•What's in the Below Deck Crew's Suitcases?After finishing second at the Tour of California this week behind winner Bradley Wiggins (Team Sky), Garmin-Sharp's Rohan Dennis said he hopes to ride his second Grand Tour later this year. Whether that his first three-week race of 2014 comes at the Tour de France or the Vuelta a Espana is yet to be determined, but Dennis said he is looking forward to the challenge whenever or wherever it comes. Related Articles Rohan Dennis withdraws from the Tour de France
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"It will be one of those two," Dennis said. "If it isn't the Tour it will be the Vuelta, which means unfortunately I won't be here for Utah or Colorado. But the Tour is definitely not out of the question yet. That's the goal — whether I do the Tour or the Vuelta — to finish it somewhat not buckled."
The 23-year-old Australian, who rode with Rabobank's development team in 2011 and Team Jayco-AIS in 2013, signed with Garmin-Sharp last year and took his first overall win in a professional stage race at the 2013 Tour of Alberta. Dennis forced his way into Garmin's Tour team last year after a strong showing at June’s Critérium du Dauphiné.
He finished second overall at the five-day Circuit Cycliste Sarthe-Pays de la Loire this year after coming in as runner-up during that race's individual time trial. He also finished second in the time trial stage of the Criterium International. He was runner-up again during the prologue time trial at Tour de Romandie.
Dennis catapulted to the top of the general classification in California with another runner-up performance during the stage 2 individual time trial in Folsom, where he finished 44 seconds behind Wiggins. He carved another 20 seconds out of Wiggins' advantage with a winning attack in the final kilometers of the climb up Mt. Diablo during stage 3, but he lost six seconds to Wiggins on the stage 6 climb to Mountain High. He eventually finished 30 seconds down on the 2012 Tour de France winner.
Dennis said he came into the race as a potential team leader for Garmin, along with Tom Danielson and Janier Acevedo. When those two climbing specialists lost more than two minutes in the time trial, he accepted the mantel of leadership.
Dennis also grabbed the leadership role in Alberta with a second-place finish to Peter Sagan, coming in 18 seconds behind the Cannondale rider during the Canadian race's prologue. He jumped into the overall race lead on a windblown stage 3 that was ripped apart by crosswinds.
Dennis made the front echelon of 17 riders that powered away from the field and eventually put more than 16 minutes into the peloton. In the stage finale, he beat BMC's Brent Bookwalter in a six-up sprint that also included Belkin's Robert Gesink, Cannondale's Damiano Caruso, Argos-Shimano's Patrick Gretsch and BMC's Steve Morabito. Then he held on for two more stages to seal the deal.
"Not to take anything away from that tour, but this is probably more established and higher quality all around," Dennis said in California. "We've got Bradley here and Cavendish, Peter Stetina, Lawson [Craddock]. The list goes on and on. So, really, to get second here is probably more of an achievement for myself."
Dennis said his result this past week gives him more confidence heading into the rest of the season.
"Especially after Diablo," he said. "Usually I wouldn't really get to the top. I'd blow two or three kilometers before the whole of last year. Now |
on Hwy. 6. Out front is a readerboard sign with "GOD BLESS OUR TEACHERS" on the east side - the side you see when driving to Negreet from Many. The high school, which looks fairly new with its bright, red metal roof, appears out of nowhere as we navigate a curve on Hwy. 476. Trucks outnumber cars 3-to-1 in the parking lot.
And there, just as the lawsuit contends, is the electronic marquee for the school, scrolling through notices of weather cancellations and other mundane information followed by "IN ALL WAYS ACKNOWLEDGE GOD & HE WILL DIRECT THY PATH PROV. 3 V6 FCA MEMBERS" That would be the sixth verse of Proverbs 3 from the Holy Bible (and a reference to the school's chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes) - on the marquee of a public high school in the United States in January 2014. Fifty-plus years of constitutional law and U.S. Supreme Court rulings have not breached the piney-wood parapets of rural western Louisiana.
In the school office, a secretary who I imagine is happily married - with three kids whose first names start with the same letter - and goes to church every Sunday tells me Principal Wright "isn't available." She smiles nervously but nods in affirmation when I ask her if they've been getting a lot of media inquiries. But the smile also tells me she's been instructed to keep quiet. And she does. She takes my name and cell number. Wright never calls.
While I'm in the office, Robin snaps some photos in the cavernous lobby of more Bible verses posted on the walls and a portrait of Jesus - a painting presented to the school, we believe, by the 8th grade class that graduated last spring. The Christ portrait hangs above the exits from the lobby, so He is the last thing students see before heading home when the final bell rings.
We head back to Many to try to talk to the superintendent. On the way we stop in at BJ's Grocery & Bait. The proprietor, presumably BJ but he won't give his name or go on record, acknowledges that "GOD BLESS OUR TEACHERS" is indeed an attaboy for Rita Roark, who he says taught his own daughter and is "a good person." This is the Bible Belt he explains, echoing what Superintendent Ebarb allegedly told the Lanes, and folks are God-fearing. The lawsuit and the attention it's beginning to bring to his community is "sad." Like everyone else we've spoken to, he's friendly with a ready smile. When I pull out money to pay for my Dr. Pepper, he says, "A dollar will do," conjuring up images of Ike Godsey, the General Mercantile and John-Boy Walton.
More Bible verses and Christian iconography in the NHS lobby
At the Sabine Parish School Board office adjacent to Many Cemetery, another pleasant secretary informs me that Superintendent Ebarb is also unavailable. She too nods in affirmation when asked if they've been getting a lot of calls - with that same smile that says, "That's all you're getting out of me, mister."
She hands me a sheet with the official school system response: "The Sabine Parish School Board has only recently been made aware of the lawsuit filed by the ACLU. The lawsuit only represents one side's allegations and the board is disappointed that the ACLU chose to file suit without even contacting it regarding the facts.
"The school system recognizes the right of all students to exercise the religion of their choice and will defend the lawsuit vigorously."
She takes my name and cell number. Ebarb never calls.
Back near the Toledo Bend shore beneath the pine and gum trees, Scott Lane catches himself when he accidentally refers to his kids by first name instead of the initials used in the lawsuit to protect their identity. He's frustrated that he can't spill forth with details, because mixed with the trepidation about the Lanes becoming Many's Familia Non Grata is a simmering outrage.
He tells us little that isn't already in the lawsuit, but there's the look in his eye of a man who has a lot to say and is itching to say it.
In a personal account he wrote that was published to the ACLU's website on the day the suit was filed, Lane details the bewilderment he and his wife felt when they realized the superintendent of schools was willing to not only countenance the proselytizing and Christian cheerleading at Negreet High, but endorses them. (The suit alleges that Superintendent Ebard sent a memo to the administration at Negreet High applauding them for standing up for their faith and that the memo was read over the school's intercom system.)
"We don't begrudge others their right to their Christian faith," Lane writes. "But that's why the separation of church and state is so important: It gives us all the breathing room and freedom to believe what we want to believe and to practice those beliefs without undue influence or interference by the government. Forcing your beliefs on another is not freedom; it is oppression."Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney have the political power to decide who they want to let into Canada and who they want to keep out.
With the power to make these decisions, a pattern has emerged where the current Conservative government has laid out the red carpet for former U.S. government officials such as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. While other people seeking entry or residency to Canada have encountered nothing but a locked door and an unwelcome mat. Or, if they currently reside in Canada, they are about to be kicked out.
With a strong case being built around charging Bush with war crimes, why was he allowed into Canada without question or scrutiny by the government and Royal Canadian Mounted Police when others have been denied?
Again, it comes down to political choices and political will.
Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Jason Kenney, has made numerous public statements defending the impartiality of Canada’s immigration system but a developing pattern is emerging regarding who is on Canada’s Most Wanted vs. Most Un-wanted list -- so much so that Jason Kenney has been dubbed by Canadian activists as the new “Minister of Censorship and Deportation.”
While Kenney has stated that the Ministry of Immigration and Citizenship is separate from the country’s immigration system (and denies the ability to interfere politically), the operational truth is that these two political entities work in conjunction with one another.
For example, Minister Kenney has the ability to shape the immigration policy, the basis of the immigration system.
Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, Peter Van Loan, who is in charge of Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), has control over this enforcement arm of the Canadian immigration system.
This means Kenney has the power to table legislation and set policy to prevent a deportation and Van Loan could grant a waiver to halt a deportation by the CSBA.
If they wanted to.
Here’s an overview of who Canada has let into this country, who it has kept out and who it is currently trying to kick out.
Who’s in
On Friday May 29, 2009, Presidents “W.” Bush and Clinton were invited to come to Toronto to speak about their legacies as U.S. presidents. The event was sponsored by such corporations such as the Globe and Mail, TD Financial Group, Nayarit Gold Mining and the Toronto Board of Trade.
Protesters outside the Convention Centre where the two men spoke were more concerned with the presidents’ legacies regarding war crimes:
-President George W. Bush and his administration for their actions in Iraq, including his declaration of pre-emptive war and his support of CIA-operated rendition sites and torture practices.
-President Bill Clinton and his administration for working through the United Nations Security Council to impose sanctions on Iraq between 1990-2003 and for the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999.
Bush had previously visited Calgary, Alberta for another speaking engagement on March 17, 2009. Protesters in both Calgary and Toronto were infuriated to hear that Canada had allowed suspected war criminals to freely enter the country.
Upon hearing that Bush would be travelling to Canada, Lawyers Against the War (LAW) issued a statement to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) asking that Bush be denied entry into Canada under Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act -- Section 35(1)(a), because Bush is a war criminal under Canada's Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act -- Sections 4 to 7 / subsections 6(3) to (5)
Along with Clinton and Bush, other prominent members of the Bush’s administration, or Bush’s “war allies,” have been allowed to enter Canada. These include: Condeleezza Rice’s (former U.S. Secretary of State) visit to Calgary on May 13, 2009; Michael Chertoff’s (former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security) visit to Ottawa on February 23, 2007; John Howard’s (former Prime Minister of Australia and member of Bush’s Coalition of the Willing) visit Ottawa on May 18, 2006; and Donald Rumsfeld’s (former U.S. Secretary of Defence) visit to Banff, Alberta on September 13, 2006.
Canada’s decision to allow individuals such as Bush to cross the border establishes the trend of an open-door, blood-red carpet policy of inclusion to those who are suspected of committing war crimes
According to writer Joshua Blakeney, “It is clear that Canada is increasingly perceived to be a ‘safe haven’ for self-confessed torturers and war criminals who have committed what at Nuremburg -- reflecting upon the unilateralism and genocidal practices of Nazism -- was defined as the ultimate war crime of aggressive war.”
Who’s Out
Juxtaposed against the list above of individuals Canada has allowed to cross its borders are individuals who have been denied entry or repatriation; the list of 'who’s out' reads like a black-list of prominent foreign peace activists and current Canadian citizens.
The most notorious case being that of British MP George Galloway, who was denied entry into Canada by the Canadian Border Service Agency (CBSA) on March 20, 2009, right before his Canadian speaking tour, because he was considered a threat to national security.
Citizenship and Immigration Minister Kenney could have overturned the decision but chose not to do so. The Federal government cited the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA), Section 34(1), which reads among other points of order, that refusal can be based on whether, “e) engaging in acts of violence that would or might endanger the lives or safety of persons in Canada; or (f) being a member of an organization that there are reasonable grounds to believe engages, has engaged or will engage in acts referred to in paragraph (a), (b) or (c).”
Along with Galloway, other peace activists and progressives who have been barred entry into Canada include: Reza Alijani (an award winning Iranian journalist with Reporters Without Borders) and; Shadi Sadr (a women’s activist in Iran) were denied entry into Canada in early May, 2009; and Ann Wright (retired U.S. Army colonel and peace activist) and Medea Benjamin (co-founder of Code Pink), who were denied entry into Canada on October 22, 2007.
Along with these peace activists, Canada has so far refused to repatriate Canadian citizens held in a hellish legal and diplomatic limbo, thus denying them re-entry into the country.
One such case is that of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen held captive in Guantanamo Bay for the past six years who seeks repatriation.
Khadr was captured by American forces at the age of 15 following a four-hour firefight with militants in the village of Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan. He has spent six years in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps charged with war crimes and providing support to terrorism after allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier, but has yet to face a U.S. military tribunal.
The youngest person held in Guantanamo bay and the only Western citizen left, the Canadian government has so far refused to demand his repatriation to Canada. On June 12, Prime Minister Harper told Fox News that “that Canada is not willing to take in Guantanamo Bay detainees.” This despite an April 23, 2009 Federal Court ruling ordering the government of Canada to seek Omar Khadr's repatriation from the United States.
Another Canadian citizen suspended in diplomatic limbo is Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen from Montreal who is currently stranded in Sudan, literally living inside the Canadian embassy for more than a year.
Abdelrazik was arrested on potential terrorism charges back in 2003 but the Sudanese government had released him without charges. Both the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligent Service (CSIS) have similarly stated they both have no evidence against him.
Regardless of his innocence, the Canadian government has refused to allow Abdelrazik back into Canada despite a June 4 Federal Court ruling which orders the Federal government to repatriate him.
Who’s being kicked out
Included in the list of Canada’s most un-wanted are also those foreign nationals or refugee status applicants who face the threat of deportation from Canada because of the politics these individuals embody.
These include foreign nationals currently being held on Canadian Security Certificates. According to writer Justin Podur, “The entire security certificate process is based on urgency in placing someone in detention and ignoring due process, followed by a long, dragged out detention.”
Although major changes were made, including a February 2007 Federal Court ruling that struck down the security certificate system as violating the Canadian Charter, a re-vamped security certificate system still remains in place in Canada.
Podur writes, “In response to legal challenges to these secret deportation trials and opposition to draconian long-term detentions of people without trial, the government has released many of its detainees on house arrest. These include Mohamed Harkat, Mohammad Majoub, Mahmoud Jaballah, Adil Charkaoui, and most recently Hassan Almrei. Despite the pressures to ignore the lack of evidence, the courts have slowed down the government's rush to persecute these men.”
If the government’s security certificates withstand further court challenges, deportations of these men will begin.
Iraq war resisters seeking permanent residence status in Canada are another group of individuals and families facing impending deportation back to the United States in the coming months, where they face military court marshals and less-than honourable discharges from the U.S. military for their conscientious objections to being deployed to Iraq.
Canadian Parliament passed two majority motions in support of resisters, but Kenney has spoken out against them as a group from his position as minister in charge of immigration, referring to them as “bogus refugee claimants.”
Kenney was rebuked by writer John Hogan in a Toronto Sun article, where Hogan claimed the Minister was interfering politically in the cases of war resisters by speaking publically, exposing his government’s bias. While a spokesperson from Kenney’s office later stated that resister claims are being handled through what the government has called “independent tribunals,” Hogan countered, “The immigration officers who are deciding the war resisters' applications do not constitute ‘independent tribunals.’ They exercise decision-making authority delegated to them by the minister of citizenship and immigration."
Lee Zaslofsky, an organizer with the War Resisters Support Campaign (WRCS), called Minister Kenney's comments political interference on the supposedly independent Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) tribunal, which passes judgment on resisters' immigration claims. He said, "Minister Kenney's comments show the Harper government has a blanket policy of opposition against war resisters, which makes it nearly impossible for them to be treated on a 'case-by-case basis' as our government has been leading Canadians to believe."
Criticism of Minister Kenney's remarks was also expressed through an open letter by Elizabeth McWeeney, President of the Canadian Council of Refugees. In the letter, written on January 8, 2009, she stated her concern surrounding Kenney's comments which she called, "highly inappropriate," since they "give the strong appearance of political interference."
Fear and exclusion
Take all the separate elements of exclusion from Canadian society through the Canadian immigration system and put them together and the common factor between all the different groups of the un-wanted revolve around our perception of ‘national security’; as if the current government is using fear to force to public into a false decision between people’s security or a person’s right to not be discriminated against based on someone else’s politics.
Again, it all comes down to political decisions. Ask yourself: would you rather our government allow a suspected war criminal into this country, or someone who promotes peace or simply wants to live here in peace?
krystalline kraus is a Toronto-based writer.Effective data protection enforcement is really hard. The cases where there is a data breach or clear failure to provide notice are easy. The hard cases are where data is used in a manner that is highly creative but also risky or where conflicting laws and interests need to be arbitrated. Those tough cases require Solomon’s judgment and a real capacity to understand not just the law but also computer science, statistics, and human psychology. Staffing such agencies is a challenge. Funding them at a time when tax revenues are growing very slowly is a struggle. This already is a European issue, which will be made more difficult when regulatory reform puts new burdens on existing agencies. It is a problem in Australia where implementing reform has required the writing significant guidance without addition staff for the privacy commissioner. This is an American issue as the FTC has expanded its technology staff, but the FTC only has enforcement authority over a portion of the economy. However, the challenge in countries enacting new comprehensive privacy programs is greater still.
Last week, I was in Brazil. The Brazilian Justice Ministry has distributed a draft comprehensive data protection law for public comment. The draft speaks of undefined “responsible authorities.” Most draft privacy or data protection laws include significant language on the powers of enforcement agencies. I believe Brazilian authorities do not yet have a clear picture of their expectations from a data protection agency or sector-specific agencies given new data protection powers.
My remarks are those of a policy thinker with long experience in observing what works and what has been problematic. It is offered as an observation not as advocacy.
Data protection law is often framed in terms of fundamental rights; however, it is also an essential part of industrial policy for the 21st century. At its best, it encourages data-driven innovation in an economy and society while still protecting individuals from digital predestination. At its worst, it stifles creativity without protecting people from the worst excessive uses of data pertaining to people. Writing the law is doubly difficult, because information and computing technologies are evolving at a rate that can’t be captured in very specific clauses. Therefore, data protection law will leave great discretion to enforcement agencies.
The data protection agency should be the arbiter of the guidance provided by law. As said above, information technology evolves much faster than laws that set bright lines and absolute legal certainty. The best data protection laws set clear objectives for data protection laws and create robust expectation for those organizations that exploit information. In other words, the law should state what is expected, greater protection for individuals from the inappropriate creation and application of information, but not necessarily how those protections should be achieved. When law is designed to grow with the technology applications that it regulates, the more robust the legal authority must be. To be effective, the agency needs diverse skill sets that go beyond traditional consumer protection. The agency needs people who can interrogate an organization to assure they have honesty and skills to assure mathematics isn’t applied to data in an inappropriate manner for inappropriate purposes.
Placing the authority in numerous sector-specific regulators may seem more attractive and less costly. However, a society cannot afford to duplicate that expertise in many sector-specific regulators. Instead, the resources need to be dedicated and applied across an economy. That does not mean that specific oversight responsibilities might not be dedicated to a specialized agency. For example, specialized laws related to credit reporting or employment. What it means is that the overall guidance for information policy should rest with a data protection agency. Furthermore, the more agencies that enforce a law, the more likely one will find the law applied in an inconsistent manner. Japan currently has this problem with over thirty agencies enforcing the same law.
The agency should have the following attributes:
The agency should have the independence to make tough calls. Information drives both the public and private sector. An agency should not be afraid to identify collections and uses that are inappropriate. It should, therefore, not be part of an executive agency. Furthermore, in a perfect world, its funding should not be subject to the appropriation requests of an executive agency as well. There are numerous cases of data protection agencies having budgets cut because of actions a government did not like. Furthermore, independence is a requirement of adequacy with European Union data protection law.
The individual or individuals that lead the agency should have fixed terms and should not be removable without due process. Particularly, the commissioners should not be subject to removal for political reasons.
It should have resources to weigh the capacity and integrity of the organizations using advanced information technologies and mathematics. This means employing engineers and mathematicians not just lawyers. The most advanced agencies are creating technology units, and those technologies units are collaborating with similar units at other global agencies.
International cooperation should be an agency mandate. Information just moves. Effective enforcement requires agency cooperation. There have been numerous cases where data protection agencies have cooperated to bring enforcement actions. Laws such as the Safe Web Act facilitate the sharing of enforcement data. The Brazilian law will be judged in part on how interoperable it is with other agencies.
The agency should have an educational mandate as well. That should be education both for organizations that use and collect data as well as for the individuals to whom the data pertains. Companies need to understand the expectations that go along with data stewardship. Individuals need to understand their role in protecting their interests. Privacy notices alone will not achieve that end. Consumer education needs to be an explicit task.
Brazil is in the early phases of the development of its data protection legal system. It is a large country with significant data flows commensurate with it being the 7th largest economy. A data protection enforcement agency in Brazil will need to be large enough with diverse skill sets necessary to deal with the challenges of a modern information driven economy. The Brazilian economy is not at its strongest at the moment, so visualizing a new agency that will reap future economic benefits requires imagination. However, at the end of the day, the investment in thoughtful data protection, both in terms of law and agency, surely will create great benefits.
Funding issues are not unique to Brazil. It is time to think outside the box to fund data protection. If we want independent agencies, we need to give them dedicated funding sources. Maybe there should be a license to process data with the license fee dedicated to paying for a data protection agency. I would welcome other suggestions.Got a band? Need some shirts to sell for merch? Are you on a budget? Of course you’re on a budget, you’re in a band.
I started Vacord Screen Printing in 2006 because I had a band. It was a noise band in Philly called MOTHER. A two person band, me and one of my best friends Sanchez. Finally, I was in some sort of band, and we of course needed shirts. Sanchez put together a design and I contacted a friend of a friend who did screen printing, and he quoted me on 100 shirts and I thought it was too expensive, so I went and got a little speedball art kit and did them myself, which then turned into doing shirt projects for fun and for other people, which has now grown into a significant business known nationwide with several employees.
But enough about me, what about your band? You need awesome shirts so you can sell them at shows, but you also need a good deal because you want your margin to be nice on those sales. Here are some tips to keep it affordable.
KISS or Keep It Simple, Stupid – KISS is sort of my motto in life. For every color in the design, there is a screen. And for every location too. So a 3 color front and 3 color back print is going to cost a lot more than a 1 color front print. Keep it simple and that will keep the cost down. A LOT. Two color designs can have a big impact – If you must have more than one color in your design, try just using two colors, as that second color as an accent color won’t add much cost to your project, but can add a whole lot visually to your design. Keep it one sided – Like I mentioned in #1, every location is a screen, or a set of screens. If you keep your design on the front only, that can keep it cheap. Use affordable but nice shirts – Most people love American Apparel, but they’re not the cheapest shirts obviously. On the other hand, a lot of people don’t want a regular old boxy tshirt. But there are many very affordable shirts that are made from ringspun cotton, like Anvil 980 or Gildan g640. These may only be fifty cents more per shirt compared to their boxier, less soft cousins, but a lot cheaper than the high-end shirts like American Apparel or Alternative. Remember that you’re trying to convince people to give you dollars for these shirts, so the shirt itself needs to be nice and something people will actually want against their bodies. (Similar to why you should try to shower on tour). Discharge ink – Discharge ink is getting more popular, but not all screen printers use it. We do, of course. Discharge works by becoming part of the shirt, instead of being a layer of ink on top, like traditional ink. And discharge doesn’t have to be more expensive; instead it can actually be cheaper because it’s easier and faster to print in a lot of cases. And it’s way more awesome of a result, which can help in actually moving the shirts off the merch table. Take advantage of price breaks – Like a basement power noise show, screen printing pricing is all about volume, volume, volume. Our price breaks are at 24, 48, 100, 200, and 500 pieces. The price difference per shirt if you go from 48 to 100 pieces can be significant, which helps your margin when you sell the shirts. Sometimes a band may ask for 90 shirts, then learn that it would be actually cheaper in total to get 100. Always ask about price breaks. Want variety? Mix up the shirt color, not the design – If you want to keep it cheap but get some variety still, try mixing up the color of shirts. White discharge ink will look good on a ton of different shirt colors, so instead of getting 100 black shirts, you could do something crazy like try other colors than just black. As long as the design is kept the same, the pricing is still based on how many shirts we print at a time, so adding in a variety of shirt colors doesn’t change that. And like most printers we can change the ink for a small fee, so you could do 50 shirts with red ink on black, and then 50 shirts with black ink on red, and not increase the total order cost much. Don’t procrastinate – Leaving for tour in a week? Rush fees can hurt, so it’s best to start talking to a screen printer earlier. Starting the conversation a month before you need the shirts gives us plenty of time to discuss pricing, iron out details, and print and ship the shirts before you have to have them for your next tour or big local show.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us.
Need shirts for your band? We would love to help with that. Fill out this form and we’ll get right back to you.Red Hat has fixed an important vulnerability in the OpenStack subsystem that’s used to manage network connectivity to and from virtual machines. If left unpatched, it could allow an attacker to access network resources from virtual machines.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-7543 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, is located in openstack-neutron, a “pluggable, scalable and API-driven” component of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform that’s used to provision networking services to virtual machines.
In a security advisory, Red Hat describes the flaw as a “race condition” triggered by a minor overcloud update. In OpenStack vernacular, the overcloud is the production cloud used by tenants, as opposed to the control cloud, or the undercloud, which is used to bootstrap the production cloud.
The overcloud update disabled neutron security groups by setting net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables, net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables and net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables to 0. In turn, this disabled iptables, the Linux kernel firewall, creating a serious security risk.
“The race was only triggered by an update, at which point an attacker could access exposed tenant VMs and network resources,” Red Hat said in its advisory.
Updated neutron related packages were released for OpenStack 6.0 (Juno), 7.0 (Kilo), 8.0 (Liberty), 9.0 (Mitaka), 10.0 (Newton) and 11.0 (Ocata) to fix the vulnerability.
This week, Red Hat also released kernel patches for several editions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 and 7.3 Extended Update Support to fix moderate and important vulnerabilities that could be exploited remotely and could lead to denial of service conditions, arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation — gaining higher privileges than the user running the affected component.
The update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 fixes a single vulnerability tracked as CVE-2017-7895. This flaw has been known since April and is located in the kernel server implementation of the Network File System (NFS) versions 2 and 3.
If exploited the flaw could lead to arbitrary code execution, which is why it’s rated with 9.8 out of 10 in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. The flaw has been patched in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 and 7.4 in June.
Red Hat is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.Mary Beth Haglin, 24, said: “I am the victim.” The busty brunette has admitted romping with the 17-year-old almost every day for six months and sending him raunchy selfies to turn him on. One shot included her stripped to sexy black undies and leaning seductively against a wall.
MYDRIM JONES Mary Beth Haglin slept with the 17-year-old hundreds of times
She could be jailed for two years if convicted of sexually exploiting the boy. But Haglin, who began working as a stripper under the name Bambi after being sacked from the school, insisted: “The student is the one who seduced me.“ She claimed the teenager swept her off her feet after coming on strong and wooing her with handwritten notes and texts.
MYDRIM JONES Haglin claimed that she was the victim because she was seduced
The teacher said: “He did so with such intelligence and such an elevated vocabulary that I was completely duped by the whole façade.“ Haglin said she became vulnerable through a troubled relationship with her boyfriend.
We had sex – almost daily – in his car, my car, his mum's house, and his dad's house Mary Beth Haglin
She said “He caught me in my weakest moments, and he used that to his advantage. “I did ignore a lot of that at first because obviously, I knew that it was illegal, not allowed, frowned upon - everything.”
She decided to respond to one of the pupil’s messages after a big bust-up with her boyfriend and they started their physical relationship in October 2015, she said. He compared their relationship to The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman and once called her “Mrs Robinson” after Anne Bancroft's character.
MYDRIM JONES Haglin entered a relationship with the student after a troubled relationship with her boyfriend
Haglin told TV's Dr Phil: “We had sex – almost daily – in his car, my car, his mum's house, and his dad's house.” She said that she tried to end the affair but claimed the pupil threatened to expose her if she tried to leave him. She added: “When things got way out of control, and I wanted out, he began saying 'I will light a match and burn your life down.'”
MYDRIM JONES The pupil called Haglin Mrs Robinson after Anne Bancroft's character in The GraduateCity Government
GUEST OPINION: Oppose CVS At 16th And State
By Stephen C. Fischer
It’s a longshot, but a grassroots effort of average citizens in Boise is taking on the big corporation of CVS Pharmacy and their plans to build a 15,000-foot store at State and 16th – with a petition that has garnered more than 300 signatures in its first week.
This proposed CVS would be an oversized eyesore with lots of unsightly asphalt for 48 spaces of parking. It would demolish the artsy Arcade building, along with three vintage homes on Jefferson Street. Also, there are already at least three pharmacies in the immediate area.
This big and boxy monstrosity of traffic and smog and noise would intrude against a cherished historic neighborhood at the gateway to downtown Boise – the type of project that threatens Boise at its core, its heart, and so is a danger to all the Treasure Valley.
As the number of signatures to the petition soars, CVS ignores it at the peril of a boycott of not only this store, but its other stores. Any local government officials ignore us at the peril of losing our votes.
This is a scrappy rally of regular residents who are trying to save our uniquely lovely and livable hometown from being demolished into a bland and boring version of urban sprawl and congestion, concrete and asphalt, neon and noise.
In the words of one commenter on the petition site, we don’t want Boise to become Everywhere Else, USA.
This effort to block CVS at State and 16th seems to be a last stand to save Boise, to preserve its special character from a crass commercialization that seems to be sweeping across America — devastating the ambience of attractive cities and robbing them of their individual identities.
At present, Boise seems beset by a tidal wave of proposed developments that threaten to overwhelm us with a demolition of beauty and a leveling of local character, reducing our surroundings into a bland and boring monotony.
A new and excellent resource named Vanishing Boise is chronicling the startling and sad degradation that awaits us in Boise if we don’t put up a strong and determined resistance right away. http://www.facebook.com/vanishingboise
If we turn back CVS to more suitable locations in our area, we will have won a great victory that could give us the momentum to stop other projects that are a looming danger to our precious but precarious quality of life.
As Homer Simpson says while driving down a typical American roadway of chain stores and fast-food franchises, “Ah, the Miracle Mile [or State Street heading west from downtown Boise]. Where value wears a neon sombrero and there’s not a single church or library to offend the eye.”
Let’s not let Boise succumb to this kind of joke, this defacement and defilement that benefits only a tiny few elitists of power and wealth, to the detriment of the common person.
Keep Boise Unique!!! Please join us: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-cvs-at-state-and-16th-in-boise
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RelatedBelow is a collection of some things I’ve learned over the years as a Pro Tour Magic player. I’ve tried to exclude things I jotted down solely for the purpose of appearing witty, but the format kind of lends itself to these items and some of that no doubt survived. My goal with this piece is to open these items up for discussion, which will help me add to and refine the list – a list I’ve been cultivating for a while. When it comes to this complex game we love, we all have more to learn than we have to teach. Hopefully I can teach you all a little, and from your responses learn a lot.
Trust everyone, but cut the cards. (Not mine, but too important to exclude). Sailors’ corollary: “Pray to God, but row to shore.” According to Paul Rietzl, the wisdom of the crowd is usually this about draft formats: During the first two weeks of a new draft format, it is “The best format ever.” Week 3, the format is “Tempo based.” Week 4 it is “Bomb dependent.” In Week 5, it is “Unplayable.” When your friend who always plays control picks aggro, trust her and avoid control, but don’t trust her aggro list. a) When underprepared, play Rock. b) Poll your friends before playing Paper (are they actually playing Rock, or just scared of it?) If you always follow a recipe as close as you can when cooking, don’t use a sideboard guide. (Unless novice or very underprepared). “Next Week’s Deck” (Scissors) is better than “Last Week’s Deck” (Rock)—consider the top table metagame—but you’ll have to tune it yourself. Specific: If you spend Saturday on Magic Online, spend Sunday outside. (General: “Arbitrary” commitments to avoid inertia and obtain balance are not arbitrary.) The person playing only one deck in testing will have a tuned list. Whether to play the deck is your question. Which 75 cards to put in the deck is mostly theirs. Your significant other (assuming he or she is a muggle) sharing your PT vacation with you should be scheduled to arrive on Sunday morning—to watch you in top 8 or to start the non-Magic phase of the trip, but not earlier. The same reasoning as: 2 hours of work and then a 2-hour movie is better than 4 hours of movie and work, as long as you care about focusing on the work or the movie. When someone thinks of an idea you already thought of a week ago, explore where they are headed and why before pointing out that you thought of it first. The two of you may be holding connecting pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, rather than the same piece. They count losing the last round to make Top 16 or Top 25 the same as winning the last 3 rounds to make Top 16 or Top 25. But the former is harder and ought to count for more, in the same way a sports team’s strength of schedule ought to matter but is hard to measure. (Put another way, tiebreakers tell us something about strength of schedule and performance under pressure, but that information is not persistent). If you ignore the worst card in your opening hand and the remaining N cards make a hand you would WANT to see if you mulled to N, you should usually keep. Master this and you won’t be mulliganning too much. If your 7-card hand needs multiple things to get going, not just one thing, you should |
such as devaluing the currency (which the Federal Reserve could do by buying a great many bonds, thus flooding the world with dollars), could stimulate our exports and hence production and hence employment and reduce imports (which would further help domestic production), but they are too risky given the interdependence of our economy and the economies of the rest of the world. Europe is staggering and would be hurt by our devaluing, and our banks and other financial institutions are heavily involved in those European economies.Greg Sargent has the rundown on the impact of Vice President Joe Biden using the phrase "big fucking deal" a few weeks ago -- and, apparently, it wasn't much of a big fucking deal.
From a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll:
As you may have heard, Vice President Joe Biden used foul language to describe how important he thought passage of the new health care bill was when he whispered to President Obama "this is a big expletive deal" -- do you think the vice president's use of foul language to describe the bill was offensive, or not? Yes, offensive: 37% No, not offensive: 57%
Yes, well, no surprise here. Sure, the good people of America take care to observe proper decorum in instances that call for it -- i.e. not loudly swearing in church and whatnot -- but in casual conversation and unguarded moments where we suspect no one is listening, actual real-live people in the world get mad salty.
That's just the real world of human interaction. William Shakespeare, the greatest English language writer in history, penned ornate sex jokes for the Queen of England (there's a reason I snicker whenever I hear a politician say "Country matters!"). Like Biden, even Peggy Noonan -- the only human being I think is actively attempting to speak in iambic pentameter at all times -- drops in the odd swear word when she thinks she's far enough away from the microphone.
Most people don't get worked up over this, because most people aren't mewling, doe-eyed infants. (57% sounds about right to me, actually.)
(Also? Know who also isn't much of a BFD, according to this poll? Sarah Palin! Sargent notes that "a majority, 51%, say that if Sarah Palin campaigns with a candidate, it will make them less likely to support that person." Again: duh.)Plans for a private foot-passenger ferry service from downtown Nanaimo to downtown Vancouver are one step closer after the city and Island Ferry Services reached an agreement on a 20-year lease.
The company's director of marine operations, Dave Marshall, says Island Ferry will pay $52,000 a year for the prime downtown waterfront location near the terminal used by BC Ferries for its Gabriola Island service.
"This is a good day. This is significant. It's the conclusion of work that has been going on for a number of months," said Marshall
Marshall says the foot-passenger service will be up and running by March 2015. The company is proposing to run two catamarans on the route capable of travelling at 37 knots, with six daily round trips taking about 68 minutes each way.
The Vancouver terminal for the route has not been announced.
Previous efforts to run a foot-passenger ferries between Nanaimo and Vancouver have failed, in part because of low ridership levels, and expensive engine failure, and tax bills.Stare at your feet whilst walking around Georgian and Victorian Dublin and you wont be able to go ten feet without crossing a cast-iron coal hole cover.
A common feature of Georgian and later Victorian era terraces were coal cellars built under the footpath and accessible from the basement floor of the house. In some cases these cellars extend well under the street, as the Luas building workers keep finding out. Access hatches, known as coal holes, were installed so that coal and turf deliveries could be shovelled in from the street without dragging it through the house. They are between 12" - 14” in diameter, small enough to keep all but the most svelte size 0 burglars out, and generally circular so that the lids cannot fall through the hole.
The majority of the covers were made between 1760 and 1830 in long closed foundries like Tonge and Taggart on Windmill Lane, South City Foundry on Bishop Street, Sharke’s on Church Street, Hammond Lane and T Saul & Co on Upper Leeson Street
They were all cast with lines and patterns to stop people slipping on them in the rain and frequently with the name of the foundry. Over time the covers became highly detailed with floral motifs and geometric patterns, allowing the architects and home owners to show off a bit more personality.
*Thanks to Ask About Ireland for some of the info!By Margaret Kimberley
In 2009, the New York state legislature imposed a tax surcharge on residents earning
$1 million or more per year. This “millionaire’s tax” was passed with the proviso that it expire on December 31, 2011. When Democrats in the state capital proposed extending this tax on the rich, Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo said no, and the surcharge was history.
The Occupy Wall Street protesters held a march, dubbed the millionaire’s march, to demand that the rich pay their fair share of taxes. They marched past the New York City homes of billionaire David Koch, News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, and Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase. For some strange reason, they did not march past the offices of the Democratic governor.
This stunning inaction is a bad omen that the Occupy Wall Street movement is doomed to fail unless it changes course quickly. The only way to protest income inequality or bailouts of the financial services industry is to protest against the people in power, even when they happen to be Democrats. Occupy Wall Street appears destined to turn into yet another effort to soft pedal Democratic complicity in the current economic crisis. OWS activists must not only disconnect themselves from the Democratic Party, but have the courage to protest them as strongly as they would Murdoch and Koch.
Agitation in favor of the “99%” against the “1%” is useless if it doesn’t address the bipartisan nature of the attack on the working people of this country. It is a bad sign indeed when the likes of Nancy Pelosi express support for OWS. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hypocritically asks for “100,000 strong standing with Occupy Wall Street.” It strains credulity to believe that the people in charge of raising corporate cash for democrats really want to see changes in our political system.
It is Barack Obama, not George W. Bush, who made a lie of the dictum that Social Security is the “third rail of politics.” It is now in the slaughterhouse along with all other government programs, waiting its turn to be eviscerated. The Democrats have excelled in committing the crimes which Republicans have only dreamed about, and they will only grow bolder if they are not called to account.
As a witness to the protest in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti park, this columnist did not see one sign or hear any general assembly statements denouncing the Democratic Party. It is easy to shout down Geraldo Rivera and Fox news, that condemnation is low hanging fruit for any intelligent person.
It will be harder to say that Andrew Cuomo and his political aspirations are as much a part of the problem as Messrs. Koch and Dimon. The propaganda which ignores Democratic Party perfidy is very deeply imbedded in the American people. If they don’t hear the voices of the American left telling them the truth of the country’s condition, then our situation is a dire one indeed.
The coming days and weeks will give the occupiers ample opportunity to speak out as the Obama administration ratchets up its efforts to realize right wing fantasies. On the same day that marchers missed a golden opportunity to expose the Democratic Party’s complicity in letting wealthy New Yorkers get away with their ill gotten gains, the administration charged Iranian citizens in a bizarre and unbelievable plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Will the OWS forces move to protest when Obama makes the inevitable case for war, or will they revert to letting Democratic crimes against humanity go unopposed?
While OWS promises to remain unco-opted by any political party, it has not moved further to include the Democrats in its denunciations. Partly as a result of its leaderless, decentralized nature, OWS has been slow to solidify any demands. Words like breaking up the concentration of wealth and power will be meaningless without a more pointed critique of the political system, a critique which should be no respecter of persons or party.
Mass action is the only way to prevent further inequality, and further American aggression around the world. Occupy Wall Street can be the beginning of a great movement, or a lost opportunity. The experiment may be in its beginning stages, but the learning curve has to be brief if OWS is to not only remain free from political interference, but make good on its claims of fighting for the interests of working people.After draining 14 of 18 three-pointers in the first half, the Rockets appeared well on pace to break some records against the Warriors. And indeed, in blowing out Golden State 140-109, Houston blasted right through the franchise high for three-pointers (17) and set the record for points scored at the Toyota Center with 140. With 3:41 remaining and garbage time in full effect, Donatas Motiejunas drained Houston's 23rd three, tying the all-time NBA record.
Houston had plenty of time to make history, but Mark Jackson's Warriors would have none of it. First they watched the Rockets -- clearly gunning for the record -- miss a couple of eager heaves while the crowd rained down chants of "ONE MORE THREE!"
When Patrick Beverley drove the lane, threw down a big dunk, and celebrated a little too demonstratively for a guy whose team was up 30, the Warriors finally snapped. First Draymond Green got ejected for a hard hit on Beverley, then Jackson engaged a troll job for the ages.
On Houston's last few possessions, the Warriors assured there would be no more threes. Jackson knew full well the Rockets were hunting for the record, so he had his guys commit intentional fouls to prevent Rockets from even attempting to break the record. It worked. Houston couldn't even pull a three-pointer in the final 1:58 and finished the game with 23 threes, tying the mark set by the Orlando Magic in 2009.
Well trolled, Coach Jackson. Good to see you've still got some pride down 30-plus points.Hillary Clinton ditched the press in the middle of a statement after suffering from another large coughing fit aboard her new plane.
From RCP:
“He seems to have this bizarre attraction to dictators, including Putin. He won’t tell us where he owes $650 million. There’s a lot of rumors about that. And he has made it clear that he doesn’t particularly care if Putin and the intelligence services attack American institutions,” Clinton said as she trailed off into a coughing attack. “Can I have some water,” Clinton asked an aide.
Of note, at the 1:22 minute mark we see the black “doctor” who follows her around with what people speculated was an Diazepam or Apokyn pen is back.
He mysteriously disappeared after questions about whether he was her “handler” went viral.Narendra Modi, dwelt on foreign policy issues during his swing through the northeastern states earlier this week.
MODI’S FRONTIER
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The frontier is where domestic politics meets diplomacy. It was no surprise then that the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, dwelt on foreign policy issues during his swing through the northeastern states earlier this week. Flanked by China, Bangladesh and Myanmar, the Northeast is a crucible where many of India’s foreign and security challenges come together. Speaking at Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh, a state claimed in its entirety by Beijing, Modi declared that China must shed its “expansionist mindset”. He also insisted that Arunachal is an integral part of India and that “no power can snatch it from us”.
As the leader of the BJP, which sees itself as a champion of national security, Modi’s tough rhetoric in the election campaign was understandable. It is also in line with the mainstream national narrative on the territorial dispute with Beijing. It might not be accurate to see Modi’s statement on the territorial question as representing the China policy of a future government headed by him after the elections. Modi had earlier travelled to China to a warm reception in Beijing as the chief minister of Gujarat and a potential prime minister of India. In his engagement with Chinese leaders, Modi had signalled his openness towards more business ties with Beijing, while apparently not mincing words on India’s security concerns.
Modi also inherits the foreign policy legacy of the NDA government (1998-2004), which had a pragmatic orientation towards China. Then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee sought to expand the engagement with China, resolve the boundary dispute, end the nuclear imbalance with Beijing and strengthen India’s military capabilities. In Beijing, a spokesperson of the ministry of foreign affairs offered a bland response to Modi’s comments by affirming China’s commitment to a peaceful resolution of the boundary dispute. Beijing has no apparent reason to get into an argument with Modi on the contentious boundary question.
POWER SHIFT
At some point during the campaign, when he articulates the BJP’s foreign policy agenda, Modi may offer a more substantive insight into his thinking on China. In doing so, Modi will have to come to terms with the dramatic expansion of China’s comprehensive national power over the last decade. As a result of this expansion, China’s weight in the global economy, international and regional institutions, and in the Asian balance of power, has risen exponentially. Above all, China’s influence on India’s immediate neighbourhood has grown by leaps and bounds.
For the next government, tough rhetoric on the boundary question is no substitute for coping with the multiple challenges arising from China’s new status as a first-rate power. With China emerging as the second-largest economy in the world and a leading exporter of capital and technology, comprehensive commercial cooperation with Beijing is an imperative that no government in New Delhi can ignore. At the same time, the next government in Delhi must also address the implications of one important fact: the growing gap in the strategic capabilities of China and India in favour of the former. China’s GDP is now four times larger than that of India, and Beijing’s defence spending is more than thrice that of India.
SMART STRATEGY
India’s China policy, then, needs more strategy and less posturing. Central to such a smart approach to China must be the acceleration of India’s economic growth and the pursuit of purposeful national development. Consider, for example, Arunachal Pradesh. Notwithstanding China’s territorial claims, Arunachal has been under India’s control and Beijing has had no power to stop Delhi from developing the state.
Modi may be zeroing in on the right issue when he criticised the inordinately slow economic modernisation of the region. The UPA government’s impressive plans for building road and rail networks in the Northeast remain mostly on paper. An ambitious strategy and a credible plan to develop infrastructure all across the Himalayan frontier are likely to make a better impression on Beijing than the rhetoric on the boundary dispute.
If the BJP is serious about standing up to China, it must also reconsider its policies towards India’s smaller neighbours. Nothing illustrates the BJP’s lack of a strategy than its opposition to the settlement of the land boundary dispute with Dhaka. The more India squabbles with its neighbours, the easier it is for China to expand its influence in the subcontinent. It is a pity that Modi gave no hint of a positive shift in the party’s policy towards Bangladesh during his run through the Northeast.
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The writer is a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, Delhi and a contributing editor for ‘The Indian Express’Vote Now:
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The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's reported execution of British aid worker David Haines is likely only the latest in what promises to be an escalating, serialized slaying of innocent people to prove its terrorist credentials and recruit more members, national security experts told Newsmax."They are the ones. It is not al-Qaida," former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra said. "They are trying to recruit more people. They believe the techniques that they are employing right now are successful in their recruitment and their funding — and they're going to keep going exactly in that direction."They know the West is mad at them, OK?" Hoekstra continued. "But I don't think that they're seeing a robust Western response to this yet."At this point, we don't have a frightening coalition, so they're just going along — they're killing Americans, and they've just killed this Brit, they're killing Christian minorities — and they’re seeing a half-hearted response from the West."What they're seeing is their influence within the jihadist movement growing exponentially, so they're going to continue doing exactly what they're doing," Hoekstra said.The Islamic State claimed that it had beheaded Haines, 44, who was kidnapped last year while working for the French agency ACTED, in retaliation for British Prime Minister David Cameron entering a coalition with the United States against the militants.The beheading would be the third by ISIS in recent weeks, after those of two U.S. journalists who were taken hostage in Syria, James Foley, 40, and Steven Sotloff, 31.Haines is a father of two from Perth in Scotland.The three executions were recorded in videos released to the Internet. The video of Haines' beheading was available on the website of the private terrorism monitoring group SITE. As in the other videos, it showed a masked militant beheading Haines. He was featured at the end of the video released on Sept. 2 showing Sotloff's death.The video was entitled "A Message to the Allies of America" — and it opened with Cameron strongly pledging last month to work with the Iraqi government and allied Kurdish Peshmerga forces to defeat the Islamic State."This British man has to pay the price for your promise, Cameron, to arm the Peshmerga against the Islamic State," said the masked man, dressed in black and speaking with a British accent.He was standing over Haines, who was shown kneeling and wearing an orange jumpsuit. The video then showed the beheading of the kneeling man. The deaths in the earlier videos followed virtually the same script.At the end of Haines video, another hostage was shown — with the masked terrorist saying that he would be killed if Cameron continued to support battling the Islamic State.In a statement late Saturday, Cameron called Haines' murder an "act of pure evil" and vowed that Britain would do all it could to bring the killers to justice."This is a despicable and appalling murder of an innocent aid worker," the prime minister said. "It is an act of pure evil."We will do everything in our power to hunt down these murderers and ensure they face justice, however long it takes," Cameron said.President Barack Obama condemned "the barbaric murder" of Haines and pledged its commitment to working with the U.K. and other nations to defeat the Islamic State, which also is referred to as ISIL."The United States stands shoulder to shoulder tonight with our close friend and ally in grief and resolve," Obama said in a statement. "We will work with the United Kingdom and a broad coalition of nations from the region and around the world to bring the perpetrators of this outrageous act to justice, and to degrade and destroy this threat to the people of our countries, the region and the world."On Friday, Haines' family appealed to his captors to respond to their messages.In interviews with Newsmax, Hoekstra and retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden said the video gave no doubt that ISIS murdered Haines."Obviously, you do what you can do, but why would any of us have reason to believe that it's not what it is?" asked Hayden, who is also the former director the CIA and the National Security Agency. "It just shows the very nature of the adversary here."It shows the true nature of this enemy we call ISIS. This is the literal meaning of terrorism: doing violence to the innocent for political effect."While ISIS specifically named Cameron in its latest video, neither Hayden or Hoekstra told Newsmax that it would likely affect Britain's determination to eliminate the terrorists."They're attempting to intimidate Western leaders," Hayden said. "I don't think that works — and it hasn't to date, and I don't expect it to work in the future."In fact, in the United States, it's pushed the president more in the direction of action, not away from it," Hayden observed. "Cameron was already quite strong in some of the things he's said."In the future, though, world leaders may be more cautious in their public statements on their plans for ISIS, he said."I don't know if killings like this could or should affect what democratic leaders say," Hayden said. "I'm sure that they'll be counseled not to be as public in terms of some of the things they might say. I certainly hope that it doesn't affect some of the things they might do."Regardless, Hoekstra said: "You're not going to base foreign policy off the brutality against two Americans and one British citizen. You can't formulate foreign policy that way."Hoekstra served eight terms in the House of Representatives as a Republican before leaving office to run unsuccessfully for Michigan governor in 2010."I don't think this will have any impact at all on the long-term strategy of the Brits," he added. "They recognize this as a threat. They recognize it as a brutal threat."Hopefully, their resolve to join the United States to battle ISIL will be firm and resolute."Newsmax wires contributed to this report.Chief Executive CY Leung will attend a second forum on August 18 to meet the public and to listen to people’s views and aspirations.
The forum will be held from 2.30pm to 4pm at Kwun Tong Kung Lok Government Secondary School at 90 Kung Lok Road. Secretary for Food & Health Dr Ko Wing-man and Secretary for the Environment KS Wong will accompany the Chief Executive.
Members of the public are invited to attend the forum this Sunday. As seats are limited, admission tickets will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis.
Subject to site circumstances, the tickets will be distributed at around 9am this Sunday at the Kwun Tong District Office Public Enquiry Service Centre on G/F, the Grande Building, 398 Kwun Tong Road.
Details of a third forum will be announced later.
Full News here – news.gov.hk – News Ticker
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Some local news is curated - Original might have been posted at a different date/ time! Click the source link for details.Lebanon's social media is aflutter by its own version of the Ice Bucket Challenge, as young Lebanese are posting pictures and videos of themselves burning the flag of the Islamic State under the hashtag #BurnISISFlagChallenge.
The new phenomenon was sparked when three young men staged a flag burning in a Beirut square in protest of the alleged beheading of a Lebanese officer at the Muslim group's hands. The youths posted a video of the flag-burning online and encouraged others to follow suit, Mother Jones reported.
Though many have since taken up the cause, the design of the Islamic State flag has raised concerns Lebanon's Justice Minister and others that burning it is sacrilegious and an affront to Islam, as it is emblazoned with the religion's holy tenet "there is no god by Allah and Mohammed is his prophet" in Arabic.
Minister Ashraf Rifi went as far as to demand the "sternest punishment" for creators of the original video, who are "stirring up sectarian conflicts," an act illegal in Lebanon, Asharq-al-Awsat reported.
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But other politicians rallied for the youth's support, one of which even offered his services as an attorney should they be brought to trial.
A member of the Change and Reform parliamentary bloc in Lebanon, Nabil Naqoula, slammed the minister's response to the flag-burning, saying the Islamic State's flag "does not represent Islam in the slightest."
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Lebanese youths in Beirut burn the ISIS flag pic.twitter.com/7a8gTOHVFG
The Jewish Press » » Burn Your ISIS Flag Today [video] #BurnISISFlagChallenge #isis #Israel http://t.co/IeR0LbUK33 pic.twitter.com/DULQDOkz8O
#BurnISISFlagChallenge It's got Allah & Muhammad written on it. I'm against them but burn a flag with Allah written, I wouldn't suggest that
Is #BurnISISFlagChallenge #Lebanon's new trend an act against #IS or #Islam itself? #justwonderingJared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and senior adviser, didn't identify on his government financial disclosure form that he is currently a part-owner of a real-estate finance startup and has a number of loans from banks on properties he co-owns, according to securities filings.
Mr. Kushner's stake in Cadre -- a tech startup that pairs investors with big real-estate projects -- means the senior White House official is currently a business partner of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and billionaires including George Soros and Peter Thiel, according to people close to the company.
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The Cadre stake is one of many interests -- and ties to large financial institutions -- that Mr. Kushner didn't identify on his disclosure form, according to a Wall Street Journal review of securities and other filings. Others include loans totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders, to properties and companies part-owned by Mr. Kushner, the Journal found. He has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt, according to the analysis.
Jamie Gorelick, a lawyer representing Mr. Kushner, said in a statement that his stake in Cadre is housed in a company he owns called BFPS Ventures LLC. His ownership of BFPS is reported in his financial-disclosure form, although it doesn't mention Cadre.
Ms. Gorelick said the Cadre stake is described in a revised version of his financial-disclosure form that will be made public after it has been certified by ethics officials. She said Mr. Kushner has previously discussed his Cadre ownership with the Office of Government Ethics and that Mr. Kushner has "resigned from Cadre's board, assigned his voting rights, and reduced his ownership share." A spokesman for the Office of Government Ethics didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Gorelick added that it is "very normal" for a financial disclosure form to be revised and that the form was prepared by Mr. Kushner's lawyers on his behalf.
Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, and other ethics experts said investments such as Mr. Kushner's ownership of Cadre typically need to be disclosed.
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They said Mr. Kushner didn't appear to violate disclosure rules by not publicly reporting his business-related debts and guarantees. But they said such arrangements ideally should be disclosed, in part because they could force Mr. Kushner to recuse himself from certain issues involving the lenders.
"Anything that presents a potential for the conflict of interest should be disclosed so that the public and the press can monitor this," Mr. Potter said.
Ethics experts' concern is that Mr. Kushner's business connections could jeopardize his impartiality in certain areas and that, absent disclosures, the public is in the dark about potential conflicts. His rapidly expanding responsibilities range from working on a Middle East peace deal to making federal bureaucracy operate more efficiently. As a senior federal official, Mr. Kushner is bound by ethics laws that require him to recuse himself from matters that would directly affect his financial interests.
Ms. Gorelick, who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said Mr. Kushner will "recuse consistent with government ethics rules."
Mr. Kushner, the 36-year-old scion of a real-estate family, agreed with federal ethics officials to divest more than 80 assets after he and his wife Ivanka were hired by her father, President Donald Trump, to be senior aides. White House officials have said some of the sales were needed to avoid potential conflicts between Mr. Kushner's far-reaching job duties and his personal financial interests.
He is retaining more than 200 other assets, worth a total of at least $116 million, according to his disclosures. These are mostly apartments and office blocks around the U.S. Like his father-in-law, Mr. Kushner has declined to put these assets in a blind trust, which ethics experts regard as the cleanest way to avoid conflicts of interest. Someone close to Mr. Kushner said there are practical problems that made a blind trust not a realistic option.
A White House spokeswoman referred questions to Mr. Kushner's lawyer.
Mr. Kushner co-founded Cadre in 2014 with his brother Joshua and Ryan Williams, a 29-year-old friend and former employee of Kushner Cos., the family-controlled business that Mr. Kushner ran until recently. Cadre markets properties to prospective investors, who can put their money into specific buildings or into an investment fund run by Cadre, which collects fees on each deal.
To get off the ground, Cadre turned to a Goldman Sachs fund and a number of high-profile investors. Among them were the venture-capital firms of Mr. Thiel, Silicon Valley's most prominent supporter of Mr. Trump, and Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc., according to Cadre's website. Other backers include Chinese entrepreneur David Yu, co-founder with Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Jack Ma of a Shanghai-based private-equity firm, hedge-fund manager Daniel Och and real-estate magnate Barry Sternlicht, people close to Cadre said.
Cadre also secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of George Soros, a top Democratic donor whom Mr. Trump criticized during his presidential campaign, the people close to the company said. Mr. Soros's family office is also an investor in Cadre.
The investors declined or didn't respond to requests for public comment on their backing of Cadre, but a person familiar with Mr. Soros's family office said it had invested in early 2015, before Mr. Trump declared his presidential candidacy.
Cadre has solicited money from investors for several Kushner Cos. real-estate projects, according to information sent to prospective investors and reviewed by the Journal. Jared Kushner personally has stakes in some of the real-estate projects for which Cadre has raised money, according to Cadre documents and his disclosure form.
While Mr. Williams acts as the public face of Cadre, Mr. Kushner remains one of the owners, with the power to "influence the [firm's] management or policies," according to the latest public information on file with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Jared Kushner's company JCK Cadre LLC is shown as owing 25% to 50% of Quadro Partners Inc., which owns at least 75% of RealCadre LLC, which does business as Cadre. Mr. Kushner has reduced his ownership stake to less than 25%, his lawyer Ms. Gorelick said.
Mr. Williams, chief executive of Cadre, said the company has been working with regulators to update its public filings to "reflect Jared's non-operational, non-management relationship with the company, which has been in place since the inauguration."
BFPS Ventures, the company that Mr. Kushner's lawyer says holds his Cadre stake, is shown on his financial disclosure form as owning unspecified New York real estate valued at more than $50 million. The form adds that "the conflicting assets of this interest have been divested."
Beyond Cadre, some of the assets Mr. Kushner is holding on to are hard to pinpoint, partly because they are housed in entities with generic names such as "KC Dumbo Office," according to the disclosure form.
The Journal matched many of the assets to specific real-estate investments. An analysis of the debts on those properties, using real-estate data services PropertyShark and Trepp LLC as well as property records, found ties to a broad swath of U.S. and foreign banks, private-equity firms, real-estate companies and government-owned lenders.
Lenders to Mr. Kushner, either directly or via properties he co-owns, include Bank of America Corp., Blackstone Group LP, Citigroup Inc., UBS Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. Royal Bank of Scotland didn't immediately respond to requests for comment; representatives of the other firms declined to comment.
Mr. Kushner will recuse himself from matters to which Deutsche Bank or RBS are parties, because he has provided personal guarantees on their loans, said a person familiar with his ethics arrangement.
--Coulter Jones contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 02, 2017 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)Story highlights A former Obama spokesperson calls Trump's allegation "simply false"
James Clapper denied the FBI could have tapped Trump's phones through a FISA court order
Washington (CNN) Former White House officials are strongly refuting President Donald Trump's stunning allegation that his predecessor, Barack Obama, wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower ahead of the 2016 election.
Although Obama has yet to respond to the claim himself, a spokesman to Obama called "any suggestion" that Obama or any White House official ordered surveillance against Trump "simply false."
"A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice," Kevin Lewis said in a statement early Saturday afternoon. "As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any US citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false."
Neither @barackobama nor any WH official under Obama has ever ordered surveillance on any US Citizen. Any suggestion is unequivocally false pic.twitter.com/qF04X3NUvq — Kevin Lewis (@KLewis44) March 4, 2017
Obama himself was at the National Gallery of Art in Washington Sunday with his wife, former first lady Michelle Obama, People magazine reported
Building on Lewis' remarks, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who served under Obama, said Sunday that the intelligence agencies he supervised did not wiretap Trump last year, nor did the FBI obtain a court order through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor Trump's phones.
Read MoreBee colonies are still dying, and food may get more expensive as a result.
Beekeepers in the U.S. lost 42.1 percent of their bee colonies between April 2014 and April 2015, according to a recent annual survey. Those losses continue a trend of die offs among bee colonies, which beekeepers say could drastically affect our food supply.
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Without bees to pollinate crops, we stand to lose many staple foods that we eat every day, from apples and tomatoes, to onions and berries.
It’s normal to lose some colonies. Beekeepers say it’s acceptable to lose about 18.9 percent of colonies during a winter season. At that rate, it’s still economically feasible to keep bees without charging higher prices to rent them out for pollination. But winter losses have been much higher than that for at least a decade. Last winter, U.S. beekeepers lost 23.1 percent of their colonies, just a slight improvement from the winter of 2013-2014. Those numbers look like a huge improvement over previous years, though; from 2006-2013, winter losses averaged about 30 percent.
Winter losses tell only part of the story. In fact, U.S. beekeepers lost enough colonies during the last two summers to make up for the improvements in winter losses. Last summer, about 27.4 percent of colonies died out. Large-scale commercial beekeepers, those with more than 50 colonies, seem to be especially prone to losing bee colonies during the summer.
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Why are bee colonies dying? Several reasons: sometimes they succumb to winter cold, and sometimes a colony falls prey to mites, viruses, or fungi. Colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is one of the biggest problems, and it’s actually pretty creepy. Colonies that have succumbed to CCD are eerily deserted. The adult bees are gone, but there aren’t any bodies. It’s likely that the workers died elsewhere, but they left with unhatched young in the brood chamber, ample supplies of food in the hive, and the queen all alone in the hive.
Researchers think CCD is the product of an unfortunate combination of pesticides, parasites, pathogens, and nutritional problems caused by less diversity and availability of sources of pollen and nectar. Any of those causes could also contribute to more ordinary kinds of colony loss.
We’re not in danger of losing bees altogether, but if these losses continue, produce could get more expensive. Most commercial beehives don’t make their money on honey; they earn their living by renting out their bee colonies to pollinate farmers’ crops. Often, this involves actually loading the beehives onto a truck (at night, when the bees are asleep in the hive) and driving to a farm.
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As bee populations decline, there will be fewer colonies to meet the demand for pollination, beekeepers will have to haul their hives further to do the job, and the increased cost will, most likely, get passed along to you at the grocery store.
Image: Hadi via Wikimedia CommonsGov. Scott Walker holds Olivia Block, 2 1/2 weeks, for a demonstration of oxygen saturation monitoring by Stuart Berger, medical director of the Herma Heart Center of Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. Credit: Gary Porter
SHARE Special Report Deadly Delays: The nation's newborn screening programs depend on speed and science to save babies from rare diseases. But thousands of hospitals fall short, deadly delays are ignored and failures are hidden from public view — while babies and their families suffer. Go to section
By of the
Gov. Scott Walker signed a bill Monday that would allow Wisconsin to join at least 31 other states in requiring all newborn babies to be tested for the No. 1 killer of infants with birth defects.
The measure, which had languished for nearly two years in the Legislature but passed with wide support, was signed during a ceremony at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin.
"This simple little test is about $4 and can save a life," Walker said.
Many hospitals in the state are already testing babies voluntarily for critical congenital heart disease, but a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation in December revealed that more than a dozen were not performing the test. A 201 |
afternoon in a way that would cost her as little money as possible; she wasn't going to be paid for a whole month as part of her punishment. As she pulled her baseball cap down over her forehead, though, she heard /u/M1schK4's voice call out from behind her.
"Winters!" She groaned quietly, stopping and turning cautiously to see him approach through a pack of officers discussing something about getting new uniforms. "Elsa, wait," he said as he drew closer, "I have something to ask you." He paused, possibly waiting for Elsa to say something, but when there was no response he continued with his thought. "I have some reports to finish and a couple other things to take care of here, but I wanted to ask; do you want to go for dinner tonight, maybe get some Thai or something? I think it might be fun to catch up, y'know?"
Elsa felt her pulse freeze in her veins. "Y-you wh—um...go...um…" /u/M1schK4 raised an eyebrow. "I—um—I...money. I-I-I'm on unpaid leave now, I don't know if—"
"Oh, that's okay, I can spot you tonight, no problem!" He clapped his hands together. "Whaddaya say? Want to give it a try?"
Elsa's jaw flapped noiselessly. This is a date. He's asking you on a date. In no universe is this not a date. She felt her palms get sweaty, her neck start to flush red. It was so cold in the station. You can't go, it's against regulation. He's your Captain, he's your trainer. Commanding officers can't date their cadets, it's against regulations. She closed her mouth, frowning as the thoughts kept flowing.
You'll disappoint him.
He's just asking because he pities you; he knows you're a screw-up cop, you can't hide it.
That's why he's giving you remedial training, because he's the one who saves lives.
He's the hero, not you. He's what it means to be strong, not you.
You'd just hold him back.
He doesn't deserve the indignity of dealing with you.
"I-I-I can't. I'm sorry." Elsa saluted and spun on her heel. She heard /u/M1schK4 call after her, but she grabbed the brim of her cap and squeezed it as far down her face as it would go.
It was the only way for her to hide the fact that she was crying. "Stupid," she said to herself. Why can't you just behave like a normal human being?
The next two days of lessons were even worse than the first. Elsa knew why, too; the air between herself and /u/M1schK4 had become sour. He still smiled when she walked in for the morning session, said good morning, and handed her one of the croissants he said he got from the breakfast tray in the other conference room. He still asked her if she needed a break, or if she wanted to just power through the rest of the day's sessions and go home early. He still sat with her on breaks and drank coffee. But it was different than what he'd done that first day.
Now, there was no chat, just business.
Elsa could tell that something was different since she had clumsily rejected his offer to go out for dinner. If he tried chatting to her now, it was only about stuff they had just covered in the lessons. He didn't ask her about her music, or what she watched on TV last night, or how her trip home was, or anything. It was all strictly business.
Elsa felt, in a way, disappointed by that. Don't fool yourself, it's not like you'd interest him with anything you possibly could have to say. But despite what she thought, there was still a part of her that...wanted the attention, wanted to share with him. As awkward as it had been when he had asked about the music she had listened to, Elsa felt like that was the sort of thing she wanted more of from /u/M1schK4. She wanted to just...be with him. Be around him. Be involved with him and the things he did. She wanted to talk to him, to know him. He'd done so much for her, and she wanted nothing more than to have the opportunity to give it back tenfold.
But he didn't deserve to be burdened by her, so she let him be as quiet as he wanted. It wasn't her decision to make whether or not /u/M1schK4 wanted to let her know about who he was, and she wasn't going to over-step her bounds as an unpaid cadet and insert herself where she didn't belong.
Elsa shut her apartment door behind her after returning from her third day of remedial lessons. She dropped her bag on the table and hung her cap on the coatrack, kicking off her shoes and walking over to the calendar in the kitchen. She picked up a pen from the counter and crossed off the current day. She sighed. "Only twenty-eight more days of hell left."
She turned on the TV and curled up on the couch, cuddling her favorite panda bear pillow to her chest and flipping over to a movie channel to catch the middle of Bourne Identity. She stuffed her face into her pillow, exhaling heavily. She turned the bear around and looked straight in the beady, black button eyes. "I need more you in my life, buddy," she said to it quietly, "you're pretty good at letting stuff happen and keeping on with just being cute." She squeezed the pillow tightly, digging her chin into the top of the bear's head. "Do you want to try teaching me that? How to be cute, I mean?" The bear stayed quiet. Elsa shrugged. "I'll take that as a maybe."
Eventually, the movie ended and Elsa got up to make herself some popcorn. With the steaming bag in hand, she settled back into the rut she had worn in her couch and cocooned herself in a blanket to watch the next movie to come up: Fever Pitch. Elsa didn't care much for baseball, or sports in general, but her arms were wrapped too tightly around the panda pillow and her fingers too buttery from the popcorn to bother changing the channel now. She watched Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore watch baseball games and grow as a couple until the credits rolled. She felt so tired; the empty bag of popcorn had fallen onto the floor and she was resting her head on the arm of her sofa like it weighed a ton. I must have a lot on my mind, she joked to herself, affording a small smirk. She closed her eyes for a moment, considering just going and laying in bed for the rest of the night despite the fact that it was barely even five o'clock. It wasn't like she had any other plans.
A knock on her door begged to differ. Elsa heaved herself to her feet and walked over to the knob, taking a hold of it and swinging the door open. Her eyes practically popped out of her head.
"Hey, glad I caught you." /u/M1schK4 smiled down at her, peeking over her head at the depths of her apartment. "Your file was attached to your incident report, and I noticed your address hadn't changed since the last time we saw each other, so I figured it would be easy for me to drop by."
"Wh-what are you doing? Don't you...have work?"
/u/M1schK4 waved his hand, alerting Elsa that he was carrying a plastic bag printed with the words "Thank You Come Again" in big red letters. "Work-schmerk," /u/M1schK4 said, "I can finish the paperwork later. It's Friday night! Why not enjoy it?" He raised the bag up in front of her face. "Since you weren't too keen on going out, I thought why not have a night in, right?"
"No!" Elsa looked over her shoulder in a panic, realizing quite suddenly that her apartment was a complete pigsty. She turned back to /u/M1schK4, closing the door a bit. "No, I can't. Sorry, I…" She searched for more words, but the failed to come to her. /u/M1schK4's face fell.
"Why not?" He leaned to the side slightly, peering over her head again more conspicuously. "Do you have something going on in there?"
"No, I just—"
"Did I do something to offend you? If I did, I'm really sorry; I'd like to know how to make it up to you."
"It's not...no, I—"
"Do you not like Thai?"
"No!" Elsa said forcefully. Her hand was shaking violently on the doorknob, and in the quiet that followed her outburst she could hear the latch jiggling. She took a deep breath. "We just can't, /u/M1schK4!" She shut the door in his face. slumping against it and collapsing to the ground. It felt like every system in her body was failing. Her heart was pounding out of her chest. Her eyes were burning, watering, crying. Her hands shook like tremors as she brought them slowly to her mouth and bit down on the tips of her fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself away, trying to find a way to transport herself to that calm and peaceful beach she had heard in that song a few days ago. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You know he's not going to take "no" for an answer.
More thumping on her door proved her conscience right almost immediately. "Elsa? Elsa, open up, please!" /u/M1schK4 waited less than a second before knocking again. "Elsa, I want to talk to you; there's something going on that I don't understand, and I need to ask you about it. Please open your door." Elsa tried to call back to him, to tell him to go away, but all that came out was a small squeak. /u/M1schK4 continued knocking. "Elsa? Elsa!" He paused, the knocking ceasing. A part of Elsa believed that he had actually left.
She was proved wrong when his voice sounded out again.
"Elsa? Don't make me do it."
Elsa shook her head.
Another few moments' pause.
"Officer Winters! This is your Captain, Officer /u/M1schK4; open the door!"
Elsa shook her head even more vigorously.
"Officer Winters, I have reason to suspect that your apartment is currently housing some suspicious activity, and I would like to ask you kindly to consent to a brief search."
Stop, please.
"I know you can hear me, Officer Winters. This is your commanding officer ordering you to open this door!"
Elsa started clawing her way up the wall, struggling back to her feet. I can't believe it. I can't believe this is happening.
"Winters, if you don't open this door, I'll come back in fifteen minutes with a warrant and make you open it!"
Elsa threw the door open with such force the doorknob crashed into the cabinets in the kitchen. "Fine!" She felt her fingers digging in to her palms. She turned away from him, clawing at her own eyes. "Fine, come in the stupid apartment!" Her voice was creaky and hoarse. "It's a huge mess, though, put your bag on the table and sit down; I need to clean up a bit." She didn't see him come in, but she heard the takeout bag crinkle onto the table and the door close behind her.
"Thank you." /u/M1schK4's voice was low, soft.
Elsa wiped her cheeks. "I have...I have, like, Verizon channels and AMC. The r-remote's on the coffee table. Just...just let me clean some stuff up." /u/M1schK4 tiptoed around her and made his way to the couch, and Elsa turned to move all her junk off of the dining table. She heard the channel change as she scooped the coats, bags, and books into her arms. She shuffled to her bedroom and dropped the things on her bed, which was unmade and already covered in clothes. She slammed the bedroom door shut as she returned to the main part of the house, seeing /u/M1schK4 looking slowly around the room, ignoring the sports newscast blaring from the TV.
"I've never been in here before," he said gently, as innocently as possible. "I've seen the outside of your door a few times, but you've never let me in."
Elsa scowled as she picked up some dishes from the coffee table. "Yea, well, have a good look while you can."
/u/M1schK4 shrugged. "I never said it wasn't nice, you know. And it's not really that messy either; now, if we were at my place? Boy, I'll tell you, you'd need a pickaxe to dig through some of the crap I have laying—"
"Why are you here?" Elsa slammed the cups and bowls she had collected down on the kitchen counter. /u/M1schK4 looked over at her, confused. She tapped her fingers on the counter. "I don't remember inviting you over, you just looked up my address and invited yourself."
/u/M1schK4 blinked. "I already told you; you didn't want to go out to eat, so I brought some takeout so we could catch up in here."
"I thought I told you that I didn't want to do that." Elsa felt her eyes start to water again. "Or did you not hear me?"
"No, I heard you," /u/M1schK4 replied, "but I also heard something that made me really worried." He turned off the TV, tossing the remote aside on the couch. He looked Elsa straight in the eyes. "Are you okay, Elsa?"
Elsa bit her lower lip, frowning. "Yes."
/u/M1schK4 raised an eyebrow. "Really?"
"I said yes."
"When did you eat two pints of ice cream?" He nodded towards the kitchen.
Elsa spun around, noticing now that the two empty Haagen Dasz containers were sitting on the counter, one of them still housing the spoon she had used to devour them with. She turned sheepishly back to /u/M1schK4. "Over the past few days," she lied, "just snacking during commercials and stuff."
"That's kind of a lot."
Elsa furrowed her brow. "Thanks for that," she said angrily.
/u/M1schK4 slapped himself in the forehead. "No, that's not what I meant. What I meant was that it seems like emotional eating, and based on the other vibes I'm getting from you, it makes me think that something's going on." Elsa crossed her arms. "Elsa, you can tell me if something's wrong. I want you to feel like you can talk to me about stuff."
"We can't, /u/M1schK4, you know that."
/u/M1schK4 shook his head. "No, I don't know 'that.' What is 'that?' What 'can't we?'"
"You know! You know regulation!"
"What does regulation have anything to do with this?"
"What?"
/u/M1schK4 stood up from the couch and walked over to the table, leaning on the back of one of the chairs. "Elsa, why do you think I'm here?"
Oh my god. Elsa shook her head, covering her mouth and walking across the room to the couch. Oh my god, you're so stupid. You are so stupid!Of course he was never trying to hit on you; he's too perfect to do that. She dove head-first into the couch, arm reaching out frantically for her panda bear pillow. He never even thought about hitting on you. He never even dreamed it! But your stupid butt couldn't see that, obviously. It's always about you, you, you and what you want.
"Elsa?" /u/M1schK4 turned and approached the couch slowly. "What's wrong?" Elsa's response was directly into the couch cushions, rendering it incomprehensible. /u/M1schK4 sighed. "You can talk to me, Elsa. Please, I just want to understand."
"I screwed up, okay?!" Elsa flipped over and flailed her arms around childishly, pounding the couch with her fists. "There, I said it! Are you happy now? You're perfect, and I'm a wreck! That's what's wrong, /u/M1schK4!"
"Are you talking about the hostage thing that got you taken off pay? Elsa, that's just part of being a cop, things happen; you handled it better than any other cadet could have. You don't need to take it so hard."
"That's easy for you to say! You're a Captain! You've been saving lives for years! I just want to save lives too, but I can't do it!"
"You've had one assignment, Elsa! You can't judge your abilities on one stupid assignment!"
"Your first assignment went better than that!"
"My first assignment?"
"Yea!"
"What do you think my first assignment was?"
Elsa blinked. "Are you...kidding?"
/u/M1schK4 shook his head. He sat down on the coffee table. "You know what happened the first time I went on patrol? I got called to backup a car chase, and I wrapped my cruiser around a telephone pole." He grabbed the collar of his shirt, pulling it away from his neck and revealing a massive patch of scars around his collar bone. "I shattered my collar bone, broke six ribs, and dislocated my shoulder. If the glass from the window had hit two inches to the left, it would have ripped my lungs to shreds. And I was one of the better drivers in my cadet class, too." He let go of his shirt. "That was my first patrol. That was why I stopped coming to see you after the night I helped you out; I was in the hospital." Elsa pulled her pillow in to her chest, sliding her heels up to her rear and squeezing her knees tightly. "Helping you out was something that just...happened. And I'd do it again in a heartbeat. This time, though, it'd be because you're my friend. And I'd kick the crap out of anyone who tried assaulting one of my officers."
Elsa was crying. She didn't care any more. "Your friend…" Her voice sounded far away, hollow.
"We're friends, Elsa." /u/M1schK4 smiled. He reached out a hand and placed it gently on her knee. "And you're right; I do know what regulation says. I'll tell you right out front, that's not what's on my mind right now. As long as we're patrolling in the same precinct, we're going to have to be professional." He patted her knee. "Can you be okay with that?" Elsa didn't respond. /u/M1schK4 sighed. "I'd like to get to know you more. Maybe I get transferred, maybe you get promoted to Captain across town, or maybe something else. Right?" Elsa looked up at him. He shrugged. "I'm not saying I'd never…"
Elsa's heart leaped into her throat. "You're the reason I became a cop." The words left her tongue before she could even think.
/u/M1schK4's smile faltered for a second. "I'm...really?"
Elsa felt her face turn bright red. No hiding it now, genius. She nodded pitifully. "I wanted to be brave like you. I wanted to help people like you'd helped me. I wanted to show you that I can be strong."
/u/M1schK4 shook his head. "Elsa, I knew you were strong. You went home that night like nothing had happened at all. It wasn't because you were numb, it was because you were strong enough to put it behind you. And every time I came back to check in on you, I could see the same thing." He rubbed her knee with his thumb. "I'm honored that I inspired you to change your life and take on something new. It means a lot that I could move someone as strong as you."
Elsa bit her pillow. She felt more tears roll down her cheeks. /u/M1schK4 smiled. She felt her ears burn. You can be his friend, that's more than good enough. She spat out the furry cushion and murmured, "The, um...is the food going cold?"
/u/M1schK4 looked over his shoulder at the bag of takeout on the table. "Oh," he said, "are you hungry?" He stood up and went over to the bag, pulling out one of the styrofoam boxes and opening it up. He put a finger into a mound of rice. "I could zap it for a few seconds, I guess. Is the microwave—?"
"Over the sink," Elsa said, nodding in the direction of the appliance. /u/M1schK4 spun around comically, finally zeroing in on the little black box housed amongst the cabinets. Elsa afforded a small smile. She uncurled herself from around her pillow and stood up, wiping her cheeks dry of tears. She shuffled her way to the kitchen, where /u/M1schK4 was finishing up punching in the numbers on the microwave. "u/M1schK4?"
"Hmm?" He turned around.
Elsa took a deep breath. She stepped forward, arms outstretched, and wrapped the man in a hug. She heard his breath seize in his chest, which made her smile a bit. It wasn't panic, or fear, but pleasant surprise. "I'm sorry to make you worry."
u/M1schK4 patted her on the back. "It's okay; I'll worry about my friends any day."
Elsa released him, stepping back quickly as she felt the invisible iron curtain of police regulation slam shut between them. She was smiling broadly, though. u/M1schK4 was as well. "And, thanks for coming to check on me," she said quietly. "I...didn't know I needed you to."
He nodded. "Any time." The microwave beeped, and he turned to remove the warmed-up takeout. He peered over his shoulder at her. "That smile looks good on you," he said slyly, "you should wear it more often."
Elsa giggled, running a hand through her hair and gathering it over one shoulder. "Stop it," she replied. u/M1schK4 laughed, putting the other takeout box in the microwave and punching the buttons again. Elsa felt her face come to rest in a grin. We both know, she thought, it's only a matter of time.
One day, everything will finally fall in line.
A looser interpretation of the song you requested, u/M1schK4, but I hope you liked it just the same:
"As Long As You're Mine" from Wicked: YouTube /watch?v=z4tWBetHvsA
Thanks for reading! :)Woolworths to be a star of profit reporting season, fashion retail struggles
Updated
Woolworths is expected to be one of the stars of profit-reporting season as some other retailers struggle in a sluggish economy.
One of the biggest battlegrounds in retail is between newly-energised Woolworths and Coles.
Coles boss John Durkan, outwardly at least, is not bothered by the resurgence in his biggest competitor.
"There's plenty of opportunity for us if we deliver for our customers and give them low prices, high-quality product and make it easy for them to shop. There is no doubt there's enough trade out there for everyone," he said.
Coles' response to Woolworths is to step up its lowering of prices, which, if its first half results are any guide, also lowered its profit.
"I can't give you an insight on our results, our results are coming up, the year end's just finished so I am not allowed to do that. But I can assure you investing in lower prices over a long period of time will ensure that Coles is a growth company," Mr Durkan said.
With the nightmare of hardware chain Masters now behind it, Woolworths is tipped to unveil a profit of around $1.5 billion — after last year's loss of $1.2 billion.
"Woolworths has done extraordinarily well in the last 12 months with growing their market share in the food sector," Morningstar retail analyst Johannes Faul said.
However, Mr Faul makes the point that Woolworths result would be even stronger without the price war with Coles.
"The top line is growing, the sales are growing, but the heavy discounting will have an impact on the profitability of those sales," he said.
Ditto Wesfarmers-owned Coles.
Away from food and liquor, shareholders in Australia's retailers will be hoping last week's bad news from struggling department store Myer is not a portent of things to come this reporting season.
"We've seen real retail turnover only increase by about 1.5 per cent, which is around the rate of population growth, so after inflation we are not getting any growth in retail sales per capita," retail partner at Deloitte Access Economics David Rumben said.
"It wouldn't surprise me to see some poorer results come through because the market environment has been pretty flat and we know that competition has also been pretty intense."
Fashion now out of fashion
Nowhere has that competition been more intense than in fashion retailing where share prices reflect that fashion is now out of fashion.
The write-down of its Top Shop and Sass and Bide concessions has helped Myer shares down 40 per cent in the last 12 months.
Specialty retail, which among its brands includes Rivers, Millers and Katies, is down 16 per cent.
Even Solomon Lew's Premier Investments, with Peter Alexander, Just Jeans, and Jay Jays, is off 15 per cent.
"On the physical store space we've seen the multi-national franchises expanding their store networks in Australia, I'm thinking H&M, Zaras, Uniqlos of the world, but also online has obviously taken a lot of share," Mr Faul said, outlining some of the challenges facing fashion outlets.
While Myer has once again thrown the spotlight on the department store space — privately-owned David Jones suffers from similar pressures — and among discount department stores, little change is expected at the other strugglers, Big W and Target, leaving only Kmart as the star.
"That model has to continue to evolve and change and we have to see investors with confidence to stay the journey," retail strategist Brian Walker, the founder of The Retail Doctor, said.
The continued strength in the Australian dollar should have helped the earnings of stores like Harvey Norman and J-B Hi Fi, who sell predominantly imported goods.
They should also have benefited from the east coast housing boom, as should retailers like furniture maker Nick Scali.
"That's brought with it a lot of extra housing activity, in terms of new housing developments and people switching between houses and there's a deal of retail spending that's complimentary to that, so spending on furniture, white goods and the like," Mr Rumbens said.
Nick Scali will be the first of the listed retailers to report, on August 10, followed by J-B Hi Fi on the 14th.
Topics: business-economics-and-finance, industry, retail, australia
First postedTexas' top public university administrators remain among the highest paid in the country, according to a nationwide survey released Wednesday.
University of Texas System Chancellor Bill McRaven and Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp ranked second and third in the nation, earning $1.5 million and $1.3 million respectively, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education's annual Executive Compensation Report, which lists the pay of chancellors and presidents of public universities.
Texas A&M University President Michael Young, who made $1 million, was the only other Texan in the top 10; he placed eighth.
University of Houston System Chancellor Renu Khator, who made $851,000, ranked 14th this year — down from the very top spot last year. She ranked higher last year because she collected $200,000 in bonuses and $400,000 in deferred compensation — pay used by universities to incentivize employees to stay in their jobs.
The average total compensation for public college presidents was $501,398 in fiscal year 2016, a 5.3 percent increase over the prior year. The Chronicle of Higher Education includes base pay, bonuses and other perks in its rankings.
This year's highest-paid public university president was Arizona State University's Michael Crow, thanks to a $550,000 bonus he collected for staying at the university for 10 years. He earned just under $1.6 million including that bonus.
Texas university leaders have been well-compensated for decades, but they have only risen to the top of national lists in recent years. Last year, The Texas Tribune reported that pay for the state's chancellors and flagship university presidents had shot up 70 percent over the previous four years. That growth has rankled some politicians, who question whether it's the best use of state resources.
But regents from the state's top university systems — who are appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott and set the pay for chancellors and presidents — defended the expenditures, saying they are needed to recruit the best talent.
"Our chancellor is essentially the CEO of one of the largest and most complex organizations in the state of Texas and one of the largest systems of higher education in the country, and we believe his compensation is reasonable and justified," said UT System Board Chairman Paul Foster. "He is well-recognized as a great leader and manager, and in my opinion, earns every cent."
University of Houston System Board Chairman Tilman Fertitta said the pay is a reflection of the size of Texas universities and the state's commitment to education.
"Given the $6 billion economic impact that UH alone has on the city of Houston and the amount of research dollars spent, I don’t think anyone should be surprised at what it takes to recruit talented chief executives capable of innovating and managing billion-dollar budgets," Fertitta said.
The Texas Tribune provided this story.The military budget is the portion of the discretionary United States federal budget allocated to the Department of Defense, or more broadly, the portion of the budget that goes to any military-related expenditures. The military budget pays the salaries, training, and health care of uniformed and civilian personnel, maintains arms, equipment and facilities, funds operations, and develops and buys new items. The budget funds four branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force. For FY2019, the Department of Defense budget is $686,074,048,000[1]
Budget by year [ edit ]
Defense Spending as a Percent of GDP 1792-2017
Historical defense spending
The following is historical spending on defense from 1996-2015, spending for 2014-15 is estimated.[2] The Defense Budget is shown in billions of dollars and total budget in trillions of dollars. The percentage of the total U.S. federal budget spent on defense is indicated in the third row, and change in defense spending from the previous year in the final row.
Decades 1990s 2000s 2010s Years 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 Defense Budget (Billions) 266 270 271 292 304 335 362 456 491 506 556 625 696 698 721 717 681 610 614 637 Total Budget (Trillions) 1.58 1.64 1.69 1.78 1.82 1.96 2.09 2.27 2.41 2.58 2.78 2.86 3.32 4.08 3.48 3.51 3.58 3.48 3.64 3.97 Defense Budget % 16.8 16.5 16.0 16.4 16.7 17.1 17.3 20.1 20.4 19.6 20.0 21.9 20.9 17.1 20.7 20.4 19.1 17.5 16.8 16.0 Defense Spending % Change -0.1 +1.6 +0.2 +7.8 +4.0 +10.1 +8.2 +26.0 +7.6 +3.1 +10.0 +12.5 +11.3 +0.2 +3.4 -0.6 -5.0 -10.5 +0.6 +3.8
Budget for FY2019 [ edit ]
For FY2019, the Department of Defense has a budget of $686,074,048,000[1]
Total Overview [ edit ]
DoD Total (Base + OCO + Emergency) Budget by Appropriation Title ($ in Thousands) (Discretionary Budget Authority) + OCO + Emergency FY2019 Military Personnel $152,883,052 Operations and Maintenance $283,544,068 Procurement $144,340,905 RDT&E $92,364,681 Revolving and Management Funds $1,557,305 Defense Bill $674,690,011 Military Construction $9,801,405 Family Housing $1,582,632 Military Construction Bill $11,384,037 Total Base + OCO + Emergency $686,074,048
For Personnel Payment and Benefits [ edit ]
Personnel payment and benefits take up approximately 39.14% of the total budget of $686,074,048,000[1]
Pay & Benefits Funding ($ in billions, Base Budget only)[1] Pay & Benefits Funding FY 2019 Military Personnel Appropriations $140.7 Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Care Accruals $7.5 Defense Health Program $34.2 DoD Education Activity $3.4 Family Housing $1.6 Commissary Subsidy $1.3 Other Benefit Programs $3.4 Military Pay & Benefits $192.0 Civilian Pay & Benefits $76.4 Total Pay & Benefits $268.5
By Overseas Contingency Operation [ edit ]
*Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds are sometimes called War funds[3]
Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) Funding by Operation/Activity ($ in billions) [ edit ]
By Military Department [ edit ]
[1] Military Health Care Funding [ edit ]
Military Health Care Funding ($ in billions, Base Budget only) Program FY2019 Defense Health (DHP) $33.7 Military Personnel $8.9 Military Construction $0.4 Health Care Accrual $7.5 Unified Medical Budget $50.6 Treasury Receipts for Current Medicare-Eligible Retirees 11.1
The MHS offers a rich health care benefit to 9.5 million eligible beneficiaries, which includes active military members and their families, military retirees and their families, dependent survivors, and certain eligible Reserve Component members and their families. The Unified Medical Budget (UMB), which comprises the funding and personnel needed to support the MHS’ mission, consumes nearly 9% of the Department’s topline budget authority. Thus, it is a significant line item in the Department’s financial portfolio.[1]
Previous Budgets [ edit ]
For the 2011 fiscal year, the president's base budget for the Department of Defense and spending on "overseas contingency operations" combine to bring the sum to US$664.84 billion.[4][5]
When the budget was signed into law on 28 October 2009, the final size of the Department of Defense's budget was $680 billion, $16 billion more than President Obama had requested.[6] An additional $37 billion supplemental bill to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was expected to pass in the spring of 2010, but has been delayed by the House of Representatives after passing the Senate.[7][8]
Emergency and supplemental spending [ edit ]
The recent military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were largely funded through supplementary spending bills outside the federal budget, which are not included in the military budget figures listed below.[9] However, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were categorized as "overseas contingency operations" in the starting of the fiscal year 2010, and the budget is included in the federal budget.[citation needed]
By the end of 2008, the U.S. had spent approximately $900 billion in direct costs on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The government also incurred indirect costs, which include interests on additional debt and incremental costs, financed by the Veterans Administration, of caring for more than 33,000 wounded. Some experts estimate the indirect costs will eventually exceed the direct costs.[10] As of June 2011, the total cost of the wars was approximately $1.3 trillion.[11]
By title [ edit ]
USA 2010 Military Budget Spending
The federally budgeted (see below) military expenditure of the United States Department of Defense for fiscal year 2013 are as follows. While data is provided from the 2015 budget, data for 2014 and 2015 is estimated, and thus data is shown for the last year for which definite data exists (2013).[2]
Components Funding Change, 2012 to 2013 Operations and maintenance $258.277 billion -9.9% Military Personnel $153.531 billion -3.0% Procurement $97.757 billion -17.4% Research, Development, Testing & Evaluation $63.347 billion -12.1% Military Construction $8.069 billion -29.0% Family Housing $1.483 billion -12.2% Other Miscellaneous Costs $2.775 billion -59.5% Atomic energy defense activities $17.424 billion -4.8% Defense-related activities $7.433 billion -3.8% Total Spending $610.096 billion -10.5%
By entity [ edit ]
Entity 2010 Budget request[12] Percentage of Total Notes Army $244.8 billion 31.8% Marine Corps $40.6 billion 4% Total Budget taken allotted from Department of Navy Navy $142.2 billion 23.4% excluding Marine Corps Air Force $170.6 billion 22% Defense Intelligence $80.1 billion[13] 3.3% Because of classified nature, |
ulated or use a five pin header when plugging the FTDI into your breadboard.)
The move to a 5V setup has a few advantages besides the higher speed. You'll be able to interface with more breakout boards, power a small servo or two directly from the on board regulator, and there will be no chance of frying the board accidentally by connecting a 5V FTDI or ISP programmer.
We'll have some more images and a new video showing what 16 MHz can do up soon!
(Spoiler alert: It's twice as fast!)The identities of the Joker's clowns in the bank heist, whose names you would only know through the script or through watching the scene with subtitles. The robbers are: Dopey: Alarm man (one of the two robbers who enters by rappeling on a cable from a vacant office across the street). Is shot in the back by Happy with a suppressed pistol. Happy: The guy who shoots Dopey, then runs downstairs and drills into the vault. As soon as the vault door unlocks, he is shot by Grumpy. Grumpy: The driver of the stationwagon, entering through the lobby with Chuckles and Bozo. He is shot in the shoulder by the bank manager (as Bozo tricks the manager into using his last shotgun pellet). When Happy remarks that he was told to take out the alarm guy, Grumpy remarks that he was told something similar and shoots Happy. He then loads their satchels with money, and Bozo helps him place them by the door. When they're done, Grumpy draws his pistol and aims it at Bozo, believing that the Joker has Bozo to kill him after they load the cash, unaware that Bozo is the Joker. The Joker shrugs and says that actually, he kills the bus driver. Grumpy is confused, until seconds later, when a school bus bursts through the doors and runs over him. Chuckles: He is the guy riding shotgun with Grumpy when they pick up the Joker (as Bozo) on the street corner. When they enter, he announces their arrival by firing a submachine gun into the ceiling, then overpowers a guard. He is killed when the bank manager shoots him in the back with a sawed-off shotgun. The Joker (posing as Bozo): Handling crowd control, the Joker sticks primed grenades into the hostages' hands so they will be focused on holding on for dear life. He wounds the bank manager after tricking him into using his last round using an automatic Glock 18 pistol modified to use extended stick magazines. After the school bus arrives, the Joker shoots and kills the driver, and finishes loading the money. As he is about to drive away, the bank manager asks him what he believes in. The Joker momentarily doubles back over to the manager, sticks a gas grenade in his mouth, and unmasks himself to reveal his clown makeup, before driving off.Instruction[5] Instruction Disable SLI at the system level, even if it's disabled on the game's profile. The game tries to use it which severely hits the performance. Make sure the card for PhysX is the same card that's rendering the game (GPU #1). DO NOT dedicate the second card to PhysX.
DO NOT use the second card or the CPU for PhysX.
Both of these will either cause massive performance hits, FPS drops, or stuttering. If you've done both of the above and still have 5-7 FPS make sure to disable these overlays (in this order, depending on what you have installed): RivaTuner Statistics Server (makes FPS go down to 5-7) Discord overlay (may crash the game on certain hardware) Twitch overlay (same as Discord) UPlay overlay (stupid I know... but it crashes or causes performance hits in some of Ubisoft's own games...) Steam overlay (if disabling all of the above doesn't work) If you still need a boost in performance, set process priority to High in the task manager.In just about every way you can measure the topic, protected bike lanes have been linked to more and safer bicycling. There’s a logical reason for that: they’re protected from cars.
However, protected bike lanes aren’t only protected from automobile traffic; they’re also separated from sidewalks (at least via paint, if not curbs, bushes, trees, distance, or barriers). Naturally, this protects pedestrians from bicyclists, but in a number of obvious and subtle ways, this also protects pedestrians from cars. In some areas, the improvement is dramatic.
NYC DOT/Public Domain NYC DOT/Public Domain
Regarding the NYC streets noted in the chart above, where protected bike lanes were introduced, Matthew Roe, the former senior safety planning and research manager at the NYC Department of Transportation, says : “There had been about one pedestrian fatality per mile for years on those streets. We saw huge, huge reductions.”
In that Streetsblog article, Michael Andersen of PeopleForBikes listed four reasons why protected bike lanes help protect pedestrians. Before sharing those, I’m going to run through some ideas from my own head as well.
The most obvious point, I think, is that bicyclists and pedestrians no longer share a piece of (often narrow) infrastructure. Mixing relatively fast-moving bicyclists with pedestrians is somewhat like mixing fast-driving cars and slow-driving cars. Speeding is the more common and bigger traffic safety issue, but drivers can also get a ticket for driving too slowly, because the unexpected variation in speed is what causes a lot of the risk. At slower speeds, bicyclists aren’t nearly as dangerous as cars, of course, but the general safety issue is the same. If you don't force bicyclists and pedestrians onto the same infrastructure, bicycle–pedestrian collisions are reduced. (Of course, bicycle–pedestrian collisions are not the big threat to pedestrians. Car–pedestrian collisions are. But avoiding any collision is a good thing.)
NYC DOT/Public Domain NYC DOT/Public Domain
Another thing is that "more-complicated” infrastructure makes people pay more attention. It’s not hard to check both ways before crossing the street, but pedestrians sometimes get complacent and neglect to adequately do so before walking across. Even more disturbingly, many drivers do not see and even do not look for pedestrians as they make turns where pedestrians cross. The results are… well, you know the results. However, when there are car lanes, protected bike lanes, and sidewalks, people become more aware that they need to carefully look around before crossing another transportation route. Very simply, the greater awareness protected bike lanes bring to drivers is one of the key reasons bicyclists are safer, and the same goes for pedestrians. With a path for each mode of transport, the majority of people are subtly but effectively asked to be more attentive to others.
Protected bike lanes also often result in narrower car lanes. On the public safety front, narrower car lanes are a big win. Wide roads designed for cars to drive fast will result in people driving faster. Narrower roads will communicate to the driver that they should be more cautious and drive more slowly. Studies have found road design to be more influential than speed limit signs for influencing driving speed.
NYC DOT/Public Domain NYC DOT/Public Domain
Okay, jumping into Michael’s points, his first one was related to my point just above. He noted that “protected bike lanes shorten crossing distances.” Indeed, with fewer or at least narrower car lanes, pedestrians can much more easily get from one side to the other without being touched by a car. In the case of crossing the bike lanes, if there is an unexpected encounter, it’s much easier for a bicyclist and a pedestrian to avoid each other than a car and a pedestrian.
Michael’s second point is also an excellent one: “protected bike lanes make it easier to know which direction cars are coming from.”
With more of the roadway chopped up and delineated for specific users, pedestrians can more easily focus on the crossing point at hand and can more easily examine the possible routes cars might be coming from when crossing the car lanes. “When you’re walking, it’s not the traffic you expect that poses a danger — it’s the traffic you don’t expect,” Michael aptly notes.
The essence of Michael’s third point is visibility. Very well emphasized in the bicycling world (and general transportation safety world) is that one of the dangers people bicycling on sidewalks face is that they are more often shielded from drivers and a driver may not see them while turning across their path... until it is too late. A similar but perhaps less obvious point is that pedestrians (and joggers) can be shielded in the same way. If a driver has to cross a protected bike lane to get to where he or she is headed, he or she will have a clearer view of where bicyclists might be coming from, but also a clearer view of where pedestrians might be coming from.
Another matter of "visibility" that Michael didn't mention but is also very important is that, the more bicyclists and pedestrians there are on the street, the more drivers take note that they need to watch out for bicyclists and pedestrians. Seeing more people on the street makes you more aware that people are on the street. Obvious, but often overlooked. This is surely one of the reasons that bicyclist fatalities and injuries drop, on a relative basis if not an absolute basis, as bicycling rates go up.
Michael’s final point is the least obvious, in my opinion. It is: “protected bike lanes reduce traffic weaving.” This is an excellent point that wouldn't have crossed my mind. It’s got to be one of the most dangerous actions for pedestrians: a driver is switching lanes while approaching a crosswalk and doesn’t see the shielded pedestrian until the last minute. As Michael puts it: “Another maneuver that endangers people walking is the ‘zip-around’: people swerving their car from one lane to another to get around a stopped car, only to realize the other driver had stopped to yield to someone in the crosswalk.” Almost all of us have seen close calls from this, and I’m sure many have seen worse. Protected bike lanes help here again when they reduce the number of car lanes (and especially “mixed traffic lanes”). “Once zip-arounds become impossible, people driving simply queue up to wait their turn — and people walking are, once again, the biggest winners.”
As we can see, there are a lot of obvious as well as subtle reasons why protected bike lanes help to protect pedestrians. Now that we have run down so many, can we have protected bike lanes on all the roads?!Electric Assisted Bikes, also known as e-bikes or e-assist bikes, are a growing trend, not just in Oregon but worldwide. The New York Times recently ran an article profiling the growth of sales that e-bikes are experiencing in Europe, and their growing popularity with “older people, delivery businesses and commuters who don’t want to sweat.” E-Bike Sales are Surging in Europe, August 25, 2014. There has been recent local focus as well. Jennifer Dill, Director of the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium (OTREC) recently appeared on OPB’s Think Out Loud to discuss their growing use and yesterday the National Institute for Transportation and Communities released an in depth and well researched survey of the regulations surrounding e-bikes in the United States.
So, are e-bikes legal to ride like an unassisted bicycle? Yes, but with some very important differences (explained below).
An Electric Assisted Bicycle is a very specific creature in Oregon law under ORS 801.258. It must:
Be designed to be operated on the ground with wheels; Have a seat or saddle; Have no more than three wheels; Have BOTH fully operative pedals for human propulsion AND an ELECTRIC motor; AND That electric motor cannot have an output above 1,000 watts AND it cannot be capable of propelling the vehicle at a speed greater than 20 MPH on level ground.
There are a lot of specific requirements for a bike to be an e-bike under the law. I have spoken to some owners of e-bikes who have motors above 1,000 watts that cannot get over 20 MPH and some who have motors at 1,000 watts who can get a speed higher than 20MPH. These are not Electric Assisted Bicycles under the law and are not granted the same rights as Electric Assisted Bicycle users.
Electric Assisted Bicycles are given the same status of bicycles under Oregon law. ORS 814.405. That means that, when reading other statutes, any rights or responsibilities given to a rider of a bicycle under the law is also given to the rider of an Electric Assisted Bicycle (unless specifically stated otherwise).
The key law in which Electric Assisted Bicycles are not given the same rights and responsibilities as unassisted bicycle operators is operation upon a sidewalk. Unassisted bicycle riders can, as a general rule, operate upon a sidewalk unless specifically prohibited from doing so by municipal ordinance (like downtown Portland and the Eugene transit mall area). However, Electric Assisted Bicycle operators are specifically excluded from riding on sidewalks statewide. ORS 814.410(1)(e).
This law creates an unnecessary inefficiency for an Electric Assisted Bicycle operator riding on the street or confined to the bicycle lane via ORS 814.420, but cannot legally escape to the sidewalk in the case of traffic or another blockage. This is an interesting restriction given the inability, by the very nature of its definition, for an e-bike to exceed 20 MPH, but an unassisted bike with the right rider could easily exceed 20 MPH on a sidewalk.
Another key difference between Electric Assisted Bicycles and unassisted bicycles is that operators under 16 are not allowed to ride Electric Assisted Bicycles per ORS 807.020(15).Thomas Oosthuizen's withdrawal left WBA Light Heavyweight Champion Juergen Braehmer without an opponent for his next title defense, but the latter is not short on options. According to Sauerland Promotions' Don Majeski, both Sean Monaghan and Erik Skoglund are on the shortlist to face Braehmer on March 19th.
A final decision should be made by the end of the day, at which point we will update this post.
Monaghan (26-0, 16 KO), a local favorite from Long Island, spent some time on truTV this year with wins over Cleiton Conceiçāo and Don George. The latter was the biggest of his career, making Braehmer a monumental step up for the thirty-four-year old.
Still, props to him for being willing to step into hostile territory against a legitimately elite light heavyweight.
Skoglund (24-0, 11 KO) is ten years younger than Monaghan and similarly untested, his best win coming over a forty-five-year-old Glen Johnson in December of 2014. He is ranked #3 by the IBF, two spaces above Monaghan, but the other sanctioning bodies have him below the New Yorker.
Either of these fights interest you?Sen. John McCain said Friday he would not vote for the GOP’s latest plan to repeal and replace much of ObamaCare — dealing the effort a potentially fatal blow.
The Arizona Republican said he could not support the bill because it was not “the product of regular order in the Senate,” meaning it did not go through the usual process of committee hearings and public debate.
“That is the only way we might achieve bipartisan consensus on lasting reform, without which a policy that affects one-fifth of our economy and every single American family will be subject to reversal with every change of administration and congressional majority,” he said in a statement about the bill crafted by Sens. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina — a close friend — and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
“I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal. I would consider supporting legislation similar to that offered by my friends Senators Graham and Cassidy were it the product of extensive hearings, debate and amendment. But that has not been the case. Instead, the specter of September 30th budget reconciliation deadline has hung over this entire process.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants a vote before Sept. 30, when the bill could be passed under current budget rules with only 50 GOP votes, with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaker.
After those rules expire, the bill would need 60 votes because of an assured Democratic filibuster.
McCain condemned the rush to pass the bill on a purely partisan basis.
“We should not be content to pass health care legislation on a party-line basis, as Democrats did when they rammed ObamaCare through Congress in 2009,” he said. “A bill of this impact requires a bipartisan approach.”
The Arizona Republican — who is undergoing treatment for brain cancer — said he hoped to continue working on health care reform, and cited a bipartisan effort by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) that they scrapped after McConnell chose the party-line law.
“Senators Alexander and Murray have been negotiating in good faith to fix some of the problems with ObamaCare. But I fear that the prospect of one last attempt at a strictly Republican bill has left the impression that their efforts cannot succeed. I hope they will resume their work should this last attempt at a partisan solution fail,” he said.
McCain also voted no on a previous incarnation of the repeal-and-replace effort, infuriating President Trump, who was desperate to fulfill a major campaign promise.Event Photojournalism - Event & Corporate Photographer in Washington, District of Columbia Event Photography in Washington DC Event Photojournalism is about more than taking pictures - we tell your event’s story. Backed by the best Washington DC event photographers, we are an award-winning studio that covers a wide range of events in the area. And we’ve been doing it for over 27 years. Although we’ve been around the world doing what we love, there’s something special about event photography in Washington DC. From holiday party photography to food photography, red carpet events and political gatherings, we can find the story behind all of it - and capture those moments forever in picture. We are passionate about finding ways to document your event and the reality of the people and the moments that are a part of it. As the premiere Washington DC event photographers, we pride ourselves on our reputation of being non-obtrusive and professional. From intimate events to large corporate gatherings and non-profit charity fundraisers that span the metro area, we’ve done it all. We’ve worked at thousands of events and clients in and around Washington DC. If you are looking for only the best event photography in Washington DC, look no further. When you work with us, we become part of your team, addressing all of your needs and concerns with the professionalism and experience that only comes from nearly three decades of experience as photographers in DC and around the globe. As your event unfolds, we will be there to capture and document every candid moment. Each event is unique, which is why we develop a vision long before we begin taking photographs. This planning is what allows us to find the storylines behind each and every detail. Your event photographs will reflect the real look, feel, and experience of your event. Work with us and discover why we are the most trusted Washington DC event photographers. Telling memorable stories is what event photography is all about. And that’s what we’ve been doing best for 27 years.
Why choose us At Event Photojournalism, we offer a diverse range of services to our clients when it comes to corporate photography. Our business is rooted on the principles of excellence and dedication of an expert team of photographers. Whether it is an exclusive affair, major corporate events or global programs, we offer high quality photography services to our clients. Over the years, we have managed to impress clients with a set of customized services for capturing the best shots at corporate events. We have an experienced and professional team that delivers extraordinary images to suit the preference of our clients. Our company has earned acclaim for Corporate Photography Washington DC and our team caters to the requirements of each of our clients. Event Photojournalism stands out in the crowd thanks to the quality and diversity of photography services that we offer to companies and individuals. With a team of skilled photographers, we have emerged as the best Event Photographer Washington DC and continually produce stunning photographs that exceed expectations every time. We are proud to have the best customer service department which works together with the team of photographers to meet the unique requirements of our clients in a seamless manner.
Things to know Things to know No matter what the event is, Event Photojournalism has mastered the art of photography to produce the best images. Event Photography Washington DC has reached the highest point of innovation. Using the latest tools and equipment we have managed to impress our clients and establish lasting partnerships. Our team of photographers is highly knowledgeable on-location specialists, working in all venues and lighting situations for a variety of events, subjects, products and individuals. The care and effort of our team are reflected in the pictures we produce for each client, event and project; meeting the objectives of our clients and exceeding their expectations. Whether it is Food Photography dc or any other types of photography services that you require, we are there to provide you with the best service in the industry as an expert in the field of photography and a renowned service provider for over two decades. Our company has always believed in customer satisfaction and commitment to our clients. No matter what the event is, Event Photojournalism has mastered the art of photography to produce the best images.
Get in TouchAn international team of scientists had a warning last week: A massive amount of methane trapped in Antarctic ice could be released into the atmosphere.
Which probably prompted some energy companies to think: We gotta get our hands on that.
Gas hydrates are crystalline gas (often methane) molecules surrounded by a “cage” of water in a solid that resembles ice. As it melts, the gas is released. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, methane hydrates are stable compounds in water at a depth of greater than 300 feet.
At right is a map of methane hydrate deposits located off the coast of South Carolina. Right there, just off our coast, all that methane, ready to burn. But who is going to invest in figuring out how to tap into these reserves?
Your rich Uncle Sam, that’s who. Late last month, the Department of Energy announced more than $5.5 million in investments granted primarily to universities for research into how the methane in these hydrates could be used.
[Fourteen newly funded research] projects build on the completion of a successful, unprecedented test earlier this year that was able to safely extract a steady flow of natural gas from methane hydrates on the North Slope of Alaska. … “The Energy Department’s long term investments in shale gas research during the 70s and 80s helped pave the way for today’s boom in domestic natural gas production that is strengthening U.S. energy security while creating thousands of American jobs,” said Secretary [Steven] Chu. “While research on methane hydrates is still in the early stages, these research efforts as part of President Obama’s all-of-the-above energy strategy could potentially yield significant new supplies of natural gas and further expand U.S. energy supplies.”
Ah, yes. All-of-the-above. And under, and behind, and submerged. Election strategy as environmental albatross. No doubt the Republicans will stop this nefarious Obama administration plot once they realize that it’s an example of the government picking winners and losers in energy. And when they learn how socialist it is, what with government money going to benefit energy companies down the line, and so on.
If we’re actually able to extract the methane, what does that mean for energy production? William Pentland at Forbes explains.
The United States is almost literally swimming in the stuff. For example, a pair of relatively small areas roughly 200-miles off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina contain more than 1,300 trillion cubic feet of methane gas. In 2008, the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that there are about 85 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable gas resources within gas hydrates on Alaska’s North Slope. The research that extracted gas from hydrates in April relied on a technology developed by ConocoPhillips and the University of Norway, Bergen, which injects a mixture of carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen into a hydrate formation to facilitate the flow of natural gas.
The Energy Information Administration already predicts that the U.S. will become a net natural gas exporter. If we start pulling all of this gas out of the seabed, it’s hard to predict the impact on the global economy.
It could be worse: Methane traps 20 times more atmospheric heat than carbon dioxide, making it an enormously potent greenhouse gas, but the impact of unfiltered release from the Antarctic is worse than extracting and burning it.
And it could be far, far better. With studies demonstrating that there’s enough power in the wind to meet the world’s needs, we could just leave the damn methane at the bottom of the ocean.
But then how’s ConocoPhillips gonna make a buck?Space Race 2.0 Sixty years ago, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. The event served as the starting pistol in what would come to be known as the Space Race, a competition between the U.S.S.R. and the United States for spaceflight supremacy. In the decades that followed, the first human reached space, a man walked on the Moon, and the first space stations were built. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S. were soon joined by other world powers in exploring the final frontier, and by the time the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, the contentious Space Race was something of a distant memory. In recent years, however, a new Space Race has taken shape—Space Race 2.0. Rather than powerful nations guided by presidents and premiers, however, the competitors in this race are tech startups and private businesses spearheaded by billionaire entrepreneurs. And while the current atmosphere is far less contentious than that of the first Space Race (save the odd tweet or two), the competition is just as fierce. A Crowded Field SpaceX, Blue Origin, Bigelow Airspace, Virgin Galactic, Boeing, Lockheed Martin… Not only has the number of private companies engaged in space exploration grown remarkably in recent years, these companies are quickly besting their government-sponsored competitors.
Not only are private companies already surpassing their government counterparts, several are poised to widen their lead in the coming months and years. If all goes according to plan, when SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launches in September, it’ll take the title of the world’s most powerful rocket away from NASA’s Saturn V. Virgin Galactic is already selling tickets for what it expects to be the first private spaceflights, which will take place aboard the sleek VSS Unity. SpaceX plans to send space tourists to the Moon in 2018, and then in 2024, the company hopes to launch a system that will take people all the way to Mars…roughly 5-15 years before NASA expects to do the same. All on the Same Team Private companies may be in the lead, but the finish line for this Space Race isn’t exactly clear. The first iteration was arguably “won” when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the Moon, so does this sequel end when we establish the first Moon base? When a human walks on Mars? When we leave the solar system? Truthfully, the likelihood of humanity ever calling it a day on space exploration is slim to none. The universe is huge, with galaxy estimates in the trillions, so the goalpost will continue moving back (to bring another sport into the analogy). Rather than focusing on competing in what is ultimately an unwinnable race, private and government-backed space agencies can actually benefit from collaboration thanks to their inherent differences.
“The way that SpaceX, Planetary Resources, or Virgin Galactic approaches space exploration is going to be very different from NASA or the Air Force,” explains Lewicki. Private companies aren’t beholden to the same slow processes that often stall government projects, and they can secure or reallocate funding much more swiftly if need be. However, unlike agencies like NASA, they do have shareholders to keep happy and a need to constantly pursue profitability. The two sectors, therefore, have a tremendous opportunity to help one another. Private companies can generate revenue through government contracts —for example, NASA has contracted Boeing to transport astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), and SpaceX just closed a deal with the U.S. Air Force to launch its secretive space drone. This leaves the government agencies free to pursue the kind of forward-thinking, longer-term research that might not immediately generate revenue, but that can be later streamlined and improved upon in the private sector. Ultimately, Space Race 2.0 has no losers. The breakthroughs happening in space exploration benefit us all, and truly, a little friendly competition never hurt anyone (unless you count the egos bruised by those tweets).
This interview has been slightly edited for clarity and brevity.Jake Lever will meet with his manager on Thursday about his new contract
IN-DEMAND Adelaide defender Jake Lever will meet with his manager on Thursday before ramping up contract negotiations with the Crows.
Lever wanted to wait until AFL and the AFL Players' Association agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement so he knew what the salary cap was going to be.
With the lucrative pay deal – including an immediate 20 per cent increase – signed last week, Lever will catch up with his manager Ned Guy in Adelaide to discuss his next move.
Why are clubs so keen to lure Crow Jake Lever?
"I haven't been using the CBA as an excuse," Lever told 5AA on Wednesday.
"My manager is coming over tomorrow and I'm sure we will sit down with the club in the near future and the contract negotiations will continue.
"But if it's not in the near future, I wouldn't be worried."
Lever is developing into one of the best intercept marking defenders in the competition.
The 21-year-old said it was his choice that the Crows haven't put an offer in front of him for next season.
"We didn't want anything (until the CBA was finalised)," Lever said.
"You do speak about it (with your manager), but not in the depth it has to be.
"Now we know what everything looks like and the club have a clearer picture, we can sit down tomorrow and have a really good conversation about it.
"There's always media hype (about rival clubs) and that sort of stuff, but in the end, I’m playing for the Adelaide Crows at the minute and I'm focused on this week of football."
Lever and forward Mitch McGovern are the two most prominent Crows players who are out of contract.
Crows skipper Taylor Walker signed a three-year extension on Tuesday until the end of 2021, while the club has also locked in Eddie Betts, Luke Brown, Kyle Hartigan and Wayne Milera to new deals this year.The price, quality and seasonality of Australia’s food is increasingly being affected by climate change with Australia’s future food security under threat, our new report has revealed.
Australia’s food supply chain is highly exposed to disruption from increasing extreme weather events driven by climate change, with farmers already struggling to cope with more frequent and intense droughts and changing weather patterns.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT
Key Findings
1. Climate change is making weather patterns more extreme and unpredictable, with serious consequences for Australia’s agricultural production.
Climate change is driving an increase in the intensity and frequency of hot days and heatwaves in Australia, changing rainfall patterns, increasing the severity of droughts, and driving up the likelihood of extreme fire danger weather.
Average rainfall in southern Australia during the cool season is predicted to decline further, and the time spent in extreme drought conditions is projected to increase.
Water scarcity, heat stress and increased climatic variability in our most productive agricultural regions, such as the Murray Darling Basin, are key risks for our food security, economy, and dependent industries and communities.
Climatic challenges could result in imports of key agricultural commodities such as wheat increasingly outweighing exports.
2. More frequent and intense heatwaves and extreme weather events are already affecting food prices in Australia.
Climate change is increasing the variability of crop yields.
Food prices during the 2005- 2007 drought increased at twice the rate of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) with fresh fruit and vegetables the worst hit, increasing 43% and 33% respectively.
Reductions of livestock numbers during droughts can directly affect meat prices for many years.
Rainfall deficiencies in parts of Western Australia and central Queensland are projected to reduce total national crop production by 12% in 2014-15, and the value of beef and veal exports by 4%.
Cyclone Larry destroyed 90% of the North Queensland banana crop in 2006, affecting supply for nine months and increasing prices by 500%.
The 2009 heatwave in Victoria decimated fruit crops, with significant production losses of berry and other fruit crops.
3. Climate change is affecting the quality and seasonal availability of many foods in Australia.
Up to 70% of Australia’s wine-growing regions with a Mediterranean climate (including iconic areas like the Barossa Valley and Margaret River) will be less suitable for grape growing by 2050. Higher temperatures will continue to cause earlier ripening and reduced grape quality, as well as encourage expansion to new areas, including some regions of Tasmania.
Many foods produced by plants growing at elevated CO2 have reduced protein and mineral concentrations, reducing their nutritional value.
Harsher climate conditions will increase use of more heat-tolerant breeds in beef production, some of which have lower meat quality and reproductive rates.
Heat stress reduces milk yield by 10-25% and up to 40% in extreme heatwave conditions.
The yields of many important crop species such as wheat, rice and maize are reduced at temperatures more than 30°C.
4. Australia is extremely vulnerable to disruptions in food supply through extreme weather events.
There is typically less than 30 days supply of non-perishable food and less than five days supply of perishable food in the supply chain at any one time. Households generally hold only about a 3-5 day supply of food. Such low reserves are vulnerable to natural disasters and disruption to transport from extreme weather.
During the 2011 Queensland floods, several towns such as Rockhampton were cut off for up to two weeks, preventing food resupply. Brisbane came within a day of running out of bread.
5. Australia’s international competitiveness in many agricultural markets will be challenged by the warming climate and changing weather patterns.
Australia is projected to be one of the most adversely affected regions from future changes in climate in terms of reductions in agricultural production and exports.
Climate impacts on agricultural production in other countries will affect our competitiveness, especially if warmer and wetter conditions elsewhere boost production of key products such as beef and lamb.
6. If the current rate of climate change is maintained, adaptation to food production challenges will be increasingly difficult and expensive.
By 2061, Australia’s domestic demand for food could be 90% above 2000 levels, with a similar increase in export demand.
Transitioning to a new, low-carbon economy is critical to avoiding the most dangerous impacts of climate change.
The longer action on climate change is delayed, the more likely it is that progressive, small-scale adaptive steps to cope with climate change will become increasingly inadequate and larger, more expensive changes will be required.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORTEmbryonic Stem Cell Injection “Patients need to understand that this is not PRP, your own stem cells, or A cells. Embryonic Stem Cells are the only growth cell. This is the first procedure that grows hair outside of having a hair transplant,” says Hammond.
Hair restoration experts at the Colorado Surgical & Hair Institute recently announced the breakthrough technology of Embryonic Stem Cell Injections to treat hair loss. They have the distinction of being one of only three hair loss centers in the United States to offer this revolutionary technology. The procedure is effective at strengthening existing hair and growing new hair without having a surgical procedure. Patients can begin to regrow hair in as little as two to fourteen weeks.
According to Lisa Hammond, Medical Director at Colorado Surgical & Hair Institute, “The beauty of this treatment, is that there are no complications, no contradictions, and most importantly, no failures. It works on everyone.”
About Embryonic Stem Cell Injection Therapy:
The procedure involves BioD Amniotic/Placental ECM (Extracellular Matrix), or BioD Restore. BioD Restore is a human-derived ECM allograft produced from medically screened, sterile harvested cryopreserved donor placental tissue. Placental tissue is an ECM that is protected from rejection. It stimulates Stem Cells and rejuvenates/repair the skin and hair follicles. And because BioD is made from a human placenta, it is automatically protected from rejection. So it promotes healing and new growth.
About the Colorado Surgical & Hair Institute:
For more than two and a half decades, the Denver hair transplant experts at Colorado Surgical Center & Hair Institute have assisted thousands of clients restore their scalp and facial hair. They offer high quality hair transplant services at affordable prices, To learn more about the Colorado Surgical & Hair Institute visit http://www.coloradosurgicalhair.com/ or call (303) 857-5799.Curious what its like to visit some of the beaches on the map? Have a look at the beach reports, accessed from menu at the top of the page! Photos of some of the beaches so you have an idea of what its like to visit :)
Mobile users, be aware if opening in Google Maps app, only a limited amount of data can be shown at a time, so you'll need to turn areas on and off.
If using a mobile browser, details of each beach can be displayed by clicking on the area, and then the name box that appears to give details on time restrictions.
Due to Safari and some iOS applications not being able to function correctly with detailed Google Maps integrated on websites, the map now needs to be opened in a separate tabWhat if? It’s one of humanity’s most frequently asked and scariest questions. We often look into the abyss that is the past with such great longing for what our minds perceive as better days. Were they really better or did our brains just shut out the indubitably scarring thoughts of the past and replace them with only happier, more enticing contemplations? This is the trouble with looking into the past; hindsight is, as they often say, 20/20. When it comes to sports, the "what if?" scenarios play out for longer than you want. They often leave you wishing you couldn’t even remember anything at all rather than recalling only the depressing moments. Such is the nature of looking back at trades that almost happened, but ultimately did not transpire.
That’s the basis of this endeavor, a look back at two failed trade proposals between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Chicago Bulls for a man that most widely consider the single greatest player in the history of the National Basketball Association. It’s not often that you hear that Michael Jordan could have been traded during his career – or even that the trades were close to happening – yet that's the case with these two separate deals. "What if either of these trades did happen?" will be a question that keeps coming to the forefront of your mind. Unfortunately, we don't own an alternate universe machine that allows us to view into that beautiful realm. Do your best to not have that horrifying question enter your consciousness. And, |
sometimes uses materials taken from nature, such as diamonds, gold, semen and blood, to create a psychological reaction in the viewer. [3]
In 1995, Evaristti was a visiting professor in Bangkok at the Silipakorn Fine Arts University. While in Bangkok, he witnessed over thirty road casualties every day, and accompanied investigators to several accidents. Here he acquired blood and other materials from some of the scenes, and used them with ink to paint on canvases. In this way, he was trying to create an image of what disaster might look like. The most important element was the use of real blood. Evaristti quoted Picasso that art is a representation of reality expressed through a lie. However, in these paintings the blood is real and thus not a lie. He titled the piece "Crash".[3]
After studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Evaristti gained notoriety for a museum display entitled Helena in 2000 that featured ten functional blenders containing live goldfish. The display, at the Trapholt Art Museum in Kolding, Denmark, invited guests to turn on the blenders. This led to museum director Peter Meyers being charged with and, later, acquitted of animal cruelty.[4]
In 2001, Evaristti worked on his project "Terrorialista", which is a silver-patina bronze sculpture made up of twenty-eight parts that together form a complete human body. The pieces are all based on photographic images of human bodies that were blown apart by acts of terror by both sides of the conflict. The allegiances, gender, nationality, religion and every other feature that had identified the people in those photographs was now eradicated. Parts of this work are further explained in the Pink State.[3]
Evaristti's next major work, in 2004, entitled Ice Cube Project, was to paint the exposed tip of a small iceberg red. This took place on March 24, in Kangia fjord near Ilullissat, Greenland. With two icebreakers and a twenty-man crew, Evaristti used three fire hoses and 3,000 litres (790 US gallons) of paint to color the iceberg blood-red. The artist commented that, "We all have a need to decorate Mother Nature because it belongs to all of us."
On January 13, 2007, Evaristti hosted a dinner party where the main course was agnolotti pasta that was topped with a meatball made with his own fat, removed earlier in the year in a liposuction operation.[5]
On June 8, 2007, Evaristti draped the peak of Mont Blanc in France with red fabric, along with a 20-foot pole with a flag reading "Pink State". He had been arrested and detained on June 6 for attempting to paint the peak red. He has stated that his aim is to raise awareness of environmental degradation.[6]
In 2009, Evaristti exhibited his "Body Bags" project. This consisted of three body bags cast in bronze, each in a different color, to symbolize the three main monotheistic religions. He claimed the body bags were like the modern-day image of the skull and reminded people how fragile human life was. By making each resemble a different religion, he was trying to enforce the idea that no matter what ideas you believe in, your life will still end in death.[3]
On January 27, 2010, Evaristti exhibited his artwork "Rolexgate" which is a model of the entrance gate to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. 80% of the model is made up of gold which comes from the teeth of Jews who died in the concentration camps. The model had been briefly exhibited in Berlin, but was removed because of the audience reaction.[7]
In 2010, Evaristti created his "Boxing Bag" project, in which he replaced boxing bags' sand stuffing with hair cut from Christians, Jews, and Muslims. He invited viewers to nudge certain bags aside to get through the pathway. He suggested that a viewer who hit certain bags had a vendetta against that religion. [3]
In March 2013, Evaristti painted a frozen waterfall in Hovden, Aust-Agder, Norway red with fruit juice.[8]Jacob Puzey Runs a World Record for 50 Miles on a Treadmill Brian Metzler / December 2, 2016
Jacob Puzey averaged sub-6-minute mile pace for 50 miles en route to a new world record on a treadmill. Photo: Brian Metzler
Altra Elite athlete Jacob Puzey ran an average pace of 5:56 per mile to set the new world record for the fastest 50-mile run on a treadmill at The Running Event trade show on Dec. 1 in Orlando, Fla. Puzey finished 50 miles in 4:57:45, shattering the previous record of 5:57:31 by nearly an hour. His en route marathon split time was 2:38.
Fans from all over trade show packed the Altra booth the cheer on Puzey to the new world record. Puzey is an experienced ultrarunner who ran the entire 50 miles in the Altra Paradigm road shoe on a ProForm Boston Marathon Treadmill. Puzey stayed hydrated with soft drinks and electrolytes and fueled with potato chips, stopping for a bathroom break only once.
Puzey’s wife Amy, along with their 6-month old daughter Ashima, gave him motivational Post-It notes on the treadmill console during his run, with messages like “Nothing is impossible!” and “Arise from the dust and be men!” and “Be strong, be grateful, have courage!”
“I felt surprisingly great,” says Puzey, who owns a 2:22 marathon PR. “I didn’t have super high expectations, I just wanted to see if I could run the previous record’s pace. I happened to feel really good today and going at a 5:56 pace felt great. I put one foot in front of the other on the treadmill and just kept going.”Kanye West might not have the greatest track record with the paparazzi but lately he has been playing quite the peacemaker.
Encircled by airport photographers, the 38-year-old producer-turned rapper was busy taking questions when a fracas broke out between the two men and a punch was thrown.
Kanye’s immediate reaction to the mayhem was to swoop in with an embrace.
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“Bro, bro, come on man, cut it out," he says to the man while hugging him and breaking up the fight.
The gentle gesture is a massive turn around for West, who has had his fair share of run-ins with paparazzi in the past.
The incident took place at Los Angeles International Airport, the same place West had a scuffle with members of the paparazzi in July 2013.
Shape Created with Sketch. Kanye West stuns MTV ceremony with on-stage attack on Taylor Swift Show all 7 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Kanye West stuns MTV ceremony with on-stage attack on Taylor Swift 1/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 2/7 REUTERS/Lucas Jackson 3/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 4/7 ERIC THAYER / Reuters 5/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 6/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 7/7 1/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 2/7 REUTERS/Lucas Jackson 3/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 4/7 ERIC THAYER / Reuters 5/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 6/7 REUTERS/Gary Hershorn 7/7
That confrontation with cameraman Danny Ramos gained him a misdemeanour criminal battery charge, two years probation, 24 court-mandated anger management classes and 250 hours of community service. He was also made to pay restitution fees to Ramos.
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Subscribe nowWhile it may still be best known as the birthplace of the Bluenose and as a vibrant fishing port, in recent years, Lunenburg, N.S., has become a magnet for creative talent.
"I think it's tied to the fact that we're a heritage community," said Mayor Rachel Bailey, noting that a strong tourism industry also gives the town and its artists a boost.
Bailey was in Sydney on Thursday and was asked by organizers of the Growing the Creative Economy Conference to come and share how a town of 2,300 has been making such a success of its artistic and cultural sector.
"We've been looking to build on that," she said.
Diversified economy
Bailey also pointed to the town's diversified economy, which includes traditional fishing and marine-related industries, and a video game development company that employs 80 people, HB Studios.
Ten years ago, the town established a partnership with NSCAD University which has resulted in a further strengthening of the artistic fabric of the community.
Lunenburg Mayor Rachel Bailey spoke at a conference in Sydney on Thursday about what Lunenburg has been doing to become an arts and culture hub. (Hal Higgins/CBC)
The university has a Community Studio Residency program that provides some recent grads with a studio for one year in a number of communities, one of which is in Lunenburg.
"It's an opportunity for them to build their body of work," said Bailey.
She says while the artists are free to move on after the year is up, a number of them have chosen to stay in Lunenburg.
As well, local artists have created an online map featuring Lunenburg's 21 artists and artisans, and their galleries.
Bailey is especially enthusiastic about the latest advancement in the town's cultural quest. Two years ago, the former Lunenburg Academy was repurposed and became the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance.
"It's a beautiful, iconic building," she said.
Strong leadership
Another recent development, the Lunenburg School for the Arts, is located at the corner of Prince and Montague streets.
As for what advice she would give to others hoping to learn from Lunenburg's success, Bailey points to strong leadership and a commitment from local people to see it through.
"It requires planting seeds and cultivating them by being champions of it as municipal leaders, and finding other champions in the community," she said.A new report, launched by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), argues that conventional oil production is likely to peak before 2030, with a significant risk of a peak before 2020. The report concludes that the UK Government is not alone in being unprepared for such an event - despite oil supplying a third of the world's energy.
The report finds that we are entering an era of slow and expensive oil as resources get harder to find, extract and produce. Major new discoveries, such as those announced recently in the Gulf of Mexico, will only delay the peak by a matter of days or weeks. Simply maintaining global production at today's level would need the equivalent of a new Saudi Arabia every three years.
According to the report's chief author, Steve Sorrell, senior researcher at UKERC, "In our view, forecasts which delay a peak in conventional oil production until after 2030 are at best optimistic and at worst implausible. And given the world's overwhelming dependence upon oil and the time required to develop alternatives, 2030 isn't far away. The concern is that rising oil prices will encourage the rapid development of carbon-intensive alternatives which will make it difficult or impossible to prevent dangerous climate change."
The report defends more optimistic estimates of the size of oil resources but notes that much of this is in smaller less accessible fields which may only be produced relatively slowly and at high cost. It also highlights the accelerating decline in production from existing fields; more than two thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030 to prevent production from falling.
Steve Sorrell: "It makes no sense to provide precise forecasts of when a peak in oil production will occur. The data is unreliable, there are multiple factors to consider and a ‘bumpy plateau' seems more likely than a sharp peak. But we can say that the window is narrowing rapidly. The effects of global oil depletion will depend greatly on the response from governments and on the scale of investment in new energy technologies."
UKERC's report is the first study to take an independent, thorough and systematic review of the evidence and arguments in the ‘peak oil' debate. It addresses the following question: What evidence is there to support the proposition that the global supply of ‘conventional oil' will be constrained by physical depletion before 2030?With all the hype surrounding the extremely pro-black Black Panther movie coming out in February 2018, DC Comics might just be sitting on a gem in their battle against Marvel Studios.
Meet Nubia. Wonder Woman’s twin sister.
A photo posted by (@) on
Nubia is not the foil to Diana, Wonder Woman’s true identity, but a true equal. According to the DC lore, she was created in 1973 out of the same clay used to make Diana, only her clay was black. She was formed by the goddess Aphrodite, and from there her backstory gets a bit wild. She is stolen at birth by Mars, the god of war, and was trained by him to become a master at hand-to-hand combat. In fact, when she was introduced in Wonder Woman Vol. 1 #204, she beat Diana in battle, and only stopped when she met her sister at sword point.
In the latest edition of the DC multiverse (which, as it sounds, refers to a version of the comics in which multiple universes exist at once), Nubia rules as the Wonder Woman of Earth-23. But her résumé is a bit more extensive. Aside from having superhuman everything, she once was the sole guardian of the River Styx, aka actual hell, and also ruled Floating Island, a community of all men. But no biggie because apparently Nubia is suggested to be in a position akin to Queen Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons and Wonder Woman. The non-comic book translation? Nubia is literally an otherworldly black queen.
With all of this #BlackGirlMagic, Black Twitter is already demanding Nubia appear on the big screen. Some users have already planned some of the casting and directing roles. One suggested Ava DuVernay direct while Serena Williams plays the lead.
Others suggested that Angela Bassett might just be a real-life version of Nubia.
It's clear that so many people are ready to hit the theaters if this happens.
Social media users have already shown Hollywood their creative genius — by suggesting a Lupita Nyong'o and Rihanna heist movie. In May, it was announced that the movie would actually happen, proving that there is power in the tweet. Perhaps it would be a smart move on DC’s part to give Nubia a starring role.
The comic giant has been battling with Marvel Studios at the box office. The rollout of the Avengers universe movies, which began in 2008 with the first Iron Man movie, has propelled Marvel into mainstream success. And with Marvel’s highly anticipated Black Panther movie catering to black and POC audiences, a Nubian clapback is said to be a good follow-up both to Marvel and Wonder Woman’s box office hit.
Either way, as this Twitter user states, it’s fair to say no one’s wig is safe from Nubia.For the past week or so, a group of Microsoft watchers have been talking about a new version of Windows that may be called something like Windows 10 Cloud. Brad Sams reported on something call Cloud Shell, or Cshell on January 26th, and followed up that report a few days later with a sighting of the “cloud” name hidden in the latest preview build of Windows 10.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley weighed in with news that her sources say that Windows Cloud is basically a spiritual successor to Windows RT: a light-weight version of Windows that’s designed to only run Windows Store apps.
Now the folks at Windows Blog Italia claim to have gotten ahold of a pre-release version of the operating system, and their report seems to confirm Foley’s.
Update: As MSPowerUser notes, this seems to be legit, because a leaked ISO is making the rounds. Download at your own risk.
The site confirms that the operating system looks virtually identical to the desktop version of Windows 10, but it can only run apps that are downloaded from the Windows Store.
But it does support Win32 apps that have been converted to Windows Store/Universal Windows Platform apps using Microsoft’s Project Centennial tools. Even apps which still use Win32 processes will work. They just need to be packaged as UWP apps for distribution through the Windows Store
It’s not entirely clear at this point if Windows 10 Cloud is designed to run exclusively on devices with ARM-based processors or if it’ll also work on computers with Intel or AMD chips. But it does seem likely that this is Microsoft’s answer to Google’s Chrome OS: a light-weight operating system that’s designed with security and ease-of-use in mind… and which cannot necessarily run legacy programs unless their converted into a compatible format first.
You can find more pictures at Windows Blog Italia.A German man has just finished a very impressive Paper Airplane Machine Gun, or a Papierflieger-Maschinenpistole, which just sounds so much cooler. It actually takes a stack of paper, folds it into paper air planes and shoots them.
The device takes a stack of what looks like post-card size paper in the “clip”, forms them into paper air planes by a series of rollers and folding edges and then launches them out of the end. A cheap electric screwdriver powers the entire drive train, which allows him to shoot around 20 planes per minute (PPM?).
Sadly there’s really not too much information on how it works, nor the files to reproduce it. [Papierfliegerei], as he goes by on YouTube, decided to build this awesome contraption to show off just what 3D printers are capable of these days. He designed the whole thing in 3D CAD and had many of the parts printed off at a 3D printing company called fabberhouse.de, while the rest of the components are off the shelf.
Let’s see him upgrade that electric screwdriver with a Dremel….
[via r/videos]Greenwich could lose its place at the centre of global time if a move to "atomic time" is voted in by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva in January 2012.
Time scientists are discussing the implications of the change today in pre-vote meeting organised by the Royal Society. British newspapers are mulling how British pride would be dented if the riverside patch of South London gets taken out of the centre of world time-keeping. The Sunday Times said that it would truly mark the end of our days as a "Victorian superpower".
Time has been measured by atomic clocks since 1972, but the hyper-accurate clocks do not measure time as experienced by humans on Earth because the planet's rotation is uneven. Currently, the atomic clocks are adjusted to fit into time as humans experience it, with leap seconds every few years pushing the atomic clocks into line with "human time".
The divergence between GMT and Atomic Time is tiny. At the moment, the leap seconds are applied in a stepped scheme.
The current system of leap seconds causes significant difficulties for computer systems that rely on processes being performed in exact sequence. See how Google grappled with the problem here. Mobile phone networks and GPS systems in particular suffer when leap seconds strike. Continuous atomic time would be much easier to manage.
The ITU document says:
The result of the process would be to stop applying leap seconds at an agreed point and permit the difference with UT1 to increase at a rate of approximately one second per year. The projection by the BIPM for the (UT1 - UTC) difference to accumulate to one hour is approximately 550 years.
In the new system, it is possible there would be leap minutes once or twice a century.
Alternatively we could keep human and atomic clock times running concurrently: "Knowledge of the precise difference between UTC (human time) and UT1 (atomic time) would continue to be monitored so that any user desiring UT1 would have the information to correct his readings of UTC to UT1 should he choose to do so," reads the International Telecommunications Union's proposal. The ITU is the UN's specialised telecommunications agency.
The implications of the alternatives are being discussed.
One positive outcome for Brits distressed by the loss of our Victorian superpower status is that the end of GMT as an international standard could accelerate the move to keep British Summer Time into the winter, letting us have lighter evenings.
The ITU posed these questions to member states:
Do you support maintaining the current arrangement of linking UT1 and UTC (to provide an approximate celestial time reference by the use of a stepped atomic time scale)?
Would you support the revision of Recommendation ITU-R TF.460-6 to provide a continuous time scale?
So far, the ITU has received replies from just 16 nations for the latest survey (out of a total of 192, 55 of which participate in the formation of UTC). But with 13 in favour of the change, and just three against, the bill looks likely to pass, so far.
Read the document here [.docx download] ®Spread the love
Last year, Baron David de Rothschild was indicted by the French government after he was accused of fraud in a scheme that allegedly embezzled large sums of money from British pensioners.
It has taken many years to bring this case against Rothschild and his company the Rothschild Financial Services Group, which trapped hundreds of pensioners in a bogus loan scheme between the years of 2005 and 2008.
One by one the pensioners lost their money and pressed charges against the notorious banker, beginning a case that would take many years to get even an indictment.
In June, Paris-based liaison judge Javier Gómez Bermudez ruled that Rothschild must face a trial for his crimes, and ordered local police to seek him out in his various mansions that are spread throughout the country.
“It is a good step in the right direction. The courts are now in agreement with us that there is enough evidence to interrogate Baron Rothschild. The first thing they will have to do is find him. Once they have done that they can begin to question him. It is a real breakthrough moment for everyone involved,” lawyer Antonio Flores of Lawbird told the Olive Press after the ruling.
“In short, independently of what happened to the investment, Rothschild advertised a loan aimed at reducing inheritance tax, which is a breach of tax law,” he added.
While news of a single Rothschild being indicted is certainly noteworthy, a particularly important announcement was made this Friday.
The French government announced that it has launched an investigation into the entire Swiss branch of the Rothschild’s banking empire.
According to Bloomberg,
The Swiss unit of Edmond de Rothschild said it’s the subject of a French probe regarding a former business relationship managed by a former employee. “Edmond de Rothschild (Suisse) SA is actively participating in the criminal investigation under way,” the Geneva-based bank said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. “The bank denies all the allegations that have been made against it.” Edmond de Rothschild, a private banking and asset management firm established in Paris in 1953, oversees about 150 billion euros ($164 billion) and is led today by Baron Benjamin de Rothschild and his wife Ariane. The Swiss unit traces its roots to the acquisition of Banque Privee in Geneva in 1965. The company has no further comment at this time, according to the statement. Officials in Geneva weren’t immediately available to respond to a telephone call from Bloomberg News on Friday.
The Rothschild empire has been instrumental in helping move the global elite’s wealth from traditional tax havens like the Bahamas, Switzerland and the British Virgin Islands to the U.S.
Last month, the Free Thought Project reported on the above the law tax haven established inside the United States by the Rothschilds.
After opening a trust company in Reno, Nev., Rothschild & Co. began ushering the massive fortunes of the world’s most wealthy individuals out of typical tax havens, and into the Rothschild run U.S. trusts, which are exempt from the international reporting requirements.
The Rothschild banking dynasty is a family line that has been accused of pulling the political strings of many different governments through their control of various economic systems throughout the world.
Historically, there is ample evidence to show that the family has used insider trading to bilk money from both private and public funds.
During the Battle of Waterloo in the Napoleonic wars, Nathan Rothschild was responsible for one of the oldest cases of “insider trading,” which led to the Rothschild family robbing a whole nation blind. In 1815 when the battle of Waterloo took place, there were no quick methods of communication like we have today so messengers were used for communication in times of war. The Rothschild’s took advantage of this by having spies on the frontlines of the battle who would return information to the family faster than the messengers used by the military.
When the British won the war, Nathan Rothschild, was of course, the first to know, and he immediately went to the stock exchange and started selling stocks while putting out the rumor that the French had won the war. This created a panic on the floor of the stock exchange and investors all over England began frantically selling their stocks. With the price of all stocks plummeting Rothschild was able to buy out the whole English market for a fraction of its cost. When word returned that the English had actually been victorious, the value of the market soared, and overnight Nathan Rothschild expanded his family’s wealth, and cemented their position as one of the richest families in the world.ROCKLIN, Calif.— The headaches were excruciating and wouldn’t go away. Her doctor said they were migraines. Then, one morning a few weeks later, Jamie Hancock stood up from the couch and discovered she couldn’t move the right side of her body. When she spoke, her speech was slurred.
At the hospital, doctors told her she was having a stroke. The 32-year-old Hancock, whose children were just 1 and 3, had a sobering epiphany: “My whole life is changed forever.”
Now, six years later, no one would know she is a stroke survivor. A lifelong dancer, she is fit and muscular. She speaks clearly and walks quickly as she shuttles her kids around, runs errands and teaches dance classes.
But the effects—for her and other young stroke victims—linger just below the surface. They are there when she gets mad at her family, when she can’t remember what she needs at the grocery store, and when she gets fatigued after working for a few hours. The noise and light can be unbearable, forcing her to escape to a dark room.
Some days Hancock tries to be the energetic and sociable working mom she was before the stroke. Then she crashes.
“I sort of forget I have a disability and I think I can do everything anyone else my age can do,” she said. “But I can’t.”
***
Hancock is among a growing number of younger adults who’ve had strokes, which occur when blood flow to the brain is blocked or a vessel in the brain bursts. Because strokes are most often associated with old age, symptoms in younger adults may be overlooked, according to patients, advocates and physicians. And their need for rehabilitation—to return to active lives as parents and employees, for instance—can be underestimated.
“The American public is still very locked on stroke being an infliction of the elderly,” said Amy Edmunds, who started a nationwide advocacy and support organization called YoungStroke. “But we are an emerging population…and we really need to be recognized.”
The rate of hospitalization for strokes dropped nationwide by 8 percent between 2000 and 2010 (from 250 to 204 per 100,000), but in those same 10 years it increased almost 44 percent for people ages 25 to 44, though from a much smaller base (from 16 to 23 per 100,000), according to research published in May in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The reasons for the rising prevalence among young people are not clear, but physicians believe that growing risk factors such as hypertension, smoking, and obesity contribute. And because younger patients aren’t as aware that they can get strokes, they may not be proactive about controlling those risk factors. Older patients, by contrast, may be more inclined to exercise, eat healthy, and take preventive medications.
“Older people are educated and understand they need to take care of themselves and are doing all the things to prevent strokes,” said Lisa Yanase, a stroke neurologist at Providence Health and Services in Oregon. “Young adults…think they are bulletproof. They haven’t had the realization that these things can actually be bad for them.”
Some young people also may have strokes because of drug abuse, and others because of undiagnosed genetic conditions. Hancock’s stroke was caused by a tear in the artery.
Strokes are still more common among older adults though. People ages 18 to 50 years old account for only about 10 percent of the 795,000 strokes that occur each year, according to the American Heart Association.
When their patients are younger, doctors don’t always immediately recognize strokes, said Lucas Ramirez, a physician at Keck Hospital of USC and one of the co-authors of the journal article. Young adults may also be unaware they are having a stroke, jeopardizing their chances of receiving critical, time-sensitive treatment.
Common symptoms, for all ages, include sudden confusion or numbness, slurred speech, or severe headache.
Hancock said she had no idea of the warning signs. “I had heard about strokes, but I thought they were for the elderly,” she said.
***
Years had passed since the stroke, and now the Fourth of July was just a few days away. Hancock had promised her children they could buy fireworks. At the fireworks stand, Blythe, 9, and Andrew, 7, selected several sets. But when the clerk handed the bag to the kids, one of Andrew’s wasn’t inside.
“Mom, where’s my rocket man?” he asked.
Hancock asked her son to stop. He asked again—and again.
“Hold on!” she yelled. “I’m trying to focus on paying. You know I have a hard time with focusing.”
Hancock said she never used to be that way. Now, she has trouble multitasking and gets angry about minor things—her daughter playing music too loud, her son bouncing the ball inside the house. “My family pays the price,” she lamented.
Both children say they’ve learned what to do when their mom gets stressed. Andrew gives her hugs. Blythe helps her take deep breaths. “Sometimes she has really good days and sometimes she has horrible days,” Blythe said.
In addition to the emotional rollercoaster, Hancock said she has lost the cognitive ability to do some things, such as handling the family finances.
There is less money to go around, too. Just a few months after the stroke, Hancock returned to her job as an executive assistant at the California Restaurant Association. But she couldn’t concentrate, manage her time, or meet deadlines—and she eventually left. Later, she got fired from a subsequent job.
“I would get distracted really, really easily,” she said. “I still do.”
Hancock said she spiraled into depression, which therapists later told her was likely a symptom of the stroke. She also became addicted to a painkiller prescribed to treat her headaches. She said it helped her get through the day without feeling exhausted.
With the assistance of Suboxone, a medication to treat opiate addiction, Hancock got sober. But that didn’t stop her mood swings. There were times when she slammed cabinets so hard that they fell off their hinges.
Her husband, Ken Hancock, said the stroke and its aftermath nearly tore their family apart. At first, he just felt scared. For a while, his wife couldn’t wash her own hair or pick up their children. When she cooked, one of her hands shook.
He concentrated on getting his wife to appointments and taking care of her and their children. But as she got better physically, he said, she became worse emotionally. The addiction didn’t help, and they argued frequently. “It was a terrible, terrible cycle,” he said. “It took a long time to realize better things were around the corner.”
Now, the family is in a better place, he said. Jamie Hancock sees a therapist and takes medication that is normally used to treat schizophrenia. The volatility has subsided.
Ken Hancock said his wife’s brain injury isn’t visible, but it’s there. “She is still trying to recover, and we are sort of in the same boat with her,” he said.
***
On a June afternoon, Hancock sat in her living room with another young stroke survivor, Jen Ruzicka Lee, who was stricken last year at age 43. An ER nurse and longtime runner, she returned to nursing part-time in April but still stutters and uses a walker.
They laughed and nearly cried as they talked about the impact of different medications, becoming intimate with their husbands again and the guilt they felt daily about the effect of the strokes on their children.
Both women said they had attended a few stroke support groups but couldn’t relate to the older participants. “They would say, ‘You need to nap,’” Hancock recounted. “That’s great, but I can’t. I have kids.”
Support groups and rehabilitation programs are typically designed for older adults, said Edmunds, the YoungStroke founder, who was hit by the disease at age 45. Many young stroke survivors have to figure out how to continue raising children and working while dealing with the effects of a stroke.
“It’s a different landscape for younger adults,” Edmunds said. “We need skills to help us get on with our lives post-stroke, which could conceivably be as long as pre-stroke.”
Hancock and Lee, along with two other women, have become an informal support network. They text often and meet for coffee when they can. This month, they had a family barbecue.
Being a young stroke survivor, Hancock said, “is a whole different ballgame.”
***
Hancock tried to return to dancing soon after her stroke. She couldn’t do a single turn on the floor, and walked out in tears.
“I had to learn to walk again so I don’t know why I thought in my brain I could take an advanced dance class,” she said.
Over time, Hancock regained her strength. She said she doesn’t think her brain will ever be able to handle a 40-hour workweek. Teaching dance part-time can even be too tiring some days.
On this evening, however, Hancock energetically stepped into a brightly lit dance studio. She and five young students warmed up to music. Hancock instructed them to run through the dance routine they had practiced the previous night.
“Let’s see what you remember,” she said.
Then she smiled. “Let’s see what I remember, too.”From the front office, follow the long, locker-lined hallway toward the box office for several hundred feet. Walk through the doorway, turn right. Walk a little farther, turn left, then left again, to find the South Eugene High School Little Theater.
On a recent Monday afternoon, Patrick Avery�s junior and senior drama students gather for class as scheduled. But instead of reading lines for an upcoming performance, they are asked to offer opinions about their school.
Sitting in the second row of the theater is 17-year-old Rose Heising, whose neighborhood school is North Eugene High across town. She lays out the reasons why South Eugene was her first choice for high school.
�It has better opportunities and an excellent drama department,� Heising said. �We have more interesting classes, really, and we�re better funded, too, so that�s really helpful.�
Heising said the contrast between where she lives and where she attends school has a lot to do with why she enrolled at South.
�This is a rich neighborhood, so parents can donate money and volunteer, and there�s just more access to more,� she said.
Heising�s sentiment is shared by many classmates who live in the South Eugene High area.
�I�ve never actually been to North, but I�ve heard about the neighborhood, and it�s a relatively poor neighborhood. And because of that obviously it makes me feel less inclined to go there,� said 17-year-old Hannah Montgomery, a junior. �It doesn�t seem like it�s worth my time.�
If such assessments seem harsh, consider the statistics that back them up.
Since 2003, North Eugene High has the highest number of neighborhood students who have opted to enroll at another high school, Eugene School District data show. Additionally, the school has had the lowest student enrollment of the district�s four traditional high schools every year but once since 2003.
Continued low enrollment projections at North are expected to result in cutting three full-time-equivalent teaching positions for the 2016-17 school year, district spokeswoman Kerry Delf has confirmed.
The announcement of the planned staff cuts at North has prompted teachers, students, parents and others to speak out on the district�s school choice policies. At issue, some say, is whether the district can continue to operate four distinct high schools in the face of declining enrollments.
Several Eugene School Board members have said they�re open to having a new discussion about the pros and cons of school choice at the high school level � although any changes probably wouldn�t materialize until the 2017-18 school year at the earliest.
The North Eugene High area has the highest level of poverty and lowest income and education levels in town, which prompts some parents to send their children to school elsewhere. The notion that North has less to offer because of those demographics plays a role in perpetuating the downward spiral that the school faces each year with fewer students, fewer per-pupil state dollars, and fewer teachers to provide robust academic programs.
The relative freedom in the district for students to transfer from one school to another tends, by its nature, to favor more financially stable families that have the time, money and transportation to drive their child to another school outside of their given boundary. That further exacerbates the divide between North and the other high schools.
But fixes to the complex problem are elusive.
Simply banning the school choice policy strikes many as unfair: Taxpayers pay for schools throughout the district, so why shouldn�t they be able to choose which school their student attends?
Also, each school offers slightly different programs, so those who want to continue with their French or Japanese immersion classes, in theory, would not be able to do so without school |
names matter. A “magic literal” like 3.14159265 is anathema to sustainable software development.
The third one is easiest for most people to read. It separates concerns nicely: The “outer” function describes its parameters:
( diameter ) => //...
Everything else is encapsulated in its body. That’s how it should be, naming PI is its concern, not ours. The other formulation:
(( PI ) => //... )( 3.14159265 )
“Exposes” naming PI first, and we have to look inside to find out why we care. So, should we should always write this?
( diameter ) => (( PI ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 )
Well, the wrinkle with this is that typically, invoking functions is considerably more expensive than evaluating expressions. Every time we invoke the outer function, we’ll invoke the inner function. We could get around this by writing
(( PI ) => ( diameter ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 )
But then we’ve obfuscated our code, and we don’t want to do that unless we absolutely have to.
What would be very nice is if the language gave us a way to bind names inside of blocks without incurring the cost of a function invocation. And JavaScript does.
const
Another way to write our “circumference” function would be to pass PI along with the diameter argument, something like this:
( diameter, PI ) => diameter * PI
And we could use it like this:
(( diameter, PI ) => diameter * PI )( 2, 3.14159265 ) //=> 6.2831853
This differs from our example above in that there is only one environment, rather than two. We have one binding in the environment representing our regular argument, and another our “constant.” That’s more efficient, and it’s almost what we wanted all along: A way to bind 3.14159265 to a readable name.
JavaScript gives us a way to do that, the const keyword. We’ll learn a lot more about const in future chapters, but here’s the most important thing we can do with const :
( diameter ) => { const PI = 3.14159265 ; return diameter * PI }
The const keyword introduces one or more bindings in the block that encloses it. It doesn’t incur the cost of a function invocation. That’s great. Even better, it puts the symbol (like PI ) close to the value ( 3.14159265 ). That’s much better than what we were writing.
We use the const keyword in a const statement. const statements occur inside blocks, we can’t use them when we write a fat arrow that has an expression as its body.
It works just as we want. Instead of:
(( diameter ) => (( PI ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 ))( 2 )
Or:
(( diameter, PI ) => diameter * PI )( 2, 3.14159265 ) //=> 6.2831853
We write:
(( diameter ) => { const PI = 3.14159265 ; return diameter * PI })( 2 ) //=> 6.2831853
We can bind any expression. Functions are expressions, so we can bind helper functions:
( d ) => { const calc = ( diameter ) => { const PI = 3.14159265 ; return diameter * PI }; return "The circumference is " + calc ( d ) }
Notice calc(d)? This underscores what we’ve said: if we have an expression that evaluates to a function, we apply it with (). A name that’s bound to a function is a valid expression evaluating to a function.15
Amazing how such an important idea–naming functions–can be explained en passant in just a few words. That emphasizes one of the things JavaScript gets really, really right: Functions as “first class entities.” Functions are values that can be bound to names like any other value, passed as arguments, returned from other functions, and so forth.
We can bind more than one name-value pair by separating them with commas. For readability, most people put one binding per line:
( d ) => { const PI = 3.14159265, calc = ( diameter ) => diameter * PI ; return "The circumference is " + calc ( d ) }
nested blocks
Up to now, we’ve only ever seen blocks we use as the body of functions. But there are other kinds of blocks. One of the places you can find blocks is in an if statement. In JavaScript, an if statement looks like this:
( n ) => { const even = ( x ) => { if ( x === 0 ) return true ; else return! even ( x - 1 ); } return even ( n ) }
And it works for fairly small numbers:
(( n ) => { const even = ( x ) => { if ( x === 0 ) return true ; else return! even ( x - 1 ); } return even ( n ) })( 13 ) //=> false
The if statement is a statement, not an expression (an unfortunate design choice), and its clauses are statements or blocks. So we could also write something like:
( n ) => { const even = ( x ) => { if ( x === 0 ) return true ; else { const odd = ( y ) =>! even ( y ); return odd ( x - 1 ); } } return even ( n ) }
And this also works:
(( n ) => { const even = ( x ) => { if ( x === 0 ) return true ; else { const odd = ( y ) =>! even ( y ); return odd ( x - 1 ); } } return even ( n ) })( 42 ) //=> true
We’ve used a block as the else clause, and since it’s a block, we’ve placed a const statement inside it.
const and lexical scope
This seems very straightforward, but alas, there are some semantics of binding names that we need to understand if we’re to place const anywhere we like. The first thing to ask ourselves is, what happens if we use const to bind two different values to the “same” name?
Let’s back up and reconsider how closures work. What happens if we use parameters to bind two different values to the same name?
Here’s the second formulation of our diameter function, bound to a name using an IIFE:
(( diameter_fn ) => //... )( (( PI ) => ( diameter ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 ) )
It’s more than a bit convoluted, but it binds ((PI) => (diameter) => diameter * PI)(3.14159265) to diameter_fn and evaluates the expression that we’ve elided. We can use any expression in there, and that expression can invoke diameter_fn. For example:
(( diameter_fn ) => diameter_fn ( 2 ) )( (( PI ) => ( diameter ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 ) ) //=> 6.2831853
We know this from the chapter on closures, but even though PI is not bound when we invoke diameter_fn by evaluating diameter_fn(2), PI is bound when we evaluated (diameter) => diameter * PI, and thus the expression diameter * PI is able to access values for PI and diameter when we evaluate diameter_fn.
This is called lexical scoping, because we can discover where a name is bound by looking at the source code for the program. We can see that PI is bound in an environment surrounding (diameter) => diameter * PI, we don’t need to know where diameter_fn is invoked.
We can test this by deliberately creating a “conflict:”
(( diameter_fn ) => (( PI ) => diameter_fn ( 2 ) )( 3 ) )( (( PI ) => ( diameter ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 ) ) //=> 6.2831853
Although we have bound 3 to PI in the environment surrounding diameter_fn(2), the value that counts is 3.14159265, the value we bound to PI in the environment surrounding (diameter) ⇒ diameter * PI.
That much we can carefully work out from the way closures work. Does const work the same way? Let’s find out:
(( diameter_fn ) => { const PI = 3 ; return diameter_fn ( 2 ) })( (() => { const PI = 3.14159265 ; return ( diameter ) => diameter * PI })() ) //=> 6.2831853
Yes. Binding values to names with const works just like binding values to names with parameter invocations, it uses lexical scope.
are consts also from a shadowy planet?
We just saw that values bound with const use lexical scope, just like values bound with parameters. They are looked up in the environment where they are declared. And we know that functions create environments. Parameters are declared when we create functions, so it makes sense that parameters are bound to environments created when we invoke functions.
But const statements can appear inside blocks, and we saw that blocks can appear inside of other blocks, including function bodies. So where are const variables bound? In the function environment? Or in an environment corresponding to the block?
We can test this by creating another conflict. But instead of binding two different variables to the same name in two different places, we’ll bind two different values to the same name, but one environment will be completely enclosed by the other.
Let’s start, as above, by doing this with parameters. We’ll start with:
(( PI ) => ( diameter ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 )
And gratuitously wrap it in another IIFE so that we can bind PI to something else:
(( PI ) => (( PI ) => ( diameter ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 ) )( 3 )
This still evaluates to a function that calculates diameters:
(( PI ) => (( PI ) => ( diameter ) => diameter * PI )( 3.14159265 ) )( 3 )( 2 ) //=> 6.2831853
And we can see that our diameter * PI expression uses the binding for PI in the closest parent environment. but one question: Did binding 3.14159265 to PI somehow change the binding in the “outer” environment? Let’s rewrite things slightly differently:
(( PI ) => { (( PI ) => {})( 3 ); return ( diameter ) => diameter * PI ; })( 3.14159265 )
Now we bind 3 to PI in an otherwise empty IIFE inside of our IIFE that binds 3.14159265 to PI. Does that binding “overwrite” the outer one? Will our function return 6 or 6.2831853? This is a book, you’ve already scanned ahead, so you know that the answer is no, the inner binding does not overwrite the outer binding:
(( PI ) => { (( PI ) => {})( 3 ); return ( diameter ) => diameter * PI ; })( 3.14159265 )( 2 ) //=> 6.2831853
We say that when we bind a variable using a parameter inside another binding, the inner binding shadows the outer binding. It has effect inside its own scope, but does not affect the binding in the enclosing scope.
So what about const. Does it work the same way?
(( diameter ) => { const PI = 3.14159265 ; (() => { const PI = 3 ; })(); return diameter * PI ; })( 2 ) //=> 6.2831853
Yes, names bound with const shadow enclosing bindings just like parameters. But wait! There’s more!!!
Parameters are only bound when we invoke a function. That’s why we made all these IIFEs. But const statements can appear inside blocks. What happens when we use a const inside of a block?
We’ll need a gratuitous block. We’ve seen if statements, what could be more gratuitous than:
if ( true ) { // an immediately invoked block statement (IIBS) }
Let’s try it:
(( diameter ) => { const PI = 3 ; if ( true ) { const PI = 3.14159265 ; return diameter * PI ; } })( 2 ) //=> 6.2831853 (( diameter ) => { const PI = 3.14159265 ; if ( true ) { const PI = 3 ; } return diameter * PI ; })( 2 ) //=> 6.2831853
Ah! const statements don’t just shadow values bound within the environments created by functions, they shadow values bound within environments created by blocks!
This is enormously important. Consider the alternative: What if const could be declared inside of a block, but it always bound the name in the function’s scope. In that case, we’d see things like this:
(( diameter ) => { const PI = 3.14159265 ; if ( true ) { const PI = 3 ; } return diameter * PI ; })( 2 ) //=> would return 6 if const had function scope
If const always bound its value to the name defined in the function’s environment, placing a const statement inside of a block would merely rebind the existing name, overwriting its old contents. That would be super-confusing. And this code would “work:”
(( diameter ) => { if ( true ) { const PI = 3.14159265 ; } return diameter * PI ; })( 2 ) //=> would return 6.2831853 if const had function scope
Again, confusing. Typically, we want to bind our names as close to where we need them as possible. This design rule is called the Principle of Least Privilege, and it has both quality and security implications. Being able to bind a name inside of a block means that if the name is only needed in the block, we are not “leaking” its binding to other parts of the code that do not need to interact with it.
rebinding
By default, JavaScript permits us to rebind new values to names bound with a parameter. For example, we can write:
const evenStevens = ( n ) => { if ( n === 0 ) { return true ; } else if ( n == 1 ) { return false ; } else { n = n - 2 ; return evenStevens ( n ); } } evenStevens ( 42 ) //=> true
The line n = n - 2; rebinds a new value to the name n. We will discuss this at much greater length in Reassignment, but long before we do, let’s try a similar thing with a name bound using const. We’ve already bound evenStevens using const, let’s try rebinding it:
evenStevens = ( n ) => { if ( n === 0 ) { return true ; } else if ( n == 1 ) { return false ; } else { return evenStevens ( n - 2 ); } } //=> ERROR, evenStevens is read-only
JavaScript does not permit us to rebind a name that has been bound with const. We can shadow it by using const to declare a new binding with a new function or block scope, but we cannot rebind a name that was bound with const in an existing scope.
This is valuable, as it greatly simplifies the analysis of programs to see at a glance that when something is bound with const, we need never worry that its value may change.
Naming Functions
Let’s get right to it. This code does not name a function:
const repeat = ( str ) => str + str
It doesn’t name the function “repeat” for the same reason that const answer = 42 doesn’t name the number 42. This syntax binds an anonymous function to a name in an environment, but the function itself remains anonymous.
the function keyword
JavaScript does have a syntax for naming a function, we use the function keyword. Until ECMAScript 2015 was created, function was the usual syntax for writing functions.
Here’s our repeat function written using a “fat arrow”
( str ) => str + str
And here’s (almost) the exact same function written using the function keyword:
function ( str ) { return str + str }
Let’s look at the obvious differences:
We introduce a function with the function keyword. Something else we’re about to discuss is optional. We have arguments in parentheses, just like fat arrow functions. We do not have a fat arrow, we go directly to the body. We always use a block, we cannot write function (str) str + str. This means that if we want our functions to return a value, we always need to use the return keyword
If we leave out the “something optional” that comes after the function keyword, we can translate all of the fat arrow functions that we’ve seen into function keyword functions, e.g.
( n ) => ( 1.618 ** n - - 1.618 **- n ) / 2.236
Can be written as:
function ( n ) { return ( 1.618 ** n - - 1.618 **- n ) / 2.236 ; }
This still does not name a function, but as we noted above, functions written with the function keyword have an optional “something else.” Could that “something else” name a function? Yes, of course.16
Here are our example functions written with names:
const repeat = function repeat ( str ) { return str + str ; }; const fib = function fib ( n ) { return ( 1.618 ** n - - 1.618 **- n ) / 2.236 ; };
Placing a name between the function keyword and the argument list names the function. Confusingly, the name of the function is not exactly the same thing as the name we may choose to bind to the value of the function. For example, we can write:
const double = function repeat ( str ) { return str + str ; }
In this expression, double is the name in the environment, but repeat is the function’s actual name. This is a named function expression. That may seem confusing, but think of the binding names as properties of the environment, not of the function. While the name of the function is a property of the function, not of the environment.
And indeed the name is a property:
double. name //=>'repeat'
In this book we are not examining JavaScript’s tooling such as debuggers baked into browsers, but we will note that when you are navigating call stacks in all modern tools, the function’s binding name is ignored but its actual name is displayed, so naming functions is very useful even if they don’t get a formal binding, e.g.
someBackboneView. on ( 'click', function clickHandler () { //... });
Now, the function’s actual name has no effect on the environment in which it is used. To whit:
const bindingName = function actualName () { //... }; bindingName //=> [Function: actualName] actualName //=> ReferenceError: actualName is not defined
So “actualName” isn’t bound in the environment where we use the named function expression. Is it bound anywhere else? Yes it is. Here’s a function that determines whether a positive integer is even or not. We’ll use it in an IIFE so that we don’t have to bind it to a name with const :
( function even ( n ) { if ( n === 0 ) { return true } else return! even ( n - 1 ) })( 5 ) //=> false ( function even ( n ) { if ( n === 0 ) { return true } else return! even ( n - 1 ) })( 2 ) //=> true
Clearly, the name even is bound to the function within the function’s body. Is it bound to the function outside of the function’s body?
even //=> Can't find variable: even
even is bound within the function itself, but not outside it. This is useful for making recursive functions as we see above, and it speaks to the principle of least privilege: If you don’t need to name it anywhere else, you needn’t.
function declarations
There is another syntax for naming and/or defining a function. It’s called a function declaration statement, and it looks a lot like a named function expression, only we use it as a statement:
function someName () { //... }
This behaves a little like:
const someName = function someName () { //... }
In that it binds a name in the environment to a named function. However, there are two important differences. First, function declarations are hoisted to the top of the function in which they occur.
Consider this example where we try to use the variable fizzbuzz as a function before we bind a function to it with const :
( function () { return fizzbuzz (); const fizzbuzz = function fizzbuzz () { return "Fizz" + "Buzz" ; } })() //=> undefined is not a function (evaluating 'fizzbuzz()')
We haven’t actually bound a function to the name fizzbuzz before we try to use it, so we get an error. But a function declaration works differently:
( function () { return fizzbuzz (); function fizzbuzz () { return "Fizz" + "Buzz" ; } })() //=> 'FizzBuzz'
Although fizzbuzz is declared later in the function, JavaScript behaves as if we’d written:
( function () { const fizzbuzz = function fizzbuzz () { return "Fizz" + "Buzz" ; } return fizzbuzz (); })()
The definition of the fizzbuzz is “hoisted” to the top of its enclosing scope (an IIFE in this case). This behaviour is intentional on the part of JavaScript’s design to facilitate a certain style of programming where you put the main logic up front, and the “helper functions” at the bottom. It is not necessary to declare functions in this way in JavaScript, but understanding the syntax and its behaviour (especially the way it differs from const ) is essential for working with production code.
function declaration caveats17
Function declarations are formally only supposed to be made at what we might call the “top level” of a function. Although some JavaScript environments permit the following code, this example is technically illegal and definitely a bad idea:
( function ( camelCase ) { return fizzbuzz (); if ( camelCase ) { function fizzbuzz () { return "Fizz" + "Buzz" ; } } else { function fizzbuzz () { return "Fizz" + "Buzz" ; } } })( true ) //=> 'FizzBuzz'? Or ERROR: Can't find variable: fizzbuzz?
Function declarations are not supposed to occur inside of blocks. The big trouble with expressions like this is that they may work just fine in your test environment but work a different way in production. Or it may work one way today and a different way when the JavaScript engine is updated, say with a new optimization.
Another caveat is that a function declaration cannot exist inside of any expression, otherwise it’s a function expression. So this is a function declaration:
function trueDat () { return true }
But this is not:
( function trueDat () { return true })
The parentheses make this an expression, not a function declaration.
Combinators and Function Decorators
higher-order functions
As we’ve seen, JavaScript functions take values as arguments and return values. JavaScript functions are values, so JavaScript functions can take functions as arguments, return functions, or both. Generally speaking, a function that either takes functions as arguments, or returns a function, or both, is referred to as a “higher-order” function.
Here’s a very simple higher-order function that takes a function as an argument:
const repeat = ( num, fn ) => ( num > 0 )? ( repeat ( num - 1, fn ), fn ( num )) : undefined repeat ( 3, function ( n ) { console. log ( `Hello ${ n } ` ) }) //=> 'Hello 1' 'Hello 2' 'Hello 3' undefined
Higher-order functions dominate JavaScript Allongé. But before we go on, we’ll talk about some specific types of higher-order functions.
combinators
The word “combinator” has a precise technical meaning in mathematics:
“A combinator is a higher-order function that uses only function application and earlier defined combinators to define a result from its arguments.”–Wikipedia
If we were learning Combinatorial Logic, we’d start with the most basic combinators like S, K, and I, and work up from there to practical combinators. We’d learn that the fundamental combinators are named after birds following the example of Raymond Smullyan’s famous book To Mock a Mockingbird.
In this book, we will be using a looser definition of “combinator:” Higher-order pure functions that take only functions as arguments and return a function. We won’t be strict about using only previously defined combinators in their construction.
Let’s start with a useful combinator: Most programmers call it Compose, although the logicians call it the B combinator or “Bluebird.” Here is the typical18 programming implementation:
const compose = ( a, b ) => ( c ) => a ( b ( c ))
Let’s say we have:
const addOne = ( number ) => number + 1 ; const doubleOf = ( number ) => number * 2 ;
With compose, anywhere you would write
const doubleOfAddOne = ( number ) => doubleOf ( addOne ( number ));
You could also write:
const doubleOfAddOne = compose ( doubleOf, addOne );
This is, of course, just one example of many. You’ll find lots more perusing the recipes in this book. While some programmers believe “There Should Only Be One Way To Do It,” having combinators available as well as explicitly writing things out with lots of symbols and keywords has some advantages when used judiciously.
a balanced statement about combinators
Code that uses a lot of combinators tends to name the verbs and adverbs (like doubleOf, addOne, and compose ) while avoiding language keywords and the names of nouns (like number ). So one perspective is that combinators are useful when you want to emphasize what you’re doing and how it fits together, and more explicit code is useful when you want to emphasize what you’re working with.
function decorators
A function decorator is a higher-order function that takes one function as an argument, returns another function, and the returned function is a variation of the argument function. Here’s a ridiculously simple decorator:19
const not = ( fn ) => ( x ) =>! fn ( x )
So instead of writing!someFunction(42), we can write not(someFunction)(42). Hardly progress. But like compose, we could write either:
const something = ( x ) => x!= null ;
And elsewhere, write:
const nothing = ( x ) =>! something ( x );
Or we could write:
const nothing = not ( something );
not is a function decorator because it modifies a function while remaining strongly related to the original function’s semantics. You’ll see other function decorators in the recipes, like once and maybe. Function decorators aren’t strict about being pure functions, so there’s more latitude for making decorators than combinators.
Building Blocks
When you look at functions within functions in JavaScript, there’s a bit of a “spaghetti code” look to it. The strength of JavaScript is that you can do anything. The weakness is that you will. There are ifs, fors, returns, everything thrown higgledy piggledy together. Although you needn’t restrict yourself to a small number of simple patterns, it can be helpful to understand the patterns so that you can structure your code around some basic building blocks.
composition
One of the most basic of these building blocks is composition:
const cookAndEat = ( food ) => eat ( cook ( food ));
It’s really that simple: Whenever you are chaining two or more functions together, you’re composing them. You can compose them with explicit JavaScript code as we’ve just done. You can also generalize composition with the B Combinator or “compose” that we saw in Combinators and Decorators:
const compose = ( a, b ) => ( c ) => a ( b ( c )); const cookAndEat = compose ( eat, cook );
If that was all there was to it, composition wouldn’t matter much. But like many patterns, using it when it applies is only 20% of the benefit. The other 80% comes from organizing your code such that you can use it: Writing functions that can be composed in various ways.
In the recipes, we’ll look at a decorator called once: It ensures that a function can only be executed once. Thereafter, it does nothing. Once is useful for ensuring that certain side effects are not repeated. We’ll also look at maybe: It ensures that a function does nothing if it is given nothing (like null or undefined ) as an argument.
Of course, you needn’t use combinators to implement either of these ideas, you can use if statements. But once and maybe compose, so you can chain them together as you see fit:
const actuallyTransfer = ( from, to, amount ) => // do something const invokeTransfer = once ( maybe ( actuallyTransfer (...)));
partial application
Another basic building block is partial application. When a function takes multiple arguments, we “apply” the function to the arguments by evaluating it with all of the arguments, producing a value. But what if we only supply some of the arguments? In that case, we can’t get the final value, but we can get a function that represents part of our application.
Code is easier than words for this. The Underscore library provides a higher-order function called map.20 It applies another function to each element of an array, like this:
_. map ([ 1, 2, 3 ], ( n ) => n * n ) //=> [1, 4, 9]
We don’t want to fool around writing _., so we can use it by writing:21
This code implements a partial application of the map function by applying the function (n) => n * n as its second argument:
const squareAll = ( array ) => map ( array, ( n ) => n * n );
The resulting function– squareAll –is still the map function, it’s just that we’ve applied one of its two arguments already. squareAll is nice, but why write one function every time we want to partially apply a function to a map? We can abstract this one level higher. mapWith takes any function as an argument and returns a partially applied map function.
const mapWith = ( fn ) => ( array ) => map ( array, fn ); const squareAll = mapWith (( n ) => n * n ); squareAll ([ 1, 2, 3 ]) //=> [1, 4, 9]
We’ll discuss mapWith again. The important thing to see is that partial application is orthogonal to composition, and that they both work together nicely:
const safeSquareAll = mapWith ( maybe (( n ) => n * n )); safeSquareAll ([ 1, null, 2, 3 ]) //=> [1, null, 4, 9]
We generalized composition with the compose combinator. Partial application also has a combinator, which we’ll see in the partial recipe.
Magic Names
When a function is applied to arguments (or “called”), JavaScript binds the values of arguments to the function’s argument names in an environment created for the function’s execution. What we haven’t discussed so far is that JavaScript also binds values to some “magic” names in addition to any you put in the argument list.22
the function keyword
There are two separate rules for these “magic” names, one for when you invoke a function using the function keyword, and another for functions defined with “fat arrows.” We’ll begin with how things work for functions defined with the function keyword.
The first magic name is this, and it is bound to something called the function’s context. We will explore this in more detail when we start discussing objects and classes. The second magic name is very interesting, it’s called arguments, and the most interesting thing about it is that it contains a list of arguments passed to a function:
const plus = function ( a, b ) { return arguments [ 0 ] + arguments [ 1 ]; } plus ( 2, 3 ) //=> 5
Although arguments looks like an array, it isn’t an array: It’s more like an object23 that happens to bind some values to properties with names that look like integers starting with zero:
const args = function ( a, b ) { return arguments ; } args ( 2, 3 ) //=> { '0': 2, '1': 3 }
arguments always contains all of the arguments passed to a function, regardless of how many are declared. Therefore, we can write plus like this:
const plus = function () { return arguments [ 0 ] + arguments [ 1 ]; } plus ( 2, 3 ) //=> 5
When discussing objects, we’ll discuss properties in more depth. Here’s something interesting about arguments :
const howMany = function () { return arguments [ 'length' ]; } howMany () //=> 0 howMany ( 'hello' ) //=> 1 howMany ('sharks', 'are', 'apex', 'predators' ) //=> 4
The most common use of the arguments binding is to build functions that can take a variable number of arguments. We’ll see it used in many of the recipes, starting off with partial application and ellipses.
magic names and fat arrows
The magic names this and arguments have a different behaviour when you invoke a function that was defined with a fat arrow: Instead of being bound when the function is invoked, the fat arrow function always acquires the bindings for this and arguments from its enclosing scope, just like any other binding.
For example, when this expression’s inner function is defined with function, arguments[0] refers to its only argument, "inner" :
( function () { return ( function () { return arguments [ 0 ]; })( 'inner' ); })( 'outer' ) //=> "inner"
But if we use a fat arrow, arguments will be defined in the outer environment, the one defined with function. And thus arguments[0] will refer to "outer", not to "inner" :
( function () { return (() => arguments [ 0 ])( 'inner' ); })( 'outer' ) //=> "outer"
Although it seems quixotic for the two syntaxes to have different semantics, it makes sense when you consider the design goal: Fat arrow functions are designed to be very lightweight and are often used with constructs like mapping or callbacks to emulate syntax.
To give a contrived example, this function takes a number and returns an array representing a row in a hypothetical multiplication table. It uses mapWith, which we discussed in Building Blocks.24 We’ll use arguments just to show the difference between using a fat arrow and the function keyword:
const row = function () { return mapWith ( ( column ) => column * arguments [ 0 ], [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 ] ) } row ( 3 ) //=> [3,6,9,12,15,18,21,24,27,30,33,36]
This works just fine, because arguments[0] refers to the 3 we passed to the function row. Our “fat arrow” function (column) => column * arguments[0] doesn’t bind arguments when it’s invoked. But if we rewrite row to use the function keyword, it stops working:
const row = function () { return mapWith ( function ( column ) { return column * arguments [ 0 ] }, [ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 ] ) } row ( 3 ) //=> [1,4,9,16,25,36,49,64,81,100,121,144]
Now our inner function binds arguments[0] every time it is invoked, so we get the same result as if we’d written function (column) { return column * column }.
Although this example is clearly unrealistic, there is a general design principle that deserves attention. Sometimes, a function is meant to be used as a Big-F function. It has a name, it is called by different pieces of code, it’s a first-class entity in the code.
But sometimes, a function is a small-f function. It’s a simple representation of an expression to be computed. In our example above, row is a Big-F function, but (column) => column * arguments[0] is a small-f function, it exists just to give mapWith something to apply.
Having magic variables apply to Big-F functions but not to small-G functions makes it much easier to use small-F functions as syntax, treating them as expressions or blocks that can be passed to functions like mapWith.
Summary
Functions Functions are values that can be part of expressions, returned from other functions, and so forth.
Functions are reference values.
Functions are applied to arguments.
The arguments are passed by sharing, which is also called “pass by value.”
Fat arrow functions have expressions or blocks as their bodies.
function keyword functions always have blocks as their bodies.
keyword functions always have blocks as their bodies. Function bodies have zero or more statements.
Expression bodies evaluate to the value of the expression.
Block bodies evaluate to whatever is returned with the return keyword, or to undefined.
keyword, or to. JavaScript uses const to bind values to names within block scope.
to bind values to names within block scope. JavaScript uses function declarations to bind functions to names within function scope. Function declarations are “hoisted.”
Function application creates a scope.
Blocks also create scopes if const statements are within them.
statements are within them. Scopes are nested and free variable references closed over.
Variables can shadow variables in an enclosing scope.
Recipes with Basic Functions
Before combining ingredients, begin with implements so clean, they gleam.
Having looked at basic pure functions and closures, we’re going to see some practical recipes that focus on the premise of functions that return functions.
Disclaimer
The recipes are written for practicality, and their implementation may introduce JavaScript features that haven’t been discussed in the text to this point, such as methods and/or prototypes. The overall use of each recipe will fit within the spirit of the language discussed so far, even if the implementations may not.
Partial Application
In Building Blocks, we discussed partial application, but we didn’t write a generalized recipe for it. This is such a common tool that many libraries provide some form of partial application. You’ll find examples in Lemonad from Michael Fogus, Functional JavaScript from Oliver Steele and the terse but handy node-ap from James Halliday.
These two recipes are for quickly and simply applying a single argument, either the leftmost or rightmost.25 If you want to bind more than one argument, or you want to leave a “hole” in the argument list, you will need to either use a generalized |
After the alleged attack, Winchester Crown Court heard one of the granddaughters phoned 999 and said the pensioner had slipped and fallen
Mr Parker said: 'He was frightened and went outside and in the darkness he saw a figure, a man aged around 18 wearing a hat or hoodie.
'Whoever that was stood looking straight at him and then moved on.' After he went back inside, a brick was then thrown at the window, smashing a pane.
When police arrived they could smell petrol, but could not find the source.
A silent phone call was also made to the house while officers were there.
Mr Parker added: 'Someone that night tried but failed to frighten him to death.'
The court was told how days later, on November 10, the elderly man went to start his car in the garage but it wouldn't work so he called the AA.
'The man was lured out of bungalow believing that his adopted daughter had collapsed in the garden '
When they arrived they discovered the car had been sabotaged, the fuel line had been severed and a bolt placed over the battery compartment.
Mr Parker said: 'It appears to be an attempt, fortunately which failed, to cause an explosion when the car started.'
Jurors heard the bid to kill the grandad culminated on November 15 after the mother drove her daughters, son and his girlfriend to their grandparents' home.
Mr Parker added: 'We say the plan between them came to a head that night when the five of them went to the bungalow and battered him with bricks and possibly other weapons, in order to kill him.'
The mother lay on the ground outside while one of the children ran to get the elderly man.
As he stepped outside he was'set upon' by his grandson - who went on to steal £355 of his grandfather's pension from inside the house - and then his granddaughters began to hit him with bricks concealed in plastic bags.
Mr Parker described the five defendants plotting together to kill the pensioner 'in order to inherit his estate'.
He said it was the execution of 'an operation planned days in advance' and added: 'They wanted to make it look as though he had died as a result of an accidental fall.
'A final act in a conspiracy to kill him.' After the attack, one of the granddaughters made a 999 call, claiming her grandfather had slipped and fallen.
The five defendants all deny charges of conspiracy to murder and wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily.America did not develop a House of Lords, yet we imported the rigging of the British class system, Ms. Isenberg argues. This was hardly a land of equal opportunity. Brutal labor awaited most migrants. There was little social mobility.
“Puritan religious faith did not displace class hierarchy, either; the early generations of New Englanders did nothing to diminish, let alone condemn, the routine reliance on servants or slaves,” she observes. “Land was the principal source of wealth, and those without any had little chance to escape servitude. It was the stigma of landlessness that would leave its mark on white trash from this day forward.”
From this beginning, Ms. Isenberg moves confidently forward, through, for example, the class issues that undergirded the Civil War and the popular eugenics movement, favored by Theodore Roosevelt, that marked many as targets for sterilization. Slavery and racism are hardly discounted in this book, but she maintains her focus on poor whites.
She singles out North Carolina as “what we might call the first white trash colony.” It was swampy and, thanks to its shoal-filled shoreline, lacked a major port. It had no real planter class. Its citizens were viewed as sluggards, “cowardly Blockheads” in the words of one early writer. Another referred to the state as the lawless “sinke of America.”
Ms. Isenberg moves through the Great Depression, pausing to admire James Agee’s complex yet urgent nonfiction account of the lives of poor tenant farmers in Alabama, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” (1941). Elvis arrives. So does Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
Trailer parks, redolent of “liberty’s dark side,” come under her appraisal, as do movies like “Deliverance.” (She finds its redneck caricatures to be loathsome.) The careers of Dolly Parton, Jimmy Carter, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Bill Clinton are analyzed. Mr. Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky resulted in a spectacle that the author likens to a “white trash outing on the grand national stage.”
She considers the phenomenon of Sarah Palin, and reality television shows like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” and “Duck Dynasty.” Donald J. Trump the politician is not on this book’s radar, yet Ms. Isenberg writes in her Palin section: “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance the dancing bear will win.”Shawn Sheehan and his family. (Kara Stoltenberg; used with permission)
Shawn Sheehan is a teacher of special education at Norman High School in Norman, Okla., and he was the 2016 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year, as well as a finalist for National Teacher of the Year. Sheehan has been teaching for more than five years, an active member of a profession that he had not expected to join.
Sheehan comes from a military family, and when he was in college, he decided to follow his father into the Air Force. A month before he was commissioned, he was found to have a kidney-related illness that disqualified him. Though he recovered, he was still thought to be too much of a risk and was refused again. In his biography for the Teacher of the Year program, he wrote, “I was heartbroken that I couldn’t serve my country and uncertain of what to do with my life.”
But he found a new purpose. During the summer and in after-school programs, Sheehan had worked with students with disabilities and coached Special Olympics teams. He realized that he could serve his country in a different way — and he became a teacher.
Now he says he can’t think of doing anything else — except not in Oklahoma. Sheehan and his wife, Kaysi Sullivent Sheehan, have accepted teaching jobs in Texas, where salaries for educators are higher. In this post, a version of one he published on his blog and gave me permission to republish, he explains why he and his family are moving and how hard it was to make the decision. He has been weighing the decision publicly on his blog. You can read, for example, this post, “All I Want for Christmas is a Reason to Keep Teaching in Oklahoma. He didn’t find it.
According to a report by the National Education Association this month, the average public school teacher salary in 2016 was $58,353. Oklahoma was ranked 49 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, with an average salary of $45,276. The top average salary was in New York, at $79,152. And Oklahoma ranked 44th in expenditures for public K-12 students per student in average daily attendance.
My Washington Post colleague Emma Brown wrote a story about the financial difficulties facing public schools in Oklahoma, which are so severe that some districts have moved to four-day weeks, this after eliminating programs such as art and music. Read Shawn Sheehan’s story as well as Brown’s.
By Shawn Sheehan
Teaching in Oklahoma is a dysfunctional relationship. And with a myriad of emotions, I have made the decision to end this relationship.
My wife and I are excited to announce that we have accepted teaching positions in Texas. We are joining many other teachers who have either already left or plan to do so over the next year.
(Photo by Shawn Sheehan)
This decision wasn’t an easy one. Not by a long shot. Our circle of friends can attest to that. I considered other jobs, tried to find adjunct positions, and my wife and I have worked very hard to pay off our debt in bigger chunks.
But at the end of the day, the simple truth is that we can be paid a respectable wage for doing the same job — this job we love very much — by heading out of state.
[Think teachers aren’t paid enough? It’s worse than you think.]
I’m sorry it’s come to this, but I will leave with my head held high. I poured my heart and soul into my teaching at Norman High School. I represented our state at the highest level. I tried to help find funding sources via SQ 779. I ran for state Senate. I started a nonprofit focused on teacher recruitment and retention that has spread nationwide. I’ve done everything I know how to do to try and make things better.
We could stay, but it would cost our family — specifically our sweet baby girl. My wife and I are not willing to do that. We, like you, want what’s best for our children and she deserves to grow up in a state that values education. And so do your children.
Before I go, I want to address the most frequently overlooked challenge to improving education in Oklahoma: teachers. In my last blog post that caught much attention, I asked, “Should I stay or should I go?” There were two kinds of responses to my post. The majority were to the tune of “We’d hate to see you go, but totally understand and wish you the very best.” But there were unexpected critics; ones who actively impede improvements to education in Oklahoma.
There are teachers in this state who say things like, “I’m just in this for the students. If you’re not in it for the kids, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” This was one response from a teacher who vehemently disagreed with my statements.
Do other teachers out there really think we aren’t in this for the students? Who in their right mind teaches in Oklahoma for the money? Of course, I’m here for my students, their families, and this community, but I won’t apologize for demanding a livable wage.
I never said my situation was the reality for ALL educators. I was simply sharing my story with the world. It wasn’t necessary for the teachers out there whose spouses earn more money than us to invalidate my story. They also missed my point about the bigger problem being a lack of funding for education and other core state services.
We won’t move the needle forward in education until teachers in this state acknowledge the plight of the teacher next door. It’s great that not all of us struggle, but for those of who do, PLEASE don’t vilify us further. It’s not helping. Surely they can imagine what life would be like living single on an Oklahoma teacher salary or what the bank account might look like for two married Oklahoma educators with a 7-month-old daughter.
Oftentimes, I find these are the same teachers who vote against legislation and/or legislators who would help our cause. If my reality isn’t yours, is there a need discredit my and OUR colleagues’ stories? How many times will they excuse these budget cuts and “proudly” declare that they’d teach one hundred students in a classroom with no supplies and that they’d do it for free because it’s all about the kids?
I have one last piece of advice for the incredible, hard-working, passionate, committed, responsible Oklahoma educators out there. While we have our work cut out for us at the State Capitol, and there’s much work to be done in our communities, the quickest way we can see tangible results for our students is to have the tough conversations with our co-workers. We have to be better about supporting our teacher family and sharing everyone’s stories. We need a stronger united front and while this is not meant to be a plug for your local teacher union, I will say they’re a great starting point for information, member or not. And we have to stop pushing this idea of teaching as mission work.
I hope all my readers know I have loved every second of teaching in Oklahoma. There are great things happening in our schools every day and I have been honored to be a part of it. I hope I represented teachers well. I hope I shook things up a bit and sparked important conversations from the dinner table to the boardroom. And I hope my and my family’s departure, which is among many this year, makes a statement. We’re voting with our feet on this one.
My sincere thanks to my students, their families, Norman High’s superb faculty and staff, the Oklahoma State Department of Education, and for all the #oklaed supporters out there who will fight on. We’re hanging our hat south of the border but it was made in Oklahoma and we won’t forget that.
[With state budget in crisis, many Oklahoma schools hold classes four days a week]Remember yesterday, when we were talking about how incredible Rays ace and kiss-denier Chris Archer has been over his last three starts, during which he literally made baseball history? Well, it’s time to give Chris Sale some love, too, because he’s been just as dominant as Archer has during his last few starts for the White Sox.
Sale has pitched four straight games in which he’s induced at least 20 swings and misses, a feat that hasn’t been achieved since 2002, according to MLB.com. First, watch this mesmerizing video of an assortment of the swings and misses from his last four starts, and then we’ll talk about how crazy this all is:
The surface statistics from these starts—49 strikeouts and four walks in 30.2 innings—are self-evidently astonishing, but the more granular stuff is where the true wonder is, because it tells us that every pitch in Sale’s arsenal has been more or less untouchable since May 23.
Via Brooks Baseball and Pitch f/x, here are the whiffs per swing rates on all of Sale’s pitches from his last four starts:
Fastball: 28.43 percent
Sinker: 25 percent
Change up: 50.53 percent
Slider: 46.51 percent
Those numbers are insane, particularly the two attached to the slider and change up. For context, Stephen Strasburg had the whiffiest change up in baseball last year, racking up a whiffs per swing rate of 46.42 percent, and 2014’s most elusive slider (46.43 percent) belonged to Ervin Santana. So, basically, Chris Sale has spent his last 30 innings on the mound armed with not one, but two impossibly deadly out pitches.
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Here’s another absurd statistic: opposing batters have swung and missed at over 20 percent of all the pitches Sale has thrown over his last four starts. Spend more time watching Chris Sale pitch. That is all.The Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa is looking for public feedback about the design of its new science park.
The museum has been holding public consultations all month on the redevelopment of its green space. The national facility is hoping to create a world-class park that is accessible for all ages, all year round.
"We have some ideas of what we'd like to see but we want to talk to people in the community about what they want to see. We want it to really be a community hub, so whether that's places to have picnics, or concerts, or places to hang out," said exhibition and interpretation officer Britt Braaten.
The museum is also hoping to create an outdoor space that reflects the exhibits found inside the museum's main building, Bratten said.
"We imagine a very cool playground, like science-inspired, [where] play structures look like atoms or molecules, this sort of thing."
'A vision for the future'
The museum hopes to get as much input as possible from the public about what should go inside the four-hectare green space.
"We're doing consultations for a master plan that's going to allow us to have a vision for the future and then we're going to be able to build this fantastic park," said visitor researcher Gabrielle Trépanier.
Museum employees Britt Braaten, left, and Gabrielle Trépanier, right, helped facilitate a public consultation at the Alta Vista Community Association picnic on Sunday. A number of consultations have been held this month about what a new science park should look like. (CBC)
Ottawa Coun. Jean Cloutier says he supports the idea of creating an accessible space but he doesn't want his community to be on the hook.
"I would like to see something that is interactive. I would like to see something that is of no cost to the community. I would like to see something that is family-oriented. I would also like to see something for seniors," he said.
The project hasn't received any funding to date, but museum officials say the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation Foundation is working on developing a campaign to raise funds, estimated to be between $6 million and $7 million.
The last public consultation of the month is scheduled to take place on June 25 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the grounds of the museum.More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself scrounging around looking for crap to write about in the depths of Salt Lake City’s Craigslist. Every once in a while, I find some literary gold mines, but typically this search results in me stumbling across some hands-down messed up shit.--- So I thought to myself, “Why should I be the only one enjoying these Internet gems?” Just because they never panned out as Secret Handshake stories doesn't mean they should go unused. The following posts are a collection of my idle Craigslist bookmarks for the past month or so. Enjoy.
House Cleaning in a Sexy Outfit (Holladay)
Actual description from post: Just looking for a female to come do some light cleaning in a sexy outfit. If you have a sexy outfit, great! If you don't, it's ok. Please send over price and picture.
What this means: This either means there’s someone out there who has an unbridled Don Draper complex, or he’s a serial killer who wants you to rub the lotion on your skin. That could be a bit extreme. But I'm sure he’s just some super-lazy bro who needs his house cleaned and figures, “Eh, why not have someone do it in a sexy outfit?” It's hard to argue with that logic. It’s just too bad that this guy doesn’t know about this.
Beware of Kimbo (Utah)
Actual description from post: Just like the title says, BEWARE OF KIMBO.
What this means: My biggest fear isn’t that this person is referring to Kimbo Slice, the UFC fighter (pictured above), of whom I do fear -- terribly -- but rather that I should fear an unknown mystery Kimbo. All it says is BEWARE OF KIMBO. What the f*ck? This could mean anything: maybe someone's ex-wife, a pet snake, a sandwich. I hate coming across posts like this. Now whenever I see somethings that says Kimbo, I will instinctually fear it and wonder about any danger that could be lurking. To hell with Kimbo.
Wax my Back (SLC)
Actual description from post: Would like to have someone wax my back or maybe even shave it. Some hair on my back but it's not like a rug. I just want it waxed or shaved. Preferably waxed, but either will do.
What this means: God, it’s tough to be mad at this guy. I mean, I’ve been in some tight spots before. One time when I was 3 years old, I tried to put on a Cabbage Patch Kid outfit (it was a one-piece astronaut suit) and I got my dong stuck in the zipper. My older sisters were babysitting and they freaked the hell out, so they had to ask our neighbors to come over and unlodge it. It was terrifying for everyone. What I’m trying to say here is, I feel bad for this guy. He has an issue and no one will be a good neighbor and help him out. Don't be judgin'.
Idiot at Artesian Well Park (800S 500E)
Actual description from post: To the guy wearing the red shirt and driving the silver car filling up a water container this afternoon. The water-flow rate at each of the spigots is controlled by the diameter of the spigot, not how many of the three spigots are flowing. When you put your FINGER on one spigot to block it, all you accomplished was getting your grimy germs on the spigot. Thanks a lot. Grossed me out, and it was my first trip to the park for water.
What this means: I hear the water there is great, but I would rather "Bear Grylls it" than drink from a public water fountain. More importantly, does SLC have a problem using drinking fountains? I can’t help but think of the Parks and Recreation episode where they try to solve a very similar problem.
Any gay Mormons need a cover wife? - 25 (Come to you)
Actual description from post: I'm being dead serious. Any gay men out there need a girl to pretend to be the perfect wife while you live your life doing what needs to be done?
What this means: This is just depressing. But since this makes me want to mash my eyes into their sockets, I felt that it’s worth sharing. In the '90s, Jerry Seinfeld described this situation as a "Beard," which essentially is a woman who pretends to be gay guy’s date or wife for whatever reason. That was 20 years ago! Good lord, there's still a need for this?! REALLY? Utah never seems to disappoint me. I suspect these agreements are as common in Utah as an LDS laptop crashing from too much porn. It’s too bad that this is even an issue.
Need your boobs rubbed? - m4w - 33 (Salt Lake area)
Actual description from post: Well, it so happens that I have a set of nice big hands that love touching and playing with boobs. Doesn’t matter how big, or how small, I’m interested. This is free and just mutual fun for the both of us. Just as long as you are comfortable, we can do whatever. I promise I am a gl male who is well-educated and has a good job here in Salt Lake. So if you are interested in having fun, get back to me. Feel free to text me as well at __________. Hope to hear from you soon!
What this means: This guy poses a brilliant argument, which, at its essence, is quite simple: “I got hands and you got boobs.” Damn it, this guy is a genius. I bet he uses this logic on everything -- "Hey, I got this face and you got tacos." Since everyone lies on the Internet, it would be great if he didn’t have big hands at all. I’m truly hoping this is the case.
I had a lot more of these bad boys but I forgot that Craigslist eventually removes its older posts, so here are the rest of the bookmarks that I wanted to share but, unfortunately, no longer exist:
- I’m willing to do minimal yard work for Modern Warfare 3
- I have killer cars for your rap videos
- Come over and sing my baby to sleep
- Will trade cool shit for sweet swords
Wolf is also the author of City Weekly’s daily events blog Glad you Asked.
Twitter: @WolfColinWhen animals are overexposed to antibiotics, they can develop drug-resistant infections, which can prove fatal for humans. Jeff Roberson/AP
There's another place to watch for antibiotic overuse: the meat your children are eating, whether beef, pork, turkey or chicken. As a result, the country's leading pediatrics group is calling for farmers to stop using antibiotics to help livestock grow faster.
In a report Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics detailed the overuse of antibiotics in animals, which can make bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and Campylobacter stronger and resistant to drugs previously able to fight them off. The federal government has been warning Americans about the dangers of overusing antibiotics in hospitals and of asking doctors to prescribe them when they aren't necessary, but what hasn't received as much widespread attention is the danger that can occur when these medicines are overfed to animals, the academy wrote.
Antibiotics were once considered a miracle drug, opening the door to surgeries that hadn't been possible before, including organ transplants. Before their use, a simple cut could mean death if it became infected. In recent years, however, the overuse of these drugs has become a major global threat that the World Health Organization has drawn attention to, reporting also on Monday that its latest survey results show these superbugs are widely misunderstood.
In a farm setting, caretakers administer antibiotics and hormones to animals to fight infections, but also for nonmedical purposes, including to make animals grow faster while simultaneously feeding them less. As a result of overexposure, animals can develop infections that drugs cannot fight, the same way humans can when they eat foods that have been contaminated by bacteria.
Bacteria can spread to other livestock in contaminated quarters, and when the animals are slaughtered for meat and delivered to supermarkets, children can become exposed by eating infected meat. Farm workers or people who visit farms can also become infected. If the infectious bacteria is drug resistant, any drugs given in a hospital or at the doctor's office would be ineffective.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year more than 2 million Americans become sick because of drug-resistant bacteria, and more than 23,000 of them die. For most infections, incidence is highest among children younger than 5, the academy says.
Many of the drugs used to combat infections are the same in humans as they are in animals, but humans – who themselves are given too many antibiotics – still use significantly fewer than animals do. In 2012, more than 32.2 million pounds of antibiotics were used in animals, compared with 7.25 million pounds of these medicines used in humans. While humans need a prescription from a doctor to access antibiotics, nearly all drugs used in animals do not need a prescription from a vet and can be bought over the counter.
"The indiscriminate use of antibiotics without a prescription or the input of a veterinarian puts the health of children at risk," Dr. Jerome Paulson, one of the authors of the report and past chairperson of the academy's executive committee of the Council on Environmental Health, said in a statement.
In recent years epidemiologists have been able to link the overuse of drugs in animals to infections they have found in humans. These have included methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, in turkey, pork, chicken and beef. People also have gotten MRSA from exposure to livestock, and exposure to E. coli in animals has led to urinary tract infections in humans, and to sepsis, which is commonly called "blood poisoning."
Parents who want to buy meat that doesn't have these added antibiotics must look for organic certifications from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, specifying that no growth hormones or antibiotics have been used.
The report comes at the beginning of what President Barack Obama has proclaimed “Get Smart About Antibiotics Week.”Secession in the United States has been attempted before. It ended in the Civil War with the southern states being forbidden from seceding.
Texas has talked about it. California is talking about it now and even says it has its own embassy in Moscow, Russia (this according to secession supporters and not state officials). But what would an independent California country actually be like?
All we can do is look at current California policies and political leanings and attempt to project how they might operate as a country on their own.
Entitlement Spending
California’s state government has a reputation for big spending and they live up to that with the highest in the nation welfare payout totaling $44.8 billion for the year 2016 according to USGovernmentSpending.com. The nearest state to California’s yearly welfare payout is New York at $18.5 billion. Most states are less than half of New York.
On top of that, California is referred to as a “sanctuary city,” meaning that they do not enforce federal immigration laws, so people who have entered the United States illegally and who are not citizens may go to California without anyone looking into them or trying to send them back to where they came from.
In fact, California goes beyond being a sanctuary city. They don’t just allow illegal immigrants to live in their state without any deterrent, they actually provide taxpayer-funded benefits to them. Some benefits provided to illegal immigrants by California taxpayers include in-state college tuition, driver’s licenses, and state funded healthcare for illegals under the age of 19 with a bill in the works to provide it for older undocumented adults as well. They even allow people without legal status to obtain law and other professional licenses.
According to a comment made to the L.A. Times by Joe Guzzardi, spokesman for the group of Californians for Population Stability, “Citizens are out of the loop on these immigration bills,” said Joe Guzzardi, spokesman for the group Californians for Population Stability. “I question whether or not any of them would have passed on the ballot, especially the ones dealing with outlays of taxpayer money.”
So a new country with handouts for illegals along with such lax laws, if any, concerning immigration would be an absolute magnet for illegals already in the United States who are looking for friendlier turf. This is especially true when thinking that the handouts might become more and the laws might become even weaker or nonexistent without pressure from the rest of the United States.
But here’s the catch. President-elect Trump has already proposed ending federal funding for states who ignore federal laws. So California could be financially on its own either way. And that’s where all of the big spending falls apart.
California is not just using its own state taxpayers for giveaways to illegals, it’s getting a huge amount from the federal government, who gets the money from taxpayers in states other than California. According to Breitbart, of California’s $252.5 billion in total estimated government spending for fiscal year 2015, the U.S. federal government provided $93.6 billion, or 37 percent. That works out to a stunning $6,451 per year for every man, woman and child in the state of California.
So one thing is for sure, a new country that was formerly a state known as California will be operating on 37 percent less income but a colossal amount of new expenses such as its own military and welfare system since it would now be its own federal government. And then with the influx of illegals wanting to board the gravy train to the country of California, well it could easily be Venezuela’s socialism wreck all over again with more people living off of the taxpayers than actually being taxpayers. And that would send taxes to the moon since they are already through the roof with California currently having the highest state income tax in the United States. They’d have to add a new federal income tax of their own on top of that and then the mass exodus of businesses and other taxpayers would begin.
California would become a country of people who have no citizenship in the United States or the new country of California. Would California, then, automatically make those people citizens of its new country? And if so, would that make them taxpayers? If citizenship automatically made them taxpayers, the new country might run into an interesting and ironic problem since a number of those non-citizens would not want to become citizens of the new country either in order to avoid the associated taxes. And since California now seems to pride itself on welcoming illegal immigrants without making them become citizens, well, they would have no way of solving that problem. They would have people who want all the benefits of citizenship but none of the responsibility or expense. Such a situation would bankrupt their new country.
And the country of California would, ironically, find itself in the same position that the United States is in right now. Might they then be forced to end government giveaways to illegals or even deport them? Or, if the giveaways were ended, would non-citizens leave on their own?
It could be a fascinating change of course for the current sanctuary state who would likely find that it can’t survive as a sanctuary country. Assuming such a country still had free elections, it could be that their people, made poor by the massive taxes that would be required to attempt to keep the country financially alive, would elect their own nationalist leader who proposed secure borders, lower taxes, and immigration laws.
No one knows the future, but what a country of California might end up looking like could be much different than its current sanctuary state status and big spending, liberal government ways. Out of necessity, it might become something even to the right of the country from whom its wanting to secede. That’s as good a guess as anyone’s.
Rhett October is on Twitter @RhettOctober
ALSO SEE: California To Start Regulating Cow FartsThe 1,172-mile (1,885-km) $3.8 billion (3.46 billion euros) pipeline - being built by a group of companies led by the pipeline's operator, Energy Transfer Partners - would offer the most direct route for shale oil from North Dakota to US Gulf Coast refineries, carrying sweet crude oil fracked from North Dakota's Bakken oil patch through South Dakota and Iowa into Illinois.
Energy Transfer Partners insists the project is safe, while local Indian tribes and ecological groups are fighting the pipeline's permitting process in federal court and in protests on the ground.
Shades of retribution?
The arrested demonstrator, 37-year old Red Fawn Fallis, was confronted by two officers on the evening of October 27 while taking part in a demonstration, according to a police affidavit.
During an ensuing struggle Fallis then allegedly fired at a police officer three times with a handgun, failing to hit him, according to an account from Captain Bryan Niewind of the Morton County Sheriff's Department. Later a small amount of marijuana was found in her possession, according to court documents. If found guilty she faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
Over the weekend, construction crews were working next to the camp that authorities cleared Thursday, when they arrested more than 140 people at the sprawling encampment known as Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires camp, which is located on Army Corps of Engineers land.
Activist and actor Susan Sarandon speaking at the site last week
Protests
The project has faced months of protest from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, as well as environmental activists, who say it threatens local water supplies and sacred tribal sites. Police have clashed with protesters on several occasions when they moved in to clear out a camp constructed by demonstrators on private land.
Protesters said that those arrested in the confrontation had numbers written on their arms and were housed in what appeared to be dog kennels, without bedding or furniture.
In response, some demonstrators torched three vehicles on a bridge, creating a blockade that effectively cut off easy access to the pipeline construction zone and made it far harder for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and nearby residents to get to Bismarck for errands and medical appointments.
Others are less prepared to use force. "We don't want people instigating things that are going to get out of hand. We don't need them," said Don Cuny, chief of security for the large camp near the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers. "They want the kids out of here if things get ugly," said Emmett White Temple, a 55-year-old member of the Standing Rock Sioux.
Crowdsourcing to help the protesters has brought in $1 million (910,000 euros). One online legal defense fund has raised more than $655,000 for "the legal defense of warriors protecting land, water and human rights."
Meanwhile, thousands of supporters of the tribe and environmental activists turned to social media on Monday aiming to confuse the police, who many believe are using it to track the protesters. Some 4,600 people used Facebook's location tagging feature to "check in" on Monday afternoon at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, near the site of the pipeline, vastly boosting the numbers actually there.
Bigger picture
The pipeline's future will set a precedent for the other such ventures. The case is also seen to expose divisions within US society over the role and influence of corporate giants such as Energy Transfer Partners, in which Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds shares. His rival, Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has been a very strong supporter of fracking.
Mainstream media has been slow to report the story and when it does has tended to focus on the violent confrontations at the expense of a wider narrative of competing land and environmental policy, the journalist, Amy Goodman, host of the "Democracy Now!" news broadcaster has argued. Goodman had an arrest warrant issued for her in September after her coverage of the situation, before a judge dismissed the charges, Goodman said at the time: "Not enough people realize what's going on out there. It's a bigger story than the amount of attention it's received."
Watch video 01:08 Share North Dakota: Severe riots during pipeline protest Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/2RrGn North Dakota: Severe riots during pipeline protest
jbh/kl (Reuters, AP)Chart: Hawaii is #1 in Teacher Absenteeism at 79%
Related: Hawaii is #1 in Teachers Union Power
Related: DoE Student Absenteeism Over 20%
Teacher Absenteeism in Charter and Traditional Public Schools
From Thomas B Fordham Institute, September 20, 2017
Research confirms what common sense dictates: Students learn less when their teachers aren’t there. According to multiple studies, a ten-day increase in teacher absence results in at least ten fewer days of learning for students.
Clearly, some absences are unavoidable—teachers are only human. But compared to their counterparts in other industries and other countries, U.S. teachers seem to have poor attendance. On average, they miss about eight school days a year due to sick and personal leave (in addition to the breaks they get for school vacations and national holidays); meanwhile, the average US worker takes about three-and-a-half sick days a year. Yet the first of these averages obscures the degree to which absenteeism is concentrated among a subset of teachers.
In Teacher Absenteeism in Charter and Traditional Public Schools, Fordham senior research and policy associate David Griffith takes an unprecedented look at teacher chronic absenteeism rates in charter and traditional public schools—that is, the percentage of teachers who miss at least eleven days of school, excluding professional development days and field trips.His major findings include the following:
Nationally, teachers in traditional public schools are almost three times as likely to be chronically absent as teachers in charter schools: 28.3 percent versus 10.3 percent.
In eight states plus the District of Columbia, traditional public school teachers are at least four times as likely to be chronically absent as their charter school peers.
In thirty-four of the thirty-five states with sizable charter sectors—and in each of the ten largest cities in the country—teachers in traditional public schools are more likely to be chronically absent than teachers in charters.
The chronic absenteeism gap between charter and traditional public school teachers is largest in states where districts—but not |
needed for national defense. Mullen wants, instead, to raise the annual defense budget in the worst of times to at least 4% of GDP. Such a policy is clearly designed to deceive the public about ludicrously wasteful spending on weapons systems which has gone on for decades.
It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services. Many people believe that our military is the largest, best equipped, and most invincible among the world's armed forces. None of these things is true, but our military is, without a doubt, the most expensive to maintain. Each year, we Americans account for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together spend on their militaries annually.
Equally striking, the military seems increasingly ill-adapted to the types of wars that Pentagon strategists agree the United States is most likely to fight in the future, and is, in fact, already fighting in Afghanistan -- insurgencies led by non-state actors. While the Department of Defense produces weaponry meant for such wars, it is also squandering staggering levels of defense appropriations on aircraft, ships, and futuristic weapons systems that fascinate generals and admirals, and are beloved by military contractors mainly because their complexity runs up their cost to astronomical levels.
That most of these will actually prove irrelevant to the world in which we live matters not a whit to their makers or purchasers. Thought of another way, the stressed out American taxpayer, already supporting two disastrous wars and the weapons systems that go with them, is also paying good money for weapons that are meant for fantasy wars, for wars that will only be fought in the battlescapes and war-gaming imaginations of Defense Department "planners."
The Air Force and the Army are still planning as if, in the reasonably near future, they were going to fight an old-fashioned war of attrition against the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991; while the Navy, with its eleven large aircraft-carrier battle groups, is, as William S. Lind has written, "still structured to fight the Imperial Japanese Navy." Lind, a prominent theorist of so-called fourth-generation warfare (insurgencies carried out by groups such as al-Qaeda), argues that "the Navy's aircraft-carrier battle groups have cruised on mindlessly for more than half a century, waiting for those Japanese carriers to turn up. They are still cruising today, into, if not beyond, irrelevance Submarines are today's and tomorrow's capital ships; the ships that most directly determine control of blue waters."
In December 2008, Franklin "Chuck" Spinney, a former high-ranking civilian in the Pentagon's Office of Systems Analysis (set up in 1961 to make independent evaluations of Pentagon policy) and a charter member of the "Fighter Mafia" of the 1980s and 1990s, wrote, "As has been documented for at least twenty years, patterns of repetitive habitual behavior in the Pentagon have created a self-destructive decision-making process. This process has produced a death spiral."
As a result, concluded Spinney, inadequate amounts of wildly overpriced equipment are purchased, "new weapons [that] do not replace old ones on a one for one basis." There is also "continual pressure to reduce combat readiness," a "corrupt accounting system" that "makes it impossible to sort out the priorities," and a readiness to believe that old solutions will work for the current crisis.
Failed Reform Efforts
There's no great mystery about the causes of the deep dysfunction that has long characterized the Pentagon's weapons procurement system. In 2006, Thomas Christie, former head of Operational Test and Evaluation, the most senior official at the Department of Defense for testing weapons and a Pentagon veteran of half a century, detailed more than 35 years of efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system. These included the 1971 Fitzhugh (or Blue Ribbon) Commission, the 1977 Steadman Review, the 1981 Carlucci Acquisition Initiatives, the 1986 Packard Commission, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, the 1989 Defense Management Review, the 1990 "Streamlining Review" of the Defense Science Board, the 1993-1994 report of the Acquisition Streamlining Task Force and of the Defense Science Board, the late 1990s Total System Performance Responsibility initiative of the Air Force, and the Capabilities-Based Acquisition approach of the Missile Defense Agency of the first years of this century.
Christie concluded: "After all these years of repeated reform efforts, major defense programs are taking 20 to 30 years to deliver less capability than planned, very often at two to three times the costs and schedules planned." He also added the following observations:
"Launching into major developments without understanding key technical issues is the root cause of major cost and schedule problems Costs, schedules, and technical risks are often grossly understated at the outset There are more acquisition programs being pursued than DoD [the Department of Defense] can possibly afford in the long term.
"By the time these problems are acknowledged, the political penalties incurred in enforcing any major restructuring of a program, much less its cancellation, are too painful to bear. Unless someone is willing to stand up and point out that the emperor has no clothes, the U.S. military will continue to hemorrhage taxpayer dollars and critical years while acquiring equipment that falls short of meeting the needs of troops in the field."
The inevitable day of reckoning, long predicted by Pentagon critics, has, I believe, finally arrived. Our problems are those of a very rich country which has become accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns.
Given the present major recession, whose depths remain unknown, the United States has better things to spend its money on than Nimitz-class aircraft carriers at a price of $6.2 billion each (the cost of the USS George H. W. Bush, launched in January 2009, our tenth such ship) or aircraft that can cruise at a speed of Mach 2 (1,352 miles per hour).
However, don't wait for the Pentagon to sort out such matters. If it has proven one thing over the last decades, it's that it is thoroughly incapable of reforming itself. According to Christie, "Over the past 20 or so years, the DoD and its components have deliberately and systematically decimated their in-house technical capabilities to the point where there is little, if any, competence or initiative left in the various organizations tasked with planning and executing its budget and acquisition programs."
Gunning for the Air Force
President Obama has almost certainly retained Robert M. Gates as Secretary of Defense in part to give himself some bipartisan cover as he tries to come to grips with the bloated defense budget. Gates is also sympathetic to the desire of a few reformers in the Pentagon to dump the Lockheed-Martin F-22 "Raptor" supersonic stealth fighter, a plane designed to meet the Soviet Union's last proposed, but never built, interceptor.
The Air Force's old guard and its allies in Congress are already fighting back aggressively. In June 2008, Gates fired Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley. Though he was undoubtedly responding to their fervent support for the F-22, his cover explanation was their visible failure to adequately supervise the accounting and control of nuclear weapons.
In 2006, the Air Force had managed to ship to Taiwan four high-tech nose cone fuses for Minutemen ICBM warheads instead of promised helicopter batteries, an error that went blissfully undetected until March 2008. Then, in August 2007, a B-52 bomber carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles flew across much of the country from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. This was in direct violation of standing orders against such flights over the United States.
As Julian Barnes and Peter Spiegel of the Los Angeles Times noted in June 2008, "Tensions between the Air Force and Gates have been growing for months," mainly over Gates's frustration about the F-22 and his inability to get the Air Force to deploy more pilotless aircraft to the various war zones. They were certainly not improved when Wynne, a former senior vice president of General Dynamics, went out of his way to cross Gates, arguing publicly that "any president would be damn happy to have more F-22s around if we had to get into a fight with China." It catches something of the power of the military-industrial complex that, despite his clear desire on the subject, Gates has not yet found the nerve -- or the political backing -- to pull the plug on the F-22; nor has he even dared to bring up the subject of canceling its more expensive and technically complicated successor, the F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter."
More than 20 years ago, Chuck Spinney wrote a classic account of the now-routine bureaucratic scams practiced within the Pentagon to ensure that Congress will appropriate funds for dishonestly advertised and promoted weapons systems and then prevent their cancellation when the fraud comes to light. In a paper he entitled "Defense Power Games," of which his superiors deeply disapproved, Spinney outlined two crucial Pentagon gambits meant to lock in such weaponry: "front-loading" and "political engineering."
It should be understood at the outset that all actors involved, including the military officers in charge of projects, the members of Congress who use defense appropriations to buy votes within their districts, and the contractors who live off the ensuing lucrative contracts, utilize these two scams. It is also important to understand that neither front-loading nor political engineering is an innocent or morally neutral maneuver. They both involve criminal intent to turn on the spigot of taxpayer money and then to jam it so that it cannot be turned off. They are de rigueur practices of our military-industrial complex.
Front-loading is the practice of appropriating funds for a new weapons project based solely on assurances by its official sponsors about what it can do. This happens long before a prototype has been built or tested, and invariably involves the quoting of unrealistically low unit costs for a sizeable order. Assurances are always given that the system's technical requirements will be simple or have already been met. Low-balling future costs, an intrinsic aspect of front-loading, is an old Defense Department trick, a governmental version of bait-and-switch. (What is introduced as a great bargain regularly turns out to be a grossly expensive lemon.)
Political engineering is the strategy of awarding contracts in as many different Congressional districts as possible. By making voters and Congressional incumbents dependent on military money, the Pentagon's political engineers put pressure on them to continue supporting front-loaded programs even after their true costs become apparent.
Front-loading and political engineering generate several typical features in the weapons that the Pentagon then buys for its arsenal. These continually prove unnecessarily expensive, are prone to break down easily, and are often unworkably complex. They tend to come with inadequate supplies of spare parts and ammunition, since there is not enough money to buy the numbers that are needed. They also force the services to repair older weapons and keep them in service much longer than is normal or wise. (For example, the B-52 bomber, which went into service in 1955, is still on active duty.)
Even though extended training would seem to be a necessary corollary of the complexity of such weapons systems, the excessive cost actually leads to reductions in training time for pilots and others. In the long run, it is because of such expedients and short-term fixes that American casualties may increase and, sooner or later, battles or wars may be lost.
For example, Northrop-Grumman's much touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hangars first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform; and -- at a total cost of $44.75 billion for only 21 bombers -- it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.
Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the "Warthog." It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force's hot-shot self-image.
Some 715 A-10s were produced and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because the Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that fly in straight lines at high altitudes rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.
Using the F-22 to Fight the F-16
The military-industrial complex is today so confident of its skills in gaming the system that it does not hesitate to publicize how many workers in a particular district will lose their jobs if a particular project is cancelled. Threats are also made -- and put into effect -- to withhold political contributions from uncooperative congressional representatives.
As Spinney recalls, "In July 1989, when some members of Congress began to build a coalition aimed at canceling the B-2, Northrop Corporation, the B-2's prime contractor, retaliated by releasing data which had previously been classified showing that tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions in profits were at risk in 46 states and 383 congressional districts." The B-2 was not cancelled.
Southern California's biggest private employers are Boeing Corporation and Northrop-Grumman. They are said to employ more than 58,000 workers in well-paying jobs, a major political obstacle to rationalizing defense expenditures even as recession is making such steps all but unavoidable.
Both front-loading and political engineering are alive and well in 2009. They are, in fact, now at the center of fierce controversies surrounding the extreme age of the present fleet of Air Force fighter aircraft, most of which date from the 1980s. Meanwhile the costs of the two most likely successors to the workhorse F-16 -- the F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- have run up so high that the government cannot afford to purchase significant numbers of either of them.
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultra-fast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its roll-out on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22's prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wants to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants have balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is "the most expensive fighter plane ever built."
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter -- that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar -- but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to "fourth-generation wars" like that with the Taliban in Afghanistan -- the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the U.S. ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable, as the history of Afghanistan, that "graveyard of empires" going back to Alexander the Great, illustrates so well. Unfortunately, President Obama's approach to the Bush administration's Afghan War remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.
Nonetheless, the F-22 is still being promoted as the plane to buy almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the Air Force also claim that we need the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument goes this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that, if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel's are fully equipped with F-16s and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are "better" than the ones we've sold elsewhere.
Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in 44 states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin and some in the Defense Department have therefore proposed that, if the F-22 is cancelled, it should be replaced by the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, also built by Lockheed Martin.
Most serious observers believe that this would only make a bad situation worse. So far the F-35 shows every sign of being, in Chuck Spinney's words, "a far more costly and more troubled turkey" than the F-22, "even though it has a distinction that even the F-22 cannot claim, namely it is tailored to meet the same threat that ceased to exist at least three years before the F-35 R&D [research and development] program began in 1994."
The F-35 is considerably more complex than the F-22, meaning that it will undoubtedly be even more expensive to repair and will break down even more easily. Its cost per plane is guaranteed to continue to spiral upwards. The design of the F-22 involves 4 million lines of computer code; the F-35, 19 million lines. The Pentagon sold the F-35 to Congress in 1998 with the promise of a unit cost of $184 million per aircraft. By 2008, that had risen to $355 million per aircraft and the plane was already two years behind schedule.
According to Pierre M. Sprey, one of the original sponsors of the F-16, and Winslow T. Wheeler, a 31-year veteran staff official on Senate defense committees, the F-35 is overweight, underpowered, and "less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 'lead sled' that got wiped out over North Vietnam in the Indochina War." Its makers claim that it will be a bomber as well as a fighter, but it will have a payload of only two 2,000-pound bombs, far less than American fighters of the Vietnam era. Although the Air Force praises its stealth features, it will lose these as soon as it mounts bombs under its wings, which will alter its shape most un-stealthily.
It is a non-starter for close-air-support missions because it is too fast for a pilot to be able to spot tactical targets. It is too delicate and potentially flammable to be able to withstand ground fire. If built, it will end up as the most expensive defense contract in history without offering a serious replacement for any of the fighters or fighter-bombers currently in service.
The Fighter Mafia
Every branch of the American armed forces suffers from similar "defense power games." For example, the new Virginia-class fast-attack submarines are expensive and not needed. As the New York Times wrote editorially, "The program is little more than a public works project to keep the Newport News, Va., and Groton, Conn., naval shipyards in business."
I have, however, concentrated on the Air Force because the collapse of internal controls over acquisitions is most obvious, as well as farthest advanced, there -- and because the Air Force has a history of conflict over going along with politically easy decisions that was recently hailed by Secretary of Defense Gates as deserving of emulation by the other services. The pointed attack Gates launched on bureaucratism was, paradoxically, one of the few optimistic developments in Pentagon politics in recent times.
On April 21, 2008, the Secretary of Defense caused a storm of controversy by giving a speech to the officers of the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. In it, he singled out for praise and emulation an Air Force officer who had inspired many of that service's innovators over the past couple of generations, while being truly despised by an establishment and an old guard who viewed him as an open threat to careerism.
Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) was a significant military strategist, an exceptionally talented fighter pilot in both the Korean and Vietnamese war eras, and for six years the chief instructor at the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. "Forty-Second Boyd" became a legend in the Air Force because of his standing claim that he could defeat any pilot, foreign or domestic, in simulated air-to-air combat within 40 seconds, a bet he never lost even though he was continuously challenged.
Last April, Gates said, in part:
"As this new era continues to unfold before us, the challenge I pose to you today is to become a forward-thinking officer who helps the Air Force adapt to a constantly changing strategic environment characterized by persistent conflict.
"Let me illustrate by using a historical exemplar: the late Air Force Colonel John Boyd. As a 30-year-old captain, he rewrote the manual for air-to-air combat. Boyd and the reformers he inspired would later go on to design and advocate for the F-16 and the A-10. After retiring, he would develop the principals of maneuver warfare that were credited by a former Marine Corps Commandant [General Charles C. Krulak] and a Secretary of Defense [Dick Cheney] for the lightning victory of the first Gulf War.
"In accomplishing all these things, Boyd -- a brilliant, eccentric, and stubborn character -- had to overcome a large measure of bureaucratic resistance and institutional hostility. He had some advice that he used to pass on to his colleagues and subordinates that is worth sharing with you. Boyd would say, and I quote: 'One day you will take a fork in the road, and you're going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way and you can do something -- something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted and get good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won't have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you have to make a decision. To be or to do' We must heed John Boyd's advice by asking if the ways we do business make sense."
Boyd's many accomplishments are documented in Robert Coram's excellent biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. They need not be retold here. It was, however, the spirit of Boyd and "the reformers he inspired," a group within Air Force headquarters who came to be called the "Fighter Mafia," that launched the defense reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their objectives were to stop the acquisition of unnecessarily complex and expensive weapons, cause the Air Force to take seriously the idea of a fourth generation of warfare, end its reliance on a strategy of attrition, and expose to criticism an officer's corps focused on careerist standards.
Unless Secretary Gates succeeds in reviving it, their lingering influence in the Pentagon is just about exhausted today. We await the leadership of the Obama administration to see which way the Air Force and the rest of the American defense establishment evolves.
Despite Gates's praise of Boyd, one should not underestimate the formidable obstacles to Pentagon reform. Over a quarter-century ago, back in 1982, journalist James Fallows outlined the most serious structural obstacle to any genuine reform in his National Book Award-winning study, National Defense. The book was so influential that at least one commentator includes Fallows as a non-Pentagon member of Boyd's "Fighter Mafia."
As Fallows then observed (pp. 64-65):
"The culture of procurement teaches officers that there are two paths to personal survival. One is to bring home the bacon for the service as the manager of a program that gets its full funding. 'Procurement management is more and more the surest path to advancement' within the military, says John Morse, who retired as a Navy captain after twenty-eight years in the service.
"The other path that procurement opens leads outside the military, toward the contracting firms. To know even a handful of professional soldiers above the age of forty and the rank of major is to keep hearing, in the usual catalogue of life changes, that many have resigned from the service and gone to the contractors: to Martin Marietta, Northrop, Lockheed, to the scores of consulting firms and middlemen, whose offices fill the skyscrapers of Rosslyn, Virginia, across the river from the capital. In 1959, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois reported that 768 retired senior officers (generals, admirals, colonels, and Navy captains) worked for defense contractors. Ten years later Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin said that the number had increased to 2,072."
Almost 30 years after those words were written, the situation has grown far worse. Until we decide (or are forced) to dismantle our empire, sell off most of our 761 military bases (according to official statistics for fiscal year 2008) in other people's countries, and bring our military expenditures into line with those of the rest of the world, we are destined to go bankrupt in the name of national defense. As of this moment, we are well on our way, which is why the Obama administration will face such critical -- and difficult -- decisions when it comes to the Pentagon budget.
Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books. To listen to a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's potential economic death spiral, click here.
Copyright 2009 Chalmers JohnsonThe first time I listened to Tim Minchin’s new song “Come Home (Cardinal Pell)” I cackled. Brilliant rhyming. Religion and prison. Bell with a Pellian knell. Minchin writes poetry with a pungent point.
The second time I listened to it I was just double checking that Minchin never used the word “fuck.” He often does. He didn’t this time. He didn’t have to – the grotesque nature of the circumstances doesn’t need to be punctuated by obscenity.
The third time I listened to it I cried. I was driving in my car. I cried big fat tears that caused me to pull over to the side of the road.
I’m not a victim of sexual abuse. No one in my family is. I do know people who are. I am a Catholic and a public critic of Cardinal Pell and the Catholic church on its handling of cases of child sexual abuse. I’ve expressed frustration at the church’s unwillingness to reform in response to this abject, catastrophic failure of its mission.
Tim Minchin asks George Pell to 'come home' in expletive-filled new song Read more
Crying at Tim Minchin’s little ditty calling on Cardinal Pell to come home and face the music is the last reaction I expected to have.
Listening to victim’s testimony is harrowing. That makes me cry. Sometimes it makes me furious. And sometimes, I admit, I have to turn it off or stop reading because it’s too much to take in.
But a whimsical, acerbic and mocking take down of Cardinal Pell? What’s there to cry about?
For starters, it provoked sorrow at my loss of faith in the church, an organisation that has done much good but nonetheless values its rules, assets, and male privilege above all else.
I cried because there was little else I could do with my deep fury that neither Pell nor his mates at the Vatican appear to take seriously the need to respond fully and openly, and to reform the church, in the face of the child sexual abuse crisis.
Jesus said there is no greater love than to lay down your life for another. Cardinal Pell says there’s no way I could risk my health by flying business class to Australia.
I know Jesus says “judge not lest you be judged” but I reckon it’s a fair question to ask, Cardinal Pell: what would Jesus do?
Jesus said “let the little children come to me” and “you must be like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus valued children in their innocence and goodness. The church allowed priests to destroy that goodness and then valued the institution above the victims.
But if I’m honest, it’s not just a loss of faith in a human institution. It’s a challenge to my faith in a loving and gracious God.
I long ago stopped buying the idea of intercessory prayer – the kind where you ask God or some saint or Mary to intercede on your behalf or someone else to cure an illness or relieve a burden. I don’t believe God interferes in human lives in that way.
But I do – well on most days anyway – still believe in a source of love, grace and goodness that motivates our human existence.
Watching Cardinal Pell flounce about in his regal gear and flout the royal commission, watching the institution supposedly founded by Jesus grotesquely morph into something so removed from the teachings of Christ: it shakes me to the core. It shakes the very foundations of belief. It gives me no hope.
When Minchin sings “And if Lord God omnipotent reigneth, he will take one look at you and say, go home Cardinal Pell... I think the lord is calling you home Georgie”, I wonder: where the hell God is in all of this?
I feel hesitant honestly expressing my reactions. How much more significantly, terribly, horribly wronged must victims of child sexual abuse feel? How much courage must it take to testify to a royal commission about something so foul that’s happened to you? How deep must their feelings of betrayal, sorrow, loss, and anger be?
Here's fresh insight into Pell's response to the child sex abuse crisis. It's not encouraging Read more
How can we as a society not pay attention? How can the church, and one of its supposed “princes”, Cardinal Pell fail to face this great wrong and move heaven and earth to make it right?
No less a legal mind than Frank Brennan outlines the significant charges and questions that Cardinal Pell has to answer under oath and cross-examination. Or as Minchin simply sings: we have a right to know what you knew.
Cardinal Pell should, as Minchin sings, come home. But if he won’t, some victims of child sexual abuse want to go to sit in front of him when he testifies via video link. The proceeds of Minchin’s song are going to fund their travels.
If you want to support them, buy the song. Just be forewarned: Minchin is a genius who provokes hilarity and horror in just four minutes of melody. If you are Catholic, I recommend not listening while you are driving.Mazda Reveals 2016 MX-5 Cup Racer, New Global Racing Series By Bradley Iger November 04, 2014
Today at the SEMA show in Las Vegas, Mazda took the wraps off the all-new fourth generation MX-5 Cup racer, along with a new global racing series that will be held in North America, Europe and Asia, all in identical spec-tuned versions of the new Miata. Mazda also revealed that the winner of the series will be awarded more than just a cash purse for their victory.
The series is set to culminate at the end of the year with a Global Shootout at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca to crown the series champion. That individual will receive, along with the typical race winnings, a one-day test in Mazda’s TUDOR United SportsCar Championship prototype racer, pictured below.
As the most popular production-based race car in use today, the MX-5 enjoys a devout and enthusiastic following both on and off the track, and the idea to bring spec competition to a global arena should ratchet up the excitement substantially. Masahiro Moro, Managing Executive Officer in charge of Marketing for Mazda had this to say about the new series:
“We’re excited to take the elements of success of the existing Mazda MX-5 Cup series, and introduce them to a new global audience. It has long been our goal to see Mazda fans around the world competing in identical MX-5s, and the launch of the 2016 MX-5 Miata is the perfect time to make this goal a reality."The Vancouver International Soccer Festival has cut ties with the B.C. Soccer Association over the participation of a Tibetan women's soccer team in next month's tournament.
Tournament founder Adri Hamael told CBC News that he has asked the B.C. Soccer Association to cancel the Vancouver International Soccer Festival's membership with the organization and sanctioning.
"I do not see a point in staying a member," said Hamael. "VISF's core values are inclusion, respect and equality and by asking for a list of [the Tibetan players] while not requiring a list of all of our participants does not align with our values."
Team Tibet in training in Clementown, India, June 12. The team is scheduled to play in the opening match of the Vancouver International Soccer Festival July 7. (Tibet Women's Soccer)
According to Hamael Canada Soccer, through the BCSA, started making unprecedented demands of VISF organizers once it was announced the Tibetan women's team would play in the tournament.
Tibet not recognized by FIFA
Hamael believes the extra scrutiny is due to the fact that Tibet is not recognized by FIFA, the body that rules soccer internationally.
"I believe they are trying to find something to prevent the team from playing," he said last week.
Canada Soccer is a member of FIFA. The B.C. Soccer Association is the provincial arm of Canada Soccer.
Team Tibet consists of 14 players age 16 to 20 who are living in exile in Nepal and India. They are part of a humanitarian outreach program that teaches soccer to girls.
Team Tibet will make its international debut at the Vancouver International Soccer festival, after being denied tourist visas to attend a tournament in Dallas (Tibet Women's Soccer)
The Vancouver International Soccer Festival is in its 13th year of operation and has been sanctioned by B.C. Soccer since 2009.
'Full power...to veto games'
Hamael says in recent weeks Canada Soccer conducted a review of VISF tournament rules and began requesting additional documentation, including the names of the Tibetan players and the travel approval documents issued by their national soccer association.
Tibet does not have a national soccer organization — something that Canada Soccer would likely be aware of.
In an email sent by the B.C. Soccer Association on behalf of Canada Soccer it was also suggested non-compliance with the requests would affect the tournament's insurance status, although according to Hamael the VISF has insurance through an independent provider.
Canada Soccer regulations
In a statement the BCSA said it is obligated to comply with Canada Soccer regulations, which state:
"Provincial/Territorial Associations, District Associations, Leagues and Clubs wishing to arrange exhibition games in Canada between their amateur team(s) and amateur teams from another National Association shall request permission in writing from Canada Soccer's General Secretary at least thirty (30) days prior to the scheduled date of the proposed game.
"Canada Soccer shall have full power and authority to sanction or veto any such game."
Hamael says his tournament has never been asked to submit the names or travel documents of players on foreign teams in the past to receive approval from B.C. Soccer.
Tournament will go on
He says this year's tournament won't be impacted by the change in status.
"All my licences, VISF insurance, and all my venue permits are confirmed and are not affected by my decision to withdraw my membership and sanctioning," he said.
"We cannot wait to welcome all VISF athletes and guests regardless of their nationalities and backgrounds, whether they are affiliated or not — that's why I created this event."
CBC News requests to speak to a Canada Soccer official were not returned.
The Vancouver International Soccer Festival is set to begin July 7 at Empire Fields in East Vancouver.
Tibet plays Canada in the opening match.A woman has lodged a complaint with the Mahila police station, accusing her husband of assaulting her and pronouncing triple talaq when was she was unconscious one-and-a-half-year ago. This is the first such case in the city since the Supreme Court pronounced illegal the practice of instant triple talaq in August this year.
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Rubina Lakhani (23), a resident of Mochi Bazaar near Jubilee area of the city, filed the complaint with Mahila Police on Thursday evening. In her complaint, Rubina stated that around one-and-a-half-year ago, her husband Afzal Lakhani beat her up severely over domestic quarrel. Due the beating, the woman claimed that she fell unconscious. “When I regained consciousness, my in-laws asked me to |
today by a federal jury for their wide-ranging Internet fraud schemes.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Blanco of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Gregory K. Davis of the Southern District of Mississippi made the announcement.
Oladimeji Seun Ayelotan, 30, was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud, conspiracy to commit identity theft, access device fraud, and theft of U.S. government funds, two counts of mail fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Ayelotan faces up to 95 years in prison. Rasaq Aderoju Raheem, 31 was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and bank fraud, conspiracy to commit identity theft, access device fraud, and theft of U.S. government funds, three counts of mail fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Raheem faces up to 115 years in prison. Femi Alexander Mewase, 45, was convicted of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit identity theft, access device fraud, and theft of U.S. government funds. Mewase faces up to 25 years in prison. Sentencing for all three is set for May 24 in the Southern District of Mississippi.
According to trial testimony and evidence presented in the three-week trial, the defendants participated in numerous complex Internet-based financial fraud schemes, including romance scams, re-shipping scams, fraudulent check scams, and work-at-home scams, as well as bank, financial, and credit card account takeovers. From as early as 2001, the defendants identified and solicited potential victims through online dating websites and work-at-home opportunities. In some instances, the defendants carried on fictitious online romantic relationships with victims for the purpose of using the victims to further objectives of the conspiracy. For example, the defendants convinced victims to ship and receive merchandise purchased with stolen personal identifying information (PII) and compromised credit card and banking information, to deposit counterfeit checks, to withdraw money from fraudulent pre-paid debit cards that were loaded with money from stolen credit cards and to transfer proceeds of the conspiracy via wire, U.S. mail, or express delivery services.
A total of 21 defendants were charged in this case. To date, defendants Adekunle Adefila, 41, of Nigeria; Anuoluwapo Segun Adegbemigun, 40, of Nigeria; Gabriel Oludare Adeniran, 30, of Nigeria; Genoveva Farfan, 45, of California; Rhulane Fionah Hlungwane, 26, of South Africa; Teslim Olarewaju Kiriji, 30, of Nigeria; Dennis Brian Ladden, 75, of Wisconsin; Olutoyin Ogunlade, 41, of New York; Taofeeq Olamilekan Oyelade, 32, of Nigeria; Olufemi Obaro Omoraka, 27, of Nigeria; and Olusegun Seyi Shonekan, 34, of Nigeria; have pleaded guilty to related conspiracy charges. Susan Anne Villeneuve, 49, of California, is awaiting trial.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service investigated the case. Significant assistance was also provided by the Criminal Division’s Office of International Affairs, the HSI Cyber Crimes Center, HSI Attachés in Pretoria, South Africa and Dakar, Senegal, the U.S. Marshals Service’s International Investigations Branch and the Southern District of Mississippi District Office, the South African Police Service (SAPS) Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation (DPCI) Electronic Crimes Unit, the SAPS Interpol Extradition Unit, the South African National Prosecution Authority and the South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development. Trial Attorney Conor Mulroe of the Criminal Division’s Organized Crime and Gang Section, Senior Counsel Peter Roman of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Annette Williams of the Southern District of Mississippi tried the case.
If you believe that you may have been a victim of criminal fraud committed by any of the defendants, please go to http://www.justice.gov/usao-sdms/scams and complete the questionnaire. Defendants allegedly used the following email addresses and names to perpetuate the scheme:
ADDIEP01@YAHOO.COM
ANITA.LAUREN01@GMAIL.COM
ANITA.LAUREN1@GMAIL.COM
EMPLOYMENTOFFERS007@YAHOO.COM
FAYEKIMBERLY@YMAIL.COM
FAYEKIMBERLY19@YAHOO.COM
FEMI_OMORAKA@YAHOO.COM
FMPLUST12@GMAIL.COM
FNCYJEN@YAHOO.COM
FOLLYEDWARDS@YAHOO.COM
GENTILEMARK186@GMAIL.COM
GERVINOJ@YAHOO.COM
GERVINOJ11@GMAIL.COM
GLENNSATTELBERG1961@GMAIL.COM
HORLAMI84@YAHOO.COM
JOHNVINO56@GMAIL.COM
JONES_DICKSON@YAHOO.COM
JUSTIN.WORSHAM@YAHOO.COM
KAREN_ROB01@YAHOO.COM
KEVINSMITH3949@YAHOO.COM
LMG.ORCHID1827@GMAIL.COM
LLOYDFARELL0012008@YAHOO.COM
MARCHAS1963@GMAIL.COM
MARK2GENTLE@YAHOO.COM
MATT.MILLER4070@GMAIL.COM
MAXWELLSAMUEL59@YAHOO.COM
MIMICOLE001@YAHOO.COM
MOBICOALZ@GMAIL.COM
OLADIMEJISEUN2008@YAHOO.COM
OLUWA_NISHOLA@YAHOO.COM
PETERLAWSON5050@YAHOO.COM
RASAQ_ADEROJU@YAHOO.COM
RDARWIN322@GMAIL.COM
RDARWIN324@GMAIL.COM
REDARMY_TX_HOST@YAHOO.COM
RHULANEF@YAHOO.COM
RWASSER@ROCKETMAIL.COM
SEGSEA121@YAHOO.COM
SMITHKEVIN902@GMAIL.COM
SPOWELL26AL@GMAIL.COM
SPOWELL26AL3@YAHOO.COM
STACYADAMS20009@YAHOO.COM
STARENTERPRISE74@YAHOO.COM
SUSANV1418@YAHOO.COM
TESCOSG@YAHOO.COM
Stacy Adams Marlon Chase
Regina Darwin Folly Edwards
Kimberly Faye Lorene M. Garrett
Mark Gentile John Gervino
Dickson Jones Anita Lauren
Samuel Maxwell Mark Miller
Adeline Piper Sarah Powell
Karen Robinson Glenn Sattelberg
Kevin Smith Mark Smith
Richard Wasser Justin Worsham
Any information that you provide through the questionnaire may be helpful in the criminal investigation and prosecution of this case. A federal investigator may contact you with additional questions or to request documents you may have. Please note that submitting the questionnaire is not a substitute for consulting with your own attorney to determine what actions and remedies may be available to you through civil litigation. If you have any questions related to this matter that are not addressed at the above websites, you may contact federal law enforcement authorities at USAMSS.Scams@usdoj.gov.One of the most enduring and shocking moments from the white nationalist march on Charlottesville this summer was the parking garage beating of counter-protester DeAndre Harris by a crowd of khaki-clad white nationalists, who swarmed around the 20-year-old with flagpoles and shields.
One of the hate group leaders involved in that clash successfully persuaded a local magistrate on Monday to issue an arrest warrant for Harris on a felony charge of “unlawful wounding,” complicating an ongoing police investigation into the men who attacked the counter-protester.
Both Harris’ lawyer and the League of the South, a neo-Confederate organization, say Harold Ray Crews, the group’s North Carolina chairman, pursued the warrant. In order to do so, he took advantage of a quirk in the judicial system, according to a Charlottesville police detective and Harris’ lawyer.
After trying to file a compliant with police, Crews apparently went to the magistrate’s office, which requires only a police report based on the complainant’s testimony and the determination of probable cause to issue a warrant. In a statement, S. Lee Merritt, Harris’ attorney, Merritt attributed the charge to a “successful campaign” by the League of the South to “manipulate the Charlottesville judiciary and further victimize Mr. Harris.” He denied that his client was involved in causing the head injuries Crews sustained.
Charlottesville police detectives and Merritt have expressed surprise that local authorities issued the warrant at all.
“This is the first time I’ve seen this situation happen,” Merritt told TPM.
In a Wednesday phone call, Merritt told TPM that Crews and his fellow League of the South members have been discussing pressing charges against Harris on their podcast, “Southern Nationalist Radio,” “for quite some time,” but that he did not expect “a magistrate to sort of decide to independently run with it.”
Charlottesville Det. Sgt. Jake Via, who is supervising the parking garage case, told the Washington Post that he, too, was “not expecting this.”
“We were expecting to do our own investigation into the man’s allegations,” Via told the newspaper.
Crews, a 48-year-old North Carolina real estate lawyer who describes himself as a “Southern Nationalist” on his Twitter bio, did not respond to TPM’s email and phone calls requesting comment. But the League of the South posted several items celebrating the pending arrest of the “young negro male” involved with “harassing their members” in the parking garage.
Crews has deep ties to the League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has reported that he runs their Facebook, website and a related YouTube channel that’s posted under his own name.
His allies have celebrated the arrest warrant as a victory for their side, with white nationalist blogger Hunter Wallace calling Harris’ charge the end of “another race hoax” and prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer cheering “the end of the Deandre Haris [sic] myth.”
Both Merritt, Harris’ attorney, and the white nationalists say they believe the copious video evidence of the incident will vindicate them. Video shows the man that Merritt says identifies as Crews trying to stab a counter-protester with the pole of a Confederate flag, and Harris swinging a flashlight in response. Merritt said in a statement that the flashlight “did not make significant contact” with Crews before Harris was kicked to the ground by six white nationalists who beat him with wooden sticks and a shield, leaving him with a cranial lacerations and several fractures. Photos show Harris bleeding profusely from his head.
According to Merritt’s statement, the injury Crews sustained to his head came from “a completely separate subsequent incident” involving a clash “between at least four white males,” which was also appears to have been captured in multiple photographs.
Three of the white nationalists involved in the parking garage beating have since been arrested.
As the Post reported, Commonwealth’s Attorney Warner “Dave” Chapman, a Democrat, will decide whether to prosecute the case once the warrant is served against Harris.
Merritt told TPM he is working with Charlottesville police to determine the terms of Harris’ surrender, but would not release the date out of “concerns about his safety and people knowing he’s in town.”
“He had to leave Charlottesville because he no longer felt safe in the city,” Merritt said of Harris, who was a resident of the city at the time of the August rally. “He couldn’t continue his job as an assistant school teacher because of anxiety that he gets around large crowds. He was doing a pretty good job recovering. But there’s still this angst of him being charged after being the recipient of this brutal attack. It’s set him back emotionally.”
This post has been updated.WASHINGTON -- If someone admits to a federal official that he's used illegal drugs, that information should be sent to the FBI so that person can be disqualified from purchasing a gun, Sen. Chuck Schumer said Sunday.
Noting that the alleged shooter in the Tucson massacre had admitted to military recruiters that he had used drugs on several occasions, Schumer said he is proposing to the Justice Department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the military be required to notify federal officials about such admissions. The New York Democrat said such a process does not require new legislation.
Jared Lee Loughner is charged with five federal counts in the killing of a federal judge and shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The mass shooting January 8 outside a Safeway grocery store resulted in six dead and 13 injured.
A military official told Fox News last week that Loughner was rejected from enlisting in the Army in 2008 because he admitted he had used drugs. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because privacy laws prevent the military from disclosing such information about an individual's application.
Schumer said if military recruiters or other officials report admissions of drug use to a national database, those individuals could be denied a gun.
"After Jared Loughner was interviewed by the military, he was rejected from the Army because of excessive drug use. Now, by law, by law that's on the books, he should not have been allowed to buy a gun," Schumer told NBC's "Meet the Press."
"But the law doesn't require the military to notify the FBI about that, and in this case they didn't. So I --this morning -- I'm writing the administration and urging that that be done, that the military notify the FBI when someone is rejected from the military for excessive drug use and that be added to the FBI database," Schumer said.
The issue of limiting Second Amendment rights has exploded in the wake of the Arizona shooting as lawmakers and officials discuss whether increased curbs should be put on gun ownership.
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Sunday that a citizen protecting his home or hunting doesn't need a gun with 33 bullets per clip.
"I think the nation's spirits would be lifted if the Congress acted quickly with the president and reinstated the assault weapons ban which also had the ban on these large magazines, these clips that carried 30-plus bullets," he said.
Rendell, speaking on CBS' "Meet the Press," added that had Loughner earlier been classified as having mental illness, he would never have gotten a gun under provisions established in existing gun control laws.
"Had this man been classified, had he been committed civilly at any time prior to his purchasing the gun from Wal-Mart, he would have in fact been denied access to that firearm," Rendell told "Face the Nation."
Schumer said he is hopeful legislation would move to reinstate the assault weapons ban. But the senator noted that while the mental illness provision had been added to gun laws several years ago -- after a shooting in Long Island in which the gunman had been declared by a court as mentally ill -- Loughner was not on anyone's books because he apparently never received treatment.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who appeared with Rendell, said that some would argue that if more people had been carrying guns, the alleged shooter may not have gotten off as many rounds as he did. But, he added, Loughner apparently suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which went untreated.
"The most important thing that would have prevented this is if this Loughner had been identified as what he clearly was," he said.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who appeared with Schumer, agreed that the law was not written with a case like Loughner in mind.
"There's a hole in what we need to do. And I'm willing to work with Senator Schumer and anybody else that wants to make sure people who are mentally ill cannot get and use a gun," he said.THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: BJP has made its largest ever political foot print in Kerala when the results of the election to the local self-government institutions were announced here on Saturday.The most impressive among the performance of BJP was in Thiruvananthapuram, the state capital. BJP amassed 35 seats in the 100 seat corporation council and thus become the second largest political force in the corporation. BJP had only six members in the last corporation council ruled by the CPM led LDF. The BJP which had their presence only in Thiruvananthapuram and Ernakulam corporations in the state in the recent past has opened account in all corporations, except Kannur in this election.The party won two seats each in Kollam and Ernakulam city corporations and won six and seven seats respectively in Thrissur and Kozhikode city corporations. According to statistics available till 1.30 pm, BJP has the majority to rule one municipality, and 14 grama panchayaths in Kerala, which again is another record. Till now, the BJP did not get the majority seats in even a single gram panchayath outside Kasargodu.Immediately after the result of the election result trend was over, BJP state president V Muraleedharan said one of the main reasons for the political surge of BJP was the minority appeasement policies followed by both LDF and UDF in the state. According to him, the party has not yet taken a decision on offering or accepting any political support to either LDF or UDF in Thiruvananthapuram Corporation.The CPM-led LDF that has been ruling the corporation has won only 45 seats this time. The UDF tally is only 21. There are three independent candidates and two of them are UDF rebels. The minimum seats required for any political combine is 51.Google Wallet is coming to Glass soon. According to a source close to the company, Google is currently testing a way for Glass users to send money to their friends through Wallet by simply using their voices to ask Glass to “send money.” The company is testing this service internally right now, but chances are it will launch to all Glass users in the near future.
To install the Wallet service on their devices, Glass users currently have to be signed in to a computer on Google’s corporate network. From there, they can install the Wallet glassware, and after setting the service up from there, they are ready to send money from Glass.
Given that Google has also rolled out a similar feature for Gmail users, it’s not a huge surprise that the company would also want to bring the ability to send money from Glass. The use cases, after all, are pretty much identical. Imagine you’re at a restaurant and you want to send your share of the bill to a friend. You simply ask Glass to “send money,” swipe through the interface a few times and you’re done (that’s assuming your friends let you wear your Glass while having dinner with you, of course).
By default, Google takes a 2.9 percent fee for these Wallet transactions or 30 cents — whichever is higher.When I was in college and took Psych 101 to fulfill a core requirement, we had an actual discussion about the morality of applying B.F. Skinner’s respondent conditioning techniques to human beings. According to a letter that Rod Dreher got from a public school principal, that dilemma has been solved:
One of the worst things about public schools is that they are raising our children as if they do not have souls. In a public school, discipline and motivation to do the right thing are based purely on external stimuli–school-wide behavior programs and incentives for the good kids and discipline for the bad ones. These are simply controls that do not prepare anyone to do what he ought. This Skinner based approach is pervasive and inescapable. The poor and poorly behaved get the worst of it, for they are truly treated like soulless animals and governed purely by external stimuli.
This was easily foreseeable. The “soulless” argument was the one I used with my atheist psych prof back in the stone age and I was roundly laughed at. There were two differences between then and now; however. For one I still did well in the class. Despite our disagreement, the prof recognized that I understood Skinner’s thought and thus mastered the material, even if I had issues with it. Secondly, my argument was cheered by a number of my classmates, something the reporting I read tells me they would be afraid to do in the current educational environment.
If one is atheist and there is no supernatural source for morality, I have a complete understanding of how morality can shift as it is doing right now. What I cannot wrap my head around is efforts to hide behind some egalitarian ideal and calling it amorality. It is not amorality, it is a substitute morality, and sadly it is not egalitarian.
It is simply logic, really. The new egalitarian ideal carries with it norms and mores that make up a new morality. If I think that homosexual practice is a sin and I am therefore close-minded and discriminatory, then I violate the new morality. There is no such thing as amorality, it is a behavioral impossibility.
That also means that nothing is truly egalitarian. If there is a morality, those that comply with it will be considered better than those that do not, hence there is nothing egalitarian about it.
Oppression, discrimination, all the things we currently seem to fear most are not a matter of morality at all really – they are matter of the heart. It is not a matter of the rules, it is a matter of how the rules are applied and enforced. The new bathrooms rules will end up being as discriminatory as the old ones, they are just going to discriminate against a different group.
That’s why a supernatural source for morality makes so much sense. Only something supernatural can change the human heart sufficiently to make the application of the rules humane and graceful. Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, we in the church have failed at this so many times and in so many ways. But at least our morality comes from a place that offers the hope of better. The new morality offers no such hope.
Yes, I cling to the old morality, but more importantly I cling to the only hope.On Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN Newsroom,” Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) stated that President-Elect Donald Trump and Fidel Castro have similar “personality traits,” and Trump doesn’t understand “the tripartite system of government we have, in a Congress under Article I as an independent branch of government. I don’t think he understands that it’s Congress, and really the Judiciary Committee, that can bring impeachment charges.”
Cohen said, “No question they [Republicans] would marginalize Democrats and this show that they’re going have a heavy hand, and that’s really unfortunate. You know, what we’re looking at overall here Carol, is oligarchy.”
He added, “And the scary thing is, about his [Trump’s] position with Russia, the last two people I remember in this Western Hemisphere that were so close to Russia were Armand Hammer, who loved oil and money, and Fidel Castro, who loved to talk for long periods of time, hated disloyalty and dissent, and eliminated it, and was very much an egocentric individual.”
Cohen stated that Trump and Castro had similar “personality traits,” such as, “Castro needed to be the center of attention at all times. He executed certain of his comrades for trumped up charges because he wanted total control and wanted to put that fear into people. He was very close to his family, and he had a multitude in his family. Didn’t trust others. And it was all about him and public speaking and he liked to speak on ad infinitum. He was not — with the exception of the fact that he was dedicated to a philosophy, and to his country making allegiance with Russia, there are lot of personality traits that are similar.”
Cohen concluded, “I don’t think he even understands the tripartite system of government we have, in a Congress under Article I as an independent branch of government. I don’t think he understands that it’s Congress, and really the Judiciary Committee, that can bring impeachment charges.”
(h/t Grabien)
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchettHere’s how it works when a big company believes that its power is in its girth: They enter this bizarre world that leads them to believe that what comes from their PR organs is enough to float their troubles away. It’s all about denial and avoiding any potential shareholder backlash. And so we come to the sad state of affairs at RSA, the security division of EMC, one of the big-bellied enterprise kings that apparently made a deal with the National Security Agency.
It’s a deal that is now affecting the trust that people have in the company and raises questions about other technology companies and how they have profited from their relationships with the government. It’s fine enough for technology executives to sit down with President Barack Obama like they did last week and say how awful the NSA is behaving. But the RSA’s work with the NSA shows that technology companies need scrutiny as well. The reality: mistrust is spreading, writes security expert Bruce Schneier.
I think about this all the time with respect to our IT systems and the NSA. Even though we don’t know which companies the NSA has compromised — or by what means — knowing that they could have compromised any of them is enough to make us mistrustful of all of them. This is going to make it hard for large companies like Google and Microsoft to get back the trust they lost. Even if they succeed in limiting government surveillance. Even if they succeed in improving their own internal security. The best they’ll be able to say is: “We have secured ourselves from the NSA, except for the parts that we either don’t know about or can’t talk about.”
There’s proof that RSA made a deal with the NSA to use the spy agency’s random number generator as the preferred or default formula in Bsafe, its software for enhancing security on personal computers and other technologies, Reuters reports. This has put RSA in the bright light of scrutiny. The $10 million deal looks especially bad, considering the connection it has to documents released by Edward Snowden and reported by the New York Times in September. In those documents it was revealed that the NSA formula was actually flawed and had been used by the agency to create a backdoor into encryption products.
RSA said in a blog post on Monday that it does not “ever divulges details of customer engagements, but we also categorically state that we have never entered into any contract or engaged in any project with the intention of weakening RSA’s products, or introducing potential ‘backdoors’ into our products for anyone’s use.” But many in the security profession are just not buying it. Here’s a tidbit from an awesome rant and good summary of what happened from Melissa Elliott, a security analyst and novelist:
September 2013: Revelations derived from the Snowden leak show* that Dual EC is definitely deliberately backdoored by the NSA. RSA acts really surprised. RSA offers some weak excuse that elliptic curves were totally hip (literally in vogue) at the time. RSA does not mention anything about taking anyone’s money. Allegations are posted that an unspecified company accepted ten million dollars to make it their default. Everyone paying attention is pretty sure it’s RSA. (* Full disclosure: smart people disagree with the smoking-gunness of Dual EC being called out specifically by the leak. It’s complicated.) December 2013: Reuters points to RSA specifically regarding the ten million dollars. RSA issues a non-denial of such magnitude that I’m driven to rage blog.
The denial makes their predicament worse than it now is. It has even led to a backlash. Mikko Hypponen, chief of research at F-Secure, announced this week in an open letter to EMC Chairman Joe Tucci that he would not participate in the RSA’s annual lavish conference slated for February in San Francisco. Hypponen is a well-respected security expert who had planned to lead a talk titled: “Governments as Malware Authors.”
It’s clear that the actions of RSA and EMC have cast a shadow across the IT world. Until now, it has been the NSA that has been perceived as the true force of darkness, worming its way into systems to monitor our data streams. Now we see a side of the business that is more intertwined with the NSA and by proxy, its agenda for spying.
(Feature image via Flickr)Image caption Talent shows and reality TV have been hit by the campaign
Satellite broadcasters in China have cut entertainment TV by two-thirds following a government campaign, state news agency Xinhua has reported.
An order by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) to curb ''excessive entertainment'' came into effect on 1 January.
The number of entertainment shows aired during prime time each week has dropped to 38 from 126, said the watchdog.
The news came as the president warned of the influence of Western culture.
In the piece published in a Communist Party magazine, President Hu Jintao also urged efforts to boost the country's own soft power, said Xinhua.
The order, which was issued in October 2011, limits each of the country's 34 satellite channels to two entertainment programmes each week and a maximum of 90 minutes of entertainment content every day from 19:30 to 22:00.
Image caption Talent show Super Girl struck a wrong note with censors who ordered it off the air last year
Broadcasters are also required to air at least two hours of news programming between 06:00 and midnight. They must each broadcast at least two 30-minute news programmes between 18:00 and 23:30.
The country has the largest number of television viewers in the world - an estimated 95% of its 1.3 billion people.
'Low taste'
"Satellite channels have started to broadcast programmes that promote traditional virtues and socialist core values," SARFT said in a statement.
Talent shows and reality TV are among the biggest casualties of the cuts. The list of restricted programmes also included talk shows and emotional stories that were deemed to be of "low taste", said the Xinhua news report.
In September last year, censors told Hunan Satellite Television to take the popular talent show Super Girl off the air. They said the show, which featured women of all ages in a singing contest, was ''too long''.
However the SARFT statement also said that popular dating shows, such as If You Are The One, and soap operas, such as Li Yuan Chun, produced by Henan Satellite TV, will still be on air during prime time on weekends.
If You Are the One, produced by Jiangsu Satellite TV, is the most popular dating show. It broke viewership records in 2010, prompting copycat programmes by other broadcasters.
The high ratings of such programmes and their relatively low production costs meant bigger profits for the satellite TV stations. But regulators, however, saw red over the sensationalist and ''vulgar'' content.A paper is being written.
Photo by Fotokostic/Shutterstock
As a group, scientists are not widely admired for their prose style. To no small extent, this derives from their insistence on the passive voice, that boogeyman of basic composition classes. Nevertheless, the style has its defenders: Two experts in scientific style recently took to Reddit to debate the convention, taking positions for and against the passive voice in scientific writing. Their conversation reveals that quarrels about the active and passive voices have more to do with the way our culture discusses science than they do with arbitrary quirks of style.
Few ostensible rules are more poorly understood than the prohibition against the passive voice, partly because the passive voice itself is poorly understood. In the Reddit AMA, Celia Elliott, a grant writing specialist in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois, took a stand on behalf of the passive voice, but to do so she first had to explain it. As she wrote, “It’s all about the direction of the action. In the active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action. (‘The pitcher throws the ball.’) In the passive voice, the subject of the sentence receives the action of the verb. (‘The ball was caught by the pitcher.’)” Put more simply, the active voice emphasizes agency, while the passive voice puts the focus on objects themselves. Consequently, the active tends to be associated with subjective experience and the passive with objective facts.
When I teach courses on writing, I try to avoid arbitrary rules. Following the late style expert Joseph Williams, I hold that good writing is basically good storytelling. To tell a story well, we need to clearly identify our characters and then show the reader what those characters do. The passive voice makes storytelling more difficult because it hides the characters deep in the sentence—if it shows them at all. On Reddit, Kristin Sainani, an associate professor of health research and policy at Stanford University, took a similar position, arguing that the passive voice “obscures who is responsible for what.” The passive has its place (I used it to open the prior paragraph), but, more often than not, it disrupts the flow of a narrative, making it difficult for the reader to connect one idea to the next.
By contrast, Elliott argues that scientists should use the passive voice in order to highlight their results. She writes, “The main advantage of the passive voice, in my opinion, is that it allows the writer to put the important concepts, ideas, findings, principles, and conclusions first. …” In other words, the passive voice allows us to discuss discoveries rather than the scientists who discovered them. In theory, it plays an important rhetorical function, because it insists on the factual truth of discoveries by minimizing the role that fallible human subjects play in the equation.
Ultimately, however, scientists may be doing themselves a disservice by downplaying their place in the scientific process. Sainani holds that there’s something slightly untrustworthy about passive constructions, writing, “It’s more accurate and honest to say, ‘We found that …’ since this emphasizes the role that the experimenters played in designing, conducting, and interpreting the experiments.”
Among other things, the passive voice may make it more difficult to celebrate particular scientific accomplishments. When scientists fight for the passive voice, they’re not fighting for their right to write poorly. They think science should speak for itself. But in a time when climate change deniers blind themselves to hard data and vaccine conspiracy theorists blithely cover their ears to public health risks, it has never been more clear that science doesn’t speak for itself.
The success of charismatic scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson shows that the public responds better to stories about science than they do to simple scientific facts. So long as scientists insist on writing in the passive voice, they may have a harder time telling those stories well.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
LAWTON, Okla. -- A priest who pleaded guilty to sexual battery charges in San Diego is the newest chaplain at a Catholic church in Lawton.
Fr. Jose Alexis Davila joined Blessed Sacrament in Lawton in December, despite a criminal misdemeanor for inappropriately touching a 19-year-old woman in 2011. The church introduced him to the congregation, but never mentioned his criminal past -- or even his last job, writing only that "he has pastoral experience in the United States."
"We’re very alarmed by this," said David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. "This is precisely the pattern that’s been in the Catholic Church for decades and it’s amazingly irresponsible."
Following Davila's conviction in 2012, San Diego news outlets reported he was quietly reinstated and deemed "fit to minister." A judge sentenced him to three years probation and 150 hours of community service. He worked briefly at another parish before leaving the area.
He arrived in Oklahoma last year, and was officially assigned to three additional congregations in Elgin, Apache and Sterling.
For Clohessy, who has followed the case since it began, the new position is a disappointment.
"Yes he deserves a second chance but not in a position of trust and responsibility and authority and respect like a priest," he told NewsChannel 4. "And certainly not with no warnings to families around him. If a clergyman or woman abuses his authority and takes sexual advantage of a teenager we really think it should be exactly what the bishops promised it would be and that’s 'one strike and you’re out.'"
Parishioners told NewsChannel 4 they had no idea about Davila's past, though some very strongly supported him, even accusing the victims of fabricating stories.
Fr. Michael Chapman said his congregation was not informed, though some found out on their own. He said the congregation will be informed this weekend.
"You don’t condemn a person for a maybe one-time offense," said Chapman, adding he believes Davila when he tells him the contact was inadvertent. "We don’t have a congregation of saints, we have a congregation of sinners, including the lead sinner who is the priest."
Chapman says he believes Davila pleaded guilty to minimize embarrassment to himself and the church.
The leader of the Oklahoma City archdiocese stood by his decision to employ Davila.
Archbishop Paul Coakley released the following statement to NewsChannel 4:
“It is important that we operate in an open environment where people in our parishes and institutions feel safe and welcome to practice their faith. While Father Davila’s actions with an adult parishioner five years ago occurred in the presence of others at his office in California, he understands that those actions were perceived as inappropriate. He accepted the consequences of his lapse in judgment. Without excusing or justifying his behavior, I think he can now safely and appropriately return to ministry. Some actions such as the sexual abuse of a child are so grievous that the perpetrator must be permanently removed from ministry. This was not one of those actions. Before allowing him to serve in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, my staff conducted a full investigation, including a criminal background check, probationary period and lengthy interviews with leaders from dioceses in which Father Davila has served. Father Davila has been open and forthcoming about his experience. He is committed to the strict code of ethical conduct expected in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, and he understands – as do all of our priests, staff, teachers, employees and volunteers – that they are required to follow the policies and procedures in place to create a safe environment – no exceptions.”
But some members of the congregation are considering switching parishes after the news.
"I have niece and nephews and I wouldn’t feel comfortable with this person working with any children," said Janet Bullard. "It’s hurtful this kind of stuff. It puts a stain on the church. Most of these people are good decent people and these scandals really hurt a lot of people and really ran a lot of people out of the church."London, England (CNN) -- It is still regarded as one of the greatest upsets in World Cup history; the day the U.S. shocked the |
to go out and see their friends.
So you lash out at them for being so insensitive and callous toward you. You’ve been having a bad day and they have done nothing about it. Sure, you never asked, but they should just know to make you feel better. They should have gotten off the phone and ditched their plans based on your lousy emotional state.
Why It’s Toxic: Blaming our partners for our emotions is a subtle form of selfishness, and a classic example of the poor maintenance of personal boundaries. When you set a precedent that your partner is responsible for how you feel at all times (and vice-versa), then will develop codependent tendencies. Suddenly, they’re not allowed to plan activities without checking with you first. All activities at home — even the mundane such as reading books or watching TV — must be negotiated and compromised. When someone begins to get upset, all personal desires go out the window because it is now your responsibility to make one another feel better.
The biggest problem of developing these codependent tendencies is that they breed resentment. Sure, if my girlfriend gets mad at me once because she’s had a bad day and is frustrated and needs attention, that’s understandable. But if it becomes an expectation that my life revolves around her emotional well-being at all times, then I’m soon going to become very bitter and even manipulative towards her feelings and desires.
What You Should Do Instead: Take responsibility for your own emotions and expect your partner to be responsible for theirs. There’s a subtle yet important difference between being supportive of your partner and being obligated to your partner. Any sacrifices should be made as an autonomous choice and not seen as an expectation. As soon as both people in a relationship become culpable for each other’s moods and downswings, it gives them both incentives to hide their true feelings and manipulate one another.
5. Displays of “Loving” Jealousy
What It Is: Getting pissed off when your partner talks, flirts, touches, calls, texts, hangs out, or sneezes in the general vicinity of another person and then you proceed to take that anger out on your partner and attempt to control their behavior. This often leads to insano behaviors such as hacking into your partner’s email account, looking through their text messages while they’re in the shower or even following them around town and showing up unannounced when they’re not expecting you.
Why It’s Toxic: It surprises me that some people describe this as some sort of display of affection. They figure that if their partner wasn’t jealous then that would somehow mean that they weren’t loved by them.
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This is absolutely crazy to me. It’s controlling and manipulative. It creates unnecessary drama and fighting. It transmits a message of a lack of trust in the other person. And to be honest, it’s demeaning. If my girlfriend cannot trust me to be around other attractive women by myself, then it implies that she believes that I’m either a) a liar, or b) incapable of controlling my impulses. In either case, that’s a woman I do not want to be dating.
What You Should Do Instead: Trust your partner. It’s a radical idea, I know. Some jealousy is natural. But excessive jealousy and controlling behaviors towards your partner are signs of your own feelings of unworthiness and you should learn to deal with them and not force them onto those close to you. Because otherwise you are only going to eventually push that person away.
6. Buying the Solutions to Relationship Problems
What It Is: Any time a major conflict or issue comes up in the relationship, instead of solving it, one covers it up with the excitement and good feelings that come with buying something nice or going on a trip somewhere.
My parents were experts at this one. And it got them real far: a big fat divorce and 15 years of hardly speaking to each other since. They have both since independently told me that this was the primary problem in their marriage: continuously covering up their real issues with superficial pleasures.
Why It’s Toxic: Not only does it brush the real problem under the rug (where it willalways re-emerge from even worse the next time), but it sets an unhealthy precedent within the relationship. This is not a gender-specific problem, but I will use the traditional gendered situation as an example. Let’s imagine that whenever a woman gets angry at her boyfriend/husband, the man “solves” the issue by buying the woman something nice, or taking her to a nice restaurant or something. Not only does this give the woman unconscious incentive to find more reasons to be upset with the man, but it also gives the man absolutely no incentive to actually be accountable for the problems in the relationship. So what do you end up with? A checked-out husband who feels like an ATM, and an incessantly bitter woman who feels unheard.
What You Should Do Instead: Actually, you know, deal with the problem. Trust was broken? Talk about what it will take to rebuild it. Someone feels ignored or unappreciated? Talk about ways to restore those feelings of appreciation. Communicate!
There’s nothing wrong with doing nice things for a significant other after a fight to show solidarity and to reaffirm commitment. But one should never use gifts or fancy things toreplace dealing with the underlying emotional issues. Gifts and trips are called luxuries for a reason, you only get to appreciate them when everything else is already good. If you use them to cover up your problems, then you will find yourself with a much bigger problem down the line.
Mark Manson is a bestselling author, blogger, digital nomad, and former dating coach. He writes about psychology of modern life and culture. Mark also sometimes gives unconventional life advice. Some people say he’s an idiot. Other people say he saved their lives. You can learn more about Mark and his work by checking out his website.
6 Toxic Relationship Habits Most People Think Are Normal | Mark MansonThis is an ongoing story, please refresh for updates.
We have eyewitness reports of a shooting taking place at The BPM Festival at the Blue Parrot venue in Playa Del Carmen on late Sunday night during the elrow showcase.
Most reports are now settling at eight fatalities, although witnesses have claimed upwards of 12. One has been confirmed as a security guard at the Blue Parrot. There are reports of "several wounded" in hospital.
There are multiple videos on social media of the aftermath of the incident, and several eyewitness accounts note "bodies covered in blood" and a "frantic, chaotic atmosphere" on the streets of Playa Del Carmen.
We also have unconfirmed reports from witnesses in Mexico of another shooting taking place at a second club, though details are still very limited at this time.
The BPM Festival has stated: "After alleged reports of shots fired this morning at Blue Parrot, all BPM parties are shut down while police investigations are underway."
Suggestions from many is that the attack is cartel related.
Below are the latest social media posts from eyewitnesses:
— Pipe Llorens (@pipellorens) January 16, 2017
A photo sent to Pulse reportedly showing ambulances at the scene of the incident. By Alex Hernandez.
Balacera en BLUE PARROT en el cierre de BPM.
BREAKING: Gunshots Reported During Closing Night of BPM Festival.
Fuente: @weirdmarcos pic.twitter.com/G2G2qTy2A3 — NochesElectronicasMx (@nochesmx) January 16, 2017
Our thoughts are with everyone currently at the festival. We hope everyone makes it home safely.
— Sour Patch (@KennaCrane) January 16, 2017
— BPM prtymnstr (@Party_Mnstr) January 16, 2017
— Melissa Herrera (@junkbabe68) January 16, 2017
Another video taken from the scene:
** Latest Update **
According to the Guardian, Mexican state officials have confirmed a lone gunman has killed least five people and injured as many as fifteen during the closing night of The BPM Festival. The confirmed dead are two Canadians, two Italians and one Colombian, and are all reportedly employees of The BPM Festival.
The shooting took place outside of the Blue Parrot which was hosting Catalan promoters elrow for the closing party. Scottish DJ Jackmaster was inside the venue at the time of the shooting.
Someone has come into the club in Playa Del Carmen and opened fire. 4-5 dead and many wounded. Stay in ur fuckin hotel if you're here at BPM — JACKMASTER (@jackmaster) January 16, 2017
SoundCloud user Matthew Weaver posted the following eyewitness account from Mixmag's US Digital Editor Valerie Lee:
Below is the official statement from The BPM Festival:
More updates as news comes through.When Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal arrived in Uttam Nagar on Sunday afternoon to inaugurate a sewer pipeline, he was in for a rude shock. Raising anti-Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) slogans, irked residents of the locality burned the CM's effigy.
The locals said the party did not deliver on any of the pre-poll promises and now that the municipal corporation elections were round the corner, the CM has once again started wooing the public with his false promises.
The protest was led by former Congress leaders from the area. Adequate police force had to be deployed to control the agitated mob to prevent any untoward incident.
The CM arrived in the Mohan Garden area of the locality around 3pm. Hundreds of local people then took to the streets and started raising anti-AAP slogans. They also waived black flags in front of the CM's convoy, asking him to "go back".
Protesters said the sewer line that Kejriwal had come to inaugurate was built by the leaders of the last reigning political party. They also said the construction work of the sewer was to be completed in a year, but even after four years, it was nowhere near completion.
They also alleged that AAP has been working only on paper and has done no ground work for the betterment of citizens, as was promised at the time of elections two years ago.
Protesters further said the plan to construct hospital in Bindapur had been stalled. A health centre and a bus terminal have been built there but both are not operational as of now, they said.Out of more than 4,300 MBBS students who passed out from state-run medical colleges between 2009 and 2014 in Gujarat, only 530 served in government run-hospitals in rural areas for three years as per the bond they have to sign at the time of admission.
According to the data tabled in the Gujarat Assembly recently, the state government has collected more than Rs 15.68 crore from those MBBS students who have breached their bonds and opted out of this mandatory service in villages.
While replying to a question raised by Congress MLA Paresh Dhanani seeking details about such doctors, State Health Minister Nitin Patel in his written reply stated that there were total six medical colleges in the state as on December 2014.
A total of 4,341 MBBS students have passed out from these colleges between 2009 and 2014, said the reply.
Out of these qualified doctors, only 530 had served in state-run rural hospitals during that period of five years, revealed the data tabled in the Assembly.
As per the Gujarat government's rules, MBBS students of tate-run colleges have to sign a bond at the time of admission, giving a promise that they would serve for three years in rural areas, failing which they have to pay Rs 5 lakh.
The government said only 530 'bonded doctors' out of the 4,341 have served their full term in rural hospitals, while others have paid the bond amount and moved elsewhere.
As per data, only 96 out 757 served their full term in 2009-10; 105 out of 811 in 2010-11; 141 out of 951 in 2011-12; 109 out of 950 in 2012-13, and just 79 out of 872 in 2013-14 have served in rural areas.
Replying to another question about collection of bond money from doctors who have breached their bonds, government has stated that more than Rs 15.68 crore has been collected from 1,412 doctors who have opted out of their mandatory service in rural areas.
In 2009-10, Rs 2.81 crore were collected from 361 doctors, in 2010-11, Rs 3.33 crore were collected from 337 doctors, in 2011-12, Rs 3.87 crore were collected from 312 doctors, Rs 3.26 crore collected from 271 doctors while Rs 2.39 crore were collected from 131 doctors.
Facing flak from Opposition on the condition of health-care services in rural areas, Gujarat Chief Minister Anandiben Patel recently admitted that the shortfall of doctors is truly a matter of concern.
While speaking at a function in Nadiad town two days back, she expressed concern over vacant posts of doctors in state-run hospitals.
"Our government has regularly increased seats in medical and nursing colleges. However, there are very few doctors who remain in Gujarat, as most of them either start their own practice or settle abroad. People are suffering due to such imbalance," said Patel.Following published remarks by actor Gary Oldman, in which he defends Mel Gibson’s past anti-Semitic comments, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has said that Oldman, “should know better than to repeat tired anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish control of Hollywood.”
“Mel Gibson is in a town that’s run by Jews and he said the wrong thing because he’s actually bitten the hand that I guess has fed him,” Oldman said in an interview with Playboy.
The remarks came after the British actor cited what he believes is hypocrisy in Hollywood, that personalities like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart can get away with politically incorrect humor, while others cannot.
PHOTOS: Hollywood’s PR Nightmares
“Gary Oldman’s remarks irresponsibly feed into a classic anti-Semitic canard about supposed Jewish control of Hollywood and the film industry,” said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the ADL. “He should know better than to repeat and give credence to tired anti-Semitic tropes. Mel Gibson’s ostracization in Hollywood was not a matter of being ‘politically incorrect,’ as Mr. Oldman suggests, but of paying the consequences for outing himself as a bigot and a hater. It is disturbing that Mr. Oldman appears to have bought into Mr. Gibson’s warped and prejudiced world view.”
A 2013 ADL poll revealed that 24 percent of all Americans believe that “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” contributing to the stereotype.
UPDATE: Oldman has since issued an apology for his comments, which the ADL has deemed “insufficient.”Getty Images/ Chip Somodevilla Millennials can be exasperating, a candidate is finding.
Hillary Clinton has a problem, and it may not be Donald Trump.
There’s growing attention to the role millennials are playing in the 2016 election, and in particular their support for third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein. In a Quinnipiac poll, Clinton’s lead over Trump among 18-to-34-year-olds falls to just 5 percentage points, from 21, when the Libertarian Johnson and the Green Party’s Stein are included, notes a story from Mic.
A New York Times/CBS News poll shows 26% of voters aged 18 to 29 plan to vote for Johnson and 10% for Stein. A poll of millennials is due later Thursday.
NYT/CBS & @QuinnipiacPoll showing big defections from Clinton should set up more interest in @GSG poll solely on Millennials due out today. — Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) September 15, 2016
MarketWatch spoke with Libertarian vice-presidential nominee Bill Weld, who laid out his party’s aggressive budget cutting plan, as well as his defense of Johnson’s gaffe, who in an interview did not know what Aleppo was.
Clinton is heading back to the campaign trail after her short break due to pneumonia. She is traveling to North Carolina where, the Los Angeles Times notes, ballots are already in the mail. The article makes the case that the Clinton camp never really believed the postconvention bump in her polls, and therefore isn’t rattled by the recent decline in her numbers.
The Clinton campaign is highlighting a story in Newsweek that said Trump has a troubling web of foreign business connections. Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, resisted comparisons to the Clinton Foundation and said the Trump family would not step away from the Trump Organization if the Republican nominee were to become president.
“Do his children continue to run a $10 billion corporation that their father has built? Absolutely they do. Why wouldn’t they?” he asked
Trump, meanwhile will deliver a speech at the Economic Club of New York, where he’ll offer more information on his tax plan. Ahead of the speech, his daughter Ivanka Trump laid out the candidate’s child-care plan in Cosmopolitan. The exchange got testy after Ivanka said there was “a lot of negativity in these questions.” Ivanka Trump said the child-care plan is paid for and is budget-neutral in the overall Trump tax plan.Advisory
Secunia SA 51412
Information
By default, when creating a connection using iOS you will get a nice helpful warning if you stumble upon a certificate chain that can’t be verified:
However some applications override this functionality. In the case, an unfixed vulnerability submitted through Secunia SVCRP reached its 6 month limit as per Secunia’s disclosure policy. This means that a MITM can replace the certificate on the connection and decrypt the traffic without the user knowing, leading to a loss of confidentiality.
It’s also interesting to note when you authenticate with the WebEx service, that as you can see below from this burp screenshot, it submits your credentials to not just one, but two WebEx servers; one in the USA, and one in Beijing in China. You’ve got to wonder what the purpose is of that, though I won’t speculate about that:I was at a university class when my sister texted me saying: You just got something from Shanghai!
At first I was wondering what it could be, but then I remembered Secret Santa. So when I got back home, I opened the package and saw that my Secret Santa had given me Dean's amulet from Supernatural!
I had specified that Supernatural was one of my favorite TV series so I was happy to receive the necklace.
I'm not used to wear necklaces but I do like to collect things from my favorite movies, series and video games, so this amulet is gonna go right next to Nathan Drake's ring!
Thanks again, mr. Secret Santa!
P.S.: Sorry for picture quality. I'm such a bad photograph!
EDIT: So, I just received another gift by mail! It was an AWESOME Game of Thrones T-Shirt! I'll let you see the picture. I love it! My secret santa is really generous :) THank you! Thank you! THank you!
Edit 2: Just when I thought I was being spoiled, I received another gift in the mail! I present to you my new Shawarma (Avengers) t-shirt!
Thank you so much, my dear secret santa, you are awesome!As you've noticed on the rest of Sports on Earth and every other website this planet has to offer, the NCAA Tournament provides a near-infinite number of storylines. This is a fundamental advantage of an event with 68 teams playing a constant stream of win-or-die elimination games over the next three weeks: The only way to avoid being entranced by the NCAA Tournament is to actively decide to avoid it, and even then it's difficult.
But for my money, in a macro sense, there's one primary massive story coming out of this tournament, and it's one that will make the difference between this being just another tournament, or something transcendent:
Is Gonzaga finally going to make the Final Four?
Ten teams have reached the NCAA Tournament 20 times without ever reaching the Final Four. Three -- BYU (29), Xavier (27) and Missouri (25) -- have made it 25 times, and of those 10 teams, only three are in the tournament this year. The first is Xavier. The second is Creighton. And the third is Gonzaga.
The first time I ever heard the word "Gonzaga" was, fittingly, in a Twin Peaks episode.
Gonzaga has been playing basketball for over 100 years, but it didn't make the NCAA Tournament until 1995. The only real contribution it made to the basketball landscape before then was bringing John Stockton to the world, and even he never made it to the Big Dance. After an 0-6 conference start in '95, the Zags rebounded and ultimately beat Portland by 13 in the West Coast championship game. Suffice it to say, it was not the most stirring, emotional breakthrough. This only online video from that game looks like something your local middle school filmed so they could package highlights for the parents.
The Bulldogs were wiped out by Joe Smith and Maryland in the first round, and they would miss the tournament for the next three seasons. As far as we knew back then, they were a one-and-done tourney cameo team like the rest of them, an Eastern Illinois or Norfolk State or McNeese State. Then-coach Dan Fitzgerald, who died in 2010, resigned after the NCAA penalized the program for "lack of institutional control," and Gonzaga basketball was just some pointless thing that happened in a weird part of the country you'd never visited but would like to someday.
A man named Dan Monson, one of Fitzgerald's assistants, took over. In his second season, 1999, Gonzaga not only made the tournament, it made it all the way to the Elite Eight before losing to a Connecticut team that would ultimately win the national championship.
Monson left after that season to (unsuccessfully) coach Minnesota -- in 18 seasons afterward, at Minnesota and Long Beach State, he has made the NCAA Tournament only twice -- and Mark Few took over. And now Gonzaga is … Gonzaga! The Bulldogs haven't missed the tournament since 1998 -- the fourth-longest streak in the sport -- and the team name has become synonymous with college basketball, the very definition of what college basketball can be.
So you're a tiny Jesuit school in Spokane, Washington, in a gym that holds only 6,000 fans, and most of the country never stays up late enough to watch any of your games. That's OK: You can become a powerhouse. The glory of college basketball is that it can happen anywhere, that it is happening anywhere, that it's not just for big cities: It can be in Charleston, Illinois; or Natchitoches, Louisiana; or Bozeman, Montana. And for the past 19 seasons, Spokane has been the veritable center of college basketball. The big boys not only cannot ignore the Zags, they in fact actively court them. UCLA, Arizona, Michigan State, Connecticut, Baylor, West Virginia, Notre Dame, Illinois, they've all made the trip to Spokane in the last decade, essentially to kiss the ring. Playing Gonzaga makes them look better.
They've even had an all-time NCAA Tournament moment of their own, a moment that brought Adam Morrison to tears and Gus Johnson to the brink of a damned stroke.
It is one of the most remarkable stories in sports, what Gonzaga has done over the past two decades. It's done it for so long that we have gotten used to it, that we think it's perfectly normal, but it isn't. It's amazing, and it should seem amazing to use every time the Bulldogs do it. It's the premier example of what college basketball is capable of.
College basketball is a caste sport. Take a look at the teams that have been to more Final Fours than any other school:
North Carolina.
Kentucky
UCLA
Duke
Kansas
Louisville
Ohio State
Six of these teams are serious Final Four contenders this year as well. This is what college basketball can be, at its worst. It can be the Premier League, or the old Yankees-Red Sox American League East races: The haves, and the everybody else.
But Gonzaga gives everyone hope. If this tiny school can out of nowhere become a national power, then your team, with the right culture, the right set of circumstances and the right coach, can do it too. They probably won't. There's only one Gonzaga. But it can happen.
One thing still eludes the Zags, though: that Final Four. The Elite Eight loss to Connecticut in 1999 was the peak: The Bulldogs have made only one regional final since then, in 2015, where they lost to, of course, Duke. Last year was going to be the year too, but a Sweet 16 upset loss to Syracuse -- a game that Gonzaga led by nine late -- knocked them out. Even with all the years of success, Gonzaga has been particularly excellent the last few years, culminating in this season, when it flirted with going undefeated and ended the season as the No. 1 team in Ken Pomeroy's ratings. This team is no fluke, or underdog, or upstart. It might just be the best team in the country.
Which means it is time. Until it makes a Final Four, Gonzaga will always have its doubters. It will have no better opportunity than this year. The Zags are a No. 1 seed in the West Region. The No. 2 seed is Arizona, a team they've already beaten. No one else in the region, other than maybe the crazy-pace lunatics of West Virginia, is all that terrifying. This is the time. Gonzaga has what many consider the best team it has ever had. It doesn't have to go farther east than Utah the entire tournament. It is all set up for it. Gonzaga deserves a Final Four as much as any team has ever deserved a Final Four. Whether it can finally grab a spot is the most compelling story of this tournament. You're crazy if you don't root for them to do it.
* * *
Email me at leitch@sportsonearth.com follow me @williamfleitch or just shout out your window real loud, I'll hear you. Point is, let's talk.Could Steve "Sting" Borden participate at the WrestleMania XXX pay-per-view next year? Per a recent report, WWE management believes he might.
Sting, of course, is the one big-name wrestler Vince McMahon has never been able to get.
And with TNA being in a state of total disarray (whether the troubled promotion will even be around in 2014 is a lingering question), WWE's chances of signing him to a deal seem to be better than ever.
As Bryan Alvarez notes in this week's F4W Newsletter (subscription required), while the company appears to have ruled out Hulk Hogan coming back, the promotion believes it can bring in Sting for a WrestleMania XXX appearance: "The WWE side believes that Hogan's ultimately TNA-bound, but they also feel there is a decent chance that they may end up being able to get Sting for WrestleMania next year."
Alvarez also offers some background information about WWE's interest in the veteran star:
A few years ago WWE did a video tease for Undertaker's return that the Internet immediately assumed was actually a tease for Sting. It never was, but there was so much talk about it that WWE actually did open up negotiations briefly with Sting as a result of it. It never went anywhere, but with TNA in the state its in and no guarantee they'll offer him another great deal for 2014, the timing may be perfect for him to make a jump.
Presumably, Sting would take on Undertaker at WrestleMania XXX, as that's obviously where the interest is. A John Cena and Sting program would be an intriguing option too, though.
Of course, while the 54-year-old would undoubtedly garner a decent amount of attention if he were to wrestle in New Orleans next year, it remains to be seen just what he would do for the card business-wise.
Despite his name value, he hasn't made terribly much difference to TNA's financial situation over the last seven years. Sure, he has nostalgia appeal, but what else?
With this in mind, how likely would he be to boost WrestleMania's business?CLOSE The U.S. is calling for North Korea to grant an amnesty for the immediate release of a Korean American sentenced to 15 years hard labor for "hostile acts" against the state. Kenneth Bae is at least the sixth American detained since 2009. (May 2) AP
Kenneth Bae was accused of committing "hostile acts" against North Korea.
Kenneth Bae, right, and Bobby Lee, pose together as freshmen students at the University of Oregon in 1988. Bae, detained for nearly six months in North Korea, has been sentenced to 15 years of "compulsory labor" for unspecified crimes against the state. (Photo11: AP file) Story Highlights Bae was detained in November
At least six Americans have been detained in North Korea since 2009
The U.S. State Department did not comment on the sentencing
BEIJING – The United States on Thursday demanded North Korea grant amnesty and release a Korean-American sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for unspecified "hostile acts" against the state.
Kenneth Bae, 44, from Washington state, had been detained since November after entering the country's northeast as either a tourist or tour operator.The sentence comes after months of increasingly dire threats from North Korea, including nuclear war, that appear designed to pressure the U.S. government into concessions, say analysts.
"There's no greater priority for us than the welfare and safety of U.S. citizens abroad, and we urge the DPRK authorities to grant Mr. Bae amnesty and immediate release," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said, refering to the country's formal title, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Said to be a devout Christian who ran a travel company from the northeast China city of Dalian, Bae had previously visited North Korea several times without incident. He was tried at the Supreme Court on April 30, said Korean news agency KCNA.
A guilty verdict was inevitable after another KCNA report Saturday claimed "he admitted that he committed crimes aimed to topple the DPRK with hostility toward it. His crimes were proved by evidence."
In several cases since 2009, the United States has sent high-profile envoys to secure the release of U.S. citizens detained in North Korea. In 2009, former president Bill Clinton brought home two U.S. journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were serving 12 years' hard labor after crossing the border illegally.
This time the outcome may be harder to predict, analysts warned, as Washington may resist the old model for tackling these cases, while North Korea's young ruler Kim Jung Un, the third generation of Kim family dictators to rule the isolated state, may revise his father's playbook. Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico, and Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, were unable to meet Bae during a January visit.
The current crisis on the Korean Peninsula worsened after the North's Feb. 12 nuclear test drew additional United Nations sanctions. Pyongyang insists on recognition as a nuclear state, and an immediate end to sanctions. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said dialogue with North Korea remains conditional on the regime demonstrating genuine commitment to ending its nuclear weapons program.
After the failure of its "high-risk, high-return strategy" over recent months, "North Korea is trying to shift toward so-called kidnapping diplomacy," said Kim Sung-han, a former South Korean vice minister of foreign affairs and trade. This new phase in Pyongyang's diplomacy has a highly familiar goal, said Kim, now an international relations professor at Korea University in Seoul.
North Korea wants "a U.S. envoy like former presidents Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter to come to Pyongyang, to make the United States kowtow to Pyongyang, that's exactly what North Korea intends to achieve, and why they so quickly gave (Bae) a sentence," said Kim. "They've sent the ball to the U.S. side."
Washington is unlikely to make concessions, but "if a US citizen is being abused by a totalitarian regime, the USA cannot sit idly by, and will probably be considering some action," he said. Bae is being used as a "hostage," agreed Tong Kim, an international relations expert, also at Korea University. The case "may open up an opportunity for a prominent U.S. citizen to visit Pyongyang, to bring him out, but it won't lead to any significant outbreak of dialogue," said Tong, a former U.S. State Department official.
While the Obama administration will appeal for Bae's release, it "will not want to follow the same pattern that occurred in the Ling and Lee case," said Scott Snyder, senior fellow for Korea Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "The idea of having high-profile visitors come to North Korea to bring back Americans is fraught with moral hazard, and carries with it perceived political benefits for the DPRK leadership," he said. "But it doesn't bring any political benefit to the American president."
Bae's alleged crimes remain unclear, but are likely to be "an extraordinary exaggeration" by a regime that shows "paranoia and hyper-sensitivity to any criticism, intentional or unintentional," said Daniel Pinkston, a North East Asia expert for the International Crisis Group in Seoul. "Something on a hard drive, taking photos, or maybe saying something, almost anything can be considered sensitive to the regime," he said.
North Korean authorities "are in the middle of this coercive bargaining game" to be accepted internationally as a nuclear state, and to re-orientate their relationship with South Korea, said Pinkston. "They'll do whatever they can to further that objective," including the use of Bae as a bargaining chip, he said. But the pattern of negotiation and release of U.S. citizens was set under the rule of Kim Jong Il, warned Pinkston. "We have new leadership now, we'll have to see what unfolds."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/ZofECN(Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) is in the final stages of negotiating a deal worth more than $37 billion to sell a record 440 F-35 fighter jets to a group of 11 nations including the United States, two people familiar with the talks said.
This would be the biggest deal yet for the stealthy F-35 jet, set to make its Paris Airshow debut this week.
The sale represents a major shift in sales practices from annual purchases to more economic multi-year deals that lower the cost of each jet.
The pricing of the jets was still not final, although the average price of the 440 jets was expected to be $85 million, the people said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the negotiations publicly.
The multi-year deal for the fighters will consist of three tranches over fiscal years 2018-2020.
A Lockheed representative said the U.S. company does not discuss negotiations on contracts and said any deal involving a “block buy” would be announced by the U.S. government. A representative for the customers including the United States did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Last week, representatives from 11 F-35 customer nations met in Baltimore, Maryland to discuss terms and toured a Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) facility in Maryland that provides equipment for the jet. Those nations included Australia, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, South Korea, Britain and the United States.
The memorandum of understanding being negotiated between Lockheed and the customers aims to procure 135 or more jets in fiscal year 2018 for delivery in 2020 for about $88 million per jet, the people said.
In the subsequent fiscal years, 2019 and 2020, procurement would ramp up to 150 or more jets per year.
FILE PHOTO: A U.S. airman adjusts his cap in the cockpit as a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II aircraft is moved on the eve of the 52nd Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport near Paris, France June 18, 2017. REUTERS/Pascal Rossignol/File Photo
The average price in 2019 could be $85 million for the F-35 “A” variant and could drop below $80 million in 2020, the people said. That would mark the lowest price ever paid for an F-35, making this deal an important step in reducing the overall cost of each jet.
The F-35 has been widely criticized for being too expensive, including by U.S. President Donald Trump and other U.S. officials who have criticized the Pentagon’s most expensive program for delays and cost overruns. Recently, a quarter of the operating F-35 fleet was grounded until further notice because of irregularities in the pilots’ oxygen supplies.
REDUCING COSTS
The memorandum of understanding will guarantee contracts will take place in each successive future year. This allows the manufacturing group led by Lockheed to take advantage of greater economies of scale, reducing the cost of each jet. They have been working to reduce the cost of the jets through streamlining the supply chain and purchasing materials in bulk.
Recently revised estimates indicate the U.S. Defence Department expects to spend $379 billion, down from $391 billion, to develop and buy 2,443 of the supersonic warplanes through 2039, one of the people said.
“This is part of an ongoing process. If it gets done, it would be a plus for Lockheed, allowing for better long-term production management,” said Robert Stallard, an analyst at Vertical Research.
The F-35 comes in three configurations, the A-model for the U.S. Air Force and U.S. allies; the B-model, which can handle short take-offs and vertical landings for the Marine Corps and the British navy; and the carrier-variant F-35C jets.
In February, the Pentagon agreed to a deal for the tenth batch of the fighter aircraft and agreed to pay below $95 million per jet for the first time, compared with $102 million in the previous purchase which was the lowest price up until that point.
Around that time the Pentagon said the price of a jet could fall 16 percent to around $80 million in future purchases.
Slideshow (2 Images)
The F-35 business accounts for about 37 percent of Lockheed’s total revenue. During the first quarter, Lockheed’s revenue from its aeronautics business increased 8 percent to $4.1 billion, led by higher sales of the F-35.
Lockheed executives have estimated that a multi-year deal will save about $2 billion for the nations that choose to participate in the multi-year purchase.
Lockheed, the prime contractor, and its partners, including Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N), United Technologies Corp’s (UTX.N) Pratt |
good texture. Let the mixture sit too long, and the breadcrumbs absorb too much liquid and the patty once again returns to mush.
Now how's that for some textural contrast?
Amping Up Flavor and Moisture
At this point, I was pretty darn happy with my burger. It was certainly more flavorful than anything you could get in the store, but it still wasn't quite at the level of competing with an actual hamburger. I wanted a veggie burger that a meat eater would realistically choose even when there was actual ground chuck staring them in the face. This meant more flavor and even juicier texture.
The one major advantage that meat has over vegetables in terms of delivering juice to a burger patty is in its fat. Animal fat is tends to be more highly saturated then vegetable-based fats. Because saturated fats stack together more tightly and easily, they tend to be firmer at a given temperature. Most animal fats don't melt until well above room temperature, while most plant-based fats are liquid at room temperature.
What does this mean? It means that with a well-made beef-based burger patty, your fat stays in discrete firm chunks that melt only as the patty starts to cook, basting the meat in fat and creating little pockets of chin-dripping juiciness that show themselves only when you bite down on the burger. Vegetable-based patties, on the other hand, don't have this advantage, which means that you have to build the extra moisture directly into them if you want them to have any chance at survival.
In my previous adventures with non-beef burgers, I discovered the secret to adding moisture to a lean turkey burger without overwhelming it or ruining its texture: roasted puréed eggplant.
I decided that since I was roasting some mushrooms already, I may as well throw an eggplant in there with them. Roasted eggplant is some really magical stuff. Not only does it taste great on its own (just throw in a bit of good olive oil and lemon juice), but it has the characteristic of being able to carry many other flavors along for the ride, all while adding a subtle sweet meatiness.
When combined with my chopped mushrooms, it added exactly the moisture that my patties needed, even helping them to brown a bit better in the pan.
Taking another queue from that Turkey Burger recipe, I decided to add a bit of Marmite to my patties to help boost up their savoriness. A product made from the spent yeast leftover after fermenting alcohol, Marmite (or the Australian equivalent Vegemite) is a concentrated source of glutamates. I use it in everything from soups and stews to, well, veggie burgers.*
* And if you're a Kiwi, better act fast, because there's a shortage of Marmite this year!
That little dab of marmite was all that the burgers needed to send them into rocket-boosted, escape-velocity-achieved, 1.21 gigawatt flavor orbit.
Ok, the Marmite and an onion cooked directly into them.
Fine, and some cheese, just to tie the whole thing together.
The best part of the recipe? It behaves almost exactly like ground meat when you're handling or cooking it. That means that whatever you can do to a normal patty—griddle it, throw it on the grill, press an onion into it, smash it with a spatula, shape it into a loaf, make a Jucy Lucy—whatever—you can do with this mix.
Is it the easiest stuff in the world to make? Admittedly no. It requires roasting vegetables, sautéeing leeks, boiling barley, and chopping nuts and chickpeas, and that's all before you even form it into patties. But believe me when I tell you that you'll never look at veggie burgers the same way again.
That's good news for vegans, and heck. I'd even say it's good news for burger lovers who are just out for something a little bit different (don't forget to add the bacon).
UPDATE 4/3/2012: Some folks were having issues with the patties holding together or being too mushy. After more testing, I've pintpointed the problem to be with the chickpeas and the degree to which they get processed (underprocessed and your patties fall apart. Overprocessed and they get mushy). To alleviate this problem, the best thing to do is separate the chickpeas into two batches, puréeing one with a bit of flour and baking powder (to act as binder and leavener), and roughly chopping the second batch. This ensures good texture and good binding in a more consistent manner. The recipe has been updated to reflect these changes.
Get The Recipe!
Homemade Vegan Burgers That Don't Suck! »
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"Nobody trusts him. Nobody trusts him," Brees said when asked about players' attitudes toward Goodell. "I'm not talking about a DUI, or using a gun in a strip club, which are pretty clear violations. I think there're too many times where the league has come to its decision in a case before calling a guy in, and the interview is just a façade. I think now if a guy has to come in to talk to Roger, he'll be very hesitant because he'll think the conclusion has already been reached."
The Saints implicated in the "bounty" scandal mostly have kept their lips zipped in meetings with Goodell. The approach hasn't helped. Brees wasn't the only one speaking out over the weekend.
"NFL stands for NOT for Long!! in the league and Life," Jeremy Shockey wrote on Twitter. "The no it all Rog goodell lied to every player and told us concussions will not effect us in life that a LIE."
Brees' opinion carries weight. Shockey's words will be heard too, but also by NFL general managers considering him as a potential last-minute signing. They might be reminded that Shockey's declining skill set isn't worth the trouble.The euro fell further against the dollar, hitting a new 14-month low. The euro has tumbled against the dollar since last fall as faith in Europe's shared currency dwindles. Greece's debt crunch is widely seen as a test of Europe's ability to restore fiscal discipline to the weak economies in its union and keep the decade-old currency viable.
"It's going to drop further," Tim Speiss, chairman of the personal wealth advisers practice at Eisner LLP in New York, said of the euro.
The dollar's rise pushed commodities prices lower, especially oil. That sent prices of oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron lower.
Greece passed a bill in its Parliament after heated debate that calls for unpopular cuts in public spending in pensions and other areas, as well as tax increases. Greece needed to approve the austerity measures to be eligible to receive a $141.9 billion aid package from the International Monetary Fund and the 15 other countries that use the euro.
Greece needs access to an initial portion of the money by May 19 to cover $11.6 billion in debt payments, or it likely will default.
Even if Greece gets the money, there are still worries that the loans would be only a temporary fix to a growing debt problem across the continent. Portugal and Spain have also seen their debt ratings downgraded.
In economic news, the Labor Department said new claims for jobless benefits fell lass than expected last week. It also said productivity rose more than forecast in the first quarter, but that was due in part to a drop in labor costs, which is a negative signal for consumer spending. The report comes a day ahead of the government's April jobs report. It is widely seen as the most important economic report.
Treasury prices rose, pushing interest rates down in the bond market. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 3.41 percent from 3.54 percent late Wednesday.The thermal paste comparison update you have been waiting for! Next update to follow sometime in 2016!
Which is the Best Thermal Paste? – 2015 (Update) – August
Due to many requests by readers, followers and even some companies wanting their pastes to be included in our comparison, we decided to do an updated “Which is the best thermal paste” article. The previous article can be found here – http://www.play3r.net/reviews/cooling/thermal-paste-comparison-2015-best-thermal-paste/
We have added the following pastes to our graphs and tested them using the same methods as the previous comparison:
– TOP SECRET X (Sorry, it’s NDA)
– Cooler Master E1
– Cooler Master E2
– Arctic Silver 5
– Prolimatech PK1
– Phanteks TH-NDC (Supplied with Phanteks coolers)
We also re-tested a couple of other thermal pastes based on readers questions, discussions and disagreements; we like to do what the people want!
Click each thermal paste below to purchase or learn more about the particular paste on test from the previous article – http://www.play3r.net/reviews/cooling/thermal-paste-comparison-2015-best-thermal-paste/!
Akasa Pro-Grade 460
Arctic Ceramique 2
Arctic MX2
be quiet! DC1
Coollaboratory Liquid Copper
Coollaboratory Liquid Pro
Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra
Cooler Master Generic
EKWB Ectotherm
Gelid GC Extreme
Generic
IC Diamond 7 Carat
JunPus D9000
JunPus DX1
Noctua NT-H1
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
Thermalright CF III
Xigmatek PTI
XSPC K2
Test Setup
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K (3.9GHz @1.1v & 4.5GHz @1.25v)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15
Motherboard: ASRock Z97 OC Formula
RAM: Kingston GSkill TridentX 2400MHz 8GB (2x4GB)
PSU: Cooler Master V1200 1200w Platinum
OS: Windows 7 Premium 64 bit
Testing Methodology:
As each thermal paste requires different curing times, different bedding in times, it made testing each thermal paste quite an arduous task in terms of time; no fear, taking our time is what Play3r does best and the following method was devised for the testing, something each of the thermal pastes had to go through prior to obtaining results.
Step 1 – Applying each thermal paste by each of the manufacturers recommended methods; where no methods were given, common sense and experience comes into play.
Step 2 – Running the test system for 24hrs with a run of Prime95’s torture test for an hour to help cure the paste in; some don’t need curing, but tough, we did it anyway!
Step 3 – After 24hrs, I ran Prime95 for 30 minutes on each of the following settings saved from BIOS; 3.9GHz @ 1.1v and 4.5GHz @ 1.25v; this is to give a completely level playing field
Step 4 – Delta temperatures were taken due to any variance in ambient temperatures; British weather can be a marvellous thing and be cold and wet one day, to warm and sunny the other. Bare this in mind when reading our results. Delta temperature is core temperature minus ambient temperature which is believed to give more consistent results, some will disagree, but I prefer this method.
With the test setup noted, the entire testing methodology being laid out in an understandable and tedious way, it’s time to see who reigns king…
Thermal Paste Comparison Results
Final Words
It’s quite apparent that Coollaboratory with their Liquid Ultra and Pro compounds are king of the castle in terms of cooling performance, although these do have their pitfalls and some people prefer to go elsewhere. The main issue with Liquid metal is it is quite abrasive and personally, I have found it removes CPU information which is indented into the IHS; it becomes a problem if you like to know which CPU you are installing prior to booting up etc.
With the addition of a few thermal pastes, the TOP SECRET X compound does very well and is nearly comparable to IC Diamond 7 Carat; one of the pastes which we re-tested due to sour plums from their company rep. I guess it paid off for them as they gained a degree or 2 and moved up the charts a little, but it isn’t a precedent which we intend to set, but we felt we should give it another chance at least. Like the liquid metal options, it does cause abrasion too so bear that in mind before purchasing it.
The Cooler Master E1 and E2 also do very well in our charts, which gives us a trend that the metallic pastes tend to do a little better than ceramique/creamy compounds etc. The E1 is made from silver with the E2 using gold as its substance of choice and both with their merits, the E2 does outperform the E1 in our tests.
So what’s the verdict? Well the graphs speak for themselves, but there is always new compounds coming to the market to challenge the stalwarts such as Arctic Silver 5, MX-2 etc, but it isn’t often one can change one’s preference without showing a noticeable difference, not only in performance but in application to. What will come around in 2016 to rival the industry leaders and will any come close to Coollaboratory? Only time will tell!
If there are any thermal pastes you would like to see in the graphs which have not already been included, leave a comment below on the article!
If you are a company and would like us to take a look at your thermal interface/compound, feel free to contact us via our contact form! Or you can CLICK HERE!A new group inspired by Ted Cruz's plan to tie the U.S dollar to a unit of solid gold is planning to spend up to $1 million to back his hopes in New Hampshire, a well-financed push meant to elevate him to first-tier status there on the appeal of an offbeat issue.
The Lone Star Committee, a new organization filed under section 527 of the tax code, is planning to flood the Granite State airwaves with radio ads highlighting Cruz's plans for a sound dollar.
Given that Cruz's biggest financial supporters have been slow to sink resources into New Hampshire, Lone Star's investment is shaping up to be the biggest play yet by Cruz forces to perform well in a state that might not naturally be drawn to a tea party renegade.
The new tax-exempt group plans to broadcast only issue spots, steering clear of more overt language used by super PACs to directly back their candidate or, more commonly, attack their rivals.
"We see ourselves as waging the idea battle on economics, at least to Republican primary voters," said Rich Danker, the GOP strategist behind the group who believes monetary policy matters to voters. "It's overrated how much how they drift toward personality. At the end of the day, it's really where the candidates are on policy."
The wonky outside spenders are the latest addition to the fold of overlapping, at times diverging, groups trying to spend big money to support Cruz independently. But it is the first Cruz group dedicated to issue spending, which several presidential candidates have used to give an extra boost to their primary bids.
The group does not appear to have the blessing of the Cruz campaign in Houston, which Danker said he has had no contact with since launching.
"They would probably be most comfortable not having to worry about what I'm doing," said Danker, explaining why he didn't seek the permission of Cruz aides. "I wanted to sort of do things that would lead the campaign in the direction of emphasizing their economic message and showing them it can work."
The Cruz campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
But the founders are no strangers to Cruz circles. Danker met privately with Cruz for an hour last year when managing the New Jersey Senate race of Republican Jeff Bell, and he is a close associate of Sean Rushton, Cruz's top economic adviser, who Danker says inspired him to set up a group like Lone Star.
The group, which Danker said raised about $100,000 in the first week, is budgeting toward a $1 million buy focused almost entirely in New Hampshire, where Cruz has climbed but still remains solidly behind Donald Trump, who has led polls there for months. It's hired a North Carolina fundraiser, Jay Rao, to collect big checks. And they're planning to have a rapid-response arm dedicated to what they say will be feverish attacks on Cruz's contentious backing of the gold-tied dollar.
"They came fast and furious, and they did not stop for the past two months," said Brian Domitrovic, the policy mind behind the group, who expects continued criticism of Cruz on gold. "We'll be ready for it."
Cruz broached the gold standard in his well-regarded showing at the CNBC debate two months ago, although he does not push aggressively for it on the stump
"Instead of adjusting monetary policy according to whims and getting it wrong over and over again and causing booms and busts, what the Fed should be doing is, number one, keeping our money tied to a stable level of gold," he said on stage, agreeing with Rand Paul that the Federal Reserve is a "series of philosopher-kings."
Bashing the Federal Reserve has become in vogue for Republican hopefuls, but Cruz's plan to limit changes in the value of U.S currency by tying it to gold remains controversial in mainstream economics. When the University of Chicago asked 40 leading economists three years ago if Americans' lives would improve with a gold standard, not a single one said yes.
"This is the most idiotic idea I have ever heard from a presidential candidate. The entire economics profession thinks it's a joke," said David Blanchflower, a leading monetary policy expert at Dartmouth. "It would be more sensible to go on the goldfish standard."
Asked if he could envision the issue having any appeal with GOP primary voters in New Hampshire, Blanchflower replied: "None whatsoever."
Cruz's backers disagree, pitching the issue as a political winner for a Republican electorate skeptical of centralized power in the Federal Reserve, especially in libertarian-leaning New Hampshire.
Unique tax structure
One potential obstacle for organizers is their decision to file as a 527 committee, rather than the two options most commonly used today by big money operatives: a super PAC, which must disclose the identities of donors, or as a nonprofit, which can shield those names but cannot run as many advertisements calling for the direct election or defeat of candidates.
Lone Star shares more in common with a super PAC — Danker said it plans to disclose its donors monthly to the IRS. But the other big campaign spender that is choosing to file with the IRS, a nonprofit supporting Marco Rubio, Conservative Solutions Project, has been criticized by Republican rivals and campaign finance reformers for hiding the names of people with a large influence on the political process.
In some ways, Lone Star will suffer the worst of both worlds: The group would not be able to spend more than half of its money on federal express advocacy, said Jason Torchinsky, a Republican campaign finance attorney, even though it will still identify its donors. Danker defended the tax incorporation as the best option for an issue-based group, though he said it could reclassify as a super PAC in the future.
"Since Citizens United, when you can have super PACs do unlimited express advocacy with unlimited corporate and individual dollars, what they're doing would be rare," Torchinsky said.MPs have resisted public opinion on same-sex marriage for a decade. The reasons are complicated, but new research shows they are gradually being won over
Labor frontbencher and western Sydney MP Tony Burke voted no to legalising same-sex marriage in a parliamentary vote in 2012. He now supports it. Labor’s Jason Clare has admitted he has changed his mind on the issue, and now calls on the Coalition government to “grow a pair” and deal with it in parliament. Liberal minister Josh Frydenberg voted against same-sex marriage five years ago – the party did not give its MPs a conscience vote at the time – but has switched, and now supports allowing same-sex couples to wed.
According to research soon to be published in the Australian Journal of Political Science, not a single politician has flipped the other way – nobody who wanted to legalise same-sex marriage in the failed attempt in 2012 now has doubts. By 2016, almost 60% of Labor MPs who voted no (and were still in in parliament) had shifted to supporting same-sex marriage. Of Coalition MPs, 21% had changed their minds.
The answer's in the post – Australian marriage equality vote explainer Read more
The change has been rapid, but in some ways, so slow. The researchers, Andrea Carson, Shaun Ratcliff and Yannick Dufresne, point out that the issue of same-sex marriage throws up questions about what democracy is: public support for change has been strong in opinion polls for about a decade.
In a representative democracy, politicians don’t automatically vote according to the majority view, but on this issue, the research paper concludes, “federal politicians have largely ignored majority opinion” for complex reasons.
Their analysis of the more than 600,000 responses to the ABC’s Vote Compass survey during the 2013 election campaign, as well data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, commercial opinion polls and other sources, found that just one electorate – Maranoa, a vast conservative seat in south-western Queensland including towns such as Roma and Kingaroy – opposed same-sex marriage. Just over half its citizens believed marriage should only be between a man and a woman. And its MP, Liberal National David Littleproud, agrees with them.
All other 149 lower house electorates had majority support for change, although some regional seats in Queensland and New South Wales are very tight and only tip over into supportive if undecided voters are included. The electorates of prominent opponents such as Tony Abbott (Warringah in Sydney), Kevin Andrews (Menzies in Melbourne) and Andrew Hastie (Canning in Western Australia) support marriage equality. Warringah, for instance, is one of the most supportive electorates in the country, ranking 14th out of all seats, with about 70% backing marriage equality. Canning is more divided.
Yet here we are. Twenty-three other countries, including New Zealand, Canada, Britain, the United States, Germany and France, have legalised same-sex marriage. And Australia has not.
Here we are, with a government insisting we have a postal survey on this issue, largely because those politicians who want to deny same-sex couples the right to wed have compelled it.
In 2012 the House of Representatives rejected marriage equality by a margin of 98 to 42 – the vote would have been tighter if the Coalition had allowed a conscience vote. The Australian Marriage Equality group says if a vote were held now, it would comfortably pass in both the House and the Senate.
The huge data produced by Vote Compass, with statistical weighting to compensate for a survey that was “opt in”, means that for the first time, we have a glimpse about what people in every electorate thinks and to compare that with their representative’s view. The results give insight into why this issue has been so politically polarising – especially for the conservative parties – and why the national parliament has lagged so far behind public opinion.
It all started in 2004, says Alex Greenwich, an independent NSW state parliamentarian, co-chairman of Australian Marriage Equality and a gay man who married his partner Victor in Argentina five years ago, a marriage that is not recognised in Australia.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Howard and attorney general Philip Ruddock in 2004, when the prime minister announced the Marriage Act will be amended to exclude gay couples and ban same-sex couples from adopting children. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP
It was then prime minister John Howard’s insistence that the Marriage Act be amended to specify that marriage was “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”, that spurred Greenwich, now 36, to become actively involved in changing the law.
Because the right has made it so central to the culture wars …it has become a totemic issue Dennis Altman
Australian Marriage Equality, a nonpartisan group that campaigns for same-sex marriage, was established that year. “My initial support was based around the fact that I don’t like being told I can’t do something because I’m gay, especially to marry the person you love,” Greenwich says.
Labor backed Howard’s amendment, reluctantly. “Labor has made clear we don’t support gay marriage,” said frontbencher Nicola Roxon at the time. It wasn’t until 2011 that Labor’s policy platform was amended to support marriage equality. The Greens have always backed it.
Dennis Altman, academic and pioneering gay activist, agrees with Greenwich that Howard’s attempt to delegitimise the marriage of gays who had travelled overseas to wed was the catalyst for a determined campaign to change the law.
“It really only became an issue after John Howard made it an issue,” says Altman. “More radical people never saw the importance of marriage, but over the last couple of years because the right has made it so central to the culture wars and have linked it to so many other issues, it has become a totemic issue.”
The first public poll on same-sex marriage in Australia is believed to be a Newspoll in June 2004. That found that 38% of respondents were in favour of same-sex marriage and 44% against. Just three years later, opinion polls started to find majority support – Greenwich puts that down to active campaigning by LGBTI groups and the influence of more overseas countries changing their laws.
The latest Newspoll in August found 62% in favour, with 32% against and 6% uncommitted.
Essential Media has just released a report summarising all its polling on marriage equality since 2010. It showed that support has steadily increased from the low 50s in 2010 to tdeche low 60s now, with most Australians expecting the laws to change in the next few years.
Research director Andrew Bunn says the only comparable issue where public opinion has been so out of step with political opinion is assisted dying, where an even higher percentage of people support allowing a terminally ill person assistance to die if they choose.
Carson says the research paper, Same-sex marriage debate in Australia: Public opinion and policy congruence, is the first empirical research in this country into legislators’ policy responsiveness to public opinion.
Although national opinion is strongly in favour of change, it becomes more complex – particularly for the conservative parties – the more you drill down.
“Opposition to same-sex marriage was highest in 2013 in divisions with fewer same-sex couples; a higher average Coalition two-party vote across the 2010 and 2013 elections; lower median ages (suggesting a higher number of families with children); lower household incomes; lower population densities, and a greater proportion of overseas-born residents,” the research paper says.
In other words: “Electorates with high levels of opposition to same-sex marriage tend to provide the Coalition with the majority of their two-party vote. Those with lower levels of opposition were more likely to vote Labor.”
There needs to be overwhelming support before their MPs are prepared to move away from the status quo bias Andrea Carson
It isn’t hard to see why the Coalition has been so divided on this – much of its support, particularly in country areas and among older voters and people with strong religious affiliations, have reservations, although they have declined over time.
Labor has also been torn in the past, because of its (declining) links to the Catholic church and because immigrants who support the ALP are more likely to be conservative on this issue. Jason Clare’s electorate of Blaxland in western Sydney is among the 10 seats with the highest resistance to same-sex marriage. More than 60% of its people speak a language other than English at home and more than 20% identify as Muslim, making them less likely to be pro marriage equality.
Many Coalition members – but not all – have responded to their electorates’ comparative unease. Of the 10 seats where objection to marriage equality is strongest, only one is represented by an MP who is a definite supporter – Jason Clare.
Of the 10 electorates with the highest backing for marriage equality (in some seats support is around 90%) every MP approves of same-sex marriage and will vote to change the law, whether the politician is Liberal or Labor.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alex Greenwich, Joyce Maynge and Sydney councillor Linda Scott at a charity run for Mardi Gras. Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images
Carson says there is a “status quo bias” in Australia – a temptation to leave things as they are – and that majority approval of same-sex marriage has not been enough for MPs to be convinced.
Our major political parties are “interest aggregators” – interest groups such as religious organisations influence political parties on specific issues because they can be relied upon at elections, whatever the general voter might think.
“Some of those groups, even though they are a minority, are quite vocal within political parties, which can’t afford to ignore them,” says Carson, a lecturer in political science at the University of Melbourne.
“With Labor, most of the MPs have moved to support same-sex marriage. We find there needs to be a certain tipping point before they will shift over and that’s well above the 50% mark. It needs to be up to the 60% range before you start seeing MPs shift. It needs to be much higher (on average) for Coalition MPs. There needs to be overwhelming support before their MPs are prepared to move away from the status quo bias.”
The research found that MPs representing electorates where opposition to same-sex marriage was 40% – so well below half – would still tend to resist change. There was still a 95% chance that they would be against same-sex marriage.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Liberal minister Kelly O’Dwyer, right, represents a constituency, Higgins, where voters overwhelmingly support equal marriage, according to polling evidence. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
“It was only once same-sex marriage opposition declined below an estimated 30% … did the probability of a Coalition MP opposing changes to marriage laws drop below 50%, and then only by a small margin.”
That explains why many Coalition MPs in big cities representing more educated, more affluent electorates such as prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in the Sydney seat of Wentworth and Kelly O’Dwyer in the Melbourne seat of Higgins, have no resistance to supporting same-sex marriage. Both of those electorates are in the 10 that most strongly support marriage equality, so there is no political risk for their MPs.
The other issue is “salience” – people might support marriage equality, but are unlikely to change their vote on it. It was not among the most critical issues for the Vote Compass responders. The Essential report notes that in a 2010 opinion poll, 60% of people did not think it was an important issue compared with others such as the economy and healthcare. (A majority of Green voters did think it was important.)
The judges' verdict on equal marriage: change in Australia only comes with pain | David Marr Read more
Given the heat over same-sex marriage now, the importance of the issue to voters may have changed. Essential found that those who opposed marriage equality felt more strongly about the issue than those who supported it. This was particularly true for Liberal and National voters, where 48% of those opposed feel very strongly compared with only 16% of those in favour.
Carson says her study indicates that same-sex marriage will happen in Australia. “It’s going to be inevitable given that public opinion is slowly overwhelming this status quo bias, but we don’t know when,” she says. “Even within the Coalition, their levels of opposition have fallen over the last four years, which suggest that their MPs are reading the signs.”
It has taken a long time to read the signs, but all the signs are all there.
Ten electorates most opposed to same-sex marriage Maranoa*, Queensland (represented by LNP’s David Littleproud – voting no)
Groom Queensland (represented by LNP’S John McVeigh – voting no)
Flynn, Queensland (represented by LNP’s Ken O’Dowd – voting no)
Hinkler, Queensland (represented by LNP’s, Keith Pitt – voting no)
New England, New South Wales (represented by National Barnaby Joyce – voting no)
Kennedy, Queensland (represented by Katter’s Australian party’s Bob Katter – voting no)
Grey, South Australia (represented by Liberal Rowan Ramsey – voting intention unknown)
Blaxland, NSW (represented by Labor's Jason Clare – voting yes)
Barker, SA (represented by Liberal Tony Pasin – voting intention unknown)
Parkes, NSW (represented by National Mark Coulton – voting intention unknown) * Only seat where a majority was opposed Source: Same-sex marriage debate in Australia: Public opinion and policy congruence, UNSW
Ten electorates most supportive of same-sex marriage Sydney, NSW (represented by Labor Tanya Plibersek – voting yes)
Melbourne, Victoria (represented by Greens’ Adam Bandt – voting yes)
Grayndler, NSW (represented by Labor’s Anthony Albanese – voting yes)
Wentworth, NSW (represented by Liberal Malcolm Turnbull – voting yes)
Melbourne Ports, Victoria (represented by Labor’s Michael Danby – voting yes)
Wills, Victoria (represented by Labor’s Peter Khalil – voting yes)
Gellibrand, Victoria (represented by Labor’s Tim Watts – voting yes)
Batman, Victoria (represented by Labor’s David Feeney – voting yes)
Higgins, Victoria (represented by Liberal Kelly O’Dwyer – voting yes)
Brisbane, Queensland (represented by Liberal Trevor Evans – voting yes) Source: Same-sex marriage debate in Australia: Public opinion and policy congruence, UNSWNY Man Free After Arrest for Busking
An NYPD officer forcefully arrested a man who was playing music in a subway station after reading aloud the law that appears to allow the musician to perform.
Gothamist reported that the incident took place at the Lorimer Street/Metropolitan Avenue station of the southbound G train around 1:30 AM on Friday, Oct. 17. The musician is reported to be a 30-year-old named Andrew Kalleen.
A seven-minute video clip of the encounter, which has been viewed on YouTube over 1.2 million times, begins with Kalleen explaining that the law permits him to play music for donations in the subway stations. According to the Rules of Conduct listed on the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s website, Kalleen appears to be correct. Section 1050.6c reads:
Except as expressly permitted in this subdivision, no person shall engage in any nontransit uses upon any facility or conveyance. Nontransit uses are noncommercial activities that are not directly related to the use of a facility or conveyance for transportation. The following nontransit uses are permitted by the Authority, provided they do not impede transit activities and they are conducted in accordance with these rules: public speaking; campaigning; leafletting or distribution of written noncommercial materials; activities intended to encourage and facilitate voter registration; artistic performances, including the acceptance of donations
The cop read the law aloud, apparently from a cellphone, while standing next to Kalleen. Nonetheless he insisted that the musician needed a permit to perform and ordered him to leave. Many of the bystanders spoke up in support of Kalleen as the officer repeatedly removed Kalleen’s guitar, told him to go and called for backup. The scene ends with uniformed officers and at least one plainclothes cop throwing the musician to the floor and hauling him away as members of the crowd boo and chant “Fuck the police!”
The New York Daily News reported that Kalleen was charged with loitering. “I’m usually muscled out of the situations,” the paper quotes him as saying. “I decided this time I’m not going to stand for it.” RT writes that he was detained for five hours after his arrest. He told RT he plans to sue the city.
Of the NYPD’s subsequent justification for the officer’s behavior, Gothamist further reported:
An NYPD’s spokesperson tells us that Kalleen was playing guitar, singing and accepting donations “without permit of permission” from the MTA. Because he is a “transit recidivist,” which the spokesperson explained as someone having an open ticket or warrant, perhaps related to turnstile jumping or a similar offense—he was arrested and charged with loitering. There was no mention of him impeding transit activities.
RT adds:
MTA regulations differ from state law which says that performers loitering in a transportation facility may be arrested unless specifically authorized to be there. So the possible outcome of [Kalleen’s] lawsuit is not clear.
xac branch:— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.COMMENTARY: Canton and the expanding Pro Football Hall of Fame would be the perfect home for the Cleveland Browns' training camp.
If life were fair (your mom was right, by the way), Canton, Ohio, would be home to an NFL team.
As we know, the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL, was born here Sept. 17, 1920, in Ralph Hay's auto showroom located at the corner of present-day Third Street and Cleveland Avenue NW.
The original NFL included five Ohio teams: the Columbus Panhandles, Cleveland Indians, Dayton Triangles, Akron Pros and Jim Thorpe's legendary Canton Bulldogs, who won NFL Championships in 1922 and 1923.
Among the earliest NFL teams is the Green Bay Packers, the league's only publicly owned team, which explains perfectly why they're still in Green Bay, which is no larger than Canton.
If any city should have had permanent status for an NFL team, it only stands to reason Canton would have been the one. Even to this day, Canton produces NFL players like Hershey makes chocolate.
But you play the hand life deals you — in this case, the Cleveland Browns.
Columbus has enough
Last month, Browns fans in Northeast Ohio blanched at the news that the team was planning, yet again, to move its training camp from Berea to Columbus.
But the deal blew up, not unlike the offensive line.
Columbus is one of the nation's most successful cities; so what if the Statehouse looks a like a commode? They don't need the Browns. They have Ohio State, Jack Hanna, the Clippers (the Cleveland Indians' minor league team) and the Blue Jackets, who have set the NHL on fire. (Information has been changed to correct an error at 9:15 a.m. 1/4/17. See correction at end of story.)
Colum |
and I’ve been listening to her fantastic podcast, The Web Ahead for more than a year now)
The first thing I did was to read the W3C spec for the CSS shapes module level 1. Yes, the spec does read a bit like some legal document in the beginning, but the fun starts from section 2 where all the cool stuff is. In a nutshell, CSS shapes allows us to wrap text around more than just rectangular boxes. You can now wrap your text around circles, ellipses and polygons and even images.
Before CSS shapes came along, we were more or less locked into standard layouts of rectangular columns. We had to explain to designers who came from print design that no, we can’t make the text flow around your beautifully cropped image of Beyoncé.
You want this? Sorry, you get this.
CSS shapes is being developed by the Adobe Web Platform team and they have blogged about how this spec has been developing since 2012. Check out the cool demo the team built, based on Alice in Wonderland, to showcase CSS shapes’ capabilities. Point is, with CSS shapes, it’s totally possible to have text wrap around Beyoncé’s elbow.
To be honest, the W3C spec is not that easy to understand, so here’s my attempt at explaining it in plain English. A prerequisite for applying a CSS shape property to an element is that the element must be floated. It doesn’t work on non-floated elements.
If the browser you’re using right now supports CSS shapes, you should see text wrapping nicely around the image of Beyoncé, otherwise you’ll just see the standard rectangular column of text. (Hint: Try using Chrome or Safari)
There are 4 basic shape functions you can use to define an element’s shape, in other words, how you want the text to flow around your element. In addition to that, you can also extract a shape from images with an alpha channel.
The browser identifies the required shape from the shape-image-threshold property. Pixels which have a higher alpha value than the threshold will make up the shape, so it’s value must be between 0.0 (transparent) to 1.0 (opaque). If, for some reason, your image doesn’t load, there will be no shape to speak of.
For now, text can only flow on the opposite side of the float declared on the element, meaning if it’s floated left, then the text will flow on the right, and vice versa. In the future, it will be possible to make text flow all around an element with something called CSS exclusions.
Here's an example of how you would use shape-outside to make text flow along an image.
.shape { shape-outside: url("path/to/nicely-cropped-image.png"); shape-image-threshold: 0.5; shape-margin: 10px; float: left; }
There are two types of shape properties:
shape-outside which flows the text around a shape. This goes with the shape-margin property.
which flows the text around a shape. This goes with the property. shape-inside which wraps text inside a shape. This goes with the shape-padding property. (This property has been deferred to CSS shapes module level 2)
The circle() function
.circle { /* general styles for the div*/ width: 200px; height: 200px; background-color: #A4F4B0; border-radius: 50%; /* make it a shape!*/ shape-outside: circle(); float: left; }
The formal syntax for using the circle() function is:
circle( [<shape-radius>]? [at <position>]? )
The question marks indicate that the parameters are optional.
CSS shapes live inside a reference box, which is the basis for the coordinate system. It follows the CSS box model. Razvan Caliman, one of the engineers working on CSS shapes, wrote a very good in-depth article on CSS reference boxes.
The shape-radius is the radius of the circle and takes any length unit (px, em, rem, etc.), as well as percentages. You can also use closest-side and farthest-side.
closest-side uses the length from the centre of the shape to its closest edge of the reference box. Conversely, farthest-side uses the length from the centre of the shape to its farthest edge of the reference box. This property defaults to closest-side if left blank.
The position is represented by a pair of x and y coordinates on the element’s coordinate system. It defaults to (0, 0), at the centre of the element.
CSS shapes is one of those properties that won’t totally break your layout if someone is viewing it on an unsupported browser. It just falls back onto the usual rectangular column most people are already used to anyway.
The ellipse() function
.ellipse { width: 100px; height: 200px; background-color: #A4F4B0; border-radius: 50%; shape-outside: ellipse(); float: left; }
An ellipse is just a circle that appears to have been sat on. Or squashed. So the official syntax for the ellipse() function is:
ellipse( [<shape-radius>{2}]? [at <position>]? )
Notice the 2 behind shape-radius? This just means the function takes in 2 variables, the length of the ellipse’s radius on the x-axis and another length on the y-axis. Like the circle, it defaults to closest-side. The position variable also behaves like the circle() function, and the coordinates default to (0, 0), the centre of the ellipse.
The inset() function
.inset { width: 200px; height: 160px; background-color: #A4F4B0; border-radius: 50px; shape-outside: inset(0px round 50px); float: left; }
It took me a bit more time to wrap my head around the inset() function, but what helped was playing around with the code on Codepen. Here’s the official syntax for the inset() function:
inset( <shape-arg>{1,4} [round <border-radius>]? )
The shape-arg takes in variables the way we write the shorthand for margin or padding, in the order of top, right, bottom then left. So you can pass in 1 value, 2 values or 4 values. Inset is applied from the edge of the element inwards toward the centre.
When shape-arg is set to 0px When shape-arg is set to 15px
The optional parameter here is border-radius, which allows you to create rectangles with rounded corners and flow your text along those rounded corners. Personally, I think the border-radius property is what makes the inset() function useful at all since we can already make text flow around normal rectangles, but that’s just me.
The polygon() function
.polygon { width: 200px; height: 200px; clip-path: polygon(0 0, 0 200px, 200px 100px); background-color: #A4F4B0; shape-outside: polygon(0 0, 0 200px, 200px 100px); float:left; }
The polygon() function allows you to define your own shape using coordinate pairs as parameters. The official syntax for the polygon() function is:
polygon( [<fill-rule>,]? [<shape-arg> <shape-arg>]# )
There is an optional fill-rule property which determines how the shape will be displayed, especially when you have a complex shape with many points which may cross each other. The default value is nonzero. You can refer to the fill-rule property for more information.
Each coordinate pair will be a point on your desired shape. There has to be at least 3 points for this to work. In my example code, I used clip-path to create the polygon shape by “clipping” out the bits of the element which are outside the polygon, so we can see the text flow nicely around it.
It may be pretty straightforward to create a standard shape like the triangle in my example, but for complex shapes, plotting the points would be quite a painful endeavour. Which is why Razvan Caliman released the CSS Shapes Editor for Chrome. It adds an additional tab to the Elements panel called Shapes. It allows you to drag points on your shape and adjust it in the browser. The article covers exactly what you need to do to install and use the extension.
Browser support for CSS shapes
CSS shapes has been available for Chrome since the 37 release, while Safari support came along at 7.1. Here’s a look at the browser support for CSS shapes as of time of writing:
The unfortunate thing is, neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer supports CSS shapes right now. But this is a feature that we should all keep an eye on, and get ourselves ready for, because this could potentially change the way we design websites altogether.
Recommended reading for more CSS shapes goodness:Sing “Walking in Memphis” to a Memphian you just met.
Really? I mean, we get what you’re doing, but don’t. Although, if you have a burning desire to belt out a tune that screams “Memphis,” impress us with a stirring rendition of “Who Run It” by Three 6 Mafia. Or Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back.” Maybe try Rufus Thomas’ version of “Walking the Dog.” Now, that would be an introduction. Yet, the best choice is to not sing at all.
Add us to a national “most dangerous cities” list.
Unfortunately, we’ve been on the FBI’s dangerous list several times due to our crime rate. It is an issue, among several issues, the city is working hard to curb. We just don’t like being publicly called out on our shortcomings.
Mention Libertyland.
Libertyland itself does not piss us off. Actually, it does the opposite. When it is brought up, we are reminded of all of the fun times spent at the theme park — riding the water logs, driving the bumper cars, filling up on cotton candy and soft pretzels, and of course, screaming our heads off on the way down the Zippin Pippin. We catch a case of nostalgia, which can bring a tear or two to our eyes. And it’s those unexpected tears, allowing you to see through our hardened Memphis shell, that can possibly raise the level of pissivity.
Utter the name “John Calipari.”
Don’t go there.
Whine “It’s just a little snow/ice, and everything is closed. Why? What’s the big deal?”
The big deal is that A. unlike our northern neighbors, we don’t have enough equipment to clear all of the roads in a record amount of time, and B. since we don’t get this type of weather often, we don’t know how to drive in it. Therefore, until we come up with solutions for both A and B, stay at home, have a Coke and a smile, and shut the f— up.
Assume Graceland is our city’s only attraction.
It is definitely the city’s most popular attraction, but not the only one. Beale Street, the National Civil Rights Museum, Stax, the Pink Palace, Bass Pro Shops at the Pyramid, Hattiloo Theatre, the Orpheum Theatre, and Elmwood Cemetery are just samples from a long list of awesome sites that will give you a glimpse into the city’s juicy past, present, and future.
Bash Memphis barbecue.
Don’t even think about fixing your mouth to talk trash about our ‘cue. Ours is the best in the world. Period. We don’t care if you prefer the barbecue styles of other cities. If you want their barbecue, go there. And stay. However, while you’re in Memphis, remember these words of a great unknown, yet on-point philosopher: “Don’t start none, won’t be none.”
Bash Memphis.
Only Memphians are allowed to bash the Bluff City for whatever reason. Now, the title “Memphians” only applies to those who have lived in our fair city for at least 10 years. If you haven’t been here but for a minute, heed the words of the great philosopher quoted above.
Refuse to at least try coleslaw on your barbecue sandwich.
It may not sound or look appealing, but when the combination of creamy coleslaw and tangy meat hits your lips, you will be singing its praises for the rest of your life. Go on. Take a bite.
Say: “You don’t sound like you’re from Memphis.”
How exactly are Memphians supposed to sound? If your answer is “DJay” from the movie Hustle & Flow or almost any character in The Client, then you need to hush. There is no denying that we have accents. However, they are usually not as “drawly” or “Hee Haw-ish” as portrayed onscreen through some actors’ exaggerated Southern voices.
Complain about the “slowness” of our city.
A Southern lifestyle is a relaxed lifestyle. We prefer a peaceful pace, as to not break a sweat, especially on the days when the heat and humidity are unbearable. So, gripe as much as you want. Nothing you say will make us do anything any faster.
Drive below 70 mph on I-240 (or any other road in the city).
Our slow pace picks up when it comes to the roads. Sure, the posted speed limit may be 65 (and then will abruptly drop to 55 in some spots), but we believe in driving with the flow of traffic. So, if the flow is 80, 80 and above we shall go. If you can’t keep up, get in the “slow” lane. Or better yet, take the bus, so that we can drive around it and cut it off.
Don’t wave when we graciously let you into our traffic lane.
Now, this is a no-no. Sure, we are speed demons. In fact, we’ve been ranked the worst drivers in the state. Yet, as part of the Bible Belt, we still maintain our Christian values and Southern hospitality by occasionally allowing drivers to jump in front of us. We’ll flash our lights — our way of saying “come on over, friend.” However, if you get in front of us without holding up the Southern hand of “thanks,” values and hospitality be damned. We will proceed to put the pedal to the metal, drive alongside you, give you a stare that will make you rethink your life, and then cut you off. So, basically, you will end up back at square one.
Compare Memphis to Nashville.
Both cities are musical cities, and that’s pretty much it. Memphians will always believe there is no competition. Because the big M-town is just better.Not only are tattoos a defacement of your body, but getting one could affect your ability to go on a mission.
Imagine you are standing outside a beautiful white temple. Its walls and grounds are immaculate. On the lawn near the front door is a painter. He has displays of his art for all to see.
A few minutes later, you see this painter turn around, pull out cans of paint, and start to paint on the walls of the temple. His painting isn’t ugly, but it just doesn’t belong there. Do you say anything to him? Do you ask him to make his picture bigger and more colorful and offer to pay him for his work? Or do you say, “You can’t do that! This is a holy temple!”?
What would you do if it were your temple? The Apostle Paul said, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? … For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are” (1 Cor. 3:16–17).
“A tattoo is graffiti on the temple of the body,” said President Gordon B. Hinckley. 1
Tattoos are permanent. They are not only physically damaging, but through disobedience to the voice of the prophets, choosing to get one causes spiritual damage also. On top of that, something you might not have thought about before is that having a tattoo will affect your application to be a missionary.
Bobby’s Mistake
When Bobby Collins (name has been changed) sent his mission papers off, he was surprised that he did not get back a large white envelope containing his mission call. Instead, he received a letter from the Church’s Missionary Department asking about his tattoo.
When Bobby graduated from high school, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go on a mission. He moved away from home to work, and he liked the independence of not having his parents around all the time. At about the same time, his best friend and his cousin both got tattoos. “That kind of lowered my guard,” he says.
Bobby had always been good at art, so he designed his own tattoo. He knew tattoos were discouraged by the Church and that his mother wouldn’t like it, and before he went to get it, he asked his brother what he thought about it. His brother had some good advice. He said, “Life already gives us so many scars. Why would you want another one?”
But Bobby had already made up his mind. Six weeks and 700 hard-earned dollars later, he had a huge tattoo all the way up one leg. “It was really painful. It was bloody,” he remembers. And “getting one made it easier to think about getting more.” He didn’t get any more, but after strengthening his testimony of the gospel, he did decide he wanted to serve a mission.
As painful as getting his tattoo was, the pain of regret that Bobby felt was much worse. He was very worried about whether or not he would be able to serve a mission. He wanted to get the tattoo removed but couldn’t afford to. He worried what his future spouse and children might think of it.
“That letter from the Missionary Department scared me a lot,” Bobby says. “My biggest fear was that this one thing was going to hold me back from serving a mission.”
Bobby had to do what the Missionary Department asks all missionary applicants who have tattoos to do. On his original application he told them a little about his tattoo. The letter he received later requested a few more details, including an explanation of when and why he got it and where it is located on the body as well as a description or photograph of it. He was also asked to describe how he felt about it.
When a missionary candidate with a tattoo applies, General Authorities review each case and decide whether that candidate will be allowed to serve a mission. Some cannot.
Bobby did receive his mission call. He is grateful to be a missionary and sorry that, now a representative of the Lord’s Church, he once decided to get a tattoo.
For some missionaries, having a tattoo means being assigned to serve in a place where their tattoo is either culturally accepted or to a colder climate where long sleeves, and tights for women, will cover their tattoos. A tattoo can limit not only where you can serve, but, depending on its content and your feelings about it, it could also determine whether you can serve at all.
Advice for Future Missionaries
“I just hope people will follow President Hinckley’s counsel,” Bobby says. “I know that he is a prophet of God. If he says it’s important, then it’s important.”
Bobby has some counsel of his own too, the same counsel his brother gave him: “Even though we can be forgiven through the Atonement, why do something else that’s going to leave us scarred?”
You Are His Creation
“You are a child of God. Your body is His creation. Would you disfigure that creation with portrayals of people, animals, and words painted into your skin?
“I promise you that the time will come, if you have tattoos, that you will regret your actions. They cannot be washed off. They are permanent. Only by an expensive and painful process can they be removed. If you are tattooed, then probably for the remainder of your life you will carry it with you. I believe the time will come when it will be an embarrassment to you. Avoid it. We, as your Brethren who love you, plead with you not to become so disrespectful of the body which the Lord has given you.” President Gordon B. Hinckley, “A Prophet’s Counsel and Prayer for Youth,” Liahona, Apr. 2001, 37.
From a Health-Care Professional
Inna Prokopenko is a registered nurse and licensed master aesthetician in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has attempted to remove many tattoos in her years of work. Here is some of what Inna has to say about tattoos:
Physical Risks
One big physical risk of getting a tattoo is ink allergies. They can develop right away or in six months to a year after someone is tattooed. Ink allergies make the tattooed part of your body swell up and get red and itchy. If you are allergic and ink gets into your bloodstream, you could become very ill.
Blood-borne illnesses are another risk. If needles and other equipment are not properly sterilized, it is possible to get HIV or other illnesses.
Removals
Regret for being tattooed is more than a risk—it is a certainty for all of Inna’s patients. Many people try to get tattoos removed so they can look more professional at their jobs or to show a good example to their children.
Laser tattoo removal can remove some tattoos—at least partially—but removal is much more painful than getting tattooed in the first place.
Laser treatments don’t usually cause scarring, but there is a possibility.
Yellow tattoos or tattoos using yellow inks cannot be removed without surgery.
Removal treatments take a long time and are very expensive—much more expensive than getting the tattoo.
NotesToday the new 10-1 council passed their first budget. For the first time in many years, the median-priced home will see a reduction in taxes. The council was also able to include millions for much-needed social service spending and parks.
“Austin can be proud of this budget, which reduces taxes while increasing social services,” Mayor Steve Adler said. “This is a responsible budget that includes significant investments in affordability and equity, all while ensuring that the taxpayers of Austin are able to realize a dividend from the tremendous growth in our community.”
The adopted budget includes a 6% homestead exemption, an increase in the exemption for seniors and disabled residents from $70,000 to $80,000, a 3% across the board raise for all city employees, and nearly $9 million in additional social service spending.
At the very end of the process, there was $1 million in unallocated funds. The council voted to return that to taxpayers by further lowering the tax rate. ###The Puzzler in the Pit
Episode Summary
Some protestors at a fracking site found a body in the pit. The narrow subpubic concavity and irregularly lipped ventral margin of the pubic symphysis suggests the victim was a man in his 40s. His left ulna was fractured and he had a cast; a piece of fabric with blood on it was found caught in the cast, and there were clues written on it about vengeance. His bones were quite porous for his age. Saroyan and Brennan note that the remains have less flesh than they did when they were found, and Hodgins thinks someone added HCl to the pit. He pours baking soda on the body to stop the tissue decomposition. The entire body has similar pitting save the occipital, because it was a fake bone. Based on that, Angela finds that the victim was Lawrence Brooks, who had a severe injury during a boating accident. Brooks worked as a major national crossword puzzle creator and was known as somewhat of a recluse.
"Hey, look, I just gave birth to a 2-month-old!"
Booth talks to Amelia Brooks, his wife. She didn't report him missing, ostensibly because he often stayed out to work on his puzzles, and suggests that his assistant, Alexis Sherman, may have been responsible. While Alexis was upset that Lawrence hadn't made her co-editor yet, she insists she did not kill him. She plays a threatening voice mail for Booth and Aubrey and describes a man who came looking for Lawrence on several previous occasions. Based on Alexis' description, Angela draws the face of Emery Stewart. Emery was writing a book on Brooks, but his voice does not fit with the threatening phone call. He suggests Donald McKeon, a one-time friend of Brooks' but more recently bitter rival. McKeon was staying at the hotel to which Booth traced the threatening call. He admits to having made the call, but not to killing Brooks. He insists that Brooks stole one of his puzzles, and he was threatening legal action.
Back at the lab, Brennan and Daisy find remodelled fractures localized around the pelvis, ribs, ankles, and arms. An x-ray of his femoral shafts shows significantly thinning cortical bone. There is also bone bruising around the metacarpophalangeal (MCP) joints, suggesting he punched someone right before his death. There are also healed avulsion fractures from about two months ago, suggesting someone bent his fingers back. A tox screen of his bone marrow reveals Brooks had been taking a drug for Alzheimer's, and that drug caused the bone issues.
Booth and Aubrey talk to Amelia Brooks again. She admits she knew about the Alzheimer's and that she was publishing Brooks' old puzzles, because they needed the money from his job for his treatment. She accidentally published McKeon's puzzle. She didn't know where Brooks' money went. Angela tracks down Brooks' bank statements and finds he was doing gambling online. Aubrey finds the bookie, who admits to having broken Brooks' fingers but didn't kill him. Brooks was bankrolling Alexis. She admits to stealing his money, but did not kill him.
Finally, Daisy finds bilateral neural arch fractures on C5, C6, and C7, suggesting cause of death was a broken neck. Then her water breaks. At the hospital, the team realizes that Saroyan's partial match on the blood in the cast could mean the blood was from a close relative. Aubrey reads Emery's manuscript and realizes that he is Brooks' son. In college, Brooks got his girlfriend pregnant; the girlfriend died in childbirth, and he gave up the baby. After Emery's parents died in an accident, he learned he was adopted and figured out Brooks was his birth father. He had arranged with Brooks to meet at a cafe to talk, but Brooks didn't show. Emery tracked him to his house, saw Brooks out on a walk, and confronted him. Brooks claimed he didn't know Emery, and they got into a fist fight. Brooks fell backward down the hill and died. Emery decided to cover up the body. Aubrey tells him Brooks had Alzheimer's--that's why he didn't remember Emery; he wasn't ashamed of him.
Comments
Forensic
They used the pelvis for age-at-death and sex this episode! Woo!
As usual, I question their ability to find "microfractures" and "bone bruising" all over the place, but especially so since the bones were compromised by acid.
Plot
It seems odd that someone would bother to reconstruct the EOP and nuchal lines on a fake occipital. Are skull prostheses really that detailed with respect to anatomy?
Amelia knew that Lawrence had Alzheimer's, and she didn't report him missing when he didn't come home? And she knew that he had Alzheimer's, and she didn't bother to look into their joint accounts to make sure the money was being managed properly?
Hodgins was running around the lab with an erlenmeyer flask filled with red liquid. Not king of the lab safety team, eh?
Hahahaha, another TV baby: cute, plump, pink 2-month-old. And Daisy doesn't have to deliver the placenta. And the nurse hands her the baby with a light blanket, rather than shoving a tightly-swaddled baby on her boob. Oh, TV birth. So funny. At least it was too late for an epidural; that was realistic.
Dialogue
"I'm told my people skills are not very well developed." - Brennan
"A human being is trying to escape from her vagina." - Angela
Ratings
Forensic Mystery - B. Solid enough mystery. Some plot quibbles as above.
Forensic Solution - C. This episode relied on Angela to: find the positive ID, do a forensic artist sketch of the possible killer, and do forensic computing to find bank information. She's always doing crazy things, but this episode was egregious in how many hats they needed her to wear.
Drama - C+. Some solid pathos at the end from the guy who played Emery.MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has devised a method by which robots can understand and respond to voice commands, stated in clear, plain language. The system is advanced enough to understand contextual commands, too, including references made to previously mentioned commands and objects.
The so-called ComText system (short for “commands in context”) created by CSAIL researchers provides “Alexa-like” vocal control of robots, which can demonstrate a contextual understanding not just of previous commands, but also of the objects they interact with and their surrounding environment.
This all adds up to a robot users can interact with in the same way they might interact with another person; interfacing with robots is clearly a big challenge, and a potentially huge barrier to their commercial introduction and use in general consumer-facing applications. Even in industry, it would be far easier to have humans and robots working together if they understood natural language voice commands.
ComText has been demonstrated to work by learning designations for certain objects, so you can for instance tell it that “this tool I’m holding is my tool,” and in future whenever you say something like “hand me my tool,” it’ll find the right one and retrieve it. The ComText system was tested by researchers using a Baxter model, which is a two-armed, essentially humanoid bot created by Rethink Robotics.
ComText is made possible because it has different kinds of memory, including both semantic memory, which covers general info, and episodic memory, which is tied to specific occurrences and events. In test, the robot was able to do the right thin in response to tester voice commands around 90 percent of the time, which is remarkable, and the team hopes to push the limits using more complex input, including multi-step commands and a deepening of the robot’s contextual knowledge.Atlus announced today a deluxe edition version of their upcoming action-adventure/puzzle game, Catherine, known as the “Love is Over” Edition. The bundle, set to release alongside the regular edition on July 26th, includes a pair of polka dot boxers based on the ones worn by Vincent in the game, the “heart-meter” T-shirt worn by the titular Catherine, and a pillow case featuring a piece of concept art. All of this will be boxed in a pizza box from the establishment known as “Stray Sheep,” which is a predominant location in the game.
In addition to this deluxe edition, whose print run will be strictly limited based on preorder figures, gamers who preorder either the standard or deluxe edition will receive, in typical Atlus fashion, both an artbook and a soundtrack sampler CD. The deluxe edition will carry an MSRP of $79.99 and is available for both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. See more photos of its contents and the preorder bonus after the jump.November 14, 2011
Alex Schmaus reports on the first day of Occupy Cal protests last week at UC Berkeley--and plans to step up the struggle with a student strike this week.
CALIFORNIA'S UNIVERSITY students, faculty and staff are looking ahead to a student strike and day of action on November 15 after an Occupy Cal General Assembly at the University of California (UC) Berkeley ended a day of protests and confrontations with police November 9 with an overwhelming vote--569 to 31--to make the call.
"We will strike in opposition to the cuts to public education, university privatization and the indebting of our generation," reads the call for a day of action "in all sectors of higher education."
The GA meeting at Berkeley came after the first day of protests in a week of planned demonstrations to "ReFund Public Education"--called against a 200 percent increase in tuition at state colleges and universities since 2008, on top of massive cutbacks to public education as a whole.
The UC system, once the pride of the state, is going through a process of de facto privatization. Last year, it passed a milestone of collecting more money in student fees than in funding from the state of California. And now UC President Mark Yudof is talking about a further 81 percent fee increase for undergraduates.
The combination of fee hikes and budget cuts have spurred protests across California during the last two school years, including a March 4 day of action in 2010 that linked the struggle at the state's universities with protests in the K-12 system--and which inspired protests to defend public education around the country.
Now, the November 15 day of action will itself build for the final actions in the week of protests on November 16--demonstrations outside meetings of UC's Board of Regents at UC San Francisco-Mission Bay and of the California State University (CSU) Board of Trustees meeting at CSU Long Beach.
THE PROTESTS at Berkeley on November 9 captured national attention when police attacked an attempt by students to set up an Occupy encampment on campus. A total of 39 people, both students and faculty, were arrested.
But there were protests the same day across the state. More than 1,000 rallied at UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine, among other campuses. At UC Los Angeles, demonstrators shut down the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards. Police moved in and arrested 11 students.
In Berkeley, the day of action got off to a spirited start when 3,000 students rallied on campus at noon to demonstrate support for the Occupy movement. Many marched afterwards to the nearby Telegraph Avenue branch of Bank of America, prompting its closure for the day.
The students were no doubt energized by the general strike and day of action called by neighboring Occupy Oakland for the week before, on November 2.
"I've seen many protests and mobilizations, but nothing I've witnessed has compared to what I saw at the Oakland general strike," said Suzy Babb, an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. "It made me realize the full impact of the Occupy Movement and its ability to reach across diverse sectors of the working class. The Occupy movement has reinvigorated the movement at Berkeley. Students who have never been active are now inspired to recreate what's happening in Oakland on our own campus."
Oakland's general strike had the same effect on tens of thousands of people from around the Bay Area who stayed away from work or school and demonstrated on November 2. During the high point of the day, some 15,000 people marched on the Port of Oakland where International Longshore and Warehouse Union members honored mass community picket lines and shut down the port.
One week later, the Berkeley protests had an air of confidence. After the Bank of America picket, hundreds of students marched back to the Berkeley campus to begin establishing the Occupy Cal protest encampment in Sproul Plaza. Three tents were pitched on the grass directly in front of Sproul Hall.
Most of those present were expecting a conflict with campus police since a message from campus administration detailing its "no encampments" policy had been sent out earlier in the week.
Campus police issued a dispersal order to the crowd at 3:30 p.m., but about 200 students showed their determination to stand their ground by linking arms and forming a human barricade around the tents. Video of the standoff was viewed by tens of thousands on YouTube.
Students were unable to protect the tents when dozens of police in riot gear and wielding long wooden clubs broke through the human barricade and confiscated the tents within a few minutes. Six students and one faculty member were arrested, and many were injured during the clash. "[They] had their rods and just [made jabbing motions]," said Berkeley student Ashley Pinkerton. "They were just beating us."
Occupy Cal supporters refused to disperse in the face of this violence. Organizers asked protesters to "text your friends to get down here"--and as the sun began to set and darkness fell on the campus, the crowd swelled by several hundred.
By 9:30 p.m., close to 100 riot police were deployed around the plaza, several new tents had been pitched, and 600 supporters were assembled around them. Police moved in for a second time to attack the assembled students and confiscate the new tents.
The clash between police and protesters linking arms in a human barricade was repeated, this time with more police, more beatings and more arrests. Once police broke through the human barricade and confiscated the tents, however, they retreated to the top of the steps approaching Sproul Hall in the face of near universal determination on the part of those present to hold their ground in the plaza below.
Robert Slaughter, a political science major at nearby Saint Mary's College, was one of those arrested during this second clash with the police. Slaughter, who is Black, was subjected to what appears to be a clear case of racial profiling. After being thrown to the ground and beaten by police in the process of arrest, he was separated from the rest of the protesters in county jail and held longer than anyone else.
After being bailed out by the UNITE HERE hotel workers union on Friday afternoon, Slaughter, who had never been arrested before, recounted how Alameda County Sheriff's deputies had harassed him. "They yelled at me, 'What gang are you in?' and 'Where are your tatoos?'" he said.
Slaughter has been issued an order to stay away from the Berkeley campus, but he plans to hold the UC administration to account by speaking at a rally just off campus during the upcoming student strike on November 15.
AFTER THE second clash between students and police, the authorities continually gave unlawful assembly dispersal orders, but cops were frustrated in their attempts to end the protest. The crowd continued to grow, peaking at close to 1,500 when supporters from Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco arrived at midnight.
At this point, the massive crowd sat down and began a General Assembly-style discussion. Tension eased, and the mood became much lighter, even jubilant. The assembly cheered, comically, when somebody began blowing soap bubbles in the air over them.
The "people's mic" technique developed by Occupy Wall Street--where activists repeat the words of speakers in waves so that they can be heard in large crowds--was used to communicate. The assembly was so large that speakers had to wait for the crowd to repeat their words three times, sending their message to larger numbers on the edge of the assembly.
Activists discussed next steps, and then a vote took place around 1 a.m. under the star-filled sky. The November 15 date won support as a strike day in order to build momentum for the planned mass protests against the UC Board of Regents and CSU Board of Trustees.
Those demonstrations are being organized by the ReFund |
– not all of it grass. "In 18 years ranching next to Waterton Lakes National Park, I didn't lose one cow to bears, but I saw them killing cows on my neighbour's property," Russell said.
To help farmers living near WLNP absorb the cost of living with apex predators, the Alberta government compensates for livestock killed by bears, although some farmers complain it is too little or too hard to get. Currently compensation comes from funds collected for hunting and fishing licenses, although some ranchers have suggested all Alberta taxpayers should contribute to the cost since many of the bears seen in the national park live part of their lives on the farms and ranches nearby.
I pondered my willingness to pay as I strolled through Waterton town – and I stopped, puzzled, when I passed a golf cart occupied by two border collies wearing reflective orange vests. They sat quietly near a sign reading “Help Keep the Wild in Wildlife”. "[The dogs] chase deer out of town before they give birth because mama deer are very aggressive,” a woman explained. The deer also attract cougars, so keeping them away prevents another human-wildlife conflict.
It seemed 150 years after his death, Charles Waterton's philosophy of protecting predators was still in vogue, even though his practice of putting fences around wildlife no longer worked. Instead I saw humans and wildlife learning to co-exist, with deer-herding dogs and bear-savvy school children. People were building on the concepts of Charles Waterton, protecting creatures for their own value, while modifying them for a different era. And the proof it was working was being able to watch a bear going about his business without fear – on my part or the bear’s.In the wake of the passage of health care reform, Senate Republicans say that they’re less willing to work with Democrats than they were in the past–if such a thing is even possible. But at the same time, multiple key GOP senators say they’re certain one major initiative–financial regulatory reform–will pass the Senate this year.
“I think it’s going to be very, very difficult — very difficult — to get 41 members [to sustain a filibuster],” Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) said in a speech last week.
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who was tapped to serve as a Republican negotiator in an early round of the regulatory reform debate, told reporters last week he was “100 percent” certain that a major bill would pass this year.And that raises a question: While reinforcing Republican opposition to most other issues, did health care reform make the passage of regulatory reform more likely? Conversations with multiple Democratic Senate aides all point to a common, underlying fact: financial regulatory reform is a sui generis issue–one which, as Corker implied, members of both parties will have a hard time voting against. However, at the height of their opposition to health care reform, Republicans had convinced themselves that the bill was dead, and so they came to see their program of opposition as a no-lose enterprise. If health care reform had died, that may have driven the GOP toward a stauncher opposition to regulatory reform. But so long as they see its passage as inevitable, they have the incentive to play along.
“If we had failed in passage, Republicans would be emboldened,” one aide told me. “I don’t see how they’ll message their way out of this one.”
“If it looks like financial reform is going to pass, aren’t they going to want to have a hand in shaping this thing?” asked another aide rhetorically.
And, indeed, there are some signs that Republicans are beginning to question whether it’s the brightest idea to let Democrats own this issue–and paint the GOP into a corner with the unpopular financial sector. Last week, after Senate Banking Committee Chair Chris Dodd advanced a Dem-only bill, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL)–the committee’s ranking member–came back to the table for the third time in the past several months.
Perhaps that leads to substantial GOP support, or perhaps it doesn’t, but Dodd–burned by several rounds of Republican bad faith–says, deal or no, he wants his bill to come to the Senate floor shortly after Congress returns from recess two weeks from now.
Last week, as the Democrats rounded up major victories on health care reform, Dodd told me and several other reporters, “I think, frankly, there are a number of Republicans who went along with the strategy of ‘just say no’ who were never really happy with it, but if it worked they would go along. They saw it fail. And now they’ve had enough of it. and they really want to be involved in crafting things.”
That may be overstating things. But if health care reform gave one legislative issue a boost, regulatory reform might be the one.America, I want you to back away from the Fox News. I want you to turn off the talk radio, unfollow Donald Trump on Twitter and seriously reevaluate your commitment to some of those Reddit threads. Because it's turning your brain into a festering pile of paranoia. I'm just saying because I care.
The latest evidence – and by evidence I mean actual data culled by professionals and not "something somebody thought he heard in the backmasking on a Hendrix track" -- of our collective mania is a new study from the University of Chicago that reveals that nearly half of all Americans believe medical conspiracy theories. Nearly half. The findings, published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, are culled from a study of 1,351 adults who were polled about their beliefs on six popular theories: "The CIA deliberately infected large numbers of African Americans with HIV under the guise of a hepatitis inoculation program," "Doctors and government still want to vaccinate children even though they know these vaccines cause autism and other psychological disorders," "The FDA is deliberately preventing the public from getting natural cures for cancer and other disorders because of pressure from drug companies," "Health officials know that cell phones cause cancer but are doing nothing to stop it because large corporations won't let them," "Public water fluoridation is really just a secret way for chemical companies to dump the dangerous byproducts of phosphate mines into the environment," and "The global dissemination of genetically modified foods by Monsanto is part of a secret program launched by the Rockefeller and Ford foundation to shrink the world's population." As the study's authors write, "49% of Americans agree with at least one medical conspiracy theory and 18% agree with three or more." Or, in the words of "30 Rock's" Tracy Jordan, "White dudes inject AIDS into our chicken nuggets." And this, right here, is how a man like Kevin Trudeau, a man who is now serving a 10-year jail sentence for lying about what the mythic "they" don't want you to know, managed to spend months on the New York Times bestseller list and make himself an embarrassment of riches.
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In a nation in which a full third of the population rejects evolution and people go berserk disputing a TV show about science, maybe our not-based-on-anything-real-or-conclusive medical skepticism isn't surprising. The study's lead author, J. Eric Oliver, suggests the findings also reflect our difficulty with complex issues that are not black and white. "Science in general -- medicine in particular -- is complicated and cognitively challenging because you have to carry around a lot of uncertainty," he says. "To talk about epidemiology and probability theories is difficult to understand as opposed to 'If you put this substance in your body, it's going to be bad.' It's important to increase information about health and science to the public. I think scientific thinking is not a very intuitive way to see the world. For people who don't have a lot of education, it's relatively easy to reject the scientific way of thinking about things."
If your neighbor who thinks the "Left Behind" movies are totally going to happen also wants to believe the dentist is putting tracking devices in his fillings, it's a free country. (Side note: OR IS IT?) But the implications of a deep distrust of the health system have greater implications for all of us. The study reports, "Although it is common to disparage adherents of conspiracy theories as a delusional fringe of paranoid cranks, our data suggest that medical conspiracy theories are widely known, broadly endorsed, and highly predictive of many common health behaviors." And "high conspiracists" – people who believe three or more common theories – are less likely to "use sunscreen or get influenza shots or annual checkups," and more likely to use herbal supplements.
We all need to have agency over our own healthcare – and traditional medical practitioners are wise to work with patients to come up with complementary and alternative medicine plans that are in the best and safest interests of everybody. We don't have to swallow every press release for every new alleged miracle big pharma drug. But these persistent and unfounded theories are driving a perpetually booming snake oil business that peddles unregulated and dangerous "cures," and it's leading to a frightening return of diseases that were once all but eradicated. Got measles? Thank an anti-vaxxer. And remember that while not every doctor is trustworthy, ignorance and fear are indisputably bad for your health.Lin-Manuel Miranda Hopes to Film Broadway's Hamilton With Current Cast
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of the critically acclaimed new musical Hamilton, hopes to film the Broadway production with its current cast, according to a Tweet posted by the Tony-winning composer Oct. 5.
Miranda's Tweet clarified a posting on Vulture.com in which the composer-lyricist reportedly said the production would be filmed before June 2016, adding, "You-couldn't-make-it-up filmmakers have been coming to the show…I have talked to producers about filming this cast before this cast moves on."
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The aforementioned follow-up Tweet reads, "I said we WANT to film the show with this cast before the year is out. That's all I said."
Miranda also explained via Twitter, "When I announce stuff for real I PROMISE you'll know first. I am grateful for your enthusiasm because my god how lucky we are."
1) Gmorning. I said we WANT to film the show with this cast before the year is out. That's all I said. There are no plans for anything yet. — Lin-Manuel Miranda (@Lin_Manuel) October 5, 2015
The new musical by Tony Award-winning In the Heights star and creator Miranda explores the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton. Inspired by the book "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow, the musical incorporates historical figures such as George Washington, Aaron Burr, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
The new musical plays the Richard Rodgers Theatre.The World Junior Championships are just past the New Year. Both Finland and Sweden have named their camp rosters and the New York Rangers have a few prospects heading there. One of those is the 89th overall pick from last year, Aleksi Saarela from Finland.
In related news, Robin Kovacs (picked 62nd overall last year) was not given an invite for Sweden despite notching 17 points in 22 games in Allsvenskan, the SHL’s minor league. Kovacs has also posted an assist in four SHL games and six points in as many international games this season. His exclusion has been surprising to say the least.
Aleksi Saarela is part of Finland camp for two pre-WJC games. Final roster will be chosen after that. Robin Kovács NOT named by Sweden. #NYR — Alex Nunn (@aj_ranger) December 7, 2015
After a slow start in Liiga, Saarela has been a house of fire in his last 10 games, notching eight goals and 10 points in that span. He already has 15 points in 26 games this season, a huge jump from the 12 points he had in 51 Liiga games last season. That’s some pretty good second-year growth if I do say so myself.
Despite not getting to see Kovacs on the big international stage, it will be good to see Saarela get an extended look against some of the best the world has to offer from the junior level.Take a look at the latest designs for new toll lanes on Interstate 66 and how the changes will impact traffic throughout the area.
WASHINGTON — Under the latest designs for new toll lanes on Interstate 66 outside the Capital Beltway, a Metro power substation would be relocated, much of a jogging and bike trail would be next to the highway, and drivers would see dozens of new bridges, toll gantries and traffic patterns.
The refined designs will serve as the basis of final public hearings next month. Construction work could begin before the end of the year, with the most significant work ramping up along much of the 22-mile corridor between the Beltway and Gainesville, Virginia, in the first half of 2018.
The lanes are scheduled to open in 2022. They will be free for cars with three or more people and an E-ZPass Flex switched to HOV mode, while other vehicles will be charged a variable toll that rises or falls based on the amount of traffic in the toll lanes.
The multicolored final designs can be complicated to read, with curling purple aerial structures, dashed lines for potential noise walls, red toll lanes, yellow general purpose lanes and orange ramps next to thin red lines that mark the home and business property that will be taken or purchased by the project.
Among the details in the designs:
Express Lanes users will be able to enter or exit the toll lanes at Monument Drive in any direction at all times of day. The designs add new ramps. There would still be no access to Monument Drive from the regular lanes.
A significant redesign of the I-66/Chain Bridge Road (VA-123) interchange, including a complete rebuild of Chain Bridge Road through the interchange.
The project will pay to move a Metro power substation near the Dunn Loring Metro station that the private companies designing, building and operating the two toll lanes in each direction next to three regular I-66 lanes had initially suggested building a ramp over as a way to save money. A vocal group of neighbors opposed that, and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe told WTOP in April that the designs would be reworked. Instead, a shorter ramp between the regular eastbound lanes and the toll lanes will provide access.
Recently, proponents of a jogging and bike path that is part of the project expressed concerns about a significant portion of the route running directly next to the highway. The final design proposals would put a majority of the trail being built directly as part of the project next to the highway, either inside the sound wall or next to the highway in an area where no new sound wall is proposed. In Prince William County, only three small segments of the trail are being built as part of the project. Each of those segments runs along a road other than I-66.
Other highlights (from east to west):
A new park and ride off Balls Ford Road near Manassas National Battlefield would have an entrance and exit only to and from the express lanes to and from the east. Like other park and ride structures planned as part of the project, it would include a bus area, kiss and ride, and slugging area. The park and ride would be expanded by 2040.
Past the battlefield, a new separated exit for Sudley Road (234) and flyover ramps allowing drivers in the regular lanes to move into the express lanes toward the Beltway or out of the regular lanes toward Gainesville, a shift for the rest area pavement, and new bridges for I-66 and Bull Run Drive will carry traffic.
In Centreville, drivers in the express lanes will not have a direct exit to U.S. 29.
Major changes for Route 28 are a key part of the project. The new interchange, to be surrounded by sound walls, includes crossings for the bike and jogging trail, at least 10 new bridges for highway traffic, and changes on Route 28 that would connect Walney Road and Braddock Road over Route 28, add a new service road out of E.C. Lawrence Park to avoid the current turn onto or off 28, and there will be a new extension of Poplar Tree Road across Route 28 to connect to Stonecroft Boulevard behind Sully Station Shopping Center.
This is the design plan for the I-66-Route 28 interchange.
At Stringfellow Road, drivers in the toll lanes headed eastbound will have an option to move to the regular lanes. Only drivers in the toll lanes headed westbound will have an option to exit at Stringfellow Road, and the only entrance will be for drivers headed eastbound in the toll lanes. That entrance and exit are scheduled to be open around the clock. I-66 will cross over Stringfellow Road on new bridges, which will include extended eastbound exit lanes for drivers going to or from the Fairfax County Parkway. Additional extended entrance and exit lanes are planned around U.S. 50.
As noted above, the Monument Drive exit would expand to allow entrance and exit in both directions (to the toll lanes only).
At the Route 50 interchange, not all drivers would have direct access to the toll lanes or from the toll lanes to Route 50. The designs call for adding an entrance from westbound 50 to the westbound toll lanes and an exit from the eastbound toll lanes to eastbound 50. Drivers in the regular lanes would continue to have the option to exit or enter in any direction.
The interchange with VA-123/Chain Bridge Road would be revamped to reduce the number of curving ramps and add traffic lights at several I-66 exits. Drivers will be able to exit or enter the toll lanes in either direction. The interchange includes trail connection crossings and a new bridge to carry VA-123.
A series of projects around the Vienna Metro station would revamp traffic patterns there. To and from the west, the toll lanes will connect to a new Vaden Drive bridge to provide bus and carpool access. On the west side of the station, the I-66 and Nutley Street interchange will be completely rebuilt into what is known as a diverging diamond setup. From Nutley Street, drivers will have direct access to only the regular lanes.
As noted above, in the Dunn Loring area, the designs now propose relocating a Metro power substation to the south side of I-66 just to the west of the development at the station. Express Mobility Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they or the state would bear the cost of the change. Also in that area, Gallows Road would be realigned to the east, away from Stenwood Elementary School.
At the Capital Beltway, the existing maze of on and off ramps is set to get even more complex. A series of new bridges, entrances and exits, and stormwater management ponds will be constructed largely over and around the existing roadways. Drivers in both the toll and regular lanes will have exits or entrances to and from the regular lanes on the Beltway, I-66 and the toll lanes on each road.
The tolls on I-66 inside the Beltway are separate but related to this project. Those rush-hour only tolls begin for solo drivers in December.
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© 2017 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.by Matthew J.X. Malady
People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer and editor Joe Veix tells us more about what it was like to have lived 26 years without eating any fruit.
I’m 26 and have never eaten fruit, AMA!
— Joe Veix (@joeveix) April 24, 2014
Joe! So what happened here?
It’s true, I’ve never eaten fruit. I’ve had avocados and tomatoes, but I’ve been told those “don’t count.” I’ve also never had juice, though I do drink red wine. That’s technically juice, right?
To be clear, I’m not just being picky. I’m an open-minded guy and like to try everything once. I just get nauseated about even thinking of eating fruit. I’m not sure why. I used to get sick a lot when I was younger, so my theory is that I probably attempted to eat fruit while ill and my brain associated those two things — like how if you get food poisoning after eating salmon rolls, for two and a half decades of your life you won’t be able to stomach seafood or sail a boat or look at the ocean.
But it hasn’t been too difficult for me. I think part of the reason I’ve gotten so far into my life without having to actually confront this is that it’s been easy to avoid fruit. Our country is very unhealthy, and most fruit comes in candy form. (I should mention, I’ve never had candy fruit.)
It’s only ever been socially awkward. For example, if someone brings something with fruit in it to a dinner party and they offer it to me, and I refuse to try it, they get really offended. I then have to explain this whole weird thing to people I just met, and then they think I’m fucking with them, and then usually everyone at the party will just start listing different fruits. “What about apples?” “No.” “Oranges?” “No.” “Jujubes?” “No!”
I’ve frequently been offered money in exchange for trying fruit — on one occasion as much as $500. But my dignity is not for sale!
There was also one time a few years ago when I was working as a production assistant for a TV show, and I had to pick up groceries for the office. I didn’t know what a lot of fruits on my list actually looked like — I have no fruit buying experience — and the supermarket didn’t have any identifying signs.
I was too embarrassed to ask anyone for help, so I used my phone to Google image search all of the fruits. I creeped out a few nice elderly ladies who saw me very sternly holding my phone in front of each basket of fruit, one by one. After I couldn’t confirm the difference between lemons and limes, I had to send a photo to my then-girlfriend to get confirmation. It was a close call.
Also, if I go to a birthday party and the cake turns out to have fruit in it, that’s terrible. Because I love cake.
I realize it’s mostly psychosomatic, but the nausea is so bad that I sometimes get grossed out just by the scent of fruit. If someone starts peeling an orange on the subway I’ll have to switch cars, or risk vomiting.
Despite this, it was my New Year’s resolution to try fruit.
Whoa. But as much as it would be interesting to keep the whole “no fruit thing” going forever and perhaps achieve some sort of record, it’s probably not the worst thing in the world that you’ve gotten to a point where you may be ready for some changes. Could you do me a favor and try some grapes, a few mango chunks, a slice of apple, a kiwi, and a peach right now for the first time and let me know what you think?
Sure! I enlisted my friend Jenny as my “fruit ambassador,” because I don’t know how to pick out fruit or how to go about slicing and peeling it. I might accidentally eat a core or a sticker. In the grocery store, Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” started playing while we felt peaches, which I took to be a good omen.
In addition to fruit, I got a bar of dark, spicy chocolate as a palate cleanser and a 22-ounce beer to ease my nerves.
1. Grapes (seedless, red)
I started with one that was pea-sized. It had a plastic texture, like the smooth side of a Lego. I chewed and swallowed it without a problem, so I tried a bigger one. When I bit down it exploded in my mouth, which surprised me so much that I yelled “ew.” Eating it felt like chewing on grass that was wrapped around chilled mucus.
2. Champagne Mango
My friend showed me her elaborate grid cutting system for mangos, while explaining that her mother used to say that “mangos are the apples of the Philippines.” The analogy was lost on me. I excitedly took a bite, and violently gagged. I somehow managed to choke it down. It tasted like stomach acid. I don’t remember anything else about it. It’s possible I blacked out. The whole thing was basically a core, too, like how a potato chip bag is mostly air. What a huge rip-off. Fuck mangos, man.
3. Apple (Fuji)
I ate a slice, and it didn’t taste like much — like damp cardboard. Bland and crunchy. The juice kind of grossed me out, but I didn’t mind the taste and texture overall. I could see myself enjoying it on a salad, or maybe in a pie. Feeling empowered, I bit straight into that sucker, which felt oddly satisfying.
4. Kiwi
This is my friend’s “top five favorite fruit.” Based on how it looked, and still reeling from my mango failure, I was very nervous. The piece that she cut for me had the look and texture of green sashimi, with seeds that looked like specks of dirt. But I actually enjoyed my first bite. I ate two more pieces, and really liked them too. I kept smiling about it, and my friend pointed out that I had seeds in my teeth, but I didn’t even care, I was so happy about kiwis.
5. Peach
I was skeptical about peaches (re: mango PTSD). The slice tasted similar to the apple, though the skin was pleasantly bitter. Like the kiwi, I was able to eat it without any issues. I asked my friend to demonstrate how she would “casually” eat a peach, like a normal person on the bus, and then I copied her — chewing like I imagined James Dean would — and we talked about politics.
Lesson Learned, if any?
Fruit is actually pretty good! (Except for mangos.) I know it’s a cliche, but you really have to overcome your fears and try new things, even if those things make you vomit, because life is short, and probably even shorter if you don’t eat fruit.
Just one more thing.
I’m very excited and optimistic about my new lifestyle. I’ve opened up an entire chamber of the food pyramid! I can now drink all sorts of fancy cocktails and smoothies! I could get a new wardrobe! The whole world is brimming with delicious, juicy possibilities.
Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York. Illustrations by Hallie Bateman.A Bolt Bus in Manhattan
Wikipedia photo
One of the most interesting recent economic developments has been the growing appeal of relatively upscale intercity buses as a means of transportation:
Megabus.com and BoltBus led U.S. curbside bus companies that boosted trips by 32 percent this year as travelers opted to leave their cars behind and surf the Internet while traveling, DePaul University researchers said.
The popularity of U.S. intercity buses picking up passengers at the curb rather than in a terminal has been growing since the industry reversed a 46-year decline in 2006, Joseph Schwieterman, director of DePaul’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development in Chicago, said in a telephone interview. Bus traffic including traditional service grew this year at the fastest pace since 2008, the institute said in astudy released today.
Like Duncan Black, I’m far from certain that the right way to understand this is actually as intercity bus trips substituting for intercity car rides. The way I would primarily interpret it is as these services leading to additional trips that wouldn’t otherwise have been taken. Instead of riding Amtrak to New York once a year, you ride the bus three times instead. But to me the most interesting thing about these services isn’t how successful they are right now, but how successful they could be in a future of effective congestion pricing on the northeast’s roads. The charges that would be necessary to make a trip up or down I-95 relatively untrafficked would be pretty hefty. Since a bus could spread the price of a congestion charge across many passengers, this would serve to expand the price gap between a bus trip or a car trip. At the same time, however, traffic reduction would substantial cut the speed gap between a bus and Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service.
Non-car intercity transport is always going to be less appealing in other less dense parts of the country since the value of having your car with you at the endpoint is higher. But as those are also the regions that lack recent intercity rail service, the value of a stronger bus option in terms of relieving congestion at airports would in some ways be higher. A little bit lost in the shuffle in the ideological wrangling that seems to have killed dreams of high-speed rail is that as the U.S. adds a hundred million new people over the next forty years, we’re definitely going to have to do something to accommodate their movements. We’re not exactly building dozens of new airports and you’re not going to cut a brand new freeway through New Jersey.Matt Sandusky, 33, has been a peripheral presence in the case since it broke into public view last fall. He was involved in the Second Mile, the charity for troubled youth where, prosecutors said, Jerry Sandusky found his victims, and then, at about age 11, went to live with the Sanduskys, at first as a foster child.
After Jerry Sandusky’s arrest, Matt repeatedly denied being abused and accompanied the family in public shows of support.
But his biological mother has told The Patriot-News of Harrisburg that Jerry Sandusky in effect stole her son from her.
Her husband, Mike Long, said in a November interview that Matt’s behavior worsened after he was sent to the Sanduskys and that soon after moving there, he ran away at night in a torrential rainstorm. “Everybody was thinking there was something going on, we just weren’t sure what,” Mike Long said.
Matt Sandusky’s former wife, shortly after the charges against her father-in-law were filed, moved in court to have Jerry Sandusky barred from being alone with her children.
In closing arguments Thursday, Sandusky’s lead lawyer, Joseph Amendola, said the case against him defied common sense.
To convict Sandusky, “you have to believe he was the boldest perpetrator in history, taking these kids out, showering with them in front of other coaches,” Amendola said. “It doesn’t add up. It makes no sense, absolutely no sense.”
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He noted that young men who accused Sandusky of abusing them did not step forward until years after the suspected incidents, and he suggested that they were goaded into making the accusations by one another, by law enforcement officials eager to find more victims, or by the promise of lawsuit payouts.
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Amendola reminded the jury that when the police first talked to the witnesses, some at first said they had not been abused. “The police kept going back and questioned them to say, ‘There’s more to this, we know you aren’t telling the truth,’ ” he said.
He also stressed that the earliest allegations against Sandusky, now 68, date to the 1990s. “After all these years, when Jerry Sandusky’s in his mid-50s, he decides” to be a pedophile, Amendola said. “Does that make sense to anybody? He was involved with kids from the time he was a kid.”
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But a prosecutor, Joseph E. McGettigan III, said the defense was asking jurors to believe a far-fetched conspiracy theory. In a case with such strong evidence, he said, “you always have to accuse the victims, and you always have to allege a conspiracy,” and in this case the conspiracy would have to include the accusers, a fellow coach who testified for the prosecution, and law enforcement officials.
“The great thing about conspiracy theories,” McGettigan said, is that “they collapse of their own weight.”
He appealed to the jury to recall how pained and nervous the accusers, now young men, were to tell their stories. For victims in such cases, he said, “humiliation, shame and fear equal silence,” leading to years of evasions before the truth comes out.
For them to testify, “Can you imagine how difficult that must have been?” he asked, adding that he felt cruel asking them about it.
McGettigan said Sandusky exhibited the classic behavior of a predatory pedophile, lavishing attention and gifts on troubled and neglected children and getting them accustomed to the abuser’s touching before attempting any sexual contact.
And he directed jurors to an interview Sandusky gave in November with Bob Costas of NBC, which was shown during the trial. Costas asked if Sandusky was sexually attracted to young boys. Sandusky first repeated the question, then gave a meandering answer that ended in a denial.
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“I would think that the automatic response when someone asks you if you’re a pedophile, a child molester or anything along those lines, your response would be, ‘You’re crazy, you’re nuts, no,’ ” McGettigan said.
The arguments and testimony in the case took nine days, and the jury must sift through 48 charges; 4 others were dismissed. Judge John M. Cleland ordered the jury sequestered while it deliberates, and if there is no verdict by late Friday, deliberations will continue into the weekend.
Some of the charges involve overtly sexual acts, including anal and oral sex with a minor, that, if proved, are clearly illegal. But Cleland cautioned the jury that other charges were far more ambiguous, involving contact that could be either innocent or criminal.
“It’s not necessarily a crime, for example, for a man to take a shower with a boy,” or even lather the boy’s hair or soap his back, the judge said, referring to behavior attributed to Sandusky. The critical question in those instances, he said, is whether the adult makes the contact for sexual arousal.
“The issue is not what the child felt,” Cleland said. “The issue is what the defendant intended.”A team of scientists in Switzerland has created a microchip monitor that is essentially a tiny blood lab embedded in a patient’s skin that would send continuous updates to a smartphone. The device, still in the prototype stage, would eliminate the guesswork now inherent in such crucial medical decisions as chemotherapy or chronic-disease dosage.
“Each patient treats the drug in a different manner,” Dr. Sandro Carrara, one of the team leaders, told the Star from Lausanne on Thursday. “It is a nightmare for any oncologist who tries to treat a patient. One molecule or a set of molecules will have different outcomes in different people. “This tries to personalize the cure in real time for doctors.”
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The microchip, half the size of a paperclip, can monitor five proteins and organic acids simultaneously. It sends the results, via an external battery patch, to a smartphone or computer, allowing a doctor to tailor the dose in real time to how the patient is responding. “We are sure that this is a breakthrough, providing continuous monitoring for several applications,” said Carrara. “This is something like working on the future. It’s very exciting.” How long it lasts depends on what it is monitoring, he said. A glucose sensor can last up to one year but a chemotherapy drug sensor may last only a day. “Typically the chemotherapy drugs are spooled out by the metabolic system in 10 hours, so the continuous monitoring would be more than enough.” The lab at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is working on two other applications for continuous monitoring: drugs used in intensive-care units and drugs used in anesthesia.
In intensive-care units, “you have a few hours to save the life of a person. But you don’t know the vital parameters apart from a fever or a few others.” For anesthetists, getting the dose right “is a very well known problem,” said Carrara. “This would provide immediate information on how a drug is being metabolized.”
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The EPFL teamhas tested the device on animals and hopes it could be commercially available to doctors and their patients in four years. “I have already started a couple of good discussions with doctors, and the feedback is they have the will to use this. They do not have any information at the molecular level. They are ready to have new tools.” Fellow team leader Dr. Giovanni de Micheli introduced the device Wednesday at the Design, Automation and Test Europe conference in Grenoble, France.A referendum next year on proportional representation could mark B.C.'s last chance in a long time for electoral reform, says the man who co-chaired failed referendum bids in 2005 and 2009.
And though opposition to moving away from the first-past-the-post system in British Columbia remains, academics in New Zealand say the shift to proportional representation has served that country well.
The BC NDP and the Greens have said there will be a referendum on proportional representation in the fall of 2018, coinciding with the next municipal election. The parties – which last week announced they would topple Premier Christy Clark's Liberal government when the legislature is recalled – have said whatever form of proportional representation is approved through the referendum will be used in the provincial election that follows.
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The NDP and the Greens have said they will actively campaign in support of "the agreed-upon form of proportional representation" though spokespersons for both parties said they do not have a preferred form at the moment.
The past two referendums involved the single transferable vote (STV) system, which was recommended by the Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform in 2004, and allows voters to rank multiple candidates. The citizens' assembly said the STV would give voters more power and yield fairer results. The group's final report noted opposition parties picked up 42 per cent of the popular vote in the 2001 provincial campaign but claimed only two of 79 seats.
In the 2005 referendum, more than 57 per cent of voters supported STV, falling just short of the 60-per-cent threshold needed to enact the change.
But support for STV plummeted to 39 |
get access to the men's pay data — and the comparisons left them deeply dismayed.
Debby Jennings, for instance, whose work as the longtime women's sports information director had earned her a national reputation, discovered that her base salary was $4,000 lower than that of her men's counterpart even though she had a list of accomplishments and awards that went on for pages. Moshak and her colleagues on the women's strength and conditioning staff, Holly Mason and Collin Schlosser, found not only that they were paid less than men's trainers — in Mason's case, some $100,000 less than her football counterparts — but that the university had ignored its own personnel policies and had offered benefits to the men's side, such as employment contracts, not available to them.
"Football overwhelmingly is the top revenue-generating sport in athletics and the sport that generates the most fan interest," UT officials argued in response to a complaint Moshak and her colleagues filed with UT's Office of Equity and Diversity. "With no disrespect being intended to Ms. Moshak, [the director of men's sports medicine] is more important to athletics because of his football-related responsibilities." After a yearlong investigation, the office agreed that some aspects of the hiring and salary-setting process showed "inconsistencies" that should be corrected. But its January 2011 report rejected any claims of sex discrimination, holding that for the most part, the women's and men's job and salary comparisons weren't valid, and the university's chancellor declined to make any changes.
Meanwhile, to the women, the merger was starting to feel less like a consolidation than a hostile takeover. UT had hired a new athletic director, the University of Alabama's Dave Hart, to oversee the process. It was a process, the women now say, that effectively meant phasing out the Lady Vols' identity and logo and replacing it with the men's "Power T" brand. Hart has denied that this was ever his intention, but in a sworn affidavit, Summitt says that Hart admitted as much to her in person.
When Jennings, now one of the female plaintiffs taking on the university, protested that male students seemed to be getting special treatment and that media coverage for female athletes was suffering, she was "shunned for stating her opinions,... for questioning the male leaders or their ideas, [and] for advocating Title IX equity issues," her lawsuit alleges. In court documents, Hart described her attitude as "negativity and insubordination." Jennings was also told not to apply for the job overseeing the merged media relations office because UT's then football coach "did not want to work with a female," her lawsuit says. The university denies this, but in court documents it does acknowledge hiring or promoting four men — all younger and with less experience — into supervisory roles over Jennings.
Moshak, meanwhile, says she was demoted, stripped of her supervisory responsibilities, and denied the opportunity to apply for the head training position that eventually went to her counterpart on the men's side, who came from the football program. Even Team ENHANCE ended up under male supervision.
The merger culminated with the layoff of 15 people — 12 women and three men — in April 2012. Schlosser, a male member of the women's conditioning staff, was one of them, prompting a heartfelt letter to Dave Hart from the coaches of the women's softball team: "We keep coming back to the same questions: 'Why would we let go of one of the best and brightest, not just in our athletic department, but within his entire profession? Why would we not do whatever it takes to find a way to keep one of our student-athletes' best resources?'"
After the dust had settled, the reconfigured executive staff of the athletic department consisted of seven men and a single woman, while the senior administrative staff was made up of 13 men and two women. The reorganization "effectively resulted in a mass demotion of females and staff working with female student-athletes," Moshak, Mason and Schlosser claimed. Where the old organizational structure had afforded them autonomy and opportunities for advancement, now the woman's staff faced what they called a "testosterone wall."
The lawsuits have also unearthed some recent history that the school might have wished stayed buried. Jennings, in her suit, says the Lady Vols' most revered icon, Summitt, was pushed out of her job against her will, and that Jennings paid a personal price for standing up for her hero - a set of accusations that were widely reported in local media outlets and in other sports publications and that briefly rekindled the furor over women's athletics at Tennessee.
When Summitt retired in April 2012, some 10 months after she learned she had Alzheimer's — and a few days after the layoffs — she and UT officials insisted that the decision was hers. But Jennings's lawsuit tells a different story.
According to Jennings — who worked alongside Summitt for 35 years and co-authored several books with her — Dave Hart told Summitt that she wouldn't be coaching the Lady Vols during the 2012-13 season. Summitt was "very upset and extremely hurt," Jennings says in her lawsuit, and she protested the decision in an email to Hart, calling it "discriminatory" and "wrong." A couple of months later, Jennings contends, she herself was forced out in retaliation.
In court documents filed last fall, Summitt corroborated Jennings's account. Hart's decision "was very surprising to me and very hurtful as that was a decision I would have liked to make on my own at the end of the season after consulting with my family, doctors, colleagues and friends," she wrote in a sworn affidavit. Summitt added that she and Hart had a later meeting where Hart said she had "misinterpreted" what he said. Then, after Jennings's lawsuit hit the news last fall, Summitt issued a new statement saying it was "entirely my decision to step down... I did not then, and I do not now, feel that I was forced out by the university." Meanwhile, Hart reiterated to Sports Illustrated that Summitt's retirement was "Pat's decision from the get-go."
Kristin Galles, the Title IX attorney, says the allegations in the lawsuits mirror what she has heard from many of the female coaches she has represented over the years. The difference at UT, she says, is that the women sued. "That's very rare because you're blackballed," she said. "You're a troublemaker, you're a problem, and the men don't want that."
Indeed, Moshak and her colleagues say they see signs of blackballing in their case. Both she and Jennings have taken early retirement and are working as consultants. (Moshak is also promoting a new book, "Ice and Go: Score in Sports and Life.") Holly Mason, the associate strength coach, survived the layoffs but was fired this May. Schlosser remains unemployed.
Meanwhile, Holly Warlick, Summitt's longtime assistant, who led the Lady Vols to another Southeastern Conference title in her rookie year as head coach, earned $485,000 last year, versus $1.3 million for men's basketball coach Cuonzo Martin, hired the year before, whose team finished second in the conference last year.
Later this month, the Tuck Center's associate director, Nicole Lavoi, will release a new study and report card focusing on the number of female coaches in the top NCAA schools. According to Lavoi's data, UT's head coaching staff is now 38.5 percent female, below the national average.
The grade she gives to the once-lauded UT program: a D.I recently put together a PHP client library for FilePreviews and immediately thought about putting together a blog post on how I’d use it. After 6 years, according to this repo, of not writing a single line of PHP, I looked into Laravel since it seems to be the rave these days. Alright, let’s get to it.
This is a step by step guide on how to use Laravel to upload files to S3, and generate previews and extract metadata using FilePreviews.io. If you are already uploading files to S3 with Laravel, check out how to integrate with FilePreviews.
Create a Laravel project
I’m assuming you’ll probably have composer already installed.
$ composer create-project laravel/laravel --prefer-dist filepreviews-laravel-example
Filesystem / Cloud Storage Setup
In this example we’ll be using AWS S3 to store our files. After you’ve got a bucket and some credentials, let’s setup the project to use them.
First we’ll add S3 support to Laravel
$ composer require league/flysystem-aws-s3-v3
Since no one want’s to commit their S3 credentials we’ll modify config/filesystems.php to use environment variables.
's3' => [ 'driver' =>'s3', 'key' => env('S3_KEY'),'secret' => env('S3_SECRET'),'region' => env('S3_REGION'), 'bucket' => env('S3_BUCKET'), ],
Now add your corresponding credentials to your project’s.env file.
S3_KEY=YOUR_AWS_S3_ACCESS_KEY S3_SECRET=YOUR_AWS_S3_SECRET_KEY S3_REGION=us-east-1 S3_BUCKET=YOUR_AWS_S3_BUCKET
Database
We’ll use sqlite in this example instead of Laravel’s default which is MySQL. Set DB_CONNECTION to sqlite in your project’s.env file.
You’ll also need to create an empty sqlite database file: storage/database.sqlite.
Model
Now we need to create a Document model. Our Document model will have a name, file (a URL on S3 to our original file), preview_url (a URL to a preview generated by FilePreviews), and preview (a JSON string containing all the results and metadata generated by FilePreviews.
First we’ll generate our model and it’s pertaining migration file.
$ php artisan make:model Document --migration
We need to add the rest of our fields to that migration before running it. You’ll find the migration inside the database/migrations directory. It’ll be named something like 2015_11_25_125309_create_documents_table.php.
Make sure the up() function looks like the following.
public function up() { Schema::create('documents', function (Blueprint $table) { $table->increments('id'); $table->string('name'); $table->string('file'); $table->string('preview_url')->nullable(); $table->json('preview')->nullable(); $table->timestamps(); }); }
Now run your migrations.
$ php artisan migrate
Controllers
Our simple application will allow you to list existing documents and create new ones. To simplify things a bit we’ll generate a resource controller.
$ php artisan make:controller DocumentController
Let’s go ahead and add that to our routes.
Route::resource('documents', 'DocumentController');
Next we’ll configure our controller’s functions, index which will render our list of documents, and create which will render our form.
<?php namespace AppHttpControllers; use IlluminateHttpRequest; use AppDocument; use AppHttpRequests; use AppHttpControllersController; class DocumentController extends Controller { /** * Display a listing of the resource. * * @return IlluminateHttpResponse */ public function index() { $documents = Document::all(); return view('documents.index', compact('documents')); } /** * Show the form for creating a new resource. * * @return IlluminateHttpResponse */ public function create() { return view('documents.create'); } }
Note: Make sure to import/alias our Document model by adding use AppDocument;. Things like this always got me.
Views
Now our controller is missing the templates/views for both index and create.
Create resources/views/documents/index.blade.php. All this view does is list created documents, showing the id, name, and preview_url if available. We’ll also add a link to our create route.
<html> <head></head> <body> <h1>Documents</h1> <p><a href="{{ route('documents.create') }}">Create Document</a></p> @foreach ($documents as $document) <ul id="document-{{ $document->id }}"> <li>ID: {{ $document->id }}</li> <li>Name: <a href="{{ $document->url }}">{{ $document->name }}</a></li> <li class="preview-url"> @if ($document->preview_url) <a href="{{ $document->preview_url }}">Preview</a> @else No Preview @endif </li> </ul> @endforeach </body> </html>
Create resources/views/documents/create.blade.php. All this view does is show any errors with the form, and allow submitting a form with a file input field.
<html> <head></head> <body> <h1>Create Document</h1> @if (count($errors) > 0) <div> <ul> @foreach ($errors->all() as $error) <li>{{ $error }}</li> @endforeach </ul> </div> @endif <form action="/documents" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data"> {{ csrf_field() }} <p> <label for="file">File</label> <input type="file" name="file"> </p> <input type="submit"> </form> </body> </html>
Note: Make sure the form has the correct enctype or else you’ll have issues uploading files.
Uploading to S3 and storing Document
Now the fun starts! Let’s add the store function to our DocumentController.
<?php namespace AppHttpControllers; use Storage; use IlluminateHttpRequest; use AppDocument; use AppHttpRequests; use AppHttpControllersController; class DocumentController extends Controller { /** * Display a listing of the resource. * * @return IlluminateHttpResponse */ public function index() { $documents = Document::all(); return view('documents.index', compact('documents')); } /** * Show the form for creating a new resource. * * @return IlluminateHttpResponse */ public function create() { return view('documents.create'); } /** * Store a newly created resource in storage. * * @param IlluminateHttpRequest $request * @return IlluminateHttpResponse */ public function store(Request $request) { $this->validate($request, [ 'file' =>'required' ]); $file = $request->file('file'); if ($file->isValid()) { $name = $file->getClientOriginalName(); $key = 'documents/'. $name; Storage::disk('s3')->put($key, file_get_contents($file)); $document = new Document; $document->name = $name; $document->file = $key; $document->save(); } return redirect('documents'); } }
Note: Make sure to import/alias our Document model by adding use Storage;.
A couple of things going on here, let’s break it down.
Validate our file field is present. Make sure file is valid. Store file in S3. This file stored on S3 are private by default, meaning that we’ll need to generate a temporary URL to access them. Create Document using file name and key where file was stored in S3. Redirect to /documents.
Since our files are stored privately on S3 we’ll need a way to generate that temporary secure URL to access them. A good place to add this is in our model. We’ll append a dynamic property to our model called url. By using the underlying AWS client library, we can create a presigned URL that expires in 20 minutes. We access this property like any other, e.g. $document->url.
<?php namespace App; use Storage; use Config; use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel; class Document extends Model { protected $appends = ['url']; public function getUrlAttribute() { return $this->getFileUrl($this->attributes['file']); } private function getFileUrl($key) { $s3 = Storage::disk('s3'); $client = $s3->getDriver()->getAdapter()->getClient(); $bucket = Config::get('filesystems.disks.s3.bucket'); $command = $client->getCommand('GetObject', [ 'Bucket' => $bucket, 'Key' => $key ]); $request = $client->createPresignedRequest($command, '+20 minutes'); return (string) $request->getUri(); } }
If you run php artisan serve and navigate to http://localhost:8000/documents/create, pick a file, and submit, you should be redirected to http://localhost:8000/documents. You’ll now see the created Document. If you click on the file’s name you should be redirected to your file on S3 using our presigned URL. Success!
So we still haven’t actually done anything with FilePreviews at this point. This example until nows serves as an idea of what most people would be actually doing already. Now we’ll see how FilePreviews fits into all this.
Integrating with FilePreviews.io
We’ve put together a package that’ll help you implement FilePreviews in your Laravel projects. Let’s install that.
$ composer require filepreviews/filepreviews-laravel
Now we need to add our Service Provider and Facade to config/app.php.
'providers' => [ //... FilePreviewsLaravelFilePreviewsServiceProvider::class, ], 'aliases' => [ //... 'FilePreviews' => FilePreviewsLaravelFilePreviewsFacade::class, ]
To customize the configuration file, publish the package configuration by running php artisan vendor:publish.
Signup for a FilePreviews.io account by going to https://api.filepreviews.io/auth/signup/. Create a free application and get your Server API Key and Server API Secret from you application’s settings. Add those to your project’s.env.
FILEPREVIEWS_API_KEY=YOUR_FILEPREVIEWS_SERVER_API_KEY FILEPREVIEWS_API_SECRET=YOUR_FILEPREVIEWS_SERVER_SECRET_KEY
Generating Preview
Now we need to request generating a preview after our file has been uploaded and our Document created. Let’s add a function to our model which will then call from our controller.
public function requestPreview() { $fp = app('FilePreviews'); $options = ['metadata' => ['checksum', 'ocr'], 'data' => [ 'document_id' => $this->attributes['id'] ] ]; $url = $this->getFileUrl($this->attributes['file']); return $fp->generate($url, $options); }
We’re asking FilePreviews to generate a request for a file, extract the file’s checksum and OCR. We’re also adding our document id. We’ll use this later so we can identify what preview/metadata belongs to what document.
Let’s tweak our controller’s store function.
public function store(Request $request) { $this->validate($request, [ 'file' =>'required' ]); $file = $request->file('file'); if ($file->isValid()) { $name = $file->getClientOriginalName(); $key = 'documents/'. $name; Storage::disk('s3')->put($key, file_get_contents($file)); $document = new Document; $document->name = $name; $document->file = $key; $document->save(); $document->requestPreview(); } return redirect('documents'); }
After creating our document, we are calling our $document->requestPreview() to let FilePreviews know what we want.
If you run php artisan serve and navigate to http://localhost:8000/documents/create, pick a file, and submit, you should be redirected to http://localhost:8000/documents. You’ll now see the created Document, but you’ll still see “No Preview”. Why is that?
If you recall our requestPreview() function we call $fp->generate($url, $options);. This lets FilePreviews know what we want extracted from our file, we get a confirmation, but no results just yet. This is a fire and forget operation, since it could possibly take a few minutes depending on the file size and requested metadata. We could poll FilePreviews for our results but that’s not really efficient. This is why FilePreviews allows you to subscribe to your application’s webhook by setting a Callback URL.
Webhooks
Let’s go ahead and setup our application to handle webhooks. With filepreviews-laravel this is really easy. Add the following route to app/Http/routes.php :
Since FilePreviews webhooks need to bypass Laravel’s CSRF verification, be sure to list the URI as an exception in your app/Http/MiddlewareVerifyCsrfToken.php middleware:
<?php namespace AppHttpMiddleware; use IlluminateFoundationHttpMiddlewareVerifyCsrfToken as BaseVerifier; class VerifyCsrfToken extends BaseVerifier { /** * The URIs that should be excluded from CSRF verification. * * @var array */ protected $except = [ 'filepreviews/webhook' ]; }
The FilePreviews webhook controller we registered fires two events: filepreviews.success and filepreviews.error. Let’s create a Listener( app/Listeners/FilePreviewsSuccess.php ) to handle the filepreviews.success event.
<?php namespace AppListeners; use Event; use AppDocument; class FilePreviewsSuccess { /** * Handle the event. * * @param array $results * @return void */ public function handle($results) { $document_id = $results['user_data']['document_id']; $document = Document::find($document_id); $document->preview_url = $results['preview']['url']; $document->preview = json_encode($results); $document->save(); } }
Let’s setup the event listener mappings for this application in app/Providers/EventServiceProvider.php.
protected $listen = [ 'filepreviews.success' => [ 'AppListenersFilePreviewsSuccess' ] ];
Our listener will react to the filepreviews.success event, look for a Document that matches document_id and update it.
To try this out locally I recommend using something like ngrok.
With php artisan serve running, on another tab/window run ngrok localhost:8000. Setup ngrok’s forwarding URL as your Callback URL on your FilePreviews application’s settings. Once that’s done navigate to http://localhost:8000/documents/create, pick a file, and submit. In a few seconds you should see a request logged in ngrok with the status 200 OK. If you then navigate to http://localhost:8000/documents you should see a link “Preview” instead of “No Preview”. Click that and you’ll see an image of the file you previously uploaded. Super cool stuff, right?
Bonus: Realtime with Pusher
Just because I’m really liking Laravel, I’ll show you how to add some realtime goodness using Pusher to what we already have working. Once we’re done we won’t need to refresh to see whenever our documents get previews.
Let’s add support for broadcasting events to Pusher.
$ composer require pusher/pusher-php-server
Go signup for a free account on Pusher, create an app, and set credentials in your project’s.env.
PUSHER_KEY=YOUR_PUSHER_APP_KEY PUSHER_SECRET=YOUR_PUSHER_APP_SECRET PUSHER_APP_ID=YOUR_PUSHER_APP_ID
Let’s create an event app/Events/FilePreviewsGenerated.php. This event will broadcast on the filepreviews channel an event called filepreviews.generated
<?php namespace AppEvents; use IlluminateQueueSerializesModels; use IlluminateContractsBroadcastingShouldBroadcast; use AppEventsEvent; use AppDocument; class FilePreviewsGenerated extends Event implements ShouldBroadcast { use SerializesModels; public $document; /** * Create a new event instance. * * @return void */ public function __construct(Document $document) { $this->document = $document; } /** * Get the channels the event should be broadcast on. * * @return array */ public function broadcastOn() { return ['filepreviews']; } /** * Get the broadcast event name. * * @return string */ public function broadcastAs() { return 'filepreviews.generated'; } }
We’ll tweak our FilePreviewsSuccess.php listener to fire a FilePreviewsGenerated event after saving our document.
<?php namespace AppListeners; use Event; use AppDocument; use AppEventsFilePreviewsGenerated; class FilePreviewsSuccess { /** * Handle the event. * * @param array $results * @return void */ public function handle($results) { $document_id = $results['user_data']['document_id']; $document = Document::find($document_id); $document->preview_url = $results['preview']['url']; $document->preview = json_encode($results); $document->save(); Event::fire(new FilePreviewsGenerated($document)); } }
All that’s left is add the Pusher JavaScript code on our index view.
<html> <head></head> <body> <h1>Documents</h1> <p><a href="{{ route('documents.create') }}">Create Document</a></p> @foreach ($documents as $document) <ul id="document-{{ $document->id }}"> <li>ID: {{ $document->id }}</li> <li>Name: <a href="{{ $document->url }}">{{ $document->name }}</a></li> <li class="preview-url"> @if ($document->preview_url) <a href="{{ $document->preview_url }}">Preview</a> @else No Preview @endif </li> </ul> @endforeach <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.3.min.js"></script> <script src="https://js.pusher.com/3.0/pusher.min.js"></script> <script> $(function() { // Enable pusher logging - don't include this in production Pusher.log = function(message) { if (window.console && window.console.log) { window.console.log(message); } }; var pusherKey = '{{ config('broadcasting.connections.pusher.key') }}', pusher = new Pusher(pusherKey, { encrypted: true }), channel = pusher.subscribe('filepreviews'); channel.bind('filepreviews.generated', function(data) { var $doc = $('#document-' + data.document.id), $previewUrl = $doc.find('.preview-url'); $previewUrl.html('<a href="' + data.document.preview_url + '">Preview</a>'); }); }); </script> </body> </html>
With php artisan serve and ngrok running, we’ll need a new tab/window to run php artisan queue:listen.
The complete source code for this example project is available on GitHub.
If you have any questions or feedback on this post or FilePreviews.io, feel free to let me know.At last, Bill Clinton could not help himself.
He paced the stage during a speech on Tuesday in North Carolina, holding his microphone close. He raised his left index finger. And at once, the meandering address turned sharply, and without prompting, to his charitable foundation, a magnet for criticism in recent weeks.
“We live in a Snapchat-Twitter world,” Mr. Clinton lamented, tilting his head theatrically — a septuagenarian embracing his age, decades after reveling in saxophone cool.
“It’s so much easier,” he said, “just to discredit people and call them names.”
For Mr. Clinton and his extended circle, this election has at times felt like a campaign devised to discredit the former president and call him names.
And after more than a year of uncharacteristic restraint — a notable shift from eight years ago, when his simmering instincts often burdened Hillary Clinton’s first presidential run — Mr. Clinton seems to have had enough.After arguing that gay people are pawns of Satan, Southern Baptist Convention leader Richard Land told a Washington Watch listener yesterday that God will punish gay Christians until they repent.
Responding to a caller who said that he recently debated with a gay Christian over the church’s stance on homosexuality, Land recounted the story of a woman who left his church to become a Satanist. He explained that God consequently had her killed, and said the story should serve as a warning for gay Christians.
Land: If this person has had a genuine experience with the Lord and they have trusted the Lord as their Savior, I believe that this person will be in Heaven. Having said that, is this person in an active homosexual relationship? Caller: He is at this point, yes. Land: Well I believe that the Lord also says that those who are his children he will chastise and he will spank. If a Christian is in a homosexual relationship or if a Christian is in an adulterous relationship for instance, outside of marriage, a heterosexual relationship, God will seek to convict that person and God will chastise that person and God will judge that person. Let me just give you an answer that’s analogous: When I was in my first church, I was pastor of a church in New Orleans when I was a seminary student, I had a woman in the church who had become a Christian and she got involved through a personal relationship with a man, she got involved in Satanic worship and she went around the French Quarter saying that she used to think that Jesus was the messiah but that now she believed the Devil was the angel of light. I went to her and I talked to her about 1 Corinthians 5 where Paul says to give over someone for the destruction of the body for the salvation of the soul. I talked to her about 1 Corinthians 11 and I said, ‘If you are really a believer, then God’s not going to let you be a stumbling block and God’s not going to let you continue in this kind of sin, and God will chastise you and God will ultimately remove you if necessary. Now if you go along and nothing happens to you, then I have to believe that you were never part of us and 1 John 2:19 applies, you’ve gone out from us because you were never part of us and you went out from us that it might be made manifest you were not part of us.’ She rejected my counsel and six weeks later at the age of around 25 she dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. I believe that God removed her because she was his child and she was a stumbling block to others. So if this person goes on and is perfectly happy in this homosexual relationship and nothing happens to him, then I would have to believe that he has never had a conversion experience. If he has had a conversion experience, the Lord is not going to let him go, the Lord is going to continue to convict him and to chastise him, to bring him back, as he did David.
Later in the broadcast, Land talked to a caller who said that Obama is a “Communist Muslim terrorist” who “might as well be Satan personified.”
Land didn’t contest the caller’s claims but said that in his opinion, “President Barack Obama is a judgment of God on the United States” because of Roe v. Wade and the legalization of abortion.
“I believe that Barack Obama, his presidency, is a judgment of God on the United States,” Land said.Founded in 2008, Spice Market has come a long way through its eight years of journey. The popular restaurant has seen its share of highs and lows as well. Even in the face of struggles, Sumit Gulati, owner of Spice Market, kept going on. He patiently waited for almost two years but never let go the focus from the core values of the restaurant business, which ultimately resulted in a hockey-stick growth of the Spice Market.
Sumit Gulati Talks About How to Build A Successful Restaurant Brand
Sumit Gulati shares his experience and learnings with The Restaurant Times by POSist in an exclusive interaction. Edited Excerpts…
What was the idea behind Spice Market?
Spice market was started in 2008. When we saw the location, the place called for an Indian restaurant as it was an upcoming hub in South Delhi with malls, movie theatres, hotels and corporate offices etc. So Indian food seemed to be the best option over there. But we were very clear that we didn’t want to do only North Indian food in the name of Indian food. We already had Gulati’s at the Pandara road specializing in North Indian cuisine, which has been operational for more than five decades.
We wanted to offer a cuisine that speaks of India as a whole, with a lot of regional influences. We were inspired by the concept of actual “Spice Markets”, as the most prominent ingredients in Indian food are the spices, no matter which region. Each of the different regions in India has their own inherent spices. We based our menu on these different regional spices. That’s where the inspiration for the ambience came as well. ‘Spice market’ was a working title, but later, we thought it worked best as a Brand name as well.
How was the initial response to the restaurant?
We saw a lot of highs and lows; mostly lows at our initial stage. Right after we opened doors in May 2008, the stock markets & real estate crashed leading to recession. There were also a couple of terrorist attacks in Delhi and Mumbai that year, which led to a very lean tourist season. Our whole business plan & forecasting went for a toss. It was a very tough year to survive.
The rentals were very high and our bar license also took almost 2 years to come. We seriously considered shutting down at that time. But I’m glad we decided to hang around for a bit more, as the 2nd year was better and 3rd year even better.
How did you go through the year of slowdown? What has been your learning experience?
During the slowdown, we focused a lot on cost control; be it the food or staff. We kept our costs as low as possible. Chiquita and I ran all shifts ourselves and did not hire any managers until our 4th year.
The competition was such that most restaurants in our neighbourhood were giving huge discounts to corporates and other walk-in customers. We were convinced that this was not a sustainable practice. Instead, we tried to give personal attention to each guest with consistent quality food. This helped us achieve a considerable growth year on year even when the market was slow.
The key learning for us here was that patience is an extremely important virtue while building a brand. Secondly, there is no shortcut to perseverance. If you are dedicated to serving a great quality experience, you will surely get the customers who will find your product a good value for their money.
Before starting Spice Market. Were you involved with Gulati’s to get some experience before working on the real project?
After we completed our studies and acquired some international experience, my wife and I worked with my father at Gulati’s for a couple of years to get hands-on experience and learn from him. Gulati’s is my source of inspiration.
My father has been running it for more than 40 years. He keeps pushing us to do better and better. My father taught me not to give up and always do better than before.
Spice Market boasts of a PAN India cuisine. How have customers responded to this unique speciality restaurant?
Chiquita, my wife who also happens to be the Head Chef of Spice Market, and I travel regularly to different regions of India. We try the food, pick up the flavours and try to recreate them at Spice Market with our own interpretation. For example, we had loved Laal Maas on our travel to Udaipur and Jaipur. When we launched Spice Market initially, Lal Maas was the single most selling dish for 2-3 years. Now there are the authentic Hyderabadi Dum Biryanis, which our guests totally love. Of course, there are some dishes that don’t work, so we keep updating our menu every 4-6 months to bring new finds. We always knew there was a market for Pan-Indian Cuisine but nobody had tapped it, back in 2008. Nowadays, most of our customers are well-travelled and are willing to try something new.
You play around every possible cuisine at your restaurant. How many SKUs you have at present?
Our menu is very precise now compared to the time when we started. We have almost shrunk our menu to less than half in the last 8 years, the primary reason being able to maintain the standards and authenticity of the food. A big menu is hard to maintain in terms of quality & freshness, which we do not compromise on.
Also, read Chiquita Gulati’s expert opinion on how to purchase the best knives for your restaurant here.April 14, 2015 2 min read
After receiving our Established Entrepreneur of 2014 award, Gravity Payments founder Dan Price has just announced yet another game-changing proposition.
Over the next three years, the 30-year-old plans to raise the minimum salary for every employee at his credit card processing company to $70,000, he told The New York Times.
The concept dawned on Price, he said, while reading a study about happiness, which ultimately concluded that money makes a major difference in the lives of employees who make less than $70,000.
To pay for raises among his 120-person team, Price is cutting his own $1 million salary to $70,000, and also allocating 75 to 80 percent of the company’s expected profits this year of $2.2 million to forthcoming wage increases.
Related: Entrepreneur of 2014 Winner on How He Caught the Entrepreneurial Bug
All told, 70 employees will see pay increases, Gravity’s head of marketing, Ryan Pirkle, told the Times, and 30 staffers will see their salaries double. The average salary at the company is $48,000 right now.
While Price conceded that the move is bound to have little impact on his personal extravagances, which chiefly include snowboarding and picking up the tab at bars with friends, he made the bold decision in order to give employees their chance at the American Dream, he said.
“The market rate for me as a CEO compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” he told the Times.
Related: McDonald's Is Raising Employees' Wages, But Only at Corporate Locations
As his company is significantly smaller than the corporate giants caught in minimum-wage activists' crosshairs, Price adds he wasn’t under any outside pressure to make the call -- a signal that many, if not most, entrepreneurs would pay higher if their budgets allowed.
After announcing the news to his team yesterday afternoon, Price was met by ecstatic cheers followed by speechlessness.
Price founded Gravity Payments at age 19 to eliminate the confusion and excessive fees it costs small business owners to accept credit card payments. The company now processes a little under $10 billion in credit card transactions, and counts annual revenues of $150 million.
Gravity Payments has since expanded into other categories, including administering gift and loyalty programs, consulting on point-of-sale systems, handing out low-cost loans and offering analytics based on credit card data.
Related: Should Tipped Minimum Wage Still Exist?Choose your subject: Select a General Subject Agricultural Studies Architecture Design Biological Sciences Business Management Computer Science Culinary and Cosmetic Services Engineering Health Professions and Medical Services Humanities and Liberal Arts Legal Studies Mechanical and Electrical Repair Media Related Communication Physical Science Psychology School Administration The Visual and Performing Arts Transportation and Distribution Services
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is a lack of political clarification. What would achieving such clarification entail?
Rashi: We are living in a period in which neoliberalism is in a deep crisis. We see the capitalist class develop new strategies for the accumulation of capital and new forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation. At the same time, we see rising mass struggles and, therefore, the potential for formulating new strategies and new forms of organization of the subaltern, dominated, and laboring classes. The key to answering any political question involves looking at the developments and seeing what lessons we can learn from them. For three years in Québec, we prepared for the student movement. We were trying to craft a strategy that would get labor to launch a general strike. It became impossible to do that because there was no part of the labor movement that was willing to launch a general strike. A wider form of mobilization emerged from massive urban spontaneous demonstrations. No one predicted that. Mass movements have incredible creativity and what we have to do now is become involved in mass struggle.
SG: I agree with Rashi’s sentiments, but not with some of the analysis behind it. This gets back to an assumption I keep hearing, even though it is fundamentally wrong. Life is hell for many people, certainly, but capitalism is actually doing very well, despite this. Capitalists are rolling in dough. There is no profitability crisis. If you take a look at what has actually happened over the last 20 or 30 years, this has been one of the most dynamic periods for capitalism in its history. Compare it to the 1950s or 1960s, when a good part of the globe was outside of private capital accumulation. China is integrated now, as are the areas that formerly comprised the USSR. There are very few countries, if any, for which leaving capitalism might be on the agenda. Workers are dependent on the stock market, cheering when it goes up because it increases their pensions, even when the stock is on the rise only as a function of more restructuring and layoffs. Capitalism is not in decline, it is winning — that is the “historical specificity” of the present that we have to start with. How are we going to deal with this? Capitalism isn’t going to disappear in 25 years. If we think that the world is going to end in 25 years, unless we have gotten rid of capitalism, then we might as well give up. The question is, Do we want to build a long-term movement to change capitalism?
Rashi is obviously right about unexpected things happening, but we have to be clearer about the limits of these struggles. What is incredible about the Québec student movement is that they organized for about seven years. The real question is, What is going to happen to all those people who learned how to mobilize and organize? Where are they taking that experience — into the workforce? Into the academy? What will come of that?
Rubin: The problem talking about movements now is that most current struggles, particularly economic struggles, are defensive. They are fighting against austerity and wage cuts. Sometimes they win what I would call temporary victories, but if you are on the defense for decade after decade, the prognosis is not very good. This is why, when I hear phrases like “new forms of revolution,” I simply do not know what that means. It seems to me the fundamental historical problem now is the same as it was 100 years ago. We actually have not progressed beyond it.
Concluding remarks
.
Rashi: It is very difficult, within the confines of the U.S., to get a full understanding of the incredible variety of struggles around the world. If you engage with movements in the Middle East, in Southern Europe, in Latin America, in South Africa, you see that things are bubbling and changing. Class struggle and mass struggle is beginning to unearth solutions to many of the questions that we seem to be posing here in only an abstract way. I would encourage all of you — young activists, young socialists, young revolutionaries — to engage in that kind of practice, with that kind of militancy, because I don’t think you can find an answer without being involved in ongoing struggles.
SG: I was in a meeting about a month ago about what kind of organizing could take place amongst homecare workers, and I suggested that they start thinking about how they could raise some funds to cover costs. One of the organizers said I was full of shit — he said we had to start by getting the money from the people in the room. I thought this was nuts, but all the homecare workers were nodding their heads in agreement. They were making the minimum wage, and their hours had been cut. Nevertheless, they agreed that if they were going to begin to organize, they had to start by making an additional sacrifice themselves. That’s where the struggle is.
SB: I agree it is impossible to simply ignore the actual movements and struggles. The fact of the matter is that, in the U.S., the Left is not organized around unions or class. It is organized primarily by identity groups and interest groups. We certainly have to think about what forms of organization are suitable, but first we have to figure out, fundamentally, what we, as socialists or as Marxists, actually want. What’s the goal? Nobody in the 19th or 20th-century had any question as to what the revolution meant. The revolution would bring about a republic. Changing the economic structure and abolishing classes was seen as the ultimate goal, part of a secular ideology, based in the Enlightenment, that would guide the new society. But today nobody is sure what a revolution would even mean.
AB: How can we say there is no capitalist crisis today? We live in a situation in which capitalist economies have been growing very slowly, the demand for labor has been very slack, and workers increasingly find themselves to be more or less superfluous to the production process, such that they can only take jobs by accepting increasing conditions of misery. Yes, it is true that austerity sucks and every time people fight they win temporary gains only to lose something else, but you cannot just sit things out. Under these conditions, people discover they have to fight, and they do fight. They find new tactics and new forms of organization. That is the period in which we live today. It is very important to pay attention to the kinds of affirmations that are possible under these conditions. Look at the recent history of struggle — the anti-globalization movement, Occupy, and plenty of others. They did not organize themselves around an affirmation of class identity. That is a very important feature of the present moment and it does not simply arise from bad ideas on the Left, but emerges from the real conditions in which people find themselves. I agree with Roger that the conditions for revolution emerge from struggle.
Rubin: It is true in a certain sense that the conditions for revolution emerge from struggle, but there are many different forms of struggle. People do not always come to the conclusion that they should struggle, and people often struggle in bad ways.
I want to end by pointing out that one fundamental idea that emerged from the Enlightenment, and which is deeply connected to the idea of utopia, is the conviction that people can consciously transform society. That idea was taken up by the socialist movement of the 19th century. At the heart of the Marxist project is the idea that humanity can liberate itself and restructure society in a conscious way. The fate of humanity and the fate of the Marxist project both depend upon the extent to which people — and not just a few people, but billions of people — can be convinced this is true. The problem is not strictly economic. People may struggle when there is austerity, but people can also struggle, and have done so, under conditions of greater job security. For the Left, it is ultimately a question of human freedom, and not only of social struggle. |P
Transcribed by Danny JacobsEvery share makes Black Voice louder! Share To Share To
She has been arrested multiple times for destroying Black Lives Matter signs, but police refuse to charge her with a hate crime because they share her views.
An Annapolis, Md., woman was arrested after she had been caught on security cameras vandalizing a Black Lives Matter sign on the property of St. Phillips Episcopal Church, reports WBALTV News.
Chari Raye McLean was arrested and charged with two counts of destruction of property after she painted the word “Black” on the church’s Black Lives Matter sign to read “Lives Matter.”
Police set up a surveillance camera after multiple reports of vandalism against BLM signs at the church and elsewhere around Annapolis and Anne Arundel County over the past five months. Pictures of the 56-year old woman, who claims she is not a racist, were taken right during the act.
When questioned by the police, McLean said she did not deface the signs, but her statement was later found to be false by the officers.
“They made contact and spoke with her. She denied defacing the sign. However, they noticed she had black spray paint on her hands,” Anne Arundel County Lt. Ryan Frashure said.
The senseless hatred that Black Lives Matter has received from white supremacists across America shows how real racism is in our time.
Opponents of BLM argue that “All Lives Matter, not just Black Lives!”
But when have white people in America been treated as if they did not matter? When have they been abused with impunity by state funded agencies? NEVER!
Therefore, the hatred against the movement, which goal is to address the issues that impact a marginalized race, can be explained only by racism coming from some of our fellow citizens, including political elites who are working very hard to derail the conversation about the devaluation and destruction of black lives.
Despite being caught in an act that clearly constitutes a hate crime and lying about it to the law enforcement officers, Anne Arundel County police concluded not to bring up hate crime charges against McClean, claiming that she “only disagreed with the message” and “doesn’t understand the concept behind the movement.”
We are not surprised at all by their refusal to charge McLean, who has been caught and charged earlier for defacing BLM signs, given that these cops share her views.
Ensure to visit this page for all exclusive updates and uncensored news. Kindly SHARE this article on any social media of your choice.The provincial government wants new rules around gay-straight alliances to be in place for the beginning of the 2018-19 school year, at the latest.
Bill 24 prevents Alberta schools from notifying parents if their child joins a GSA. It passed Wednesday morning in the legislature 42-23.
When Education Minister David Eggen rose to close debate just before 11 a.m., he told MLAs they could be on the right side of history, or they could oppose the bill.
After it passed, he said government had collaborated with schools for more than two years to build solid GSA policies, so the groundwork to implement Bill 24 is already there.
In terms of policing the new legislation, Eggen said teachers will need to follow the changes to the code of conduct. His ministry will also pursue complaints.
“Laws are only good if you make sure you actually are enforcing them,” he said.
“Teachers have been looking forward to this clarity, so I think compliance around the law will be based on education, acceptance and internalization of the law to realize it’s the right thing to do.”
Battle over for UCP
The NDP government argued the bill protects kids, ensuring schools won’t out them to their parents. It closed a loophole, it said, which some schools had used to flout the spirit of the School Act.
The United Conservative Party insisted the legislation was political overreach and there was no need for it.
Thirty-eight NDP members stood Wednesday to support the bill, along with Liberal MLA David Swann, PC MLA Richard Starke and both members of the Alberta Party.
UCP MLAs were united in their opposition to Bill 24, though member for Chestermere-Rocky View Leela Aheer abstained from voting.
She said afterwards she supported most of the bill, but was concerned about government overreach and couldn’t vote yes.
Independent Strathmore-Brooks MLA Derek Fildebrandt also voted against it.
Debate was at times heated and emotional, with some MLAs drawing from personal experience as the UCP pushed for amendments that were ultimately rejected.
One group is already mulling a potential court challenge to the new legislation, but UCP house leader Jason Nixon said that’s not on the opposition’s agenda.
Nixon said while discussions will likely continue in the public, “this has passed, we’re moving on.”
Eggen will be pleased, after saying Wednesday he hoped the opposition would “back off.”
“I really don’t need them sniping around the edges and somehow undermining the good work and safe place we’ve now created with Bill 24,” Eggen said.
UCP Leader Jason Kenney came out swinging against the idea of the legislation months ago, saying parents should know what their kids are doing in school unless the parents are abusive.
After it was introduced, he argued Bill 24 stomped on parents’ rights. He also accused the government of using the bill to thwart the School Act — to allow sensitive subjects to be taught without parental permission.
egraney@postmedia.com
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For other uses, see RT
"RTTV" redirects here. It is not to be confused with Russian Television International
RT (formerly Russia Today) is a Russian international television network funded by the Russian government.[4][5] It operates pay television channels directed to audiences outside of Russia, as well as providing Internet content in English, Spanish, French, German, Arabic and Russian.
RT International, based in Moscow, presents around-the-clock news bulletins, documentaries, talk shows, debates, sports news, and cultural programmes that it says provide "a Russian viewpoint on major global events".[3] RT operates as a multilingual service with conventional channels in five languages: the original English-language channel was launched in 2005, the Arabic-language channel in 2007, Spanish in 2009, German in 2014 and French in 2017. RT America (since 2010),[6] RT UK (since 2014), and other regional channels also offer some locally based content.
RT is a brand of "TV-Novosti", an "autonomous non-profit organization", founded by the Russian news agency, RIA Novosti, on 6 April 2005.[1][7] During the economic crisis in December 2008, the Russian government, headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, included ANO "TV-Novosti" on its list of core organizations of strategic importance of Russia.[8][9][10]
RT has been frequently described as a propaganda outlet for the Russian government[11] and its foreign policy.[12][13][14][15][16][17] RT has also been accused of spreading disinformation[17][18][19] by news reporters,[20][21] including some former RT reporters.[22][23][24] The United Kingdom media regulator, Ofcom, has repeatedly found RT to have breached its rules on impartiality and of broadcasting "materially misleading" content.[25][26][27][28] RT's editor-in-chief compared it with the Russian Army and Defence Ministry, and talked about it "waging the information war against the entire Western world."[29] September 2017, RT America was ordered to register as a "foreign agent" with the United States Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Under the act, RT will be required to disclose financial information.[30]
History
Foundation
The creation of RT was a part of a larger public relations effort by the Russian Government in 2005 that was intended to improve the image of Russia abroad.[31] RT was conceived by former media minister Mikhail Lesin,[32] and Russian president Vladimir Putin's press spokesperson Aleksei Gromov.[33] At the time of RT's founding, RIA Novosti director Svetlana Mironyuk stated: "Unfortunately, at the level of mass consciousness in the West, Russia is associated with three words: communism, snow and poverty," and added "we would like to present a more complete picture of life in our country."[32] It is registered as an autonomous nonprofit organization[34] funded by the federal budget of Russia through the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation.[35]
In 2005, RIA Novosti helped establish ANO TV-Novosti (or "Autonomous Non-profit Organization TV-News") to serve as the parent organization for the planned channel. ANO TV-Novosti was registered on 6 April 2005.[1] ANO TV-Novosti appointed Sergey Frolov as its CEO position;[36]
The channel was launched as Russia Today on 10 December 2005. At its launch, the channel employed 300 journalists, including approximately 70 from outside Russia.[31] Russia Today appointed Margarita Simonyan as its editor-in-chief, who recruited foreign journalists as presenters and consultants.[32] Simonyan stated that the channel's intent was to have a "professional format" akin to the BBC and Euronews that would "reflect Russia's opinion of the world" and present a "more balanced picture" of Russia.[37]
Simonyan, who was only 25 years old at the time of her hiring by the channel, was a former Kremlin pool reporter and had worked in journalism since she was 18. She told The New York Times that after the fall of the Soviet Union, many new young journalists were hired, resulting in a much younger pool of staffers than other news organizations.[38] Journalist Danny Schechter (who has appeared as a guest on RT)[39] has stated that having been part of the launch staff at CNN, he saw RT as another "channel of young people who are inexperienced, but very enthusiastic about what they are doing."[40] Shortly after the channel was launched, James Painter wrote that RT and similar news channels such as France 24 and TeleSUR saw themselves as "counter-hegemonic", offering a differing vision and news content from that of Western media like the CNN and the BBC.[41]
Development and expansion
Dmitry Medvedev took part in the launch of RT Documentary
Vladimir Putin during a visit to the new RT broadcasting centre
RT launched several new channels in ensuing years: the Arabic language channel Rusiya Al-Yaum in 2007, the Spanish language channel RT Actualidad in 2009, RT America – which focuses on the United States – in 2010, and the RT Documentary channel in 2011.[6]
In August 2007, Russia Today became the first television channel to report live from the North Pole (with the report lasting five minutes and 41 seconds). An RT crew participated in the Arktika 2007 Russian polar expedition, led by Artur Chilingarov on the Akademik Fyodorov icebreaker.[42][43] On 31 December 2007, RT's broadcasts of New Year's Eve celebrations in Moscow and Saint Petersburg were broadcast in the hours prior to the New Year's Eve event at New York City's Times Square.[43]
RT drew particular attention worldwide for its coverage of the 2008 South Ossetia war.[43][44][45] RT named Georgia as the aggressor[45] against the separatist governments of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which were protected by Russian troops.[46] RT saw this as the incident that showcased its newsgathering abilities to the world.[12] Margarita Simonyan stated, "we were the only ones among the English-language media who were giving the other side of the story – the South Ossetian side of the story."[44]
In 2009, Russia Today rebranded itself to simply the "RT" initials.[47] Simonyan denied that the name change was an attempt to hide its Russian origins, stating the corporate logo was changed to attract more viewers and commenting, "who is interested in watching news from Russia all day long?"[6]
In early 2010, RT unveiled a highly controversial advertising campaign called "Question More", which was created for the channel by Britain-based McCann Erickson.[14] One of the advertisements featured as part of the campaign showed President of the United States Barack Obama "morphing" into Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and asked: "Who poses the greatest nuclear threat?" The ad was banned in American airports. Another showed a Western soldier "merging" into a Taliban fighter and asks: "Is terror only inflicted by terrorists?"[48] One of RT's 2010 billboard advertisements won the British Awards for National Newspaper Advertising "Ad of the Month".[49]
RT is one of several international channels to challenge the United States media's global news coverage.[50] In 2010 Walter Isaacson, Chairman of the U.S. Government's Broadcasting Board of Governors (which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia), called for more money to invest into the programs because, "We can't allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies," mentioning specifically Russia Today, Iran's Press TV and China's China Central Television (CCTV) in the next sentence. He later explained he actually was referring to "enemies" in Afghanistan, not the nations he mentioned.[51] In 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the United States was "losing the information war" abroad to foreign channels like RT, Al Jazeera and China Central Television[52] and that they are supplanting the Voice of America.[53][54]
Since 2012
In early 2012, shortly after his appointment as the United States Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul challenged Margarita Simonyan[55] on Twitter, regarding allegations from RT[56] that he sent Alexei Navalny to study at Yale University.[55][56] According to RT, McFaul was referring to a comment in an article by political scientist Igor Panarin, which RT had specified were the views of the author.[57][58] McFaul then accepted an interview by Sophie Shevardnadze on RT on this and other issues and reasserted that the Obama administration wanted a "reset" in relations with Russia.[59][60]
On 17 April 2012, RT debuted World Tomorrow, a news interview programme hosted by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The first guest on the program was Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.[61][62][63] The interview made global headlines as Nasrallah rarely gives interviews to Western media.[64] Commentators described this as a "coup"[65][66] or a "scoop".[67] WikiLeaks described the show as "a series of in-depth conversations with key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world."[68] It stated that the show is "independently produced and Assange has control"; WikiLeaks offers a "Broadcasters license, only".[47]
Assange said that RT would allow his guests to discuss things that they "could not say on a mainstream TV network."[69] Assange said that if Wikileaks had published Russian data, his relationship with RT might not have been so comfortable.[64] In August of that year, RT suffered a denial of service attack for several days by a group calling itself "Antileaks". It was speculated that the group was protesting Assange and/or Russia's jailing of members of the activist music group Pussy Riot.[70]
On 23 October 2012, RT, along with Al Jazeera and C-SPAN, broadcast the Free and Equal Elections Foundation third-party debate among four third-party candidates for President of the United States.[71][72] On 5 November, RT broadcast the two candidates that were voted winners of that debate, Libertarian Party candidate Governor Gary Johnson and the Green Party of the United States candidate Jill Stein from RT's Washington, D.C. studio.[73][74][75]
In November 2012, Israeli Defense Force bombs severely damaged RT's offices in Gaza City, wounding four journalists, during Operation Pillar of Defense. The office was right next to that of the Israeli target, Al-Aqsa TV, a television station that was affiliated with the Palestinian militant group Hamas.[citation needed]
In May 2013, RT announced that former CNN host Larry King would host a new talk show on RT. King said in an advertisement on RT: "I would rather ask questions to people in positions of power, instead of speaking on their behalf."[76][77] As part of the deal, King would also bring his Hulu series Larry King Now to RT. On 13 June 2013, RT aired a preview telecast of King's new Thursday evening program Politicking, with the episode discussing Edward Snowden's leaking of the PRISM surveillance program.[78]
Vladimir Putin visited the new RT broadcasting centre in June 2013 and stated "When we designed this project back in 2005 we intended introducing another strong player on the international scene, a player that wouldn't just provide an unbiased coverage of the events in Russia but also try, let me stress, I mean – try to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams.... We wanted to bring an absolutely independent news channel to the news arena. Certainly the channel is funded by the government, so it cannot help but reflect the Russian government's official position on the events in our country and in the rest of the world one way or another. But I’d like to underline again that we never intended this channel, RT, as any kind of apologetics for the Russian political line, whether domestic or foreign."[79][80]
In early October 2014, RT announced the launch of a dedicated news channel, RT UK, aimed at British audiences. The new channel began operating on 30 October 2014.[81]
In 2018 some of the RT staff started a new media project Redfish.media that positions itself as "grassroots journalism".[82] The website has been criticized by an activist Musa Okwonga for deceptively taking an interview from him and then distributing it across RT channels while hiding its real affiliation.[83] Another similar project is In the NOW started in 2018.[84] In 2019 Facebook blocked the In the NOW page. Facebook said that even though it does not require pages to disclose who funds them, it had suspended the channel so viewers would not "be misled about who’s behind them". Maffick’s CEO, described the blocking as “unprecedented discrimination,” and noted that Facebook didn’t ask other channels to declare their parent company and financial affiliations. In the NOW also has an active channel on YouTube and regularly posts videos from Soapbox. [85][86]
Organization
State-owned RIA Novosti news agency, which founded RT in 2005, is one of the largest in Russia. Its chairperson is Svetlana Mironyuk, who has modernised the agency since her appointment in 2003.[87][88][89] RIA Novosti has stated it helped establish RT, but is "neither a sponsor nor a backer of Russia Today."[6] Mikhail Seslavinsky, in charge of the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation asserted in 2005 that "Russia Today will come as an independent company".[90] Under Russian law RT is an independent organisation.[34]
In 2007, RT established offices in the same building as RIA Novosti, after the Russian Union of Journalists was forced to vacate them.[91] In 2012 Anna Kachkayeva, Dean of Media Communications at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, stated that they "share the same roof" because the two organizations are located in the same building, but regarding "funding, editorial policy, management and staff, they are two independent organisations whose daily operations are not interconnected in any way."[34] In 2008, Simonyan noted that more than 50 young RT journalists had gone on to take positions in large Western media outlets.[43] By 2010, RT had grown to a staff of 2,000.[6]
RT studios building in Moscow in 2013
In December 2012, RT moved its production studios and headquarters to a new facility in Moscow. The move coincided with RT's upgrade of all of its English-language news programming to high-definition.[92][93][94]
In 2013, a presidential decree issued by Vladimir Putin dissolved RIA Novosti and subsumed it into a new information agency called Rossiya Segodnya (directly translated as Russia Today).[95] According to a report on the RT website, the new news agency is "in no way related" to the news channel RT despite the similarity to RT's original name.[95] However, on 31 December 2013, Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the RT news channel, was also appointed as editor-in-chief of the new news agency while maintaining her duties for the television network.[96]
RT cooperates with a number of media sources in Russia and abroad, including private media like Izvestia, Kommersant, Trud, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Vedomosti, Argumenty i Fakty and the non-Russian Association for International Broadcasting, Huffington Post and News.com.au.[3][97]
Budget
When it was established in 2005, ANO TV-Novosti invested $30 million in start-up costs to establish RT,[11] with a budget of $30 million for its first year of operation. Half of the network's budget came from the Russian government; the other half came from pro-Kremlin commercial banks at the government's request.[41] Its annual budget increased from approximately $80 million in 2007 to $380 million in 2011, but was reduced to $300 million in 2012.[98][99] Russian President Vladimir Putin prohibited the reduction of funding for RT on 30 October 2012.[100]
About 80 percent of RT's costs are incurred outside Russia, paying partner networks around $260 million for the distribution of its channels in 2014.[101][102] In 2014 RT received 11.87 billion rubles ($310 million) in government funding that year and was expected to receive 15.38 billion rubles ($400 million) in 2015.[103] (For comparison the bigger BBC World Service Group had a $376 million budget in 2014-15.[104]) However at the start in 2015, as the ruble's value plummeted and a ten percent reduction in media subsidies was imposed, it was thought that RT's budget for the year would fall to about $236 million.[101][102] During the year, government funding was increased to 20.8 billion roubles (around $300 million in September).[105] In 2015, RT was expected to receive 19 billion rubles ($307 million) from the Russian government in 2016.[106]
Network
According to RT, the network's feed is carried by 22 satellites and over 230 operators, which provides a distribution reach to about 700 million households in more than 100 countries,[107] and that RT America is available to 85 million households throughout the United States.[108]
In addition to its main English language channel RT International, RT UK and RT America, RT also runs Arabic language channel Rusiya Al-Yaum, Spanish-language channel Actualidad RT, as well as the documentary channel RTDoc. RT maintains 21 bureaus in 16 countries, including those in Washington, D.C., New York City, London, England; Paris, France; Delhi, India; Cairo, Egypt; Baghdad, Iraq; and Kiev, Ukraine. It employs over 2,000 media professionals worldwide.[3]
The sharp decline in the ruble at the end of 2014, forced it to postpone channels in German and French.[104]
As well as the news agency Ruptly, RT also operates the following websites: RT на русском (in Russian),[114] RT en français (French),[115] RT Deutsch (German).[116]
In 2015 RT's YouTube news channels were: RT (the main channel), RT America, RT Arabic, RT en Español, RT Deutsch, RT French, RT UK, RT на русском and the newly launched RT Chinese.[101]
In September 2012, RT signed a contract with Israeli-based RRSat to distribute high definition feeds of the channel in the United States, Latin America and Asia.[117] In October 2012, RT's Rusiya Al-Yaum and RT joined the high definition network Al Yah Satellite Communications ("YahLive").[118] On 12 July 2014, during his visit to Argentina, Putin announced that Actualidad RT will broadcast on free-to-air in the South American country, making it the first foreign television channel to be broadcast free-to-air there.[119][120] However, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Argentina's State Media Authorities decided to suspend RT on 11 June 2016, along with the Venezuelan television channel TeleSur that had been authorized by the previous left-leaning government of Cristina Kirchner. Officially, Argentina wants to devote RT's frequency spot to domestic broadcasts.[121] RT was made available on the dominant Australian subscription television platform Foxtel on 17 February 2015.[122]
Ratings
Reliable figures for RT's worldwide audience are not available.[105] In the United States, RT typically pays cable and satellite services to carry its channel in subscriber packages.[123] In 2011, RT was the second most-watched foreign news channel in the United States (after BBC World News),[124] and the number one foreign network in five major U.S. urban areas in 2012.[125] It also rates well among younger Americans under 35 and among inner city areas.[125]
In the UK the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) has included RT in the viewer data it publishes since 2012.[105] According to their data approximately 2.5 million Britons watched RT during the third quarter of 2012, making it the third most-watched rolling news channel in Britain, behind BBC News and Sky News (not including Sky Sports News).[92][126][127] However RT was soon overtaken by Al Jazeera English,[128] and viewing figures had dropped to about 2.1 million by the end of 2013.[129] For comparison it has marginally fewer viewers than S4C, the state-funded Welsh language broadcaster,[130] or minor channels such as Zing, Viva and Rishtey.[131] According to internal documents submitted for Kremlin review, RT's viewership amounts to less than 0.1 percent of Europe's television audience, except in Britain, where 2013 viewership was estimated at approximately 120,000 persons per day.[123] According to the leaked documents, RT was ranked 175th out of 278 channels in Great Britain in May 2013, or in fifth place out of eight cable news channels.[123] In August 2015, RT's average weekly viewing figure had fallen to around 450,000 (0.8 percent of the total UK audience), 100,000 fewer than in June 2012 and less than half that of Al Jazeera English.[105][132] In March 2016 the monthly viewing was figure 0.04%.[133]
Latin America is the second most significant area of influence for internet RT (rt.com). In 2013, RT ascended to the ranks of the 100 most watched websites in seven Latin American countries.[134]
A Pew Research survey of the most popular news videos on YouTube in 2011-12, found RT to be the top source with 8.5 percent of posts. However of these, 68 percent consisted of first-person video accounts of dramatic worldwide events, likely acquired by the network rather than created by it.[135][136] In 2013, RT became the first television news channel to reach 1 billion views on YouTube.[13] In 2014 its main (English) channel was reported have 1.4 million subscribers.[137]
In 2015 The Daily Beast reported that RT hugely exaggerated its global viewership and that its most-watched segments were on apolitical subjects.[138] Between 2013 and 2015, more than 80% of RT's viewership was for videos of accidents, crime, disasters, and natural phenomena, such as the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor event, with less than 1% of viewership for political videos.[123] In late 2015, all of the 20 most watched videos on its main channel, totaling 300 million views were described as "disaster/novelty". Of the top 100, only small number could be categorized as political with only one covering Ukraine.[105] The most popular video of Russian president Putin shows him singing "Blueberry Hill" at a 2010 St. Petersburg charity event.[123] In 2017, The Washington Post analysed RT's popularity and concluded that "it’s not very good at its job" as "Moscow’s propaganda arm" due to its relative unpopularity.[139] RT has disputed both The Daily Beast's and The Washington Post's assessments and has said that their analyses used outdated viewership data.[140] [141]
A study involving Professor Robert Orttung at George Washington University states that RT uses human interest stories without ideological content to attract viewers to its channels. Also between January and May 2015, the Russian-language channel actually had the most viewers, with approximately double the number of the main channel, despite only having around one third the number of subscribers.[101]
Programming
In 2008, Heidi Brown wrote in Forbes that "the Kremlin is using charm, good photography and a healthy dose of sex appeal to appeal to a diverse, skeptical audience. The result is entertaining – and ineffably Russian." She added that Russia Today has managed to "get foreigners to at least consider the Russian viewpoint – however eccentric it may be..."[142]
The Alyona Show
The Alyona Show, hosted by Alyona Minkovski, ran from 2009 to 2012 (when Minkovski left RT to join The Huffington Post). Daily Beast writer Tracy Quan described The Alyona Show as "one of RT's most popular vehicles".[143] The New Republic columnist Jesse Zwick wrote that one journalist told him that Minkovski is "probably the best interviewer on cable news."[144] Benjamin R. Freed wrote in the avant-garde culture magazine SOMA that "The Alyona Show does political talk with razor-sharp wit."[145] David Weigel called the show "an in-house attempt at a newsy cult hit" and noted that "her meatiest segments were about government spying, and the Federal Reserve, and America's undeclared wars".[45] Minkovski had complained about being characterized as if she was "Putin's girl in Washington" or as being "anti-American".[145] After Minkovski argued that Glenn Beck was "not on the side of America. And the fact that my channel is more honest with the American people is something you should be ashamed of.", Columbia Journalism Review writer Julia Ioffe asked "since |
, and community cohesion." When a community garden is established in a neighborhood, property values typically shoot up in the surrounding area. (That said, this can also raise thorny issues around gentrification and displacement in low-income areas.)
Other research has found that community gardens can increase social bonds and networks among neighbors and the people who participate in farming. These farms, the authors write, "bridge gaps, reduce existing tensions, and foster social integration between otherwise segregated groups." Tilling the soil on a Saturday morning is a great way to bring people together. It's also a healthy, relaxing activity.
There are even a few economic perks. While urban farms don't usually provide all that many livable-wage jobs, they can "serve as sites for education, youth development, and skills/workforce training opportunities." Some cities have programs that use urban agriculture to help teach young people about science, environmental stewardship, and healthy eating. Other urban farms offer workforce training, though Santo says further research is needed to gauge how transferable these skills are.
The big catch, however, is that urban farms aren't always as inclusive as they aspire to be — and there are often huge class divides. "A number of case studies," the Johns Hopkins authors note, "have found that urban farms and gardens … have been led by mostly white non-residents in predominantly black and/or Latino neighborhoods, unintentionally excluding people of color from participating in or reaping the benefit of such efforts." (The links are mine, though they have many more citations.)
So urban farming can have a number of wonderful social benefits — but those aren't always shared widely. "It is essential," the authors conclude, "that the residents of the communities being affected by urban agriculture projects are not just consulted but fully empowered in leadership and decision-making to the greatest extent possible." Otherwise, urban farming mostly will just be a fun hobby for urban elites.
3) Urban farming isn't always more environmentally friendly
Modern-day industrial agriculture certainly has its environmental drawbacks — from soil degradation to disruption of the nitrogen cycle to all the fossil fuels used for the heavy machinery. But, the authors note, that doesn't mean urban farming is always a clear improvement.
Some advocates like the idea of urban agriculture because it reduces the number of miles that food needs to be transported. Yet transportation is a relatively small slice of the overall carbon footprint of agriculture. One study of an urban farming project in the United Kingdom found that it reduced diet-related emissions for the community by just 0.4 percent (although the fields themselves did help sequester carbon-dioxide). The emissions benefits may be biggest for produce that gets shipped by air, like berries.
And on the flip side, some studies have noted, if urban farms take up too much land and increase sprawl, they could actually end up making global warming worse by increasing overall driving. Cities only have finite space, and sometimes the greenest thing you can do with a vacant lot is build more housing rather than grow a bunch of plants.
There are other angles to consider, too: urban growers often use water and fertilizer and pesticides less efficiently than large-scale rural farms do. Industrial agriculture gets a bad rap, but there are sometimes real advantages to economies of scale.
The environmental benefits of urban farming get even more complicated when we consider indoor "vertical farms," which are often touted as a sustainable option that use less soil and water. Although designs differ, some of these setups can use an enormous amount of energy, especially if they require artificial lighting. Still, it varies case by case; see this piece by Paul Marks in New Scientist for a further exploration.
That all said, the Johns Hopkins authors note, various studies have found that urban agriculture can have some less-obvious environmental benefits. Community gardens and green roofs can help filter out local air pollution, cool down cities in the summertime, and retain precipitation — avoiding storm-water runoff into nearby waterways. When designed well, urban gardens can provide valuable habitats for wild bees and other pollinators.
"It's hard to make sweeping generalizations here," Santo told me. When designed right, urban farms can make some modest but valuable improvements to the sustainability of our food system. But when designed poorly, they can end up being even worse for the environment — say, if they're using fertilizer inefficiently and polluting nearby waters with nitrogen run-off.
4) One little-studied aspect of urban farms — they can teach us to appreciate food better
In our conversation, Santo mentioned one feature of urban farms that often gets shortchanged in dry policy discussions: "They can reconnect people with how to grow food."
That is, people who participate in a community garden learn what it takes to grow different crops — and appreciate how difficult it actually is. They can better grasp the seasonality of different fruits and vegetables (which is, at the very least, a handy skill in the grocery store). They can learn why food waste occurs. They can see firsthand the the ins and outs of a complex, vital system most of us have lost touch with.
Nathanael Johnson at Grist has written wonderfully about this aspect of urban farming, and he cited a 2012 essay in Gastronomica by Jason Mark making this point at length. "Spend a few months taking a broccoli from seed to harvest, and you’ll soon have a much deeper appreciation for the natural systems on which we depend," Mark writes. "Our connection to the earth becomes gobsmackingly obvious when you watch the crops grow (or fail)."
"Maybe," Marks adds, "urban agriculture is most valuable for how it forces us to be more conscientious about the people who feed us: the farmworkers, the truck drivers, the processors and the packagers, the prep cooks, all of whom work for next to nothing and have little time themselves to play in the dirt."
That romantic notion is a little hard to quantify in a study — although researchers are certainly trying. Santo mentioned that she'd love to see further explorations of how people apply the knowledge and skills they gain from urban farming in other areas. Do they become more politically engaged? Do they start pushing for broader reforms in our food system? Right now, it's a little tough to say. But if urban farming keeps expanding around the country, this may turn out to be its most lasting impact.
Further reading: 40 maps that explain food in America
Watch: The difference between a sweet potato and a yamI thank the people of India, their Military and Govt. for their quick and kind assistance for the ppl of Maldives in every instance of need — Mohamed Nasheed (@MohamedNasheed) December 5,
NEW DELHI: India lost no time in dispatching drinking water to Maldives on Friday after it received a distress call from Male requesting fresh water supplies as the capital's main water treatment plant was damaged in a fire.India sent 200 tonnes of drinking water through five IAF heavy-lift aircraft and also pressed into service naval warships to supply potable water to Male. PM Narendra Modi used the opportunity to assure Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen that India stood "shoulder to shoulder" with Maldives, saying "together we will take our ties further ahead".Maldives conveyed to foreign minister Sushma Swaraj through her counterpart Dunya Maumoon, the daughter of former president Abdul Gayoom, that Male was in a state of emergency as its 100,000 residents were left without drinking water after the desalination plant there stopped working.Swaraj discussed the issue with Modi after which things moved quickly, allowing an IAF plane carrying potable water to depart for Male early morning. "India was the first country to reach Male with assistance," foreign ministry spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin said. "We are ready to help a Saarc neighbour in any way we can," he added.Maldives, according to local media reports, has also requested Sri Lanka, the US and China for help.While India sent 200 tonnes of water on Friday, five more aircraft carrying the same amount of water will reach Male on Saturday. Indian Navy's patrol vessel INS Sukanya reached Male on Friday night and will be stationed there to produce water round the clock to meet the water crisis. It is carrying 35 tonnes of fresh water and has two reverse osmosis (RO) plants onboard which have a capacity of producing 20 tonnes of fresh water per day.Apart from this, a large tanker vessel INS Deepak has also set sail from Mumbai. Two offshore patrol vessels (OPVs) have been kept on standby for any future requirements.The first aircraft, an IL-76, arrived in Male on Friday at 1.15 pm carrying a large consignment of water to meet the immediate requirement. It was received by Col (retd) Mohamed Nazim, minister of defence and national security of Maldives, also the head of the task force set up to deal with the water crisis, along with fisheries minister Shainee, environment minister Thoriq Ibrahim and ambassador Abdul Hameed."Defence minister Nazim expressed his deepest appreciation and heartfelt thanks for India's prompt response to alleviate the problems of Maldivians in the true spirit of our close and time-tested ties," said the Indian high commission in a statement.A major fire broke out at the Male Water and Sewerage Company (MWSC) generator control panel on December 4, causing extensive damage to the cabling of the generator to the distillation plants and disconnection of water supply. The only water available at Male is stored in tanks and sumps and is being supplied for one hour every 12 hours.Mark Wilson's goal just after the break was enough to beat the visitors in an ill-tempered game which saw the Ibrox men end up with nine men - and then have Diouf dismissed after the final whistle.
Rangers midfielder Steven Whittaker was sent off by referee Calum Murray in the 35th minute after picking up his second booking for a foul on Emilio Izaguirre.
A spat ensued in the tunnel as the players went in at the interval and then, in second-half injury-time, Rangers defender Madjid Bougherra was sent off after picking up his second caution.
Seconds after the final whistle, as Hoops manager Neil Lennon and Rangers assistant Ally McCoist had to be pulled apart by the technical areas, the unruly Diouf, booked earlier, was booked and red-carded for approaching Murray.
However, Thompson claimed the night of mayhem could be traced back to when Diouf and Lennon clashed on the touchline following the dismissal of Whittaker.
He said: "Our physio had gone on when Steven Whittaker went off and Diouf shouldered him. Neil saw it and it has gone on from there. That instigated everything.
"They have players who play on the edge but our players did as we asked from them. We are delighted with the performance, discipline-wise and football-wise.
Rangers manager Walter Smith claimed Diouf was an "easy target".
Smith said: "He's an easy target for criticism and he gets himself wound up a little bit as he has done at the end of the game because it was a frustrating evening for us to see two players sent off.
"That's the way he is. I am not so sure we committed many more fouls than Celtic."Washington State Tries To Criminalize Service Providers For User Behavior; Internet Archive Sues
from the section-230,-have-you-read-it? dept
SB 6251 would effectively coerce, by threat of felony prosecution, online service providers to become censors of third-party users' content by threatening five years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine per violation against anyone who knowingly publishes, disseminates or displays or anyone who “indirectly” “causes” the publication, dissemination, or display of content that contains an explicit or even “implicit” offer of any sexual contact for “something of value” in Washington if the content includes an image that turns out to be of a minor. Because of its expansive language (i.e., “indirectly” “causes”), the law could be applied not only to online classified ad services like Backpage.com but also to any web site that provides access to third-party content, including user comments, reviews, chats, and discussion forums, and to social networking sites, search engines, Internet service providers, and more. A law that takes such an overbroad approach is of serious concern to the Internet Archive, which aims to serve as a library for the Internet, and accordingly, houses more than 150 billion web pages archived since 1996.
The law expressly states that it is not a defense that the defendant did not know that the image was of a minor. Instead, to avoid prosecution, the defendant must obtain governmental or educational identification for the person(s) depicted in the post (notably, even if that ID does not contain a photograph). This means that service providers – no matter where headquartered or operated – may be asked to review each and every piece of third-party content accessible through their services to determine whether the content is an “implicit” ad for a commercial sex act in Washington, whether it includes a depiction of a person, and, if so, obtain and maintain a record of the person’s ID. These obligations would severely impede the practice of hosting third-party content online.
For years, we've talked about the importance of Section 230 inapplying liability directed at the actual people who break laws, rather than the tools and services they use. Unfortunately, some people fail to make a distinction and love to blame service providers. And... once it gets into areas that make people react emotionally, things get ridiculous. For example, we've written a few times about the misguided attacks on Backpage.com, which only came about because of similar misguided attacks on Craigslist. At issue was that both sites had been used for prostitution and sex trafficking. But, rather than do thething and work with those platforms -- who both have programs to do exactly this -- to make it easier for law enforcement to find and prosecute those involved in such efforts, grandstanding politicians and activists blamed the service providers, driving the actual activities further underground. Of course, they have never had any real legal argument, and the lawsuits have fallen flat However, it appears that some politicians in Washington State decided to pass a state law ( SB 6251 ) which targets service providers. It's one of those laws that it's easy for politicians to get behind without realizing what they're actually doing. They think they're "protecting the children" but they're actually making the problem significantly worse. That's because they're not setting up a better way to track down and stop those actually responsible, but rather are simply telling them to move further underground, where it will be even harder to stop them.And, of course, in their zeal to "protect the children" the politicians who passed this bill wrote it so broadly that it can create massive problems for tons of legitimate online service providers. The Internet Archive, represented by the EFF, has filed to join a lawsuit (from Backpage) against the law, pointing out that it clearly violates Section 230 of the CDA, which providers the necessary safe harbors for service providers. The overreach of the Washington law is pretty astounding:I'm sure the folks behind this law had the best of intentions. Sex trafficking of underage persons is a very real and horrific problem (even if the numbers bandied about are massively exaggerated ). But the real solution is to go after the actual perpetrators, and that means working with service providers to help track them down -- not criminalizing the service providers in a way that kills off lots of legitimate activity as well.
Filed Under: cda, censorship, liability, safe harbors, section 230, washington state
Companies: backpage.com, craigslist, eff, internet archive, village voiceNewcastle United have reportedly joined the race for Liverpool's Divock Origi.
According to The Telegraph, Newcastle United are in the race to sign Liverpool striker Divock Origi before Thursday's transfer deadline, joining Premier League rivals Tottenham Hotspur among other clubs.
The Magpies have landed one striker this summer in Spaniard Joselu, and he marked his first league start with a goal against West Ham United, but question marks still linger over the futures of Aleksandar Mitrovic and Dwight Gayle.
Manager Rafael Benitez has been frustrated in the transfer market this summer but may now hope to land another striker, with a raid on former club Liverpool potentially on the cards.
The Telegraph report that Newcastle are interested in securing the services of Liverpool striker Divock Origi, who has allegedly been told that he could leave before the transfer deadline as he pursues first-team football.
If Liverpool bring in a new signing - preferably Monaco's Thomas Lemar - then Origi could leave, possibly in a part-exchange deal for Lemar himself, but a whole host of other clubs are also thought to be keen.
Crystal Palace, Tottenham Hotspur, Marseille, Inter Milan, Juventus, Sampdoria, Bayer Leverkusen, Werder Bremen and Wolfsburg are also understood to be interested in signing Origi, either on loan or permanently.
Origi, 22, joined Liverpool from Lille in the summer of 2014, and having been loaned back to the French side for a season, he joined up with the Reds in 2015 - and he has hit 21 goals in 76 games in all competitions for Jurgen Klopp's men.
The Belgian international, who broke out at the 2014 World Cup to spark his move to Liverpool, has struggled to nail down a starting role at Anfield, and now finds himself behind Roberto Firmino, Daniel Sturridge and possibly even summer signing Dominic Solanke.
Newcastle could now emerge as a possible destination for Origi if he wants to play first-team football this season, but the Magpies will not only have to fend off major competition from the likes of Tottenham - who are looking for competition for Harry Kane - but also hope that Liverpool bring in new faces to free up Origi before the deadline.PLUS: Did Palin attorney defame an ethics complainant in recent statement?
Brad Friedman Byon 7/22/2009, 2:12pm PT
[Update 7/24/09: I chatted about the issues in this article with noted Mudlflats blogger & Huffington Post contributor AK Muckraker --- an expert on all things Palin --- while Guest Hosting Thursday's Mike Malloy Show. Listen to the interview right here. Select Hour 3 audio archive. Interview begins about 10 minutes into the archive.]
A brief, two paragraph statement [PDF] by the private attorney of Alaska's very-soon-to-be-former Gov. Sarah Palin was posted on the governor's official public state website on Monday.
Attributed to "THOMAS VAN FLEIN --- Personal Attorney for Governor Palin," the statement posted to the Governor's officially run state website at www.gov.state.ak.us decries the latest ethics complaint filed against Palin --- alleging the improper disclosure of gifts and the receipt of free services --- as an abuse of the state Ethics Act.
That the official state website would be used to publicize the private response of Palin on Monday to another ethics charge is somewhat ironical, given Tuesday's leak of a preliminary independent report [PDF] from a state ethics commission investigator finding "probable cause" that Palin's "official" legal defense fund violated the Ethics Act in that it made use of her "official position for personal gain."
Citing Alaska Statute 39.52.120(a) which states that a "public officer may not use, or attempt to use, an official position for personal gain," the state's independent investigator, Thomas M. Daniel notes that "personal gain" is defined by law as "a benefit to a person's or immediate family member's personal interest or financial interest."
Does the use of the state's website to publicize Palin's personal attorney's response to an official ethics complaint constitute the use of "an official position for personal gain"? Was the complainant allowed to post her attorney's response to the complaint, or to Palin's personal response to it, on the official Alaska state website? Of course not.
Perhaps one more ethics complaint needs to be filed in Alaska before Palin quits her job as Governor this weekend.
We came across Monday's publicly posted private response via a Monday night tweet on Palin's personal Twitter page which linked to it:
But, as still more irony would have it, Palin and/or her attorney may have also committed a legally actionable act of defamation in their response to the leak of yesterday's confidential "probable cause" finding....
In attorney Van Flein's statement responding to the leak of the report, as posted on Palin's Facebook page yesterday, he may have defamed the complainant, Alaska resident Kim Chatman, by declaring, as fact, some action of hers to have been "illegal."
"All options are open in terms of legal remedies," Van Flein threatened, in response to his apparent belief, as ABC News characterized it, that Chatman is the one who leaked the confidential preliminary report. "It is a clear violation of Alaska law that Mr. Daniel explicitly reviewed with Ms. Chatman prior to her illegal actions. We will be contacting the appropriate authorities for review and action."
It's unclear whether Van Flein was asserting that the alleged "illegal action" of Chatman was the leak of the preliminary report, as ABC implies, and, if so, what his evidence is for that. None is given. But he has very clearly stated, as a fact, that Chatman committed "illegal actions."
That is, of course, what Palin, via Van Flein, had inaccurately alleged about Alaska blogger and radio host Shannyn Moore, after she discussed rumors of a coming "iceberg scandal" that might sink the U.S.S. Palin --- as we reported here at the time --- shortly after Palin announced she would be aborting her term as Governor to, apparently, become a celebrity community organizer.
Trouble is, neither Moore, nor anybody else to our knowledge, ever stated that the rumored "iceberg" investigation --- believed to be into whether or not Palin misappropriated funds and/or materials and/or labor from the construction of the Wasilla Sports Complex for use in the construction of her Wasilla home on Lake Lucille, which was built during approximately the same period, as detailed last year by the Village Voice --- was a "fact" (other than the general assertion that it was a fact that local Alaskans had been buzzing about those rumors for several weeks leading up to Palin's surprise resignation announcement).
As Van Flein, who at the time described media reports of those allegations as "actionable," wrote in his July 4th legal threat letter [PDF] in response:
To the extent several websites, most notably liberal Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore, are now claiming as "fact" that Governor Palin resigned because she is "under federal investigation" for embezzlement or other criminal wrongdoing, we will be exploring legal options this week to address such defamation. This is to provide notice to Ms. Moore, and those who re-publish the defamation, such as Huffington Post, MSNBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post, that the Palins will not allow them to propagate defamatory material without answering to this in a court of law.
So while neither Moore, nor any other media that we're aware of, "claim[ed] as 'fact'" that Palin was "under federal investigation," Van Flein, on behalf of Palin, has now stated that a legal complainant, Kim Chatman, committed "illegal actions."
Despite their widely reported threats and attempts at intimidation, as Moore and other local bloggers described it at the time, no lawsuits for "defamation" have yet been filed by the Palin team to date. But it certainly seems that Chatman --- if, in fact, she did not leak the report, or break any other laws --- might well have a very good case of "defamation" to file against Palin at this point.* * *
The rate of 3.0-or-larger earthquakes in Oklahoma jumped by about 50 percent since last year alone—and the increase is even more dramatic if you look at Oklahoma's longterm quake history. The earliest year for which there are reliable USGS records is 1978, so we'll start there.
For 30 years—from 1978 until 2008—Oklahoma experienced an average of two earthquakes per year that measured 3.0 of bigger. But then something crazy happened. In 2009, the number of earthquakes began to shoot up. And it kept climbing. "People thought oh this might be a swarm of earthquakes, where you get a series of small quakes that build up to a bigger one then dies off," Williams said. "But this has just gone on and on. It's over a much broader area. We're not even calling it a swarm anymore. It's surprising."
Last year there were 109 earthquakes of 3.0 or bigger in Oklahoma—a record high. But by one-third of the way through this year, Oklahoma had already logged 145 earthquakes of that magnitude. Looking at these numbers, scientists believe there's a significant chance the state could see a damaging magnitude 5.5 (or bigger) quake next. Last month, Oklahoma made headlines when it experienced seven earthquakes—most strong enough to knock dishes off shelves, the largest measuring at a magnitude of 4.3—over the course of a single weekend. Officials are now developing an emergency earthquake plan for the state, where there has been a 500 percent increase in the purchase of earthquake insurance in three years, according to local TV station KFOR.
"It's an unprecedented situation in Oklahoma state history," Williams told me. "And it's kind of a seismological rule of thumb that when you have certain number of earthquakes in a region over time, there's a relationship between the rates of smaller earthquakes and the rates of larger ones. We're applying that rule to Oklahoma."
Scientists say the connection between increased seismic activity and fracking is clear, but there's still a lot we don't understand. And that's because there's a lot about fracking that we don't actually know. We don't know the pressure at which wastewater is injected, and we don't know how deep into the ground wastewater is injected—it could be hundreds of feet, or it could be miles. "The depth of injection matters," Williams said. "If it's really deep, the pore pressure changes affect where faults have more energy to release... But the operators of these wells aren't required to produce this information in detail."
There are also questions about which chemicals are used in the fracking process. Companies might use different materials in the fluids that help break up rock and extract petroleum. And without fully understand why fracking causes earthquakes when it does, we also can't figure out why it doesn't always cause them. Correlation, of course, isn't causation. Why does fracking seem to be linked to an uptick in earthquakes in some places but not in others?The Twitter feed you can always count on for pancakes and other delicious food porn went rogue over the weekend.
The official IHOP Twitter account strayed from breakfast pictures and began sharing anti-Hillary Clinton tweets. The following retweet, which mocks Clinton and her supporters for running a “garbage campaign,” was screenshotted by many users.
IHOP immediately cleaned up their account, providing no explanation. Concerned the chain was taking a political stance, followers started asking questions. Some even called for a boycott.
@IHOP Because of your disgusting retweet, I plan on going to @DennysDiner. Shame on you. #Boycott — #TeamPerezNC 🔥🇺🇸 (@NCResist) January 15, 2017
@IHOP I suggest you offer an explanation instead of just deleting pic.twitter.com/bgSvik7Qkk — Angie Johnson (@wheresmyTitogon) January 15, 2017
After an influx of inquiring tweets from followers, IHOP announced an investigation revealed the account was hacked.
After investigation, we have confirmed that our account was hacked this morning. We appreciate our fans bringing this to our attention. — IHOP (@IHOP) January 15, 2017
But users are not buying it. Many are pointing to the fact that only one off-brand message was shared.
Hackers compromised the @IHOP Twitter account in order to retweet one single tweet… Seems legit. https://t.co/ysbXEc1WAl — Joel (@JoelNihlean) January 15, 2017
@IHOP @MarshieBCakes y'all niggas lying 😂😂 one of your interns forgot to switch accounts — jackie (@modd25) January 15, 2017
Even the user whose account was retweeted is mocking the incident.This pathbreaking article was first published by GR in 2002. In the word of University of Toronto Professor John Valleau, “It is the right time to speak out for a civil world order and reject the threat of techno-tyranny.”
VISION for 2020 is a mission statement of the U.S. Space Command which was published in 1997.1 Since 1997, it has been joined by further documents fleshing out more details of the plan, such as a “Long Range Plan”. (Note the date, 2020, which gives a time scale for our concerns.)
Vision for 2020 sees outer space under the unilateral control of the United States and filled with weapons able to maintain this control and also able to attack the earth below. The stated purpose is “dominating space” to “protect U.S. interests and investment” (perhaps not so very lofty). This involves “control of space”, meaning “access to space, freedom of operations within space, and an ability to deny others the use of space”, and also “global engagement”, which is “the application of precision force from, to, and through space” as “an active warfighter” with “space-based earth strike weapons”. Apparently, then, we are all meant to live not only under constant U.S. surveillance, but under constant threat of violence from a blanket of space weapons — most of us would consider this an indignity too great to be supported.
To what end? The purpose already quoted makes that quite clear: namely, the forceful control of the first whole-world commercial empire. This is driven home by what Vision for 2020 calls an “historic perspective”, which states that “military forces have evolved to protect national interests and investments” and “during the rise of sea commerce, nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests. During the westward expansion of the continental United States, military outposts and the cavalry emerged (sic) to protect our wagon trains, settlements and railroads”, and so on. It goes on to say “the emergence of space power follows... these models” (i.e. of former empires and of genocide).
This is only to confirm, in a surprisingly frank way, what has become the common worldwide understanding of the intense U.S. pressure to impose the neo-liberal agenda and structural adjustment on third-world nations (and us), namely to facilitate the classic imperial aim of seizing the resources and exploiting the labour of less developed countries, where possible with the help of puppet governments. The otherwise curious pattern of often heartless U.S. interventions, overt and covert, is also most plausibly interpreted in this way, as is the refusal to countenance the rule of law in international matters, and the rejection of cooperation in confronting ecological imperatives. No surprises here, just a reminder that the ‘globalisation’ fights, the environmental concerns, the civil rights dismay and the present focus on the military threat are really all part of a single apprehension of threatened tyranny — tyranny threatened, one has reason to hope, not by most people of the U.S.A., but by a corrupt ruling class acting on behalf of a corporate and financial elite which is able to ‘buy’ political power.
Note the problem of controlling such an empire when one colony or another is restive. Nuclear weapons are of limited value, because they are too powerful for most occasions. Their actual use will be too disruptive of the Empire (and will probably have adverse collateral effects on current ‘friends’ and maybe even the homeland). And bodybags quickly become unacceptable to a citizenry not fully identified with the imperial aims.
But imagine space with a blanket of orbiting surveillance equipment and space weapons such as particle-beam and laser devices, rocket and missile launchers, devices to disable electromagnetic equipment or to control the weather locally, and so on. With this, it would be possible to apply force locally and instantly, to choose just that level of pain deemed appropriate, and to do so with impunity. It would mark the end of local sovereignty and much of human dignity.
The role of the Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) project can be seen, in this light, primarily as a stalking horse: a relatively benign-sounding excuse (after all, ‘defensive’, and anyway certain to be ineffective) for abrogating an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that would otherwise stand in the way of the bigger plans.
All is not lost yet. There seems, at last, to be a growing awareness among U.S. citizens of what has been going ahead in their name. One sign of this is the current bill HR3616 presented to Congress by Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), which would prevent the U.S. Administration from proceeding to develop or put in place space weapons; other U.S. NGOs are pushing for a new international treaty banning all weapons from space. Although the events of September 11 helped the Bush Administration to forward its space agenda initially, the travesty of the Afghan “anti-terrorism war” is making people start to question the direction of U.S. policy. There will certainly also be worldwide opposition to the imposition of U.S. military domination of space, as the intention becomes widely recognized.
Canada has a vital role to play. For many years Canada has worked toward banning all weapons from space, playing a leading part in the General Assembly resolution on the subject (November 1999) and repeatedly proposing in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) the convening of negotiations to add such a codicil to the Outer Space Treaty (1967) (which forbids only weapons of mass destruction). Thus our credentials are good, and our partnership in NORAD and NATO must give us some weight. Now is the time for our country to be more vocal. Also adaptable: if the project is being derailed at the CD, then the campaign has to become more public. The Canadian public will give full support, and there may be nothing else so important for the future of Canada and the world as such an initiative.
It is the right time to speak out for a civil world order and reject the threat of techno-tyranny.
Notes“Democrats stuck together very well this session and made strong arguments and strong advocacy on behalf of a woman’s right to choose,” state Sen. Kirk Watson (D), the head of Texas’ Democratic caucus, told the Express-News. “Just this week, I’ve had pressure from leadership pushing to bring up bills in an almost threatening way, and we have stood up to that. …Now we’re at the end of the session, and they’re dead.”
This year, in Texas, there were 24 different measures introduced that would essentially sabotage a woman’s reproductive rights in one way or another. Each measures was blocked and defeated before reaching the House or Senate floor. This is an outstanding victory for Texas and the millions of pro-choice supporters.
The San Antonio Express-News reports, most of the bills were backed by Gov. Rick Perry (R) and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R).
It’s great news, and we should see more of this. It’s been a battle. Texas lawmakers have launched multiple attacks on women’s health during the last two years. They tried to cut family planning funding, made repeated attacks against Planned Parenthood and tried passing some of the most restrictive abortion bans we’ve seen in decades.
Even with this year’s Texas victories, Republicans continue spending, and wasting, our tax dollars trying to impose draconian anti-choice bills that have been, and will continue to be, overturned. Why will they be overturned? Because it’s 2013 and we’re not going back. Women in this country will not go back to the days before Roe v. Wade when abortion was illegal and deadly. That seems clear to the majority of Americans. And yet Texas and other state Republican lawmakers continue to introduce anti-choice bills that try to silence women by stripping away reproductive rights.
There were 694 provisions about reproduction this year between January and March. That is an average of seven reproductive provisions per day! Lawmakers, please. Really – Get the f**k out of our bodies.
The 24 Texas wins deserve a happy dance, as the War On Women continues on. The Republicans who are trying to force-feed their misogynist agendas in Congress will pay the price come 2014. Last year, Democrats had to put a lot of time and effort into getting POTUS re-elected and bringing in powerhouses like Elizabeth Warren. Next year, we shall have a plethora of energy to remove all those anti-choice lawmakers who have sinned against us. They seem to have forgotten the terrible defeat their party experienced in 2012, and we did that, with one hand tied behind our backs. Just you wait, Henry Higgins. The War On Women is ours to be won.
Congratulations to Texas Democrats!
Congratulations Texas Women!
Here Are Five American Women’s Rights Organizations That Work Had To Protect and Maintain The Reproductive Rights Of Women:
NOW
NARAL
Planned Parenthood
National Abortion Federation
UniteWomen.org
(The author, Leslie Salzillo, is a writer, pro-choice activist, political commentator, and visual artist. She writes diaries in Daily Kos and began contributing to AddictingInfo.org in March of 2013)On the morning of February 28, 2006, Darcus Shorten dropped off her 21-month-old son at day care and headed downtown to the headquarters of the Houston Police Department, where she worked on the eleventh floor as a sex-crimes investigator. Shorten was 44 years old, just five feet two inches tall and about 125 pounds, one of the smaller officers on the force. She almost always wore a business suit and a tasteful array of jewelry: silver earrings, a silver necklace dotted with small diamonds, and two or three silver bracelets. In meetings, she was so soft-spoken that her colleagues sometimes had to lean forward to hear what she was saying.
When Shorten arrived at her desk, two sergeants were walking through the office, handing out the reports of sexual assaults that had arrived the previous day. Shorten’s new case involved a 43-year-old prostitute named Andrea who had told a uniformed officer that she had been abducted at knifepoint by a short, stout black man and forced into a dark, four-door car. He had driven her behind the New Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church, in Acres Homes, a mostly poor black neighborhood twelve miles northwest of downtown, just beyond Loop 610, where he had raped her repeatedly, then pushed her out of the vehicle, ordering her to face the wall of the church as he drove away into the night.
Shorten sighed. Of the 1,700 or so reports of sex crimes that she and the unit’s eleven other investigators received every year, the complaints by the street prostitutes were regarded |
of styling with gel or mousse and should be kept up by shaving day by day. It works best with solid jawlines and gloomy appearance. This is perfect for more seasoned high schooler young men who need to keep up a tasteful appearance.
10. Short Clean and Taper Hairstyles
With tight twists, only a tiny bit of length is sufficient to see hair’s surface. A fast decrease around the hairline tidies up the edges all around.
11. Side Pompadour Hairstyles
It will make a rebound. Pompadours have usually been seen all through design history since they should be possible with hair of different lengths – keeping it either long or short on top. Keep the style set up with grease.
12. Straight Shag Hairstyles
This hairdo has developed into a standout amongst the most in vogue hair styles for young men. Contingent upon what sort of hair you have, it can be entirely low upkeep, requiring just a brush and perhaps some mousse. In the event that you do not have actually straight hair, you may need to utilize a level iron to pick up that stick straight look. More often than not, this style works best for young men with actually straight hair, gloomy appearance, round cheeks, and high temples.
13.Cool Top Curls Hairstyles
For low upkeep twists, a more drawn out on top, short sides and back slice is the approach. This cool cut styles twists on top while killing the sides with a high razor blur.
14.Short Butch Cut (Burr Cut)
This hair style, likewise called a burr, is a to a great degree short buzzcut. This is a style that is well known among men in the military. It’s low support, and on account of its short length, sweat won’t make the hair look awful. This kind of hair style likewise does not should be styled.
Numerous young men will like its manly appearance and the general effortlessness of the cut. In case you’re going for this hair style, you might be capable avoid the excursion to the hairdresser and either trim it yourself or request that a guardian out.
15. Short Textured Haircut – Spiky Crop
This blast and facial hair combo is not your standard trim or style. With textured volume at the back and straight cross periphery, it is an activity in differentiations. A high-low blur and calculated sideburn finish this style forward look.
16. Mohawk Hairstyles
Courageous young men with comprehension guardians might need to try a mohawk. This is unquestionably a standout amongst the most well-known hair styles. It is named after the Mohawk tribe of Native Americans. Their warriors would regularly shave their heads spare one strip in the center. This style was said to rouse dread in their adversaries.
Adolescents will like its wild and one of a kind look. Some guardians, in any case, may discover the style a bit excessively forceful. This is unquestionably a teen’s hair style that lives on the edge.
17.Simple Short
This style keeps the hair somewhat more on the top, with sides and back short. This hairstyle is the best for those who need aneasy hairdo. They will get the opportunity to play with this new look. A little hair gel and tussle of the hair will make a spiked or bedhead look in no time flat.
18.Spiks Mens Short Hairstyles
It is a prominent teen hair style, the spiky periphery is a pleasant other option to the porcupine spikes of the 90s. A just about wind-blown look makes a delicate yet spiky style that looks awesome.
This style more often than not works best with mousse, since gel tends to make the hair lose its delicate look. It takes little upkeep; everything it needs is a fast gone through with styling mousse every morning. Since a wind-blown look is the premise of this style, it doesn’t take a great deal of chiseling. The style works best with solid jawlines and solid cheekbones.
19. Rough Messy Hairstyles
Like every single extraordinary hairdo, variety is critical. This variety of the precise periphery is a rough practically spiky kind of hair that has short sides additionally a shorter length on top with an unmistakable separation of the hair close to the top. This is an incredible search for men with straight thick hair.
20.Afro Hairstyles
A short, decreased afro gives an African American’s textured hair the delicate and common twist that is broadly famous today.
Since African Americans have a characteristic thickness and composition to their hair, they frequently do not have experience a great deal of support to get the twist, however they could require a little measure of gel for styling. This style works best for African Americans who have the characteristic surface required for an afro, round or oval faces, and short brows.
21.Short Dread
The common composition found in an African American’s hair flawlessly to dreadlocks. Albeit long fears are still in style, short fears are making waves.
The fears stand around the head with textured styling. It is regularly seen with the head shaved on the sides and back with fears on top. This style takes little support since dreadlocks tend to stay set up. Young men with the slice just need to keep rolling the dreadlocks to keep them from getting to be tangled. This teenager hair style works best with the composition of African American hair and an unmistakable jaw or even jawline.
22.False Hawk Hairstyles
It is short around the sides and back, and it step by step gets longer as it pulls towards the center of the head.
This hair style brings styling with gel so as to keep it in the center. It works best with people that have gloomy appearance, solid buttons, and high cheekbones. Like the mohawk and pig tail, this is a cut for the more expressive high schooler young men.
23. Side Part Combover +Short Pompadour
This is an extraordinary teen’s hair style that looks smooth and spruce. This style has long hair all around and gets longer at the top. It is styled smooth back yet not tight against the head, making a “poofed” appearance.
This cut takes a great deal of support and a considerable measure of gel. It works best with solid cheekbones, round countenances, and short temples. Alongside the undercut and side part, it’s a superb decision for tasteful teenager young men.
24. Cornrows Hairstyles
It is a generally African haircut, designed by utilizing an upward, underhand movement to make columns of interlaces that lie near the scalp. Regularly framed in straight lines, cornrows can be controlled to frame distinctive sorts of shapes or waves on the surface of the scalp.
Cornrows are low-maintenance and can be left in for drawn out stretches of time, gave that the wearer takes consideration to delicately wash the lines on a reliable premise and oil the scalp. Cornrows can take drawn out stretches of time to accomplish, so persistence is critical.
This is one of the funkier teen’s hair styles on this rundown, however, it is a decent decision for a teen who needs something somewhat strange.
25.Induction Cut Hairstyles
It includes shaving all the hair utilizing an electric razor without a watchman. This razor setting is alluded to as #0, and it adequately diminishes the length of your hair to the briefest conceivable without abandoning you bare.
This hair style is low-support, and it’s particularly effective in regions that are inclined to high warmth. This style likewise gives you the chance to design the whole scalp with extremely sharp edge dispensed examples, as the scalp is currently, as it were, a clear canvas.
High schooler young men that live in colder territories might need to avoid the instigation cut, since it can prompt an always crisp head in the winter time. It functions admirably with an extensive variety of face shapes and hairdos.
26.Tousle Hairstyles
Shockingly, it takes a touch of experimentation to get right. It’s extraordinary for high schooler young men who need a laid-back appearance.
For this look, you ought to skirt a hair style so that your hair is staying at the closures. This will give the best conditions for the perfect tousled style.
27. High Contrast Fade Hairstyles
Blur hairdos are turning out to be greatly well known amongst men of late. The blur hair style is one that is normally went with on hair styles that are shorter long, however, we are presently seeing longer hair on top with a blur come into men’s hairdo patterns. An awesome looking, at times an all the more unpleasant and not as mixed blur can look extraordinary.
28.Short Wavy Undercut Hairstyles
On the off chance that you have wavy hair, you may think that it is hard to discover a style that fits you. Provided that this is true, consider this style. It utilizes an undercut yet permits the twists to hold their shape, giving your hair a one of a kind identity.
In this hairdo, the twists are trimmed to suit and casing the face shape so they’re not a wavy chaos. In case you’re utilized to raucous twists, attempt this cleaner look.
29.Modern Cowlick
It permits you to tame your coarse hair and receive a stellar trim in return. This is a short hair style that is longer at the front. This gives a wet hope to short hair, highlighting numerous characterized closes along the scalp and an indication of an undercut. So on the off chance that you have shorter hair, try this hairstyle. Use hair gel or other styling product to make you look gorgeous.
30.Military Roused Cut
There was a time when the military roused cut was extremely popular that a lot of men had this hairstyle but over the past years, more and more styles have taken over. This is usually achieved by having all portions of the hair tapered. Yes, that is right, you will have tapered sides, back and top.
31.Slicked Back Haircuts
This is a very simple hairstyle wherein all strands of the hair should be short aside from the ones that are placed in front. The front strands of the hair will be pushed back with gel or cream to make the look more formal. This can work best for men with oval faces.
32.Side Part + Short Haircuts
For some men, they normally part their hair on one side but this hairstyle has gained popularity recently when men realized that they can have a side part and still have short hair at the same time. This is usually achieved by having one side of the hair longer than one side and the long portion will be placed over the side to make the whole hairstyle look neat and manly.
33.Fade Taper Undercut+ Slicked Back
You may love the slick look because you feel that it makes you look dapper but you do not want to wait that long before you can achieve the look. This is the best haircut for you then because this style does not require you to have hair that is too long before you can achieve the style that you want. The top portion of your hair will not be longer than 2”. The hairline will be taped up to complete the look.
34.Crew Cut + Modern Twist Haircuts
The crew cut has always been a favorite but if you feel that this is already outdated, you will have a grand time checking out the modern crew cut that comes with faded temples. This can work well if you are planning on having a beard. The top portion of the hair is a bit longer than the sides but they will still be easy to maintain. To style, use cream or gel on the hair and push hair forward from the back portion. This is the definite opposite of doing a slick back.
35.Spiked Flat + Top Haircuts
The flat top has made its appearance again after not being done by men for a decade but it is back with a vengeance and it is sharper than ever as the top portion is spiked instead of being totally flat. In order to make the hair look better, have burst fade on the sides of the hair to emphasize the top portion of your hair.
36. Messy Crop
There is a big possibility that you do not want a lot of length on the top portion of your hair for different reasons. You may not like it because you are impatient or you know that you will get a memo from your office if you would continue trying to grow your hair. What you can do is have a textured fringe that you will style on your forehead with distinct comb marks. Make your hairstyle more evident by having a blurry fade that is more evident on the back portion of your hair.
37.Vertical Pompadour + Razor Part
When you hear the word pompadour, you will assume a lot of hair. Since you are not too fond of having long hair, you may not give the pompadour some thought but perhaps you will change your mind when you see the vertical pompadour. You can still get a lot of height without the need to have long hair. Your hair will be styled vertically (hence its name) but the edges are rounded. You can make this look cooler by adding a razor part on one side of your hair.
38.Short and Clean Buzz Cut
There is nothing like a buzz cut that can make everything seem fuss free but it will be hard to carry off this look if you are not used to not having a lot of hair. You can make this more modern if you would choose a mid fade and if you can have a beard as well if you do not want to look too clean.
39.University Style
This is a type of hairstyle that can make you look younger if this is what you are trying to achieve. The sides and the back portion of the hair is cut short in order to make this hairstyle easier to maintain. The front portion of the hair and the crown are usually longer and fuller. If you would like to style this haircut, then you can do this easily. A lot of men prefer using gel in order to slick it back a bit although a side part would be nice too.
40.Brush Cut Haircuts
Do you wonder how this cut has gotten its name? This is because of how short the hair strands are going to be once you have gotten this hairstyle. The back portion and the sides are tapered to make this look neat while the crown portion is a bit longer but will follow the shape of the hair. The strands of the hair will look similar to the bristles of the typical hair brush.
41.Very Short Haircuts
If you do not like to have too much hair on your scalp at all but you do not want to appear bald then this is the best hairstyle for you to try. Your hair will be cut so much that only about 1/8th of your hair will be left behind. You will know if the barber has cut your hair well if your head feels like sandpaper when you run your palm across.
42.Businessman’s Cut
If in case your office has strict rules about hair and your hair is not supposed to be too short then this is the best hairstyle for you, as the name implies. The back and the sides of the hair are tapered while the crown portion of the hair is a bit longer. This will allow you to change it a bit so you can brush it and part it.
43.Butch Cut
If you are not too fond of the induction cut because you still want a bit of hair, this can be a good alternative. Instead of 1/8th of your hair being removed, only 1/4th of your hair will be removed so you will still have soft hair on your scalp. Basically, all of the portions of your hair will be of the same length.
44.High and Tight Hairstyle
The sides and the back portion of your hair will be shaved so you will have short hair all around. The crown portion of the hair will still have some short hair strands that will be just enough for you to style a bit whether you would like to spike it up or place it on the sides will be up to you.
45.Small Mohawk Haircuts For Curly Hair
This can be great if you have always been fond of the mohawk hairstyle. This is not as extreme as the spiked mohawk though and it may work better on you if you have wavy or curly hair. Basically, the sides and the back portion of your hair will be shaved and the only hair that will be left behind is the one in the middle portion of your head.
46.Landing Strip Haircuts
If you want to have hair that looks a bit different from the styles that you see a lot of men donning you can try this type of hairstyle. This is basically a shorter version of the flat top. This is so short that your hair part will already be evident. The sides of your hair will be shorter than the hair that can be found on top.
47.Tapered Sponge Curls
If you have sponge curls that you would like to tame, this is the best hairstyle for you to have. You only need a bit of length in order to show the texture of your hair. Your sponge curls already look cool on their own. You just have to improve them a bit by making sure that the edges of the hair will be clear. This can be achieved with the tapered cut.
48.Short Curly + Bald Fade
Once again, if you have curly hair then this hairstyle will look great on you. The curls that you will have on your head will be a bit longer than the hair that you will have on the sides and the back but not long enough that you will become stressed over it when you are trying to style it in the morning. The bald fade on the sides can improve the silhouette of your hair.
49.Regulation Cut
If you have ever tried to enter the military, you may be aware that one of the things that they are very particular with is your haircut. A military cut is usually so short that your hair will stay flat on your head. If you do not want your hair to be that short, there are some types of regulation cut that you can choose from namely low regulation, medium regulation and high regulation.
50.Whitewalls Haircuts
When it comes to men’s short hairstyles, the list will never be complete without whitewalls. If this is the first time that you have heard of it, this refers to a type of hairstyle that is so short that some portions of the scalp can be seen easily already. The hair on the back portion and sides are shaved in order to fit well with the whitewall of the crown area of the head.
51.Faux Hawk Haircuts
Faux Hawk Haircuts is the type of hairstyle that you want if you want your hair to be short but not too short that you will have some trouble with it once it starts to grow out. The back portion and the sides are a lot shorter than the one on the top of the head. This will allow you to still style your hair the way that you want it. You can make it into a sort of mohawk if you want.
52.British Band Style Haircuts
If you have checked out some British bands before, you will notice that the members of the band seem to have similar hairstyles. The back and the sides are not that short that your head will still be covered but the front portion of the hair, particularly the bangs will be long and thick. This is recommended for men with naturally thick hair. It will also work well for you if your hair is a bit wavy as you need wavy hair to keep the hairstyle dramatic.
53. Designed Haircut
This is usually a short hairstyle wherein the crown portion is a bit longer than the rest of the hair. The sides in particular will be designed intricately with different symbols or sometimes even words. It is important that you go to a barber who is highly skilled in making some designs or the side of your head will look messed up.
54.Spiked Crop Haircuts+Beard
If you would like to have bangs but still keep the sides and back of your hair short then this is possible. If you want to make this look better, you can achieve it by having a disconnected beard. Obviously, this is meant for men who already have a beard otherwise if you would only start growing it now, your hair will also grow out before your beard can be ready.
55.Curly Temple Fade Haircuts
This is another style to try if your hair is naturally curly but you want to make it look more modern. The fade should start from the temple going down but leave the back part with a lot more hair so that the fade style will be evident. The forehead should be lined straight while the neck portion will resemble a sort of arc.
56.Super Short Haircut with Beard
The best thing about this haircut is how it will be cut and styled. All of the edges will be emphasized. Your hair will have the super short quality but will still be obvious because of the way that your hair has been fixed. You can make the beard seem to be connected to your hair. Take note that doing this hairstyle on your own will be impossible. Allow a professional to do it for you.
57.High and Tight Military Short Haircut
When you hear the word “military” and you have to relate it to hair, you cannot help yourself, you think of something short. This is the type of military hairstyle that appeals even to those who are not part of the military because it looks neat and put together. The sides and the back portion of the hair will be cut extremely short while the hair on the top portion of the hair will be really long. This is the type of hairstyle that you should have when you want to have a transition from short to long.
58.Slicked Back
The hair is short all over but instead of using a razor, scissors are used to trim the hair as close as possible to the scalp. The scissor cut will make sure that the hair strands have more texture. The hair that is located on the top portion of the head can be pushed back a little so that it can look neater. If your hair does not want to cooperate, you may be using the wrong hair products. The right gel or cream can give the effect that you want.
59. Short and Side Part
If you want to have a type of hairstyle that will look great when you are working in the office, this is the right hairstyle for you to have. If you are wondering about the side part, you can just choose the natural side part of your hair.
60.Ivy League
If you have always wished to look like those college students who are studying at Ivy League colleges and universities or you want to bring back those days then you can choose to have this hairstyle. Actually, you may have this hairstyle as long as you like the way that it looks. The sides and the back portion of your hair will be cut short.
The top portion of your hair will then be tapered and can be placed towards the sides in order to have an overall neat appearance. Remember that the crown and the front portion of your hair will be the thicker than the rest of your hair when you choose this style.
61.Brushed Up + Side Parted Pompadour
If you are familiar with the usual pompadour, you know that this is usually brushed up. This time, you can have a more modern pompadour as it will be side parted. You can even do a hard part which means that the natural part of your hair will be lined so that it can be emphasized. This can be done by a skilled barber or stylist. Achieving the side-parted pompadour will be easy to do without the hard part.
62. Simple Short Back and Sides
If you do not want to put too much fuss on the type of hairstyle that you are going to have then this is a good option. Simply leave the back and the sides of your hair short while the hair on top and the crown portion of your head will be kept long. This is a flattering hairstyle that can fit all face shapes so you will have no trouble pulling off this look.
63.Brush Cut
Do you want a type of short hairstyle that is so short that your hair strands will already resemble the bristles of a brush? This may be the one that you are searching for. You can work out this hairstyle with or without facial hair. Once again, the sides and the back portion of your head may be a bit shorter than the one on the top portion but not so much that they will look uneven. This wash and wear hair can give you a few more minutes to spare when you prepare for work in the morning.
64.Office Short Haircut
One of the reasons why you are so particular about the type of hairstyle that you are going to pick is because of the type of work that you do. You want a hairstyle that will make you fit in in the corporate world. You want a type of hairstyle that will make people take you seriously when they are talking to you or when you are discussing things with them in a meeting.
This hairstyle is short enough to look neat but not short enough that they will make judgments about you. The back and the sides of your hair will be tapered while the crown portion of your hair will be a bit longer. This will make it easier to brush and part on the right side.
65.Flat Top
There was a time when people thought that the flat top is gone for good but when it came back, it came back in a more modern and appealing way. Gone are the days when you have to look like a pencil eraser just to pull off this look. The flat top now does not have to be that high. Of course, you still need the right hair products and having naturally straight hair will help a lot too.
66.Mohawk Short
If you do not work in the corporate world and you work somewhere wherein you are encouraged to show off your personality then you are in luck. You can easily try this small mohawk hairstyle. If you are still confused why this is a small mohawk, just remember how large the usual mohawk should be. This will be small enough that you will barely notice it. The sides of the mohawk will be buzzed close to the scalp in order to emphasize the thicker portion of your head.
67.Short and Layered Haircut
Some men hear the word layered and they already assume that this is similar to what women are wearing. Layered hairstyles for women are extremely different from men’s. this layered haircut can look amazing on you as it can give your hair a more messy look without trying too hard. You can style this in different ways too depending on your mood because the length is just right for styling. Remember that to maintain this hairstyle, you may need to have all of your hair trimmed.
There are some men who have always wanted to try the mohawk style but they know that they will never be allowed or they are not sure if it would suit them. A nice alternative will be the faux hawk style. The hair will be cut in such a way that it is not too short but of course, it will not be reaching your chin in any way so this can still be classified as “short” hair. The sides and the back portion of the hair will be a bit shorter than the one on the crown of your head but still short enough to emphasize the middle portion of your hair.
69.High Skin Temple Fade with Spikes
If you have always loved how spiky hair looks on you but you do not want to have spikes on the sides of your hair then you can have the high skin temple fade. The spikes should look uniform in appearance so you might need to pay a little bit more attention to it in the morning when you prepare for work.
70.Shaved Fade + Slicked Hair
Do you want to give the appearance that your hair is cut higher than it should? You can have the lower portion of your hair shaved totally while you keep the top and the middle portion in a fade style. The upper portion of your hair should have long strands that will be easy to slick back with the use of the right styling products.
71.Indie Short
Once again, let us reiterate that as long as your hair does not reach your chin yet, then it can be considered short. This is the reason why this hairstyle is a part of this list. This is actually really short if you would not pay attention to the front portion of your hair that will fall near your eye. In order to make this look more cool, you can have your hair curled so that it will go upward. This will work best for men who have naturally soft and curly hair.
72.Short Curls
Who says that having curly hair will not look flattering on men? It is all about the styling. You know that your curly hair is hard to tame but you do not have to hate it. You can keep the front portion of your hair longer while the sides of your hair and the back portion will be cut closely. This hairstyle will work whether you have facial hair or not.
73.Undercut + Cool Design
The undercut is surely becoming a classic style that men would choose from time to time especially when they feel that they need a change but if you want to look different, you may choose to have an undercut hairstyle with a cool design on the side. There are different designs to choose from too. Some will go for some horizontal or vertical lines but you can unleash your creativity (or at least, your barber’s creativity) so you can have a hairstyle that is unlike the others that you have seen before.
74.Slick + Winged Back
If you would like to have the slick back style but you noticed that a lot of men already have it, then this is the best one for you to choose. The great thing about this is you do not have to cut your hair too short in order to achieve this. The back portion of your head will also show the four parts that you have slicked back just to get this look.
75.Short Shaggy Hair
The shaggy hair does not have to make you look like a hermit or a rocker. You can look decent and still keep it short but still have hair on your head with the use of this hairstyle. This normally works best for men with prominent foreheads because you can cover your forehead with the fringes that you are going to have but even if you do not have a prominent forehead and you want something different, you can try out this style.
76.Bald
If you do not like to have hair on your head at all or you truly feel that the bald look suits you well then this involves completely shaving all of your hair from your head until it is already shiny. This requires a lot of maintenance though if you are not naturally bald. It can also be harder to maintain if your hair is thicker than most.
Now that you have reached the end of the list, you already have 76 great men’s short hairstyles that you can pick for yourself. Whether you want to revamp your whole style or go for something similar will be up to you. The important thing is that you already have some ideas about what you want.
So… what are you going to try this year?House DJ Skream has been left red faced after his pre-gig rider was sensationally leaked ahead of an upcoming appearance at Dublin’s Opium Room’s tonight.
The rider, visible below, made several strange and outlandish requests which suggest that the lanky disc spinner may be letting the life of an adored DJ go to his head.
Some of the requests include – a life size Waterford Crystal figurine of himself, all of his Guinnesses to be served with straws and tiny umbrellas, a strict “blowjobs or coke” rule for any promotional staff that he has to interact with and to be allowed to say the sentence “I’m half Irish” without any locals tutting or rolling their eyes.
Skream, pictured above explaining exactly how big he likes his lines of ketamine before his last Dublin gig, claims to write a unique rider for every gig based on his location, highlighting the fact he has Guinness and Waterford Crystal on his Dublin rider whereas the rider for a recent Glasgow gig included methadone, Buckfast and deep fried foods.
“We’re quite a small yet burgeoning outfit here in the city,” confirmed promoters Abstract, “but I don’t think we could afford the bath of freshly washed €50 notes that he wanted or the request to keep the CDJs, which he says he is going to lick so nobody else can use them, after the gig.”
“The blowjobs, maybe we could do, but anything beyond that will be difficult,” added the promoter.
Some of the world’s biggest EDM stars like Deadmau5 and Armin Van Buuren have weighed in on the revelations calling the rider “standard” and insisting that “Skream isn’t asking all that much – if anything he’s selling himself short” before claiming that they have both in the past have had a clause embedded into the rider which allows them “to throw coffee in the face of the sound tech guy – repercussion free”.
Skream, who is spending time in Dublin ahead of tonight’s gig, has so far failed to respond to the leaking of the rider but reports from sources close to the DJ claim that the gig is still set to go ahead once his demands are met.From: A New York Lawyer [Email him]
With Hillary about to "wow just wow" at the AltRight, a lot of the online pundits tangentially associated with the AltRight are trying to get ahead of the media narrative and brace for the increased web traffic.
Blogger Vox Day, author of SJWs Always Lie, made an effort to define the AltRight and I thought it was pretty good.
In the interest of developing a core Alt Right philosophy upon which others can build.
The Alt Right is of the political right in both the American and the European sense of the term. Socialists are not Alt Right. Progressives are not Alt Right. Liberals are not Alt Right. Communists, Marxists, Marxians, cultural Marxists, and neocons are not Alt Right. The Alt Right is an ALTERNATIVE to the mainstream conservative movement in the USA that is nominally encapsulated by Russel Kirk's 10 Conservative Principles, but in reality has devolved towards progressivism. It is also an alternative to libertarianism. The Alt Right is not a defensive attitude and rejects the concept of noble and principled defeat. It is a forward-thinking philosophy of offense, in every sense of that term. The Alt Right believes in victory through persistence and remaining in harmony with science, reality, cultural tradition, and the lessons of history. The Alt Right believes Western civilization is the pinnacle of human achievement and supports its three foundational pillars: Christianity, the European nations, and the Rule of Law.
The Alt Right is a Western ideology that believes in science, history, reality, and the right of a genetic nation to exist and govern itself in its own interests. What the Alt Right is, Vox Popoli, August 24, 2016
There are sixteen points, so I won’t quote them all—you can either Read The Whole Thing or read Vox’s own TL:DR:I’ve already written a review of GRAVITY as a film in its own right. In short, I loved it, and I think it will go down as a landmark film in cinema history. But as promised in that review, now I want to go deeper into what GRAVITY got right and wrong about the reality of the space program. While my initial review was spoiler-free, be warned -- this one is not and you should see the film before reading it
Regular readers of the site know that I’m not just a movie geek, I’m also an astrophysicist. And from time to time I write articles about the science behind certain movies. The purpose isn’t to nitpick, but to broaden our whole geeking out experience, and to use the movie to talk about science. My general principle is that it doesn’t bother me when filmmakers have to bend reality to tell a great story. But I can’t stand it when they get the details wrong out of laziness, or produce films that make no sense.
Aside from astrophysics knowledge, what makes me qualified to talk about GRAVITY? I’ve spent a lifetime of being a space geek, and growing up in Florida, I would travel to see Shuttle launches, read everything I could get my hands on, and even pore over every detail in the Space Shuttle Operator’s Manual from the library. That was all great preparation for an amazing gig I was lucky to get as the cohost of a TV show (with astronaut Mike Massimino and others), the third season of National Geographic’s KNOWN UNIVERSE (now on DVD, Amazon) that was in equal parts about astronomy and space exploration. In filming the show, I got to go to behind the scenes at several NASA facilities, watch astronauts train, and play with their toys. I talked to many astronauts, but just as importantly got to interview the scientists and engineers who design the spacecraft, space suits, tools, and simulators that keep the astronauts safe. I put on a space suit, ate the space food, and got in the simulators. It was great fun, and though I didn’t know it at the time, excellent background for understanding all kinds of things going on in GRAVITY from an insider’s perspective.
In this article I’ll mostly go in chronological order through the film, taking a look at what the filmmakers got right and wrong, but mostly using it as an excuse to talk about space exploration and physics.
Blue Marble
After the title card, the first shot we see is of the Earth from space. It looks amazing, especially in IMAX 3D. You can see how massive and yet fragile it is. We all depend on that thin blue layer of atmosphere to survive. As the film progresses, we see majestic shots of mountain ranges, hurricanes, and even night shots of city lights and cascades of aurorae. These are based on real shots taken by astronauts over a half-century of space exploration. Just check out some of this stunning time-lapse video:
Jet Packs
Continuing in the establish shot, we see George Clooney’s character, Matt Kowalski, is zipping around in some kind of experimental jet pack. This is based on a real thing! In fact, there have been a whole series of space jet packs dating back to a prototype system that was sent up in the Gemini days, but never used. In the 1980s, shuttle astronauts did use a system that looked and acted almost entirely like Clooney’s system, the Manned Maneuvering Unit, or MMU. It shoot out jets of compressed gas which let the astronauts maneuver in space, untethered. Astronauts used them to capture satellites, and they were expected to be used in space construction, like building the ISS. But after a few missions, their use was discontinued. They worked fine, but if there was a malfunction the astronaut could shoot off into space, never to be seen again.
In GRAVITY, the astronauts’ motion is sped up from what it would be in real life. Astronauts take slow, precise, deliberate actions in space, because speed is your enemy, both in terms of reaction time, energy of impact, fuel consumption, space suit constrictions, and our inherent unfamiliarity with microgravity. But hey, that’s a concession I’m willing to make -- I’d rather have a movie that moves along than a perfectly accurate, plodding one. I’ve watched enough hours of NASA TV to know that real spacewalks aren’t exactly your ideal suspense thrillers.
Today, every astronaut on a spacewalk remains tethered or attached to an arm, but as a backup they also have a simplified |
weets.
Others simply chortled about “Mario being Mario”. He missed a chance, got substituted and cried about it? Well, that’s just another one to add to the list of Balotelli antics.
The truth though was something rather more understandable. In the preceding week, DNA tests had proven that Balotelli was the father of Pia, the daughter born to his ex-girlfriend Raffaella Fico on December 5, 2012.
A long and at times bitter legal fight saw Mario refuse any contact with the child until he could be sure she was his, something which proved difficult as two sets of lawyers couldn’t agree on how to conduct a DNA test.
After it was confirmed he was Pia’s father, Balotelli immediately took responsibility for her, to his credit, something which flies in the face of his - at times deserved - public image of lacking maturity.
“Writing ‘Dad’ gave me an explosion of emotion, but now I want to keep this joy for myself,” the forward wrote in an open letter at the time. “I hope my silence can help people understand there is a child here who doesn’t know how the media or television worlds work. I hope my few words can help to definitively put an end to this affair.”
As fate would have it, Pia was born in Naples and Balotelli would face them with Milan that weekend. Super Mario hoped to score for his daughter in her home town, and wore a T-Shirt under his kit with a message for her.
However, it turned out to be a frustrating evening for the Rossoneri, and for Balotelli in particular.
With around 20 minutes to play, Pepe Reina rushed off his line to challenge the striker, but completely missed the ball. Mario wasn’t expecting it though, and he put the ball wide with the goal at his mercy. He had missed his big chance, and was substituted soon after. After what must have been a difficult week, his tears were completely understandable.
His most recent visit to the San Paolo brought frustration of a different kind, as Balotelli played just three minutes of a 1-1 draw. Similarly, his visit to Naples with Manchester City in the Champions League saw the striker score, but end up on the wrong end of a 2-1 defeat.
Known as a penalty specialist, even his first missed spot kick came against the Partenopei, Reina saving his effort at San Siro in September 2013.
Still though, that night of tears in 2014 could be seen as a turning point in Mario’s career. Along with the death of his adopted father, being a father to Pia has seen a new maturity in Balotelli.
He may have failed at Liverpool and in a loan return to Milan, but think about it, did you hear anything about his behaviour off the pitch? His move to Nice attracted mirth, particularly in sections of the English media, but Balotelli scored 15 times in 23 Ligue 1 games as Les Aiglons surprisingly qualified for the Champions League play-offs.
With only a 12-month contract, the striker could have opted to chase the money and moved elsewhere, but he decided to stay in France, clearly viewing the Allianz Riviera as the best place to finally fulfil his potential.
Sadly, he may not be able to play on Wednesday, with Coach Lucien Favre confirming a knee injury is likely to rule him out. Still, if there’s any chance, you can be sure Balotelli will be desperate to play.
“He’s happy to return to Naples,” Nice general manager Julien Fournier explained on Radio Kiss Kiss Napoli. “He loves his daughter, and he’s happy to return.”
Even if we may not see him on the pitch this week, Balotelli has intimated that he could one day play for Napoli. Either way, the city and its club will always hold a special place in the heart of the enigmatic striker.Mr Gutruf said the patch or band could be wirelessly linked to electronic devices such as a mobile phone or tablet which would alert the user to high UV radiation levels.
Published this month in the journal Small the research marks a new direction for such technology, as the transparent material has been developed using a rubber rather than a silicone base for the electronics. The rubber gives the functional part in the device much greater flexibility.
"This has been hard to do because rubber doesn't usually withstand the temperatures of processing," Mr Gutruf said. "And because they are so flexible and stretchable you can integrate them into clothes, backpacks, gloves and so on."
The new material is not limited to detecting and monitoring UV radiation either. The research group's co-leader Madhu Bhaskaran said the zinc oxide could also be tailored to detect toxic gases such as hydrogen and nitrogen dioxide.
Dr Bhaskaran said in industries such as coal-fired power stations, early warning systems which flagged the risk of an explosion were vital. Meanwhile the material could also be used in to monitor nitrogen dioxide levels and pollution in big cities in real time.(CNN) President-elect Donald Trump signaled Thursday that he will look to "strengthen and expand" the US's nuclear capability hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to enhance his country's nuclear forces.
The exchange appeared to raise the prospect of a new arms race between the two nuclear superpowers, which between them boast more than 14,000 nuclear warheads, the still deadly legacy of their four-decades long Cold War standoff.
But the comments by Putin, who is presiding over a project to restore Russia's lost global power and influence, and Trump, who will shortly become the US commander-in-chief, did not spell out exactly what each side is proposing or whether a major change of nuclear doctrine is in the offing.
Trump weighed in with a tweet just hours after Putin spoke following a meeting with his military advisers to review the activity of the past year.
"The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes," Trump wrote.
On Friday, Putin downplayed the risk of a new nuclear arms race between Russia and the US and said there was "nothing new" in Trump's tweet.
"During his election campaign, (Trump) said US needs to bolster nuclear capabilities and armed forces in general and there is nothing new," Putin said at this annual news conference.
It was not immediately clear if the President-elect is proposing an entire new nuclear policy that he would begin to flesh out once he takes office next year.
Trump could also be referring to plans to modernize the current US nuclear arsenal that are currently underway and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The Obama administration has outlined a plan to modernize delivery systems, command and control systems and to refurbish warheads in the US nuclear triad -- the US force of sea, airborne and missile delivered nuclear weapons.
JUST WATCHED The Cold War: Then and now Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH The Cold War: Then and now 01:40
But the plan keeps the size of the nuclear force at existing levels.
Trump's tweet appeared to envisage an expansion of the size of the US nuclear force, but it was not immediately clear if that is the case.
Trump communications director Jason Miller sent a statement to try to explain the President-elect's tweet on nuclear capability.
He suggested Trump was "referring to the threat of nuclear proliferation and the critical need to prevent it," although that was not referenced in the tweet. He also said Trump was emphasizing the need to "modernize our deterrent capability."
In Moscow earlier Tuesday, Putin said in a defense speech that Russia needs to "enhance the combat capability of strategic nuclear forces, primarily by strengthening missile complexes that will be guaranteed to penetrate existing and future missile defense systems."
Putin's remarks appeared to suggest that he was talking about new weapons systems that could overcome US missile defenses, a development that could force the US to respond. It was not clear, however, if he was contemplating an expansion in the total numbers of Russian weapons or of the stocks of those arms that are deployed.
Trump and Putin have suggested Trump's inauguration next month will ring in closer relations after the two sides retreated to their most entrenched positions since the end of the Cold War.
The ambiguity and timing of Putin's remarks also suggested that he may be laying an opening gambit in his relationship with the new US President-elect.
The Russian President is seeking to return Russia to the front ranks of global influence, a project that is key to his domestic political survival and often involves actively seeking to undermine US power.
His power plays in Ukraine and in Syria and military maneuvers close to the borders of former Warsaw Pact states have alarmed Western leaders and stoked tensions in Europe.
Photos: Cult of Putin Photos: Cult of Putin Putin plays with his Yume, an Akita dog, prior to an interview by Nippon Television Network Corporation on December 7, 2016. Hide Caption 1 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin visits Russia's Przewalski horse reintroduction center in the Orenburg Reserves, near the border with Kazakhstan, on October 3, 2016. Hide Caption 2 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin While his nation waded deeper into the Syrian civil war, Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, spent his 63rd birthday on the ice Wednesday, October 7, playing hockey with NHL stars and various Russian officials and tycoons in Sochi. For years, Russia's leader has cultivated a populist image in the Russian media. Hide Caption 3 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin holds a cat as he inspects housing built for victims of wildfires in the village of Krasnopolye, in a region in southeastern Siberia, Russia, on Friday, September 4. Hide Caption 4 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin, left, and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev jokingly toast at a lunch during a meeting at the Black Sea resort in Sochi, Russia, on Sunday, August 30. Hide Caption 5 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin exercises during his meeting with Medvedev on August 30. Hide Caption 6 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin sits in a bathyscaphe as it plunges into the Black Sea along the coast of Sevastopol, Crimea, on Tuesday, August 18. Putin went underwater to see the wreckage of an ancient merchant ship that was found in the end of May. Hide Caption 7 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin holds a Persian leopard cub in February 2014 at a breeding and rehabilitation center in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Perhaps the most important vote in Russia's public selection of a new Olympic mascot was cast when Putin said he wanted a funky leopard to represent the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. Hide Caption 8 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin holds a pike he caught in the Siberian Tuva region of Russia on July 20, 2013. Hide Caption 9 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin enjoys some fishing during his vacation to the Tuva region on July 20, 2013. Hide Caption 10 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin submerges on board Sea Explorer 5 bathyscaphe near the isle of Gogland in the Gulf of Finland on July 15, 2013. Hide Caption 11 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin plays with his dogs 'Buffy', right, and 'Yume' at his residence Novo-Ogariovo, outside Moscow, on March 24, 2013. Hide Caption 12 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin studies a crane during an experiment called Flight of Hope on September 5, 2012, in which he piloted a hang glider, aiming to lead the birds into flight. It's part of a project to save the rare species of crane. Hide Caption 13 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin takes part in a training session for young ice hockey players before the "Golden Puck" youth tournament final in Moscow on April 15, 2011. Hide Caption 14 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin rides a Harley-Davidson to an international biker convention in southern Ukraine on July 14, 2010. Hide Caption 15 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin The Russian president aims at a whale with an arbalest (crossbow) to take a piece of its skin for analysis at Olga Bay on August 25, 2010. Hide Caption 16 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin A wetsuit-clad Putin embarks on a dive to an underwater archaeological site at Phanagoria on the Taman Peninsula on August 10, 2011. Hide Caption 17 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Famed for his love of martial arts, Putin throws a competitor in a judo session at an athletics school in St. Petersburg on December 18, 2009. Hide Caption 18 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin during his vacation in southern Siberia on August 3, 2009. Hide Caption 19 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin swims the butterfly during his vacation outside the town of Kyzyl in southern Siberia on August 3, 2009. Hide Caption 20 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Assisted by a Russian scientist, Putin fixes a satellite transmitter to a tiger during his visit to the Ussuriysky forest reserve of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Far East on August 31, 2008. Hide Caption 21 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin carries a hunting rifle in the Republic of Tuva on September 3, 2007. Hide Caption 22 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin A shirtless Putin fishing in the headwaters of the Yenisei River in the Republic of Tuva on August 13, 2007. Hide Caption 23 of 24 Photos: Cult of Putin Putin in the cockpit of a Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber jet at a military airport on August 16, 2005, before his supersonic flight. Hide Caption 24 of 24
And while Russia's economic and conventional military strength pales beside that of the US, its nuclear arsenal remains the root of its power and prestige.
It is also unlikely to be a coincidence that Putin's remarks came three days before the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, a collapse he views as a disaster of history.
Trump, who sees foreign policy through the eyes of an ultimate deal maker, may have felt the need to respond to Putin's remarks. He did so a day after meeting with his incoming military officials at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. CNN's Barbara Starr reported that the talks included discussion of plans to modernize the US nuclear arsenal.
The President-elect's choice of Twitter to make such an important and sensitive statement was characteristic of his operating style.
But it underlined how the shorthanded communication of policy by social media is imprecise and open to multiple interpretations that are already posing problems for foreign governments as they seek to divine Trump's true intentions.
Still, the suggestion that he could preside over a new nuclear arms race will spook critics who argued he showed himself unfamiliar with basic nuclear doctrine during the campaign.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had argued that it would be a mistake to hand the US nuclear codes over to a man who could be "baited with a tweet."
The President-elect also caused consternation in Asia by suggesting that Japan and South Korea who are protected under the US nuclear umbrella might think about developing their own weapons, a move that could unleash a new global nuclear arms race.
Trump's comment on Twitter also strikes a sharp contrast with the early months of the administration of President Barack Obama, who committed himself to the symbolic goal of a world without nuclear weapons -- an act that helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Obama also concluded a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START) with Putin's predecessor as Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev. The treaty imposed new limits on the numbers of launchers and warheads each side have deployed.
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During the campaign, Trump argued that the US needs to modernize its aging nuclear infrastructure.
"Our nuclear program has fallen way behind, and they've gone wild with their nuclear program. Not good. Our government shouldn't have allowed that to happen," Trump said during his second debate in October against Clinton. "We are old. We're tired. We're exhausted in terms of nuclear. A very bad thing."
America's nuclear submarines are all more than 30 years old and its most dominant long-range bomber remains the 60-year-old B-52s. The Pentagon has also called for upgrading the US arsenal of ICBMs, or intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The Pentagon has estimated that it will need to spend as much as $18 billion per year over the next 15 years -- for a total of $270 billion -- to modernize the nuclear triad.
The United States has 7,100 nuclear warheads while Russia has 7,300, according to the non-partisan Arms Control Association.
The US has 1,367 warheads deployed on inter-continental ballistic missiles, heavy bombers and on submarines, the State Department said in September. Russia has 1,796 in the same category.
Russia's inventory of deployed warheads has risen in number owing to fluctuations in Moscow's modernization program and is not seen as a strategic worry by the US military. The United States currently has fewer total weapons, including those in reserve, than Russia because it has dismantled more obsolete devices.The Arizona Coyotes are being surprisingly candid about how much money they lost in year one of private ownership.
LeBlanc giving update on losses for #Coyotes for first fiscal year: $16.6 million. Model had it at $20 million. — Sarah McLellan (@azc_mclellan) March 13, 2015
The losses are expected to continue this year, somewhat unsurprisingly.
LeBlanc anticipates loss for current fiscal year will be "substantially lower" than $16.6 million. — Sarah McLellan (@azc_mclellan) March 13, 2015
Let's unpack this a little bit. The initial loss report is about $7.4 million below what was initially reported back in October of 2014 by New York Post reporter Larry Books, amid the first rumors that Andrew Barroway was interested in purchasing the team. That the figure is that far below what was reported in October would help to explain why Barroway would put so much money into the team.
The other good news for the Coyotes is that the critical component in bringing costs down has comparatively little to do with average attendance figures, at least according to LeBlanc:
LeBlanc said one reason losses were less than projected in year 1 is that the franchise did well in corporate sales/sponsorships. — Craig Morgan (@cmorganfoxaz) March 13, 2015
Corporate sales and sponsorships are particularly important for a variety of reasons. The most obvious reason is that they tend to pay a lot more than an average season ticket or even an individual suite does. The other reason is that businesses, especially larger corporations or partnerships, tend not to be transient. So even though ticket buyers come and go, corporations looking to generate business via advertising tend to stick around so long as they perceive a benefit to doing so.
There are still many questions that remain unanswered though. How exactly the ownership group calculates its revenues/expenditures is still a secret. And why LeBlanc and IceArizona decided to become candid now about the team's financial losses is also an open question. With the desire to reduce or eliminate ticket surcharges on certain events at Gila River Arena, perhaps this information is designed to persuade Glendale city councilors that there is no need to fear making changes to the arena management agreement.
It will be very interesting to see how Glendale, who has the right to audit the team's finances after every fiscal year, responds to this news. However, the number that gets reported to Glendale for purposes of determining the out-clause came in significantly higher than what IceArizona is saying the franchise incurred.
#Coyotes had to report $34.8 mil loss to Glendale, which included 1-time closing cost of deal ($7.8mil) and full Ribeiro buyout ($10.4 mil). — Sarah McLellan (@azc_mclellan) March 13, 2015
Correction: it's $34.4 million as the loss reported to Glendale, which is the number that applies to the out-clause. — Sarah McLellan (@azc_mclellan) March 13, 2015
$34.4 million represents 68.8% of the loss threshold necessary to trigger the out-clause window after the fifth fiscal year. Even "substantially lower" losses in the second and third years could very easily push the total number over $50 million, especially if the rebuild significantly drives fan/corporate interest away.
So overall, there's plenty of good news and plenty of bad news. The financial picture of the Coyotes is clearer now than it has been before. Where the team goes from here, and what direction the team's finances trend in, will likely determine if the franchise remains in Arizona after 2018.The Obama administration is admitting hundreds of African immigrants to the U.S. under a “secret accord” that channels them through South America and Mexico, charges the Washington watchdog Judicial Watch.
“The Obama administration has done a great job of promoting its various back-door amnesty programs, which include perpetually extending a humanitarian measure designed to temporarily shield illegal immigrants from deportation during emergencies,” the Judicial Watch report said.
“It’s known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and in the last few years migrants from several African countries have received it so the new influx is not all surprising.”
The Obama administration already has opened the door to thousands of young men from Syria, designated them as refugees “refugees.” It also tried to grant amnesty to up to 5 million illegal aliens until the plan was slapped down by a federal judge in a ruling the U.S. Supreme Court let stand.
Sign the petition! Urge Congress to ‘halt Muslim immigration now!’
The new discovery by Judicial Watch said African immigrants “are being housed in shelters in the Mexican border town of Tijuana while they await entry into the United States under what appears to be a secret accord between the Obama administration, Mexico and the Central American countries the Africans transited on their journey north.”
The report cited an article in a Mexican newspaper that said Mexico’s immigration regulators, the Instituto Nacinal de Migracion, said Mexico is “living through a wave of undocumented Africans, due to a humanitarian crisis on that continent, that has saturated shelters in Tapachula, Chiapas, and generated pressure on shelters in Tijuana, Baja California.”
The Africans are granted special status by Obama because of issues such as the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Mexican officials say the backlog is aggravated by the “slow pace” of U.S. immigration officials in San Isidro, who process only 50 asylum applications daily.
The journey for the migrants begins by traveling to Brazil “under a South American policy that allows the ‘free transit’ of immigrants.”
Judicial Watch said Ecuador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama “facilitate the process by transferring the concentration of foreigners towards Mexico based on an agreement that Mexico will help them gain entry into the U.S. so they can solicit asylum.”
The Washington watchdog said the Africans mostly enter Mexico through Chiapas, which borders Guatemala.
“This week alone 424 Africans arrived at the Chiapas immigration station, which is situated in Tapachula. Shelters in Tijuana currently have 154 migrants from African countries waiting on their U.S. asylum solicitations, according to figures provided by the INM,” Judicial Watch said.
The Mexican newspaper report said they don’t want to stay in Mexico.
Tijuana officials have reported helping migrants from Somalia, Ghana and Pakistan get into the U.S. through San Isidro.
The special access status for Somalians was just extended by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson until March, 2017.
The Obama administration cited the conditions in Somalia for providing the special treatment.
“There continues to be a substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions in Somalia due to ongoing armed conflict that would pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Somali nationals, as well as extraordinary and temporary conditions in the country that prevent Somali nationals from returning to Somalia in safety,” said a notice in the Federal Register.
“The secretary has also determined that permitting eligible Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is not contrary to the national interest of the United States.”
Sign the petition! Urge Congress to ‘halt Muslim immigration now!’WASHINGTON
– Israel may strike Iran should the United States fail to take prompt action to curb Tehran's nuclear program, Rep. Dan Burton said Wednesday.
Speaking at a session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Burton warned that Iran continues to enrich uranium, adding that Israel will not allow the process to continue. The slower America acts, the more it risks the prospect of seeing a military clash in the Middle East, he said.
Similar sentiments were recently expressed by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who stressed the urgency of reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program in order to lift the risk of a pre-emptive Israeli strike.
"They (the Israelis) will not tolerate an Iranian bomb," the French FM said In an interview with the British Daily Telegraph, published Monday.
Also at the session, Rep. Brad Sherman said that the US will freeze anti-Iranian decisions only after Tehran suspends its nuclear plan.
Berman added that should dialogue fail, the next option he would favor is tough sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council. The third option will be sanctions imposed outsides the framework of the Security Council, in case Russia or China will express objection in the UN. The least favorable option in his view is sanctions imposed by America only.Journalism, unlike most white collar jobs, is a 24x7 affair. That means unlike other professionals, scribes hardly get time to catch up with life, like watching a good theatrical performance, for instance.
Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday showed great empathy and remarkable skill when he took it upon himself to deliver for the entertainment-starved patrakaars who went to cover his media conference an acting performance so accomplished that even the likes of Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Naseeruddin Shah or Leonardo DiCaprio would find it difficult to match.
Kejriwal's timing, magnetism and an indefinable star quality captivated the audience and he held centrestage with such ease and panache that even when he had stepped out of the room without taking a single question, the congregated media stood motionless as magic hung thick in Delhi's polluted air.
"I want to request Modiji with folded hands," said the Aam Admi Party supremo by putting his palms together, catching his audience unawares by transcending the role as Laurence Olivier, for instance, frequently did on Broadway.
"Aap ki ladai mujse hai. Mujhe maarlo, mujhe pitlo, mujhe jo krna hai kr lo, meri Delhi ki logon ko pareshaan maat kro (Your fight is with me, so beat me if you wish, take revenge on me but don't let the people of Delhi suffer… Don’t try to stop the good work being done in Delhi)," he said, prompting some among the media to fish out their handkerchiefs on the sly to wipe an errant tear while some were left gasping for breath.
The crux of Kejriwal's monologue was to highlight the "selfless, passionate work" that his 21 MLAs are apparently doing which, he claimed, Narendra Modi wants to desperately stop. Why? Ostensibly because the Prime Minister is "scared" of him and insecure about the "good work" that Delhi government is doing.
These Parliamentary Secretaries put in a lot of effort behind all the development work we do. It is with their help that the Delhi government is functioning and they are not being paid for their work," he claimed.
"They go to schools, hospitals, find out what necessities are required, they work very hard. They are our eyes, ears, hands and feet. They serve the people without remuneration," thundered the Delhi Chief Minister, banging the table for maximum impact.
Watching the drama unfold, one was reminded of William Blake's immortal lines: Tiger, tiger, burning bright/ In the forests of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?/ In what distant deeps or skies/ Burnt the fire of thine eyes…?
Amid the unmitigated brilliance of the performer, one forgot to ask a simple question to the Delhi CM. Why would his selfless, altruistic, workaholic, hermit-like MLAs need the designation of 'Parliamentary Secretaries' to render their social work? Why can't the work that Kejriwal claims that they do — scouting for mohalla clinic lands, for instance — be done without the sanction of a title?
The answer, as Kartikeya points out in an informative piece in Firstpost, lies in Article 239AA of the Indian Constitution.
It states that only 10 per cent of the total number of members in the Delhi Legislative Assembly could be appointed as ministers. Given that Delhi Assembly has 70 members, Kejriwal can at best appoint only six ministers (excluding him). This presented AAP chief with a problem. His party won 67 seats, yet only seven of them can be accommodated (including himself) in the Cabinet. To quell an internal rebellion and subsequent factionalisation which may even lead to breakaway or poaching by rival parties, Kejriwal circumvented the Constitutional mandate by appointing 21 MLAs as 'Parliament Secretaries' for a grand total of six ministers.
What was the legal tenability of Kejriwal's move?
There is clear precedence of two High Courts (Bombay HC and Himachal Pradesh HC) quashing such appointments — in Goa and Himachal Pradesh — as violative of the Constitution on several grounds. The courts have ruled that these secretaries are de facto (as a matter of fact) ministers even if not ministers de jure (as a matter of law).
In addition, Kejriwal took further rick while appointing the MLAs because Delhi does not have any specific law to employ parliamentary secretaries unlike states such as Karnataka, Assam or West Bengal.
Sensing trouble, the AAP tried to sought an amendment to the Delhi Members of Legislative Assembly (Removal of Disqualification) Act, 1997. Through the Bill, the Delhi government wanted “retrospective” exemption for the parliamentary secretaries from disqualification provisions.
It is this amendment that the President refused to give assent to and the matter now lies with the Election Commission which will take a final decision.
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote in 1947: "Do not go gentle into that good night/ Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light…"
As the light seemed to be dying on him, Kejriwal, sensing that his ingenuous move has been caught out for what it is, came into the media conference and blasted away at rivals, invoking the fury of a tornado.
"In 1952 there were three parliamentary secretaries. When BJP used to have parliamentary secretaries, then it was legal but when we do it, it's illegal?"
In 1997, BJP CM in Delhi also appointed parliamentary secretary. Congress also did during Sheila ji's time. Then it was right?"
If Kejriwal had flooded our eyes with all the pathos of a Greek tragedy when he beseeched Modi to "beat him" instead of making "Delhi suffer", here he was at his vintage best, playing the character he was born to play — the victim.
Nobody plays victim as many times as Kejriwal did — be it during CBI raid on his principal secretary's office, during the suicide of a farmer at an AAP rally or even when he expelled Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav from the party. During all of these times, Kejriwal made the humble 'victim' a legendary figure by playing the role to perfection, making us believe that the stars are aligning against his party and the entire world is involved in a mysterious conspiracy to unseat him.
When Kejriwal joined politics, Hollywood lost a star who could have won multiple Academy Awards. Instead of criticising, let us thank him for at least showing us flashes of his infinite genius.
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.In 1925, a young American physicist was doing graduate work at Cambridge University, in England. He was depressed. He was fighting with his mother and had just broken up with his girlfriend. His strength was in theoretical physics, but he was being forced to sit in a laboratory making thin films of beryllium. In the fall of that year, he dosed an apple with noxious chemicals from the lab and put it on the desk of his tutor, Patrick Blackett. Blackett, luckily, didn’t eat the apple. But school officials found out what happened, and arrived at a punishment: the student was to be put on probation and ordered to go to London for regular sessions with a psychiatrist.
Probation? These days, we routinely suspend or expel high-school students for doing infinitely less harmful things, like fighting or drinking or taking drugs—that is, for doing the kinds of things that teen-agers do. This past summer, Rhett Bomar, the starting quarterback for the University of Oklahoma Sooners, was cut from the team when he was found to have been “overpaid” (receiving wages for more hours than he worked, with the apparent complicity of his boss) at his job at a car dealership. Even in Oklahoma, people seemed to think that kicking someone off a football team for having cut a few corners on his job made perfect sense. This is the age of zero tolerance. Rules are rules. Students have to be held accountable for their actions. Institutions must signal their expectations firmly and unambiguously: every school principal and every college president, these days, reads from exactly the same script. What, then, of a student who gives his teacher a poisoned apple? Surely he ought to be expelled from school and sent before a judge.
Suppose you cared about the student, though, and had some idea of his situation and his potential. Would you feel the same way? You might. Trying to poison your tutor is no small infraction. Then again, you might decide, as the dons at Cambridge clearly did, that what had happened called for a measure of leniency. They knew that the student had never done anything like this before, and that he wasn’t well. And they knew that to file charges would almost certainly ruin his career. Cambridge wasn’t sure that the benefits of enforcing the law, in this case, were greater than the benefits of allowing the offender an unimpeded future.
Schools, historically, have been home to this kind of discretionary justice. You let the principal or the teacher decide what to do about cheating because you know that every case of cheating is different—and, more to the point, that every cheater is different. Jimmy is incorrigible, and needs the shock of expulsion. But Bobby just needs a talking to, because he’s a decent kid, and Mary and Jane cheated because the teacher foolishly stepped out of the classroom in the middle of the test, and the temptation was simply too much. A Tennessee study found that after zero-tolerance programs were adopted by the state’s public schools the frequency of targeted offenses soared: the firm and unambiguous punishments weren’t deterring bad behavior at all. Is that really a surprise? If you’re a teen-ager, the announcement that an act will be sternly punished doesn’t always sink in, and it isn’t always obvious when you’re doing the thing you aren’t supposed to be doing. Why? Because you’re a teen-ager.
Somewhere along the way—perhaps in response to Columbine—we forgot the value of discretion in disciplining the young. “Ultimately, they have to make right decisions,” the Oklahoma football coach, Bob Stoops, said of his players, after jettisoning his quarterback. “When they do not, the consequences are serious.” Open and shut: he sounded as if he were talking about a senior executive of Enron, rather than a college sophomore whose primary obligation at Oklahoma was to throw a football in the direction of young men in helmets. You might think that if the University of Oklahoma was so touchy about its quarterback being “overpaid” it ought to have kept closer track of his work habits with an on-campus job. But making a fetish of personal accountability conveniently removes the need for institutional accountability. (We court-martial the grunts who abuse prisoners, not the commanding officers who let the abuse happen.) To acknowledge that the causes of our actions are complex and muddy seems permissive, and permissiveness is the hallmark of an ideology now firmly in disgrace. That conservative patron saint Whittaker Chambers once defined liberalism as Christ without the Crucifixion. But punishment without the possibility of redemption is worse: it is the Crucifixion without Christ.
As for the student whose career Cambridge saved? He left at the end of the academic year and went to study at the University of Göttingen, where he made important contributions to quantum theory. Later, after a brilliant academic career, he was entrusted with leading one of the most critical and morally charged projects in the history of science. His name was Robert Oppenheimer.Tiger Woods said his golf is not acceptable for the PGA Tour and he will not return until it is.
Woods shot a career-worst 82 to miss the cut in the Phoenix Open by 12 shots. He was playing poorly at Torrey Pines when he withdrew after 11 holes because of tightness in his back.
Editor's Picks Harig: Calculating Tiger's next tournament Where might we see Tiger next? Bob Harig examines the possibilities.
Four-Ball: Will Tiger Woods miss any majors? Will Tiger Woods miss any majors? And why would he make an announcement like this? Our panel dives deeper into the story. 1 Related
Woods said Wednesday on his website that the injury is not related to the back surgery he had last spring. He said he is having physical therapy every day and feeling better.
"Right now, I need a lot of work on my game, and to still spend time with the people that are important to me," he said. "My play, and scores, are not acceptable for tournament golf. Like I've said, I enter a tournament to compete at the highest level, and when I think I'm ready, I'll be back."
Woods is not playing Pebble Beach or Riviera, and said he would practice next week at his home and at |
who ultimately voted against advancing the health care bill, hurt leadership's ability to get Murkowski's vote.
Republican leaders had hoped to get her on the skinny repeal, and they were cautiously optimistic she could flip. But after Trump's testy exchange with her, they couldn't win her over.
"He made it much harder," the GOP source said.
In recent weeks, Republican senators growing frustration has morphed into action.
After Trump expressed his displeasure with his attorney general and former Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley declared publicly that as the chairman of the Senate's judiciary committee, he wouldn't entertain the idea of confirming another Attorney General if Sessions left his post. Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Chris Coons of Delaware introduced legislation that would further protect Robert Mueller, the special counsel overseeing the Justice Department's Russia investigation, from being ousted.
Even before his Twitter screed against McConnell this week, Trump saw firsthand that he cannot will or bully legislation into being.
"We're getting used to each other," South Dakota Sen. John Thune, a member of leadership, said before the recess. "A lot of our members have never had a Republican administration. "This is a President, obviously, who's never had to work with Congress. I just think there are some growing pains that come with that, but things we can work through."
In the meantime, Trump is still demanding that McConnell do something on health care.
"Mitch, get back to work and put Repeal & Replace, Tax Reform & Cuts and a great Infrastructure Bill on my desk for signing. You can do it!" Trump tweetedPORTLAND, Ore. - Across the metropolitan area, about one out of every 10 items in your recycle bin doesn't belong, according to a study just released by Metro.
Metro sorted through about 300,000 pounds of your garbage and recycling during the course of about seven months. It found the city of Portland fared about the same as other cities, even those with weekly trash pickup as opposed to Portland's every other week scheduled trash pickups.
But one item that did stand out for Portland - one specific mistake that Portlanders made more often than everyone else - was the amount of diapers thrown into the recycling bin.
"Comparing the city of Portland's program to the rest of the region, the study found that there was no difference in terms of the overall level of contamination, but when we took a closer look at specific materials, we did see some differences between plastic bags and diapers," said Metro planner, Marta McGuire. "For the city of Portland, compared to the rest of the region, their samples had more diapers as compared to the rest of the region."
There're a lot of data in the study that have to be analyzed first before cities decide whether to make changes, which could include more frequent trash pickups or more frequent glass pickups.
One highlight was that Portlanders didn't have nearly as many plastic bags. Plastic bags can't be recycled because they can cause problems with machinery. Other cities in Metro had three times as many plastic bags.
--- More information from Metro on recycling
--- Metro: "Study picks apart garbage, recycling to see how well region's residents sort
--- Metro: "2014-15 single-family recycling and waste composition studiesJul 26, 2013; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick (7) and wide receiver DeSean Jackson (10) walk off the field together at the end of practice during training camp at the Eagles NovaCare Complex. Mandatory Credit: Howard Smith-USA TODAY Sports
The first day of full team practice at the Philadelphia Eagles training camp is in the books. Here are a few quick lines to get you up to date on what happened today:
On the injury front, it seems as though Cary Williams tweaked a muscle in his leg. He spent most of practice dealing with the trainers. This isn’t a great start for Williams, who faced scrutiny from fans and media for skipping out on the non-mandatory camp. Arrelious Benn came down hard in a one-on-one drill and had to leave practice. This is also bad news for Benn. He’s got size and talent but it won’t do him any good if he can’t stay healthy.
The quarterbacks all looked decent today. Michael Vick struggled with an early interception in seven-on-seven drills but bounced back. Nick Foles threw a deep ball to DeSean Jackson that might be candidate for best play of the camp so far. He went up and over Bradley Fletcher for the one handed grab about 60-yards down field. Reports are that Barkley is a bit behind the rest, which is to be expected. Some of his passes were a bit errant but he seems to be getting the team lined and ready to go very quickly. He will need to show he can make the tough intermediate throws that are required in the NFL.
The first team secondary was Williams (pre-injury) and Fletcher at corner, and Patrick Chung and Nate Allen at safety. After Williams went down Curtis Marsh stepped in. Boykin came in the nickel. All this was to be expected. Reports are that Kenny Phillips is a full go with no restrictions. This is some of the best news Eagles fans could hope for when it comes to the defensive side of the ball. If Phillips can stay healthy, he would easily be our best player in the back end. Marsh was taken in the 3rd round of 2011 and was labelled as a project, but with a change in regime he will need to prove that he can contribute this year otherwise his days here will be number.
Reports are that Trent Cole and Brandon Graham looked very out of place in coverage. If Billy Davis wants these guys to be effective he needs to have them rushing the passer almost exclusively. It’s simply a waste of their skill set to have them drop back in coverage. On the bright side though, Connor Barwin reportedly looked very good in coverage. This is good news, because unless Graham and Cole show vast improvements over camp they will be a liability in coverage.
First practice in the books and other than a few tweaks it looks like everyone came out alive. We have another practice tomorrow in shorts before the first practice in pads on Sunday. This will be allow us to get a better look at the guys working in the trenches. Stay tuned for more.Save Money By Paying Full Price
So you had enough foresight to determine the price range for your new car before you started shopping in earnest. You did everything right: you calculated a maximum price you were willing to pay, and committed to it. You researched the Kelley Blue Book values, spent a Sunday looking at VINs on the lot (or online) and taking notes, and pitted multiple dealers against each other. Then, ideally, you made your final offer sometime in the early evening on the last day of the month – to a panicking salesman desperate to make his quota.
After all that, it’s still not over. Time and again I see people save money on big transactions, only to give back what they saved and then some on financing.
Why? Because financing is more complicated than pricing, and has multiple variables involved; not just a price, but an interest rate and a time period.
Given the choice, you should always take high-price/low-financing over low-price/high-financing. Or at least measure the difference between the two before deciding.
Let me give you an example. The average price of a new car is around $28,400. Say a dealer offers you a choice of 5-year financing plans at:
a) 0%.
b) 7%, but he’ll lower the price 10% to $25,560.
Which is the better deal?
With 0% financing, figuring out the monthly payment is obvious. With interest, it’s more complicated.
WARNING: What follows is an equation, complete with parentheses and powers and stuff. Don’t complain when you see it and think it’s complicated. I’ll walk you through it.
.07 is the annual interest rate, 12 the annual number of pay periods and 60 the total number of payments. Take your annual interest rate. Divide it by the number of months in a year. Add 1. Figure out where the calculator’s exponent key is, then press “6”, “0”, and the plus-minus key. Subtract from 1, multiply by 12, divide into your interest rate, multiply by the sales price. DONE!
The salesman won’t go to all this trouble, of course. He just needs to read off a list of approved price/financing combination issued from the corporate office. A list that you don’t have access to.
Take the 7% financing, and you won’t be paying close to $25,560. You’ll be paying over $30,000. Lowering the price by a certain percentage while raising the interest rate by a smaller percentage is the first parlor trick the dealership teaches to rookie salesmen. Don’t be duped by this. Here’s a chart that explains the potentially fatal difference:
Besides, you should probably get your financing in place before you negotiate. Go to your bank, your credit union, a competing bank, it doesn’t matter. Only once you get a dollar figure and an interest rate approved in writing should you start shopping for cars.
This makes inherent sense, and it’s the reason why lenders run a credit check. Think about it: low-price/high-financing is available to almost anyone. High-price/low-financing is something you have to qualify for. A lender will make it as easy and effortless as possible for you to overpay them.
If you think low-price/high-financing is bad on a car loan, it’s even worse for a mortgage.
Using Freddie Mac’s own numbers, average 30-year fixed rates are at 4.35% now and were 5.06% a year ago. Say you wanted to finance 80% of the purchase price of a median-priced home a year ago. (80% is the threshold at which you’d save the price of private mortgage insurance, which is the premium that lenders charge to people who pose a credit risk by not putting enough money down.) That’d be 80% of $207,100, or $165,680.
This is only the amount financed – not the entire purchase price. Plug the numbers into the formula above, and you’d be making monthly payments of $895.49.
At today’s 4.35% rate, making the same monthly payments, you’d be able to borrow as much as $179,886 – which is 80% of $224,857.
Given how far interest rates have fallen, with the lower rates you can now pay “median” prices to buy a home 8% more expensive than the median. Interest rates are powerful. Always do the math and don’t let any salesman push you into a deal you’ll regret.
This is a guest post by Greg McFarlane, who runs ControlYourCash.com and wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can also find the Kindle version here.I don’t know of any particular term for the RPG game master’s equivalent of writer’s block. What do we call it when, as a GM, we need to develop interesting NPCs and all we come up with is bartenders who used to be adventurers (class: Fighter of course), helpful blacksmiths with strong Scottish accents, and villains who twirl their mustaches?
A little inspiration can sometimes be difficult to find. When times are desperate, some hints for places to find inspiration might be helpful to develop memorable character concepts with some depth. Rolling20s offered a decent overview of ideas for what to do for inspiration. Considering the difficulties that can arise when a GM needs some NPCs for the next session and doesn’t have any ideas, though, I thought a slightly more detailed approach to non-player characters in particular wouldn’t go amiss. I offer ten sources for NPC inspiration:
Books/Movies: There are some excellent, iconic character concepts in novels and film. Even comic books have something to offer. You don’t want to be caught in the trap of very obviously just presenting retreads of other people’s great ideas, though, so don’t stop when you find a great character idea. Instead, think about why it’s a great idea. Try to distill it down to a few essential characteristics. In fact, if you can pick out just one thing that works, that’s best — and if there are others that work just as well, you can use them later for other NPC concepts. Once you have an idea or two, build on it to create something that feels fresh and original. This approach works great for epic villains, heroes, and anti-heroes.
There are some excellent, iconic character concepts in novels and film. Even comic books have something to offer. You don’t want to be caught in the trap of very obviously just presenting retreads of other people’s great ideas, though, so don’t stop when you find a great character idea. Instead, think about why it’s a great idea. Try to distill it down to a few essential characteristics. In fact, if you can pick out just one thing that works, that’s best — and if there are others that work just as well, you can use them later for other NPC concepts. Once you have an idea or two, build on it to create something that feels fresh and original. This approach works great for epic villains, heroes, and anti-heroes. Co-Workers: Where books and movies can give you some of the most dynamic, dramatic NPC concepts, thinking about the people with whom you work every day (or people you know from school, or the prison yard, or wherever you spend your days around other people) can provide excellent grist for producing characters who serve more as “color” for the campaign. As with concepts sourced from books and movies, you should try to pick out a single characteristic around which you can build a character so that you don’t end up just throwing Bob your neighbor into the game. An exception to this, of course, would be a one-time gag when you know your players might appreciate the humor of an NPC who is reminiscent of someone you all know, but tread very very lightly if you decide to go this route, and if you do it too often it loses its potency.
Where books and movies can give you some of the most dynamic, dramatic NPC concepts, thinking about the people with whom you work every day (or people you know from school, or the prison yard, or wherever you spend your days around other people) can provide excellent grist for producing characters who serve more as “color” for the campaign. As with concepts sourced from books and movies, you should try to pick out a single characteristic around which you can build a character so that you don’t end up just throwing Bob your neighbor into the game. An exception to this, of course, would be a one-time gag when you know your players might appreciate the humor of an NPC who is reminiscent of someone you all know, but tread very very lightly if you decide to go this route, and if you do it too often it loses its potency. Images: One approach that I use and abuse quite regularly is browsing images on the Web. Especially when I need character ideas for a swords and sorcery fantasy game (usually Pathfinder RPG these days), I find that a really good picture can kick the creative center of my brain into motion and very quickly present me with a compelling idea or two for an NPC (or even a PC).
One approach that I use and abuse quite regularly is browsing images on the Web. Especially when I need character ideas for a swords and sorcery fantasy game (usually Pathfinder RPG these days), I find that a really good picture can kick the creative center of my brain into motion and very quickly present me with a compelling idea or two for an NPC (or even a PC). Legends: Characters of myth and legend (even mythologized historical figures) make excellent epic NPC concepts, but they definitely don’t tend to work very well for “extras” on the set of a campaign. Achilles, Hamlet, Oedipus, and other leading men are great examples. Female counterparts like Atalanta, Rosalind (from As You Like It), and Elektra can fill these roles just as easily. More secondary characters such as Eurystheus or Ophelia can serve evocative NPC roles handily as well.
Characters of myth and legend (even mythologized historical figures) make excellent epic NPC concepts, but they definitely don’t tend to work very well for “extras” on the set of a campaign. Achilles, Hamlet, Oedipus, and other leading men are great examples. Female counterparts like Atalanta, Rosalind (from As You Like It), and Elektra can fill these roles just as easily. More secondary characters such as Eurystheus or Ophelia can serve evocative NPC roles handily as well. Stat Blocks: NPCs created by others, as in the case of supporting cast in published adventure modules, can provide a useful jumping-off point for creating your own NPCs. So too can stat blocks in monster books and similar sources. Many game books offer “generic” character stat blocks as well, such as the example stats for the NPC classes in the back of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. Rolling up a set of stats for a character can provide a less derivative approach to the same means of inspiring character creation. Stat blocks are often somewhat dry when trying to find inspiration, but they can occasionally produce that spark of imagination you need — especially if one stat is particularly high or low.
NPCs created by others, as in the case of supporting cast in published adventure modules, can provide a useful jumping-off point for creating your own NPCs. So too can stat blocks in monster books and similar sources. Many game books offer “generic” character stat blocks as well, such as the example stats for the NPC classes in the back of the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook. Rolling up a set of stats for a character can provide a less derivative approach to the same means of inspiring character creation. Stat blocks are often somewhat dry when trying to find inspiration, but they can occasionally produce that spark of imagination you need — especially if one stat is particularly high or low. PCs: How well the idea of using your PCs as inspiration for NPCs will work for you depends on you, your players, and the campaign. I have GMed campaigns that were heavily populated with NPCs that were direct copies of my own PCs from other campaigns. They generally appeared only as cameos and departed again. It is very easy to fall into the trap of making a PC into a “pet” NPC that takes over the game to some extent, or otherwise spoils some of the fun of the game for the players, though — so be extremely careful with this approach and don’t get too attached to an NPC just because it’s based on a PC of yours. Remember to think of them as different people from your PCs, and let them get killed if need be. It is probably a bad idea to use other people’s PCs as templates for NPC creation, though, because it is too easy to offend someone by mishandling the character concept.
How well the idea of using your PCs as inspiration for NPCs will work for you depends on you, your players, and the campaign. I have GMed campaigns that were heavily populated with NPCs that were direct copies of my own PCs from other campaigns. They generally appeared only as cameos and departed again. It is very easy to fall into the trap of making a PC into a “pet” NPC that takes over the game to some extent, or otherwise spoils some of the fun of the game for the players, though — so be extremely careful with this approach and don’t get too attached to an NPC just because it’s based on a PC of yours. Remember to think of them as different people from your PCs, and let them get killed if need be. It is probably a bad idea to use other people’s PCs as templates for NPC creation, though, because it is too easy to offend someone by mishandling the character concept. Randomness: There are plenty of resources for random character creation that you can use to get an NPC concept started. Roleplaying game character generators are the obvious choice, and a number of them can be found by searching for them in your favorite search engine. Some RPG books offer basic random character generation tools as well, and foremost among them are a pair of books published by AEG — the Toolbox and the Ultimate Toolbox, both of which are essentially nothing but random d20 charts for hundreds of pages. When using something like that, just start by rolling up some interesting things on a few charts until your imagination takes over, then fill out the rest of the details as they occur to you, and never be afraid to reject the result of a roll if you don’t like it.
There are plenty of resources for random character creation that you can use to get an NPC concept started. Roleplaying game character generators are the obvious choice, and a number of them can be found by searching for them in your favorite search engine. Some RPG books offer basic random character generation tools as well, and foremost among them are a pair of books published by AEG — the Toolbox and the Ultimate Toolbox, both of which are essentially nothing but random d20 charts for hundreds of pages. When using something like that, just start by rolling up some interesting things on a few charts until your imagination takes over, then fill out the rest of the details as they occur to you, and never be afraid to reject the result of a roll if you don’t like it. Repeats: Some concepts lend themselves to reuse. File off the serial numbers, change the names to protect the guilty, and dress everything up a bit differently to present something you know from past experience is interesting and works well. Just don’t overdo it, or you’ll get a reputation for being unimaginative when people start figuring out what you have been doing.
Some concepts lend themselves to reuse. File off the serial numbers, change the names to protect the guilty, and dress everything up a bit differently to present something you know from past experience is interesting and works well. Just don’t overdo it, or you’ll get a reputation for being unimaginative when people start figuring out what you have been doing. Wikipedia: The “Random Article” link at Wikipedia can be a great source of inspiration if you don’t have any specific ideas at all, but going directly to a particular article about a topic related to what you need can be even better. My own “significant other” uses it quite heavily when she feels a need for inspiration when planning out a roleplaying session, not just for creating NPCs but for all kinds of things — plotlines and subplots, names for things (like a Druidic circle called the Racomitrium), and so on. Follow whatever links you find interesting, and eventually you may well discover you have an excellent idea brewing in the back of your head.
The “Random Article” link at Wikipedia can be a great source of inspiration if you don’t have any specific ideas at all, but going directly to a particular article about a topic related to what you need can be even better. My own “significant other” uses it quite heavily when she feels a need for inspiration when planning out a roleplaying session, not just for creating NPCs but for all kinds of things — plotlines and subplots, names for things (like a Druidic circle called the Racomitrium), and so on. Follow whatever links you find interesting, and eventually you may well discover you have an excellent idea brewing in the back of your head. Yourself: This idea is more fraught with danger than any other, but if all else fails you can always try to represent some variation on yourself in an NPC. Pick one characteristic, good or bad, and blow it completely out of proportion; imagine yourself as an epic character and fill in the details; or just fill in the background details of some otherwise uninteresting character with information from your own past, your own preferences, and your own habits. Alter some details to direct attention away from this sleight of hand trick, and avoid giving such a character a central role to protect yourself from falling into the trap of making You into a “pet” NPC.
Ultimately, inspiration comes to us wherever it decides to arrive. Making a list of the sources of inspiration that work well for you in particular can provide a quick and easy way to kick start your imagination when times are desperate, however. If none of these ideas work for you some day, as Rolling20s pointed out, you could always just sit down and start writing and see what comes up. I’ve never tried it for game session planning, myself, but it has worked well for writing from time to time.
[tags]rpg, role playing games, non-player characters, npcs, inspiration[/tags]New study shows that the prescribed weight loss has no effect on cardiovascular disease and mortality among patients with type-2 diabetes.
Official recommendations for obese patients with type-2 diabetes is to lose weight.
But this might not be the best advice and doctors should change their treatment guidelines, say health researchers from University of Copenhagen and University of Southern Denmark.
In a new study of obese patients with type-2 diabetes, they have discovered that patients who reached their planned weight loss target did not have a lower risk of developing heart disease and did not live longer than patients who hadn’t lost weight.
"We blindly strive for weight loss [for diabetic patients], but in fact we have no evidence that it’s healthy. Our study suggests that, at best, it has no effect," says lead-author Rasmus Køster-Rasmussen from the Research Unit for General Practice, University of Copenhagen.
"We should shift our focus from weight loss to other things that we know [have a beneficial effect on patient] survival and cardiovascular disease. For example, physical activity and a Mediterranean diet with vegetables, fish, a glass of wine, fruit, and lots of olive oil and nuts--without weight loss in mind," he says.
The new research is published in the journal PLOS ONE, after a two-year struggle to get the paper accepted for publication. Køster-Rasmussen attributes this delay to the nature of the controversial results.
"The study is absolutely solid"
The new study is a cohort study that began 25 years ago, tracking the progress of type-2 diabetes patients in Denmark.
761 patients were monitored during the first six years after receiving their diabetes diagnosis. Patients were seen by their GP once every three months, where they were weighed and advised to lose weight before the next appointment.
Køster-Rasmussen and colleagues checked their progress again, 13 years later, in the Danish national registers to see which patients had survived and which diseases they had contracted.
They discovered that patients who tried and failed to lose weight lived just as long as those who achieved their weight loss target.
"The study is very robust," says diabetes researcher Henning Beck-Nielsen, who is a professor at the University of Southern Denmark. He was not involved in the new study.
"It confirms what other studies have previously shown. It suggests that weight loss doesn’t have as big an effect on cardiovascular disease as was once thought,’ says Beck-Nielsen.
Expert: Weight loss has other positive effects
Three years ago a groups of American researchers reached the same conclusion after conducting a large randomised trial.
But even though the two studies point in the same direction, this is not a green light to put on weight, stresses Beck-Nielsen.
"I still believe that [doctors] should recommend that [patients] lose weight, because it has other positive effects."
"What matters is that you live a good life. When patients lose weight, they have a better life because weight loss is essential to stabilise their diabetes and thereby avoid eye problems and kidney disease," says Beck-Nielsen.
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Read the Danish version of this story on Videnskab.dkA Resource by Mark D. Roberts Go to Mark's Blog and Home Page
Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable?
Part 1 of 3
by Rev. Dr. Mark D. Roberts
Copyright © 2005 by Mark D. Roberts
Note: You may download this resource at no cost, for personal use or for use in a Christian ministry, as long as you are not publishing it for sale. All I ask is that you give credit where credit is due. For all other uses, please contact me at mark@markdroberts.com. Thank you
My Various Wrings on Jesus
The Birth of Jesus: Hype or History?
Was Jesus Divine? The Early Christian Understanding
Why Did Jesus Have to Die?
Was Jesus Married? A Careful Look at the Real Evidence
What Was the Message of Jesus?
How Can We Know Anything about the Real Jesus?
What Languages Did Jesus Speak and Why Does It Matter?
Recovering the Scandal of the Cross?
The Passion of the Christ: An In-Depth Review
Unmasking the Jesus Seminar
Jesus Revealed: Know Him Better to Love Him Better, by Mark D. Roberts Please pardon some shameless self-promotion, but I really do think this book has something to offer. Jesus Revealed examines many names and titles of Jesus (Son of God, Son of Man, etc.), explaining their historical, theological, and personal significance. Plus, I've added an appendix that answers the question "Was Jesus Married?" This book includes study questions for personal or group study. I've heard that it's helpful been helpful in adult classes and small groups. For more information or to purchase, click here.
Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable?
Part 1 of series: Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable?
Part 11 of series: Unmasking the Jesus Seminar
Posted on Monday, September 26, 2005
This post serves as a bridge between two different blog series. It's the last post in a series called Unmasking the Jesus Seminar, and the first post in a new series called Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable?
In my Unmasking series, I showed that the Jesus Seminar, a gathering primarily of New Testament scholars, appeared to be an objective attempt to determine what Jesus really said (and did). But, in fact, it was part of the overall vision of its founder, Robert Funk, to undermine orthodox Christianity, and especially its understanding of and faith in Jesus. The collection of Seminary Fellows, combined with the methodology they followed in their work, predetermined the Seminar's results. Beginning with extreme skepticism concerning the reliability of the gospels as historical sources about Jesus, the Seminar concluded – surprise! – that the gospels tell us relatively little about the historical Jesus. I don't mean to imply that every Fellow in the Jesus Seminar was a poor scholar (some were quite fine), or that everything the Seminar produced was worthless. But, on the whole, the main thrust of the Seminar's work was both academically suspect and injurious to Christian orthodoxy.
For the most part, the Jesus Seminar is old news these days. It no longer makes headlines because it ran out of sayings and actions of Jesus to debunk. Once it showed that Jesus didn't say much of what was attributed to him in the gospels, and that He didn't do much of what was attributed to him in the gospels, there wasn't much left for the Seminar itself to say or do.
Nevertheless, it seemed good to me to engage the Jesus Seminar on a critical basis. I wrote the Unmasking series, partly because some of the Fellows from the Jesus Seminar, like John Shelby Spong or Marcus Borg, continue to pass on the sins of the fathers to the children through their writings. Moreover, many people who never read one actual word published by the Jesus Seminar still live under its ominous shadow. I know Christians who have had a nagging feeling that sometime in the recent past a bunch of objective scholars got together and discovered that Jesus didn't say much of what the gospels record. And I know non-Christian folk who read the newspaper accounts of the Jesus Seminar and, to this day, have had no reason to doubt what was so enthusiastically reported about the historical unreliability of the gospels. I've tried to suggest many reasons to doubt the results of the Jesus Seminar, so that people might not be haunted or inspired by its ghost.
Yet the Jesus Seminar's passing didn't put an end to imaginative speculation about Jesus and the gospels. The most recent version of such comes from Dan Brown's bestselling book, and soon to be hit movie, The Da Vinci Code. To his credit, Brown doesn't claim to have written non-fiction. His book, after all, is a novel. Yet within the construct of the novel there is a lot of what is presented as if it were in fact historically accurate information about Jesus and early Christianity. And then there's the tantalizing statement on the first page of the book: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." Since The Da Vinci Code has much to say about many early Christian documents, it seems as if Dan Brown is claiming that anything he says about these documents is actually true. In fact, many readers, both Christian and non-Christian, have taken the fictional history of early Christianity as its presented in The Da Vinci Code as fact. When characters say things like, "All scholars know that...," many readers have taken this as a statement of fact, rather than an fictional claim of a novel. The result is that many people now believe that the biblical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are unreliable sources of information about Jesus, and that the non-canonical gospels, like the Gospel of Mary or the Gospel of Philip, provide the unabridged truth about Jesus. This movie, staring Tom Hanks, is due to be released on May 19, 2005
In my series called Was Jesus Married? A Careful Look at the Real Evidence, I've examined the latter part of this belief. I've shown that the non-canonical gospels, in addition to being unreliable sources of information about Jesus, actually provide almost nothing to support the fiction of Jesus's marriage as it's presented in The Da Vinci Code. But this book has left a lingering impression, rather like the distant echoes of the Jesus Seminar, that the New Testament gospels are unreliable.
Therefore, as I finish up my Unmasking the Jesus Seminar series, I'd like to segue into a new but related series, one I'm calling Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? In the several posts of this new series, I want to explain why Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are, in fact, reliable.
I'm thinking of reliability in two different senses. On the one hand, I intend to show that the biblical gospels are reliable sources of historical information about Jesus. In spite of their various limitations, these documents can help us to know quite a bit about what Jesus said and did. On the other hand, I also want to show that the New Testament gospels are reliable as a basis for faith in Jesus. Christians who take these documents seriously as guides to knowing Jesus are, in my view, acting reasonably, and I want to explain why. (Yes, of course I have a bias in this matter. But I think I can defend my bias with reasonable arguments and ample evidence.)
My new series, therefore, will pick up where the Unmasking series leaves off. I hope that I have shown why the Jesus Seminar should be dismissed by folks who want to know the facts about Jesus. I hope that I will show a better way to determine who Jesus was, what He said, and what He did. Therefore, this new series is the positive flip-side of the Unmasking series.
Before finish this post, I want to mention five further points.
First, this new series will be an elaboration of another series I did called How Can We Know Anything About the Real Jesus? I won't repeat everything in that series, especially the material about non-biblical sources of information about Jesus. But I will take the closing points of that series and develop them much further in this new series.
Second, as I stated at the beginning of How Can We Know Anything About the Real Jesus?, I am well aware that the topic I'm planning to discuss is vast, complex, and filled with controversies. If you're not familiar with my background, I should mention that I completed a Ph.D. in New Testament at Harvard, where I studied with some of the top critical scholars in the world, and where I had many bright colleagues, at least seven of whom ended up as Fellows in the Jesus Seminar. So I'm quite familiar with many of the critical issues associated with the gospels and the question of the historical Jesus. Moreover, when I wrote my book Jesus Revealed, I read a lot of the newer academic literature on Jesus, including things published by Jesus Seminar Fellows. So, though I'm not a full-time scholar, I'm reasonably up to date on the scholarly conversation about Jesus.
Third, this new series is meant primarily for my blog readers – an educated group composed mostly of non-specialists. In other words, I'm not writing for New Testament scholars. This means I will not footnote my comments as I would if I were producing an academic paper. And I will feel the freedom to make generalizations without backing up everything I say with reams of evidence.
Fourth, if you're the sort of person who likes those reams, you should check out the preceding post in the Unmasking series ("What Do Scholars Really Think About Jesus?") In this post I made reference to lots of scholarly literature on Jesus and the gospels. Perhaps the most directly relevant book for this new series is The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig Blomberg. Blomberg is a top-notch evangelical scholar who defends the trustworthiness of the biblical gospels in 250 demanding yet readable pages.
Fifth, in this new series I hope to show why it's reasonable to regard the New Testament gospels as reliable, both for historical inquiry and for personal faith. I cannot prove that the gospels are accurate, however, because this sort of proof cannot be had in historical investigations. Nor can I solve all of the problems that attach themselves to the question of the trustworthiness of the gospels. Many of these, quite honestly, I'm still working on in my forays into academia. But I do believe that a reasonable person, looking at the facts with an open mind, will conclude that the New Testament pictures of Jesus, while not photographic, are sufficiently realistic to merit both scholarly and spiritual confidence.
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Can We Know What the Original Gospel Manuscripts Really Said?
Part 2 of series: Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable?
Posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2005
When we open a Bible and look for the gospels, we find them in English translation, neatly collected at the beginning of the New Testament, complete with book names, chapter and verse numbers, punctuation, paragraphs, and these days, usually with chapter headings and reference notes. None of these were present in the original manuscripts of the writings we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. (Yes, even punctuation wouldn't have been present in the original documents.) What we find in our Bibles is the result of a process of preservation, translation, and publication. It makes sense to wonder if what we read bears any resemblance to what the gospel writers actually penned almost 2,000 years ago. Can we know what the original gospel manuscripts really |
arrangement gave Rolling Oven, which began as a food truck, the opportunity to open a stationary location and provide taproom patrons with fresh-as-it-gets pizza.
West Sixth Brewing, founded in 2012 holds mainstay status in the state’s craft beer lineup, employing more than 40 people. At its historic, former industrial bakery location, customers can easily enjoy selections from Chef Ouita Michel’s Smithtown Seafood, which shares a doorway with the West Sixth taproom.
As further evidence of craft beer’s economic waves, Selznick points to the services of a retired firefighter who built a specialty business cleaning the supply lines that run from a bar’s beer kegs to its taps.
“He’s got more demand than he can handle,” Selznick said. “When you look at all the businesses the craft beer industry supports – bottle and can makers, cardboard boxes, cleaning supplies, grain processing, farms, trucking – they make a significant impact.”
Working together this fall, the guild and the Kentucky Department of Agriculture inspired multiple collaborations across the state. They assembled five teams, each consisting of two breweries and a Kentucky Proud ingredient, and challenged each to create a specialty brew.
Louisville’s Against the Grain Brewery paired with Lexington’s Ethereal Brewing to create Peach Sour Saison, a specialty beer using peaches from Mulberry Orchards in Shelbyville.
During the beer’s release event in October, Ethereal Co-founder Andrew Bishop explained several of the young brewery’s beers include fruit.
“And some people are into it right away. Usually the craft beer fans,” he said. “But then I’ve had people who don’t want fruit in their beer at all.
“As a matter of fact,” Bishop said, after sipping from his glass, “I’d use even more peaches the next time around.”
As a backdrop to much of the activity, the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development offers multiple programs to help grow businesses, from startups to thousand-employee manufacturers.
Polly said his coffee company should qualify next year for the Kentucky Small Business Tax Credit program. The program incents business with up to $25,000 in tax credits annually after they’ve hired new full-time employees and invested in qualifying equipment.
West Sixth has taken advantage of the program the past three years.
And Country Boy, which plans to open a larger production facility and taproom in Georgetown in spring 2017, received preliminary approval for incentives through the Cabinet’s Kentucky Business Investment program.
For more information on the Kentucky Guild of Brewers, visit www.kygbrewers.org. To learn more about the Cabinet’s business-development programs, visit www.thinkkentucky.com.
From Think Kentucky, the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development
Northern Kentucky Breweries, Members of the Kentucky Guild of Brewers
Covington
See NKyTribune story about Braxton Brewery here.
Bellevue
Newport
See NKyTribune story about Wooden Cask Brewery here.Income inequality can be seen from space
How? It's surprisingly simple. Turns out, demand for trees in neighborhoods behaves a lot like a luxury item, as opposed to a basic necessity.
Tim De Chant at The Per Square Mile blog wrote about research on this a couple of weeks ago. Then, he went out and found examples, using images from Google Earth.
Research published a few years ago shows a tight relationship between per capita income and forest cover....They found that for every 1 percent increase in per capita income, demand for forest cover increased by 1.76 percent. But when income dropped by the same amount, demand decreased by 1.26 percent. That’s a pretty tight correlation. The researchers reason that wealthier cities can afford more trees, both on private and public property. The well-to-do can afford larger lots, which in turn can support more trees. On the public side, cities with larger tax bases can afford to plant and maintain more trees.
The trouble, as De Chant points out, is that the disparity here is about more than aesthetics. It's about air quality, cooling effects in the summer, and documented impacts on stress, crime, and quality of life. It's also interesting because it seems to go against the stereotype of wealthy suburbs where all vegetation has been eliminated in favor of houses.
That's Houston's Fourth Ward above, and River Oaks neighborhood below. But De Chant found satellite examples all over the United States, as well as in South America and China.
Read about the research on trees and income inequality
See more photos of neighborhood comparisons
Via Steve EasterbrookThe liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee has won a round against the National Republican Congressional Committee — with the liberal group turning back an effort to get an ad targeting Republican proposals on Medicare pulled from broadcast.
As Greg Sargent reported, the NRCC wrote a letter to WMUR in New Hampshire and Comcast, complaining that a PCCC ad attacking Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH) for having “voted to end Medicare” was false and demanding that it be taken down.“As a social worker here in the north country, I’ve spent my life helping people with disabilities. Now, I have a disability,” the woman in the ad says. “If I didn’t have Medicare, doctors’ bills could wipe me out — and put a burden on my five kids. When Congressman Charlie Bass voted to end Medicare, that was an attack on New Hampshire families just like mine.”
Key quote from the NRCC’s letter:
The Budget Resolution as approved by the U.S. House of Representatives does NOT end Medicare. In fact, the Budget Resolution makes no changes at all to Medicare for current or near retirees, as none of the Medicare-related provisions in the Budget Resolution would even take effect until 2022.2 This fact makes the Advertisement especially misleading, as the woman featured in the Advertisement is a current Medicare beneficiary, and would not have her Medicare benefits ended, or even changed in any way, under the Budget Resolution.
(Emphasis in the original.)
The letter also cited PolitiFact’s take on the Medicare proposals, and its declaration that they did not amount to ending Medicare.
Adam Green at PCCC, which gave the letter to Sargent, told TPM that the ad is still running.
“There’s a reason that we provided the letter, made that letter public,” said Green. “It’s absurd on its face. Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman addressed this — and the Republican plan would absolutely end Medicare.
Did their attorneys discuss anything with the stations, TPM asked? “It really wasn’t serious enough to involve attorneys,” said Green. “We just have a basic background document that we gave to them.”
Chris Ellis, spokesperson for Comcast Spotlight (the corporation’s local advertising sales division) confirmed to TPM that the ad was still running. “First of all, the ad reflects and advertiser’s point of view, and we neither approve or reject ads based on the opinions,” said Ellis. “With that said, we provided the information provided by the NRCC, and we have in turn provided the information that was provided by the advertiser [PCCC] to the NRCC, and on that basis we decided the ad would continue to run.”
John Randall, e-campaign director for the NRCC, told TPM: “Well, you know, we have submitted a letter and we have asked for the ad to be pulled because it is factually inaccurate. According to PolitiFact and the Washington Post, their claims are inaccurate and false, and we don’t believe that ad should be on the air.”
Where do things go from here? “You know, we hope that the right thing is done, and this false and misleading ad is taken off the air,” said Randall.-Ed. Note: This is a guest post by Bill Reno. Bill is an American goalkeeper enthusiast. When he's not busy researching obscure collegiate rosters or watching highlights of lower tier teams, you can usually find him enjoying a nice slice of 'za somewhere around Dallas, TX. Check out his site Everybody Soccer for more goalkeeper-specific content or find him on Twitter @letsallsoccer.
As the entire Atlanta United fan base knows, Brad Guzan will be joining the club this summer. We’re not exactly sure when Guzan will slide over, but it probably won’t be until mid-to-late June. Middlesbrough’s last match is against Liverpool on May 21st but with the World Cup Qualifying matches (June 8th, 11th) Atlanta will likely be Guzan-less for another 7-10 matches.
In the meantime, Alec Kann has had a respectable start to the season and would be a bit of a surprise if he lost his starting spot before Guzan stepped in. While some may want to see 24-year-old Alex Tambakis in net, realistically it’s Kann’s job to lose. Kann hasn’t saved any points for Atlanta this season but seeing how the 2016 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year currently has a 54% save percentage, it’s nice to see him not bleed goals left and right.
With so many goalkeepers struggling this year, there’s a feeling of a lost generation of goalkeeping currently transpiring. Not only does MLS feel short on realistic starting options, the US is thin on potential starters despite being only 14 months away from the World Cup. Oddly enough, Kann is a great case study for the goalkeeping shortage, both domestically and internationally.
The lack of developed goalkeeping is a result of a couple things. (This is relevant to Kann, just give me a second.) While there are currently thirty-eight teams between USL and NASL, the USL is only entering its seventh season. So when MLS continued to expand over the past decade and veteran goalkeepers retired, there were less and less tested goalkeepers to turn to. Essentially every late-twenty year old American goalkeeper has missed out in a crucial stage of development because there weren’t enough USL/NASL games available, if at all.
Alec Kann, who turns 27 in August, has only just recently played his 44th professional game in six years, with only 15 of those being in MLS. For all the hate the college game receives, Kann actually played more games at Furman (66) in less time than he did as a professional. Compared to Jon Kempin (turned 24 this month, 49 professional matches), Jesse Gonzalez (21, 32 matches) or Northwestern alum Tyler Miller (24, 32 matches). All of them are likely going to be close to doubling Kann’s count when they turn 27.
Naturally a lack of development will not only change the on-field performance of a player, but also the mindset. Younger goalkeepers iron out their game over time, finding out what style they’d like to adapt and knowing they have a long road ahead of them. Unfortunately for Kann, he doesn’t have that luxury with the current stage of career. While goalkeepers have longer careers, most are finished developing around 28.
All that to say, it’s very tough to say what Kann’s ceiling is truly or even what type of goalkeeper he is. Theoretically he should be entering the peak of his career but he still has a number of games to get under his belt before we can truly expect that for him. On top of that, Atlanta have protected him very well. While many are wowed by Atlanta’s attacking prowess, Atlanta has limited Kann to only a handful of tough situations. Kann has only faced one 1v1 situation this year (before the D.C. match) and has otherwise had a comfortable and straightforward time in net, which is probably fine with Kann. He’s not a goalkeeper who is going to chase down crosses and he’s not going to overplay his hand in the box. While other teams might need a more active goalkeeper, Atlanta doesn’t because the defense can take care of it for the most part. Perhaps the one big knock on Kann is that he still doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence with his distribution but for someone who only has 15 MLS starts, we can’t say that’s historically been a problem for him.
Looking at Kann’s upcoming successor, Guzan is met with the same number of question marks. Guzan was only briefly viewed in positive light by USMNT fans. During his first three seasons as Aston Villa’s starter (2012-2015), Guzan was showing some incredibly positive signs that he was the goalkeeper ready to supplant Howard.
For three straight years, Guzan stood on his head to keep Aston Villa out of relegation. The life-or-death stretch of playing was highlighted with Guzan earning Aston Villa’s Player of the Year Award in 2013. Unfortunately his legacy was immediately wiped away his last year at the club. In 2015-16, Aston Villa finished dead last in the Premiership with a 27/76 goal differential. Guzan’s heart was called into question multiple times by fans and met with absurd drama like “gumgate”. Watching him now, he’s lost the smoothness and calming demeanor he once owned and understandably makes fans leery to call him their starter.
Guzan and Kann share similarities in their playing style as mostly reserved goalkeepers, but possibly the biggest similarity is that we don’t know what their true ceiling is. Perhaps Kann is a late bloomer if he’s given more game time, perhaps not. Maybe Guzan can return to the form that we saw in 2012-2013, maybe not. The situation is heightened with the fact that Guzan will likely be sitting on hefty salary. For a goalkeeper to be met with high expectations, Guzan is actually in a great position to have his third consecutive less-than-stellar season with as many different teams.
I suppose the silver lining in Atlanta’s goalkeeping shuffle is that they can be successful with just about any goalkeeper with how good their defense is. So if Guzan can’t succeed with Atlanta, frankly, it puts to rest the idea of him as a USMNT candidate. Alternatively, Atlanta will most assuredly make a playoff run (*double checks Eastern Conference standings and nods confidently*) and the postseason stage should give Guzan a great jumping board to prepare him for any large international tournaments that might happen in 2018.Oxide Developer says Nvidia was pressuring them to change their DX12 Benchmark
Oxide Developer says Nvidia was pressuring them to change their DX12 Benchmark
| Source: DSO Gaming Author: Mark Campbell
Oxide Developer says Nvidia was pressuring them to change their DX12 Benchmark
Oxide games delivered us the first ever in-game DX12 benchmarking tool with their Ashes of a Singularity benchmarking tool, providing us with some very interesting results and a lot of controversy. Nvidia is certianly not a fan of this benchmark as it gives AMD a distinct advantage and in some cases gives Nvidia negative scaling when moving to DX12.
Nvidia's PR team even went to far as to say that they did not consider the benchmark as a proper representation if DirectX 12 performance, saying that the benchmark had many issues, particularly with MSAA.
Now and Oxide developer claims that Nvidia was placing a lot of pressure on the developer to disable certain settings within the benchmark in order to give Nvidia better performance, which would likely come at AMD's disadvantage. It is also claimed that Nvidia wanted to disable DirectX 12 asynchronous compute on Nvidia components, despite the fact that their own drivers claim that their GPUs support it.
“There is no war of words between us and Nvidia. Nvidia made some incorrect statements, and at this point they will not dispute our position if you ask their PR. That is, they are not disputing anything in our blog. I believe the initial confusion was because Nvidia PR was putting pressure on us to disable certain settings in the benchmark, when we refused, I think they took it a little too personally.”
What is most startling here is that Nvidia's own drivers tries to claim that Nvidia's GPUs has support for DirectX 12 asynchronous compute, which is something that Oxide says that their GPUs clearly do not really support. He also states the Nvidia only have a tier 2 DirectX 12 implementation whereas AMD has a tier 3 implementations, meaning that Nvidia has a little more CPU overhead.
“Personally, I think one could just as easily make the claim that we were biased toward Nvidia as the only ‘vendor’ specific code is for Nvidia where we had to shutdown async compute. By vendor specific, I mean a case where we look at the Vendor ID and make changes to our rendering path. Curiously, their driver reported this feature was functional but attempting to use it was an unmitigated disaster in terms of performance and conformance so we shut it down on their hardware. As far as I know, Maxwell doesn’t really have Async Compute so I don’t know why their driver was trying to expose that. The only other thing that is different between them is that Nvidia does fall into Tier 2 class binding hardware instead of Tier 3 like AMD which requires a little bit more CPU overhead in D3D12, but I don’t think it ended up being very significant. This isn’t a vendor specific path, as it’s responding to capabilities the driver reports.”
Right now it is looking like AMD GPUs are set to gain a nice bit of extra performance in DirectX 12 titles, but until a few more games drop we cannot really know for sure.
We already know that AMD has placed a lot of time and effort into building and supporting next generation API's like Mantle, Vulcan and DirectX 12, so hopefully that effort will begin to pay off when these APIs are more widely used in games.
You can learn more about DirectX 12 and asynchronous compute here.
You can join the discussion on the claims that Nvidia were pressuring Oxide games to change their Ashes of a Singularity Benchmark on the OC3D Forums.
Oxide Developer says NVIDIA was pressuring them to Disable Settings In their DX12 Benchmark. http://t.co/jRdAXJATyV pic.twitter.com/EOlrjczujO — OC3D (@OC3D) August 31, 2015
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Most Recent CommentsIn a new video from The Young Turks, host Cenk Uygur lit into “defense industry whores” who will do anything they can to force the United States into a military engagement with Iran.
Uygur began by berating former Democratic senator Evan Byah for collaborating with a group that produced “one of the worst fear-mongering ads that I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s about our negotiations with Iran — and the point of those negotiations is that they don’t get nukes, and they can verify, absolutely positively, that they will not have nukes,” he continued. “This ad, of course, lies and says the exact opposite — that if we strike a peace deal with them and can verify that they don’t have nukes, they will get nukes.”
The video — entitled “Special Delivery” — was produced by the American Security Initiative and was intended to be played during the Sunday morning political talk shows. However, ABC, NBC, and CBS declined to play, leaving Fox News as the only network to air the video.
“I can guarantee you that this video,” which depicts a nuclear weapon in a van exploding in an American city, “was funded by defense contractors who actually do want a war [with Iran] so they can get richer.”
“They’re not interested in our security,” he said, “they want the exact opposite — the less security we feel, the more we pour into defense contractors. Evan Bayh worked for those guys — as did Saxby Chambliss and Norm Coleman — they were their top bitches when they were in the Senate.”
“They were whores for these guys when they were in the Senate,” Uygur explained, “and they’re whores for them now that they’re out of the Senate.”
Watch the entire clip via The Young Turks on YouTube below.How Did This Get Made? #87
You know a sequel is good when none of the original actors from the first film are involved and the lead in the movie is not an actor but instead a lawyer. The hilarious Nick Thune joins Paul, June, and Jason to discuss Easy Rider 2: The Ride Back. They’ll cover everything from the real time driving scenes to all the confusing flashbacks to the terrible sound design. Reminder: If you have a sound collage for the 1st Annual HOWDIES email us over at howdidthisgetmade@earwolf.com! Also, you can now check out June Diane Raphael & Casey Wilson in ASS BACKWARDS for free on Netflix & HULU y’all! Plus, OJ: The Musical is now available on VOD & iTunes, go to www.ojthemusical.com for more info! Don’t forget to grab yourself a brand new HDTGM Daredevil T-shirt over at the Earwolf store and a copy of Paul’s comic book Aliens Vs. Parker available at www.amazon.com!Every year I buy Workman Publishing’s Secret Garden calendar, and by chance I stumbled across this Adult Coloring Book calendar. I was intrigued by this craft I knew nothing about, so I got the calendar, some pencils, and got to work coloring. And now I’m hooked. Coloring is relaxing, creative, and a great way to decompress after a hectic day.
Each month of the calendar is made up of artwork that complements the month. The main coloring area covers the entire top page and about 1/8th of the bottom page. I found it a little difficult to color across the folded pages, but it wasn’t impossible. The paper itself is heavy and there were no visible pressure marks showing up on the page behind the one you are coloring (I used pencils). The designs vary from very detailed to more simplistic, and most are very attractive and appealing. The designs include:
January – Koi in lily pond
February – Heart design
March – Bunnies and eggs
April – Flowers
May – Roses and Birds
June – Dragonflies
July – Ice cream and frozen treats
August – Sand dollars and sea shells
September – Parrots and tropical flowers
October – Under the sea – whales, dolphins, octopus, divers, waves (only design that is a little strange looking)
November – Pumpkins and gourds
December – Snowflakes
So if you love adult coloring books, this calendar is a great way to display your talent and skills.How quickly the shine comes off. When on 26 October Carles Puigdemont, Catalonia’s separatist president, signalled that he would not call regional elections, thus triggering a unilateral declaration of independence from Spain, his decision took Europe’s collective breath away.
Puigdemont’s tactics had until that moment served to integrate and mobilise public support, and his leadership was credited with bringing to life the nationalist vision of a Catalan state. But within hours of that declaration, Catalonia came under direct rule from Madrid, and Puigdemont fled to Brussels with four of his cabinet ministers, to the astonishment of many in the region – especially those who had expected him to stand up to Madrid and, at the very least, lead a campaign of civil disobedience.
Puigdemont defended his decision, arguing that he and his colleagues travelled to Belgium to raise their case for statehood at the EU institutions, but this did not prevent newspaper columnists from ridiculing him and cartoonists drawing him hiding out in a box of Belgian chocolates.
Carles Puigdemont: I’m not just fighting for Catalonia. This is about democracy itself Read more
The world, mocked FT columnist Robert Shrimsley, had “a new and heroic freedom fighter. De Gaulle, Gandhi, Mandela and now Carles Puigdemont, deposed leader of Catalonia who, as Spain took central control over his region, fled to Brussels and is refusing to return until he has guarantees about his safety. One can only imagine the conversations between the leader in exile and his aides.”
One can only imagine, indeed. We shall probably have to wait for Puigdemont’s memoirs before we can know exactly what was going on inside his head. Over the course of less than a week, he made two terrible political mistakes.
Puigdemont should, in my opinion, have held his nerve and not unilaterally declared independence, an action that immediately undermined the political legitimacy of the Catalan nationalist movement. But having decided to pull the trigger – something that was guaranteed to provoke Madrid into imposing direct rule – he should have remained in Spain whatever the consequences. I would very much doubt that the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, would have been foolish enough to imprison Puigdemont and turn him into a martyr.
Political leadership is about character and example. If such leadership is to mean anything at all, it must stand for principles that are believed in for themselves. A deposed Puigdemont standing up to Madrid for the Catalan cause might have been one of the most dramatic moments in Spain’s modern political history, possibly causing further national trauma. But, at the same time, it would have put an end to the destabilising (for the country as whole) dialogue of the deaf between Puigdemont’s party and the Madrid government.
Play Video 1:16 Brussels prosecutor: Carles Puigdemont has turned himself in to police – video
Without a crystal ball, we cannot know for certain how it would have played out but my strong impression is that after the backlash from the Spanish government’s heavy-handed use of police force against Catalan civilians, the Spanish prime minister was prepared to show a larger degree of flexibility in dealing with the Catalan leadership. Ironically, it was that very same backlash that emboldened Puigdemont into thinking that he had gained the upper hand on Rajoy.
Catalonia isn’t just Spain’s nightmare – it is Europe’s | Simon Jenkins Read more
If history is to be made, it requires, more often than not, the taking of big political risks. A statesman, Bismarck once observed, “must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment”. Puigdemont’s tragedy is that when he did hear those footsteps, he panicked and chose to ignore them.
We cannot predict what will happen on 21 December when the Catalans vote at regional elections. Much will depend on how Madrid deals with Puigdemont now that he has turned himself in. But one thing is certain: the consequences of Carles Puigdemont’s failed gamble will live on.
• George Kassimeris is chair in security studies at the University of WolverhamptonA rich blend of white and dark chocolate makes this gluten-free double chocolate torte with chocolate mousse out of this world!
Recipe and photos have been updated as of January 16 2016! You can easily double this recipe like I did originally, but remember to use a 10-inch springform pan and adjust your cooking time (around 25 minutes total because the torte will be thinner.)
This past week marked our 4 year wedding anniversary! To celebrate, I was going to treat Dan to a cake (which he gets frequently, but there are never any complaints.) We had to grocery shop to pick up some ingredients, and I decided to check the mail before we left. Lucky for us, we found a ton of coupons. But the best part was finding the coupons for Lactantia. I use their cream all the time, whether it be for baking or throwing into a fettuccine sauce.
While browsing through the coupon book, I noticed they had some recipes listed. I came across their Dreamy Double Chocolate Torte and knew instantly that I was going to make it for our anniversary! No regrets here, it was super rich and absolutely delicious. The scary part was how badly I misread the ingredients. I ended up leaving out a whole cup of sugar and thought I was screwed. But it turned into the best mistake ever because the dessert was the perfect amount of sweetness. I could seriously not imagine another full cup of sugar…
Gluten-Free Double Chocolate Torte with Chocolate Mousse Kacey Yields 10 I have halved the original recipe, but if you do double it, use a 10-inch springform pan and reduce cooking time as the torte will be thinner. 20 minPrep Time 50 minCook Time 1 hr, 10 Total Time Save Recipe Save Recipe Print Recipe My Recipes My Lists My Calendar Ingredients 1/4 cup dark chocolate, chopped
1/8 white chocolate, chopped
3/8 cup butter
3/8 cup sugar
1/8 tsp. salt
2 eggs, room temperature
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tbsp. coffee liqueur (I used Kahlua) optional
1/4 cup sweetened cocoa powder
Mousse:
1/8 cup dark chocolate, chopped
1/8 cup white chocolate, chopped
1 cup heavy whipping cream Instructions Preheat oven to 375F. Grease a 6-inch springform pan and line with parchment paper. Prepare a double boiler by adding about an inch of water to a small saucepan. Heat until water reaches a SMALL simmer. Place a heat-proof bowl on top of the pan and melt the dark chocolate. white chocolate, and butter together until smooth. Remove bowl from heat and whisk in sugar and salt. Pour in the vanilla, coffee liqueur, and eggs (whisking well before you add the next.) Whisk until evenly combined. Sift in cocoa powder and stir until combined. Pour the mixture into the springform pan. Bake for 40-45 minutes, or until cake is set. Remove pan from oven and allow to cool for about 10 minutes on a wire rack. Gently peel the parchment paper away from the cake and turn over onto the wire rack. Allow to finish cooling completely. For the mousse, reheat your double boiler. In a clean bowl, add 1/4 cup of whipping cream and heat with the dark chocolate and white chocolate. Cook until melted and combined, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and allow to come to room temperature. Pour the rest of the whipping cream into the bowl of your stand mixer. Whip on medium-high until your cream reaches stiff peaks. Add the room temperature chocolate mixture and carefully fold into the whipped cream, stirring until combined. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for about 20-30 minutes. When ready to serve the cake, add the mousse to the top-centre of the cake. Garnish with chopped chocolate or cocoa powder. 7.8.1.2 54 https://thecookiewriter.com/gluten-free-double-chocolate-torte-with-chocolate-mousse/ Kacey Joanette
I don’t understand why I have issues when it comes to making mousse. I have this terrible phobia of deflating my whipped peaks, so I NEVER seem to fully incorporate my chocolate completely. This results in large, hard chunks of chocolate throughout the mousse. Better yet, the chocolate I do not mix in from the bottom of the bowl usually goes back to its solid state, wasting a ton of goodness down there… Arg, time to get over that fear! At least when I updated this recipe I had nice, silky mousse!
If you are curious to see the original directions and ingredients to this gluten-free double chocolate torte, I posted it here.The league got back to work on Thursday, but there were some squads that needed a game to work off the rust.
The Blazers, Bulls, Hawks and Mavs were some of the teams that just didn't look themselves after a long layoff. A flurry of trades, injuries to LaMarcus Aldridge, Stephen Curry, Anthony Davis and Kevin Durant, and the news that Chris Bosh would miss the rest of the season, further complicated the first four days of post-break action.
But at this point, we know with 90(ish) percent certainty who the playoff teams will be in the West. We're not so sure about the bottom of the East, but that doesn't matter too much. At least five of the seven Eastern Conference playoff series will be interesting.
So while there are teams that need to improve on one end of the floor or the other between now and April 18, the best thing the best teams can do is get (and stay) healthy, so that the playoffs can be as competitive and exciting as we think they'll be. Keep your fingers crossed as we play the final third of the season.
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• Last week: More moves to be made?
• This time last year: Heat and Rockets roll through a slow deadline -- The Sixers dealt Spencer Hawes and Evan Turner at the deadline, Jason Collins became the first openly gay player in the four major U.S. sports, Thomas Robinson denied Corey Brewer, and James Johnson went off the glass.
• Plus-minus stud: Serge Ibaka (OKC) and Timofey Mozgov (CLE) were each a plus-54 last week.
• Plus-minus dud: Garrett Temple (WAS) was a minus-49 in two games last week.
• Hero Team of the Week: Oklahoma City (3-0) -- Despite Kevin Durant's foot issue, seven days off, and a rotation shakeup at the deadline, the Thunder continued to roll, beating the Mavs, Hornets and Nuggets by an average of 16 points.
• Zero Team of the Week: Washington (0-2) -- The Wizards got hammered by the Cavs and then blown out in the second half in Detroit.
• High jumps of the week: Detroit (+4), Utah (+3), Five teams (+2)
• Free falls of the week: Charlotte (-4), Boston (-3), Three teams (-2)
• East vs. West: The West is 188-137 (0.578) against the East in interconference games and was 6-5 last week.
• Toughest schedules through Sunday: 1. L.A. Lakers, 2. Utah, 3. Sacramento
• Easiest schedules through Sunday: 1. Golden State, 2. Washington, 3. Milwaukee
Schedule strength is based on cumulative opponent record, and adjusted for home vs. away and days of rest before a game.
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Pace: Possessions per 48 minutes (League Rank)
OffRtg: Points scored per 100 possessions (League Rank)
DefRtg: Points allowed per 100 possessions (League Rank)
NetRtg: Point differential per 100 possessions (League Rank)
The league has averaged 96.2 possessions (per team) per 48 minutes and 103.0 points scored per 100 possessions through Sunday.
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NBA.com's Power Rankings, released every Monday during the season, are just one man's opinion. If you have an issue with the rankings, or have a question or comment for John Schuhmann, send him an e-mail or contact him via twitter.RICHMOND, Va. — The cast and crew of the new PBS mini-series MERCY STREET is in Richmond filming the Civil War-based drama about the lives of two volunteer nurses on opposing sides. The series stars actors and actresses like HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER star Josh Radnor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead from THE RETURNED. While celebrities may sometimes seem closed off from you and me, some actors and actresses provide fans with a glimpse behind-the-scenes using their social media accounts. Several MERCY STREET cast members seem to be fond on taking photos on Instagram. Here is a selection of shots that shows the MERCY STREET crew around town.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays Nurse Mary Phinney, a feisty New Englander and widow who is a newcomer at Mansion House Hospital, asks a practical question about her costume.
Winstead, a North Carolina native, seems to be happy enjoying springtime on the East Coast.
It seems the actress got some time off of the set to enjoy a Canal cruise.
Actress Tara Summers, who plays Anne Hastings on MERCY STREET, enjoys Richmond’s public art.
Summers, who you’ve seen in BOSTON LEGAL, STALKER and RAKE, is also complimentary of her co-stars and Richmond’s natural beauty.
Actor Jack Falahee, who plays Frank Stringfellow, seems to be enjoying his time in town.
Though the actor, who you’ve seen in HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER, did seem a tad jealous of this crew.
Actor Cameron Monaghan, who plays Tom Fairfax, spent some of his time in town learning about the city’s history.
We have yet to find Instagram accounts for or recent photos from MERCY STREET cast members Josh Radnor (HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER), Gary Cole (VEEP, THE GOOD WIFE, OFFICE SPACE), Peter Gerety (THE WIRE), McKinley Belcher III (MADAM SECRETARY, CHICAGO PD), Shalita Grant (NCIS: NEW ORLEANS) and Hannah James, but we trust they too are enjoying their time in Richmond.
By the way, if you’re on Instagram, please give WTVR CBS 6 a follow here.Written Mar 6, 2017
In June of last year, I published my first VPN review on That One Privacy Site. Just previous, I had announced how I wanted to conduct this feature – namely eliminating bias, and including transparency regarding the selection of the services to be reviewed. I began using random.org’s “trails” feature which made public the services that were chosen using said website’s number generator. Early on, this solution proved useful, as anyone could get on that site as they wished, and could see the last 10 services that were rolled. Thus, it was easy to provide transparency when a service was selected.
However, during the selection process for the last several reviews, I’ve experienced a problem. When I roll a service that has already been reviewed, I re-roll and tweet out that I’m doing so, again, to be transparent. As the number of services reviewed grows, this method becomes less viable, because the rolls in the trail start becoming more bogged down with duplicates, making:
“The last 10 rolls for services to be reviewed”
…become…
“The last 2-5 rolls for services to be reviewed, mixed with other meaningless rolls”
I also wish for my reviews to be as relevant to people’s interests as possible. This has led me to consider other possibilities of conducting this selection. After some thought, I believe I have found a workable solution that will allow a selection process relevant to my reader’s interests, while keeping bias out of the equation and maintaining transparency.
Here is how I will conduct the VPN review selection from now on:
When I am ready to begin a new review, I will send out the link to a form where anyone who wishes may nominate a service of their choice to be reviewed – this call will be sent out via twitter, diaspora, and gab.ai. Services nominated must be currently on the VPN Comparison Chart and can’t have been reviewed by me for at least one year (if you’re curious about a date that a given service has last been reviewed, each has a “written/last updated” section at the top). Duplicates will NOT be accepted and will be removed just prior to selection as will any non-response. random.org will continue being used to select the service and record the “roll” for people to independently verify – instead of the number on the chart, the number selected will simply correlate to the row number in the spreadsheet – which can be found here for anyone to view. |
26 years".
In 2009 Gavin Hyatt, a British plumber, had an embryonic twin spill out of his stomach.
Medics said the 4cm growth was a parasitic twin that had died in the womb early in their mother's pregnancy.With their first comeback stage on Mnet M! Countdown now complete, there have been worrying fans and speculations whether member Tao will be joining the next few promotional stages.
As comeback performances usually involved numerous takes to make the stage as perfect as possible, there is a high probability the filming of M! Countdown was especially strenuous for Tao, as there were reports of recurrent injuries suffered by the artist in the past year.
In July 2014, Tao injured his foot while filming SBS variety show Laws of the Jungle, following another ankle injury at the Idol Star Athletics Championships. Tao was spotted traveling around in a wheelchair, and had to opt out from the group performance of “Growl” at EXO‘s second solo concert last month.
At the most recent EXODUS album press conference, it was announced that “as long that his injuries does not worsen, he will be joining EXO in all comeback performances.”
Although it has not been explicitly said that Tao is going to take a rest from the next upcoming performances, there a lot of concerns for the need of a break so his leg injury does not worsen.
A Twitter update by Tao’s largest Chinese Baidu fanbase, PreciousTaoBar, also added on to the speculations that the worsened leg injury after rehearsals that morning (at M! Countdown) might lead to his withdrawal from the following comeback stages.
TAO's injury has gotten worse after the rehearsal this morning, so he will not join the following comeback stages #getwellsoontao — PreciousZTaoBar (@BaiduTaoBar) April 2, 2015
After the stage on M! Countdown, Tao updated his Instagram and Weibo accounts in response towards his fans’ worries about his injury. He shared a selca of himself on Instagram, cheekily sticking out his tongue though still looking in pain, and captioned in English, “I will get well soon.”
He also updated his Weibo profile information with “It really hurts T.T But I really want to dance. Today’s performance has brought disappointment to many of you. I will be obedient and recuperate.”
[instagram://0-HLD8BPfK]
#GetWellSoonTao also trended worldwide on Twitter as fans expressed their concern over the unexpected turn of events.
Stay tuned to Koreaboo for official statements and updates on Tao’s participation in promotional activities.The Jets ended a cross-country, 2 ½-week search for a head coach by hiring someone who grew up just minutes from their training center in Florham Park, N.J.
The Jets officially named Todd Bowles, a 51-year-old from Elizabeth, as their new head coach Wednesday. The Jets chose Bowles after two interviews in the last week.
They have hired the anti-Rex Ryan. Bowles brings a quiet demeanor, who is liked by his players but also not afraid to discipline them. The Jets believe he will be someone who can unify a franchise that was fractured over the past two years.
Despite a public perception Quinn was the favorite, a source said Bowles was just as popular, if not more. After the first round of interviews, the Jets’ desire was to interview both Bowles and Quinn again. To that end, the Jets were prepared to fly to Seattle on Saturday night if the Seahawks lost to the Panthers in the playoffs. They were not definitely going to offer him the job. Instead, they wanted to talk to him again. When the Seahawks won to advance to this week’s NFC Championship Game, that plan ended.
If the Jets wanted to wait to talk to Quinn again, it would not happen until after the NFC Championship Game, at the earliest. If the Seahawks were to defeat the Packers on Sunday, the Jets would not be able to offer him the job until after the Super Bowl.
With the Falcons and other teams also interested in Bowles, the Jets lined up a second interview with him for Tuesday. Owner Woody Johnson, team president Neil Glat and consultants Charley Casserly and Ron Wolf had been impressed with Bowles in the first interview Jan. 7.
In the second interview, new general manager Mike Maccagnan got to meet Bowles. A group of Bowles, Maccagnan, Johnson, Casserly and Wolf went to dinner that night. At one point, Maccagnan and Bowles were left alone. Maccagnan came away convinced Bowles was the right choice, and the two sides agreed on a four-year deal worth a little more than $16 million.
Bowles will work with Maccagnan to try to revive a Jets organization that has not made the playoffs or had a winning record since 2010.
“It’s an honor and privilege to coach the Jets,” Bowles said in a statement from the team. “I want to thank Mr. Johnson and Mike Maccagnan for this opportunity. I can’t help but be humbled by the chance to coach this team. I am going to do everything I can to build a consistent winner.”
Johnson was impressed with Bowles’ record.
“From entering the league as an undrafted free agent in Washington to becoming a very successful coordinator in Arizona,” Johnson said, “Todd has earned everything he has achieved. He is a hard-working and dedicated leader who has garnered the respect of players and coaches. I am confident that Todd and Mike Maccagnan are the right combination to lead this team.”
With Bowles coming to the Jets, Quinn is the favorite to get the Falcons job, and Atlanta is willing to wait for him, according to an ESPN report.
Sources said Bowles’ approach of being something between an players’ coach and a disciplinarian appealed to the team. They felt players would play hard for him, but would also be held accountable, something that was lacking under Ryan.
The Jets also liked Bowles’ ideas about putting together a coaching staff. Bowles wants to hire former Bills and Cowboys coach Chan Gailey as his offensive coordinator, according to a source. He also is expected to hire Dolphins defensive line coach Kacy Rodgers as his defensive coordinator, according to a source.
Bowles, 51, was considered one of the top head-coaching candidates on the market. He spent the past two seasons in Arizona, where the Cardinals were fifth in scoring defense this year.
“I think he’s going to be a great head coach,” Cardinals defensive end Calais Campbell said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “ He has all the tangibles. He’s smart. He knows how to put his talent in position to win. He’s a natural leader. People want to follow him because he does it the right way consistently. I’m excited for him to see how well he does.”
The Cardinals’ defense had to overcome injuries and suspensions to some key players this past season. Bowles’ adaptability is something that impressed the Jets.
“I think that’s what makes him a great coach,” Campbell said. “He knows what his players do well and he puts them in position to do well. He knows if what an outside linebacker’s strengths are and he’ll put him in those situations to excel and try to keep him out of situations where he will struggle.”
Campbell supported the Jets’ view that Bowles will put his foot down when he needs to.
“He yells rarely but he will get after you, especially when the energy is low,” Campbell said. “He’ll get on you real quick. As long as you have good energy and you make mistakes, he’ll fix them, but if you don’t have good energy, he’ll get after you real quick. He definitely has a fire behind him when he needs to.”Finally, she speaks. Monica Lewinksy, the woman with whom President Clinton really did have sexual relations back in the late 90s is opening up to Vanity Fair with an explosive essay that sheds light on a number of misconceptions about her and her life.
The big news in “Shame and Survival”: She writes, “Sure my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: It was a consensual relationship.” Also: “I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.”
Now 40, Lewinksy, who, by the way, looks beautiful in the photo spread, writes about what it has been like to be her for the last nearly two decades. She has floated between New York, LA and Portland, Ore. — this last being the utmost antithesis of Washington, D.C.
Taken from a preview from Vanity Fair‘s publicity department, here are the more splashier parts of the story they’re letting us see:
1. In the wake of the affair and the press coverage, Monica was suicidal. She blames Matt Drudge and The Drudge Report for her “global humiliation” that was “driven by the Internet.” While she never actually tried to commit suicide, the thoughts were there.
2. She finds it “interesting” that Hillary Clinton’s instinct is to “blame the woman.” She insists she is not the “narcissistic loony toon” Hillary said she was. (Narcissism observations are pretty noteworthy coming from Hillary considering who she’s married to, right?)
3. She’s had a hard time securing jobs because of her past. She gets by on projects and loans from family and friends.
4. Best quote: “It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress.”
Most importantly, why is Monica doing this? And why now?
She says it is time to stop “tiptoeing around my past—and other people’s futures. I am determined to have a different ending to my story. I’ve decided, finally, to stick my head above the parapet so that I can take back my narrative and give a purpose to my past. (What this will cost me, I will soon find out.)” She asks somewhat rhetorically, “Am I supposed to put my life on hold for another 8 to 10 years?)
No longer angry at NYT‘s columnist Maureen Dowd (whom she formerly referred to as “Moremean Dowdy”) she says she’d now meet her for a drink.
Come on, Maureen, you need to take Monica up on this!
The June issue will be out May 8 and more nationally on May 13.A teacher at a Texas high school allegedly distributed this anti-Muslim handout to his economics class. (Photo: KHOU)
A high school economics teacher is facing disciplinary action after allegedly distributing anti-Muslim handouts to his students.
In late March — although the events are just coming to light now — an unnamed teacher at Foster High School in Richmond, Texas, sent students home with an eight-page handout entitled “Islam/Radical Islam (Did You Know).” The handout, which was not approved by the Lamar Consolidated Independent School District, made claims such as “38% of Muslims believe people that leave the faith should be executed” and “There are an estimated 190-300 million ‘radical Islam’ followers.” It also made reference to terrorism, beheadings and “if taken hostage by radical Islamists, what to do.”
The information on the handout, which cited no sources, had allegedly beem pulled from various hate sites, according to the New York Daily News.
This anti-Muslim handout included references to beheadings, terrorism and what to do if taken hostage by radical Islamists. (Photo: KHOU)
A Muslim student in the class took the handout home to her parents, who contacted the Houston office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Houston). The family has chosen to remain anonymous but CAIR-Houston is calling for swift action against the teacher. “I’m hoping that they will take appropriate disciplinary action, but more than that we would like to provide some sort of diversity training to the teachers in the district,” Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of CAIR-Houston, tells Yahoo Parenting. “My guess is that some of the educators in the district don’t know or understand Muslims, which is unfortunate because there is a large population of Muslims in that district. Without training, the school is on a collision course and things like this will keep happening.”
The Lamar Consolidated Independent School District provided Yahoo Parenting with the following statement: “We’re disappointed to learn one teacher made independent changes to a lesson plan, resulting in information being given that didn’t follow subject matter, or state and local curriculum plans. As soon as this issue was brought to our attention, the administration addressed the situation with the teacher. Ensuring our students have access to factual information, given in the proper context, is a priority in our District. Arbitrary curriculum decisions, which are clearly outside of the guidelines, won’t be tolerated. The District generally does not comment on personnel actions, but the appropriate measures will be taken in response to this matter.”Photos by Flora Bartlett
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
We're living through a great time for LGBT sportspeople. As more and more professional athletes come out—most recently Keegan Hirst, captain of West Yorkshire rugby team Batley Bulldogs—the revelations are increasingly greeted with rounds of applause rather than jeers. Or, indeed, with indifference—making it known that it's no big deal. However, that's not to say it's easy, of course, and in a sport as deeply rooted in heterosexual masculinity as rugby is, it can be terrifying.
The Kings Cross Steelers were formed in 1995 by a group of gay men in a pub in—spoiler alert—King's Cross. Their aim was to create the first gay-inclusive rugby union team in the world. Twenty years later they have a membership of over 120 and are four-time winners of the European Championships for gay rugby teams.
The story of the world's first gay rugby team starts, surprisingly, with Tory MP and soon to be Lord, Robert Hayward. He wasn't at the founding meeting but joined a few weeks later and was made chairman. "We never set out as some kind of gay crusade. We were just a group of guys who wanted to play rugby," he says. In the early days the Steelers were treated with curiosity by the opposition: "Lots of people, particularly the older people, would ask how we knew we were gay and where we found our players," Hayward tells me. "We were useful in that way because people could ask us questions that they'd never get the opportunity to ask normally."
I'm sitting in the bar that the team shares with East London RUFC. Outside, training has already begun. It's surprising just how many people there are—I count at least 50 guys, which is impressive for a Tuesday night—but I'm told this is actually quite a low turnout. The standard is high, albeit it with a few dropped balls—not a great shock, given that most of the players have spent the summer months with a pint instead of a rugby ball in hand. And then there's the fact that a lot of the players are totally new to the game, or returning from hiatuses caused by not feeling able or welcome to play after they'd come out earlier in life.
The club's current chairman, Alex Smith, is a perfect example. "I had played for straight teams before joining the Steelers, but, to be honest with you, I had self-excluded myself," he says. "I wasn't openly gay at that point and I didn't feel comfortable talking about it. Guys would ask me what I was doing that night and I wouldn't want to say that I had a date. That wasn't something I felt I could say at that point."
Throughout the club there are stories of players who were keen rugby players at school, who were then shunned as soon as they came out as gay. Alex, the PR man who was showing me around the club, was one such case: he'd been part of his private school rugby team until he came out. His next experience of rugby wasn't until late last year, when he joined the Steelers.
All photos by Flora Bartlett
The club's secretary, Ollie, looks like a rugby player and is skillful with the ball, but is relatively new to the game. He's played rugby for three years, firstly with the Cardiff Lions, a gay-inclusive team, before moving to London two years ago. I ask him whether being an openly gay man had been a barrier to joining clubs previously.
"Yeah, it had always played on my mind," he tells me. "Especially thinking, 'I'm going to join a club and I'm openly out.' But the people I would be playing with probably wouldn't know that I was openly out. I had only come out five years ago and I had no inbuilt mechanisms for coming out in the workplace or in a club without making it obvious. At university I had been part of the mountaineering club, and coming out to them was a terrifying experience. I had the feeling that if a certain amount of time had elapsed and you hadn't told them, then you thought that you had tricked them."
Joining a rugby club is an intimidating experience as it is: you're walking into a place where a group of people already have very strong bonds. So coming out to a "straight" club as a gay man must only make that joining process even more terrifying—a feeling Ollie alludes to: "When I asked to join the Cardiff Lions I thought that I was a reasonably confident person at that point in my life, and I could join a straight team," he says. "But it just seemed more straightforward and easier to join a team where you didn't have to come out. I also didn't have a group of gay friends, so I thought this would be a great opportunity to meet likeminded people."
Homophobic incidents are incredibly rare for the team. Chairman Alex has played in gay-inclusive teams for eight years, three at the Steelers and five for a Manchester team, and has only experienced two instances of homophobic behavior. Sadly, this isn't the case for all of the players. Chris had been sports president at university in Bristol and had lived with rugby players during college, but he'd also had a stilted start to his rugby career.
"I had knowledge of the game; I used to watch it. I fancied it, but I never felt comfortable doing it. My mates played for a straight team in Bristol that had three gay players, but I still couldn't bring myself to do it," he says.
For Chris, the Steelers had been more than just a rugby club: he'd moved to London on a Sunday, gone for a social that night, and begun playing on the Tuesday. Since then, squad members have helped him find a job and a flat. At university he'd participated in gymnastics, hockey, and cheerleading, often being the only openly gay man, and hadn't had any issues. Unfortunately, the uni football team had been less accommodating: "I didn't have many issues at university because I was so involved in the organization and volunteering, but I did have problems with my football team," he tells me. "They hated me and they behaved very poorly; they used to come up to me at the sports nights and say, 'You're such a fucking bender.'"
The Steelers also boast international experience in coach Nicola Evans, who has been capped for Wales's women. She hadn't previously been involved in gay-inclusive rugby but her first impressions have been very positive.
"It's a lot like being at a school, really, because you have the beginners, who have wanted to play rugby but have never had the opportunity, and you have the players who have played all the way through from youth level," she says.
Her experiences in women's rugby are similar to those that gay players face; stereotypes abound, but they can be shattered by simply watching a game. "In women's rugby you get lots of stereotypes, but in reality the women are from lots of different backgrounds and there isn't a type," she says. "It's the same with Kings—the men here are shattering those stereotypes."
Before I visited the Steelers I was expecting to see a team worn down by weekly bouts of homophobia from other teams. The truth is the polar opposite: rugby is about respect, and nothing earns a team respect more than being incredibly good. The Steelers are proof of that.
The next step for them will be taken in Nashville, Tennessee next year at the Gay World Cup. If they win, they can add "world champions" to their list of accomplishments; not bad for a rugby team dreamt up in a pub 20 years ago.What a difference six months — and a health-care overhaul proposal — can make! Just six months ago, the U.S Preventive Services Task Force, which works within the Department of Health and Human Services as a “best practice” panel on prevention, sounded a warning signal over a slight decline in annual mammograms among women in their 40s. In fact, they warned women of this age bracket that they could be risking their lives if they didn’t get the annual preventive exam (via HA reader Devil’s Advocate):
The downward trend, however slight, has breast cancer experts worried. Mammograms can enable physicians to diagnose the disease at early stages, often before a lump can be felt. “When breast cancer is detected early, it often can be treated before it has a chance to spread in the body and increase the risk of dying from the disease,” says Katherine Alley, medical director of the breast health program at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda. The U.S Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of experts working under the Department of Health and Human Services, recommends that women older than 40 get a mammogram every one to two years. The task force finds the test most helpful for women between ages 50 and 69, for whom it says the evidence is strongest that screening lowers death rates from breast cancer. Other groups, including the American Medical Association, suggest a more rigorous schedule, saying the test should be done every year; insurers often pay for annual tests. But experts say they are seeing gaps beyond two years in many cases. Carol Lee, chair of the American College of Radiology’s Breast Imaging Commission and a radiologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, says many women understand that they need to have a mammogram but don’t go back for repeat tests after the first one. In Bethesda, Alley said she has even heard anecdotal reports of breast cancer survivors forgoing recommended mammograms.
But today, that same panel says … never mind:
“We’re not saying women shouldn’t get screened. Screening does saves lives,” said Diana B. Petitti, vice chairman of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which released the recommendations Monday in a paper being published in Tuesday’s Annals of Internal Medicine. “But we are recommending against routine screening. There are important and serious negatives or harms that need to be considered carefully.” Several patient advocacy groups and many breast cancer experts welcomed the new guidelines, saying they represent a growing recognition that more testing, exams and treatment are not always beneficial and, in fact, can harm patients. Mammograms produce false-positive results in about 10 percent of cases, causing anxiety and often prompting women to undergo unnecessary follow-up tests, sometimes-disfiguring biopsies and unneeded treatment, including surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. But the American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology and other experts condemned the change, saying the benefits of routine mammography have been clearly demonstrated and play a key role in reducing the number of mastectomies and the death toll from one of the most common cancers. “Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and these idiots want to do away with it,” said Daniel B. Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School. “It’s crazy — unethical, really.”
What changed in six months to change the USPSTF from a sky-is-falling hysteric on a 1% decline in testing to Emily Litella? If the administration gets its way, the government will be paying for a lot more of these exams when ObamaCare passes. That will put a serious strain on resources, especially since many of the providers will look to avoid dealing with government-managed care and its poor compensation rates.
The motivation for HHS will be to cut costs, not to save lives. The sudden reversal in six months of the USPSTF, especially after it made such a stink over a relatively minor decline in screening, certainly makes it appear that they have other priorities than life-saving in mind here.
One final thought. Barack Obama predicated his ObamaCare vision on the notion that increased prevention would save costs. Suddenly, his administration is for decreased screening and prevention. Could that have anything to do with the CBO scoring on screening? And what does that say about how government will make decisions once they control the compensation and care in the US?
Update: Courtesy of an anonymous reader, here are the members of the US Preventive Services Task Force. See if you can figure out the one thing they all have in common:
What do they have in common? There isn’t a single oncologist among them, at least not as a listed specialty by the USPSTF published roster.The original Starship Troopers. Photo: Tristar Pictures
Break out the bug spray! Sony Pictures Über-producer Neal Moritz has decided that the time has come to reboot Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 fascist classic Starship Troopers. He has assigned the script to screenwriters Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz, who, among other things, wrote Thor and X-Men: First Class, as well as many episodes of the TV shows Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Fringe. Of course, they also wrote Agent Cody Banks, which makes one think that Frankie Muniz could be the perfect former child star to take over the Neil Patrick Harris role.
A new Starship Troopers follows remake plans for Verhoeven’s Total Recall and RoboCop. How long until his Basic Instinct and Showgirls get updated? Come to think of it, we could totally see Frankie Muniz in both of those, too.It’s been a week since we packed up our tents, hugged it out, got into our separate cars and hesitantly cruised out of Watkins Glen.
It’s been a week since we looked at each other and said “BEST. WEEKEND. EVER.” — with a bright light in our eyes proving we weren’t just saying it, this was for real.
It’s been a week, and we still can’t shake that Magnaball feeling.
All week we’ve been trying to get back to our real lives. We’re doing okay, but our souls haven’t joined us quite yet. They’re still jumping for joy in those festival fields, reminding us there was something so much better. They’re tugging away at us, pushing memories into our minds, surprising us with smiles when we least expect it.
Photo by Jordan Nahmias
We’ve scrolled through our photos too many times this week, simply beaming at the memories. We’ve clung just a little closer to our phones and feeds, our hearts getting that hit of happiness when we hear from someone in our Phish family, a Magnaball article pops up, or someone posts something — anything — that takes us back.
With our souls stuck in a place that feels so right, we’ve spent the week wondering: why can’t that be real life?
Why can’t we always be surrounded by thousands of people so full of love, so full of acceptance, so full of joy, of peace, of celebration? Why can’t our everyday lives be that powerfully simple, so immersed in what’s happening now?
We remind ourselves that regular life is amazing too — so many blessings, so many good people, all the realities that allow us to partake in events like this, all the perspective that helps us appreciate what isn’t the norm. But for some reason, even that recognition isn’t powerful enough to shake that Magnaball feeling.
So the week has been consumed with thoughts of: when can we do it again? Can we somehow go to Dick’s next weekend? No, we can’t really go to Dick’s next weekend. Is there any truth to these Mexico rumours? A winter tour? Man, why can’t Phish throw a festival every summer…?
We’re all just dreaming of our next experience, always left so incredibly satisfied — but wanting more more more.
Photo by Jeff A. Florentine, Instagram: @jaflorentine
At some point this week, we took a deep breath and pressed PLAY on shows that didn’t exist just days before. As we re-listen, we’re overwhelmed by that Magnaball feeling — the notes carrying new, vivid moments into our minds…
Dancing our faces off during “Walls of a Cave,” the army of red sticks bopping to “Meatstick,” our hearts practically stopping during “Dirt.”
How we made “Waiting All Night” fun even though we really don’t like that song. How we looked at each other during a gorgeous jam and said “is this still ‘Prince Caspian’?! This can’t still be Caspian!” — feeling terrible for anyone who took that pee break.
When the day began with “Divided Sky,” shooting us to another level before we’d even become comfortable in our spots, covering our bodies with goosebumps despite the sudden heat.
The universal silence during “What’s the Use,” tens of thousands of us hanging on to every sound as if it was life itself, because in that moment — it absolutely was life itself.
The “Drive-In Jam” … no words.
And the fireworks, the fireworks! Did they seriously choose to do fireworks during a freakin’ vocal jam? Wait, was that a happy face?! I never want this to end.
But now it’s over. We’re back where we came from, separated yet again from the people, the sights, the sounds that make us feel more like ‘us’ than anything.
We laughed so hard it hurt. We felt so much we cried. We loved so hard that love was everywhere, it came pouring into us — giving us even more to put back out.
We danced and hugged, held hands and slapped high fives. We happily crawled into our cold tents each night, waking up to friends and sunshine, nothing to do but be, and that little awesome voice inside that says one thing and one thing only: “YOU GET TO SEE A SHOW TONIGHT.”
Of course we can’t shake that Magnaball feeling.
We aren’t meant to shake it.
We’re some of the luckiest people on earth to be part of something this pure, this unifying, this magical — we have to hold onto it.
So instead of shaking it, soak in it. Instead of forcing yourself fully back into reality, drag your recovering feet for a while. Listen to the shows and look at the pictures. See your Phish family and hug them big.
Then start saving for your next run, because we know how to do this again.
See you there ❤
If you enjoyed this piece, please recommend and share with others.Enlarge By Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY A possible ban on peanuts on airplanes is being propsed due to peanut-allergy sufferers. It's much ado about peanuts. The Transportation Department has asked the public for weeks to comment on whether the once-popular, but increasingly rare, snack for passengers should be banned or restricted on airline flights for the sake of those who suffer serious allergies. But whichever way public sentiment falls, there can be no ban on peanuts without scientific proof to back it up. The department issued a clarification last week saying that it would abide by a provision in decade-old funding legislation that says no airline can be made to stop serving peanuts until 90 days after Congress and the Transportation secretary receive a peer-reviewed study that finds "severe" allergic reactions to the tiny peanut particles that might be present on a plane. The department isn't commissioning such a study, but the public can continue to weigh in until Aug. 9, and the comments will be reviewed. A possible ban was among consumer protection rules proposed by the department earlier this month. It also proposed raising compensation for fliers who are bumped off oversold flights. Restricting peanuts was important to some peanut-allergy sufferers who choose not to fly for fear of a reaction in the middle of a flight. Jennifer Roeder of the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network in Fairfax, Va., says, "The most practical solution... would be to simply discontinue serving packaged peanut snacks on all flights." Several airlines have quit serving peanuts, including Continental, JetBlue, United, Virgin America and American. But some caution that they serve products that contain other types of nuts or are made in facilities where peanuts are handled. Delta, the world's biggest airline, is among the few carriers that continue to serve peanuts. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more TOP TRAVEL STORIES Most read Most e-mailed TOP TRAVEL STORIES Most read Most e-mailedSWling Post reader, Philip Dickinson, recently contacted me with the following question:
“I have just bought a Tecsun 606 which takes two AA batteries which I think are normally rated at 1.2 volts. I have just ordered some lithium ion AA and notice that they are 3.7 volts. Can I use them?”
I replied to Philip that I’m pretty sure I’ve used lithiums in my PL-380 and/or PL-310ET without experiencing any problems. I know I’ve certainly used lithiums in several other receivers. [Update: I’ve always used Energizer and Duracell 1.5 V Lithium AA batteries–not 3.6V AA batteries.]
As I was about to post his question here on the Post, Philip sent another message:
“I found Tecsun’s email address and they rule out the 3.7 volt lithiums. Good job I checked.”
Wow–indeed, I’m glad you checked as well!
I had searched the PL-606 owner’s manual (PDF), but found no reference for voltage tolerances. Now I’m curious if other Tecsun receivers would have difficulty handling the higher lithium voltage.
Please comment if you have insight!
[UPDATE: Please check out this follow-up post and primer on Lithium batteries.]
RelatedAirmail has been one of the better email clients for Mac for years, offering a ton of features to help you burn through your inbox. This February, the company released its first iOS app, but only for the iPhone and Apple Watch, and now, with version 1.1 Airmail iOS, the app is coming to the iPad, too. The updated app offers support for a whole bunch of features including: split-screen, multitasking, read receipts, scheduled emails, keyboard shortcuts, and Touch ID security.
As we pointed out with our writeup of Airmail 1.0 for iOS, this is an app that doesn't have just a single gimmick to help you manage your email, but offers options, options, and more options. It's probably not best for casual email users, but for people who spend so much time in their inbox it feels like they should be paying rent, it gives you the choice to manage your messages how you like. Support for iPad is a logical step forward, and split-screen mode is very welcome for lighting up inboxes on-the-go. The app is available for $4.99 from the App Store.Rep. Ron DeSantis (Facebook)
The gunman who shot Republican whip Steve Scalise asked about political affiliation before opening fire on lawmakers practicing for a congressional baseball game.
Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) left practice shortly before the shooting, and he believes he spoke with the gunman briefly before getting into a car with his staffers about 7:10 a.m., reported Fox News.
“There was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there,” DeSantis said. “It was just a little odd, and then he kind of walked toward the area where all this happened.”
The Florida Republican said the man was not carrying anything when he spoke to him, but DeSantis believes he fired the shots a short time later.
“There was no one that was obviously walking around with a rifle at the time, but it was just a little odd that he kind of really, you know, walked up to us and asked and then went ahead — it was probably about three minutes, five minutes after we pulled out of the parking lot,” DeSantis said.The artistic curtain has once again risen on a historic Downtown treasure.
What began a century ago as the Rialto Theater -- and in turn became the Chief Theatre and then the Runyon Theater -- is now home to Spirit House Cabaret.
Brian Palomar and Keith Avery, owners of the Downtown Bar and Starlite Diner in Central Plaza, have re-imagined the space as a classy dance club, performing arts venue and social gathering spot.
After the Runyon Theater went dark in December of last year, Avery said he and Palomar began toying with the idea of using the site to provide Puebloans with a safe and upscale clubbing and dancing experience.
"We wanted to do something different for the community, to bring a place for live music, burlesque and dance, all within a safe environment," Avery said.
After a lease was secured in March, the process of prepping the building, specifically the interior, for opening night began.
"It was a lot of work," Avery explained. "A lot of cleaning and painting, mostly cosmetic rather than structural in nature."
In addition to a new sound system and refurbished main bar, a dance floor, flanked by VIP lounges, was installed on the third, or top, level.
A closed-off space previously used for storage.
Work was done on the ceiling, including upgrading the fire sprinkler system, with the entire interior, including the lobby bar, given a new red and black with silver trim color scheme.
For the main stage, a staple of the theater through its various incarnations, there is now both VIP and main seating sections.
The only thing remaining to be put in place was a moniker.
"Spirit House Cabaret reflects the fact that spirits could be in the building," Avery said. "Rumor has it that there are spirits in there, so...
"Plus the name also refers to the alcoholic spirits we serve, so we felt that it worked for whatever thought process you're going through."
Spirit House Cabaret's first big-scale offering was a mid-August Bumps and Grinders burlesque show, which attracted a capacity crowd and generated rave reviews.
Another Bumps and Grinders show is slated for Oct. 21, with an Oct. 28 Halloween-themed party and a paranormal activity search also on the docket.
"We intend to start booking live music," Avery said. "From local to national level acts. And in March, |
,” intrinsically objectifying women. A more objective and humanizing approach to the discussion would be to refer to those areas as being “sexualized,” because the hips, waist and breasts are not sex organs.
This is not to criticize any reporter, however, as all are imperfect and these tendencies are heavily indoctrinated into our society. It is merely to demonstrate that there is a much deeper meaning to the notion of men “checking out” women. This study clearly confirms that not only do men stare at women’s breasts in order to evaluate them but it also demonstrates women’s tendency to pick up on the cues and objectify themselves and other women.
Written by: Vanessa Blanchard
My Eyes are Up Here
Exposure to Sexually Objectifying Media
Science DailyLimbaugh echoes Malkin:
"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on... I wonder if Obama's going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard."
I'm sorry but this is outrageous. The story was a classic schoolbus bully incident; it could happen anywhere any time and has happened everywhere at all times with kids of all races, backgrounds and religions. To infer both that it was racially motivated and that this is somehow connected to having a black president is repulsive. I know that is almost de trop with Limbaugh, but sometimes you have to regain a little shock. This man is spewing incendiary racial hatred. He is conjuring up images of lonely whites being besieged by angry violent blacks... based on an incident that had nothing to do with race at all. And why, by the way, does someone immediately go to the racial angle when looking at such a tape?
These people are going off the deep end entirely: open panic at a black president is morphing into the conscious fanning of racial polarization, via Gates or ACORN or Van Jones or a schoolbus in Saint Louis. What we're seeing is the Jeremiah Wright moment repeated and repeated. The far right is seizing any racial story to fan white fears of black power in order to destroy Obama. And the far right now controls the entire right.
Do they understand how irresonsible this is? How recklessly dangerous to a society's cohesion and calm? Or is that what they need and thrive on?
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- West 25th Street has the breweries. East Fourth the chefs. West Sixth the clubs.
Egads, Detroit Avenue has the Invasion of the Geeks. And they're coming -- with swords, dragons, wizards, robots and Whovians.
Put on your big glasses and roll out the pocket protectors... The Side Quest Bar is opening any day now.
Sam Bridgeman doesn't pull punches about his soon-to-be nerd palace, located in the old Eddy and Iggy's spot, 17900 Detroit Ave.
"We are a geek bar," he says. "We're appealing to geeks and nerds."
Both words have become watered-down in recent years, used to convey "I'm smart" with passive-aggressive half-panache. But Bridgeman is determined to put the nerd back in the word, by really, really getting geeky.
The bar will roll out table games, comic books, TV nights.
"We timed our grand opening for Saturday, Aug. 30, to get the Whovians in," he says, referring to fans of the TV show "Doctor Who." Yes, Side Quest will host a TV party that night.
How about karaoke? Bike nights? Nude sushi? EDM wet T-shirt nights?
Are you kidding? Bridgeman would rather host lectures.
"We were thinking about one on how to make your own beer or maybe on solar panels," he says. "We don't want to be like all the other bars."
The bar's name has its origins in Dungeons & Dragons, a game Bridgeman likes to play – and promises to host in the joint.
"Geek has become very commercialized, to the point where everyone wants to think they're some geek," he says. "The good thing is there isn't a stigma attached to liking some things anymore, but we're not geek posers. We want a place where you can come and watch the History Channel or read comic books."
The hope is the geeks will drink while they're doing it. Side Quest will serve a wide array of craft beers. Bridgeman even plans on bringing in brews specially customized for Side Quest, including a Dungeons & Dragons beer called 20 DIPA. (Long story, OK?)
Sounds rockin' and all, but, uh, can you keep a bar busy with D&D fans?
"Yes, of course," he says. "Geeks drink, too, you know."The battle for net neutrality is ramping into high gear, as we anticipate an FCC vote on December 14 to either confirm or reject Chairman Pai’s draft order to undermine the 2015 Open Internet Order. With the future of the Internet, its capacity to continue fostering innovation, and freedom of expression online hanging in the balance, EFF encourages Internet users to speak out--both online and in the streets--to defend net neutrality.
Remote actions
You can can help defend net neutrality, wherever you’re located. We’ve set up tools to enable users to both email and call your Members of Congress, who will have an important role to play, especially if the FCC chooses to undermine innovation and freedom of expression by allowing ISPs to discriminate among their customers.
We’ve also suggested further opportunities to raise your voice both in communications with your representatives and in public, where your voice can carry an even greater impact. Finally, EFF is part of the Battle for the Net coalition, which is hosting an online petition and promoting further actions offline.
In-person actions
After you’ve taken action online, consider participating in any of the many actions planned around the country to champion the chance for anyone to access the Internet on equal terms.
On Thursday, December 7, responding to the company’s role in undermining user rights, allies are organizing protests at dozens of Verizon stores from coast-to-coast. An interactive map includes protest sites, as well as confirmed visits to congressional offices to amplify the message that Internet users want the right to access the network on equal terms, rather than according to their ability to pay a ransom to corporate ISPs.
A week later, allies--including the Center for Media Justice, Color of Change, the National Hispanic Media Center, and Free Press--will host a rally outside the FCC in Washington on the morning of the Commission’s vote on Chairman Pai’s draft order. A separate coalition has also organized a protest the day before the vote at the same site.
Whether or not you can join actions on December 7 in a city near you, or on December 13 or 14 in Washington, you can support these events by sharing links to more information in your social media channels. Make sure your community understands what’s at stake and why net neutrality (enforced by light touch FCC regulation) matters.
Planting seeds
If you’re motivated to do more, find an allied grassroots network where you live to build the movement for digital rights beyond the current flash point surrounding the FCC’s attack on net neutrality. From net neutrality to mass surveillance, and from Congress to local city councils, digital rights are both under attack and also present profound opportunity for local groups focused on making a public case for users.
If the Electronic Frontier Alliance has not yet recruited a local group near you, consider starting one! We’re eager to invite any network of 3 or more people taking action locally to inform, inspire, and mobilize their neighbors, classmates, colleagues, or friends to join the Alliance.
With a defining cornerstone of the Internet under attack from federal regulators and corporate ISPs, there’s never been a more important time to raise your voice to defend your rights online.Shakira has announced she is lucky to be alive after she was attacked by a vicious sea lion that mistook her mobile phone for a fish.
Shakira escaped a nasty sea lion attack before posting this photo of herself and some penguins in Cape Town (Picture: Shakira/Facebook)
The 35-year-old Wherever, Whenever singer was attempting to take a photo of ‘the beast’ when it jumped out of the water and turned on her as she holidayed in Cape Town, South Africa.
The star then took to Facebook to tell her tale in a piece named ‘Special Report: Attacked by a Sea Lion’.
The Columbian, who is dating Barcelona footballer Gerard Piqué, explained: ‘I happened to see some sea lions and seals.
‘I thought to myself how cute they were, so I decided to get a bit closer.
Shakira believes the seal lion mistook her phone for food (Picture: Shakira/ Facebook)
‘Suddenly, one of them jumped out of the water so fast and impetuously that it got about one foot away from me, looked me in the eye, roared in fury and tried to bite me.
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‘Everyone there screamed, including me. I was paralysed by fear and couldn’t move, I just kept eye contact with it while my brother “Super Tony” jumped over me and literally saved my life, taking me away from the beast.’
The pair escaped relatively unharmed with scratches to their hands and legs as they scrambled up the rocks to safety.
Shakira went on to say that the seal probably confused the shiny reflection of the mobile phone she was using with some sort of fish.
The singer and her brother grazed themselves on rocks as they climbed to safety (Picture: Shakira/Facebook)
‘It probably thought I was teasing it with food and then taking it away from it,’ she added.
‘Now I’m off to see some penguins! I hope they are a bit more friendly!’
Shakira later posted a picture on Twitter of her with the waddling birds. She wrote: ‘Today with the penguins! Definitely friendlier!’
VIDEO: Shakira – Whenever, WhereverAnother Taiwanese mother witnessed a violent attack on her daughter earlier tonight. While arguing and attempting to get back together with his ex-girlfriend, a man surnamed Huang cut the woman’s 12-year-old daughter’s throat.
The incident occured at around 8 p.m. in Tainan. According to SETN, the girl had tried to mediate the argument between the two adults; however, as the drama unfolded she became a bargaining chip for the man and was taken hostage. When negotiations broke down, he cut a 6-cm-long, 0.5-cm-deep wound across the girl’s neck.
Neighbors brandishing bats came running to the rescue after hearing the mother’s screams; however, by that time, the man had already escaped. The mother grabbed a cloth to try and stop the bleeding and rushed her daughter to the nearest hospital.
Luckily, the wound wasn’t too deep, requiring 8 stiches, and the girl is now recovering. Police are tracking the whereabouts of the man.
The attack follows a series of random attacks that have shook Taiwanese society, starting off with the beheading of a 4-year-old girl on the streets of Taipei on Monday. Two more random attacks followed with many worrying that more copycat attackers would soon follow. While this attack wasn’t random, the use of a knife and the fact that the victim was a young girl has left Taiwanese spooked yet again.
By Liting Lin
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PrintNew Spring Training Uniforms Across MLB for 2016
Spring Training’s going to look a whole lot better in 2016.
Today Major League Baseball, Majestic, and New Era announced a new unified on-field look for the annual slate of exhibition games held every March. The new look includes ball caps, lighter-weight uniforms featuring regular season designs, specially marked baseballs, and other on-field elements.
Jerseys are all part of the new Flex Base “uniform system” developed by Majestic, this new template is not exclusive to Spring Training, it will be worn throughout the regular season as well. Via a host of player feedback over the last two years, the new “Flex Base” jerseys are now anywhere between 10-20% lighter, will feature a lighter weight twill for application of logos and player name/numbers, and will also have new mesh panels up either side of the jersey (see a photo of that on a regular season jersey, and the new MLB tag on the pants here). These side panels are now available to be designed, as we saw with the new Arizona Diamondbacks uniforms released early last month.
But I know you guys are more interested in the actual designs than the technologies, so we’ll move on to that…
THE CAPS
While the New Era cap technology is staying the same (Diamond Era 59FIFTY), there are new elements being added to the cap of each team. All caps will have each team’s respective league logo embossed on the right side and a patch noting whether they’re a Florida or Arizona based Spring Training club on the other:
There will also be a design featuring Spring Training elements on the inside of the cap crowns, you’ll see details of this design (as it’s also featured on player jersey name and numbers) later on in this post.
Several teams are getting a new cap design as part of the change, the Chicago White Sox are going along the same route the Brewers took earlier this week by wearing a retro design with their modern colours:
The recently crowned World Series champions will crown themselves, the Kansas City Royals placing a gold crown above the “KC” logo on their cap:
One of the two caps being worn by the Los Angeles Dodgers will be without their familiar “LA” logo, replaced with a script “D” from their jersey chest, kinda reminds me of Mr. Baseball:
Toronto is going a more puzzling route, the Blue Jays remain blue but now dark navy blue (on the cap only), a double-white outline forms the shape of a maple leaf, no red to be found:
Detroit is going bold, and bright, their road Spring Training cap is an all-over orange… that should really stand out under that Florida sun (no fears, they also have a navy blue version of this, seen later in the post):
There’s several more designs you’ll see below, take note of Texas and their new state outline cap, and the Marlins have an orange “M” on their usual cap logo.
THE JERSEYS
Team jerseys will look more like their regular season counterparts, actually they’re the same thing teams will wear during the regular season. From Spring through the World Series most teams will now be wearing the same basic uniform design, with the usual exceptions such as the Tigers, Yankees, Cardinals, Dodgers.
These will not be replacing the batting practice uniform, as soon as the regular season begins teams will return to wearing their regular BP cap and jersey, in most cases the same design as last year, before games.
As mentioned earlier the biggest difference between the regular season and spring training uniform will be the sublimated graphics featured within the player name and numbers, these graphics feature general Florida and Arizona imagery along with the 2016 Spring Training logo. The design is the same for every team regardless of where they play.
These examples above are the same graphic style which is featured on the inside crown of the cap.
Most teams are wearing their standard regular season alternate jerseys with new Spring Training patches on the sleeve — FL for Florida clubs, AZ for Arizona teams.
Some teams have created new designs for the Spring such as the Tampa Bay Rays who have their large yellow sunburst logo on the left side of their chest:
The White Sox matching the cap with the new modern-retro batterman look:
And Minnesota, possibly giving us an early look at their new red alternate jersey? (Edit: Yes, they were)
That new gold, blue, and red combo of theirs really is growing on me every day.
Taking a look now at every team’s new look, grouped by division. Click on any of the images below for a much closer look at the new uniforms, patches, and number sublimation pattern
AL EAST
Baltimore adds a new all-black cap to their usual orange alternate jersey, Boston does the same with their red alternate now with a new red and blue cap. The Yankees, one of the few alternate-less teams in the league will stick with their usual Spring Training design, now with a white panel cap — this uniform is their home Spring set, they also have a road one which is featured later in this post.
Tampa Bay is wearing their powder blue alternate with the sunburst logo in place of “RAYS”, they have two caps to choose from, we are showing it with the designated home powder blue, they also have a navy blue which is shown later in this post. Toronto went with a mis-matched look, wearing a navy blue cap with a double-outline around a navy maple leaf (they’ve told me they’re going to play up the double outline much more going forward, it’s on their sleeves, pants, wordmarks, numbers, and new 40th season patch). The Jays will wear this new cap with their regular royal blue alternate jersey, no names on the back.
AL CENTRAL
The White Sox, like the Brewers, are going with a modern re-colouring of an old logo from the 1980s, changing their previously blue and red “batterman” logo to the modern black and silver. This logo is worn on both the cap and jersey (the jersey using the same design as their regular black alternate look), the familiar “SOX” logo as a patch on one sleeve.
Cleveland keeps their blue jersey untouched, now with a white panel cap and red “C” up front. Detroit has a home and road Spring jersey, we’re showing the home set in this image, the cap shows just a white outline around a navy blue “D” (road version of this set later in this post).
Kansas City has added a crown to their cap, possibly as a nod to their World Championship but more likely just a nod to their name. A patch celebrating their title is on the sleeve of their standard regular season road alternate blue jersey. Minnesota, like Detroit, has a home and road set, we’re not sure which is which, the above look is an all red uniform with a red front-panel on the cap. The Twins are set to unveil a new red alternate jersey this weekend, it’s possible this could be it. They just unveiled it, this is it!
AL WEST
No surprise with Houston, we had already heard they would be wearing their new regular season blue alternate uniforms in the Spring, the cap is new and features their BP cap logo, the H-star in a circle. The Angels go with their usual red alternate uniform, name-less, with a red and blue cap (note that the Angels are the only team wearing the Spring Training patch on the left sleeve).
Oakland, like the rest of the AL West in their usual alternate jersey, the cap has their alternate white elephant logo up front. Seattle goes with their teal alternates, cap features the compass rose logo with a teal bill. Texas, again, standard alternate jersey, but with a neat new cap, their white “T” over a map of the State.
NL EAST
Another modern-retro look as the Atlanta Braves stick with their old 1970s “A” logo, now in today’s colours, the jersey is the same as their regular road alternate but now reading “BRAVES” across the front instead of “ATLANTA”. Miami sticks with the usual black alternate but now with an orange “M” on their cap.
Nothing changes for the National League champs in New York, the Mets wearing their usual home alternate jersey with last year’s BP cap. The Phillies have a nice new red jersey, looks like a legitimate red alternate jersey… and spoiler alert, it totally is! The Phillies will wear this jersey a few times during the 2016 regular season. Hooray!
Washington is Washington. Usual red alternate, same white-front-panel cap as last year (only team with different colours for the “eyelets” on this year’s caps).
NL CENTRAL
This division dominated the regular season last year! And then got hammered in the playoffs… 162 games of competing so much against the best of the best will do that.
Chicago goes with the standard blue alternates, same BP cap as last year, funny thing — in this image they’re shown to still be wearing the old 16-star National League logo as a patch. A new jersey and they’re still using the logo which was replaced three years ago. Cincinnati regular red alternates with last year’s BP cap.
Milwaukee will go with their brand new alternate uniforms, and hey, first look at this set with name and numbers! Pittsburgh stays the same as last year, wearing their black alternate jersey, and St. Louis joins the Phillies in wearing what looks like a red alternate jersey which does not exist as a regular season option… hopefully they, like the Phils, wear this a few times in 2016. New cap too, an all red version of their blue Sunday home alternate.
NL WEST
Arizona’s the only team to get a major overhaul heading into 2016, that’s their new regular season alternate jersey you see above, paired with a new cap bringing back the classic baseball chomping snake head logo. Colorado goes with the purple alternate jersey and keeps the streaking baseball mountain cap logo from years of BP past.
The Dodgers, there’s another one of those “looks like a regular season jersey but isn’t” designs, paired with a new “D” cap shown in larger detail earlier in this post. The Dodgers also have brought back their BP cap from last year, you’ll see that in the image following this section.
San Diego shows no signs of their new blue and yellow (or even brown and yellow) colour scheme, it’s their navy blue alternate jerseys from last year with their same old BP cap from the last several seasons. Giants also with their usual BP cap, but with a new jersey, a black version of their road grey alternates. I like it.
ROAD UNIFORMS AND ALTERNATE CAPS
Five teams will be wearing either a separate road set or have two cap options. The Yankees are shown with their road uniform above, cap is the same but now with a grey front panel instead of white, the jersey reads “NEW YORK” across the front in grey with white trim, the number on the back in the same style.
Tampa Bay has a road navy and powder blue cap, the jersey is the same as shown earlier. The Tigers road uniform requires sunglasses, an all-orange cap with orange “D” logo is set to be worn with a navy blue jersey and orange “D” (the home features a white “D”). Typically the Tigers do not wear their MLB designated Spring Training jerseys, opting to stick with their regular season home and roads, we’ll see if that plan sticks.
Minnesota has last year’s BP cap and their usual regular season alternate, there may be some mixing and matching going on with their red cap and this jersey as well. Finishing things up it’s the Dodgers with their new Spring Training jersey paired with their BP cap carried over from last year.
THE OTHERS
The visual Spring Training experience doesn’t end with the caps and jerseys, MLB is really going all out this year, Spring Training will be treated (visually) as a “jewel event”, the same level as Opening Day, the All-Star Game, and the Postseason. This means a unified look across the board, on-field logos, on-deck circles, base jewels, in-game baseball designs, hoodies, and the previously featured cap and jersey patches.
The big question will be “Why?”, yes, I hear the familiar calls of “money!”, but I get the sense it’s not quite as much about money as past league-wide endeavours… “money!” wouldn’t explain why almost every team is wearing the exact same jersey design as their regular season set. They could have just as easily churned out another 30 designs, called it a Spring jersey, and added it in addition to their BP set.
I get the feeling this is more about upping the overall appearance of a Spring Training game, make things look a little more professional (Tigers orange aside), worthy of the title of the best baseball league in the land. Sure the sublimated numbers are kinda silly, but again, it’s Spring, if they’re going to experiment with some odd things I’d rather they do it then than during the regular season.
Looking forward to seeing how it all looks out there on the field in just a very few short weeks! BASEBALL IS BACK!Sideways Mencken Embarrassing Yourself In 1972 I cast my first vote in a presidential election. Richard Nixon. Within a couple of weeks I was in front of the White House demonstrating for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
So when I talk about embarrassing electoral decisions I know whereof I speak.
Those of you voting for John McCain on the basis of fear of Obama are going down that path. A vote against Obama will embarrass you later in life. You're going to very quickly come to realize -- well, those of you who aren't just blinder-clad partisan tools -- that the McCain campaign's attacks on Obama were not just dishonest but ludicrous.
Let me put on my magic Slytherin predicting hat: Obama will govern from the center. He will appoint a cabinet that will be more genuinely bi-partisan, or more to the point non-partisan, than any we've seen in modern history. Respected technocrats at Treasury. A respected-by-the-military moderate, possibly a Republican, at Defense.
His inauguration speech will trouble the
He will reach out to Hillary as a force in the Senate to counterbalance Nancy Pelosi in the House.
He will focus on the economy and put more contentious issues on the back burner.
A year into his presidency the economy will have improved (it always does: we're the Americans, and this isn't 1929,) and he will have done nothing terribly radical or scary and the McCain smear and fear campaign will be a sort of vague memory. Those that fell for it will deny ever having done so.
We'll see whether I'm right. But I'll tell you this: what I've just described is the real right-wing fear. The GOP's hard right doesn't fear a radical Obama: they'd love a radical Obama. It's a successful Obama that terrifies them. Following a second failed Bush with a second successful moderate Democrat would doom the genuinely radical dreams of the far right. The GOP would be forced to the center. Forced to compromise on abortion and gay rights. Forced to choose between moving toward the center or letting themselves be entirely defined by the wingnuts.
The rest of you who cast a vote for McCain on the basis of your fears of Obama will feel like fools. And by the way, you will be. Just like I was in 1972. In 1972 I cast my first vote in a presidential election. Richard Nixon. Within a couple of weeks I was in front of the White House demonstrating for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.So when I talk about embarrassing electoral decisions I know whereof I speak.Those of you voting for John McCain on the basis of fear of Obama are going down that path. A vote against Obama will embarrass you later in life. You're going to very quickly come to realize -- well, those of you who aren't just blinder-clad partisan tools -- that the McCain campaign's attacks on Obama were not just dishonest but ludicrous.Let me put on my magic Slytherin predicting hat: Obama will govern from the center. He will appoint a cabinet that will be more genuinely bi-partisan, or more to the point non-partisan, than any we've seen in modern history. Respected technocrats at Treasury. A respected-by-the-military moderate, possibly a Republican, at Defense.His inauguration speech will trouble the DailyKos.com but hearten TheModerateVoice.com He will reach out to Hillary as a force in the Senate to counterbalance Nancy Pelosi in the House.He will focus on the economy and put more contentious issues on the back burner.A year into his presidency the economy will have improved (it always does: we're the Americans, and this isn't 1929,) and he will have done nothing terribly radical or scary and the McCain smear and fear campaign will be a sort of vague memory. Those that fell for it will deny ever having done so.We'll see whether I'm right. But I'll tell you this: what I've just described is theright-wing fear. The GOP's hard right doesn't fear a radical Obama: they'd love a radical Obama. It's a successful Obama that terrifies them. Following a second failed Bush with a second successful moderate Democrat would doom the genuinely radical dreams of the far right. The GOP would be forced to the center. Forced to compromise on abortion and gay rights. Forced to choose between moving toward the center or letting themselves be entirely defined by the wingnuts.The rest of you who cast a vote for McCain on the basis of your fears of Obama will feel like fools. And by the way, you will be. Just like I was in 1972. This entry was posted by Michael Reynolds, on Friday, October 31, 2008. You can leave your response.Calm thy twitching, People Who Twitch When I Don’t Post Things! For here I be, Posting A Thing. A brand new Wheel of Time Re-read, to be exact! Yay!
Today’s entry covers Part I of the Prologue for A Memory of Light, in which I contemplate the incompatibility of war with historical preservation efforts, demonstrate my brilliant detective-ing skills (which are cleverly disguised as “my complete lack of short-term memory skills”), and spend almost twenty minutes trying to come up with a “metal/mettle” pun for this intro that makes the slightest amount of sense before giving up in disgust.
Previous re-read entries are here. The Wheel of Time Master Index is here, which has links to news, reviews, interviews, and all manner of information about the Wheel of Time in general. The index for all things specifically related to the final novel in the series, A Memory of Light, is here.
This re-read post, and all posts henceforth, contains spoilers for the entire Wheel of Time series. If you haven’t read, read at your own risk.
And now, the post!
First, a small unimportant formatting note which no one will care about except me (so why am I telling you (I don’t know (shut up))): given the sheer number of jumps between point-of-view characters within chapters in this book, I’ve finally caved to the inevitable and started indicating POV switches within chapter summaries with dividers (WOT-themed ones, whee!). This will hopefully make things less confusing, or at least make them confusing in clearly delineated discrete chunks, which is probably the best we can all hope for at this juncture. Got it? Good. Whee!
Second and much more importantly, a brief note to say: I’ve said it before, but it bears saying many many times: thank you guys so much for all your kind words to me about this blog. I cannot say how much it pleases me that you find enjoyment in reading it, and that you continue to follow it through all my crazy. This entire endeavor has been immeasurably enriched by your faithful presence and thoughtful contribution to the community you’ve built around it, and it would absolutely not have been the same without you.
So, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for reals. And welcome back, my dears, as we turn, with somewhat bittersweet anticipation, into the homestretch of this thang.
Onward!
Prologue: By Grace and Banners Fallen [Part I]
What Happens
A soldier named Bayrd plays with the putty-like substance that used to be a coin, and listens to Lord Jarid Sarand demand to know what’s going on. All the metal in the camp of Jarid’s army has turned to mush overnight, and all their food has rotted away. Bayrd begins whetting two stones together as Jarid declares that this “unnatural night” is Queen Elayne’s fault, along with her witches. He demands her head, but shockingly, one of his guards, Eri, asks how exactly they’re supposed to do that. Jarid blusters threats at his insolent tone, but Eri only smirks. Karam opines that Elayne isn’t doing anything but ignoring them; they are no threat to her with no working weapons or food, but Jarid feverishly ignores his words. Eri suddenly rips off his House Sarand badge and walks out of camp, ignoring Jarid’s shouts after him. Jarid goes back to planning an assault against one of the cities, not noticing that other men are gathering up their belongings and drifting away as well, until Karam begins doing the same, followed by Lord Davies. Jarid howls that they will pay for their betrayal as Bayrd continues working on his spearhead.
There was something powerful about crafting the spearhead. The simple act seemed to push back the gloom. There had been a shadow on Bayrd, and the rest of the camp, lately. As if... as if he couldn’t stand in the light no matter how he tried. He woke each morning feeling as if someone he’d loved had died the day before. It could crush you, that despair. But the act of creating something—anything—fought back. That was one way to challenge... him. The one none of them spoke of.
Bayrd finishes his stonehead spear, and tells the other guards he will make others for them once they leave. Jarid leaps for Bayrd, incensed, but two of the others grab him. They drag Jarid through the now mostly-abandoned camp to a tree, where they bind and gag him. Bayrd gives him a waterskin, and tells Jarid it’s nothing personal, but there’s something they all have to do, and Jarid’s wife isn’t the leader they need to do it, and Bayrd will be hanged before he lets Andor go to the Last Battle without him. Jarid begins to weep, and Bayrd promises to send someone his way if they see anyone.
I have an oath older than the one to your family, anyway. An oath the Dragon himself couldn’t undo. It was an oath to the land. The stones were in his blood, and his blood in the stones of this Andor. Bayrd gathered the others and they left for the north. Behind them in the night, their lord whimpered, alone, as the ghosts began to move through camp.
Talmanes marches with half the Band toward Caemlyn as quickly as he dares, while refugees clog the road and smoke and screams rise from the city ahead. Talmanes is appalled at how bad the situation looks as they approach the walls, and is fearful to think what will happen if the Shadow gets hold of the dragons stored in the city.
The Palace wasn’t on fire yet. Could the soldiers there be holding? No word had come from the Queen, and from what Talmanes could see, no help had arrived for the city. The Queen must still be unaware, and that was bad. Very, very bad.
Talmanes joins one of his commanders, Sandip, who points out the bands of mercenaries grouped outside the walls, doing nothing. He also points out that the city will be a deathtrap soon, and then they see that Trollocs are attempting to seize the gate out of which the refugees are fleeing. Talmanes realizes what will happen if the Shadowspawn manage to block all the gates out of the city, and calls for the Band to advance on the gate.
Isam sits at a table in an “inn,” or reasonable facsimile of such, in the ramshackle parody of a town that sits near the valley of Thakan’dar, in the shadow of Shayol Ghul itself, and wonders who summoned him. He reflects that most humans have no idea the place even exists, and knows it is no home, even though he had grown up there. He is careful to keep out of sight of the figures in red veils wandering the streets below.
The Samma N’Sei, the Eye Blinders, had always been touchy and full of pride. No, touchy was too mild a term. They required no more than whim to take a knife to one of the Talentless. Usually it was one of the servants who paid. Usually.
A man in a hooded cloak walks down the street, and the Samma N’Sei scatter before him, by which Isam knows it is Moridin. Isam expects the Chosen to enter the inn, but Moridin walks past without stopping. Isam is served food, and is glad it contains no meat, since you could never be sure what kind of meat you were being served in the Town. A pretty woman dressed in red and black enters with arrogant confidence, and Isam goes to one knee even though he does not recognize her, assuming she must be of the Chosen.
That motion woke the ache inside his stomach from where he’d been wounded. He still hadn’t recovered from the fight with the wolf. He felt a stirring inside of him; Luc hated Aybara. Unusual. Luc tended to be the more accommodating one, Isam the hard one. Well, that was how he saw himself. Either way, on this particular wolf, they agreed. On one hand, Isam was thrilled; as a hunter, he’d rarely been presented with such a challenge as Aybara. However, his hatred was deeper. He would kill Aybara.
The woman sits at his table, and tells Isam that she wants al’Thor dead, a task at which he has failed in the past. Isam points out that each time he was set on al’Thor, another of the Chosen then took him away from the mission. The woman says that will not happen this time, and that unless the Great Lord himself says otherwise, he is to kill al’Thor. Isam notices peripherally carriages outside, escorted by Fades, and knows there are thirteen women inside; he surmises that “another” has been caught. The woman chastises him for his failure in the Two Rivers, but Isam has wondered before whether that had truly been meant to work, or just keep him out of the way. He reflects that he is tired of being a pawn. He tells her he will need help, and in answer she brings two of the red veils into the room.
The men dropped their veils and bared their teeth. Burn me. Their teeth were filed. These had been Turned. You could see it in their eyes— eyes that weren’t quite right, weren’t quite human.
He almost runs to Tel’aran’rhiod, for he has never seen the Samma N’Sei lower their veils except to kill, but they do not attack. The woman tells him they will accompany him; Isam notes the difference between that and “serving |
frantically trying to fight his insecurities and regain his lost abilities.
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The plot beats I liked in the last year of Superman stories—a more meaningful understanding of human frailty and down-on-the-ground connection to real-world injustices—were smothered by overcooked emotional scripting and underwhelming villains. This Superman stopped feeling like the superhero other heroes would look up to.
Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne wasn’t wearing his cape and cowl during the last year of Batman comics. A near-death experience left him reborn without the skills and trauma that birthed the Dark Knight and a fitter-than-ever Jim Gordon fought crime in a 10-foot-tall robo-Batsuit. Like the weaker Superman storylines, these arcs had their charms, especially when showing a Bruce Wayne who was more emotionally well-adjusted.
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But, fun as it was, the Gordon Batman would never have the bleak psychological allure of Bruce Wayne’s Dark Knight. People like Batman because he’s a survivor who turned loss into a strength, though that mindset has painfully isolated him from meaningful relationships over the years.
However, the biggest surprise of the relaunched Batman and Detective Comics—written by Tom King and James Tynion IV, respectively—has been how Bruce has been prioritizing relationships after putting the cowl back on. In the main Batman title, he’s taking a new approach to superhero mentorship, addressing junior partner Duke Thomas with refreshing respect and candor.
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Over in Detective Comics, he’s revealed his identity to Batwoman in an appeal for her expertise that leaned on emotional connection. What’s more, he’s letting her be in charge of training heroes that will be facing the mysterious threat targeting vigilantes in Gotham.
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This is a big shift from the terse, aloof, and all-knowing iteration of Batman that’s been prevalent in recent years. He’s asking for help, acknowledging the emotional states of others and praising his partners.
He’s even treating the new superpowered crimefighters in his city with less than total suspicion.
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It’s all stuff Batman hasn’t been shown doing in a long time. My interview with Tom King last month gave some insight as to the logic powering this characterization:
You’re inheriting a Batman who is kind of a clean slate, but it also feels like Bruce is showing more emotional range in your first two issues. What’s your take on Batman’s relationships? What does it look like when Batman lets people in? King: I think at this point in his career—and this goes back to the continuity stuff—it’s stupid to write a story where Batman’s like, “I don’t need a family. I just need to go forward and think about my dead parents.” He’s smart enough to realize that he’s been through some things and that he does need a family and that he does need help.
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In similar fashion, the tweak of making Superman an explicit father figure humanizes him more than the Clark Kent who just died. The recently deceased Clark was dating Wonder Woman in a relationship that hit a rocky patch after his power loss. The Man of Steel flying through the skies is married to Lois Lane and helping raise their young son. He’s an older, more experienced Kal-El—supposedly from the reality that preceded DC’s 2011 reboot—who lived a secret life with only occasional superheroing. Now that he’s taken up the red cape again, the quieter moments with his family have served as a counterpoint to the super-fisticuffs.
That life isn’t without its tensions…
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…but, so far, the new stories position Superman as a source of stability and comfort, even if he is a transplant from a universe that doesn’t exist anymore. He’s not raging around, losing his temper.
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Superman as a level-headed dad with a son that he’s teaching superhero stuff. Batman, of all people, telling someone not to pull away. DC’s made a lot of mistakes handling its characters and issuing unfulfilled promises over the last few years, making it hard to trust that the publisher can execute better-nature versions of its heroes. But, as regards its two biggest icons at least, these last few weeks have been a promising start.Barack Obama is not a skillful strategist like Bill Clinton. He is not a gifted rhetorician like Ronald Reagan. Nor is he a bold and inspiring leader like Abraham Lincoln. And he can’t seem to shake himself loose from the strings that attach him to the trial lawyers, to big labor, and, surprisingly, to the standard banker-economists who got us into the mess we are in now. But he is an honest man. He is intelligent, analytical, and knowledgeable. And he tries hard to think through the dilemmas which confront us and to tell us clearly and straightforwardly what he wants to do and why he wants to do it.
But it doesn’t seem to work.
Contrast this to the politicians he is up against. When John Boehner at the height of the debt ceiling crisis answered him on the national media he simply did not tell the truth. He said that the president would not compromise, would not take yes for an answer, and wanted it all his own way. But he cannot have forgotten that he had negotiated Obama into far more cuts than Obama and his caucus had wanted, thought wise or even palatable in return for a modest increase in revenue to be achieved by closing egregious and unfair loopholes in personal and corporate taxes. This is the same compromise recommended by the “Gang of Six,” which included the extremely conservative and admirably patriotic Senator Tom Coburn, by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson group, and by Republican economists like Martin Feldstein. It was the Speaker who, Arafat-like, walked away from that deal because he concluded he lacked the skill or the muscle or the spine to sell it to his own caucus. Let it be said that this compromise included recalculating the cost of living formula for social security—a change every responsible economist recommends—but the equally rigid Nancy Pelosi rejected.
And Mitt Romney, supposedly a man experienced in business realities, in a parody of himself, has pronounced that he opposed the deal reached on the very eve of default—because it did not go far enough in the direction of what the Tea Party wanted.
Where can we find leadership that fits today’s circumstances, as Obama’s cool, rational approach and clear-headed rhetoric apparently do not?
I turn to the ancient Greek comic author, Aristophanes, speaking at what must have seemed a similar time. In his play The Knights two citizens are looking for a leader fit for the times. They come upon a sausage-seller and propose him as ideal for the job.
“Tell me,” asks the astonished man, “how a sausage-seller can become a great man.”
“You will be great,” they answer him, “precisely because you are a sad rascal without shame, no better than a common market rogue.”
The dialogue shifts to fit exactly the situation of Sarah Palin (remember the Katie Couric interview), the god-parent of the Tea Party. The sausage seller objects: “But I have not had the least education. I can only read, and that very badly.” And he is answered: “That is what may stand in your way, almost knowing how to read. A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue. But do not, do not let go this gift, which the oracle promises... Politics these days is no occupation for an educated man, a man of character. Ignorance and total lousiness are better. Don’t jettison such god-given advantages.”
Look at the roster of leaders vying for my party’s nomination. At the top of the list stand Mitt Romney, who will say anything, and Michele Bachmann, who assured us that defaulting on the national debt is no big deal, while a sensible man like Jon Huntsman is in single digits.
Oh, I know: it’s not funny, but one must either laugh or weep.Back in February, a desperate message appeared in my Twitter feed. The IT Crowd, the sitcom by geeks for geeks (They did it first, Big Bang Theory!), needed extras for an episode of the fourth series. Geeky extras. Realising that I was not only a geek but someone with an unholy acting talent to rival that of Calculon from Futurama, I couldn't not apply.
They had asked for a photo of myself geeked up. Unfortunately, I didn't have anything special for such an occasion. Resigned, I sent a photo of myself looking normal, in the hopes that they might keep me in mind for another occasion, one where they needed suave, sexy people like myself. Confusingly, they got back to me within a few hours, telling me they very much wanted me as one of the geeks. There had clearly been an administrative error, but I decided to pop along to filming all the same. This is my story...
Day One
1300. Arriving at the rendezvous point half an hour early, I'm greeted by the UK's least intimidating street gang - the phrase "Should've gone to Specsavers" has never seemed more appropriate. It's the first day of university all over again, as "Have you travelled far?" and "What do you normally do?" fill the air like a nerd mantra. The crowd murmur, impressed, as Norwich, Scotland and Ireland are mentioned, and jaws drop as one of our number, Micha, reveals that he's come all the way from Germany for this. For some reason, my half-hour walk from home to the location fails to elicit much of a response.
1330. We're met by the lovely Chris Jones, who has the unenviable task of nerd-herding over the course of the shoot. To the bemusement of passers-by, this gaggle of geeks marches into our very own TARDIS, a white trailer whose insides resemble an American diner, only without a jukebox. Or any food. There's a television, though, and we sit chatting as someone from wardrobe comes to assess our nerd credentials. I watch, nervously, as some of my cohorts are handed extra-nerdy shirts and cardigans to wear. With my checked shirt, striped tie and thick glasses, could I be about to get sent home for looking too cool?
1400. No. In fact, the wardrobe lady compliments me on how nerdy I'm looking and waves me through. I'm told there's a danger I might strobe, though, and spend the next quarter of an hour envisaging myself as a superhero, a bit like Dazzler from the X-Men (but with larger breasts).
1430. A group of glamorous female extras from an outside agency comes to join us in the trailer. I'm later told that they were dressed rather provocatively, but I'm too busy looking around at the bevy of bespectacled nerdy beauties to notice. I may not have the social skills to actually go up and talk to any of them, but I can sure as hell stare. So that's exactly what I do.
1500. The call comes through from the not-so-evil overlords on set: bring on the extras! We're shepherded out of the warmth of the TARDIS and into the bitter cold of a disused multi-storey car park. It's a glamorous life, working in television. I wonder, as we're separated into several small groups and positioned between metal fences, if perhaps we have been gathered for a darker purpose - I suspect the sitcom gods would look quite favourably upon a sacrifice of 30 or so nerds in exchange for another successful series...
1515. It seems their plan is more fiendish than I had imagined, as it's revealed that our first task... is to run. There are some things in life that I just don't do, and running's one of them (Counting past 23 is another, which makes birthdays difficult). I consider storming out, but at that moment we are greeted by comedy legend Graham Linehan, writer/director on The IT Crowd and one of the brains behind shows such as Big Train, Black Books, and Father Ted. He thanks us for coming along and explains a little about the scene, and as his Irish tones wash over us my reservations melt away. I don't do running, but I'll make an exception for Graham Linehan. Plus, I realise, if I do everything exactly to the letter then he's sure to promote me to a regular on the show, right?
1545. After several takes, Graham congratulates us, I get my breath back, and all is well. One of the other extras compliments me on my particularly nerdy-looking running; how did I manage to get my limbs to flail around like that? "Four years at RADA", I tell him.
1600. Richard Ayoade, aka Moss, arrives on set. At once, three dozen fanboys and fangirls go into silent raptures, all of us wondering who will be the first to smash through our delicate veneer of professionalism and give him a big hug. Nobody does, but we all secretly really want to. We are told that the next scene will involve a lot of standing around and cheering. Now that, I can do. Several big barrels of fire have been lit on set for atmosphere, and we're told not to go near them. Instantly, like a child with a candle at the dinner table, I find myself resisting the urge to wave my hand over the flames.
1700. I manage to avoid third degree burns, and before long another scene is in the can. Despite the icy conditions, there's a slight party atmosphere among the extras as members of the crew distribute hand-warmers. One of the agency girls, having been recruited through more traditional means, seems a bit confused by the afternoon's events, and asks me if this is going to be on television. I reply that I think it's some sort of internet thing.
1715. As the crew sets up the next scene, we break to go to the toilet. As I stand at the urinal, the man next to me thanks me for coming along. Now, there are some things in life that I just don't do, and talking to people at urinals is one of them. However, as the words filter through to my brain, I realise I know the owner of those Irish tones. I don't do talking to people at urinals, but I'll make an exception for Graham Linehan. We have a lovely conversation in which he tells me we're all doing a marvellous job, and I tell him how great it is to be a part of it. I decide that it's probably the wrong time to ask him about my becoming a regular character, and with a parting warning about the hot tap, Graham is gone. Eventually, I calm down enough to go about my business. Oh, and he was right about the tap.
1730. Chris O'Dowd, who plays Roy, is brought down to the set, and we continue our crowdly duties during a scene between the two of them and actor Benedict Wong. I'm completely swept up in it by this point. It's Moss and Roy! In the flesh! Moss and Roy and... Pete? Fearing my own name isn't nerdy enough, I try to come up with a suitable moniker for my character. Eventually, I narrow it down to Billy and Eustace. I'll let Graham decide.
1830. The room buzzes as another guest actor is brought in, and a jumper is borrowed from one of the extras for him to wear. It looks better on him, somehow. As the scheduled end of the day approaches, we're asked if we're okay with hanging around for an extra half hour so that they can finish the day's scenes. Of course we're okay with it. I do feel slightly sorry for the agency-hired extras, though. Most have been doing this for so long that there's no longer any novelty value to being an extra, and they're certainly not imbued with the sense of sheer excitement that can only come from being a massive fan of the show. For them, it's just been a cold day standing around in a car park. My sympathy quickly evaporates, though, when I hear one of them refer to it as 'The It Crowd'. Some things just cannot be forgiven (Graham has said in the past that either pronunciation is acceptable, but we all know the truth...).
1930. The day comes to an end, and we are sent back out into the world to resume our place at the bottom of the pecking order. Each of us has an extra spring in our step, though, because we've just had the most incredible afternoon. And we get to do it all again tomorrow!
Read part two of Pete's adventures later in the week! The IT Crowd is screening on Channel 4 on Friday nights.This tiny island nation of 5.4 million people is known for being meticulously managed. On a continent of charmingly chaotic mega-cities, Singapore is a polished showpiece of tidy office towers, sleek shopping malls and infrastructure that actually works.
The government tends to keep a tight rein on anything that might disrupt its finely kept veneer. Earlier this year it tried to ban three children's books perceived to promote homosexuality, but backed down after an online uproar. A local film called "To Singapore, With Love," about political exiles, was labeled a threat to national security and banned in September. Earlier this month the city-state banned shisha tobacco.
In this context the quiet rise of exotic dance would seem to be ground-breaking. But across the city dance studios are starting to install 38mm brass spinning poles. Pole dancing, it turns out, is taking off in the conservative capital of Southeast Asia.
In a shop-house near Singapore's business district, a group has gathered to see a routine from the renowned Australian pole dancer Michelle Shimmy, who is in town to launch a local franchise of her Sydney-based Pole Dance Academy (PDA).
Read MorePole dancing being used for fitness
One of the Singapore dance instructors, Salmah, steps up to introduce her "Ghetto and Sass" class. "I do the booty work around here," she says. "I know people say we're conservative, but this is sexy, it involves gyrating and a lot of hip and thigh work. … It's like twerking, although I'd rather not call it that."
Four new pole dancing studios have opened up recently — among them an Italian franchise, Milan Studio — all looking to cash in on the growing interest in pole dancing. Many gyms in Singapore are now offering pole dance fitness classes as an alternative to yoga and pilates.
"Pole [dancing] has increasingly become a norm among women here in Singapore," says Sueann Tan, co-owner of the new PDA studio. "I don't think it's because we are getting less conservative as Singaporeans, but rather, that people are starting to understand that pole dancing is moving further away from its'stripper' roots."
Most of the new pole dancing additions have been founded by students of Bobbi's Pole Studio, Singapore's original pole dancing destination, located next to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Dominic Chappell led Retail Acquisitions which bought BHS
The former owner of BHS, Dominic Chappell, has been accused of being "a liar" who had his "fingers in the till" by top BHS managers.
The claims were made to MPs at a hearing into the collapse of the firm.
In a scathing attack, the ex-chief executive of BHS, Darren Topp, alleged Mr Chappell threatened to kill him during a row over company money.
Mr Chappell described that claim as "absolute rubbish" in a comment to a reporter after he had given evidence.
Mr Chappell, whose Retail Acquisitions bought BHS for £1 last year, defended his recovery plan for BHS, saying it had been "credible and viable".
He told MPs that as the 163-store chain teetered on the edge of collapse, Sir Philip Green, whose Arcadia group sold BHS to Mr Chappell last year, scuppered a rescue deal with Mike Ashley, the owner of Sports Direct.
However, Sir Philip has denied knowing of any bid interest from Mr Ashley.
'Premier League liar'
Earlier, Mr Topp said he initially took Mr Chappell's claim to be a turnaround specialist and property expert at face value. When Mr Chappell's promises "unravelled", rather than "putting money in" he had "his fingers in the till," Mr Topp said.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption BHS hearing: Topp tells MPs 'Chappell threatened to kill me'
Former BHS financial consultant Michael Hitchcock was similarly scathing of Mr Chappell and his team. He told MPs: "I think I was duped. I think the technical term is a mythomaniac. The lay person's term is he was a premier league liar and a Sunday pub league retailer. At best."
He added: "The credibility and ability of the people Dominic surrounded himself with were not fit for purpose... I fundamentally don't think he understood what was going on.
"I question his intelligence, he wasn't a retailer. The motive was purely for his own benefit. There is a big smell test which I adopt in a lot of these situations, and it just did not smell right," Mr Hitchcock said.
Analysis: Simon Jack, BBC business editor
What we have learnt for sure is that Retail Acquisitions Limited, the company set up to buy BHS from Sir Philip, was not a normal company.
Some directors resigned the minute the deal was done as they felt uncomfortable that the board was becoming stuffed with friends of Dominic Chappell. This is a board remember that voted in favour of using company money to refinance the mortgage of Mr Chappell's father.
The stage is now set for Sir Philip Green to take the hot seat next Wednesday. He calls the shots at BHS's former parent company Arcadia and its ultimate owner Taveta Investments, which in turn is owned by his wife Lady Tina Green. That set up is not exactly normal either.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Former BHS employee 'appalled' by revelations at select committee.
'Death threat'
Mr Chappell, a former racing driver with limited retail experience, had promised to put millions of pounds into a BHS after he bought it from Sir Philip Green's Arcadia group.
He said his business plan for BHS was fundamentally sound and the retailer could have survived if he had been able to raise sufficient funds.
However, there are questions over his decision to transfer about £1.5m out of the company to Sweden. Mr Topp said his initial reaction to hearing of the transfer was to call the police.
During a heated phone call, Mr Topp told MPs, Mr Chappell threatened to kill him. "If you kick off about it, I'll come down there and kill you," Mr Chappell is alleged to have said.
However a Daily Telegraph reporter tweeted that, after the hearing, Mr Chappell described that claim as "absolute rubbish".
The money was transferred back to BHS, minus transaction fees.
Meanwhile, Mr Hitchcock said he was forced to change the company's bank mandate to "stop any chance of money flowing outside of the business".
'Philip went crazy'
During his questioning, Mr Chappell said Sir Philip could have done more to help save BHS, rather than tip it into administration.
Arcadia was a major secured creditor, and it was Sir Philip who took the decision to call in administrators Duff & Phelps, Mr Chappell said.
Mr Chappell claimed that just before BHS went into administration he had arranged a rescue deal backed by the billionaire owner of Sports Direct, Mike Ashley.
On learning of this deal, "Philip went absolutely crazy, screaming and shouting down the phone that he didn't want to get involved with Mike Ashley," Mr Chappell said, adding that it was then that Sir Philip called in a £35m loan.
Image copyright PA Image caption Sir Philip Green was accused of blocking a deal to sell BHS to Sports Direct
During the hearing Mr Chappell also accused administrator Duff & Phelps of being "heavily conflicted" because of its close connection with Sir Philip, describing the firm as the billionaire's "ponies".
Mr Chappell also said he was looking at launching a legal suit against Arcadia and Sir Philip over a BHS property sale by the tycoon to his stepson. He claimed that BHS missed out on £3.5m because of it.
'Significant funding'
However, a spokesman for Sir Philip denied those claims. He said he was "unaware of any bid interest by Mike Ashley."
Moreover, Sir Philip had not chosen the BHS administrator, and "did not ban or block Retail Acquisitions from meeting with the pensions regulator", the spokesman said.
BHS could have been saved had Mr Chappell "brought funding to the table," he continued.
Sir Philip's firm Arcadia "invested substantially in BHS and there was significant funding at the point of sale. He [Sir Philip] gave Retail Acquisitions every opportunity to succeed in the turnaround," the spokesman added.
'Held to ransom'
The BHS pension scheme, fully funded a decade ago, now has a £571m pension deficit and negotiations over plugging these liabilities formed a key part talks to rescue the retailer.
Mr Chappell claimed BHS was "held to ransom" by the Pensions Regulator and Sir Philip. He said he attempted to meet the Pensions Minister three times, only for her to cancel on the grounds of being conflicted.
Also during his evidence, Mr Chappell:
Declined to detail his earnings from BHS, but said he would send MPs a letter
Called former BHS executive Michael Hitchcock "a man of many words and of very little delivery".
Apologised for the "avoidable travesty" of 11,000 people losing their jobs
Said there had been an enormous lack of investment in BHS under Sir Philip
MPs have already taken evidence from the pensions regulator and financial advisers on the sale of BHS to Retail Acquisitions. Sir Philip is due to appear later this month.
The Business, Innovation and Skills Committee and the Work and Pensions Committee are hearing evidence into the collapse of the 163-store group, which resulted in up to 11,000 jobs losses and left a huge hole in the pension fund.
Duff & Phelps announced last month that BHS would be wound down with the loss of up to 11,000 jobs after efforts to find a buyer failed.
BHS, which went into administration in April after the company ran out of money and could not pay suppliers, is holding closing down sales over the coming weeks.Mr. Ham built his organization, Answers in Genesis, on the premise that biblical truth trumps all other knowledge. His Creation Museum, in Petersburg, Ky., contrasts “God’s Word,” timeless and eternal, with the fleeting notions of “human reason.” This is how he knows that the earth is 10,000 years old, that humans and dinosaurs lived together, and that women are subordinate to men. Evangelicals who disagree, like Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, are excoriated on the group’s Web site. (In a recent blog post, Mr. Ham called us “wolves” in sheep’s clothing, masquerading as Christians while secretly trying to destroy faith in the Bible.)
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Mr. Barton heads an organization called WallBuilders, dedicated to the proposition that the founders were evangelicals who intended America to be a Christian nation. He has emerged as a highly influential Republican leader, a favorite of Mr. Perry, Mrs. Bachmann and members of the Tea Party. Though his education consists of a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University and his scholarly blunders have drawn criticism from evangelical historians like John Fea, Mr. Barton has seen his version of history reflected in everything from the Republican Party platform to the social science curriculum in Texas.
Mr. Dobson, through his group Focus on the Family, has insisted for decades that homosexuality is a choice and that gay people could “pray away” their unnatural and sinful orientation. A defender of spanking children and of traditional roles for the sexes, he has accused the American Psychological Association, which in 2000 disavowed reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality, of caving in to gay pressure.
Charismatic leaders like these project a winsome personal testimony as brothers in Christ. Their audiences number in the tens of millions. They pepper their presentations with so many Bible verses that their messages appear to be straight out of Scripture; to many, they seem like prophets, anointed by God.
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But in fact their rejection of knowledge amounts to what the evangelical historian Mark A. Noll, in his 1994 book, “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” described as an “intellectual disaster.” He called on evangelicals to repent for their neglect of the mind, decrying the abandonment of the intellectual heritage of the Protestant Reformation. “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
There are signs of change. Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith. Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.
Scholars like Dr. Collins and Mr. Noll, and publications like Books & Culture, Sojourners and The Christian Century, offer an alternative to the self-anointed leaders. They recognize that the Bible does not condemn evolution and says next to nothing about gay marriage. They understand that Christian theology can incorporate Darwin’s insights and flourish in a pluralistic society.
Americans have always trusted in God, and even today atheism is little more than a quiet voice on the margins. Faith, working calmly in the lives of Americans from George Washington to Barack Obama, has motivated some of America’s finest moments. But when the faith of so many Americans becomes an occasion to embrace discredited, ridiculous and even dangerous ideas, we must not be afraid to speak out, even if it means criticizing fellow Christians.When the first signs of the paper class scandal at UNC emerged nearly four years ago, the NCAA sided with university officials who found no athletic motive. Hundreds of nonathletes were in the classes too and had also received the same high grades.
The NCAA’s enforcement division now has a different view. On Thursday, UNC released the NCAA’s notice of allegations that found athletes in several sports, particularly football and men’s and women’s basketball, received “special arrangements” from an academic support program that catered only to athletes, steering them to classes, suggesting grades and in some cases writing portions of their papers.
The NCAA’s enforcement staff accused UNC of having a lack of institutional control, one of the most serious charges that can be levied by the organization, and of allowing dozens of instances of impermissible benefits to athletes. UNC faces major sanctions that could bring severe penalties such as vacated wins, hefty fines and postseason bans.
The report hit former faculty leader Jan Boxill with numerous instances of improper help to athletes, but it did not cite specific athletic officials or coaches for impropriety or lack of oversight. Boxill, who resigned earlier this year, was a former academic counselor to the women’s basketball team, a philosophy professor and director of the Parr Center for Ethics at the school.
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“There’s no way anyone can read that and think it’s a good day for Carolina,” said Gene Marsh, an attorney and former chairman of the NCAA’s Committee on Infractions.
UNC officials offered little clue as to how they will respond to the allegations. The university received the notice of allegations on May 20 and has 90 days from that date to respond.
Chancellor Carol Folt said in a statement:
“We take the allegations the NCAA made about past conduct very seriously. This is the next step in a defined process, and we are a long way from reaching a conclusion. We will respond to the notice using facts and evidence to present a full picture of our case.
“Although we may identify some instances in the NCAA’s notice where we agree and others where we do not, we are committed to continue pursuing a fair and just outcome for Carolina.”
Former chancellors Holden Thorp and James Moeser declined to comment on the report.
Athletic director Bubba Cunningham spoke about the report during a conference call Thursday.
“I think at times I would be disappointed with maybe actions of what we did as an institution. Other times I’d be disappointed in how things were characterized that I would think would be inaccurate. So I just think of it as a healthy range of emotion, and I think there will be a lot of emotion by a lot of people as everybody reads this from their own perspective.”
Paper classes
The notice of allegations came six months after Kenneth Wainstein, a former top U.S. Justice Department official, delivered an extensive report that found strong ties between the fake classes and athlete eligibility. He reported that Debby Crowder, the longtime administrative manager for the African and Afro-American Studies department, had created them in 1993 after the academic support program for athletes complained about independent studies that required too many meetings.
Crowder responded by creating independent studies that had no professor. She assigned a paper and provided high grades so long as one was turned in. In the late 1990s, Crowder began converting lecture-style classes into the paper classes, in part because the university had limits on how many independent studies a student could use toward graduation.
Her boss, department chairman Julius Nyang’oro, not only knew about the fake classes, he offered a few more after she retired in 2009.
More than 3,100 students enrolled in the classes, roughly half of them athletes, who are less than 5 percent of the student body. Several experts have said the academic fraud is the worst in NCAA history.
The NCAA report, which relies heavily on Wainstein’s findings, found the athletes received preferential treatment.
“The AFRI/AFAM department created anomalous courses that went unchecked for 18 years,” the report said. “This allowed individuals within ASPSA to use these courses through special arrangements to maintain the eligibility of academically at-risk student-athletes, particularly in the sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball.”
The NCAA report does not address how many athletes may have been kept eligible to play through the bogus classes. It found that 10 athletes exceeded the university’s 12-hour credit limit on independent studies from fall 2006 through summer 2011.
Crowder and Nyang’oro did not cooperate with the NCAA, which resulted in two more allegations of serious noncompliance from the association. The report showed numerous officials and staff were interviewed by the NCAA, including men’s basketball coach Roy Williams, former football coach Butch Davis, women’s basketball coach Sylvia Hatchell and former athletic director Dick Baddour.
The notice of allegations blamed academic officials, and particularly the College of Arts & Sciences, for failing to properly monitor the academic support program and Boxill.
The program has been under the arts and sciences college for many years, but Wainstein found that staff there saw their role as serving the athletic department, with John Blanchard, a former senior associate athletic director, as the de facto boss. Blanchard retired two years ago.
Nyang’oro resigned from his chairman’s position in 2011 and was forced to retire in July 2012. Boxill resigned in February 2015, months after the university took action to fire her.
A severe notice of allegations
Stuart Brown, a lawyer who handles athletic compliance cases, said UNC could have been in a worse situation with the NCAA given the length of the scandal, the number of athletes involved and the way the fake classes worked.
“It’s as benign as can be, realistically,” he said, “but still a very severe notice of allegations.”
He noted the NCAA did not hit UNC with academic misconduct, which would likely lead to heavier penalties.
“The person on the street might say, ‘If this isn’t an academic fraud allegation, what possibly could be?” Brown said.
The NCAA’s use of the “lack of institutional” control tag makes this investigation different from the one five years ago that began when the NCAA interviewed a handful of UNC football players, including current NFL players Marvin Austin, Greg Little and Robert Quinn, for taking improper gifts and benefits from sports agents.
The NCAA handed down its punishment in that case in March 2012, nine months after UNC received the notice of allegations in June 2011.
The notice of allegations effectively sets a timetable for the conclusion of the prolonged investigation into one of the most complex academic scandals in NCAA history. Under the normal timetable, UNC will meet with the NCAA in Indianapolis in three months and receive a ruling in nine months, likely by March 2016.
Marsh said the NCAA has been using the impermissible or “extra” benefit rule to cover academic misconduct in recent cases because many universities don’t provide a clear definition as to what it is.
“The philosophy is let the schools decide first through their own disciplinary process if these set of facts are academic fraud or academic misconduct,” Marsh said. “And if they conclude that it’s academic fraud, boom, the NCAA will use that. But if they do not, the NCAA does not walk away, they will use extra benefits.”
Staff writer Joe Giglio contributed to this storyLogo of Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage
An intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is a practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill, as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts, and cultural spaces that are considered by UNESCO to be part of a place's cultural heritage.[1] Intangible cultural heritage is considered by Member States of UNESCO in relation to the tangible World Heritage focusing on intangible aspects of culture. In 2001, UNESCO made a survey[2] among States and NGOs to try to agree on a definition, and the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage[3] was drafted in 2003 for its protection and promotion.
Definition [ edit ]
The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage[4] defines the intangible cultural heritage as the practices, representations, expressions, as well as the knowledge and skills (including instruments, objects, artifacts, cultural spaces), that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognise as part of their |
imlico, 2002 - 688 pages, 2002 - Cardinals 0 Reviews Proud, greedy, corrupt and driven by overwhelming personal ambition. Such is the traditional image of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, Abbot of St. Albans, Bishop of Tournai and Papal Legate. It is an image which Peter Gwyn examines, challenges and decisively overturns in this remarkable book. From exceedingly humble beginnings Wolsey rose to a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any other British commoner. Peter Gwyn explores every aspect of the Cardinal's career - not least his relationship with Henry VIII -and sets it firmly in a vividly recreated Tudor world. The Wolsey who emerges is a man of prodigious energy and ability, a tireless dispenser of justice, an enlightened reformer wholly dedicated to his king and country - a man who has been consistently misrepresented and maligned for four-and-a-half centuries. 'Magisterial' Antonia Fraser, Sunday Telegraph 'Learned and controversial, it has all the elements of a detective story...His verdict is convincing...a fascinating book.' Lord Blake, Country Life 'A work of magisterial ambition and achievement...He has taken a great subject and transformed it.' Blair Worden, London Review of BooksPhil Mickelson's candid and blunt assessment of U.S. Ryder Cup fortunes Sunday night at Gleneagles was in response to, among other things, captain Tom Watson's approach to what was supposed to be a Saturday night team-bonding session that turned ugly, sources told ESPN.com this week.
Four sources who witnessed the proceedings in the U.S. team room at the Gleneagles Hotel said Watson took no responsibility for any shortcomings, scoffed at a gift that the U.S. team members gave him, ridiculed several European team players and started the proceedings by denigrating the Americans' play that afternoon.
"You could have heard a pin drop in that room,'' one of those in attendance said. "He was pissed. It all went from there.''
Sources told ESPN.com that Tom Watson took issue with his team's play, among other things, during a Saturday night meeting at the Ryder Cup, leading Phil Mickelson to offer a stinging rebuttal of Watson's captaincy one day later. GLYN KIRK/AFP/Getty Images
The U.S. lost 16½-11½ to the Europeans at Gleneagles, the eighth American defeat in the past 10 Ryder Cups. Watson, the last U.S. captain to win on European soil in 1993, was brought back for a second try, his appointment championed as new thinking for the PGA of America, which had not gone with a repeat captain since Jack Nicklaus in 1987. But Watson was criticized for failing to get to know his players, for his communication skills, for his pairings and ultimately for the way he handled discussions with the team.
Watson responded in an open letter Saturday.
After the team's defeat Sunday night, Mickelson, although not by name, called out Watson in the media session, which included all 12 players and Watson sitting at the dais in the middle.
"Nobody here was in [on] any decision,'' Mickelson said at one point, and lauded the system used by captain Paul Azinger during the Americans' Ryder Cup win in 2008. "Unfortunately, we have strayed from a winning formula in 2008 for the last three Ryder Cups, and we need to consider maybe getting back to that formula that helped us play our best."
A night earlier, the U.S. had fallen behind 10-6 after a horrific afternoon in foursomes (alternate shot), in which it won just a half-point out of four. Earlier, much to their surprise, Mickelson and regular partner Keegan Bradley were told they would not be playing in the afternoon after also sitting out the morning session. It was the first time in 10 Ryder Cup appearances that Mickelson, 44, had sat out an entire session.
Given Mickelson's stature in the game as well as the fact that he and Bradley were 4-1 as a team in the Ryder Cup (not to mention 2-1-1 at the Presidents Cup), most expected them to be in the lineup, perhaps in place of Rickie Fowler and Jimmy Walker, who had just seen their third straight match go to the 18th hole, all ending in ties. But despite Mickelson's attempts to talk his way into playing, Watson held firm.
Things blew up after the Americans performed so poorly that Saturday afternoon. Fowler and Walker, playing their fourth match, lost to the rested European team of Graeme McDowell and Victor Dubuisson, 5 and 4.
"You could have heard a pin drop in that room. He was pissed. It all went from there." Source in the U.S. team room on captain Tom Watson's address to players
Despite the 10-6 deficit, the U.S. team was fairly upbeat Saturday evening looking ahead to the Sunday singles, the pairings for which had just been announced. Fresh in the players' minds was the fact that Europe had come back from the same margin two years earlier at Medinah. And two players in the room, Mickelson and Jim Furyk, were on the 1999 U.S. team that also came back from that score on the final day at The Country Club in Brookline.
They gathered in the team room that night -- a hotel ballroom at the lavish Gleneagles Hotel with TVs, ping-pong tables, food and drink. They were joined by their wives or girlfriends (except for Fowler), as well as their caddies and their significant others. Some of the hotel staff were in the room, as were a few members of the PGA of America staff. In all, more than 40 people were there when Watson returned to the team room after speaking to the media about the Sunday pairings.
Watson started by saying, according to all of the sources: "You stink at foursomes.''
After praising the rookie team of Patrick Reed and Jordan Spieth, Watson went through the Sunday singles pairings and ridiculed several members of the European side as he went through the matchups. Soon after, Watson was presented a gift by Furyk, a replica of the Ryder Cup trophy that was signed by every member of the team. Instead of thanking them, the sources said Watson said the gift meant nothing to him if the players didn't get the real Ryder Cup on Sunday and that he wanted to be holding it aloft on the green in victory.
Said one of the sources: "That's almost verbatim. He said it basically means nothing to me.''
Added another: "It was fairly shocking that he treated this thoughtful gift with such disdain.''
When Watson was done, other players, as is standard, were invited to speak, and several did, as well as assistant captains Andy North, Raymond Floyd and Steve Stricker. (North also works as an ESPN golf commentator.) Mickelson went last, and he came to the front of the room, then sat in a chair with his back to Watson while he addressed the team, telling it, among other things, that he felt good about a comeback.
"Phil went player by player and told a story about each one," one source in the room said. "It changed the tenor of the room from completely negative and heads down to 'Let's give this a go tomorrow.' He gave almost 180 degrees difference than what Tom did.''
The comeback fell short, as the U.S. earned just 5½ of the 8½ points it needed for the comeback.
According to three witnesses, Watson greeted several of the singles losers Sunday, including Bradley, by telling them they should have played better.
Amid all the postmortems, Mickelson offered a stinging rebuttal to the captaincy of the eight-time major champion Watson, who became the oldest captain in Ryder Cup history. When things got a bit testy in the interview room due to Mickelson's comments, Watson attempted to dismiss the obvious tension by saying, "My management philosophy is different than his.''
Watson also disagreed with the Azinger method, saying, "It takes 12 players to win. It's not pods.''
But Mickelson had made his point.
Said one of the sources: "[Mickelson] was trying to lead the team and protect the team there when he put himself under the gun pretty good on Sunday night. He did that for a lot of people.''Story highlights District Judge G. Todd Baugh schedules a new hearing for Friday
He says it appears the mandatory minimum is two years, not 30 days
Cherice Moralez, 14 when she was raped, committed suicide before her 17th birthday
30-day rape sentence given to a teacher who admitted to raping his 14-year-old student may be illegal, according to the Montana judge who imposed it.
The judge scheduled a new hearing for Friday.
"The Defendant shall be present at argument as the Court, if necessary and appropriate, will amend the mandatory minimum portion of the sentence," read a court order filed Tuesday.
It appears the mandatory minimum is two years, not 30 days, the order said.
"In this Court's opinion, imposing a sentence which suspends more than the mandatory minimum would be an illegal sentence," it continued.
The case drew widespread attention when District Judge G. Todd Baugh imposed the 30-day sentence on Stacey Dean Rambold and made controversial comments about the victim, saying she "seemed older than her chronological age."
Scott Twito, a prosecutor with the Yellowstone County attorney's office, did not immediately return a call for comment.
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In a memo from his office to the Montana attorney general's office, attorneys had argued the relevant statute was "misapplied and the minimum sentence that could be imposed in Rambold's case was two years" -- anticipating the judge's Tuesday order.
Rambold admitted to raping the girl while he was her teacher at her high school.
Cherice Moralez was 14 at the time. She took her own life shortly before her 17th birthday.
Case details
The case began in 2008 when Cherice was a student at Billings Senior High School and Rambold, then 49, was a teacher.
School officials learned of the relationship, and Rambold resigned.
Authorities charged Rambold with three counts of sexual intercourse without consent.
As the case wound its way through the legal system, Cherice committed suicide. She was a few weeks shy of her 17th birthday.
With her death, prosecutors entered into what is known as a "deferred prosecution agreement" with Rambold.
This meant that all charges against Rambold would be dismissed if he completed a sex-offender treatment program and met other requirements. One of them was to have no contact with children.
Rambold admitted to one of the rape charges.
But the ex-teacher fell short of the agreement.
"He had some contacts with nieces and nephews in a family setting and other adults were present," Baugh said.
He also had relationships with women that he didn't tell his counselors about.
"That is a violation from his deferred prosecution so he was dropped from the plan," said the judge.
As a result, the case was revived in December 2012.
The hearing
At a hearing last month, Baugh ruled that Rambold's infractions weren't serious enough.
"He made some violations of his treatment program," he said. "They were more technical and not the kind you would send someone to prison for."
He sentenced Rambold to 15 years in prison. Then, he suspended all but 31 days of the sentence, according to the Yellowstone County District Court.
The judge gave Rambold credit for one day he spent in jail.
Incredulous at what had happened, the victim's mother, Auliea Hanlon, shouted at the court, "You people suck."
"She wasn't even old enough to get a driver's license," Hanlon said in a statement released by her attorney. "But Judge Baugh, who never met our daughter, justified the paltry sentence saying she was older than her chronological age. I guess somehow it makes a rape more acceptable if you blame the victim, even if she was only 14."Revolutionary War Historical Article
Christmas in the 17th and 18th Centuries
By Donald N. Moran
Editor's Note: This article was reprinted from the December 2001 Edition of the Liberty Tree Newsletter
In 17th and early 18th century Colonial America, a Christmas celebration did not resemble the festivities that we are familiar with today. Christmas was considered the first day in a season of celebration, a season which would last, in some areas, until the end of January. The Christmas Advent season consisted of December 25th, The Nativity of Jesus; December 27th, The Feast of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist (celebrated by the Masons); January 1st, The Circumcision of Jesus; January 6th, The Epiphany of Jesus (The they twelfth day of Christmas); and February 2nd, the Purification of the Virgin. Christmas celebrations varied throughout the colonies, from the Puritans in New England who did not celebrate Christmas at all, to the Southern Anglicans whose revelries most closely match modern Christmas celebrations.
The Puritans of New England outlawed Christmas until the mid-19th century. In the early part of the 16th century, the Puritans in England, under Oliver Cromwell, outlawed the celebration of Christmas, calling it "Popish" (Roman Catholic) and considering the secular celebration a continuation of pagan beliefs. The Puritans in Massachusetts and other parts of New England held on to these beliefs.
In 1659, a law was enacted in Massachusetts to punish anyone who "... is found observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way, any such days as Christmas day, shall pay for every such with offense five shillings." The immigration of other religious denominations to the colonies saw this attitude in New England, but weren't able to change it until about 150 years ago.
Although Christmas wasn't outlawed outside of New England, several denominations, mostly found in the middle colonies, were opposed to the celebration. In 1749, a visitor among the Quakers in Philadelphia noted that: "Christmas Day... The Quakers did not regard this day any more remarkable than other days. Stores were open... There was no more baking of bread for the Christmas festival than for other days; and no Christmas porridge on Christmas Eve!"
At first the Presbyterians did not care much for celebrating Christmas, but when they saw most of their members going to the Anglican Church on that day, they also started to have services. Philip Fithian, a Presbyterian missionary working among the Virginia Scotch-Irish in 1775, remarked that: "Christmas Morning - Not a Gun is heard Not a Shout - No company or Cabal assembled - To Day is like other Days every Way calme & temperate."
To the Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Lutherans, the Christmas season was embraced and celebrated mainly by the Church of England and the Roman Catholics, and primarily in the southern colonies. (One exception is the Dutch in New York who celebrated Christmas with religious services.)
The celebration of the Christmas season in the southern colonies consisted of parties, hunts, visiting, feasts and church services. Christmas decorations generally consisted of holly and ivy strung throughout the house, with a sprig of mistletoe prominently displayed. A great effort was made to decorate the churches with laurel, holly, and other garlands.
The traditional feast varied from household to household (depending on how wealthy the family was) but generally, consisted of wines, rum punches, hams, beef, goose, turkey, oysters, mincemeat pies, and various other treats. The season was considered a grown-up celebration, but presents would generally be given to children. Irena Chalmers notes that in 1759, that George Washington gave the following presents to his children: a bird on Bellows; a Cuckoo; a Turnabout Parrot; a Grocers Shop; an Aviary; a Prussian Dragoon; a Man Smoking; a Tunbridge Tea Set; 3 Neat Books, a Tea Chest. A straw parchment box with a glass and a neat dress'd wax baby. Southern families usually supplied rum and presents (often candy) to their slaves on the first of the year.
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Traditional symbols of the American colonial Christmas did not resemble our modern Christmas celebration. The Christmas tree originated in Germany in the 16th century, but did not gain popularity in America until after 1842 when it was introduced in Williamsburg.
Life on the American colonial frontier was, as it would be expected, quite different from the well established east coast.
The frontier at that time was heavily populated with the Scotch-Irish. They organized their lives by the events of the Christian calendar, but differed greatly from the rest of British America. For reasons unknown to us, they seemed to have preserved some of the ancient Christian rituals which had lingered along the border lands between England and Scotland decades after they were abandoned in other regions of the British Isles.
Our frontier people seemed to have kept a day which they called "Old Christmas", on January 6th. On that day, even in the poorest of homes, feasts were common, and they lit bonfires that night. They also celebrated by continual discharging of their muskets. This had been the custom in the British borderlands. On the Southern frontier some of these customs continued to the 20th century. Visitors to Appalachia and the highlands of North Carolina found the practice of "Old Christmas" with bonfires and the firing of guns, along with fireworks still exist.
One visitor noted: "In some parts of this country it is the custom to observe what is known as 'Old Christmas' ". Opinion varies as to the date: Some believe it is the 5th and some the 6th of January. This day is believed by these people who keep it to be the real date of the birth of Jesus. They say the Christmas we observe is a "manmade" Christmas."
The first Christmas card did not appear until about 1846 in England.
Christmas Carols were sung during the holidays, but most of the popular carols of today had not been written before the late 1700's.
The most enduring hymn that was popular in colonial America was Joy to the World, written by Isaac Watts of Virginia during the 1760s.
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Back to Historical ArchivesTony Schwartz has become a prominent figure on the campaign trail this year because Donald Trump, with whom he co-wrote The Art of the Deal, is the GOP’s nominee. Schwartz came out swinging against Trump, saying their book was “full of falsehoods” about the mogul’s successes and that Trump wants to be a dictator, not a President.
Today, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin asked him what he sees happening if Trump loses.
He was very clear that he does believe Trump will lose and it is not a matter of “if.” As far as what the nominee will actually do if he loses, Schwartz said that he thinks “the prospect of him losing is almost more terrifying [than the prospect of him winning].”
“His need to build back his own sense of self-worth will make him willing to blow up democracy in any way that he can, meaning he’ll dispute the election, he’ll try to get these folks — some of these folks who are out here — he’ll try to get these folks to react in potentially violent ways,” he said. “I think in a polarized — a deeply polarized — country, it’s a scary, scary prospect.”
When Schwartz said that the day Trump loses, the next phase of his “trouble-making” will begin, political commentator Lanhee Chen suggested that Trump won’t go too far off the deep end because his brand will still be at stake.
“The brand and Donald Trump are dead,” Schwartz said. “The brand is already dead. He’s already getting way fewer people buying the products he sells and the brand will live with a small percentage.”
[image via screengrab]
Lindsey: Twitter. Facebook.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comWith ambient temperatures reported at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the 48th Baja 500 off-road race has already been called the most brutal of all time by veteran competitors. It may also be the most lethal, claiming the lives of two motorcycle racers and one spectator in three unrelated incidents.
In the interest of maximum clarity, here is the complete and exact official statement regarding the fatalities from race organizing outfit SCORE International:
“The closing time on the race course was delayed by one hour, 10 minutes as SCORE and local officials worked on the aftermath of an accident early during the start of the cars, trucks and UTVs involving a race truck within a half mile of the start. Racer Todd Pedersen, Orem, Utah, while negotiating a turn entering the Ensenada wash and attempting to avoid some fans, eventually hit three spectators. An eight-year old boy was fatally injured in the accident, according to police on the scene. He was transported to an Ensenada hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The boy’s mother was hospitalized and is reported in stable condition at a hospital in Ensenada with head and leg injuries. The identities of the two victims were not released. In the first racer fatality, Pro Moto Unlimited rider Travis Livingston, 34, of Palmdale, Calif., crashed at race mile 288.9. When SCORE medical personnel arrived, while attempting to stabilize him, Livingston went into cardiac arrest and could not be revived. In the second racer fatality, Sportsman Moto rider Noah Evermann, 34, of Alaska, was found dead near his motorcycle at race mile 180.9 by another race team. No further information was released regarding all three accidents as all three are still being investigated by Ensenada Municipal Police.”
The “Ensenada wash” SCORE is referring to as the site of the spectator’s death is one of the very first turns in many Baja races. After launching from a starting line in the city, competing vehicles generally drive less than a mile over pavement before making a hard turn and dropping into the dry riverbed (“wash”) to basically hit race-pace and tear into the desert.
This has always been an extremely popular, and dangerous, place to spectate.
When a race car takes a turn, the “outside” of that corner is pretty much the last place you want to be. Should the car lose control, it usually ends up wiping wider than it means to. This has happened at that very turn before, and it’s exactly what happened this time as you can see in videos of the crash circulating around the internet and a few images of the aftermath on Race-Dezert’s live-race thread.
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Those videos are disturbing, and I would highly discourage you from watching them. This annotated image of the danger spot will help you understand the situation:
The vehicle that lost control was Trophy Truck No. 75, a rig loosely resembling a Chevy Silverado reportedly built by an outfit called Space Monkey and owned by Mike Cook out of Provo, Utah. For those of you unfamiliar with the sport, Trophy Trucks represent the fastest and generally most elite level of desert racing in Baja. They’re pretty much just steel frames strapped to enormous engines putting out more than twice as much power as the fastest Ford F-150 you can buy.
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Cook’s team had qualified 23rd out of a 45-vehicle class at this year’s race, ahead of a few extremely competitive drivers including Mark Post and Troy Herbst. The point I mean to make is, we’re not talking about amateur drivers.
There’s no way to overstate the sadness surrounding this loss of life, especially since the victim was a child. The tragedy is exacerbated by the fact that the incident could have been avoided by following simple safety etiquette. But with swarms of people all over the place, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of the moment without realizing how much danger you’re actually in because of where you may be standing. Let this be a tremendously painful reminder of how quickly racing situations can become catastrophic, even when you’re only on the sidelines.
As a sidebar, parts of Mexico including Baja are currently holding elections for their next leaders. It remains to be seen whether this disaster becomes a political issue or causes governments to alter regulations around racing, which has been a mainstay of the local culture and economy for decades.
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Unfortunately, lethal catastrophe continued along the race course with the deaths of Pro Moto Unlimited rider Travis Livingston and Sportsman Moto rider Noah Evermann.
Livingston was riding No. 6x, a Honda CRF450X, relaying with teammates Jay Rabjohn, Jeffrey Trulove and Ryan Smith.
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Evermann was also on a CRF450X, No. 232x, a teammate to Seth Wakeling and Giovanni Perez.
Reports circling around seem to indicate that extreme heat contributed to the passing of both riders, but that is still conjecture at this point. We will follow up with more complete details surrounding both riders as they come to light.
In the meantime, there is nothing to express but sincere condolences to all affected by the tragedies of the 2016 Baja 500. Extreme conditions and speeds are exactly what attract us to this event. The desert taking friends, competitors and family members like this is a brutal reminder of how high the stakes really are.
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The 48th running of the Baja 500 is repeatedly being called one of the hardest ever.
“The heat was extreme,” said Colton Udall, who won the Pro Unlimited motorcycle class. “I’ve never really raced in anything hotter than that before in my life. I pretty much just raced 250 miles of 115-degree weather and my brain feels like it is cooked.”
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Toyota factory driver BJ Baldwin, famous for completing entire races on his own, had to tap out of the race early and posted a picture of himself on oxygen on Facebook. His co-driver Willie Valdez said, “I’ve been racing for over 30 years and this is one of the hottest races I’ve ever been in.”
Similar reports of immense suffering under oppressive temperatures are all over the place. 2016 Baja 500 Race winner Tavo Vildosola simply said, “The heat down in the desert was absolutely ridiculous.”
To the three who lost their lives in this year’s event, rest in peace, and a speedy recovery to everyone injured. I still believe in Baja. Racing there is a unique and important sector of motorsports that should be preserved, along with the memories of those who made the ultimate sacrifice to the sport. That said, I also hope last week’s events inspire a revision on the education and protection of spectators.AFP officers at St Stephens Institute of Technology. Its owners were charged with serious fraud offences on Wednesday. The revelations come after the Australian Federal Police charged the owners of another international college, the St Stephens Institute, with serious fraud offences on Wednesday afternoon. The federal police began a probe last November after Fairfax Media provided the AFP with evidence the college was involved in suspected criminal conduct and the exploitation of dozens of overseas workers sub-contracted to work for Australia Post. One of the charged men who part-owns the institute, Baljit "Bobby" Singh, has been paid millions of dollars by the federal government and Australia Post, despite repeated union warnings that he was exploiting overseas students and workers. Australia Post terminated Mr Singh's labour hire contracts on Wednesday and said it was increasing efforts to stop contractors exploiting workers. But Mr Singh remained listed as a registered training provider on the federal government's training.gov.au website as of Wednesday night.
Rakesh Kumar. Credit:Luis Ascui Rakesh Kumar, 37, and Mukesh Sharma, 42, appeared before Melbourne Magistrates Court on Wednesday on five charges each, including conspiring to obtain or gain from a Commonwealth entity, possessing forged documents and dealing with money or property that is suspected of being the proceeds of crime. Mr Kumar is also charged with falsifying documents. Mukesh Sharma. Credit:Luis Ascui Both men were granted bail to return to court in January. It is understood Mr Singh remains in custody on similar charges, but prosecutors are unlikely to oppose him being granted bail.
AFP Manager Crime Operations, Paul Osborne, said the success of this operation highlights the need for agencies to continue to work together to stop those individuals who believe they are above the law. "In this case, the men involved have created an elaborate plan and defrauded millions of dollars in government funding and from students in vulnerable circumstances," Commander Osborne said. "I would like to stress that the AFP would not have been able to successfully disrupt this scheme without the cooperation from Australia Post throughout this year-long investigation." It is suspected that the St Stephens Institute was set up as a hub for recruiting and exploiting overseas workers and students who were prepared to pay large sums of money, or to forgo pay and conditions, to get visas. The revelations raise major questions for the Immigration department, which was recently merged into Australia's new border force agency and which has previously faced fierce criticism for failing to crack down on visa rorting.
They also highlight ongoing concerns about Australia's ability to police unscrupulous education providers, employers and migration agents who sell access to temporary skilled working visas and student visas, while holding out the hope of permanent residency. The Salvation Army on Wednesday called on the federal government to ramp up measures to prevent the exploitation of migrant workers, while unions said the Abbott government needed to "take action to stamp out these appalling practices". TK Melbourne Education & Training College has allegedly provided overseas students with back-dated certificates of education in return for large payments. An audit by the Australian Skills Quality Authority February found TK Melbourne to be in "critical non-compliance" with national Registered Training Organisation standards. The following month, in March, the Immigration Department offered TK Melbourne the ability to apply for "streamlined visa processing". An Immigration spokesman said the visa offer was part of a "blanket-offer" sent to dozens of education providers and did not mean TK Melbourne would have met the criteria for approval.
The college offers overseas students certificates in business management and early education learning, which are used to support applications for 457 and other types of visas to work in Australia. The ASQA audit found "several occurrences of plagiarism" with "entire sentences and paragraphs" in some TK Melbourne students' work being "direct copies". This happened even when students were writing on different topics. It also appears some TK Melbourne students have not been doing their own course work, with the same handwriting appearing in assignments from several different students' portfolios. ASQA found the duration of training for several qualifications "was not consistent" and resulted in a "significant deviation" from national standards that could not be adequately explained. "The amount of training has not been determined based upon the existing skills, knowledge and experience of learners, with the timeframes being insufficient to allow for new entrants into the industry sectors to effectively develop all of the skills and knowledge required," the ASQA audit found.
It also found TK Melbourne did not have proper facilities to accommodate the number of students it claimed to have on its books, with an attendance register from February stating 252 students were present when its premises could only hold 118 people at that time. TK Melbourne also only had four trainers and assessors present to oversee its claimed 252 students. Further, four of the assessors TK Melbourne told auditors it had on its books claimed to be no longer working there. Documents show TK Melbourne allegedly provided a foreign student a certificate to show she had completed a six-month business course on October 3 last year. However, internal TK Melbourne emails show the student had only received an "offer letter" from TK Melbourne to begin their course on October 10. On October 15, TK Melbourne provided a "completion letter" regarding the same student's certificate III in business, which the letter claimed began in March last year and was an English-language full-time course. The Australian Federal Police told Fairfax Media it had in March referred information about TK Melbourne's alleged provision of "fake/fraudulent educational qualifications to assist in person obtaining visas into Australia" to the Immigration department to investigate.
The AFP statement said the Immigration department had begun its investigation. But Immigration is understood to have referred TK Melbourne back to ASQA. Through its lawyers, TK Melbourne denied involvement in providing false qualifications to students and said any compliance problems identified by ASQA could and would be rectified. - with Adam CooperThe official website for the television anime adaptation of Kakeru Utsugi's How to keep a mummy ( Miira no Kaikata ) manga revealed a new key visual and the premiere dates on Friday. The series will premiere on Thursday, January 11 at night at 1:58 a.m. (effectively Friday morning) on TBS. It will also air late night on BS-TBS on January 13 and iTV on January 25.
The show's staff will hold a pre-screening event of the first episode on December 24.
Crunchyroll is releasing the original manga digitally in English, and it describes the story:
When high school student Sora Kashiwagi finds himself staring down a mysterious oversized package sent to him by his self-proclaimed "adventurer" father, the last thing he expects is for it to be opened from the inside... by a little mummy so small it can fit in the palm of his hand!
Kaori (Yuyushiki, Bottom Biting Bug 2nd season) is directing the anime at studio 8-bit. Deko Akao (Flying Witch, Noragami, Frame Arms Girl) is handling the series composition, and Takahiro Kishida (Welcome to the Ballroom, Madoka Magica, Durarara!!) is the character designer. Atsushi Nasuda is producing the anime.
[Via Ota-Suke]After recent allegations by Michael Bennett, the Las Vegas Police Protective Association is demanding an apology from Bennett and an investigation by the NFL. The NFL says there is no basis for an investigation. (1:21)
The NFL said Thursday that it has no plans to investigate Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett's behavior during an incident in which he was detained and handcuffed by police in Las Vegas two weeks ago.
The league was responding to a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell from the president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, the union that represents the police in that city. In the letter, the union alleged that Bennett made false accusations against Las Vegas police and asked the league to "conduct an investigation, and take appropriate action."
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy wrote in response, "There is no allegation of a violation of the league's personal conduct policy and therefore there is no basis for an NFL investigation."
Earlier, NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith voiced a similar response, saying, "There are no grounds for the NFL to investigate our union rep, and I look forward to Roger confirming the same."
Steve Grammas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, wrote the letter to Goodell on Thursday and made it available to media. He said, in part, "While the NFL may condone Bennett's disrespect for our American Flag, and everything it symbolizes, we hope the League will not ignore Bennett's false accusations against our police officers."
Bennett sat on the bench during the national anthem for a Seahawks preseason game on Aug. 13 and said at the time, "I can't stand right now. I'm not going to be standing until I see the equality and freedom."
John Burris, an Oakland attorney who is representing Bennett in the Las Vegas incident, said that the union's questioning of Bennett's integrity is "outrageous," especially given the department has just begun its investigation of the incident. "To suggest he is lying without having conducted an investigation is ridiculous," Burris told the Seattle Times.
On Wednesday, Bennett accused Las Vegas police officers of racial profiling, saying they pointed guns at him and used excessive force during the incident.
"It sucks that in the country that we live in now, sometimes you get profiled for the color of your skin," Bennett said Wednesday. "It's a tough situation for me. Do I think every police officer is bad? No, I don't believe that. Do I believe there's some people out there that judge people on the color of their skin? I do believe that."
Michael Bennett on Wednesday accused Las Vegas police officers of racial profiling, saying they pointed guns at him and used excessive force. Elaine Thompson/AP Photo
The incident occurred in the early morning hours on Aug. 27, after the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight in Las Vegas, when police apprehended Bennett after hearing what sounded like gunshots in a crowded area. Bennett wrote on Twitter that officers pointed guns at him "for doing nothing more than simply being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time" and ordered him to lie down on the ground.
Bennett wrote that one officer, with his gun drawn, warned him that he would "blow my f---ing head off" if he moved. Another officer jammed his knee into Bennett's back and handcuffed him, according to Bennett.
"The Officers' excessive use of force was unbearable," Bennett wrote. "I felt helpless as I lay there on the ground handcuffed facing the real-life threat of being killed. All I could think of was 'I'm going to die for no other reason than I am black and my skin color is somehow a threat.'"
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Undersheriff Kevin McMahill said Wednesday that his department has launched an internal investigation into the events of that night.
McMahill said he had found "no evidence that race played any role in this incident."
McMahill said that officers were investigating what they thought was an active shooter in a nightclub. As people ran from a club, an officer spotted Bennett crouched by some machines. McMahill said that when the officer spotted Bennett, Bennett took off running out of the club, and officers pursued him before taking him down and putting him in cuffs.
Later, when asked why Bennett had been singled out, McMahill said he did not know but that he hoped the investigation would clarify that.
Wednesday night, Goodell issued a statement in support of Bennett, saying he "represents the best of the NFL -- a leader on his team and in his community."
"Our foremost concern is the welfare of Michael and his family," Goodell said in his statement. "While we understand the Las Vegas police department will address this later this evening, the issues Michael has been raising deserve serious attention from all of our leaders in every community. We will support Michael and all NFL players in promoting mutual |
ceania.[150][151] To cope with the psychological stresses of life during wartime, Smith begins a diary, in which he observes that "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future", and so illustrates the principal, ideological purpose of historical negationism.[152]
Franz Kurowski was an extremely prolific right-wing German writer who dedicated his entire career to the production of Nazi military propaganda, followed by post-war military pulp fiction and revisionist histories of World War II, claiming the humane behaviour and innocence of war crimes of the Wehrmacht, glorifying war as a desirable state, while fabricating eyewitness reports of atrocities allegedly committed by the Allies, especially Bomber Command and the air raids on Cologne and Dresden as planned genocide of the civilian population.[153]
See also [ edit ]
Cases of denialism [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]Despite the suspension of his positive and principled campaign for president, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul remains the bravest man in politics [“America’s proud political process,” Editorial, Feb. 11].
He was not the candidate who was going to stoke your fears, promise you free stuff, or pander to your religious beliefs. He was the candidate who told the truth, no matter how unpopular it was. That is the bravery that is missing in politics today. As his father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul has said, quoting George Orwell, “truth is treason in an empire of lies.”
Rand Paul changed the conversation. He raised reforming the National Security Agency and questioned the blowback associated with our foreign policy. No other candidate talked about reducing federal spending to such an extent or called so consistently for criminal justice reform.
I cannot understand how Republicans think they will ever win another election without growing the party and welcoming conservatives who actually care about liberty and the Constitution.
Vincent Raia, CommackThis is Oh Land, a gorgeous specimen of a woman who has the potential to become my next obsession.
She sounds like a hybrid between Robyn, Lykke Li and Bat For Lashes but she doesn’t step on their toes, her style and sound is most definitely her own.
I don’t need to tell you guys that though, you will instantly be able to tell when you check out her flawless live performance of Wolf & I above. I should also mention that Oh Land is a former pupil of the Danish Royal Ballet, which makes her an absolute delight to watch.
She’s been releasing music in her homeland of Denmark for a number of years now, but after signing a major label deal with Epic Records last year we will hopefully be seeing and hearing a lot more from her in 2011.
Oh Land – Wolf & I (Live)OnePlus One was one of the most surprising devices in 2014. This handset was touted as the flagship killer, and is considered one of the best devices of 2014. That being said, OnePlus has announced its successor two days ago, after weeks and weeks of various teasers, rumors and leaks. The OnePlus 2 is definitely a compelling device, it packs in great specs, and it will certainly going to be interesting if OnePlus 2 can beat its predecessor in terms of sales.
As already mentioned, this smartphone was launched two days ago, and first teardown already appeared online. The first dismantling of the OnePlus 2 comes from China, courtesy of IT168. If you take a look at the gallery down below, you'll be able to see the whole teardown process, and what lies inside the OnePlus 2. It seems like the teardown went relatively smoothly, there were no significant obstacles in the teardown process. Keep in mind that IT168 doesn't really have a difficulty rating (in numbers) like some other sites.
The OnePlus 2 sports a 5.5-inch 1080p (1920 x 1080, 401ppi) LTPS display, 3 or 4GB of RAM, and is powered by the Snapdragon 810 64-bit octa-core SoC by Qualcomm. The 3GB model of the device ships with 16GB of internal storage, while the 4GB variant comes with 64GB of in-built storage. The 13-megapixel OIS camera is available on the back of this handset, along with a dual-LED, dual tone flash, and a Laser Autofocus. The 5-megapixel snapper can be found up front, and a non-removable 3,300mAh battery is also a part of this package.
Android 5.1 Lollipop comes pre-installed on the OnePlus 2 with the company's Oxygen UI on top of Google's OS. The device also sports a fingerprint scanner below the display, and despite the fact that thing looks like a physical home button, it's not. It is a home button, but only a touchpad, so keep that in mind. The OnePlus 2 also sports a metallic trim around the device, while it measures 151.8 x 74.9 x 9.9mm, and weighs 175 grams. That's it folks, check out the gallery down below to check out the whole procedure, if you're interested of course.The U.S. is in a state of transition after a thoroughly disappointing summer and fall, and here is a look at the players coming up and those who should be phased out.
The U.S. national team is a mess. There is no other way to say it after a disastrous Gold Cup and gut-wrenching loss to Mexico in the CONCACAF Cup.
The U.S. looks old and Jurgen Klinsmann has to know this, which is why he has to start thinking about integrating more new blood into his player pool, even with World Cup qualifying set to kick off next month.
Just how bad are things in the player pool? A closer look suggests that while there are still too many older players who can make good claims to being the best options at a variety of positions, there are good prospects in the pipeline at most positions. The real question is how long will it take those prospects to get to a level good enough to merit a call-up.
Klinsmann is in an interesting predicament because his window to experiment openly has closed on him after the team's run of bad results. Klinsmann spent the six months after the World Cup trying out different things, bringing in new faces, testing out different formations. There were some poor results, but it was chalked up to experimentation. Now, with so many bad results in recent months, Klinsmann may not have the luxury of testing out things and running the risk of more losses.
The November World Cup qualifiers will tell us plenty about just how much pressure Klinsmann is facing, and how much freedom he still has to try things out. If Klinsmann keeps trotting out squads loaded with players in their mid-30s, then it will be clear he no longer feels safe in his job enough to experiment. Now, if Klinsmann brings in a young team to qualifying next month it will be a very clear sign he still isn't feeling that much pressure.
What options is Klinsmann facing when it comes to choosing his team? Here is a closer look at the state of the U.S. player pool, position by position:
GOALKEEPERS
The Starter- Tim Howard. After a year out of the starting lineup, Howard is ready to retake the top spot. We know Klinsmann called it an open competition, and said he would rotate goalkeepers, but as things stand, Howard is the clear choice to be the No. 1.
The Backup- Brad Guzan. Did an admirable job filling in for Howard, and could still be the starter eventually, but should sit behind Howard going forward.
Don't forget about- Bill Hamid. Klinsmann may seem reluctant to incorporate him on a consistent basis, but Hamid is the best American goalkeeper in MLS and, at 24, only has room to grow.
Time to say goodbye- Nick Rimando. A good teammate, and someone who made the most of his appearancs, but at 36, Rimando needs to make way for the next generate of goalkeepers.
One for the future- Ethan Horvath. Currently starting matches for Norwegian side Molde, the 20-year-old netminder recently started in Olympic qualifying for the U.S. and is already drawing raves from overseas.
RIGHT BACK
The Starter- Fabian Johnson. It may seem strange to list a player who may or may not ever play for Klinsmann again, but there's no denying he's the best option in the U.S. player pool, so for now, he stays on the list. It will be interesting to see just how long it takes for Johnson and Klinsmann to make up, assuming they ever do.
The Backup- DeAndre Yedlin. Though Klinsmann has preferred him in a right wing role, Johnson's looming banishment might make it necessary to give Yedlin a long look at fullback earlier than Klinsmann would have liked.
Time to say goodbye- Brad Evans. The 30-year-old Evans actually turned in an admirable shift in the loss to Costa Rica, but he'll be 31 in the spring and it's time to look at younger options. Klinsmann may have to hold off on saying goodbye, though, if Johnson doesn't return to the national team any time soon.
Don't forget about- Timmy Chandler. Many U.S. fans will want to forget about Chandler's showing at the Gold Cup, but that awful tournament doesn't change the fact Chandler is a German Bundesliga starter when healthy and one of the few natural options at a thin position.
One for the future- Desevio Payne. Though he was a bit overshadowed by the center backs and goalkeeper on the U.S. Under-20 World Cup team, Payne was very impressive at right back. Having broken through with Dutch side Groningen last year, Payne has fallen off the radar a bit since his summer breakout due to injuries, but the 19-year-old is definitely one to keep an eye on when he returns to full health and starts seeing first-team minutes in the Netherlands.
RIGHT CENTER BACK
The Starter- Geoff Cameron. After spending almost a year without playing in this spot, Cameron showed in recent matches that he is the best option in the pool.
The Backup- Ventura Alvarado. Yes, he is very raw, and his shakiness in recent months has soured plenty of U.S. fans on his potential, but he's 23, on a big team in Club America, and Klinsmann loves him. He needs to get better to keep his current place on the depth chart, but there's no denying he's being given every chance to succeed.
Time to say goodbye- Michael Orozco. Why say goodbye to a player who doesn't turn 30 until January? There are simply better options, both younger and older, and Orozco isn't likely to get much better than he is now. That hasn't stopped Klinsmann from continuing to call him in, but in a crowded picture at center back, Orozco looks like the one most likely to lose out.
Don't forget about- Omar Gonzalez. There is no denying his form is in a bad place right now, which explains why he has fallen out of the national team picture for the moment, but he's only a year removed from being dominant and at 27 there is little reason to think he can't regain his best form.
One for the future- Cameron Carter-Vickers. The hype train slowed down on Carter-Vickers after his so-so showing in Olympic qualifying, but when you consider he's still just 17 years old you realize just what a special talent we're talking about. He's a few years away from being a force, and he has all the attributes to be a national team starter eventually.
LEFT CENTER BACK
The Starter- Matt Besler. Overcame a drop in form after a very taxing 2014 in time to regain his starting spot after John Brooks went down injured. It is clear Klinsmann sees Brooks as the future, and a healthy and in-form Brooks seems a safe bet to return to the starting lineup, but for now Besler should be the option as World Cup qualifying begins.
The Backup- John Brooks. The lasting memory of his Gold Cup struggles has erased the memories of his impressive World Cup, but the reality is he's still just 22 and has the talent to be worth considering a future starter. He needs to get healthy though, and get back to being a regular for Hertha Berlin. Until he does that, he will sit behind Besler.
Don't forget about- Matt Hedges. If Hedges played in a major media market he would be receiving significantly more buzz, which would be deserved given the outstanding season he's having with FC Dallas. Technical and boasting good size, Hedges keeps getting better, and at 25, he still has room to grow as a player.
One for the future- Matt Miazga. It has been a breakout 2015 for the New York Red Bulls defender, starting on the top team in the league, and coming off an impressive showing at the Under-20 World Cup. A move to Europe seems inevitable in 2016,
LEFT BACK
The Starter- Tim Ream. He may not be the most natural fit at the position, but Ream understands the spot and has the tools to be a serviceable starting option for the immediate future until a more dynamic option emerges. Ream's positioning and passing make him a player who should be able to hold things down in CONCACAF World Cup qualifying, but he probably isn't the long-term answer at the position.
The Backup- Greg Garza. Sidelined after surgery to repair a hip injury, Garza has been sidelined for a while, and been carrying an injury dating back to the start of 2015. We haven't seen his best in a year, but those who remember him at his best know he just might wind up being the top option by the time the hexagonal roles around in 2017, if not sooner.
Time to say goodbye- DaMarcus Beasley. Yes, he can still do the job, but Beasley is 33 and it's time to look at other players. The next round of CONCACAF qualifying is a good time to try out some younger options.
Don't forget about- Brek Shea. It's easy to forget the Orlando City speedster was a regular part of Klinsmann's plans before injuries sidelined him. At the start of the year he was seen as a left back option, with the help of Orlando City playing him there. Injuries ended that experiment though, leaving Shea to play in midfield before being sidelined by surgery. Now that he's back, Shea could once again develop into a left back option, particularly if Orlando City gives him another shot at the position in 2016.
One for the future- John Requejo. The Club Tijuana defender did relatively well at the Under-20 World Cup, and the Xolos are said to have plans for him to see more minutes with the first team in the coming seasons.
DEFENSIVE MIDFIELDER
The Starter- Jermaine Jones. At age 33, Jones should be listed in the "Time to say goodbye" section alongside Kyle Beckerman, but with no other younger options appearing ready to take the mantle, Jones could be the one old-timer to carry on into the next round of World Cup qualifying. It remains to be seen whether Jones could really handle playing as a pure defensive midfielder, but he may have to in order to stick around.
The Backup- Danny Williams. It should be the Reading midfielder's time to step up and fill the void of aging options Jones and Beckerman, but his awful showing against Costa Rica earlier this month didn't exactly instill a ton of confidence. Look for Klinsmann to give him more chances though.
Time to say goodbye- Kyle Beckerman. The 33-year-old RSL midfielder did a outstanding job of enjoying a late-career national team renaissance, but his time should be up. Klinsmann needs to integrate younger options.
Don't forget about- Alfredo Morales. Another player who hasn't exactly dazzled when given national team opportunities, Morales is starting in the German Bundesliga and is just 25, making him a player who should play a larger role as the current World Cup qualifying cycle rolls on.
One for the future- Wil Trapp. The U.S. Under-23 captain boasts the kind of feel for the game that should help him enjoy a smooth transition to the international level, and Klinsmann just might find himself skipping a generation of options to give Trapp a real shot in 2016.
RIGHT MIDFIELDER
The Starter- Alejandro Bedoya. The veteran midfielder has had a rough year on the national team front, from his awful showing playing out of position against Brazil, to his woefully timed illness that cost him a chance to play in the CONCACAF Cup. When healthy, Bedoya remains a top option, and go-to starter.
The Backup- DeAndre Yedlin. He isn't a natural winger, but Yedlin's speed makes him an enticing option. Could he really be used as a starter on the wing in important matches? That still seems a bit of a stretch.
Time to say goodbye- Graham Zusi. The 29-year-old Zusi hasn't had the best year, and there's always a chance of a turnaround similar to the one his club teammate Matt Besler enjoyed, but you get the feeling some younger options are knocking on the door, leaving Zusi unlikely to remain in the picture for very long.
Don't forget about- Darlington Nagbe. Now an American citizen, the Portland Timbers standout has the technical and physical qualities to excel on the international level. Klinsmann is aware, having already contacted the Timbers about him. It shouldn't be long before he's a regular part of the national team.
One for the future- Paul Arriola. The Club Tijuana attacker was snubbed from the U.S. Olympic qualifying team after an impressive showing at the Under-20 World Cup, but remains a very intriguing attacking prospect who can play in a number of positions.
LEFT MIDFIELDER
The Starter- Gyasi Zardes. The LA Galaxy speedster has enjoyed a breakout year with the national team in 2015, and while he may not be a natural left winger, he has held his own and should continue to see playing time there until some natural options step up. Like, for example, Brek Shea.
The Backup- Brek Shea. He can still be a bit wild at times, but the 25-year-old free spirit has shown signs of maturity with Orlando City and could definitely force himself back into the picture on the left flank. He isn't quite as good going at defenders as Zardes, but he's naturally left-footed, provides better service, and is versatile enough to play in multiple spots.
Time to say goodbye- Brad Davis. Not a real surprise he's listed here given the fact he turns 34 next month. Davis will go down as a player who had a heck of a left foot.
Don't forget about- Sebastian Lletget. Having taken MLS by storm in his first season in the league, Lletget boasts the kind of technical quality Klinsmann needs in his squad.
One for the future- Josh Perez. The U.S. Under-17 standout boasts speed, a dangerous left foot and the technical quality to develop into something special. With a move to Italian club Fiorentina in the works, Perez has a very bright future, either as a forward or left winger.
ATTACKING MIDFIELDER
The Starter- Michael Bradley. Though you could definitely make the argument the U.S. would be better off with Bradley playing in a deeper role, he remains the choice in the playmaking spot for now based on what Klinsmann prefers in the player pool at the moment. Bradley has shown he can take over a game in this role, particularly when playing behind two forwards.
The Backup- Lee Nguyen. The New England Revolution playmaker has been getting nibbles of playing time from Klinsmann, and, generally speaking, he's done well when given the chance. Will that lead to a larger role at some point? In an ideal world he would be in the starting lineup, with Bradley sitting deeper in midfield, but for now Nguyen remains a bench option.
Time to say goodbye- Benny Feilhaber. This will probably anger some folks who still can't fathom why Klinsmann has refused to call in the Sporting KC playmaker, but he isn't on this list because he isn't good enough to help. Feilhaber surely could offer something to the national team, but it has become painfully obvious that Klinsmann doesn't rate him. Feilhaber turns 31 in January, and with some impressive young attacking midfield talents in the pipeline, you have to think his window for having some sort of role with the national team is closing fast.
Don't forget about- Emerson Hyndman. The Fulham midfielder may be in a tough spot with his club team as he battles through the final year of his contract, but Hyndman showed enough at the Under-20 World Cup, and in Olympic qualifying, to remind us all that he's a very promising midfield prospect. He's still only 19, but if he makes a club move that leads to regular playing time in 2016, he could be a national team regular before long.
One for the future- Christian Pulisic. The U.S. Under-17 national team star is considered a future superstar, and his showings at the Under-17 World Cup have done nothing to slow down the building hype. Currently in the Borussia Dortmund setup, Pulisic has the sort of vision and skill that could see him starring in a World Cup one day. He still has plenty of developing to do, and some stiff competition from the likes of Hyndman and Gedion Zelalem, but Pulisic is as promising a prospect as there is in the entire player pool.
STRIKER
The Starter- Jozy Altidore. He remains inconsistent, but Altidore continues to be the clear-cut top choice starting striker in the pool, and nobody seems ready to offer a real challenge to that standing. If there is a question right now it's whether Klinsmann may consider benching either Altidore or Dempsey in order to inject some consistent pace into the U.S. attack. The pair haven't looked good playing together lately, leaving you to wonder which of them Klinsmann would bench.
The Backup- Bobby Wood. The CONCACAF Cup goal helped Wood earn a special place in the hearts of U.S. fans who had few reasons to celebrate that day. Wood has shown he can score in big moments, and he's earning regular playing time for Bundesliga 2 side Union Berlin. Is he ready to challenge for a starting national team role? Not quite, but he's on a good path and, at 22, Wood should continue to improve.
Time to say goodbye- Alan Gordon. With all due respect to the Galaxy forward, the fact he has been on the periphery of the national team conversation illustrates just how dire the target forward pool is for the U.S. at the moment. As barren as the cupboard is, Gordon shouldn't be needed again.
Don't forget about- Gyasi Zardes. If other wing options emerge to allow Klinsmann to push Zardes into the forward mix, look out for the Galaxy attacker as someone who could provide the pace up top the team sorely needs.
One for the future- Rubio Rubin. The U.S. Under-20 World Cup standout missed out on Olympic qualifying after his club failed to release him, but make no mistake, he figures prominently in that age group as one of the most promising forward talents in some time. After impressing in his national team debut last year, Rubin is squarely on Klinsmann's radar, though foot surgery will sideline him until January.
FORWARD
The Starter- Clint Dempsey. Based on recent form, Dempsey is looking more like he belongs in the "Time to say goodbye" category, but it is probably a bit premature to write him off already because of a bad run of form. Some time off could do Dempsey some good, and we just might see the Dempsey of old in 2016 if he can recharge his batteries this winter.
The Backup- Aron Johannsson. His move to the German Bundesliga has looked like a good fit for him, though he continues to face injuries that raise questions about his durability. With Altidore and Dempsey struggling, Johannsson has a very real chance to assert his position in the player pool, but he has to get healthy and stay healthy first.
Time to say goodbye- Chris Wondolowski. He will never live down "The Miss," but Wondolowski has shown nothing but class in continuing to play well in MLS and keeping himself in the national team picture. He turns 33 in January, though, and with several young forwards looking primed to break in next year, we probably won't see Wondolowski with the national team again next year.
Don't forget about- Joe Gyau. The speedster was on the verge of breaking out in 2014 before a knee injury cost him a year on the sidelines. He is working his way back to action, and while we still don't know if he will be able to return to his previous levels, the 23-year-old is talented enough to merit keeping a close on his recovery.
One for the future- Jordan Morris. You could argue the future is now with Morris, who boasts the kind of speed and nose for goal that must have Klinsmann considering bringing him into the senior team on a permanent basis. Morris is still playing at Stanford, but that's only for a few more months. It's tough to see him staying in college beyond this current season, which means we could see him turn pro in 2016, which would speed up his already-impressive evolution as a player.Follow me:
I had really fallen in love with Sunday Riley’s Good Genes! It was amazing for my skin, making it smooth reversing acne pigmentation and giving my skin an overall glow. But the price tag was a KILLER at £85 for only 30ml.
That’s crazy but if it’s a miracle worker It’s worth it, but it is not a miracle worker! Don’t get me wrong it’s a very good product but if you’re not a millionaire it is not really worth it but for us, non-rich people is there a dupe out there? Here is my review of The Ordinary Lactic Acid Treatment.
There is a full review of the Sunday Riley’s Good Genes Here so, please read before you finish this blog post.
Let’s compare and see what you think.
Price Tag –
There is a MASSIVE difference in price while the Sunday Riley’s is £85, The Ordinary is only £5.80 that is a very big difference in price so in that sense The Ordinary is a brilliant choice.
Amount –
You get the exact same amount in both bottles 30ml.
Packaging –
Obviously, there’s a big difference here, while the Sunday Riley’s is very fancy, The Ordinary Lactic Acid is in a simple frosted glass bottle with a white dropper and a clear easy to read Label.
Formula –
The formula is just like water and sinks in quickly but isn’t good under makeup so that’s a big difference from good genes as that looks beautiful under makeup.
Smell –
Not going to lie this smells disgusting, but you do get used to it after a while.
Ingredients –
The ingredients that are the same in both products are lactic acid, Xanthan Gum, Triethanolamine and I’m pretty sure that’s it so there is a lot more ingredients in Good Genes.
What Does It Do –
The Ordinary Lactic Acid exfoliates your skin and reduced inflammation which really helps my acne scars and uneven skin tone.
The Drawback –
You can only use it at night as it is terrible under makeup, if you have sensitive skin this isn’t for you and it makes your skin more susceptible to sunburn so you always need to wear sun cream ( you should anyway)
Is It A Dupe?
I wouldn’t exactly call it a Dupe as Sunday Riley’s Good Genes is brilliant, feels lovely gives you beautiful glowing skin but unless your in your 50 + or money isn’t a problem, you don’t need it but with the lactic acid treatment from The Ordinary it gives you a lot of the same results, in the long run, it’s cruelty free and vegan so I would highly recommend giving it a try.
Cruelty-Free Fashion | Blazer Outfit
The Ordinary Skincare Review!
NARS Soft Matte Complete Concealer Review!!
Share this post: Follow me:Vince McMahon wants to take the "wrestling" out of World Wrestling Entertainment.
No, this isn't an outrageous plot the colorful impresario has cooked up for his wrestlers to act out in front of thousands of screaming fans. McMahon, the chairman and chief executive of WWE, wants to give the company a makeover, starting with the name. From now on, WWE will no longer stand for World Wrestling Entertainment. It will just be WWE, plain and simple.
Fear not, fanatics. There will still be plenty of smack in "Smackdown," and "Raw" will still be fresh.
But McMahon wants more than men in tights in his life. He wants to grow the WWE through acquisitions and expand its business beyond the ring. In particular, he said, WWE is targeting companies involved in production, live entertainment and branding.
"I think every brand has to re-create itself," he said. "I want everyone to look at us in a vastly different way than they have."
Besides hunting for acquisitions, WWE is moving ahead with long-talked-about plans to create its own cable network for its vast library of wrestling fare. The company has been meeting with distributors including Verizon and hopes to get a channel launched in 2012.
McMahon also wants to start marketing WWE's expertise in producing live events.
"No one does television production better than we do, it's damn near the Olympics," McMahon said in his customary rasp after an afternoon rehearsing for a taping of one of WWE's shows. "We know more about live event touring than anyone in the United States." The company puts on about 300 shows annually.
The moves come as WWE looks to rebound from a tough end to 2010 that saw attendance at its events and pay-per-view revenue both drop 15% in the fourth quarter. The declines were blamed on the economy, although WWE probably didn't help matters by raising prices at a time when its core audience was feeling the pinch.
"I think it is very obvious that they need to do something," Hudson Square Research managing director Marla Backer said of the company's plans. "Clearly, their prospects in terms of growth are limited if they stick to their knitting."
Not everyone embraces WWE's desire to move beyond the wrestling mat.
"I think that the most important thing right now is the return of the health of the core business," said Jay Kaplan, portfolio manager for Royce & Associates, which holds about 9% of WWE stock. "One of the market's big concerns is are they losing market share to real fighting," Kaplan added, referring to mixed martial arts and ultimate fighting.
This is not the first time WWE has tried to expand beyond its core. Several years ago, it partnered with NBC to launch the XFL, a springtime football league that died after just one season. A restaurant in Times Square also flopped. McMahon said he's learned his lesson from those follies and will stick to the entertainment business.
For more on McMahon's plans for the WWE, please see our story in Thursday's Los Angeles Times.
-- Joe Flint
Photos: Top: Vince McMahon with his son-in-law Paul "Triple H" Levesque. Right: McMahon. Credit: Ethan Miller / Getty Images.This is a start to a weekly series that I will call, State of the Game. This will get the big updates on what we are currently working on, no matter the state that it is in. While we will still post on the stuff as we get it done, we want a nice format that will be a way to give out more information on everything, from concepts, to implementation.
So, what have we been doing? The current focus has been on the M.A.V. editor implementation. We have ‘most’ of the functionality in to build up your M.A.V. to prepare for launch. This includes a functional U.I. for selecting parts, displaying stats, validating builds, and launching into a level.
In the pictures you can see the building process at various stages. The validation currently checks very few things, only weight, total parts, and that there is not an intersection of the parts.
Now that we have a good way of building up M.A.V.’s we have moved over to focusing on some levels. These levels will be 100% for testing only, as the final game will have procedurally generated worlds. The primary goal for these levels are to provide a predictable testing environment so players (And Us!) can test different parts and M.A.V. builds and have a decent way of comparing the results. Here are the test areas we are currently working on.
Firing Range:
This Level will be set in a Canyon environment. There will be many targets at different elevations and distances. Some targets will move along preset patterns while others will stay static. Our goal with this level is to provide long and medium range players a way to fine tune their builds and skills.
Traversal Level:
This level will be setup in a hilly forest, with many other obstacles in the area. There will be static enemies firing at you from a distance while you travel to a set number of goals and then exit the area. This level will allow us to test all of our handling settings, speed settings, and general motion. It will also train players for ‘scout’ type builds and avoiding enemy fire. (Or shooting them first!)
Urban Level:
This will be our first full combat area. It will be setup to be handled in a variety of ways but it will be very hostile. We will also use it to test destruction areas, weapon settings, and general full balance. This will be our primay AI test area as well.
We have a few more ideas, but we have not started on them yet and want to hold off on them until we get these primary 3 to a playable state. One more thing, each test level will have a timer and scoring system. This allows the test level to become a mini-game as well, and will give you a better measure on if that tweaked setting actually helped or not. We may turn this into a leader board feature, so you could upload your top scores and ‘compete’ with others. We also talked about letting you tackle the test levels in a multiplayer setting as well, but that will likely get postponed until our focus moves to multi-player.
Well, that’s the current state of the game! As always, tell us how you feel!Chris Trew
The game plan was to get into Game 5 of the World Series for as little as possible. Armed with $75 cash and another couple hundred digital dollars by way of Venmo and PayPal, I set off to Houston. Phone fully charged, chin up, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, this being my inaugural journey into championship game territory.
The Astros have never won a World Series, I’ve never been to one, and New Orleans is close enough to Minute Maid Park that if you’re someone like me you’re absolutely renting a car, zipping west on I-10, and rolling the dice. The scene was pretty bare when I arrived about five and a half hours before the game — which would itself wind up being about 5 and a half hours long.
2:05pm: “I have no idea what the laws are”
Even though ending up in jail would make for a better post, there’s no wifi behind bars, so I wanted to make sure I’d meet my deadline. My first step was checking in with the Houston police officers who were near the ballpark to get the scoop. The first couple of cops had no idea what the actual laws were and when the second pair of cops also had no idea, I took my question online and discovered, from the Houston Press:
In Texas, unsurprisingly, there’s no state law against ticket scalping, and in Houston there is only a city ordinance that makes it illegal to sell them on public property inside city limits without a permit. There’s also no limit on the amount of money a person may try to resell a ticket for, so even if you grew up hearing cautionary tales about the shady business of buying tickets from a scalper, there’s nothing making that line of work illegal.
This non-answer didn’t make me feel better about engaging in conversations with strangers just across the street from the ballpark.The AccuWeather.com Long-Range Forecasting Team is predicting another brutally cold and snowy winter for a large part of the country, thanks in large part to La Niña... yet again.
La Niña, a phenomenon that occurs when sea surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific are below normal, is what made last year's winter so awful for the Midwest and Northeast. Monster blizzards virtually shut down the cities of New York and Chicago. Last winter was one of New York City's snowiest on record.
La Niñas often produce a volatile weather pattern for the Midwest and Northeast during winter due to the influence they have on the jet stream. The graphic below shows the position the jet stream typically takes over the U.S. during La Niña.
This graphic illustrates the common position the jet stream takes over the United States during La Niña.
The way the jet stream is expected to be positioned during this winter's La Niña will tend to drive storms through the Midwest and Great Lakes. Last year, the jet stream steered storms farther east along the Northeast coast, hammering the Interstate 95 corridor.
Therefore, instead of New York City enduring the worst of winter this year, it will likely be Chicago.
"The brunt of the winter season, especially when dealing with cold, will be over the north-central U.S.," stated Paul Pastelok, expert long-range meteorologist and leader of the AccuWeather.com Long-Range Forecasting Team.
Chicago, which endured a monster blizzard last winter, could be one of the hardest-hit cities in terms of both snow and cold in the winter ahead.
AccuWeather.com Long-Range Meteorologist Josh Nagelberg even went so far as to say, "People in Chicago are going to want to move after this winter."
While winter's worst may not be focused over the major cities of the Northeast this year, the region will not get by unscathed. Pastelok warns there could be a few significant snow and ice storms that could pack a punch.
Ice events could also be a problem for areas farther south from the southern Plains to the southern Appalachians this season, while a significant severe weather threat develops in the Lower Mississippi Valley in February. This threat is extremely concerning for the areas in Mississippi and Alabama that were devastated by tornadoes in the spring.
The West is expected to be split between mild and dry conditions in the Southwest |
3.
Here are five things to know about devolution:
1. What is N.W.T. devolution?
Right now, Ottawa owns almost all the public land and waters in the territory. The federal government makes the final decisions on the development of resources such as oil and gas, and mines, and keeps almost all of the money companies pay to develop the resources (resource revenue).
Tlicho Grand Chief Eddie Erasmus and N.W.T. Premier Bob McLeod officially sign the Tlicho government on to the N.W.T.'s devolution agreement-in-principle on Friday in Behchoko. The Tlicho are one of five aboriginal groups to sign on to the agreement. (CBC)
The devolution agreement being negotiated will transfer control of public land and resources to the N.W.T. The territory will make the decisions about resource development and will keep 50 per cent of resource revenue, up to an annual limit of about $60 million.
In the agreement-in-principle, the federal government agrees to provide one-time transition costs and annual money to fund the territory’s land and resource management programs, and to transfer all existing federal northern development department assets such as buildings and building leases.
2. Where will this resource revenue money go?
The N.W.T. has committed up to a quarter of its share of resource revenue to aboriginal governments that sign on to the final devolution agreement. The N.W.T.’s fiscal responsibility policy pledges to use the rest for paying down debt and investing in infrastructure rather than for day-to-day operating expenses.
3. Which aboriginal governments have signed on to devolution?
The Northwest Territory Métis Nation, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, the Sahtu Secretariat, the Gwich’in Tribal Council and the Tlicho government. The Akaitcho Territory government and the Dehcho First Nations have not.
4. Does this transfer of ownership include offshore oil and gas resources?
No. The federal government will keep ownership of offshore resources. But the agreement-in-principle commits Canada to begin negotiating offshore resource revenue sharing with N.W.T. within 60 days of the signing of a final devolution agreement.
5. What will be different after devolution?
Besides having decision-making power over lands and resources and a new source of revenue, the territory will inherit about 175 federal Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development employees based in N.W.T. whose jobs are affected by devolution. The GNWT will likely also need to hire more people to handle tasks that were done for these Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development workers by other federal departments.Police say residents in a South Jersey community woke up Sunday morning to find unwanted fliers posted along their street.Ku Klux Klan and hate fliers were reportedly left along driveways on Forklanding Road in Cinnaminson.The fliers stated "love your own race" and "stop homosexuality and race mixing".Police do not believe that any one person was the target, but neighbors were stunned to read what it said on the fliers."And it looked like a Valentine. It had like water droplets on it and it was a little shiny, and I thought, 'Oh did somebody drop something? It looks like a card.' So I went and picked it and up and I was like, 'love your own race?" I just looked and I was like'stop homosexuality?'" said Rita Strough of Cinnaminson. "I'm like Oh my God. It said, 'Join the Klan today.' I was just shocked."Police issued the following statement:Statement from the Southern Burlington chapter of the NAACP:Two Player 2048 - 2x2048 0 0
Created by Instapainting.com - turn any photo into a hand-painted oil painting for only $49.
Join the numbers and get to the 2048 tile!, or have the most points at the end!
This is the two-player version.
IMPORTANT: This game only works on the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome browsers.
Give this link to the other player:
Waiting for other player...
How to play: Take turns using your arrow keys to move the tiles. When two tiles with the same number touch, they merge into one! Merge your opponent's tiles to add to your score. The player who creates the 2048 tile wins, or, if no moves are possible, the player with the highest sum of all tiles wins!
Note: This site is not the official version of 2048. This site is a derivative, and should be used with caution. All other sites are derivatives of this derivative, and should be used with extreme caution.
Created by Chris Chen of Instapainting.com. Based on 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli.Main
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Politics Jon Stewart to Reddit: you don't matter
Backstory: Reddit has been pushing support for the Stewart/Colbert rally since its inception, possibly since before its inception.
At the Rally For Sanity press conference on Saturday, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, asked Stewart and Colbert a question: what role did the Internet play in convincing you to hold this rally? The response: "it didn't hurt."
Question at around 1:40
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/jon-stewart-and-stephen-colbert-hold-post-rally-to- re store-sanity-press-conference/
Did you hear that Reddit? All that work you put into getting the word out, organizing meetups, and convincing people to go "didn't hurt". All that initial support in getting the ball rolling on this rally a few months back was great, but it wasn't a factor. Thanks for your meaningless and futile support that Comedy Central really didn't need at the end of the day to get a surprise crowd of 250,000 people to the rally. Did you hear that Internet? You had no role in this either, it was all Comedy Central all the way.
Colbert doesn't get a pass on this either, his "thanks Reddit for raising half a million dollars for our charity but it didn't affect attendence one way or the other" comment is a backhanded compliment at best.
And to say this all live, in a press conference, to the co-founder of a community of millions that did everything in its power to get the word out past its own readers to the greater internet, that is flat out disrespectful and wrong. Alexis is a friend of mine, and he's a super nice guy. He would never dream of saying this to Jon Stewart but I will: you owe Alexis an apology and you owe Reddit an apology. I'll stop short at saying you owe The Internet an apology because honestly I think The Internet owes us all an apology for a number of things, Justin Bieber notwithstanding.
In the clip you'll notice Stewart uses part of his answer to Alexis' question to make the point that Comedy Central had the idea for this rally "months" before Reddit did. Which is really odd considering Alexis didn't ask or imply that Reddit gave Comedy Central the idea for the rally in the first place. Sounds like someone feels a litle guilty about something. Who thought of it first doesn't matter, it is impossible to deny that Reddit's actions encouraged Comedy Central to actually pull the trigger. Except Stewart did, right to Alexis Ohanian's face, in a live press conference.
Why am I so bent about this? First and foremost, because a friend of mine got smacked down on live TV by a guy he helped, and I can't stand by and do nothing about it without at least saying something. But also because Daily Show writers have been doing essentially the same thing to me, every single day for the past 10 years. They use Fark every day to source material, and haven't mentioned Fark on air even one single time. It's the same attitude toward Reddit: "sure doesn't hurt, but not a significant contribution." Thanks to Fark, your writers don't have to go far to fill your shows up with material for you to use. Every writer I've met thanks me vociferously for Fark and tells me how much easier it makes their jobs. Sure that's not worth a daily mention, but I would think at least one in the last 10 years. It has yet to happen. I've learned to live with it, but Alexis is my friend and he does not deserve this kind of treatment. Especially considering the effort Reddit put into promoting the rally.
I'm not implying they owe Reddit or Fark any credit for the success of the Rally, that's definitely not the case. Comedy Central did the bulk of the work, that can't be disputed. This is about common courtesy. If someone does you a favor, a thank you is a kind and appropriate response. In Reddit's case, "it doesn't hurt" is a slap in the face. It discounts all the effort they went through - and they went through a lot. And they weren't the only ones, several other large web communities pitched in as well.
Here's my proposal: Jon Stewart should apologize for discounting the impact that Reddit and other Internet communities had on this rally, or next time The Internet should remember Comedy Central thinks they don't count and should show them what happens when "The Internet" actively works to convince people to not attend. Because if Reddit had put similar effort into convincing people not to attend, the crowd size would have been far smaller than anticipated. And if you don't believe me, let's see how it goes next time if Stewart makes the wrong decision.
PS: pretty sure this post will guarantee that I and/or Fark never get a mention on The Daily Show but that wasn't happening anyhow. Backstory: Reddit has been pushing support for the Stewart/Colbert rally since its inception, possibly since before its inception.At the Rally For Sanity press conference on Saturday, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, asked Stewart and Colbert a question: what role did the Internet play in convincing you to hold this rally? The response: "it didn't hurt."Question at around 1:40Did you hear that Reddit? All that work you put into getting the word out, organizing meetups, and convincing people to go "didn't hurt". All that initial support in getting the ball rolling on this rally a few months back was great, but it wasn't a factor. Thanks for your meaningless and futile support that Comedy Central really didn't need at the end of the day to get a surprise crowd of 250,000 people to the rally. Did you hear that Internet? You had no role in this either, it was all Comedy Central all the way.Colbert doesn't get a pass on this either, his "thanks Reddit for raising half a million dollars for our charity but it didn't affect attendence one way or the other" comment is a backhanded compliment at best.And to say this all live, in a press conference, to the co-founder of a community of millions that did everything in its power to get the word out past its own readers to the greater internet, that is flat out disrespectful and wrong. Alexis is a friend of mine, and he's a super nice guy. He would never dream of saying this to Jon Stewart but I will: you owe Alexis an apology and you owe Reddit an apology. I'll stop short at saying you owe The Internet an apology because honestly I think The Internet owes us all an apology for a number of things, Justin Bieber notwithstanding.In the clip you'll notice Stewart uses part of his answer to Alexis' question to make the point that Comedy Central had the idea for this rally "months" before Reddit did. Which is really odd considering Alexis didn't ask or imply that Reddit gave Comedy Central the idea for the rally in the first place. Sounds like someone feels a litle guilty about something. Who thought of it first doesn't matter, it is impossible to deny that Reddit's actions encouraged Comedy Central to actually pull the trigger. Except Stewart did, right to Alexis Ohanian's face, in a live press conference.Why am I so bent about this? First and foremost, because a friend of mine got smacked down on live TV by a guy he helped, and I can't stand by and do nothing about it without at least saying something. But also because Daily Show writers have been doing essentially the same thing to me, every single day for the past 10 years. They use Fark every day to source material, and haven't mentioned Fark on air even one single time. It's the same attitude toward Reddit: "sure doesn't hurt, but not a significant contribution." Thanks to Fark, your writers don't have to go far to fill your shows up with material for you to use. Every writer I've met thanks me vociferously for Fark and tells me how much easier it makes their jobs. Sure that's not worth a daily mention, but I would think at least one in the last 10 years. It has yet to happen. I've learned to live with it, but Alexis is my friend and he does not deserve this kind of treatment. Especially considering the effort Reddit put into promoting the rally.I'm not implying they owe Reddit or Fark any credit for the success of the Rally, that's definitely not the case. Comedy Central did the bulk of the work, that can't be disputed. This is about common courtesy. If someone does you a favor, a thank you is a kind and appropriate response. In Reddit's case, "it doesn't hurt" is a slap in the face. It discounts all the effort they went through - and they went through a lot. And they weren't the only ones, several other large web communities pitched in as well.Here's my proposal: Jon Stewart should apologize for discounting the impact that Reddit and other Internet communities had on this rally, or next time The Internet should remember Comedy Central thinks they don't count and should show them what happens when "The Internet" actively works to convince people to not attend. Because if Reddit had put similar effort into convincing people not to attend, the crowd size would have been far smaller than anticipated. And if you don't believe me, let's see how it goes next time if Stewart makes the wrong decision.PS: pretty sure this post will guarantee that I and/or Fark never get a mention on The Daily Show but that wasn't happening anyhow. · · ·
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This thread is closed to new comments.SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Republican candidate John McCain may have used his song in the U.S. presidential campaign, but veteran rock ‘n’ roller Chuck Berry has no doubt whom he wants to see in the White House next year.
Rock and roll legend Chuck Berry performs during a concert in Burgos, northern Spain, November 25, 2007 REUTERS/Felix Ordonez
“America has finally come to this point where you can pick a man of color and that not be a drawback,” the legendary 81-year-old guitarist said of Barack Obama, who clinched the Democratic presidential nomination last week and would become the country’s first black president if he wins in November.
“It’s no question, myself being a man of color... I mean, you have to feel good about it,” Berry, himself a black pioneer in the 1950s music scene, told Reuters by phone from New York ahead of a Brazil tour that starts next week.
“Definitely a proud and successful moment for all the people of this country, not just black people, but Americans in general.”
McCain, now preparing to take on Obama in the November presidential election, used Berry’s hit “Johnny B. Goode” as an early campaign theme, although he has since switched to Abba’s “Take a Chance On Me.”
“Johnny B. Goode” turned 50 in January and topped the list of the 100 greatest guitar songs of all time that Rolling Stone magazine published this month.
“In the ‘50s there were certain places we couldn’t ride on the bus,” Berry said. “And now there is a possibility of a black man being in White House. Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last,” he said, quoting the words of a Negro spiritual song famously invoked by assassinated civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King Jr.
The first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, known as the “father of rock ‘n’ roll,” Berry has been on tour since the start of the year in the United States and Europe.
Berry has not released an album of new material since 1979’s “Rock It.” But he has been promising one since 2001 and it may be close to becoming a reality.
“There are definitely plans for a new record. And we may have more on that by the time we get there in Brazil... But we can’t release any names yet,” he said.
Until then, Berry doesn’t mind playing the same old songs. Neither do his fans, who will pay more than $100 a ticket in Brazil to hear his hits “Memphis”, “Maybellene”, “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”.
“(Those songs) never get old and you can’t never forget where you came from,” he said. “The old have become classic, because classic never dies.”Multiple sources have told Motorsport.com that NASCAR will implement new procedures for crashed vehicles in the top three national tours this season.
If a car or truck sustains damage during a race and is taken to the garage, that driver will not be able to return to competition.
Damaged cars that cannot be repaired on pit road within five minutes — starting with the time the driver crosses the yellow line at the entrance to pit road to the time he crosses the yellow line at the exit — will be forced to retire from the race.
While on pit road, teams will be allowed to remove or reattach original body parts with fasteners and/or tape. Rods or supports can be used to brace the original panels. However, new panels cannot be used as replacements.
A comprehensive list of mandatory car components required to return to competition will be issued by the series directors.
Drivers guilty of commitment-line violations coming to pit road or are caught speeding will have to serve a 15-second penalty.
Teams will be allowed to repair mechanical failures in the garage if the malfunction did not occur during an accident.The son swears the father saw it all coming.
Kyrie Irving ticks off the milestones as if they were fresh produce on a weekly grocery list.
"In eighth grade," Irving said, "my father told me I would wind up as the best guard in the state of New Jersey. In my senior year of high school, he told me I'd be the number one player in the country. Then, in college, he told me I'd be the number one pick in the draft.
"He laid out all the necessary steps for me. It was up to me what I did with them."
Irving continues to cement his role as the young cornerstone of the Cleveland Cavaliers, leading all NBA rookies in scoring with 18.1 points a game. (He also dishes out 5.1 assists).
He will be a member of Team Chuck in Friday's NBA Rising Stars game, the second player selected after Clippers sensation Blake Griffin.
"I thank my father," Irving said. "He did things the old-school way. No shortcuts. Nothing guaranteed."
The father swears it was the son who saw it all coming, who wrote down "GOAL: PLAY IN THE NBA" on a slip of paper when he was in the fourth grade and pulled it out whenever someone doubted that a spindly high school freshman barely 5-foot-8 could ever make it to the pros.
Drederick Irving was Kyrie's measuring stick. Each summer he'd line up against the mark in their home, recording his father's 6-foot-4 frame.
"I want to be bigger than you," Kyrie told his dad.
"You will be," his father promised.
He had reason to believe that was true. After Drederick's dreams of an NBA career were snuffed out by a failed tryout with the Celtics, he played in New York's Pro Am league, gliding up and down the asphalt courts exuding grace in an otherwise hardscrabble game.
Kyrie was only a toddler in a stroller, yet his bright eyes followed the action, followed his father. Afterward, when released from the constraints of his perch, Kyrie would clamor for the ball, dribbling with one hand, his steady gaze fixed on Drederick.
He was 13 months old.
"And I have the footage to prove it," Drederick said.
He brought the boy everywhere, but then, what choice did he have? When Kyrie was 4 and his sister, Asia, was 5, their mother, Elizabeth, died suddenly, leaving Drederick to care for two confused, heartbroken children. His own grief needed to be tucked away during the hectic daylight hours of raising two active kids. Only when they were tucked in safely was Drederick free to sob himself quietly to sleep.
He wanted more for his children than he had. As one of six children growing up in the Mitchel housing projects in the Bronx, N.Y., Drederick saw too much too soon. He was a child on welfare whose father abandoned him when he was 6, whose mother, Lillian, worked two jobs to keep the family afloat. Drugs and crime and guns were everyday obstacles, and Drederick recognized education and basketball would be his escape.
"I consider myself a good man," Drederick once told Kyrie, "but I want you to be a better one."
Drederick moved his small children to New Jersey and enrolled them in private school, but he brought them back regularly to the Mitchel projects.
"I was there almost every weekend," Kyrie said. "I got to be in the same environment my dad was in. I was basically a kid playing on a jungle gym in the projects."
Kyrie Irving is averaging 18.1 points and 5.1 assists per game. AP Photo/Tony Dejak
Drederick commuted to Wall Street, where he was a financial broker. For years he worked for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center.
Eight months before 9/11 he changed jobs, accepting a position with Garvan Securities on the 40th floor of the same building.
"I was there three weeks and I didn't like it," Drederick said. "I can't really explain it. I just had a bad feeling in my stomach about it."
He moved to Thomson Reuters at 3 Financial Square but walked through the World Trade Center building each morning from the train station.
On the morning of 9/11, he was striding through the lobby of the twin towers when a thunderous noise knocked him backward.
"I thought the boiler exploded," Drederick said. "The boom was so loud, the force of wind so powerful. There was shattered glass everywhere."
Within seconds, chaos ensued: collapsing walls, screaming people, suffocating smoke.
"All I could think of was, 'I've got to get to my kids,'" Drederick said.
He pushed his way to the exit, but there was a logjam at the door. People were frightened to leave the building because so much debris was falling from the sky.
"I stuck my head out and tried to see, but I couldn't tell what it was," he said. "Pieces of the building, pieces of the plane, a lot of paper..."
He dashed across the street, dodging chunks of steel, then began frantically dialing his friends at Cantor Fitzgerald. He tried his former boss, his former secretary, a slew of buddies with whom he shared his hopes, his dreams, his proud stories of his children's accomplishments. Nobody picked up. He glanced up at the building, at the flames licking the top floors, at the smoke engulfing the towers.
"I was standing there watching the debris fall from the sky, and then I realized, 'That's not debris. Those are bodies,'" Drederick said.
"It has taken me years to get that image out of my mind. I still have dreams about 9/11, to be honest. It was a horrible day. I lost so many friends."
Drederick knew he needed to move away from the towers, which quickly became choked with dust and death and despair. His cell phone was useless and the roads were blocked. For a moment, panic took hold. What if he didn't make it? Who would take care of his children?
Ten-year old Kyrie and 11-year-old Asia were at school when the 9/11 attacks began. Kyrie sat quietly as one parent after another, their faces ashen, burst into the building and gathered their children in their arms.
"There were a bunch of teachers crying, a bunch of them leaving the classroom," Kyrie said. "No one knew what was going on.
"Everyone else left with their parents. My sister and I had to wait until school got out."
The babysitter was waiting for them at home, transfixed by the horror unfolding on the television. The solemn reports did little to soothe two terrified siblings who just wanted to throw their arms around their dad.
Drederick could not reach them. Phone lines were down, the trains were grounded, so he began walking toward his old neighborhood.
"I was afraid Asia and Kyrie would think I still worked for Cantor Fitzgerald," he said. "You don't know if kids that young pay attention when you change jobs."
"I don't know why my father would say that," Kyrie said. "I knew exactly where he worked. I also knew he had to pass through the twin towers every day.
"I was worried. Really worried."
Drederick walked nine miles from Wall Street to 137th street and Alexander Avenue in the Bronx, a journey that took more than six hours. He was able to reach his friend Larry Romaine, who drove to Drederick's home to assure his children he was alive and safe.
"I told my children there was a guardian angel looking over me," Drederick said. "How else can you explain it?"
That horrific day haunted him for years. As his children grew, Drederick became even more hands-on, stressing academics and encouraging athletics. He coached Kyrie until the eighth grade, impressed by his young son's poise and resolve.
When Kyrie reached high school, Drederick enrolled him at Montclair Kimberley Academy. After Kyrie led his team to a state prep championship, it became apparent he needed better basketball competition, so he completed his final two years at St. Patrick's in Elizabeth, N.J., where he also won a title.
By then, nearly every college in the country wanted him.
It was so vastly different from Drederick's basketball experience, which often left him overshadowed, first by his close friend Rod Strickland, who would later star in the NBA and become Kyrie's godfather, then later by his Stevenson High School teammates, who seemed to play a little more, score a little more, shine a little brighter.
Drederick drew initial interest from UConn, James Madison and Boston University, but when it came time to pass out scholarships, no one came calling.
It wasn't until BU lost a recruit that head coach John Kuester and assistant Rodney Johnson decided to take one more trip to the Mitchel projects to see what the Irving kid had decided.
Their fine car and their long trench coats set off alarms. Drederick was not a troublemaker, but the dudes that came asking for him sure looked like cops.
"Hey, can you tell me where we can find Dred Irving?" Kuester asked.
"Aw, he's dead, man," his neighborhood friend answered.
"Oh, how terrible," Kuester said. "We're from Boston University and we came to offer him a scholarship."
"A scholarship? Yeah, he lives right down there, two doors over," the boy said.
Drederick Irving went on to score 1,931 career points for the Terriers. His one NCAA appearance was a lopsided loss to Duke, which, more than 20 years later, came knocking for Kyrie.
The son inked with the Blue Devils, was limited to 11 games his freshman year after a toe injury and still became the top choice in last spring's draft. Kyrie went pro with the caveat that he'd complete his Duke degree in five years.
"He's halfway there," Drederick reported. "He gave me his word."
Kyrie claims the transition to the NBA has been seamless, devoid of pressure. Because he was born in Melbourne, Australia, while his father played professionally for the Bullen Bombers, Kyrie could compete in the 2012 Olympic Games for Australia. He'd rather play for the U.S., but so far he hasn't been asked.
His father figures that could change.
"This whole thing is a fairy tale," Drederick said. "Kyrie always hoped to play in the NBA, just as I did.
"He made it, so I feel like I've made it, too."
Kyrie will be 20 on March 23, but his steady gaze remains fixed on the man who devoted his life to his son.
"If you are fortunate to have a father like I have," he said, "you're given a foundation. You can be content with that, or take it and run with it, like I did.
"My father is the one who told me to want more. My father is the one who told me not to settle."
Drederick has remarried and has a new daughter, London. He beams when he talks of Asia, who is thriving as a junior at Temple University.
He commutes back and forth from New Jersey to Cleveland to make sure his son is comfortable, and safe, and will be in Orlando, Fla., to watch Kyrie perform during All-Star Weekend. It is an exhausting schedule, but Drederick won't hear of changing it.
Last time Kyrie came home to West Orange, N.J., he shimmied up to the wall, which showed him at 6-foot-3½, still short of his father's mark.
The son swears he will never reach the heights his father has.
The father swears Kyrie Irving accomplished that a long time ago.
Longtime Boston journalist Jackie MacMullan is a columnist for ESPNBoston.com.A federal court jury in Cleveland, Ohio, has convicted a cardiologist of ordering unnecessary medical tests, performing unnecessary procedures and submitting fraudulent bills totaling $7.2 million.
Fifty-six-year-old Harold Persaud of Westlake was convicted of one count of health carefraud, 13 counts of making false statements and one count of engaging in illegal monetary transactions. Prosecutors say Persaud billed Medicare and private insurers for more expensive procedures than were performed, falsified stress tests to justify unnecessary heart catheterizations and referred patients for heart bypasses they didn’t need.
Persaud was accused of engaging in the scheme between 2006 and 2012. Prosecutors say the $7.2 million in fraudulent bills led to payments by insurers totaling $1.5 million.
Persaud’s attorney could not be reached for comment.
Copyright 2019 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.* Telstra to sell 76.4 pct stake in CSL to HKT for $1.8 bln
* HKT will also purchasing remaining 23.6 pct stake from New World
* Telstra says committed to Asia expansion strategy
SYDNEY, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Australia’s Telstra Corporation is selling its majority stake in its Hong Kong-based mobiles business CSL to HKT Ltd for A$2 billion ($1.8 billion), even as it says it is committed to the Asian region in the long-term.
Telstra Chief Executive David Thodey said it was the right time to capitalise on the success of CSL, which has recorded compound annual revenue growth of 9.4 percent over the past three years.
“There are a number of dynamics in the Hong Kong mobiles market that means this is the right opportunity for Telstra to maximise our return on this successful asset,” Thodey said in a statement.
Thodey said Asia remained an important part of Telstra’s strategy and the company intended to be in the region in the long-term.
Telstra owns a controlling stake in Autohome Inc, the owner of Chinese car sales websites, that listed on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month with a market value of around $3.2 billion.
“It is interesting considering they’re looking at an Asian-expansion story, to be selling out of their Hong Kong division, but the price and what they’re getting for it does seem appealing,” Evan Lucas, a market analyst at IG, said of the HKT deal.
Lucas said it did raise questions about releasing an asset that was a good foothold into China, but on balance it is “a very nice pick up and good for shareholders”.
HKT Ltd will also buy the remaining 23.6 percent of the CSL business that is currently held by New World Development, bringing the total value of the deal to $2.43 billion.
Joanne Chua, investment manager at Rivkin Securities, said the purchase was positive because it increased free cash flow for Telstra.
“This is in line with Telstra strategy because, if you look at the business itself, what they’re trying to do at the moment is trying to diversify and trying to build its presence in the Asia-Pacific, so it definitely is a good step for them to step into the Asia market,” Chua said.
“Because there are so many dynamics, there are so many different mobile companies in Hong Kong, and Telstra would think this is a really good opportunity to maximise the return on this asset,” she said.
Telstra said the sale of CSL is expected to generate a profit of around A$600 million, with net proceeds incremental to the company’s free cashflow guidance of A$4.6 billion to A$5.1 billion in 2014.
The deal is subject to regulatory approval in Hong Kong.Share with your friends Submit
Far and away, the most frequently asked question I receive as a writer with bipolar and anxiety is, “How did you get to a place where you could be this open about your struggles?”
It’s usually followed with a question like, “Aren’t you scared?”
I used to be terrified. Like many folks with a mental illness, one of the first things we’re told is to keep it to ourselves. At times, I existed in a cloud of shame that followed me around wherever I went. But that’s just it – that’s exactly why I came out and became such a vocal advocate for my community. It’s because of that shame that I started talking about what I had been through. I was tired of feeling afraid, tired of feeling ashamed, and tired of seeing the stories of my community being told by people who just didn’t get it. I wanted to tell my own story and to reach people like me who needed to know, without a doubt, that they were not alone.
Yes, it’s scary to put yourself out there and tell the whole world – let alone family or friends – about what can be the darkest, most vulnerable part of our journeys. There are real risks involved, too, that people need to weigh when deciding who to tell about their illness(es) and when. Our safety, our security, our housing, and our jobs can all be at stake because mental illness, unfortunately, is a highly stigmatized status to hold in our society.
But when I weighed all of these risks, and I thought about my fourteen-year-old self, who was contemplating suicide because he felt utterly alone, I knew that I had an obligation to speak up. For me, if I could help make someone’s burden a little bit lighter by being outspoken about my illnesses, the benefits far outweighed the risks.
I remember that the first place I looked for help as a teen was not a guidance counselor, not a parent or guardian, not a friend. Instead, I turned to Google. I searched for things like, “Help, I want to die” and “I’m depressed and I don’t know what to do.” I remember, vividly, scouring the search results, looking for some kind of affirmation or something to hold onto.
The reality is that the stigma around mental health keeps us so silent that we’d rather ask Google what to do than ask our friends or family. We go it alone because we’re ashamed, we’re afraid, we’re confused, we’re overwhelmed, and we think that our struggles make us too much of a burden for others to deal with.
There was a time when Google knew more about my mental illnesses than my best friend did. After spending too many years feeling isolated, disconnected, and ashamed, I began to write about what I had been through. And, with time, that writing ceased to be a private exercise and instead, became the beginnings of a blog. That blog helped bring into sharp focus all of the reasons why being out as someone with bipolar and anxiety was the right decision for me.
Why am I out?
Because I want to build community around mental illness, especially for those who, like myself, are transgender and also grapple with these illnesses.
Because, too many times, I’ve received emails that said, “You’re genderqueer and bipolar? I thought I was the only one.”
Because too many people think of folks with mental illness as anything but people – as criminals, or “psychos,” or burdens on society rather than fully human and deserving of every bit of compassion, respect, and dignity that all people should be afforded.
Because, when you take away the rights of people with mental illnesses – when you vote against important legislation or elect a politician who wants to strip us of the resources and support that we need – I want you to remember my face and remember my words.
Because visibility matters, and because I want teens to grow up in a world where, when they are searching for people who have lived through what they’re going through, they can find them.
Because a teenager sent me a letter that said, “I found you through Google. I’m trans and I have bipolar. I didn’t think I could be successful, but I look at everything you’re doing, and you make me believe in something.”
Because I want to create a safe space for others to use their voices, too, so that together, the collective vibration of our voices will be an undeniable force.
Because you cannot deny our personhood, our worth, our brilliance, or our power when we work together.
Because teens would rather tell me they’re suicidal through my Tumblr ask box than pick up the phone and call a hotline or a friend.
Because an article I wrote asking people not to ridicule someone with a mental illness was read in over 180 countries by millions of people around the world.
Because it was an article I never |
A number of stores sold out of some products and the Dick Smith website received an unprecedented volume in traffic."
"We understand a certain amount of misinformation was published online last week that led some customers to believe certain products were on sale when they were not or they were a different discount."
News of the sale was leaked on Friday, with sites claiming it was a games clearance sale due to a staffer saying Dick Smith would no longer be stocking any video games.
Several documents posted online appeared to show video game stock set to be pushed out at massively reduced prices.
Dick Smith confirmed on Facebook later on Friday that the sale would take place from 8am this morning.
Among the items on the leaked lists were Nintendo's Wii Console, slashed to $129 down from a recommended retail price of $299.
Xbox consoles were on sale for $100, down from Xbox’s RRP of $399, and the PlayStation Portable (PSP) was down to $40 from its RRP of $189.95.
But when customers turned up at stores this morning, many found staff claiming to be unaware that the sale had even been scheduled.
Twenty-six-year-old desktop support worker, Charles Grogan told news.com.au that he visited three different Dick Smith stores in Queensland but found that many of the games listed were not on sale.
“Toombul was first on my list, there was at least 100+ people in line by the time doors opened,” Mr Grogan said.
“Customers ran to the back of the store where the game section normally is, skipping past all the items on sale in 'throw out bins' along the way.”
“When I got to the counter, the sales staff were yelling out to customers to stop picking up the display boxes for Xboxes and PlayStations as the store had no stock of those items that were on sale.”
Mr Grogan said that most of the sale stock wasn’t on display at Dick Smith’s Cannon Hill store, but was kept behind the counter.
“The staff member at Cannon Hill told me that the leaked list of sale items actually changed a few times over the weekend,” he said.
The staff member also told Mr Grogan that the sale was meant to start on April 5 but had to be pushed forward due to the leak.
“They didn't have the staff over the weekend to reprice the stock on the shelf, instead they came in early and took it all off the shelf,” he said.
News.com.au senior developer Sebastian Servat was one of the people queuing up this morning, a decision he said was a complete waste of time.
“There were hundreds of people just barging in the store, grabbing games, consoles, accessories, just to make it to the register and be told that nothing is on sale,” Mr Servat said.
Some reports even claim that because of the leak, Dick Smith declined to offer many goods on sale.
One commenter on Gizmodo said the staff at Dick Smith posted a sign outside one of their stores that read:
“Dear Customers,
As you may know, we are having a huge gaming sale starting from 2/4/12.
However due to the internet leak, our business will not drop 80% of what was listed until April 10th.
Thankyou (sic)”
However, a spokesperson for Dick Smith confirmed that the sale did indeed take place today as planned.
"All Dick Smith stores received communication about the gaming sale last Wednesday."
Angry customers vented their frustration online, accusing staff of snapping up items before they officially went on sale.
"Speaking to a mate who works at Dick Smith said most of the staff got consoles before the stores were open this morning," one commentor on Gizmodo claimed.
Another - “Vin” - said the staff at Cannon Hill told him Xbox consoles were not available for sale because they weren’t in “saleable conditions”.
“But I was informed (by another Dick Smith store) that they had two Xboxes in store,” he wrote
This claim was also backed up by commenter “Matt” who said he heard a similar response when he spoke to one of the staff at Cannon Hill.
“If they were going to let staff have first dibs, they shouldn’t have confirmed the leak, or at least informed that this was going to be standard practice,” he wrote.
Associate editor of Kotaku, Luke Plunkett wrote on Twitter: “wow, Dick Smith's sale was a total f***ing waste of everyone's time. And they wonder why nobody buys video games there!”
“DSE Altona had almost nothing (on sale), plenty of stock of items that were clearly on the discount list at full price," wrote a commenter known as "Mixer" on OzBargain.
"As far as I am concerned, this is absolutely bait advertising.”
Dick Smith said pricing should have been "consistently applied across identical products in all stores", but the advertised stock was "limited and varied in amount and products between stores".
"This was clearly outlined on the Dick Smith Facebook page when the sale was announced last week," it said.Pedro Rios Jr., October 11, 1999 – July 4, 2014. (Photo courtesy of the Rios family)This is the first piece of a four-part investigative series on the Chicago Police Department and the Independent Police Review Authority.
Also see Part II and Part III of the series, as well as this supplement.
On July 4, 2014, as the final explosions of Chicago’s lakefront fireworks extravaganza trailed into the water and began fading in the night sky, 14-year-old Pedro Rios Jr. crossed Cicero Avenue in front of an approaching police car, on the northwest side of town.
A brown-skinned boy just over 110 pounds, sporting a low fade haircut and the faint beginnings of a mustache, Rios walked in blue-and-white sneakers, shorts and a blue T-shirt – which soon bore the marks of two gunshots, fired into his back by a police officer.
The young Chicagoan technically saw the end of his eighth grade year; school had ended for the summer two and a half weeks prior. But given a spell of missed days and poor grades, Rios did not graduate from the neighborhood elementary school he attended with two younger brothers.
Pronounced dead on the scene of his encounter with police, he never will.
That authorities in the squad car pursued the 14-year-old – and that an officer discharged a firearm, killing Rios – is not in dispute. Yet an official copy of the boy’s death record, certified by the Cook County medical examiner, states “suicide” under “manner of death.” Performed by the same medical examiner’s office, Rios’ autopsy findings state “homicide.”
Meanwhile, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) – a City of Chicago agency tasked with investigating police misconduct complaints and weapon discharge notifications – categorized the fatal shooting of Rios as “non fatal” in its statistical report to the public.
Such misclassifications are not the only aberrations Truthout discovered in government reporting related to the death of the 14-year-old. Nor is Rios’ shooting the only instance in which a fatal encounter with Chicago police officers disappeared from statistics.
According to IPRA spokesperson Larry Merritt, in separate conversations with both Truthout and the Chicago Justice Project, the oversight agency’s numbers are sourced directly from the Chicago Police Department, via the Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting (CLEAR) database. Translated from jargon: Chicago’s municipal government provides accuracy in reporting police violence only to the extent accuracy exists in police data. Even setting the matter of IPRA’s purported independence from the department aside – the revelation is a bombshell.
As deaths disappear into database digits, Laura and Pedro Rios Sr. live the reality that their four children are now three.
After months of trumpeting free-falling crime rates, as evidence of successful policing, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy faces ongoing scrutiny over the department’s statistics. Covered in detail by journalists at Chicago magazine, McCarthy-era crime reporting has seen a small number of murders go uncounted as such, marked in a mysterious non-criminal “death investigation” column instead. For a department intent on measuring success by year-to-date statistics, creatively categorizing crime provides a surefire route for driving down the crime rate, as officers themselves and experts who’ve long studied the numbers, related in Chicago magazine’s report.
Analyzing three years of deadly shootings by police under McCarthy’s leadership, Truthout found at least four fatal shootings, in addition to the fatality of Pedro Rios Jr., missing from reports to the public.
But as deaths disappear into database digits, and careers are calculated alongside numbers, Laura Rios and Pedro Rios Sr. live the reality that their four children are now three.
Near Chicago’s Lake Michigan, in a working-class neighborhood at the edge of city limits, Laura Rios spoke with Truthout by way of an interpreter, sitting at her kitchen table as two preteen sons played with their toddler cousin nearby.
“These have been very sad months,” she said, pausing.
“I need Pedro but he’s gone.”
“It is as if his life didn’t even count, as if he was trash,” she said, her voice quickening at “basura” (“trash”) and then faltering. “That hurts so much as a parent.
“Something is not right with all of this,” she added after a silent moment, sitting up straight and brushing the hair from her eyes.
“I won’t let it go.”
Secrecy and Impunity
However, there is no reason why Laura Rios must live with unanswered questions regarding the death of her second-born child. Since it took place at a surveillance supply company, outfitted with cameras at the incident location, the shooting of Pedro Rios Jr. was captured on video, currently in possession of authorities. Anticipating a request for a protective order from the City barring its public release, Mark Brown of Lane and Lane, the family’s lawyer, will be filing a complaint in federal civil court in coming weeks. Alongside the suit, he will also be requesting a copy of the video and asking the court to deny any request for a protective order.
Meanwhile, the official paper trail left in the shooting’s wake is also barred from public viewing, with the Independent Police Review Authority’s investigation precluding a Freedom of Information Act release of records.
Against the landscape of an accountability process lacking on all fronts, the killing of Rios reveals profound failures in governance.
Of the fatal shooting cases closed by IPRA in the years studied, all of the shootings were deemed justified. Investigations lasted an average of 16 months (1) – 10 months beyond the time limit recommended by the US Department of Justice. Among them is the killing of Black 20-year-old Michael Wilson, who was in possession of a hammer when shot by six officers, who collectively discharged 24 bullets.
With the bulk of records blocked while IPRA investigates, Truthout found the little information that remains available on the death of Rios, marked by discrepancy after discrepancy – in time of death, (2) manner of death and the alleged chronology of events.
Of particular concern: a likelihood surmised from autopsy report details on wound course, that the boy was shot and killed laying face down in an alley, where his body remained for two hours before being pronounced dead. The police account, however, offers a different scenario, in which Rios ran from officers, was shot and continued to run, pivoted, and ran back toward the officer who then tackled him.
Delivered by Superintendent Garry McCarthy directly, the account was part of a lengthy public statement, justifying each of the eight police shootings that occurred the same July 4th weekend.
Months later, Chicago faces a moment of possibility. With an impending mayoral runoff election, between incumbent Mayor Rahm Emanuel and challenger Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, the prospect of change in all city agencies has been raised.
“Almost none of these shootings are deemed inappropriate, much less considered murders. Statistically, that just can’t be true.”
But against the landscape of an accountability process lacking on all fronts, the killing of Rios reveals profound failures in governance beyond any single site of abuse in custody, shooting, statistic or even mayor, revealing policies at all levels of government that stand at odds with best practices, and the human right to life – particularly of Chicago’s Black and young people.
In a city where such violations are living history, however, after decades of police torture led by Commander Jon Burge have resulted in his freedom while 19 of those tortured into confessions languish behind bars – and where Truthout uncovered the ongoing purging of the vast majority of misconduct complaints – the precedent of Department of Justice intervention beckons. But the death of a child, shot in the back among a pattern of youth killed similarly, prompts a deeper reckoning as well, with the very basis of authorized deadly force, as it stands across the United States.
“Around the country, several hundred people are killed by police every year,” said Dr. Richard David, an intensive care doctor at John H. Stroger Cook County Hospital and professor in public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Almost none of these shootings are deemed inappropriate, much less considered murders…. Statistically, that just can’t be true.”
Findings
Pedro Rios Jr. in summer camp, 2012.Seeking to uncover the facts while shedding light on the life of the boy – who mass media initially described as a man, with a “Dirty Harry gun” according to police, Truthout spoke with Rios’ family and former educators, a civil rights lawyer, a criminologist and six medical professionals of varying specialties. Civilians who’ve filed misconduct complaints and a spokesperson and former intern of the Independent Police Review Authority were interviewed, as was the police reform advocate who catalyzed a Department of Justice investigation into the Newark Police Department, helmed by Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in the five years leading up to his 2011 appointment. Spokespeople representing Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan and the Cook County medical examiner, Dr. Stephen Cina, corresponded with Truthout in the course of the three-month investigation, in which Chicago Police News Affairs and the office of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez have not yet responded to multiple requests for comment.
Analyzing available data and records regarding the shooting of Pedro Rios Jr., alongside related media accounts, civil suits, municipal code, state law and Department of Justice best practices, Truthout also reviewed reports, budgets, statements and directives generated by four different Chicago city agencies, over the years of the current administration. The investigation found:
Contradictions in the police account of the killing of 14-year-old Pedro Rios Jr. and multiple aberrations in the classification of his death
Rios was shot twice in the back, and died of gunshot wounds from bullets with an upward course, raising the possibility that the 5-foot-4-inch youth on flat terrain was shot lying face down.
With fatal wounds to both lungs, which would have severely and immediately impacted Rios’ breathing – in the autopsy report reading of two separate critical care doctors specializing in pulmonary medicine – the teen was highly unlikely to have been able to run in multiple directions after being shot, as asserted by Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in his public statement.
Charged with assault of a police officer postmortem, Rios was handcuffed and died in police custody, an “extraordinary occurrence” in Illinois penal and law enforcement terminology.
At the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, Rios’ parents identified their son via photograph. According to a spokesperson, the identification method was in line with office policy. But, Laura Rios and Pedro Rios Sr. described being given no information as to why they could not see their son’s body, despite asking a Cook County interpreter for explanation.
A copy of the child’s death certificate, authorized by the medical examiner, lists “suicide” as the manner of death while the autopsy report, performed by the same medical examiner’s office lists “homicide.” A Cook County spokesperson acknowledged the mistake and reported its correction in the state’s vital records database.
Trends in underreporting police violence and the purging of the vast majority of misconduct complaints
Categorized as “non-fatal,” Rios’ death is among at least five fatal police shootings uncounted in “officer involved shootings” statistical reports from 2012 to 2014, provided to the public by the Independent Police Review Authority and derived directly from the Chicago Police Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting (CLEAR) database.
From 2012 to 2014, police shot – and injured or killed – 16 Chicagoans placed in their custody, according to IPRA narrative reports, noting the overlap of extraordinary occurrences and officer-involved shootings.
Through parameters set by City of Chicago code, Chicago Police directives, and Illinois law – invalidating and/or transferring complaints, through various mechanisms – the majority of allegations and weapons discharge notifications logged by IPRA are purged.
According to its quarterly reports, IPRA referred 72 percent of its entire log to the Bureau of Internal Affairs in the Chicago Police Department, from 2012 to 2014. Created on the promise of independent, civilian-led oversight of police misconduct, IPRA reverts the majority of allegations received back to Chicago Police, with complaints related to “improper search,” “criminal misconduct,” “arrest/lockup,” “search warrants,” “conduct unbecoming an officer” and “medical integrity” among those in the reported jurisdiction of Internal Affairs.
Of the minority of its log retained after referrals, IPRA assigned only 30 percent – or 8 percent of its total log – for investigation.
Internal Affairs investigated 22 percent of IPRA referrals it received – or 16 percent of the total logged by IPRA – in 2012 and 2013, citing the remainder as “administratively closed.”
An Illinois statute, the Uniform Peace Officers’ Disciplinary Act, requires that those submitting complaints of misconduct also submit sworn statements. Leading to the purging of hundreds of complaints submitted without statements in Chicago alone every year, Truthout found state law cited Chicago Police and university, municipal and county law enforcement agencies across the state, in addition to the Illinois State Police. The policy runs counter to law enforcement best practice recommendations – for serving as a deterrent by intimidating complainants via the threat of punishment by law if considered perjury – of the Department of Justice and International Association of Chiefs of Police. The requirement is specifically prevented as such by the attorney general of the State of New Jersey.
Truthout will be examining the complaint process in-depth in a coming report.
Institutionalized police bias among agencies tasked with police accountability
Per a Chicago Police directive, IPRA provides police officers accused of misconduct with the names of their complainants; the opportunity to review previous statements prior to questioning; and a period of 24 hours after the shooting of civilians before questioning takes place.
Of 10 fatal shootings occurring between 2012 and 2014, with cases closed by IPRA, all were deemed “justified.” Many raise clear concerns of police bias, given aberrations in video, forensic and testimonial evidence; findings contradictory with other legal experts; and eyewitnesses unpursued. Six victims were shot in the back; three were unarmed. In one instance, an alleged weapon was never recovered. In multiple instances, an alleged weapon was in dispute. Seven were youth, 16 to 24 years old. All of the victims were men; nine were Black and one was Hispanic. In the series to come, Truthout will be examining the investigations.
IPRA investigators are trained by Chicago police officers and alongside them: The oversight agency cited the attendance of its staff at six separate trainings led by Chicago Police, including regular attendance at Chicago Police Training Academy, as well as three trainings led by military or other law enforcement agencies, in its most recent biannual report.
Since January 2012, IPRA has reportedly referred 190 cases to Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, whose office will bring former Chicago police officer Dante Servin to trial in mid-April for the shooting death of unarmed Rekia Boyd, the first criminal charges faced by a Chicago police officer in 15 years. In 2011, Alvarez’s office declined to press criminal charges against Chicago police officer Gildardo Sierra for the shooting death of unarmed Flint Farmer; Sierra shot Farmer seven times, discharging the last three shots at close range while Farmer lay face down, as captured on dash cam video, killing him. It was the eighth shooting in which Sierra was involved.
The high cost of failed oversight
A combined $21 million in taxpayer funds are dedicated to the city’s police accountability structure, among the Independent Police Review Authority, Internal Affairs, and the Police Board, according to the City of Chicago’s 2015 budget. In contrast, a proposed ordinance to fund reparations for police torture victims seeks a one-time sum of $20 million, to provide counseling and education to those tortured into false confessions by police, alongside monetary restitution and inclusion of the city’s decades-long police torture scandal in Chicago public school curricula.
Between 2012 and 2014, the City of Chicago Department of Law requested payment of $192 million in settlements, verdicts and fees attributed to the Chicago Police Department. $61 million was paid to settle wrongful convictions, and another $43 million went toward cases charging excessive force. The majority of cases were from the city’s backlog, which as of September 2014 included 491 Chicago police cases – but on average 20 percent, or 250 cases, were the result of incidents taking place in the years of the current administration.
City of Chicago 2015 Budget ordinance, Positions and Salaries. Another $581,242 attributed to the agencies is budgeted separately in Appropriations.
In the series to come, Truthout will explore the life of Pedro Rios Jr., and the pattern and practice of Chicago police violence and impunity. The coming reports will also provide updates resulting from ongoing requests for comment from involved agencies and the fulfillment of records requested under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, in progress with the Independent Police Review Authority, the Chicago Police Department and the office of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.
In January, Truthout interviewed IPRA’s spokesperson, who has not yet responded to multiple follow up requests for comment. The agency’s quarterly reports detailing allegations and notifications logged, and referrals, can be found at www.iprachicago.org/resources.html.
Alex Cachinero-Gorman contributed interpretation services to this report.
Footnotes:
1. Calculated by Truthout as length of time between date of the shooting and date attributed to the closed investigation report by IPRA.
2. Although an initial media account attributes a 10:07 pm time of death to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office, Rios’ official death certificate records a time span of more than two hours between time of injury and time of death, at 12:06 am – the time an investigator arrived to the scene and the only time on file, according to a Cook County spokesperson. While Department of Justice and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention handbooks on death reporting suggest an initial pronouncement and estimated time of actual death should exist, the medical examiner’s office maintains a policy that time of death is officially the time an investigator from their office arrives on the scene to pronounce it. As the autopsy report shows no evidence of medical treatment beyond connection to a monitor, amid varying policies and times cited, it remains unknown for certain if medical aid was needed and denied, at any point during the two hours Rios lay in an alley, although medical professionals Truthout spoke to found it unlikely the teen would have survived his injuries long. A record of non-transport by paramedics was requested of the Office of Emergency Management and Communications by way of a Freedom of Information Act request.On a continent where more than half the population lives off-the-grid, many African villagers can neither afford nor acquire simple solar lamps. Instead, they have to rely on dangerous kerosene products to light their homes. Five young men behind a new social enterprise hope their modular solar lamp can offer this remote clientele an affordable and healthy alternative.
"When I talk to people about solar, when I show people solar lamps, they get so excited that it's unreal," says 25-year-old Adam Camenzuli, an Ontarian and one of five behind KARIBU Solar Power. "I can really see the amount of impact that we can have by giving people the choice... the opportunity to choose between kerosene and solar, because right now that choice doesn't exist in an affordable way."
About 590 million Africans live without an electrical connection, according to the International Energy Agency's most recent numbers.
The problem with kerosene
The majority of these people rely on kerosene lamps to light their homes or businesses.
A crowd gathers on the outskirts of Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, to watch Sameer Gulamani demonstrate how a solar-powered lamp works. (Karibu Solar Power)
Most Tanzanians, Kenyans and Ghanians own kerosene lamps, according to a 2011 study on off-grid lighting in sub-Saharan Africa by Lighting Africa, a program run by the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation to improve access to energy.
A Tanzanian villager will walk to a store and buy a small amount of kerosene to run their lamp that day, explains Sameer Gulamani, another Ontarian and a director of KARIBU. The next day, when their kerosene supply runs out, they will return and buy more.
It's a simple model, but with major problems for consumers. Kerosene lamps hardly provide enough light to fill a space, and often this means that some activities, like children doing their homework, are limited after darkness sets in.
Health and safety are two additional major concerns. The use of kerosene, according to Lighting Africa, can result in:
Burns.
Child poisoning, if accidentally consumed.
Poor visual health, because lamps provide low lighting.
Indoor air pollution.
"It's bad quality of life. They can't charge their phone with it. It hurts their eyes. It causes fires, smoke inhalation — all these negative effects, including the environmental factors," says Camenzuli.
'Can't afford' $20 solar lamps
Recently, an upsurge in businesses peddling solar lamps in Africa has provided an alternative for buyers. But, it's an alternative many can't afford.
"People just can't afford a $20 solar lamp," explains Camenzuli, who now lives in Tanzania and has tested the affordability of solar lamps for villagers there.
Off-grid living around the world Around the world, 1.6 billion people live without access to electricity. Of these: 1.265 million live in developing countries.
More than 95 per cent live in developing countries in Asia or sub-Saharan Africa.
More than eight out of 10 live in rural areas. — Lighting Africa, International Energy Agency
He recalls walking to dinner one night and stopping at a stand where women were selling peanuts, gum, cigarettes and other knicknacks. The solar lantern he carried intrigued them, so he offered to sell it — first for $20, then $15 and finally $10.
"There was no way they were going to spend the money for it," he remembers.
Camenzuli's experience is supported by Lighting Africa's research, which found that most consumers are concerned with affordability. Their low incomes usually make it impossible to pay a high price up front.
Their study found that about 40 per cent of African households contain four or five people, which generally include between one and three children. From the five countries studied — Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia — each household's average monthly income ranges from $90 US to $154 US.
"So people that really need these products aren't the ones using them," says Camenzuli. "That's a problem."
A modular lamp
But the recent university graduates behind KARIBU think they have found the solution to these problems with their company's new modular solar lamp.
The lamp breaks down into three components:
Solar panel.
Rechargeable battery and mobile phone charger.
Light.
To make the lamp affordable, KARIBU plans to use a "franchised business model of rent-to-own solar solutions," says Gulamani, mimicking how villagers currently purchase kerosene but eliminating the need for the toxic substance.
The Karibu modular solar power lamp is divided into three components, allowing buyers to eventually purchase the lamp's solar panel in a rent-to-own scheme. (Karibu Solar/Youtube)
"If you could spend that dollar instead on a nice, clean LED light, you'd readily do that," Gulamani explains.
Small shop owners will purchase whole lamps. They will rent out the rechargeable batteries and lights to local villagers for a daily fee.
"They take it home. Their kids study at night. They can charge their mobile phone. They have a light in their house. It's great," Camenzuli says, adding the solar lamp is about five times brighter and lasts slightly longer than the kerosene alternative.
Renters will return to the shopkeepers once their battery is out of power to recharge using the store's solar panel.
Every time a villager purchases a recharged battery, they will be making an investment towards the solar panel. Once they have paid enough into the system, the shopkeeper will give them the panel, and the household will become "solar independent."
'My way of giving back'
It is a working business model because the men don't expect to profit from this business venture. As a social enterprise, any profits would be funnelled back into the business to purchase more stock, pay staff a living wage, and expand their market.
The five have already contributed a lot of their own money to the project, says Camenzuli. He quit a high-paying commercial banking job in Toronto to move to Tanzania and commit to KARIBU full-time.
"We want to see that the solution reaches millions of people in Africa," says Gulamani.
Gulamani, now a first-year law student at York University, has family roots in Tanzania, a country his parents left behind to come to Canada.
"They didn't have all of the privileges that I've been able, fortunate enough to have in my life," he recalls. "This project in particular [is] my way of giving back."
Crowdsourcing funding for pilot
KARIBU has already received a lot of recognition for its innovative prototype and socially responsible thinking. The United Nations Environment Programme recently lauded KARIBU with a 2013 SEED award, which celebrates "social and environmental start-up enterprises [tackling] key sustainable development challenges."
There's great ambition to expand this way beyond the borders of Tanzania - Sameer Gulamani, KARIBU Solar Power director
With its prototype designed and business plan ready, KARIBU has managed to secure some funding from investors. A so-called angel investor that has been supportive of the team from the start gave KARIBU $25,000.
Next month, Camenzuli and Gulamani will launch an online funding campaign, hoping to raise an additional $50,000. The company will use the money to run a pilot project of the rent-to-own system in northern Tanzania.
If it is successful and they generate more investor interest, they hope to expand beyond Tanzania's north.
"Geographically, you have to start somewhere, and that place happens to be Tanzania for us," says Gulamani. "[But] there's great ambition to expand this way beyond the borders of Tanzania."The Italian publication Bitsandchips.it (which has been more or less authentic so far) is reporting that Intel is actually debating the very existence of its next iteration of Broadwell processors. That means that there is a very high likely hood that Intel cancels the desktop arrival of the Broadwell architecture altogether. Needless to say this will make for a very interesting development and depending on whether or not Intel decides to push back the release of Skylake-K, could seriously affect enthusiasts.
An unofficial slide showing Intel’s process lead over the Industry @unkown.
Broadwell-K might be binned, Intel could be planning to skip an architecture on the desktop front
Before I state the contents of this particular report, relevant background information would be prudent I think. Basically there have been numerous (confirmed) reports of Broadwell-K experiencing overheating and TDP problems – a fact that arises from its micro-architectural design (not exactly a design flaw per say, more like an expected iteration flaw). Broadwell-K is expected to fall around 65W TDP, however, at higher clocks the processor’s unrestrained TDP rises to around 88W, infact a few SKUs of Broadwell-K are stated to be rated at max TDP of 95Ws. Although I would be surprised if any enthusiast thats going for a ‘k’ series CPU actually cares about power consumption, the fact remains that more power sippage = more electro migration = lowered life span. For those not familiar with the concept, electro migration is the erosion of the gates inside the processor due to excessive current.
Now the report actually stats that Intel top brass in Santa Clara is currently discussing completely canceling the Broadwell-K platform. Basically aimied at updating the Devil’s Canyon platform, Broadwell-K was supposed to appease enthusiasts who go for an unlocked multiplier design till the time Skylake-K lands. While there are existing reports of Braodwell-K being delayed to 2H 2015, this is the first report we have received that states it might simply be binned. I would like to reflect a little on what would happen if it is canceled as well. Basically, Intel will either shift backwards to this year (most certainly 2H 2015) the launch of Skylake-K or enthusiasts who like an unlocked multiplier design will have to wait a long time. Skylake-S is already expected soon, so an unlocked multiplier design shouldn’t really be an issue for Intel to pull off. I am also curious on how this affects the Broadwell-E platform, since HEDT is one of the better market skimming approaches for Intel.Get the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Cristiano Ronaldo helped Angel di Maria "greatly" in deciding to move to United from Real Madrid.
Di Maria will come face-to-face with Ronaldo on familiar turf when Argentina play Portugal in Tuesday night's international friendly at Old Trafford.
Despite a man-of-the-match performance in Real's triumphant Champions League final victory over Atletico Madrid in May, Di Maria became marginalised at the Bernabeu after the World Cup's top scorer James Rodriguez and Germany midfielder Toni Kroos arrived in Madrid.
City and Paris Saint-Germain's financial issues prevented them from making a move for Di Maria, and former Red Ronaldo advised the Argentine to capitalise on United's emergence.
"Before we knew I was coming to Manchester for sure, he told me it was a massive club and that I would be very happy here and it would be good for me," Di Maria said.
"At that time, we didn’t know for sure that I was coming or not, so we didn’t go into great detail, but what he did say helped me greatly to make my decision.
"It was a very big moment in my career," Di Maria added.
"Leaving a club like Real and coming to as big a club as Manchester United makes you grow as a player and helps you progress in your career.
"It was a very important moment and I’m really happy here. Let’s hope things go well for me so I can be here for many years.”
Di Maria, who completed a British-record £59.7m transfer to Old Trafford in mid-August, joined Real the year after Ronaldo's world-record £80m switch from United and the duo formed a strong bond.
Although Real are currently top of La Liga, they lost two of their opening league matches as Xabi Alonso, who left for Bayern Munich, and Di Maria impressed elsewhere.
"If I was in charge, maybe I would have done things differently," Ronaldo lamented in September.
More recently, Ronaldo said: "Angel has had an unbelievable impact on United already.
"He is a fantastic player and is going to be amazing for them in the future.
"You have already seen with his attacking play and goals that he will be a big star for them.
"I have been in touch with Angel a few times since he joined United. He is my friend and we have sent text messages and spoken.
"United is one of the biggest and best clubs in the world and I know Angel will be a big player there too.
"I was so happy at Manchester United and so will Angel be. I am supporting him and wishing him the best."
Di Maria has inherited Ronaldo's No.7 shirt and scored three and assisted five in nine United appearances.Measles is now spreading outward from Disneyland in California, in the worst outbreak in years. The epidemic is fueled by growing enclaves of unvaccinated people.
The CDC reports that in just the past month, 84 people from 14 states contracted measles, a number that is certainly an under-estimate, because the CDC doesn’t record every case. California alone has 59 confirmed cases, most of them linked to an initial exposure in Disneyland. A majority of people who have gotten sick were not vaccinated.
For years, scientists (including me) have warned that the anti-vaccination movement was going to cause epidemics of disease. Two years ago I wrote that the anti-vaccine movement had caused the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years. And now it’s happening with measles.
Finally, though, the public seems to be pushing back. Parents are starting to wake up to the danger that the anti-vax movement represents to their children and themselves.
What's sad about this – tragic, really – is that we eliminated measles from the U.S. in the year 2000, thanks to the measles vaccine. As this CDC graph shows, we've had fewer than 100 cases every year since.
But we had 644 cases in 27 states in 2014, the most in 20 years. And 2015 is already on track to be worse. Measles may become endemic in the U.S, circulating continually, thanks to the increasing numbers of unvaccinated people. Until now, each outbreak was caused by someone traveling from abroad and bringing measles to us. The anti-vaccine movement has turned this public health victory into defeat.
Anti-vaxxers have been relentless in the efforts to spread misinformation. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccines are beneficial, they endlessly repeat a variety false claims, such as:
Vaccines cause autism. They don’t.
The preservative thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. It doesn’t.
Natural immunity is all you need. It isn’t. Measles infects 90% of people exposed to it unless they are vaccinated.
A healthy lifestyle will protect you from measles. It won’t.
Now, finally, some parents are pushing back. Parents and schools in California, where the epidemic began, are concerned that their children will be exposed to measles from unvaccinated children in schools. And the schools are starting to do something they should have done long ago: send the unvaccinated kids home.
The problem arises from California’s vaccine exemption policy: although public schools require kids to be vaccinated, parents can exempt their kids simply by saying they have a personal objection to vaccination. It’s not just California: only two states, Mississippi and West Virginia, don’t allow parents to claim a philosophical or religious exemption to vaccines And Colorado has the |
their application. It may seem strange at first, until we critically examine the source, to speak of either selfish or unselfish joy. Joy is an emotional ecstasy arising from pleasure. It is something intensely personal. While we can and do share our pleasures to some extent with others, the resultant impact of them on various personalities will vary as widely as the personalities. At times what may give rise to rapturous joy in us, when shared, may give rise to positive aversion in another. A pertinent example of this would be the reactionary effect of certain music on people of differing tastes. While it is not uncommon for some of the modern generation to literally swoon in ecstasy under the influence of the combination of discordant and dissonant notes and chords, others find them anything but entertaining or pleasurable. Here we have what might be termed "selfish joy" on the part of the participants, by those who have to suffer most unwilling participation. For all that, within the group enjoying it, there is a reciprocity of delight, happiness, and rapture between the entertainers and the entertained. Superficially, then, we could say it is not the phenomenon of joy itself, that is either selfish or altruistic by nature, but that time, place, and circumstance must all be considered in relation one to the others. However, to bring mudita within the ambit of the Buddha-Dhamma we need to go deeper into the necessity for cultivating this perfection. What are the opposites to be eliminated by its cultivation? We never tire of asserting the interdependence of every aspect of the Buddha-Dhamma, no matter which particular facet is being discussed. We have already stated that ignorance is failure of perception, and it is true that greed and hatred do arise through the non-perception of their source and subsequent results; that basically craving born of ignorance is the culprit, and that the purpose of the Buddha-Dhamma is to eliminate craving. It is craving that gives rise to jealousy, envy, covetousness, avarice, and greed in all of its manifestations. Here it is that mudita when practiced and developed becomes a "sublime" and "boundless" state of mind to be "dwelt in" as a corrective characteristic for their removal. One of the most frequently used similes by the Buddha was that of fire. At times it was the destructive quality of fire that was likened to the destructive nature of the passions. At other times it was the ardent nature of fire that was to be emulated in the pursuance of the path to holiness. In its uncontrolled existence fire is a destructive danger. Under control it is one of man's greatest boons and blessings. In either case it was a motivating force to be reckoned with, at all times active, potent, and energetic. The three roots of evil — greed, hatred, and delusion — are also known as "the three fires." On one occasion the Buddha and his band of monks were for the time staying on Gaya Head, a mountain near the city of Gaya. From their elevated position they watched one of the great fires that from time to time ravaged the countryside. This inspired what is known as "The Fire Sermon," which is the third recorded discourse delivered by the Buddha subsequent to his Enlightenment, and at the beginning of his long ministry. To the Buddha, the world of Samsara was like the flaming plains below, "Everything is burning," said the Buddha, "burning with the fire of passion, with the fired of hatred, with the fire of stupidity." (Vin. 21) It is these three fires that give rise to jealousy, envy, covetousness, avarice, and greed. The craving for possessions, the craving for sensual pleasures, the begrudged success of others, the hatred that is begotten by the gains of others, the odious comparison of greater status compared with our humble circumstances, these are the "fires" that burn within us to our undoing. It is now evident why mudita is such an important characteristic to be cultivated. When we can view the success of others with the same equanimity, and to the same extent, as we would extend metta and karuna — loving-kindness and compassion — to those who suffer grief and distress, sadness and tribulation, sorrow and mourning, then we are beginning to exercise mudita, and are in the process of eradicating greed and craving. Developed still further, we can reach the stage of sharing with others their joy of possession, their financial or social successes, their elevation to positions of civic or national importance, or their receipt of titles and honorifics. In such a manner mudita is counteractive to conceits of all kinds, and its growth and development checks craving's grip. Until we have developed this subjective characteristic within ourselves how can we develop the objective characteristics of metta and karuna? The accumulated possessions, results of our greed, may give us the pleasure and the happiness of the miser gloating over his hoard of gold. The happiness born of shared pleasures, shared love, shared possessions, shared delights in another's success, will surpass the meager selfish happiness of the miser. Unselfish joy multiplies in ratio to the extension of its application, quite apart from its purifying effect on our own lives. In Ñanamoli's translation of Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga he uses "gladness" for mudita, with the footnote: "Mudita — gladness — as one of the divine abidings is always used in the sense of gladness at others' success." Buddhaghosa illustrates this by saying: "On seeing or hearing about a dear person being happy cheerful and glad, gladness can be aroused thus: 'This being is indeed glad. How good! How excellent!' Just as he would be glad on seeing a dear and beloved person, so he pervades all being with gladness." In "The Analysis of the Sixfold Sense-Field" (MN 137) the Buddha speaks of the six joys connected with renunciation. While such joys are subjective by nature, they are devoid of any taint of egoistic craving that could give rise to the cankers of jealousy, envy, covetousness, or greed. These joys arise on the realization of the impermanence of material shapes, sounds, smells, flavors, touches, and mental states, and the renunciation of attachment to them.
The Nature and Implications of Mudita by L.R. Oates (From Metta, Vol. 12, No. 2.) Altruistic joy is one of the four "sublime states" of mind — friendliness, compassion, altruistic joy, and equanimity — which together form one related group among the various spiritual or physical exercises generally described as meditation or contemplation. These all have as their common aim the attainment of mental calm or equanimity, which is intended in turn to foster the development of liberating insight. "A still mind, like still water, yields a clear reflection of what is before it." This is why this particular series ends with equanimity, but the route by which it is attained in this case is different from that traversed for the most of the other themes used as a focus for concentration. The others, such as meditation on the breath, on death, on visual objects (kasina [kasi.na]), or on the Buddha, the Doctrine, and the Order of the Enlightened One, are entirely concerned with the self-cultivation of the meditator. Most of these themes are abstract or inanimate, while the Buddha and the Order (in the strict sense applicable here) have transcended any power of ours to help or hinder them. So the only person concerned or affected in these forms of training is the meditator. It was doubtless to encourage those wrestling by these means with their own inner weakness or conflicts that the following verse of the Dhammapada was uttered: Let no one neglect his own task for the sake of another's however great; let him, after he has discerned his own task, devote himself to his task. — Dhp 166 But if this were the whole story it would be difficult for such self-cultivation to serve in turn as a basis for the freedom from bondage to the self-concept, which is the main characteristic of the development of insight. Indeed, it was the recognition of the dangers of self-preoccupation, or self-righteousness, liable to arise in these often acute struggles for self-discipline, that impelled the more extreme exponents of the Pure Land school of Buddhism to abandon self-cultivation in favor of the less exacting path of reliance on the Buddha's transforming grace. But the cultivation of the "sublime states" represents a less radical form of compensation which, while compatible with other practices, can help to broaden the meditator's perspective in order to achieve a mode of equanimity which does not imply withdrawal into oneself or indifference to others. The starting point here, of course, is on the ethical plane in the practice of generosity in practical ways (dana; daana) which, in order to become interiorized and thereby go beyond mere outward form, must be grounded in an attitude of friendliness (metta) for all beings without distinction. Since this outlook implies the recognition that all beings are subject to joys and sorrows just as we are, it finds a natural development in sympathy — that is to say, compassion — for their sorrows and joy in their blessings. The former of these seems much the easier to achieve, since it is possible to feel compassion for suffering even in the absence of any positive friendliness for the sufferer, whereas it is only possible to share genuinely in another's joy if there is some element of true affection or friendliness present. This is perhaps why, on a much lower level of sensitivity, the reporting of news seems so heavily concentrated on the side of crimes and disasters, which are perhaps felt more likely to arouse interest than happier events and deeds. If the latter arouse any interest at all, it is likely to be spiced with envy or cynicism. Not only does genuine joy in the prosperity of others require some element of affection; it requires this to be of a quite high order. A great deal of what passes for love is really aimed at mere emotional gratification on the part of the lover, for whom the "beloved" is little more than a prop for acting out some drama satisfying a purely subjective need — the beloved's own needs being treated less seriously. Indeed, even apart from outright commercialization, a certain habit of bargaining with affections seems remarkably widespread, when one begins to take notice of it. In the light of this, the ability to feel a genuine joy in another's happiness, equal to one's satisfaction with one's own, represents a truly "sublime state." So it is not surprising that in the history of Buddhism, which cultivated this attitude systematically, there arose an aspiration to share with others not only one's material resources, but the spiritual resources described as merit. This aspiration follows naturally enough from the basic theory as to what merit is. Merit is the accumulation of tendencies resulting from enlightened deeds which, according to the law of moral causation (the law of karma), conduce to the future happiness of the doer. Here he is joyful, hereafter he is joyful, in both worlds the well-doer is joyful. "I have done good" is the thought that make him happy. Still greater is his joy when he goes to states of bliss. If the doer is still in a state where only purely personal forms of satisfaction are possible, the fruits of merit can only take this form. But suppose he loves even one being so much that, if that being is in some state of deprivation, he can only be made happy by the improvement of that being's lot, then the merit which is due to him can only take effect by benefiting him through that other's welfare. The wider his altruism expands, so that purely personal gratifications no longer adequately satisfy him, the wider must be the range of the benefit which his own merit would need to bring to others if it is to fulfill its defined function of bringing happiness to him. At the same time, his altruistic tendencies will ensure that he will have vastly more merit due to him, so his resources will tend to become commensurate with the aspirations, for example, of Santideva, when he says: May I be an alleviator of the sorrows of all beings and a divine medicine to those afflicted by disease. May I be the benefactor and bringer of peace to them until all their bodily ailments and mental tribulations are at the end. The principle of the sharing or transference of merit, so much stressed in Mahayana Buddhism (though not unknown in Theravadan practices) is sometimes objected to by Western Buddhists because of a superficial resemblance to the Christian doctrine of atonement, which they have rejected. But the principles entailed are not really identical, since the Christian doctrine is based on an essential distinction between the roles of the Creator and the created, while the Buddhist sharing of merit arises from a combination of the definition of merit and of the nature of altruistic joy. It has a further importance too, in that it anticipates the emancipation to be derived from insight into the emptiness of the self-concept, that is to say, awakening to the emptiness of the concepts "I" and "mine" in terms of ultimate truth. On this level, the description "mine" as applied to merit will finally be seen to be as inapplicable as in the case of any other assumed possession. This was already explicitly set out in one of the Buddha's earliest discourses, "The Marks of the Not-self," in which he taught his first five disciples to contemplate each of the five components of personality in the terms: "This is not mine; this I am not; this is not my self." The fourth of these components is the aggregate of mental tendencies or activities, which include merit and demerit. Even on a lower plane than that of perfect insight, it can be seen that our deeds are not exclusively ours, because no one acts in absolute isolation, so that every act involves some stimulus or opportunity arising from activity of others. On the other hand, a too persistent insistence on the individual nature of merit can only impede the ultimate awakening to the Not-self. This has some bearing, too, on the reason why friendliness, compassion, and altruistic joy are regarded as leading to an equanimity which does not imply an indifference to the joys and sorrows of others. In the absence of such a conclusion, the alternate sharing of joys and sorrows, like these emotions arising on one's own account, would be as endless as the world-cycles which it is the Buddhist aspiration to transcend. The goal of the "divine states" is that the aspirant, who in process achieves the role of a Bodhisattva in a two-way empathy with others by his perfect sharing of their joys and sorrows, is in a position to radiate to them stability, which in turn will help them to be less subject to their own emotional vicissitudes. In this way, he and they are liberated together, each sustaining the other.As we get closer to the draft, more and more mock drafts are emerging, attempting to predict the prospect that each NFL team will draft in Round 1 of the 2017 NFL Draft.
Last year, we tracked 105 mock drafts and zero had the Cincinnati Bengals taking William Jackson III in Round 1. Will draft experts and football bloggers nail the Bengals’ Round 1 choice in 2017? It’s much easier to correctly predict who the Bengals will draft this year than it was last year due to the Bengals’ poor 2016 record landing the team a top 10 draft pick. The Bengals hold the No. 9 pick in the 2017 NFL Draft. Some of the names that have been connected to Cincinnati with the most frequency are that of linebacker Reuben Foster, running back Leonard Fournette and defensive end Solomon Thomas.
Be sure to bookmark and check back on this page frequently for more mock drafts to be added.
Most popular picks for the Bengals:Everything changed for the better when we started using slack at work. We’ve made countless custom integrations; doorbells, intercoms, travel cards, reddit, lunch menues, git hooks, server monitoring, you name it – we haz it.
My family has been using Google Calendar for a few years. Me and my wife used to think that we we’re busy every night and that there was no room for improvisation. Google Calendar showed us that we had lots of free evenings and weekends, which has been great.
When it was time to evaluate a group chat app, I saw no reason to use HipChat, Skype or anything like that. Slack to the rescue!
Slack’s free tier gives us 10 integrations, search for the latest 10 000 messages and 5GB storage. This is plenty for a family of 4. In this blog post I’ll go through how we use it and the integrations we have made to aid us.
We use channels just the same way we use them at work. “fixahuset” is a channel for stuff that needs to be fixed around the house, “general” is important stuff, “handla” is for picking up milk on the way home, “mathem” is an integration i’ll get to in a bit, and “random” is the usual cat gif mayhem we’ve all learned to love/hate. “pedertest” is where i test new integrations.
Integration no 1: Where are the kids?
We, as most parents to 10yo kids, ask this question daily. Picking them up at school, but they’re at a friend’s house, etc. Gah. This is a custom Slackbot command, which calls out to my server and returns the result.
My server runs a little curl script that calls out to Find My iPhone and returns a static GoogleMap image. The kids will probably start to question this thingie eventually, but works for now.
Integration no 2: Google Calendar
Our old Google Calendar integrates very smoothly, just hook it up and let Slack know when you want the notifications.
Integration no 3: School information
It turns out our school is living in the future, providing a RSS-feed per child. I had no idea. RSS works very well with this setup.
Integration no 4: Online food shopping
In Sweden, MatHem is one of the biggest e-commerce sites for groceries. We use them for a weekly delivery, and it works great. The night before delivery we generally take 10 minutes and cram everything we can come up with into our cart, which means that we miss a lot of essentials. What if we could add uhm… juice to our cart throughout the week, the moment when someone realise that we’re out of uhm… juice (“sök” means search, “köp” means buy).
This integration is not kosher at all, and I’m probably breaking some terms and conditions. But we need this, and it could be done, so hey. If you work at MatHem or is offended by this in any way – please let me know and I’ll cease and desist.
That’s all the stuff we’ve got now, but more to come. Applying tactics from work to family life may seem cold, but I see this as a way to make the most out of our time. It’s not like we’re writing Jira stories or planning our vacation in Trello. Yet.
UPDATE
Lots of people wrote and talked about this, like Qz.com, Forbes, NyTeknik (Swedish) and Apparat (Russian). And on Twitter (1) (2) (3) (4), Hackernews and Fatherly.com. CBC Spark also made an interview, which was great fun.The mayor of Lévis, Que., says the city is considering reviewing its bylaws after a cyclist got a $440 fine for riding on a bike path after 11 p.m.
The 63-year-old cyclist in question, Gilles Frénette, was on the Parcours des Anses bike path in Old Lévis — across the river from Quebec City — on Wednesday night when police approached him.
He was told he was breaking a municipal bylaw that prohibits people from being in public parks between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Mayor Gilles Lehouillier said the police stopped Frénette because there have been recent reports of break-ins and mischief along this particular path.
He defended the police's actions, saying they were acting in accordance with the law. Only six tickets have been issued this summer, he said — not bad, considering the path is used for 350,000 bike trips a year.
But some say it's the principle of the matter.
Quebec Solidaire MNA Manon Massé called on Transport Minister Robert Poëti to make sure all municipalities in Quebec have bike-friendly policies.
"$440 — that's the price Mr. Frénette would have to pay for riding on a bike path after 11 p.m. Is that how we encourage cycling?" she asked in a news release. Massé said people should be encouraged to use bikes rather than cars.
Revisiting the bylaw
Etienne Grandmont of Accès transports viables, an advocacy group for alternative transportation, said not only should people be encouraged to use bikes, but that police on bike paths should be using two wheels rather than four, as well.
"They went on the bike path with their car, that's something that's really [surprising] for a cyclist, to be in front of a car on a bike path. They should be a presence on the bike path, but using bikes too," Grandmont said.
As for Frénette's ticket, the fine was later lowered to $150 and Lehouillier said the city will take another look at the bylaw, because he doesn't want to discourage people from biking.
Quebec City has a similar regulation, though it's rarely enforced.
In Montreal, cyclists can use bike paths 24 hours a day except during the winter and on certain bridges at night.Knowing what they know now, the Houston Texans could not feel as good about making Jadeveon Clowney the first pick in the 2014 NFL draft. The St. Louis Rams might have gotten the order reversed when they took Greg Robinson second and Aaron Donald at lucky No. 13. And what to make of Odell Beckham Jr. after he lit up opposing defenses as the third receiver selected?
While NFL teams do not get second chances in the draft, the benefit of hindsight and a few assists from veteran talent evaluators set the foundation for re-ranking of the leading 2014 draft prospects. This retrospective Top 25 features seven receivers overall, including two in the top four slots. Three quarterbacks made the list based partly on positional value, while a fourth QB -- Jimmy Garoppolo -- trailed nearby despite not playing (or perhaps because of it).
This list amounts to a look at how teams might now see the 2014 draft prospects they selected near the top of the round. There's no sense in completely discarding predraft evaluations after just one season, but first impressions are too important to ignore. That helps explain why the first three overall selections -- Clowney, Robinson and Blake Bortles -- fell long distances.
Here is our top 25 re-ranking of the 2014 NFL draft class, created with the input of NFL evaluators:
1. Khalil Mack, OLB, Oakland Raiders: Mack validated his top-five status with a promising rookie season. The Raiders expect him to spend less time in coverage and more time rushing the passer this season.We’re currently in the eye of a storm of Saint Louis FC announcements this month. We’re waiting on the USL-Pro schedule to be released, more signing announcements, and let’s not forget the kits.
This past week a huge announcement was finally made on STLFC’s affiliation with the Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer. Some Saint Louis fans may not have heard yet of all of the benefits that come with that agreement. So I sent general manager Jeremy Alumbaugh a few questions about the arrangement, such as why they chose to do it in the first place, the kinds of players we might see, and all things affiliation, and he was kind enough to answer.
First of all, what exactly does this agreement mean for STLFC?
This agreement means that Saint Louis FC has a partnership with Chicago Fire. Plain and simple partnerships help both parties. It obviously has been in the works for many months, which has allowed us an opportunity to develop relationships with their franchise and specifically the Technical Staff. Having discussions about potential players, sharing resources with scouting has been a big help as covering a country this big is difficult for any club on their own.
We will receive players on loan from the Fire which will help our roster as we look to compete in the very competitive USL PRO here in 2015. It also is an avenue for our players to perhaps get opportunities in MLS.
How important was it to get a deal like this in place for the club’s inaugural season?
It helps. We feel the players we get will add to us because they will know St. Louis and how important soccer is to this city. Also, for some players that we have signed, they are looking for an opportunity to perhaps move onto another level. Being able to have a relationship with the Fire will help our technical staff as they can utilize another resource in the professional soccer world.
What about the Chicago Fire organization made this an attractive option?
It was simple. Our first meeting, it was said by the Fire, this is a simple partnership, the Fire need to know that players they send to St. Louis will be taken care of, play in a meaningful environment and get better on and off the field. They didn’t want control of our technical side. They were comfortable with [head coach] Dale Schilly and his staff and knew of his track record of dealing with players on loan (Chris Schuler, Luis Gil, Colin Warner) guys that when Dale coached AC St Louis were on loan because they couldn’t get minutes in MLS and now they are everyday players in MLS. Dale was a key fixture in our talks, his reputation spoke for itself.
Also, the Fire are rebuilding and young players are part of that, so we knew we would get players from them. Being close to Chicago makes it easier for staff and players to get back and forth as needed. Bottom line is it fit, they want the same things that we want.
How many players from Chicago do you anticipate will be involved in STLFC’s season?
Hard to say with the CBA coming up, but we anticipate 2-4.
How would you sell this agreement to a St. Louisan who is already a fan of a different MLS club?
No selling needed. It’s great that they have an MLS team. Still keep their MLS team. When their MLS team plays against Chicago, cheer them on, want them to beat the Fire, that’s ok. When the Fire aren’t playing your MLS team watch the Fire and maybe cheer them on if you feel ok doing it, if not that’s ok.
It’s important to know we are Saint Louis FC…we aren’t Chicago Fire 2. We are our own club that is an affiliate of the Fire, not controlled by them. We are PROUD to be their affiliate and will work hard to make their players better, just like all teams around the WORLD with loan players try to make them better. It is a partnership and that’s why this fits…some MLS teams were looking to control us and St. Louis is not a city that needs to be controlled by the outside when it comes to soccer. We’ve been here awhile, now we just need to prove off and on the field that we belong in professional soccer.
Let’s say a player is sent down from Toyota Park who plays a position you’ve gotten very good play out of recently. Who would get the priority of playing time?
Best guys play. It’s a long season so depth is important, but part of the reason the Fire worked out is because they want players to earn their minutes here in USL PRO, not given them because they are MLS loan players… That wasn’t necessarily what we heard from other MLS teams we spoke to. We flew to two cities to visit with them and had phone conversations with a third. In the end the Fire made sense with us and where we are trying to head with Saint Louis FC.
It certainly didn’t go unnoticed that Chicago used their first two picks in the SuperDraft on St. Louis-area collegiate players (Matt Polster from SIUE and Kingsley Bryce from SLU). Have there been any discussions so far about either of those players, or anyone else?
We’ve talked about a lot of players. It is exciting that they drafted those guys in the first two rounds, but we have not spoken about them since the Draft. I know Matt and Kingsley are focused on making the First team, just like everyone in camp will be. No player in the world of professional soccer wants to go on loan…you think the young kid from Chelsea wants to go to Hull City? Of course not, he want to play for the first team. With us we know that the players we pick up will know that if they come here, that we and our supporters will expect them to play hard for that Saint Louis FC jersey. When they are here we will treat them as they are our own and when they move on we will sit back and say…St. Louis helped them get to their next step and we will feel great pride in that accomplishment.
Both Dale and myself will be in Chicago portion of their pre season training and I’ll be in Portland for their last part of pre season camp. Th Fire want us there, because they feel it is important that we get players in St. Louis that we are comfortable with, that means a lot to our club.
Other than loanees, what other benefits are there to affiliating with an MLS team that you wouldn’t have if STLFC were an independent USL-Pro club?
As mentioned earlier, scouting is big. Having access to their insight and knowledge is helpful and a great resource. Also, for players aspiring to get to another level it is important to have that link to the next level. There is no doubt that some of our players will get called up and given an opportunity either in pre season, during the season or even next year so a big part of this is player development driven.
There are also some community initiatives that the Fire have put into place through their foundation that we feel will also work here in St. Louis and adding value to our community is a major focus for Saint Louis FC. I imagine that the supporters groups from Chicago and St. Louis will find a way to enjoy a beverage with each other and that only helps grow the game in the US.
As I understand it, this agreement is just for this season. Would there be any interest in renewing it for 2016 and beyond, and is there any option in place to do so?
Relationships are best when they are taken day by day. We expect that this is a long term partnership but both sides will be watching closely to see how it develops. We have had discussions about continuing this past this year and there will be an appropriate time for those discussions to continue, but both franchises are very focused on the upcoming season.
Anything else you’d like to say about the affiliation, the Chicago Fire, or how this changes things for Saint Louis FC?
I think for many of our supporters, fans and even those that are not sure yet about us…they all have known this was in the works. It isn’t a surprise for most. Like I said earlier, we are not Chicago Fire 2, we are Saint Louis FC. We are proud to be their affiliate and look forward to the season and all of the exciting moments it will bring to all of us.
The excitement that has been brewing since last May has been incredible. This announcement doesn’t change any of this, 2015 is a BIG year for St. Louis.
AdvertisementsThe Chinese military has deployed troops near the border with North Korea to counter defections, as well as stem the number of violent incidents that have taken place there, Radio Free Asia reported.
Sources in the area said that troops from the People’s Liberation Army have been stationed in the area near the Tumen River, the most frequent crossing point for North Korean defectors, whether they stay in China or ultimately move on to another country.
Sources in the city of Helong, in China’s northeastern Jilin Province, told the network that, in areas where there had previously been only border guards, there were now members of the regular People’s Liberation Army that had also been deployed, and that these do not appear to be temporary developments.
Sources in the area said the PLA had not been stationed at the border previously, but now it has been almost a month since they arrived. In local villages they are officially starting to build offices, an indication that they plan to stay long-term.
“After seeing this,” a source told RFA, “we can say that they have officially been stationed there.”
As the regular forces of the People’s Republic of China, the PLA has not traditionally been stationed in the border areas near the North. However, sources told the RFA that the troops had suddenly been stationed there in response to a number of armed incursions by North Koreans.
For instance, in December a deserter from the Korean People’s Army reportedly killed four Korean-Chinese in Jilin Province’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture before being captured. Then, in April, an unknown number of gunmen crossed the border, killing three Chinese.
Just last week Chinese guards reportedly shot and killed a border-crosser who resisted arrest.
High-ranking military authorities are known to have issued a command last June to crack down on defectors in the area, but North Korean defectors are believed to have disregarded the order and simply sought to evade the crackdown.
However, the long-term deployment of Chinese forces in the area may indicate that they are preparing so as to be able to push back or prevent large numbers of border crossings in the event of a sudden change on the Korean Peninsula.
Sources told RFA that the Chinese military had spread throughout in border areas across from North Hamgyong Province in North Korea.QUICK NOTE: XFINITYTV.com is the place to be for all of your bug-eatin’, back-stabbin’, “Survivor” coverage. During the season we’ll have insightful weekly Power Rankings, exit interviews, and full episode recaps. Follow me on Twitter (@gordonholmes) for up-to-the-minute updates.
“Survivor: Kaôh Rōng” will premiere on CBS Wednesday, February 17, 2015 at 8 p.m. ET with a special 90-minute episode.
The Rules: Each week our two combatants will create separate power rankings. The ranking of the person who is voted out of the next episode will determine the number of points the players will earn. At the end of the season, the person with the most points will be named the “Survivor: Kaôh Rōng” Power Rankings Challenge Champion.
Quick Note: The pre-season rankings are for exhibition purposes only. No points will be awarded based on their content. Ideally, the players are being ranked based on their likelihood of being named Sole Survivor.
Shirin Oskooi’s Pre-Season Rankings
1. – Nick: Who seeks life coaching from a tall, attractive white guy? You can’t coach privilege, but you can waltz your way to a million bucks with it. 2. – Neal: He has all the God-given attributes to win, concealed by ice cream pants and a bow tie. “A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection,” as David Sedaris once said, so no one will see him coming. 3. – Tai: This is a kind, lovely human being. How in the world(s apart) did he get cast for “Survivor”? 4. – Joe: This retired GI Joe American hero has potential to be the season’s bad-ass grandpa. 5. – Kyle: Holy cow, I didn’t realize the Incredible Hulk was based on a real dude. He is massive. Someone call Vince McMahon. (RIGHT, GORDON??) 6. – Caleb: A 26-year-old 6-year old burning off a sugar (and social media) high. He should be fun to watch, and hey, Fabio won! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 7. – Peter: The only doctors who do well on “Survivor” are the medical crew. 8. – Scot: Will his ball-handling ability still command the same pay? Why don’t we ask Gary Hogeboom, Grant Mattos, Steve Wright, Jeff Kent, Brad Culpepper, Cliff Robinson, John Rocker, Kenny Hoang… 9. – Darnell: Will Darnell live up to the prestige of past “Survivor” postal workers? The good news is, he doesn’t have to “owtu’it” or “obltay” as Dan Foley attempted; he just needs to outlast. 10. – Aubry: To all the female contestants who said they were most like Parvati: Parvati was beaten in this game by a woman named Sandra. Season 32: meet Sandra. 11. – Julia: Heed Queen Bey. “Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation. Slay trick, or you get eliminated.” 12. – Cydney: What’s not to like about a sassy, strong, Ivy League woman who hates bigots and cares for her eyebrows? ;) Her body may scare people ala Alicia Calaway and land her an early jury seat, but at least she can bathe in branch chain amino acids at Ponderosa and reinflate. 13. – Michele: Harry Potter fan!!! And I like that she compares herself to Parvati…Patil. She loves reading people and the future. #Divination 14. – Anna: For our second installment of Brains vs Brawn vs Beauty, Morgan goes to Vegas! 15. – Jennifer: Zero-vote final Tribal Council potential is strong in this matriarch. Her 38 years of age is geriatric compared to all but one other woman on this cast. I don’t make “Survivor” history; I just cite it. 16. – Liz: The space shuttle Challenger was a marvel built by NASA geniuses meant to soar across the universe. It also disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight. 17. – Alecia: Adrenaline junkie, generic young woman who doesn’t know this game well. Here for the scenery…let’s hope she doesn’t blend into it. 18. – Debbie: She’ll have to leash her inner tiger to fit in. But her outer tiger says “Rawr.”
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Comcast.The new census data released on Tuesday should infuriate young Australians because it shows definitively how the housing market is being rigged against them.
It dispels for good the myth that a shortage of dwellings is what’s causing house prices to rocket beyond their reach.
The key myth-busting statistic is the average number of people |
to evacuate them, to relocate them to - out of Russia because for most of them it's just deadly dangerous to stay in Russia because some of them are already hunted by their relatives outside of Chechnya.
GREENE: They're being hunted by their relatives, did you say?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yes, they are being hunted because, like, homosexuality in Chechnya is considered to be a stain on the whole family. And it is believed that the only way to kind of wash away this stain is to kill this person.
GREENE: That sounds terrible. Is the Russian government supporting your organization? Or what would you like to see from the Russian government?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Well, the Russian government obviously doesn't provide any support to any LGBT organizations. We try to report to them, but they usually ignore us. And what we want from them right now is to have appropriate investigation of this situation.
GREENE: Are you optimistic that that investigation will happen?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: You know, it's a very complicated question. For the first weeks when this information became public they didn't do anything. But at the same time, there was a lot of attention from the international communities. There was a lot of pressure. And the Russian authorities were asked a lot about what's going on in Chechnya. And at some point, they weren't able to be silent anymore and they started to do something. It's actually a horrible thing for them, too, for their reputation - like, how do they look like, like monsters?
GREENE: You're talking about the Russian government.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Yeah, because they don't do anything about the citizens of Russia being killed, tortured and kidnapped.
GREENE: We were speaking to the communications manager for the Russian LGBT Network. And we should just remind our listeners we are withholding her name because of the sensitive work that her organization is doing. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Thank you.
Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.The long fabled 0.6.7 update is finally here! I did miss my internal deadline by 2 weeks, but in my defense, I moved across the country!
So, time to get to the juicy part, the change log.
Features
Leaderboard visibility mid match
You can now bring up the leaderboard mid match by pressing ‘Tab’ [default keybinding].
The leaderboard now auto sorts based on winning team and further by kill counts by team players.
When bringing up the leaderboard, you gain back mouse control. You can use this to mute players mid match in multiplayer.
The leaderboard style now matches the end game scoreboard style, which will allow more social interactions as they come online
Esc menu
Pressing ‘Esc’ no longer exits the match, instead it brings up the escape menu.
From this menu you can change game options, including sound, key bindings, microphone input, and mouse sensitivity.
You also have quick access to the help menu, exit to the main menu, or exit MAV completely.
Pressing ‘Esc’ again will return you back to the game.
This menu is available everywhere in the game.
Help menu
In the main menu there is now a ‘Quick Start Guide’ available that helps walk you through the very basics of MAV.
There are 6 screens covering what a MAV is, the Game modes, and basic building advice for the garage.
This screen is available at any time through the ‘help’ option in the Esc menu.
Tool tips
I have added tooltips to many UI elements.
If you see a UI element that needs a tool tip, please report it to me!
Push to Talk
The microphone option has changed to a push to talk system.
You can now also select the microphone you want to use for voice chat.
All keybindings for this are user editable.
Server Connection Screen
You now get proper screen feedback when connecting to servers.
If a connection fails, you will get a screen notifying you of the failure and the error reason.
If you are forced out of a server, you will see a notification screen with the reason [kicked, server shutdown, server restart].
Players joining and leaving servers is now announced through the in-game chat system.
Automated reporting
I have enabled automated error reporting though anonymous usage statistics.
This reports code errors, along with information already found in the output log files.
There is also reporting on login to help gather information on how the player base is progressing through Ranks.
When online, there is minor reporting on levels played, number of deaths per level, and errors per level.
This is all to help me with balance changes and tracking down bugs.
Bug Fixes
Spine builds no longer become a headless set of legs when losing the spine part.
Repair sheds would fail to reload weapons if one of your weapons had been destroyed. This is fixed now.
Fixed issue with Steam account connection not binding to Bombdog accounts correctly.
Change instances of ‘Commander’ role type to ‘Engineer’ role.
Fixed collision issues with the spectator camera causing many extreme closeups when trying to follow MAVs.
Made spectator camera affected by the mouse sensitivity setting.
Minor Changes
Updated base shotgun ammo from 18 to 28. This makes shotgun build much more viable in combat.
Adjusted role type experience earning. There was an error with Sniper XP calculation making it much easier to earn than it should be. Defender XP distance to MY base increased from 250 meters to 500 meters. Attacker Kill XP distance reduced from 150 meters to 50 meters. Sniper kill distance XP increased from 350 meters to 500 meters. Support kill distance XP increased from 100 meters to 250 meters. Removed extra Attacker XP bonus for multiple enemy’s nearby in Arena mode. Decrease Sniper accuracy XP bonus from max 250 weight to 50 weight. Increased movement XP modifier from.01 to.02. This means Scouts earn double the XP for distance covered compared to before. Increased weapon type damage weight from.01 to.05. This means the weapons used to damage enemy’s are weighted 5 times heavier than before.
Adjusted camo shader to make colors and patterns more vibrant. This helps solve some visibility issues that were reported.
Created new AI camo patterns to ensure contrasting patterns among teams.
Added label to show visible map size on in-game map. This will help Support players range shots.
See you in-game!VIDEO: Carrying Das Kapital leads to detention in Istanbul on May Day
ISTANBUL
AA photo
Expressing opposition to massive marches, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu encouraged individuals to mark May Day in Istanbul with carnations. However, police in the city detained a single woman who brought a book to Taksim Square: Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.”“Tomorrow, Taksim will be accessible to any of our citizens who want to come ‘symbolically.’ They should come and lay their carnations and show their respect,” Davutoğlu said at a gathering with highway workers on April 30.On May 1, only a small group of unionists were allowed into Taksim Square for a moderate remembrance ceremony for the victims of 1977’s May Day, when 34 people were killed.A single woman, on the other hand, walked past the police checkpoint near Taksim, showing the book “Das Kapital” by Karl Marx. Police officers then briefly followed the woman before forcefully detaining her.The detention triggered reactions on social media. Several users argued that the footage showed the government wants to prevent not only groups, but also individuals, from reaching the iconic square on the symbolic day.“If you say that you will go there with tens of thousands of people to organize a rally, then it should be named as creating chaos, not as a commemoration,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in Ankara on May 1, referring to Taksim Square.Want To Spend Election Night At NPR HQ?
Have you ever wondered what it's like to be at NPR on election night? Here's your chance to find out.
On Tuesday, Nov. 6, NPR's social media desk will host around two dozen of you at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. We're looking for people from across the political spectrum — bloggers, Twitter users, Tumblrs, Redditors, etc. — who plan to cover election night on their own. It'll be a chance to hang out with fellow political geeks and NPR staff, as well as an opportunity to experience election night at NPR in person. We'll supply the food and the wifi, too.
If you're interested in applying, please fill out this form. We'll make our selections over the next couple of weeks on a rolling basis, so the sooner you apply, the better.By By Karen Graham Jan 23, 2016 in Environment Monsanto's genetically engineered (GE) Roundup-Ready alfalfa has already cost farmers millions of dollars, and now, a new study by the USDA, the same agency that re-approved it, has found that GE alfalfa has really gone wild, literally. The study lends confirmation to and explains the number of transgenic contamination episodes over the past few years that have cost American alfalfa farmers and exporters millions of dollars. More telling is that the study exposes the failure of the USDA's "coexistence" policy, says The USDA's "Coexistence" fairytale The USDA has long maintained that genetically engineered crops can coexist with nor-GMO and organic crops. Yet this very issue has been the basis of a number of complaints filed over GE alfalfa contaminating non-GMO fields. The USDA has long maintained that if GMO-farmers and non-GMO farmers "just sorted things out," using good management practices, transgenes would be confined to GE crops and the fields where they are planted. In 2013, the federal agency, in keeping with its belief in "coexistence" of these crops, rejected a Washington state farmer's complaint about his alfalfa being rejected for export because of the presence of the genetically modified trait that made it unacceptable in Asian countries. The USDA said the Washington farmer's non-GMO alfalfa crop should be addressed by the marketplace and not the government, reported Depending on which side of the fence people tend to lean, anti-GMOers are saying, "See, we told ya so," and proponents of GMO crops are saying a little transgenetic contamination is to be expected. However, the A photo of Alfalfa -- a flowering plant in the pea family Fabaceae cultivated as an important forage crop. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand it is known as lucerne and as lucerne grass in south Asia. Wikipedia / Fir0002 It is all about the bees Alfalfa is a perennial grass, unlike other GMO crops. The study found that the Roundup-Ready gene, a protein called CP4 EPSPS that conveys resistance to glyphosate, was being spread by bees, doing what they naturally do, cross-pollinating alfalfa fields sometimes separated by several miles. The USDA's results suggested that “transgenic plants could spread transgenes to neighboring feral plants and potentially to neighboring non-GE fields.” Now the USDA didn't test this possibility, but there is no question that non-GE alfalfa has been contaminated, and probably on many occasions. But there is more to this story. We go back to 2005 when the USDA first approved The USDA re-approved the GE Roundup-Ready alfalfa for planting in 2011. The study was done just a few months after the USDA gave its re-approval, meaning all of the feral GE alfalfa the researchers detected arose from the small number of fields planted in 2005 and 2006. Monsanto says that now, over 30 percent of alfalfa seeds sold are GE Roundup-Ready seeds. This means that more than likely, there are more feral alfalfa stands than the USDA study would suggest. While the USDA says more studies on transgenic contamination are needed, American farmers don't need further data on something they have known for over six years. Regulatory action is needed or we will see all our alfalfa crops contaminated with GE genes. The USDA though continues to bow before the biotech giants and has failed to enact a single restriction on GE crop growers. In a study published in December 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) verified that genetically engineered alfalfa had gone wild in our western states, in a very big way.The study lends confirmation to and explains the number of transgenic contamination episodes over the past few years that have cost American alfalfa farmers and exporters millions of dollars. More telling is that the study exposes the failure of the USDA's "coexistence" policy, says EcoWatch The USDA has long maintained that genetically engineered crops can coexist with nor-GMO and organic crops. Yet this very issue has been the basis of a number of complaints filed over GE alfalfa contaminating non-GMO fields. The USDA has long maintained that if GMO-farmers and non-GMO farmers "just sorted things out," using good management practices, transgenes would be confined to GE crops and the fields where they are planted.In 2013, the federal agency, in keeping with its belief in "coexistence" of these crops, rejected a Washington state farmer's complaint about his alfalfa being rejected for export because of the presence of the genetically modified trait that made it unacceptable in Asian countries. The USDA said the Washington farmer's non-GMO alfalfa crop should be addressed by the marketplace and not the government, reported Reuters Depending on which side of the fence people tend to lean, anti-GMOers are saying, "See, we told ya so," and proponents of GMO crops are saying a little transgenetic contamination is to be expected. However, the USDA study found that in sites tested in California, Idaho and Washington state, over one-quarter, 27 percent of them, contained transgenic alfalfa.Alfalfa is a perennial grass, unlike other GMO crops. The study found that the Roundup-Ready gene, a protein called CP4 EPSPS that conveys resistance to glyphosate, was being spread by bees, doing what they naturally do, cross-pollinating alfalfa fields sometimes separated by several miles.The USDA's results suggested that “transgenic plants could spread transgenes to neighboring feral plants and potentially to neighboring non-GE fields.” Now the USDA didn't test this possibility, but there is no question that non-GE alfalfa has been contaminated, and probably on many occasions.But there is more to this story. We go back to 2005 when the USDA first approved GE Roundup Ready alfalfa for use. About one percent of national alfalfa acreage was GE alfalfa by 2006. In 2007, a federal court put a halt to GE alfalfa planting but allowed what had already been planted to remain in the ground. Being a perennial, an alfalfa field can produce for about five years.The USDA re-approved the GE Roundup-Ready alfalfa for planting in 2011. The study was done just a few months after the USDA gave its re-approval, meaning all of the feral GE alfalfa the researchers detected arose from the small number of fields planted in 2005 and 2006.Monsanto says that now, over 30 percent of alfalfa seeds sold are GE Roundup-Ready seeds. This means that more than likely, there are more feral alfalfa stands than the USDA study would suggest.While the USDA says more studies on transgenic contamination are needed, American farmers don't need further data on something they have known for over six years. Regulatory action is needed or we will see all our alfalfa crops contaminated with GE genes. The USDA though continues to bow before the biotech giants and has failed to enact a single restriction on GE crop growers. More about Monsanto, roundup ready gm crops, Alfalfa, feral GE alfalfa, coexistance More news from Monsanto roundup ready gm cro... Alfalfa feral GE alfalfa coexistanceOur Ghost Story preview continues with Chapter 4! And as an added bonus, you can now watch Jim reading chapters 1 and 2 at last October’s NY Comic Con Fan Dinner!
Watch:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2, part 1
Chapter 2, part 2
Missed previous weeks’ posts? Catch up here:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
We’ll be posting 5 chapters in all over the coming weeks, plus video of Jim reading chapters 1 through 4.
You can pre-order Ghost Story from our store or through the Virtual Signing, which also offers signed copies of Changes, Side Jobs, and The Dresden Files RPG. All Virtual Signing pre-orders must be placed by July 19th.
Also, today marks the release of Ellen Datlow’s The Naked City anthology, featuring Jim’s short story “Curses.” Check it out!The early history of Bitcoin is often compared to the early days of the Internet. Although some say the killer applications for the peer-to-peer digital cash system have yet to arrive, many people understand the potential of this open system for online value transfer. The Internet completely revolutionized how information travels around the world, and Bitcoin could have the same impact on money, payments and many other aspects of finance.
Permissionless Finance
One of the key innovations of the Internet was that it enabled permissionless publication of information. While a handful of media companies held tight control over information and news in the past, anyone with a Facebook or Twitter account can now instantly turn into a reporter on the scene of an interesting event.
Bitcoin offers a similar transition to a more decentralized version of online finance. Instead of getting permission from PayPal, Visa or MasterCard to accept online payments, anyone can instantly sell their goods and services for Bitcoin; it only takes a Bitcoin wallet to get started. Although online drug markets have existed in the past, these sorts of uncensored marketplaces become more practical in a world where Bitcoin exists. This is not to say these markets are morally right or wrong. They are simply an illustration of the permissionless nature of Bitcoin payments.
Although Bitcoin requires permission from no one on a technical level, legal barriers to entry still exist when it comes to offering financial services on top of the blockchain. Regulations tend to come into play when entrepreneurs are taking custody of their users’ bitcoins. Of course, it’s still possible to create new p2p protocols for financial services, which can be viewed as nothing more than software. An example of this concept in action is JoinMarket, which is a way for Bitcoin users to get a return on their holdings by offer liquidity to CoinJoin transactions.
Bitcoin Could Change How the Internet Works
Bitcoin also has the potential to completely change the way the Internet works. The creation of a form of true digital cash allows applications to experiment with new incentive structures and monetization models.
The most common monetization model on the Internet has evolved to the point where it’s all about tracking users’ movements and selling that data to third parties. Brave Software is a startup that hopes to fight against this trend by way of a new browser. The idea is to provide users with better privacy while browsing the web and eventually have users choose to make small Bitcoin payments to content creators rather than becoming a product for advertisers. In the meantime, the browser uses ad-blocking technology to replace pop-ups and third-party cookies with less-intrusive advertisements.
21 is another startup in the Bitcoin ecosystem that sees entirely new types of payments becoming possible thanks to the peer-to-peer digital cash system. Part of the mindset here is to view Bitcoin as a system resource rather than a currency. Having some bitcoins on devices by default may be useful in creating effective markets for sharing excess bandwidth, storage and other system resources. Bitcoin may enable a future where the specs of a particular device are less important because system resources can be automatically purchased with Bitcoin on p2p markets in the background.
A Complete Revolution in Money
One last thing to keep in mind when it comes to Bitcoin as a commodity or currency is that this is a true revolution in money. Bitcoin has specific implications when it comes to a government’s ability to have control over the economy. Whether it’s to avoid capital controls, inflation, censorship of payments, bail-ins or any other economic policy, citizens now have the ability to opt-out of the traditional system entirely via Bitcoin. Although gold has been viewed as the main hedge against specific government actions in the past, Bitcoin’s role in this regard may increase as more commerce and general economic activity moves online.
The Internet weakened centralized control over information, and Bitcoin could do the same for money.
Kyle Torpey is a freelance journalist who has been following Bitcoin since 2011. His work has been featured on VICE Motherboard, Business Insider, RT’s Keiser Report, and many other media outlets. You can follow @kyletorpey on Twitter.We won't put troops in Libya: US
Updated
United States defence secretary Robert Gates has made a passionate case for intervention in Libya despite admitting there is little understanding of who the rebels are.
Mr Gates would not address reports that CIA operatives are already inside Libya, but the claim has revived debate about the promise not to put American boots on the ground in Libya.
Mr Gates and top uniformed military officer Admiral Mike Mullen spent a day answering questions on Capitol Hill and being pilloried for taking America into a conflict without getting approval from Congress.
Giving evidence before a congressional committee, Mr Gates stuck to the administration's line that there would be no American boots on the ground.
"We're saying we're not going to put any boots on the ground... that is my understanding," he said.
But he then clarified his position.
"I'm pretty confident that NATO as an organisation would not authorise boots on the ground as part of this operation," he said.
The confusion prompted one US congressman to dub Libya probably the "most muddled definition of a military operation in US history".
News of a secret order signed by the US president authorising covert American support for the rebels has been received as paving the way for a possible arming of the opposition.
But the defence secretary did not want to discuss that.
"Frankly there are many countries that can do that. That is not a unique capability for the United States and as far as I am concerned, somebody else should do that," Mr Gates said.
The defence secretary conceded very little was known about the opposition, which he described as almost a misnomer because the rebels were such a disparate, scattered group.
"To be honest, other than a relative handful of leaders, we don't have much visibility into those that have risen against Gaddafi," he said.
The hearing was told the opposition had only about 1,000 fighters with military training, but the US had no contingency plan to avoid a stalemate other than keeping the pressure on the Gaddafi regime.
"We may not know much about the opposition or the rebels, but we know a great deal about Gaddafi. This guy has been a huge problem for the United States for a long time," he said.
He suggested one of Mr Gaddafi's own military could "take him out" or Libya's tribes could abandon him.
White House spokesman Jay Carney indicated the defence secretary's comments were no guarantee the US would not be arming the rebels.
Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, government-and-politics, world-politics, libyan-arab-jamahiriya, united-states
First postedUpcoming drama “Housewife Detective” (tentative title) has revealed photos from its first table reading!
Actress Jang Nara will be acting as a mother for the first time in a Korean drama, while 2PM’s Chansung will be acting alongside her as a fellow detective.
The table reading included actors Jang Nara, Hwang Chansung, Jo Hyun Jae, Hong Soo Ah, Lee Min Ho, Kim Ki Do, and many more.
Jang Nara will be playing Myung Yoo Jin, a single mother who is the assistant detective of Chansung’s character Detective Hee Joon. As Myung Yoo Jin has to balance taking care of a child and being a detective at the same time, many viewers are curious to see how the story will unfold.
Meanwhile, “Housewife Detective” will be a 100 percent pre-produced drama and is planned to air domestically and in foreign countries at the same time. The drama will start filming during the first half of 2017.
What are your thoughts on this upcoming drama?
Source (1)In Saudi Arabia, women aren’t allowed to drive, and cannot leave home without a male guardian. In Iran, gender segregation appears in workplaces and public events, and only 6% of parliament members are female. But third wave feminists in the States have bigger fish to fry – namely Wonder Woman’s armpit hair.
Or lack thereof.
Yes, this is a real thing. Following the release of the latest Wonder Woman movie trailer, a voice of outrage have risen on Twitter. The SJWs are outraged by the clean-shaven armpits of the Amazon princess, played by actress Gal Gadot.
Here’s one such tweet:
Complaints about Wonder Woman’s armpit digitally bleached. My question is -why is an Amazon with no previous contact with humankind shaven? pic.twitter.com/S6sDNj7UFQ — Laura Lioness (@Lioness_Laura) March 20, 2017
Of course, there are also saner voices out there
First female superhero film for 17 years and all the talk is about her armpits… #WonderWoman pic.twitter.com/MPXMERdi3S — r.a.c.h.e.l t. (@racheltunnard) March 17, 2017
What’s my take on this?
1) The fact that Wonder Woman’s armpit hair is missing is indeed totally unrealistic.
2) But so is the fact that she’s an Amazon Princess from the Paradise Island who rides an invisible plane and wields the magical lasso of truth.
Here are some additional Wonder Woman cartoons, like the one where Wonder Woman marries Superman, or the one about the Evolution of Wonder Woman.Technology has made it easier than ever to stay in touch. But services like Skype and FaceTime don't necessarily guarantee a good conversation. They provide a virtual venue; the rest is up to us. You can imagine a point where our apps do take that next step, though: nudging us when it's our turn to talk; making sure we say the right thing; and reminding us to shut up when it's time to listen. With US+, a new app for Google Hangout, you can get a taste of that future.
The app was created by artists Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald. Combining some rough linguistic and facial expression analysis, US+ monitors video chats in real time. You can see how hostile you're being; how positive; or how honest. At certain intervals, the application will give you suggestions, telling you you're talking too much or noting that your interlocutor looks sad.
Both artists see something like US+ as an inevitability, but at this point, the software is more about exploring the idea of algorithmic mediation than actually mediating conversation in a significant way. "While this app really works, I’m doubtful that any of the things it’s recognizing are things that someone with 10 minutes of training couldn’t identify faster than the computer," McDonald says.
"The tongue in cheek portion is the idea that maybe we won’t have the option to ignore these suggestions at some point," he adds. "Either the system will be so accurate that we can’t afford to ignore it, or it’s so ingrained in the way we interact that we feel uncomfortable living without it." Think of it as your smartphone's autocorrect with Skynet-level smarts.
>Think of it as your smartphone's autocorrect with Skynet-level smarts.
In either case, putting it out there in this rough form at least gives us a chance to think about the implications. "Hopefully if we experiment enough, early on, we can retain the critical perspective we have before it’s impossibly prevalent," he says.
Recently, McDonald and McCarthy co-taught a course called "Appropriating Interaction Technologies" for NYU's ITP program. The catchier name for it was "social hacking," with students dreaming up clever ways to interrupt the digital routines and commonplace technologies we rely on every day.
One student asked strangers on the street to borrow their phones, only to snap a picture of their browsing history. Another asked friends to help him figure out where to buy a coffee, using only a virtual Street View-style interface.
At some point, McCarthy says, the group's discussion turned to why. "After the students had gone out and created mayhem by introducing small'social glitches,' everyone started asking why are we doing this, is it just to make people uncomfortable or is there a deeper point?," McCarthy recalls. But in those cases—and with US+—she finds that the disruptions can offer a different perspective on the relationships we have with technology and each other.
"With the current pace of tech development and startup culture, there’s not a lot of time for contemplation in the process," she says. "I think as artists we can contribute to the conversation by provoking people to engage with questions about what kind of social future we’re building."Oskar Groening was found guilty in July 2015 of being an accessory to the murders of 300,000 people at the Nazi death camp.
But he filed an appeal for the sentence to be suspended.
"Based on expert opinion, the superior regional court finds that the convicted individual is fit to serve out the term despite his advanced age", said the court in Celle in northern Germany.
Incarcerating Groening would not violate his fundamental rights, it said, arguing that "appropriate precautionary measures" could be taken to meet any special needs arising from his old age.
Groening has been living at home despite his conviction, and given his age, it had until now been unclear if he would actually be jailed.
Making the case for his imprisonment, German prosecutors have said that a court doctor has determined that Groening is able to serve his sentence, on condition he is given appropriate nursing and medical care while in detention.
Groening worked as an accountant at Auschwitz, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed or used as slave labour, and shipping it back to his Nazi superiors in Berlin.
He also on several occasions performed "ramp duty", processing deportees as they arrived by rail in cattle cars.
New legal basis
During his trial, Groening acknowledged "moral guilt" but said it was up to the court to rule on his legal culpability.
He had testified that he was so horrified by the crimes he witnessed at the camp after his arrival in 1942 that he appealed three times for a transfer to the front, which was not granted until autumn 1944.
Groening had previously been cleared by German authorities after lengthy criminal probes dating back to the 1970s.
But a case was reopened against him as the legal basis for prosecuting former Nazis changed in 2011 with Germany's landmark conviction of former death camp guard John Demjanjuk.
The former guard was sentenced not for atrocities he was known to have committed, but on the basis that he worked at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland and had thus been a cog in the Nazis' killing machine.
Demjanjuk died in 2012 before his appeal could be heard, but that verdict spurred new investigations against several elderly former Nazis.
More than one million European Jews were killed at Auschwitz before it was liberated by Soviet forces. Yet, of the camp's 6,500 SS personnel who survived the war, fewer than 50 were ever convicted.You can now apply online. The online form will ask questions that are relevant to you based on the information you enter. You can edit and download the application before it is submitted. If you need digital help completing your online application, you can use our assisted digital service.
You can use form EEA (PR) to apply for, replace or renew a document certifying permanent residence or a permanent residence card.
You should also read the guidance notes for detailed information on what to submit with your application.
Read ‘Top reasons permanent residence applications are rejected or refused’ to find out the most common reasons applications for permanent residence are rejected or refused.
If you’re planning to apply for a document to confirm your status, you can sign up for email updates instead. These updates will tell you about the steps you may need to take to confirm your status after the UK leaves the EU.
EEA and Swiss nationals
If you’re an EEA or Swiss national you can use form EEA (PR) to apply for a document certifying permanent residence.
You can also apply online but not if you’re a student or self-sufficient person and you’re either:
reliant on a family member for financial support
financially responsible for any other family members
If you apply online, you can use the European passport return service and keep your passport while your application is processed. You can’t use this service if you use the PDF form to apply.
For more information on the application process read ‘UK residence for EU citizens’.
Non-EEA or non-Swiss family member of an EEA or Swiss national
If you’re a non-EEA or non-Swiss national, you can use form EEA (PR) to apply for a permanent residence card.
For more information on the application process read ‘Permanent residence card’Do you think Tesla's new Summon self-parking feature is neat? Well, CEO Elon Musk says that's just the beginning. On a call with reporters today, Musk reiterated his prediction that fully-autonomous Teslas will be possible in two years' time, noting that Summon is "just a baby step."
"Ultimately you’ll be able to summon your car anywhere … your car can get to you." The sometimes-fantastical CEO added, "I think that within two years, you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country," citing, for example, a Tesla owner beckoning their vehicle to drive solo from New York to meet him in LA.
"I think that within two years, you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country."
"It will meet you wherever your phone is … and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey." How will it charge itself? Why, that's what that creepy prototype metal snake is for. The CEO called the snake "sort of fascinating in its creepiness," adding that "some version" of it would initially roll out to the company's supercharger stations.
Musk later admitted that his predictions "might be slightly optimistic" and he clarified that sort of autonomous driving would require more than a simple software update to existing Model S and Model X vehicles. "We do need more sensors than the car currently has to achieve that goal. You need a lot of redundancy … more cameras, more radars, redundant power buses … so that any system can fail in the car and it doesn’t need to backup to a driver."
In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 10, 2016
That means that retail Teslas might not be driving themselves in two years, but Musk thinks the technology will be totally in place by that point. As he noted to reporters, ""in that timeframe of 24 to 36 months, it will be able to drive on virtually all roads at a safety level significantly better than human."
Tesla Some drivers are having too much fun with Tesla's auto-steer
Be sure to subscribe to The Verge's YouTube channel for more car related videos including our coverage at the 2016 Detroit Auto ShowEd Miliband has vowed to rip up the rule book as prime minister and go it alone if there is no international consensus to tackle multinationals engaging in massive tax avoidance.
In an interview with the Observer, the Labour leader urged David Cameron to find agreement at the G8 summit of leaders next month around an ambitious agenda forcing corporate giants to pay their fair share.
He said that, if Cameron fails, he himself as prime minister would unilaterally act to make multinationals operating in the UK more transparent about the money they make here, the movement of cash around their corporate structures, and the justifications for the tax they pay.
He would also increase the resources of HM Revenue and Customs to strike at tax cheats.
Miliband, who will speak at a Google event in Hertfordshire on Wednesday, said he believed some multinationals, including the internet giant, were not living up to their responsibilities to society. Google was accused by MPs last week of being devious, calculating and unethical after it emerged that it paid just £3.4m in tax on £3.2bn of sales taken from UK customers last year as the sales were technically "closed" in low-tax Ireland.
Miliband said: "Now, what is the politicians' responsibility: change the law. But it is also to talk about the kind of society we want to create and what the responsibilities of a company like Google are. I don't think they are living up to their responsibilities at the moment, and I will be very clear about that on Wednesday.
"It is part of a culture of irresponsibility. If everyone approaches their tax affairs as some of these companies have approached their tax affairs we wouldn't have a health service, we wouldn't have an education system. And actually the point I will make at Google is that will undermine Google."
Meanwhile Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, writing in the Observer, has given his first reaction to last week's criticism of his company by MPs on the public accounts committee. He says tax avoidance is rightly a "hot topic" in difficult economic times and urges genuine reform, but adds: "Politicians – not companies – set the rules."
But, in a major policy announcement, Miliband says a Labour government would engender a more responsible capitalism in the UK by changing those rules with or without international agreement. Miliband would:
■ Pursue a new global system where multinationals must publish their revenues, profits and other key corporate information useful to revenue authorities in each country in which they operate.
■ Force multinationals to publish such information in the UK even if international agreement cannot be found on the issue, as they do in Denmark.
■ Make it a legal requirement for multinationals operating in the UK to disclose details of any tax avoidance schemes they are using globally.
■ Seek reforms to "transfer pricing" rules to stop companies from shuffling money to other parts of their firm based in tax havens in return for spurious services.
■ Open up the ownership of companies sited in Britain's tax havens to the UK revenue authorities, but also seek to allow developing countries access to such information.
Miliband said the government was "dragging its feet" on the issue of tax avoidance. "They have got to act. If they don't act, we will act in government. This is an absolutely massive and serious issue.
"I think |
get wallop in the general election.
And because they’re running for president they’ll all have a highly visible demonstration of how toxic it is to oppose marriage equality today, especially after the Supreme Court, dominated by Republican appointments, has put to bed bans on marriage equality for good.
Tough luck, Rick Santorum, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, and friends! Smell you later!Hipster beards blamed for poor razor sales
Storified by CBC News Community· Tue, Aug 06 2013 14:26:29
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Sore-faced girlfriends and the leaders of North America's largest consumer goods companies appear to have at least one thing in common if a recent dip in men's razor sales is any indication -- both can agree that the beard trend has got to go.
Just gonna say it: I can't wait for full beards and mustaches to END. | Hipsters are killing American razor sales http://on-msn.com/1bTd7LJJulie R. Neidlinger
Proctor & Gamble, which dominates the razor market withGillette's Mach-3, reported last week that razor sales have been falling indeveloped markets. Battery maker Energizer likewise announced that sales of its Schick men'srazors have dropped 10 per cent in the past year.
Both companies peg the dip on factors such as increasing competition, but some analysts and business reporters place the blame squarely on the checkered, suspender-laden shoulders of today's scruffy hipster men.
"Are Hirsute Hipsters Killing the Razor Business?" asked Bloomberg's Kyle Stock in a headline, while Jason Notte of MSN Money lays his thoughts out with a biting verve: "Hope you really like that handlebar mustache and set of pork-chop sideburns, Mr. Vest-Clad Washboard-Playing Mixologist, because they're killing multinational corporations' bottom lines."
#Starbucks #VeryBerryHibiscusTea #Venti #Tea #Pool #RayBan #Beard #Bearded #Beardsman #Hipster #Plugs #tunnels #Tattooed #StretchedEars #StraightEdgexjohnxmanninox
#hipsterbeard #thebeard #goodmorning off to work 4 hours of sleepRoland Lee Slade III
My beautifully bearded man! #hipsterbeard #facefursarahmarymawer
Both Notte and Stock point out that while trendy youngurbanites have undoubtedly embraced both ungroomed and stylized facial hair, theoft-beleaguered subculture cannot be blamed for everything.
Some posit that perhaps the manufacturers themselves are at fault.
Increasingly complex razors with more bells, whistles andblades have driven up the cost of products in recent years, turning many away from brands likeSchick and Gillette altogether.
All you hipsters need to start shaving so poor @Gillette can sell you 7 blade razors for $15 a pop. tinyurl.com/ox79kybOlde Richmond Civic
More likely that the cost of razors prompted hipsters to grow their hair out in the first place: on-msn.com/1bTd7LJ via @MSN_MoneyB.J. Worthington III
Gillette and Schick blaming hipster beards for the drops in their sales. This is possibly the funniest piece of news I've ever heard.Emma Deeks
And yet, facial hair does seem to be more ubiquitous among young men than it has in decades.
The Wall Street Journal cites another possible reason for the decline in major brand razor sales as the rise of razor subscription sites like the Dollar Shave Club that send off-brand razor blades to a person's home on a monthly basis.
Civil War in Men's Shaving - Analyst Insight from Euromonitor InternationalAnalyst Insight by Nicole Tyrimou, Beauty and Personal Care Analyst at Euromonitor International Men's shaving has been going through a r...
"Over the medium to long term, the desire foran unshaven look is expected to continue, especially in Western Europe whereincreasing unemployment coupled with stubble being in vogue will continue todamage growth of razors and blades," wrote analyst Nicole Tyrimou for marketresearch firm Euromonitor International.
"However, the biggest concern formen's shaving companies will be if this trend catches on in Latin America, amarket skewed towards fashion trends and celebrities, with increasingly morecelebrities and sportsmen, from Brad Pitt to Lionel Messi, often being seen withstubble or even a full-grown beard in some cases."
Zimbio
I've had my beard before it was "hipster." Does that make me a trendsetter?Shawn Harrison
Hipster beards are changing the world.... http://fb.me/11WkSFoQ4Joffre the Giant
Hipster Abraham Lincoln had a beard four score and seven years before it was cool.Matt Shepherd
Does anyone you know shave less than usual due to the cost of razors, or have a style that warrants them useless? Comment below with your thoughts and observations.Denzil Minnan-Wong knew he was the skunk at the garden party even before he was asked directly if that’s how he felt on Wednesday, representing the only mayor openly disdainful of new taxes to pay for a massive Toronto region transit expansion. The Toronto councillor stood in for Rob Ford on a CivicAction mayors’ panel discussing how the region will move ahead with taxes that can be dedicated to building more transit, and more quickly.
Traffic moves slowly from James Snow Parkway to the 401 in Milton. Recognizing the burden of congestion, mayors in cities around Toronto are pushing to get transit improvements into their areas and are ready to pursue new revenues to get there. ( Steve Russell / Toronto Star )
Minnan-Wong was seated among Oakville Mayor Rob Burton, Oshawa’s John Henry, Burlington Mayor Rick Goldring and Markham Mayor Frank Scarpitti. Each vowed their support for new taxes to pay for transit. But only 24 hours earlier, Ford had issued the most recent in a series of rejections of such taxes or tolls. The Toronto mayor dismissed a city staff report endorsing a sales tax, gas tax, parking levies and higher development charges to contribute to Metrolinx’s $2 billion annual transit plan. Meantime, Scarpitti drew agreement from his counterparts when he said, “A healthy Toronto means a healthy region.”
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“It’s all about getting new revenue tools. If we don’t get that money, the Big Move (regional transportation plan)is going to be the ‘big slow move,’” Scarpitti told about 300 business, community, student and labour leaders at the day-long event organized by CivicAction. Minnan-Wong said he agreed, too — that there is general agreement that something needs to be done to improve Toronto region transit. But he said he couldn’t support transit taxes without more discussion of who will pay to operate that bigger system, given that all transit depends to some degree on government subsidies. He also suggested the public doesn’t necessarily trust government with its money. “When we’re asking families across the city to pay on average $900 per year for the next 14 years, they’ll say, ‘OK, who are you going to give it to? So you’re going to give some of it to the TTC.’ And they read that a project went from $14 million to $105 million. They say, ‘Well, we’d like to give you that money, but we’re not so sure you’re going to manage it well.’ “When they read in the paper that Metrolinx spent $700 million for one of the most expensive fare cards on the planet, they say, ‘Well we’d like to solve transit, we’re prepared to think about revenue tools, but we’re not sure you’re accountable enough to spend it wisely,’” said Minnan-Wong.
CivicAction CEO Mitzie Hunter echoed past comments by Metrolinx CEO Bruce McCuaig, who has said that it will be Toronto city council, rather than Ford, who determines Toronto’s official position on transit taxes. “It was wonderful to have Toronto at the table,” she said of Minnan-Wong’s participation. Hunter also praised Toronto’s leadership in consulting residents about the issue.
Read more about:A long-anticipated extension for Cubs President Theo Epstein and his staff appears imminent, perhaps by Monday's home opener.
"I'd imagine we'll get it wrapped up at some point in the near future, but no deadline," Chairman Tom Ricketts said Monday.
Epstein, who is expected to receive a long-term extension making him the sport's highest-paid executive, said negotiations have been smooth.
"This is not a one-man operation," Epstein said. "We're in this together as an organization. Everyone has different contract status, but our goal is to keep the group in the front office together for a long time."
World Series or bust? Epstein is aware many Cubs fans believe 2016 will be a bust if it doesn't result in a World Series title.
"The expectations thing, I know it can kind of create this subtext that hangs over the club with every two-game losing streak or every game that goes wrong or every injury," Epstein said before Monday night's opener. "People try to put it in context that the ultimate goal is the World Series.
"But the reality is that's not how we feel internally. We know it's a grind. We know it's a process. We know what we're shooting for. We're here to win the World Series. But you don't think about that on a daily basis. You think about the challenges the game presents, how you can overcome those and coming together as a team and as an organization and working your tail off to move forward and progress. That's what drives us.
"In the end, if you don't win the World Series, you're very disappointed. If you do, it's worthwhile because you focused on the journey."
Epstein quipped that not winning the World Series last fall was more disappointing than in 2012, the first year of his massive rebuilding program.
But "nothing is promised in this game or in life," Epstein said. "Windows slam shut, and people get run over by buses crossing the street. You can't control everything, so you want to make the most of every day and every opportunity at the start of the season."
Money matters: Epstein said the Cubs have enough money to add a player before the trade deadline. They open the season with about $150 million in base salary and termination-pay obligations. That includes a prorated portion of the $11 million salary of pitcher Edwin Jackson, now with the Marlins.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Crowds gathered in Buenos Aires to mourn Mr Kirchner's death
Argentina's former President, Nestor Kirchner, has died at the age of 60 after suffering a heart attack.
Mr Kirchner served as president from 2003 to 2007, and was being tipped to stand for election again in 2011.
His wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, succeeded him as president in 2007, after he had overseen Argentina's recovery from a severe economic crisis.
Mr Kirchner, who had a heart operation in September, died in El Calafate in southern Argentina.
The couple had faced some criticism within Argentina for appearing to get around presidential term limits by stepping aside for each other, and suffered a setback last year when their Peronist party lost its absolute majority in both houses of Argentina's Congress.
Health issues
A lawyer by training, Mr Kirchner served as mayor of Rio Gallegos, his hometown in Argentina's Patagonian south, before becoming governor of the wider region - the oil and gas-rich province of Santa Cruz.
He was elected president after Argentina had seen a series of presidents come and go following a major financial crisis in 2001.
Mr Kirchner died with his wife by his side after being admitted to hospital in El Calafate in the early hours of Wednesday morning, reports said.
Image caption The Kirchners were a dominant force in Argentine politics
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez announced three days of national mourning, and praised Mr Kirchner as someone who fought for international justice.
"I think the bells should chime in Venezuela and in the whole of Latin America and in all the places where they struggle for a world of equals, for a world of peace," said Mr Chavez.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her country mourned with all Argentines.
"They have lost a leader and the Kirchner family has lost a beloved husband and father. Today our thoughts and prayers are with the president and her children," she said.
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera said his death represented a "great loss" for Latin America.
"He was a man who dedicated his life to public service for the whole world," said Mr Pinera.
Mr Kirchner had been been dogged by ill-health since leaving office in 2007 and had undergone two major operations in 2010 alone.
In February Mr Kirchner had surgery to remove a blockage in his carotid artery, which carries blood to the brain.
He had emergency angioplasty in September, when he complained of numbness in his legs and routine tests revealed a blocked coronary artery.
Economic recovery
As president Mr Kirchner encouraged changes in Argentina's justice system that set in motion dozens of trials against members of the 1976-1983 military government, who were accused of human rights abuses.
He oversaw Argentina's recovery from the country's economic crisis in 2001 and 2002, and many Argentines credit him with fighting poverty and unemployment.
However, Mr Kirchner and his wife also faced allegations that they used their influence over local authorities to accumulate wealth.
The couple denied the claims. According to their own statements, the Kirchners made most of the money through property deals in Santa Cruz, the province Mr Kirchner governed before becoming president.
The politician was confrontational towards his opponents, and some critics called Mr Kirchner authoritarian.
He also sharply criticised big business, and his unorthodox economic policies were unpopular with investors.
While the Argentinian stock exchange was closed due to a public holiday on Wednesday, Argentine bond prices gained after the news of Mr Kirchner's death.
Since leaving office Mr Kirchner continued to remain politically active despite his health problems.
He had remained a member of the Argentine congress and secretary general of the South American regional grouping, Unasur.
With that role he maintained political influence beyond the borders of Argentina, playing a role in disputes and issues across South America, including in recent civil unrest in Ecuador.As we all know, Google's content display network, as well as many other successful setups rely on delivering targeted adverts to users to increase the chances of adverts falling in front of the desired audience.
I can't quote or link to any specific examples, but I've read many, many, many complaints from users online that keep seeing adverts for things they've searched for.
From a user experience point of view, what is the reason for this? Common sense surely dictates that someone that searches for "buy baseball bats online" might have an interest in buying a baseball bat online - and to an extent, other products relating to baseball. Surely it's a good thing that they see adverts relevant to their interests?
Why would seeing adverts for baseball goods/products not be desired over something completely random like movie rental or new dishwashers?
Edit:
Given that this question has become quite popular, I'd just like to point out (for the record!), that I don't enjoy my browsing experience being disrupted by adverts either; in fact, most of the time I do not even notice them (or when I do, depending on the advert it can give me a negative impression of the brand in question).Adam Smith argued that all it took to move a country from the lowest form of barbarism to the highest opulence was peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice. Now a lot of core institutions and public policies are embedded in a regime of peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice that we as scholars of political economy need to tease out and explain clearly. But it is not like Smith and Hume, or Hayek and Buchanan are silent on what that recipe for economic growth and prosperity is in terms of core institutions and public policy.
One of my fellow graduate students from the early 1980s Dan Mitchell does an excellent job in this video explaining the sources of economic prosperity. Dan has several videos online which are excellent tools for communicating basic economic policy. To my mind, Russ Roberts found his niche with podcasts, and Dan may have found his niche with these short video presentations. Perhaps President Obama can put down the blackberry for a minute and go to I-tunes and subscribe to EconTalk, or check out You Tube and watch the videos from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity. It would be time well spent.Congresswoman Introduces Bill to Protect Landlords of Compliant Medical Marijuana Businesses Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and seven initial co-sponsors introduce HR 6335 to stop unfair land grabs by DOJ
WASHINGTON, DC — Late Thursday, Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) and seven initial co-sponsors introduced HR 6335, the States’ Medical Marijuana Property Rights Protection Act, in an attempt to stop the seizure of property from landlords of state law-compliant medical marijuana businesses.
The introduction of HR 6335 comes less than a month after U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag served an asset forfeiture lawsuit against the landlord of Harborside, a medical marijuana dispensary in Rep. Lee’s district of Oakland. The Justice Department action was opposed by Rep. Lee, but it also sparked an outcry from local and state officials, including City Council members, the Oakland City Attorney, and the Board of Equalization.
“Yesterday, I introduced legislation to urge the Administration and the Congress to begin to align federal law to states’ laws that allow for safe access to medical marijuana for patients,” said Congresswoman Lee. “As a long-time supporter of the rights of patients to have safe and legal access to medicine that has been recommended to them by their doctors, this bill will provide clarification to California businesses and security for California patients.”
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“The people of California have made it legal for patients to have safe access to medicinal marijuana and, as a result, thousands of small business owners have invested millions of dollars in building their companies, creating jobs, and paying their taxes. We should be protecting and implementing the will of voters, not undermining our democracy by prosecuting small business owners who pay taxes and comply with the laws of their states in providing medicine to patients in need.”
For more than a year, the Justice Department has been threatening the landlords of state law-compliant medical marijuana dispensaries with asset forfeiture proceedings if they don’t promptly evict their tenants. More than 300 such letters have been sent to property owners across California as well as in Colorado and other medical marijuana states. Though the number of actual prosecutions is far fewer, the intimidation caused by the threats has resulted in the closure of more than 400 dispensaries in California.
“Property owners have become the most recent victims in the Justice Department’s escalating attack on medical marijuana,” said Steph Sherer, Executive Director of Americans for Safe Access, the country’s largest medical marijuana advocacy group. “However, let us not forget that with the closure of these dispensaries, thousands of patients are prevented from safely obtaining a medication that has already been deemed legal to use with a physician’s approval.”
HR 6335 will prohibit the federal government from using the civil asset forfeiture statue — 21 U.S.C. 881(7) — to go after real property owners if their tenants are in compliance with state medical marijuana law. At the same time, the new law would not prevent the Justice Department from using the civil asset forfeiture statue against real property owners in connection with conduct not sanctioned by state law. While property owners have an opportunity to retrieve seized property in civil court, they are not afforded many of the constitutional rights granted to criminal defendants, such as the right to an attorney and a jury trial. In addition, the burden of proof is on the property owner to show their innocence rather than the government having to prove their guilt.
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In addition to seeking the Harborside property, U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag has threatened similar action against a number of Bay Area property owners. Just in San Francisco alone, nine city-permitted dispensaries have been shut down in the past few months. This week, city and state officials joined a theatrical but somber funeral procession to Haag’s office in order to draw attention to the latest two facilities — HopeNet and Vapor Room — forced to close due to threatening letters sent by Haag to their landlords.
About 100 million people — or one in three Americans — live in states with medical marijuana laws. Currently, seventeen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws authorizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes.
Tags: Alaska medical marijuanaHolly Holm has a lot going against her as she prepares to face Ronda Rousey at UFC 193 next weekend, but luckily she has everything she could possibly need to get ready, including advice from arguably one of the greatest champions of all time.
Holm has trained for her entire career at the Jackson-Winkeljohn fight team alongside pound-for-pound king Jon Jones, who has been a training partner and mentor in many ways as the former boxer forged a new career as a mixed martial artist.
Holm has spoken several times in the past about the influence Jones has had on her style and approach to fighting, but as she approaches the biggest matchup of her career, he’s gone above and beyond to ensure that she’s ready for what lies ahead.
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"We have the same team and I love to hear his input because he’s obviously been able to take what our coaches teach and put it together perfectly," Holm said about Jones when speaking on a media conference call ahead of UFC 193.
"I love to hear his input on it and he has been very helpful and very instrumental in this fight camp, a lot of things that sometimes he’ll just brainstorm on that works really well for me, he’s been great, been a great help."
While Holm admits that Jones isn’t exactly the right size to serve as her sparring partner, he will often times attend her training sessions and offer advice that could be valuable when facing someone as dangerous as Rousey in the Octagon.
"There’s been times where he might even just come to my mitt session and have some ideas on things that he feels works with my fighting style and just ideas that he has. He’s got a very, very good mind about fighting and I always appreciate his advice," Holm said.
Beyond Jones’ influence, Holm has a benefit most fighters who have faced Rousey never had: a championship coaching staff with proven credentials to get her ready for battle.
Rousey has taken on a laundry list of top fighters during her day, but Holm happens to train under coaches like Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn, who have had a hand in no less than 11 fighters currently ranked in the top 10 of the UFC, not to mention at least four former champions in the promotion as well.
Jackson, Winkeljohn and the rest of their coaching staff, including striking coach Brandon Gibson, have put together a winning formula like few gyms worldwide and they hope to hand a healthy dose of that championship attitude to Holm when she faces Rousey this month in Melbourne, Australia.
"Having such great coaching and having such great teammates and having that, that sense of accomplishment and that champion mindset is huge. I love it; I’m blessed to have it," Holm said. "These guys are champions because they perform, but they have the help of the best coaching in the world. And so it all goes together.
"You can have all the best coaching in the world, but if you don’t have a fighter that wants to get in there and make something of it it’s the missing link. And if you have a fighter that wants it but doesn’t have the right guidance then there’s a missing link. So we have it all at the gym. The best coaches, the best training partners, and the best advice, and that means a lot.
In a strange way, Holm says working around so many top fighters can actually be a little intimidating because everyone surrounding her is at an elite level. Holm is preparing for her own title fight but her teammates Carlos Condit and Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone both have the same opportunity coming up in December and January while others like Jones and Andrei Arlovski hope to be in those same situations in 2016 as well.
A watchful eye ultimately makes Holm even more conscious about everything she’s doing right and wrong in the gym as she strives for perfection alongside her teammates. That pursuit to be the best could be a key element when Holm faces Rousey with the title on the line.
"Sometimes it’s overwhelming because they’re all actually, they’re watching sparring and our gym is very busy. We’ll have 20 and 60 people training at the same time, you have these champions watching over you sparring. It’s like, oh man, it’s like a test all the time, but I like it because it makes it real," Holm said.
"It makes the fight real, and I like that they’re watching. It makes me want to perform right, and I love having the coaches really over me because I want to do what they’re teaching me. I want to perform, so it’s awesome being part of it."Emily Geraghty is a DIY writer and video specialist for ViralNova. Previous to ViralNova, she worked in digital content and video production for MTV, Allure, Glamour and LogoTV, as well as reality television development. In her free time she runs the fashion blog That Cheap Bitch.com, a blog about thrift store shopping and inexpensive beauty trends.
After a cold, harsh winter, there's nothing more satisfying than watching flowers and greenery blossom in your backyard. April showers bring May flowers, and now that those flowers are here, it's time to step up your gardening game! With the 20 DIY garden ideas below, you can take your garden from drab to fab in no time. The hard part will be deciding which one you'll try first!
1. Don't throw away that old tree stump. Turn it into a cool, mini garden instead.
2. Cinder blocks make for a great garden wall, and you can plant even more things inside of them.
3. Plant herbs in old wine boxes for a rustic look.
4. Make stepping stones to add some one-of-a-kind flair to your garden.
Get the tutorial here.
5. Instead of filling up an entire planter with potting soil, stuff the bottom with milk jugs.
6. Make all-natural bug repellant to keep insects from eating your plants.
Get the recipe here.
7. Make cute concrete garden mushrooms.
Learn how to make these here.
8. Make a rain barrel to repurpose water.
It looks complicated, but it's actually quite simple.
9. You can make a garden fountain out of pretty much anything with these instructions.
10. Turn old tires into cool planters.
11. I'm not sure what these little DIY garden creatures are, but they sure are cute.
Learn how to make your own colony of garden creatures here.
12. Make a vertical garden with tiny planters mounted on a fence.
13. Attract beautiful butterflies to your garden with a special feeder.
Read more about this here.
14. Make a planter and birdbath combo with this simple tutorial.
15. With succulents or seeds, an antique typewriter becomes a unique garden display.
16. You can also plant greenery in old kids' toys.
17. If you live in an arid climate, this planted water bottle trick will help keep your garden efficiently hydrated.
Read how it works here.
18. Chicken wire and spray paint create these cool garden decorations.
19. Turn vintage glass into light-catching garden decor.
20. This hanging garden table is made from pallets, and it folds up!
Find out how to make it here!
I love the way those garden decorations made of chicken wire and spray paint look. I don't have a lot of space in my yard to work with, so I'm going to have a hard time narrowing down which ideas I want to try. Which one of these DIY projects inspired you?Craig Young has taken time out from Ireland duties © Getty Images
Ireland's seam bowler Craig Young has joined Hampshire on a short-term loan deal in their first response to a crippling early-season injury crisis.
Young, 26, will get an outing in Hampshire's Second XI Championship match against Somerset at the Ageas Bowl, starting on Monday, in the hope of forcing himself into contention for the home Championship match against Middlesex on May 1.
Young was previously on the books at Sussex but had a frustrating time with injuries and never graduated beyond 2nd XI cricket. He has played 24 times for Ireland across three formats.
Ireland coach John Bracewell said: "Craig will continue his progression as one of Ireland's front-line bowlers after a very good spell, especially over the last 12 months.
"With the North-West Warriors not having any championship cricket until late May and Ireland not in action until June, we feel the timing is ideal for Craig and hope he can aid Hampshire's significant injury problems.''
Young said: "The request has come from completely left field. But it's great to be given a chance, which I hope I can grab with both hands."
Two years ago, he suggested that he had the pace and bounce to fill the void left for Ireland by Boyd Rankin. He took five wickets on ODI debut, against Scotland, and was Ireland's top wicket-taker on a World Cup acclimatisation tour in Australia and New Zealand.
Hampshire's current injury crisis includes fast-bowler Fidel Edwards, who suffered a fractured ankle at Headingley this week whilst fellow seamers Reece Topley, Gareth Berg and Ryan Stevenson are all still not available for selection due to injury.
Hampshire's director of cricket Giles White told The Echo: "Craig comes as a recommendation from John Bracewell and, in light of the current injury problems we have, this gives us a good opportunity to take a closer look at him."
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Traditionally, sending money to friends and family abroad is done through money transfer services such as Western Union or WorldRemit. Yet, a small handful of companies are exerting power over the global remittance industry by charging high fees on money sent abroad. By doing so, they are cutting off a lifeline for countries that are tackling economic problems.
In 2016, official recorded remittances to developing countries amounted to $429 billion. This was a 2.4 percent drop compared to the $440 billion generated in 2015, according to the World Bank. Contributing factors to the decline were low oil prices, weak economic growth in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries in addition to a slow growth in Europe.
As a consequence, major remittance-receiving countries such as India saw a sharp decline in flows. India, which is the biggest remittance receiver, saw inflows amounting to $62.7 billion in 2016. That’s a decrease of 8.9 percent from the $68.9 billion received in 2015. Sub-Saharan Africa witnessed a decline of 6.1 percent to $33 billion in 2016, whereas Europe was affected for the third year in a row. Remittance flows contracted by an estimated 4.6 percent to $38 billion.
The average transfer fee is nearly 20 percent from South Africa among the G20 countries [PDF]. From the group of G8 rich countries, it’s at 14 percent. Japan is reportedly the most expensive to send money from, whereas Russia is the cheapest. Yet, there is a solution: sending remittance payments through bitcoin.
Speaking to Coin Journal, Josh Gordon-Blake, vice president of Global Partnerships at Pangea, a mobile-centric remittance platform, said that remittance senders don’t care about cryptocurrencies or the technology behind their transactions. The key factors for them are knowing how fast, safe and affordable it is to put money in the hands of their loved ones.
“Bitcoin can improve the customer’s remittance experience by increasing the speed and reducing the cost of remittances,” Gordon-Blake said.
Established in 2014, Pangea, a Chicago-based mobile remittance service and app, was set up with the aim of making money transfers secure, simple and fair. With receivers in 15 active countries within Asia and Latin America, and the most volume sent from the U.S. to Mexico, Gordon-Blake states that the company is always looking for any edge that will improve the user experience.
“We’re keeping our eye on bitcoin and have taken an interest in it because of the wide range of benefits it could provide,” he said. “We take pride in the fact that we offer instant transfers for a low, flat fee, and when bitcoin is ready to help Pangea’s customers, we will be ready to adopt the technology.”
By 2030, research indicates that bitcoin will become the sixth largest global reserve currency. Earlier this month, the digital currency surpassed $4,300 achieving yet another all-time high. With a market cap just under $72 billion and having quadrupled its value since the beginning of the year, it’s hard to ignore bitcoin’s dominance.
It is because of the digital currency’s increased popularity and adoption that Gordon-Blake believes that bitcoin will improve the customer’s remittance experience.
In addition to offering a faster and cheaper service, the underlying infrastructure of bitcoin would allow a remittance company to focus on other elements of the user experience. These include better tracking tools, culturally relevant user interfaces and other financial products, states Gordon-Blake.
“The end result should be that instant low-cost transfers will be table stakes and that the millions of migrant workers around the world that send remittance will begin to enjoy a first class user experience,” he said.
Challenges, though, remain. Gordon-Blake states that until consumers trust bitcoin as a currency in the same manner that they trust fiat currencies, there won’t be much demand for bitcoin remittance.
“However, even if bitcoin remittances are unlikely to be a consumer success in the near term, remittance companies that can harness bitcoin as a technology will have a material customer benefit to bring to the market,” he concluded.
Pangea have now launched across nine new termination countries across Asia as the company continues to roll out new products and features to new customers.In Newsweek: Voters don’t find the idea of a hung Parliament as disastrous as they used to.
Nick Clegg
An officer candidate being interviewed for a posting on the British general staff was once asked to define the role of cavalry in modern warfare. He replied that it was to lend some color and dash to what would otherwise be a somewhat dreary and sordid occasion. Nick Clegg, the leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, is the equivalent of the cavalry in the case of Thursday’s British general election. Until his eruption onto the scene, the muddy battlefield was a dull trench war between two heavily armored divisions, each of them wearily familiar with the tactics and strategy of the other.
Years ago, when I toiled as a columnist for The Nation, Nick Clegg was my intern. (So, for that matter, was Edward Miliband, Gordon Brown’s minister for energy and climate change and brother of Brown’s most likely replacement, Foreign Secretary David Miliband.) I have done my best to trade on this mentoring relationship with power, to little avail. Clegg worked for me in the magazine’s New York offices while I was writing from Washington, so our direct contact was limited. What I chiefly remember, apart from his now-famous personal charm, was how “European” he was. His parentage was partly Dutch and partly Russian. He has since married a Spanish woman and has three children with Spanish names. And, of course, his party is the one most closely identified with the British aspiration to full British engagement in the European Union. This is the strength and the weakness of his position, and of his party.
I wrote last week of the way in which European peoples are looking at one another sidelong (and not in a nice way) since the reduction of the Greek economy to an abject state of beggary and dependence. If you get a chance, look at what the German tabloid press is saying about the Greeks: It shows the European spirit in a pretty tattered and emaciated state. And, while it was inevitable that Gordon Brown’s contents-under-pressure boorishness would one day disclose itself in some ugly manner right in front of the electorate, as happened last week, it wasn’t at all a certainty that on the question at issue he would happen to be more right than wrong. It was universally said that the annoying old lady who cornered him in the street was upset about “immigration.” For decades, this has been a code word for working-class resentment at the arrival of former colonial subjects from the Caribbean and Asia, the big recruiting topic of the post-Nazi British National Party, which has also been making inroads in some traditional Labor seats. But this woman was exercised by the huge number of white and blue-eyed Poles who had come to England not to settle but as “guest workers” in the construction and electrical sectors. The prime minister was quite right to remind her that under the same terms of free movement within the European Union, millions of British people had also taken advantage of the right to work on the continent.
There’s a whole sector of the British professional class that probably knows Tuscany and Provence better than it knows large areas of post-industrial Britain. But this “Europeanized” layer is not large enough to swing an election, especially at a time when the stupendous size of Britain’s debt puts it at risk from the same continentwide factors that have ruined the Greek economy. This, in turn, is why some of those who rate bonds have been warning that a so-called hung Parliament, unable to arrive at swift or difficult decisions, would endanger the stability of sterling and cause a crisis of confidence in Britain’s decisive financial system. And a hung Parliament is precisely the contingency that Nick Clegg’s sudden emergence makes many times more likely.
This should not have come as such a surprise. If you exempt the appeal of strictly local nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, British society is actually a three-party system stitched and corseted into a two-party duopoly. The duopoly is reinforced by the apportionment of seats in Parliament, which fails to reflect the number of votes cast for each party and instead bases itself on a winner-take-all regime. About once every generation this breaks down. In the mid-1970s, Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal Party suddenly won 6 million votes and upset the re-election plans of Edward Heath’s Tories. Those Liberal ballots were votes cast, in part, as an oblique demand for proportional representation. On that occasion, though Heath had not exactly been defeated, as the incumbent he could be said to have lost much more than he had won, and he had to go. The same harsh logic will face Gordon Brown later this week if his party is anything but convinc |
and deploy software by running multiple x86-based Windows, Linux, and other operating systems simultaneously on the same PC.
You can replicate server, desktop, and tablet environments in a virtual machine and allocate multiple processor cores, gigabytes of main memory and graphics memory to each virtual machine, whether the virtual machine resides on a personal PC or on a private enterprise cloud.
For more information, see the broader VMware Workstation Pro documentation or specifically the VMware Workstation 12 Pro Documentation Center.
What's New
This release of VMware Workstation 12 Pro addresses an out-of-bounds memory access vulnerability related to the drag-and-drop feature. This may allow a guest to execute code on the operating system that runs VMware Workstation 12 Pro. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project has assigned the identifier CVE-2016-7461 to this issue.
Prior Releases
Features and Known Issues from prior releases of VMware Workstation Pro are described in the release notes for each release. To view release notes for prior releases of VMware Workstation 12 Pro, click the following links:The Australian two dollar coin is the highest-denomination coin of the Australian dollar. It was first issued on 20 June 1988, having been in planning since the mid-1970s. It replaced the Australian two-dollar note due to having a longer circulatory life.[1]
The one dollar and two dollar coins are legal tender up to the sum of not exceeding 10 times the face value of the coin concerned.[2]
Design [ edit ]
In accordance with all other Australian coins, the obverse features the portrait of the reigning monarch, who during the lifetime of the coin has only been Queen Elizabeth II. From 1988 to 1998 the portrait of her was by Raphael Maklouf before being replaced in the following year by one sculpted by Ian Rank-Broadley.[3]
Designed by Horst Hahne, the reverse depicts an Aboriginal Elder, inspired by an Ainslie Roberts drawing of Gwoya Jungarai, known as One Pound Jimmy.[4][5] However, the design is not intended to depict any person in particular.[6] The design also incorporates the Southern Cross and native grasstrees. The initials of its designer, Horst Hahne, were removed from the design from 1990 onwards.[1]
All two-dollar coins have been struck at the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra. 160.9 million coins were minted in the first year of issue.[5] It has been issued in all years since except 1991,[5] with an average mintage of 22 million coins per annum from 1989 to 2008.
The 2012 Remembrance reverse $2 coin.
In 2012, the Australian mint released the first ever different designed 2 dollar coin. It features a poppy flower, with the words Lest we Forget and Remembrance Day in the background of the coin. There had been no commemorative designs for this issue, until the 2012 Remembrance coin was minted. Along with the 2012 Remembrance coin was a coin with the same text and image but the centre poppy was red with a black centre. It was therefore the first coloured circulating coin in Australia.
On 21 June 2013, a third commemorative 2 dollar coin was launched by the Royal Australian Mint. This coin, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, featured a purple circle bordering St Edward's Crown.[7]
As a part of the 100 years of Anzac Day a coin programme launched by the Royal Australian Mint, two separate coloured coins were released. The first was released in 2014, it featured two green circles in the middle of the coin and a dove in the centre. The word Remembrance was stretched across the top of the coin. In 2015, the fourth circulating coloured coin in Australia was released. It includes red stripes much like the 2013 Queen Coronation coin. It also features five crosses amongst poppies and the words Lest we Forget in the centre. A fifth coin was also released in 2015. It is sunset orange and it features a sun in the centre with birds and the Flanders Field poem in the background.
In 2016 a commemorative coin was issued for the Rio Olympic Games. Five Coins were issued for circulation via Woolworths and were made available in packs of the 5 coins on the 27 July 2016. A Paralympic Games coin was issued on the 22 August 2016.[8]
When the coin was introduced there were complaints that the coin was too small for its value and was easily lost, or counterfeited by placing two 5 cent pieces together and colouring them gold.[citation needed] However, with an uninterrupted milling on the 5 cent and the 2 dollars having 5 grooves in 4 lots separated by 7mm length of the side, identification is easy. It has the same size and milling as the 10 Swedish kronor.
Its smaller size in comparison to the $1 coin can lead to confusion for visitors from outside Australia.
Minting figures [ edit ]
The coin has only been struck at the Royal Australian Mint in Canberra, the nation's capital. The only year without production was 1991 (due to the large amount issued for the coin's introduction in 1988).[1]
Year Mintage 1988* 160,900,000 1989* 31,600,000 1990 10,300,000 1991 - 1992 15,500,000 1993 4,900,000 1994 22,100,000 1995 15,500,000 1996 13,900,000 1997 19,000,000 1998 8,700,000 1999 27,300,000 2000 5,700,000 2001 35,600,000 2002 29,700,000 2003 13,700,000 2004 20,000,000 2005 45,500,000 2006 40,500,000 2007 26,000,000 2008 47,000,000 2009 74,500,000 2010 36,500,000 2011 1,800,000 2012 5,900,000 2013 35,100,000 2014 39,900,000 2015 22,000,000 2016 12,900,000 "*" denotes that coins were minted with the designer's initials References: [9]
Commemorative coins [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Ian W. Pitt, ed. (2000). Renniks Australian Coin and Banknote Values (19th ed.). Chippendale, NSW: Renniks Publications. ISBN 978-0-9585574-4-3.For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium,” which ran in the December 17th issue of The New Yorker, documents the people who were involved and what they did.
Dr. Van Murray Sim, the founder of Edgewood Arsenal’s program of clinical research on psychochemicals, was a man of deep contradictions. He was a Navy veteran, but he worked at the Army post as a civilian. For the doctors who worked with him, he was like Dr. Strangelove; he was a leader; he was the “Mengele of Edgewood”; he was a good old soul. Sim could be manipulative and vengeful, ethically shortsighted, incoherently rambling, rashly slipshod in his methods, but he was also fearless and ambitious and devoted to chemical-warfare research. He was gargantuan—his body exuded forcefulness, like an oversized rook on a chessboard—but he was willing to allow himself to be rendered helpless. In 1959, he was the first person to be given VX, a highly lethal nerve agent. As the drug began to take effect, Sim became irrational and started to thrash around. “I was having difficulty with vision, seeing—a distortion of vision, sweating, tremors, nausea, vomiting,” he later recalled. His face grew pale. He eventually stopped talking and descended into a world of his own imaginings.
Not everything that Sim sampled was so deadly; he also kept unauthorized vials of Demerol, which he used habitually, in his travel case. He had taken LSD several times, and also Red Oil, a highly potent synthetic version of marijuana. The drugs were being tested at the arsenal for use in “psychochemical warfare”—a concept, developed at Edgewood in the nineteen-forties, that entailed a search for mentally incapacitating chemicals to replace guns and grenades on the battlefield. Sim once mixed a milligram of crystallized psilocybin—a drug found in hallucinogenic mushrooms—with water and drank it as if it were lemonade. He saw people nearby turn sickly green. “I feel very light, almost weightless,” he pronounced. “And, for me, that’s quite a trick.”
These self-experiments—with their egocentricity and their daring—helped give Sim the status of a minor military legend. At the time, the clinical research at Edgewood was conducted on soldier volunteers, recruited from around the country. “He became a guinea pig,” a general testified before Congress in 1959. “He got pushed around by the other doctors just as any other volunteer would. And once he entered that chain of events he was no longer the head of the laboratory. He was just a little boy in a cage.”
The testimony was meant to underscore Sim’s sacrifice. And yet, even as Sim was being heralded before Congress, he was running a series of remarkable LSD experiments, designed to administer drugs to people who had no idea that they were getting them. In this way, Sim helped guide the arsenal’s clinical research into the murky world of intelligence, interrogation, even torture. The work was given a special code name, Material Testing Program EA 1729. It was carefully kept secret, even on the grounds of the arsenal.
Sim began to pursue the use of psychochemicals for intelligence purposes soon after he arrived at Edgewood, in 1956. That February, he travelled to New York, to meet with Sidney Malitz, the acting chief of psychiatric research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Edgewood periodically sent samples of drugs to the institute for testing on patients and volunteers, each chemical marked with an Edgewood Arsenal, or EA, code. In 1953, a catastrophic amount of EA 1298—a version of mescaline—had been injected into a patient named Harold Blauer, who had a violent reaction: shock, coma, and then death. Blauer, a professional tennis player, had been admitted to the institute for depression, and was never told that he was part of a military experiment. The researchers at the institute were scarcely better informed. One later confessed, “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.” At Edgewood, Blauer’s death was treated as a case study in toxicity. “This lead will be pursued,” an official at the arsenal noted.
Sim knew of the death—an account of the case was kept in a sealed file that only he had the authority to open—but he maintained a relationship with the institute. By the time he met with Malitz in New York, the Army was interested primarily in LSD—known as EA 1729. Malitz agreed to test LSD and similar drugs on volunteers or “selected patients,” in order to determine how people would react during phony interrogations. He offered to use hypnosis to plant secrets in subjects’ minds. Then, he said, “one of the hallucinogens will be administered and an attempt made to see if the patient will reveal the information.”
Sim indicated that he would consider the offer. Three months later, he obtained permission to test psychochemicals at the arsenal itself. LSD’s effects were still little understood; as Sim acknowledged, it was possible to become “smothered by the preponderance of conflicting reports.” Within that morass, there was evidence that the drug posed genuine health risks. “The observations of certain British investigations on normal volunteers and reliable reports from their colleagues suggest that during acute LSD intoxication the subject is a potential danger to himself and to others,” Sim wrote in an early report. “In some instances a delayed and exceptionally severe response may take place and be followed by serious after-effects lasting several days.”
Researchers at Edgewood began by conducting basic studies. Joseph Bertino, who served as a Medical Corps officer at Edgewood from 1956 to 1958, joined three other researchers to explore LSD’s effect at incrementally higher doses. Measuring the drug in micrograms per kilogram, or mcg/kg, they worked their way up to 16 mcg/kg—a huge amount, at which subjects could not even repeat a short sentence, exhibited signs of hypertension, and occasionally vomited or hyperventilated. One man saw “horrible green-eyed monsters” everywhere; another felt “a constant flow of electricity throughout his body.” Bertino told me that careful psychological screening of subjects before these kinds of tests prevented serious reactions, but that there were instances at the arsenal of “subjects who were kind of slightly paranoid to start with who became psychotic.”
The drug was unpredictable. “We could give exactly the same dose of a drug that was produced in the chem lab—so it was clean and absolutely the same—and we could see absolutely tremendous differences in the reactions of the volunteers,” a former Edgewood staff member recalled. Even after the experiments, some subjects demonstrated unusual behavior. Another former member of the Medical Corps, who used to bunk with the volunteers, told me that he woke up one night to find one of the men holding a hospital scale over his head. “He didn’t have a clue,” he recalled. By luck, he was not crushed. He calmed the soldier down and guided him back to his bunk.
In 1957, Sim began talking with the Army Intelligence Board about researching LSD in a series of “practical experiments.” The goal of psychochemical warfare is simply to disable one’s enemy. But to use a drug in interrogation one has to penetrate the individual mind—not shut it down but force it open—and an enemy who knew the effects of a drug might be better able to resist it. At Edgewood, it was deemed important to conduct LSD tests on people who were provided with no information about what the drug would do. In 1958, a soldier who had come to the arsenal thinking that he would be testing gas masks was dosed with LSD during an interview with a doctor, who casually sipped some water and encouraged him to do the same. Some soldiers reacted with confusion; one lunged at an officer, not knowing why.
Sim oversaw tests designed to gauge whether the drug could make deception more easily detectable by polygraph, believing that it would help reveal lies, but ultimately he was forced to concede that the experiments were inconclusive. A Medical Corps officer who was stationed at Edgewood in 1958 told me, “These were confabulations of military persons who thought that psychedelic drugs could loosen tongues and spill military secrets.” Occasionally, the C.I.A. or senior military intelligence officers would send operatives to the arsenal to be given LSD and then questioned. Some of the tests were intended to see how soldiers would perform; some were designed to prepare them in the event that a Soviet operative secretly dosed them. In one experiment, intelligence specialists were blindfolded and placed in an isolation chamber. The men—some of whom had been told nothing about the drug’s effects—became tense and anxious, and quickly became unable to bear the isolation. When they emerged, they were subjected to hostile questioning. All agreed that the threat of return to isolation would constitute a very effective form of duress.
Sim viewed the experiments as promising. “You do lose your will,” he testified in Congress. But some of the doctors at the arsenal were deeply troubled. Colonel Albert Dreisbach, the ranking Medical Corps officer in those early years, struggled with his conscience as he assisted Sim. Dreisbach’s son, a minister, later explained, “Years after my father’s death, I learned that he had sought psychiatric counsel to deal with the internal conflict resulting from his oath as an officer to follow orders versus his previous oath as a doctor of medicine.”
Nevertheless, the testing continued. In 1958, Tony Manheim was working as a personnel clerk at Fort Holabird, an intelligence center in Maryland, when he signed up for a three-day drug trial at Edgewood. He and a dozen other men were bused to the arsenal, and, after a day of medical and psychological tests, they were invited to unwind at a cocktail party. Suddenly, one of the officers started making a disturbance. “He went berserk,” Manheim told me. “He began yelling and screaming.” Manheim began to notice something different in himself, too. “I was feeling isolated and paranoid,” he told me. “I felt threatened.” White-coated doctors were also at the party, and he realized that the drinks he and the others were given had been laced with a drug; years later, he learned that it was LSD. Manheim was separated from the other men and led to an interrogation room for questioning. Even though he was feeling fearful, he did not believe that he would be harmed. “I thought it was playacting; it was preposterous and silly,” he recalled. “I didn’t think it was going to get the military what it was looking for.”
Inevitably, Sim recognized, research of this kind would hit an impermeable ceiling at the arsenal. Just about everyone at Edgewood knew that drugs were tested there, and might be capable of figuring out what was happening if he suddenly felt strange. In recommendations to the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Sim argued that if the LSD tests were moved off the arsenal this ceiling could be breached. The drug, he said, was ready for use “in real situations on an experimental basis.”
Army intelligence officials began discussing the “desirability” of covertly dosing people with LSD during actual interrogations. Although Sim’s staff had assured them that LSD produced no irreversible changes in normal people, none of the Edgewood subjects had been monitored long enough to make such an assessment. Moreover, how could one be sure that an unwitting subject was not latently schizophrenic, or suffering from some other significant medical problem? The intelligence officials expressed concern that in such cases LSD, coupled with the stress of a real interrogation, could cause “chemically induced psychosis in chronic form,” or other permanent adverse effects. Here, too, Sim and his personnel assured them that the risk was slight. In the end, the intelligence command agreed to the interrogations—so long as the conditions were carefully controlled and the subjects were not American.
On December 7, 1960, Sim held a briefing with the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, in which he elaborated plans for overseas LSD trials, and it was agreed that they would be conducted in Europe, with the participation of European intelligence agencies. No one had illusions about the moral ambiguities of the program. The United States faced a ruthless adversary—one that “condones any kind of coercion or violence for intelligence purposes,” an Army report noted—and extending the meticulous protections that Americans enjoyed to enemies, or even to suspected enemies, was regarded as an unaffordable luxury. The officers involved told themselves, “In intelligence, the stakes involved and the interests of national security may permit a more tolerant interpretation of moral-ethical values.”
Insisting that the non-American subjects be given medical evaluations before experiments were conducted, even if a ruse was needed, the Army intelligence command began to prepare for operational trials in Europe and, later, in the Far East. Sixteen unsuspecting people would be drugged, without ever being told that they were part of a test. Such were the rules of the Cold War.
The Army hurriedly assembled a secret three-man unit, which was named the Special Purpose Team: an officer from Army intelligence, a doctor from the Medical Corps, and an officer from Edgewood. Major Ernest Robert Clovis, a chemist and psychologist who had worked closely with Sim on much of the Army’s LSD research, was chosen to represent Edgewood. Clovis was a cryptic presence at the arsenal; in fact, Clovis was not even his real name—he had changed it from Kolovos. He was taciturn and, some say, fiercely intelligent. His classic military bearing—he was of medium build, trim, with short hair that he kept greased and sharply parted—belied an idiosyncratic personality. He kept an apothecary’s cabinet filled with jars and vials; one, labelled “Putrescence,” contained a substance that smelled like rotting flesh, which he apparently thought could serve as a nonlethal weapon. A retired officer who knew him told me, “I think he was taking drugs like amphetamines and spinning around his quarters like a washing machine.”
Clovis was interested in perception, and could philosophize at length on the meaning of the color brown, but mostly he was a Cold Warrior. He had served in Korea, and, in an atmosphere defined by doctors uninterested in military protocol, this set him apart. “He was very much concerned with the fact that people didn’t appreciate what it was like to be in combat, what happened to his buddies,” Ed Stearns, a psychologist who worked with him at Edgewood, recalled. “He had a chip on his shoulder. But he was a well-trained experimental psychologist, and he had all sorts of ideas for trying things. One vivid memory stayed with me all these years. Auditory scientists had been playing with what was called ‘delayed auditory feedback,’ where you spoke into a microphone and you heard yourself on earphones some milliseconds after you spoke, and I remember Clovis with his earphones, shouting, trying to read a passage. It is a very difficult thing to do.” He apparently hoped that the test could be used to learn if a soldier or official had been covertly drugged.
On April 28, 1961, Clovis and the two other team members flew to Europe for ninety days. Their mission, called Operation THIRD CHANCE, was to dose unwitting people with LSD and measure the results. In preparation, the team reviewed dossiers on foreign intelligence assets who were suspected of espionage or of filing questionable reports. The medical officer, Lieutenant Colonel David MacQuigg, evaluated the physical health of the candidates, to the extent that it had been documented; Clovis met with their American handlers to build psychological profiles; and the Army intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel William Jacobson, looked for tools to use in interrogation, such as discrepancies in previous testimony, evidence of dissembling, and weaknesses, or “soft spots,” where the assets could be emotionally worn down or broken by harassment.
In each country, the team joined with local operatives and methodically rehearsed scenarios to lure subjects to a spot where they could be given the LSD and interrogated. As Jacobson later noted, the team even memorized scripts for “verbal gambits” that would steer the interrogation in a preferred direction. He recalled that “a variety of devices for stressing the subject” were prepared, although he did not say what those were. And since the team did not want to alienate an asset who might turn out to be valuable, the members rehearsed a “reconciliation pitch” to assuage any resentment that the test caused.
No two experiments were the same, but there were commonalities. Typically, the Special Purpose Team sought out a safe house—an accommodation that was unknown to Soviet operatives, or had no other intelligence value. Once the subject arrived, agents would initiate casual banter in the living room, where, hours earlier, Clovis had prepared the drug. He had brought over from Edgewood powdered LSD, which he would use to dust a drinking glass— leaving upon it “an imperceptible dry residue.” Once the test subject was made comfortable, a member of the Special Purpose Team would offer everyone refreshments. When subjects were dosed in soda or juice, the team member made a show of pouring the drinks from the same bottle. If alcohol was served, LSD was slipped into a cocktail after several rounds, while the interrogators sipped “cold tea”—presumably passed off as whiskey—or slowly nursed their drinks.
The officers watched and waited for the drug to take effect, and then employed a verbal gambit to direct the test subject into a room with a polygraph. Using the years of LSD research that Van Sim had helped orchestrate at Edgewood, the response time of the drug could be charted with reasonable accuracy. As the LSD achieved its peak effect, the interrogators’ techniques grew increasingly harsh, to cause maximum anxiety and fear. Jacobson noted that there would be “verbal degradation and bodily discomfort,” and threats against the subject’s life. In two cases, the team suggested to subjects that their “mental condition had been induced and would be a permanent state unless they coöperated.” The questioning would last as long as the drug was effective: eight hours, or possibly more.
The members of the Special Purpose Team chose ten subjects, in various European countries. Clovis maintained the posture of a scientist, charting the many variables, tinkering with doses, and making psychological observations. He carefully documented the reactions, which ranged from the expected (“frightened, dependent”) to severe (“defeated, hopeless”). Some of the men appeared to be innocent of any wrongdoing. An intelligence asset in Germany who had access to sensitive documents had presented some difficulties to his handlers, and so was nominated for a test. The LSD-enhanced interrogation “gained admissions from the subject which explained most of his handling difficulties,” but the man insisted that he was not a spy.
There were also some unexplained reactions, affirming LSD’s capacity to trigger infinite behavioral variation. One subject seemed to be immune to the drug—an “object lesson in humility,” Jacobson observed. The team began to fear that someone had given the man a warning, or that he had been trained in countermeasures to LSD, suggesting that the whole operation was somehow “compromised to the opposition.” Several weeks later, the team found a pretext to covertly slip him LSD again, this time at more than twice the first dose. The reaction was similar: scarcely any effect.
In France, the team abandoned the decision to test only foreigners, and surreptitiously gave LSD to Private James Thornwell, a soldier from South Carolina who worked as a clerk at an American military-communications station in Orléans. Thornwell, the only African-American soldier at the station, had a contentious relationship with his superior and had recently been demoted; for these reasons, it appears, he was suspected of stealing a hundred and seventy-two classified documents that had gone missing. For ninety-nine days, members of the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps had interrogated Thornwell continuously. Thornwell later recalled being confined to a small room, where he was kept awake for long stretches and forbidden access to food, water, or a toilet; interrogators told him, “If you talk, you get your physical needs taken care of.” He was beaten, and attacked with racial epithets; but he was also told that his interrogators were there to protect him from white soldiers trying to hunt him down, or from assassins working for French intelligence. Thornwell was convinced that he was fighting a war for his own mind. When he could not hold himself any longer, he defecated on an interrogator’s desk. To withstand the isolation, he played imaginary chess on a wall, and dictated an improvised novel, just to hear a human voice. But as the days went by he was pulled deeper into a psychological void. According to a report drafted by a psychiatrist Thornwell saw years later, “He became unsure of who he was, where he was, and why all of this was happening.”
At some point, Thornwell admitted to taking some of the classified documents—an admission that he later said he made up in order to end his suffering. But what he said did not add up: once, he claimed to have burned some of the classified documents; another time, he said that he tossed them all into the Loire. (More than fifty of the documents had been discovered on the riverbank.) He agreed to be questioned under sodium pentothal, saying that he had nothing to hide; the officers found the results inconclusive. He agreed to hypnosis, and was told that if he lied he would feel pinpricks across his body. When he withheld some information about his life, he felt millions of pins tearing into his skin and in his brain, and screamed in agony. But he said nothing more conclusive about the documents.
At last, after three months of trauma, Thornwell was released, but the Army wasn’t done with him. An evaluation by a military psychiatrist found—unsurprisingly, after his ordeal—that Thornwell exhibited an “antisocial personality” with “paranoid trends.” Yet, even though the psychiatrist didn’t believe that Thornwell had “voluntarily compromised government secret information,” he recommended that the experimental interrogations continue. Hypnosis would not work on such a man, he wrote, but “the tension method,” in combination with “tension-producing drugs,” would be successful. This is where the Special Purpose Team came in.
Shortly after Thornwell was let go—maybe even that same day—he met a man who called himself Fusfield. After introducing himself as a lawyer, Fusfield told Thornwell that he was in grave danger, and that he could help. Thornwell could never recall precisely what happened after his lengthy confinement, but he remembered that the two men had lunch, and then Fusfield drove him to a remote mill house in the wooded French countryside. Along the way, a car began to pursue them. Fusfield told Thornwell that assassins working for the French government had tracked them down. By the time they reached the house—a lone rustic structure by a river—Thornwell’s sense of reality had begun to warp. The house’s interior appeared to be covered with spiderwebs, and he found himself seated at a desk, facing a small man with pallid green skin. The man, keeping his hands under the table, explained that he and Fusfield had taken tremendous risks to help him, but, before they could take any more, they needed to be able to trust him—they needed to know what had happened to the documents.
Thornwell, weakened by his relentless isolation, knew that he was not himself. “My head was full of the universe,” he later told his psychiatrist. “Meteorites were burning inside my head, stars shooting off.” He started feeling intense pain and confusion. Time and space tore apart. One moment, it seemed, he was seated at the desk; at another moment, his body had been thrown across the room, and he was being violently crushed against a wall. Suddenly again, he was back in his chair, facing the ashen, alien-like man across the desk, as if he had never left. Thornwell didn’t understand LSD, or even that he had been drugged; he had no framework for comprehending what was happening to him. His nerves felt as though electric current were coursing through them, and he became convinced that a magnet was keeping him locked in the chair—that he was being electrocuted through it. He struggled to get up, but the man at the desk told him to sit, and he found that he could not disobey: he had lost any sense that the chair was separate from his body. Thornwell passed out. When he awoke, the following morning, he was in Fusfield’s car again, heading back to Orléans. He looked at Fusfield, and he saw the same ghoulish skin that the man behind the desk had. Fusfield handed him a piece of fruit. Then he let him go.
Throughout Thornwell’s interrogation, the members of the Special Purpose Team drew his attention to the changes in his perception, and indicated that they had the power to make him permanently insane. After he was let go, he forever had to question whether he had been fundamentally altered. “I felt like my mind was being erased,” he said later. Back in the United States, Thornwell could not speak of his experience without descending into hysterical fits of tears—and, even if he could, who would believe him? He drifted in and out of jobs and relationships. Depressed, and deeply suspicious of the people around him, he went for long periods without speaking—until he feared that he would lose the ability altogether—and once refused to see anyone but his doctor for nearly six months. “The irony is that the Army interrogation techniques forced upon him a tortuous state of isolation,” his psychiatrist noted. “And the legacy of this is that he now imposes this upon himself.” In 1980, two senators from South Carolina, moved by Thornwell’s story, succeeded in obtaining a private congressional bill for him. Thornwell was awarded six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “But he still struggled,” his lawyer, Harvey Kletz, told me. “His behavior was still aberrant, and I don’t think the money in any way changed what burdened him.” Four years later, Thornwell’s body was found in a swimming pool. His wife speculated that he had died of a seizure, although he had never had one before. He was forty-six years old.
For William Jacobson, the intelligence officer on the Special Purpose Team, Thornwell’s interrogation was a success. In a classified report that he filed with Van Sim and a small roster of Army officials, he argued that key admissions had been extracted from him, and from the other test subjects. In Thornwell’s case, these included “variations of the subject’s previous account,” and “satisfactory evidence of subject’s claim of innocence in regard to espionage intent.” Jacobson observed that Thornwell’s interrogation indicated a “need for preplanned precautions against extreme paranoid reaction,” but he argued for further tests with “real subjects of actual crimes for research and operational purposes.”
David MacQuigg, the Medical Corps doctor assigned to the team, also filed a report, in which he expressed naked contempt for the men he had experimented on. Describing them as “money-mad” con artists and liars, he wrote, “These people have no morals and live by their wits.” Like Jacobson, he saw the need for additional tests, and even for the construction of an “interrogation laboratory” where LSD might be tested in combination with radical alterations in room temperature, or a barrage of “supra-sonic waves.” Rather than arguing for reduced amounts of LSD, MacQuigg wrote, “I am of the opinion that a heavier dosage is indicated,” even though this would inevitably cause disabling mental breakdowns. “While it is true that there will be subjects overdosed, and become too upset to interrogate at peak, there is a big gain,” he explained.
Clovis, who no doubt had the most intimate experience with LSD, appeared to have the greatest reservation about how it had been used. It frustrated him that there was little meaningful science to be gained from the interrogations; trying to isolate the effect of the drug amid the chaos that the team manufactured was nearly impossible. The tests offered no definitive conclusions about anything the Army had been trying to learn, he argued, and noted wryly that “in most cases, the gain was considerably less than that.” He thought the attempt to combine the peak LSD experience with harsh interrogation, to create maximum terror, was nearsighted. “I most emphatically do not think that subjects, with the dosages we used, are ‘recovered’ at six hours, nor at seven, nor even at ten,” he argued. His only argument in favor of continuing the research was that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly pursuing similar work, and so “time is of the very essence here.”
Clovis envisioned a more careful, more nuanced study of the drug; he even seemed to be wondering whether a return to a laboratory setting would be a better way to proceed. But the Army intelligence command had a different set of research questions in mind: it wanted to investigate “if the Oriental reaction to LSD was different from the Caucasian reaction.” A series of covert tests were planned in the Far East, and in 1962 a group of military intelligence officers travelled to Hawaii, where the U.S. Pacific Command was headquartered, and to Korea and Japan, to lay the groundwork for the new experiments. In briefings with the Pacific Command, the officers made a pitch: any admissions made during interrogations, they said, would be “a collateral advantage”—information that could be shared. The Pacific Command welcomed the proposal, and agreed to open up its dossiers on foreign intelligence operatives “to provide Orientals of various nationalities for use in LSD experiments,” an Army report later noted.
Clovis joined two other officers to reconstitute the Special Purpose Team. Within the Army, officers had become terrified that James Thornwell’s story would leak, and in August, 1962, just before the team departed for Hawaii, to begin the operation, the Army intelligence command at Fort Holabird issued a stern warning: “You are hereby instructed that under no circumstances will you use or allow to be used EA 1729 on U.S. citizens.”
The LSD experiments in the Far East—the precise countries where they occurred remain secret—seem to have been more brutal than those in Europe. The team chose half a dozen subjects, who appear to have been either suspected smugglers, narco-traffickers, or alleged spies working for hostile intelligence agencies. In interrogations, the team used significantly larger doses than it had in Europe.
As before, LSD demonstrated its unpredictable nature. The first man, a “boat engineer” whom the Pacific Command suspected of transporting enemy spies, was given twice the amount that the team had given Thornwell, but did not appear to suffer from much disequilibrium. Generally speaking, though, the covert application of LSD at high doses, combined with harsh interrogation, had a devastating effect. Subjects experienced obvious emotional trauma. Some became catatonic or ataxic, or suffered anxiety and discomfort at levels that can only be called torture.
On September 10th, a subject was slipped LSD shortly before 11:30 A.M., and by 12:25 P.M. he began to exhibit severe reactions. “He broke out into a sweat and collapsed over the table,” a medical report noted. “He was carried to a bed with imperceptible pulse, obviously in shock; corneal and lid reflexes were imperceptible.” After remaining unconscious for an hour, the man gradually became more alert, but he was still addled. “He was propped up in an interrogation chair by team members and interrogation attempted no relevant answers,” the report explained. Every fifteen seconds or so, “with little regard of pain,” the subject would allow his head to collapse onto the table. |
trapper opp produksjonen gradvis og har ordrer som beskjeftiger dem godt utover året og potensielt neste år.
– Interessen er meget stor rundt om i verden. På sikt vil det offentlige sivile markedet, altså brannvesen, politi og redningstjeneste, bli vel så viktig som det militære markedet, mener Muren.
Ifølge ham vil tre firedeler av verdiskapingen foregå i Norge. Batterier og enkelte andre komponenter kjøpes inn, resten utvikles og produseres her til lands.
FFI og Innovasjon Norge
Prox Dynamics har siden 2009 blitt støttet av Forskningsrådet i et prosjekt kalt Mosquito som varer ut 2013.
I fjor mottok dessuten selskapet 3,4 millioner kroner fra Innovasjon Norge til Project Hornet der selskapet samarbeider med Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt (FFI).
– Vi gjorde en grundig jobb på forhånd og fikk tilbake en ryddig, ordentlig og relativt rask behandling. Dette har vært helt avgjørende for dagens produkt, understreker Muren.
Risky business
FFI har stått for konseptutvikling, altså hvordan denne nye teknologien best kan utnyttes operativt. Gjennom testing i en simulert operativ virkelighet har Forvaret lansert nye kravspesifikasjoner.
Eksempler på dette er krav om at UAV-en måtte kunne gå raskt i lufta, ta av fra hånda, at systemet må kunne betjenes med en hånd ledig og at UAV-ene skal oppbevares flyklare uten å måtte monteres ute i felt.
Muren mener Black Hornet har potensial til å bli en ny eksportsuksess for norsk forsvarsindustri. Men innrømmer samtidig:
– Dette er «risky business» med teknologi som er strukket helt til bristepunktet i et tøft marked med tøffe kunder. Så det kommer ikke av seg selv.
Les også: Noen av verdens fremste jetakrobater kommer til Norge
Her er Norges nye superkanon
Disse kjemper om å erstatte Sea King
Se hvordan flygere blendes av lasere
Se 85 kampfly på ØrlandPolice in Hawthorne, Calif., confront a dog during an arrest in July.
A surprising number of dogs are shot by cops. A new documentary looks at the problem.
On a Sunday afternoon in October of this year, Gabrielle Stropkai’s dog was shot by a police officer investigating a burglary nearby. The dog “was walking by and went ‘ruff ruff’ — just a couple of little ruffs,” a neighbor of the Stropkais’ told local television in Boise, Idado. But “she didn’t jump at him or anything.” In response, the owner remembers, the officer “pulled his weapon, asked whose dog it was, and shot her in the back of the head.” The dog died instantly.
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The Stropkais are not alone in their grief. A Google search for “dog shot by police officer” returns countless stories from across the United States. YouTube, too, is full of harrowing videos. There is even a website, the bluntly titled “Dogs That Cops Killed” blog, which seeks to “collect a few of the innumerable instances of police officers killing dogs” and to push back against the “wars on drugs, peace, and liberty.”
#ad#This unlovely trend has claimed the attention of Patrick Reasonover, a libertarian filmmaker in California who is currently raising money for a proposed documentary, Puppycide, through the crowdsourcing service Kickstarter. “We’re excited by this one,” Reasonover tells me, “because on so many issues — the War on Drugs, for example — it’s impossible to move the ball. You can feature the problems with the drug war, but there are so many embedded interests that one documentary isn’t really going to solve the problem. With this issue, however? We feel that it could.”
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Around eight months ago, Reasonover began to notice the proliferation of online videos of police officers shooting dogs. “People were going nuts about it,” he recalls. “There were tons of views on these things. We had dogs and we were disturbed, so we thought we’d reach out and start contacting some of the victims.” In doing so, he quickly learned that the news reports and the published footage were only the beginning of the story. Because police departments don’t keep easily accessible records of dog shootings, it is hard to gauge the scale. A recent review of public records by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals concluded that almost half of all firearms discharges by police officers involve the shooting of a dog. But nobody really knows.
Indeed, even animal-rights activists aren’t fully aware of the numbers in their communities. “They would tell us that there were, say, five news stories on these dogs that got shot,” Reasonover says. “But through my digging and persistence I found out that actually, you know, 22 were shot and no one ever knew.” One thing led to another, and he discovered that “there is a set of people who are working across the nation, through lawsuits or legislation or appealing to the Justice Department.” As part of his project, Reasonover is hoping to file Freedom of Information Act requests in all major cities and jurisdictions in the U.S. and to get hold of all firearm-discharge records. From that, he hopes to assemble a better list.
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It may make brutal reading. A recent lawsuit in Milwaukee filed by a woman whose dog was killed forced that city to compile its records. “They found that a dog was shot every seven days,” Reasonover says. “Just in Milwaukee.” And, unless something changes, the number will only continue to rise. “Over the course of the past forty or fifty years, dogs have moved from the barnyard to the back yard to the bedroom,” Ledy Vankavage, the senior legislative attorney at Best Friends Animal Society, has observed. In the meantime, the drug war has been ratcheted up, terrorism has become a pressing concern, and, as Radley Balko has so distressingly chronicled, the police have become increasingly militarized. “You have this recipe for these police entering our lives more and more and more,” Reasonover explains. “The dogs are there, and so they are killed.”
“And then the police conduct their own investigation, and nothing happens.”
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Reasonover makes it clear to me that he is not “anti-police,” nor does he wish to turn them into the villains of the piece. “When we’ve asked police about these things,” he says, “they, like most Americans, have dogs, and they hate it when this happens as well. But they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. There’s the union and there’s police in general, and so you’re not trained. You go out. Something split-second happens. You’re not thinking contemplatively. And if you’re not trained, you just react.”
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Fear of being disciplined or sued is enough to push many to insist that they had no other option. “Plenty of police apologize,” Reasonover concedes, “but in a lot of instances, they say, ‘Your dog was aggressive, we did what we needed to do.’” In raising awareness, the Puppycide team hopes that police forces will start to offer training to their officers. “In most cases, a dog won’t charge at you unless it’s trained to. But most cops don’t know that, so they see the dog there barking aggressively; they take that as aggressive behavior, and they shoot it.”
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Reasonover believes that the issue will be of interest across the political spectrum. “One of the reasons we’ve felt so excited about this documentary is that there are a lot of communities there who would share this view. At first, we thought it would be liberty-oriented people who knew our work from before. But in the past two days, we think it’s just everyone at large. Left and Right. We’ve even had people who are cat owners!”
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Nevertheless, making a documentary about such a touchy subject is going to present some challenges. Reasonover and his colleagues had to recut the trailer on their Kickstarter page after potential donors complained that it was too distressing. “We included the terrible footage because we thought it was important for people to see the reality of the situation,” he tells me. “But a lot of dog owners and animal-welfare advocates basically told us that they couldn’t watch the video — it was too painful. So we have a new trailer, and it tells the story in a way that sets the stage and the tone but doesn’t show the graphic content.”
I ask Reasonover whether this will present a problem when it comes to the final cut. After all, if people are disturbed by the trailer, how will they cope with a full film? He’s not worried. “We are going to position these moments in a structured story and pace out the terrible bits,” he tells me. “We’ll have the good things about dogs and the heroes who are changing the way things are done. It won’t be compressed.” One of the problems with creating a trailer, Reasonover adds, is that it is difficult to get people to believe that this is actually happening. “People don’t think it’s true until you show them,” he says, “because they just think, ‘Well, cops are there to help people.’ But it is.”
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A happy warrior, he ends on an upbeat note. “This is a solvable problem. And the documentary will go a long way to solving it.”
— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer for National Review.Will Atlanta United make the playoffs?
If so, what seed will they earn?
I broke down the playoff contenders in the MLS Eastern Conference on Monday.
I think you are going to like how I think things will shake out.
I’ve included what I think is the pivotal game for Atlanta United’s chances of making the playoffs for each team in each capsule.
***COMMERCIAL BREAK***
Make sure you listen to today's edition of Southern Fried Soccer.
***BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING***
Toronto
Record: 13-3-8.
Points: 47.
Games remaining: 10.
Schedule (with predicted result): at Chicago (L), vs. Philadelphia (W), at Montreal (D), vs. San Jose (W), at L.A. Galaxy (W), vs. Montreal (W), at New England (L), vs. New York Red Bulls (D), vs. Montreal (W), at Atlanta United (L).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: at Atlanta United in the regular-season finale.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 89-89-50.
Predicting number of points they will win: 17.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: First, with 64 points.
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NYCFC
Record: 13-7-4
Points: 43
Games remaining: 10.
Schedule (with predicted result): vs. New England (W), at New York Red Bulls (L), vs. Sporting KC (D), vs. Portland (W), at Colorado (L), vs. Houston (D), at Montreal (D), at Chicago (L), at New England (W), vs. Columbus (W).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: at Montreal, Sept. 27. A point in that game, which is what I’m predicting will happen, will likely end Montreal’s hopes and eliminate a team from playoff contention.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 93-88-53.
Predicting number of points they will win: 15.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Fourth, with 58 points.
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Chicago
Record: 12-6-5
Points: 41
Games remaining: 11.
Schedule (with predicted result): at Montreal (L), vs. Toronto (W), vs. Minnesota (W), at Montreal (D), vs. New York Red Bulls (W), vs. D.C. United (W), at Philadelphia (W), at San Jose (L), vs. NYCFC (W), vs. Philadelphia (W), at Houston (L).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: vs. NYCFC, Sept. 30. If Chicago wins, and my predicted results for Atlanta United hold true, this game could be the one that opens the door for Atlanta United to move into third place.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 100-102.
Predicting number of points they will win: 22.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Second, with 63 points.
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New York Red Bulls
Record: 12-9-2.
Points: 38.
Games remaining: 11.
Schedule (with predicted result): at Portland (L), vs. NYCFC (W), at Dallas (L), at Chicago (L), vs. Philadelphia (W), at Columbus (L), vs. D.C. United (W), at Toronto (D), vs. Vancouver (W), vs. Atlanta United (W), at D.C. United (W).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: vs. Atlanta United, Oct. 15. Duh.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 104-99-56.
Predicting number of points they will win: 19.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Fifth, with 57 points.
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Columbus Crew
Record: 11-12-2.
Points: 35.
Games remaining: 9.
Schedule (with predicted result): at Orlando (D), vs. L.A. Galaxy (W), vs. Dallas (D), vs. Sporting KC (D), at Vancouver (L), vs. New York Red Bulls (W), vs. D.C. United (W), at Orlando (W), at NYCFC (L).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: at Orlando, Aug. 19. Earning even a point on the road will likely make Orlando City’s goal of reaching the playoffs impossible.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 79-82-49.
Predicting number of points they will win: 15.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Sixth, with 50. points.
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Atlanta United
Record: 10-7-5.
Points: 35.
Games remaining: 12.
Schedule (with predicted result): at D.C. United (W), at Philadelphia (L), vs. Dallas (W), vs. New England (W), vs. Orlando (W), vs. L.A. Galaxy (W), vs. Montreal (L), vs. Philadelphia (W), at New England (D), vs. Minnesota (W), at New York Red Bulls (L), vs. Toronto (W).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: vs. Toronto, Oct. 22. A win and Atlanta United can move into third place in the Eastern Conference.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 99-117-57.
Predicting number of points they will win: 25.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Third, with 60 points.
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Montreal
Record: 8-8-6.
Points: 30.
Games remaining: 12.
Schedule (with predicted result): vs. Chicago (W), vs. Real Salt Lake (W), vs. Toronto (D), vs. Chicago (D), at New England (L), vs. Minnesota (W), at Toronto (L), at Atlanta United (W), vs. NYCFC (D), at Colorado (L), at Toronto (L), vs. New England (W).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: at Atlanta United, Sept. 24. Montreal can keep its hopes alive with a win in Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 122-92-66.
Predicting number of points they will win: 18.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Seventh, with 48 points.
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Orlando City
Record: 8-10-6.
Points: 30.
Games remaining: 10.
Schedule (with predicted result): vs. Columbus (D), vs. Vancouver (W), at New England (L), at D.C. United (W), at Atlanta United (L), at Portland (L), vs. New England (W), vs. Dallas (D), vs. Columbus (L), at Philadelphia (D).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: vs. Columbus, Aug. 19. The team must get three points or it could fall eight points behind and Columbus, and remain five behind Atlanta United, which will have three games in hand.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 88-100-47.
Predicting number of points they will win: 12.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Eighth, with 42 points.
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Philadelphia
Record: 8-11-5
Points: 29
Games remaining: 10.
Schedule (with predicted result): at San Jose (L), at Toronto (L), vs. Atlanta United (W), at Minnesota (W), at New York Red Bulls (L), vs. Chicago (L), at Atlanta United (L), vs. Seattle (D), at Chicago (L), vs. Orlando (D).
Pivotal game for Atlanta United: vs. Atlanta United, Aug. 26. Philadelphia’s schedule is brutal. It must win its home games against the playoff contenders.
Win-loss record of remaining opponents: 102-78-52.
Predicting number of points they will win: 8.
Predicting final place in Eastern Conference: Ninth, with 37 points.
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Atlanta United should benefit from having the easiest schedule of the contending teams as well as three games in hand on Columbus, two games in hand on Toronto and NYCFC, and a game on Chicago and New York Red Bulls. As you read, I think Montreal, a team I like, and Philadelphia are going to suffer because they have the toughest schedules. Orlando may be able to turn things around, but based upon their current form (2-9-6 in last 17) it’s hard to see that happening.
You may be upset that I think Atlanta United may fall at Philadelphia, and at home to Montreal. You can’t win them all. Teams that use similar tactics as Philadelphia have given Atlanta United trouble all season. As for Montreal, I think that’s a very tough matchup for Atlanta United and you can’t win all of the home games.
Here are final standings, based upon points:
Toronto, 64.
Chicago, 63.
Atlanta United, 60.
NYCFC, 58.
New York Red Bulls, 57.
Columbus, 50.A move by Poland’s new conservative government to take control of the state-owned broadcaster has left journalists, human rights activists and free speech campaigners in Europe with an anxious sense of déjà vu.
Poland’s parliament last week passed a new media law to give the newly-elected Law and Justice party (PiS) more latitude to control state-run television and radio, prompting warnings from Brussels about a potential infringement of “European values.”
Critics say Poland is following the script used by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to reshape Hungary’s media landscape in the past five years, consolidating his grip on power by neutralizing critics of his Fidesz party. His vision of a more nationalistic, “illiberal” state has earned Hungary’s press a downgrade from free to only partly-free by Freedom House, an American NGO.
The situation in Poland is “very similar to what the Orbán government did when they came to power in 2010,” said Tamás Bodoky, editor-in-chief of Atlatszo.hu, an independent investigative website based in Budapest.
The concern in Poland goes beyond the impact on the state-run media to publications and broadcast stations owned by private companies, who could face commercial and political pressure to avoid criticizing the government, as they have in Hungary, media analysts and NGOs claim.
As those critics see it, Poland is fast heading down the Hungarian path: a state media that becomes simply a mouthpiece for government, a neutered private media controlled by a small number of wealthy businessmen with ties to the ruling party, and journalists hampered by legal restrictions and political pressure from speaking truth to power.
“Law and Justice is trying things that have worked well for Fidesz,” Philip Howard, a professor at the University of Washington, in Seattle, and former director of the Center for Media, Data and Society at Central European University, in Budapest, said in an email. “They are definitely learning from the Hungarians.”
Yet the Orbán modus operandi isn’t as blunt as some of his critics contend, making it hard for Brussels or his opponents to block policy changes pushed by a popular and democratically elected leader.
Zoltán Kovács, Orbán’s spokes-man, dismissed the concerns, calling Hungary’s media diverse and thriving. “Our commitment to the freedom of media … is unbroken,” Kovács said in an email. “If you’re familiar with the Hun[garian] media landscape, you would notice that it has never before been so colorful (and critical) as for the past couple of years.”
“Hun[garian] media freedom is alive and kicking, even if many are critical of the circumstances,” he added.
Starved of funds
Orbán’s party took office in 2010 with two-thirds of the seats in the Hungarian parliament, giving it the power to change the constitution. One of his priorities was to address what he saw as a left-wing bias in the media that was both “unfair ideologically and a hassle to him on a pragmatic level,” according to Csaba Tóth, director of strategy at the Republikon Institute, a liberal think tank. “His goal was to change the balance of power.”
One of Orbán’s first acts was to pass a controversial media law strengthening regulation of print, broadcast and online media. A new oversight body, the Media Council, was given extensive powers, including the ability to issue licenses and impose large fines for content it deemed objectionable.
Stacked with Fidesz appointees, it is not independent and has allowed the government too much sway over the industry, European lawmakers, media analysts and human rights campaigners have complained.
The state-owned TV and radio networks and the public news agency were centralized and brought under tighter government control. Its news output heavily favors the Fidesz party, observers say.
The “slow strangulation” of critical media has helped Fidesz consolidate its grip on power.
Critics including Mertek, an NGO that monitors the Hungarian media, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have accused the government of rearranging the privately-owned media to be more friendly to Fidesz, partly through the distribution of public advertising contracts to supportive media outlets.
In a relatively small media market, spending on advertising by publicly-owned bodies such as the Hungarian National Bank, the postal service and the national lottery account for a large portion of the available advertising revenue. Under Orbán, the bulk of these contracts have been directed to channels and publications seen as supportive of the government, starving left-wing and opposition media outlets of funding, Mertek said in a 2014 report published in conjunction with the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.
“Market competition among media agencies is clearly distorted by the biased award of state contracts,” the report said.
Commercially-funded TV networks, newspapers, magazines, radio stations and websites can’t afford to risk alienating advertisers and suffering a loss in funding, which has resulted in self-censorship by many newsrooms, Mertek contends.
In one prominent case, the editor of a popular Internet news portal, Origo.hu, lost his job in 2014 after publishing a report on the expenses of one of Orbán’s aides. The owners said Gergo Saling left “by mutual consent” but reporters on the site said he was forced out for political reasons.
In what was seen as another attempt to shackle the media, the government announced in 2014 that it would impose a tax on advertising. The progressive levy, rising to half of ad sales above 20 billion forint (€64 million), would disproportionately hit Hungary’s most popular TV channel, RTL Klub, a subsidiary of Germany’s RTL Group.
Not only the German company was angered by the proposal: It sparked a ferocious row with one of Hungary’s most prominent businessmen, Lajos Simicska. A longtime friend of Orbán’s, whose assets include the conservative newspaper Magyar Nemzet, Simicska publicly insulted the prime minister and accused him of trampling on democracy.
Journalists in Hungary say the adoption of a series of laws, including changes to Hungary’s freedom of information laws and harsh criminal sentences for defamation, has made it harder to do their jobs.
Last summer, during the refugee crisis in Hungary, concerns about state interference in media grew. Journalists alleged that they were denied access to public facilities to report on the treatment of refugees. In September, a journalist for the Associated Press, Luca Muzi, said he had been confronted by Hungarian police while he was filming near the Serbian border and pressured to delete his footage. The news agency complained but the authorities did not take action.
The “slow strangulation” of critical media, as the radio journalist Attila Mong has described it, has helped Fidesz consolidate its grip on power, media analysts and NGOs say. Mong, the former presenter of Hungarian public radio’s flagship breakfast show, famously protested the 2010 media law by holding a minute's silence on air.
In the run-up to the 2014 par-liamentary elections, coverage by the leading TV channels and newspapers was heavily skewed to the ruling party, international monitors for the OSCE found.
Three of the five main TV channels, including the state-owned M1, “displayed a significant bias towards Fidesz in their news programs,” the OSCE said in a report. “Almost all the Fidesz campaign was covered in a positive tone, while the opposition alliance was covered mostly in a negative tone.”
RTL Klub, the most popular channel, was balanced, but its news coverage of the campaign was limited, the OSCE said. (Róbert Kotroczó, editor-in-chief of RTL’s news programs in Hungary, said in an email: “Our news team could not have reached and maintained this leading position without our independence and credibility.”) Across the mainstream media, opposition parties struggled to get their message across, giving Fidesz an unfair advantage, the OSCE said.
Constant pressure
Even the government’s critics concede that the press is still at least partly free. Hungary isn’t Turkey, Russia or Azerbaijan. Journalists aren’t arrested and imprisoned for writing articles critical of politicians; they’re not harassed, threatened, physically assaulted or murdered for writing articles that show powerful people in an unflattering light. Foreign media companies haven’t been forced out. There are numerous publications and websites that are consistently, openly critical of Fidesz.
And Orbán’s critics have successfully pushed back against some of his proposed reforms. In 2014, the government backed down on plans to impose a tax on Internet usage, which many took as an assault on civil liberties, after thousands of people protested. In May, it scaled back the advertising tax that would have hit RTL.
"If you criticize them you are a traitor" — Tamás Bodoky, editor of Atlatszo.
“It’s a free media, definitely,” Tóth said. “If anyone wants to write, have their opinion, say Orbán is horrible, they can do that and have big coverage and they won’t be sued, won’t have consequences.”
If there’s a comparison to be made, Hungary is probably closer to Italy under former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi than Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Tóth added. The Berlusconi approach was to blend political power and control over the media, via state channels and his Mediaset business empire, to outgun his opponents.
Bodoky, the editor of the investigative website, said that while there is no overt intimidation, there is “constant pressure” on media outlets, economically and politically, that are not friendly to Fidesz.
His publication, Atlatszo (Hungarian for “transparent”), regularly reports on public corruption, relying on crowdfunding and donations from overseas NGOs for support. For that, he says, it is derided as unpatriotic and a mouthpiece for foreign interests.
“They say that you are not a patriot, you are against your country,” Bodoky said. “If you criticize them you are a traitor, you are an enemy.
Unfortunately, a lot of people fall for this propaganda.”
That does not stop Atlatszo and other small, independent websites from publishing articles that present an alternative view to that of the government, and attempt to hold public officials to account. Yet they typically struggle to get much attention for their work among the wider public, Bodoky said.
“At the end of the day, opposition voices don’t reach that many people. They reach maybe 10 percent of the population who are actively seeking opposition content or critical news. People who just watch the mainstream [TV channels] or read the mainstream [newspapers], they get a lot of government-influenced news.”
This article has been updated to reflect that Philip Howard has left Central European University.There might not be a vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons, as Hillary Clinton alleged in the late 1990s—but only because it's not that vast, and it's not really a secret. Following FBI director James Comey's letter to Congress last week about finding emails tied to Clinton on Anthony Weiner's hard drive, the FBI has become a leaky sieve of allegations and details about investigations into the Clintons. Wednesday night's Wall Street Journal report on an ongoing feud between FBI agents on the case and prosecutors unimpressed with the evidence they've uncovered has propelled the disgruntled investigators to go to the press. What's noteworthy about the investigation is that it all sprung from information written about in Clinton Cash, a 2015 book and companion documentary that emerged out of the Breitbart News empire run by Steve Bannon who is, yes, currently running Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Follow all that? Follow along and see how a Breitbart News propaganda piece turns into a federal investigation that turns into a political firestorm.
Hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer is a huge contributor to conservative causes. He's a Trump and Trump Super PAC mega-donor and a top investor in Breitbart News, the conservative media group with notoriously liberal (not the Bernie Sanders kind) fact-checking standards.
Breitbart was, until recently, run by Steve Bannon, who has also been a prolific producer of conservative movies (including the 2011 Sarah Palin-venerating doc The Undefeated).
Peter Schweizer, a contributor to Breitbart during Bannon's reign, wrote Clinton Cash, which alleged that, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton made decisions based on who donated money to the Clinton Foundation and/or the Clinton Global Initiative and/or who paid Bill Clinton for speeches. Critics charged his book raised questions it was unable to answer, and many of its charges were widely debunked. Few of the tome's charges held up to significant media scrutiny and the publisher had to issue numerous corrections. He's nonetheless been interviewed by the FBI several times (as he told Breitbart and Fox News), and even said that Clinton Cash is required reading for the FBI's New York office.
With Mercer's daughter, Rebekah, Bannon produced the documentary Clinton Cash: The Movie. Time said in its review, "There are a lot of leaps of logic in the film" and that "the book and the movie sometimes draws connections and conclusions that aren't as solid as their evidence," but called the "insinuations" a "disheartening watch." After Bannon failed to find a distributor at the Cannes Film Festival last May, the film was uploaded to YouTube in July.
The FBI's New York bureau apparently does not read book or film reviews, and reportedly sought to open an investigation into the Clinton Foundation primarily on the basis of the allegations, debunked and otherwise, in Clinton Cash. The Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn have, reportedly, repeatedly told the FBI that there's no compelling evidence to continue their investigations, justify warrants or press charges (though some Fox anchors believe otherwise ). The frustrated agents in the New York FBI office, intent on pressing some kind of charges against Hillary Clinton, were the ones who pressed Comey to review emails found in the Anthony Weiner for evidence that Clinton had mishandled classified information, leading to Comey's vague letter to Congress that's consumed campaign coverage in the final days before the election.
The FBI began leaking info of this tension to the Wall Street Journal, flagship American newspaper of the conservative, Murdoch-owned News Corp. Then Fox News, the flagship American cable news station of the conservative, Murdoch-owned New Corp., jumped on the story, with Brett Baier reporting on Wednesday night that FBI agents investigating the Clinton Foundation "had collected a great deal of evidence" to suggest wrongdoing and that an indictment was "likely." He did not say whether that information was from Clinton Cash or not.Scope Components, Not Pages
Recently, the always-brilliant Scott Jehl wrote a post titled Grade components, not browsers. In his post, Scott explains that grading browser support is an ineffective way of determining what experience a particular device/browser should get. Instead, the Filament Group grades components based on their level of intricacy, which results in a more granular way of enhancing experiences to better reflect the capabilities of a device/browser/configuration.
Scott’s post reminded me of the many conversations about Web pages I’ve had over the years with clients and project managers.
“How long will the homepage take?”
Throughout my career, I’ve been asked to estimate how long it will take to develop a “quick one-page website” or how long a particular page would take to create. Pestering project managers would ask, “Hey Brad, how long will it take to build the homepage?” “What about the product detail page?”
It didn’t take long for me to start asking “Well what’s going on these pages? Is the homepage simply comprised of some text and images, or will there be something like a carousel? (hint: the answer is always ‘yes there will be a carousel.’) How about forms for data capture? Video content? An interactive HTML5 canvas? WebGL? Parallax? A whammy bar?”
I recently received an e-mail from someone at a large organization. He articulated something that pretty much every organization going down the responsive path is struggling with:
What we’re struggling with here is transforming our entire website (thousands of pages) into a responsive design.
At first glance, one might say “Thousands of pages!? Wow, that sounds challenging!” But in reality, those thousands of pages might be comprised of the same four basic components. A project’s level of effort depends entirely on what the interface is made of.
What is an interface made of?
For the past few years I’ve been obsessed with the question “What is an interface made of?” It’s the question that led to the creation of the responsive pattern library, atomic design, and Pattern Lab.
In order to better scope projects, it’s essential to look at what the interface is comprised of rather than looking at the quantity/type of pages. This is what software developers have been doing for years now, but the concept of “Web pages” has distracted us from breaking things down into features and components.
Interface Inventories to the Rescue
So how can you scope a project based on components rather than pages? I think a good place to start is with an interface inventory.
An interface inventory is a comprehensive collection of the bits and pieces that make up your interface.
We conducted an interface inventory as part of our redesign of the Pittsburgh Food Bank. We went through and captured all the unique components and features that make up the site. While most of the site is comprised of text and images, there are quite a few pieces of functionality that will need a lot of design attention. Here’s a few samples from our interface inventory:
By conducting an interface inventory, we’re able to better gauge the level of effort for each piece of functionality (especially factoring all the variables discussed in Scott’s article), discover potential hang-ups, and better communicate the project scope to the client.
Getting granular and scoping a project by components/features rather than pages leads to a more realistic scope.(Photo by Dave Hogan/Getty Images)
British actor Tom Hiddleston is in Cologne, Germany, shooting a vampire movie called Only Lovers Left Alive. Tilda Swinton (pictured with Hiddleston, above) is his co-star, and Jim Jarmusch is directing.
On Monday some dedicated fans who wanted to see him waited for 8 hours (!!!) outside the gates of the movie studio. That’s patience!
They weren’t all from Cologne, either. Many had travelled from other cities, just to say hello.
When shooting was finished for the day, Hiddleston met those fans, and had his picture taken with all of them, asking each one “what’s your name?” Then he signed autographs for them, too. That’s patience, too.
Hiddleston couldn’t or wouldn’t say how much longer he would be in Cologne. When asked if he’d had a chance to see the sights, he said that he was very busy shooting the film, but he had visited Cologne Cathedral (the Kölner Dom in German, and a UNESCO World Heritage site, BTW) and he’d had a run alongside the Rhine.
Don’t many stars have “handlers” and bodyguards just to protect them from encounters like that?
The German fans put their photos on their Facebook page and posted the videos for other fans around the world to enjoy. Hiddleston does have an army of fans, after all.
Above is a short video (33 seconds) made by Tom Hiddleston’s fans in Cologne. After a long day of shooting, he’s enjoying some chocolate that they brought for him, and apologizing for talking with his mouth full. He says that the chocolate is “incredibly good,” and just what he needed. The video below, at 15 minutes long, might be for true fans only.
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I started out in an Engineering program at a Canadian University a couple years ago. Shortly thereafter I decided I wanted to be a programmer. Totally reasonable life choices, that came with some slightly less reasonable time demands.
You see when you’re in an engineering program pulling all-nighters to get work done start becoming fairly normal. And then if you want to become a programmer you now need to digest thousands of lines of documentation and code, which definitely doesn’t help you get all the schoolwork done in a nice timely |
subjects with a variety of conditions, including pain, multiple sclerosis, anxiety, psychosis, and epilepsy, with an excellent safety and tolerability profile, no noticeable psychiatric adverse effects, and no motor impairment (reviewed by Bergamaschi et al98). Doses of up to 1280 mg of CBD have been administered to humans without toxicity or serious adverse events.98–100 Studies assessing cognitive performance did not report any impairment with CBD.54,56,57,101
CBD at acute doses of up to 800 mg did not have any effect on heart rate or blood pressure.33,54,58,79,101,102 Leweke et al74 reports that a 4-week treatment with 600–800 mg of oral CBD per day did not significantly affect hepatic or cardiac function in PSZ. A 6-week trial in Huntington’s disease patients detected no systematic abnormalities specifically associated with CBD treatment (~700 mg/day) in blood chemistry, complete blood count and differential, prolactin levels, and urinalysis.102 Similarly, the administration of 200–400 mg of CBD to participants with and without epilepsy for 1–4.5 months did not result in any changes in vital signs or labs. A few reports of somnolence may have been due in part to concomitant use of antiepileptic medication.103 Other studies did not report any subjective effects of CBD (400–800 mg p.o.) other than anxiolytic effects or reversal of adverse effects of THC.33,54,57,58,61,79,102,104 The only exception is one study reporting a modest increase in self-reported sedation.105
Haney et al54 found that 5 out of 31 study participants reported “gastrointestinal upset” within 72 h of ingesting an 800-mg dose of CBD, as compared with 1, 2, and 1 participants ingesting placebo, 200 and 400 mg, respectively. Similarly, Manini et al33 reported gastrointestinal side effects in 1 out of 6 participants exposed to an 800-mg dose of CBD. Thus, 800 mg of CBD (p.o.) may be pushing the upper dose limit, although the preliminary report of a trial in PSZ did not mention any such side effects with chronic administration of 1000 mg of CBD per day.75
There is no indication of mutagenic effects of CBD.106 In vitro studies have shown that CBD can suppress production of interleukin 8 and 10107 and induce lymphocyte apoptosis108 at micromolar concentrations; thus, there is a theoretical risk of immunosuppression. However, other results suggested a potential biphasic response, with stimulatory action at nanomolar concentrations.43,98 CBD in the micromolar range also exhibited inhibitory effects on P-glycoprotein efflux and ATPase activity.98 The extent to which in vitro effects of these concentrations are predictive of potential side effects at the nanomolar concentrations found in human serum after CBD administration is unclear.
CBD acutely inhibits the cytochrome P450 2B, 2C, and 3A subfamilies in vitro, with potential induction after long-term exposure.98 Again, concentrations associated with these interactions were in the micromolar range and significantly higher than found in human blood.109 However, the possibility of an altered bioavailability of compounds that are primarily metabolized by these cytochromes has to be considered. Such compounds include (but are not limited to) alprazolam, bupropion, carbamazepine, citalopram, clozapine, diazepam, imipramine, sertraline, valproic acid, and zolpidem. Importantly, a recent trial testing 1000 mg of CBD per day vs placebo in PSZ treated with conventional antipsychotics reported no adverse effects specifically associated with the CBD arm,75 which suggests that CBD may be a safe adjunct medication.
Summary: Potential Benefits of CBD for Cannabis Users With Recent-Onset Psychosis
The antipsychotic, anxiolytic, and potential procognitive effects of CBD, in the absence of side effects typically seen with conventional medication, would constitute a desirable effects profile for individuals with any schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. In particular, however, its reversal of psychotogenic, anxiogenic, and cognitive-impairing effects of THC, both acutely and chronically, would suggest CBD as a tailored intervention for individuals with psychosis and comorbid cannabis misuse, who constitute a large proportion of patients in the early stages of schizophrenia-related disorders. By potentially dampening the positive reinforcing effects of THC and restoring healthy reward processing, CBD may even reduce cannabis use itself. It has to be emphasized, however, that most of these suggested benefits are based on laboratory studies, in part employing small sample sizes, and confirmation by well-powered randomized clinical trials is largely pending. Clearly, this field is at an early stage, with expectations at risk of overtaking evidence. To date, there are promising leads warranting larger trials to confirm or test CBD’s efficacy in reducing positive symptoms, anxiety, cognitive deficits, and cannabis misuse. The combination of these beneficial effects, initiated early in the disease course, would hold the promise to substantially improve the clinical trajectory and long-term outcome of individuals with psychosis and comorbid cannabis misuse, in particular, a population with currently poor prognosis and no specialized effective intervention.
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© The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.comThe ruins of a huge Antiquity building which was probably the residence of the agoranomus / curule aedile, a public officer in charge of trade and market operations in Ancient Greek and Roman cities, have been unearthed in the large Ancient Roman city of Nicopolis ad Istrum nears Bulgaria’s Nikyup.
The building of the agoranomus / curule aedile of Nicopolis ad Istrum, whose name means “Victory City on the Danube River", has been found near the Forum of the major Ancient Roman city located 18 km the northwest of the city of Veliko Tarnovo in Central North Bulgaria.
The building excavated during the 2015 archaeological digs was enormous – it was 70 meters long and 40 meters, lead archaeologist Assoc. Prof. Pavlina Vladkova from the Veliko Tarnovo Regional Museum of History has told Radio Focus Veliko Tarnovo.
Nicopolis ad Isturm was founded by Roman Emperor Marcus Ulpius Traianus (r. 98-117 AD) to honor his victories over the Dacian tribes between 101 and 106 AD (most probably in 102 AD) at the intersection of the two main roads of the Danubian Roman provinces intersected – the road from Odessus (Odessos) on the Black Sea (today’s Varna) to the western parts of the Balkan Peninsula, and the road from the Roman military camp Novae (today’s Svishtov) on the Danube to the southern parts of the Balkan Peninsula.
Nicopolis ad Istrum is sometimes described as the birthplace of Germanic literary tradition because in the 4th century AD Gothic bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila) (ca. 311-383 AD) received permission from Roman Emperor Constantius II (r. 324-361 AD) to settle with his flock of Christian converts near Nicopolis ad Istrum in the province of Moesia, in 347-8 AD. There Ulfilas invented the Gothic alphabet and translated the Bible from Greek into Gothic.
The Ancient Roman city was destroyed in 447 AD by the barbarian forces of Attila the Hun, even though it might have been abandoned by its residents even before that. It was partly rebuilt as a fortified post of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) in the 6th century AD which in turn was destroyed at the end of the 6th century AD by an Avar invasion. Later, it was settled as a medieval city in the Bulgarian Empire between the 10th and the 14th century.
Lead archaeologist Vladkova has explained that inside the newly excavated residence of the trade and market magistrate of Nicopolis ad Istrum her team has discovered a number of intriguing artifacts.
“Inside it, we have found small finds, among which the most interesting are weights made of marble, limestone, lead, and bronze. Some of them were used to measure the weight of coins or artifacts made of noble metals," she says.
The archaeologists have hypothesized that the huge building was inhabited by the agoranomus / curule aedile of Nicopolis ad Istrum based on epigraphic evidence that the city did employ a magistrate with such responsibilities, and on the structure’s architecture.
According to Vladkova, the building has a very complex layout, with a number of rooms. The archaeologists have excavated two rooms with water supply and a pool.
“I think we have come across a small bathroom. Probably the agoranomus of Nicopolis lived in this building, and that was the bathroom of the residence," she says.
In her words, the archaeologists will need several more seasons to complete in full the research of the building.
Once they achieve that, their plan is to conserve and exhibit its ruins in situ so that it can be viewed by tourists visiting Nicopolis ad Istrum.
Since the excavations of the once |
by dualistically separating us from it.
To avoid becoming even longer than it is, this paper must presuppose some familiarity with the writings of Jacques Derrida. First I present, in some detail, the approach and perspective of Nāgārjuna, although with reference to Derrida when the similarities suggest such a comparison.[5] I hope that this first part is interesting in itself, but in any case it is necessary to the critique that follows. The main differences are reserved for Part Two, where Derrida is subjected to a Mādhyamika critique.
I
1. Even more than most philosophers, both Nāgārjuna and Derrida can be understood only within their philosophical context. Like Kant's dialectic, both deconstructive methods are dependent on philosophy having attained a high degree of sophistication; both are self-consciously parasitic upon the dogmatism of previous paradigms, "the interminable and total conflict of reason" (Murti). But otherwise the difference in their contexts is more striking.
Nāgārjuna is very much within the Buddhist tradition, which is as much religious as philosophical (a distinction whose invalidity becomes apparent in such an application), although Mādhyamika constitutes so major a development within Buddhism that it is almost a break with the prior tradition. But Nāgārjuna never questions Buddhist methods and goals, although he explains them in a new way. Also, like Kant, he is responding to a conflict of traditions.
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There are two main currents of Indian philosophy -- one having its source in the atma-doctrine of the Upanisads and the other in the anatma doctrine of Buddha. They conceive reality on two distinct and exclusive patterns. The Upanisads and the systems following the Brahmanical tradition conceive reality on the pattern of an inner core or soul (ātman), immutable and identical amidst an outer region of impermanence and change, to which it is unrelated or but loosely related. This may be termed the Substance-view of reality... The other tradition is represented by the Buddhist denial of substance and all that it implies. There is no inner and immutable core in things; everything is in flux. Existence for the Buddhist is momentary, unique, and unitary. The substance (the universal and the identical) was rejected as illusory; it was but a thought-construction made under the influence of wrong belief.[6]
It was the conflict between these paradigms that prompted Nāgārjuna's aufheben, which nonetheless did not lead to any merger between the two traditions (although Advaita Vedānta borrowed the dialectical argumentation of Mādhyamika for the same end, refuting the reality of the objective world). Nāgārjuna, although constituting a "Copernican Revolution" within Indian philosophy, understood himself as only explicating more clearly than others what the Buddha himself had taught.
In contrast to Indian pluralism, where conflicting systems evolved adjacently by adding sub-commentaries to commentaries on revered works, Derrida is heir to a more integrated tradition which has developed by repeatedly revolutionizing itself. Each philosophical generation defines its own identity by cannibalizing what its forebears have left. Since the failure of the Hegelian synthesis, this has meant killing not only one's own father but all one's forefathers. This difference is important because it affects their respective deconstructions. In contrast to Derrida's "hierarchy reversal" (e.g., a grammatology to replace phono- and logocentrism) there is no such reversal, temporary or not, in Mādhyamika because Nāgārjuna was reacting to a conflict between diametrically opposed paradigms.
Yet these differences should not overshadow what the two deconstructions share. One often-overlooked aspect of Buddhism, unusual for a religion but common with Derrida, is that Buddhism assumes no "golden age" in the past, no mythical pure point of historical origin to which Buddhists yearn to return. Because of their belief in an all-loving God, the Semitic religions must postulate a Garden of Eden from which man fell because of his own sin. Buddhism, accepting no such Creator, is silent about the origin of the world and of our duhkha (suffering in the broad sense: including dissatisfaction, frustration, angst). The most the Buddha ever said about this was that "a beginning cannot be found." Insofar as nirvāna might be taken as such an origin, it is not something that needs to be regained or even gained, but only to be realized by ending the delusion that keeps us from understanding the way things have always been. On other occasions, the Buddha pointed out that whether or not there was a beginning really makes no difference, since what is important is that there is an end. He often stated that he came to teach only two things: that our lives are duhkha (suffering), and there is a way to end that duhkha.
Most central to Buddhist doctrine is the denial of an ontological self. This brings us back to the paradigm conflict between Vedānta and early Buddhism. Essential to the Vedantic "Substance-view" is not only its postulation of an immutable soul (ātman)
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but also the identification of that soul with the Ground of the universe (Brahman). The Buddhist rejection of self should be understood as a critique of any such self-existent, self-present transcendental signified, and the most important Buddhist doctrine, pratītya-samutpāda, is nothing less than a systematic deconstruction of any claim to self-reflexive "pure consciousness" (cit).
Pratītya-samutpāda ("dependent origination") refutes any such conception by demonstrating the interdependence of all elements of our experience. Everything, including consciousness, may be located within a set of cause-and-effect, differing-and-deferring relationship ("when X exists, then Y arises") which precludes any simple" self-presence." The early Pali sutras contain various versions of this "interlocking chain," but the standard doctrinal compilation presents twelve factors.
(1) ignorance of the interdependent nature of all things (constituting not only the first "link" but the basic presupposition of the whole process) leads to the activation of
(2) mental formations (psychological causal factors derived from past thoughts and actions and usually understood as karmic tendencies persisting from past lifetimes) leads to
(3) (rebirth) consciousness (necessary for impregnation) leads to
(4) name-and-form (the developing mind-body complex of the fetus) which leads to
(5) the six sense-organs (including the mind as the organ of thinking) which lead to
(6) contact between such organs and sense-objects (including mind and "mind objects") and thus
(7) sensation (pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) leading to
(8) craving (not only desire for objects of pleasure but also aversion to unpleasant ones and indifference to neutral ones) and hence
(9) grasping at sense-objects, the manifestation of craving, leading to
(10) becoming (the tendency to be reborn, a function of such grasping), which causes
(11) (re-)birth, which leads to
(12) duhkha, old age, and death.
Calling this a "causal chain" does not mean that the last link rejoins directly with the first. The first two factors are causes from the past affecting the present; the next seven are causes and effects operating in the present; the last three are the future effects of present causes. Whether or not this doctrine is taken literally as referring to past and future lifetimes or psychologized into past and future experiences, its importance for Buddhism can hardly be overemphasized. The interdependence of all experience is explained without any reference to a first cause (a creator God, etc.) or a final cause. There is only "conditionality": everything is both conditioned and conditioning, each event only a function of an "economy of differences."
But at first the full critique of self-presence (Nāgārjuna's term is svabhāva, "self-existence") was only implicit. It remained for Nāgārjuna, six centuries after the Buddha, to rethink pratītya-samutpāda as implying śūnyatā (devoidness, lack of being)[7] of all phenomena. By his time Indian philosophy had developed and formalized itself to a sophistication unknown to the Buddha's generation, and in his major work the Mūlamadhyamikakārikā -- indisputably the most important work of Buddhist philos-
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ophy -- Nāgārjuna examined the views of the main schools on the central problems of philosophy: causality, motion, the senses, material objects, the self, time, action, etc. In what follows we shall summarize Nāgārjuna's analysis of two issues, causality and time. The choice is not random. Causality is the fundamental problem for Nāgārjuna -- many of the other topics, such as motion, only apply its general conclusions to more specific instances -- and, given Derrida' s critique of self-presence, temporality is the crucial issue for him. There is another reason for choosing these two. Causality and time imply each other, to the extent of being two sides of the same coin (or, to anticipate the deconstruction which follows, two aspects of the same bifurcation). Causality requires that cause precede the effect, and time requires that the past cause the future. Our plight -- the root of our duhkha -- can also be summarized in these terms: we feel that we are (or should be) free, but we know that our lives are physically and psychologically determined; we feel that we are (or should be) timeless, yet we realize that we are mortal, inextricably trapped in time. To deconstruct fully any of these philosophical problems is to deconstruct the others as well. But before we begin that deconstruction, a brief description of Nāgārjuna's method will be helpful.
It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast of styles than that between Derrida's clever, multi-layered bricolage and Nāgārjuna's straightforward dialectics, whose dry "either/or" bears more than a passing resemblance to early Greek dialectics.[8] Without explicitly postulating the laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle, Nāgārjuna's makes liberal use of them, doing nothing more than demonstrating their full implications in order to deconstruct metaphysics (including the metaphysics enshrined in our ordinary ways of thinking, implicit in the categories of language).[9] Classical Indian philosophy was a quest to determine the Real, and the Real, it was agreed, is that which is self-existent, not dependent upon anything else. Anything which can be shown to be relative to something else is thereby refuted as a candidate. So Nāgārjuna's task was quite simple: to take all the proposed candidates for Reality and demonstrate their relativity (śūnyatā), leaving nothing -- not even śūnyatā, since that term too is relative to the candidates. "...śūnyatā is the exhaustion of all theories and views; those for whom śūnyatā is itself a theory are incurable" (MMK, Xlll,8). Rather than attempt to construct a new theory or language with śūnyatā as the key term, Nāgārjuna, while understanding that ordinary language is full of deluding ontological commitments, accepts it and deconstructs it from within: "Śūnyatā is a guiding, not a cognitive, notion, presupposing the everyday" (XXIV, 18). No privileged language is created in this deconstruction, and his goal cannot be expressed or pointed to with out the delusive logocentrisms of language; but, like Derrida, Nāgārjuna thus uses it "under erasure," without committing himself to its categories.
It is here that we find the deepest resonance with Derrida, whose deconstruction also proceeds by demonstrating the inescapable différance infecting all Western metaphysical candidates for a "transcendental-signified." Deleuze's cryptic remark about Foucault -- that he is a new kind of map-maker, constructing maps for use rather than to mirror the terrain[10] -- is equally true for both Nāgārjuna and Derrida. The fun-
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damental presuppositions of metaphysics -- that we can mirror the whole terrain from some Archimedean point of pure, self-contained thought -- is the illusion they subvert, and their weapons are śūnyatā/différance. These mirror nothing because they have no reference apart from their subversive function; to fix them within a given system is to use them in ways that suppress that function.
Where they diverge is in their understanding of the result of this subversion. For Nāgārjuna the primary transcendental-signified to be deconstructed is the world we live, for the supposedly objective world is a function of our ways of thinking about it. In Indian philosophy vikalpa and prapañca refer to the superimposition of such reified thought-categories and the proliferation of thought-constructions that this generates. Realizing that the world is determined for us by our ways of thinking about it then yields to meditative practices which may lead to "the end of prapañca" (MMK,XXV, 24, the closest Nāgārjuna comes to a "definition" of nirvāna), allowing something hitherto obscured to reveal itself. In that sense, there is a "higher truth," but any attempt to describe it -- even to call it a truth -- can only be part of the "lower truth" which, as part of prapañca, must finally be superseded. In answer to an opponent's objection that then his own thesis is also self-refuted as śūnya (devoid of any truth-value), Nāgārjuna replied: "If I were to put forth any thesis whatsoever, it would have that defect; but since I advance no thesis, I do not have that fault."[11] Nāgārjuna has nothing to offer; he only wants to take something away from us. The following deconstructions should be read in that light.[12]
2. The problem of causality is the most important one for Mādhyamika, but at first encounter there seems to be a contradiction in Nāgārjuna's analysis. One the one hand, causal interdependence is so central that Nāgārjuna identifies it with the most important concept, śūnyatā (MMK, XXIV, 18). The undeniable relativity of everything is the means by which all self-existence (svabhāva) is refuted. At the same time, Nāgārjuna redefines pratītya-samutpāda in such a way as to negate causality altogether. The first and most important chapter of the MMK concluded that the causal relation is incomprehensible, and later chapters go further to claim that causation is delusive: "Origination, existence, and destruction are of the nature of māyā, dreams, or a fairy castle"(MMK, VII, 34). The last chapters seize on this issue as one way to crystallize the difference between samsāra and nirvāna. What is perhaps the most important verse in the MMK distinguishes between them by attributing causal relations only to samsāra: "That which, taken as causal or dependent, is the process of being born and passing on, is, taken non-causally and beyond all dependence, declared to be nirvāna" (MMK,XXV, 9).
How are we to take this obvious contradiction? The paradox, I shall argue, is that the experience of complete conditionality is phenomenologically equivalent to a denial of all causal conditions. A view which is so radical as to analyze all things away into "their" causal conditions is offering an interpretation of experience which becomes in-
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distinguishable from a view that negates causality altogether. Thus a dialectic is inherent in the Mādhyamika analysis. The first step examines the commonsense distinction between things and their cause-and-effect relationships, using the latter to dissolve the former and to refute the self-existence of "things." Less obvious is the second step, which reverses the analysis: the lack of "thingness" in things implies a mode of experience in which there is no awareness of cause and effect. Things and their causal relations must stand or fall together, because our notion of cause-and-effect is dependent on that of objectively-existing things. If causality explains the interaction among things, then things themselves must be "noncausal." And this is precisely our commonsense notion of what an "object" is: that thing whose continued existence does not need to be explained -- i.e., once in existence, it "self-exists." The objectivity of the world (including the objectivization of myself, my own sense of being a discrete, persisting self) depends upon this dualism. It is the bifurcation between them that Nāgārjuna shows to be untenable, by using each pole to deconstruct the other.
In order to understand the Mādhyamika critique, we must begin with a clear sense of what it is that is being criticized: not primarily metaphysics, but our commonsense understanding of the world, which sees it as a collection of discrete entities (including myself) interacting causally "in" space and time. This understanding (one or the other aspect of which is absolutized in systematic metaphysics) is what makes the everyday world samsāra for us, and it is this samsāra that Nāgārjuna is concerned to deconstruct. The implication of Nāgārjuna's arguments against self-existence (e.g., MMK Chapters I, XV) is to point out the inconsistency concealed within this everyday way of "taking" the world: we accept that things change, yet at the same time we assume that they remain "essentially" the same -- which is necessary if they are to be "things" at all. Other Indian philosophers, recognizing this inconsistency, tried to solve it by absolutizing one of these at the expense of the other. The satkāryavāda substance-view of Samkhya emphazied permanence at the price of not being able to account for change, and the asatkāryavāda modal-view of early Buddhism had the opposite problem of not being able to account for continuity. The basic difficulty with all such views is that any understanding of cause and effect which tries to relate two separate things together can be reduced to the contradiction of both asserting and denying identity.
As the first prong of his attack on the bifurcation, Nāgārjuna refutes our common-sense distinction between things and their causal relations simply by sharpening the distinction to absurdity. If things are to be self-existent, then they must be distinguish able from their conditions, but their existence is clearly contingent upon the conditions which bring them into being and eventually cause them to disappear. If it is objected that one cannot live without reifying such fictitious entities, at least to some extent, then the Mādhyamika agrees; but this "lower truth" (samvrti), while not denied completely, must not be taken as a correct understanding of the way things really are.
But that is only the first step, for now the critique dialectically reverses. The category of causality turns out to be just as dependent upon things as things are on their causal conditions. This second step is easy to state but harder to understand. Granted, if there is only cause-and-effect, then there is no thing which causes and no thing which is effected; but if there is nothing to cause or be effected, then there is no reason to perceive the world in terms of cause-and-effect. For example, implicit in our concept of change is the notion that a thing is becoming other than it was, so unless one reifies something self-existent in order to provide continuity between these different conditioned states,
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there is nothing apart from the changing conditions to be changed. The concept of change needs something to "bite" on, but the first step of the dialectic leaves nothing unconditioned to chew. If the colleague I meet for lunch is not in any sense the same person I saw earlier, because there is no substratum of permanence to "him," then it also makes no sense to say that "he" has changed. Thus, if there is only coming-and-going -- with no "thing" that comes or goes -- then there is no real coming and going.
What are we left with? A universe śūnya-events, none of which occurs for the sake of any other. Each event -- every leaf-flutter, wandering thought, and piece of litter (all things become "thingings") -- is whole and complete in itself, because, although conditioned by everything else in the universe and a manifestation of that whole, for precisely that reason it is not subordinated to anything else but is an end-in-itself. In that sense each thing is the only thing in the whole universe (tathatā, "just this! ") and thus is unconditioned, because the duality between determinism and freedom is deconstructed at the same time. If "liberty or freedom signifies properly the absence of opposition" (Hobbes), then such unimpeded interdependence implies freedom, since there is not only no "thing" that does the event but also no "other" to oppose it. This means that, whenever any event occurs, it is the whole universe that makes the event happen or rather is the event. If we accept that the universe is self-caused, then it acts freely whenever anything is done. The spontaneous actions of an enlightened person respond to a situation like a glove fits on a hand because they are not done by him (her). Without a sense of self, thoughts and actions are experienced as welling-up nondually from a source unfathomably deep -- or (what amounts to the same thing) from nowhere. If one nondualistically is a cause/effect, without the sense of being a hypostatized self that dualistically uses cause/effect, then there is not the awareness that it is a cause/effect; it is experienced as whole, complete, and "traceless."[13] If we try to find a "transcendental signified" in Mādhyamika, it can only be every event that ever occurs in the whole universe, which is why the Buddha could teach simply by twirling a flower.
So there turn out to be only two alternatives: either cause-and-effect relationships between discrete thought-constructed objects, or nondual "all-conditionality" (pratītya-samutpāda) which is experienced as unconditioned freedom (tathatā).[14] In order to experience the latter, the heirarchy which causality constructs -- for the most important hypostatized object is me, the subject who craves other objects and needs an understanding of cause-and-effect relationships in order to manipulate circumstances and obtain them -- must be demolished. "All conditionality," in its complete negation of anything to be attached to, offers no practical utility, because there is no longer any object to be obtained or any self to crave it; whereas a hypostatized self which wants to obtain some other hypostatized thing will need to construct a causal chain of events which leads to it. Because each event in such a chain is experienced not in itself but only
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for the sake of the next, and the next,..., the śūnya nature of each is overlooked in our eagerness to obtain the objectified goal. The dissatisfaction with each particular event, in hurrying to the next, is essential to the sense of self, which is why causality is the root category of thought and hence the one most in need of deconstruction.
3. Before considering the implications of the above analysis for Derrida, we must see that exactly the same paradox applies to temporality: if there is only time, then there is no time. To deconstruct the delusive dichtomy between beings and time is to realize that I am not in time because I am time, which means that I am free from time.
The early Buddhist emphasis on impermanence does not mean an acceptance of time and change as we usually experience them. Samsāra is literally the temporal cycle of birth and death, coming and going, which is somehow negated in nirvāna. What is the genesis of such birth and death? "... time is generated by the mind's restlessness, its stretching out to the future, its projects, and its negation of 'the present state'."[15] But there is no future without a past; expectations and intentions are determined by previous experiences -- more precisely, by the "seeds" (vāsanās) and mental tendencies (samskāras) which remain from them. So past and future work together to obscure the present, usually negating it so successfully that we can hardly be said to experience it. The ceaseless stream of intentionality devalues the present into simply one more moment in the sequence of causal relationships, as an effect of past causes and a cause of future effects.
The consequence of this devaluation of the present is that time becomes objectified through a reversal taking place. Instead of past and future being understood as a function of present memories and expectations, the present is reduced to a moment within a "time-stream" which is understood to exist "out there" -- a "container," as it were, like space, within which things exist and events occur. But in order for time to be a container, there must be a contained -- something that is "in" it -- which is objects. And in order for objects to be "in" time, they must in themselves be atemporal -- i.e., self-existing. In this way, the delusive bifurcation that occurs between objects and causality is paralleled by the same bifurcation between objects and time, as a result of which each pole gains a spurious "reality." The first reified object, the most important thing to be hypostatized as atemporal, is the "I," the sense of an ontological self that is permanent and unchanging, which comes into being to discover itself in the anxious position of being an atemporal entity nonetheless inextricably trapped "in" time.
The first half of the Mādhyamika dialectic deconstructs the object that is "in" time by demonstrating that it is time. Much of our difficulty in understanding time is due to spatial metaphors, but in this case a spatial analogy is helpful. We normally understand objects such as cups to be "in" space, which implies that in themselves they must have a self-existence distinct from spatial relations. Not much reflection, however, is necessary to realize that the cup itself is irremedially spatial: all its parts must have a certain thickness, and without the various spatial relations among the bottom and sides and handle, the cup could not be a cup. One way to express this is to say that the cup is not "in" space but itself is space: the cup is "what space is doing in that place," so to speak. The same is true for the temporality of the cup. The cup is not an atemporal, self-existing object that just happens to be "in" time, for its being is irremedially temporal. This de-
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stroys the thought-constructed dualism between things and time. When we want to express this, we must describe one pole in terms of the other, by saying either that objects are temporal (in which case they are not "objects" as we usually conceive of them) or, conversely, that time is objects -- that is, that time expresses itself in the manifestations which we call objects. Probably the clearest expression of this was by the Japanese Zen master Degas: "The time we call spring blossoms directly as an existence called flowers. The flowers, in turn, express the time called spring. This is not existence within time; existence itself is time."[16] This is the meaning of his "being-time" (uji):
"Being-time" means that time is being; i.e., "Time is existence, existence is time."... Every thing, every being in this entire world is time... Do not think of time as merely flying by; do not only study the fleeting aspect of time. If time is really flying away, there would be a separation between time and ourselves. If you think that time is just a passing phenomenon, you will never understand being-time.[17]
Time "flies away" when we experience it dualistically, with the sense of a self which is observing it from outside. Then time becomes something which I have (or don't have) objectified and quantified in a succession of "now-moments" that cannot be held but incessantly fall away. In contrast, the "being-times" which we usually reify into objects do not occur in time because they are time. As Nāgārjuna would put it, that things (or "thingings") are time means that there is no second, external time which they are "within."
This brings us to the second prong of the dialectic. Having used temporality to deconstruct things, we must now reverse the analysis and use the lack of a thing "in" time to negate the objectivity of time also. When there is no contained, there can be no container. If there are no things which have an existence apart from time, then it makes no sense to speak of "them" as being young or old: "So the young man does not grow old nor does the old man grow old" (Nāgārjuna)[18]. Dōgen expressed this in terms of firewood and ashes:
... we should not take the view that what is latterly ashes was formerly firewood. What we should understand is that, according to the doctrine of Buddhism, Firewood stays at the position of firewood... There are former and later stages, but these stages are clearly cut.[19]
Firewood does not become ashes; rather, there is the "being-time" of firewood, then the "being-time" of ashes. If there are no atemporal objects, then the present does not gain its value or meaning by its relation to past or future. Each "being-time" is complete in itself. But how does such "being-time" free us from time?
Similarly, when human beings die, they cannot return to life; but in Buddhist teaching we never say that life changes into death... Likewise, death cannot change into life... Life and death have absolute existence, like the relationship of winter and spring. But do not think of winter changing into spring or spring into summer.[20]
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Because life and death, like spring and summer, are not in time, they are in themselves timeless. If there is no one who is born and dies, there is only birth and death; but if there are only the events of birth and death, then there is no real birth and death. Alternatively, we may say that there is life and death in every moment, with the arising and passing away of each thought and act. Dōgen again: "Just understand that birth-and-death is nirvāna... only then can you be free from birth and death."
This paradox suggests two contradictory descriptions. We may say that there is only the present: not, of course, the present as usually understood -- a series of fleeting moments which incessantly fall away to become the past -- but a very different present which incorporates what we normally call the past and the future, because it always stays the same.
We cannot be separated from time. This means that because, in reality, there is no coming or going in time, when we cross the river or climb the mountain we exist in the eternal present of time; this time includes all past and future time.... Most people think time is passing and do not realize that there is an aspect that is not passing (Dōgen).[21]
What is the aspect of time that is not passing? It is always now. Alternatively, this non-dual way of experiencing time may be described as living in eternity: again, not eternity in the usual sense, an infinite persistence in time which presupposes the usual duality between things and time. There is "an eternity on this side of the grave" if the present is not devalued, as Wittgenstein realized:
For life in the present there is no death.
If by eternity is understood not infinite temporal duration but non-temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present.[22]
So there is nothing outside the incessant flux of change, yet there is also something which does not change at all. Transformation is experienced very differently if one is the change rather than an observer of it. The same is true for causality. The interdependence of time and causality means that to live (in) the Now-which-does-not-fall-away is freedom, for that Now is an unconditionality which is not incompatible with conditions as long as I am those conditions. To be the Now means to be one with whatever is happening, in which case conditions are not a constraint but constitute the everchanging web of possibilities which may be actualized (or not) freely. Such freedom is not a delusion born of ignoring the causal factors that determine my behavior, but just the opposite: it is motives, conscious or unconscious, which pull me out of the Now by objectifying both time and things (including, first, me) in order to provide a field-of-play for the network of intentions. Of course, there is nothing wrong with such an objectified field as long as it is realized to be a mental construction, for then I am not objectively trapped within my own objectifications. But, from the "highest point of view," we have always lived only (in) the Eternal Now. Any other sense of time is the result of prapañca thought-projection within that Now. That is why philosophy -- not only metaphysics but even deconstructive anti-philosophy, including this paper -- cannot be the Way, but must finally yield to something else. To identify with any thought-construction is to be objectified by it and lose the Now, whereas meditation -- zazen, yoga, etc. -- is learning how to dwell in that Now.
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II
1. In terms of the double-deconstruction above, Derrida performs the first phase of the dialectic but not the second. The Mahāyāna dissolution of self-existing objects "into" time anticipates the critique of self-presence which Derrida makes in textual terms, by showing that every process of signification is an economy of temporal differences:
The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals, which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself... There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.[23]
But, despite realizing that each term of such dualities is only the différance of the other, Derrida does not see the second phase, in which the dialectic reverses. In Dōgen's "being-time," lack of self-presence is not incompatible with "the eternal present of time," because without self-existing objects time is not composed of a succession of "now-moments." Such moments exist only relative to objects, as their successive modulations. Mahāyāna ends up with a distinction between the commonsense understanding of objectified time, in which the present shrinks to a moving dividing-line whereby the future continuously falls away to become past, and the non-metaphysical experience of an Eternal Now. It is no coincidence that this bears more than a passing resemblance to (among many other things) Heidegger's distinction between the "fallen" metaphysical conception of time and a more primordial understanding which the "fundamental ontology" of Being and Time attempts to grasp.
Derrida's most detailed examination of time and of Heidegger is in "Ousia and Grammē: Note on a note from Being and Time."[24] Its point of departure is a footnote from Being and Time in which Heidegger, having differentiated his own view of time from the traditional and metaphysical one, argues that the "fallen" conception of time is implicit in all Western metaphysics from Aristotle through Hegel and Bergson. It originates in an aporia found in Aristotle's Physics IV, in which the nature of time is determined as "nonbeing''because it is composed of a succession of elementary parts -- "nows" (nun):
But in order to be, in order to be a being, it [time] must not be affected by time, it must not become (past or future). To participate in beingness, in ousia, therefore is to participate, in being-present, in the presence of the present, or if you will, in presentness (p.40).
The circularity of this definition remains "unthought" until Heidegger. From the Mādhyamika perspective, this aporia is merely another version of the delusive bifurcation between things and time. Aristotle's metaphysical demonstration is only a more explicit determination of the duality already latent in ordinary language. Whether both terms resulting from the bifurcation are taken to be real (both "container" and "contained" being real, as presented above in Part 1) or the reality of one is used to deny the reality of the other (as with Aristotle) is irrelevant to the main point.
72 LOY
From a Mādhyamika perspective, what is most interesting is that Derrida's essay takes for granted the very metaphysical determination of time that Heidegger and (to a lesser extent) even Hegel are attempting to bring into question. Ironically, the many passages which Derrida quotes from Hegel and He |
ship with Visual Studio and extensions shipped by third party extension vendors to this model. Curious about which extensions impact startup, solution load, and typing performance? You can see this information in Help -> Manage Visual Studio Performance. Do you develop an extension? We will be publishing guidance to help extension developers move to on-demand loading. Moving subsystems from the main VS process to separatel processes: We moved some memory-intensive tasks such as Git Source Control, and our JavaScript and TypeScript language services to separate processes. This makes it less likely for you to experience delays caused by code running in the main Visual Studio process, or Visual Studio becoming sluggish and even crashing as the main process approaches the 4GB memory limit of 32-bit processes. We will continue to move components out-of-process in coming releases. Faster project load, coding, and debugging for C++: We have made loading C++ projects faster. Check out this video showing the improvement. You can enable this by setting “Enable Faster Project Load” to True from Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> C/C++ -> Experimental. We have also made improvements to our linker and PDB loading libraries to make incremental builds and launching the debugger much faster while significantly reducing memory consumption while debugging. Improved speed when using Git, Debugging, and editing XAML Code : We have improved the speed of source control operations by switching from libgit2 to git.exe. We have also improved debugging performance by optimizing initialization costs and other costs related to IntelliTrace and the Diagnostic Tools window, and removed several delays that occur when editing XAML files.
This is just the start and we are dedicated to making improvements like these to make Visual Studio start faster, be more responsive, and use less memory. Keep an eye out for more posts on the Visual Studio blog over the coming days where we’ll go deep into the technical details behind these improvements.
We rigorously test these changes to anticipate issues and deliver the best performance but there is no substitute for real world code. We need your help! So please install Preview 5, try it out with your large solutions, and tell us what you think by using the Report-a-problem tool within the IDE.
Improvements in productivity
Visual Studio “15” also has a lot of features aimed at keeping productivity high.
Editing Code
IntelliSense filtering is now available in C#, VB and C++. While exploring complex APIs, you can narrow to just the type you need (for example, just methods, properties, or events). In C# and Visual Basic we determine the “target type” required at a position and preselect items in the list matching that type. This speeds up your typing flow and removes the burden of having to figure out the expected type at a given location.
In C++, an experimental Predictive IntelliSense feature shows a filtered list of IntelliSense results so you don’t have to scroll through a long list. Only items of the expected type are listed based on need based probability. You can turn on this feature in Tools > Options > Text Editor > C/C++ > Experimental.
In XAML, we have added IntelliSense completion for x:Bind which provides a completion list when you attempt to bind to properties and events. Namespace completion offers to auto-complete the prefix if the reference to the namespace already exists. XAML IntelliSense has also been updated to filter out types and properties that do not match. The closest match is selected, so you only see relevant results and don’t have to scroll through a long list of types.
In JavaScript, we have completely revamped the language service that powers IntelliSense. Previously, as you typed, a JavaScript engine continuously executed your code to provide runtime-like completion lists and signature help. This was great for dynamic JavaScript code, however it often provided an inconsistent editing experience. The new language service uses static analysis powered by TypeScript to provide more detailed IntelliSense, full ES6/ES7 coverage, and a more consistent editing experience.
Quick Fixes and Refactorings
To help you maintain a readable codebase and catalyze your development workflow, we’ve added more Quick Actions and Refactorings for C# and Visual Basic. Move Type to Matching File moves a type into a new file that has the same name and Sync File and Type Name gives you the option to rename your type to match your file name (and vice versa). Lastly, Convert to Interpolated String lets you embrace C# 6.0 and VB14 goodness by transforming your string.Format expressions into interpolated strings.
Navigating Code
Getting around, and knowing where you are in a large codebase can be challenging; we’ve added several new navigation features to help with this. Go To: (Ctrl +, or Ctrl + T) lets you quickly find files, types, methods, and other kinds of objects in your code.
Find All References (Shift+F12) now helps you get around easily, even in complex codebases. It provides advanced grouping, filtering, sorting, searching within results, and (for some languages) colorization, so you can get a clear understanding of your references.
Debugging
In Preview 5 we have introduced and experimental feature: Run to Click. You no longer need to set a temporary breakpoint to skip ahead and stop on the line you desire. When stopped in the debugger, simply click the icon that appears next to the line of code your mouse is over. Your code will run and stop on that line the next time it is hit. You can turn on this feature in Debug > Options > Enable Run to Click.
The New Exception Helper: See what you need more quickly with the new Exception Helper. View the most useful exception information at a glance, including seeing what variable was null, in a compact non-modal dialog with instant access to inner exceptions.
Try it out
For the complete list of everything in this release, along with some known issues, look at the Visual Studio “15” Preview 5 Release Notes page.
A couple of important caveats about Preview 5. First, this is an unsupported preview so don’t install it on machines that you rely on for critical production work. Second, Preview 5 should work side by side with previous versions of Visual Studio, but you must remove any previous Visual Studio “15” Preview installations before beginning the setup process. Check out this Preview 5 FAQ for other common questions.
As always, we welcome your feedback. For problems, let us know via the Report a Problem option, either from the installer or the Visual Studio IDE itself. Track your feedback on the developer community portal. For suggestions, let us know through UserVoice.
Last but not least, check out Mitra’s post from earlier today to learn more about the upcoming developer conference Connect(); 2016.The BBC's current thinking is to publicise the channel's closure and new online home from October this year. At the same time, the BBC will air repeats of BBC Three shows on BBC One and Two to indicate how the channel's programming will survive on linear TV. Between January and March, the Beeb will then turn BBC Three into a "transitional channel" and publicly launch BBC Three Online. It's unclear exactly how this almost-closed TV channel will work -- the BBC has suggested that it could run 12 hours per week of "archive programming" late at night. On March 1st, the channel will then disappear completely.
It seems there's no turning back. Despite petitioners' efforts, the BBC is pushing ahead and has the provisional backing of the BBC Trust. Unless something drastic happens, the demise of BBC Three's TV channel is just a matter of when and how.
[Image Credit: BBC Pictures/Rough Cut]A WestJet flight from Vancouver to Toronto was diverted to Calgary last night after yet another threat.
It was the third "hoax" involving a bomb scare and the fourth threat overall against the airline in the past five days.
"Yes, we've been hit again," said WestJet spokesman Robert Palmer.
We believe the threat against <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WS722?src=hash">#WS722</a> is a hoax. We diverted the flight out of an abundance of caution. —@WestJet
He confirmed WestJet Flight 722 took off from Vancouver at 5:14 p.m. PT Wednesday. The airplane landed safely in Calgary just before 8 p.m. MT.
The Boeing 737-700 was carrying 30 passengers and five crew members. The airline tweeted at about 8:30 p.m. MT that everyone was exiting the plane by mobile stairs.
Passenger Kyle Raymond tweeted to the CBC's Stephanie Wiebe that at least one fire truck was waiting nearby as the plane landed.
He said it was several minutes before the stairs were put in place to allow the passengers off.
<a href="https://twitter.com/StephWiebeCBC">@StephWiebeCBC</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/learaymond">@learaymond</a> the stairs are coming. I feel like Sandra Bullock in a very boring air version of Speed! <a href="http://t.co/oPf59YSK5g">pic.twitter.com/oPf59YSK5g</a> —@mrkyleraymond
WestJet says all flight 722 passengers were found seats on Toronto-bound flights later Wednesday evening.
The Calgary-based airline released a statement late Wednesday after what it termed "yet another hoax."
4 false threats in 5 days
"We understand and appreciate that four false threats in five days is generating a great deal of interest and unfortunately, rumour and speculation," the statement read.
"We will not comment on these rumours nor will we share information about how we handle with these incidents, for obvious reasons. We will continue to work closely with law enforcement to find those responsible. Safety remains our top priority and we will continue to be vigilant to keep our guests and our crews safe."
A previous threat was made on Tuesday night against Flight 323 from Toronto to Saskatoon. It landed safely at John Diefenbaker airport and all 113 passengers and five crew members were able to leave the aircraft safely using the stairs.
That wasn't the case Monday night when six passengers were injured during an emergency evacuation of a WestJet flight in Winnipeg. The Boeing 737-700 was about an hour and a half into its flight from Edmonton to Toronto when it made its emergency landing after an unspecified threat.
On June 27, a flight from Halifax to Edmonton was diverted to Saskatoon after an airport official in Kincardine, Ont., received a bomb threat. No explosives were found that time either, but the incident created flight delays in Saskatoon.
Air Canada and the St. John's Airport were affected last week, with a bomb threat the night of June 25 that led to an evacuation of airport buildings until safety was ensured.At first glance, the victory of Donald Trump suggests that big political money has less clout than imagined in U.S. democracy. Not only are defeated Democrats consumed with blame-shifting and calls to deliver better messages to a supposedly crucial “white working class,” but pundits are portraying President-Elect Trump as a populist politician unmoored from the establishment or big donors. Some journalists even suggest that the hundreds of conservative millionaires and billionaires organized by Charles and David Koch lost relevance this time – because the two brothers personally refused to endorse Trump and their donor network cut back originally projected spending from almost a billion to a “mere” $750 million.
But we beg to differ. As researchers who have been tracking the long-term rise and recent impact of the Koch network, we see a very different picture. During the election campaign, Trump relied upon well-established conservative organizational networks that could reach into many states and communities. He made overt deals with the National Rifle Association and the Christian right, and he benefitted indirectly from Koch network operations centered in a nation-spanning, political party-like federation called Americans for Prosperity. Even more important, after his campaign squeaked through on November 8, an unprepared President-Elect Trump started to fall back on people and plans offered by the Koch network, which aims to dismantle not only Barack Obama’s accomplishments but much of what the federal government has done for 75 years to promote security and opportunity for ordinary Americans.
As we have detailed in a September 2016 research article, for many years the Kochs and their associates have orchestrated donations from hundreds of wealthy conservatives to build and support interlocked sets of free-market-oriented think tanks, advocacy groups, and constituency mobilization efforts. Growing since 2004 and now spanning three dozen U.S. states, the Koch centerpiece Americans for Prosperity (AFP) now employs hundreds of professional operatives, claims close to 300,000 affiliated volunteer activists, and spends some $150 million annually on electoral efforts and policy campaigns. Not surprisingly, AFP was very active in the 2016 election, surgically injecting massive resources of money and canvassing power into key Senate, gubernatorial, and down-ballot races.
The Kochs certainly did not want Trump to win the GOP nomination; they preferred the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Florida Senator Marco Rubio. As the New York magnate made surprising headway, the Koch network shifted resources to Congressional and state battles, pursuing a strategy designed to maximize post-2016 leverage despite Trump. But now that Trump has actually prevailed, Koch cleverness hits the jackpot. Although widely unpopular with the mass public, the Koch policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich, union busting, Medicare privatization, business deregulation, and evisceration of environmental and global warming measures is ripe to be rammed through a GOP-dominated Congress and sent to the desk of a president who needs Koch-affiliated personnel, understands very little about policy issues, and will be looking for victorious bills to sign into law. The stage is perfectly set to advance the core Koch ultra-free-market agenda, even though the brothers avoided endorsing Trump and the candidate himself discussed almost none of the relevant policy shifts in his appeals to voters.
“Promise her anything, but give her Arpege!” Only readers of a certain advanced age will recall this playful perfume advertising ditty from the mid twentieth century. But it captures a similar, much more serious bait-and-switch unfolding right now in American politics. Worryingly, this switcharoo is poised to unfold without much citizen understanding or debate. Most media outlets have not noticed that the Koch network is now fusing with the emerging Trump presidency – a situation that leaves citizens in the dark about huge pending policy upheavals in federal programs most American families have long taken for granted.
How the Koch Network Played in Election 2016
Despite loud pronouncements from Charles Koch that his network would not support Trump, the Kochs’ massive political operation worked over many months to turn out Republican voters in key states. Above all, AFP was deeply involved in get-out-the-vote efforts, especially in the critical swing states of Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
Publicly available numbers suggest that AFP’s grassroots organizing made a real difference – and indirectly helped Trump, who had little campaign capacity of his own. In Wisconsin, for instance, AFP claims that it reached over 2.5 million voters in phone banking and canvassing efforts. In North Carolina, AFP claimed over 1.2 million calls and 120,000 door-to-door efforts, or nearly the entire reported margin of victory for Trump. And in Pennsylvania, AFP claims it made over 2.4 million phone calls and knocked on over 135,000 doors, more than twice Trump’s margin of victory in that state. AFP’s grassroots efforts were especially pronounced in Florida, where AFP boasts that its people knocked on a record-breaking one million doors throughout the state to help re-elect Senator Marco Rubio. Hillary Clinton lost the state by just over 100,000 votes. In all four of these states AFP helped to re-elect the incumbent Republican Senator and make important down ballot gains. Obviously, given what we know about the decline of split ticking voting, most of the same citizens AFP mobilized for state and Congressional contests also cast ballots for Donald Trump.
Beyond AFP’s mobilization in the run-up to Election Day, Trump and other Republicans were likely buoyed by longer-term efforts pursued by the Koch network across the states. Enacting voter ID laws and legal measures to eviscerate the organizing and bargaining rights of labor unions have been two of ongoing efforts of the Koch network – which always prioritizes steps to undercut the fundraising and organizational capacities of liberals and progressives. AFP and other Koch groups have worked closely with other right-wing allies to enact “right to work” measures and laws that make it hard for unions to hold members or wield organizational capacities in elections and policy battles. Their efforts have paid off handsomely in the form of abrupt declines in union membership and clout in Wisconsin and Michigan, two states that Trump won by a hair on November 8. Observers also believe that Wisconsin’s voter ID law had a significant impact in lowering black voter turnout in Milwaukee.
An Unprepared President-Elect Turns to Koch Politicians
Having helped to elect Trump and a fully GOP-controlled Congress, the Koch network is now positioned to staff and steer much that happens in Washington DC. Trump won the presidency by dominating the media and borrowing get-out-the-vote networks from allies like the National Rifle Association, the Christian right, AFP, but after November 8, his own inner circles provided little in the way of expert allies to help him fill tens of thousands of federal government jobs and plan comprehensive policy agendas. Especially on the domestic side, Trump has responded by immediately outsourcing much of this work to experienced GOP officials, including key players in his emergent White House and in Congress who have long been groomed by the Koch network. That network, in turn, offers ideas and people to help Koch affiliated politicians shape the Trump administration and agendas.
For the emerging Trump White House, Vice President Mike Pence, long a Koch network favorite, was put in charge of transition planning for federal personnel appointments – and one of his senior staffers for this effort is his long-time associate, Marc Short, recent head of Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, the lynchpin of the Koch network’s fundraising operation. (Starting in 2011, Freedom Partners became the Koch network’s “political bank”, charged with collecting hefty contributions from some 400 to 500 conservative millionaires and billionaires who attend the twice-yearly “Koch seminars” that convene at posh resorts to plan strategies and channel resources to selected conservative think tanks, issue advocacy groups, and activist and voter mobilization efforts, especially those controlled by the Koch network itself.) In addition to Pence and Short, newly-named White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus has had strong ties to AFP’s chapter in Wisconsin – a chapter that has been central to all aspects of politics and policy in that state during the ascendancy of Governor Scott Walker.
Personnel is policy, as the saying goes. Significantly, our research tracking operatives’ careers in AFP shows that key Koch officials have, for years, regularly moved on to important positions on Republican electoral and governing staffs. In the past, those plum governing positions have been in governors’ offices and on Congressional staffs. Now the Trump White House personnel operation can recruit many AFP and other Koch-groomed operatives and place them throughout the federal executive branch. So far, the process is moving right along. For example, the newly designated CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, has close Koch network ties, as do other transition advisers like Kris Kobach, a hardline Trump advisor on immigration policy who may end up in some key post in the new administration.
White House and executive staffing through Koch networks is only part of the Trump story, however, because Pence and Priebus have ready-made bridges to Congressional GOP leaders who are themselves closely aligned with the Koch network. After apparently denouncing and opposing GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan during the election campaign, President-Elect Trump did a quick about-face to fully embrace Ryan and his radical government-shrinking policy agenda. Speaker Ryan has been a featured politician at many Koch donor conclaves over the years, and Washington Post reporter Matea Gold has described Ryan as “clearly a favorite of the Koch donor network.” It is not hard to see why. Ryan’s main priorities, already spelled out in budgets that House Republicans have repeatedly passed, include slashing federal funding for Medicaid, Food Stamps, and other parts of the social safety net for the poor; privatizing Medicare for future generations of American retirees; instituting large and regressive tax cuts rewarding corporations and the very wealthy; gutting what remains of labor regulations and union rights; and eliminating business and environmental regulations. Ryan’s budget plans, now ready to push through Congress to a Republican president’s desk, align perfectly with the Koch network’s ultra-free market libertarian plans to virtually dismantle the U.S. federal government as a domestic welfare and economic force. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has also developed deep ties to the Koch network, and has previewed his plans for undoing Obama-era initiatives in closed-door Koch donor meetings.
With all of these leadership ties in place, is it no surprise that specific plans have rapidly emerged to advance the Koch agenda in the new Congress that convenes in January 2017, perhaps enacting bills so quickly that opponents will be disorganized and most Americans will not understand what is happening. Within days of the election, Speaker Ryan announced plans to move forward with upward-tilting tax cuts and repealing ObamaCare – and, even more amazingly, with his own longstanding Koch-style plan to turn America’s very popular and economically efficient Medicare health insurance program into dwindling “premium support” coupons that older Americans would have to use to cover just part of the ever-rising price for private insurance. Trump barely mentioned Medicare during the election, only to suggest he would protect the established public program along with Social Security. But when President-Elect Trump decided to back Paul Ryan for Speaker, his transition website quietly changed its Medicare wording to signal support for the privatizing voucher plan.
Similarly in lockstep with Koch-aligned Congressional Republicans, Trump has denied the existence of global climate change and he and Congressional GOP leaders are targeting Obama-era initiatives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and improve environmental protections. Withdrawing from – or subverting – the recently ratified Paris global warming compact is on the Trump-Ryan agenda, as are steps to disempower the Environmental Protection Agency as a tool to reduce carbon emissions and the unleashing of new rounds of oil and coal production. All of these goals have been pushed by the Koch network – even as the threats to humanity grow and most Americans, including Republicans, have come to believe that global warming is a real problem that needs a federal response.
Will a Bait and Switch Presidency Spark Backlash?
Back in August, an National Public Radio correspondent suggested that the Koch political network was “building a … wall against Trump.” By now it is obvious that this depiction is just plain wrong. Despite protestations to the contrary, Koch-backed efforts provided crucial electoral support for Trump and his eventual Congressional allies. And taking a longer and deeper view, the construction over recent years of a comprehensive interlocked network of Koch donor funded organizations – including the vast federation Americans for Prosperity – has put in place personnel and policy plans now very much needed by a very unprepared amateur-hour president.
The emerging Trump-Koch agenda will, of course, drive Democrats and liberal advocacy groups to new levels of frenzy – and that may be a feature, not a bug, for Trump’s closest advisors. By combining this agenda with attacks on minority and immigrant rights and a “clash of civilizations” foreign policy, the new administration probably hopes to overwhelm its opponents. Liberals and Democrats could be so focused on Trump’s racial and international policies that they fail to mobilize widespread American popular support to save programs like Medicare.
Ironically, however, the pending Koch-inspired eviscerations of the U.S. social insurance system are likely to disillusion many of Trump’s “make America great again” voters. Medicare is one of the most cost-efficient and popular government programs, ensuring affordable, consumer friendly heath care to all U.S. seniors across metropolitan, suburban, small town and rural areas alike. Replacing this program with vouchers will disproportionately hurt poor and middle-income seniors. And this change would also devastate the bottom lines of many hospitals and clinics, especially in non-wealthy areas of the country. In addition, eliminating ObamaCare funding for Medicaid and subsidies for lower-middle-income people who purchase private plans on the state exchanges would make health insurance either unavailable or unaffordable for around 22 million non-elderly Americans. Typically, Trump and others in the GOP rhetorically imply that ObamaCare beneficiaries are chiefly poor urban blacks and Latinos, but in fact many millions live in the nonmetropolitan places that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
With total GOP control of Washington DC about to happen, the Koch network dream of an enfeebled U.S. domestic government is on the verge of realization. Unless Democrats learn to speak clearly and organize in many states and counties, no one will even be available to make the key changes visible or explain what is happening to disillusioned voters. In a Koch-ified America, corporations would hold unfettered sway and ordinary citizens would be left “free” to their own devices and local charity – no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. Should it come to pass, this aftermath to a supposedly “populist” presidency is going to come as a real shock to most Americans – and above all to those who rallied to Trump’s 2016 promise to uplift their struggling communities and “make America great” again for people like them.The MPAA, RIAA and five large U.S. Internet providers have extended the "Six Strikes" anti-piracy system until late next month, TorrentFreak has learned. The agreement expired last summer but has been extended several times while the parties involved work towards making it future-proof.
During the summer of 2011 the MPAA and RIAA teamed up with five major Internet providers in the United States, announcing their a plan to “educate” BitTorrent pirates.
The parties launched the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) and agreed on a system through which Internet account holders are warned if their connections are used to download pirated content.
After five or six warnings ISPs take a variety of repressive measures, including bandwidth throttling and temporary disconnections.
The system has been in place for several years now and last summer the agreement was set to expire. However, the CCI informs TorrentFreak that the program will continue and earlier this month it was extended again until March 22.
This is a relatively short extension, suggesting that the parties are close to a new agreement. However, CCI was not able to confirm this.
“While this extension is shorter than prior extensions, it is still a matter of routine business that will allow us to maintain the program as we work together to refine the system,” a spokesperson informed us.
The negotiations have been ongoing for months so it’s clear that the new deal will include some changes. We can only speculate what these are, but it would be no surprise if the MPAA and RIAA have asked for more serious consequences for repeat infringers.
Under the current system a user will no longer receive any warnings after the 6th copyright alert, and permanent disconnections are not part of the program.
This made sense five years ago when the original terms were negotiated. However, just a few weeks ago Cox Communications was held liable for pirating customers because they failed to terminate their accounts, which puts the old agreement in a new light.
There has also been explicit critique from some copyright holders. A few months ago several independent movies studios called for an end to the “six strikes” scheme, describing it as an ineffective “sham”.
According to the movie studios the copyright alerts are highly ineffective because only a small fraction of the piracy notices are forwarded to the Internet providers.
Time will tell whether any of the upcoming changes will address these concerns.
For CCI, however, the core task remains educating consumers and shifting norms and behavior, pointing them towards legal sites and services.
“The members of CCI are committed to this voluntary effort to educate consumers about copyright and how they can access and enjoy digital content. We are proof positive that collaboration can work, and we are excited about the future of the organization,” CCI’s spokesperson says.As I have pointed out on more than one occasion over the past year or so, the Republican Party's budget wizard, Catholic House Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, needs help with simple math for his budget assumptions as his math doesn't add up.
It has become sport to watch economist Paul Krugman and many others demystify Ryan's budget "analysis." Each such article acted like one was watching the curtain pulled back on the great Wizard of Oz.
Ryan doubled down to claim his budget proposal contained not only fiscal probity, but that he wrapped his budget in Catholic social teaching. Academics and the nuns quickly debunked such oddball claims by Ryan, as his budget doesn't even come close to resembling Catholic social teaching.
Even two timid Catholic bishops kept writing Ryan and his colleagues pointing out that his budget was a "moral failure," albeit to no avail.
Now comes Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine, who like Krugman and so many others, dismantles Ryan's analysis of fiscal reality.
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Says Chait:
"Changes in the way we think about the world are not ‘news’ in the classic sense — they occur gradually, without discrete events to signal them. But they matter. Two such developments have come together recently, both reported in the New York Times. The first is the collapse of intellectual support for the notion that immediate austerity can boost economic growth. The second is a growing consensus that health-care-cost inflation is slowing for deep structural reasons, rather than having undergone a mere temporary dip from the recession. These trends have something in common: They blow to smithereens the intellectual foundations of the Obama-era Republican policy agenda.
During the last four years, the hoary Republican nostrums of lower taxes, spending, and regulation have cohered into a specific view of the world. Paul Ryan has been the leading figure in defining this view and persuading the entire party, almost without exception, to fall in line behind it. The Ryan worldview is that the United States is heading toward a massive debt crisis, that the crisis is driven primarily by rising health-care costs, and only his plan stands any chance of alleviating it. Ryan has expounded this view over and over..."
He concludes:
"And yet the canon of Levin and Ryan has undergone no revision whatsoever. The debt crisis is “irrefutably happening,” Ryan insisted recently. Obamacare, he said yesterday, will “collapse under its own weight.” Ryan and his party are so certain of these foundations his worldview rests upon that he can’t even be bothered to look down at the rubble all around his feet."
Austerity Kills
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David Stuckler, a senior research leader in sociology at Oxford, and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist in the Prevention Research Center at Stanford, are the authors of “The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills.”
The two wrote a lengthy op-ed Sunday in the New York Times, which is mandatory reading for anyone even casually interested in the federal budget fight. The authors review the reality in Europe where austerity budgets were slashed wantonly to devastating results.
They then take a look at how things are playing out in the U.S:
"Somewhere between these extremes is the United States. Initially, the 2009 stimulus package shored up the safety net. But there are warning signs — beyond the higher suicide rate — that health trends are worsening. Prescriptions for antidepressants have soared. Three-quarters of a million people (particularly out-of-work young men) have turned to binge drinking. Over five million Americans lost access to health care in the recession because they lost their jobs (and either could not afford to extend their insurance under the Cobra law or exhausted their eligibility). Preventive medical visits dropped as people delayed medical care and ended up in emergency rooms. (President Obama’s health care law expands coverage, but only gradually.)
The $85 billion “sequester” that began on March 1 will cut nutrition subsidies for approximately 600,000 pregnant women, newborns and infants by year’s end. Public housing budgets will be cut by nearly $2 billion this year, even while 1.4 million homes are in foreclosure. Even the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation’s main defense against epidemics like last year’s fungal meningitis outbreak, is being cut, by at least $18 million."
And their conclusion:
"One need not be an economic ideologue — we certainly aren’t — to recognize that the price of austerity can be calculated in human lives. We are not exonerating poor policy decisions of the past or calling for universal debt forgiveness. It’s up to policy makers in America and Europe to figure out the right mix of fiscal and monetary policy. What we have found is that austerity — severe, immediate, indiscriminate cuts to social and health spending — is not only self-defeating, but fatal."
Why then do so many cardinals, bishops and Catholic lay people support Congressman Ryan, and the 50-plus Catholic House Republicans who vote in lock-step in support of his federal budget proposal, when Ryan's proposed cuts, if implemented, would be fatal?There’s almost no part of Goodfellas that hasn’t been analyzed to death since 1990. There’s Liotta’s hilariously self-satisfied narration, which offers no apology or remorse as the bodies pile up. There’s the kinetic, disconnected approach to plotting, zipping between vaguely related scenes with an intensity that belies its 140-minute running time. Contrast that with The Godfather films, which were intricately plotted and ended in epic crescendos of violence. Instead, Goodfellas simply follows Henry and his pals Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) as they hang out, occasionally rip off truck and airplane shipments, and attack people, either for business or nothing at all.
Pesci, who won an Oscar for his role, is Goodfellas’s most memorable actor—so much so that nearly every line he speaks has passed into total cliché. But it’s remarkable how all of the film’s dramatic tension is centered around his character Tommy, who can snap at a moment’s notice. Though there are larger stories told in Goodfellas (the most notable being the famed Lufthansa heist), they don’t really matter to Henry’s life and safety. Even when he goes to jail for four years, he eats like a king (who can forget the clove of garlic sliced with a razor blade), and he ends up arrested not because of the millions earned in the Lufthansa heist, but for a cocaine-dealing business he ran on the side.
It’s all so gloriously pointless, and yet Scorsese makes the mobster’s life feel like that of a god among men. Liotta has probably never been better—wormy (his braying laughter at Tommy’s bad jokes is wonderfully hideous) and yet somehow sympathetic. Perhaps because he’s placed alongside two truly cold-blooded men, Henry is the closest thing the audience gets to an anti-hero in the film: His mild shock at every pointless murder feels like moral outrage in the mobster world. That’s a dynamic David Chase understood when laying out the world of his TV show The Sopranos (the only true Mafia masterpiece produced since Goodfellas): By making his protagonist Tony a slightly more reasonable person than his violent, thick-headed associates, the character seemed infinitely more relatable.
Scorsese has since come back time and again to the world of crime. The Departed, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director (Goodfellas was nominated but lost to Dances With Wolves), has the same energetic storytelling style but applies it to a more intricate plot of triple agents and informants. The Wolf of Wall Street comes closest to Goodfellas’s fascinatingly blurry territory of depiction vs. endorsement, and stirred up debate in 2013 for making the life of a homophobic, misogynistic, and heartless white-color criminal look like a luxurious commercial. Goodfellas has the same dark heart, understanding that even as the audience watches on with horror, there’s some tiny part of them that has completely surrendered to the madness and the fun. That was Goodfellas’s original genius and, even in retrospect, it seems impossible to equal.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.25 SHARES Facebook Twitter
Well, that was fast. It was just last week we learned that the “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” team of director David Lowery, and actors Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara shot a secret project over the summer. And now in a pleasant surprise, the movie is in the can and headed to Sundance.
Titled “A Ghost Story,” the picture will screen as part of the NEXT Section and details are being kept close to the vest, with the story revolving around a ghost and the house he haunts. The supporting cast notably includes indie rocker and occasional actor Will Oldham, with Sonia Acevedo, Rob Zabrecky, and Liz Franke also featuring. We really can’t wait to see what they’ve put together, and these first images are a great tease.
The Sundance Film Festival runs from January 19-29, 2017. [Bloody Disgusting]
Click here for our complete coverage from the 2017 Sundance Film FestivalWikileaks published a new trove of top secret documents revealing that the NSA spied on the private meetings of major world leaders, including UN chief Ban Ki-Moon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as well as the prime ministers of Italy and Israel.
The National Security Agency (NSA) listened in on high-level meetings on climate change, global economics, and even “how to deal with [US President Barack] Obama,” according to the new documents released by WikiLeaks.
“Today we showed that UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s private meetings over how to save the planet from climate change were bugged by a country intent on protecting its largest oil companies,” said WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange about NSA activities.
RELEASE: TOP SECRET NSA recording of private meeting between UN's Ban KiMoon and Germany's Angela Merkel https://t.co/RwOVWzozrQ@UN — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 23, 2016
Assange added that the UN will most likely react to these leaks.
“We previously published Hillary Clinton’s orders that US diplomats were to steal the secretary general’s DNA. The US government has signed agreements with the UN that it will not engage in such conduct against the UN — let alone its secretary general.
"It will be interesting to see the UN’s reaction, because if the secretary general can be targeted without consequence, then everyone from world leader to street sweeper is at risk.”
RELEASE: NSA intercept of Netanyahu talking to Belusconi about Israel's bust up with Obama https://t.co/erYje26bPppic.twitter.com/BpT255Xqx8 — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 23, 2016
The top secret documents have also brought to light other meetings held by top world leaders that were bugged by the NSA, including one between Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi in 2010 during which Netanyahu pleaded with Berlusconi to help him deal with US President Obama.
Read more
The NSA apparently spied on another meeting involving key EU and Japanese trade ministers tasked with discussing final compromises that might be made as part of WTO (World Trade Organization) negotiations.
Moreover |
College Fix.
Meanwhile, Minnesota State University Moorhead is set to have a panel discussion called “Not Your Festival Wear: Fashion and Cultural Appropriation” that asks how “appropriation is fueled by women’s fashions and ‘white feminism.’" Vanderbilt University Residential Education, in collaboration with Vanderbilt Feminists, is hosting a chat on cultural appropriation “just in time for Halloween.”
Texas A&M University held a cultural appropriation diversity workshop earlier this month, and the University of New Hampshire took it a step further, hosting an entire cultural appropriation “teach in” not only aimed at Halloween, but also Cinco de Mayo and Dia de los Muertos.
At Tufts University, students were warned they could be subject to probes from campus police for costumes that make students “feel threatened or unsafe.” Administration officials encouraged students to report anyone wearing an “inappropriate and offensive costume,” according to the College Fix. Examples include geishas, Native Americans, Confederate soldiers or anything involving wearing blackface and/or a sombrero.
The University of Texas issued a 29-point checklist on offensive Halloween costumes that said even “seemingly harmless themes can be carried out incorrectly,” and the bias response team asked students to report any “party with a racist theme.”
A Greek official at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College went so far as to warn fellow Greeks their chapters could be shut down if they wear the wrong costumes.
The University of Florida offered 24/7 counseling last year around Halloween.
“Some Halloween costumes reinforce stereotypes of particular races, genders, cultures, or religions,” the administration wrote. “Regardless of intent, these costumes can perpetuate negative stereotypes, causing harm and offense to groups of people.”San Diego Comic-Con 2015 is inching closer, and there’s no one who knows the ins and the outs of the convention better than this week’s special guest: David Glanzer, Director of Marketing and Public Relations for Comic-Con International.
We discuss a wide range of topics with David, including Hall H wristbands, the WonderCon move, and much more — followed by this week’s biggest convention news.
The SDConCast is brought to you by 3DLightFX, the makers of the innovative cordless 3D Deco Lights. Find the perfect Marvel, Nickelodeon, Hasbro, or Disney light to decorate your or your child’s room. And now, you can pre-order the brand new Star Wars lights on Target.com, available in Darth Vader, Yoda, or Boba Fett. Visit 3DLightFX.com to find out more.
Show Notes:
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Website: Outside Comic-ConGhost Rider is the name of many antiheroes appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Marvel had previously used the name for a Western character whose name was later changed to Phantom Rider.
The first supernatural Ghost Rider is stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze, who, in order to save the life of his father, agreed to give his soul to "Satan" (later revealed to be an arch-demon named Mephisto). At night and when around evil, Blaze finds his flesh consumed by hellfire, causing his head to become a flaming skull. He rides a fiery motorcycle and wields blasts of hellfire from his body, usually from his skeletal hands. He eventually learns he has been bonded with the demon Zarathos. Blaze was featured in the Ghost Rider series from 1972 to 1983. The subsequent Ghost Rider series (1990–1998) featured Danny Ketch as a new Ghost Rider. After his sister was injured by ninja gangsters, Ketch came in contact with a motorcycle that had somehow been mystically enchanted to contain the essence of a Spirit of Vengeance. Blaze reappeared in this 1990s series as a supporting character, and it was later revealed that Danny and his sister were Johnny Blaze's long lost siblings. In 2000s comics, Blaze again became the Ghost Rider, succeeding Ketch. In 2013, Robbie Reyes became Ghost Rider as part of the Marvel NOW! initiative.
Nicolas Cage starred as the Johnny Blaze iteration of the character in the 2007 film Ghost Rider and its 2012 sequel, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Gabriel Luna plays Robbie Reyes in the television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Fictional character biography [ edit ]
Johnny Blaze [ edit ]
Following the western comics character who originally used the name, the first superhero Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, debuted in Marvel Spotlight #5 (August 1972), created by Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas,[1] writer Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog. He received his own series in 1973, with penciller Jim Mooney handling most of the first nine issues. Several different creative teams mixed-and-matched until penciller Don Perlin began a considerably long stint with issue #26, eventually joined by writer Michael Fleisher through issue #58. The series ran through issue #81 (June 1983). Blaze returned as Ghost Rider in a 2001 six-issue miniseries written by Devin Grayson; a second miniseries written by Garth Ennis in 2005, and an ongoing monthly series that began publication in July 2006. Johnny Blaze was the son of Naomi Blaze and Barton Blaze, Naomi being the previous Ghost Rider.
Noble Kale [ edit ]
Noble Kale was the original Ghost Rider, from the 18th century. He became the Ghost Rider in order to defend his hometown from the Furies, but killed himself when his son was offered to him as a sacrifice.[volume & issue needed]
Danny Ketch [ edit ]
The next Ghost Rider, a young man named Daniel "Danny" Ketch (Johnny Blaze's long lost little brother), debuted in Ghost Rider vol. 3, #1 (May 1990). This Ghost Rider was nearly identical to the previous, although his costume was now a black leather biker jacket with spiked shoulder-pads, grey leather pants, and a mystic chain he wore across his chest, which responded to his mental commands and served as his primary melee weapon. His new motorcycle resembled a futuristic machine and the front of it could lower to serve as a battering ram. Like the original Ghost Rider's bike, the wheels were composed of mystic hellfire. Unlike the relationship between the previous Ghost Rider and the demon with which he was bonded, Ketch and his demon—who in vol. 2, #91 (December 1997) is revealed to be Marvel's incarnation of the Angel of Death/Judgment—are cooperative with each other. At the close of the series with vol. 2, #93 (Feb. 1998), Ketch apparently died. The following year, however, Peter Parker: Spider-Man #93 (July 1999) revealed Ketch was still alive. Nearly a decade later, Marvel published the long-completed final issue as Ghost Rider Finale (Jan. 2007), which reprints the last issue and the previously unpublished #94.[2]
Alejandra Jones [ edit ]
During the 2011 storyline "Fear Itself", a Nicaraguan woman named Alejandra Jones becomes Ghost Rider through a ritual performed by a man named Adam. Though she demonstrates many previously unknown powers of the Ghost Rider entity, she is deprived of its full power when Johnny Blaze takes back most of this power.[volume & issue needed]
Robbie Reyes [ edit ]
In 2013, a new character took on the Ghost Rider mantle: a Mexican-American resident of East Los Angeles named Roberto "Robbie" Reyes, who drives a black classic muscle car reminiscent of a modified 1969 Dodge Charger rather than a motorcycle.[3][4] Robbie Reyes was created by writer/artist Felipe Smith and designed by Smith and artist Tradd Moore.[5]
1,000,000 B.C. version [ edit ]
Due to the Celestial Progenitor presence influencing human evolution, in 1,000,000 B.C., certain humans became much more intelligent than others as well as able to speak a new language. However, they had to hide that gift from their brethren for fear of being ostracized. One day, a boy that was gifted with the ability to speak is approached by a mysterious stranger that also possessed that gift, only to witness the stranger transform into a beast and devour his entire tribe. The stranger allowed the boy to live and names him "Ghost" before telling him to challenge him when he is worthy. The boy was forced to survive on his own, though he does befriend a woolly mammoth. After almost dying in the harsh environment, he is approached by Mephisto in the form of a snake, who tells him to say its name. Ghost does that and is bonded with a Spirit of Vengeance; after which he imbued his newly acquired hellfire into the mammoth. Other humans had never seen someone ride an animal before and began referring to Ghost as "The Rider". The Rider continued his search and five years later, eventually caught up with the man who devoured his tribe. The man transformed once more, revealing himself to be the first Wendigo. During the fight, the Rider took the bones of the dead that Wendigo had killed and used them to form a weapon; the earliest version of Ghost Rider’s signature chain. The Rider fought Wendigo until finally it and the Rider’s woolly mammoth tumbled over a cliff. Afterwards, Ghost was approached by Odin and Lady Phoenix to join the prehistoric version of the Avengers.[6]
Upon imbuing his hellfire into another woolly mammoth, Ghost Rider assisted the prehistoric Avengers (consisting of Agamotto, Odin, Lady Phoenix, and prehistoric versions of Black Panther, Iron Fist, and Star Brand) in fighting an out of control Celestial called the Fallen; which resulted in his woolly mammoth getting killed in action. Ghost Rider swore revenge and assisted his teammates in defeating the Fallen and sealing it away underground in what would become South Africa.[7] Ghost Rider later assisted the prehistoric Avengers in fighting the First Host.[8]
Powers and abilities [ edit ]
The Ghost Rider is a human who can transform into a skeletal superhuman wreathed in ethereal flame and given supernatural powers. The motorcycle he rides can travel faster than any conventional vehicle and can perform seemingly impossible feats such as riding up a vertical surface, across water, and leaping across great distances that normal motorcycles cannot. The Ghost Riders are virtually indestructible and notoriously hard to injure by any conventional means, as bullets and knives usually pass through them without causing pain (knives are shown to melt while in their body).[9] It is possible that they are genuinely immortal, as it is said that God created them and only God can destroy them.[10] Despite being composed of bone and hellfire, the Ghost Riders possess formidable superhuman strength, enough to easily pick up a truck and hurl it across a road. It has been stated that Johnny Blaze as Ghost Rider can press around 25 tons (50,000 lbs) (or more as seen in World War Hulk).[11]
Each Ghost Rider entity also had abilities specific to him or her.
Johnny Blaze Originally when Blaze transformed into Ghost Rider, his body changed but not the clothes he was wearing. In his new incarnation, this is different and his clothes take on a different appearance with a spiked leather jacket and chains. As Ghost Rider, he can cause his motorcycle to transform and surround itself with hellfire or he can create a new cycle from pure hellfire. He is also capable of projecting hellfire as a weapon. His hellfire "burns the soul" without leaving physical injuries on the victim and its effects have been seen as similar to the "Penance Stare." In his new incarnation, Blaze is now possibly the most powerful hero on Earth. During "World War Hulk", it was stated by Doctor Strange that Ghost Rider might be equally as powerful as the "Green Scar" persona of Hulk and could possibly defeat him. During this series, Doctor Strange also states that Ghost Rider protects only the innocent, which none of the Illuminati are. In recent comics, Blaze's Ghost Rider has been given the "Penance Stare" and mystical chain, both of which were specific to the Danny Ketch Ghost Rider. Blaze also uses a shotgun and discovered that he can discharge hellfire from the weapon when he first encountered Ketch. Now, he also has new abilities including hellfire breath, the ability to produce chains from either his throat or chest, and the ability to travel between incorporeal realms.
Danny Ketch When Ketch transformed into Ghost Rider, his clothes changed with him, taking on the appearance of a spiked leather jacket with chains, gray leather pants, and spiked gloves and boots. Likewise, his motorcycle underwent a radical transformation, changing from a conventional one into a high-tech motorcycle (this transformation was not strictly limited to the motorcycle he was found in the cemetery with as he was once seen able to transform another cycle in "Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness"). Along with flaming wheels that allow the bike to nearly fly across surfaces, the bike included a shield-like battering ram on the front. As the Ghost Rider, Ketch used a mystical chain which responded to his mental commands. It could grow in length, alter direction while in the air, stiffen into a staff or spear, and separate into several links which can strike like shrapnel and then return to their original form. Daniel's most famous power was the Penance Stare. By locking eyes with a target and mentally focusing, the Danny Ketch Ghost Rider was able to make the target experience all the pain they had ever inflicted on anyone else. However, some beings have shown resistance to this ability, such as Venom and Carnage as their alien symbiote "costumes" do not technically have eyes; and Madcap who is so masochistic, he claims to enjoy the experience. In the 1994 Fantastic Four animated series, this ability was shown to be powerful enough to bring down the mighty Galactus, as Ghost Rider forced Galactus to feel the pain of all those who had died as a result of his feeding on their planets; as Ghost Rider put it, "A billion souls". This display of power, though, appeared to simply be a rewrite for the animated series, as the original storyline in Fantastic Four issue 243 has Doctor Strange casting a spell that causes all of the souls of those Galactus had killed by his feedings to be visited upon him at once. Originally, this incarnation of the Ghost Rider could only be summoned if Danny was present when "innocent blood was spilled" (an innocent simply being threatened was not enough), at which time Danny had to touch the gas cap of his motorcycle for the transformation process to occur. Later, he was able to summon the Ghost Rider without touching the gas cap but still needed to wait for innocent blood to be spilled. Later still, he was able to summon the Ghost Rider by willpower alone.
Robbie Reyes The ghost of Eli Morrow that inhabits Robbie's body is not, according to Johnny Blaze, a true Spirit of Vengeance. Regardless, he gives Robbie several abilities similar to that of other Ghost Riders, including the power to manifest and control chains ending in thin knives or sickles.[12] The black muscle car that Morrow's ghost initially inhabits is linked to Robbie's Ghost Rider form, allowing him to instantly teleport to and/or merge with the car. The car can also be driven remotely, and Robbie's Ghost Rider form can pass harmlessly through it, allowing it to drive into foes. The car's trunk, when opened, acts as a portal, allowing the Ghost Rider to transport anything, including people, to any location. Though it is initially unknown if Robbie's Ghost Rider form possesses the divine powers of his predecessors, he eventually displays the ability to use the Penance Stare during a battle with Star Brand.[13] Eli is able to take full control of Robbie's body when the teen gives in to his negative emotions, signified by a pallid skin tone and both of his eyes turning orange. His Ghost Rider form also displays the ability to change into a more powerful and demonic form when Robbie is sufficiently angered.[14] At the end of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s fourth season, to prevent the Darkhold from being used again, he slung his flaming chains in the same manner as a Sling Ring, allowing him to travel the Multiverse and take the book with him for safekeeping.
Other Spirits of Vengeance [ edit ]
Vengeance [ edit ]
Michael Badilino, an ex-member of the New York City Police Department, is one-third of an "Organic Medallion of Power"; the other two are Ketch and Blaze (the Medallion itself was never explained in any true detail). He possesses powers more in line with those of the Zarathos version of Ghost Rider, although he also possesses the Penance Stare and his motorcycle seemed to share characteristics with the Noble Kale version. His appearance is distinguished by a deep purple skull, large fangs protruding from his upper jaw, and backswept curved horns on the top of his skull.
In his superhuman form, Badilino was called Vengeance, and originally attempted to kill the Ghost Rider, believing him to be Zarathos. Vengeance later became the ally of Ghost Rider and Johnny Blaze. Vengeance would also take on the role of the Ghost Rider and even semi-seriously referred to himself by that name when confronted by Spider-Man shortly after the apparent death of Ghost Rider in battle with Zarathos and acolytes The Fallen. Vengeance killed himself, along with the villain Hellgate, by triggering a massive explosion through his Hellfire, the source of the mystical flames that encompass the bones of both Vengeance and Ghost Rider.
Vengeance reappears in the last four issues of Ghost Rider vol. 2, involved in Blackheart's plans to kill Noble Kale. Vengeance aids the Ghost Rider in the ensuing battle, destroying Blackheart and ruling Hell during Ketch's absences.
The Last Stand of the Spirits of Vengeance [ edit ]
Seven riders show their flaming heads for the first time in this story arc by writer Jason Aaron and artist Tan Eng Huat. Daniel Ketch returns with a new mission: to collect the powers of all the Ghost Riders for the angel Zadkiel to prevent the corruption of the powers with their human hosts. Zadkiel has other motives he keeps to himself, of which he needs the powers of the riders to tear down the walls of New Jerusalem and wage war on the heavens.
Trail of Tears [ edit ]
A version of Ghost Rider appeared in the miniseries Ghost Rider: Trail of Tears #1–6 (April–Sept. 2007) by writer Garth Ennis and artist Clayton Crain. Set during the American Civil War, it finds Confederate officer Travis Parham avenging the murders of his friend, an ex-slave named Caleb and Caleb's family. Parham meets a horse-riding Ghost Rider who seeks the same men. Eventually, Parham learns about the deaths instrumental in helping set forth the Spirit of Vengeance.
Enemies [ edit ]
Aqueduct A former soldier who gained the power to control water and was hired to kill Ghost Rider. He would become a frequent opponent to the hero afterwards. Black Rose Johnny Blaze's wife, who was revived as a servant for Blackheart and later married Ghost Rider Noble Kale. Blackheart Mephisto's son, Blackheart, created a group of Spirits of Vengeance to battle Ghost Rider in hopes of conquering Hell. Instead, Ghost Rider Noble Kale defeats him and takes over his portion of Hell. He is the main antagonist in the 2007 Ghost Rider film. Blackout A Lilin who worked under Deathwatch that frequently crossed swords with Ghost Rider. After the hero burned him to disfigurement, Blackout learned his secret identity and began killing his loved ones and acquaintances. Blackout appears as a henchman of Mephisto in the 2012 film Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Centurious A servant of Mephisto who sought to battle Zarathos, Centurious was the head of the Firm and targeted Ghost Rider for his association with the demon. Deacon An agent of Zadkiel given power in order to destroy Ghost Rider. Deathwatch Daniel Ketch's archenemy. A Translord from an unknown demonic dimension posing as a crime boss in New York in an attempt to murder its residents. He would later die at the hands of Ghost Rider then be resurrected as a servant for Centurious. Doghead Francisco Fuentes was an acquaintance of Danny Ketch who was murdered while walking his dog Chupi. He was resurrected by Blackheart, merged with Chupi, and became his servant. Death Ninja An agent of Centurious who infiltrated Deathwatch's ranks who frequently battled Ghost Rider. Dormammu A Faltine from another dimension who battles Ghost Rider in videogames. Hag and Troll Demons under Deathwatch, they were his most loyal servants. Hoss A demon. Occasionally an ally of the Ghost Rider, and known for driving a red car. Kid Blackheart The Antichrist who hoped to enter Heaven and destroy it. Lilith An ancient immortal sorceress from Atlantis, Lilith gave birth to the Lilin over the centuries and was imprisoned until recently. Upon her freedom, she discovered many of her kind had been murdered by the Spirits of Vengeance and sought their demise. Her four most loyal children are Pilgrim, Nakota, Meatmarket, and Blackout. Lucifer Lucifer, like the other Hell-lords, sought to remove the human component from the Ghost Rider in hopes it became a mindless killing machine to eliminate humanity. However, Ghost Rider proved too strong and Lucifer was exiled to Perdition. Later, Lucifer would be the demon charged with torturing Zadkiel for all of eternity. Madcap A lunatic cursed with immortality and enhanced healing capabilities, Madcap has fought several of New York's heroes with Ghost Rider one of his most frequent opponents. Mephisto Johnny Blaze's archenemy. A demon who posed as the Devil himself to claim Johnny Blaze's soul. Mephisto is the one responsible for bringing Ghost Rider into Johnny's life. Ghost Rider, however, is able to resist the evil that overcame him long ago, and is now able to use his powers for good no matter what. Angered, Mephisto sought revenge against Ghost Rider, and now constantly tries to win his creation back. Mephisto appears under the name Mephistopheles in the 2007 Ghost Rider film. Orb Crash Simpson's (mentor to Johnny Blaze) partner in his traveling motorcycle stunt show, Drake Shannon lost most of his face in a challenge against Crash for the business. Given an eyeball-like helmet by They Who Wield Power able to hypnotize others, he would return to try and reclaim the stunt show but was foiled by Ghost Rider. He would return as one of Ghost Rider's most frequent enemies. Scarecrow A contortionist, Ebenezer Laughton decided to use his gifts as a thief. In time, he would turn to murder and brought into conflict with Ghost Rider and nearly killed from the encounter. The Firm turned him into an undead creature, bearing superhuman abilities and able to induce fear in others (whose fear could heal his wounds), setting him upon the Spirit of Vengeance again (becoming a frequent foe). Steel Vengeance Steel Wind's sister, Sadae Tsumura gave her soul to Centurious to save her sister after an encounter with Ghost Rider left her comatose. Sadae was turned into Steel Vengeance, a cyborg bent on killing Ghost Rider. Steel Wind Following a freak explosion, Ruriko Tsumura was remade as a cyborg by Freakmaster and challenged Johnny Blaze at the Quentin Carnival in cycling, defeating him and earning a place amongst them. However, she ran the business into the ground and battled Ghost Rider, leaving her comatose. She was rehabilitated by Centurious and used as his agent. In time, she would instead become Ghost Rider's ally. Vengeance A Spirit of Vengeance, Lt. Michael Badilino sold his soul to Mephisto to gain the power to destroy Ghost Rider (whom he blamed for the death of his family). When he learned it was instead Zarathos, he became Ghost Rider's ally. Zadkiel An archangel who sought to usurp Heaven due to his hatred for God's admiration of humanity. Using Ghost Rider to kill other Spirits of Vengeance in order to empower himself, Zadkiel took the throne and cast out Ghost Rider. The hero would return with the dead Spirits of Vengeance to defeat Zadkiel and imprison him in Hell. Zarathos A demon bound to Johnny Blaze by Mephisto to become the Ghost Rider. He would, however, come to exert control over the entity, but ultimately would be separated from Blaze in the conflict against Centurious. He would later renew his alliance with Lilith.
Other versions [ edit ]
Ultimate Marvel [ edit ]
In the Ultimate Marvel Universe, Ghost Rider made his debut in Ultimate Comics: Avengers volume 2, #2.[15] Ultimate Ghost Rider's origin is explained in Ultimate Comics: Avengers volume 2, #4. One day while on a cross-country trip across the United States, twenty-something couple Johnny Blaze and Roxanne Simpson come across a bar where they befriend a biker gang, who plies them with beer. The gang's friendly demeanor is a ruse, as they kill the intoxicated Blaze as part of a Satanic ritual. During the ritual, they barter their souls with Satan in exchange for wealth and power. Satan grants their request but maintains the upper hand. The deceased Blaze also makes a deal that Satan will get his soul in exchange for the assured safety of Roxanne. For twenty years Blaze trains to become the Ghost Rider, burning away his Christian baptism, and is sent into the world to get his revenge. He tracks down and kills the members of the motorcycle gang—now rich and in positions of power—individually. In response to these deaths, the White House issues an Executive Order kill the Ghost Rider. The Avengers are recruited for the mission with no knowledge of the Ghost Rider except that he is 7 ft tall and has the strength of Thor.[16] When the Avengers are unsuccessful in stopping the Ghost Rider from killing his next target, the truth behind the Ghost Rider's selection of targets is learned, and the Vice President of the United States, Michael Blackthorne is revealed to be the former leader of the motorcycle gang, who sold his soul to become a Ghost Rider, AKA Vengeance, into which Blackthorne now transforms. During their confrontation, the Ghost Rider drags Vengeance into a church which turns them both back into human form, allowing the Punisher to finish off Blackthorne. After pleading his case, Blaze is allowed to leave. He is later seen in a park with Satan watching Roxanne, who was brought back to life with no memory of what happened. Satan agrees to let her live her life if Blaze continues to be his Ghost Rider, to which Blaze agrees.[17]
Ghost Rider 2099 [ edit ]
Ghost Rider 2099
Zero Cochrane, who in the Marvel 2099 alternate timeline is a cybernetic take on the Spirit of Vengeance, is not a supernatural being, but a cybernetic being with a digitized copy of Cochrane's mind. He encounters a futuristic counterpoint to Michael Badilino's Vengeance. The Ghost Rider of 2099 appears to drop out of existence during the consolidation of the 2099 books into a single title called 2099 World of Tomorrow. He subsequently appears in the 2099 "epilogue" book Manifest Destiny, arguing with the AI that empowers him.
The Spirit of Vengeance [ edit ]
This version of Ghost Rider, known as the Spirit of Vengeance, debuted in Guardians of the Galaxy, set in an alternate future of the Marvel Universe. He has the ability to traverse space and fire spike projectiles from his forearms. This Ghost Rider is a religious zealot, embittered toward a church (a version of the Universal Church of Truth) proclaiming it would produce its god in the flesh. That being, the Protege, is destroyed by the Celestial Scathan the Approver. This Ghost Rider refers to himself simply as the Spirit of Vengeance, although his real name is given as Autocylus, from the planet Sarka. After answering a distress call from Firelord,[18] the Guardians of the Galaxy help a planet in peril, this Ghost Rider eventually helps to destroy the threat. The Spirit of Vengeance joins several other powerful beings including Martinex, Hollywood, Replica, Firelord, Phoenix IX and Mainframe.[19] The heroes, rallied by Martinex, stay together as the new Galactic Guardians.[20][21]
Marvel Zombies: Dead Days [ edit ]
Ghost Rider is seen in Marvel Zombies: Dead Days (Marvel One-Shot 1, May 2007) as one of the uninfected; he then appears briefly in "Marvel Zombies" at the point in which the zombie heroes of New York are making their assault on The Silver Surfer.[volume & issue needed] He later appears in Marvel Zombies 3 as an infected while chasing Machine Man and is then easily decapitated.[volume & issue needed]
What If [ edit ]
In the second volume of the series in issue number 45, Daniel Ketch's sister, Barbara, becomes the Ghost Rider after Danny is killed in the graveyard. In this version, Barbara is more vicious and ruthless as Ghost Rider. Eventually, Doctor Strange and Spider-Man team up to try to stop her with the help of Johnny Blaze.[22]
In the Spider-Gwen universe (Earth-65), there evidently is a version of Ghost Rider whom that universe's Betty Brant dresses as for Halloween.[23]
Peter Parker [ edit ]
Frank Castle [ edit ]
Infinity Warps [ edit ]
In Infinity Wars, Ghost Rider is fused with Black Panther. Prince of Wakanda T'Challa was an arrogant boy who because of his conflict with his father, he was exiled from his place. He went to America where he found Jericho Simpson (fusion of Brother Voodoo and Crash Simpson) who became his new father figure and gave T'Challa a new name as Johnny Blaze. During a stunt performance, he sensed his father T'Chaka dying and got distracted which resulted in his own death. He was then revived by Zarathos, half-sister of Bast and offered him to him powers in exchange of eating souls of sinners. At first he was reluctant, but when battling his father's killers, he accepted the offer and became Ghost Panther and battled Erik Killraven (fusion of Erik Killmonger and Killraven), while riding a burning Panther.[24]
In other media [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
Marvel Cinematic Universe [ edit ]
Animation [ edit ]
Film [ edit ]
Video games [ edit ]
Reception [ edit ]
In May 2011, Ghost Rider placed 90th on IGN's "Top 100 Comic Book Heroes" list.[41]
Collected editions [ edit ]
The New Fantastic Four: Monsters Unleashed (features a "new" Fantastic Four consisting of the Ghost Rider, the Hulk, Wolverine and Spider-Man) (trade paperback, 1992; reprints Fantastic Four #347–349)
(features a "new" Fantastic Four consisting of the Ghost Rider, the Hulk, Wolverine and Spider-Man) (trade paperback, 1992; reprints #347–349) Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 1 (trade paperback, 2005; reprints Marvel Spotlight #5–12, Ghost Rider vol. 2 #1–20 and Daredevil #138)
(trade paperback, 2005; reprints #5–12, vol. 2 #1–20 and #138) Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 2 (trade paperback, 2007; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 2 #21–50)
(trade paperback, 2007; reprints vol. 2 #21–50) Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 3 (trade paperback, 2009; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 2 #51–65, Avengers #214 and Marvel Two-In-One #80)
(trade paperback, 2009; reprints vol. 2 #51–65, #214 and #80) Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 4 (trade paperback, 2010; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 2 #66–81, Amazing Spider-Man #274 and New Defenders #145 and 146)
(trade paperback, 2010; reprints vol. 2 #66–81, #274 and #145 and 146) Ghost Rider Team-Up (trade paperback, 2007; reprints Marvel Team-Up #91, Marvel Two-in-One #80, Marvel Premiere #28, Avengers #214 and Ghost Rider vol. 2 #27 and #50)
(trade paperback, 2007; reprints #91, #80, #28, #214 and vol. 2 #27 and #50) Champions Classic Vol. 1 (trade paperback; reprints Champions #1–11)
(trade paperback; reprints #1–11) Champions Classic Vol. 2 (trade paperback; reprints Champions #12–17, Iron Man Annual #4, Avengers #163, Super-Villain Team-Up #14, and Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #17–18)
(trade paperback; reprints #12–17, #4, #163, #14, and #17–18) Ghost Rider: Resurrected (trade paperback, 1991; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 3 #1–7)
(trade paperback, 1991; reprints vol. 3 #1–7) Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Classic Vol. 1 (trade paperback, 2009; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 3 #1–10)
(trade paperback, 2009; reprints vol. 3 #1–10) Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Classic Vol. 2 (trade paperback, 2010; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 3 #11–20 and Doctor Strange: Sorcerer Supreme #28)
(trade paperback, 2010; reprints vol. 3 #11–20 and #28) X-Men & Ghost Rider: Brood Trouble in the Big Easy (trade paperback; 1993; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 3 #26–27 and X-Men #8–9)
(trade paperback; 1993; reprints vol. 3 #26–27 and #8–9) Wolverine and Ghost Rider in Acts of Vengeance ( Marvel Comics Presents #64-70)
( #64-70) Rise of the Midnight Sons (trade paperback, 1992; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 3 #28 and #31; Ghost Rider/Blaze: Spirits of Vengeance #1, Morbius #1, Darkhold: Pages from the Book of Sins #1 and Nightstalkers #1)
(trade paperback, 1992; reprints vol. 3 #28 and #31; #1, #1, #1 and #1) Spirits of Venom (trade paperback, 1993; reprints Web of Spider-Man #95–96 and Ghost Rider/Blaze: Spirits of Vengeance #5–6)
(trade paperback, 1993; reprints #95–96 and #5–6) Ghost Rider: The Hammer Lane (trade paperback, 2002; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 4 #1–6)
(trade paperback, 2002; reprints vol. 4 #1–6) Ghost Rider: Road to Damnation (hardcover, 2007; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 5 #1–6)
(hardcover, 2007; reprints vol. 5 #1–6) Ghost Rider: Road to Damnation (trade paperback, 2007; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 5 #1–6)
(trade paperback, 2007; reprints vol. 5 #1–6) Ghost Rider Vol. 1: Vicious Cycle (trade paperback, 2007; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 6 #1–5)
(trade paperback, 2007; reprints vol. 6 #1–5) Ghost Rider Vol. 2: The Life and Death Of Johnny Blaze (trade paperback, 2007; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 6 #6–11)
(trade paperback, 2007; reprints vol. 6 #6–11) Ghost Rider Vol. 3: Apocalypse Soon (trade paperback, 2008; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 6 #12–13 and Annual #1)
(trade paperback, 2008; reprints vol. 6 #12–13 and #1) Ghost Rider Vol. 4: Revelations (trade paperback, 2008; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 6 #14–19)
(trade paperback, 2008; reprints vol. 6 #14–19) Ghost Rider Vol. 5: Hell Bent and Heaven Bound (trade paperback, 2008; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 6 #20–25)
(trade paperback, 2008; reprints vol. 6 #20–25) Ghost Rider Vol. 6: The Last Stand (trade paperback, 2009; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 6 #26–32)
(trade paperback, 2009; reprints vol. 6 #26–32) Ghost Rider Vol. 7: Trials and Tribulations (trade paperback, 2009; reprints Ghost Rider vol. 6 #33–35 and Annual #2)
(trade paperback, 2009; reprints vol. 6 #33–35 and #2) Ghost Riders: Heaven's on Fire (trade paperback, 2009–2010; reprints Ghost Riders: Heaven's on Fire #1–6)
(trade paperback, 200 |
major variations in manufacturing process, specifically in how steel and iron were welded together to create the finished blade (A through D below).
Under microscopic examination, they also noted that almost all blades exhibited micro-cracks in the steel cutting edge, caused by improper quenching technique, also noted in the diagram:
SourcesOriginally posted to It’s Going Down
by Alexander Reid Ross
Taking a break from the bi-monthly ‘Trumpism‘ column, Alexander Reid Ross headed up to the recent #OregonUnderAttack occupation in Burns, Oregon to tell us what exactly was going down.
The Malheur Rebellion took overnight control of all screen time throughout social media and conversations about it quickly became pervasive. I felt compelled to go to the site and try to gain some perspective. I contacted Ben Jones, and we decided to go down together to get a sense of the people involved in the occupation to learn how to further organize against them. Although we were only in Burns for something like two days, taking only one trip to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, we spoke to a number of people, both community members and militiamen, and got a better feeling for how to approach the ridiculous and horrific scene.
What surprised us most was the fact that we spent twenty minutes walking through the Malheur Wildlife Refuge where the Bundys are currently holed up with a number of patriot movement volunteers. We saw no police, no feds, and no security. Perhaps it was our scamoflage, but it was profoundly puzzling for the two of us to walk around in a right wing insurrection in broad daylight without any kind of alarms going off. However, according to recent reports, a new “security detail” has arrived “carrying rifles and sidearms and clad in military attire and bulletproof vests.” The Bundys were in a meeting, so we did not interview them, perhaps for the better. As Charlotte Roderique from the Burns Paiute tribe declared that morning, it was senseless “to dignify them” with that sort of attention.
Not that John Ritzheimer and Blaine Cooper deserve attention, either. However, we wanted a closer understanding what kind of people they were, who was in Burns, and how we can organize to stop them. What struck us as Ritzheimer went through his dogmatic rap about Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution was that his presentation of “liberating the land” for the use of the “local community,” the construction of the argument and even the precision of the rhetoric, seemed incredibly close to leftist discourse.
Besides that, their mission remains locked into the context of white supremacism, of “liberating land” for the ranchers and miners to carry on their business without regulations, restrictions, or accountability. For this purpose, they are met by their cohorts from Idaho, Montana, Arizona, and Alaska. One unique thing about this issue is that it is not Oregonians, but Threepers (Three Percenters) from other states.
The Threepers believe erroneously that only 3 percent of the original colonists participated in the 1776 Revolution. They see themselves as upholders of the revolution, rather than revolutionaries. There is an important truth to the rhetoric that cloaks the large distance between left and right.
The right remains faithful to its reactionary credo, while the left remains inherently progressive—not merely at face value, but on a deeper sense of emergent communities struggling to liberate themselves from a racist and colonial situation. That situation lies on one side of a disparate gap between rebellion and revolution. Whereas the right seeks a rebellion against the federal government and a restoration of the original deal—the constitution as they interpret it—the left seeks revolutionary transformation of the settler state premised on the rights of individual private property according to the productivist dogma of “Wise Use” and “waste.”
In this sense, the populist ideology of “land and liberty” fails completely, because it bears the traditional values of the Constitution, going back to the standard life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. The ideology of anti-government and anti-police also fails, because it establishes not community defense but armed paramilitaries and assault forces that go against the interests of local communities. Anarchists value the land for different reasons, we appreciate the land in itself, for itself, and seek to defend it from the interests of capitalist exploitation. Like most of the Burns community, we uphold everyday people’s rights to maintain their way of life against psychotic militiamen and federal intervention.
After interviewing some six different militiamen, we noticed a few general trends.
The militiamen did not come from the local communities, they came largely from Arizona, California, Idaho, and Montana. With this in mind, it is difficult to locate an “Oregon Patriot Movement” as an agent in this “standoff.”
Outside of a few people, the reality there is not really a militaristic professionalism, in spite of the fact that many of those there have arms and perhaps even come from that background (or are pretending to do so).
The militiamen also claim to be standing up for the ranchers, but aren’t all really ranchers. Ritzheimer told us he doesn’t know the first thing about ranching, but he wants ranchers who have “harmonized” with the land to have a bigger say than college graduates at the BLM. While this is certainly populist talk, to repeat, the populist movement does not actually seem genuine. Instead, it appears that the militia continually taps into a growing marginal fringe.
While at the compound and in Burns, we noticed at least three basic personality types coming from the small, but growing, fringe. Their commonalities are that they seem truly “ready to die.” They are believers, but their commitment also locates them, to some extent, on the apparently informal loose chain of command.
The Predator: John Trudell, the famous Native poet and activist, used to speak about a “predator spirit” that exists in the colonial context of the US. The Predator is single minded, hateful, ruthless, cold, efficient, and fanatical. He is certain of his task, he has made up his mind, and acted on his convictions. He inspires others by nature of his austere discipline, and the “top dog” way that he takes others on his team down a notch, either through reprimand or a jocular insult.
The True Believer: These guys look dotingly to the Predator for condescending appreciation. They are wide-eyed devotees, and their autonomous capacities are questionable. Although they seem almost naive and emotional, they commit some of the most atrocious acts, simply out of the desire to be appreciated and even loved. For their acts, they are equipped by top dogs to look and feel like part of the hierarchy.
The Low-Bagger: Just like any movement, the white supremacist movement has its low-baggers. These guys are the militiamen who come from all over, and are largely disorganized. They are attracted to the anti-authoritarian appeal of some aspects of the militia movement, and are more into booze, pot, and women than they are militant discipline and brutality. However, ideologically, they are not “true believers” so much as they are skeptics and often wingnut conspiracy theorists who can think their way around justifying attacks against the state and minorities in some, though not all, instances.
“Low bagger” is generally a term for a kind of traveler who contribute to activities where needed. For small movements with limited local support, low-bagging can be extremely helpful and even crucial. The low baggers who are part of the militia movement seem to have relatively low commitment to the “cause,” and are more drawn to the lifestyle of danger and rebellion. It is tempting to suggest that the left could be winning them over. However, the question becomes not “do we want to court low-commitment members of the right,” but “is it possible to cut the cord between them and the militias, and attempt to show them the errors of conspiratorial thinking of white supremacism and the corporate private property ideology?”
To do this, it seems important to continue to sharpen distinctions between us and the Patriot movement. This does not mean debating them or giving too much attention to their causes. It means allying with black people and other communities of color, as well as Indigenous peoples and other disenfranchised people struggling for collective liberation, including rural white opponents and potential-opponents of militia activity.
Though the “anti-authoritarian” streak is strong in the militias, and the rebellious broken hierarchies are awkwardly personality driven and non-militaristic, the militias’ power is reinforced by the institutional repression that backs them up. In particular, that support comes from the white supremacy of the government that would ruthlessly destroy similar dissent from communities of color. It also comes from the media, which offers them control over the stream of images, giving them full attention and preferable treatment by covering up their cracks and hypocrisies, rather than focus equal attention on other key problems (such as the awful methane leak in California). By fighting against institutional repression, we might also be able to create space for honest discussions of reactionary activity and how to confront it.
The Patriot movement’s twisting of the narrative toward “white civil rights” and anti-oppression directed toward the “abolishment” of the BLM is also important to fight—even while we continue to propose the kind of response that anarchist thinker Shawn Wilbur has been writing about, such as alternative approaches to land management. In my recent anthology, Grabbing Back: Essays Against the Global Land Grab, I observed the rising conflict of extremes after the housing market crash, and compiled a number of essays by leading thinkers and organizers such as Keisha-Khan Perry, Noam Chomsky, and Vandana Shiva contemplating alternative approaches to land grabs, federal land management and “market based solutions.” These contributors call for solidarity, an end to extractive and exploitative economies, and what Javier Sethness-Castro calls “ecological self-management.” There must be an “abolition,” but this general abolition must extend to the abolition of prisons, deportations, and capitalism, in favor of not just land redistribution by a central authority, but autonomous autogestion, producing for one another in the spirit of mutual aid.
The scene from the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation. Photo by Ben Jones.
The militiamen use the term “abolishment” intentionally as though it was connected to the abolition of slavery; it fits into their vocabulary of pseudo-anti-oppression and anti-authoritarianism. However, the error here is important, in that it attempts to ignore the unjust inequalities in treatment that give white people greater privileges over non-white people, despite the universal claims of civil rights. The narrative of “white rights” and “reverse racism” is only a dressed up version of “white power” that the media prefers. Strong opposition to these terms of discourse is important to provide an adequate reframing of the discussions taking place in society.
Serious work is happening on the ground by the Rural Organizing Project (ROP), which organizes against militias, mapping it out strategically, and organizing with local communities, we need to take these factors into account. The 1,001 opinions on the internet remain important, but the fact remains: the opinions on the ground matter the most, and the local base for militias doesn’t exist in Burns, and their dissent is given expression thanks in part to groups like ROP. Militias require outside assistance to maintain these kinds of occupations, which means they are still parachute-type situations that rely on low baggers who bring all kinds of problems to their group, such as fist-fights, binge drinking, and lies. Accountability to the local community seems important to the militias on the surface, but really the point is to gain attention and to do what the left calls “raising consciousness” in order to spread their movement. Their hope is that eventually, once they occupy one place, others will begin to occupy areas in their regions. In reality, they are disempowering the local community.
In many of these problems, the left can recognize some of its own embarrassing realities, and learn from their mistakes instead of simply ridiculing them while repeating the same errors. Without a base of support from the community, and because they are propped up by institutional oppression, this hope for a spread of their actions is cast in a kind of faith in a spiritual awakening. Rizheimer told us that more people from Burns did not join them, because they are afraid. In spite of the fact that neither the community nor local law enforcement supports them, they have a psychological complex of success—they have accomplished a foothold in a longer narrative that stretches back not just to the Sugar Pine mine and the Bundy Ranch, but the anti-immigrant movement in Arizona, and other extremist interventions in mainstream political life. The narrative goes back to Ruby Ridge, Waco, and even the 1979 Sagebrush Rebellion. It is, then, an inter-generational movement with something like an “activist” mentality.
As we left the compound, we saw in the margins by the fire two younger people sitting by a fire. One looked like a back-woods low bagger and the other, a young woman with hair dyed blue. Were they journalists, or were they fringe Cascadian bioregionalists unsure as to whether or not they supported insurrection by any means against the federal government? In either case, the symbolic effect rang true, because we have seen too many comrades publicly consider supporting the ranchers and vigilantes.
We need the Cascadians, moderates, and anti-statists of every variety to come out directly against the Malheur Wildlife Refuge occupation and all other occupations motivated by colonial narratives lodged in racism and the interests of capital. We also need to be respectfully and responsibly introspective about the small ways in which we perpetuate what Joel Olson called “white democracy” in everyday life. The racists, Islamophobes, and lunatics involved are clearly manipulating our rhetoric for the use of big business and private interests. Their hope—to bring down the government by enshrining the corporate state even further through the sacralization of the patriot movement and its would-be martyrdom—remains the enemy of all we stand for.
While we empathize with many people in Burns who distrust of the FBI, police, and federal government, we also agree with their higher levels of animosity toward the Bundys for bringing those forces to bear in their community. We believe that the far right is ultimately not the government’s responsibility to deal with. Antifascists must organize to stop the spread of the far right with local communities, because no one else will.
Special thanks to Ben Jones for his crucial contributions to this essay. Also, if you are interested in supporting the local community of Burns, Oregon, contact the Rural Organizing Project, which has been doing excellent work throughout Oregon for many years.
Support our work! Please donate:An Ohio Republican legislator who campaigned on “family values” and fought against LGBTQ rights has resigned after he was reportedly caught having sex.
In his office.
With a man.
According to Newsweek, a few months ago an “observer” encountered the patriotic state Rep. Wes Goodman in his Columbus, Ohio, office at the Riffe Center, planting his flag having consensual sex with a man who was not an employee. The person told the Ohio House chief of staff, who told the Speaker of the House Cliff Rosenberger. Rosenberger met with Goodman, who is married, and Goodman resigned for “inappropriate conduct” immediately after the meeting.
Goodman, a 33-year-old who calls himself the “conscience of the conservative movement,” was named to the “Hall of Shame” in 2014 by the largest gay-rights advocacy group, the Human Rights Watch, after he campaigned against marriage equality in Washington, D.C.
He has often spoken about “natural marriage” throughout his career, and his Twitter bio describes him as “Christian. American. Conservative. Republican. Husband to @Beth1027.”
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Goodman’s constituents have reached out to support him and his family as he goes through this trouble in a number of ways:
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There is no word on whether Wes Goodman has pulled up his pants yet.
Read more at Newsweek.LONDON (Reuters) - European Central Bank officials are unlikely to make any change in policy on Thursday, while data from the United States will help the Federal Reserve decide whether to immediately follow December’s rate increase with another.
FILE PHOTO: European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi arrives for a news conference at the ECB headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany, December 8, 2016. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski/File Photo
Recent data from the euro zone suggests the bloc’s economy ended 2016 on a solid footing, and last month the ECB surprised markets by saying it would trim its monthly bond purchases to 60 billion euros ($63.86 billion) starting in April.
So none of the economists polled by Reuters this week expect any change at Thursday’s meeting. They were unanimous in saying the ECB’s next move, after April’s planned cut, will be to taper quantitative easing further [ECILT/EU].
“Next week’s ECB meeting should be a non-event. After the December decision to extend QE at a slower pace, the ECB is almost on an autopilot for the rest of 2017,” said James Knightley at ING.
However, a rebound in prices in December is reviving calls for the ECB to taper its bond purchases, particularly in Germany. Many Germans feel low rates are eating into their savings and fuelling a property bubble while inflation is already close to the ECB’s target of almost 2 percent.
But protectionist sentiment is growing after Britain voted to leave the European Union and Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. Several elections in EU countries this year could have far-reaching political ramifications and even threaten the euro zone itself. That is likely to stay the ECB’s hand for now.
In the press conference after the policy announcement, ECB President Mario Draghi will probably also face questions over the hacking of his email account during his tenure as governor of the Bank of Italy.
It is not yet clear what the hackers got their hands on. But the idea of a leak of sensitive information ranging from monetary policy to emergency measures for Greece will be of concern.
TRUMP STUMP
ECB officials are growing increasingly worried Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential race may harm the euro zone by hurting trade with the U.S and fuelling populism.
Speaking publicly and behind the scenes, officials emphasize any U.S. shift toward protectionism could hurt the already fragile euro zone economy and pave the way for an even stronger backlash against globalization and the euro project.
Trump gave little new policy information at a press conference on Wednesday, but his protectionist statements have kept many investors from adding to risky positions.
The president-elect has threatened to impose retaliatory tariffs on China, build a wall along the Mexican border and tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Before Trump’s inauguration on Friday, and their next policy announcement on Feb. 1, several Fed policymakers are due to speak, and they are likely to send an upbeat message.
Inflation, industrial production and housing-start numbers are all expected to signal a strengthening economy, giving the Fed scope to follow up December’s rate increase with more tightening this year.
Its Federal Open Market Committee is expected to hike twice more in 2017 and recent comments from policymakers suggest there could be a third move too. [FED/R]
“The FOMC continues to predict only gradual increases in the federal funds rate, especially given the uncertainty surrounding the economic agenda of Trump’s administration,” Credit Suisse economists told clients.
“We continue to see two additional hikes in 2017, but acknowledge that the outlook is subject to change in months ahead.”
BEGINNING OF BREXIT
Britain’s shock decision in June to leave the European Union has sent sterling tumbling. Although the economy has so far fared better than expected, inflation numbers on Monday will probably show prices jumped in December as imports became more expensive.
FILE PHOTO: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives for his election night rally at the New York Hilton Midtown in Manhattan, New York, U.S., November 9, 2016. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/Files
Prime Minister Theresa May has said she will trigger Article 50, starting the formal withdrawal from the EU, by the end of March. Many think she will take a hard line on immigration at the cost of Britain’s access to the single market, hindering trade.
“The government has sent clear signals that the UK will leave the Single Market, a so-called ‘hard Brexit’,” said Sarah Hewin at Standard Chartered.
May is due to speak on Tuesday, setting out the approach her administration will take to Brexit. If she does indicate away from a soft Brexit, sterling will probably fall further.BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — The family of an elderly Florida man who died in September says video shows a deputy reentering their home after the man's death, and stealing prescription drugs, reports CBS affiliate WPEC.
Palm Beach County Deputy Jason Cooke has been charged with burglary. Authorities say he stole prescription medications after an elderly man, who authorities found passed out during a welfare check shortly after Hurricane Irma hit on Sept. 12, was taken to a local hospital where he died.
Investigators say shortly after the scene cleared, Cooke, who was not on the original call, showed up to the home and went inside. The home's internal surveillance cameras activated and sent an alert to the homeowner's sons, who called the sheriff's office.
In video released by the family, a man holding a flashlight while wearing what appears to be a police uniform can be seen rummaging in a kitchen, and inspecting pill bottles before reaching into his pocket.
In a statement released Tuesday, the family said the video was recorded about an hour and a half after the dying man was brought to the hospital. In the statement, they accused Cooke of burglary.
"We were outraged and disgusted when we viewed this," the family said.
Cooke was placed on paid administrative leave after being granted bond.CTV Atlantic has pleaded guilty to breaching the Youth Criminal Justice Act by broadcasting video showing the faces of two young offenders involved in a violent home invasion more than a year ago in Cole Harbour.
The broadcaster was in Halifax provincial court on Tuesday to face two counts of breaching a publication ban. A representative of the company entered the guilty plea.
The video aired on Aug. 24, 2015 — the day three 17-year-old boys pleaded guilty to charges related to a home invasion that left a teenager partially paralyzed by a gunshot.
A Nova Scotia Legal Aid lawyer complained to police when she heard the next day that images of her client leaving court — with his face clearly visible — were broadcast on TV. Christa Thompson, who laid the complaint, said the footage showed two of the teens walking out of the courtroom with sheriffs and being escorted to the elevator.
The Youth Criminal Justice Act shields identities of Canadians who are accused or convicted of crimes committed while under the age of 18.
"I'm pleased to hear that CTV is taking responsibility," Thompson told CBC News on Tuesday, adding the goal of protecting young offenders' identities is to ensure they have a chance at rehabilitation.
"To violate the ban, I think, does undermine the purpose and principles contained in the act."
'Serve as an example'
CTV News is a division of Bell Media Inc., which has so far declined to comment on the case while it's before the courts.
Sentencing will take place on March 21.
Ashley MacLean Kearse now needs a wheelchair and help to wash and eat. (Submitted by Wendy Kearse)
Thompson said it's a good reminder for media about their duty to protect the identities of youth involved in the justice system.
"I would … hope that this case would serve as an example to keep the requirements of the act in the forefront," she said Tuesday.
A law professor at Queen's University has said these types of charges are exceedingly rare in Canada. Nicholas Bala told CBC News last month that he could think of only two or three such cases in the past 25 years.
Bala also said a fine — rather than jail time — is the most likely outcome because police are pursuing a corporation and not an individual.
Three youths and one adult, former amateur boxer Markel Jason Downey of Cole Harbour, were charged in the December 2014 home invasion.
Ashley MacLean Kearse, of Cole Harbour, was shot during the crime. She was paralyzed from the chest down.By Emman Ovuakporie and Johnbosco Agbakwuru
It was anger and lamentations galore on the floor of the House of Representatives on Tuesday after news broke about the arrest and detention of about 50 Nigerian students by the Turkish government for alleged terrorism. The students were said to have been arrested over the coup attempt in Turkey, although the students have not been accused of any form of involvement in the said coup.
The matter was reported through a motion of urgent national importance sponsored by a member of the House Committee on Diaspora, Solomon Maren.
And to express resentment on the action of the Turkish government, the House not only mandated the Nigerian government to wade into the matter and explore all diplomatic options to secure the release of the students from detention, it also gave the Turkish government a seven-day ultimatum, expected to elapse on Tuesday, to release the students.
The House further mandated its Committees on Diaspora, Education, Foreign Affairs and Interior to investigate the circumstances surrounding the students arrest.
Maren, in the motion, drew the attention of his colleagues to the hardship, extortion, torture and even death which, according to him, Nigerian students go through as they seek for education abroad.
He said that since the failed Turkey coup of July 15, there had been a clamp down on 2099 schools in Turkey, over their alleged involvement in the coup.
“The Turkish government had also come had on Institutions associated Islamic Schilar Fetullar Gulen linked with the coup, and had also called on the federal government to shot down 17 Turkish schools in Nigeria for alleged links with the Hizmet movement that also masterminded the coup”, the lawmaker said.
He recalled how a Nigerian student was murdered in Dubai, another Julie bedridden in Italy following alleged torture and maltreatment and another student killed in Malaysia because his travel documents could not be updated on time.
In his contribution to the motion, Rep Raphael Nnana Igbokwe, who represents Ahiazu/Ezinihitte Mbaise Federal Constituency of Imo State, called for the consolidation of the motion with a previous motion which called for an investigation of the involvement of Turkish schools in Nigeria in the coup, adding that Turkey came hard on Nigerian students because the country failed to close down Turkish institutions in Nigeria as was recommended by the Turkish government.
Igbokwe further disclosed that, according to the Ministry of Education, Turkish International Schools is privately owned, just as he queried the Corporate Affairs Commission, CAC, for allowing a private entity to register as an international entity.
However, another member of the House, Jagaba Adams Jagaba, from Kaduna State, advised the House to apply caution over the matter as it involved the diplomatic relationship between Nigeria and Turkey.
Jagaba said it would be counterproductive for the lawmakers to pre-empt the actions of the executive which has the traditional duty of diplomatic relations with foreign nations. But Rotimi Agunsoye said Nigeria should openly reprimand Turkey for detaining the students and demand an apology.
The House learnt that out of the 120 countries that have students in Turkey, only Nigerian students were detained.
Speaking to Sunday Vanguard, Chairman, House Committee on Diaspora Matters, Rep Rita Orji, said that the detention of the 50 students was an insult to Nigeria.
Orji, who represents Ajeromi-Ifelodun Federal Constituency of Lagos State on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party,PDP, said the arrest of the students would have been understandable if there was any conflict between Nigeria and the Turkish government.
“This is not the first time Nigerians based abroad are being dealt with this way. It was so sympathetic that students left their homes to where they are studying, if there is any conflict involving the two countries, it would have been understandable, but the issue of taking them right from the airport to detention and collecting their passports, I think this is the height of insult to the sovereignty of a nation”, the Committee Chairman said.
“This is not the issue of parents of these children, it is the issue of how you respect the sovereignty and dignity of where they come from.
“It is just a terrible outcry on insinuations, a mere allegation that they are studying or they are linked to any of these schools they said the proprietors or the owners have link with government overthrow or the coup.
“It is terrible because even here in Nigeria, the Turkish Ambassador attended the graduation ceremonies of students of those same Turkish schools that are purportedly to be shut down on the order of their government.
“So, you ask, where is our sovereignty if on this level, do we really have a diplomatic relationship? Couldn’t they have called on the government of Nigeria before taking such drastic action.
“They are not ruling Nigeria for us, Nigeria is a sovereign nation and as such we are not taking instructions from Turkey. The students are in a lawful course. Non of the students has been listed as a terrorist, none of them has been mentioned as a terrorist and none on the list of wanted persons.
“It is high time we rose up to this challenge so that people will know that the life of every Nigerian matters, this is not the issue of black life matters that is in the United States, but this time life and rights of every Nigerian student abroad matters.
“It is unfortunate that it is happening at this critical time but I know the government of Nigeria is going to do due diligence. I believe this is an insult and assault on the dignity of persons and if not for any reason, African Charter respects life. We have freedom, it cannot based on your own assumption, hound people and detain them.
Continuing, she said, “This case is premeditated, you can’t tell me it is sudden. These students were targeted and waited for arrival. It is not that it is something that happened without their knowledge, it is an orchestrated attempt to tarnish the image of Nigeria.
“I think the relevant authorities should stand up for the defence of these students and that will save our other students in other countries because this is Turkey today, it could be another country tomorrow, that will wake up again and do the same thing against our people.”
Also commenting on the matter, Chairperson of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Nnena Elendu- Ukeje, said Nigeria will not normally interfere in the internal workings of any country especially when it involves a situation that seems to threaten their democracy.
She went on: As a country, we also owe a responsibility to our citizens to know exactly where they are or how their doing in their host country. But we would draw the line when it comes to that number of our citizens who have been arrested in a foreign country and especially charged with treason.
“It is pretty heavy, and any responsible country and parliament would want to find out exactly what the true status is, and that’s what we intend to do, moving forward.” Aggregate opinion in the House is that the Nigerian government should use all diplomatic means to ensure that the ‘innocent’ students are released from the Turkish cell. Besides, it has been argued in some quarters that Nigeria should review its diplomatic policies and ensure that she puts a stop to the rampant harassment and intimidation of her nationals doing genuine business and with valid travelling documents in any part of the world.How McDonalds delivers in other countries around the world
MCDONALD’S home delivery could soon be lobbing on your front door step.
The fast food giant is about to trial McDelivery in Victoria, prompting concerns from a health campaigner.
Its South Melbourne outlet will test customers’ appetite for the service by late next month. Other locations are expected to follow.
Customers will have to place a minimum $25 order through the Menulog website and pay a $4.95 delivery fee.
Deliveries will operate Sunday to Thursday from 5pm-11pm, and Friday and Saturday from 5pm-10am the next morning.
WOULD YOU HAVE MCDONALD’S HOME DELIVERED? HAVE YOUR SAY BELOW
The service will cater to areas within a 2.5km radius including South Melbourne, Port Melbourne, Albert Park, South Wharf and Docklands.
McDelivery is already being tested at two Sydney locations, with another five to soon be added.
“Australians have enjoyed the convenience of restaurant home delivery for decades and our customers have told us they like the idea of Macca’s delivery,” spokeswoman Skye Oxenham-Lupul said.
“We will look to extend the service once these trials are completed.”
Obesity Policy Coalition executive manager Jane Martin was worried about consumers getting even easier access to unhealthy food.
“The concern is it creates even more convenience. It’s expanding the market at a time when people are already eating poorly, particularly young men who consume large amounts of chips and burgers,” Ms Martin said.
Ash Naulty, 25, said he was keen on the idea and surprised it had taken so long.
“I’d definitely use it, especially in winter when you don’t want to get out of the house. It’s common at all types of fast food places overseas,” he said.
McDonald’s said it chose South Melbourne because of the area’s population growth and customer demand.
Most of the standard menu, including Big Macs, french fries and healthier salads and wraps, will be available.
Sydney customers have given mixed reviews on Menulog, with some happy and others alleging long waits or soggy items.
karen.collier@news.com.auAt least 10 Taliban insurgents, including key commanders were killed on Friday in Wardak province in a clash with security forces, security officials said Saturday.
General Ahmad Fahim Qaim, Wardak police chief, said that the clash occurred when Taliban insurgents attacked security forces who were protecting engineers working on the Arghandi-Ghazni 220 kV power line that comes from Turkmenistan. The engineers had been working in Saydabad district of Wardak province to restore power after it was cut in Sultan Khail village of the district by local mafia.
According to Qaim during the clash Qari Rouhullah, Qari Sami and Mawlavi Nasrullah, Taliban’s local commanders, were killed.
Six other Taliban insurgents were wounded in the clash, Qaim said.
Qaim said that work on the electricity line will be completed in two days.
One army soldier was killed and two others were wounded in the clash, Qaim added.NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 05: Activists hold a protest near the Manhattan apartment of billionaire and Republican financier David Koch on June 5, 2014 in New York City. The demonstrators were protesting against the campaign contributions by the billionaire Koch brothers who are owners of Koch Industries Inc. The brothers have become a focus of Democrats and liberals as they are accused of skewing the political playing field with their finances. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Today, Monday, January 11, will have a big impact on the American Middle Class and all of those who aspire to it.
Today, the United States Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
This case has been brought to the Court by the Koch-sponsored "Center for Individual Rights (CIR) " -- an outfit that made its reputation challenging civil rights laws. The CIR is asking the Court to break with forty years of precedent to impose radical new limits on the rights of workers to negotiate together for higher wages and better working conditions.
Four decades ago, the Supreme Court ruled -- unanimously -- that since public sector unions must represent all of the employees in a bargaining unit, labor agreements can require all employees that benefit from that representation to pay a fair share contribution to support the costs of negotiating and servicing the labor agreement.
This does not mean that all employees are required to join a union and contribute to its lobbying and political work -- or to anything else it might do that is not directly related to negotiating and enforcing the terms of a contract.
And recall that public sector unions represent only groups of workers that have voted to form -- or join -- a union to represent them.
The Supreme Court found that it would make no sense to allow a situation where employees get the benefit of wage increases, paid holidays, health care benefits, etc. that are negotiated by the union leaders elected by the employees -- but they can simply refuse to pay the costs of getting those benefits.
Billionaires like the Koch Brothers think otherwise. They want to make it as hard as possible for all workers to bargain together for higher wages, because they actively support a low-wage economy where CEOs, big corporations and Wall Street Banks can pay employees as little as possible and they can keep as much as possible for themselves.
The Friedrichs case itself deals only with public employees. But the Koch Brothers would like to weaken the rights of all employees to organize unions -- and they think that a sharp reversal by the Supreme Court would be a great first step in that direction.
Trouble is, if the Koch Brothers get their way it will deliver a body blow to the chances of ordinary Americans to live secure, middle class lives. Remember, the wages of ordinary people have not increased in the United States since 2000. In fact, virtually all of the considerable economic growth that we've seen in America over the last three decades has gone to the wealthiest 1%.
That's because people like the Koch Brothers have used massive campaign contributions and an army of lobbyists to rig the rules of the American economy.
We desperately need to reform government so it will once again level the economic playing field and build an economy that benefits all ordinary Americans -- not just the wealthy, CEOs and big corporations.
If the Kochs get their way at the Supreme Court, it will do just the opposite. It will tilt the game even more in the favor of huge CEO salaries, enormous Wall Street bonuses, and gigantic corporate profits.
And it will make it harder for people like teachers, firefighters, road workers, and paramedics to negotiate for the kind of wages that allow them to live secure, middle class lives.
These are the kinds of people that were the foundation of the American Middle Class. It was their skill that educated and protected Americans for generations. And it was their middle class incomes that provided the buying power that allowed the American economy to explode -- to become the economic envy of the rest of the world.
And let's remember that it was the ability of public sector employees to organize and negotiate together for decent wages and safe working conditions that lifted so many out of poverty and made them part of the Middle Class.
Next week Americans celebrate a national holiday to commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. Fifty-one years ago, Dr. King was shot in Memphis where he had gone to support a strike by mainly black sanitation workers who were organizing to demand the ability to negotiate together for better wages and safer working conditions
The event that touched off that strike was the death of two sanitation workers who were crushed by an unsafe, malfunctioning garbage truck compactor. It had been cheaper to pay the occasional death benefit to a low income, African American sanitation worker's family, than to invest in safety equipment on those garbage trucks.
The ability of those workers to organize together to negotiate -- to form a union -- not only brought them higher incomes and safer working conditions. It gave them dignity. In fact |
2 Server Push allows the server to send assets to the browser before it has even asked for them.
Before we jump into HTTP/2 let’s take a look how it works with HTTP/1:
In HTTP/1 the client sends a request to the server, which replies with the requested content, usually with an HTML file that contains links to many assets (.js,.css, etc. files). As the browser processes this initial HTML file, it starts to resolve these links and makes separate requests to fetch them.
Check out the following image that demonstrates the process. Pay extra attention to the independent requests on the timeline and to the initiatior of those requests:
HTTP/1 assets loading
This is how HTTP/1 works, and this is how we develop our application for so many years. Why change it now?
The problem with the current approach is that the user has to wait while the browser parses responses, discovers links and fetches assets. This delays rendering and increases load times. There are workarounds like inlining some assets, but it also makes the initial response bigger and slower.
This is where HTTP/2 Server Push capabilities come into the picture as the server can send assets to the browser before it has even asked for them.
Look at the following picture where the same website is served via HTTP/2. Check out the timeline and the initiator. You can see that HTTP/2 multiplexing reduced the number of requests, and the assets were sent immediately together with the initial request.
HTTP/2 with Server Push
Let’s see how you can use HTTP/2 Server Push today with Node.js and speed up your client’s load time.
HTTP/2 Server Push Example in Node.js
With requiring the built-in http2 module, we can create our server just like we would do it with the https module.
The interesting part is that we push other resources when the index.html is requested:
const http2 = require('http2')
const server = http2.createSecureServer(
{ cert, key },
onRequest
)
function push (stream, filePath) {
const { file, headers } = getFile(filePath)
const pushHeaders = { [HTTP2_HEADER_PATH]: filePath }
stream.pushStream(pushHeaders, (pushStream) => {
pushStream.respondWithFD(file, headers)
})
}
function onRequest (req, res) {
// Push files with index.html
if (reqPath === '/index.html') {
push(res.stream, 'bundle1.js')
push(res.stream, 'bundle2.js')
}
// Serve file
res.stream.respondWithFD(file.fileDescriptor, file.headers)
}
This way the bundle1.js and bundle2.js assets will be sent to the browser even before it asks for them.
You can find the full example here: https://github.com/RisingStack/http2-push-example
HTTP/2 & Node
HTTP/2 in @nodejs can help us at many points to optimize our client-server communication.
With Server Push, we can send assets to the browser before it has even asked for them to reduce the initial loading time for our users.Born on Aug. 7, 1916, Wolfe served two terms as U of T’s chancellor, from 1991 to 1997.
Former University of Toronto chancellor Rose Wolfe, who graduated at least 60,000 students at 90 convocations and bestowed about 60 honorary degrees, died on Friday. She was 100.
Wolfe would have been touched by the words of fondness and admiration that have marked her passing, her daughter Elizabeth told the Star in an email.
He described Wolfe as “a powerful force for good” who “lived a rich and full life,” personified the very best values of the university and built bridges to the many communities it serves. “Quite simply the perfect chancellor” is how he once described her to the Star.
“At the age of 75, when many people begin to rest, Rose became chancellor of the University of Toronto and worked tirelessly for the next six years,” said former U of T president Robert Prichard in a statement.
She described the children as “undersized, pale and withdrawn” in an earlier Star report.
The job that changed her life came in the 1940s at Jewish Family and Child Services. She was to place Jewish children from displaced persons camps in Poland, Belgium and France in Canadian Jewish homes.
Born Rose Senderowitz, she once wanted to be a doctor but felt her marks in math were not good enough, so she chose sociology instead, graduating from U of T in 1940, the same year she married Ray Wolfe.
“She believed in rocking the boat,” Elizabeth said. “She never shied away from taking leadership to task, to do more and better.”
She said Wolfe would want to be remembered as someone who challenged authority, called into question conventional wisdom and demanded action.
One of the children she helped, John Freund, remembered Wolfe on Saturday as a “very fine” and “beautiful woman.”
“The war was over,” she said. “But we really didn’t know the numbers or the horrors they went through. They didn’t talk.”
Freund came to Canada as a Jewish war orphan when he was 18, in 1948. He said he told Wolfe that he wanted to finish high school, which he had started in Prague. He remembers that she advocated for his education at the Canadian Jewish Congress, at which point he was granted the financial aid to finish school.
That experience cemented Wofle’s decision to establish a chair in honour of her late husband for the study of the Holocaust.
“We owe it to our predecessors, to ourselves and to future generations to understand what happened during that terrible period in human history,” the university’s campus magazine quotes her as saying.
Among the many high points of Wolfe’s career were serving as vice-president of the women’s division of the United Jewish Appeal; president of the Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations; and president of Jewish Family and Child Services.
Through her work, Wolfe often rubbed shoulders with famous people, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
She was also known as U of T’s “most prominent volunteer,” once visiting a Scarborough hospital in her chancellor regalia to present a dying Victoria University student with his diploma
Wolfe had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathan, “late in life,” and continued working for a time, as she told the Star in 1996. Mother and daughter both recalled the day she resolved to quit.
“She did leave her work after coming home to my 5-year-old self crying on the doorstep,” Elizabeth told the Star in an email on Saturday. “She committed to being there for us when we were young and made certain we were always well fed, well dressed, well groomed, well behaved and actively engaged in activities.”
Elizabeth said Wolfe had high expectations in all aspects of life and believed her children were a reflection of her.
Wolfe was also a very “impressive” hostess, Elizabeth said. “My fondest memories of her were watching her act as hostess at her dining room table, serving the most elegantly prepared meals and engaging guests in vibrant and entertaining conversation.”
From the early 1960s on, Wolfe was deeply involved in community activities, Elizabeth said. She treated her volunteerism as though it were her profession — a full-time undertaking with regular prep work, meetings and debriefings.
“When I was a young practising lawyer, she would often call at night for consultations,” Elizabeth said. “Those conversations instilled in me my own commitment to community engagement.”
Through her exemplary service as chancellor, as a member of the university’s Governing Council and in her many volunteer positions, Wolfe has left a magnificent legacy, said U of T president Meric Gertler in a statement.
“The University of Toronto has lost a beloved champion, a distinguished alumna, and an incredibly warm and generous friend,” Gertler said.
Many aspects of life at U of T have benefited from Wolfe’s leadership and dedication, from the experience of commuter students to alumni engagement, fundraising and the university’s global academic standing, Gertler noted.
Wolfe’s name will always be synonymous with generosity, free spirit and intellectual freedom, said Anna Shternshis, director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at U of T.
The former chancellor was extensively involved in the life of the centre, Shternshis said in an email, adding that Wolfe advocated for female leadership in academia and for the study of Yiddish — a Jewish language brutally damaged by the Holocaust.
“She took a keen interest in our current students, met with them, wanted to know about their concerns and challenges,” Shternshis added. “They trusted her because they sensed her ultimate devotion to their success.”
Michael Marrus, professor emeritus of history at U of T, spoke fondly of Wolfe. He was the inaugural holder of the professor of Holocaust Studies chair that she endowed 20 years ago as chancellor.
“I knew Rose before this, from Jewish community activity,” Marrus said. “(She) was emphatically present with her Jewish identity but also with her sense of community responsibility.”
Marrus also recalled Wolfe as “extraordinarily poised and elegant … not a hair out of place … perfectly attuned to the moment, and very diplomatic.”
Wolfe was succeeded as chancellor by Hal Jackman, and Marrus said she gave advice to her successor about how best to be a greeter for the school.
Marrus said, “Rose spoke regularly and spontaneously and spoke in a milieu in which academics are used to speaking themselves — fluently and graciously and in a way that made everyone feel happy and at home.”
He remarked that this quality was one of her strengths, and that people looked to her to “create a great family in the community.”
Martin Sampson, communications director for the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, described Wolfe as a “giant in the Jewish community.”
She was a great Canadian committed to social justice, education and philanthropy, he said.
In 1999 Wolfe was inducted into the Order of Canada. “She is a defender of social justice, whose extensive and tireless involvement with many boards and committees has made her a dynamic contributor to society,” the citation read.
Wolfe was predeceased by her husband and is survived by her daughter, Elizabeth Wolfe; her son, Jonathan, and daughter-in-law Amal Wolfe; and grandchildren Ryan, Jaimie, Michael and Rachel.
Funeral services will be held Monday at Benjamin’s Park Memorial Chapel.EFF Tells Court That The NSA Knowingly And Illegally Destroyed Evidence In Key Case Over Bulk Surveillance
from the because-of-course-they-did dept
EFF filed its first lawsuit challenging illegal government spying in 2006. The current dispute arises from Jewel v. NSA, EFF's 2008 case that challenges the government's mass seizure of three kinds of information: Internet and telephone content, telephone records, and Internet records, all going back to 2001. EFF's brief notes that the government's own declarations make clear that the government has destroyed five years of the content it collected between 2007 and 2012, three years worth of the telephone records it seized between 2006 and 2009, and seven years of the Internet records it seized between 2004 and 2011, when it claims to have ended the Internet records seizures.
"The court has issued a number of preservation orders over the years, but the government decided – without consent from the judge or even informing EFF – that those orders simply don't apply," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Regular civil litigants would face severe sanctions if they so obviously destroyed relevant evidence. But we are asking for a modest remedy: a ruling that we can assume the destroyed records would show that our plaintiffs were in fact surveilled by the government."
The Government cannot have it both ways, as it seeks to do here. It cannot present one understanding of the scope of plaintiffs' claims -- a very broad one -- when asserting state secret privilege, but claim a much narrower understanding when it is destroying evidence.
the law presumes that the destroyed evidence goes to the merits of the case, and the burden is on the spoliating party to show that no prejudice resulted.".... After having repeatedly and vociferously claimed that the plaintiffs must produce evidence from the government of individual seizure of their communications and records (as opposed to the boxes of their evidence plaintiffs have long presented), the government cannot meet its burden to show no prejudice has occurred here. Unsurprisingly, it has made no attempt to do so.
We followed the back and forth situation earlier this year, in which there were some legal questions over whether or not the NSA needed to hang onto surveillance data at issue in various lawsuits, or destroy it as per the laws concerning retention of data. Unfortunately, in the process, it became clear that the DOJ misled FISA court Judge Reggie Walton, withholding key information. In response, the DOJ apologized, insisting that it didn't think the data was relevant -- but also very strongly hinting that it used that opportunity to destroy a ton of evidence. However, this appeared to be just the latest in aof the NSA/DOJ willfully destroying evidence that was under a preservation order.The key case where this evidence was destroyed was the EFF's long running Jewel v. NSA case, and the EFF has now told the court about the destruction of evidence, and asked the court to thus assume that the evidence proves, in fact, that EFF's clients were victims of unlawful surveillance. The DOJ/NSA have insisted that they thought that the EFF's lawsuit only covered programs issued under executive authority, rather than programs approved by the FISA Court, but the record in the case shows that the DOJ seems to be making this claim up.The full filing is worth reading as it highlights how ridiculous the DOJ's "oh we didn't thinkstuff mattered to this case" argument really is. As EFF notes, all the way back in 2010, it had filed a brief that explicitly noted that they were challenging the use ofthis kind of data.The filing lists out the history of the government repeatedly destroying relevant information, despite the preservation orders from the court, and despite clear language noting that the government had to preserve exactly this kind of data. The DOJ's argument that it thought the data under FISA-approved programs didn't count seems especially weak, given that the DOJ itself was part of trying to hide that those programs even existed. As the EFF filing notes, the argument seems preposterous in context. For example, at one point, the DOJ claims that it thought EFF didn't mean FISC-approved programs because it talked about "warrantless" surveillance. However, as EFF notes, even FISC-approved programs are still warrantless, because a FISC order is not a warrant.Even more damning for the DOJ, the EFF filing points out that in the DOJ's own attempts to kill this case under state secrets claims, it said that the activity had been approved by FISC. So, for all the talk about how it had no idea that EFF was interested in FISC-approved surveillance, that's clearly untrue or it wouldn't have invoked FISC as having approved the collection! After listing out numerous examples of government officials making official statements in the case talking about FISC approval and how revealing this would reveal FISC-related state secrets, EFF points out:As EFF points out, when evidence like this is destroyed:And now we wait to see how the DOJ tries to tap dance out of this one.
Filed Under: destruction, evidence, jewel v. nsa, nsa, spoliation, surveillance
Companies: effruckawriter:
We’ve launched a new fundraiser campaign through Bonfire to support RAINN, because…
…well, if we have to explain why we’re doing this, I don’t even know where to begin.
RAINN, for those of you who may not know of the organization, is the nation’s largest anti-sexual violance organization. We at Team Lazarus believe they are worthy of our support, and hope you’ll join us. All proceeds from the sales of these shirts go to RAINN. The campaign will run for 15 days from today, and our goal is to sell 50 shirts, though of course we won’t complain if we can sell more than that.
Thank you very much for your support.
While I’ve got your attention, an update on the upcoming release dates. The first of our quarterly format issues, LAZARUS 29, is scheduled for March, with issue 30 planned for June, and the end of the “FRACTURE I” arc in October. The dates look good on our end, and I’ll be posting some of Michael’s preview art in the next few hours here and on the LAZARUS Tumblr.Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson greets supporters prior to a debate hosted by the Free and Equal Elections Foundation and moderated by former CNN talk-show host Larry King on October 23, 2012 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
The 2016 election is one that will be talked about for years and years to come. Not only because of the two main candidates in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but also for what could be the start of the rise of a third party.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson can be thanked for that. You might recognize him from the ballot in 2012 where he reached roughly one percent on the vote, the biggest win for a third party presidential candidate since Ralph Nader in 2000.
So who is Gary Johnson? He’s the former two-term governor of New Mexico. In New Mexico, he was a member of the Republican party. In his first term, he vetoed 200 bills, many of them spending bills. The state Democrats made defeating Johnson a top priority in 1998, but not only did he win, he served two terms.
According to recent polls, he is polling at 13 percent, two percent away from his target of 15 percent so he can be a part of the presidential debates. If he does make it onto that stage, thanks to the unpopularity of Trump and Clinton, the exposure he gets will certainly be interesting to see.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “What the hell is a libertarian?”
Gary Johnson gives a short and simple answer to that question. Being a Libertarian is being socially liberal and fiscally conservative. According to Johnson, the Libertarian Party “starts out from a fundamental premise: As Americans, we believe in freedom. Every individual has dignity and is worthy of civility and respect. The core of our character is one of generous and enlightened self-interest: Every man and women has the right to choose what to do with their time, their talents, and their lives.”
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty damn good start to me.
Perhaps the thing that won me over the most, was his statement after the shootings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the attack on law enforcement that followed them.
“Once again, we find ourselves grieving for the victims of a senseless attack, their families and a community. And once again, we are trying to understand it.
"We have no idea what is truly behind the murder of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge. But as was the case in Dallas just days ago, we do know that violence and killing are not how we deal with problems in America. We cannot hide from the broader and very real issues of distrust that create tensions between law enforcement and the citizens they serve.
"We must focus on healing those divides, while also rejecting these attacks on law enforcement as the cowardly acts that they are -- regardless of the motivation.”
Gary Johnson hit the nail on the head with this statement.
The two party system is slowly dying, and that’s probably a good thing. I think it’s insane how we’re supposed to identify ourselves with one side of the political spectrum and stick with their out-dated and extreme policies and ideas.
I think the common misconception with Gary Johnson and third parties is that voting for them is a wasted vote. To me, that’s the furthest from the truth. If you ask me, wasting your vote is walking into your precinct and voting for someone your conscious will haunt you for just because of some stupid party affiliation that says you must vote for them.
I encourage everyone to go to isidewith.com and take the political quiz they offer. It’s a simple 60 questions and at the end, they tell you who you match up most with. Even if you’ve taken it before, do it again, Gary Johnson is now included on this list.
The two major candidates are so polarizing and controversial it’s overwhelming; we have an opportunity to make our voices actually heard here. Make a vote for your conscious this November, not for the lesser of two evils.
Where Johnson stands on the issues, per Johnsonweld.com
War on drugs
“The Johnson/Weld team supports the legalization of marijuana and believes each state should have the right to legalize and regulate it, as is the case with alcohol. Johnson and Weld do not support the legalization of other recreational drugs that are currently illegal. It is, however, their belief that drug rehabilitation and harm reduction programs are more acceptable and successful than incarceration and arrests for drug use.”
Abortion
“Gary Johnson has the utmost respect for the deeply-held convictions of those on both sides of the abortion issue. It is an intensely personal question, and one that government is ill-equipped to answer. As Governor, Johnson never advocated abortion or taxpayer funding of it. However, Gov. Johnson recognizes the right of w women to choose.”
Immigration
“Having served as Governor of a border state, Gary Johnson understands immigration. He understands that a robust flow of labor, regulated not by politics, but by the marketplace, is essential. He understands that a bigger fence will only produce taller ladders and deeper tunnels, and that the flow of illegal immigrants across the border is not a consequence of too little security, but rather a legal immigration system that simply doesn’t work. Making it simpler and efficient to enter the U.S. legally will provide the greatest security possible, allowing law enforcement to focus its time and resources on the criminals and bad actors who are, in reality, a relatively small portion of those who are today entering the country illegally.”
Taxes
“Governor Johnson advocates the elimination of tax subsidies, the double taxation embodied in business income taxes, and ultimately, the replacement of all income and payroll taxes with a single consumption tax that will allow every American and every business to determine their tax burden by making their own spending decisions. Taxes on purchases for basic necessities would be “prebated”, with all other purchases taxed equally regardless of income, status or purpose.”
Wasteful Spending
“Governor Johnson has pledged that his first major act as President will be to submit to Congress a truly balanced budget. No gimmicks, no imaginary cuts in the distant future. Real reductions to bring spending into line with revenues, without tax increases.
The idea that we can somehow balance the federal budget without cutting military spending and reforming entitlements is fantasy. What is required is leadership and political courage. As Governor of a state with an overwhelmingly Democrat legislature, Gary Johnson stood up to excess spending, vetoed 750 bills and literally thousands of budget line items…and balanced the state’s budget.”
Jobs
“Government’s role is to create and maintain a regulatory and tax environment in which private job-creators can prosper. Gary Johnson did that as Governor, and would do so as President. Government regulation should only exist to protect citizens from bad actors and the harm they might do to health, safety and property. Regulation should not be used to manipulate behavior, manage private lives and businesses, and to place unnecessary burdens on those who make our economy work. Eliminating unnecessary regulations and applying common sense to those rules that are necessary will free up capital and allow those who want and need to create jobs to do so.”
Foreign Policy and National Defense
“The objective of both our foreign policy and our military should be straightforward: To protect us from harm and to allow the exercise of our freedoms. As President, Gary Johnson will move quickly and decisively to refocus U.S. efforts and resources to attack the real threats we face in a strategic, thoughtful way. The U.S. must get serious about cutting off the millions of dollars that are flowing into the violent extremists’ coffers every day. Relationships with strategic allies must be repaired and reinforced. And the simplistic options of “more boots on the ground” and dropping more bombs must be replaced with strategies that will isolate and ultimately neuter those violent extremist groups.”
Read or Share this story: http://fsune.ws/2az2y2tA bike shop is allegedly offering spouse receipts so that cycling addicts can show their other halves they paid less for the latest bike or accessory than they actually did.
In what is being described as a "genius" bit of salesmanship the service would allow customers to change the price of a purchase on the receipt and, if true, would add a new level of subterfuge to spousal cycle spending transparency.
Local bike shop now offers a 'wife receipt' so you can choose whatever price you want to take home with your new bike... #Genius — Bike Nerd (@BiikeNerd) September 8, 2015
Suggestion what's on offer is a "wife receipt" have, unsurprisingly, been met with derision on Twitter, women rightly pointing out keen female cyclists are as likely to splurge on expensive bikes and kit as men.
@BiikeNerd @nPlus1_ genius? Or sexist. Because only men buy bikes and wives don't approve. — Lois MM (@ClaudAndI) September 14, 2015
Is this a good idea, though, or just the road to a rocky relationship? Tell us what you think.Plucking a few events out of the vastness of the world and declaring them to be the news of the day is a mysterious and complicated project. Sometimes what’s news is inarguable—the outbreak of war, a head-of-state transition, natural calamity—but very often it falls into the category of the resonant incident. It isn’t a turn in the course of history, but it strikes editors as illustrative of something important. Take crime. If crimes don’t involve anyone powerful or well known, they generally aren’t considered news. But a few such crimes do become news, big news, and hold the public’s imagination in a tight, enduring grip. An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in the morning on Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens. The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times. In 1964, Rosenthal was forty-one years old and relatively new on the job as the newspaper’s metropolitan editor, an important step in his ascent to a seventeen-year reign over the Times’ newsroom. Ten days after Genovese was killed, he went downtown to have lunch with New York City’s police commissioner, Michael Murphy. Murphy spent most of the lunch talking about how worried he was that the civil-rights movement, which was at its peak, would set off racial violence in New York, but toward the end Rosenthal asked him about a curious case, then being covered in the tabloids, in which two men had confessed to the same murder. He learned that one of the competing confessors, Winston Moseley, had definitely murdered a woman in Kew Gardens, Kitty Genovese. That killing had been reported at the time, including in a four-paragraph squib buried deep within the Times, but Murphy said that what had struck him about it was not the crime itself but the behavior of thirty-eight eyewitnesses. Over a grisly half hour of stabbing and screaming, Murphy said, none of them had called the police. Rosenthal assigned a reporter named Martin Gansberg to pursue the story from that angle. On March 27th, the Times ran a front-page story under a four-column headline: 37 WHO SAW MURDER DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector The following day, the Times ran a reaction story in which a procession of experts offered explanations of what had happened, or said that it was inexplicable. From then on, the story—as they wouldn’t have said in 1964—went viral.
It’s evidence of a kind of editorial genius that Rosenthal, by playing the story in the way that he did, was able to get such a reaction. The tabloids had treated it simply as a sensational tale of urban violence. The Times made sure that its apathetic-witness angle would land by prominently displaying the story on its front page. The murder now stood for a profoundly disturbing sociological trend. The key line in Gansberg’s story came from one of the witnesses (none of whom were named), who said, “I didn’t want to get involved.” Some of the fascination that racialized, sexualized violence attracts surely rubbed off on the story—it became clear from photographs and from other outlets that Genovese was white and attractive and that Moseley, a repeat rapist, was black—but the gist of the piece lent itself perfectly to Sunday sermons about a malaise encompassing all of us. It was a way of processing anxieties about the anonymity of urban life, about the breakdown of the restrictive but reassuring social conventions of the fifties, and, less directly, about racial unrest, the Kennedy assassination, and even the Holocaust, which was only beginning to be widely discussed, and which seemed to represent on a grand scale the phenomenon that one expert on the Genovese case calls Bad Samaritanism. The Times’ version of the Genovese story represents a version of reality that was molded to conform to a theory. The March 27th story began “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.... Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.” Later that year, Rosenthal published a very short instant book, the only book he ever wrote on his own, called “Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case,” which used portentous, outraged language to enshrine the apathy narrative. (He urged readers “to recognize that the bell tolls even on each man’s individual island, to recognize that every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window.”) By the eighties, a widely used college psychology textbook drew this scenario from the Times account: “What is interesting about this event is that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors came to their windows at 3:00 AM in response to her screams of terror—and remained at their windows in fascination for the 30 minutes it took her assailant to complete his grisly deed, during which time he returned for three separate attacks.” [cartoon id="a18078"] It’s now clear that this version of events is wrong, thanks to a number of Genovese revisionists who have emerged over the years. They include Jim Rasenberger, a journalist who has written a couple of influential articles about the case, notably one in the Times, in 2004; and Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, the authors of a 2007 article in American Psychologist (which quotes from, and debunks, the textbook rendering). The essential facts are these. Winston Moseley had been out in his car, looking for a victim, when he came across Genovese driving home from work. He followed her. She parked at the Kew Gardens train station, adjacent to her apartment. Moseley parked, too, and attacked her with a hunting knife. She screamed, and a man named Robert Mozer opened his window and shouted, “Leave that girl alone!” Moseley ran away. Genovese, wounded but not mortally, staggered to the back of her apartment building and went inside a vestibule. Moseley returned, found her, and attacked again, stabbing her and assaulting her sexually. He fled again before she died. The Times story was inaccurate in a number of significant ways. There were two attacks, not three. Only a handful of people saw the first clearly and only one saw the second, because it took place indoors, within the vestibule. The reason there were two attacks was that Robert Mozer, far from being a “silent witness,” yelled at Moseley when he heard Genovese’s screams and drove him away. Two people called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the scene—precisely because neighbors had called for help—Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that the murderer had fled. The one indisputable villain in the Genovese case, other than Moseley, was Joseph Fink, who worked in the apartment building across the street from where Genovese lived. He saw the first attack, did nothing, and, after Moseley had fled, took a nap in the basement, rather than going outside to help Genovese. A more ambiguous figure was Karl Ross, a friend and neighbor of Genovese’s, who was drunk that night. He heard the first attack and did nothing. The second attack occurred in the vestibule outside his apartment door. He opened the door a crack, saw Moseley plunging a knife into Genovese, and closed the door, terrified. He made a couple of phone calls, the first to a friend on Long Island, who advised him to do nothing, the second to a neighbor in the building, who told him to come over. Ross crawled out of his window, across the roof, and into a neighbor’s apartment, and eventually called the police. It may or may not be relevant that Ross was thought to be gay, at a time when gay New Yorkers had a lot to fear, both from attackers on the street and from the police. Three months before the murder, Rosenthal had assigned a five-thousand-word story that ran on the Times’ front page under the headline “GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN.” The fact that Kitty Genovese herself was gay evidently escaped his notice. Winston Moseley certainly led a highly compartmentalized life. He was steadily employed, a married man with two children, and he owned a single-family house in South Ozone Park, Queens. He also routinely broke into people’s houses and stole television sets, which is what led to his apprehension for Genovese’s murder, five days later. Somebody who saw him leaving a house with a TV called the police, and in the course of being questioned Moseley confessed to a number of gruesomely sexualized murders of young women, including Genovese’s; another murder he had committed; and one that he hadn’t committed. (The last created the double-confession story that Rosenthal had asked the police commissioner about.) At Moseley’s trial, a few months later, because of the pervasiveness of the apathy narrative, the prosecution decided not to call Joseph Fink or Karl Ross as witnesses, even though they could have offered the most direct accounts of the murder. Still, Moseley had confessed to the murder; the trial was about whether he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury convicted him. Today, at seventy-nine, Moseley is the longest-serving inmate in the New York prison system. Aside from the guilty reflections it inspired, the Genovese case had some tangible consequences. It helped in the push to establish 911 as an easy-to-remember national police emergency number; in 1964, the most reliable way to call the police in New York was to use the specific telephone number of each precinct, and caller response wasn’t always a high priority. Two psychologists, Bibb Latané and John Darley, created a new realm of research into what came to be called the bystander effect, the main finding of which is that your likelihood of intervening in a Genovese-like incident increases if you believe that there are very few other bystanders. The effect has stood up through repeated experiments. In 1977, Winston Moseley, engaged in a periodic attempt to be granted parole, had the chutzpah to argue in a Times Op-Ed piece that his misdeed had wound up making the world a better place: “The crime was tragic, but it did serve society, urging it as it did to come to the aid of its members in distress or danger.”
The fiftieth anniversary of the Genovese murder has generated two full-length books about the case: “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America,” by Kevin Cook (Norton), and “Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences,” by Catherine Pelonero (Skyhorse). Both authors have interviewed everyone there is to interview and reviewed the public records about the case, but so much attention has preceded their efforts that they wind up working from nearly identical sets of facts, and it sometimes feels as if they were straining to stretch their accounts to book length. Both have decided to write in the true-crime style, which entails occasionally telling us what people may have thought or felt, or presenting as quoted dialogue unrecorded private scenes from long ago—an unfortunate decision, given how much the story turns on the trustworthiness of journalism. Cook is the more adept storyteller of the two. His peppy, knowing style calls to mind pop-culture products from the time of the murder, like the magazine Argosy or the television crime drama “Naked City.” And he is firmly, and persuasively, in the revisionist camp. He says that Moseley’s prosecutors concluded that there were only five or six witnesses who could plausibly testify at the trial. Pelonero is an anti-revisionist, who presents herself as a defender of the sullied reputation of Martin Gansberg, the Times reporter on the story, and as someone who insists that the unpleasant truth about Genovese’s neighbors’ behavior not be dodged. Her count of true witnesses, gleaned from police records, is thirty-three. (According to Cook, the prosecutors who interviewed potential witnesses found that most didn’t grasp what had been going on.) “Historical revisionism of the Kitty Genovese story was underway, and the beautiful twilight of falsehood did indeed enhance it into something far less blinding than the burning glare of the truth,” Pelonero writes, with more passion than clear meaning. [cartoon id="a18075"] The Kitty Genovese who emerges from these books was an appealingly independent woman who had grown up in a large middle-class Italian-American Catholic family in Brooklyn but decided not to follow when everyone else left the city for New Canaan, Connecticut. A |
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“Using anti-semitism as a response for hiding the crimes of the Israel government is disgusting. Einstein once said he would hate to see the Israelis do to the Palestinians what the Nazis done to the Jews, and that has happened.
“Furthermore, the Palestinian people are Semites. Is it Anti-Semitic to criticise them?”
A spokesperson for the NUS said: “These are utterly contemptible comments, which have absolutely no place in either the student movement or wider society. We are not aware of this individual ever having held elected office within, or being a representative of, NUS. These comments stand in complete contrast to the tolerance and inclusivity we value as an organisation and of the society we want to see.”
Nir Bitton sparked debate himself on Instagram when he posted an image in support of Israel’s military offensive against Palestine which was quickly taken down.
The NUSceptics committee, which has been lobbying for SUs to leave the NUS, has told The Tab: “At NUS conference, the floor heard arguments against commemorating the holocaust which received significant support.
“This kind of vile bigotry is unfortunately all too common amongst the NUS clique.”The latest GOP senator to express concern is Marco Rubio of Florida. Toward the end of his appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” his discussion with host Jake Tapper turned to health care legislation ― specifically, the bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
In fact, they are so frustrated that they seem to have forgotten it would take just three of them to force a slower, more open process.
On Senate health care bill, @marcorubio says every other senator "should have an opportunity, to weigh in and make...or propose changes"
When the House passed the American Health Care Act (AHCA), its version of the legislation, Republican senators were quick to decry both the bill and the debate that led to it. They said the House had acted brashly ― hatching legislation behind closed doors and then rushing to vote before the public could get a good look at it. Republican senators also said the proposal itself was too harsh ― breaking promises to protect people with pre-existing conditions and taking insurance away from 23 million people, according to Congressional Budget Office predictions.
Now it’s clear that the Senate process won’t play out so differently after all.
A group of GOP senators has been writing the bill in private. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) plans to take legislation directly to the Senate floor, where it will most likely get just 20 hours of formal discussion. Neither the Finance Committee nor the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee ― the two with jurisdiction ― plan to hold hearings. (In 2009 and 2010, Democrats held literally hundreds of hours of hearings, as part of a process for the Affordable Care Act that took more than a year to complete.)
The Senate legislation itself is likely to look resemble that House bill so many GOP senators insisted they couldn’t tolerate. It might propose to unwind the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid a little more slowly and offer marginally more financial assistance to lower-income and older consumers, but overall, the impact of the bill would be nearly the same. Many millions of people would lose health insurance, and millions more would lose consumer protections that guarantee access for people with serious medical problems.
Rubio, asked about all of this on Sunday, vowed that the process would be open:
That bill has to at least have a vote in the Senate, and I hope it’s a vote that allows plenty of time for debate, analysis, and changes. And input. And if that’s the process we follow, it will be fine. If it is an effort to rush from a small group of people straight to the floor in an up-or-down vote, that would be a problem. The Senate rules are not conducive to that sort of action.
As Topher Spiro, the former Senate aide now at the Center for American Progress pointed out on Twitter, Rubio’s vow is essentially meaningless. The Senate rules for the debate McConnell envisions would give all senators a chance to weigh in, but it would be during that brief, 20-hour window of final debate ― this, for legislation that would affect one-sixth of the economy and the insurance arrangements for tens of millions of Americans.About two months ago, Dr. Elizabeth Stier was shocked to learn that she would lose a vital credential, board certification as a gynecologist, unless she gave up an important part of her medical practice and her research: taking care of men at high risk for anal cancer.
The disease is rare, but it can be fatal and its incidence is increasing, especially among men and women infected with H.I.V. Like cervical cancer, anal cancer is usually caused by the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which is sexually transmitted.
Though most of her patients are women, Dr. Stier, who works at Boston Medical Center, also treated about 110 men last year, using techniques adapted from those developed to screen women for cervical cancer.
But in September, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology insisted that its members treat only women, with few exceptions, and identified the procedure in which Dr. Stier has expertise as one that gynecologists are not allowed to perform on men. Doctors cannot ignore such directives from a specialty board, because most need certification to keep their jobs.When I was a new mother living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2010, I often forgot that my infant son, Harper, didn’t look like me. As I pushed him around the neighborhood, I thought of him as the perfect brown baby, soft-skinned and tulip-lipped, with a full head of black hair, even if it was the opposite of my blond waves and fair skin.
“He’s adorable. What nationality is his mother?” a middle-aged white woman asked me outside Barnes & Noble on Broadway one day, mistaking me for a nanny.
“I am his mother,” I told her. “His daddy is Filipino.”
“Well, good for you,” she said.
It’s a sentiment that mixed-race couples hear all too frequently, as interracial marriages have become increasingly common in the United States since 1967, when the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia struck down laws banning such unions. The story of the couple whose relationship led to the court ruling is chronicled in the movie, “Loving,” now in theaters.
In 2013, 12 percent of all new marriages were interracial, the Pew Research Center reported. According to a 2015 Pew report on intermarriage, 37 percent of Americans agreed that having more people marrying different races was a good thing for society, up from 24 percent only four years earlier; 9 percent thought it was a bad thing.This post was written by Ryan Holiday, the marketing genius behind American Apparel and Tucker Max and author of two hit books. Ryan’s first book, Trust, Me, I’m Lying, is an inside look into into the world of media manipulation that Ryan engages in for his clients. But becoming a media master didn’t require college for Ryan— he dropped out. And he hasn’t stopped dropping out. Ryan shares how this habit has impacted his life:
"One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow—a very painful slaughter of innocents." - Henry Sidwick.
You, the ambitious young person, how many of your natural selves have you identified yet? How many of them are suffocating? Are you prepared for the collateral damage that’s going to come along with letting the best version of you out?
My victims:
Ryan, college student 1 year from graduating with honors
Ryan, the Hollywood executive and wunderkind
Ryan, director of marketing for American Apparel
All dead before 25. May they rest in pieces.
I am a perpetual drop out, quitting, abandoning or changing paths just as many others in my position would be getting comfortable. By Sidwick’s terms, I guess I am a serial killer. This “slaughter” made from room for the exponential growth of Ryan Holiday, published author. But he better not get comfortable either. Because he too may have to be killed one day. And that will be a good thing.
Because the future belongs to those who have the guts to pull the trigger. Who can drop out and fend for themselves. If you're reading this site you're probably already contemplating a decision like that. I want to show you why it might be the right call for you and how to do it.
The Big Myth
"It wasn't quite a choice, it was a realization. I was 28 and I had a job as a market researcher. One day I told my psychiatrist that I really wanted to do was quit my job and just write poetry. And the psychiatrist said, 'Why not?' And I said, 'What would the American Psychoanalytic Association say?' And he said, 'There's no party line.' " - Allen Ginsberg
Let’s get the big myth out of the way. There’s not much dropping involved in leaving school. When I did it, I remember walking to the registrar's office—I was so nervous. My parents had disowned me, I needed to move to a new city, the girl whose job I stole hated me. Why was I doing it? I’d just helped sign my first multi-platinum rock act and I wasn’t about to go back to the dorms and tolerate reading in the newspaper about other people doing my work. I was 20 years old.
I’m here to drop out of school, I announced to the registrar (like I was some presidential candidate who thinks he literally has to throw his hat into a ring). In fact, as my advisor informed me, that wasn’t exactly necessary. I could take a leave of absence for up to a year and possibly more, without even jeopardizing my scholarship. I braced for the same condescending, paternalistic lecture I'd gotten from my parents. It didn't come. These people were happy for me. And if I submitted the right forms, I might even be able to get course credit for the work. How’s that for a party line?
So I took the plunge, and like many big risks, it turned out that leaving of school was more manageable than I could have ever anticipated.
What I Wish I’d Known
I get a lot of emails from kids who are on the verge of dropping out. They always seem so scared. And I empathize with them. I know I was scared when I quit. Even billionaires, years removed from the decision that has now, in their case, been clearly vindicated, still speak of the hesitation they felt when they left school. Were they doing the right thing? What would happen? Were they throwing everything away?
It’s the scariest and most important decision most young entrepreneurs, writers, artists will ever make. So naturally, they take it very seriously. But doing that—taking it so seriously—almost wrecked me.
I remember pulling into a parking space one day a few months after dropping out, stressed and on the verge of a breakdown. Why am I killing myself over this?, I thought. It’s just life. Suddenly, a wave of calm washed over me. I was doing what young people are supposed to do: take risks. There is no need to stress anything so seriously, let alone school (as someone told me later, he’d gotten sick when he was in college and missed 18 months of school. They’re 50 now and a year and half seems like two seconds). I’m not going to starve. I’m not going to die. There is nothing that can’t be undone. Just relax. Relax. And I did. And it worked.
1) If I’d realized it sooner, I could have avoided many needlessly sleepless nights.
2) I also wish someone had given me some more practical advice:
3) Try to have a few months money on hand. It makes you feel less pressure and gives you more power in negotiating situations.
4) Keep a strong network of friends—college friends especially. The unusualness of your situation is a warping pressure.
5) Keep connected to normal people so you can stay normal.
6) Take notes! I wish I’d written down my observations and lessons for myself the first time I dropped because it wasn’t my last time and I could prepared better for round II and III.
Why I Did It Again (and again)
When I dropped out of school, I was betting on myself. It was a good bet (one that surprised me, honestly) In less than 3 years, I’d worked as a Hollywood executive, researched for and promoted multiple NYT bestsellers, and was the Director of Marketing for one of the most provocative companies on the planet. I had achieved more than I ever could have dreamed of—the scared, overwhelmed me of 19 could have never conceived of having done all that. (Which is why I killed that younger version of me). Yet, I knew it was time to drop out again. The six-figure job had to go. It was time for the next phase in my life. What I had, just like college had been, was holding me back.
That’s exactly what I did. I left and moved 2,000 miles away to write a book. It was wracking and risky and hard for everyone in my life to understand. But I was prepared this time. I knew what to expect. I’d saved my money, I built up my support system and I refused to take it too seriously. Whatever happened, I probably wouldn’t die.
...and I didn’t. In fact, within six months I’d sold the book to Penguin for several times my previous salary and was securely on my new path.
Welcome to the Future
I, and the many people who email me, seem to have a funny habit: We repeatedly leave and give up the things that most people work so hard to achieve. Good schools. Scholarships. Traditional jobs. Money. We don’t believe in sunk costs. If that sounds like you, then you’re probably a perpetual drop out too. Embrace it. I have.
I know that I will do it again and again in my life. Why? Because every time I do, things get better. The trial by fire works. It’s the future. The institutions we have built to prop us up seem mostly to hold creative and forward thinking people back. College is great, but it is slow and routine. Corporations can do great things, but fulfilling individuals is not one of them. Money is important but it can also be an addiction. Accomplishments like a degree or a job are not an end, they are means to an end. I’m so glad I learned that.
On your own path in life, remember the wise words of Napoleon and “Trade space for time.” (Or if you prefer the lyrics of Spoon “You will never back up an inch ever/that’s why you will not survive.”) Space is recoverable. The status of a college degree, the income from a job—recoverable. Time is not. This time you have now is it. You will not get it back. If you are stuck in a dorm room or wedged into a cubicle and what you are doing outside of those places is actually the greatest possible use of you, then it’s time to drop out.
Acknowledge, as Marcus Aurelius writes, the power inside you and learn to worship it sincerely. It may seem counter-intuitive that dropping out—quitting—is part of that, but it is. It’s faith in yourself. It’s about not needing a piece of paper or other people’s validation to know you have what it takes and are worth betting on. This is your life, I hope you take control and get everything you can out of it.
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This post was originally published in 2013.FILE - In this Dec. 15, 2015 file photo, participants hold the "Oath of Allegiance" and American flags during a naturalization ceremony attended by President Barack Obama at the National Archives in Washington. Tens of thousands of immigrants are applying for U.S. citizenship in a year when immigration has taken center stage in this year's presidential campaign, especially in the race for the GOP nomination. In interviews, many say the fear of Donald Trump becoming president is motivating many longtime immigrants to apply for citizenship in order to vote. Trump, the GOP front-runner, has made immigration a central theme of his combative campaign to win the Republican nomination. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
New research suggests that the average immigrant household costs US taxpayers significantly more in public welfare benefits than households headed by natural-born American citizens do, adding fresh fuel to the national debate over immigration policy.
The study, released Monday by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), an organization that favors restrictions on immigration, looks at government programs providing cash, food, housing, or medical care that more than half of immigrant-headed households rely on to some degree. It attempts to put a price tag on those benefits, estimating that the average immigrant household costs taxpayers $6,234, 41 percent more than the average native-born family.
This includes 33 percent more in cash welfare, 57 percent more food assistance, and 44 percent more Medicaid benefits. Public housing benefit costs are about the same for the two groups.
According to the study, authored by public policy analyst Jason Richwine, "illegal immigrant households" cost an average of $5,692 in welfare benefits, less than those headed by legal immigrants. The research also concludes that immigrants from Central America and Mexico have by far the highest welfare costs of any region of origin.
"With the nation facing a long-term budgetary deficit, this study helps illuminate immigration's impact on the problem," Richwine wrote.
The new CIS study follows up on research released last September that concluded 51 percent of immigrant-headed households receive some form of welfare, much more than the 30 percent of native-headed households who receive welfare.
Based on the data available, Richwine attempts to explain the higher consumption of welfare benefits by pointing to the lower level of education held by immigrants and the larger number of children in the average immigrant household.
The report argues that being less educated and less skilled leaves immigrants in low-paying jobs and reliant on welfare programs. Since many benefits are geared toward children, larger families would be expected to use more of them.
The study concludes that the best way to remedy this situation is to allow less immigration by uneducated and unskilled immigrants.
Daniel Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization that advocates reducing immigration, said the CIS findings are not surprising, given the "de-skilling of the immigration flow relative to the average American." He decried immigration policies that favor family relationships more than job skills and abilities.
"This is the big quandary about immigration at a level that's considerably higher than the country needs," Stein said. He questioned why the US admits immigrants who lack the skills to get a good job and will cost taxpayers more money.
Other research based on different data has come to the opposite conclusion about the relationship between immigration status and welfare costs. The American Immigration Council argues that immigrants pay far more in taxes than they receive in benefits.
Researchers from George Washington University, Leighton Ku and Brian Bruen, attempted in 2013 to compare public benefits used by poor immigrants and poor native citizens. They found that low income non-citizens use fewer public benefits than low income citizens, and the benefits they do get have a lower value than those received by natives.
In a study published by the libertarian Cato Institute, Ku and Bruen explained that their analysis differs from some others because they evaluated individuals rather than households and they only focused on the poor because the public benefit programs in question are means-tested.
Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute who edited the 2013 study, said this approach is the only way to get a true "apples to apples" comparison between the immigrant population and the native-born community.
"We thought it doesn't make sense to look at rich immigrants and rich natives when looking at programs for poor Americans," he said. Instead, the Cato researchers zeroed in on those who were actually eligible for these benefits.
Nowrasteh pointed to several flaws he sees in the CIS approach:
Counting immigrant-headed households can include children who are born as US citizens and citizens who are spouses of immigrants.
CIS does not account for differences in income and includes very wealthy citizens who may skew the results.
The studies do not include Medicare and Social Security, the two largest federal welfare programs, which immigrants contribute more to and receive less from.
Walter Ewing, a senior researcher at the American Immigration Council, a group that promotes fair and humane immigration policy, also claimed the CIS study misrepresents the data to some degree. He said it is unfair to consider children of immigrants part of an immigrant household until they are 18 but then treat them as part of the native born community when they are tax-paying adults.
"This is a bit disingenuous given that all children are 'costly' when young because they consume educational and health services which they don't 'pay back' until they are adults in the labor force," Ewing said.
The patterns identified by CIS only emerge when one does not control for education, income, or number of children, said Randy Capps, director of research for US programs at the Migration Policy Institute, an organization that believes immigrants can create new social and economic assets.
"Once poverty is controlled, public benefit costs are actually slightly lower for immigrants," he said.
Richwine rejected those criticisms and defended his methodology.
While it is true that focusing on households ties US-born children to their immigrant parents, he argued "common sense" dictates that the child's presence in the country is a direct result of the parents' immigration. He also contended that welfare programs are structured around households and there are many that specifically benefit children.
Stein agreed that treating children of immigrants as a "byproduct" of immigration makes sense if one is trying to measure the burden on taxpayers.
"It's not really fair to pretend that the US citizens born here of immigrants are not part of the immigration flow," he said.
According to Capps, the household analysis magnifies the difference in welfare use, but "using a family or household as a unit of analysis makes sense because it is important to account for costs related to children in immigrant families, even if those children are U.S. born."
Richwine acknowledged that data suggests poor, uneducated immigrants use fewer welfare benefits than poor native citizens, but he argued they are also a much larger percentage of their community than poor natives are. He also questioned whether that fact makes them good candidates for residency and citizenship.
The CIS study explains that Medicare and Social Security were left out of the analysis because they chose not to include social programs that participants pay into before receiving benefits.
Nowrasteh suggested critics of the current system should focus on welfare reform rather than immigration reform. He has advocated an approach described as "building a wall around the welfare state," by reducing immigrant eligibility for public benefits.
"I want to cut down immigrant welfare use by reforming welfare," he said, rather than getting rid of immigrants. He feels welfare changes would have an impact more quickly.
The CIS report dismisses welfare reform as "not a policy change likely to occur in the near future." Richwine also questioned whether immigrant parents could legally be stopped from signing their US-born children up for benefits that American citizens are eligible for.
He noted that past efforts to restrict immigrant access to welfare benefits have failed or have been undermined by loopholes. Without abolishing or rolling back those programs, he does not believe reforms would be effective.
According to Richwine, the study demonstrated the flaws in current US immigration policy, which he described as "an irrational hodgepodge clearly not designed with American interests at heart," more than it did problems with welfare programs.
"The more important lesson here is immigration policy is just not being rationally carried out," he said.
An immigration system driven by the nation's interests would not welcome unskilled workers whose families will become dependent on the government, he argued.
Stein said people like Nowrasteh are envisioning a "libertarian abstract world" that ignores the economic and political costs of immigration. He believes allowing entry by uneducated immigrants who will accept low wages hurts less educated Americans and erodes the bargaining power of American workers seeking better conditions and higher pay.
According to Capps, it is possible that reducing the number of unskilled immigrants could open those jobs up to Americans, but if they continue to pay low wages, the workers will require the same government benefits the immigrants currently do. Shrinking the labor pool could raise wages, but it might also constrain the economy and reduce employment overall.
Ewing said groups like CIS and FAIR that support restricting immigration are looking at the welfare issue the wrong way.
"The most humane, practical, and beneficial way to deal with public benefit use among immigrants is to empower them to earn higher wages--not to beat them further into poverty by cutting their access to public benefits programs," he said.
He argued that a pathway to citizenship and naturalization would be a more effective way to reduce immigrant welfare use, as would English and adult education courses to give them the skills they need to get better jobs.
"Bemoaning that there are immigrants utilizing public benefits accomplished nothing constructive," Ewing said.The Villanova piccolo player who went viral Saturday night after she cried on national television during the Wildcats' third round loss appeared on 'The Tonight Show' Monday night.
Villanova student Roxanne Chalifoux became Internet famous when a camera caught a glimpse of her crying. Jimmy Fallon invited her to play with the show's house band, The Roots.
During the clip, Chaifoux and The Roots played the Villanova fight song and Fallon showered her with gifts including a gift basket and two tickets to see Taylor Swift.
"We know you like Taylor Swift," Fallon said. "So we called up Taylor and she gave you two tickets to her world tour."
"It's absolutely mind-blowing," Chaifoux said of the attention. "All I thought I did was cry on national television."
Chaifoux realized what was happening when she saw herself on the jumbotron with tears streaming down her face.
"All I could think about was my dad was at the game and I didn't want him to see me crying, but then it turned it everyone saw me crying," Chaifoux told Jimmy Fallon.BY: Follow @charleswrussell
President Donald Trump on Wednesday kicked off his push for tax reform, pitching his plans to overhaul the tax code as a way to help working-class Americans and keep the U.S. competitive against foreign countries.
"This is the place where the Main Street of America got its start and this is where America's Main Street will begin its big, beautiful come back," Trump said in Springfield, Mo. "We're here today to launch our plans to bring back Main Street by reducing the crumbling burden on our companies and on our workers."
Before Trump discussed his "pro-worker, pro-American" tax reform plan, he sent prayers to those affected by Hurricane Harvey, which has devastated southeast Texas.
"Our first responders have been doing heroic work to shepherd people out of harms way and their courage and devotion have saved countless lives. They represent the very best of America," he said. "Together, we will endure and overcome. To those affected by the storm, we are praying for you and we are here with you every single step of the way."
Trump then called the current U.S. tax code "self-destructive" and touted a Commerce Department report that projects three percent annual economic growth. He framed his tax reform push as a way to create more jobs.
"The foundation of our job creation agenda is to fundamentally reform our tax code for the first time in more than 30 years," the president said.
Trump listed four principles for tax reform. The first is to make the system fair, simple, and easy to understand, and to remove the loopholes that benefit the wealthy and special interests.
"We need a tax code that is simple, fair, and easy to understand. That means getting rid of loopholes and complexity that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans and special interests," Trump said, adding that he wants to "allow the vast majority of our citizens to file their taxes on a single, simple page without having to hire an accountant."
The other three principles are: a competitive tax code to encourage job creation and wage growth, tax relief for the middle class, and international corporate tax reform to bring money back to the U.S.
Trump also put Congress on notice, saying that he does not want to be "disappointed" in the legislature for failing to pass tax reform.
He specifically called out Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who is from Missouri and up for reelection in 2018.
"We must lower our taxes," Trump said. "Your senator, Claire McCaskill, she must do this for you, and if she doesn't do it for you, you have to vote her out of office."
"I'm calling on all members of Congress—Democrat, Republican, and Independent—to support pro-American tax reform," he added.
Trump called for lower taxes for middle-income Americans using what his administration is calling the "American model."
"My administration is embracing a new economic model. It's called very simply: The American Model," Trump said. "Under this system, we will encourage companies to hire and grow in America, to raise wages for American workers, and to help rebuild our American cities and communities. That is how we will all succeed and grow together, as one team, with one shared sense of purpose, and one glorious American destiny."
Trump did not just discuss tax reform as a domestic issue; he framed it as a necessary move to stay competitive against foreign countries, referencing former President Ronald Reagan in the process.
"In 1986, Ronald Reagan led the world by cutting our corporate tax rate to 34 percent. That was below the average rate for developed countries at the time," Trump said. "Everyone thought that was a monumental thing that happened. But then, under this pro-America system, our economy boomed; it just went beautifully, right through the roof."
"The middle class thrived, and median family income increased. Other countries saw the success," he added.
Trump argued that other countries responded by lowering their own taxes to remain competitive.
"They acted very swiftly by cutting taxes lower and lower and lower and reforming their tax systems to be far more competitive than ours," Trump said. "Over the past 30 years, the average business tax rate among developed nations fell from 45 percent to less than 24 percent, and some countries have an unbelievably low tax, including, by the way, China, and some others that are highly competitive and really doing very well against us."
"They are taking us, frankly, to the cleaners."The avocado is a fruit of a different time. The plant hit its evolutionary prime during the beginning of the Cenozoic era when megafauna, including mammoths, horses, gomphotheres and giant ground sloths (some of them weighing more than a UPS truck) roamed across North America, from Oregon to the panhandle of Florida. The fruit attracted these very large animals (megafauna by definition weigh at least 100 pounds) that would then eat it whole, travel far distances and defecate, leaving the seed to grow in a new place. That’s the goal of all botanical fruits, really. Survival and growth via seed dispersal.
Related Content Holy Guacamole: How the Hass Avocado Conquered the World
But the great mammals disappeared forever about 13,000 years ago in the Western Hemisphere. Around that time, North America lost 68 percent of its diverse Pleistocene megafauna, and South America lost 80 percent, Connie Barlow, author of The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, And Other Ecological Anachronisms says. But even after this major shift in the land mammal population, the wild avocado still requires the same method of seed dispersal, which makes it somewhat of an evolutionary anachronism.
“After 13,000 years, the avocado is clueless that the great mammals are gone,” Barlow explains. “Without larger mammals like the ground sloth to carry the seed far distances, the avocado seeds would rot where they’ve fallen and must compete with the parent tree for light and growth.”
A fruit with smaller seeds, like a berry, for example, can be consumed whole and dispersed by small mammals, making the chances of fruiting in a new place higher.
After the giant mammals had died out, if an avocado tree was lucky, a jaguar might’ve found the fruit attractive—the cat’s stomach is designed for digesting large hunks of meat, leaving potential for swallowing the avocado whole, though there is no evidence to support this idea. Rodents like squirrels and mice may have also contributed, as they traveled and buried seeds in the ground, rather than letting it rot on the surface. Wild avocados were appealing to larger animals because it had enough tasty flesh to lure them in and could be eaten in one bite. The fruit had a larger pit and less flesh than today’s avocados, but it really served as a quick snack for big mammals like the mammoth. Barlow writes in “Haunting the Wild Avocado,” originally published in Biodversity:
The identities of the dispersers shifted every few million years, but from an avocado’s perspective, a big mouth is a big mouth and a friendly gut is a friendly gut. The passage of a trifling 13,000 years (since the Pleistocene extinction) is too soon to exhaust the patience of genus Persea. The genes that shape fruits ideal for megafauna retain a powerful memory of an extraordinary mutualistic relationship.
How the avocado still exists in the wild after surviving its evolutionary failures remains a puzzle. But once Homo sapiens evolved to the point where it could cultivate the species, the fruit had the chance to thrive anew. Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves. Through cultivation, humans have bulked up avocados so there is more flesh for us to eat.
The avocado has been a staple food in Mexico, as well as Central and South America, since 500 B.C. Spanish conquistadors discovered the fruit from the Aztecs in the 16th century, but the ahuacate, the Aztec word for “avocado,” wasn’t grown commercially in the United States until the turn of the 20th century. By 1914, the exotic fruit made an appearance on California soil. Roughly 90 percent of today’s avocados are grown in California according to NPR. But Barlow is quick to point out the difference between a cultivated avocado and those found naturally.
“The wild varieties of avocados that are still somewhat available have a thin fleshy area around the seed—it wouldn’t necessarily be something that we would recognize as edible,” says Barlow. “When we go to the store and we see an avocado on sale, it’s always a question of will this be one with a tiny seed, or will it be a batch where the seed takes up five-sixths of the space of the fruit?”
Ecologist Dan Janzen conducted groundbreaking research on these and other “anachronistic fruits” and found that the avocado isn’t alone in this regard. His research in the late ’70s in the neotropics— an ecozone that includes both Americas and the entire South American temperate zone—sparked a shift in ecological thinking regarding these evolutionary-stunted fruits. Other examples include: papaya, cherimoya, sapote and countless other fleshy fruits of the neotropics. Another surprising “ghost” you may see everyday: Honey locust pods scattered about your driveway. All of these fruits are not considered edible by most native mammalian standards today. Barlow continues:
“In 1977, however, was beginning to suspect that he—along with every other ecologist working with large tropical fruits of the New World—had been wrong in one very big way. They all had failed to see that some fruits are adapted primarily for animals that have been extinct for 13,000 years.”
What makes the avocado even stranger as an evolutionary dancer without a partner is that the pit is actually toxic.
“We don’t have the liver or the enzyme systems to detoxify our bodies from something like the avocado seed,” Barlow says. “But at the same time, the rhino which has been around for ages, can eat all kinds of things that are toxic to everyone else.”
A South American folk recipe for rat poison mixes avocado pits with cheese or lard to kill off unwanted rodents. Whether or not humans are supposed to eat avocados from an evolutionary standpoint, America produced 226,450 tons of the fruit and consumed 4.5 pounds per capita in 2011. The avocado, a true “ghost of evolution,” lives on.
More avocado facts to drop at your next party:Paper Bridge designed by artist Steve Messam, Cumbria, U.K., 2015. Made from 22,000 sheets of red paper that are not held together with glue or other adhesives, the self-supporting bridge was built using the structural principles of dry stone walls. A temporary installation that was capable of supporting the weight of “one person,” it was dismantled and recycled.
Phaidon
Long before tiny houses were a lifestyle trend, architects, designers, and artists were creating small-scale buildings that allowed them to experiment and take creative risks. Nanotecture: Tiny Built Things, published recently by Phaidon, is a fun little book that “presents 300 examples of small built works that illustrate how tiny projects can convey interesting design resolutions,” author Rebecca Roke writes in the introduction, “all the more compelling for being made in miniature.”
Perhaps since nobody can agree on the exact dimension of what constitutes “tiny,” Roke divided the book into five chapters of small works that she organizes into categories using a Starbucks-like naming system that she has labeled from micro to mini to midi to macro to maxi.
“Whether micro or macro, many of the projects in this book are designed to be constructed as efficiently as possible,” she writes, adding that “tiny built things frequently convey a sense of freedom to experiment without the weighty responsibility of a large budget or complex functional requirements.”
And while many of the structures, which span the globe and were built in the past few decades, are variations on temporary or permanent housing, the book includes site-specific artworks, pavilions, sheds, installations, cabins, treehouses, animal shelters, and more, many of which are demountable, portable, inflatable, and otherwise ingenious and inventive in their design and construction methods.
“Nanotecture is a celebration of the small, the compact, the miniature and the tiny,” Roke writes, adding that the “inspiring, surprising and delightful” small-scale architecture featured in the book “illustrates that size is no barrier to architectural creativity.”
Glass House, Milan, 2012. Following in the modernist tradition of Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949) or Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (1951), this three-story glass house by Italian architect Carlo Santambrogio is all about the 360-degree view.
Phaidon
Emergency GRID housing by Carter Williamson Architects, Sydney, 2002. The insulated steel |
analysis to optimise results (43%), and engaged in other shady practices (20%). Fewer respondents admitted to engaging in these practices themselves, although 25% admitted to adjusting statistical analysis to optimize results. There was strong agreement that such practices should be reported in research papers; however, our audit found only two such admissions. The present survey confirms that questionable research practices and poor reproducibility are present in EBS studies. The belief that EBS is effective needs to be replaced by a more rigorous approach so that reproducible brain stimulation methods can be devised and applied.
Citation: Héroux ME, Loo CK, Taylor JL, Gandevia SC (2017) Questionable science and reproducibility in electrical brain stimulation research. PLoS ONE 12(4): e0175635. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175635 Editor: Jelte M. Wicherts, Tilburg University, NETHERLANDS Received: November 28, 2016; Accepted: March 28, 2017; Published: April 26, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Héroux et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This work was supported by National Health and Medical Research Council (https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/), APP1055084. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction Scientists agree that we are facing a crisis of confidence [1]. Research results are irreproducible, from dozens of psychology findings [2] to hundreds and even thousands of genetic [3] and fMRI [4] discoveries. Some have even argued that the majority of the published literature must be false [5]. Neuroscience, a field filled with statistically underpowered studies [6], unfortunately is at the forefront of this reproducibility crisis. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a popular, non-invasive and non-painful technique used by researchers and clinicians to assess and modulate brain function. Recently, we surveyed researchers on their ability to reproduce findings from studies that used transcranial magnetic stimulation to modulate non-invasively the excitability of the human motor cortex [7]. Only 40–55% of survey respondents were able to routinely reproduce previously published results. Worrisome was the finding that researchers engaged in, but failed to report, questionable research practices. Electrical brain stimulation (EBS) is a trendy method to modify brain function that has received considerable media attention [8]. Exploding on the scene less than a decade ago, the number of EBS papers has doubled to more than 3000 in less than three years. Much cheaper to perform than magnetic stimulation, EBS is claimed to improve everything from stroke motor recovery and depression to food cravings and language acquisition. However, EBS is not without controversy. Several high-profile laboratories have been unable to reproduce previously published findings [9–12]. We were curious about whether the published literature reflects the experience of researchers using EBS. Specifically, we wanted to know whether researchers are able to reproduce published EBS effects and whether they engage in but fail to report questionable research practices.
Materials and methods Online survey To assess the use of EBS to alter human brain excitability and function, we invited corresponding authors of identified publications to complete an anonymous internet-based survey (S1 and S2 Files). The study was approved by the University of New South Wales Human Research Ethics Committee (HC13326), and was conducted in accordance with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. As the survey was anonymous and online, written or oral consent was not obtained. Briefly, the survey asked respondents about their area of study, the number of years they had worked with EBS, the number of published and unpublished EBS papers, and how sample sizes were determined for these studies. For unpublished papers, respondents specified the reason for the failure to publish their results. Next, we asked respondents about the types of EBS protocols they had used and, for each protocol, their ability to reproduce previously published effects. If respondents indicated they only investigated unpublished, novel effects, their responses were not considered when determining the ability of researchers to reproduce previously published results. Finally, we asked respondents how they thought other researchers performed and reported EBS studies and, using the same questions, we asked how they themselves performed and reported EBS studies. On completion of the survey, respondents were invited to provide additional comments. Then the respondents were entered into a draw, independently conducted by the local IT department, to win an iPad. Pubmed search and e-mail address extraction A PubMed search was conducted on 31 December 2015 for all studies using tDCS or one of its common variants: direct current stimulation[Title/Abstract] OR tDCS[Title/Abstract] OR transcranial alternating current stimulation[Title/Abstract] OR transcranial random noise stimulation[Title/Abstract] OR HD-tDCS[Title/Abstract] OR tACS[Title/Abstract] OR transcranial electrical stimulation [Title/Abstract]. Titles and abstracts of identified references (n = 3,106) were reviewed and all human neuromodulation, brain function and clincal studies were retained. We excluded reviews, meta-analyses, errata, comments, letters, and single subject case studies as well as studies on animals, clinical trial planning, modelling electrical currents in the brain, intra-operative monitoring, and electrical stimulus perception. This resulted in a total of 1,258 references. E-mail addresses of corresponding authors and those available in the Author Information field of Pubmed references were retrieved; this resulted in 976 unique e-mail addresses and these researchers were invited to complete the survey. Audit of published research A sub-sample of 100 published papers (S5 File) were selected randomly from the 1,258 identified references to determine whether the questionable research practices listed in our survey are routinely reported in publications. For each paper, we also noted: if primary study findings were positive or negative; if the Methods included a statistical analysis section; the sample size and the strategy used to determine sample size; whether error bars in figures were undefined or were standard error of the mean; whether figures included individual subject data and whether p-values of 0.1 > P > 0.05 were interpreted as statistical trends or statistically significant.
Discussion On the surface, EBS seems like a panacea. What other technique can claim to improve so many disparate brain functions? Warning bells have been sounded, and highlight the difficulty some research groups have reproducing published EBS effects [9–12]. Unfortunately, these concerns are largely drowned out by the never ending torrent of new papers. The present anonymous web-based survey of EBS scientists indicates that, as with transcranial magnetic stimulation, this field is not immune to issues of reproducibility, questionable research practices and publication bias. While early EBS studies reported large, significant effects, what evidence is there that this technique is truly effective? Several meta-analyses have recently addressed this issue. For example, there is good evidence that EBS is effective in major depression [15], but not fibromyalgia pain [16], food craving and consumption [17], Parkinson’s disease [18] and stroke aphasia [19]. A common finding from these meta-analyses is that EBS studies are often of low research quality [20, 21] and that, when present, EBS effects are often small [20–24]. For example, EBS reduces chronic pain by only 12% (95% CI 8% to 15%), below the threshold for a minimal clinically important difference [22], and anodal EBS is associated with a significant reduction in reaction time, but the magnitude of this effect is small (Hedges’ g: −0.10, 95% CI −0.16 to −0.04) [24]. Importantly, these estimates exaggerate the true effect sizes because they do not take into account results from unpublished studies [25, 26]. Neuroscience research is often grossly underpowered [6], so how can so many papers report significant (i.e. p < 0.05) results when true EBS effects tend to be small? Low statistical power and publication bias may be to blame. Statistically significant effects from underpowered studies are necessarily inflated [25, 26], and often reflect false-positive results [5]. This fact explains why the first study to report an effect is often the most likely to overestimate its size (i.e., the winner’s curse) [6]. However, as more studies are published, effect sizes tend to decrease, sometimes to the point of being inconsequential. A classic example comes from transcranial magnetic stimulation research when the first paper published using a novel stimulation protocol—theta-burst stimulation—reported consistent and powerful effects in a sample of 8 subjects [27]. Years later, when the technique had been adopted by dozens if not hundreds of laboratories, the same group of researchers conducted a larger scale study involving 52 subjects; this time results were highly variable with “no overall effect” [28]. These issues are particularly troublesome because researchers continuously want to publish new discoveries. Stimulation techniques and paradigms are varied or applied to new patient groups, rendering the findings novel. Thus, many papers may suffer from the winner’s curse. Only when meta-analyses are performed and the effects of these related, but at the time novel, effects are pooled is it possible to estimate the true size of an effect. Thus, researchers using EBS must use care when designing studies. With small effects, sample sizes need to be increased to obtain adequate statistical power [6] and precise estimates of studied effects [29]. When sample size calculations are performed, they should not be based on inflated effects reported by small underpowered studies as this will result in too few subjects being tested [6]. Publication bias—where significant results are more likely to get published—was highlighted as a problem by several respondents. While our audit found 90% of papers reported significant effects for the primary research outcome, only 45–50% of respondents reported being able to routinely reproduce published effects for anodal and cathodal EBS. Even if we consider the additional 30–35% of respondents who were sometimes able to reproduce published effects, the discrepancy between the published literature and the experience of respondents likely reflects publication bias in EBS research. At the heart of publication bias is the thirst to publish novel findings and the reliance on p-values and α = 0.05 [30, 31]. Because statistically significant, not to be confused with scientifically or functionally significant, results are more likely to be published, practices such as p-hacking (trying several analyses and data inclusion/exclusion criteria and selectively reporting those that produce significant results) and HARKing (hypothesising after results are known) are part of the research landscape [32–34]. In our survey, for example, 25% of respondents admitted to, at one time or another, modifying their statistical analysis to obtain a favourable p-value. Other questionable practices that favour significant results in EBS research were also identified. Sadly, institutional incentives that reward the number of papers published lead to the natural selection of practices that produce significant results, and unfortunately, bad science gets results [35, 36]. In response to such issues, there have been calls to increase statistical power to 90% and decrease significance thresholds to α = 0.005 or 0.001 to avoid false positive results [37, 38]. With the traditional threshold of α = 0.05, a perfectly performed replication study has only a 50% chance of reproducing a significant effect [6, 37], a coin flip! Focus should be less on p-values and more on the scientific importance of the confidence intervals of the effects. One of the benefits of larger sample sizes is that effect size estimates are more precise [6, 29, 37], and by increasing the level of certainty surrounding the size of investigated effects, readers and editors will be interested in results regardless of their positiveness or negativeness, thus doing away with the fickle p-value [39]. Surveys can be influenced by various forms of bias. For example, those that focus on sensitive issues, questionable research practices in our case, may be biased by socially desirable responding: the tendency for respondents to give overly positive self-descriptions [40]. Unfortunately, only 0.2% of health-related surveys consider the effects of socially desirable responding on their results [41], and the present survey was not specifically designed to identify or correct for this. If present, socially desirable responding may have led us to underestimate negative practices and overestimate positive ones. However, socially desirable responding is less prevalent in anonymous self-report surveys [42], especially online ones such as ours [43]. It was recently noted that survey wording and interpretation may cause the prevalence of questionable research practices to be overestimated [44] and it is possible that this phenomenon influenced our results. Surveys are also at risk of self-selection and non-response biases [45, 46]. These biases may in part explain the glaring discrepancy between our audit and survey results. Nevertheless, the audit represents a large sample of randomly selected EBS papers and thus is a representative sample of published EBS papers. In sum, obtaining accurate estimates of questionable research practices is not simple. The lack of transparency and scientific rigor we have uncovered likely reflects the pressure on researchers to publish significant results in high impact journals [14, 26, 35, 47–50]. This pressure drives a vicious cycle in which journals, institutions and funding agencies expect more, and, to survive and reach these expectations, scientists consciously or unconsciously adopt questionable or fraudulent research practices [7, 35, 36, 47–52]. These pressures and problems are not unique to research in EBS, nor are they new. But currently they are casting a shadow on the genuine efforts of researchers to improve brain function, a goal that is as important as ever. Fortunately, awareness of these issues is on the rise [1–7, 14, 26, 35, 36, 47–52] and recommendations and guidelines are emerging. These include justifying samples size with a priori power calculations, pre-registration of methods and analysis plans, reporting research transparently, making data and computer code openly available, and rewarding reproduction and replication studies [29, 53–59]. In EBS studies, researchers should include control brain sites in their stimulation protocols to overcome the shortcomings of sham stimulation and include control tasks to ensure the specificity of reported effects [60]. As highlighted by Poldrack et al. [55], these solutions are uncontroversial, yet their implementation is often challenging for researchers and best practices are not necessarily followed. The clinical promise of EBS will remain illusory until the practice of neuroscience becomes more open and robust.
Acknowledgments We thank Dr. Andrew Cartwright for help implementing the online survey. This work was supported by an NHMRC grant (JLT, SCG).
Author Contributions Conceptualization: MEH CKL JLT SCG. Data curation: MEH SCG. Formal analysis: MEH CKL JLT SCG. Funding acquisition: JLT SCG. Investigation: MEH JLT SCG. Methodology: MEH CKL JLT SCG. Project administration: MEH. Resources: JLT SCG. Software: MEH. Supervision: SCG. Validation: MEH CKL JLT SCG. Writing – original draft: MEH SCG. Writing – review & editing: MEH CKL JLT SCG.Once upon a time, the historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth collected fairytales in Bavaria, which were locked away in an archive until now … here is one of the newly discovered stories – The Turnip Princess
A young prince lost his way in the forest and came to a cave. He passed the night there, and when he awoke there stood next to him an old woman with a bear and a dog. The old witch seemed very beautiful and wished that the prince would stay with her and marry her. He could not endure her, yet could not leave that place.
One day, the bear was alone with him and spoke to the prince: "Pull the rusty nail from the wall, so that I shall be delivered, and place it beneath a turnip in the field, and in this way you shall have a beautiful wife." The prince seized the nail so strongly that the cave shook and the nail cracked loudly like a clap of thunder. Behind him a bear stood up from the ground like a man, bearded and with a crown on his head.
"Now I shall find a beautiful maiden," cried the prince and went forth nimbly. He came to a field of turnips and was about to place the nail beneath one of them when there appeared above him a monster, so that he dropped the nail, pricked his finger on a hedge and bled until he fell down senseless. When he awoke he saw that he was elsewhere and that he had long slumbered, for his smooth chin was now frizzy with a blond beard.
He arose and set off across field and forest and searched through every turnip field but nowhere found what he was looking for. Day passed and night, too, and one evening, he sat down on a ridge beneath a bush, a flowering blackthorn with red blossoms on one branch. He broke off the branch, and because there was before him, amongst the other things on the ground, a large, white turnip, he stuck the blackthorn branch into the turnip and fell asleep.
When he awoke on the morrow, the turnip beside him looked like a large, open shell in which lay the nail, and the wall of the turnip resembled a nut-shell, whose kernel seemed to shape his picture. He saw there the little foot, the thin hand, the whole body, even the fine hair so delicately imprinted, just as the most beautiful girl would have.
The prince stood up and began his search, and came at last to the old cave in the forest, but no one was there. He took out the nail and struck it into the wall of the cave, and at once the old woman and the bear were also there. "Tell me, for you know for certain," snarled the prince fiercely at the old woman, "where have you put the beautiful girl from the parlour?" The old woman giggled to hear this: "You have me, so why do you scorn me?"
The bear nodded, too, and looked for the nail in the wall. "You are honest, to be sure," said the prince, "but I shall not be the old woman's fool again." "Just pull out the nail," growled the bear. The prince reached for it and pulled it half out, looked about him and saw the bear as already half man, and the odious old woman almost as a beautiful and kind girl. Thereupon he drew out the nail entirely and flew into her arms for she had been delivered from the spell laid upon her and the nail burnt up like fire, and the young bridal pair travelled with his father, the king, to his kingdom.A US federal judge yesterday ordered the release into the United States of 17 Chinese Muslims who have been held at the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, a ruling that dealt a setback to the Bush administration.
District Judge Ricardo Urbina gave his ruling at a hearing to consider the appeals by members of the Uighur ethnic group, who are seeking their release from the military prison and asking to go to the US.
He said there was no evidence that the detainees, who have been held at Guantánamo for nearly seven years, were enemy combatants or a security risk, and said that the US constitution prohibited indefinite detention without cause. He ordered them to be brought to the court for a hearing on Friday.
The Bush administration had argued that federal judges do not have the authority to order the release of the detainees into the US.
Lawyers for the prisoners said the ruling marked the first time that a federal court had ordered the release into the US of prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay.
The Uighurs remain at the prison even though the US military no longer considers them enemy combatants. The US has been unable to find a country willing to accept them. It has said they would face persecution if they were returned to China.Editor Ratings: User Ratings: [Total: 0 Average: 0/5]
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In college, I had a great career. I started every game. I had the second-most tackles in Kansas history. I was one of the best players, offense or defense, in the nation.
When draft day came around in 2011, I sat in a room with my family and friends waiting for my phone to ring.
But it didn’t ring. I wasn’t drafted at all.
There’s a huge stigma to going undrafted. Not a lot of people talk about it, but there is. For a guy who’s drafted, and in particular drafted high, you’re allowed to make so many more mistakes. People want you to succeed, and any shortcomings you have are viewed as temporary. An “adjustment phase.”
When you’re undrafted, you just don’t have that same margin for error. You have to go above and beyond — and then above and beyond that.
Like a lot of guys who were snubbed in the draft, I play with a chip on my shoulder. Every play is an opportunity to prove wrong everyone who did not recognize my talent.
As an undrafted player, you’re playing every game against a team that passed on you … with every single pick they owned. Other coaches, other players and even some members of the media assume there must be a reason you were not drafted.
They’re looking, waiting, just hoping for you to make a mistake.
Why?
Because if you do make one, they can think to themselves, “Oh. That’s why he went undrafted. Okay. We’re fine. We did our jobs.” And that’s the stigma you don’t hear as much about. It’s not just that everyone thinks you’re a fringe player. It’s that, in this weird way, everyone wants you to be one.
Name. Pedigree. Reputation. They’re hard to overcome.
Luckily, I came in with veteran players who didn’t care about any of that. And I mean I got really lucky. I got two all-timers: Brian Dawkins and Champ Bailey. Out of everyone in the league, those were probably the two best and most professional guys to be able to play under. I got both of them. And once they saw I could play, nothing else mattered. They wanted to win. Pretty soon they were fighting our coaches to put me in.
I made first-team All Rookie that year. And I’ve been playing on an elite level ever since.
But still, there’s that stigma. Even after you prove yourself, it follows you around. It’s the difference between having and lacking pedigree: When you have it, you’re “confirming.” When you lack it, you’re “proving.”
Sometimes, it’s in subtle ways. When I tore my ACL last January, a lot of people wrote me off. Most guys, if they tear their ACL at 25, people are optimistic. But with me, for whatever reason, it was like, “He won’t get it back. He’s on the downside now.”
I came back in seven months, which shocked people. Then I put up a Pro-Bowl and All-Pro season, which shocked them even more.
Earlier this summer, the football analytics site Pro Football Focus released their annual list of the Top 100 players in the NFL. I came in at No. 4 — behind only J.J. Watt, Aaron Rodgers and Justin Houston.
When the list came out, some people made a big deal about my ranking being so high.
But to me, it honestly didn’t seem strange at all.
To arrive at their rankings, Pro Football Focus uses a lot of advanced metrics — high-end stats and high-end film. But at the same time, they really only use one metric, and it’s the simplest one there is: performance. I’ll quote them: “This list is based solely on 2014 play. Nothing that happened in previous years or may happen in the future is accounted for. This isn’t about class or talent; it’s about form throughout 2014.”
And that’s what separates the PFF list from other lists. It’s name-blind, pedigree-blind and reputation-blind. It asks one question: Did you perform? And it measures one thing: How did that performance stack up against the rest of the league?
There are two main things you want from a cornerback: First, don’t give up touchdowns. And second, don’t give up big plays. I didn’t give up a single touchdown last year. And I didn’t give up a single play over 22 yards. Zero and zero. If I was a pitcher in baseball, I’d have pitched a shutout — for an entire season.
A couple of months later, NFL Network released its own Top 100 list. In a way, it was the complete opposite of the Pro Football Focus list. This one, voted on by players, had no defined criteria.
And when a list’s criteria are “undefined,” what that really means is they’re defined by our default settings — the instinctive ways that we judge people: Name. Pedigree. Reputation.
So when the NFL Network list came out, I didn’t even need to look. I could already guess. And I guessed right.
They left me off entirely.
Remembered by facts and forgotten by opinions: That’s the life of the undrafted underdog in the NFL.
So, yeah, I know I’m not the most famous player. I know I’m always going to rank higher on certain lists than others. But I know who I am. I know what I’m capable of. And I know there is only one way to make sure that people never forget my name.
Win the Super Bowl.The penny might be more trouble than it’s worth.
The cost to produce the one-cent coin increased to 1.5 cents during 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported. In 2015, the penny cost 1.43 cents to make, while in 2014, its production value was 1.66 cents.
Despite efforts to cut the costs of manufacturing the copper coin, it seems unlikely that the cost of making it will ever sink below one cent. As a result, the Obama administration has been considering alternatives to the penny. In March 2014, the White House called for a “comprehensive review” of U.S. currency, including options to replace the penny and nickel.
However, in order to change currency denominations, Congress would have to pass a law, which it doesn’t seem eager to do. In 2010, after considering the issue, Congress told the U.S. Mint to look for cheaper ways to make coins—but there doesn’t seem to be a clear solution.
“There are no alternative metal compositions that reduce the manufacturing unit cost of the penny below its face value,” a 2014 report to Congress said.
The Mint does make money on the dime and quarter, producing 2.87 billion dimes and 2.65 billion quarters in 2015. Meanwhile, Mint facilities in Philadelphia and Denver produced 9.16 billion pennies during the same time.A leading psychiatrist has called for the reclassification of magic mushrooms, LSD, and other psychedelic drugs on the grounds they could be crucial in treating mental health problems.
James Rucker, honorary lecturer at King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, proposed that legal restrictions on the use of such substances be lifted and used to aid ailments such as anxiety and addiction.
Such drugs “were extensively used and researched in clinical psychiatry” during the ’50s and ’60s, Rucker wrote in the British Medical Journal, but were prohibited in 1967 following fears that they were causing psychological harm—in spite of medical evidence to the contrary. But more than two decades after they were classified as Schedule 1, materials in accordance with the United Nations Convention on Psychotropic Substances, the U.S.’s war on drugs was revealed to be little more than fear mongering.
In 1992, John Ehrlichman, former assistant to Richard Nixon, admitted that the administration had stoked misgivings about the harmful effects of drugs and exploited the public’s lack of awareness for their own political gain—a move which means, 50 years later, psychedelics face more restrictions than heroin and cocaine.
“Hundreds of papers, involving tens of thousands of patients, presented evidence for their use as psychotherapeutic catalysts of mentally beneficial change in many psychiatric disorders, problems of personality development, recidivistic behaviour, and existential anxiety,” Rucker says of the drugs’ medical history. “No evidence shows that psychedelic drugs are habit forming; little evidence shows that they are harmful in controlled settings; and much historical evidence has shown that they could have use in common psychiatric disorders.”
Christopher Evans, director of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, agrees with Rucker’s examination: “Many of these highly restricted hallucinogenic drugs should be considered for their therapeutic potential in well-controlled clinical studies in controlled environments. Though I believe the drugs should remain closely regulated (like opiates), the restriction should be geared to allow clinical research.”
Organizations around the world—most recently in Norway—have begun contesting the current restrictions. There have also been a number of pilot studies undertaken to test the clinical efficacy of psychedelic substances when used as treatment for ailments such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, alcohol addiction, and cluster headaches, the results of which support Rucker’s claims. A study published last week in the Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry journal has even suggested psychoactives such as MDMA may help treat PTSD.
One of the principal qualms surrounding the use of psychedelics is that they will induce dependence, but existing research shows that this is not the case. LSD was named the safest psychotropic—a substance that alters brain function and perception—in a 2010 analysis of potential harms caused by drugs of this nature, and is significantly less likely to result in a toxic dose than alcohol, cocaine, or heroin.
“Drug legislation has been bias toward groups of people that are associated with the drug and of course financial interests as opposed to the intrinsic harm the drugs cause to the population and addiction liability,” Evans says. “Hallucinogens certainly have potential therapeutic value in many diseases and are much less likely to become problematic to society than psychostimulant therapeutics such as methylphenidate and amphetamine, and opiate therapeutics such as Oxycodone or Vicodin.
“Addiction is not the problem.”
It is not only that its effects have been misrepresented, then, but that its benefits have been suppressed in favor of antediluvian political propaganda. A U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health from 2001-2004 found that those who reported use of psychedelics had lower levels of serious psychological distress, with no need for mental health treatment. No association with psychosis was uncovered.
The classification means that pilot studies on the effects of the drugs remain challenging. Rucker cites the “practical, financial and bureaucratic” barriers to carrying out trials with psilocybin—the naturally occurring compound in magic mushrooms—as a result of the UN’s mandate. Only one manufacturer in the world holds enough of the correct quality to be used effectively, and costs some $153,000 for 50 doses. In the UK, holding the drug requires a $750,000 license (which only four hospitals have) and regular inspections from police. As such, the price of clinical trials for psychedelic substances is up to 10 times higher than those for heroin.
In view of the evidence, then, perhaps it’s time we stop dismissing shrooms and hallucinogens as the pastime of underachieving college kids and re-examine their potential impact on the medical world.Microsoft is still making Nokia phones. In a surprise announcement this morning, the software giant unveiled its latest Nokia 216 feature phone. Despite announcing plans to sell its feature phone business to FIH Mobile, a subsidiary of Foxconn, for $350 million earlier this year, Microsoft is still launching new Nokia phones. The new Nokia 216 is one of the most basic phones that Microsoft manufactures, and it will be available in India next month for around $37. It includes a 2.4-inch QVGA display, with 0.3-megapixel cameras at the front and rear, running on the Series 30 OS with the Opera mini browser. It even has a headphone jack.
It's easy to understand why Microsoft continues to create feature phones, as the company still sells millions of them every month. Microsoft previously hoped that feature phone users would create a Microsoft account and become part of the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's not clear whether the millions of feature phone users ever actually did that. Microsoft hinted earlier this year that it's planning to kill off its Lumia smartphones, and recent rumors have suggested that the Lumia brand will die off toward the end of the year.
Rumors suggest that Microsoft is planning a Surface-branded phone for next year. In the meantime, Microsoft's Lumia and Windows Phone strategy has not succeeded, and both sales and Windows Phone market share have declined since the company's mobile restructuring last year. Microsoft has significantly scaled back its phone business, and laid off thousands of employees as part of a $7.6 billion write off for acquiring Nokia's phone business.Photo by Eduard Merigo
When Cha Bai was 15 years old, in the early 1960s, she stopped sleeping in her parent's house. A few strong boys from her village, Krolah (in Ratanakkiri, Cambodia) had gone into the forest, where they gathered brown leaves, split bamboo, cut branches, and then built her a small sleeping hut within the protective enclosure of the village. For the next five years, before she married, Cha Bai slept in the hut. Some cold nights, her sisters or a friend would join her to keep warm and gossip. Some nights she slept alone. And some nights, if she felt like it, one of the young men in the village would sleep with her instead.
Kreung young people are different these days, says Ha Youen Thong, a village elder in Krolah. They streak their hair red and orange. They wear jeans, and they listen to popular music. They've stopped learning to hit the gong or play flutes. Even more worrisome to him and others in Krolah, they're getting married earlier than ever before.
"These days, girls at twelve or thirteen are married already," says Cha Bai. "They sleep together early—then they have to marry. It's not like before. Mothers and fathers don't know much about their children, and they don't have ways to restrain them."
"We try to tell our children, 'Don't walk so much like the Khmer,'" says Thong. "But they don't listen."
To those who live in the high blue mountains of Cambodia's northernmost province, Khmer culture often represents material modernity: money instead of bartered goods; motor scooters from Thailand and Japan; colorful, mass-manufactured fabrics to use for clothes and wedding tents. But, as the elders of Krolah are quick to affirm, it brings with it a set of values as well.
Khmer culture can be fastidious about cleanliness. The words for "beautiful" and for "clean" are the same, perhaps because in a nation where so many are vulnerable to the elements, dirt reeks of poverty. Khmer culture is even more fastidious about purity—at least when it comes to women. A Khmer saying goes: Men are gold and women are silk—only one can be wiped clean of a stain.
Kajeanh Mom, 20, shows one of the maiden huts still standing in Khoun village, Ratanakkiri. Photo by Eduard Merigo.
In the days of Cha Bai's youth, the Kreung people did things differently. Every girl who came of age left her parents' house to sleep in a small, low hut nearby. Kreung people call the huts the "maiden huts," or "houses of the young women." They've been building them for as long as anyone can remember, long before the decades when Khmer people came to settle the far reaches of Ratanakkiri.
They build them to allow young people to experience courtship on their own terms, says Cha Bai. "We were shy of our mothers and fathers! They knew young men were coming over to sleep with us!"
Back in those days—the late 1960s—the village would fill with music and conversation when night fell, as young boys from nearby villages sat on the steps of the girls' maiden huts. They'd pipe wavering love songs on flutes or sing and pluck stringed gourds. If the girl wasn't interested, the two would chat for a while, and the boy would eventually meander on to other huts in the village. If she was, though, she'd invite the boy in to talk privately for a while. "The usual stories of men and women," Cha Bai laughs, remembering what it was like.
If the girl fell in love, she and the boy would sleep together, says Cha Bai. She is delicate about what this means.
Sometimes the affair—"sleeping together"—would last a few nights, says Yan Vuy, the village chief of nearby Kacheung. The couple would come together, then part without blame. Sometimes, though, |
. "Did you see anything you'd want to wear?" the tailor asks, but Embiid shakes his head. "I can't decide. It is a little overwhelming," he says. Less than four years ago, he had never visited the United States, never spoken a sentence in English, never watched an entire professional basketball game, never even heard of the NBA draft. "I need a little more time to figure this out," he tells the tailor.
He goes back through the binder again, once more scanning the faces, until he comes upon one he is sure he recognizes. It is a thin face with a wide nose, a goatee and a whisper of a mustache. "Who is that?" he says, and the name is so near to his mind that it is driving him crazy. His manager leans in to take a look at the book, and she follows his stare to a picture of a face she instantly knows. "Are you kidding?" she asks, because Embiid can be playful. Maybe he is joking, she thinks. But she can't be sure.
"That's Kevin," she says, tapping her finger against a picture of the most valuable player in the league that Embiid is about to enter. "That's Kevin Durant."
EMBIID IS SPENDING these final weeks before the draft at what his agency calls boot camp, training with eight other future NBA players as they study the fine points of a transition to a career as a professional athlete. He lives in his own apartment for the first time, and a nutritionist goes grocery shopping with him and shows him how to prepare healthy breakfasts. A financial adviser teaches him about investing; a branding expert shows him how to best communicate with fans on Twitter. He works daily with a yoga instructor and a weight trainer and two physical therapists and a sports scientist who records his weight balance as he moves. Each night brings another activity meant to prepare him for the NBA life: a movie premiere, front-row tickets to Jimmy Kimmel or courtside seats at a playoff game. He is followed most everywhere by Matsubara, Goor and an intern in charge of his transportation -- all of whom mostly worry that Embiid is having to deal with too much, too soon.
"It's a pretty fast learning curve," Matsubara tells him one day.
"By now, I'm pretty used to that," Embiid says.
He started playing basketball in 2011, mostly because he was bored. There were a few outdoor hoops at the sports club where he played high-level volleyball in Cameroon, and he started spending his breaks throwing a volleyball toward the rim and then dunking it, until one day a basketball coach saw him and recruited him for a local team. That coach gave Embiid a DVD about Hakeem Olajuwon titled Hakeem the Dream. It was a compilation of backstory and highlights from Olajuwon's journey from Nigeria to the U.S. and eventually to two NBA championships. Embiid replayed the video twice each night and practiced the moves the next morning, honing his jump hooks and shoulder fakes. Everything he knew about basketball came from rewatching those 49 minutes. "I kind of got obsessed," Embiid says.
He is from an upper-middle-class family -- the son of an army colonel and a mother who traveled regularly to France -- and his parents had gifted him with both a sense of the possibilities beyond Cameroon and the means to pursue them. They bought him a basketball and paid for an Internet package that allowed Embiid to watch his first moments of the NBA, a playoff game that aired at 3 a.m. Early in the summer of 2011, they enrolled their oldest son in a basketball camp run by Cameroon's only NBA player, forward Luc Mbah a Moute. There were 50 players at the camp, and after the first day Embiid concluded that he was one of the worst. He traveled whenever he touched the ball and mistook opponents for teammates. But Mbah a Moute watched Embiid play and saw something else: a novice basketball player who nonetheless seemed engineered to play the sport. He had the easy footwork of a former soccer player, the quick leaping ability of an elite volleyball spiker and hand-eye coordination passed down from his father, Thomas, who had played professional handball. At the end of the basketball camp, Mbah a Moute invited the top five players to another camp for elite African players. He chose Embiid first.
"Are you crazy?" Embiid said. "I'm not in the top 30 players here."
"Good thing I know more than you," Mbah a Moute told him.
They traveled together in August 2011 to the international camp. The walls of the gym were lined with college and high school coaches from the United States, including one from Montverde Academy in Florida, where Mbah a Moute had gone to school. The coach offered Embiid a scholarship and an I-20 visa to come to the United States. He went home to pack, but his father didn't want him to go. His son had not even graduated from high school yet, and he had never been away from his family or visited the United States. Embiid was an international prospect in volleyball, and his father believed that was his better sport.
"How do we know this is the best future for you?" his father asked, so Embiid decided to enlist Mbah a Moute's help in convincing him. Mbah a Moute tried to tell the colonel about basketball and the riches of the NBA, but some of the specifics were difficult to translate.
"Some players make $50 million," Mbah a Moute said, and the colonel misunderstood.
"Fifty thousand dollars?" he said, still impressed, and he agreed to let his son go.
EMBIID SPENT THE first year regretting that he had come. The coach who had recruited him to Montverde took another job, and the school's new coach assigned him to the junior varsity squad. He vomited during warm-ups of the team's first practice after 20 minutes spent running suicides. He had never run sprints or lifted weights, and he got bumped around in the paint. "I came here to play basketball, and I never was good enough to play in the games," he says. "I would get in, mess up, and a few teammates would be kind of laughing at me."
A few of those teammates started to refer to him by a nickname, Big Quiet, because he often went unnoticed. He walked to a McDonald's near campus for lunch every day with a few other African players and learned English off the menu on the restaurant wall, ordering chicken sandwiches for three weeks until he knew enough to order something new, and then something new after that.
English was his fourth language, after French, Spanish and a local dialect, Bassa, and he became fluent within a year. Once he started to understand what his coaches were saying, the game started to make sense. He became a defensive force on the AAU summer circuit, blocking a few shots each game even though he still had the endurance to play for only 10 or 15 minutes. He transferred to a high school called the Rock School in Gainesville, Fla., and the coach, Justin Harden, gave him a daily workout schedule: 30 minutes of running, 30 minutes of weights, 200 jumpers and 100 free throws -- in addition to practice. He was still one of the team's most unpolished players, and he occasionally made embarrassing mistakes. But in his best moments, he made the game look easy, and he led the team to a state championship. "Nobody ever talked about how good he was, because he wasn't great yet," Harden says. "But every college program in America could see how good he was becoming."
Kansas, Texas, Florida and Louisville all offered scholarships. Embiid had never heard of any of them, so he searched on Google, trying to memorize which team went with which mascot. He sought advice from Mbah a Moute, who suggested Kansas because of coach Bill Self's reputation for helping big men improve.
"Most kids cannot be objective about themselves, and he actually can," Self says. "He knows what he needs to learn, and he studies. He can see something one time and then do it. I wouldn't be surprised if he could learn to play guard and have success. There's not another big man I would ever say that about."
At Kansas, Embiid was the ambassador between two worlds -- beloved by Cameroonians who knew little about basketball and by Kansas fans who knew nothing about Cameroon. His teammates imagined Africa as a place of jungles and tribal war paint, so he decided to have some fun with them while also burnishing a reputation for toughness. "Did I tell you about the time I killed a lion?" he asked them, inventing a story about having thrown a spear tipped with poison and then carrying a lion on his back for a mile. In fact, he had grown up in a nice house in a neighborhood of diplomats in a city of 2.5 million, and the only lion he had ever seen was in a cage at the zoo. "Most of those guys still think that story is true," Embiid says. "It started as a joke, but then they respected me after that."
When his parents came to visit, they had trouble making sense of America. His mother asked a Kansas administrator: How is college in the U.S. different from high school? His father asked a KU assistant coach: What does it mean to set a screen? In February, when it became clear Embiid would make millions in the NBA, he suggested to his parents that they might want to move to the U.S. Why not enjoy a mansion, some spending money, a few nice cars? He was starting to enjoy the U.S. for its vampire TV shows and its Shirley Temples. But his mother said she didn't want to leave her job working for the government, and his younger brother is still in eighth grade. "Their lives are in Cameroon," says Embiid, who has yet to go back for a visit. "They are happy for me, but they don't want any of this for themselves. They don't understand it."
Neither do his friends in Africa, most of whom have suddenly started playing basketball themselves. How hard can it be? They know of only one basketball player, a novice who spent a few years practicing and is now on the verge of a guaranteed fortune.
"Now everybody in Cameroon thinks basketball is easy," Embiid says. "They think they can have what I have. It is a whole country of No. 1 picks."
THE ORIGINAL GOAL was to keep the location of Embiid's workouts a secret, but secrets like this never last long. By the time Embiid arrives at the high school gym in Santa Monica one morning in late May, a few dozen basketball insiders are already in the bleachers, clipboards and lattes in hand. A videographer films Embiid as he warms up his back and stretches his legs. Mike Dunleavy Sr., a former NBA coach and general manager, has volunteered to run the morning workout, mostly so he can watch Embiid from up close. Kids who attend an adjacent elementary school migrate over during recess, carrying Sharpies and pressing their faces against the gym's windows and doors.
"Every day for me is a tryout," Embiid says as he laces his shoes. "That's the situation I'm dealing with."
What he's dealing with is the usual scrutiny of a potential No. 1 pick, amplified by the fact that his last college game ended with a stress fracture in his back, which kept him from playing in the NCAA tournament. Part of him wanted to stay at Kansas, if only to slow his life down by spending two years in the same place, but Mbah a Moute and even Self saw better reasons for him to go. Why continue to risk his back for more years when his draft stock would never improve? Now he has gone through rehab and feels healthy -- "100 percent," he says -- but NBA teams are leery of investing their futures in a big man with a history of back problems. These informal workouts at a tiny high school gym have become the focal point of the NBA offseason. How is Embiid moving? How's his stamina? How often does he ice?
"How are you feeling, big guy?" Dunleavy asks as he watches Embiid run the floor during a drill, set a screen and then, a few minutes later, knock down six consecutive 3-pointers. Embiid is both the biggest and the most athletic player on a court filled with likely first-round picks; he dribbles by an opposing center on one possession, then posts up a forward on the next. "I guess I've got my answer," Dunleavy says as the practice continues. "You're feeling pretty good."
With a few minutes left in the workout, the players begin to scrimmage. Embiid blocks a shot, grabs the loose ball and dribbles the length of the court, stopping just inside the 3-point line. He is guarded by two players, so he turns his back to the basket, pretending to retreat. Then he shakes his shoulders to fake one way, like he watched Olajuwon do so many times on the video. He spins the opposite way and jumps into the air, fading away from the basket. He shoots from 22 feet, and the ball drops cleanly through the basket. Both defenders shake their heads. "Damn," one says.
Dunleavy watches from the sideline and starts to laugh, and before long most of the people in the gym are laughing too.
Everybody is appreciating the magic they have just witnessed -- everyone except Embiid, who looks mostly perplexed. Not long ago, the laughter he heard on a basketball court came for different reasons. He wants to be sure.
"Coach," he says, jogging over to Dunleavy. "That was good, right?"As some technology bootcamps have begun to sputter, Denver’s Galvanize said it is dealing with its own growing pains and on Tuesday cut 37 employees, or 11 percent of its workforce.
“These actions are consistent with our overall strategy to build a more product-focused platform that enables a continuous learning environment, serving all members of the Galvanize community: from students to large enterprises to the more than 1,000 startups who reside on our campus,” Robin Olsen, Galvanize’s director of public relations, said in an email.
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“Learn to play:” Palestinian schools strive to modernize classrooms The company, co-founded in 2012 by tech entrepreneur Jim Deters and several others, started as a co-working space for startups. But its goal was to add technology education and it did so the following year at its first location in the Golden Triangle neighborhood. Galvanize became one of the early companies to offer crash courses in web development, computer programming and other technology skills — for around $20,000 a session.
Galvanize also picked up several rounds of funding, its most recent last August when it raised $45 million in a deal led by ABS Capital Partners. At the time, it employed 139 people in Denver and 300 nationwide. The company expanded to Boulder, a second Denver location and one in Fort Collins, plus several other states. The company opened its eighth campus in New York City this year.
But Galvanize wasn’t the only bootcamp in town. In the Denver area alone, similar tech educators include Turing School of Software and Design, Skill Distillery and Code Craft School of Technology. Elsewhere, national bootcamps such as General Assembly, which has a location across the street from Galvanize’s Platte Street campus, grew rapidly. General Assembly now has about two dozen campuses worldwide.
According to the Course Report, which tracks and reviews bootcamps, the number of bootcamp companies has grown to 94 from last year’s 91. The number includes 15 new schools and seven closed ones. Denver has eight campuses, while Boulder has two, according to the Course Report.
“Statewide, competition has changed pretty dramatically over the last year,” said Jeff Casimir, Turing’s founder and executive director who helped Galvanize start its education curriculum in 2013. “A year ago, there was RefactorU in Boulder, Galvanize was operating four campuses (in Colorado), Skill Distillery was in the DTC, GA was here. Dev Bootcamp was planning to come here, and Iron Yard, which was the University of Phoenix, was threatening to come. Fast forward to today and RefactorU has changed their model. … Galvanize closed its Fort Collins campus. Iron Yard closed and Dev Bootcamp is not coming.”
Casimir said even his nonprofit bootcamp, which doesn’t have investors pushing for profitability, isn’t immune.
“Our enrollment is always a challenge. It’s difficult for us, too,” he said.
The New York Times this month detailed some of the fallout, using terms such as “shakeout” and “glut.” It quoted Tarlin Ray, president of Dev Bootcamp: “We were simply unable to find a sustainable business model.”
“I think the shutdowns are generally indicative of more competition and schools expanding very quickly. We expect some consolidation. As all new industries tend to do, bootcamps grew really quickly in the first couple of years — 200 percent year over year in the first year of operating, so some shaking out is normal,” said Liz Eggleston, co-founder of the Course Report. “We’ve already seen some consolidation (i.e., Hack Reactor buying/rebranding several schools), schools closing because the business didn’t make sense for the owners (i.e., Dev Bootcamp), acquisitions, etc., and I think we’ll continue to see that shake out a bit in 2017.”
However, Eggleston said, thousands of new developers got their start by attending these classes and now have new jobs.
“If other bootcamps can find a profitable business model (and they really should be able to) while focusing on quality outcomes and student experiences, then they’ll continue to thrive,” she said. “I would bet that Galvanize’s layoffs are part of an attempt to find that profitable model.”
For Galvanize, which continues to offer bootcamps, programs for students who pay their own tuition will still be offered, but the company is moving to a model of retraining employees of corporate clients who foot the bill.
Deters recently stepped down as CEO to become chairman at Galvanize. He will remain as chairman, Olsen confirmed.
“In a marketplace where we have watched several of our competitors close their doors recently, we see vast opportunity,” Olsen said, pointing to U.S. Department of Labor statistics that tech jobs continue to be the fastest-growing job category in the country. “There is a significant tech talent gap in the U.S. — with approximately 600,000 unfilled tech jobs — and the demand far exceeds the supply of skilled talent. Our move to a blended learning environment (physical and digital) and a business focused on both (consumer and business) learners is well positioned to succeed.”- Youtube.com [Impartial Truth- source]
see also: Youtube.com
Here lie the accounts of Adolf Hitler's pleas to the world during the largest bloodshed in mankind's history, World War 2. Adolf Hitler's most poignant orations during the second World War which had been buried for almost a century are now [first time] available for the world to hear.
Visit the voices of the past to bear witness their side of history. The unabridged Adolf Hitler, who tried incessantly to avoid the continuation of the senseless war. Stark contrast to the Western Allies and their pet (((Bolsheviks))) in the East.
Churchill, Hitler & The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire & The West Lost The World, Pat Buchanan, 2008
Hitlers War, David Irving, 1977
Facts Are Facts, by Benjamin Freedman, 1954
The Balfour Declaration, by Benjamin Freedman, 1961
Samuel Untermyer speech, August 1933
TGSNT.tv
HellstormDocumentary.com
Thomasgoodrich.com
Jamesbacque.com
Questioningtheholocaust.com
Justice4germans.wordpress.com
Mourningtheancient.comRacked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.
The Abercrombie & Fitch headquarters is composed of roughly 16 buildings set among 500 forested acres, which, during a late October visit, explode in fall colors. Security guards at the gate sport crisp blue button-downs from the brand. Banks of scooters let the 2,600 employees zip between meetings held in a series of massive, corrugated metal structures that look a bit like high-fashion barns. The grounds are filled with meandering paths, tree-lined walkways, and even firepits. The entire campus exudes wholesomeness, like a corporate wellness retreat that lasts all year.
“It’s a really lovely place to work,” says Clare Drummond, Abercrombie’s senior global PR manager, as she leads me past the company cafeteria, currently offering quinoa bowls and fresh juice. “We have a big roaring fire every morning, which is very lovely to come into at 7 a.m. There’s a really nice, communal feeling to the buildings.”
The facility has been a hive of activity the last few months, as the company revamped its catalog for the holidays, part of a larger brand refresh. Nearly every aspect of the business happens here, from designing the lines to storing inventory in gigantic warehouses. In one basement, photographers are shooting product images for the website. In another section, designers play with denim, using a bank of washing machines filled with rocks and pebbles in a quest to achieve the perfect fade. In another building, a full-sized mock store is being adjusted, altered, and tested to determine the right way to merchandise the latest collection.
The models in the new catalog were actually photographed in Maine, but pretty much every other aspect of the company is dictated and controlled from this idyllic-looking campus in New Albany, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. Why, of all the cities across the country, would a multinational fashion brand set down roots in the Rust Belt, in a town best known for Buckeyes football? A second-tier city in the Midwest can seem like a surprising choice until you examine just how deep Columbus’s retail influence runs.
“We’re the middleman behind the industry,” says Kenny McDonald, president and CEO of Columbus 2020, the regional economic development agency. “For everything you need to do well in retail, there are people here who can do that. There’s a big Columbus footprint out there.”
Some of the country’s biggest brands are hometown companies: the Limited empire, now known as L Brands, which currently includes Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret, and Henri Bendel (and used to include Abercrombie & Fitch and Express), as well as other mall giants like DSW. But it took a much-publicized 2012 study that noted the city and its surrounding area employed the third most fashion designers in the country (518), behind perennial powerhouses New York (6,825) and Los Angeles (3,641), to really get the city on the national radar.
“A great portion of what you see in a mall or shopping center in the United States was designed or based off of ideas that came from Columbus.”
A series of surprised articles followed in its wake. Drummond, the Abercrombie PR head, captures the national impression of the city’s fashion scene when discussing her move to the city nearly two years ago: “I didn’t think anything of it, because I didn’t know anything about it. When people found out about the move, they asked me, ‘Why?’”
As Drummond and many others discovered, big brands attract lots of talent, one of many factors behind the city’s recent resurgence. “It doesn’t feel like the Midwest,” she says, and like many locals, she gushes about the dining scene, boutiques, and cultural attractions that have blossomed in neighborhoods like the Short North.
The city also happens to be a leader in transportation, market testing, and retail design, guiding the logistics and look of countless stores. The modern American shopping experience owes a lot to a city that has been derisively nicknamed Cow Town, USA.
“A great portion of what you see in a mall or shopping center in the United States was designed or based off of ideas that came from Columbus,” says Aaron Spiess, executive vice president of Big Red Rooster, a local retail design firm. “Folks don’t even know retail design is an industry, and consumers don’t see our names. But we have a big reach.”
Columbus has a history of being underestimated and overlooked. It’s a bit insulting for a city of more than 800,000 people — more than double that of Cleveland or Cincinnati — to almost always include the state name in any reference, as if the speaker may be thinking of a different Columbus, not the 15th biggest city in the country.
A famous cover from Columbus Monthly with the headline “Columbus’s Inferiority Complex: Are We As Weak As We Think We Are?” depicts the city as a scrawny entrant in a bodybuilding contest, surrounded by more buff and exciting metropolises from across the country. During a brief stay to shoot the 1980 film Brubaker, actor Robert Redford dryly noted that Columbus was “into lawn mowers.”
Part of that lack of identity may have to do with the city’s origin story. After Ohio was granted statehood in 1803, leading politicians feuded and bickered so much about the location of the capitol that, to deny any potential favoritism, they created one from thin air. Former hunting grounds at the intersection of a few major rivers were dubbed Columbus in 1812. Both a transportation hub and government center, it was purposely built to be in between other places.
“I’m not sure if the story is true or not, but supposedly, when politicians created Columbus, a few of them went over to a pub in nearby Franklintown,” says McDonald. “They had the land and didn’t have a name. One of the men in the room’s heroes was Columbus, so that’s now they got the name.”
It may be boring, but that location would prove to be fortuitous for a variety of industries. The city’s central position within the Midwest and proximity to the Northeast made it a prime location for factories and warehouses throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as a transport center. Once known as the buggy capital of the country (some even say world), Columbus was also home to the Curtiss-Wright airplane plant during World War II, which attracted skilled labor, which in turn made the area attractive for post-war factories, magnets for local manufacturing jobs.
The city also became a popular test market, the place where Wendy’s hamburgers, Starbucks drinks, and Tide detergent underwent trials to see if they would play to the masses. A 1962 New York Times article, reflecting on the city’s role as as an arbiter of everyday taste, explained this “typical American city often pays no heed to style leaders” and instead charts its own measured, reasonable course. It had become famous for being so average.
Columbus’s biggest asset was that its demographics closely mirrored the rest of the US, according to Shashi Matta, a clinical associate professor of marketing at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. Numerous consumer marketing firms and consultancies, such as Illuminology and Lextant, sprung up to help capture and analyze shopper sentiment.
It had become famous for being so average.
“Columbus does have an advantage in that we’re never out of touch with middle America,” says Joanna Felder, vice president at Chute Gerdeman, a Columbus firm that specializes in retail design and branding. During a conversation at her office in the Brewery District, fresh cookies are laid out on the table. That’s part of the pitch, she says. We’re as sophisticated and savvy as other companies, but we have a direct connection to consumers that keeps our concepts grounded in reality.
“We can actually see how an idea works with a regular customer, not just a New York shopper or tourist,” she explains. “We’re not cluttered with opinions and attitudes in Columbus, so there’s a lot of make-or-break market testing here.”
If innovations that take root in Columbus have a great chance of scaling up nationwide, it makes sense that a pair of retail visionaries who made their mark here in the ’60s and ‘70s would help transform the way Americans shop.
Leslie Wexner didn’t have the pedigree of a globetrotting retail titan. His initial exposure to the fashion industry was through the store his parents Bella and Harry opened in downtown Columbus in 1951. Like most clothing stores of its time, it sold a little bit of everything: coats, dresses, sportswear. Wexner worked at the store after graduating from Ohio State and credits the experience with teaching him to pay attention to detail and cater to his customers.
Wexner couldn’t figure out why his father worked so hard yet barely turned a profit. During one of his father’s vacations, according to Forbes, Wexner began analyzing the store’s performance, tallying up profits from each item and running through a stack of invoices to see what was and wasn’t selling. He concluded that big-ticket items such as coats, while expensive, didn’t make much money because they didn’t turn over fast enough and lingered on store shelves. All the money came from pants and shirts, which rotated much more quickly. That led Wexner to his breakthrough idea: Create a store that just sells sportswear, which could be quickly stocked and restocked to mirror trends and new ideas in the marketplace, and profits will soar.
By the mid-’80s, the Limited was selling more women's clothing than any other merchant in the world, including big department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney.
Wexner brought his idea to his parents, who felt it was a nonstarter. According to Forbes, his dad actually told him to get a job. Undeterred, Wexner, then 26, took out a $5,000 loan from an aunt and started his own company at the Kingsdale Shopping Center in nearby Upper Arlington. Named the Limited, the store only sold basics like skirts, sweaters, and shirts and proved to be a quick success.
After expanding locally, Wexner took the business public in 1969 and saw unprecedented national success. By the mid-’80s, the Limited was selling more women's clothing than any other merchant in the world, including big department stores like Sears and J.C. Penney. (Like other mall-based fashion brands of its era, the Limited has struggled in the current retail environment. It was spun off of and sold to Sun Capital in 2007, and last week announced it will close all its stores.)
“He was inventing the face of fashion and speciality store retailing,” says Denny Gerdeman, a store design expert who worked with Wexner and would go on to co-found Chute Gerdeman with his wife.
Wexner was, however, careful in how he grew his company.
“He always said be a fast second; pioneers get arrows in their back,” Gerdeman continues. “You can spend a lot of money trying to be that cutting-edge guy. But if you pay attention, learn, and improve, that’s where the big win is.”
Wexner’s data-driven approach would make billions and lead him to institutionalize numerous methods that have become commonplace in the fashion industry. He took regular scouting trips overseas to pick up on European fashion trends and would bring back items to test in select stores before rolling them out nationwide. He was one of the first to move into Asia, acquiring Mast Industries, an importer and contract manufacturer, to quickly produce and ship new product; by 1986, three 747s were crossing the Pacific with Limited merchandise each week.
He astutely acquired new companies, turning around fading old-school firms such as Abercrombie & Fitch, a traditional sporting outfitter that filed bankruptcy in 1976, into one of the country’s largest retailers, or scaling up small businesses, such as Victoria’s Secret, a small San Francisco–based chain, into global powerhouses. At one point, stock analysts had a “Wexner Watch,” waiting to act on the impresario’s next move. He likened himself to Howard Roark, the self-important architect in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, and like Roark, wanted to “do it his way.”
“We test to manage risk,'' he told the New York Times. ''A lot of people in the fashion business shoot in the dark. You can't just decide that purple is going to be big in the fall. Then you're a kamikaze pilot.”
A homegrown titan now worth more than $7.8 billion, Wexner showed Ohioans, and everyone else, that it was possible to grow — and keep — a massive retail company in Columbus. During the early phase of his expansion, Wexner took a map of the United States and a compass and drew a circle showing how much of the country was within a two-hour flight of Columbus. That circle contained 70 percent of the US population.
Wexner’s growing conglomerate became as much about retail design and real estate as it did clothes. Gerdeman, who worked with Wexner on stores for high-profile locations such as Chicago’s Water Tower Place, says the experience was like getting a Ph.D. in store design: “At the time, other stores were traditional, brown and beige. His idea was bright and shiny, polished mirrors, stainless steel, mirrors everywhere, upbeat and up-tempo and cutting-edge all around. Young female baby boomers were on fire to get that merchandise.”
“Retailing is a free form of entertainment.”
As Wexner told him, “Retailing is a free form of entertainment,” and the crowd always needed to be engaged.
“He had an opinion on what he did and didn’t like, and sometimes it was difficult for him to communicate it,” says Gerdeman. “I remember that we rebuilt the Water Tower location of the Limited a couple of times until he was satisfied. As a young designer, I was terrified I was going to lose my job. I’d never seen anybody tear down a store before.”
While Wexner was constructing an empire, an academic at Ohio State University was also challenging the way the fashion industry thought about how stores looked. Alton Doody was a progressive management and business expert who wrote for publications such as the Harvard Business Review, penned an iconic book about Ford Motors called Reinventing the Wheels, and even designed a more “friendly” way to sell caskets. But his most lasting contribution would be melding store design and strategy. In a 1967 article, he predicted e-commerce decades before Amazon, correctly assuming that “central distribution facilities would create an upheaval in mass merchandising.”
Doody found that strategic mandates from the boardroom often weren’t filtering down into retail locations. Retail Planning Associates, his consulting firm, and Management Horizons, where he worked with a variety of OSU professors, took a more holistic approach to fashion retailing, pushing what are in hindsight perhaps obvious lessons for stores.
Shoppers should have an accurate expectation of what to find in a store, be able to find it while there, and also see other things they want on the way to finding the thing they wanted in the first place. In addition, stores should be easy to reorganize when conditions or seasons demand. These might not seem like radical shifts, but they represent a big step beyond the thinking of the department stores and general stores of the time. Propelled forward by Doody’s focus on technology and extensive data collection (the company’s archives contained thousands of photos of vintage store layouts), these ideas became revolutionary.
“There’s a Columbus mafia. We’ll see each other at the airport and think, ‘Who’s going to which pitch meeting?’”
“He was one of the first guys to put the art and science together,” says Gerdeman. “He started sketching out customer journey pathways, how to position things in the store, the walkway for customers. He was all about the journey and was a real pioneer.”
Doody, who would go on to form the Doody Company in 1974, worked with Walmart to create what would become the big-box store model and consulted for Target and Montgomery Ward.
“He worked with all the big players,” says Gerdeman. “He started when some of these concepts were just fledgling. Now, there’s a huge shift in retail strategy, which he predicted, and it’s been fascinating to watch it unfold over time.”
Doody and Wexner’s ideas influenced their own companies but more importantly, inspired other entrepreneurs to build on their ideas.
“About 40 companies spun off of the Doody Company,” says Big Red Rooster exec Spiess. “The fundamental strategy, bridging the business and creative process together, has created a triangle of retail, consulting, and design companies in Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati.”
“There’s a Columbus mafia,” says Felder. “We’ll see each other at the airport and think, ‘Who’s going to which pitch meeting?’”
Big Red Rooster has done work for Home Depot and Under Armour and recently designed the Foot Locker flagship in New York’s Herald Square. Fitch, another heavyweight firm (unrelated to Abercrombie & Fitch) with a big office in Columbus, has designed stores for Adidas, Lego, H&M, and the Limited.
Columbus talent hasn’t just shaped the stores inside malls; it’s also set a template for how many modern mall complexes look. On the north edge of Columbus, Easton Town Center appears less like a grid packed with 240 shops and restaurants than a bustling, idyllic retail village.
Orderly streets of stores sport a grab bag of architectural details best described as quaint — one building has “Established in 1999” chiseled into its concrete exterior — and center around a faux train station to form a shopping destination that, with a billion dollars in annual revenue, ranks among the top 30 such centers in the nation. It takes progressive ideas of placemaking, sidewalk culture, and city layout with a focus on walkable, human-scale design revered by urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs and applies it to the retail prerogative. There are even baskets of free umbrellas in entryways that carry the slogan “Easton’s got you covered.”
“More than 25 million people come through here every year,” says Jennifer Peterson, chief executive at Steiner and Associates, which runs the mall. “The secret here is trying to surprise and delight the customer. I don’t think traditional malls are thinking about making |
't require us to stuff bulky tomes under our pillow. A concentrated period of learning followed by a short relaxing sleep is all that's needed.Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. As President Barack Obama heads to Moscow in an attempt to bury the lingering legacy of the Cold War, Rupert Wingfied-Hayes tries to judge the mood of Russia's leaders behind the Kremlin's walls. Russian horse flies are huge and carnivorous. I know this from the personal experience of being eaten alive by them while trudging through a forest in western Russia this week.
While the US put most of its nukes on submarines and hid them in the oceans, Russia hid its massive arsenal in its trackless forests
The real monsters are as big as a cockroach and can bite you through your shirt. It is very unpleasant. Why was I not better prepared? Why had I left the tin of extra strong insect repellent on my desk in Moscow? Good questions. But more important is why I was there in the first place. The answer is that I was looking for a nuclear missile base. Well, actually a disused nuclear missile base. Scattered through the forests of Russia and Ukraine, and as far away as the Kazakh steppe, is a vast network of ruins, testament to the once huge size of the Soviet war machine. While the US put most of its nukes on submarines and hid them in the oceans, Russia hid its massive arsenal in its trackless forests. Now armed only with a grimy satellite image from the internet I was trying to find the place where one part of it was kept. Eventually after walking for what seemed like hours, exhausted and covered in bites, we found it. Nuclear arsenal The reality was rather a disappointment. A collection of broken concrete buildings, half demolished. Ransacked by locals for window glass and bricks. The legacy of the Cold War can still be found in the Russian countryside It was hard to imagine that this was once a top secret facility, ready to deliver death on a massive scale. Even the missile silos were a disappointment, stagnant concrete pools with old oil drums floating around in them. The huge, metre-thick concrete lids had been cast aside like old pieces of rubbish. "If we'd come here 20 years ago, we'd have been locked up as spies," one of my colleagues quipped. And of course he was right. It suddenly struck me just how far the world has come since the bad old days of the Cold War. A huge part of that is because of a treaty called Start I. By the end of the 1980s Russia and America had amassed nuclear arsenals of an astonishing size - 60,0000 warheads, enough to blow the world up many times over. But then, in 1991, the two countries signed a truly historic deal that would slash their stockpiles by 80%. The ruins all around me in the forest were the result. But since then, despite many attempts, no new deal to cut nuclear weapons further has ever been put in to effect. Russia and the United States still have around 23,000 nuclear warheads, still more than enough to destroy the planet. Challenging task One reason is a lack of will, but the main one is a lack of trust. This week, as he prepared to welcome Barack Obama to Moscow, Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev said relations between the two countries have sunk nearly as low as they were during the Cold War. Negotiating nuclear disarmament is likely to be a lengthy process This is the hill that President Obama has set himself the task of climbing. In April, in Prague, the US president set out his vision for a world free of nuclear weapons. To get there, the two countries that possess 96% of all the nuclear weapons in the world will have to start by cutting their own arsenals. That will be impossible unless America and Russia can learn to trust each other again. 'Anti-American' feelings I went to a party at the US embassy in Moscow this week. It was the annual Independence Day bash. Will Presidents Obama and Medvedev be successful in rebuilding trust? Everyone who is anyone in Moscow society was there, Gary Kasparov the former chess grand master, actors, writers, business leaders, politicians. But try as I might, I could not spot a single member of the current Kremlin leadership, big or small. It is a far cry from the days when President Boris Yeltsin used to turn up in person to toast his American friends. Since the election of Barack Obama there has been a dramatic change, at least in the rhetoric. In her first meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Hilary Clinton famously pressed a big red button symbolically resetting the relationship. President Obama's visit will put the seal on this rapprochement. But as I stood in the garden of the US ambassador's palatial mansion, I heard a very different view. It came from a former journalist who has watched US-Russia relations for two decades. "The current Kremlin leadership is deeply anti-American," he told me. "For the last eight years they have been able to hide that fact by pretending it is really George W Bush that they did not like. "Now they have to face an American president who is genuinely popular around the world. "He terrifies them," he said, "and they still haven't figured out what they are going to do." How to listen to: From our own Correspondent Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only) World Service: See programme schedules Download the podcast Listen on iPlayer Story by story at the programme website
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionA 183-mile stretch of the Yellowstone River in Montana has been closed indefinitely after tens of thousands of fish have turned up dead in recent days, victims of a parasite that continues to spread.
The massive die-off has proved particularly devastating for native mountain whitefish. However, reports have emerged that some Rainbow and Yellowstone cutthroat trout — which are crucial to the state's sport fishing industry — have been affected.
The parasite is not native to the area, so it was likely introduced via a contaminated boat or fishing equipment, or possibly by birds from another waterway.
"A threat to the health of Montana's fish populations is a threat to Montana's entire outdoor economy and the tens of thousands of jobs it sustains," Gov. Steve Bullock said in a statement this weekend. "Our state cannot afford this infectious disease to spread to other streams and rivers and it's my responsibility to do everything we can to stop this threat in its tracks and protect Montana jobs and livelihoods."For 40 years, the poor white vote in America has largely belonged to the Republican party. For the first time in a very long time, that demographic is up for grabs, and the party that capitalizes on this chaos could be looking at electoral dominance for decades to come.
Last night, after Donald Trump won all five states in the northeast primaries, I watched in something like amazement as he railed against the loss of manufacturing jobs in America in his victory speech:
“I traveled through New York State,” he said, “and every place we went, manufacturing down 40 and 45 percent, and even more. Then we go to Pennsylvania and we see the same thing, you loo kat what’s happening with steel and so many other industries…and every single place I go is a disaster, manufacturing down 40, 45, 50, 60 percent sometimes…in a relatively short period of time. Our jobs are being sucked away from our country, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore, folks. We’re going to make it very, very difficult to do that, and when companies want to leave our great country, and lay off all these great people that in many cases helped build the country, there will be consequences for that company to pay.”
And later, after a reporter asked him about Hillary Clinton:
“I mean, Hillary’s…I call her ‘Crooked Hillary,’ she’s crooked. She’ll be a horrible president, she knows nothing about job creation, her husband signed NAFTA, which destroyed this country economically, I will tell you. You look at New York State, you look all over New England, you look at Pennsylvania, NAFTA was a disaster. Her husband signed it. It was a disaster for this country.”
Now, we could argue about how much Donald Trump actually cares about NAFTA, or whether he’s serious about repealing it or even imposing tariffs for American companies that outsource labor. (I get especially cynical when I remember that Trump’s own clothing line manufactures in China and Mexico.) But let’s skip that for now. Regardless of his true intentions, the fact that this rhetoric is coming out of the mouth of the Republican frontrunner is…well, it’s flabbergasting.
For the record, he’s right about free trade, which has been as bad for poor people around the world as it has been for working class Americans. But Republicans have always been huge advocates of free trade, for the simple reason that Republicans have always been the party of big business, and free trade means higher profits for corporations as they either outsource labor to low-wage nations, or use the threat of doing so to weaken unions and lower wages in America. Look, for example, at the positions on free trade agreements taken by John Kasich and Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the three most fiscally traditional Republicans in this year’s race. George H.W. Bush was president who first proposed the free trade agreement with NAFTA, and signed it in Dec. 1992, and no serious Republican contender since has opposed that deal or any of the others that followed.
But of course, the Republicans have not led this fight alone. Bill Clinton was the president who signed NAFTA into law, and without the support of many Democrats in the House and Senate, it never would have been ratified. President Obama has been instrumental in fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and Hillary Clinton was a strong advocate for that agreement before pressure from the progressive wing of the party led her to oppose it in this election cycle—an opposition that feels very insincere, and very temporary.
Meanwhile, more than a million jobs have been lost in America as a result of free trade agreements—700,000 alone due to NAFTA—and it has weakened labor unions and reduced wages at many of those that remain. You would expect a pro-labor candidate like Bernie Sanders to rail against free trade, and he does. What you wouldn’t expect, in a million years, is for the leading Republican to be speaking the same language.
So why is it happening? Any why aren’t his constituents revolting, even as the party leadership conspires to tank his candidacy at the convention?
To answer that question, we have to look at the strange coalition that has made the Republican party so successful since the the Reagan years. By demonizing liberals (and minorities), identifying several social “wedge” issues like abortion and gay marriage, and scaremongering on the very idea of higher taxes, the Republican elite has managed to secure the vast majority of the poor white vote in America for decades, even though GOP economics are positioned directly against the self-interest of those voters. (For a great look at this phenomenon, read What’s the Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank). It has worked beautifully, but it was always doomed to be temporary—how long can you fool people into voting against themselves before they start to see the trick?
The answer, in America, is about 40 years. But as the economy gets worse and worse, and the effects of free trade are felt on a working class that has seen real wages decline and job opportunities vanish, poor white voters are starting to see the GOP establishment as the ruling class that it is. And it’s not like they’re going to turn to Democrats as an alternative—the neoliberal movement led by Bill Clinton relies on triangulation to win elections, and has abandoned the progressive base of the party and the working class in general.
With these voters abandoning ship on the left and right, what do the current coalitions of the major parties look like? The Republican establishment has been utterly bludgeoned on a national level, as evangelicals and working class whites flock away from traditional candidates like Jeb Bush. The centrist Democrats have managed to forge a very odd coalition of affluent whites and poor minorities to hold off the progressive wing of the party, but it’s very hard to imagine that alliance holding up past Hillary Clinton and her enormous name recognition—the interests of those two groups seem too disparate for the union to remain intact for long, as the generational divide in the party demonstrates. (The workaround here is for the Dems is to follow the Obama blueprint and run minority candidates with establishment interests.)
Which leaves the largest bloc in the United States unaccounted for: The poor white voters. Where do they turn?
In 2016, there is a race to secure the future of this demographic, but these voters feel betrayed by the establishment wing of both parties. They have flocked, in the primary elections, to two candidates: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Both speak the same language on free trade and other economic issues, though Trump has also stoked nativist sentiment that holds particular appeal for those with “strong national identity.” He is an expert at making powerless people feel powerful, and at times this ends up looking very ugly. It also may give him an insurmountable advantage over candidates like Sanders who won’t exploit these tendencies and may always lack real support in parts of the country like the southeast, where racial tensions simmer at a higher level, and voters are not as open to the idea of a future Sanders-type coalition that includes blacks and Hispanics.
Which gives Trump an advantage—he’s speaking the economic language of the poor white voter without espousing liberal social views that those voters associate with the party of rich coastal elites. The Sanders advantage is that his economic positions cannot be called into question—he’s not a billionaire who has exploited NAFTA, and he has a long record of actually fighting for the economic principles he preaches. At a time when the poor white vote is in a state of flux, these are the two most likely beneficiaries of a unique electoral uncertainty.
To put it more simply, there is a silent contest operating beneath the surface of the 2016 election, and the question it asks is, “which party will poor white voters support for the next generation?” It won’t be the establishment wing of either party—those are big-money interests, and that message rings especially hollow as the economy gets worse—but if either Trump or Sanders can secure the nomination, they can remake the party in their image, and ensure that these poor white voters identify with that party for years to come. Which brings us back to reality: Trump holds the obvious advantage because he’s going to win his nomination, while Sanders is all but certain to lose.
With that in mind, maybe the Republicans should be a bit more welcoming of Trump’s candidacy. They have owned the poor white vote for 40 years, and at the moment when their hold on that demographic is looking incredibly vulnerable, they have a candidate who is showing them the way forward. So do the Democrats, for that matter. The question is, which party will take heed?PORTLAND, Maine — It’s the end of an era for Oakhurst Dairy, the dairy processor owned and operated in Portland by the Bennett family since 1921.
On Friday, Oakhurst announced it had been acquired by Dairy Farmers of America, a national farmer-owned cooperative based in Kansas City, Mo.
The sale to DFA, which represents 13,000 farmers around the country, is the end of a 92-year independent streak for Oakhurst.
Bill Bennett, chairman of Oakhurst’s board and a third-generation member of the Bennett family to manage the business, told the Bangor Daily News that the deal would not have any effect on Oakhurst’s 210 or so employees, its management team or the 70 independent Maine farmers who supply Oakhurst with their milk. The company will continue to operate as it has in the past and consumers won’t notice any changes, Bennett said. However, Bennett will transition from chairman to senior adviser.
Employees were informed of the sale on Friday, the day the deal officially closed. Financial details are not being disclosed.
DFA approached Oakhurst about eight or nine months ago about being acquired, Bennett said. While Oakhurst has over the years avoided the consolidation going on in the dairy industry — unless Oakhurst was the one doing the acquiring — Bennett said DFA approached the company at the right time.
“They seem like a great fit and the timing seemed good for us,” Bennett said. “As the Bennetts are getting older we look to the future. We have been thinking over the last few years, ‘what can we do to best assure the best future for the company?’ and DFA really offered us that sort of opportunity.”
At the moment, there’s no fourth-generation Bennett family member involved in the management of the company, but Bennett said that’s not the sole reason behind the family’s decision to sell.
“This is about what is best for Oakhurst,” he said. “Our family believes that the investment by Dairy Farmers of America, a farmer-owned co-op, is the best fit for the long-term success of Oakhurst, the continuation of our values as a brand and service to our local communities, especially in today’s rapidly consolidating retail and manufacturing environment.”
He said, however, that the sale is “somewhat bittersweet” considering how long his family has run the business.
“But it’s more sweet than bitter,” Bennett said. “I’m kind of at the end of my career, so this is an exciting way to see the company move ahead. The Bennetts are involved and will stay involved. I feel better about it every day.”
Bill’s brother John Bennett is co-president of Oakhurst. He will remain in that position, along with the other co-president, Thomas Brigham, who became the first person to manage the business who was not a member of the family when he was appointed in 2012.
John Bennett said the sale was not precipitated because Oakhurst is struggling financially. Oakhurst had roughly $100 million in sales in 2013.
“Our market share is steady and we’re a leader in fluid milk sales in Maine and in northern New England,” John Bennett told the BDN. “We just see this as an opportunity to grow and improve.”
DFA, based in Kansas City, began in 1998 as a cooperative to represent dairy farmers’ interests in the industry and has grown over the years to encompass milk and ice cream processors as well. Besides Oakhurst, the cooperative recently acquired regional dairy processing facilities and brands in Connecticut (Guida’s Dairy), Minnesota (Kemps), and Maryland (Dairy Maid Dairy).
“Oakhurst is a good fit with what we’ve put together so far,” Pat Panko, chief operating officer for DFA’s fluid milk and ice cream division, told the BDN.
DFA represents about 70 dairy farmers in Maine. However, this deal has nothing to do with forcing Oakhurst to buy from those farmers instead of the 70 independent farmers from whom Oakhurst sources its milk.
“Every business we’ve bought we have not changed the composition of our milk sourcing at any one of those businesses,” said Monica Massey, a DFA spokeswoman. “Finding a home for our members’ milk has nothing to do with our investment strategy in fluid milk and ice cream.”
Bill Bennett reinforced that claim.
“That was very important to us right from beginning, that our farmers not be affected by this in that they remain independent,” he said, adding that becoming a DFA member is not a condition for farmers to continue to sell their milk to Oakhurst. “So we’ll be dealing with farmers as we always have … but we’ll have the backing of a very strong, farmer-owned cooperative.”
Bill Bennett said a conference call with Oakhurst’s farmer advisory board was scheduled for Friday and a meeting is scheduled early next week with all of Oakhurst’s farmers to provide them an opportunity to ask questions.
Another thing that won’t change, Bill Bennett said, is Oakhurst’s investments in the community. Oakhurst will continue to give 10 percent of its pretax profits to local charities that support childhood and environmental health, he said.
“As we grow, that will actually grow,” Bill Bennett said. “This is good for the community, not just for Oakhurst Dairy and Dairy Farmers of America.”NEW DELHI: In a reminder of the Gandhi Nagar child rape, a 15-month-old girl was brutalized inside the servant accommodation of an Air Force officer's house in Vasant Vihar, south Delhi while her parents were away on Friday. The girl is admitted at Safdarjung Hospital but is reported out of danger.The officer's male servant, Jagdish (24), was detained in the evening on suspicion and arrested after tests revealed blood spots on his hands. He has been charged under Section 376 IPC and the Pocso Act.Police said the child's mother works as the officer's domestic help at his house in the Shankar Vihar residential colony for defence officials. She was allowed to stay in the servant quarters with her husband, a sweeper, and daughter on condition that the officer's male servant would also use their toilet.The servant quarter can be entered from the front as well as the rear, and on Friday evening the mother had locked only the front door while going out. Police say she went out at 4.15pm, and Jagdish, who entered 15 minutes later, stayed inside for around 40 minutes.On returning, the mother found the girl bleeding from her private parts. Police were informed and the girl was taken to Safdarjung Hospital. She was initially admitted to the gynaecology surgical ward for injuries to her private parts and preliminary medical tests confirmed rape, an officer said. She was later shifted to the paediatric ward. Doctors said her wounds will take around two weeks to heal.New Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a United States student organization representing left wing ideals. It takes its name and inspiration from the original SDS of 1960–1969, then the largest radical student organization in US history. The contemporary SDS is a distinct youth and student-led organization with over 120 chapters worldwide.[1][2][3][4]
Beginning January 2006, a movement to revive the Students for a Democratic Society took shape. Two high school students, Jessica Rapchik and Pat Korte, decided to reach out to former members of the "Sixties" SDS, to re-establish a student movement in the United States.[1] Korte did this by contacting Alan Haber.[4] They called for a new generation of SDS, to build a radical multi-issue organization grounded in the principle of participatory democracy. Several chapters at various colleges and high schools were subsequently formed. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of 2006, these chapters banded together to issue a press release that stated their intentions to recreate the national SDS organization.[5] In the press release, the SDS called for the organization's first national convention since 1969 to be held in the summer of 2006 and to have it preceded by a series of regional conferences occurring during the Memorial Day weekend. These regional conferences would also be the first of their kind since 1969. On April 23, 2006, SDS held a northeast regional conference at Brown University.
Politics [ edit ]
Since its foundation in 2006, the organization's activities have centered on two broad areas. The first is building opposition to the US government-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries in South Asia and the Middle East. The second area is advocating for "students rights", broadly defined. For example, SDSers have played a major role in the national movement against budget cuts and tuition hikes in education in the recent period.[6] Practically speaking, each SDS chapter is additionally also involved in a variety of local issues having relevance to their particular area.
Structure [ edit ]
SDS is a chapter based organization.[7] Individuals belong to particular chapter, and a national working committee coordinates national campaigns and communications between the chapters. Working groups form on an as-needed basis and give reports back to the national working committee. Certain caucuses based on specific historical oppressions fulfill an ombudsman-like role, in addition to acting in support and networking capacities for the organization generally.[8]
Notable events [ edit ]
The new SDS has organized and participated in numerous actions against the Iraq War and made clear its opposition to any possible military action against Iran by the US. The Pace University chapter of SDS protested against a speech by Bill Clinton held at the University's New York City campus, prompting the university to hand over two students, Lauren Giaccone and Brian Kelly, to the United States Secret Service. After the threatened expulsion of the two protesters, Pace SDS began a campaign that helped pressure the President of Pace to resign.[9]
Beginning in March and continuing into April and May 2006, SDS chapters across the country participated in a series of actions supporting Immigrant Rights. SDS chapters, such as at Brandeis, Connecticut College, and Harvard coordinated with large coalitions of students to strike and walk out of their classes on May Day.
The newly formed SDS held its first national convention from August 4 to August 7, 2006 at the University of Chicago.[10]
In early March 2007, SDS members and allies in Tacoma, Washington led a blockade of the Port of Tacoma, where the US military was loading Stryker vehicles onto ships to be transported to Iraq. After confrontations every night for a week, the police broke the human blockade through the use of rubber bullets and pepper spray.
On March 12, 2007, one week before the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the New School chapter of SDS held a Campus Moratorium against the Iraq War. Students left classes and proceeded down 5th Avenue to the Chambers Street military recruitment center where they met with the Pace University chapter of SDS. The students entered the Recruitment Center, barricaded the door and held a nonviolent sit-in, effectively closing the recruitment center for about two hours. Twenty members of SDS were arrested and charged with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor.
On March 17, 2007, SDS groups from across the country met and participated in the March on the Pentagon, in which parts of the SDS contingent along with allies occupied a bridge near The Pentagon. Five demonstrators were arrested.
On March 20, 2007, 83 SDS chapters from around the country held coordinated actions against the Iraq war.[11] One such action in the Bay Area shut down the entrance to Chevron's World Headquarters.[12]
The Summer of 2007 was a critical turning point for SDS as a national organization. First, SDS fielded a large contingent at the first US Social Forum in Atlanta on June 27 – July 1. SDS found itself part of a national movement to change the US; at the forum, SDS members gave workshops, demonstrated, and formed bonds with members from across the country.
The second SDS National Convention took place July 27–30, 2007 at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Approximately 200 members of SDS attended what was a constitutional convention. The primary focus of the convention was to democratically create a national structure and vision for the organization. These goals were achieved, though all decisions made at the convention will be sent back to the SDS chapters for a process of ratification which is currently under way.
The first national SDS Action Camps[13] took place from August 13–16 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The camp was hosted by the Lancaster chapter of SDS. It included anti-oppression/collective liberation trainings, and workshops about a variety of things – including media skills, meeting facilitation, and direct action. The camp was held in order to provide students with skills needed to become better organizers, and deepen the sophistication of their vision and strategy.
On September 15, 2007, SDS chapters from several colleges across the country (including Ohio, Indiana, Washington D.C., Harrisburg, PA and New York) gathered and marched in the ANSWER coalition march from the White House steps, to the Capitol building. The protest was estimated to include up 80,000 people. At least 150 were arrested, and there was at least one incident where police pepper-sprayed protesters.[14]
In early November 2007, SDS members were again present at a similar blockade at the Port of Olympia, Washington. The blockade was broken only after 67 arrests, as well as use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, and other crowd-control weapons. A similar confrontation had occurred in May 2006 at the Port of Olympia.
Members and Chapters around the US and Canada participated in a large series of semi-coordinated events and demonstrations between March 17 and March 21 to bring awareness to the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.[15]
The 2008 National Convention was held in College Park, Maryland. Members at the meeting decided on a national structure: the National Work Committee and a national campaign: Student Power for Accessible Education.
A "Funk the War" demonstration, organized by DC SDS.
In September, SDS chapters from around the country converged on St. Paul, Minnesota to participate in the four days of protests against the Republican National Convention.[16][17][18]
Members of Providence SDS took over a board meeting of the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority RIPTA to protest proposed route cuts. The group also argues that the RIPTA board is detached from its riders and doesn’t represent them.[19]
The University of North Texas and several other chapters opened. In 2008, the University of Houston opened a chapter and added to the efforts of immigrant rights actions that Texas Grassroots Leadership had begun in 2006,[20] holding many protests centered on detention centers in Texas, particularly the family detention center T. Don Hutto that incarcerated immigrant mothers with children in Taylor, the center in Raymondville and Houston's Processing Center who's in contract with ICE.[21] These efforts across Texas saw a big win when the T. Don Hutto detention center changed its policies and stopped incarcerating children in late 2009. SDS at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas has continued the protests of these detention centers and plans for more in 2010. New efforts in Texas SDS chapters are being made to support the DREAM Act, as well as 2010's May Day.
SDS at the University of Houston also participated in the March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education,[22] along with SDS chapters nationwide,[23][24] as well as national anti-war,[25] anti-occupation and Israeli apartheid Week campaigns.
In March 2010, members of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee's chapter of SDS staged a protest outside the Chancellor's building. The event, designed to protest rising tuition costs, was met with a police presence. Police began using pepper spray, and arrested sixteen members of the protest, including both SDS members and allied organizations on campus through the Education Rights Campaign.[26]
On August 19, 2012, Occupy Colleges officially merged with SDS.[27]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]LONDON (Reuters) - The dollar hit new record lows against the euro, the Swiss franc and a basket of currencies on Thursday on growing belief that the U.S. Federal Reserve will cut interest rates again next month.
A woman looks at U.S. one dollars notes on display in Hong Kong November 1, 2007. REUTERS/Herbert Tsang
Adding to downward pressure on the dollar was a recovery in equity markets and a slight pick up in risk appetite which made investors more willing to put on riskier trades in high-yielding or emerging market currencies.
The more risk-friendly mood also hit the yen, a favorite source of cheap funding for the carry trades based on interest rate differentials.
The Japanese currency eased from the previous day’s 2-1/2 year peaks versus the dollar, while the high-yielding Australian and New Zealand units — top carry targets — gained broadly.
“No one really wants to bet against a fall in the dollar,” said Niels Christensen, FX strategist at Nordea.
“Fears of recession or lower activity in the United States and strong expectations of rate cuts is driving the dollar down... I am struggling to find any factor or event that could turn the tide with the dollar,” he added.
The dollar fell to a new record low of 1.1006 Swiss francs before recovering to 1.1019 francs by 9:43 a.m. EST.
The dollar index, which measures the dollar’s value against a basket of major currencies, hit a record low of 74.916.DXY.
However, the dollar gained against the yen to 108.67 yen, pulling away from the 2-1/2 year low of 108.23 yen hit on Wednesday, according to Reuters data.
Expectations for further U.S. rate cuts were reinforced on Tuesday by the Fed’s projection that economic growth will slow next year, even though the central bank adopted a reasonably hawkish tone and said that October’s cut was a “close call”.
U.S. short-term interest rate futures are pricing in a 25 basis point Fed cut to 4.25 percent on December 11 and are even giving a small chance of a 50 basis point move.
A POST-THANKSGIVING $1.50 FOR EURO?
The euro hit a record high of $1.4873, according to Reuters data, bringing its year-to-date gains to around 12.5 percent. It also set fresh all-time highs against the ECB’s trade-weighted basket of 24 currencies at 111.77.
So far European policymakers and politicians have been less vocal about the euro’s rise than they were during its 2004 rally, in part because economic growth has held up.
Germany’s export industry could cope with the euro at $1.50, the head of BGA exporters’ group was quoted as saying on Thursday.
But there are some notes of concern about euro’s levels.
Chief executive of Daimler (DAIGn.DE) Dieter Zetsche said the German car and truck maker would have to boost productivity even further to offset FX developments, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the strong euro could pose difficulties for exporters.
With the United States marking the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday and Japan shut on Friday, volumes were likely to remain subdued into the end of the week, potentially exacerbating market volatility.
“Last year the market took advantage of the low liquidity environment to drive euro/dollar above $1.30 on the Friday following the Thursday (U.S. Thanksgiving) holiday,” RBC Capital Markets said in a research note.
This time, “$1.50 looms as an equally large psychological magnet as did $1.30.”What states will participate in Obamacare’s expansion of the Medicaid program? The answer to that will have a profound effect on national and state health-care budgets and the number of uninsured US residents for years to come.
The president’s signature Affordable Care Act (ACA) raises the income level for Medicaid eligibility up to 133 percent of the federal poverty line. That’s one of the major ways the health reform attempts to expand coverage. If all states participate, 21 million will get Medicaid coverage, reducing the number of uninsured in America by 48 percent, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.
But the US Supreme Court ruling that upheld ACA’s core individual mandate for health insurance also held that Uncle Sam can’t make states go along with the Medicaid expansion. So right now, governors and state legislators across the country are facing a tricky decision: Should they dive in and accept the expansion? After all, the federal government is promising to pay virtually all the costs of such a move, at least for now.
Or should they decline to join in something that could eventually gobble a larger share of their states’ budgets?
So far, twice as many states have said “yes” than have said “no.” According to a review by consulting firm Avalere Health cited in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, there are 17 participant states as opposed to nine confirmed nonparticipants.
The breakdown here is generally along red state/blue state lines, as determined by which party holds the governor’s office. Texas and Florida both said “no,” for instance. (Yes, President Obama won Florida, but the GOP’s Rick Scott is governor.) Maryland, Illinois, and California are “yeses.”
But “no” states insist that their hesitance has as much to do with economics as with the relative unpopularity of Obamacare among their voters. While current law calls for Washington to pay for the expansion, Congress is under tremendous pressure to cut federal spending, and it’s not implausible that this subsidy might end up a target.
“States feel a lot of anxiety about making a decision to expand a program, and then having the federal government change the rules and shift more cost onto the states,” said Diana Rowland, a health policy analyst for the Kaiser Family Foundation, during a recent forum on Medicaid expansion hosted by the Alliance for Health Reform.
“Yes” states, in contrast, see the economics of their decision as a no-brainer. The formula is complicated, but in general the US will pick up 100 percent of the expansion through the first three years. After that, Uncle Sam’s share drops progressively down to about 90 percent by 2020. The presumption among budget analysts is that the match will then stay at that level – though that isn’t written into current law.
There’s also the matter of US Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments. DSH is an $11 billion pot of money that Washington uses to subsidize hospitals that treat large numbers of the uninsured who simply walk through their doors. That program is being heavily reduced under the Affordable Care Act, under the theory that the expansion of Medicaid should provide low-income Americans who are uninsured with an alternate form of financing.
That is a concern for states that turn down the Medicaid expansion. Hospitals in those states will face the prospect of a continued stream of uninsured patients, but a much-reduced stream of cash to fund their care.
“That is the perfect storm that we are very nervous about. Don’t expand Medicaid, and DSH payments go away,” said James Keeton, vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, at the Alliance for Health Reform seminar.
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The Medicaid expansion would also generally pump money into the health-care establishments of states. Thus, those who stand to gain more customers from such a move may lobby for inclusion in the ACA Medicaid program, whether they live in deep-blue Vermont or red Alabama.
“The economics of it are just so overwhelming that I think it’ll dominate the politics,” said John Holohan, director of the Health Policy Center at the Urban Institute.Google’s (s goog) planned experimental fiber network will be so open that the company hopes to see other ISPs ride it in order to deliver their own services, according to a story by BroadbandBreakfast.com. The publication quotes a project manager in charge of the program (whom we’ve also interviewed before), as saying:
“We definitely inviting the Comcasts, the AT&T service providers to work with us on our network, and to provide their service offering on top of our pipe – we’re definitely planning on doing that,” said Minnie Ingersoll, Google’s product manager and co-lead for alternative access. “Our general attitude has been that there’s |
tower of Babel, the Exodus, or the garden of Eden never really happened as described in their favorite folklore. We know those old tales are false because we can show that they are. Likewise I can show how evolution is an inescapable fact of population genetics, fossils, and phylogeny. The typical response to all of that is that we can’t really know if anything is true or false because we can’t really know anything, because we can’t even be sure if we even exist.
My impression of this sophistry is that their position is so weak that the only defense they have is to question reality itself, because the only way they can be right is if reality is wrong. If we know anything at all, we know how faith is misleading. So of course defenders of the faith insist that we can’t know anything at all. That’s the most annoying aspect of philosophy, and it’s the only application of it that I ever see. Consequently, I have developed a near complete lack of interest in the subject. So if I ever I talk about philosophy, I usually don’t make it any further than what is immediately relevant to my own empirical skepticism:
This time however, a self-described skeptic came to defense of faith, using the same arguments as apologists, trying to project his own presuppostions onto me. Spencer Hawkins posted the following message to me on facebook:
““
I told him that when I say that, it simply is true, and is even demonstrably correct, as I will show in the post; both because all my own convictions are certainly supported, or I wouldn’t hold them, and that by comparison, faith is an unsupported conviction even by the admission of believers. I thought even philosophers agreed with me on this point, that there is a notion of what is real and true, and that faith doesn’t have that where apistevists do.
This example illustrates my point about gnosticism, asserting one’s beliefs as if they were the same thing as knowledge. Knowledge is typically defined as justified belief, meaning that it can tested and demonstrated with measurable accuracy. Religious beliefs obviously aren’t that way. If you cannot demonstrate your accuracy to any degree at all by any means whatsoever, then it is a fact that you cannot actually know what you think you know. Obviously this should be treated in accordance to Sagan’s comment on the scale of mundane to extraordinary claims. This is why I say “if you can’t show it, you don’t know it”. Hawkins says that I don’t understand what that means. I asked Mr Hawkins how he came to this conclusion, but he just asserted another unwarranted assumption:
What? As if there is anything inherently wrong with being identified by others as a logical positivist. If that is applicable, it certainly isn’t a position that is vulnerable to apologists, I can tell you that with considerable experience! Quite the opposite in fact, it’s about the most defensible position there is against religious dogmatism. That’s probably why despite having these arguments continuously for decades, I have never been attacked for that by anyone; not until now. I’ve never even been accused of that before.
Just for the sake of this conversation, I had to look up what logical positivism even is. Now that I have, I’m think OK with that label, because it seems to fit for the most part, although I still consider myself more of a rationalist. Despite Mr Hawkins’ insinuation, none of the references I checked gave any hint that logical positivism, or the associated empiricism or verificationism are in any way out-dated or discredited, nor that it “died” as he says it did. In fact each source I saw implied quite the opposite specifically in the application of science. Among the tenets of logical positivism/empiricism/verificationism are that knowledge must be justified, which I obviously agree with. It also holds that there are some other aspects within philosophy which are essentially meaningless, particularly in metaphysics, and Mr Hawkins is now demonstrating that for me.
Hawkins (and like-minded apologists) say that I’m making philosophical assumptions which they also think I’m ignoring, among them that:
None of these is an unsupported conviction! I admit, I am convinced of these things. I’ll even admit that I assume all of them at least to some degree. I have to, because collectively the only option is literally insanity; but that assumption is certainly warranted in each case. None of these notions can be proven by way of evidence, but only because the very question eliminates the possibility of evidence by conditional fiat. Otherwise there is evidence for each one individually, and even if there wasn’t, they’re all still supported by reason!
It’s not like there is any real possibility that the reality we perceive might only be a huge and hugely complicated eternally and intricately detailed and functionally consistent hallucination generated within our own imaginations -despite our utter insanity otherwise. The very concept is a contradiction of itself, and yes I know that the principle of non-contradiction is also supposed to be assumed in the same way. This is what I hate about philosophy, navel-gazing metaphysics attempting to reduce reality into gibberish without any benefit that could possibly come from that. As if there is any reason to seriously consider that that whole of reality only exists within your own mind, all except you, because you’re out of your mind; as if you’re the only thing that is out of your mind. So it is a complete reversal of our only apparent reality with no point or purpose or potential truth to that postulation. Such hard solipsism, rendering the meaning of meaning meaningless is as meaningless as anything ever could be.
Take the notion of truth. Truth is typically defined as “that which is concordant with reality”. That means that reality itself is not truth, but statements about reality can be, but only if they’re true. So as I understand it, if we have to show that a statement is true before we can call it ‘truth’, then truth is whatever statement about reality can be shown to be true. Mr Hawkins implies that nothing can be shown to be true, which makes his position absolutely pointless. Even he has to agree that he thinks what he says is true and that he is trying to convince someone standing outside his own mind. There are REASONS why he has to make this assumption, as I do. He just doesn’t have any good reason to postulate such things or pursue the argument.
Spencer Hawkins as well as presuppositional apologists say that it is a circular argument, and thus fallacious to assume anything that is actually consistently and objectively apparent. However, accurate information has practical application, and that is certainly born out in each of these instances. Science works through experimental hypotheses and functional models. They don’t have to be perfect, absolute, or proven either. For example, we know that some models of the atom are flawed, each in their own respect; they’re not entirely realistic, but we still teach them because they’re accurate enough that they each work in specific applications where no other model does. The same situation applies to the rejection of solipsism.
The reliability of our senses, induction, and especially memory should be suspect, and subject to objective confirmation or correction. However that requires that we assume there are other minds out there; as if I might have imagined everyone else and the entirety of the cosmos along with them. That assumption is NOT supported by reason, but my assumption certainly is. I merely assume that what is apparently real is apparently real; because how could I have conjured such a elaborate matrix if I have to take college classes so that other products of my imagination can explain to me things that I couldn’t understand otherwise? The only other option appears to be a matrix-level conspiracy intended to fool us all. This is not a supported assumption either, because it doesn’t comply with Occam’s Razor, but my assumption still is and does.
I tried to explain the complete irrelevance of his criticism, by pointing out that even you’re just a brain in a vat, or if all that you perceive as reality is really a construct of the matrix or a dream of Brahma, that reality is still your reality, and it imposes certain rules just as any real reality would. Hawkins dismissed my explanation of his irrelevance as irrelevant, and repeated another of his “unsupported convictions”, that the future will be like the past.
This is exactly the same thing that presuppositional apologists do when they say, “How do you know the laws of physics won’t change five seconds from now?“. Is there any reason to believe they will? Or that they even could? Despite being raised in an environment of gullible wanna-believers and critics of skepticism, I do not assume that “anything is possible” as so many other people readily do. Sure the laws of physics MIGHT change, and it is just as likely that monkeys MIGHT fly out of my ass. The latter has an equally insignificant probability, and there are several reasons why that is impossible. In either case, it is not only beneath serious consideration, there is no reason to consider it. I know this means something different to philosophers than it does to scientists, but if it is neither possible nor in any way indicated, then it isn’t logical to assume it either.
If we’re talking about philosophy, then my philosophy holds that we cannot even determine whether something is possible without some precedent or parallel indicating that possibility, or at least some occurrence of that particular phenomenon which can be confirmed but not yet explained. I said to Mr Hawkins, ““ He didn’t answer that, and I don’t see how he could have without conceding an error in his criticism.
Many other people in that thread also tried to reason with him, with little or no success. Some even said that he actually agrees with me, but that he doesn’t realize it because he doesn’t understand what I actually said or meant. That’s what I think too. He should have asked for clarification, like I do.
It was then that Hawkins wrote his blog post. There he imagines that I could have constantly debated against apologists for decades and even share a stage with philosophers like Boghossian and Dennett, and that I could still somehow be unaware of Dennett’s comments about philosophical baggage. My friend, Matt Dillahunty is a big David Hume fan too, and we’ve talked about all that, only he has a different and shorter list of things we must assume because that is the only assumption that works in any application. So even his list is supported by reason.
Hawkins assumes that I’m confused about things I hadn’t confused, and he thinks that I ‘conflate’ metaphysics with epistemology. He has no reason to assume these things, and it is ironic that he doesn’t question his own assumptions while criticizing me when he assumes that I don’t question my assumptions either. He also overtly conflated apistevism with logical positivism. There is no justification for that either, but it shows that he doesn’t understand at least one of these concepts, and perhaps neither one.
He is correct about one thing though, that I treat physics like mathematics, but anyone who has taken physics understands that it is taught as a branch of calculus. So I’m justified in that too.
Conclusion: Spencer Hawkins’ criticism of what he thinks are my unsupported convictions, as well as my alleged philosophical confusions and misunderstandings is based on his own misunderstandings brought about by a series of his own false assumptions which he has failed to question himself. He didn’t question me about them either. So he couldn’t consider my perspective. He just jumped to conclusion as if his own assumptions could never be wrong.Ghostbusters is a supernatural comedy franchise created in 1984. Its first installment was the film Ghostbusters, released on June 8, 1984, by Columbia Pictures. It centers on a group of eccentric New York City parapsychologists who investigate and capture ghosts for a living. For the film, the franchise licensed action figures, novelizations, and other original Ghostbusters-themed products. After the initial success, they released original material in other fields such as comic books, video games, television series, and several theme park attractions.
Films [ edit ]
Ghostbusters (1984) [ edit ]
Ghostbusters, the first film in the series, is a 1984 sci-fi comedy film about three eccentric New York City parapsychologists. After they are fired from Columbia University, they start their own business investigating and capturing ghosts. Starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis, Sigourney Weaver, Annie Potts, and Ernie Hudson, it was released in the United States on June 8, 1984. It had been made on a US$30 million budget, but it grossed approximately US$240 million in the United States and over US$50 million abroad during its theatrical run, more than the domestic gross of the second Indiana Jones installment, making it the most successful film in America that year (after re-releases), and one of the most successful comedies of the 1980s. The American Film Institute ranked it 28th in its list of the top 100 comedies of all time.[1] IGN voted Ghostbusters the greatest comedy ever in 2005.[2] The TV Channel Bravo ranked Ghostbusters number 28 on their 100 Funniest Movies list in 2006.[3]
Ghostbusters II (1989) [ edit ]
The second film, Ghostbusters II, was released on June 16, 1989. Taking place five years after the first, the Ghostbusters have lost their credibility due to the amount of property damage they have caused, but identify a new threat to New York City after discovering a river of ectoplasmic slime that reacts to the great deal of negative emotions within the city. Murray, Aykroyd, Ramis, Hudson, Weaver, Potts, and Moranis reprised their roles from the first film, and were joined by Peter MacNicol and Wilhelm von Homburg, among others. After the success of the first film and the animated series The Real Ghostbusters, Columbia Pictures pressed the producers to make a sequel. Aykroyd, Ramis, and Reitman were uncomfortable with this at first, as the original film was intended to be conclusive and they wished to work on other projects. Eventually, they agreed and created a script. The sequel earned US$215 million off a US$37 million budget, but received lukewarm reviews compared to the first film.
Ghostbusters (2016) [ edit ]
The 2016 film, Ghostbusters, is a reboot of the franchise featuring a new cast of characters, but follows a similar narrative as the original film. A group of eccentric researchers make discoveries within paranormal incidents with their intentions being to detect and capture ghosts, and protect New York City of those spirits. The film principally features a new cast, starring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon as the all-female Ghostbuster team, along with Chris Hemsworth as their male receptionist.[4][5] Additionally, Aykroyd, Murray, Weaver, Hudson and Potts all had small cameo roles. The film was released on July 15, 2016 as Ghostbusters, with the home media released being rebranded to Ghostbusters: Answer the Call.[6] It received mixed reviews, and grossed US$229 million off a US$144 million budget.
Future films [ edit ]
Ghostbusters 3 (2020) [ edit ]
A new film connected to the original two films, tentatively titled Ghostbusters 3, was revealed in January 2019. Jason Reitman, son of original director Ivan Reitman, will direct from a script co-written by himself and Gil Kenan, while Ivan Reitman will serve as a producer.[7] According to The Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit, the film will feature teenagers, two boys and two girls, as the new recruits for the titular team.[8] It is scheduled to be released on July 10, 2020.[9] The film is expected to start production in June 2019 in Calgary for about 15 weeks.[10]
Jason Reitman's film has been the subject of some criticism, as Reitman has stated the film will likely ignore the events of Answer the Call. Leslie Jones, one of the leads of the 2016 film, called this approach "so insulting" and ignoring the efforts that her cast and crew put out.[11] Later, in February 2019, Reitman stated on a podcast that this film will "hand the movie back to the fans". Some commentators took this further insult towards Answer the Call, reflecting on the gender-driven controversy raised during production of that film. Reitman clarified that he did not mean to snub the 2016 film, and that he had "nothing but admiration" for what Paul Feig set out to achieve, while Feig himself stated that Reitman had been a supporter of his film, and that he “can't wait to see his take on the Ghostbusters universe".[12]
Animated film [ edit ]
In October 2015, The Hollywood Reporter reported that Reitman will produce an animated movie for Sony Pictures Animation, and Fletcher Moules will oversee the project as both animator and director.[13][14] Later it was announced that the movie would be told from the ghost's perspective.[15] The film will reportedly begin production following the completion of Ghostbusters 3 in 2020.[16]
Development [ edit ]
Original films (1984–1989) [ edit ]
The concept of the first film was inspired by Dan Aykroyd's own fascination with the paranormal, and it was conceived by Aykroyd as a vehicle for himself and friend and fellow Saturday Night Live alum John Belushi.[17][page needed] Aykroyd came up with Ghostbusters after reading an article about quantum physics and parapsychology in the American Society of Psychical Research Journal and then watching movies like Ghost Chasers. Aykroyd thought, "Let's redo one of those old ghost comedies, but let's use the research that's being done today. Even at that time, there was plausible research that could point to a device that could capture ectoplasm or materialization; at least visually."[18]
The original story as written by Aykroyd was much more ambitious, and unfocused, than what would be eventually filmed; in Aykroyd's original vision, a group of Ghostbusters would travel through time, space and other dimensions taking on huge ghosts (of which the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was just one of many). Also, the Ghostbusters wore SWAT-like outfits and used Proton Packs to fight the ghosts; Ghostbusters storyboards show them wearing riot squad–type helmets with movable transparent visors.[19] The original draft of the script written by Aykroyd was very large, compared to a "phone book" by director Ivan Reitman.[20][dead link]
Aykroyd pitched his story to director and producer Ivan Reitman, who liked the basic idea but immediately saw the budgetary impossibilities demanded by Aykroyd's first draft. At Reitman's suggestion, the story was given a major overhaul, eventually evolving into the final screenplay which Aykroyd and Harold Ramis finalised during a few months in a Martha's Vineyard bomb shelter, according to Ramis on the DVD commentary track for the movie.[citation needed] When Belushi died from a drug overdose, Aykroyd and Reitman eventually turned to Bill Murray to replace Belushi's role.
Ghostbusters was a box office hit, prompting Columbia Pictures to produce an animated series based on the film, The Real Ghostbusters (renamed to avoid a conflict with Filmation's existing cartoon, Ghostbusters, as well as to seek out a sequel. Aykyoyd and Ramis had not been conformable with a sequel, believing the first film was meant to be self-contained, but eventually agreed.[21]
Struggles with a third film (1990–2014) [ edit ]
A second sequel to Ghostbusters had been of interest to Aykroyd and Ramis over the course of the 1990s. During this period Aykroyd wrote a script for a potential third film in the series, titled Ghostbusters III: Hellbent.[22] The concept had the characters transported to an alternate version of Manhattan called Manhellton, where the people and places are "hellish" versions of their originals and where the Ghostbusters meet the devil (a modified version of this script was later used in Ghostbusters: The Video Game).[23][24] At the time, Aykroyd and Ramis stated that while there was interest from Columbia Pictures, they were reluctant to move forward, as Murray had become elusive, Reitman had stepped to the side to let them Aykroyd and Ramis lead the discussions, and Ramis himself was not very interested in getting in front the camera again.[25] To deal with potential actor changes, the script was designed around introducing a new, younger cast serving as the starring roles, while the former cast members would be supporting roles. This was framed to have the new Ghostbusters help Ray, Egon, and Winston with their struggling business after Peter had left to be with Dana.[26] Ultimately, Aykroyd had developed a version of the script that he said that Murray and Reitman would take part in, but by 2002, according to Aykroyd, Columbia Pictures had expressed concern over the production costs, and felt that it was too risky of a proposition.[24] Ramis also expressed that Murray had become "kind of obstructionist about" the film, further elevating the risk to Columbia.[27]
The fate of the script remained unknown until 2006, when Ramis affirmed that a variation of Aykroyd's Hellbent script was still being considered for the sequel; to reduce the need for special effects and reduce production costs, Ramis had conceived of a framing device of having the alternate version of Manhattan exist between moments in time, and featured situations of constant gridlock and where everyone spoke a different language in an otherwise unmodified version of the city. Ramis felt this approach would also reflect the "mundane" qualities of the first two films.[23] Murray remained against the film, according to both Ramis and Hudson, and there were talks to bring in Ben Stiller as a replacement for Murray.[23][28][29]
Lack of interest and motivation continued to stall progress until 2008.[22] In September 2008, Columbia Pictures hired screenwriters Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg to write a new screenplay for a Ghostbusters film, still set to revolve around a new cast of Ghostbusters, with uncertain involvement from the original cast.[30] Aykroyd and Ramis stated filming for this script was expected to start filming in late 2009 or mid 2010, with a target release window of late 2011 to 2012,[31] and Reitman had committed to directing the film.[32][33] The question remains about Murray's participation on the film. Murray had stated in a 2010 talk show appearance that "I'd do it only if my character was killed off in the first reel."[34] Aykroyd had said that Murray had seen the Stupnitsky-Eisenberg script, which Aykroyd said gave Murray the "comic role of a lifetime",[35] but Murray remained adamant about participating within it.[36] Production on the film continued, working around Murray's lack of participation,[37] and was considering the option of using a replacement actor to play Murray's character.[38]
This version of the sequel stalled again, and by July 2012, a new writing team was brought on board to revamp the screenplay. Aykroyd said that "[The screenplay has] got to be perfect. That’s the whole thing. There’s no point in doing it unless it’s perfect."[39] Etan Cohen was hired as lead scriptwriter for this version.[40] The new script still centered on a wholly new cast, this time as students from Columbia University that become the new Ghostbusters due to discovers from their research, with the original Ghostbusters actors, excluding Murray, reprising their roles in the supporting cast. Aykroyd stated that they left enough variability in the script that should Murray want to participate, they can account for him.[41][42]
Eventually, the revised script had been completed with plans to start production in 2015, now under Sony Pictures. However, Ramis died on February 24, 2014.[43] Initially, Sony stated that Ramis' role in the film had been minimal and would not affect production. However, Reitman felt that the screenplay had to be reworked to better account for this, and approached Sony with his concerns.[44] Following his meetings with Sony, Reitman instead decided to drop out as director of the film, a combination of the impact of Ramis' death on his outlook, the struggles to get a third Ghostbusters film made, and a desire to work on smaller projects such as the recently-completed Draft Day. Reitman committed to Sony to remain on in production and helped Sony look for a new director for the film.[45] Over mid-2014, Sony pursued a short list of potential directors for the film. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were in talks to direct the film, but passed on the project.[46] and Ruben Fleischer has also been considered.[47]
Reboot and Ghost Corps (2014–2018) [ edit ]
By late 2014, Paul Feig had been attached as the potential director for the third film, but Sony officially announced in August 2014 that Feig had been brought aboard to helm a reboot of Ghostbusters featuring an all-female cast.[48] Feig had been approached by Reitman and Sony's Amy Pascal to direct the sequel, but Feig turned this down, feeling the concept of the former Ghostbusters passing their roles to a new set of Ghostbusters would not allow him to give the new cast their proper time in the spotlight.[49] These talks resulted in the concept of the reboot as the best way to progress the franchise; this also allowed Feig to avoid issues with the canon from the previous films.[50] Feig partnered with Katie Dippold for the screenplay. Production started in mid-2015, and the film was released in July 2016 under the name Ghostbusters; it was later rebranded in home media as Ghostbusters: Answer the Call to distinguish it from the first film in the franchise.
During production of Answer the Call, Reitman stated that Sony Pictures had been coming off a series of flops, and were looking to a property comparable to the Marvel Cinematic Universe from which they could pull sequels, side stories, and other options for several years to follow. Reitman approached Sony with the idea of "Ghost Corps", a series of films based on the Ghostbusters franchise.[51] Sony founded Ghost Corps in 2015, with Reitman and Aykroyd overseeing its productions. Answer the Call became the first film branded with the Ghost Corps name.[52]
During the production of Ghostbusters (2016), two additional Ghostbusters related projects emerged, tied to the Ghost Corps studio. In March 2015, Deadline wrote that an all-male lead Ghostbusters film was being developed by Sony's Ghost Corps label, with Channing Tatum and Chris Pratt starring.[53] Anthony and Joe Russo signed on as co-directors, from a script by Drew Pearce, while Reid Carolin and Peter Kiernan would produce the project.[54][55] In 2016, the movie was reportedly cancelled, with the Russo brothers no longer attached.[56] Ivan Reitman later stated that he was not involved with the project, but it never got past early-development stages, with a 30-some pages of script written.[57]
The second Ghostbusters-related project reported during this time was an animated film, produced by Reitman and distributed by Sony Pictures Animation. Fletcher Moules will oversee the project as both an animator and the director.[58][59] The movie will be told from the perspective of ghosts.[60]
Following the release of Ghostbusters, Sony Pictures announced that a sequel to the film was in development.[61] In November 2016, Feig expressed his doubts that the sequel would be made, due to the film performing under expectation at the box office.[62] In response to Feig's comments, Reitman asserted that "there’s going to be many other Ghostbusters movies, they’re just in development right now."[63] With the reveal of the 2020 Ghostbusters film helmed by Ivan's son Jason Reitman, he affirmed that there was still interest at their studio to pursue a sequel to Feig's film.[7]
Return to original series (2018–ongoing) [ edit ]
In an interview in November 2018, Aykroyd spoke of a new script being developed for a Ghostbusters film that would potentially bring together himself, Murray, and Hudson back in their previous roles, even considering Murray's previous reluctance to return.[64]
In January 2019, Entertainment Weekly announced that a new Ghostbusters film connected to the original two films was in development, with a target mid-2020 release date. Ivan Reitman's son Jason Reitman will direct, with a script co-written by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan. Ivan Reitman will serve as a producer. The Montecito Picture Company will work on production. Ivan described the film as "passing the torch".[7][16]
Jason Reitman used the title "Rust City" during the development and pre-production stages to keep the project a secret.[65] An announcement trailer for the film was released the following day.[16]
Reception [ edit ]
Box office performance [ edit ]
Film Release date Box office gross Box office ranking Budget Ref North America Other territories Worldwide All time US and Canada All time worldwide Ghostbusters June 8, 1984 $242,212,467 $53,000,000 $295,212,467 #109
#34(A) #396 $30,000,000 [66] Ghostbusters II June 16, 1989 $112,494,738 $102,900,000 $215,394,738 #527 #596 $37,000,000[ not in citation given ] [67] Original Series Total $ 7008354707205000000♠ 354,707,205 $ 7008155900000000000♠ 155,900,000 $ 7008510607205000000♠ 510,607,205 $ 7007670000000000000♠ 67,000,000 Ghostbusters July 15, 2016 $128,350,574 $100,796,935 $229,147,509 #411 #552 $144,000,000 [68] Ghostbusters Franchise Total $ 7008483057779000000♠ 483,057,779 $ 7008256696935000000♠ 256,696,935 $ 7008739754714000000♠ 739,754,714 $211,000,000 [69] List indicator(s) (A) indicates the adjusted totals based on current ticket prices (calculated by Box Office Mojo).
Critical response [ edit ]
Television [ edit ]
The Real Ghostbusters [ edit ]
From 1986 to 1991, Columbia Pictures Television and DIC Entertainment produced an animated spin-off television series created by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd that is non-canon to the original film, entitled The Real Ghostbusters. "The Real" was added to the title due to a dispute with Filmation and its Ghostbusters properties.[77] The series continues the adventures of paranormal investigators Venkman, Stantz, Spengler, Zeddemore, their secretary Melnitz, and their mascot ghost Slimer. The Real Ghostbusters was nominated for an Emmy.[78]
When the show's producers began to see the youth appeal of the character Slimer, he began to be featured more prominently. In 1988, the series was retooled and renamed Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters, and featured an hourlong format with a typical Real Ghostbusters episode leading into a more kid-friendly Slimer! cartoon. As the series progressed, the regular Real Ghostbusters episodes started to become lighter in tone so as not to frighten the growing fanbase of young children.[citation needed] Additionally, the characterizations became more one-dimensional, and the animation became less detailed.[citation needed] More changes went on behind the scenes as well with the departure of writer J. Michael Straczynski.[citation needed] Dave Coulier of Full House fame came on to fill the role of Peter (voiced by Lorenzo Music), Buster Jones took over Winston from Arsenio Hall, and Kath Soucie took on Janine after Laura Summer voiced the role. Straczynski returned to the series temporarily in the 1990 season..[citation needed] The only cast members who remained throughout the entire series were Frank Welker (voice of Stantz and Slimer) and Maurice LaMarche (voice of Spengler). The show was cancelled in 1991.
Extreme Ghostbusters [ edit ]
Extreme Ghostbusters was a sequel and spin-off of The Real Ghostbusters that aired in late 1997. The show featured a new team of younger Ghostbusters led by veteran Ghostbuster Egon Spengler, secretary Janine Melnitz, and the ghost Slimer. The premise is similar to the plot of Ghostbusters II. Set years after the end of The Real Ghostbusters, a lack of supernatural activity has put the Ghostbusters out of business. Each has gone his separate way, except for Egon, who still lives in the Firehouse to monitor the containment unit, further his studies, and teach a class on the paranormal at a local college. When ghosts start to reappear, Egon is forced to recruit his four students as the new Ghostbusters. The new Ghostbusters were Kylie Griffin, a genius, expert on the occult, and female counterpart to Egon; Eduardo Rivera, a hip, cynical Latino slacker and counterpart to Peter; Garrett Miller, a wheelchair-bound young athlete and counterpart to Winston; and Roland Jackson, a studious African-American machinery whiz and counterpart to Ray. The show was given the Los Angeles Commission on Disabilities Award for making one of its main characters (Garrett) disabled but universally relatable.[citation needed]
Ghostbusters: Ecto Force [ edit ]
A new animated series, titled Ghostbusters: Ecto Force, was announced for development on June 20, 2016. The series will be set in the year 2050 and follows a new team of Ghostbusters who capture ghosts from around the world and was initially targeted for an early 2018 debut.[79] In August 2017, Reitman revealed that the series had been postponed to prioritize development on the planned Ghostbusters animated feature film.[80]
Music [ edit ]
The first film sparked the catchphrases, "Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!" and "I ain't afraid of no ghost." Both came from the theme song performed by Ray Parker, Jr., who wrote it in a day and a half.[81] The song was a huge hit, staying at No. 1 for three weeks on Billboard's Hot 100 chart and No. 1 for two weeks on the Black Singles chart. The song earned Parker an Academy Award nomination for "Best Original Song."
The music video produced for the song is considered one of the key productions in the early music video era, and was a No. 1 MTV video. Directed by Reitman, and produced by Jeffrey Abelson, the video organically integrated footage of the film in a specially designed haunted house, lined with neon in its entirety. The film footage was intercut with a humorous performance by Parker and featured cameo appearances by celebrities who joined in the call and response chorus, including Chevy Chase, Irene Cara, John Candy, Nickolas Ashford, Melissa Gilbert, Jeffrey Tambor, George Wendt, Al Franken, Danny DeVito, Carly Simon, Peter Falk, and Teri Garr. The video ends with footage of the four main Ghostbusters actors, in costume and character, dancing in Times Square behind Parker, joining in the singing.
The sequel spawned two singles from the soundtrack. R&B artist Bobby Brown had a successful hit with "On Our Own", while hip hop group Run-D.M.C. were commissioned to perform "Ghostbusters (rap version)" for the sequel.
Merchandise [ edit ]
The film spawned a theme park special effects show at Universal Studios Florida that closed in 1996. The Ghostbusters were later featured in a lip-synching dance show including Beetlejuice on the steps of the New York Public Library facade at the park. The characters were all new and "extreme" versions in the show, save for the Zeddemore character. Their Ecto-1 automobile was used to drive them around the park, and was often used in the park's annual "Macy's Holiday Parade." For the show, an experimental silicone skin was used on Slimer, which took two weeks to put together.[82] The show, Ecto-1, and all other Ghostbuster trademarks were discontinued in 2005 when Universal failed to renew the rights for theme park use.
The National Entertainment Collectibles Association (NECA) released a line of 7" scale action figures based on the first movie, but only produced a series of ghost characters, as Murray refused the rights to use his facial likeness. Their first and only series included Gozer, Slimer (or Onionhead), the Terror Dogs: Zuul and Vinz Clortho, and a massive Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, contrasting the diminutive figure that was in the original figure line.[83]
Ertl released a die-cast 1/25 scale Ectomobile, also known as the Ecto-1, the Ghostbusters' main transportation. Rubies' Costumes has produced a Ghostbusters Halloween costume, consisting of a one-piece jumpsuit with logos and an inflatable Proton Pack.
By 2007, Ghostbusters merchandise sales had exceeded $1 billion in revenue.[84]
Art Asylum's Minimates toy-line features a Ghostbusters sub-line, including a box set of characters from the 2009 video game. Extreme Ghostbusters has also seen a line of children's toys released by Trendmasters.[85][unreliable source] Toys R Us released the Villains Series 3 of the Ghostbusters Minimates in January 2010.[86]
The Parallax Corporation[87] produces a line of marshmallows in a collectible box licensed under the Stay Puft Marshmallows brand.[88]
Mattel has produced a series of action figures based on characters from both the 1984 & 1989 movies and the 2009 video game, most of which were sold exclusively on their MattyCollector.Com webstore. This 6" line featured Peter, Ray, Egon, Winston, Gatekeeper Dana, Keymaster Louis, Walter Peck, Vigo the Carpathian, and most of |
that we only had a minute — asked her what she made of the concept. She said it was fun and had already led to a number of interesting conversations and voicemail messages (more times than not, the person asleep doesn’t answer and their phone eventually goes to voicemail, something Wakie is planning to address). Given the anonymous nature of the app, I also asked her if she had ever encountered any abuse. No, she said, the Wakie community had thus far remained friendly.
After our call, ‘Natalie’ posted a message on Wakie’s in-app forum, a place where users can converse and, potentially, try to connect with the person they have just spoken to. Her message was addressed to “English journalist dude”, giving me (or any other member of the community) a chance to reply. This also hints at where the app’s future lies.
A paid-for ‘Premium’ version of Wakie is in the works that will extend the talk time for each wake up call to 5 minutes, and allow you to specify the gender of the person you are connected to and see their profile after the call, depending on their individual privacy settings.
“Also we are working on adding clever robo-calls. You will have an ability to set an alarm clock just for you: it will tell you the weather in your city, news from your industry, interesting facts and much more,” adds Adjamian. “Another thing that we’ve already tested is a Celebrity alarm clock. You can buy an alarm clock of your idol and get different pre-recorded calls from him every day. Celebrities promote their alarm clocks on their social network pages. The revenue is shared.”What are the haps my friends
all your problems are over
June 27th, 2007: Since I kinda did a comic about it, here is the latest update on the 'getting my fridge repaired' situation. If you're not interested in the Status of the Fridge of a Guy on the Internet, now would be a good place to stop reading! Okay SO the repair guy called and said he'd be by, then called JUST NOW to say that he was downstairs and ringing the doorbell. But the doorbell wasn't ringing. I verified the address and then went downstairs to meet him and he was gone! And he's not answering his cell phone either. POSSIBLE THEORIES: He was never there, but just a figment of my ice-cream starved mind.
He WAS there, but quickly phased to an alternate universe and right now Alternate Ryan is getting his fridge fixed. Screw you, Alternate Ryan!
He was at the wrong address, but the person there needed their fridge fixed too and took advantage of the situation. Screw you, opportunistic dude that fate likes better than me apparently! MORE UPDATES AS THE SITUATION PROGRESSES
GUESS WHAT JUST CAME OUT: IT'S MY NEW BOOK!! If you've ever wondered what you'd do if you were stranded in the past, wonder no longer! With HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING, you'll reinvent civilization from scratch, no matter what time period you're in. You'll become the single most influential, decisive, and important person ever born. You'll make history...
...better.
Here's the trailer!
One year ago today: i peeked in high school
– RyanHere’s a brief overview of some of the most talked about concept cars from this year’s Tokyo Motor Show.
Mazda RX-VISION Concept
The unveiling of the RX-Vision Concept at the Tokyo Motor Show has given die-hard rotary fans hope that Mazda is still planning on eventually reviving the production rotary-powered vehicle. Dubbed the Skyactiv-R, the rotary engine which sits inside the RX-Vision—and whose compact dimensions allow the vehicle to wear such a low hoodline—is said to have been under development since the demise of the last rotary sports car, the Mazda RX-8. The RX-Vision’s stretched 106.3-inch wheelbase, short front and rear overhangs and 20-inch wheels combine for a svelte, athletic look. Just a concept for now, let’s hope Mazda do decide to revive the rotary and send it to market in a body looking similar to the displayed RX-Vision concept.
Yamaha Sports Ride Concept
The Yamaha Sports Ride could potentially be “the first affordable high-volume carbon-fiber chassis structure, bringing Formula 1 materials and technology within reach of the everyday motorist.” If it’s ever green-lighted for production, that is (Yamaha was not forthcoming when asked if the concept would eventually go on sale to the general public). With the front end of a Yamaha R6, the dimensions of a Mazda MX-5 Miata, and two high-exit dual exhausts, the 1,650-lbs. mini-supercar was understandably a fan favorite amongst those covering the TMS. And thinking about the plethora of high-revving performance engines at the disposal of Yamaha to potentially power the Sports Ride concept, well, it just makes us want it even more.
Nissan Concept 2020 Vision Gran Turismo
The Nissan Concept 2020 Vision Gran Turismo—a concept vehicle that lives in the both the physical and digital worlds—made a cameo appearance at the Tokyo Motor Show, finished in a striking hue called Fire Knight Red. Seen by most as a preview of what the next-generation GT-R could look like, the Concept 2020 VGT made its real-world debut at the 2014 Goodwood Festival of Speed, following its release as a playable car in PlayStation’s Gran Turismo 6. It’s rumored the next GT-R will come with as much as 800-hp, using a hybrid powertrain engineered in joint with F1 constructor Williams.
Toyota S-FR Concept
It appears Toyota are very close to introducing an entry-level sports car into their lineup, falling below the GT86 and sandwiching the GT86 between the “small, front-engine rear-drive” concept and the rumored Supra successor. Leaked specifications indicate the S-FR will be powered by a 1.5-liter 4-cylinder gas engine with 128-hp and 109-ft lbs. of torque. Early rumors suggest a price of roughly $12,500 for the Japanese market, with production beginning in late 2016 and first deliveries commencing early 2017. It’s currently unknown whether the S-FR will make it to the US or European markets.HOUSTON — The city of Dickinson, Texas, is requiring applicants for Hurricane Harvey rebuilding funds to certify in writing that they will not take part in a boycott of Israel. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the city’s condition as a violation of free speech rights.
“The First Amendment protects Americans’ right to boycott, and the government cannot condition hurricane relief or any other public benefit on a commitment to refrain from protected political expression,” said ACLU of Texas Legal Director Andre Segura. “Dickinson’s requirement is an egregious violation of the First Amendment, reminiscent of McCarthy-era loyalty oaths requiring Americans to disavow membership in the Communist party and other forms of ‘subversive’ activity.”
The city’s website says that it is accepting applications from individuals and businesses for grants from money donated for hurricane relief. The application says that by signing it, “the Applicant verifies that the Applicant: (1) does not boycott Israel; and (2) will not boycott Israel during the term of this Agreement.”
The city appears to be enforcing a recently passed Texas law that requires all state contractors to certify that they are not participating in boycotts of Israel. While the ACLU does not take a position on boycotts of foreign countries, the organization has long supported the right to participate in political boycotts and has voiced opposition to laws and bills that infringe on the right to boycott.
The Supreme Court ruled decades ago that political boycotts are protected by the First Amendment, and other decisions have established that the government may not require individuals to sign a certification regarding their political expression in order to obtain employment, contracts, or other benefits.
On October 11, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit challenging a Kansas law on behalf of a high school math teacher who is being required by the state to certify that she won’t boycott Israel if she wants to take part in a teacher training program.
In July, the ACLU sent a letter to members of Congress opposing a bill that would make it a felony to support certain boycotts of companies doing business in Israel and its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. As a result, Senate sponsors of the bill are considering changes.Sections of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston will be closed to traffic for the next few weeks as crews work to replace the part of the roadway that spans over the Mass Pike.
State officials are warning of "hellish" traffic and urging people to stay away from the area if possible.
"If you don't need to be here, don't come anywhere near the area," Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack told WBUR.
But, if you're one of the (many) people who need to get around the area, here's what you should know:
Drivers
Commonwealth Avenue
Comm. Ave. will be closed to traffic between Kenmore Square and Packard's Corner from 7 p.m. on July 27 through 5 a.m. on Aug. 14. The Department of Transportation says access for businesses and residents will be maintained between Packard's Corner and St. Paul Street as well as between St. Marys Street and Kenmore Square, though no private vehicle access will be permitted between St. Paul and St. Marys streets.
Here's how MassDOT suggests you get around the closure:
Get full detour details here.
Boston University Bridge
The BU Bridge will be closed to all public traffic from 7 p.m. on July 27 through 5 a.m. on Aug. 14. (MBTA buses will still be permitted to pass. More details on bus detours below.)
Here's how MassDOT suggests you get around the closure:
Get full detour details here.
Storrow Drive
The University Road exit from Storrow Drive will be closed from 7 p.m. on July 27 through 5 a.m. on Aug. 14.
Mass Pike
The Mass Pike between the Allston-Brighton interchange and the Beacon Street overpass went down to three lanes in each direction earlier this month. Starting at 9 p.m. on July 28, travel will be restricted to two lanes in each direction through 5 a.m. on Aug. 7.
There will be further lane reductions during off-peak hours as the bridge replacement project progresses:
Between July 28 and Aug. 1 from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. there will be just one eastbound lane open and two westbound lanes.
Between Aug. 2 and Aug. 7 from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. there will be just one westbound lane open and two eastbound lanes.
On weekend days — from 9 p.m. on Fridays to 5 a.m. on Mondays — those lane reduction patterns will occur all day.
There are also a couple of ramp closures:
The eastbound on-ramp from Cambridge Street/Soldiers Field Road will be closed from 9 p.m. on July 28 through 5 a.m. on Aug. 7.
The westbound exit 20 off-ramp will be closed from approximately 9 p.m. on Aug. 1 through approximately 5 a.m. on Aug. 7.
See MassDOT's Mass Pike detour maps here and get the full details here.
Other Notes
-Memorial Drive in Cambridge, which is normally closed to traffic between Western Avenue and Mount Auburn Street on Sundays in the summer, will remain open on July 30 and Aug. 6.
-Carlton Street will be closed to vehicles from 7 p.m. July 27 through 5 a.m. Aug. 14.
Pedestrians and Cyclists
Full access will be maintained for pedestrians and cyclists across Commonwealth Avenue and over the BU Bridge throughout the project. However, Mountfort Street will be closed.
Here's MassDOT's recommended detour route:
There will also be additional Hubway stations on Comm. Ave. during the shutdown, at Babcock Street and Silber Way. That's in addition to the stations already in the area. (See Hubway's station map here.)
MassDOT says Hubway employees will be at the Babcock Street and Silber Way locations to assist customers Mondays through Fridays from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. They will also have additional bikes available.
During construction Hubway is offering a single ride pass for $1 or a $20 discount on an yearlong membership via their new app.
MBTA Passengers
Green B Line
The Green B Line will be replaced with shuttle buses between Babcock Street and Blandford Street stations from 9 p.m. on July 26 to 5 a.m. on Aug. 14. Those shuttles will not stop at BU West or BU Central when heading inbound. Get all the details here.
Workers remove MBTA Green Line B branch tracks on Commonwealth Avenue on Thursday, as part of the bridge replacement. The Peter Pan buses, at left, are shuttling MBTA riders. (Kathleen Dubos for WBUR)
Commuter Rail/Amtrak
The Framingham/Worcester Line, which runs under the Comm. Ave. bridge alongside the Pike, will run as normal on weekdays.
During the weekends of July 29/30 and Aug. 5/6, service will terminate at Boston Landing and shuttle service will be provided to Reservoir Station on the Green Line's D branch. There will be additional service around Red Sox games those weekends. Here are the full details.
Bus
MBTA bus routes 47 and CT2 will need to follow detours from 7 p.m. on July 27 to 5 a.m. on Aug. 14, though they are allowed to travel over the BU Bridge.
There will be no service to Mountfort St. at Lenox St. (inbound) and Mountfort St. at Carlton St. (outbound). Instead, inbound passengers will be able to use stops at the BU Bridge at Comm. Ave. and at St. Marys Street at Comm. Ave, and outbound passengers may use stops at Comm. Ave. at St. Marys Street and Comm. Ave. at University Road.
(MassDOT)
Route 57 will operate its normal route, though it will not stop at Comm. Ave. and Carlton Street or Comm. Ave. and St. Marys Street from 7 p.m. on July 27 through Aug. 13.
Get the full bus detour details here.
The state is urging people to bike and walk in the area, especially for short trips, and encouraging the use of Hubway. To that end, they've created this guide for walking and biking times between Babcock Street and Kenmore Square:
You can keep track of the project via this timelapse from Boston University.The Perceptions of Pregnancy blog, like the Researchers’ Network, aims to reach beyond boundaries and borders, and to facilitate an international and interdisciplinary conversation on pregnancy and its associated bodily and emotional experiences from the medieval to the modern. Today’s post is contributed by Beth Widmaier Capo, a professor of English at Illinois College, Jacksonville.
In 2007 I interviewed my mother, Nancy Watters Widmaier, about her experience with the Detroit Feminist Women’s Health Center in the 1970s.[i] Although she earned her nursing degree in the 1960s, she wasn’t part of the FWHM until after her own pregnancy. In 1973, she “decided that I was going to have a natural childbirth, which was kind of new at the time, so I went to a class on the Lamaze method and read a lot of books. Basically I didn’t want to take any Demerol or drugs that would make you sleepy or possibly affect the baby so that’s why I thought natural childbirth was good.... It was kind of radical for its time; all of my friends went in and asked for pain medicines.”
During delivery, “I pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed for hours and hours and hours …. They had me lying flat on my back with my legs in stir-ups rather than letting me sit in any other position. Once you go into labor and your water breaks, they won’t let you get up and walk around or anything and I thought that was terrible. I kept getting up and going to the bathroom and they would just yell at me ‘you’re not supposed to get up!’ but I did anyway.”
Later that year she attended a self-help clinic at the new Detroit FWHC. “A friend of mine, one of the more radical people I knew, read in the newspaper that there was going to be a self-help clinic to learn vaginal self-examination.... I said, ‘Oh, I don’t need that. I know all about women’s bodies. But I’ll go to keep you company if you want.’ I went and was amazed at all that I learned.”
“The night of the first self-help clinic, [the organizer] was explaining things to people, showing slides, talking about the advantages of self-examinations and talking about how women could take control of their own bodies and take the power away from the male medical profession and win some of that power themselves. Little light bulbs kept going off in my head, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. Oh, that’s a good idea.’ And then Cathy[ii] took her pants off and got up on the table and inserted the speculum and showed everybody her cervix. My jaw dropped. ‘That woman took her pants off in public!’ It was all women, but everybody was a little surprised. It was so fascinating; nobody was offended. Cathy passed out speculums and invited everybody else to do it. Very few actually did do it that night in front of everybody else, but everybody took a speculum and went home and it did in private, I’m sure.”
Mom volunteered with the DFWHC for four years. “I was there almost every day of the week because I enjoyed it.... I volunteered to work in the clinics: I did a lot of fitting diaphragms and teaching self-exams. Everyone who came in the door was offered a chance to learn a self-exam and given their own speculum.... At first we started off doing pregnancy screenings: women would come in and we’d do a urine test. We would just do it in front of them and say ‘if the hormone’s in there and it’s clear, it will turn cloudy and if it’s not, it will be clear. So what do you think this is, cloudy or clear?’ They made their own decisions, we didn’t say ‘You’re pregnant’ or ‘You’re not.’ We’d do a vaginal exam and say ‘if your cervix is not pregnant, it feels like the tip of your nose and if it’s pregnant, it’s softer than that.... We would counsel them about their options: adoption, pregnancies, deliveries and abortions.”
Through the DFWHC she became involved in the home birth movement. In late 1975 “I went and saw a couple of these home births and was amazed at the difference between hospital births, where people were hooked up to a lot of equipment and not allowed to get out of bed. At most of the home births there was no intervention and nature was just allowed to take its course. … The midwives never claimed to deliver babies; in fact I hardly ever saw them take the baby from the mother. Usually they would take the mother’s hand when the baby’s head was born, they would put the mother’s hand on the baby and she would be the one that would take it out of herself. It was amazing to see; it would help the baby’s head to come through so there wouldn’t be a lot of tearing.”
“There was this one Iranian woman. She never lay down until her baby’s head was crowning. She was just more comfortable up and moving around so she was cooking and washing, taking care of her other kid. Her mother was there, her sister was there and I was there the whole day long while she was in labor.... That baby was named after me.”
In all, she worked with the midwives for two years, helping deliver over thirty babies, stopping when she moved to a small town in Ohio: “It was politically in a different place; all these farmers couldn’t see the reasoning behind not going to the white-coated doctors and they thought it was terribly dangerous not to have your baby in a hospital and they couldn’t see the fact that keeping a woman monitored and off her feet during labor was causing problems, that scheduled Cesarean is not the desirable way to have a baby. I didn’t talk about my past to them because none of them were in a place where they could really understand anything that I said. People would have thought I was strange—‘You touched your own vagina, why would you want to do that? You better wash your hands’.”
Nancy Widmaier worked as a nurse until retirement, and passed away in 2008.
About the Author
Beth Widmaier Capo is Professor of English and Gender & Women’s Studies at Illinois College in Jacksonville, IL. She is the author of Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2007) and various articles on American literature, feminist activism, and pedagogy.
________________
[i] For brevity, feminist women’s health movement will be abbreviated FWHM in the text of this piece; feminist women’s health center will be abbreviated FWHC.
My thanks to Claire Brakel Packer for her transcription of the interview in 2007, to Marion Banzhaf for the original idea to do the interview, and to Kit-Bacon Gressitt and Jodie Lawston for reading and commenting on a longer essay regarding the interview.
For more on the Feminist Women’s Health Movement, see Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (2007); Sandra Morgen, Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990 (2002); Wendy Kline, Bodies of Knowledge: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Women’s Health in the Second Wave (2010); and Michelle Murphy, “Immodest Witnessing: The Epistemology of Vaginal Self-Examination in the U.S. Feminist Self-Help Movement” (Feminist Studies 30.1 2004: 115-147).
[ii] Cathy Courtney founded the Detroit FWHC along with Jacki Stefko.
Advertisements(CNBC) U.S. equities closed lower on Friday after the release of key employment data while investors braced themselves for the election next week.
The Dow Jones industrial average held flat, with Caterpillar contributing the most gains and Procter & Gamble the most losses. The S&P 500 gained 0.1 percent and was looking to snap an eight-day losing streak, with health care rising more than 1 percent to lead advancers and consumer staples leading decliners. The Nasdaq composite held just above breakeven.
“Nobody wants to do anything today. … Everybody is on hold for Tuesday,” said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade. “I think next week you’ll start seeing Wall Street coronate winners and losers. What I mean is you’re going to start seeing investors switching sectors very quickly.”One of the key messages of tonight’s State of the Union address will be President Obama’s willingness to bypass Congress to create jobs and reduce inequality. As luck would have it, yesterday a new government report detailed an innovation that would preserve one of the largest job creators in the country, save billions of dollars specifically for the poor, and develop the very ladders of opportunity that Obama has championed as of late. What’s more, this could apparently be accomplished without Congressional action, but merely through existing executive prerogatives.
What’s the policy? Letting the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offer basic banking services to customers, like savings accounts, debit cards and even simple loans. The idea has been kicked around policy circles for years, but now it has a crucial new adherent: the USPS Inspector General, who endorsed the initiative in a comprehensive white paper.
The Inspector General, who conducted the study with the help of a team of experts in international postal banking as well as a former executive from Merrill Lynch, correctly frames the proposal not as a challenge to mega-banks, but as a way to deliver needed amenities to the nearly 68 million Americans—over one-quarter of U.S. households—who have limited or no access to financial services. Instead of banks, these mostly low-income individuals use check-cashing stores, pawnshops, payday lenders, and other unscrupulous financial services providers who gouged their customers to the tune of $89 billion in interest and fees in 2012, according to the IG report. Post offices could deliver the same services at a 90 percent discount, saving the average underserved household over $2,000 a year and still providing the USPS with $8.9 billion in new annual profits, significantly improving its troubled balance sheet. The report calls simple financial services “the single best new opportunity for the posts to earn additional revenue.”
As America becomes more of a cashless society, more reliant on some level of financial services (try renting a car without a credit card), the 68 million under-banked are essentially forced into working with predatory businesses, without the kind of low-cost alternative the post office could provide. Banks don’t want these customers; if they did, they would actually make a play for their business. Large banks have closed branches in the very low-income communities with the largest percentages of unbanked Americans. In fact, banks find it more profitable to fund payday lenders that charge junk fees and outrageous interest—currently the subject of a Justice Department investigation—than actually take market share away from them.(Newser) – When Tini Owens says she's trapped in a loveless marriage, she means it. Owens, 65, was denied a divorce from her millionaire husband of 39 years after he told a UK judge their "minor" disagreements are simply a part of married life, reports the Times. In a case last year, Owens had petitioned the court for a divorce, complaining of "continued beratement" from her husband following her affair in 2012. Hugh Owens, 78, admitted he often "teases" his wife "in a very loud voice," but said he'd forgiven her infidelity and believed the pair should remain married into old age, per the Mirror. The judge sided with the husband, noting Tini's complaints were "of the kind to be expected in marriage" and "an exercise in scraping the barrel."
During an appeals court hearing on Tuesday, Tini—who has slept apart from her husband for several years and now lives away from their Worcestershire home—said she feels "unloved, isolated and alone." A judge responded that "it is not a ground for divorce if you find yourself in a wretchedly unhappy marriage." That provoked Tini's lawyer to call for the law to change to introduce "no-fault" divorces "in line with current thinking and social norms." He says it's unfair of a judge to ask his client to live separately from her husband for five years before again filing for divorce without his consent given their ages, per the Telegraph. It isn't clear when a decision is expected. (A man blames Uber for his divorce.)How to Vote for Bernie Sanders in California.
Michael Ludden Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 26, 2016
UPDATE 4: Only 17? You CAN vote in the California Democratic Primary if you will turn 18 by November 8, 2016. See details on how below.
UPDATE 3: Away for College in another State? You CAN vote in the California Democratic Primary either in California or from the state where you’re enrolled in college!
UPDATE 2: Military overseas? You CAN vote in the California Democratic Primary by requesting a ballot here:
Update 1: Working during voting hours? Your employer must legally PAY YOU UP TO TWO HOURS and allow you to take sufficient time off at the beginning or end of your shift to vote.
NOTE: I’m only walking through online instructions here. For more info go to http://voteforbernie.org/state/california/
California, home to nearly 40 million people, 4 of the country’s largest 15 cities and, most importantly for the Bernie Sanders’ campaign, 475 unpledged Democratic delegates up for grabs - excluding unpledged “Superdelegates” which can’t pledge until the Democratic National Convention in late July — holds the penultimate and arguably most important Democratic Primary of the 2016 Presidential Election on June 7th.
This is because America’s most populous State has the power to flip the Democratic Primary on its head in terms of both the delegate lead, as of this writing around a 250 deficit for Sanders, and popular vote, which stands at around a 2.7 million person gap right now — which doesn’t take into account the hundreds of thousands of not-counted provisional ballots nationwide or the millions of disenfranchised independent voters, the largest voting block in the USA today which favors sanders overwhelmingly. Bernie Sanders needs the leverage of EITHER the popular vote OR the delegate lead (but both would be nice) before the July convention in order to be able to convince “SuperDelegates” there to switch proportionally to support him — and California, believe it or not, has the power to give Sanders both if we show up in record numbers.
But California has a semi-closed Primary system, meaning independent voters CAN vote alongside Democrats, but all have to take extra steps by May 23rd, well before the June 7th Primary date to ensure their vote counts.
A double-digit win in California is a realistic goal for the Sanders campaign given the incredible upward trend for him there — the most recent poll released has Sanders in a tie with Clinton after surging 12% in less than 18 days from being down by double digits (14%) on April 3rd. But it won’t happen without every eligible Bernie supporter canvassing, phone banking, sharing on social media, registering to vote and ultimately VOTING!
Here’s how to vote:
Verify your voter registration.
Go to https://eservices.sccgov.org/rov/ Select “Look up Voter Registration” and input the information requested. If you are registered you should receive a notification that looks like this:
Note that it tells you that you are registered to vote and the county info
Register. (if you’re already registered, skip to the Vote section)
Go to http://registertovote.ca.gov/ Fill out the information in the forms until you get to the Political Party Preference section. For independents wishing to vote for Bernie Sanders:
Select “No, I do not want to disclose a political party preference”
4. For Democrats wishing to vote for Bernie Sanders:
Select “Yes, my political party preference is Democratic”
5. DO NOT select anything else or your vote won’t be counted.
After you submit your registration I recommend you Check your current status often up until June 7th to make sure you’re not accidentally “purged” as has happened in so many other places.
Vote.
VOTING EARLY (In Person): Anyone can vote early in-person from May 9 — June 7th, and while it’s you have to do some digging, you can get specific information on where to vote early in-person in your county here:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voting-resources/county-elections-offices/
I’m voting early on May 13th in Santa Clara County because there have been so many election day “issues” that affect likely Bernie Sanders voters that I would like to get it done early, and I don’t trust that my ballot won’t get “lost” in the mail if I do mail in.
VOTING ABSENTEE (By Mail): Anyone can vote by mail until May 31st — meaning they have to RECEIVE your mail in ballot by May 31st. You can download, fill out & mail that ballot any time you like here: http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/vote-by-mail/pdf/fill-in-vote-by-mail-app-instruct.pdf
VOTING ON PRIMARY DAY (In Person June 7th): Obviously most people will do this, but I recommend voting early in person if you can. Regardless you just need to show up to your local polling place on June 7th, which you can find here:
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/polling-place/
NOTE: Be sure to bring California ID! Either a Drivers License or photo ID plus proof of residence (bills mailed to you showing your address etc) should suffice.
If this is helpful to you please share far and wide on social media! EVERYONE who wants to vote for Bernie — even currently registered republicans — has the opportunity to register as a Democrat or “no party preference” and get their vote counted. We need to win California in a landslide, and we have the opportunity to DO JUST THAT.
Want to get more involved? The most effective method to win votes is to get out there and Canvass (I do! — it’s fun):
http://volunteerforbernie.com/Canvas/
And if you can’t do that, an easier method and actually the second most effective method to win over undecideds is to Phonebank (I do! — it’s easy):
https://berniesanders.com/phonebank
More information is available at http://voteforbernie.org/state/california/
Join the National and California communities on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident
https://www.reddit.com/r/CaliforniaForSanders
Let’s get out there and shock the world. Mobilize!
In solidarity,
Michael LuddenSep 29, 2014 at 4:38pm Paid for by patrons Community Chat: Why are you a space geek?
As this is the last show this month, we have a community chat once again. This week we ask, "Why are you a space geek?" In addition to the live conversation we had, we would love for you to leave your comments below as well! In Space News: CRS-4 Launches and Dragon berths Soyuz launches the next Space Station crew Sierra Nevada Protests Commercial Crew Award NASA Requests Proposals for Follow-on ISS Cargo Contract India puts their first interplanetary probe in orbit at Mars NASA's MAVEN spacecraft enters orbit around Mars Tickets Available for Ansari X Prize Celebration TMRO is a weekly show all about space and the comsos. Covering major events from NASA, ESA, JAXA, Roscosmos, SpaceX and more, TMRO is your weekly news and views show for every space geek! Featuring monthly live shows and weekly cosmic updates, get your Space Geek on right here! Don't forget to subscribe.Find the right combination! ChessBase 15 program + new Mega Database 2019 with 7.6 million games and more than 70,000 master analyses. Plus ChessBase Magazine (DVD + magazine) and CB Premium membership for 1 year!
In computer chess there is no getting past Komodo, a two-time ICGA Computer World Chess Champion. Find out how Komodo can take your game to the next level!
4/1/2013 – It has come to our attention that an application for Sainthood has been made for the late World Champion Bobby Fischer. This was initiated by Stan Vaughan of the World Chess Federation. The application cites six postmortem miracles that were prayed for and verified as having occurred – normally only two are required.
The "notification of verifiable postmortem miracles and request for sainthood for Icelander" was addressed to Father Jacob Rolland, as the Catholic minister who sanctified Bobby at his secret and speedy 10-minute burial in 2008. The letter, written by Stan Vaughan of the "World Chess Federation", was sent to Father Rolland and twelve further writers, journalists and chess personalities, including Fischer's friend Einar S. Einarsson of Reykjavik, Iceland, who passed it on to us (we were not on the list).
Fischer's grave in Selfoss, a small town about 40 miles from Reykjavik
"We have become convinced after five years of prayers made to Bobby Fischer that we thus notify you of these postmortem miracles in responses to our annual observations to remember his death January 17, 2008," the letter begins. It is declared an "application for Sainthood for Bobby Fischer" and a request "to declare the anniversary of his death January 17, 2008 as his day of sainthood". The miracles prayed for and verified as having occurred include the following (we quote verbatim):
In 2009 Prayers were made for middle east peace to Bobby Fischer and on January 17 Israel declared unilateral withdrawl and ceasefire from Gaza during Gaza war and later same day Hamas also declared cease fire.
In 2010 Prayers to Fischer to help 1 million victims of Haiti earthquake victims led to overwhelming amounts of aid arriving at Haiti airport on January 17, 2010
In 2011 Prayers to Fischer to help Christians gain relief from Sudan oppressors led to referendum and Jan 17 declaration that 99% vote in favor independence and oppressors recognized South Sudan independence
In 2012 prayers for peace led to Jan 17, 2012 first time in history India and China declaring plan to resolve long time border disputes
In 2013 prayers for release of Algerian hostages led to 100 plus hostages freed on Jan 17, 2013
We refrain from commenting on the viability of the application, and from reproducing the portrait picture of Father Jakob Rolland. We also do not wish to judge whether all this is in good taste or not. We are just reporting the facts.
Feedback and mail to our news service
Please use this account if you want to contribute to or comment on our news page servicePhotographs by Charles Steck
A new service is hoping there are enough lazy people in D.C. unwilling to leave their couches for booze to sustain its business of delivering liquor to residents in less than an hour.
Ultra, which already operates in the New York City area and Chicago, is launching in D.C. this week, and will deliver any amount of booze to someone for a $5 fee. Customers can log on to Ultra's website, orderultra.com, type in their ZIP code, and scroll the beer, wine, and liquor options.
Ultra is working with area liquor stores; what you see on its website reflect local inventories. The founder of Ultra, Aniket Shah, said he couldn't reveal partner liquor stores, but added that all of them have large selections. Customers pay for the liquor online, and then Ultra distributes the money to the local liquor stores. The delivery people are employees of the liquor stores.
The service seems like prime opportunity for underage drinkers who would prefer to pay for their booze online rather than over the counter. But Shah says the delivery people will check IDs |
Minister Margaret Thatcher, who lobbied hard on behalf of British industry. A Ministry of Defence briefing paper for Thatcher detailed her involvement in the negotiations:[13]
Since early 1984, intensive efforts have been made to sell Tornado and Hawk to the Saudis. When, in the Autumn of 1984, they seemed to be leaning towards French Mirage fighters, Mr Heseltine paid an urgent visit to Saudi Arabia, carrying a letter from the Prime Minister to King Fahd. In December 1984 the Prime Minister started a series of important negotiations by meeting Prince Bandar, the son of Prince Sultan. The Prime Minister met the King in Riyahd in April this year and in August the King wrote to her stating his decision to buy 48 Tornado IDS and 30 Hawk.
There were no conditions relating to security sector reform or human rights included in the contracts.[14] Contracts between BAE Systems and the Saudi government have been underwritten by the Export Credits Guarantee Department, a tax-payer funded insurance system. Guarantees on a contract worth up to £2.7billion were signed by the Government on 1 September 2003.[15] In December 2004, the Commons Trade Committee chairman, Martin O'Neill, accused the Government of being foolish for concealing a £1billion guarantee they have given to BAE Systems.[16]
Al Yamamah I [ edit ]
The first aircraft (two Hawks) were delivered on 11 August 1987 at BAE's Dunsfold facility.[17]
Al Yamamah II [ edit ]
Deliveries early 1990s – 1998
48 Panavia Tornado IDS'
Eurofighter Typhoon (al-Salam) [ edit ]
In December 2005 the governments of the UK and Saudi Arabia signed an "Understanding Document" which involved the sale of Typhoon aircraft to replace RSAF Tornados and other aircraft. Although no details were released, reports suggested the deal involved the supply of 72 aircraft. On 18 August 2006 a contract was signed for 72 aircraft. The aircraft cost approximately £4.43 billion, and the full weapons system is expected to cost approximately £10 billion.[18]
Tornado upgrade [ edit ]
In February 2006 Air Forces Monthly suggested that the eventual Eurofighter order may reach 100 and the deal could include the upgrade of the RSAF's Tornado IDS aircraft, likely similar to the RAF's Tornado GR4 standard. In an editorial the magazine also raises the prospect of a requirement for a new lead-in fighter trainer to replace the earlier generation of Hawk 65/65As and to provide adequate training for transition of pilots to the advanced Typhoon.[19] BAE System's 2005 Interim Report noted that three RSAF Tornado IDS' arrived at their Warton facility for design evaluation tests with the ultimate aim being "to improve serviceability, address obsolescence, and enhance and sustain the capability of the aircraft". On 10 September 2006 BAE won a £2.5bn (€3.7bn, $4.6bn) contract for the upgrade of 80 RSAF Tornado IDS'.[20]
Corruption allegations [ edit ]
There have been numerous allegations that the Al Yamamah contracts were a result of bribes ("douceurs") to members of the Saudi royal family and government officials.
Some allegations suggested that the former prime minister's son Mark Thatcher may have been involved, however he has strongly denied receiving payments or exploiting his mother's connections in his business dealings.[21]
In February 2001, the solicitor of a former BAE Systems employee, Edward Cunningham, notified Serious Fraud Office of the evidence that his client was holding which related to an alleged "slush fund". The SFO wrote a letter to Kevin Tebbit at the MoD who notified the Chairman of BAE Systems[22] but not the Secretary of Defence.[23] No further action was taken until the letter was leaked to and reported on by The Guardian in September 2003.[24]
In May 2004, Sir Richard Evans appeared before parliament's defence select committee and said: "I can certainly assure you that we are not in the business of making payments to members of any government."[25]
In October 2004, the BBC's Money Programme broadcast an in-depth story, including allegations in interviews with Edward Cunningham and another former insider, about the way BAE Systems alleged to have paid bribes to Prince Turki bin Nasser and ran a secret £60 million slush fund in relation to the Al Yamamah deal.[26] Most of the money was alleged to have been spent through a front company called Robert Lee International Limited.
In June 2007 the BBC's investigative programme Panorama alleged that BAE Systems "..paid hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan."[27]
According to the Campaign Against The Arms Trade, successive UK governments have given support to British Aerospace Engineering (BAE). By doing so, have given support to the Saudi regime and undermined global efforts to eradicate corruption. It has brought into question the integrity of UK business more generally.[28]. In his book, David Wearing uses the example of F&C Asset Management, a major institutional investor, who (despite benefiting in the short term), warned the defence procurement minister that it would reduce the efficient functioning of financial markets as a whole. "We believe that, for long term investors, bribery and corruption distort and de-stabilise markets, expose companies to legal liabilities, disadvantage non-corrupt companies and reduce transparency...". Thus undermining national legislation governing corrupt practices [29].
1992 NAO report [ edit ]
The UK National Audit Office (NAO) investigated the contracts and has so far not released its conclusions – the only NAO report ever to be withheld. Official statements about the contents of the report go no further than to state that the then chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, now Lord Sheldon, considered the report in private in February 1992, and said: "I did an investigation and I find no evidence that the MOD made improper payments. I have found no evidence of fraud or corruption. The deal... complied with Treasury approval and the rules of Government accounting."[30]
In July 2006, Sir John Bourn, the head of the NAO, refused to release a copy to the investigators of an unpublished report into the contract that had been drawn up in 1992.[31]
The MP Harry Cohen said, "This does look like a serious conflict of interest. Sir John did a lot of work at the MoD on Al Yamamah and here we now have the NAO covering up this report."[31] In early 2002 he had proposed an Early Day Motion noting "that there have been... allegations made of large commission payments made to individuals in Saudi Arabia as part of... Al Yamamah... [and] that Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network have received substantial funds from individuals in Saudi Arabia."[32]
Serious Fraud Office investigation [ edit ]
The Serious Fraud Office was reported to be considering opening an investigation into an alleged £20 million slush fund on 12 September 2003, the day after The Guardian had published its slush fund story.[33] The SFO also investigated BAE's relationship with Travellers World Limited.[34]
In November 2004 the SFO made two arrests as part of the investigation.[35] BAE Systems stated that they welcomed the investigation and "believe[d] that it would put these matters to rest once and for all."[36]
In late 2005, BAE refused to comply with compulsory production notices for details of its secret offshore payments to the Middle East.[37] The terms of the investigation was for a prosecution under Part 12 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001.
Threats by the Saudi government [ edit ]
At the end of November 2006, when the long-running investigation was threatening to go on for two more years,[38] BAE Systems was negotiating a multibillion-pound sale of Eurofighter Typhoons to Saudi Arabia. According to the BBC the contract was worth £6billion with 5,000 people directly employed in the manufacture of the Eurofighter,[39] while other reports put the value at £10billion with 50,000 jobs at stake.[40]
On 1 December The Daily Telegraph ran a front-page headline suggesting that Saudi Arabia had given the UK ten days to suspend the Serious Fraud Office investigation into BAE/Saudi Arabian transactions or they would take the deal to France,[40] but this threat was played down in other quarters. A French official had said "the situation was complex and difficult... and there was no indication to suggest the Saudis planned to drop the Eurofighter." This analysis was confirmed by Andrew Brookes, an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who said "there could be an element here of trying to scare the SFO off. Will it mean they do not buy the Eurofighter? I doubt it."[41]
There were reports of a systematic PR campaign operated by Tim Bell through newspaper scare stories, letters from business owners and MPs in whose constituencies the factories were located to get the case closed.[37]
Robert Wardle, head of the SFO, also stated (in a later High Court challenge, see below) that he had received a direct threat of a cessation of counterterrorist co-operation from the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the UK, in the first of three meetings held to assess the seriousness of the threat: "as he put it to me, British lives on British streets were at risk".
Article 5 of the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery prohibits the decision to drop investigations into corruption from being influenced by considerations of the national economic interest or the potential effect upon relations with another state. This does not however explicitly exclude grounds of national security.[42]
This prompted the investigation team to consider striking an early guilty plea deal with BAE that would minimise the intrusiveness to Saudi Arabia and mitigate damage. The Attorney General agreed the strategy, but briefed Prime Minister Blair - who in a reply dated 5 December 2006 - urged that the case be dropped. Despite affirming his government's commitment to bribery prosecution, he stressed the financial and counter-terrorism implications. That same day, Prince Bandar met with Foreign Office officials, after spending a week with Jacques Chirac to negotiate a French alternative to the BAE deal.[43]
A week later, after consultation with the SFO, the Attorney General met with Blair to argue against dropping the case. It was Blair's opinion that "Any proposal that the investigation be resolved by parties pleading guilty to certain charges would be unlikely to reduce the offence caused to the Saudi Royal Family, even if the deal were accepted, and the process would still drag out for a considerable period".
On 13 December, the Director of the SFO wrote to the Attorney General to inform him that the SFO was dropping the investigation and would not be looking into the Swiss bank accounts, citing "real and imminent damage to the UK's national and international security and would endanger the lives of UK citizens and service personnel."[44]
Investigation discontinued [ edit ]
On 14 December 2006, the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith announced that the investigation was being discontinued on grounds of the public interest.[45] The 15-strong team had been ordered to turn in their files two days before.[37] The statement in the House of Lords read:
The Director of the Serious Fraud Office has decided to discontinue the investigation into the affairs of BAE Systems plc as far as they relate to the Al Yamamah defence contract. This decision has been taken following representations that have been made both to the Attorney General and the Director concerning the need to safeguard national and international security. It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest.[46]
The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, justified the decision by saying "Our relationship with Saudi Arabia is vitally important for our country in terms of counter-terrorism, in terms of the broader Middle East, in terms of helping in respect of Israel and Palestine. That strategic interest comes first."[47]
Jonathan Aitken, a former Conservative government minister and convicted perjurer, who was connected with the deals in the 1980s, said that even if the allegations against BAE were true, it was correct to end the investigation to maintain good relations with Saudi Arabia.[48]
Mark Pieth, director of anti-fraud section at the OECD, on behalf of the United States, Japan, France, Sweden, Switzerland and Greece, addressed a formal complaint letter before Christmas 2006 to the Foreign Office, seeking explanation as to why the investigation had been discontinued.[49] Transparency International and Labour MP Roger Berry, chairman of the Commons Quadripartite Committee, urged the government to reopen the corruption investigation.[50]
In a newspaper interview, Robert Wardle, head of the Serious Fraud Office, acknowledged that the decision to terminate the investigation may have damaged "the reputation of the UK as a place which is determined to stamp out corruption".[51]
Delivery of the first two Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft (of 72 purchased by the Saudi Air Force) took place in June 2009.[52]
Judicial review [ edit ]
A judicial review of the decision by the SFO to drop the investigation was granted on 9 November 2007.[53] On 10 April 2008 the High Court of Justice ruled that the SFO "acted unlawfully" by dropping its investigation.[54] The Times described the ruling as "one of the most strongly worded judicial attacks on government action" which condemned how "ministers 'buckled' to 'blatant threats' that Saudi cooperation in the fight against terror would end unless the...investigation was dropped."[55]
On 24 April the SFO was granted leave to appeal to the House of Lords against the ruling.[56] There was a two-day hearing before the Lords on 7 and 8 July 2008.[57] On 30 July the House of Lords unanimously overturned the High Court ruling, stating that the decision to discontinue the investigation was lawful.[58]
OECD investigation [ edit ]
The OECD sent their inspectors to the UK to establish the reasons behind the dropping of the investigation in March 2007.[59] The OECD also wished to establish why the UK had yet to bring a prosecution since the incorporation of the OECD's anti-bribery treaty into UK law.[59]
US Department of Justice investigation [ edit ]
On 26 June 2007 BAE announced that the United States Department of Justice had launched its own investigation into Al Yamamah. It was looking into allegations that a US bank had been used to funnel payments to Prince Bandar.[60] The Riggs Bank has been mentioned in some accounts.[61] On 19 May 2008 BAE confirmed that its CEO Mike Turner and non-executive director Nigel Rudd had been detained "for about 20 minutes" at George Bush Intercontinental and Newark airports respectively the previous week and that the DOJ had issued "a number of additional subpoenas in the US to employees of BAE Systems plc and BAE Systems Inc as part of its ongoing investigation".[62] The Times suggests that, according to Alexandra Wrage of Trace International, such "humiliating behaviour by the DOJ" is unusual toward a company that is co-operating fully.[62]
Under a plea bargain with the US Department of Justice BAE was sentenced in March 2010 by US District Court Judge John D. Bates to pay a $400 million fine, one of the largest fines in the history of the DOJ. US District Judge John Bates said the company's conduct involved "deception, duplicity and knowing violations of law, I think it's fair to say, on an enormous scale".[63] BAE was not convicted of bribery, and is thus not internationally blacklisted from future contracts.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]The media would like you to believe that everyone under 35 is either cowering in fear of a Trump presidency or taking to the streets to protest it. In reality, more millennials support the President-elect than at any other time since he announced his bid for the White House in June 2015.
According to a poll released by CNN, Trump received a significant post-election bounce from the American public. Overall, 47 percent people have a favorable opinion of the President-elect — that’s an 11-point jump in a month.
Trump is also doing better among millennials. 40 percent have a favorable opinion of him, while 42 percent approve of the job he’s doing with his transition team.
Millennials also believe that Trump will be a positive force for change in their future; 53-to-43 percent believe he will change the country for the better.
They also think Trump can keep some of his economic campaign promises. Of those surveyed, 59 percent believe he will create good-paying jobs in economically challenged areas, and 71 percent believe he will repeal and replace Obamacare. Meanwhile, 58 percent think he will renegotiate NAFTA, and 48 percent think he will reduce corruption in Congress.
If Trump can deliver on any of these pledges, it’s guaranteed that he will see his numbers improve throughout his first term. The higher his approval rating, the greater chance he’ll have at bringing young people back into the Republican Party.
Latest Videos.- The veto of a religious freedom bill means faith-based groups that support marriage as a union of a man and a woman won’t have needed protections, the state’s Catholic bishops said.
“The Virginia Catholic Conference is deeply dismayed by the governor’s action,” the conference said March 30. “This veto risks the destruction of Virginia’s long tradition of upholding the religious freedom of faith communities which dates back to Thomas Jefferson.”
The bill would have forbidden the state of Virginia from punishing religious groups that follow their sincerely held beliefs that marriage is between a man and a woman. The bill passed the House of Delegates by a vote of 59-38 and the Senate by 21-19.
Virginia’s Catholic conference said the bill would ensure “that clergy and religious organizations are not penalized by the government.” The bill would also protect these individuals and organizations from civil liability.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, vetoed the bill on live radio Wednesday. He claimed that signing the bill would be “making Virginia unwelcome to same-sex couples, while artificially engendering a sense of fear and persecution among our religious communities.”
He also cited corporation leaders’ opposition to the bill, charging that it was “bad for business.”
“They don't want headaches coming from the state,” he said.
LGBT activist groups also opposed the bill.
The Catholic conference said that the bill does not apply to businesses, but “simply affirms the right of religious organizations to follow their religious beliefs.” The conference charged that Gov. McAuliffe’s veto “marginalizes religious believers who hold to the timeless truth about marriage.”
The legislation would have preserved “fair access to state resources” for clergy and religious organizations, including charities and schools, the conference said.
“Marriage is the first institution, written in natural law and existing before any government or religion, and is between one man and one woman,” the conference added. “Recognizing and honoring this institution is not discrimination, but counting people’s faith against them most certainly is.”
Sen. Charles W. Carrico Sr. (R-Grayson) sponsored the bill. He told the Washington Post he believes there will be lawsuits against churches.
“I think you see a trend around the country right now to promote homosexual beliefs, and I think you see that trend happening on a wide-scale basis,” he said.
The Virginia legislature could override the veto, but that is considered very unlikely, the Associated Press reports.
Other bills to protect religious freedom have drawn significant opposition in recent years. In Georgia on Monday, Republican Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed another proposed religious freedom protection bill.
In some states and the District of Columbia, new laws and funding decisions have shut down Catholic adoption agencies on the grounds they do not place children with same-sex couples. Some Catholic schools have also become the targets of lawsuits from employees fired for violating morals standards on sexual morality.
Wealthy funders like the Ford Foundation, the Arcus Foundation and the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund have poured millions of dollars into legal groups, law school projects and activist groups to counter religious freedom protections.
Photo credit: Joseph Sohm via www.shutterstock.com2 June 2015
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Summary
Several security improvements have been made to the Apache HTTP Server.
Software Description
apache2 - Apache HTTP server
Details
As a security improvement, this update makes the following changes to the Apache package in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS:
Added support for ECC keys and ECDH ciphers.
The SSLProtocol configuration directive now allows specifying the TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 protocols.
Ephemeral key handling has been improved, including allowing DH parameters to be loaded from the SSL certificate file specified in SSLCertificateFile.
The export cipher suites are now disabled by default.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.
This update may cause DH parameters to change which could impact certain Java clients. See http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/ssl/ssl_faq.html#javadh for more information.
ReferencesKABUL (Reuters) - A popular female politician in east Afghanistan died in hospital on Monday following a bomb attack on her vehicle last week, Afghan officials said, underscoring the growing dangers for women in the government.
Angiza Shinwari, in her mid-thirties, was at the start of a second term as a provincial council member in Nangarhar and had been transferred to Kabul for treatment. Her driver was killed in the explosion and four other people injured.
It was the second deadly attack on a female politician in three months, after outspoken parliamentarian Shukria Barakzai was targeted in November. Barakzai survived the suicide bombing, but at least three others were killed.
Female politicians are often threatened by their families as well as the Taliban, because taking a public role is considered indecent in much of ultra-conservative Afghanistan.
Colleagues described Shinwari as a determined defender of women’s rights in the ultra-conservative east and an active member of Nangarhar’s provincial council.
“She worked very hard, for women and for her own people,” said Muhtarama Amin, a friend and former provincial council member in Nangarhar.
Amin left her post last year to teach at university and wait for an opportunity to run for parliament.
“When I go to teach at university, I face a very bad, dangerous situation,” Amin said by telephone. “I am very afraid that the people sending me threats will try to kill me.”
Amin said she had appealed both to Afghan and foreign officials for protection without success. “All women working in government are in great danger. And the situation is especially bad for provincial council members,” Amin said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Shinwari kept a low profile, appearing in public with her face covered by a niqab, a Muslim veil leaving only the eyes visible.
In the more conservative parts of Afghanistan, even this is considered improper and women are pressured to wear the all-covering burqa, which covers the eyes with a fabric grill.
The governor of Nangarhar province blamed Kabul for Shinwari’s death. “Because of their carelessness, Shinwari passed away after surgery,” he said in a statement.
The president’s office described Shinwari in a statement as a teacher of Islamic sciences, a poet and a national hero.
Shinwari had lost both legs in the attack and doctors were unable to save her after surgery.RENTON, Wash. -- NFL referee Bill Leavy acknowledged he made mistakes in the Seattle Seahawks' 2006 Super Bowl loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The veteran official began an annual training-camp rules interpretation session with the Seattle media after practice on Friday by bringing up the subject without being asked.
"It was a tough thing for me. I kicked two calls in the fourth quarter and I impacted the game, and as an official you never want to do that," said the veteran of 15 NFL seasons and two Super Bowls.
"It left me with a lot of sleepless nights, and I think about it constantly," Leavy said of the February 2006 game. "I'll go to my grave wishing that I'd been better."
Several calls went against the Seahawks in their 21-10 loss to the Steelers. It was Seattle's only Super Bowl appearance.
This week is the first time since that game Leavy has been in Seattle with the Seahawks. He and a mini-crew arrived Thursday to help with the team's practices and give it a rules presentation.
Leavy didn't specify which plays he "kicked" that day in Detroit.
"Bill's personal comments speak for themselves and we see no reason to add to them," NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Saturday.
Early in the fourth quarter, tackle Sean Locklear was called for holding on a pass completion that would have put the Seahawks at the Pittsburgh 1, in position for the go-ahead touchdown. After the penalty, Matt Hasselbeck threw an interception, and then was called for a low block on a play that ended with him tackling Pittsburgh's Ike Taylor on the defensive back's return.
The penalty moved the Steelers from their 29 to the 44. Pittsburgh used its better field position to score the clinching touchdown four plays later.
The next day, then-Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren told fans at a civic gathering at Qwest Field: "I knew it was going to be tough going up against the Pittsburgh Steelers. I didn't know we were going to have to play the guys in the striped shirts, as well."
Holmgren, now a top executive with the Cleveland Browns, has since said he's gotten over that game.
But Leavy hasn't.
"I know that I did my best at that time, but it wasn't good enough," said the retired police officer and firefighter in San Jose, Calif., who became an NFL referee in 2001. "When we make mistakes, you got to step up and own them. It's something that all officials have to deal with, but unfortunately when you have to deal with it in the Super Bowl it's difficult."
Hasselbeck said he and Leavy had a chance to talk last season and address the game.
"I think all of the officials we have in the NFL are stand-up guys and Leavy is no different," Hasselbeck said Saturday.
Bobby Engram, who spent eight seasons with the Seahawks and now is with the Browns, said the team wasn't playing its best that day anyway, on top of the momentum-changing calls.
"But I feel bad for the guy," Engram said. "These refs try hard and I respect what they do. It's not an easy job. It's a fast-paced game and a lot of big, strong guys are flying around. It's just unfortunate that he had a bad game in the Super Bowl."
When high-profile referee Ed Hochuli visited the Seahawks' training camp in the months after that Super Bowl, he and his crew took good-natured ribbing from players.
"The Super Bowl was one of those games where it seemed the big calls went against Seattle," Hochuli said in August 2006. "And that was just fortuitous -- bad fortuitous for Seattle.
"The league felt, actually, that the Super Bowl was well officiated. Now, that doesn't mean there were no mistakes. There are always mistakes, but it was a well-officiated game."
Information from ESPN.com's Mike Sando and James Walker, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.“My purpose is to destroy the daemonic, and if I must rise to command an entire sector to do so, then so be it.”
–Torquemada Coteaz
Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce The Threat Beyond, the fifth War Pack in the Warlord cycle for Warhammer 40,000: Conquest!
As the Warlord cycle approaches its epic conclusion, The Threat Beyond invites you to take on the mantle of an Imperial Inquisitor and exercise the power of the Inquisition with a new warlord for the Astra Militarum. Nowhere is truly safe in the darkness of the far future, but more than most leaders, Torquemada Coteaz has carved out a region of relative stability among the stars. His eternal watchfulness and unflagging zeal have exterminated countless heresies. Now, he turns his gaze to the Traxis sector, eager to bring the order of the Imperium to this newly discovered space.
The power of the Inquisition stands against dark heresies throughout the Traxis sector, but new cards for every faction also continue the cycle’s main themes, granting more significance to your warlords and how you to choose to use them every turn. With this War Pack, you can fight alongside the Salamanders legion of Space Marines, lead a vicious attack with the Orks, or turn to the excess of Slaanesh with the Chaos faction. The Wargear of the Dark Eldar is yours to command, as are the deadly wraithknights of the Eldar, or the grenadiers of the Tau. Every faction gains new cards as they struggle to conquer the Traxis sector.
The Fury of the Righteous
With the introduction of The Threat Beyond, Torquemada Coteaz (The Threat Beyond, 89) offers you a number of distinct advantages, breaking away from standards set by other warlords and forging his own path to victory. Torquemada Coteaz allows you to start the game with both eight cards and eight resources, whereas most other warlords provide seven of each. This extra advantage may seem small, but the options that it brings you can easily shape the entire game. Torquemada Coteaz also bears eight HP on his hale side, more than any other warlord.
These bonuses come at a cost, however: Torquemada Coteaz has an ATK of zero. Even here, however, Torquemada Coteaz’s resourcefulness can increase his prowess in battle. He bears a Combat Action that reads, “Sacrifice a unit at this planet to give this warlord +3 ATK for its next attack this phase. (Limit once per attack.)” By drawing upon the nigh-limitless manpower of the Astra Militarum, including token units like the Guardsman, Torquemada Coteaz can easily strike for more damage than any other warlord.
The units in Torquemada Coteaz’s signature squad live to serve him in battle and enhance his power. The signature squad includes four copies of Coteaz’s Henchmen (The Threat Beyond, 90). This unit can engage in battle on its own, but perhaps its most useful purpose is to support Torquemada Coteaz. Coteaz’s Henchmen has an Interrupt that allows you to ready your warlord when this unit leaves play. Because of this, you can attack with Coteaz’s Henchmen and then sacrifice the Henchmen to ready Coteaz and boost his attack, allowing him to rain the fury of the Inquisition down on his foes.
Expendable Guardsman token units may be ideally suited to fuel Torquemada Coteaz, but they may not always be present when you need to boost Torquemada Coteaz’s attack. Thankfully, that’s where some of the other cards in the signature squad come in. You’ll gain access to a new support, the Formosan Black Ship (The Threat Beyond, 91), which allows you to put two Guardsman token units into play when you sacrifice a non-token unit, giving you more fodder to fling at the enemies of the Imperium.
You may also choose to use The Emperor Protects (The Threat Beyond, 93) to save your sacrificed units. By playing this free event when one of your units leaves play from your warlord’s planet, you can return that unit to your hand instead, allowing you to redeploy the unit and continue the onslaught of Torquemada Coteaz and the Astra Militarum.
The final card in the signature squad is The Glovodan Eagle (The Threat Beyond, 92). This card is an attachment that can only be attached to your warlord, giving him a permanently raised ATK. Obviously, this can be crucial for giving Torquemada a means to attack even when you don’t have units to sacrifice. However, you can also detach this attachment from your warlord, causing it to become a unit with one ATK and one HP, allowing you to deal more damage after your opponent’s units are exhausted. Then, you can sacrifice it to boost Torquemada Coteaz’s damage. Alternatively, you can take an Action to return this unit to your hand, allowing you to redeploy it next round or use it as a shield card to block up to three damage. The Glovodan Eagle offers an unprecedented amount of versatility, allowing you to command the forces of the Astra Militarum in the best possible way.
Confront the Threat
Darkness stirs among the stars and planets of the Traxis sector, and only the vigilance of the Inquisition can root out corruption and bring this new sector into the fold of the Imperium. Confront the darkest servants of Chaos in The Threat Beyond and stand triumphant with Torquemada Coteaz!
Look for The Threat Beyond at your local retailer in the first quarter of 2015!Citation: Ivarsson N, Westerblad H (2015) α-Actinin-3: Why Gene Loss Is an Evolutionary Gain. PLoS Genet 11(1): e1004908. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1004908 Editor: Gregory S. Barsh, Stanford University School of Medicine, United States of America Published: January 15, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Ivarsson, Westerblad. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited Funding: This work was supported by Swedish research Council and the Swedish National Center for Sports Research. The funders had no role in the preparation of the article. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Introduction Large-scale sequencing of human populations has revealed many regions of the genome that have undergone positive selection during recent human evolution [1]. For most such regions, the genes and the nucleotide variants under selection are challenging to identify, and one can only guess about the cellular and physiological mechanisms. In this issue of PLOS Genetics, Head et al. [2] shed light on this question for one of the most fascinating examples of selection, in part because the variant undergoing selection is a loss-of-function, and in part because it was discovered long before the human genome sequence was completed. Originally identified during a search for muscular dystrophy defects [3], deficiency of α-actinin-3 later turned out to be surprisingly common [4]. Roughly 18% of the world population is homozygous for a nonsense mutation (R577X) in ACTN3 deficiency, and the derivative allele (ACTN3 577xx) frequency correlates with greater latitude and lower temperature [5]. There is an intriguing correlation with athletic performance—the derivative allele is overrepresented among elite marathoners and other endurance athletes, but underrepresented among elite sprinters—indeed, the ancestral allele has been referred to as “the gene for speed” [6]. The evidence for positive selection of the derivative allele in European and East Asian populations is strong, but the phenotype being selected is uncertain and the underlying cell biology is even less clear. The article by Head et al. [2] provides some clarity and, together with earlier work from our group (Bruton et al. [7]), a unifying hypothesis.
Background To put the work on mechanism into context, it is helpful to review some of the basics of ACTN3 biology. The ACTN3 gene is only expressed in glycolytic, fast-twitch (type II) skeletal muscle fibers, where it binds to actin and is part of the Z-line in the sarcomere structure [8]. Considerable insight into function has come from knockout mice: fast-twitch muscle fibers of Actn3 knockout (KO) mice have increased aerobic capacity with increased citrate synthase (CS) activity and higher expression of mitochondrial proteins, such as cytochrome c oxidase and porin [4]. The Actn3 KO mice can cover more distance on a treadmill, and therefore exhibit adaptations also observed in response to endurance exercise [9]. One interesting aspect of Actn3 KO muscle is an increase in calcineurin (CaN) signaling [10]. CaN, together with calmodulin kinase (CaMK), acts as a Ca2+ decoder that responds to increases in Ca2+ and trigger intracellular signaling [11]. Wright et al. showed that mitochondrial biogenesis is activated in skeletal muscle by artificially increasing cytosolic [Ca2+] with caffeine; e.g., increases in citrate synthase and cytochrome c oxidase mRNA were observed 24 hours after caffeine exposure [12]. They also observed an increase in peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor ɣ coactivator 1-α (PGC-1α) [12], which is regarded as key promoter of mitochondrial biogenesis [13, 14]. Work from our group (Bruton et al.) showed that in cold-exposed mice, there was also a link between sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca2+ leak and mitochondrial biogenesis. Non-shivering muscles of cold-exposed mice displayed increased expression of PGC-1α with subsequent increases in citrate synthase activity and endurance [7].
Bringing It All Together In this issue of PLOS Genetics, Head et al. [2] observed marked changes in cellular Ca2+ handling in fast-twitch muscles of Actn3 KO mice. These muscles expressed more of the SR Ca2+ ATPase 1 (SERCA1) and the SR Ca2+ buffering proteins calsequestrin 1 and sarcolumenin. Muscle fibers of Actn3 KO mice showed 3- to 4-fold increases in SR Ca2+ leak and Ca2+ reuptake. Moreover, cytoplasmic Ca2+ transients were better maintained during repeated tetanic stimulation, which is in accordance with previously published data showing increased fatigue resistance in muscles of Actn3 KO mice (Fig. 1). PPT PowerPoint slide
PowerPoint slide PNG larger image
larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 1. Ca2+, heat, and mitochondrial biogenesis. The contraction of skeletal muscle fibers is initiated by sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR) Ca2+ release via the ryanodine receptors |
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It’s been a national day of tragedy, I can guarantee you of that. And you’ll see that when you finally get out of here this evening. All of America is sharing in the tragedy that you have lived through today.
We have had tremendous triumphs.
We have had triumph after triumph after triumph. And that’s how mankind goes ahead, to be a little philosophical for just a moment. We try, we try, we try!
In this program we’ve succeeded.
Really if we’re honest about it and honest with ourselves it’s beyond our wildest dreams, I would never have thought that we would go this far, without losing some people.
Something where you’re up there travelling around at five miles per second! Heat of re-entry, and all the complexities and the things that have to work right,
And we come to a time where something happens, and we have a tragedy that goes along with out triumphs.
And I guess that’s the story of all mankind.Akademy, the KDE community summit, is happening in just a few weeks, from the 30 of June to the 6 of July, in Tallinn, Estonia. The Akademy Organizing Team is pleased to welcome this year's Akademy sponsors whose support is critical to the success of the conference.
Platinum Sponsors
Akademy 2012 is generously supported by two Platinum sponsors, Blue Systems and Nokia.
Blue Systems, based in Germany, invests in Free and Open Source technologies, and sponsors the development of KDE projects and distributions like Kubuntu, Netrunner and Linux MintKDE. Blue Systems is also sponsoring the party Saturday evening.
Nokia, a global leader in mobile communication and the main contributor to the Qt Project, has a long history of supporting the KDE community and Akademy.
Silver Sponsors
In addition to the Platinum sponsors, the KDE community is happy to welcome the following Silver sponsors:
Digia is the worldwide exclusive commercial licensor of Qt, and shares KDE's commitment to the future of Qt for desktop and embedded development.
is the worldwide exclusive commercial licensor of Qt, and shares KDE's commitment to the future of Qt for desktop and embedded development. Google is a major user of open source software and supports KDE's software development with the annual Summer of Code and Code-in Contest.
is a major user of open source software and supports KDE's software development with the annual Summer of Code and Code-in Contest. Intel is a leader in the open source ecosystem, providing a range of solutions that is deep and broad at all levels of the solution stack. Intel is also sponsoring the Welcome Reception on Friday.
Other Supporters
The Akademy Bronze sponsors are Collabora, a consultancy with a long history of open source software development, and Zabbix who offers a popular enterprise-class open source monitoring solution.
The event is also supported by Froglogic and Red Flag Software.
Once again, our media partner for Akademy 2012 is Linux Magazine.
The organizing team thanks our sponsors on behalf of the KDE Community. There are still sponsorship opportunities. If you are interested, please visit Sponsoring Akademy 2012 for more information, including sponsor benefits.
Akademy 2012 Tallin, Estonia
For most of the year, KDE—one of the largest FOSS communities in the world—works online by email, IRC, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, propose and consider new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the following year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work bringing those plans to reality. The KDE Community welcomes companies building on KDE technology, or looking to begin using it.
For more information, please contact The Akademy Team.In another major blow for Louis C.K., FX and 3 Arts Entertainment are severing ties with the comedian in the wake of the sexual harassment scandal detailed by the New York Times. APA, which represents C.K. for touring, also dropped the comedian on Friday from its client roster.
FX has been the comedian’s primary TV home for the past eight years. FX’s decision comes hours after the comedian acknowledged the truth of the reports of him masturbating in front of multiple women over the years.
“Today, FX Networks and FX Productions are ending our association with Louis C.K. We are cancelling the overall deal between FX Productions and his production company, Pig Newton. He will no longer serve as executive producer or receive compensation on any of the four shows we were producing with him – ‘Better Things,’ ‘Baskets,’ ‘One Mississippi’ and ‘The Cops,'” FX said in a statement.
C.K. is the latest public figure to face a swift fall from grace after allegations of sexual misconduct became public. Entertainment firms are under extreme pressure to take a hard line on sexually charged behavior that has been routinely condoned in Hollywood for decades. Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Brett Ratner are among the high-profile figures who have seen business and creative partners disassociate themselves with stunning speed amid allegations of sexual assault and harassment.
Related Louis C.K. Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Five Women
“Louis has now confirmed the truth of the reports relating to the five women victimized by his misconduct, which we were unaware of previously,” FX’s statement said. “As far as we know, his behavior over the past eight years on all five series he has produced for FX Networks and/or FX Productions has been professional. However, now is not the time for him to make television shows. Now is the time for him to honestly address the women who have come forth to speak about their painful experiences, a process which he began today with his public statement. FX Networks and FX Productions remain committed to doing everything we can to ensure that all people work in an environment that is safe, respectful and fair, and we will continue our review of all of these productions to ensure that was and is the case.”
C.K.’s Pig Newton banner has been a major supplier of comedies to the cabler and its production entity, which has branched out to producing for other outlets. It helped shepherd the Amazon comedy “One Mississippi,” although C.K.’s clashes with star-creator Tig Notaro helped bring the accusations about his behavior to light. Pig Newton also was behind the TBS animated comedy “The Cops,” which shut down production on Friday “until further review,” the cabler said.
3 Arts Entertainment has been C.K.’s longtime management firm. 3 Arts partner Dave Becky was criticized by women in the Times’ story for allegedly pressuring them to not talk about their experiences with C.K. Becky denied threatening anyone. He is believed to remain in his role at 3 Arts, one the industry’s largest and most successful management-production firms with an impressive roster of stars. Becky represents such heavyweights as Kevin Hart and Aziz Ansari.
“We have terminated our relationship with Louis C.K. We are committed to ensuring a safe and secure environment for our staff, clients and the community at large,” 3 Arts said in a statement. “We are doing a full internal review regarding this situation and are taking additional steps to strengthen our processes and procedures while engaging with our staff to address any concerns about harassment or abuse of power. This behavior is totally unacceptable in all circumstances and must be confronted and addressed.”
Lewis Kay, partner at Kovert Creative and C.K.’s longtime PR rep, also said Friday that he has dropped him as a client.Alberta will support a nationwide tax on carbon as long as all revenue stays in the province where it was raised, Premier Rachel Notley said Tuesday on the eve of a federal-provincial meeting on climate change in Vancouver.
“Canada needs to leave behind its former global brand as climate change deniers, and Canada must therefore leave behind the failed policies of the past,” Notley said as she prepared to attend a meeting to follow up on commitments Canada made in Paris last year.
“Canada must step up into a new and better role as one of the world’s most environmentally progressive economies and one of the world’s most environmentally progressive energy producers.”
The premier said she wants to see an outcome in Vancouver that respects and acknowledges the work that Alberta has done so far.
“Alberta’s interests are to ensure that the work that we’ve committed to doing is seen as adequate,” she said. “I believe it will be because I think, in fact, it represents probably in many aspects of it the biggest move in the country.”
But Notley is adamant that revenue from any carbon levy considered by Ottawa and the provinces remains in the jurisdiction in which it was raised.
“Those are the fundamental points that we need to work with,” she said.
The Prime Minister’s Office said the meeting in Vancouver will focus on effective ways to adapt to climate change, reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming and capitalize on opportunities presented by a low-carbon economy to create good-paying, long-term jobs.
“The clean growth framework will be science-based and will build on actions the provinces and territories have already taken so that Canada can meet or exceed its climate commitments,” the PMO said in a statement.
Alberta’s climate change plan, released last November, includes an economy-wide carbon tax and the phase-out of all coal-fired power plants by 2030.
The general carbon tax on products like gasoline and natural gas will begin to be applied at a rate of $20 per tonne in January 2017 and $30 per tonne in January 2018. The levy is expected to generate $3 billion in revenue annually.
Alberta already taxes heavy carbon emitters $20 per tonne for emissions above set target levels and that is slated to rise to $30 by 2017.
In addition the province has put a 100-megatonne cap on allowable emissions from the oilsands and has committed to dramatically reduce methane emissions by 45 per cent by 2025 from conventional oil and gas operations.
Notley said the two-day First Ministers meeting will also address other issues.
Alberta will use the opportunity to press Ottawa for help to offset the economic downturn, reiterating calls for changes to employment insurance eligibility rules and new investment in provincial infrastructure.
“We will continue to make the point that we need the federal government sooner, not later, to play its role in building the national economy and to get our pipelines built,” she said.
She noted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday it is his government’s job to ensure that Canada’s resources get to market.
“Canada needs strong and effective leadership on this issue,” she said.
dhenton@postmedia.comForget levitating your house with helium balloons, or defeating Syndrome's Omnidroids - here's a real impossible task: ranking every single Pixar movie, from worst to best.
The lamp-loving Emeryville animation studio has been pumping out classics for 20 years, starting with the game-changing Toy Story in 1995. Since then billions of dollars in box office takings have rolled in, along with a shed-load of Oscars.
As The Good Dinosaur approaches, here's an ordered rundown of Pixar's very best. And remember, there's no such thing as a bad Pixar movie (just a Cars movie).
15. Cars 2 (2011)
Pixar chief John Lasseter is a major petrol head, meaning the Cars movies hold a special place in his heart. Although not, sadly, on the Pixar pantheon - especially when it comes to Cars 2. Riffing on the Bond formula, it cast Michael Caine as Aston Martin-like spy car Finn McMissile for a globetrotting caper that's big on explosions but lacking in a compelling story.
Cars 2 is passably entertaining but - unlike pretty much every other Pixar film - it isn't really about anything of substance. Consequently, this never manages to shift into top gear and, for a Pixar movie, that's a bit disappointing.
14. Cars (2006)
Cars isn't really a bad movie when stacked against its sequel, but lined up next to the rest of Pixar's output it feels a bit lightweight. There's a lot to enjoy here, though, chiefly Owen Wilson's Lightning McQueen and Paul Newman voicing Doc Hudson. Visually, too, it's a marvel to look at - waxed and polished to within an inch of its life. It's only when you pop the hood, however, that a rusty storytelling engine is revealed.
Still, this was a big blockbuster hit - its $460 million worldwide box office is better than the first Toy Story - and the idea of talking cars hits the target with younger viewers. Did you know that Cars generates $2 BILLION in merchandise sales annually for Disney/Pixar? No wonder they keep making them.
13. Monsters University (2013)
The one and only prequel in Pixar's back catalogue, Monsters University saw Billy Crystal and John Goodman rekindle their affable chemistry as Mike and Sulley, while Helen Mirren stole the show as chair of MU's Scarer programme Dean Hardscrabble.
Vibrantly brought to life by director Dan Scanlon, this fires off gags thick and fast, although leaning a bit too heavily on Animal Houses references that fly over the heads of younger viewers. But, it's hard not to think of the tragically slow Slug Monster Student and not raise a smile.
12. A Bug's Life (1998)
Arriving three years after the trailblazing Toy Story - and the the same year as the similarly-themed Antz - A Bug's Life has found itself swept under the carpet when it comes to re-evaluating Pixar.
That's a shame because this is a hugely entertaining adventure about plucky ants taking on terrifying grasshoppers (led by a sinister Kevin Spacey). Though it lacks truly memorable characters, there's heart, humour and killer gags aplenty ("don't look at the light!"). This one's well worth revisiting.
11. Brave (2012)
Boasting Pixar's first ever female protagonist in the flame-haired Princess Merida, Brave marked a return to form for the studio after the creative stumble of Cars 2. It also feels very different from anything they've done before, leaning towards the traditional fairytale story more in line with classic Disney films.
Still, with slightly confused feminist themes, Brave remains regarded as another Pixar misstep by industry observers. Which is a shame: what's not to love about a touching mother-daughter tale that sees Emma Thompson's Queen Elinor transformed into an American black bear? A half-a-billion box office hit and Oscar winner for Best Animated Film, Brave happens to cover a lot of the same thematic ground as behemoth Frozen, making the films perfect for a Disney Princess double-bill.
10. Ratatouille (2007)
Pitch a Hollywood mogul a film about a rodent who dreams of becoming a chef and you'd probably get laughed out of the room. Not so at at Pixar, who embraced Brad Bird's idiosyncratic story and spun it into movie gold.
It may not have connected as universally as the Toy Story films, but this is a zippy, fast-paced comedy that's all about the pursuit of artistic perfection. Ratatouille also provides Peter O'Toole with one of his best late career roles in the form of snooty restaurant critic Anton Ego.
9. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Conceived by the famous Pixar braintrust of John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft during a lunch break on the first Toy Story, Monsters Inc. took years to get made as animators wrestled with complex fur effects for the loveable Sulley.
When it did finally emerge in 2001... what a movie! A strange story about creatures who harvest children's fear to power a city, this is a heartfelt yarn about an unbreakable friendship. The film's technical wizardry may end up outshining its storytelling prowess, but this still goes down as a significant bar-raiser for Pixar.
8. Finding Nemo (2003)
How good are Pixar movies? So good that Finding Nemo has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and it still only made it to number eight in this list.
An undersea adventure about Marlin (Albert Brooks) searching for his lost son with the aid of forgetful blue tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), this is a breathtaking film that's packed with brilliant supporting characters. Bruce the shark, Bloat the puffer fish and a great cameo from John Ratzenberger as a school of moonfish make this a high-memorable outing for Pixar. Now, let's hope sequel Finding Dory doesn't go all Cars 2 on us.
7. Inside Out (2015)
Pixar's most recent release is an absolute stunner. Five emotions - Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness - wrestle inside the conscious mind of 11-year-old Riley as she's uprooted from her friends in Minnesota to the new surroundings of San Francisco.
Up director Pete Docter expertly cuts the action between the vivid colours inside Riley's brain and the drab drudgery of her everyday life. Child psychiatrists have heaped praise on the film, saying it offered meaningful insight into a child's emotional development. And Inside Out went down so well with film critic Mark Kermode that he's already started championing it to be the first animated movie to win the Best Picture Oscar.
6. The Incredibles (2004)
The Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't even a twinkle in Robert Downey Jr's eye when Pixar rewrote the superhero rulebook with The Incredibles. Director Brad Bird frames everyday family squabbles against jaw-dropping action, a soap-opera-with-capes approach that's more successful than any of the Fantastic Four movies we've seen to date.
The casting is also bang-on: Craig T Nelson and Holly Hunter both wrestle with midlife crises as Mr Incredible and Elastigirl, while Sarah Vowell and Spencer Fox are excellent as bickering kids Violet and Dash. Props, too, should go to Bird himself for hilarious voice work on fashion designer Edna Mode. Not only is this a brilliant Pixar film, it's comfortably one of the best superhero films that's ever been made.
5. Toy Story 3 (2010)
Disney
Everybody walked into Toy Story 3 terrified it'd be awful. What was the point? Would it end up tarnishing the memory of its illustrious predecessors? We needn't have worried because this turned out to be a stunning close to one of cinema's best ever trilogies. It also boasts two of Pixar's most emotionally pulverising moments. One, the incinerator scene and two - brace yourself - the closing sequence showing a teenage Andy giving away Woody, Buzz and the rest of his toys to a new owner.
Toy Story 3 is also notable for being the most successful film in Pixar's back catalogue (thanks to $1 billion plus in box office takings) and the last animated movie to win a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Quentin Tarantino even named it his favourite movie of 2010 - and who's to argue with him?
4. Toy Story (1995)
It all began for Toy Story when director John Lasseter watched a preview of the lightcycle scene from Tron. Inspired by the possibilities of computer animation, he eventually went on to make short film Tin Toy in 1988. The roots of Pixar's game-changing 1995 feature can be found in that five-minute film, told from the point of view of one-man band toy Tinny.
That character eventually gave way for Woody and Buzz Lightyear, an odd couple pairing whose bickering eventually blossomed into an unbreakable friendship by the movie's end. The duo - an old school cowboy and a buccaneering astronaut voiced by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen - lent the movie heart to go with its dazzling technical innovation. Along with the '90s Disney Renaissance, Toy Story helped re-energise the animated film and cement the House of Mouse as the king of cartoon cinema.
3. Up (2009)
Pixar
Up's heartbreaking first ten minutes, recounting the lifelong union between Carl Fredricksen and wife Ellie, turned all who saw it into blubbing wrecks. But, there's an awful lot more to Pixar's tenth feature than its intensely moving opening stretch.
Directors Pete Docter and Bob Peterson conjure up a wild adventure film full of wit and invention. From Carl's home soaring into the sky courtesy of thousands of balloons to the endearingly cheerful Wilderness Explorer Russell (incidentally based on Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn), this is a perfect combination of spectacle and sentiment.
2. Toy Story 2 (1999)
Originally conceived as a direct-to-video quickie, Toy Story 2 found itself upgraded to a feature film after early footage impressed Disney's top brass. Which meant Pixar had to tear the whole thing down and start from scratch - and then for a third time, after six months of animation work was accidentally deleted off the Pixar servers. And yet remarkably, from such a turbulent production would emerge one of the all-time great movie sequels.
All of your Toy Story favourites are back, with Woody swiped by an obsessive toy collector keen to sell him off to a museum in Japan. Buzz, Rex, Mr Potato Head and Slinky launch into a daring rescue mission, which neatly dovetails into the film's big message: Woody's friends are more important than immortality as an artefact inside a glass case.
1. WALL-E (2008)
True, if we're being honest, there are ten entries in Pixar's back catalogue that have a legitimate shot at the number one spot. But in the end it's hard to look past the depth, originality and sheer audacity of WALL-E - a film that doesn't feature a single line of human dialogue until 40 minutes in.
Set in the far-flung future where mankind has turned Earth into a giant garbage dump, Andrew Stanton's epic contains all the brilliance we've come to expect from a Pixar film. There's innovative storytelling, memorable characters in WALL-E ("voiced" by legendary Star Wars sound man Ben Burtt) and EVE, and stunning expansive visuals.
But what makes WALL-E a true masterpiece is its interstellar ambition. This owes more to films like Silent Running and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey than it does any animated movie that came before it. Stanton and co-writer Jim Reardon craft a story that looks at man's relationship with technology, rampant consumerism, dystopia vs utopia, and environmental decay - all wrapped up in a magnificent sci-fi blockbuster. And one that kids and adults can enjoy at the same time? That's pretty special.Moreover, the Gnostic emphasis on inner illumination aroused some discomfort in this nascent ecclesiastical establishment. As the scholar Elaine Pagels has pointed out, “Gnostic teaching… was potentially subversive of this order: it claimed to offer every initiate direct access to God of which the priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant.” This was bound to be irritating to the priests and bishops. Consequently, they launched into a vigorous campaign against Gnosticism. Once they achieved secular power, as they did when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, they were in a position to come down on the Gnostics and other heterodox Christian sects with the might of the state. Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition
In another article, I mentioned that the notion of a personal God has not made sense to me, despite (or due to) being a preacher’s kid who spent the first 19 years of my life in church.
Even as a small child, however, I knew that Bible stories, prayer, hymns and rituals pointed to “something” that could be touched by humans in a real and profound way. In fact, I had some unitive experiences as a young boy that remain prominent in my worldview to this day. I would complain to my father that there was no “direct experience of God” in our church. He laughed and tussled my hair, and I learned not to talk about it very much as time moved on.
In my mid-30’s, however, ecstatic phenomena that mirrored those of my early life returned with great power. At the time, I was studying various Eastern traditions, none of which spoke to these ecstatic experiences, other than to discourage them as “diversions” from the Goal. I spent about eight years in the desert, so to speak, unable to deny the bliss, joy and ecstasy that had awakened in my being, while at the same time finding very little support from the books and teachers I came across.
As for Christianity… I had a vague notion that, somewhere deep in the past, there were followers of Christ Jesus’ teachings who perhaps had direct experiences of “God,” but when I surveyed current expressions of the Church, I found nothing but fundamentalism, over-intellectualism, “fluff” and social clubs. The very existence of “Christian Rock” music was more than enough to keep my head and nose turned away.
Having accessed — through contact with kindred spirits who exhibit similar “symptoms” to mine — the Buddhadhamma, and having discovered within it a very specific set of meditation and mindfulness instructions that spoke directly to my ecstatic expriences, I rejoiced. I found that the Buddha overtly taught about the ecstasies (which he called jhana or samadhi), and that he placed paramount importance on them.
It’s been about seven years since I made this discovery, and it’s been less than 50 years since the Buddha’s original teachings have been made widely available in English. So, for about 2,400 years, these teachings have been “hidden” deep within Theravada Buddhism, insulated even from most monks. The Buddhist priesthood, like priesthoods from most other religious traditions, became a guardian of orthodoxy — and this orthodoxy not only avoided the direct experiences that formed the core of the original teaching, but actively repressed it down through the years. In many ways, such repression continues to this day.
* * *
I am aware that this is nothing new. Mystics and ecstatics have been oppressed throughout history, having threatened the priestly hierarchy’s authority, since few if any priests exhibit the ecstatic phenomena described, taught and championed by a given religion’s progenitor.
And yet, mystics and ecstatics arise in every generation. Whereas the dominant culture has always pathologized expressions of the ecstatic (which are, at core, feminine in nature — the subject for another article, no doubt), we rarely burn ecstatics at the stake these days.
No, we label ecstatics as “problem children” with ADD/ADHD, and we pump them full of Ritalin. We prescribe exotic cocktails of SSRI drugs, so that children and adults may return to “full productivity” on the treadmill of modern existence.
The fact that so much of modern-day society is either dependent on psychosomatic prescription medication, or has adopted damaging self-medication regimens, suggests to me that human nature is ecstatic at core.
A technological society as removed from the Sacred as ours puts a lot of pressure on individuals to suppress naturally-occurring ecstasy. Many succumb, taking the Pill. Others resist… but without competent teachers of the charismatic, they often turn to mind-altering substances, seeking in various drug or alcohol experiences that which already exists within us — free of charge, free of negative side-effects.
I am a survivor of the second category, and am thankful that I never fell into the trap of the first.
* * *
Now that the Buddha’s original Middle Path (in the form of Suttas or Discourses which purport to preserve Gautama’s teachings first in oral transmission, then written on Papyrus leaves some 2,200 years ago) is widely available in English, it is interesting to note that the Buddha did not hide the “good stuff” from anyone.
Yes, the Suttas are directed to his monks (who were legion at the time), but there was no effort to reserve these teachings for just his most accomplished followers. Gautama went out of his way to state that the Buddhadhamma was of a single cloth — nothing hidden, this is what you get, take it or leave it. It was his gift to a humanity that, like ours, had strayed far from its True Nature.
The Four Noble Truths, the fourth of which is the Noble Eightfold Path, culminating in Right Absorption (Samma-Samadhi)… followed by a life spent saturated in meditative absorption, dissolving the dastardly “fetters” that keep humans on the Wheel of Samsara… this is what Gautama taught, forwards and backwards, saturated always in jhana/samadhi.
Unfortunately, the Theravada priestly hierarchy, within just a couple generations of the Buddha’s passing, turned Buddhism into something completely different than what was originally propounded. The Abhidhamma, for instance, proposed to “add” to what had already been fully given — an entire “secret” psychological system that did not appear in the original discourses, but was added to the Pali Canon nevertheless. A few hundred years later, a series of commentaries was added to the official orthodoxy, the Visuddhimagga being the primary example. These efforts served to entrench the authority of the priesthood, and to obfuscate the ecstatic teachings of Gautama Buddha. For hundreds of years, orthodox teachings of Theravada Buddhism have filtered through these (and other similar) books, relegating the Buddha’s actual teachings to the proverbial dusty monastery basement.
* * *
So, forty-seven years after my birth, I’m “getting it” that this world does not support the ecstatic.
There is no un-broken transmission of Jesus’ ecstatic teachings (which are now coming to light in Gnostic texts being unearthed in the Middle East)… and there is for sure no formal schooling for such teachings within the mainstream Christianity of my upbringing. On the contrary, church as I experienced it was a hollow shell, filled with desperate souls who desired union with God, but who eventually settled for peak experiences (church camp rallies, etc.) and the solace of community.
Something similar has happened to Theravada Buddhism, though the advent of the Sutta Pitaka in English has given rise to a (mostly-misguided) discussion of ecstatic states.
I cannot speak experientially about Islamic Sufism, but my sense is that there is a pure transmission of ecstatic practices that retains Islam’s original ecstatic inspiration. It’s hard to know for certain, since these esoteric teachings are reserved for initiates only. Mainstream Islam, with its five-times-daily prayer and other ritual obligations, is perhaps more conducive to ecstatic experience than most other religious expressions… but, again, there is a long history there of repression of the ecstatic unitive experience, with dire consequences to many devout Sufis.
I am equally devoid of significant experience regarding Tibetan Buddhism and every other esoteric/initiatic tradition that I know of, most of which filter through a living teacher. Judging by the vast number of Eastern Teachings books available these days, there is at least the promise of ecstatic experience available through these systems, hidden as they are. [There is yet another article begging to be written about living teachers offering exclusive curriculums… but we’ll leave it for another time.]
My solution has been to (finally, after much searching) connect with a community of ecstatic contemplatives, to adopt a rigorous and skillful daily contemplative practice, to study ecstatic writings from all traditions, and to wear my ecstatic birthright as a primary element of this particular human identity. In doing so, I find that I am not alone, and that the message of ecstasy resonates deeply in those who have moved beyond unconscious repression/expression of this profound human trait.
My solution is also to recognize that exoteric religion contains Mystery symbols that carry primordial meaning for those whose practice is labeled esoteric and ecstatic — and that, despite the abandonment of ecstasy by mainstream religion, we may connect with mystic saints who’ve left surprisingly similar records within every religion.
Having been raised a Christian, I find that my early-life connection with the Person of Christ is impossible to abandon. Perhaps Jesus IS my guru, and he is speaking to me through Gnostic, Essene and other non-canonical writings represented in findings at Qumran and Nag Hammadi. I pull these ancient writings forward as the Sacred essence of Christianity’s original inspiration… and I allow them to invade my direct experience of that very same Sacred, beyond time and space, straight back to the Source of everything.
* * *
Ultimately, anyone who has given rise to the ecstatic knows that one cannot ask for more in life, no matter what our orthodox institutions say.
The upwelling of charismatic phenomena is, after all, what all the practice is about. Having come into it, our internal navigation system activates, such that it is only a matter of time before we are led all the way Home.
AdvertisementsSome Mother’s Boy In 1921, a teenager died alone in Kentucky and was buried without a name. A century later, a team of sleuths set out to find his identity.
The Case He was in a hurry when he was killed. Late at night on April 1, 1921, a teenager dashed across the tracks of a northbound train just steaming into the depot in Georgetown, Kentucky. He was hoping to catch another train—the Royal Palm headed to Jacksonville, Florida—pulling away on the opposite switch. But his timing was off, or maybe he stumbled. The corner of the massive metal engine he’d raced in front of struck him in the head, fracturing his skull and knocking him unconscious. The station agent was the first to get to the boy, who wasn’t carrying identification. No horrified onlooker claimed him as a son, brother, lover, or friend. At Ford Memorial Hospital, he was admitted as a John Doe. In a matter of hours he died as one, too. “An unidentified youth brought in the hospital here late Friday night,” the Lexington Leader reported, “died this morning without regaining consciousness. He was about 17 years of age.” At a local funeral home, it fell to Ernest Ashurst, the Scott County coroner, to find the boy’s family. Georgetown, known for its Baptist college and premium tobacco, had only 3,900 residents. The town’s depot, however, sat on the so-called Whiskey Route connecting Kentucky’s eastern distilleries to the state capital and to rail lines serving cities as far away as Buffalo and Miami. Lexington was 13 miles south, Cincinnati 70 miles north. The dead boy could have come from anywhere. Ashurst released a physical description—five feet six inches tall, 110 pounds, eyes blue-gray, hair light brown, complexion fair—along with a catalog of the young man’s possessions. “The youth’s clothes, which were of good quality, bore the clothier’s mark ‘H.M. Lindenthal, Chicago,’ and on his shirt was the laundry mark, ‘Jones,’” the Lexington Leader noted. Ashurst also found a tag bearing the code “E IC6” on the boy’s shirt, and a pocket watch engraved with the letters “W.A.” on the outside of its case, “L.H.D.” on the inside. The coroner canvassed nearby towns with telegrams and advertisements, and he took callers at the funeral home—bereft relatives in search of their own lost boys. Meanwhile, county attorney H. Church Ford, a witness to the accident, claimed that the victim hadn’t been traveling alone. “The boy, with another young man, was hidden under a box car on the east side of the station,” the Lexington Herald quoted Ford saying. The pair had attempted to cross the tracks together, but only “one succeeded in getting over.” The account made it seem like the travelers might have been hobos, but Ashurst was convinced otherwise. “The dead boy evidently is well-bred and belongs to an excellent family,” he told the Georgetown Times. The companion was nowhere in sight by the time the station agent reached the scene. According to bystanders, the boy had bought a ticket—a sign that Ashurst was right about the pair not being hobos—on a train bound for Somerset, Kentucky, some 90 miles south. A warrant was issued for his arrest. When the young man was apprehended, he insisted that he didn’t so much as know the dead boy’s name. They’d met in Cincinnati and ridden south together, nothing more. It seemed odd that they’d never exchanged names, odder still that the survivor had blithely bought a ticket while his acquaintance bled from a fatal head wound. The traveler maintained his ignorance, though, and was released from custody. Newspapers didn’t report his name. Two weeks after the accident, Georgetown’s authorities couldn’t keep the body aboveground any longer. By then the tragedy had aroused the small town’s sympathy. Residents raised money to pay for a casket and funeral. The burial was held at Georgetown’s cemetery on the afternoon of Thursday, April 14. Several townspeople attended. Others sent flowers. Ashurst pledged to not stop looking for the family. A simple headstone was unveiled, engraved with the date of the boy’s death, that of his burial, and the note “Contributed by Friends.” The stone didn’t bear a name. At least, not a real one. The first thing I learned about unidentified bodies is that they need nicknames. A moniker can derive from the place where a body is found, like Cheerleader in the Trunk, discovered in Frederick, Maryland, in 1982. It can refer to when a corpse turns up, like Valentine Sally, found on a February 14 in Williams, Arizona. Or it can memorialize a physical characteristic, like Tok, Alaska’s One-Eyed Jack, who was wearing a leather eye patch when he was located in 1979. Nicknames serve as convenient shorthand for cops tracking cases. They can also generate intrigue, empathy, and investigative leads. The best nicknames tell stories that captivate. That’s the second thing I learned about unidentified bodies: Story is everything. Of the 4,400 unclaimed, unnamed bodies discovered in the United States annually, law enforcement identifies 75 percent within a year. After that the chances of putting a name to a body plunge dramatically. Drumming up public interest with a compelling narrative is often the only way to keep cases from being forgotten. The man who taught me the lessons of the anonymous dead is Todd Matthews. By the time cases make it to him, they’ve been deemed all but unsolvable—“hard boiled,” as he puts it. Matthews co-directs the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a little known government operation housed in the Department of Justice. NamUs manages an online database of records pertaining to unidentified bodies, cross-referenced with a catalog of missing persons. The assumption is that there’s overlap—parents searching for a lost child, say, whose body detectives are trying to identify several states away. Anyone can register case information with NamUs: physical descriptions, date LKA (last known alive), dental records, and so on. About 14,500 cases of unidentified remains—and many more cases of missing persons— |
that Senate Republicans were “whipping,” or measuring support within the caucus, on including the repeal provision.
A Congressional Budget Office analysis released Wednesday found that repealing the individual mandate would save $338 billion over 10 years but would lead to 4 million more uninsured Americans by 2019 and 13 million by 2027.
President Trump has backed using the tax bill to nix the individual mandate, though the initial version of the House tax plan, unveiled last week, didn’t include the provision.
Republicans have a narrow path to get their tax plan through the Senate. With a 52-seat majority they can only afford to lose two GOP senators and still let Vice President Pence break a tie, assuming every Democrat and independent votes "no."
And including an individual mandate repeal could draw blowback from moderate senators.
Sen. Mike Rounds Marion (Mike) Michael RoundsGOP senator: Trump thinks funding deal is 'thin gruel' Lawmakers put Pentagon's cyber in their sights Endorsing Trump isn’t the easiest decision for some Republicans MORE (R-S.D.) noted he would support including a repeal of the individual mandate, but wouldn't demand it if it lost Republicans the support they needed to get to 51 votes.
Sen. Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsHouse to push back at Trump on border Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators GOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration MORE (R-Maine) warned earlier on Wednesday that she thought linking the health-care fight to the tax bill would make it harder for Republicans to pass the tax legislation.
“It complicates the efforts to get a tax reform package through the Senate,” she said.
—Nathaniel Weixel contributedHot reload
For Flutter, a cool new feature has been added to the Dart VM: hot reload. There is an entertaining YouTube clip from the Dart DevSummit that explains and shows it in detail:
Hot reload allows you to change your code while your program is running. The Dart VM will pick up the changes you’ve made and try to apply them while keeping everything running. And if it can’t, it will tell you why. This is very cool! In the spirit of hacking Dart to do great things, let us ponder how we can use this to implement the new features.
Why can’t we import new libraries in the current version of the REPL?
The REPL uses Dart’s VM service to evaluate expressions. Sadly, importing a library is not expression in Dart, so we can’t just evaluate it in that context. However, we can change the code of the REPL’s sandbox while it is running to import a new library and then we could just trigger a hot reload to update the REPL. Does this work? It actually does \o/
Dart REPL with runtime imports
But wait: another thing that we can’t do by evaluating expressions via the VM service is creating new classes and functions. In fact, none of Dart’s top-level declarations can be executed by evaluating an expression for this reason.
How can we allow top-level declarations?
Of course, we could use the same idea described above to also add a new class or a global function. However, anyone who has used IPython or similar for a while knows that you tend to redeclare the same class or function frequently as you iterate on the code. You re-execute slightly modified versions of the same code over and over again while you play around with it.
If we were to just add these declarations to our sandbox Dart library, it would require us to keep tab of what has been declared when and where in the file in order to update the declaration when you iterate on it. This requires a lot of logic and clever code. Sadly, it would also break easily if a change to a class were to break compatibility with older code or other declarations. This would keep the REPL from hot reloading and would force the user to restart it :( This sounds complex and brittle: not a winning combination, I think!
Spike & chains
Instead, what if we could redefine the same top-level declaration multiple times without the redeclarations ever colliding? Is that even possible in Dart? You bet it is! But not within the same library :) Dart allows you to import a library and then declare a class, function or global variable that shadows an existing declaration.
In this example, there will be no complaints about b.dart ’s MyClass shadowing a.dart ’s version because they live in different libraries and the local declaration in b.dart has precedence over the one imported from a.dart.
In general, shadowing is what happens when you declare a variable that hides another variable from an outer scope. For example:
Can we use this? To investigate it, I have implemented a quick spike here. It doesn’t generate any code. Rather, it is a very dumb example to make sure that what we think will work actually works. It would be frustrating to spend a lot of time on implementing this using code generation only to find out that it could have never worked! This is the gist of it:
This works indeed! We can create a chain of libraries that import each other (and also export each other because otherwise the symbols will not be available everywhere). Then the users can redefine symbols as often as they want. Obviously, this can result in old code referring to shadowed symbols, which might make things slightly confusing, but at least it won’t break. And anybody who has used IPython or similar has learnt to live with it, too. It can’t be that bad.
The diagram above shows how it works: as we add new top-level declarations, new “cells” (Dart libraries) are created which import (and export) the previous cell. The final cell is imported in the sandbox library that is used as execution environment for normal Dart expressions and statements. The sandbox file is edited in-place and then reloaded using hot reload.
A workflow vision
Moreover, if you want to update code continuously without shadowing anything, that is still possible, too: hot reload already allows for this workflow in normal Dart programs. You can do the same in the REPL. You can edit your amazing Dart library amazing_dart_library.dart and import it into REPL, play around with it, and while you do so, you can edit the code in your editor of choice and have the REPL hot reload the code when you want by calling reload(). The best of both worlds \o/
How can we implement this in practice?
Well, we are hacking Dart here, so let’s see: Hot reload is not supported by the vm_service_client yet since it is such a new feature and the service specification is not totally complete yet. I started writing a pull request for Natalie (the maintainer) to add support for it, but really, as my coworkers know: production quality code is not my thing, especially not in my spare time (sorry Natalie!). However, this does not block our hacking adventure.
pub, Dart’s package management system, not only supports automatic version constraint resolution and a centralized repository of packages, it also allows you to use local packages or to depend directly on GitHub. This is usually not advisable because you lose much of what makes pub great, but here it works: I simply forked vm_service_client into my own GitHub clone and made the necessary changes. You can find the code at https://github.com/BlackHC/vm_service_client/tree/reload_sources_poc. Afterwards, I changed the Dart REPL’s pubspec.yaml to link to my GitHub clone instead of the official version:
And that’s it! A simple pub get in the terminal now updates the Dart REPL to use the forked version.
This makes it really easy to experiment with anything: you can fork other packages to try things out and easily depend on them. And the cool thing is, I can publish this and when you download the REPL for yourself using pub, it will grab the code from GitHub, too. Very hackable yet shareable! (Even if it’s not advisable for production packages in general :)
The main bit of juicy logic is the cell generator that implements a very simple templating mechanism in line with what we’ve discussed above:
The hot reload feature is called from the REPL when a new import is needed:
And that’s pretty much it! You can have a look at all the changes in the pull request: https://github.com/BlackHC/dart_repl/pull/2.
I admit the code is a bit hacky and untidy. There is also quite a bit of unrelated wrapper code for message passing between the REPL and the sandbox in the pull request. This sadly obfuscates the main changes a bit. I need to see how we can refactor all this to make it neater and tidier again… but sometimes, it’s just easier to get things running quickly than writing the best code and pull requests. Sorry about that!
Dart REPL with top-level declarations
The Dart REPL’s source can be found at https://github.com/BlackHC/dart_repl. In addition to supporting top-level declarations, I have also added support for built-in import, loadPackage and reload commands. (Please note: loadPackage requires the soon-to-be-released 1.24 dev builds of the Dart SDK. It’s a no-op right otherwise.) These built-in commands are all trivial extensions that use hot reload. Finally, to load new packages from your local pub cache, I’m using the excellent pub_cache package.
To give it a go (and assuming you have installed the Dart SDK), just run:
pub global activate dart_repl
pub global run dart_repl
Thanks for making it to the end of this article! Please let me know what you think :)
Cheers,
AndreasThe United States has been plunged into a state of purgatory following the election of Donald Trump. In all political quarters, people are engaged in their own post-mortem analysis of how this happened and what it means, not only for the future of this country, but for the world. Trump ran on a pledge to engage in mass deportations, deny Muslims entry to the U.S., strip abortion rights, and “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. Although Trump has staked out conflicting positions on a wide range of issues over the past several years, his campaign centered on an overtly nativist agenda. And his running mate, Mike Pence, is one of the key leaders of the radical religious right contingent of the Republican Party.
While many Democrats are pointing fingers outside their own ranks to make sense of the stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton, few are willing to examine how their choice of nominee and the campaign they ran shaped the result. In this podcast, Intercept Editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed and co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill break down how we got here and what a Trump presidency means for civil liberties, surveillance, war, abortion rights, and other issues. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.
Jeremy Scahill: Thanks for joining us. I’m Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept coming to you from American purgatory. The phrase President Trump is going to be a reality for at least the next four years. To discuss how this happened and what it means I’m joined by two of my colleagues, Betsy Reed, who is the editor-in-chief of The Intercept, and Glenn Greenwald, my fellow co-founder of The Intercept and columnist and journalist. Glenn, you wrote a piece in reaction to the election, “Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit” — tell us about that piece.
Glenn Greenwald: It was inspired, essentially, by the immediate effort of the Democratic Party and their spokespeople in the media who had basically devoted themselves single-mindedly to Hillary Clinton’s election over the last 18 months to immediately start searching for everybody they can find to cast blame on, other than themselves, for what is now really the reduction of the Democratic Party into a small fringe minority party.
James Carville said that he doesn’t recall in his lifetime any party being as weak across the board as the Democratic Party. You would think that when a party faces such devastating losses over time, but especially such a crushing defeat like this one to such a weak candidate like Donald Trump, there would be some introspection, some self-examination, and there was almost none of that. There was a desire to just say that it was everybody else’s fault.
I was particularly disturbed by the way that they were casting and maligning essentially all of the people who had committed the sin of voting what they regarded as the wrong way by simply dismissing them all as primitive or troglodyte or racist or misogynist. Even though of course many of them are, many of them are not, and even for the ones that do have that as part of their motive, there are independently of that a lot of long, deep trends that have destroyed the welfare and economic security of tens of millions of people and put them into a mindset where they want to destroy this system of authority that they blame. I think that is what caused Brexit and I think to a large degree that’s what’s caused Trump. It’s urgent that we think about what these policies are that have done that to these people: who it is, who has done it, what the reasons are, and how to stop. Watching them blame the media or WikiLeaks or Putin or Jill Stein or whomever they could find seemed very clearly to be a way of avoiding that conversation. My piece was really about urging everybody to have that conversation.
JS: Right. In some ways it really felt like the closing stages of this election was like the series finale of “The Americans” where Cold War propaganda was dumped out upon the American people. There was some bizarre coalition of Julian Assange, Putin, and Trump all in bed together to subvert the glorious American democracy that would take hold as soon as Hillary Clinton won, and I was, as you do often, Glenn, I was battling people on Twitter who were basically trying to blame the election result on Jill Stein of the Green Party and her voters, and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party and their voters, and none of the people that were going after third parties in this country wanted to talk about the atrocious policies of the corporatist candidate that the Democrats ran.
No one wants to talk about the fact that the Clintons are perceived as corrupt royalty by a large segment of the U.S. population.
No one wants to talk about the fact that the Clintons are perceived as corrupt royalty by a large segment of the U.S. population: a candidate who was hawkish who deservedly got the endorsement of many leading neocons. Instead it was, “Well, whoever voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, you’re a misogynist and you are responsible for this.” The fact is that according to the exit polls, 9 percent of registered Democrats actually voted for Donald Trump. Seven percent of Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton, but why isn’t there this rage at their own partisan Kool-Aid-drinking base? Instead, it’s like they envision a world that they want where people are only allowed to vote for the candidates that they choose, that these individual people choose. And that exercising your right to vote for a third party somehow means that you are not fully participating in the democratic process and, in fact, you’re sabotaging the anointing of the chosen candidate of the Democratic Party.
I wanted ask Betsy: On this issue we have seen a kind of development on social media but also in columns written by, well, on the one hand, very partisan, life-long Democrats, blaming everyone else except their candidate, but [on the other hand] this was viewed in the sort of mainstream world of feminist writers as a referendum on misogyny and a referendum on sexism — and if you didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton then you are part of electing a women-hating punisher who is going to mercilessly strip away women’s rights in this country. Now, no doubt that Hillary Clinton endured an incredible barrage of sexist motivated attacks that a man certainly would not have received had they run the exact same campaign as Hillary Clinton, but what do you think about that line that is being stated quite bluntly by high-profile feminists that anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton is part of ensuring an overt misogynist theocracy in the United States?
Betsy Reed: Well, I guess I would say I have somewhat complicated feelings about that because I actually do believe that this election was an absolute tragedy for American feminism. It’s a complete and terrible defeat and I think that what Donald Trump displayed during the campaign and throughout his entire career is just nothing but contempt and hatred toward women. I have a 13-year-old daughter and to try to explain to her how this man could have been elected despite all of that, despite that record, I mean, it’s very difficult, a very painful conversation to have, and I think a lot of women are just shell-shocked about that.
So on one level, I have a lot of empathy for that, and I feel that myself. But at the same time, I think it’s a big mistake not to — as Glenn said — take this moment to reflect a little bit on what this reveals about our movements and about our priorities. And I feel that nominating this candidate [Clinton] who is so deeply compromised, who is so embedded in the corporate elite that has wrecked American democracy was an impossible thing — and a lot of feminists, real feminists, supported Bernie Sanders for exactly this reason. They were not “Bernie bros.” I am 100 percent a feminist and I just could never get on board with Hillary Clinton’s version of feminism. So I think we as feminists need to have a reckoning and a real discussion of what it means to be a feminist because we do face tremendous challenges in the period to come. I mean, PENCE. It’s just a complete nightmare. On a symbolic level Trump is a total disaster but Pence has made his entire political career out of the determination to abolish women’s reproductive rights. So that is an incredibly important struggle in the period to come.
I have a 13-year-old daughter and to try to explain to her how this man could have been elected despite that record of hatred and contempt toward women, I mean, it’s a very painful conversation.
JS: Right, and Mike Pence — clearly it was a very strategically wise decision on the part of the Republicans to sort of foist him onto Trump as his running mate because Mike Pence is from the Rick Santorum wing of the Republican Party, whose primary issues are stopping gay people from marrying each other and stopping women from making their own decisions on what happens with their bodies. Everything else is secondary to that — that is their major obsession.
But to transition from the earlier point that you made, it doesn’t seem like the institutional Democratic Party is learning any lessons from this. There’s other debates going on in the rank and file, ordinary people that are against Trump, but the idea that Howard Dean just threw his hat into the ring to be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee raises a lot of questions about how much introspection they’re actually doing. Keith Ellison, who is very progressive, first Muslim member of the U.S. Congress — African-American congressman from Minneapolis — is being talked about as a potential DNC chair. Glenn, can you talk a little bit about what that represents, the idea that Howard Dean could be the next head of the DNC?
GG: I was thinking about this this morning in terms of what happened in this election and how the Democratic Party in the past has succeeded, and if you look at the last 25 years of Democratic Party politics you find this really interesting trend which is: the Democratic politicians who succeeded, who won the national election, which is Bill Clinton and then Barack Obama, had one thing in common which is that they both ran as these hardcore devoted consummate outsiders. I’m not part of Washington; I’ve never been a part of Washington, in the case of Clinton I’ve only been a southern governor, in the case of Obama I’ve only been a senator for four years, and what I want to do is go in and radically and fundamentally change how this entire place that you all hate and that we all hate, how it functions. And they won.
And if you look at the ones over the same time who have lost, which is Al Gore and John Kerry and now Hillary Clinton, they are exactly the opposites. They were completely incapable of pretending to be outside forces. They were obviously with great accuracy identified as being consummate Washington insiders and so it was obvious to everybody that they would go in and perpetuate and protect and safeguard and continue to be beneficiaries of this Washington establishment and status quo that most of the people in the country hate, and for that reason they lost.
And I think Hillary Clinton was probably, of all of them, the most identifiable as a Washington insider exactly because of all the reasons that her supporters tried to claim she was most qualified and all of that. And yes, she was the most qualified in the sense that she has spent the most time inside Washington, in the most varied capacities. But that’s exactly what made her such a great liability and I think what this reflects is a fundamental flaw in how Democrats think. Especially their spokespeople, the opinion-making elite in the party, the operatives and in the media who live in these coastal cities, regard these institutions as fundamentally good and trustworthy and worthy of admiration, and of course some tinkering and some reform, but by and large they’re forces for good that ought to continue. This is the standard liberal mindset of believing in institutions of authority.
And so when you keep continuously holding yourself out as purveyors of and defenders and protectors of institutions in a culture that most of the people in the country completely despise, of course the country is going to turn its back on you and will reject you because you’re purporting to defend something that they hate.
And Howard Dean, you know people think of him at this fire-breathing liberal and maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t back in 2003 when people remember him, but since 2004 when he lost, he has done nothing but cash in on his political celebrity. He has become the worst part of DC elite corruption. He lobbies for designated terrorist groups like MEK, which is this Iranian cult that has long wanted U.S. intervention in that part of the world. He lobbies for health care and for corporate companies. He claims he’s not technically a lobbyist, though at The Intercept, as Lee Fang wrote, whether he’s technically one or not he certainly acts like one. And to even contemplate the idea that somebody like that this consummate insider who is in bed with every corporate interest, every lobbying interest, could now be the face of the Democratic National Committee — just the mere possibility of anyone talking about that shows how no lessons have been learned.
I actually don’t think he will be the DNC chair; I think the symbolism of Keith Ellison being not only African-American, but the first Muslim elected to Congress, being part of the progressive wing, being a really effective communicator; I think he’ll probably end up being selected — I hope so — but the fact that people are even thinking of Dean reflects this ongoing pathology.
JS: Well and let’s remember that Keith Ellison was one of the few and one of the first members of Congress to openly endorse Bernie Sanders. And Keith Ellison also was a major part of trying to fight against the rigging of the primary system under Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s leadership at the DNC, which of course we now know from a variety of documents and public statements by people, that the whole thing was essentially a fraud intended to ensure that Bernie Sanders was not going to be the nominee and the ironic thing about that is he probably would have been the Democrats’ best chance of beating Donald Trump because Bernie Sanders was perceived as an outsider, despite the fact that he spent so much time in Washington. The ideas he was articulating were ideas that you never heard a high-profile winnable candidate put forward by the Democrats, and so —
BR: — Well, that is a counterfactual that we’ll never know. I mean, because I do believe that you’re right, but I also think that the power of Wall Street is tremendous and they would have been virtually united against him.
JS: Well, I mean, that that may well be true —
GG: — Maybe, maybe, but I think they still they would’ve feared Trump. And yes, they don’t like Sanders ideologically, but they view Trump as this kind of like unpredictable and unstable maniac and they hate instability and unpredictability more than they hate anything else. I think they would’ve hated both. I think Mike Bloomberg probably would have run.
JS: But I think part of the point that I’m making, though — I am not claiming that Bernie Sanders would have won; what I am saying is that I think he would have been a more viable opponent to Donald Trump, for a couple of specific reasons but one very broad reason: I think that a lot of the people — for instance the state of Wisconsin where I’m from — I think a lot of the people, including rank and file union members, that did vote for Trump did so because of the trade policies linked to the Clintons and that Hillary Clinton herself we know called the “gold standard,” as Donald Trump kept repeating about the TPP, jobs are being shipped overseas.
People are hurting. People that are genuinely progressives even I think felt like this was a referendum on the legacy of the Democrats, the institutional Democrats position on trade. That certainly wasn’t the only issue — race, sexism, all of those things played a role; but I do think that Bernie Sanders tapped into the same kind of emotion that Trump did in a kind of parallel universe and I think that that’s worth talking about. Hillary Clinton didn’t say Bernie Sanders name — she tried to avoid saying that man’s name for months and months and what we saw was that when people are allowed to hear those ideas articulated as Sanders did, which are held by wide swaths of the population that never get that kind of a platform, that it resonates with people and so that also is a commentary on the corrupt state of the debate process in this country. The two-party primary system, etc.
The popular vote showed there’s large support in this country for a politics of tolerance, of progressivism, around culture issues, around gender and race. That coalition is going to be an important bulwark against the hate that Trump represents.
BR: I agree with you, Jeremy, but I do think that to some degree there is a discussion among Democratic Party insiders looking back in a Monday-morning quarterbacking way at the tactical missteps of the campaign, and they say, “Oh, you know, she really should’ve listened to Bill and campaigned more in these states,” but I actually think that the problem with Hillary went much deeper because she really was the candidate who believed in TPP, she believed in trade, she was close to Wall Street, she couldn’t have gone there because if she had shown up, they wouldn’t have believed her — and for good reason. So you know I think we have to keep that in mind I also think, though that we should —
JS: — But that’s a bad idea then to have a candidate that you’re like, “Oh well we better not send her among ordinary people because they’re going to see that she’s an empire politician.”
BR: But at a broader level, we need to keep in mind as context the fact that she did win the popular vote in the country. So this is an important discussion about the Rust Belt and these economically punished communities and I think we have to reckon with that, but at the same time, the popular vote showed how there’s large support in this country for a politics of tolerance, of progressivism, around culture issues, around gender and race, and we should keep that in mind because that coalition is going to be an important bulwark against the hate that Trump represents.
GG: Yeah, she did win the popular vote; I think she probably will end up winning the popular vote by a few hundred thousand votes or so. So a relatively small margin. A big reason why she’s going to win the popular vote is because the number of votes she received in places like New York City and California increase significantly over what even Obama received in large part obviously due to fear and horror over the prospect of a Trump presidency. But I think that that’s really cold comfort for a couple of reasons. Number one is because campaigns don’t cater themselves to the popular vote but to the Electoral College. Who knows what the popular vote total would have been had Trump spent time in California or New York trying to increase his vote total in those places. He instead ignored those as he should have done and we have an Electoral College system, that’s where the campaigns devote themselves to winning.
And then, the other aspect of it is that it isn’t just this election. If you look at like the Democratic Party’s problems, it isn’t just the fact that Hillary Clinton just lost to Donald Trump. They are also a minority in the House, a minority in the Senate. They have a record low number of governorships. And then on the state level in terms of state legislatures and even like county commissions and city councils and school boards Republicans are completely dominant.
So it’s really a systemic failure on the part of the Democratic Party. So yes, Hillary Clinton won a couple hundred thousand more votes because a lot of people in Manhattan and Los Angeles and San Francisco turned out. But I agree with what Betsy just said which is that that we do have to keep in mind that there are a huge number of people in the country who are horrified by and angry about Donald Trump’s views, and we shouldn’t just be so downtrodden that we forget that we have real weapons as people who dissent and as people who want to resist it. And there’s a really good opportunity to galvanize huge numbers of people in a way that might be really like emboldening and clarifying about these political values. So I completely agree with that point I think it’s important to emphasize, but I don’t think that should be used to kind of paper over or diminish how much of a failure the Democratic Party has become in electoral politics in this country at every level.
JS: Well, but also if you look at Hillary Clinton’s concession speech delivered the next day, at the remarks that President Obama made and then, online, the various statements put out by all sorts of prominent Democrats and their backers and their lobbyist, etc. This notion, “Well, Trump is now our president and we have to give him a chance and we have to proceed with an open mind” — to me that’s an utterly ridiculous idea. The idea that you’re going to take someone who has openly espoused a desire to do mass deportation, to shut down the borders, to have a screening process for anyone who happens to be of a particular religion, i.e., Islam, that has openly said that he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade — what chance is there to give this person? I mean to me it shows the bankruptcy of partisan politics and embracing the system that produces these kinds of options. The idea that you don’t just immediately start from the position that this is going to be a disaster and you somehow wait for him to do something, you know, really outrageous — to me actually is a pretty devastating commentary on the state of the establishment Democratic Party.
BR: Yes, just look at the neocons who were so outraged by the prospect of a Trump presidency in the national security world and they’re already turning right around on that, they’re pivoting straight to —
JS: — “praying for our commander in chief” and they’re all going to want positions in that government which actually is —
GG: — And they’re going to get them —
JS: And they’re going to get them. It’s a good transition though to let’s actually now talk about what this means.
Isn’t it reckless and even amoral to start normalizing Trump and telling Americans they should treat him with an open mind? Isn’t our obligation instead to say we don’t accept this and we are going to stand up to it?
GG: No wait before we go on to something else, I think that’s actually a super interesting point that you raise that I just want to explore just a little bit. And I’m actually really interested in what you both have to say because this has been bothering me a lot. So think about this: I’ve just heard anecdotally from friends who have children, who are, like either the children of the same age as Betsy’s daughter or a little bit older like millennials in their college years. People like a lot of young people from Democratic families or liberal families or people who live on the coast are genuinely traumatized, like scared, about the fact that Donald Trump was just elected president and that was in part because he was often depicted as comparable essentially to like the rise of Hitler. Maybe sometimes the rhetoric didn’t go quite that far but that was definitely the tenor of a lot of this. And that wasn’t completely unjustified I mean he’s talking about things like deporting 11 million people and you know banning all Muslims beyond just like the standard Republican horror show about like raging wars on reproductive rights and the LGBT and all of that like genuinely things that are outside of the norm of all political decency.
So I understand why President Obama is shaking hands with him in the Office and [saying] that we need to respect him and give him a chance because there’s this idea that we’re always supposed to have a smooth transition of power. But if you really believe everything that has been said about him over the last six months, including the fact that he’s been turned by Putin and is like an actual agent of a foreign enemy, on top of like all the other things. Isn’t that incredibly reckless and even amoral to start normalizing him that way and telling Americans that they should treat him with respect and an open mind? I mean isn’t our obligation instead to do exactly the opposite and to say, we don’t accept this and we are going to stand up to it. I mean I get that this ritual exists but is it actually appropriate in this case if we really believe in the things that we’ve all been thinking about him and hearing about what he actually is and the threat he poses?
JS: Right. They went so far in the direction of explicitly stating that Putin, the KGB, Russia had successfully infiltrated the U.S. electoral process, and then — that was part of the point I’m getting at — if they are, if they believe that, then what’s with all of this “Well we’ve got to give him a chance he’s our president now?” It really shows the lack of actual principle there in a sort of enslaved mentality toward the empire must always have this peaceful transition of power. If they believe their own propaganda, then this is a completely incongruous response to Trump’s election.
BR: But the reality is there is actually a lot of uncertainty about what Trump will do. I mean it is terrifying. The possibility that he will follow through on some of his promises — he’s made immigration … he said that that’s going to be one of his first priorities. That is genuinely, legitimately terrifying. But he also contradicts himself right and left and he did throughout his whole career. He’s gone back and forth on Snowden and he’s back and forth on everything in the diametrically opposed positions, the guy has assumed. So it is difficult to know, I think, to what extent we do need to fear him. I certainly fear him because I fear the worst.
JS: Andrew Kaczynski who now is at CNN was pointing out that over the past four years Trump has staked out the polar opposite position on the premier issues that ended up being present in this, in this debate: certainly on immigration, on abortion, on gay rights, etc. Yeah, I mean Donald Trump is a wild card of sorts but the thing that I have trouble imagining [is] Trump at these trade meetings. You know with Angela Merkel and other world leaders. I have trouble imagining what’s going to come as a result of the avalanche he’s going to be on the other end of when he starts getting, which he is now, these all-access intelligence briefings. This [is] transitioning into talking about what this means that Trump is now going to be the president of the United States.
When a presidential candidate is elected and they start to receive these briefings from the intelligence community, this is where the dark world of the kind of parallel national security apparatus in the United States thrives. Once someone comes in, particularly someone like Trump, never been in the military, never held elected office. They are going to overwhelm him — intentionally — with all sorts of dark scenarios of what can happen if he doesn’t renew this program or expand this program.
President Obama went through this in 2009 and the end result of those briefings was that he outsourced large portions of what they call the counterterrorism policy to the most unsavory, darkest components of the U.S. national security apparatus. Trump is going to be coming in with Gen. Mike Flynn, certainly as one of his top advisers, who knows if Flynn will end up in a cabinet position? Who is Gen. Flynn? Flynn was the intelligence chief for Gen. Stanley McChrystal when he was running murder incorporated as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command — handpicked by Dick Cheney. That is the guy who is guiding Trump’s worldview on counterterrorism. He is a guy that believes that assassination should be the lead policy of the United States combined with kidnapping and torturing people.
Flynn has criticized Obama’s drone program, not because it’s somehow unconstitutional, but because it’s not as effective as torture. Flynn has said Obama just wants to kill people because he doesn’t want to put them in GITMO, “We’re losing an opportunity to get great intelligence out of these people.” So the fact that Obama has failed to shut Guantanamo, the fact that he never held anyone accountable for the CIA torture, is going to mean that Trump, who already is going to be a malleable character in the face of a dozen and a half intelligence agencies inundating him with all of this stuff, but his hand-picked top advisor is one of the Hall of Famers of the world of dark ops.
And so you know people that say, “Oh well Trump is sort of anti-war, or he’s not going to be interventionist?” Just wait until he gets his 20th, 30th briefing from the generals, the admirals, the unelected non-Senate confirmed national security bureaucracy. We are going to see hellfire with Donald Trump and anyone who thought they were voting for an antiwar candidate is going to be proven mercilessly wrong.
BR: I think the same exact thing is going to be true on trade and economics. I mean he’s already staffing up with all of these deregulators, all the very architects of the policies that devastated millions of Americans in 2008.
JS: Glenn, what about on the issues of civil liberties — we know that when the Patriot Act was passed only one U.S. senator, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin — who just lost, for the second time in a row, his Senate race in Wisconsin — he voted against the Patriot Act … Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force … We sort of saw the bipartisan nature of those horrendously dangerous votes in Congress, but lay out what your current or your initial thinking is on how Trump is going to impact civil liberties, surveillance, being in control now of the NSA and other surveillance entities. What do you see coming?
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but also for White House chief of staff. But he was removed as chairman of Trump’s transition team almost immediately following the election and was passed over for the job of Republican National Committee chairman.
Wednesday morning, Giuliani said a job outside the White House will afford him more freedom to speak candidly in support of Trump’s policies.
“On the outside, I can be a very effective spokesman for his policies, maybe with a little more Independence than you have,” he said. “Well, you know, I'm independent and I say what I think. And I think I can be very effective for his policies on the outside as somebody that people can look to and say, ‘Well, he's not employed by Donald Trump, but he's telling us what he really thinks.’”Image copyright AP
The first woman to be US attorney general, Janet Reno, has died at home in Miami from complications linked to Parkinson's disease, US media say.
Ms Reno, 78, was at the centre of several political crises while serving under President Bill Clinton between 1993 and 2001.
She was criticised for a deadly raid on the Branch Davidian cult compound in Waco, Texas after just weeks in office.
Sect leader David Koresh and some 80 followers were killed during the raid.
Questions were asked afterwards about the legality of the FBI raid and why it was that so many people were killed.
Image copyright AP Image caption Ms Reno (left) was one of Bill Clinton's longest serving cabinet members
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The decision to raid the Branch Davidian cult compound of David Koresh in 1993 was one of the most momentous events during Ms Reno's term in office
Ms Reno survived the aftermath of the raid to become the longest-serving attorney-general in the 20th Century from 1993-2001 - and one of President Clinton's most trusted cabinet members.
She also continued to work despite being diagnosed in 1995 with Parkinson's disease, which caused trembling in both her arms.
After Waco, Ms Reno played a role in some of the more high-profile controversies and scandals that rocked the Clinton administration, including:
The Whitewater affair, a failed real estate project in which the Clintons had invested
The "Travelgate" scandal, in which Hillary Clinton was allegedly involved in several controversial sackings in the White House travel office in 1993
Flawed forensics at the FBI laboratory, in which the agency was accused of errors in evidence provided by its forensics laboratory to US courts to help secure high profile convictions
The Monica Lewinsky case, in which Bill Clinton was impeached over his affair with a White House intern
Accusations in the late 1990s that China had gained access to American nuclear secrets
Irregularities in campaign financing during the 1996 Clinton-Gore re-election campaign
Towards the end of her career in the spring of 2000, Ms Reno angered her hometown's Cuban-American community by authorising the armed seizure of a 5-year-old boy who was taken from his relatives' home in Miami to be returned to his father in Cuba.
Image copyright AP Image caption Ms Reno continued to work despite being diagnosed in 1995 with Parkinson's disease
Ms Reno - a self-described "awkward old maid" who was nearly 6ft 2in (1.8m) tall - will be remembered for her cautious but blunt style, on one occasion famously telling reporters: "I don't do spin."
Civil rights activist Rev Jesse Jackson tweeted that Ms Reno was a "personal friend, trailblazer {and] justice seeker".
Her biographer, Paul Anderson, earlier described her as "outspoken, outrageous, absolutely indifferent to others' opinions... truly one of a kind".
Ms Reno also won accolades outside Washington for her plain-spoken manner and folksiness, the Washington Post reports, which included her preference for kayaking on the Potomac River to "hobnobbing on the political cocktail circuit".
She will also be remembered for her frequently recited childhood stories from the Everglades swamps of Florida with a mother who wrestled alligators, the newspaper reports, to a home which included a family of peacocks, all named Horace.Researchers may have discovered a novel way to treat kidney stones - the roller coaster.
A ride on the Scooby-Doo Spooky Coaster at Warner Bros. Movie World on the Gold Coast or the Storm Coaster at Sea World may facilitate the passage of small kidney stones, according to a report published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.
Researchers at Michigan State University conducted a study after a series of patients reported passing kidney stones after riding the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster at Walt Disney World in Orlando.
In one case, a patient said he passed one kidney stone after each of three consecutive rides on the roller coaster.
According to the study, 63 percent of patients passed a kidney stone when sitting in the back of a roller coaster, while 16 percent had success in passing a stone sitting in the front seats of the ride.
Called the 'roller coaster effect', Dr David D Wartinger says this is potentially a relatively low-cost, non-invasive treatment that could prevent suffering for hundreds of thousands of patients.
"Preliminary findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones," Dr Wartinger said.
© AAP 2019Google just took another step in its mission to give Android developers better tools to analyze and monetize their apps.
The company has officially announced that it has integrated Google Analytics into its Google Play Developer Console for Android developers. Google had said that Analytics was coming to the Developer Console at its I/O conference in May this year.
Android developers can now download the Google Analytics software developer kit (SDK) and place it into an app and upload it to the Google Play Store. The Analytics SDK is also available for iOS apps.
Google Analytics for the Developer Console has four main aspects:
Google Play Referral Flow: Helps developers figure out where Google Play traffic is coming from (search, marketing campaigns, blogs or media articles etc.). This feature helps marketers figure out how successful their campaigns are and where the best traffic comes from.
Views in Google Play: Referral Flow shows how many people have viewed the app in Google Play.
Installs: Once figuring out where the traffic came from through the Referral Flow, Analytics tracks users that actually clicked and downloaded the app through Google Play.
New Users: Goes beyond the straight download numbers to show people that have opened the app and begun to use it and become “Active Users.”
The goal for Google is to show not just the raw number of views and downloads, but also how much people have engaged with the app and what version of Android they are using. With the Analytics SDK, developers can know what Android API Level their users are employing. This is beneficial information for developers that need to know how many people are using older versions of Android, such as versions 2.3.7 Gingerbread that may not have certain capabilities that are in newer versions of the operating system.
Google employs “flow visualization” in Analytics to show how a user got to the app and what actions they took within the app.The 12 days between seasons is an opportunity for racers to have some rest and to try out the fun interim events that we have planned. Between seasons, we're going to be running a lot of practise races, trials of weird race ideas and maybe even some cut-throat events. Details may be announced as early as tomorrow!
I can confirm, as suggested previously, that the alternate art Demigod's Triumphs that we'll be giving out to the top 20 players on the
The response to my suggestion of a new Development Manifesto (like the Beta Manifesto from last year) was really strong. We will go ahead with this plan and I'm expecting to find time this weekend to put it together.
We may be able to post 0.10.5 patch notes tomorrow. I'm very excited for you guys to try this patch out. We received masses of great data and feedback from our first season of race events. The prize structure will be a little different in Season Two, and we're working hard on coming up with awesome rewards and race types. Season Two will start on April 20, 2013, and will last for the same duration as Season One (45 days).The 12 days between seasons is an opportunity for racers to have some rest and to try out the fun interim events that we have planned. Between seasons, we're going to be running a lot of practise races, trials of weird race ideas and maybe even some cut-throat events. Details may be announced as early as tomorrow!I can confirm, as suggested previously, that the alternate art Demigod's Triumphs that we'll be giving out to the top 20 players on the Season One ladder will indeed have custom flavour text indicating which final placing the recipient achieved.The response to my suggestion of a new Development Manifesto (like the Beta Manifesto from last year) was really strong. We will go ahead with this plan and I'm expecting to find time this weekend to put it together.We may be able to post 0.10.5 patch notes tomorrow. I'm very excited for you guys to try this patch out. YouTube |
Lead Developer. Follow us on: Twitter Facebook | Contact Support if you need help! Last edited by Chris on Apr 4, 2013, 4:30:41 AM
Posted by Chris
on Grinding Gear Games onImage copyright Reuters Image caption Police and security forces sealed off the area after the blast
A compound housing foreign contractors in the Afghan capital, Kabul, has come under attack from Taliban fighters.
A huge explosion was heard across the city about 01:25 local time on Monday (20:55 GMT Sunday).
Kabul police chief Abdel Rahman Rahimi told the BBC a lorry bomb went off at the gate of the North Gate compound and then two gunmen went inside.
In a gun battle one police officer and both attackers were killed, and the attack is now over, police say.
Three police officers were injured during the gun battle that lasted for several hours, Mr Rahimi told the BBC's Mahfouz Zubaide in Kabul.
No one staying at the compound was injured.
North Gate is mainly used by foreigners. It is a heavily guarded compound, which was attacked by militants three years ago.
Big explosion
Power in parts of Kabul was briefly cut off shortly after the explosion.
"I was about to go to sleep when the explosion happened. The power went off," said local resident Inamullah Khan. "It was a very big explosion. It was very big."
"I've spent eight years in Afghanistan and it was the loudest and the most heavy blast I have ever experienced," said Andreas Wilmers, chief operating officer of Afghanistan Broadcast System.
He said security around Kabul was more relaxed at night.
"The control of the Afghan police, its so-called ring of steel... those checkpoints are basically operational during the day, but in the night they are not really manned," he added.
Last week, two suicide bombers linked to the so-called Islamic State (IS) killed 80 people and wounded 230 more in Kabul.
That attack, followed closely by this one on a heavily guarded compound, will once again raise questions about Afghan intelligence gathering, BBC Afghanistan bureau editor Inayatulhaq Yasini says.The curveballs just keep coming at the 2016 Winter Meetings, as Ken Rosenthal just reported a whopper:
Sources: Ian Desmond to #Rockies. — Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 7, 2016
While we were all trying to process exactly where Ian Desmond would play for the Rockies, since they’re nominally all set at the positions he plays, Rosenthal struck again:
Source: Desmond with #Rockies is multi-year. Likely will play 1B and also OF. Rox forfeit No. 11 pick in draft, first unprotected selection. — Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 7, 2016
This is interesting on so many levels, more of which will be sussed out later in a piece from Nicolas Stellini. What the trade appears to suggest most immediately, however, is that the Rockies are ready to push their chips into the middle of the table as they enter Year Three of the Jeff Bridich Era. This is news. The Rockies have made a habit of lying in the weeds or rebuilding for the better part of this century, having typically stayed out of the deep end of the free-agent market. With the five-year, $70 million commitment to Desmond, they have officially returned.
How much first base Desmond plays will ultimately be determined by whether the Rockies decide to move one of their outfielders. Charlie Blackmon and Carlos Gonzalez constantly see their names in trade rumors, and that’s unlikely to cease now that Desmond is in the fold. But what could perhaps be more interesting is if the Rockies choose to use Desmond in a Ben Zobrist role, letting him shuttle in for Trevor Story to help keep the latter fresh, as well as manning first base and cycling among the outfield spots.
The bottom line is that the Rockies are now officially interesting. They had already been trending that way, but this signing confirms it. They have a rotation that contains four pitchers projected at 2 WAR or better, plus an interesting rookie in Jeff Hoffman, as well as decent starting-pitching depth. The promotions last year both of Tyler Anderson and Jon Gray added much-needed substance to the rotation. They likewise have solid incumbents at second, short, third and the outfield. Now they’ve added Desmond. Their bullpen could be bolstered, but most teams can say that and the Rockies bullpen doesn’t project to be awful. There’s a good chance that there are more moves coming from the Rockies, moves that allow Desmond to shift back to a more natural outfield position, but in any event, there is now very real optimism around the 2017 Rockies.Kirk warns Congress may punt on debt ceiling
"Maybe, or maybe not." That's what Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) thinks about Congress raising the debt ceiling.
The first-term senator and former House lawmaker from the suburbs of Chicago said on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday that he'll "vote no on raising the debt ceiling — unless we have comprehensive, dramatic, effective and broad-based cuts to federal spending, including the reform of entitlement spending."
"The best play here is to have the bipartisan deficit commission report of the 'Gang of Six' attached to the debt limit extension," Kirk said. "That would be huge cuts in the future spending of the United States that may be a good deal. Without that, we should not send a blank check to the administration."
Kirk, of course, is referring to the the six Republican and Democratic senators working on a plan to slash the nation's debt. His fellow Illinois senator — Democrat Dick Durbin — is a member of the group, which is being led by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.).San Miguel 125th Anniversary Chalice Glass
The Marketing Store agency based in Central London, invited me a illustrate a limited edition, illustrated Chalice glass for San Miguel beer brand, to celebrate 125 years of the brand and draw attention to it’s rich and well travelled past. The Chalice will be available for consumers in bars all over London. Consumers spotted drinking from the Chalice will have the chance to win a selection of experience based prizes to create additional interest around the promotion. The launch of the Chalice will be supported with a digital media campaign with the Chalice as the hero. This will also act in informing consumers about the Prize promotion.
The brief was to produce a beautiful, illustrative, part chronologic, part geographic timeline taking consumers on a visual journey around their Chalice Highlighting key dates, places, events, quotes, inspirations and influences absorbed by San Miguel along its 125 year journey to present day.
The design has to be vibrant and bold bringing the story to life in flashes of colour evoking the adventurous spirit of the brand. Yet containing clusters of detail that could well be overlooked in a dimly lit busy bar at first glance. Allowing consumers to discover fragments of San Miguel’s influences for themselves at their own leisure. Areas of the design should reflect there geographic and or periodic roots (China, South Pacific 1950s) but still feel overtly Spanish, inline with the brands heritage.Every big election in India is fought on two planes. One is the ground: the local factors, the popular guy, the caste combinations, the regional party affiliations. The other is the media.
The fight on the ground for this year's elections is playing out in complicated ways that we may never fully comprehend, but the media-ted election is undergoing a major change. This election is not a contest between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi. Rahul's flop show during his grand interview to Arnab Goswami hasn't helped. He continues to be taken lightly. Perhaps he takes his party lightly as well, because party insiders say he's resigned to losing 2014.
With Rahul out of the fray, we are left with Modi. That explains why Arvind Kejriwal is attacking the challenger, not the crown prince who has already conceded defeat. In the media discourse over the elections that we are going to be riveted to in the weeks to come, expect the squabbles to be less between Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, and more between Aam Aadmi Party and the BJP. AAP is the new opposition, asking everyone questions that you thought couldn't be asked. The power of breaking the omerta code is irresistible.
The Congress won't ask Modi why he travels in helicopters hired by big industrialists, who pays for them and why? The Congress won't ask Modi what he thinks of the gas scam. Even the media won't go to town about the gas scam, because we don't ask questions about the company whose name must not be spoken.
UPA-II was rocked by scams involving allocation of natural resources. A huge amount of our outrage over the last few years has been devoted to "Coalgate" and "2G" and before that, to "CWG", but an alleged scam of similar proportions has been proceeding under the radar. Since only Kejriwal is asking the questions nobody else wants to ask, he has become an unassailable hero for his audience. It helps him make the point that he is the only alternative. It also shifts the media-ted election discourse from communalsim/secularism of 2002/1984, to governance, corruption and "the system".
Since Punjab and Haryana, both urban and rural, are a major concentration area for the AAP, expect these two states to soon be the Kurukshetra of AAP's moral positioning about corruption and the claim that the BJP is another Congress when it comes to corruption.
The Congress has a tactic that it's trotting out in an attempt to stay relevant in this new situation: Rahul's six anti-corruption laws which it could not pass – and which it wants to enact as ordinance, days after UPA-II's last Parliament session.It’s been just over a year since a devastating earthquake ripped through Nepal, killing 9,000 people and destroying some 600,000 structures.
Now, experts warn Kathmandu and other areas along the Himalayan Frontal Fault could be due for an even more powerful event.
Field research and analysis following the 2015 Nepal earthquake suggests a 124-mile stretch of the fault could be in the stages leading up to a massive earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater, capable of producing fractures 15-30 feet high.
An international team, including researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno, conducted several hands-on analyses of the fault lines in the Kathmandu region since last year’s earthquake
WHAT THEY FOUND Researchers dug two deep trenches near the mouths of major rivers at Tribeni and Bagmati. In Tribeni, roughly 124 miles (200 km) south of Kathmandu, they discovered a scarp – a steep bank – of at least 15 feet (5m) vertical separation between 1221 and 1262 AD. And at the Bagmati site, they found a vertical separation of about 30 feet (10m) or more, formed between 1031 and 1321 AD. The findings indicate the 124-mile stretch of the fault could be in the stages leading up to a massive earthquake of magnitude 8 or greater, capable of producing fractures 15-30 feet high. Researchers say the event would be more destructive than the 2015 Nepal earthquake.
According to the researchers, the deadly earthquake and aftershocks last year may even be a ‘warning’ of a more powerful event to come.
An international team, including researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno, conducted several hands-on analyses of the fault lines in the Kathmandu region since last year’s earthquake.
Results of the study are published to the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
The researchers dug two deep trenches near the mouths of major rivers at Tribeni and Bagmati, looking at the structural and radiocarbon relationships, along with the layers of rocks and soil, across the fault in areas where it has produced steep banks in soil deposited by the rivers.
This revealed evidence of earthquake displacement dating back thousands of years.
In Tribeni, roughly 124 miles (200 km) south of Kathmandu, they discovered a scarp – a steep bank – of at least 15 feet (5m) vertical separation between 1221 and 1262 AD.
And at the Bagmati site, they found a vertical separation of about 30 feet (10m) or more, formed between 1031 and 1321 AD.
‘We conducted a number of paleoearthquake studies in the vicinity of Kathmandu in the past year, digging trenches and studying soils and fault lines looking back over the past 2,000 years,’ said Steve Wesnousky, geophysics professor and director of the Center for Neotectonic Studies, who has studied the Himalayan Frontal Fault for 20 years.
‘Coupled with the historical record, it’s apparent the faults are capable of earthquakes far greater than the Gorkha earthquake.’
Researchers dug two deep trenches near the mouths of major rivers at Tribeni and Bagmati, looking at the structural and radiocarbon relationships, along with the layers of rocks and soil, across the fault in areas where it has produced steep banks in soil deposited by the rivers
Red stars show the study sites along Narayani and Bagmati Rivers. Green stars indicate epicenters of 2015 earthquake mainshock (M7.8) and largest aftershock, while yellow dots show epicentres of aftershocks greater than magnitude 4 one day after the Gorkha mainshock
According to the study, funded by the National Science Foundation, the Tribeni site could be approaching, or already in, the later stages of strain accumulation before a large earthquake.
‘The sum of our observations suggest that this section of the Himalayan Frontal Thrust fault, extending about 200 kilometers from Tribeni to Bagmati, may rupture simultaneously, and the next great earthquake near Kathmandu may rupture an area significantly greater than in the Gorkha earthquake,’ Wesnousky said.
‘It is prudent to consider that the fault near Kathmandu is in the later stages of a strain accumulation cycle prior to a great thrust earthquake, much greater than occurred in 2015.
‘In these regards, the 2015 Gorkha earthquake did not diminish the current level of seismic hazard in Kathmandu.’
In Tribeni, they discovered a scarp – a steep bank – of at least 15 feet (5m) vertical separation between 1221 and 1262 AD. And at the Bagmati site, they found a separation of about 30 feet (10m) or more, formed between 1031 and 1321 AD
With this new insight, the researchers are working to determine the seismic hazard in the region, and understand more about the mechanics of fault rupture along major continental thrust faults.
They say the findings suggest an earthquake along this stretch could be much more destructive than the 2015 event.
‘The scenario we developed hypothesizes that the next great earthquake may begin to the west near Tribeni and propagate into the section of fault beneath Kathmandu that did not rupture during the 2015 Gorkha earthquake,’ Wesnousky said.Jamie Whincup has declared intentions to call an early end to his Supercars career in order to race overseas.
The 33-year-old already holds a swag of Supercars records following a highly successful decade with Triple Eight that sees him stand alone as a six-time champion.
Whincup made the perfect start to his quest for a fifth Supercheap Auto Bathurst 1000 crown today, combining with co-driver and friend Paul Dumbrell to top all three practice sessions.
CLICK HERE for Speedcafe.com’s Practice 3 report.
Having concentrated on Supercars since moving into the category in 2003, Whincup will next February make his GT3 debut at the Bathurst 12 Hour.
Whincup will team with Craig Lowndes for the race in a Triple Eight-assisted Maranello Motorsport Ferrari.
Asked at Bathurst whether he aspires to race overseas, Whincup affirmed that he has no intentions of following team-mate Craig Lowndes by racing Supercars into his 40s.
Whincup, who recently opened his own coffee shop/car wash business on the Gold Coast, is currently contracted to Triple Eight until the end of the 2018 season.
“I won’t race a V8 Supercar forever, I won’t be 40 years old racing full-time,” he said.
“I’d like to end a little bit earlier and go and experience all the tracks and other categories all over the world.
“I look forward to that, but certainly not in the next couple of years.”
Whincup was meanwhile pleased with his day’s work at Mount Panorama, which had begun with a spin into the gravel at Murray’s Corner.
He ended Practice 3 0.07s clear of DJR Team Penske’s Fabian Coulthard with a pace-setting time of 2:05.29s.
“We rolled out of the truck well, the car was well balanced and we evolved it as the day went on,” he said.
“I put on the first of our seven sets of race tyres at the end of Practice 3 just to get a gauge on where we’re at.
“We’ll do a few little tweaks here and there, but all in all I’m very happy at this early stage.”
Whincup currently holds the Supercars practice lap record at Bathurst with a 2:04.91s set in Saturday’s Practice 5 last year.
“It all comes down to the conditions and what the track does overnight,” he said when asked how fast he can go tomorrow.
“If it cools down it’ll certainly be faster but it’s predicted to get warmer as the weekend goes on.
“But you don’t drive to a number, you just drive to be quicker than everyone else.”WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday that it would use its authority to exempt the agency from having to comply with environmental and other laws in its efforts to build border walls and access roads in the San Diego area.
The waiver would apply to the construction of several wall prototypes the agency plans to build in the region in response to an executive order signed by President Trump in January.
Congress has passed several laws that give Homeland Security the authority to exempt its construction of physical barriers like border walls from a variety of environmental and land management laws. The department invoked that authority five times from 2005 to 2008, the agency said. Most of the construction of the border walls currently in use was done during that period.
David Lapan, a spokesman for the department, said the waiver would also apply to replacement fencing and roads the agency plans to build in the San Diego area. The waiver will be published in the Federal Register in the coming days, the agency said.When they tell the story of the 2014 NFL Draft, they'll start with the quarterbacks.
They'll talk about Blake Bortles, Teddy Bridgewater and Johnny Manziel, and they'll talk about which teams pulled the trigger on a signal caller, and which teams decided to wait. Will these quarterbacks develop into franchise passers, or will some of these franchises be going back to the well in a few years?
This class of players has a handful of elite talents at the top, but the quarterbacks will provide an interesting twist to the top of the order. There should be plenty of moving around on the first night of the draft as well.
Here's our latest guess at the first two rounds of the NFL Draft. And at this point, it's just that: a guess.
1. Houston Texans - Blake Bortles, QB, UCF
This isn't so much a reaction to the pro days of Blake Bortles and Teddy Bridgewater as it is a representation of the current feeling about the Houston Texans and the No. 1 overall pick. Bridgewater is our top-ranked quarterback, and that's not going to change because of something he or Bortles did while throwing in shorts and a T-shirt. However, Bortles has legitimate connections to Houston's coaching staff with the relationship Bill O'Brien and George O'Leary have. Bortles is also bigger and arguably has a higher ceiling than Bridgewater. Whether it's right or wrong, Bridgewater is losing momentum in the pre-draft process.
2. TRADE Atlanta Falcons (via St. Louis Rams) - Jadeveon Clowney, DE, South Carolina
*The Rams receive a first and third round pick in 2014 and a second rounder in 2015 from the Falcons for the No. 2 overall pick.
After he dominated the 2014 NFL Scouting Combine, it's tough to imagine Jadeveon Clowney falling out of the top three picks in the draft. The Rams are an obvious candidate to trade this pick, and there should be plenty of teams willing to move up ahead of the Jaguars to land the most talented player in this class. In this scenario, Falcons general manager Thomas Dimtroff uses his relationship with Rams general manager Les Snead to move up from the No. 6 pick and get the impact pass rusher Atlanta needs.
3. Jacksonville Jaguars - Teddy Bridgewater, QB, Louisville
The Jaguars brought back Chad Henne, but that certainly doesn't mean they won't be drafting a quarterback with the No. 3 pick. Bridgewater's pro day shouldn't affect him too drastically, especially with the number of quarterback-needy teams drafting in the top 10. Jacksonville already addressed the defensive line in free agency, so Bridgewater makes the most sense. He should be ready to start on day one. Bridgewater has a proven ability to read defenses both before and after the snap. Plus, he's skilled at moving around the pocket. Forget his hand size and weight, the skills Bridgewater brings to the table as a quarterback should help make him a top-five pick.
More scouting profiles
4. TRADE Buffalo Bills (via Cleveland Browns) - Greg Robinson, OT, Auburn
*The Browns receive a first and third round pick in 2014 and a third-round pick in 2015 from the Bills for the No. 4 pick.
Here's our second trade of the top five. The Browns already have plenty of picks in this draft but are able to pick up a few more so that the Buffalo Bills can move up and take advantage of some value at offensive tackle. Greg Robinson is one of the top prospects in this class and would immediately fill Buffalo's need at right tackle. If he improves in pass protection, Robinson could end up being the best NFL offensive tackle from this draft class.
5. Oakland Raiders - Khalil Mack, OLB, Buffalo
Lamarr Houston leaving in free agency opens up another need for the Oakland Raiders. With Matt Schaub under center, the Raiders don't have to select a quarterback early if the right player isn't there. Instead, Oakland grabs one of the few elite players left on the board. Khalil Mack would be an excellent fit for Oakland's defense as well.
6. TRADE St. Louis Rams - Sammy Watkins, WR, Clemson
The St. Louis Rams are in a great position to come away with two impact players early in the 2014 NFL Draft. Even after moving back four spots, the Rams still land the top wide receiver available. Sammy Watkins would be the second first-round wide receiver the Rams have picked in the last two drafts, but Sam Bradford needs all the help he can get if he's going to finally live up to expectations.
7. Tampa Bay Buccaneers - Jake Matthews, OT, Texas A&M
Jake Matthews seems to have trouble getting noticed. He played on an offensive line with last year's No. 2 overall pick, Luke Joeckel. He's also been stuck in the shadow of Johnny Manziel for most of his career. Now, Matthews likely will be passed over by Greg Robinson as the first offensive tackle off the board in May. Still, Matthews is the type of versatile offensive tackle who should be a top-10 pick. He's an outstanding technician and has a good combination of quickness and length. Free agency opened up a need at offensive tackle for Tampa Bay.
8. Minnesota Vikings - Ha'Sean Clinton-Dix, S, Alabama
Figuring out which teams like Johnny Manziel won't be easy. Not every team will like him, and most that do won't show their hand. Manziel breaks the prototype at quarterback. He's undersized but has incredible field vision. He makes plays because of his creativity, but that same imaginative playing style has some skeptical about how he will translate to the NFL. If the Vikings decide to pass on Manziel, that opens them up to address other needs in the first round. Minnesota could certainly use an upgrade at safety, and one could make the argument that Ha'Sean Clinton-Dix is the best player available.
9. TRADE Cleveland Browns (via Buffalo Bills) - Johnny Manziel, QB, Texas A&M
Maybe between now and May, we'll get a clearer picture about how the NFL feels about Manziel. For now, it's safe to say some team will like him enough to take a chance on him in the top 10. Cleveland traded back to this spot and still lands a quarterback who could change the franchise.
10. Detroit Lions - C.J. Mosley, Linebacker, Alabama
Many have linked the Detroit Lions to offensive playmakers, but another linebacker would complete an already solid front seven. C.J. Mosley has the speed to play outside linebacker in a 4-3 defense. He moves through traffic efficiently and has more strength than most give him credit for. Add in his cover skills, and Mosley should have no trouble making an early impact in the NFL.
More scouting profiles
11. Tennessee Titans - Jason Verrett, CB, TCU
The Titans need to find another cornerback after Alterraun Verner left in free agency. Jason Verrett may be a bit undersized, but he's still the best cornerback in this class. He has outstanding footwork and closes on the football so well.
12. New York Giants - Mike Evans, WR, Texas A&M
The Giants need a big body on the outside after losing Hakeem Nicks in free agency. Mike Evans fits the bill. He had an outstanding showing at the combine and would likely be an upgrade over Nicks before long.
13. St. Louis Rams - Calvin Pryor, S, Louisville
Safety is one of the few remaining holes on the Rams' defense. Calvin Pryor may be more of an in-the-box safety than a center fielder, but he still has value in the top half of the first round. Considering how many teams need safeties, it shouldn't be surprising if Pryor is drafted between picks 10 and 20.
14. Chicago Bears - Louis Nix, DT, Notre Dame
The Bears invested a lot of money in the defensive line in free agency. Chicago could still use help on the interior, though. Louis Nix lost some value after an injury-plagued season in 2013, but he's lost a bit of weight and seems healthy for the first time in a while. If Nix falls to the back half of the first round, some team is getting a steal. In this scenario, the Bears don't let that happen.
15. Pittsburgh Steelers - Justin Gilbert, CB, Oklahoma State
Justin Gilbert is tough to figure out. On one hand, he has the ability to be a shutdown cornerback with his length and straight-line speed. On the other hand, he struggles with his footwork and was inconsistent in off coverage throughout his career. On talent alone, Gilbert should be a first-round pick. The Steelers have a big need at cornerback.
16. Dallas Cowboys - Kony Ealy, DE, Missouri
Kony Ealy improved on almost all of his combine numbers at his pro day last week. His value is in his versatility. Ealy showed the ability to move in space during linebacker drills at the combine, but he can also play with his hand in the dirt on the edge and the interior. After letting DeMarcus Ware go, the Cowboys need a pass rusher.
17. TRADE - Kansas City Chiefs (via Baltimore Ravens) - Xavier Su'a-Filo, OG, UCLA
*The Jets receive a first and fourth round pick from the Chiefs for the No. 17 pick.
Free agency wasn't kind to Kansas City's offensive line. The Chiefs now need multiple upgrades at offensive guard. With the Jets and Dolphins both possibly looking for offensive guards, the Chiefs may need to trade up to address the need. Xavier Su'a-Filo is the best guard in this class and worth trading up for. He moves well in space and has a lot of functional strength for the position.
18. New York Jets - Odell Beckham Jr., WR, LSU
Eric Decker was a nice score for the Jets in free agency, but Geno Smith still needs more weapons to take a step forward at quarterback in year two. Odell Beckham Jr. has some of the best hands in this draft, as well as the speed and body control to be a threat down the field.
19. Miami Dolphins - Zack Martin, G, Notre Dame
The Dolphins can't be picky about how they address their offensive line issues. A guard and a tackle would both be useful in Miami. Zack Martin can play either spot but would probably be best served at guard in the NFL.
20. Arizona Cardinals - Anthony Barr, OLB, UCLA
Anthony Barr falls to No. 20 in this mock draft because he's still such an unfinished product as a pass rusher. His talent is undeniable, and he's been dominating his workouts. Barr could go much higher than this, but the Cardinals won't complain if he's available at this juncture.
21. Green Bay Packers - Eric Ebron, TE, North Carolina
The Green Bay Packers have needs on defense that trump the need for a tight end, but Eric Ebron would be too good of a value to pass up. He needs to attack the football a bit better in the air. Ebron is a vertical threat with solid |
in the Sportsground.
“I am probably in the last group of people who can have a proper grown-up job and still do this.”
The squad reached out to the players union – Rugby Players Ireland – with O’Reilly commending the support offered to Connacht players by sports psychologist Dr Deirdre Lyons.
“The way they [the IRFU] have the players in the Sevens set-up they are not particularly able to stand up for themselves. Same for some 15s girls. It compromised our ability to petition through RPI to the IRFU with collective bargaining power in any shape or form.”
Systemic flaws
Remarkably, morale was solid entering the World Cup.
“Most of us knew there were systematic flaws in the structure. But it was my first World Cup after God-knows-how-many years trying. You are pumped. And there was an internal expectation that after battling through problems in the environment that we could keep that going for one last hurrah.
“Unfortunately there were too many obstacles to surmount with just bloody-mindedness. We can’t level all the responsibility at Tom. We as players didn’t perform. Our confidence just isn’t there. If you haven’t repped stuff out on the training field it cannot just come out in a game.”
The recent IRFU AGM put €500,000 aside for the women’s game – but O’Reilly sees no clear long term plan for the 15-a-side game.
“The guys in the blazers and fancy ties need to decide if this is something they are serious about. If not, fine. We will figure out how we manage it ourselves. We will make the most out of it and keep fighting.
“There is so much catching up now to do with the other nations. The tournament itself has been really well-run. What was lovely for me during the two weeks in UCD was bumping into volunteers. There wasn’t one person I didn’t half-know. And all there off their own time. I think that sums up what happened to this team. A reliance on volunteer spirit, on passion can only get you so far.”
O’Reilly is talking about the need for coaching resources at all levels.
“If we want to grow the game in Ireland, if we want to compete, we need to become a professional outfit. End of.”
Asked to comment on a number of issues raised in this interview, the IRFU responded on Friday: “The IRFU perform a tournament review after all men’s, women’s and Under 20s campaigns. Management, players and key support staff will be part of the review process.”Alec Baldwin is headed back to TV.
The 30 Rock veteran is set to star as a billionaire real estate developer, divorced father, philanthropist, society fixture and celebrated libertine who unexpectedly becomes mayor of New York City. After a heated bidding war, the hourlong entry has landed in development with a production commitment at HBO.
Baldwin, who has been vocal about his own political ambitions in the past, will serve as an executive producer should it move forward. He'll be joined by writer/EP Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned) and EP Cary Brokaw (The Player, Closer). The still-untitled project hails from Universal Television, where Baldwin has a deal, and the actor's El Dorado Pictures.
In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, confirmed that he had plans to one day run for New York mayor himself. At that time, he suggested the hold-up on any political pursuits was his commitment to the NBC comedy and his desire to be better educated about the office.
Since 30 Rock signed off in early 2013, the Emmy-winning actor and frequent tabloid target has turned up on Broadway, headlined a short-lived MSNBC show and has feuded with everyone from Shia LaBeouf to the New York Post.ASUS displayed a nerdtastic motherboard design concept, at Computex. Called the Republic of Gamers ZEUS, ASUS' creation is a socket LGA2011 motherboard with a dual-GPU graphics hardware soldered onto the board, in the place otherwise assigned for expansion slots. The top half of the ZEUS resembles that of a conventional LGA2011 motherboard, with the processor being powered by a 10-phase Digi+ VRM, and eight DDR3 DIMM slots. ASUS somehow made the platform support up to 128 GB of unregistered DIMM DDR3 memory (double the 64 GB limit of the Sandy Bridge-E HEDT platform).The second half of the motherboard has the X79 PCH, and two PCI-Express 3.0 GPUs in dual-GPU configuration. ASUS hasn't revealed which GPUs these are, but sources predict it's a pair of AMD Radeon HD 7970 (Tahiti XT) or HD 7870 (Pitcairn XT). Each GPU system has its own set of memory, and a set of 8-pin + 6-pin PCIe power connectors. The display outputs of this dual-GPU setup are given out on the rear panel, as two mini-DP + Thunderbolt ports, and one each of HDMI and standard DP. The ZEUS even has as many as 8 SATA 6 Gb/s ports, four SATA 3 Gb/s ports, and 12 USB 3.0 ports, besides two Thunderbolt 10 Gb/s ports. For now, ASUS' monstrosity is a design concept, and the company is undecided about launching it to the market. If nothing, the ZEUS serves as a testament of ASUS' mammoth engineering potential.
30 Comments on ASUS ROG ZEUS Fuses LGA2011 Motherboard with Dual-GPU Graphics
1 to 25 of 30 Go to Page 12 PreviousNext
#1 jalex3
Cant say I would ever want it. Though it is interesting. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:02 Reply
#2 ASharp
I think it would actually be a really nice board if they removed this whole dual GPU thing integrated onto the board and just put plain and proper PCI-Express slots instead. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:05 Reply
#3 SK-1
Brings new meaning to the words "Integrated Graphics". Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:11 Reply
#4 Mussels
Moderprator coming soon to a mac near you!
seems weird to have the GPU's as part of the board. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:11 Reply
#5 btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator ASharp said: I think it would actually be a really nice board if they removed this whole dual GPU thing integrated onto the board and just put plain and proper PCI-Express slots instead. Then it wouldn't be much different from X79 Sabertooth, or any other LGA2011 motherboard. Then it wouldn't be much different from X79 Sabertooth, or any other LGA2011 motherboard. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:14 Reply
#6 erixx
This is sort of what's inside consoles right?
And the cooling for the IGPs doesn't seem enough Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:42 Reply
#7 Cuzza
I like it. No stuffing around with add-in boards.
How the hell is that heatsink going to keep two GPUs cool though?? Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:50 Reply
#8 Huddo93
I am thinking the same thing, How the hell is that small heatsink going to cool dual gpu's??
This however, doesnt actually seem that stupid either. If the GPU's performed well then it would be really easy to do small Micro ATX builds.
On the other hand, I really dont think there is a large enough market for this sort of product to work. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 2:58 Reply
#9 Nordic
I could see uses in small high powered gaming pc's Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 3:06 Reply
#10 entropy13
A Z77 board with even just one GPU (like the 7870) would be more attractive. The Maximus V Gene is at $210, a 7870 is at least $320. They could probably sell such a mATX board at around $500 and there would certainly be buyers.
Or make a slightly cheaper non-ROG variant, the P8Z77-M is $135, the HD 7770 is at least $130. Sell that board at around $250. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 3:39 Reply
#11 The Von Matrices
Just judging from the GPU memory arrangement I don't see how there could be larger than a 256-bit bus per GPU, which leads me to believe this is a pair of 7850s or 7870s. This would also make the small heatsink much more reasonable. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 3:48 Reply
#12 joyman
I think Asus is going over the hill with their boards lately... Overpriced and looking more and more like s**t. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 4:01 Reply
#13 Protagonist
As for me I want it. ASUS name your price I'll give you the cash for it. Then I'll build me a trophy computer with it. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 4:16 Reply
#14 Splave
innovative for sure, although now when 1 gpu fails or you get a bent pin in the socket, you are out 2 gpu's and a mobo Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 4:57 Reply
#15 Sp33d Junki3
I think its a great step forwards to a all in one solution mobo.
I like the board. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 5:28 Reply
#16 _JP_
Splave said: innovative for sure, although now when 1 gpu fails or you get a bent pin in the socket, you are out 2 gpu's and a mobo Yep, this will be a shortcoming. Looks massive, but I'm having doubts if that heatsink can cope with 2 GPUs.Yep, this will be a shortcoming. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 6:00 Reply
#17 Aquinus
Resident Wat-man They height is key. I have a full ATX HTPC case that this could most likely fit in, so you never know. It's definitely an interesting idea, I can't wait to see some benches when it gets released (if it gets released.) What interests me is that the GPUs are passively cooled. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 6:23 Reply
#18 Geofrancis
New XBOX motherboard? or at least a guide to what's possible Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 6:48 Reply
#19 Th3pwn3r
What do you do when you want to upgrade it? Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 7:06 Reply
#20 Aquinus
Resident Wat-man Geofrancis said: New XBOX motherboard? or at least a guide to what's possible Sounds good if the console remains 300 USD. :) Sounds good if the console remains 300 USD. :) Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 7:07 Reply
#21 ensabrenoir
:eek:.....i likey. Definitely an enthusaist part.....money, praticality and better judgement dont always apply;) Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 7:43 Reply
#22 sergionography
The Von Matrices said: Just judging from the GPU memory arrangement I don't see how there could be larger than a 256-bit bus per GPU, which leads me to believe this is a pair of 7850s or 7870s. This would also make the small heatsink much more reasonable. I don't see how this heat sink can keep up with 2 hd7870s
However these could also be mobile gpus solder tonthe motherboard so it could be anything for all we know from gtx650m-680m to hd7750m-7970m tho the higher end parts with 100watt tdp don't seem very likely idk, just doesn't seem like enough cooling to have a fan less heat sink.
But hey I love the idea tho, if they can drive prices down to were buying a mono with built in graphic card is cheaper than getting each desperate then this could be a good platform for some people. Tho putting high end gpus would at least require a bigger heat sink and fans I don't see how this heat sink can keep up with 2 hd7870sHowever these could also be mobile gpus solder tonthe motherboard so it could be anything for all we know from gtx650m-680m to hd7750m-7970m tho the higher end parts with 100watt tdp don't seem very likely idk, just doesn't seem like enough cooling to have a fan less heat sink.But hey I love the idea tho, if they can drive prices down to were buying a mono with built in graphic card is cheaper than getting each desperate then this could be a good platform for some people. Tho putting high end gpus would at least require a bigger heat sink and fans Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 7:49 Reply
#23 btarunr
Editor & Senior Moderator Maybe also look at the power inputs for each of those two GPUs (8-pin + 6-pin, per GPU). A Pitcairn would never need that. Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 8:49 Reply
#24 Random Murderer
The Anti-Midas great idea, but highly impractical. what happens when two years down the road your cpu is still acceptably fast but you need a gpu upgrade? you're screwed, you have to replace a (possibly) $600+ mobo, AND buy a gpu! Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 9:40 Reply
#25 theoneandonlymrk
it would sell imho, theirs an easy extreme option for a noob all in one box and ready to go,= win, just add mem and cpu, be interesting to see if they have managed anything clever with the pciex3(hopefully) interface between cpu and gpu, ya never know:) Posted on Jun 5th 2012, 10:46 ReplyImage caption The new law is expected to acknowledge the differences between forced marriages where there is no consent and arranged marriages
Parents who force their children to marry in England and Wales could be jailed under planned new laws.
Home Secretary Theresa May said forced marriage was an "appalling practice" and criminalising it would send "a strong message that it will not be tolerated". It is already illegal in Scotland.
An estimated 8,000 young women a year are forced into marriages.
But campaigners fear the plan could deter victims from coming forward.
The new law will distinguish between forced marriages, where there is no consent, and arranged marriages where "both parties have consented to the union but can still refuse to marry if they choose to".
A Home Office consultation, which ended in March, was launched at the request of Prime Minister David Cameron, who has said forced marriage is "little more than slavery" and "completely wrong".
The new law will not apply to Northern Ireland, but ministers there will be able to introduce their own legislation, the Home Office said.
Existing laws
Mrs May announced a £500,000 fund to help schools and other agencies spot early signs of a forced marriage.
And a government advertising campaign will highlight an individual person's right to choose whom they marry.A similar law was introduced in Scotland in November giving courts there the power to issue protection orders to those at risk, which, if breached could carry a two-year prison sentence.
Since 2008, courts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland have been able to issue civil orders, under the Forced Marriage Act, to prevent forced marriage or protect victims.
This is an order in a civil court but its breach is punishable with a two-year jail sentence for contempt of court.
Opponents of the idea of criminalising forced marriages fear that victims will be dissuaded from coming forward because they do not want their relatives to end up with a criminal record.
Mr Cameron said as the plans were announced that he had listened to these concerns and there would be a "comprehensive package to identify possible victims, support those who have suffered first hand and, indeed, prevent criminality wherever possible."
He added: "We have spent time with those who work tirelessly to raise and address this issue and I want to send a clear and strong message: forced marriage is wrong, is illegal and will not be tolerated."
Freedom, a charity that campaigns against forced marriage and "dishonour" violence, welcomed the move.
Founder Aneeta Prem said: "Forced marriage is an indefensible abuse of human rights and can result in abduction, serial rape and murder.
"Criminalising forced marriage will send out a powerful message to people that this practice is unacceptable in England and will be dealt with severely."
The Labour peer and chair of trustees for Freedom, Lord Toby Harris, said: "I hope the government put the necessary Bill before Parliament as soon as possible, along with measures to support organisations like Freedom who work to advise and support victims and potential victims."
'Effective framework'
Some say that criminal law already provides punishment for offences that may be committed when coercing someone into matrimony.
"There is already plenty of criminal law to tackle murder, kidnapping, abduction, rape and all the other evil manifestations associated with forcing people into marriage against their will," said Lord Lester, who introduced the Forced Marriage Bill which led to the 2008 Act.
He stated that the family law approach was better than the criminal process which, he said, "has not proved to be an effective way of tackling a major social problem".
Shadow equalities minister Kate Green said she supported "appropriate criminal sanctions to stop more forced marriages and protect victims".
"The Home Office needs to ensure the framework adopted is effective rather than counter-productive," she added.
"Ministers need to demonstrate they are working with victims' groups and experts on the detail to make sure victims have the confidence to come forward and are not put off.
"Also, the legal framework won't make a difference without proper support, prevention, education and enforcement."ROCKLIN, Calif. -- The Rocklin Academy school board is facing tough questions from parents concerned over a controversial incident involving transgender discussions inside a kindergarten class, CBS Sacramento reports.
"These parents feel betrayed by the school district that they were not notified," said Karen England with the Capitol Resource Institute.
The incident happened earlier this summer during the last few days of the academic school year.
Gender - The Space Between
At Monday night's board meeting, the teacher at the center of the controversy spoke out. With emotions high, she addressed a packed house.
"I'm so proud of my students, it was never my intent to harm any students but to help them through a difficult situation," she said.
The teacher defended her decision to read two children's books about transgenderism including one titled "I am Jazz." She says the books were given to her by a transgender child going through a transition.
"The kindergartners came home very confused, about whether or not you can pick your gender, whether or not they really were a boy or a girl," said England.
Parents say besides the books, the transgender student at some point during class also changed clothes and was revealed as her true gender.
Non-binary: The gender beyond he or she
And many parents say they feel betrayed and blindsided.
"I want her to hear from me as a parent what her gender identity means to her and our family, not from a book that may be controversial," a parent said.
"My daughter came home crying and shaking so afraid she could turn into a boy," another parent said.
The issue was not on the agenda, so parents spoke out during public comment.
"It's really about the parents being informed and involved and giving us the choice and rights of what's being introduced to our kids, and at what age," said parent Chelsea McQuistan.
Many teachers also spoke out in support of what transpired inside the classroom. They spoke about the importance of teaching students about diversity and having healthy dialogues.
Transgender testimonial - what it means to be non-binary
One parent said the impact on her son was extremely positive.
"It was so precious to see that he had absolutely no prejudice in his body. My child just went in there and listened to the story, and didn't relate it to anything malicious, or didn't question his own body," she said.
"When we head in the direction of banned books or book lists, or selective literature – that should only be read inside or outside the classroom, I think that's a very dangerous direction to go," said 7th grade teacher Kelly Bryson.
The district says the books were age-appropriate and fell within their literature selection policy. Unlike sex education, the topics of gender identity don't require prior parental notice.
In a statement during the board meeting, the district said: "As indicated by Superintendent Robin Stout in a communication last week, staff will be engaging parents and teachers in discussions about how materials outside our curriculum will be addressed in the future."
The large discussion has compelled the board to put the item on the next month's agenda.When programming in any language there are certain common errors that everyone makes as they mature and evolve their programming skills. In the case of PHP, I’ve seen a lot of ugly and complicated code around, since the language is very permissive.
To have a good and healthy PHP code base so it won’t resemble the unmanageable cabling mess in the picture above, your project needs to have the following:
– no spaghetti code
– code reuse (avoid code repetition)
– avoid complicated nested loops
– Encapsulation (organize code in classes)
– Clean user I/O
– Code Documentation
– Consistent code conventions
– Tests
Luckily there are some PHP code quality tools that can help us address most of these problems and give us a diagnostic of our project’s code health.
###Documenting your code
PHP Documentor: Documenting code with PHP Documentor is very simple and easy. You just need to follow a very simple markup before your functions and classes and the tool will generate all the developer documentation for you. It’s also very handy when adding new people to your project or inheriting someone else’s work. Just by seeing the documentation comments in the code you can understand what a given function does, what each of its parameters need to be and what it returns. You can also expand the documentation to add use cases and even unit tests!
###Code consistency
PHP Code Sniffer: A tool that analyses the syntax of your project’s code based on a PHP syntax standard. Known standards like PEAR or Zend syntax styles are included by default but you can also customize and define our own team’s style.
PHP Depend
Analyzes the code for common issues and potential optimizations. Some examples of those are:
– if your function is too long
– if your function has too many parameters
– variable names too long or too short
– too many nested cycles
– use of eval()
– name convention consistency
– unused methods or variables
PHP Mess detector: A fork of PHPDepend with a friendlier UI and configuration options
PHPCPD (Copy/Paste Detector): A tool that will detect copy/pasted code across your project that can be reused.
###Testing
Unit testing
PHP Unit and Simpletest: Unit testing has been very useful in my experience on recent projects where I’ve been allowed to implement it. On personal project I always tend to do unit testing before layout out all my code. It might take more time to develop your project at the beginning but it will save you tons of time debugging and tracing back errors when you think you’re done programming.
If you’re using Ubuntu and have problems running PHPUnit, here’s a post about how to solve the problem.
Here’s a quick guide on how to start using Simpletest.
Integration Testing (browser emulation)
Mink and Behat are the tools you’ll need to do browser emulation to test your interfaces and how it’s all put together and interacting for the user.
###Put it all together with Phing
Phing is a tool like GNU Make or Apache Ant but it’s in PHP and extensible via PHP classes. You can put all of these tools together with Phing, so you can automate all the checking, testing and even deployment and cleanup of files or databases.
With these tools you can have a very robust quality assurance workflow on your project. Of course, this doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be any bugs or that your project will have the best code, but at least it will reduce very common problems, will increase code maintainability and help you spot problems easier. The transitions from adding or removing people from the project (like in large teams or dynamic organizations) will be smoother, as well. Also those transitions will be even smoother if you consider using an established web framework for your project instead of writing your own.
I gave a talk at FSL Vallarta 2012 about this, you can download the slides for the talk “Herramientas de calidad en codigo PHP” here. (slides in Spanish)
About the author Gabriel Saldaña is a web developer, photographer and free software advocate. Connect with him on Google+ and Twitter
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TumblrIn one day, a photo of a strip of bacon has garnered more than two million views and 3,000 comments, and has had an array of internet users vowing to go vegan. What makes this strip of flesh significant is what appears to be a fully formed nipple still attached. The photo, uploaded to Facebook before being deleted and posted to Reddit, was taken by a woman in Burlington, WI who said she was about to cook the strip for breakfast before the anatomical discovery stopped her. Once uploaded to Reddit, the photograph (which can be seen here) elicited a strong response among scores of commenters. “That’s horrifying,” one commenter said. “I never thought anything could make me not want bacon,” commented another. “Then I saw this thing. It looks disgusting.” Many commenters pointed out the irony of so many being revolted by one piece of dead flesh on a strip of another that would otherwise be consumed happily by meat-eaters. “It’s almost as if bacon came from a live animal,” one commenter said sarcastically. “That moment of cognitive dissonance when you realize that the food you’re eating was once a living creature. What a concept,” said another.
Want more of today’s best plant-based news, recipes, and lifestyle?
Get our award-winning magazine! SubscribeBy Alex Hope
Guest writer for Wake Up World
In the wake of an overwhelming response to my previously written post about experiencing a spontaneous third eye awakening, this post will cover the scientific aspects of the pineal gland, which is commonly associated with the term ‘third eye’.
What topics are going to be covered in this post?
With so much information, and misinformation, out there about the definition and functions of the pineal gland, it’s only fair that we list the main topics that are going to be discussed and explained throughout this post. You can scroll and read through each one individually, or if you prefer just read the topics that are important to you.
What is the pineal gland? What is DMT? What is the correlation of fluoride and pineal gland? How to decalcify your pineal gland? How to stimulate your pineal gland?
It’s quite a bit of information, so please bear with us if some parts end up being clunky or not fully clarified, through your feedback and questions in the comments we can ensure that the post is adjusted to reflect the best and clearest scientific and spiritual advice on how to keep your pineal gland healthy and functional.
Before I begin, I would like to express my gratitude to Caroline Cousins who inspired me to make a revised edition of this increasingly popular subject. Caroline’s an intuitive therapist who has more than two decades of experience in working with energy healing, and she is a certified energy healer in many modalities. If you’d like to learn more about her work, please visit her website at The Transformational Energy Expert, where you can also explore the ways she can help you with overcoming life transitions and ease the process of tuning into your own intuitive abilities.
What is the pineal gland?
The pineal gland, which sits at the centre of your brain, is responsible for the production of a serotonin derivative known as melatonin; a hormone that helps to regulate and maintain a healthy circadian rhythm (which regulates your sleep patterns), but also helps to regulate reproductive hormones for female gender.
During the dark hours of the night, the body’s ability to produce melatonin increases greatly, whereas during the day the production levels are low, hence you don’t feel sleepy or tired. Whenever you expose yourself to bright light during late hours, the normal cycle of body’s melatonin production is disrupted. This applies in particular to those who work different shifts at work, or frequent flyers who hop between different time zones frequently.
Your pineal gland has the highest ratio of serotonin (as quoted by Rick Strassman) anywhere within your body, which is a critical component for the production of pineal melatonin. Serotonin, as you may have heard, governs your energy and mood levels, and is often called the neurotransmitter of happiness and confidence. Doing tasks that challenge you to great extents and provide a sense of achievement are all linked with a greater production of serotonin which helps you to keep going.
“The pineal also has the ability to convert serotonin to tryptamine, a critical step in DMT formation. The unique enzymes that convert serotonin, melatonin, or tryptamine into psychedelic compounds also are present in extraordinarily high concentrations in the pineal. These enzymes, the methyltransferases, attach a methyl group—that is, one carbon and three hydrogens—onto other molecules, thus methylating them. Simply methylate tryptamine twice, and we have di-methyl-tryptamine, or DMT. Because it possesses the high levels of the necessary enzymes and precursors, the pineal gland is the most reasonable place for DMT formation to occur.” — Rick Strassman
During the 1950’s scientists concluded numerous studies on the brains of rats and mice, and found that both contain significant amounts of DMT, during that time scientists were also able to find enzymes that form DMT from tissue samples of human lungs. Then in 1965, a group of German scientists published a paper that showed the extraction of DMT from human blood. In 1972, Julius Axelrod, who was an American biochemist, confirmed the presence of DMT within the tissue of human brain.
What is DMT?
While the function of DMT within the human brain is currently unknown, Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is one of the most powerful psychedelic drugs, which happens to occur naturally in animals, plants, and the human brain.
“In 1972, Julius Axelrod also discovered that the human pineal gland produces DMT (Dimethyltryptamine), which is a hallucinogenic substance. Active and serious meditators are able to flood their brain with DMT negating the need for substances like Ayahuasca. It is also thought that diet interferes with the activity of the pineal gland, e.g. eating sugar, as it produces enzymatic inhibitors. Therefore, cleansing our body and consuming fresh, quality, organic nutrition will help to heighten our consciousness, as well as other practices.” — Caroline Cousins
When consumed orally, DMT is reported to initiate a strong psychedelic, and often spiritual, experience for the mediator. This is also part of the reason why there are so many questions around the correlation of the pineal gland and DMT production, because at the moment DMT is classified as a Schedule 1 drug, which is quite ironic if you consider the fact that it naturally occurs in the human body!
However illegal in the United States, the consumption of DMT has deep roots within the culture of South American shamans and natural healers.
While there aren’t many scientific studies yet that show the therapeutic benefits of consuming DMT, numerous selfless seekers — who have found themselves challenged with lifelong fears, depression and anxiety — have taken it upon themselves to head into the South American jungle and try magical brews like Ayahuasca and San Pedro for themselves, and no matter how many reviews and testimonials you read, it seems that by the time the experiences are over, there is a long lasting relief from emotional trauma, alleviation of issues relating to PTSD, and one generally experiences a profound sense of well-being.
Rick Strassman, whom we quoted on numerous occasions in this post, put together a scientifically-backed book called “DMT: The Spirit Molecule“, within which he shares his lifelong findings of the origins of DMT, how it is found in the human body, and the kind of mystical and spiritual experiences that people have when consuming it. The book was turned into a movie shortly after, and can be watched on YouTube for free. (You can purchase the book here.)
We live in a world where the Western society has yet to embrace the natural healing that is possible thanks to a large variety of plants on this Earth, perhaps things will start to shift gears once people begin to understand that the human body is a fastly adapting organism that can build great tolerance against chemical drugs meant to aid in depression, stress, and other emotionally-related issues.
A documentary made by VICE, illustrates the dangers that we face by extinguishing rainforests for the sake of farming and harvesting “essential” oils that you see everywhere in the supermarkets today, and how crucial of a component the rainforest is when it comes to finding ways to create natural antibiotics, simply because the human body — over the course of the last 100 years — has learned to adapt to most common antibiotics, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to create strong antibiotics for deadly viruses and epidemics. Click here to watch the documentary. (May not be available in your country.)
Common Benefits of a DMT Experience
Whether we want to believe (accept) that a naturally occurring substance such as DMT can induce a spiritual experience is up to all of us individually, but searching for “DMT reviews” and “DMT trip reports” gives us a large variety of experiences to work with, to notice common patterns and similarities that can help to understand the function of this psychedelic substance.
What are the most common experiences that people have when ingesting DMT orally? Below are our findings, gathered through numerous personal studies and reviews. Feel free to comment with your own experiences in the comments section or join the conversation on Facebook.
We have still more to go, and we will explore ways that one can stimulate and activate his pineal gland later on, but for now, another “controversial” topic of discussion is the effects that fluoride has on the pineal gland.
What is the correlation of fluoride and pineal gland?
As you begin to grow older with age, your pineal gland starts to calcify, and lose some of its potent functionality. These statements differ based on the lifestyle choices of each individual, but ingesting too much of fluoride is known to be an important factor in how fast the pineal gland gets calcified.
“One of the modern inhibitors to our pineal gland is fluoride, which calcifies it. In Europe, it is believed that 60-80% of the population has a calcified pineal gland. Conversely in Asia it is 15 to 25% and in Africa it is predicted to be 5 to 15%. Much of the water in Europe and our toothpastes and mouthwashes, have been saturated with fluoride, unlike other continents, because historic medical advice has shown it to be beneficial to the health of our teeth and gums, which is increasingly being challenged by many sources now.” — Caroline Cousins
Research compiled by Mercola shows that fluoride might not only cause cancer, but fluoride can also lead to devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s — which is directly linked with the body’s inability to produce melatonin because of a calcified gland: fluoride reduces the production of melatonin.
There have been great outbursts of anger towards the governments in countries like United States, which have admitted that the fluoride levels in water are way above their norm, and have since taken the appropriate steps to reduce water fluoridation. It hasn’t, however, stopped people from deeming this situation as a conspiracy to control people, which in all fairness isn’t so far fetched, given that DMT — which is found in the human body — is labeled as a Class 1 drug.
Which substances calcify the pineal gland?
You may want to start cutting down on the following substances, so that you can start the process of reversing the effects that calcification has done on the effects of a healthy gland.
Substance What it does? To begin the process of decalcification, you will need to inform yourself about the most harmful substances that cause your pineal to calcify in the first place. As a general rule it considered that, those who consume a poor diet are more likely to have their gland calcified than those who stick to a healthy and organic diet. Toothpaste Always check if your toothpaste contains fluoride, Colgate might have a great marketing record, but it’s not the most optimal or healthy choice for your gums. Seek alternatives, and explore options like coconut oil which promote healthy teeth and gums. Artificial Calcium Intaking large quantities of calcium that comes from processed food, and supplements, leads to large amounts of calcium phosphate that stores itself in your system. Polluted Water Avoid tap water at all costs, use a filter (and make sure it filters fluoride) whenever possible, but the best thing is to drink clean mineral or spring water, which isn’t near the cost of having your health go down the drain. Mercury Avoid foods like shark fish, swordfish, king mackerel, tilefish, also high fructose corn syrup — which research has shown to contain significant traces of mercury. Spirulina & chlorella are great additions to your diet that can cleanse your system of any mercury. Chemical Pesticides Majority of food in the supermarket was grown in a toxic environment which uses chemical pesticides to stimulate the growth of food, including a diet additive of growth hormones for animals. Consider changing your diet so that it includes organic and environmentally friendly vegetables. GMO’s Genetically Modified Organisms are a source of cancer and disease within the body, avoid at all costs and always check your food labels, preferably change your routine to shop at whole foods and organic markets. Deadly Toxins Anything artificial is going to contribute to your overall health and the health of your pineal gland. Refined sugars, chemical mouthwash, artificial foods, and other chemical “household” items will detriment your health. Drugs Harmful substances such as non-organic sugar, tobacco, alcohol and caffeine are known to reduce energy in the body |
season, he owned a remarkable Corsi-For percentage of 55.9 percent in the regular season, and further boosted his value by winning 54.6 percent of his faceoffs.
Poile's magic, and a verdict
That Poile has managed to keep just over $13 million in cap space with only Johansen left to sign is wizardry in itself, and there's no reason to believe the veteran executive won't strike a deal that doesn't greatly benefit the future of his club.
Somehow, Nashville's core of Arvidsson, Roman Josi, Mattias Ekholm, and Ryan Ellis combine for only $20.5 million in annual salary, and Poile's knack for locking down his players at reasonable rates before they hit their peaks has paid great dividends in affording the financial flexibility to build a championship-worthy roster.
For years, Nashville's missing ingredient was a top-line center, and now the club has a chance to secure a young, prospering two-way pivot in Johansen. With P.K. Subban raking in $9 million per season, Johansen surely won't leave his negotiations as the Predators' highest-paid skater, but he's well in line to earn second spot on the list, ahead of Filip Forsberg's forward-leading $6 million.
In his contract year, Johansen adequately demonstrated his importance to the Predators, and his absence in the postseason left a glaring, perhaps insurmountable hole in the lineup. Now, it's time to pay him, and a deal, let's say, for seven years and $7 million annually, fits more than comfortably in Nashville's books, and is cost-comparable to several of Johansen's peers across the league.
Now we wait.Windows 8 is something that you can now download for free, provided that you don’t mind the 90 day licence. Those who pirated the RTM build and have been stuck on a 30 day countdown rejoice, you now have more time.
However, just how much better is Windows 8 than Windows 7? It’s a question that can be answered following a dozen lines of inquiry. However, one of the most anticipated elements of Windows 8 is a faster boot sequence. The faster the start for a computer, the less time you spend chewing your nails trying to fire it up.
It’s something that Microsoft has been whacking on since BUILD last year, during which the company showed off how fast a Windows 8 machine could fire up. At the end of the process, how much progress has it made? Some, but perhaps not as much as you might have anticipated.
According to a study executed by TechSpot, Windows 8 boots one-third faster than Windows 7. Here’s the graph from its report:
If you want to run the math, head here.
Here’s the rub: on a lighting fast modern PC – specs from TechSpot at the end of this post – Windows 8 is but a third faster. That’s either good, boosts are nice, or bad, only a third on such a major release? However, it’s a bit moot. What matters is how quickly Windows RT will boot when compared to Windows 7. That will determine the tablet experience.
So, Windows 8 on your desktop will fire up a bit faster, but it’s difficult to tell how much that matters, exactly. For now, if you are planning on moving to Windows 8, expect to have less time to brew coffee in between hitting go on your computer and when it asks for your password.
Study executed used a ” high-end test system which features the Intel Core i7-3960X processor, 16GB of DDR3-1866 memory and a GeForce GTX 670 graphics card, all on the new Asrock X79 Extreme11 motherboard.”
Top Image Credit: Michael Coté
Read next: Review: Mujjo Originals sheathes your MacBook in lovely swatches of leather and feltCLEVELAND — In your life as a sports fan, whomever you root for, my only wish for you is that you never experience anything as gnarly as the collective gasp of Indians fans in the first inning of Game 6. It should be an adage, a way to say goodbye, passed down from generation to generation until people who don’t know why they’re saying it do so out of habit and tradition.
Fare thee well, and let the wind be at your back, and let your sports teams not force you to spit your soul out and inhale it back into your body.
The sound will haunt me for the rest of my days, as if I’ve watched the videotape from The Ring. There were two strikes and two outs. It was loud, it was loud, it was as loud as I’ve ever heard a ballpark, the kind of loud that’s steeped in catharsis and of shedding those decades of being the punchline, of finally getting that chance to float to the top of the stagnant, sad water and breathe deep of delights of which you’ve never dreamed and...
... doom. It was the I’ve-got-it-you-take-it of a generation, an almost inexplicable collective failure of how to play baseball. This, in the World Series, with the Indians about to win for the first time in more than a half century. All of a sudden, the players forget how to play baseball.
But I use the term "almost inexplicable" because there is an explanation. It was too loud. The outfielders couldn’t hear each other. The passion of the home crowd was the fatal flaw, an unexpectedly ironic twist. In August, that ball is caught. In March. In July. You get the idea. But because it was the worst possible timing, the Indians have to sleep under a blanket of what-ifs for the night.
For the rest of the game, the crowd was desperate to cheer something, anything, and they would occasionally get their wish. Jose Ramirez’s line drive out in the fourth? Bedlam until it nestled into a mitt. When Francisco Lindor raced to the bag in the seventh to load the bases on an infield single? It was like the first seven innings never existed, and the Indians were in control. The noise, man. The noise.
And then...
... it wasn’t an infield single. It wasn’t a comeback. It wasn’t anything. It was a game that ended with an I’ve-got-it-you-take-it, for all intents and purposes, and that is a very cruel way to end a game, indeed.
If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that it had to come down to a Game 7. This World Series always promised to be the cruelest of World Series, and we’ve known that since the postseason started:
There’s something about that kinsmanship they each have with one another, though, that would make it seem like an extra betrayal. The Cubs hadn’t won in a century, but neither had the White Sox, Red Sox, or Indians. And then their compadres left. If the Indians leave them, they’ll be stuck with a bunch of teams that were just babies when Ernie Banks retired. They couldn’t possibly share in that same measure of pain and hopelessness.
This is the best-case scenario. This is the worst-case scenario. This is 176 years of collective pain in a steel-cage match, with metal chairs in the ring and the referees pretending to be occupied with someone on the outside.
It’s as if I’ve been preparing for a decade to use words to explain what a World Series Game 7 between the Cubs and Indians will be like, and realizing that I’m completely outclassed. Are there words for this? It’s a whale song of supreme glory, of supreme defeat, sung across the planes of time.
Which is a ham-fisted way of saying this: One of these teams is gonna be so damned sad.
Sad in a way that’s hard to find a comparison for. When it comes to baseball history, these are already two of the longest championship droughts that have ever existed in the sport.
The good news (for us impartial fans, the ones who won’t die from Stage IV stress of the everything) is that it should be a brilliant baseball game. The Cubs will have the National League ERA-leader pitching, and they’ll have a Cy Young candidate available in relief for as long as it takes. They’ll also have the Cubs’ roster, which has been quite the advantage over the last two games.
The Indians will have their best starter starting on short rest and their best relievers relieving on regular rest. They can cobble together nine innings of utter brilliance without having to rely on a single pitcher who isn’t among the best in baseball. With Corey Kluber, Andrew Miller, and Cody Allen, the Indians have a trio that can win 1-0. It feels like they could win 0-(-1).
The worst part is that one of these teams will lose, and I know the cliché alarm is sounding, and I’m so very sorry, but I enjoy the idea of how both these teams could actually do it. The Indians, so scrappy, so beleaguered, so written off, and they’re riding their elite arms harder than any team has ridden their elite arms since Old Hoss Radbourn was around. The Cubs, so synonymous with heartbreak, so destined to lose, with curses that came from goats and beheadphoned fans alike. They’re so laden with unmistakable talent that was accumulated slowly and patiently.
Both of these teams would be great World Series stories, the kind of stories that would make your grandkid look up, while his or her brain secretly processes a thought like, "My god, they actually had to watch baseball like that, in basic HD, like a savage." They would ask what it was really like.
Well, I’ll tell you, kid. It was like this. Both of these teams were forsaken, empty shells without any hope for joy or resolution. Nothing good ever happened to them. But one of them had to win the last game, the game of destiny. One of them got to shed their skin and begin life anew, and the other one started over from the same stupid place they’d started every season, only this time it felt much worse.
It’s Game 7 of the World Series, and it’s the Cubs vs. the Indians. Everyone is available. Everyone is capable. I have no rooting interests other than a clean game without Buckners. This series, this matchup, has been too good for that. I can’t contemplate how this is going to end, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.
The Cubs and Indians are going to play one game to see which fans are still sad, and which fans get to experience something they never thought they would experience. It had to come down to a Game 7, didn’t it?
Baseball’s a sick twist, alright. Here’s a Game 7 of a World Series between the Cubs and Indians as proof. Either one of these teams could have lost in the first round, and it would have been business as usual. There’s something about it that’s extra, extra, extra cruel. And beautiful.
Mostly cruel, though. Sorry about that.
* * *
Worst 'Take Me Out To The Ballgame' performances at WrigleyWe passed the seven billion mark for the world’s population in 2011. Some say: No problem; God will provide. Climate change? Peak oil? Water shortages? God will make it all right.
Let’s consider one of these environmental problems, overpopulation. One of television’s venerable reality shows is 19 Kids and Counting, now beginning its 11th season. It’s the story of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their 19 children. No, they don’t adopt needy children, they make them the old-fashioned way.
Their web site is full of Christian talk, links to Creationist sites, and ads for Christian products. Here they talk about birth control.
We prayed and studied the Bible and found a host of references that told us God considered children a gift, a blessing, and a reward. Yet we had considered having another child an inconvenience [by the wife taking birth control pills] during that busy time in our lives, and we had taken steps to prevent it from happening. We weren’t sure if Michelle could have any more children after the miscarriage, but we were sure we were going to stop using the pill. In fact we agreed we would stop using any form of birth control and let God decide how many children we would have.
This is the thinking of the Quiverfull movement, whose name comes from Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” From Quiverfull.com:
We exalt Jesus Christ as Lord, and acknowledge His headship in all areas of our lives, including fertility. We exist to serve those believers who trust the Lord for family size….
What kind of childish logic is this? Maybe during the Bronze Age, people could say, “We’ll let God decide how many children we’ll have,” but today we know very well where children come from and how to avoid them.
If you drink poison, you’re not letting God decide whether you live or not; you’re deciding. If you wave a gun in a bank, you’re not letting God decide whether you get arrested or not; you’re deciding. And if you have frequent unprotected sex, you’re not letting God decide how many children you have; you’re deciding to have as many as biologically possible.
Quiverfull aficionados reject all forms of birth control. But if vaccines, antibiotics, and a clean water supply aren’t messing with God’s plan, why would contraception—not killing an embryo but simply preventing it from happening—be a problem?
Back to the Duggar family, some have defended them by noting that they’re paying their way. They’re not asking for handouts, so what’s the problem?
The problem is that the planet has a finite carrying capacity. There’s only so much oil, fresh water regenerates only so fast, and so on. To make it worse, Americans live a rich life compared to most other people. For example, the resources that support these 19 kids, assuming they consume at the rate of average Americans, could support 600 average Kenyans.
“God will provide” might satisfy a child, but adults should know better.
In a discouraging article that concludes that religious believers will simply outbreed their competitors, author Tom Rees says:
In Israel and Palestine, both orthodox Jews and religious Muslims have astonishingly high birth rates, at least in part as a consequence of waging war “by other means.” Throughout the Islamic world, those who have the most extreme beliefs are also the most likely to endorse the desirability of large families.
That other guy thinks he’ll win by having more children? We’ll have even more than that—we’ll fight fire with fire!
We find similar thinking in the U.S. Again, from Quiverfull.com:
Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement but as an army they’re building for God.
But is that the way to play the game—we just descend to the other guy’s level? Is there no role for reason here? You don’t fight fire with fire, you fight it with water!
Man once surrendering his reason,
has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous,
and like a ship without rudder,
is the sport of every wind.
— Thomas Jefferson
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/31/11.)The draw ceremony for the Nitto ATP Finals, to be held at The O2 in London from 12-19 November, has been made on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show, live on BBC Radio 2 with Boris Becker, on Wednesday morning.
Buy Tickets Now
Singles – Group Pete Sampras
[1] Rafael Nadal (ESP)
[4] Dominic Thiem (AUT)
[6] Grigor Dimitrov (BUL)
[7] David Goffin (BEL)
Singles – Group Boris Becker
[2] Roger Federer (SUI)
[3] Alexander Zverev (GER)
[5] Marin Cilic (CRO)
[8] Jack Sock (USA)
Nadal, who has won six titles in an exceptional year — including his 10th Roland Garros and third US Open crown — leads Group Pete Sampras alongside Dominic Thiem (5-2 FedEx ATP Head2Head record), Grigor Dimitrov (10-1) and David Goffin (2-0). Nadal, who has a 67-10 match record in 2017, has qualified for the season finale for the 13th successive year, highlighted by a run to the 2010 (l. to Federer) and 2013 (l. to Djokovic) finals.
Federer, who has a 52-12 career record at the Nitto ATP Finals, is looking to capture a seventh year-end title (2003-04, 2006-07, 2010-11). The Swiss has been drawn in Group Boris Becker with Alexander Zverev (2-2 FedEx ATP Head2Head), Marin Cilic (7-1) and Jack Sock (3-0). Federer has a 49-4 mark and an ATP World Tour-best seven titles in 2017.
Eight different countries are represented in the elite eight-man singles field for the second successive year, with Group Boris Becker matches beginning on Sunday, 12 November. Group Pete Sampras matches are scheduled to begin on Monday, 13 November. Pete Sampras won the 1991, 1994, 1996-97, 1999 season finale crowns, while Boris Becker won the 1988, 1992, 1995 titles.
Doubles – Group Woodbridge/Woodforde
[1] Lukasz Kubot (POL) / Marcelo Melo (BRA)
[4] Jamie Murray (GBR) / Bruno Soares (BRA)
[5] Bob Bryan (USA) / Mike Bryan (USA)
[7] Ivan Dodig (CRO) / Marcel Granollers (ESP)
Doubles – Group Eltingh/Haarhuis
[2] Henri Kontinen (FIN) / John Peers (AUS)
[3] Jean-Julien Rojer (NED) / Horia Tecau (ROU)
[6] Pierre-Hugues Herbert (FRA) / Nicolas Mahut (FRA)
[8] Ryan Harrison (USA) / Michael Venus (NZL)
The quest to be crowned year-end No. 1 in the Emirates ATP Doubles Team Rankings will reach fever pitch as Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo and Henri Kontinen and John Peers compete at The O2 in London.
Kubot and Melo have won an ATP World Tour-best six doubles titles this season — including Wimbledon and three ATP World Tour Masters 1000 crowns (Miami, Madrid and Paris). The Polish-Brazilian team have 8,600 points in the Emirates ATP Doubles Team Rankings, 1,270 points ahead of second-placed Kontinen and Peers, winner of four trophies — including the Australian Open. With 1,500 points up for grabs at the Nitto ATP Finals, Kubot and Melo require two round-robin match wins to become the year-end No. 1 team.
Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde won the 1992 and 1996 year-end doubles titles, while Jacco Eltingh and Paul Haarhuis, picked up the 1993 and 1998 trophies.The beginning of April means one thing for American sports fans: baseball is back. This year's first game will be held on Sunday, when the Pittsburgh Pirates host the St. Louis Cardinals.
According to legend, the game of baseball was born in 1835 in Cooperstown, N.Y.; the MLB was founded about sixty years later. And, though lots has changed between now and then, a game of late-19th-century baseball would still be recognizable to today's fans—including, as these photos show, the socks. And, though the modern baseball card is attributed to Sy Berger, who introduced Topps cards in 1951, its precursors were already around at that time, often in the form of studio portraits of players demonstrating the athletic poses that would have been seen on the field. (It was around that time, as The Atlantic has explained, that players' images also began to show up in cigarette packs as a "marketing gimmick.")
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These photos—some of which are undated but which appear to all come from the 1870s and '80s—are part of the A.G. Spalding baseball collection of the New York Public Library. Spalding, who will probably be most familiar today for the sports equipment that still bears his name, was a star in the early days of professional baseball, as a pitcher for the Chicago team that would eventually become the Cubs. He was also an aficionado of the game, publishing an annual guide for fans and gathering a large personal collection of baseball memorabilia, which his widow gave to the Library after his 1915 death.INDIANAPOLIS -- Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano gave his team the entire bye week off as a reward for their strong start.
The same couldn't be said for offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton. He spent the week meeting with other assistant coaches discussing what adjustments needed to be made since Mr. Reliable -- receiver Reggie Wayne -- is out for the rest of the season with a knee injury.
"Moving forward, we know it's the 'Next Man Up,'" Hamilton said. "[Darrius Heyward-Bey], T.Y. [Hilton] and some of the younger guys who may get an opportunity to go in there and make plays for us in the passing game. Somebody will have to step up and make plays."
It's understandable that Hamilton decided against a week of rest and relaxation. He's now got the toughest job on staff outside of Pagano.
Hamilton took the Colts' coordinator job with the vision of having one of the best offenses in the league. Andrew Luck at quarterback. Wayne, Heyward-Bey and Hilton at receiver. Dwayne Allen and Coby Fleener at tight end. Vick Ballard and Ahmad Bradshaw at running back.
Wayne, Allen, Ballard, Bradshaw and guard Donald Thomas are out for the season with injuries.
"It's more of a challenge, but there are no excuses," Hamilton said. "We have to find ways to get first downs and get touchdowns and that's my job, and with the support of the rest of the coaches, we're going to do just that. That's part of the National Football League, the attrition it's real and it's still tough losing those guys."
The Colts didn't lose just any player. Wayne, Luck and linebacker Robert Mathis are Indianapolis' most valuable players. Wayne has 101 catches for first downs and 40 third-down receptions. Luck targeted him 24 times in the red zone the past two seasons.
"It was unfortunate," Hamilton said. "It was tough to say the least. Andrew had a tremendous amount of trust in Reggie and knowing Reggie would get to the spot and ultimately Reggie would make the play."
It's still uncertain who the third receiver will be after Heyward-Bey, who was limited in practice Thursday because of a hamstring, and Hilton, but you can expect the Colts to move players around to try to create matchups in their favor.
The task won't be easy Sunday because the Houston Texans have the best defense in the league, giving up only 267.7 total yards a game.
The area the Colts can potentially exploit the Texans is on the ground. Houston is allowing 122.1 yards a game, which is 28th in the league. The Colts are ninth in the league in rushing yards at 129.3 a game despite not having an active player averaging more than 45.6 yards a game.
It's been talked about on a weekly basis now, but having running back Trent Richardson find his rhythm will help ease some of the burden on Luck and the receivers. ESPN's Jeff Chadiha wrote a story Thursday about how the Colts will regret making the trade for Richardson. He's averaging 3.0 yards a carry and his long is 16 yards in five games with the Colts.
"I have to do a better job of finding ways to get Trent out in space," Hamilton said. "I have to do a better job coming up with schemes that not only give our offensive line a chance to be successful, but of course create holes for Trent and create schemes that compliment his wealth of talent. That's one of the things that we spent time as an offensive staff looking at during the bye week."Calvin Ki/Square One Publishers Mr. Tiber stepped in after the Wallkill, N.Y., zoning board reversed a decision to allow the rock festival.
NEW YORK — In July 1969, the town of Wallkill, N.Y., dealt a potentially mortal blow to Woodstock Ventures, a group of rookie promoters hoping to organize a grand festival of rock music in rural New York.
Fearing hordes of unbathed tripping hippies and wild-eyed radicals, the town’s zoning board reversed a previous decision to allow the event. This, it seemed, was the end of the road for the three days of peace, love, and music that the organizers envisioned.
Enter Elliot Tiber, one of the unlikeliest heroes of the 1960s counterculture. A former yeshiva student from Brooklyn who did not even smoke marijuana, he spent his weekends helping his parents operate the shabby, money-losing El Monaco Motel in nearby Bethel. During the week, he worked as an interior decorator in Manhattan and frequented the city’s gay bars, a routine that had recently plunged him into the Stonewall uprising.
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As luck would have it, Mr. Tiber, in his capacity as president of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce — an absurd post, he later said, “because there was no commerce” — held an official permit, written by himself to himself, to hold a music and arts festival. This was the golden key that unlocked the door that opened onto one of the defining events of the era.
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With a fateful phone call, Mr. Tiber offered the permit, for $1, to Woodstock Ventures, along with the dubious charms of the El Monaco Motel as a headquarters for the festival and lodging for the stars.
In a matter of days, the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival was back on track, and Mr. Tiber, as its principal ticket agent and hotelier, embarked on six weeks of glory that clung to him, like a shimmering cloud, for the rest of his days.
It provided most of the material for two memoirs, “Knock on Woodstock: The Uproarious, Uncensored Story of the Woodstock Festival, the Gay Man Who Made It Happen, and How He Earned His Ticket to Freedom” (1994) and “Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life” (2007), written with Tom Monte.
The director Ang Lee used “Taking Woodstock” as the basis for his 2009 film of the same name, which starred the comedian Demetri Martin as Mr. Tiber.
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Mr. Tiber died Aug. 3 in Boca Raton, Fla., from complications of a stroke, Elisa Ball, his art agent, said. He was 81.
“Those six weeks?” he recalled in an interview with the Miami Herald in 2008. “Wow. These people were so enriching to my life. They opened up whole new worlds to me. I didn’t feel fat, I didn’t feel ugly. It enabled me to meet all kinds of people, to enjoy myself. I got used to that.”
Mr. Tiber was born Eliyahu Teichberg on April 15, 1935, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father, Jack, was a roofer who had emigrated from Austria. His mother, Sonia, from Russia, ran a housewares shop. In 1955, seeking to improve their fortunes, the Teichbergs bought the El Monaco Motel and moved to Bethel.
After graduating from Midwood High School, Mr. Tiber changed his name, adding the middle name Michael as a flourish. He enrolled in Brooklyn College, where he studied art, and earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Hunter College. He later attended Pratt Institute.
A career as an abstract artist failed to materialize. Instead, he worked as a decorator for the W. & J. Sloane department store on Fifth Avenue and developed a successful practice decorating private homes and apartments.
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His design career ended in spectacular fashion, as he recounted in “Palm Trees on the Hudson: A True Story of the Mob, Judy Garland, & Interior Decorating” (2011). Approached by a nightclub owner to do the decorations for a cruise-ship party, he pulled out all the stops.
“I was given ‘carte blanche,’ ” he told Publishers Weekly in 2011, “so I conjured up a heady mix of Arabian Nights décor; a bevy of muscle boys covered in gold body paint and stationed as servers throughout the boat; and at least a hundred rented palm trees.”
During the cruise, a fight broke out at the bar, then spread to the dining room and beyond. Mr. Tiber cowered behind an overturned table with Judy Garland, an idol of his since childhood. The palm trees ended up in the river. Left holding the bill, Mr. Tiber retreated to Bethel.
Key details about the origin of the Woodstock festival and Mr. Tiber’s role remain unclear. Mr. Tiber said he introduced Michael Lang, one of the festival’s main organizers, to Max Yasgur, the farmer who rented his land for the festival, after the 75 acres next to the El Monaco Motel were deemed unsuitable. Lang said that Mr. Tiber introduced him and his partners to a local real estate agent, who brought them to Yasgur.
At a screening of Michael Wadleigh’s documentary film “Woodstock” in Beverly Hills in 2006, Mr. Tiber and several of the concert organizers gathered for a discussion of the event. No one could agree on anything.
“If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be here,” Mr. Tiber said. “I had the permit for a festival for 10 years in stinking Nazi-controlled Bethel-White Lake.” When Lang and others offered different recollections, Mr. Tiber cut them off. “You were all on drugs,” he said. “I was the only one there that didn’t do drugs.”
In an e-mail, Lang wrote: “Elliot was part of the magic of Woodstock. Without his phone call bringing me to Bethel, Woodstock might never have happened, and for that I am eternally grateful.”
Flush with $50,000 in Woodstock cash, Mr. Tiber bought a Cadillac Eldorado and headed to Los Angeles with plans to become a set designer. He failed to break into the film industry and returned to New York, where he met and fell in love with the Belgian theater director André Ernotte, whom he followed back to Brussels.
Through Ernotte, he landed an interview with a Belgian television producer. Mr. Tiber wrote in “After Woodstock: The True Story of a Belgian Movie, an Israeli Wedding, and a Manhattan Breakdown,” (2015) that after he expressed his enthusiasm for “I Love Lucy,” the producer mistakenly concluded that Mr. Tiber had been the show’s chief writer and hired him on the spot.
With Ernotte, he developed a successful comedy series, “Sketch-Up.” He also wrote a novel, published in Ernotte’s French translation in 1975 as “Rue Haute,” about a woman who loses her husband in the Holocaust and haunts the streets of Brussels, screaming his name.
The partners developed the novel into a film, also called “Rue Haute.” Directed by Ernotte, it became Belgium’s entry for best foreign-language film at the 1976 Academy Awards. The novel was published in the United States in 1977 as “High Street,” and the film, with the same title, was given an American release that year.
Ernotte died in 1999. Mr. Tiber leaves two sisters.
Mr. Tiber later developed a one-man show, “Woodstock Daddy,’’ based on his Woodstock experiences.
“When I talk about Woodstock, or when I talk to my friends, it’s like time hasn’t passed,” Mr. Tiber told the Miami Herald. “Then yesterday I got out of the shower and thought, ‘My God, I look like my mother.’ ”Christopher Skinner (State Police photo) Christopher Skinner (State Police photo) Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Report: Driver blames 'time warp' in crash that killed trooper 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
CHENANGO BRIDGE (AP) — The pickup truck driver accused of intentionally hitting and killing a trooper conducting a traffic stop along a highway on Thursday told reporters a "time warp" might be to blame for the crash.
"This cop that got killed, I don't know how it happened. It had to be a time warp," Almond Upton said as he left court Thursday according to Time Warner Cable News
Upton admitted to police that he deliberately swerved his pickup truck from the left passing lane to the right shoulder to hit Trooper Christopher Skinner on Interstate 81 near Binghamton around noon, police Superintendent Joseph A. D'Amico said. Upton, of Melrose, Florida, had sideswiped two other vehicles with his 2014 Toyota Tacoma, D'Amico said.
Upton was taken into custody an hour later after a police dog tracked him into nearby woods, where he was found naked. Police said he didn't appear to be drunk or on drugs.
D'Amico said it was unclear what the motive was for striking the trooper. He said Upton, 60, told police he was driving to Connecticut to visit his mother.
Upton was arraigned on a count of first-degree murder in Town of Chenango Court. It could not immediately be determined if he had a lawyer. He was jailed without bail and couldn't be reached for comment by telephone.
The trooper's killing occurred on I-81 northbound between exits 6 and 7, near the Pennsylvania line. Traffic was detoured onto U.S. Route 11.
Skinner, 42, was from the Sidney barracks in Delaware County and was a 13-year veteran. The Binghamton resident is survived by his fiancee and two children, ages 12 and 15.
In 2011, New York instituted a Move Over law, requiring motorists to slow down and move over when approaching police and emergency vehicles alongside roadways.
Skinner is the second New York state trooper killed in a highway crash in the past six months. Trooper David Cunniff died in December from injuries he suffered when his cruiser was rear-ended by a tractor-trailer shortly after he pulled over a car for speeding on the state Thruway near Amsterdam.
In April, Trooper Todd Madley escaped serious injury after a car sideswiped his cruiser while he wrote a traffic ticket along Interstate 690 near Syracuse. The driver was ticketed for violating the Move Over law.
Skinner is the 15th member of the New York State Police to die in the line of duty since 2006, and his is the fifth line-of-duty death in the last 10 months, said the Police Benevolent Association of the New York State Troopers.(Reuters) - A federal judge in Ohio laid out a plan on Wednesday for the state to restore voting privileges for people who were illegally removed from the state’s voter rolls over the past five years.
The ruling stems from a case in which the ACLU and other plaintiffs sued, saying Ohio’s process for removing people who had died or moved away from voter rolls was illegal because it purged people simply for not voting and not responding to a letter from the state.
Voting rights cases have become pivotal battlegrounds ahead of the Nov. 8 election between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump.
The American Civil Liberties Union and others have challenged laws in Wisconsin, Michigan and North Carolina over voting rights issues.
In the Ohio case, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati said Ohio’s process for removing inactive voters was illegal, reversing an earlier ruling by U.S. District Judge George C. Smith.
In response, Smith on Wednesday ordered the state to allow people who had been removed from the rolls to cast provisional ballots on election day.
Those ballots will be checked against voter rolls, and if people were purged in the years 2011, 2013 or 2015, their votes will be counted and their registration restored.
“They’ll have to put a provisional ballot which will take a little more time but if they do that, that vote will count,” said Stuart Naifeh, an attorney with Demos, a voter rights and income inequality advocacy group that was among those suing over the policy.
Joshua Eck, a spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, said the solution was a workable one because it did not require the wholesale restoration of voting privileges to people who had moved away, died or otherwise become ineligible to vote.In the month of December, I went to watch a Bollywood movie named P.K with my family. Directed by Aamir Khan, a man who is known to poke at the controversies that plague Indian society, the movie was an immense hit in India. The film focuses on a nameless alien, whose encounters with Indians, leads him to realize the corruption that poisons religious institutions and encourages false propaganda of how to judge people based on their ‘worth’. Priests in India, P.K argues, have taken the basic religious path of Hinduism and other religions, and have manipulated it to serve their own self interests.
At a first glance, Death Parade and P.K seem to hold nothing in common. Death Parade is an illusive show that examines the true nature of a human soul in style. Bathing itself in soft blues and pinks, the show takes place at a casino-like bar, inviting both guests in the show and the audience to think alike that there is nothing but entertainment to feast on. The opening sets a stage with dancing arbiters, sipping whiskey in their shot glasses. Soft clinks of ice against the glass pair up with the chime of an elevator opening as the stage is set: welcome to Quindecim, and enjoy your stay.
But of course, nothing is at it seems. Death Parade masquerades itself well, and a closer investigation shows that there’s clearly more going on than just a couple of drinks and a game |
in real life. It's not quite the same.
Alfie Binyon
I was badly addicted to GTA and people would ask me what I did today, I would think I've been out but I've been sat in at home. The problem got worse when Call of Duty Modern Warfare came out, spent a total of 32 days playing it and lost touch with reality.
Jenny
Grand Theft Auto 4 came out and I got it for my birthday. I was playing it for about 15 days straight. I came home from school and I would just play it constantly. I went outside one day and I had this sudden urge to punch everyone and steal all their money and cars and stuff.
Chris
I've been playing games since I was very, very young. I'm 20 now and I've never had any problem noticing the difference between reality and virtual. It may affect people differently but essentially I think it's stories made up to distract people from bigger things. Who wouldn't like to hit someone occasionally if they really get on their nerves, but they understand that it's in their games not something they realistically do.
Ruth
I used to play The Sims a lot as a teenager for hours on end every day. I would find myself doing something really boring and want to press fast forward and my brain was like "you can't press fast forward" but I was really wanting to do it. It was so strange. Also playing Assassin's Creed, makes me think about wanting to run up buildings. It's weird!MONTREAL (Reuters) - An industrial contamination lawsuit brought a quarter century ago has been dismissed by the Supreme Court of Canada, bringing an end to a case dating as far back as 1924 that involved black tar so sticky that horses caught in its grip had to be shot.
The Supreme Court of Canada this week refused to hear a case filed by Canadian National Railway Co. in 1989, relating to the contamination.
It pointed to lower court decisions that questioned how a fair trial could be held about a tar spill that CN said traced back to between 1924 and 1958.
“By the time the litigation commenced in June 1989, the issues were already 30 to 65 years old,” court documents said.
“While the first 14 years of delay were excusable, the delay between the years 2003 and 2014 was inordinate and inexcusable,” the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said in 2014.
Court documents said that CN never responded to requests in 1997 by the Ontario town of Kitchener to examine five elderly witnesses, some of whom were ill.
Montreal-based CN said that tar produced as a by-product of a coal gasification plant operated by the town migrated on to its property between 1924 and 1958, according to court records.
CN alleged that the city was dumping the coal tar on neighboring lands owned by the defendant, Hogg Fuel & Supply Ltd.
The tar, a black to brown liquid, was once described in trial records as a “gooey substance” so sticky some horses were caught in it and had to be shot.
CN was seeking between C$1 million to C$2 million from Hogg Fuel and Kitchener to clean up its land, plus other costs, court documents said.
The case was filed in 1989, just after Ontario’s environment ministry told CN it was preparing to order the “owners of polluted sites and the former gas plant operators to clean-up the contaminated lands,” superior court documents show.
CN declined to comment on Friday.The Last Fishery Village In Guangzhou (Photo : Getty Images)
The so-called strongest evidence of China’s claim to Huangyan Island is gone. The 600-year-old handwritten book, owned by Su Chengfan, a former fishing vessel captain, was thrown away by the Hainan fisherman.
BBC reported that it went to the fishing port of Tanmen to look for Su Chengfan and verify the authenticity of China’s claim, although the only thing that the book possibly established is that Chinese fishermen were to first to set foot on the disputed island based on directions written on the book how to get there.
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The book, passed on from generation to generation, taught fishermen how to go anywhere and return, including the Paracels and Spratleys and how to return to Huangyuan Island. However, Su Chengfan said that although the book was important, he threw it away because it was broken.
“It was flipped through too many times. The salty seawater on the hands had corroded it … In the end it was no longer readable so I threw it away,” the retired fisherman confessed.
However, except for Su Chengfan, no one else in Hainan was willing to talk to BBC which noted that it was followed by several government vehicles with plates covered from the port to the fisherman’s house. BBC was supposed to also speak to another boat captain but was prevented because the man was picked up and questioned by Hainan police.
Huangyuan, or Scarborough or Panatag Shoal, is just one of the islands in the South China Sea that the Asian giant is claiming. On Friday, an Indonesian naval ship fired on a Chinese shipping board near the Natuna Islands, reported Reuters.
On Monday, Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said Jakarta would send a message to Beijing to demand that it respect Indonesia’s sovereignty over waters around Natuna. China has included the Natuna Islands in its “nine-dash line” which Indonesia disputes.Get the biggest Royal Family stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
This picture shows the astonishing moment a heroic member of the public wrestled an axe-wielding robber to the ground.
The man was outside a jewellers near Buckingham Palace when a gang launched a smash and grab raid.
Four suspects - two on a moped and two on a motorcycle - had pulled up to H Stain jewellers on Victoria Street and used axes and sledgehammers to smash windows and grab items on display.
As the robbers made their getaway the member of the public wrestled the moped rider to the ground by tugging on his hoodie shortly before 1pm today.
Cops later arrested a man aged 18 on suspicion of robbery and he was taken into custody at a central London police station.
The bystander, who asked not to be identified, told the Daily Telegraph it was "like watching a scene from a Guy Ritchie movie".
He said: "These guys screamed up on the scooters and two of the pillion passengers jumped off and tried to smash their way into the displays with yellow axes. I think they grabbed a few watches.
"I waited for a second because I wasn't sure they had guns and when they tried to zoom off I grabbed one who was driving by the hoodie.
"Not putting his hoodie up was a fatal mistake as it gave me something to get hold of.
"He swore at me and I managed to yank him off his machine. I thought 'this is my bloody city - why should thugs like this get away with it?'
The rider's pillion passenger was able to flee on foot into Lower Grosvenor Place, where he hailed a black cab outside the Robin Hotel and left the scene.
The other two suspects got away on a green Triumph motorbike which was later found abandoned in Eaton Square, Belgravia.
They are believed to have hailed a taxi near Eccleston Mews not long after 1pm, and Flying Squad detectives said they were particularly keen to speak to cab drivers who may have picked the suspects up.
Scotland Yard said it had no detailed descriptions of the three suspects who managed to get away, but added that they are all believed to be male and were wearing helmets and motorcycle clothing.
Any witnesses or anyone that could assist police are asked call on 101 or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.Republican nominee Donald Trump enjoyed a warmer welcome from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) in Charlotte, North Carolina than his rival Hillary Clinton received on Monday.
The New York Republican told the crowd that spending time with veterans has been the “greatest honor of this campaign.”
“Our veterans are the bravest and the finest people on earth,” Trump said, as he pledged to work with the VFW if elected president. “Our most basic commitment to provide health and medical care [to veterans] has been violated completely.”
“The other candidate in this race, crooked Hillary Clinton, […] has a much different view,” Trump jabbed. “She recently said of the VA scandal that it isn’t as wide spread as it was reported to be.”
Some people in the audience chanted “lock her up” in reference to Clinton.
Campaign signs are banned from the #VFWConvention but calls to "lock her up" are occasionally being bellowed across the exhibit hall — Sara Murray (@SaraMurray) July 26, 2016
"Lock her up" chants as Trump addresses #VFWConvention. Trump: "And to think she was here yesterday, I guess she didn't do very well." — Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) July 26, 2016
“We’re going to bring honesty back to government,” Trump declared. He also spoke about his ten-step plan for veterans reform — a plan that he has discussed previously on the campaign trail.
“This will take the place of Twitter,” Trump joked of being busy at night cleaning up the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) instead of being on Twitter.
Trump received a huge applause from the audience when he said the Syrian refugee program should be suspended to keep ISIS fighters out of infiltrating the refugee program.
“We have to be smart,” he stressed. “It’s time to believe in each other and it’s time again to believe in America.”Top 18 Ways Conservative Catholics Have Failed At Loving Gays
I regret that I have to preface this, but I’m not just talking about secular gays. I’m talking about gay men, like myself, who accept Church teaching and struggle to uphold it.
1. Trying to Use Social Media to Win Arguments About Gay Marriage & Sexuality
“I changed my opinion on gay marriage and sexuality because of someone’s Facebook status” said nobody, ever. Granted, I’m being a bit of a hypocrite considering this will be pushed to Facebook. In my defense it’s worth acknowledging that this is one of several long-ass articles with lots of references you probably won’t click on. Also, I’m writing a book on this stuff. Do I expect you to change your mind from this one article? No. Do I hope you’ll think about what I’m saying? Yes. Do I hope you’ll engage in some sort of dialogue with me? Yes. Do I expect trolls? Yes. Are you a troll? Choose your own adventure. The world has yet to adjust to these new technologies, I’m not denying their power, but for conservatives they should be aware they’re likely just to be defriended by their liberal friends for being “that guy” (http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/03/12/main-findings-10/).
2. Being Intentionally Inflammatory
Are people too easily offended? Perhaps. Is the way to fix that by being more offensive? No. Anger is not the emotion you want people to feel if you want to reason with them. Aquinas says it strips us of reason (http://newadvent.org/summa/2048.htm#article3) and unfortunately will spread like a virus (https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc [NB: I don’t agree with his anthropology, but he has good points]). If your intention is to convince someone of your position through reason, this is not a great way to start. Even if you don’t INTEND to piss someone off, you should be aware if it does. For some inexplicable reason, some people seem to think being a Catholic Rush Limbaugh is a good way to go. Referring to gay people as “sodomites” is generally a bad call. Yet, this seems to be gaining in popularity among some segments. The art of good rhetoric necessarily involves pathos, which as an appeal to emotion. If you’re emotionally untuned, it’s best you learn how to interact socially before you try to make an argument. You can bitch about how we should all be like robots only relying on logic, but unfortunately life does not allow us to depend strictly on demonstration to first principles or even dialectic. If you’re one of those people who believes we should only rely on logic and you don’t know the distinction between those two, you’ve got some Aristotle to catch up on.
3. Psychologizing Homosexuality
While reparative therapy is much less in vogue those who still ascribe to it often rely upon a Freudian framework. It’s a bit ironic considering the fact that it was the same 19th century psychiatric theories that ultimately lead to the normalization and acceptance of homosexuality. One of the more egregious manifestations of this pathologizing is the constant mentioning of how gays tend to suffer from more mental disorders and be more promiscuous (which is actually not true http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/gay-sex-vs-straight-sex/ ). As if somehow whatever makes one gay causes these things. I have heard conservatives scoff at the idea that maybe the higher incidence of depression is due to suffering from the effects of homophobia.
4. Reducing Gayness to Sodomy
For most Christians, when they hear the word “gay” they probably think “perverse temptation to sodomy.” This is a really sad state of affairs. It reduces the complexity of human attraction and relationships to only one aspect. When I hear the word “straight” I don’t think “inclined to lust after women.” When secular folks here the word gay they hear “someone who loves men.” If you’re able to accept that not all eros (amor in Latin) is necessarily sexual or demands sexual complementarity then let me offer you an alternate definition to the word “gay” lifted from the book I’m writing. Gay: An unchosen habit disposing the appetites and passions to have predominant, if not exclusive amor (eros) for people of the same sex. Now this can and does manifest sexually, but not necessarily and it would be a mistake to reduce any romantic relationship to what happens in the bedroom. Not all sodomites are gay, not all gays are sodomites.
5. Insisting on “SSA”
I’m not convinced having an acronym makes anything clearer. Furthermore, Same Sex Attraction (SSA) makes the same mistake I just mentioned. It lumps ALL attraction into one category and reduces them to aspects which are distinctly considered sinful. Gay people are then encouraged to say “I have SSA, I’m not gay” which is stupid for what should be obvious reasons. Evidently this is not obvious to everyone so let me make it clear, when I say I’m an American, that does not mean I believe in my particular or general essence I’m a citizen of this country. Nor does it mean I agree with what others who claim the same identity do. To insist that’s what I mean when I say “I’m gay” is to impose your own prejudices on what I’m saying, insist on a strange literalism, and fail at common sense.
6. Denying Difference
I’m of the opinion that whatever causes gayness has other effects that are responsible for much of the gender bending and flamboyance you’ll see in gay stereotypes. There is quite a bit of diversity in the subcultures termed “gay” (which for the record do not all match the “lifestyle” conservatives have made up). Being gay introduces an alternative psychology that I can best describe as being a hybrid of male and female. If you spend an extended period of time with only people of a different sex than yourself, at a certain point you’ll begin craving the company of your own sex. Likewise, there’s something about being gay, which isn’t reducible to our attractions, that produces the same yearning. It produces an instantaneous connection with other gay guys and a desire to be with them. Many straight men attempt to minimize this difference, in a somewhat compassionate and admirable way by trying to make me feel like “one of the bros.” When things don’t jive right I blame myself or get blamed for overemphasizing differences or even fabricating them. It’s not made up. Trust me. It doesn’t help me to pathologize or moralize it. It’s best to acknowledge it, accept it, and move on. Occasionally a gay person may develop the habit of bringing up the fact that they’re gay more than is necessary and in a provocative way. I’ll admit I’m guilty of this at times. This isn’t just a need for attention, more often than not it’s a way of acknowledging the sorrow and frustration I have at feeling out of sync with everyone. Cut us some slack.
7. Saying We “Over Identify”
Every day I have to confront the fact that I’m gay. If you’re straight, you don’t. If I think about it a lot it’s because I’ve been told on countless occasions these inclinations in me are one of the biggest destroyers of society. When I realize maybe things are a bit more nuanced and begin to find solidarity with people who share my experience while not necessarily my beliefs, that does not put my beliefs in jeopardy. It makes me a human being. The fact I use the same language as them means I speak the same language as them. Unless you’re going to pervert an obscure passage from St. Teresa Avila on why this could be bad, we should note the Catechism uses “homosexuality” which originated in secular circles. I’m gay, that means what I defined above.
8. Believing in a “Gay Lifestyle”
There’s no such thing. Just as there’s no such thing as a “straight lifestyle.” Sure, there are gay bars, clubs, etc… These are products of a consumerist culture appealing to the basest aspect of our appetites. However, I don’t go to a club or bar and then make judgements about the sexual orientation of all straight people on that basis. Nor do I look to Playboy to define straight sexuality. Are there promiscuous gays? Sure. Just as there are promiscuous straights. I resent that one segment of the gay population has come to define it for the rest in the minds of straight people. Perhaps some gay people are partially to blame, but that doesn’t justify using this expression. Then again, Christians haven’t done a great job of providing a safe space for them to create alternate gay subcultures so the fact that most of them are visibly secular is just as much if not more so an indictment of Christendom.
9. Unethical Speculation
When I say I’m gay, all of a sudden many Christians become intensely curious about my sex life. It becomes a valid topic for discussion. I’ve faced constant encouragement from Christians to make other Christians feel more comfortable by adding modifiers to it such as “celibate” or “chaste.” Neither of which are true in my case, owing to my human weakness. This brings further shame to me because I then have to come up with some cumbersome description to reassure people they don’t need to tell me what I’m doing is wrong. Meanwhile, if you’re straight I don’t start thinking “I hope he’s not fornicating” or “I hope she’s not committing adultery.” IT’S NONE OF MY BUSINESS. Learning someone’s sexual orientation does not give you permission to speculate about their sex life or even their beliefs on sexuality. You’ll have to excuse me for not giving a shit about whether or not it makes you comfortable when much of my life many of you contributed to my feeling shame and self-loathing.
10. Double Standards
In another article I discussed compliance with sin. Many Christians and Catholics have a way over-sensitive conscience when it comes to this issue. The net result is an astounding hypocrisy. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard homilies decrying the “attack on the family” by gay activists meanwhile remaining silent on divorce and contraceptives, much less suburbia. If you’re a bakery and are asked to make a wedding cake for a straight couple, and you don’t believe in divorce, do you ask them if they’ve been divorced and remarried? Do you refuse service to a Jew celebrating their Bat-Mitzvah because it is encouraging a religion you don’t believe in? If not, you probably have no business refusing to serve a gay couple. If anything it’s masking prejudice in principles.
11. Encouraging Silence & Closets
Perhaps the opposite end of the spectrum is when Catholics, pastors in particular, encourage the “keep it secret, keep it safe” attitude. In essence the belief is that it’s best to suffer in silence through this. More often than not it is out of a fear of how one’s reputation could affect one’s future. This has the effect of enabling an alarming number of gay men to enter religious communities and seminaries. The Church has been very clear about having persons with proclivities to sodomy in these institutions. Encouraging this attitude is simply another form of subversion. Also, the Church should be the safest place to come out and yet when I have encountered people who basically say “we don’t want to hear about it.” I cannot emphasize enough how toxic this is. If you want people to live a chaste life encouraging them to wear masks and keep secrets in isolation is a horrible way to go. Multiply that exponentially if they have succeeded in getting ordained.
12. Personal Inquisitions
This has hurt me and infuriated me quite a bit. The moment I stopped conforming to the in vogue terminology among heterosexual-white-middle-class-conservative-Catholic-land I became subject to inquisitions. People, close to me and total strangers, have taken it upon themselves to directly challenge my orthodoxy. I even had someone try to bring in a member of the hierarchy to determine my orthodoxy (in that particular instance, unbenounced to my inquisitors, the particular bishop was already well aware of my activities and stances). Does this not seem inappropriate? Let’s assume that I have departed from orthodoxy, what do you hope to accomplish by launching this inquisition? To get me to change my mind? Is this really the best way to do that? Does that really demonstrate charity or are you just trying to prove a point? Occasionally I have encountered someone who simply wanted clarification and it is refreshing to see how they ask about it as compared to someone who really is acting like some sort of thought-police. I suppose I should be more compassionate since there are a number of Catholics who probably feel some sense of duty to make sure I’m on the “straight and narrow.” This I believe is a misplaced sense of responsibility arising from a fragmented society blurring the lines of true responsibility combined with consciences formed by Kantian categorical imperatives. So let me make it clear: You are not complicit in sin for staying silent with those you are not in authority over or you do not have consistent intimacy with. Even there, prudence is required if and how you speak up.
13. Claiming Victimhood
I’m not going to justify everything every gay person has ever said to someone who disagrees with them. However, last I checked no one has died because they opposed gay marriage. In the United States (don’t get me started on Russia and Nigeria) gay people are still FAR more likely to suffer violence than virtually any other minority group (http://goo.gl/J4bDZn ). Lest you think the gaypocalypse of anti-christian persecution is coming because some bakeries or pizza houses suffered financial damage, let me tell you right now that’s no comparison to being beaten to death for something you can’t control. Do you really think a homophobic redneck is going to care if I say “but I try to be celibate” as he’s grabbing his crowbar to express his masculine insecurities and frustration with our country? Oh and for the record, that recent bakery case is not as clean cut as you might think. cf: http://goo.gl/5Y9b3e Also, whatever happened to “blessed are you when you are persecuted” (Mt.5)?
14. Over-Exalting Marriage
One of the more bizarre ways of dealing with how marriage has been redefined is by over-exalting it. Too bad marriage is an inferior state to celibacy, regardless of whether there is a vow (Council of Trent, Session 22 Canon 10). However, rather than encouraging communities to support asceticism and singleness, as St. Paul did, now it’s in vogue to criticize singleness (I can only speculate why “Catholic Match” could possibly be motivated to join in this refrain http://www.catholicmatch.com/institute/?p=29346 ). The theology of the body crowd has gotten so hot and bothered over “nuptial significance” they’ve become blind to the traditional understanding of the sacrament. This couldn’t possibly set people up for disappointment when they get married. It certainly couldn’t contribute to feelings of isolation for those who don’t. Especially since we all know marriage has reached its apex in suburban America.
15. Using Catholic Gays
When I came out more publicly, I did so by giving a protracted talk on the issue of homosexuality. I went through great pains to ensure that it was palatable to conservatives. I was exalted as a hero, as have other outspoken Catholics. I know many others who are lauded as being “examples” etc… Great for my ego, but guess what, it actually makes things worse. There’s a tremendous amount of pressure to live up to those kind of expectations. In large part because it only goes so far. As soon as you divert from the constant verbal self-flagellation and impossible battle of trying to conform to heteronormative standards you get treated like a pariah. God forbid you’re unchaste! What scandal! Then there are times people use me as cannon fodder in the culture war. As if somehow by knowing a gay Catholic gives them permission to lambast their acquaintances for choosing a life I wish I could lead. A life I sacrifice so I can identify with these assholes? It’s good thing I try to be chaste for Christ and not for Catholics.
16. Hiding Homophobia
One of the more difficult realities about prejudice is recognizing it in ourselves. It’s funny how often I encounter people claiming they want to love gays then within a few hours make a homophobic joke. Among Christian guys it still seems to be the last acceptable punching bag. I cannot believe how uncomfortable some guys get when they learn I’m gay, as if I’m automatically attracted to them. I just want to say “don’t flatter yourself.” Now I know I’m being a hypocrite to a certain degree by mocking Catholics, however there’s a difference between a Catholic mocking Catholics and a straight guy mocking gay guys.
17. Lack of Empathy
In my experience, Catholics are more interested in making sure I don’t have sex with men, and know that sodomy is an abomination, than relieving the loneliness and isolation that leads to it. I have found most are more ready to fight my use of the word “gay” as an affront to their delicate linguistic abstractions than listen to the story of how I came to identify that way. You cannot love someone unless you know them. Catholics and especially so-called “evangelical Catholics” have consistently shown themselves more ready to regurgitate their understanding of biblical morality as culture warriors than as companions to suffering. We’re talking about the basics of good listening here. This is one of the biggest reasons gays feel hated. Christians rarely show interest in how they experience the world. They’re always ready with some neatly packaged answer rather than acknowledging the messiness and ambiguity of lived experience.
18. Distorted Priorities
There are major ways Catholics have failed in the last 50+ years. This failure more generally has had its effects on gays in a particularly acute way. It will be difficult at first to see the connection, but once you do you won’t unsee it. In short, we have completely distorted priorities. After the more general I’ll address some particular instances where this is more obvious.
Liturgy is Central
Our first and foremost priority should be the restoration of Traditional Liturgy. For western Latin Catholics, that means the Traditional Latin Mass or the Extraordinary Form. Noticing that I’m a liturgy queen, you might be ready to dismiss my argument as a manifestation of bias (never mind that’s just ad hominem). In short here’s how Christendom was built, by putting the priority on the Liturgy. Art, culture, community, and commerce were literally built around it. In many medieval towns churches are at the center. These centuries-old artifices are beautiful feats of architecture that put our decorated boxes to shame. The marketplace would take place around the Church.
John Senior, Christopher Dawson, Aiden Nicohls, and others have all pointed out how if you lose this as the center, economic forces sweep in to bring about spiritual decay. With the advent of industrialism and corporate interests the economic structures that supported an artisan culture are all but gone. Other systems of determining value, namely relationships and religion, have been replaced by economic determinations of worth. Enlightenment rationalism obsessing over arrogantly quantify everything made it easy to value human beings in financial terms. The tragedy is how we have bought in. We consume culture like everyone else. This is in spite of the fact that FAR more is available to us than the medievals could possibly have dreamed of.
Regardless, the Liturgy is the first order of justice before God. If you’re afraid that gays are corrupting children but then let your kid receive communion on the hand (a practice that would have been considered sacrilege for the vast majority of Christian history) at a liturgy with an army of EMHC’s, where there is no Latin or Chant, then you have mixed up priorities. How can you expect any sort of moral formation unless formed by tradition and in the right order? How can you expect justice among men when you do not worship God the way He has taught us through tradition? The liturgy is not a tool for evangelism. It is not something you use for your “personal relationship” (whatever that means) according to your preferences. It’s not there for you to feel good about yourself or motivate you. It is there to give glory to Glory to God, give Him thanks for His benefits, make atonement for sins, and petition for the grace to live a virtuous life.
Without a liturgical center it is difficult to form community. Community isn’t some tenuous association of people in a similar socio-economic status with congruent preferences. It is an earthy physical proximity due to having a religious center, namely the Church. Virtually every ancient society was built around the worship of the divine. Community requires physical proximity to allow for spontaneous creativity. To enable the arts to be practiced when the inspiration strikes. Arts inspired by sacred rites sanctifying the mundane and providing a perpetual sense of the transcendent through symbols.
With all of this talk about the “new evangelization” (whatever that means) I’ve always been somewhat irritated because WHAT ARE WE EVANGELIZING PEOPLE TO? A social club where we listen to bad folk music out of a sense of obligation? A liturgy devoid of the sacred? A “faith community” that is spread apart by hundreds of miles? If we are known by our love then I’m beginning to wonder what’s to be known? Christianity is not simply a verbal or intellectual assent to a proposition, it’s a way of life lived in a community through the centuries. It starts and ends with the liturgy.
Liturgy Aside
Let’s say you’re not convinced worshiping God is the most important thing or even that a more human mode of life in community is worth giving more attention to than political campaigns. What about the homeless? Almost half of homeless youth are LGBTQ. (http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/07/12/515641/study-40-percent-of-homeless-youth-are-lgbt-family-rejection-is-leading-cause/ ) Why? Because of familial rejection. Guess how much was spent in the fight for Prop 8 alone? Close to $40 Million dollars (http://www.latimes.com/local/la-moneymap-htmlstory.html ). I should note here that those in support of gay marriage spent more. Shame on them. However, shame on us who know where Christ is.
Let’s talk about abortion. If we made it easier for gay people to adopt they may not feel the need to pursue surrogacies and other unnatural forms of conception. You want to end abortion? Stop wasting time on fighting gay marriage. Gays only make up 2-4% of the population! Stop spending so much time decrying how people sin. Has any gay person ever wondered what the Catholic Church has taught? I’ve not met a SINGLE ONE. However, instead of supporting beautiful liturgies, building community, creating culture, we’re bitching about a democratic secular state for doing something democracy supports. But what if we lose our rights? Big deal. Christ PROMISED we would be persecuted. He said to REJOICE. Instead we’re complaining about tax exemptions and lawsuits.
I know what it is like to physically suffer for my faith. I would gladly trade that for the spiritual and psychological abuse done from the arrogance, short-sightedness, close-minded, uncharitable, unimaginative, self-righteous rhetoric and neglect of those who claim the same religion. Are we ready for what’s coming? Probably not because we have been distracted by meaningless “culture wars.” Gays who are trying to be faithful ultimately become the casualties. These men and women, who could be the Churches greatest allies have been made into her greatest enemies. No one should be surprised.
If you’re Catholic and want to learn how to talk to gays read this next:
http://aharburg.tumblr.com/post/123646717480/how-to-talk-to-gays-if-youre-catholic
If you’re a secular LGBTQ person and want to learn how to talk to Catholics, read this:
http://aharburg.tumblr.com/post/123646815835/how-to-talk-to-catholics-if-youre-lgbtq
My thoughts on gay marriage next & final.Updated to v1.06! (minor update to v1.05)Play around with Applejack in this game. Pet her, scratch her ears, and try not to weird her out.I plan to make more of these pony petting games, and I'm going to redo the animation and personality/behavior code on each of them while improving the engine.Any feedback, suggestions and whatnot are welcome. I read all of your comments, even though I don't always respond to them.Yes! The v1.0 was featured on Equestria Daily!Updates:Version 1.05/1.06 released! A few animation tweaks and a new animation for happy ear-scratching. Most of the changes are under-the-hood. The game pauses when it goes to the background and it won't switch to low quality mode as quickly much, along with other subtle changes.Also released the AIR version.Yes! Version 1.0 is out. This is, at least for now, the finished version of my game. I may update to fix bugs, and I may add more content in the future. But for now I can rest. Phew!Updated! Some underlying systems have been rewritten to make animation and content creation easier.I also added a thicker neck and her much-needed freckles.It took me a while to get back to it, but I've started working on this again. An evening here, an evening there. No guarantees on a release date, but if it takes long enough I might update this one with intermediate versions.In its earlier stages, the game was featured on Equestria Daily:The Seahawks' push for the playoffs is going to come without Beast Mode.
NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport reported the running back had surgery Wednesday morning to repair a sports hernia, according to a source informed of the player's situation.
Coach Pete Carroll later confirmed that Lynch underwent surgery Wednesday morning. Carroll said there is hope for a three-to-four week recovery. Lynch will stay on the active roster for a potential late-season return.
Lynch met with noted specialist Dr. William Meyers in Philadelphia on Monday to confirm the nature of his abdominal injury after sitting out Sunday's win over the 49ers.
Though rookie Thomas Rawls has been a revelation in place of Lynch with two monster performances, Lynch has been the heart and soul of Seattle's offense since joining the team in a 2010 trade. Rawls' big games are not the only reason why it's worth wondering about Lynch's future in Seattle. The 29-year-old has taken a pounding over the last few years and was not as effective in 2015. Lynch is due $9 million in 2016, a number that the Seahawks could balk at paying.
But it's too early to start writing odes about Lynch's magical run in Seattle. If he returns by late December, he could work his way into form by the playoffs. And we would not rule anything out when it comes to Lynch making playoff memories. With Rawls having proven he can carry the load -- he has two games over 160 yards -- Lynch could form a dynamic tag team for the run-heavy offense.
At 5-5, there is no guarantee the Seahawks will even make the playoffs. This Seattle team has not looked familiar because of its rough fourth quarters, big plays allowed and erratic offense. It will certainly look unfamiliar for the next month without Lynch on the field.The nation’s union leaders, while endorsing the president’s April 15 speech on the budget deficit, say job creation is among several major things that will need to be addressed if the long-term fiscal health of the nation is to be restored.
The Obama plan would cut $4 trillion in projected deficits over the next 12 years, less than the $6 trillion proposal by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka dubbed the Ryan plan a “fraud.”
A major difference between the two plans is that the Republicans want to permanently extend the Bush tax cuts for the rich at a cost of $4trillion over the next decade, something Obama vowed never to allow.
Trumka gave his strongest praise to the president’s promises to end those tax cuts, to protect Social Security and to veto any plan that turns Medicare into a voucher program or Medicaid into block grants under the control of the states.
“President Obama gave a promise to working people that he wouldn’t allow us to go down the path set out by the radical Republican right,” said Trumka, “a path that leads to more lost jobs and a decline in our national standards.”
The president of the nation’s largest labor federation also said “the president understands why Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are so important. We oppose cuts to any of these critical programs, no matter who proposes them.”
Trumka said, however, that only massive job creation can solve the budget deficit over the long haul. “Let us refocus our national energy on job creation – because successful job creation is the key to making long |
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The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ("ACTA") is a treaty that attempts to define international standards for intellectual property enforcement. ACTA is controversial for both procedural and substantive reasons. The treaty was negotiated in secret,[1] and leaked draft versions contained many controversial terms. ACTA was signed through executive agreement, without ex post or ex ante approval from Congress. The final version[2] of ACTA contains substantive problems, but it is unclear how these will be implemented in U.S. law.
ACTA is complicated, and it is unclear what its consequences will be in the U.S. and other countries. It is even more difficult to analyze because various drafts have different sections. Some analysis of ACTA is no longer relevant because it refers to sections that are not in the final text.[3]
ACTA takes effect after six countries have ratified the agreement. As of December 2011, eight of the eleven countries have signed.[4] The Council of the European Union, representing 22 member states, signed ACTA on December 16, 2011. Signatory countries may withdraw, however. Art. 41.[2] In February 2012, Commissioner Karel De Gucht referred ACTA to the European Court of Justice to determine whether ACTA was compatible with EU treaties.[5] David Martin, responsible for ACTA in the European Parliament, said the European Parliament will wait for the Court of Justice's ruling on ACTA before moving forward.[6] The European Court of Justice may take 12-18 months to issue a decision, and its final decision may not fully settle questions of compatibility with EU law.[7]
The Trans-Pacific Partnership ("TPP") is another treaty currently under negotiation that will likely include terms on IP and copyright. The TPP had a round of negotiation in December 2011, and the next round will begin in March 2012. The text of the TPP is not public, but the USTR released a "fact sheet"[8] with portions on copyright, and public notice and comment on the TPP is available on Regulations.gov.[9]
Procedural controversy [ edit ]
Negotiations began in 2008, but the draft versions of the treaty were not public. Public interest organizations, including the EFF, demanded that the government release a copy of ACTA so that experts could provide input.[10] Numerous FOIA requests were submitted to the USTR, but the government withheld documents on national security grounds.[11]
As a result of the confusing and secret drafting process, the general public has had to rely on generalized guesswork and a shifting understanding of the treaty based on unofficial leaked versions of the text. This makes accurate analysis of the law difficult. It also demonstrates severe problems with both IP policy and access to information:
The result of these activities can be summarized by stating succinctly that intellectual property law agreements have apparently become issues of national security that require the input of commercial interests but not the public at large. As Peter Yu points out, this “national security” concern is “more correctly identified with the maintenance of good foreign or diplomatic relations with ACTA negotiating partners.” Even if this concern has some merit, as negotiating partners may want to be free of public relations concerns as they negotiate, FOIA has allowed that concern to trump those of a public that has legitimate concerns about the impact of ACTA on domestic law.[12]
Even after releasing the text, the President's executive agreement may not be constitutional. Under Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the President only has the power to "make" a treaty--the treaty must be either entered through the President's own authority, congressionally delegated authority, or confirmation of a two-thirds vote in the Senate.[13] ACTA went through none of the proper procedures, which leaves a lot of uncertainty with regards to its impact on Federal Law in the U.S. It is possible that the U.S. is now bound by a treaty that is invalid and unconstitutional under U.S. law.
Substantive problems [ edit ]
ACTA specifically allows member countries to "determine the appropriate method of implementing the provisions of [ACTA] within its own legal system and practice." ACTA § 1, Art. 2.1.[2] In past copyright treaties, the U.S. has opted for a narrow implementation with regards to certain provisions.[14] Signatories may implement the treaty broadly or narrowly.
Problems in the final text [ edit ]
ACTA requires third-party criminal liability for "aiding and abetting" piracy of copyright or related rights. Art. 23.4.[2] U.S. copyright law does not have secondary criminal liability for aiding or abetting copyright infringement. Common law has criminal liability for aiding or abetting criminal actions, which would include criminal copyright infringement, but there is traditionally a "tight nexus between the mental state of the indirect actor and the ultimate criminal act committed by somebody else."[15]
ACTA includes anti-circumvention provisions similar to the DMCA, but it does not include the exemption provisions that the DMCA has for non-profit libraries, archives, and educational institutions. Cf. Art. 27.6[2] and 17 U.S.C. § 1201(d). The DMCA also allows the Librarian of Congress to issue rules exempting certain DRM circumvention, such as phone "rooting."
ACTA mandates that countries enact anti-circumvention provisions, but only permit countries to create exemptions. Cf. Arts. 27.6[2] and 27.8.[2] This shows that ACTA is skewing the international standards towards broader copyright protection.
ACTA requires liability for infringement if the party had "reasonable grounds" to know he or she was engaging in infringing activity. Art. 9.1.[2] TRIPS Article 44.1[16] had more flexible grounds for issuing an injunction if there was innocent infringement.
ACTA may require increased liability for third-parties to infringement. Art. 12.1(a)[2] requires that judicial authorities have the ability to order "prompt and effective provisional measures" against:
"...a party or, where appropriate, a third party over whom the relevant judicial authority exercises jurisdiction, to prevent an infringement of any intellectual property right from occurring, and in particular, to prevent goods that involve the infringement of an intellectual property right from entering into the channels of commerce;"[17]
This provision may inspire more legislation like SOPA and PIPA that leverage Internet advertising services and payment service providers to prevent infringement.
ACTA requires "pre-established damages," which may require the U.S. to expand damages beyond the scope allowed in 17 U.S.C. § 504(c). ACTA Art. 9.3.[2] This may result in damage awards that do not reflect any proven harm or gain.
Improvements in the final text [ edit ]
It's important to note that bad provisions from previous drafts did not make it into the final text of ACTA:
The final version does not include a mandate for liability for intermediaries or ISPs, although they can be required to disclose subscriber information under Art. 27.4.[2]
The previous drafts of ACTA included much more aggressive provisions for ISPs and conditioned certain safe harbors on ISPs' proactive policing for infringement.
The final version also did not include any graduated response or "three-strikes" provision for repeat infringers.
Recent developments [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
de:Wikipedia:ACTAMarc Okrand (; born July 3, 1948) is an American linguist. His professional work is in Native American languages, and he is well known as the creator of the Klingon language in the Star Trek science fiction franchise.
Biography [ edit ]
Linguistics [ edit ]
As a linguist, Okrand worked with Native American languages. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1970. His 1977 doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, was on the grammar of Mutsun, an extinct Ohlone language formerly spoken in the coastal areas of north-central California. His dissertation was supervised by pioneering linguist Mary Haas. From 1975 to 1978, he taught undergraduate linguistics courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before taking a post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 1978.[1]
After that, Okrand took a job at the National Captioning Institute, where he worked on the first closed-captioning system for hearing-impaired television viewers. Until his retirement in 2013, Okrand served as one of the directors for Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute and as President of the board of directors of WSC Avant Bard (formerly the Washington Shakespeare Company) in Arlington, Virginia, which planned to stage "an evening of Shakespeare in Klingon" in 2010.[2][3]
Star Trek [ edit ]
While coordinating closed captioning for the Oscars award show in 1982, Okrand met the producer for the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.[1] His first work was dubbing in Vulcan language dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, since the actors had already been filmed talking in English. He was then hired by Paramount Pictures to develop the Klingon language and coach the actors using it in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. He was later hired for the use of the Romulan and Vulcan languages in the Star Trek film in 2009.[4] He also created Klingon dialogue for that movie, but those scenes were cut.[5] He was involved in Star Trek Into Darkness, but only during post-production.[5]
Okrand is the author of three books about Klingon – The Klingon Dictionary (first published 1985, revised enlarged edition 1992), The Klingon Way (1996) and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler (1997), as well as two audio-courses: Conversational Klingon (1992) and Power Klingon (1993). He has also co-authored the libretto of an opera in the Klingon language: ’u’ [a], debuting at The Hague in September 2010. He speaks Klingon, but notes that others have attained greater fluency.[6]
In 2018 he developed the language for the Kelpien race in the third Short Treks episode "The Brightest Star".[7] [8]
Other [ edit ]
In 2001, Okrand created the Atlantean language for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, for which he was also used as an early facial model for the protagonist's character design.
References [ edit ]StillRadioactive, on 27 August 2014 - 11:12 AM, said:
We all know that Clans are overperforming as compared to equivalent tonnage of IS'mechs. They hit harder and they stay fighting longer, and that's simply unacceptable in the long term.
We also know that the weapons, despite being lower tonnage, have drawbacks that have made them close to comparable ton-for-ton to IS weapons (c-ERML and c-ERSL notwithstanding). The longer beam times, burst-fire ACs, ripple-fire LRMs and higher heat means that 5 tons of LRM (an LRM-10) and 5 tons of c-LRM (2x cLRM-10) have roughly the same power in a fight. Now, there are some differences, but those can be bridged with small weapon balance tweaks along the same lines as what we've already seen.
The thing is that once you balance the weapons ton-for-ton, you'll still have a performance gap. You're trying to bridge a gulf that's simply too wide to be bridged with weapon tweaks alone, short of completely nerfing Clan weapons into uselessness.
Where does this problem start? WIth one thing, and one thing only: The Clan XL engine. It offers the same weight savings as an IS XL engine, with none of the drawbacks. The cXL300 in the Dire Wolf gives the same survivability as an STD300 in an Atlas, and allows the pilot to bring 9.5 tons more weapons to every engagement. The cXL375 in the Timber Wolf allows for greater maneuverability than an Orion with its biggest engine, an STD360, coupled with the same zombie potential and 9 tons of additional weapons. The cXL330 on the Stormcrow gives it the same survivability as a STD330 on a Shadow Hawk, with 12 more tons of weapons. The list just goes on and on.
Look at the Inner Sphere, and you'll see it. The vast majority of builds run an XL engine simply because the weight savings gets applied to more weapons, and the increase in firepower makes the risk of ST-death worth it. The STD engine does still exist in certain designs, such as the Centurion and the Atlas, whose primary purposes are breaching enemy positions and being hard to kill.
The Clan XL essentially allows for the extra weapons preferred by most builds, and lets them stay in the fight far longer than the average IS'mech, just like a Standard engine would.
So how can we bridge this gap?
Simple: Look to tabletop. When a Clan XL engine has a side torso blown out, it loses two engine crits. This means that it generates 10 additional heat per turn. Since most engines contain 10DHS, this means that the loss of a side torso essentially reverts what's left of the'mech to SINGLE HEAT SINKS. With the increased heat generation of Clan weapons, there would be very little reason to fear a Timber Wolf that's lost a side torso, since it would hardly ever be able to fire its remaining weapons.
When you add a massive heat penalty for Clan XLs losing a side torso, you'll have finally tackled the root of the balance problem... and you can make up the rest of it with weapon balance.Jazz Musician Kenny G awarded the title South Korea's Honorary Envoy of Tourism
Jazz musician Kenny G was given the title of honorary envoy of South Korea tourism on Wednesday, Oct. 10.
The titled was granted to the artist when he visited the nation to attend the Network of Korean American Leadership Summit and Gala on Wednesday according to The Korea Herald.
In a press conference held at the very same event the jazz saxophonist said. "I am flattered to be named an honorary ambassador in Korea. Kenny G also went on to say. "I remember thousands people at the reception screaming and I can't forget that energy."
It was has been just under two decades since the musician gave his first performance in the Asian nation. On his new role as an envoy the musician said.
"As a representative of tourism, I can go around the world with the official title and tell everyone what comes naturally to my heart, which is Korea is great."
Kenny G held his first concert in South Korea in 1995 and visited the nation numerous times to perform over the years.
The Grammy winner will be on tour with his most recent date to be slated for Oct. 12 in Cotai, Macau, China before he returns to America to play at venues such as Blue Note in New York from Nov. 15 to Nov.18. He also has performances slated for Indianapolis, San Francisco and New Brunswick in the near future.
Kenny G started playing the saxophone in 1966 at the age of ten and started his career in 1973 with Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra before he started a glittering solo career playing alongside acts like Andrea Bocelli and Aretha Franklin.
Kenny G and son Max G
© 2016 The Classical Art, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201708/1655/1155968404_5535562835001_5535546638001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Trump's 'fire and fury' threat to North Korea sparks new fears of war Trump's comments drew a counter threat from North Korea, which said it is 'carefully examining' a preemptive strike on Guam.
President Donald Trump's warning Tuesday that North Korea "will be met with fire and fury" if it continues its saber rattling sparked new fears that the standoff over the regime's advancing nuclear and missile programs could devolve into a shooting war.
The seemingly off-the-cuff broadside also reignited concerns raised during the presidential campaign that Trump's tough rhetoric, including his previous calls to build up the American nuclear arsenal, could be dangerously destabilizing.
Story Continued Below
"The greatest North Korean threat we face is not from a nuclear-tipped missile hitting the U.S. mainland but from Washington stumbling into an inadvertent nuclear war on the Korean peninsula," Siegfried Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a nuclear expert who has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, said in an email.
"The president's statements exacerbate" such concerns, Hecker said.
The president's remarks drew an almost immediate response from North Korea, which issued a statement saying it was "carefully examining" a plan to launch a preemptive strike on the U.S. territory of Guam, which lies about 2,000 miles away.
Trump made the comments from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he is staying as the White House undergoes renovations for much of this month.
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“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen," he told reporters, referring to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. "He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said, they will be met with fire and fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
Trump's warning followed a report by The Washington Post, citing a confidential assessment, that North Korea has successfully created a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles.
The United Nations Security Council on Saturday unanimously imposed new sanctions on North Korea estimated at more than $1 billion as punishment for the nation's outlawed nuclear and missile programs.
North Korea has vowed in response to continue strengthening its nuclear arsenal and threatened “thousands-fold” revenge against the U.S.
The communist government pledged to "make the US pay dearly for all the heinous crimes it commits against the state and people of this country," warning it will "teach the U.S. a severe lesson."
Trump’s threat on Tuesday came after a reporter at Bedminster asked about North Korea after the president delivered a statement on the opioid crisis. The White House declined to explain Trump’s choice of words. Counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters later Tuesday at the nearby Bridgewater Marriott Hotel that the president’s remarks were “very strong and obvious,” declining to elaborate further.
Several White House officials privately downplayed the statement, saying in some ways "it's the way Trump talks," in the words of one.
"He's pissed off in private and he's pissed off in public," this person said.
The statement was not vetted through State Department channels, one official said, but Trump has asked an increasing number of questions about North Korea, this official said.
A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Robert Manning, said he was “not aware of any change in policy” and directed all questions to the White House. The State Department also declined to comment.
But Trump’s use of the type of melodramatic rhetoric often employed by the reclusive North Korean leader and his government propaganda arms struck some experts as risky.
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“What I think the risk is is that the tit-for-tat rhetoric will escalate, and a small incident could explode and build into a larger conflict,” said Kelsey Davenport, director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. “That increases the chance of war or even a nuclear exchange in the region.”
She said the warning could escalate already high tensions and elicit a bellicose response from North Korea, including possibly another intercontinental ballistic missile test.
Others who have been responsible for North Korea policy expressed similar concerns about the president's approach -- and the risk of miscalculation on the North Koreans' part.
"They might think he means we would strike first. That could escalate out of control," said Jon Wolfsthal, who was senior National Security Council official in the Obama administration. "Publicly he should say very little other than we will protect and defend ourselves and our allies. In just that calm a way. Privately we should tell North Korea directly that their weapons are unusable and any attack in us or our allies will bring about the end of the North Korean state. Their only option is to not use these weapons and return to negotiations."
The anxiety over the president's unexpected pronouncement was shared by conservatives.
"President Trump's comments sound as if they were penned by Pyongyang," said Bruce Klingner, a researcher at the hawkish Hertiage Foundation specializing in Northeast Asia. "His statement is unhelpful and will affirm growing perceptions that the U.S. is considering a preventative military attack against North Korea."
The new warning to North Korea also drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill and renewed calls to find a way to negotiate with North Korea despite its insistence it will not accept as a precondition for talks that it halt its nuclear and missile programs.
“Isolating the North Koreans has not halted their pursuit of nuclear weapons. And President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” said Dianne Feinstein, a senior Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, adding that she believes diplomacy is "the only sound path forward."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told a Phoenix-area radio station, KTAR, that Trump's comments could bring the United States and North Korea closer to confrontation.
"You got to be sure that you can do what you say you're going to. In other words, the old walk softly but carry a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt's saying," McCain said. "I think this is very, very, very serious."
Nolan McCaskill and Josh Dawsey contributed reporting.President Obama touted the new GI Bill in a Virginia speech today, detailing how the $78 billion legislation expands educational opportunities for veterans.
"Above all, I want to pay tribute to the veterans by now advancing their dreams of pursuing an education, Obama said, speaking at a rally Monday at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., to celebrate the implementation of the bill. "With the post-9/11 GI bill we can help the veterans live their own dream."
The bill signed by President Bush a year ago, just took effect on Aug. 1 and is the first new GI Bill since the terror attacks of 9/11. The Veterans Affairs Department began distributing tuition payments to schools participating in the program over the weekend.
Obama laid out some of the bill's key provisions, including free tuition at public universities for some active duty soldiers, as well as enhanced benefits for their families and for reservists.
While the bill extends benefits to anyone with at least three months' active duty service in the military since Sept. 11, 2001, those who have served at least three years' active duty since then are eligible for four years of tuition costs at their home state's universities, plus a monthly stipend for housing and living expenses which averages about $1,100 nationwide and funds for tutoring and books.
Altogether, the benefit could top more than $25,000 a year in the most expensive states.
Troops who served at least 10 years' active duty will be able to transfer their benefit to a spouse or dependent child. Guardsmen and reservists with at least three years' active duty in the past seven years automatically qualify for the full tuition benefit just like other troops. Those who served less active time, but at least three months, will receive 40-90% of the tuition benefit, based on a sliding scale.For longtime 49ers antagonist Darnell Dockett, it was initially strange to enter the locker room of the team he tried to terrorize for his first 10 seasons when he played with the NFC West rival Cardinals.
The most awkward moments for the Pro Bowl defensive tackle? That would be coming into contact with those new teammates he’s spent years tangling with in the trenches.
“I walked past (left tackle Joe) Staley — I think we probably walked past each other four times before we actually spoke,” Dockett said. “We kind of shook hands and kind of put it behind us and now we’re on the same page.”
What led the trash-talking Dockett, 33, to sign with the team he claimed to despise? Never underestimate the important of money – Dockett signed a two-year, $7.25 million contract – but he also referenced his respect today for new 49ers head coach Jim Tomsula.
Dockett said he met Tomsula, the 49ers defensive line coach from 2007-14, at midfield after |
work from a higher level. Their handles move the centre of effort higher and wider. They have less direct feedback and feel.
Regards from Perth
Derek
April 2013
Part II – Modifications
The guys on the Aussie forum (Ubeaut) challenged me to add a brass section to support the blade. I thought this a good idea, not just for the bling but because it would add a little more solidness to the blade bedding (although Mk I is solid anyway).
I must admit to scratching my head for quite some time before coming up with a very simple addition. Here is the finished router plane...
Doesn't look any different to before? Look carefully at the brass "v" at the rear...
Under the plane the brass channel is more easily seen...
... and without the blade...
Loose and prior epoxying together...
Here in the insert...
A larger eye bolt was required. I could only get a 1/4" diameter and had to convert this to M6 (to match the brass nut).
The inside of the eye bolt must be filed so that the brass channel fits snugly..
When using epoxy, add a little tint..
When glueing in the brass insert, secure the blade upsidedown..
This will allow you to ensure that it is square to the sole of the plane.
All the best with yours.
Regards from Perth
DerekQuote EricMusco Quote: Originally Posted by Hey folks!
I know the NPC limit is certainly something many of you would like to see raised so I wanted to explain why it is in place currently. As most of you suspect already, it is a performance issue. Without going into too much detail, if someone's Stronghold begins to load a large amount of NPCs it can create issues not only in your Stronghold, but in others as well.
As with all things we will continue to monitor this limit and raise it as we can. We want to give you the opportunity to place as many NPCs possible, but we also want to ensure you have the best experience in your Stronghold as well.
Hope that makes sense. Thanks!
-eric
A 35-40 visitor limit can accomodate 3 op groups which should be enough for even guild events/parties. I was in one of the largest guilds on my server with regularly planned events and it was extremely rare for us to gather more than 30 people at any given time.
Personal strongholds are not world zones, there is little for the visitors to do except to gawk at your trophies and decorations. Even if it is in a social gathering setting, people will get bored and leave rather quickly. So unless you are in an exceptionally large guild with an abnormal number of active players who like to hold large parties at your place, the probability of a personal stronghold ever hitting the 70 visitors mark is extremely slim to say the least. That slim probility is certainly no justification to limit the NPC options for everyone elses strongholds. Eric, if the NPC limit is tied to the "potential" of having 70 visitors coming into your stronghold which when combined with more than 25 NPCs could then creat a performance issue, then the solution would be simple. Lower the visitor limit by half.A 35-40 visitor limit can accomodate 3 op groups which should be enough for even guild events/parties. I was in one of the largest guilds on my server with regularly planned events and it was extremely rare for us to gather more than 30 people at any given time.Personal strongholds are not world zones, there is little for the visitors to do except to gawk at your trophies and decorations. Even if it is in a social gathering setting, people will get bored and leave rather quickly. So unless you are in an exceptionally large guild with an abnormal number of active players who like to hold large parties at your place, the probability of a personal stronghold ever hitting the 70 visitors mark is extremely slim to say the least. That slim probility is certainly no justification to limit the NPC options for everyone elses strongholds.In a surprising twist, Philips is first to announce headphones compatible with Apple's Lightning port. As spotted by Pocket-Lint, the company's Fidelio M2L headphones utilize Apple's Lightning port to bypass the internal DAC of the iPhone, and can play high resolution 24-bit audio through a built-in DAC and amplifier.
"our first headphone that has a direct digital connection to your iOS device."
"We’re excited to launch the Philips Fidelio M2L, our first headphone that has a direct digital connection to your iOS device," says WOOX Innovations Pascal van Laer. It was widely reported that Apple quietly expanded its Made for iPhone program earlier this year to include headphones that connect to iOS devices via the Lightning port. Set to retail at €250 (about $323) sometime in December, the Fidelio M2L is an unexpected first given that Apple now owns Beats, which is famous for its line of designer headphones.
Although Philips has not listed such functionalities, Apple's Made for iPhone specification can potentially allow Lightning headphones like the Fidelio M2L to extract power from an Apple device or even provide power to such machines via an external power source. This allows users to both charge their devices and listen to music simultaneously. Additionally, such headphones can launch and interface directly with companion apps, as well as offering standard controls like volume and track skipping.For years, comedians and commentators have bemoaned the fact that jetpacks, as imagined in 1950s sci-fi movies, never materialized.
As of spring 2012, though, the dream will become a reality — if you have $100,000 to spend, that is. A Dania Beach, Fla., company called JetLev will begin shipping its water-powered JetLev R200 early next year, according to the company's website. The suggested retail price: $99,500.
JetLev claims the R200 will propel you to a height of 30 feet (the hose is 33 feet long) at a top speed of 25 mph. As noted in the video, the pack is powered by a 200 hp engine that pumps water through a 10-meter hose at 1,000 gallons per minute, generating more than 420 lbs. of thrust. The company claims you can fly around in your jetpack for hours, thanks to a 22-gallon fuel capacity.
The item comes in red, black and white, and additional colors are available for an extra $3,500.
JetLev is not the only company working on a jetpack. Martin Aviation is working on what it calls "the world's first practical jetpack." In May, the Martin Jetpack soared to a height of 5,000 feet in a test flight in New Zealand.
While the promotional video paints a nice picture, jetpacks don't always work as promised. The second video below highlights a jetpack fail that made the rounds this past summer.
Are you ready for a jetpack? Let us know in the comments.This natural bridge in France floods twice every single day
If you thought your commute home on the 101 or I95 was frustrating (and dangerous!), what do you think the residents of the island of Noirmoutier in France think of the natural passageway that connects their home to the mainland? It floods twice a day. Le Passage de Gois ou Gôa is 2.58 miles long causeway and is located on the Atlantic coast in the Bay of Bourgneuf, in the department of Vendée. The natural bridge floods every day at high tide and is the only known road in the world to do so.
It’s a one way road – you can only get from the mainland to the island on it – and is only passable at low tide and then for 1.5 hours before and after low tide. Because it spends so much time underwater, the passage is usually slippery and often has dregs of seaweed stretched across its length.
There are timetables and warning signs at each end of the bridge. Cars are prohibited from driving across it during high tide though many have not adhered to the rules and been lost under the sea. There are rescue towers stationed intermittently between the mainland and island for those caught in the tide. They can climb the towers to wait out the water.
Hundreds of years ago, the only way to access Noirmoutier island was by boat. But over the years, silt began piling up that allowed people and animals to cross on foot. The name “Gois” actually comes from the word goiser which means “to walk while wetting ones shoes.” Since the natural accumulation of the silt passageway, different degrees of stabilization work has been done to make it more passable. In 1840, service by car or horseback was established. Later, a more permanent cobblestone road was laid down and in 1971, a real bridge was constructed across the water that allows cars to get between the mainland and island easily at any time of day.
The Passage du Gois has been used twice for the Tour de France bike race. In 1999, the road was a part of Stage 2 of the Tour de France; halfway through, a biker fell and the crash created a six minute split in the peloton which completely changed the outcome of the race.
The passage was used again in 2011 as the starting point of the first race stage. The passage is also used every year for a foot race – the Foulées du Gois – and actually starts at the onset of high tide.
It’s marked as a national monument of France and attracts visitors from all over, year round, to watch the entire miles long road get swallowed up by the sea. They come to collect sea shells and play in the water during low tide as well.
sources: Dangerous Roads, Amusing Planet
<NASA Contractor Report 188251
Where No Flag Has Gone Before:
Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon
Anne M. Platoff
Hernandez Engineering Inc.
Houston, Texas
Awarded the Driver Award for the Best Paper Presented to the 26th Meeting
of the North American Vexillological Association
October 11, 1992 -- San Antonio, Texas
Prepared for
Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
under contract NAS9-18263
August 1993
Abstract
The flag on the moon represents an important event in vexillological history. This paper examines the political and technical aspects of placing a flag on the moon, focusing on the first moon landing. During their historic extravehicular activity (EVA), the Apollo 11 crew planted the flag of the United States on the lunar surface. This flag-raising was strictly a symbolic activity, as the United Nations Treaty on Outer Space precluded any territorial claim. Nevertheless, there were domestic and international debates over the appropriateness of the event. Congress amended the agency's appropriations bill to prevent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from placing flags of other nations, or those of international associations, on the moon during missions funded solely by the United States. Like any activity in space exploration, the Apollo flag-raising also provided NASA engineers with an interesting technical challenge. They designed a flagpole with a horizontal bar allowing the flag to "fly" without the benefit of wind to overcome the effects of the moon's lack of an atmosphere. Other factors considered in the design were weight, heat resistance, and ease of assembly by astronauts whose space suits restricted their range of movement and ability to grasp items. As NASA plans a return to the moon and an expedition to Mars, we will likely see flags continue to go "where no flag has gone before."
Introduction
President John F. Kennedy, in his historic speech of September 1962, expressed his vision of space exploration for an audience assembled in the stadium Rice University. Earlier that year he had challenged the United States to go to the moon within the decade. The space race was well underway and Kennedy, in foreseeing the role his country was to play in space exploration, also alluded to a role for flags. "We mean to lead [the exploration of space], for the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace." (footnote 1) Thirty years later, as we prepare to return to the moon and continue on to Mars, it is time to reconsider the political and technical aspects of placing a flag on the lunar surface.
Political Aspects
Domestic Considerations
The political aspects of the first lunar flag-raising were twofold -- both domestic and international. NASA relies upon Congress for its funding and therefore has always been very cognizant of the need for good public relations. Astronauts were considered national heroes, and the flag of the United States has been a common symbol used in all aspects of the manned space program. NASA's spacecraft and launch vehicles have always been decorated with flags. Edward H. White II became the first American astronaut to "walk in space" on 4 June 1965 (Fig. 1), and his space suit was one of the first to be adorned with a flag patch. (footnote 2) Following this tradition, flags have been used on the suits of astronauts from many countries. Use of flags in the space program created controversy, however, only when it became apparent that a flag would be planted on the moon.
Fig. 1. - Edward H. White II displays the U.S. flag on his space suit during his historic spacewalk, or EVA (NASA JSC Photograph S65-30431).
International Considerations
Prior to the Apollo 11 moon landing, the United Nations (U.N.) adopted the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies of 27 January 1967 (commonly known as the Outer Space Treaty). Article II of the treaty clearly states that "outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of occupation, or by any other means." (footnote 3) The United States, signatory to the treaty, could not claim the moon. Therefore, raising a flag on the lunar surface would merely be a symbolic gesture -- an expression of triumph similar to the planting of a flag on Mount Everest or at the North and South Poles. The legal status of the moon clearly would not be affected by the presence of a U.S. flag on the surface, but NASA was aware of the international controversy that might occur as a result. (footnote 4)
In January of 1969, President Richard M. Nixon's inaugural address stressed the international flavor of the Apollo program. "As we explore the reaches of space, let us go to the new worlds together -- not as new worlds to be conquered, but as a new adventure to be shared." NASA officials noted the tone of the speech, and there was some discussion within the agency that a United Nations flag could be used for the flight. (footnote 5) This was one of the possibilities considered by the Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing, which was appointed by Thomas O. Paine, NASA Acting Administrator, on February 25 of that year. The committee was instructed to select symbolic activities that would not jeopardize crew safety or interfere with mission objectives; that would "signalize the first lunar landing as an historic forward step of all mankind that has been accomplished by the United States" and that would not give the impression that the United States was "taking possession of the moon" in violation of the Outer Space Treaty. The committee considered several options including the possibilities of leaving a United States flag or an adaptation of the solar wind experiment in the form of a flag, leaving a set of miniature flags of all nations, and leaving a commemorative marker on the surface. (footnote 6)
The committee's report recommended using only the flag of the United States during the lunar extravehicular activity (EVA). In addition, the committee suggested that a plaque bearing an inscription ("Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind") be mounted on the lunar module to emphasize that the purpose of the mission was one of exploration and not conquest. The original plaque design featured a U.S. flag, but the graphic was changed to pictures of the eastern and western hemispheres of the Earth to symbolize the crew's point of origin. It was decided that, in addition to the large flag, 4 x 6 inch flags of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. territories, and flags for all member countries of the United Nations and several other nations, would be carried in the lunar module and returned for presentation to governors and heads of state after the flight. (footnote 7)
Technical Aspects
Design and Engineering Constraints
Work on the lunar flag assembly began about three months prior to the Apollo 11 mission. Robert Gilruth, Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) (footnote 8) and a member of the Committee on Symbolic Activities, asked Jack Kinzler, Chief of Technical Services Division at MSC, for ideas regarding the EVA. Kinzler suggested that a full-size U.S. flag could be deployed using a specially designed flagpole. He drew up a preliminary sketch (Fig. 2) and the idea was presented to the committee. Working with Deputy Division Chief Dave McCraw, he worked out the details of the lunar flag assembly over several days. The design was based on a number of engineering constraints. For example, to compensate for the lack of an atmosphere on the lunar surface, the flag assembly included a horizontal crossbar to give the illusion of a flag flying in the breeze. (footnote 9)
Fig. 2. - Lunar Flag Assembly -- Kinzler's preliminary sketch.
Two other major constraints were the weight of the assembly and the stowage space required. The team designed the entire assembly to be as lightweight as possible -- when completed it weighed only 9 pounds and 7 ounces. They reduced the size of the package by developing a two-part telescoping pole apparatus with a telescoping crossbar. It was also necessary to design a flagpole that could be easily assembled and deployed by astronauts wearing space suits. Space suits used for the lunar surface EVA were pressurized to approximately 3.7 pounds per square inch and, as a result, the amount of force that the astronauts could apply with their gloved hands was limited and their range of movement was restricted (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3. - Astronaut Reach Constraints. (NASA Press Release 69-83K, p. 122)
A 3 x 5 ft. nylon flag, obtained through the government supply catalog, (footnote 10) was altered by sewing a hem along the top. The crossbar, hinged to the pole, went through this hem, and a loop sewn around the bottom of the flag secured it to the pole. An astronaut would unfurl the flag by extending the telescoping crossbar and by raising it first to a position just above 90 degrees. He then lowered it to a position perpendicular to the pole where a catch prevented the hinge from moving. The upper portion then slipped into the base portion of the flagpole, which had been driven into the ground using a lunar geological hammer. A red ring was painted around the base of the assembly 18 inches from the bottom to aid the astronauts in judging the distance that the pole had penetrated the surface. (footnote 11)
Finally, it was necessary to protect the flag during the descent portion of the lunar landing. To make the flag easily accessible during the EVA, it was mounted on the left-hand side of the ladder on the Lunar Module (LM) (fig. 4).
Fig. 4. - Dave McCraw, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center Technical Services Deputy Division Chief, demonstrates the removal of the flag shroud from the Lunar Module ladder. He holds the "pip" pin in his right hand. (NASA JSC Photograph S69-38755)
This also reduced the amount of equipment that had to carried inside the already crowded vehicle. It was estimated, however, that the LM ladder would be heated to 250 degrees Farenheit by the descent engines as they fired during the descent staging phase of the landing. The ladder would experience temperatures up to 2,000 degrees Farenheit during the 13 seconds of the touchdown phase. Tests run on the flag determined that it would withstand temperatures of only up to 300 degrees Farenheit. These conditions made it necessary to design a protective shroud for the flagassembly. The shroud design (Fig. 5) was the work of the Structures and Mechanics Division of the Manned Spacecraft Center. It consisted of a stainless steel outer case separated from an aluminum layer by Thermoflex insulation. Several layers of thermal blanketing material were placed between the shroud and the flag assembly, limiting the temperature experienced by the flag to 180 degrees Farenheit. (footnote 12)
Fig. 5. - Flag assembly and shroud (NASA photograph S69-38748).
Construction and Testing
All of the work on the flag assembly and on the flag shroud was performed in the workshops at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Alterations to the flag were done in the fabrics shop, the sheet metals shop constructed the flagpole, and another shop anodized the flagpole -- electrolytically coating the aluminum to give it a gold color and a stiff protective surface. Tubing used in the construction of the pole was about an inch in diameter with a wall approximately 1/32 of an inch thick. The telescoping feature of the pole was created by using different sizes of tubing that slid neatly into each other. A capped bottom allowed the upper portion of the pole to slide easily into the lower portion. The base of the lower section was designed with a hardened steel point to make it easier to drive into the lunar soil.
Cost of materials was relatively low -- the flag was purchased for $5.50 and the tubing cost approximately $75. The cost of the shroud has been estimated at several hundred dollars due to the materials involved. Construction of the prototypes was achieved in several days, and after a week the team had made a few backup assemblies, and some to be used for crew training purposes. Demonstration tests were performed where the flag assembly was folded, packed, unpacked, erected and deployed to assure that it would operate properly. Kinzler flew to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to participate in a mockup review of the lunar flag assembly on 25 June 1969. The astronauts were included in several of these tests as part of their EVA training so that they would be familiar with deployment procedures. (footnote 13)
Preflight Preparation
Packing of the flag assembly followed a written 12-step procedure which required up to 5 people to ensure that it was tightly packed. Wooden blocks and plastic ties were used by the team to keep the packed flag together as they progressed through the steps. These packing aids were removed when the flag was placed into the thermal package. After the flag was rolled into the thermal package a thermal rip strip made with Velcro was used to close the package. The strip had a pull-tab at the top to make it easier for the astronauts to open the package once they were on the lunar surface. This thermal package was then installed into the metal shroud following a 4-step procedure. A small block of Thermaflex insulation was placed around the bottom and top ends of the pole to protect the flag ends from hot brackets. The flag packing for the Apollo 11 flight was performed in Jack Kinzler's office and was approved by the Chief of Quality Assurance who was present during the procedure. Once the flag thermal package was properly stowed inside the shroud, it was taken to the launch site at KSC to be mounted on the ladder of the LM. (footnote 14)
Because the final decision to fly the flag and attach the plaque was made so close to the launch date, a Lear jet was chartered to fly Kinzler, George Low (Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program), Low's secretary, the flag assembly, and the commemorative plaque to KSC before the launch. The flag and plaque were installed on the LM of Apollo 11 at 4:00 in the morning as the spacecraft sat atop its Saturn V rocket ready for launch. Kinzler had written an 11-step procedure for mounting the assembly on the ladder and personally supervised the installation.
Proper installation was vital if the astronauts were to be able to deploy the flag on the lunar surface. An astronaut first released the shroud "pip" pin by squeezing it and then pulling it out, and then released the main flag assembly "pip" pin. A spring tension against the flag poles was released when the pins were pulled allowing easy removal of the shroud. The astronaut then pulled the Velcro strip off the insulation package and discarded the wrapping materials.
Deployment and Performance
The first U.S. flag on the moon was deployed by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin during their historic EVA on 20 July 1969 (at 4 days, 14 hours and 9 minutes mission-elapsed time). The flag was seen worldwide on live television (Fig. 6). At their technical crew debriefing, Armstrong and Aldrin reported few problems with the deployment. They had trouble extending the horizontal telescoping rod and could not pull it all the way out. This gave the flag a bit of a "ripple effect," and later crews intentionally left the rod partially retracted. The Apollo 11 astronauts also noted that they could drive the lower portion of the pole only about 6 to 9 inches into the surface. It is uncertain if the flag remained standing or was blown over by the engine blast when the ascent module took off.
Fig. 6. - Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin deploy the first U.S. flag on the moon. (NASA JSC Photograph S69-40308)
The only design change made as the result of performance on the lunar surface was in the catching mechanism of the horizontal crossbar's hinge. The Apollo 12 crew could not get the catch to latch properly and, as a result, the flag drooped slightly. Later models of the flag assembly had a double-action latch that would work even if the horizontal bar was not raised above a 90 degree angle. (footnote 15)
Reactions to the Flag Deployment
Even though the event took only 10 minutes of the 2 1/2 hour EVA, for many people around the world the flag-raising was one of the most memorable parts of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. There were no formal protests from other nations that the flag-raising constituted an illegal attempt to claim the moon. Buzz Aldrin, in an article written for Life magazine, stated that as he looked at the flag he sensed an "almost mystical unification of all people in the world at that moment." A few published articles expressed regret that NASA had chosen not to plant a U.N. flag, either in addition to or alongside that of the United States.
Prior to the mission, several members of Congress relayed letters from their constituents to NASA which recommended (or in some cases opposed) the use of specific flags. Flags mentioned in these letters included the U.S. flag, the U.N. flag, and the Christian flag. (footnote 16) The congressional debate heated up in the House of Representatives as the body considered NASA's appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 1970. On 10 June, NASA formally notified members of Congress that a decision had been made to raise the U.S. flag on the lunar surface. The House approved the appropriations bill on that same day after amending it to include a flag provision. This measure did not actually affect the Apollo 11 mission, but did make it clear to NASA where many members of Congress stood on the flag issue.
A House and Senate conference committee agreed on the final version of the bill on 4 November 1969 which included a provision that "the flag of the United States, and no other flag, shall be implanted or otherwise placed on the surface of the moon, or on the surface of any planet, by members of the crew of any spacecraft... as part of any mission... the funds for which are provided entirely by the Government of the United States." The amendment, in deference to the Outer Space Treaty, concluded with the statement "this act is intended as a symbolic gesture of national pride in achievement and is not to be construed as a declaration of national appropriation by claim of sovereignty." (footnote 17)
Although the amendment was passed and became law, technically NASA was not required to deploy a U.S. flag on each of the following Apollo missions. Spencer M. Beresford, NASA's General Counsel, noted in a report to the Associate Deputy Administrator that "the managers on the part of the House further clarified the intent of the provision during the conference by stipulating that this section should not be construed to mean that the American flag must necessarily be implanted or otherwise placed on the surface of the moon or the surface of any planet on each and every landing subsequent to an initial landing." Regardless of this interpretation, the Apollo flights could have been considered exempt since, as pointed out by a member of the House of Representatives, several international partners had contributed to portions of the Apollo Program. (footnote 18) This is also likely to be the case if and when NASA sends astronauts back to the moon or on to Mars.
The Future
President George Bush, speaking on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, proposed that lunar/Mars exploration should be the nation's long-term objective in space exploration. "The Apollo astronauts left more than flags and footprints on the Moon. They also left some unfinished business. For, even 20 years ago, we recognized that America's ultimate goal was not simply to go there and go back -- but to go there and go on." (footnote 19)
Although Bush did not include the concept of international cooperation in his vision of the space exploration initiative, there are many who recognize that the political climate has changed since the days of Apollo. Space exploration and space projects have become internationalized and missions on the scale of a lunar base or a Mars mission will probably require international funding to make them feasible. It will be interesting to see which flags join that of the United States on the lunar surface and which will be the first flags on Mars. (fig. 7) One thing is clear -- as humans explore the solar system we will likely see flags continue to go "where no flag has gone before."
Fig. 7. - "Return to Utopia," by Pat Rawlings, shows the arrival of humans at the Viking 2 landing site. Flags will most likely accompany humans as they explore the planets (NASA photograph S91-52337).
Notes
1. John F. Kennedy. "Remarks of the President: Rice University Stadium, Houston, Texas." NASA News Release, 12 September 1962. On file at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) History Office. (return to text)
2. White's crewmate, James A. McDivitt, also wore a flag on his suit. The astronauts purchased the flags themselves, but following their flight NASA made the flag patch a regular feature on the space suits. Dick Lattimer, "All We Did Was Fly to the Moon" (Gainesville, FL: Whispering Eagle Press, 1983), p. 23; "Stars & Stripes Flew High on Gemini 4," Dispatch: a Newsletter for Members of the Space Patch Collectors Club," Vol. 1 No. 8 (June 1986), p.1; Buzz Aldrin, Men From Earth (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 129; corroborated by Robert Spann, 1964-66 Project Engineer for the Gemini Support Office of the Space Suit Office at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), personal communication, 10 September 1992. (return to text)
3. "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies of 27 January 1967," in Space Law: Views of the Future: A Compilation of Articles by a New Generation of Space Law Scholars, edited by Tanja L. Zwaan (Deventer, The Netherlands: Kluwer Law and Taxation Publishers, 1988), pp. 149-154. (return to text)
4. Adrian Bueckling, "Flaggen Auf Dem Mond," Zeitschrift f�r Luftrecht und Weltraumrechtsfragen 19 (1 January 1970), pp. 19-24. (return to text)
5. Richard Nixon, "Inaugural Address, January 20, 1969," in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon -- Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President 1969 (Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1971); George M. Low, memo to Director of JSC, 23 January 1969, on file at the JSC History Office. (return to text)
6. T. O. Paine, NASA Acting Administrator, memo to Associate and Assistant Administrators and Center Directors, 25 February 1969, on file at the NASA Headquarters (HQ) History Office; George M. Low, memo to Director of JSC, 23 January 1969, on file at the JSC History Office; Willis H. Shapley, NASA Associate Deputy Administrator and Chairman of the Committee on Symbolic Activities, memos to Dr. Mueller of the Apollo Program Office, 19 April 1969 and 2 July 1969, and memo to the Administrator of NASA, n.d., on file at the NASA HQ History Office; Leonard Jaffe, Director for Space Science and Applications Programs, memo to the Associate Administrator for Space Science and Applications, 13 March 1969, on file at the NASA HQ History Office. (return to text)
7. Jack Kinzler, MSC Chief of Technical Services (retired), interview with the author, 30 August 1992. Following the presentation of 4x6 inch flags to several heads of state, it was discovered that some of the national flags flown were obsolete. Dr. Whitney Smith of the Flag Research Center was contacted by NASA and asked to check the remaining flags for accuracy. Whitney Smith, personal communication, 29 April 1992. (return to text)
8. In 1973 the Manned Spacecraft Center was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center and is commonly referred to as JSC. (return to text)
9. Kinzler, interview, 30 August 1992. (return to text)
10. It is uncertain who manufactured the flag that was deployed by the Apollo 11 crew. According to a NASA Press Release of 3 July 1969, "the Stars and Stripes to be deployed on the Moon was purchased along with several others made by different manufacturers at stores in the area around the Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston. In order to attach the flag properly to its aluminum staff it was necessary to remove the binding and labels. For this reason the name of the manufacturer cannot be determined." (NASA Press Release 69-83E, 3 July 1969, on file at the JSC History Office). In his book, "All We Did Was Fly to the Moon," (Gainesville, FL: Whispering Eagle Press, 1988), p. 121, Dick Lattimer states that the flags that went to the moon were made by Annin & Co. Randy Beard, Sr., of Annin contacted the Public Affairs Office at NASA Headquarters regarding the flag shortly after the moon landing. His company had supplied many flags to NASA throughout the manned space flight program. Beard was told that three secretaries had been sent out to buy 3x5-foot nylon flags during their lunch hours. After they had returned it was discovered that all of them had purchased their flags at Sears. Annin was the official flag supplier for Sears at the time so this story seemed to confirm that the flag had been made by Annin. Beard was informed that NASA would not confirm the manufacturer of the flag because they didn't "want another Tang" -- in other words, the agency did not want another advertising campaign based upon the fact that a commercial product had been used by the astronauts. (Randy Beard, Sr., Annin & Co., personal communication, 24 August 1992 and 10 September 1992.) Jack Kinzler was unable to verify that the flags were purchased at local stores or that the labels were removed. His notes indicate that the flags were purchased from the Government Stock Catalog for $5.50. (Kinzler, interview, 30 August 1992.) (return to text)
11. Kinzler, interview, 30 August 1992. (return to text)
12. Ibid.; T. Moser, "Insulation Configuration," drawing and data from the personal files of Jack Kinzler. (return to text)
13. Kinzler, interview, 30 August 1992; JSC Technical Services Division, "Weekly Activities Report -- June 23-27, 1967," on file at the JSC History Office. (return to text)
14. Ibid.; Kinzler, "Flag Folding Procedure" and "Flag Installation in Shroud (Procedure)" from the personal files of Jack Kinzler; Kinzler, personal communication, 9 September 1992. (return to text)
15. Kinzler, interview, 30 August 1992; JSC Technical Services Division, "Weekly Activities Report -- July 7-11, 1969," on file at the JSC History Office; Kinzler, "Mounting Flag Assembly on Ladder (Procedure)," from the personal files of Jack Kinzler. Also these materials on file at the JSC History Office: "Apollo 11 GOSS NET (Ground Operational Support System Network) Transcripts," Tape 71/10, p. 390; NASA JSC Mission Operations Branch Flight Crew Support Division, Apollo 11 Technical Crew Debriefing (U), Vol. I, 31 July 1969, pp. 10-43 to 10-45; NASA JSC, Apollo News Center, "Apollo 11 Postflight-Crew Press Conference," 12 August 1969. Buzz Aldrin noted that "just beneath the powdery surface, the subsoil was very dense. We succeeded in pushing the flagpole in only a couple of inches. It didn't look very sturdy." (Buzz Aldrin, Men From Earth, p. 242.) No film footage of either the Apollo 11 or Apollo 12 liftoff from the lunar surface is available, so it could not be determined if those flags remained standing. The Apollo 14 Mission Film (JSC-563) clearly shows that the flag from that mission remained standing after liftoff. (return to |
for StackDepth exceptions and a short stack trace for non- StackDepth exceptions
- display no stack trace for exceptions and a short stack trace for non- exceptions stats - display statistics before and after the run, such as expected test count before the run and tests succeeded, failed, pending, etc., counts after the run
- display statistics before and after the run, such as expected test count before the run and tests succeeded, failed, pending, etc., counts after the run nostats do not display statistics before or after the run
The default configuration is color, nodurations, nostacks, and nostats.
All of these commands are methods of class org.scalatest.Shell. Each configuration command is a method that produces another Shell instance with every configuration parameter the same except for the one you've asked to change. For example, when you invoke durations, you'll get back a Shell instance that has every parameter configured the same way, except with durations enabled. When you invoke run on that, you get a run with durations enabled and every other configuration parameter at its default value.
Two other useful "commands" to know about, though not technically part of the shell, are the apply factory methods in the Suites and Specs singleton objects. These allow you to easily create composite suites out of nested suites, which you can then pass to run. This will be demonstrated later in this documentation.
Using the ScalaTest shell
The package object of the org.scalatest package extends Shell with all its parameters set to their default values. A good way to use the ScalaTest shell, therefore, is to import the members of package org.scalatest :
scala> import org.scalatest._ import org.scalatest._
One thing importing org.scalatest._ allows you to do is access any of ScalaTest's classes and traits by shorter names, for example:
scala> class ArithmeticSuite extends FunSuite with matchers.ShouldMatchers { | test("addition works") { | 1 + 1 should equal (2) | } | ignore("subtraction works") { | 1 - 1 should equal (0) | } | test("multiplication works") { | 1 * 1 should equal (2) | } | test("division works") (pending) | } defined class ArithmeticSuite
But importing org.scalatest._ also brings into scope the commands of the Shell, so you can, for example, invoke run without qualification:
scala> run(new ArithmeticSuite) ArithmeticSuite: - addition works - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending)
Configuring a single run
To configure a single run, you can prefix run by one or more configuration commands, separated by dots. For example, to enable durations during a single run, you would write:
scala> durations.run(new ArithmeticSuite) ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (102 milliseconds) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** (36 milliseconds) 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending)
To enable statistics during a single run, you would write:
scala> stats.run(new ArithmeticSuite) Run starting. Expected test count is: 3 ArithmeticSuite: - addition works - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending) Run completed in 386 milliseconds. Total number of tests run: 2 Suites: completed 1, aborted 0 Tests: succeeded 1, failed 1, ignored 1, pending 1 *** 1 TEST FAILED ***
And to enable both durations and statistics during a single run, you could write:
scala> durations.stats.run(new ArithmeticSuite) Run starting. Expected test count is: 3 ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (102 milliseconds) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED (36 milliseconds)*** 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending) Run completed in 386 milliseconds. Total number of tests run: 2 Suites: completed 1, aborted 0 Tests: succeeded 1, failed 1, ignored 1, pending 1 *** 1 TEST FAILED ***
The order doesn't matter when you are chaining multiple configuration commands. You'll get the same result whether you write durations.stats.run or stats.durations.run.
To disable color, use nocolor :
scala> nocolor.run(new ArithmeticSuite) ArithmeticSuite: - addition works - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending)
To enable short stack traces during a single run, use shortstacks :
scala> shortstacks.run(new ArithmeticSuite) ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (101 milliseconds) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** (33 milliseconds) 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) org.scalatest.TestFailedException:... at line2$object$$iw$$iw$$iw$$iw$ArithmeticSuite$$anonfun$3.apply$mcV$sp(<console>:16) at line2$object$$iw$$iw$$iw$$iw$ArithmeticSuite$$anonfun$3.apply(<console>:16) at line2$object$$iw$$iw$$iw$$iw$ArithmeticSuite$$anonfun$3.apply(<console>:16) at org.scalatest.FunSuite$$anon$1.apply(FunSuite.scala:992) at org.scalatest.Suite$class.withFixture(Suite.scala:1661) at line2$object$$iw$$iw$$iw$$iw$ArithmeticSuite.withFixture(<console>:8) at org.scalatest.FunSuite$class.invokeWithFixture$1(FunSuite.scala:989)... - division works (pending)
Changing the default configuration
If you want to change the default for multiple runs, you can import the members of your favorite Shell configuration. For example, if you always like to run with durations and statistics enabled, you could write:
scala> import stats.durations._ import stats.durations._
Now anytime you simply call run, statistics and durations will be enabled:
scala> run(new ArithmeticSuite) Run starting. Expected test count is: 3 ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (9 milliseconds) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** (10 milliseconds) 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:18) - division works (pending) Run completed in 56 milliseconds. Total number of tests run: 2 Suites: completed 1, aborted 0 Tests: succeeded 1, failed 1, ignored 1, pending 1 *** 1 TEST FAILED ***
Running multiple suites
If you want to run multiple suites, you can use the factory methods in either the Suites or Specs singleton objects. If you wrap a comma-separated list of suite instances inside Suites(...), for example, you'll get a suite instance that contains no tests, but whose nested suites includes the suite instances you placed between the parentheses. You can place Suites inside Suites to any level of depth, creating a tree of suites to pass to run. Here's a (contrived) example in which ArithmeticSuite is executed four times:
scala> run(Suites(new ArithmeticSuite, new ArithmeticSuite, Suites(new ArithmeticSuite, new ArithmeticSuite))) Run starting. Expected test count is: 12 Suites: ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (0 milliseconds) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** (1 millisecond) 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending) ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (1 millisecond) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** (0 milliseconds) 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending) Suites: ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (0 milliseconds) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** (0 milliseconds) 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending) ArithmeticSuite: - addition works (0 milliseconds) - subtraction works!!! IGNORED!!! - multiplication works *** FAILED *** (0 milliseconds) 1 did not equal 2 (<console>:16) - division works (pending) Run completed in 144 milliseconds. Total number of tests run: 8 Suites: completed 6, aborted 0 Tests: succeeded 4, failed 4, ignored 4, pending 4 *** 4 TESTS FAILED ***
Running a single test
The run command also allows you to specify the name of a test to run and/or a config map. You can run a particular test in a suite, for example, by specifying the test name after the suite instance in your call to run, like this:
scala> run(new ArithmeticSuite, "addition works") ArithmeticSuite: - addition works
Give it a try
I released an updated ScalaTest-1.5-SNAPSHOT today that includes the new ScalaTest shell. The snapshot works with Scala 2.8. You can download the snapshot release via the scala-tools.org Maven repository with:
group id: org.scalatest
artifact id: scalatest_2.8.1
version: 1.5-SNAPSHOT
Or you can just grab the jar file from:
http://www.scala-tools.org/repo-snapshots/org/scalatest/scalatest_2.8.1/1.5-SNAPSHOT/scalatest_2.8.1-1.5-SNAPSHOT.jar
I put the Scaladoc for this snapshot release up here:
http://www.artima.com/docs-scalatest-1.5-SNAPSHOT-5-May-2011/
These enhancements will be released as part of ScalaTest 1.5 within the next few weeks. I'm posting this preview now because I want to get feedback in general on the API and find if there are any bugs to fix or any code-breakages. (I expect no source code to break with any of this enhancement, so let me know if you have a problem.) So please give it a try and either post feedback to the discussion forum for this blog post, or email the scalatest-users mailing list.
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Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc., publisher of Artima Developer (www.artima.com). He is author of the book, Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey of the Java platform's architecture and internals. His popular columns in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design, and Jini. Active in the Jini Community since its inception, Bill led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user interfaces to Jini services. Bill is also the lead developer and designer of ScalaTest, an open source testing tool for Scala and Java developers, and coauthor with Martin Odersky and Lex Spoon of the book, Programming in Scala.
This weblog entry is Copyright © 2011 Bill Venners. All rights reserved.The top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago, according to an updated study by the prominent economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty.
The top 1 percent took more than one-fifth of the income earned by Americans, one of the highest levels on record since 1913, when the government instituted an income tax.
The figures underscore that even after the recession the country remains in a new Gilded Age, with income as concentrated as it was in the years that preceded the Depression of the 1930s, if not more so.
High stock prices, rising home values and surging corporate profits have buoyed the recovery-era incomes of the most affluent Americans, with the incomes of the rest still weighed down by high unemployment and stagnant wages for many blue- and white-collar workers.
“These results suggest the Great Recession has only depressed top income shares temporarily and will not undo any of the dramatic increase in top income shares that has taken place since the 1970s,” Mr. Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in his analysis of the data.
The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression: just above 20 percent, jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011.
That increase is probably in part due to one-time factors. Congress made a last-minute deal to avoid the expiration of all of the Bush-era tax cuts in January. That deal included a number of tax increases on wealthy Americans, including bumping up levies on investment income. Seeing the tax changes coming, many companies gave large dividends and investors cashed out.
But the economists noted that the trends looked the same for income figures including and excluding realized capital gains — implying that the temporary tax moves were not the only reason the top 1 percent did so well relative to everyone else in 2012.
More generally, richer households have disproportionately benefited from the boom in the stock market during the recovery, with the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubling in value since it bottomed out early in 2009. About half of households hold stock, directly or through vehicles like pension accounts. But the richest 10 percent of households own about 90 percent of the stock, expanding both their net worth and their incomes when they cash out or receive dividends.
The economy remains depressed for most wage-earning families. With sustained, relatively high rates of unemployment, businesses are under no pressure to raise their employees’ incomes because both workers and employers know that many people without jobs would be willing to work for less. The share of Americans working or looking for work is at its lowest in 35 years.
There is a glimmer of good news for the 99 percent in the report, though. Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez show that the incomes of that group stagnated between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, they started growing again — if only by about 1 percent. But the total income of the top 1 percent surged nearly 20 percent that year. The incomes of the very richest, the 0.01 percent, shot up more than 32 percent.
The new data shows that the top 1 percent of earners experienced a sharp drop in income during the recession, of about 36 percent, and a nearly equal rebound during the recovery of roughly 31 percent. The incomes of the other 99 percent plunged nearly 12 percent in the recession and have barely grown — a 0.4 percent uptick — since then. Thus, the 1 percent has captured about 95 percent of the income gains since the recession ended.
Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty have argued that the concentration of income among top earners is unlikely to reverse without stark changes in the economy or in tax policy. Increases that Congress negotiated in January are not likely to have a major effect, Mr. Saez wrote, saying they “are not negligible, but they are modest.”
Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics, plan to update their data again in January, after more complete statistics become available.Retro Focus Eyewear,
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Written by Steven Panzarella(@ProCreateSteve)
It was not breaking news when the Digital and DVD sales came through for Oscar winning Disney hit Frozen, and as expected they are record breaking. The house of mouse announced that Frozen sold 3.2 million DVD, Blu-Ray copies on the first day. Lets repeat that one more time 3.2 MILLION UNITS IN ONE DAY which is an unbelievable number. The DVD/Blu-Ray/Digital Copy combo packs were selling for 20 dollars a piece while the Digital copy cost ITunes users the same price on it's February 25th digital release. If it's any indication of the sales over the next week or so Frozen will most likely have one of the best home sales figures in the last 10 years. Not only that but the films soundtrack is back on top of the billboard top 200 chart for it's sixth nonconsecutive week. Frozen grossed over a billion dollars worldwide and is still playing in over a thousand theaters while the DVD is on sale and the digital copy has been available for a month. Frozen remained on the box office top ten as of last week at number 9 but that streak might end this week with Muppets and Divergent hitting theaters.
Disney has done right by Frozen at every stage during it's release with a major run in theaters then re-releasing it as a sing along after Christmas. The biggest stroke of genius was its digital release nearly a month before the DVD hit shelves. This allowed the diehards to get the digital copy early while others waited for the combo pack. The continuing popularity is nothing short of unbelievable since normally people eventually get sick of things, especially with the songs readily available on Youtube or iTunes. I'd expect Disney to announce a sequel in the future while they have already added a Frozen attraction to Disney World (Pictures with Frozen characters at Epcot had lines as long as 5 hours.) It may be a while before we let this one go, and that is the reason why Disney has been doing it better and longer then anyone.
Comments
Beautiful Movie.There comes a time in every Japanese language journey when we want to learn more, and I don't mean more vocabulary, practice, or grammar constructions. Instead of wanting more breadth, we want to find more depth in the language we're coming to grips with, whether it's through lyrics, literature, entertainment, or any other form of expressive communication. For me it was haiku that I wanted to fully grasp. I wanted to understand how it was possible that three seemingly simple lines by the poet Bashō could inspire over one hundred different translations.
駄洒落（だじゃれ） feeble joke, bad pun
For others, it's Japanese humor, be it through anime, Japanese TV, or even more traditional sources like rakugo. Japanese comedy is strictly divided between extreme slapstick physical comedy and rather deadpan wordplay, and it's the latter we'll be looking at today. Japanese puns, or dajare 駄洒落 （ だじゃれ ）, can be not only groan- or laughter-inducing, but they can also help you improve both the depth and breadth of your language ability.
Besides, when you find yourself at a silent dinner table in Japan, it's always useful to have a few bad jokes up your sleeve.
How Japanese and English Puns Work
A pun is often described as "a play on words" or "Japanese wordplay." This definition, general though it is, applies in both English and Japanese. But there are some pretty stark differences in usage and reception that are important to look at before we dive in.
Puns in English often exploit similar sounds or words to trip up the listener as the sentence continues. A well-known example is:
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
Now, this is the sort of sentence that gets linguists going on about garden path sentences and syntactic ambiguity, but all we need to do is look at the repeated words.
In each "half" of the sentence, a different meaning of the same word is used. Thus "flies" can either be a verb (first half) or a noun as part of "fruit flies" (second half). "Like" either shows the phrase is a simile, or a verb applying to the fruit flies.
Even though the two words are the same, their meanings are changed by the words surrounding them, which is pleasingly disorienting to the listener. This is called a "homonymic pun," where the words are the same but have different meanings.
Another common type of pun in English relies on "homophones," words that sound the same but have different meanings and (often) spelling. American comedian George Carlin gives us:
"Atheism is a non-prophet organization."
Here the two words "prophet" and "profit" are mixed, because we expect the latter from the second half ("non-profit organization" is a common phrase) but also understand the former, because atheists don't have religious prophets.
Japanese puns are generally one of these two, or a mixture of both. While there are at least six different kinds of puns in English, most puns in Japanese rely on repetition (like fruit flies) and homonyms (like prophet and profit). For example:
アルミ 缶 （ かん ） の 上 （ うえ ） にあるみかん。
の にあるみかん。 A tangerine on an aluminium can.
The characters "あるみかん" appear twice. First they refer to an aluminium can (アルミ 缶 （ かん ） ). Second, they are split into "ある" (there is) and "みかん" (tangerine). The middle bit links the two instances together and puts the tangerine on top of the can.
親父ギャグ（おやじぎゃぐ） old man gag, dad joke
These are homophones, but importantly have a different "spelling." As you'll see later on, most of the time the joke relies on the phrase being spoken, as different kanji will be used for the same sounds.
You might not exactly be rolling on the floor laughing right now, but that's okay. While in English there are comedy acts devoted to pun-based one-liners, Japanese dajare like the example above are strongly associated with oyaji gyagu 親父ギャグ （ おやじ ）, or "old man jokes." Think dad jokes, or the awful, awful ones you see on popsicle sticks and children's candy wrappers.
More often than not, the standard Japanese response to oyaji gyagu is to note how cold the room has suddenly become ("あっ、 寒い （ さむ ） ") in the wake of such a joke. Dajare in actual comedy, however, are generally delivered and received with a very straight face.
In fact, a 2012 paper argues that "Japanese puns are not necessarily jokes," both in terms of dictionary definition and in understanding by Japanese natives.
English speakers tend to understand puns as a subsection of jokes, but among Japanese people there is far more ambiguity as to whether dajare are a type of joke, bad wordplay, or a completely different thing altogether. What completely different thing, you ask? Well kids, to find out let's go back to the beginning of Japanese puns.
The History of Japanese Puns
Because dajare are a linguistic device, we can't make an exact timeline of its development. After all, writing came much later than language. But two important aspects stand out and are actually very helpful for a finer knowledge of Japanese.
First we have to go way back to the origins of the Chinese writing system and look at the rebus principle. A rebus is where pictures or other symbols are used for their sound to represent different meanings. An English example would be the letters "IOU" representing the phrase "I owe you."
With a pictographic writing system like early Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphics, rebuses were common. They're a useful way of writing more things without having to invent even more characters. The mixing of concepts that this causes is one of the reasons why certain kanji nowadays might have completely different meanings, like 足 meaning both "foot" and "sufficient," or 着 appearing in both "to wear" and "to arrive."
Mio and Peter Backhaus in The Japan Times suggest that as characters were being developed and assigned to meanings, there must have been some ancient Chinese oyaji who thought to use the same character for two words with the same pronunciation.
Granted, this could be a bit of a stretch. But thinking about both shared characters and homophones with different characters really opens your eyes to the amount of linguistic and written ambiguity available to Japanese speakers, which can allow for some really wicked puns.
In fact, some of the earliest puns in Japanese are poetically wicked, rather than comedic. Some of the earliest examples of waka poetry (from the Kokin Wakashū anthology, published around 920 CE) use a device called a kakekotoba 掛言葉 （ かけことば ）, or "pivot word." This is basically a homophone, but used at an important point in the poem where both meanings work together for artistic effect. For example, matsu 松 （ まつ ） (pine) and matsu 待つ （ ま ） (to wait) both have the same pronunciation, so waka is full of waiting pines. Japanese writing at this time didn't use many kanji, either, which helped keep those ambiguities in play. Let's look at a poem by Ono No Komachi:
花の色は
うつりにけりな
いたづらに
我が身よにふる
ながめせしまに A life in vain.
My looks, talents faded
like these cherry blossoms
paling in the endless rains
that I gaze out upon, alone.
The amount of linguistic and written ambiguity available to Japanese speakers can allow for some really wicked puns.
In this poem, two words have multiple meanings. nagame ながめ （ ） can mean "to gaze upon" (nagameru 眺める （ なが ） ) but also "long rains" (nagame 長雨 （ ながめ ） ). Furu ふる （ ） also has two. The one used in modern Japanese is "to fall" (furu 降る （ ふ ） ), but it can also be "to age" (furu 経る （ ふ ） ). Nowadays, "to age" is pronounced へる, so be warned. By using ambiguous words like this, Komachi could pack extra meanings into very short poems. That's why the translation is so much longer than the original.
Perhaps you're unlikely to be jumping in with Kobun just yet, but even so, devices like this still inform Japanese poetry (and comedy!) today.
Poems with puns and double meanings were written by nobles in the Heian Period (794-1185). They were called share 洒落 （ しゃれ ）, meaning "joke" or "wit." As with much of classical Japanese nobility, it was all about showing off. They wanted to prove how clever and witty they were, so they crammed poems full of these witticisms.
Ordinary people wanted a piece of the action too, but the nobles weren't best pleased. So they called these attempts dajare 駄洒落 （ だじゃれ ）. The kanji 駄 means "trivial" or "worthless." As a result, literary puns used in poems are known as "share," but general puns and the ones in this article are called "dajare." You can still have a go at waka if you want, but let's see how the "low grade" puns can help you.
How to Make Dajare Work for You
You probably wouldn't be reading this if you didn't at least have an interest in improving your Japanese. Here are some of the ways you can utilize puns to give your Japanese that extra push towards native (if a little oyaji) level speaking.
Vocabulary
Like mnemonics, puns can help certain words stick in your mind. What's extra helpful about them is that they come in neat little parcels, complete with a little bit of grammar. Because they're based on homophones, they're an excellent way to target words that are easy to mix up. This way, you only need to remember one thing, like the word for "aluminium can," then you can use that to be able to talk about everybody's favorite citrus fruit. As you'll see later, some of these examples also link up common and obscure words, which can give you a shortcut into advanced vocabulary alongside an easy-to-remember image or situation.
Learning the Culture
You can find out a lot about a culture from its humor. Personally I think British humor tends to be based on situational comedy, especially embarrassing or cringeworthy situations. Read into that what you will. Like I said above, Japanese humor tends to be either deadpan puns or extreme slapstick.
As you'll see from some of the examples below, you can get an idea of how dajare can be used to wish people luck in exams, ask for online summaries, or ask whether someone's eaten underpants.
Japanese puns are, as I've said, pretty much the same as dad jokes in English, or have the feeling of jokes made by young children. In short, a lot of these are the sort of thing everyone knows. If you can know them too, you can get a bit of implicit culture to share with Japanese people you may know or meet.
Standard Japanese Pun Examples
These dajare generally exist in isolation, as jokes. They're not really used for anything other than that. This means that they're simple in terms of use, but as you'll see, they can get pretty complicated in terms of structure and vocabulary. Let's get cracking!
Using the Same Sounds Twice
スキーが 好き。 I like skiing.
This is, in a sense, the purest form of dajare. It's also the closest to the oyaji gyagu 親父ギャグ （ おやじ ） we talk about above. Take two words or phrases that use the same sounds, mash them together into a somewhat meaningful sentence, and voila, you've got yourself a pun! This is a great way of learning single words and navigating homophones, because if you can remember one half of the phrase, you can work out the other half with relative ease.
Beware, though, as a lot of them rely on shortening or implying part of the sentence. For times when something is implied or shortened, I've put the full version in parentheses. Just treat it as a way of learning some slang along with the vocabulary!
いくらはいくら？
How much is ikura?
スキーが 好き （ す ） 。
。 I like skiing.
電話 （ でんわ ） に 誰も （ だれ ） でんわ（でない）。
に でんわ（でない）。 Nobody picks up the phone.
内容 （ ないよう ） がないよう。
がないよう。 There is no content. (It's meaningless.)
下手 （ へた ） な 洒落 （ しゃれ ） はやめなしゃれ（やめなされ）。
な はやめなしゃれ（やめなされ）。 You shouldn't make bad puns.
Using Similar Sounds Twice
Yes, I know, this is almost the same as the examples above. But these are useful to consider, just to show you that Japanese puns do offer a bit of flexibility when it comes to dad-joke construction:
脂肪 （ しぼう ） め、しぼめ！
め、しぼめ！ Shrink my fat!
布団 （ ふとん ） が 吹っ飛んだ （ ふ と ） 。
が 。 The futon flew away.
駄洒落 （ だじゃれ ） を 言う （ い ） のはだれじゃ？
を のはだれじゃ？ Who says dajare?
今夜 （ こんや ） 食う （ く ） のは 蒟蒻 （ こんにゃく ） 。
のは 。 Tonight I will eat konjac.
Sentences with Multiple Meanings
As I've explained, Japanese has a lot of homophones. This is why kanji are so important and reading kobun (which uses very little kanji) is so difficult. While speaking, you can use context or explain later, but when writing something down, kanji specify the meaning apart from the pronunciation. "So," I hear you ask, "what happens if you take the kanji or context out of a sentence?" Well, my friend, you get entertaining sentences with more than one meaning! This type of sentence is called ginatayomi ぎなた読み （ よ ） in Japanese. Take a look:
パン 作った （ つく ） ことある？ / パンツ 食った （ く ） ことある？
ことある？ / パンツ ことある？ Have you ever made bread? / Have you ever eaten underpants?
倒産 （ とうさん ） か、 辛かった （ つら ） な。/ 父 （ とう ） さん、カツラ 買った （ か ） な。
か、 な。/ さん、カツラ な。 Your company went bankrupt, eh? It must have been so hard. / It seems my dad bought a wig.
Using a Japanese Word and a Loan Word with the Same Meanings in a Sentence
As you've no doubt realized by now, Japanese borrows a lot of words from other languages, most commonly English. For the multilingual among us, this opens up a world of pun possibilities by using a Japanese word and a loan word with the same meanings. This one is perhaps best described with examples, so I'll explain a little to make sure we're all on the same page.
本 （ ほん ） がブックブックと 沈む （ しず ） 。
がブックブックと 。 The book sinks with a bubbling sound.
ブクブク is an onomatopoeia for a bubbling sound, but is also very close to ブック, or "book." 本 （ ほん ）, of course, means "book" in Japanese.
穴 （ あな ） をホール。
をホール。 Dig a hole.
You could also write this as 穴 （ あな ） を 掘る （ ほ ） to make the meaning of the sentence a bit clearer, but the way I've written it above makes the pun easier to see. ana 穴 （ あな ） is a hole, but the verb "to dig," horu 掘る （ ほ ）, is pronounced very similarly to ホール, an English loan word for "hole." This is a particularly elegant example, in my opinion, assuming an awful pun could be called "elegant."
Japanese-English Puns
ボートを 買った。 I bought a boat.
These are very similar to the puns right above, but even harder. The loan words used above are still Japanese, even if they sound like English. These examples are Japanese words used with other Japanese words that have the same meaning as English words, but sound like the first set of words. Confused? So am I, and I'm writing this article. Let's take a look at some examples.
美人 （ びじん ） と 訪れる （ おとず ） 。
と 。 To visit with a beautiful woman.
We need to go right into vocab to understand these puns. Bijin 美人 （ びじん ） technically means just "beautiful person," but like in English, it's a pretty gendered adjective. Otozureru 訪れる （ おとず ） means "to visit." Where's the pun? Well, びじんと sounds pretty close to ビジット, to "visit." We've somehow managed to get "visit" in twice across two languages!
ボートを 買った （ か ） 。
。 I bought a boat.
Now, this one is a little bit nicer. Lots of Japanese loan words suffer from not having as many sounds to use as (for example) English, and this is one of them. ボート (boat) sounds a fair bit like "bought." Add in katta 買った （ か ） and you've got a cheeky repetition of "bought," and maybe a boat too if you were being serious when you said it.
ああ、ますます 蓄積 （ ちくせき ） するデータ！
するデータ！ Oh, I'm amassing more and more data!
amass= 蓄積 （ ちくせき ） する
ああ = oh
ますます = more and more
はい、 言えた （ い ） ッス、 脱文 （ だつぶん ） 無く （ な ） ！
ッス、 ！ Ok, I've said everything…without hiatus.
hiatus = 脱文 （ だつぶん ）
はい、いえたっす=はいえたっす = hiatus
Mojiri (もじり): Switching a Word with a Similar-Sounding One
This is a common-enough method of joking in English, too. One example comes from the inaugural UK Pun Championships in 2014: "My computer's got a Miley Virus. It's stopped twerking." These aren't homophones (words that sound exactly the same), but they sound similar enough and there's enough context that we know what the word is supposed to be.
ケンタッキー・フライドチキン / 洗濯機 （ せんたっき ） ・フライドチキン
・フライドチキン Kentucky Fried Chicken / Washing Machine Fried Chicken
Just ew.
医 （ い ） は 仁術 （ じんじゅつ ） なり。 / 医 （ い ） は 忍術 （ にんじゅつ ） なり。
は なり。 / は なり。 Medicine is a benevolent act. / Medicine is like ninjutsu.
Almost quite genuine - I've seen my surgeon dad tie knots with one hand before and it's pretty spooky how stealthy he can be with it. One could be a benevolent ninja through medicine, and all it takes is switching a じ with a に.
六十 （ ろくじゅう ） |
" is a call to fitness to improve one's love life.[34] "Slow Jamz" features Twista and Jamie Foxx and serves as a tribute to classic smooth soul artists and slow jam songs.[5] The song also appeared on Twista's album Kamikaze.[5] On the song "School Spirit", West relates the experience of dropping out of school and contains references to well-known fraternities, sororities, singer Norah Jones, and record label Roc-A-Fella Records. "Two Words" features commentary on social issues and features Mos Def, Freeway, and the Harlem Boys Choir.[42]
"Through the Wire" features a high-pitched vocal sample of Chaka Khan and relates West's real life experience with being in a car accident.[11] The song provides a mostly comedic account of his difficult recovery, and features West rapping with his jaw still wired shut from the accident.[11][33] The chorus and instrumentals sample a pitched up version of Chaka Khan's 1985 single "Through the Fire".[5] "Family Business" is a soulful tribute to the godbrother of Tarrey Torae, one of the many collaborators in the album.[43] The song "Last Call" is about West's transition from being a producer to a rapper, and the album ends with a nearly nine-minute autobiographical monologue that follows the song "Last Call", however, is not a separate track.[44]
Title and packaging [ edit ]
The album's title is in part a reference to West's decision to drop out of college to pursue his dream of becoming a musician.[45] This action greatly displeased his mother, who was a professor at the university from which he withdrew. She later said, "It was drummed into my head that college is the ticket to a good life... but some career goals don't require college. For Kanye to make an album called College Dropout it was more about having the guts to embrace who you are, rather than following the path society has carved out for you."[46]
The artwork for the album was developed by Eric Duvauchelle, who was then part of Roc-A-Fella's in-house brand design team. West had already taken pictures dressed as the Dropout Bear - which would reappear in his later work - and Duvauchelle picked the image of him sitting on a set of bleachers, as he was attracted to the loneliness of what was supposed to be "the most popular representation of a school". The image is framed inside gold ornaments, which Duvauchelle found in a book of illustrations from the 16th-century and West wanted to use to "bring a sense of elegance and style to what was typically a gangster-led image of rap artists". The inside cover follows a college yearbook, with photos of the featured artists of the albums from their youth.[47]
Release and promotion [ edit ]
The College Dropout was originally scheduled for release in August 2003, but West's perfectionist habits producing the album led to it being postponed three times. It was first delayed to October 2003, then to January 2004, before finally being released to stores on February 10, 2004.[48][49]
In its first week of release, the album sold 441,000 copies and debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 chart, behind Norah Jones' Feels Like Home.[50] It remained on the second spot behind Feels Like Home for two more weeks, with 196,000 units sold in the second week and 132,000 in the third week.[51][52] In April, it was certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), indicating one million copies moved, and June 30 it was certified double Platinum.[53] By June 2014, The College Dropout had become West's best-selling album in the US, with domestic sales of 3,358,000 copies.[54][55] It has also sold over 4 million copies worldwide.[56] In 2004, The College Dropout was ranked as the twelfth most popular album of the year on the Billboard 200.[57]
Four of the singles released in promotion of the album became top-20 chart hits: "Through the Wire", "Slow Jamz", "All Falls Down", and "Jesus Walks".[58] "The New Workout Plan" was the fifth and last single.[59] "Spaceship" was planned to be the sixth single, but Def Jam decided to move on from The College Dropout's promotional campaign to begin marketing West's next album, Late Registration.[60] At one point, "Two Words" was also intended to be released as a single, and a video for the song was filmed, and later uploaded by West online in 2009.[41]
Critical reception [ edit ]
The College Dropout was met with widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 87, based on 25 reviews.[61]
The record was hailed by Kelefa Sanneh from The New York Times as "2004's first great hip-hop album".[27] Reviewing it for The A.V. Club, Nathan Rabin observed in the music "substance, social commentary, righteous anger, ornery humanism, dark humor, and even Christianity", calling it "one of those wonderful crossover albums that appeal to a huge audience without sacrificing a shred of integrity".[70] Mojo said its exceptional hip hop production was miraculous during a time when hip hop's practice of sampling was becoming "increasingly litigious",[65] and URB deemed it "both visceral and emotive, sprinkling the dancefloors with tears and sweat".[71] Dave Heaton from PopMatters found it "musically engaging" and "a genuine extension of Kanye's personality and experiences",[34] while Hua Hsu of The Village Voice felt that his sped-up samples "carry a humble, human air", allowing listeners to "hear tiny traces of actual people inside".[72] Fellow Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote that "not only does [West] create a unique role model, that role model is dangerous—his arguments against education are as market-targeted as other rappers' arguments for thug life".[69] In the opinion of Stylus Magazine's Josh Love, West "subverts cliches from both sides of the hip-hop divide" while "trying to reflect the entire spectrum of hip-hop and black experience, looking for solace and salvation in the traditional safehouses of church and family".[24] Entertainment Weekly's Michael Endelman elaborated on West's avoidance of the then-dominant "gangsta" persona of hip hop:
West delivers the goods with a disarming mix of confessional honesty and sarcastic humor, earnest idealism and big-pimping materialism. In a scene still dominated by authenticity battles and gangsta posturing, he's a middle-class, politically conscious, post-thug, bourgeois rapper – and that's nothing to be ashamed of.[63]
Some reviewers were more qualified in their praise. Rolling Stone's Jon Caramanica felt that "West isn't quite MC enough to hold down the entire disc",[66] while Slant Magazine's Sal Cinquemani observed "too many guest artists, too many interludes, and just too many songs period" on what he considered a "chest-beatingly self-congratulatory" yet humorous, deeply sincere, and affecting record.[25] It was regarded by Pitchfork critic Rob Mitchum as a "flawed, overlong, hypocritical, egotistical, and altogether terrific album".[3] Rolling Stone was more receptive in a retrospective review, calling the album "a demonstration that hip-hop—real, banging, commercial hip-hop—could be a vehicle for nuanced self-examination and musical subtlety."[73]
Accolades [ edit ]
The College Dropout was voted as the best album of the year by Rolling Stone and in The Village Voice's Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics.[74][75] Spin ranked it number one on its list of 40 Best Albums of the Year.[76] Comedian Chris Rock has attested to listening to The College Dropout while writing his material.[77] In 2005, Pitchfork named it No. 50 in their best albums of 2000–2004.[78] In 2006, the album was named by Time as one of the 100 best albums of all time.[79] In its retrospective 2007 issue, XXL awarded it a perfect "XXL" rating, which had previously been given to only sixteen other albums.[80] In its July 4, 2008 issue, Entertainment Weekly listed College Dropout as the fourth best album of the past 25 years.[81] The magazine later listed it as the best album of the decade.[82]
Newsweek placed The College Dropout among its Best Albums of the Decade list at number three.[83] Rhapsody named it the seventh best album of the decade and the fourth best hip hop album of the decade.[84][85] Rolling Stone ranked it number 10 on its list of the 100 Best Albums of the Decade and stated, "Kanye expanded the musical and emotional language of hip-hop... he challenged all the rules, dancing across boundaries others were too afraid to even acknowledge".[86] Consequence of Sound named it as the 16th best album of the decade.[87] Phoenix New Times named it the second best rap album of the decade.[88] Fact listed it as the 20th best album of the 2000s.[89] In 2012 Complex named the album one of the classic albums of the last decade,[90] and the 20th best hip hop debut album ever.[91] The same year Rolling Stone ranked The College Dropout number 298 on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,[92] and 19th on their list of debut records.[93] The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.[94]
Awards [ edit ]
Track listing [ edit ]
Information is adapted from the album's liner notes. [33]
All tracks produced by Kanye West, except "Last Call" (co-produced by Evidence; additional production by Porse) and "Breathe in Breathe Out" (co-produced by Brian "All Day" Miller).
2005 Japanese special edition [ edit ]
Bonus track No. Title Writer(s) Length 22. "Heavy Hitters" (featuring GLC) West
Harris 3:01 Total length: 80:08
Bonus DVD: The College Dropout Video Anthology No. Title Director(s) Length 1. "Through the Wire" West
Coodie & Chike 4:54 2. "Slow Jamz" (performed by Twista featuring Kanye West and Jamie Foxx) Fat Cats
West 3:34 3. "All Falls Down" (featuring Syleena Johnson) Chris Milk
West 4:05 4. "Two Words" (featuring Mos Def, Freeway and The Harlem Boys Choir) West
Coodie & Chike 4:43 5. "Jesus Walks" (Church version) Michael Haussman 4:04 6. "Jesus Walks" (Chris Milk version) Milk 4:06 7. "Jesus Walks" (Street version) West
Coodie & Chike 4:18 8. "Jesus Walks" (Making of the video) 66:56 9. "The New Workout Plan" (Extended version featuring Fonzworth Bentley) Little X
West 8:06 Total length: 104:46
Sample credits [ edit ]
Personnel [ edit ]
Credits adapted from liner notes.[33][101]
Charts [ edit ]
Certifications [ edit ]
Region Certification Certified units/Sales Canada (CRIA)[111] Platinum 80,000 New Zealand (RIANZ)[112] Gold 7,500 United Kingdom (BPI)[113] 2× Platinum 600,000 United States (RIAA)[114] 3× Platinum 3,358,000[115] *sales figures based on certification alone
^shipments figures based on certification alone
References [ edit ]Authorities in the U.S. city Denver, Colorado, arrested a U.S. man Thursday with connections to a woman who went missing in Costa Rica in 2010.
Police arrested William Ulmer at Denver International Airport as he was on his way to celebrate his honeymoon in Hawaii with his new bride, according to Fox 31 TV News. A U.S. Attorney in North Carolina charged Ulmer with five counts related to passport fraud after prosecutors alleged that he used his brother’s passport to fly to Costa Rica in March 2009 and back to the United States on Dec. 23, 2010.
Ulmer returned to the United States 18 days after his then-girlfriend, Barbara Struncova, a citizen of the Czech Republic, disappeared from the expat beach town of Tamarindo on Dec. 5, 2010.
Xinia Zamora, spokeswoman for the Judicial Investigation Police, said that missing persons case remains open.
According to Fox 31, federal prosecutors said Costa Rican investigators found blood evidence and discovered money had been withdrawn from her account the day after she went missing. Authorities have yet to identify the person who made the withdrawal.
The Tico Times previously reported that the 31-year-old Struncova went missing on Dec. 5, 2010, after returning home late from a party the night before. Struncova returned from the party at 1 a.m. on Dec. 5 to the home where she lived with Ulmer and four others.
According to sources interviewed by this newspaper, Ulmer told friends that Struncova left that same night to travel to Limón with friends. People interviewed for this story said they were unaware of any planned trip to the Caribbean.
Diana Zimmerman, one of Struncova’s friends, has blogged about her and has alleged that Ulmer, reportedly the last person to see her alive, was involved in Struncova’s disappearance, Fox 31 TV News reported.
Ulmer is expected to be sent to North Carolina soon for arraignment on passport fraud charges.Image: myLoupe/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The thought of not drinking during the parade had occurred to me.
After all, I was in New York, not my hometown of New Orleans, where drinking on the streets is legal and the to-go-cup is practically a birthright. Then again, I was participating in the city's annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade and every other scantily clad mermaid and merman seemed to be downing shots and clutching paper bag-covered beverages.
What hadn't occurred to me was the severity of the New York City Police Department's strict security measures and the virtually impenetrable parade route, which made for a pretty dire bathroom situation. Four hours later, my bladder was so full I looked more like a beached manatee than a svelte mermaid. When the parade finally disbanded, it was all I could do not to break out in a fevered dash for the boardwalk bathrooms.
"It's not a sprint, it's a marathon," is the common—and wise—adage offered to those grappling with their first Mardi Gras season and the requisite boozing that accompanies the festivities. But no matter how much one heeds that advice, Carnival is a multi-week affair, and by the time Fat Tuesday rolls around, most people have traded in good sense and moderation for excess and revelry.
Though it's no Coney Island lockdown, finding a bathroom during the Mardi Gras parades can still be tricky. Urinating in public is a jailable offense and I wouldn't wish the porta-potties lining the routes in the French Quarter on my worst enemy. If you're a New Orleans local, hopefully you've made some friends along the way with nearby homes and open-house bathroom policies, but if not, I wondered, was there some other way to combat alcohol's diuretic effects?
The short answer, it turns out, is no. Everyone knows that drinking anything in excessive amounts will cause a person to pee more, but adding booze to the equation tends to exacerbate that urge tenfold. This happens because, when you start drinking, the brain temporarily stops producing vasopressin, an antidiuretic hormone (ADH) that helps the kidneys manage the amount of water in your body.
"It's basically twofold," says Blaine S. Kristo, an urologist at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. "One, which is obvious, is that you're consuming liquids, so what goes in must come out. But with alcohol, you'll produce more urine than the liquid you've consumed."
There's not a lot you can do to affect or increase ADH levels, which help to prevent your body from losing water while keeping your blood pressure up and maintaining electrolytes. Taking ibuprofen before you head out to the festivities—an urban peeing-while-partying myth that stems from its potential urine retention side effects—won't do anything to help. And contrary to popular belief, "breaking the seal" has no effect on how much or frequently a person has to urinate, Kristo says.
"It's not that you've emptied your bladder," he says. "It's that by that point—let's say you're an hour or an hour and a half into drinking—suddenly your ADH levels have gone down, so your kidneys are producing a ton of urine."
So if you're going to hold it in, how long is too long?
"It's very relative to each person," Kristo says. "It depends on how much urine you're producing and how thick your bladder is—and everyone is going to be different. A good rule of thumb is obviously to listen to your body. If your bladder is that full and you're experiencing pain, the body is giving you pain for a reason, saying, 'you need to do something about this.' Certainly if you're in that situation, stop drinking—don't exacerbate the problem by continuing to take in fluids while your bladder is at its capacity."
What's more, consistently fighting your body's instinct to urinate can cause serious damage in the long run. "If you can get somewhere within 15 minutes or half an hour, your bladder won't explode," Kristo says. "But chronically holding your urine for long periods of time can actually stretch your bladder."
That stretching can eventually cause the bladder to scar, Kristo says, which can reduce its function as a pump, and in the long run can also cause it to shrink. It's a pretty gruesome rollercoaster.
"You see it commonly in people who have to hold their urine for long periods of time, like truck drivers," Kristo says. "Down the road the bladder becomes much smaller and they have to go more frequently because it's so stretched out…and it can't stretch anymore."
Holding it in also increases the chance of developing a urinary tract infection, as part of the bladder's function is to empty and flush out any unwanted bacteria that may try to creep in. "Bacteria are always trying to make it into the bladder. If you allow your bladder to sit full for long enough, it's basically like a petri dish," Kristo says.
So, barring the decision to—gasp—forgo drinking, what else can you do to combat a pee-spree while attending an all-day or night event?
While you're raging, stay away from drinks that might act as a bladder irritant or have additional diuretic properties—such as caffeinated teas or soft drinks (here's looking at you, Red Bull and vodka drinkers). And while it's not a failsafe solution, Kristo says choosing stronger drinks with less volume—say, sipping on tequila instead of a PBR—can help alleviate some of the pressure, since less liquid is produced.
"The alcohol is the same whether it's a glass of wine or a pint of beer or a shot—the only thing they can control is what they're consuming," Kristo says. "Just drinking cocktails or shots, you're consuming a lot less liquid than if you're consuming pints of beer."Bono has more than two-percent stake in Facebook, worth $1.5 billion BI Illustration
UPDATE: The original stories were wrong, and based on some fundamental misunderstandings of how venture capital works. Glenn Peoples at Billboard.biz explains that Bono will be lucky if he made $10 million from the sale. That's million with an "m."
EARLIER:
Today's Facebook IPO will make U2's Bono the richest rocker on the planet, according to multiple reports.
Back in 2009, the musician smartly bought 2.3 percent of shares for $90 million in the social networking company through his private equity firm, Elevation Partners.
With Facebook now going public, Bono could personally take a majority of the possible $1.5 billion in returns.
The current richest musician, Paul McCartney, has a totaled fortune of approximately $1.05 billion.
Prior to the IPO, Bono had a net worth of around $900 million thanks to a successful 30 year career. His latest "360" tour was the highest grossing tour of 2011, raking in over $300 million.
Despite the big pay day, Bono is showing no sign of slowing down. U2 has been in the recording studio and are reportedly working with hip, upcoming names in the music industry like Danger Mouse, RedOne, David Guetta and the songwriters behind the British pop boy band, One Direction.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
After the interminable international break, Liverpool finally return to action on Saturday lunchtime with a difficult-looking assignment away to Manchester City.
Fresh from the Arsenal annihilation, Jurgen Klopp's charges face another big game against one of their top-six rivals, but Pep Guardiola's side are unlikely to be as accommodating as Arsene Wenger's were last month.
The game also sees Klopp and Guardiola renew a respectful rivalry which started back in the Bundesliga in 2013.
No other manager has beaten Guardiola as many times as Klopp; he emerged victorious against the Catalan four times as Borussia Dortmund coach, and secured a 1-0 win over him on New Year's Eve at Anfield last year.
Liverpool also played out a breathless 1-1 draw at the Etihad back in March - a game which led Guardiola to claim as "one of the most special days" of his life!
The Reds enter the game in form, and Klopp's unbeaten team will head to the Etihad with August Player of the Month Sadio Mane in their ranks, looking to add to his three goals so far.
However, serial goal-hound Sergio Aguero needs just one more to become the all-time leading non-European scorer in Premier League history - and he's scored in all five of his games against Liverpool at the Etihad.
One more will see him edge past Dwight Yorke on to 124.
This weekend's standout Premier League fixture has been built up since the end of the international break earlier this week on these pages and beyond - and here's how it's been discussed from elsewhere.
Writing for the Daily Mail, Glen Williams writes: "Jurgen Klopp will take his Liverpool side down the M62 to the Etihad Stadium to face Manchester City this weekend.
"Liverpool and City will be content with their starts to the season, both winning two and drawing one of their opening three games, but this weekend will be another big test.
"The Reds have played some electrifying football up top, scoring eight goals already in this campaign, while City have managed to grind out some results."
The Telegraph's Chris Bascombe focuses on Klopp decision to omit Philippe Coutinho from his travelling squad at the Etihad.
"Jurgen Klopp has compared Philippe Coutinho’s summer transfer request to a lovers’ tiff after confirming the Brazilian will not be in the squad for Saturday’s tip to Manchester City," he writes.
"Klopp will reintegrate the 25-year-old into his side over time, but says he must first prove his fitness.
"But there will be no bad blood between the pair moving forward after they held talks upon Coutinho’s return from Brazil. Klopp says the failed bids of Barcelona will be swiftly forgotten."
Miguel Delaney of The Independent focuses on the long-running and healthy rivalry between the two managers in the dugout.
He writes: "Whereas Klopp’s approach is more easily translatable between teams and can be more quickly taken to a highly competitive level through the effects of his sheer personality, Guardiola’s requires a much deeper understanding - but that kind of understanding can take a team to a much higher peak when it is perfect.
"It is something symbolically reflected on the pitch - those three-four-second attacks against 15-second build-ups - and raises an interesting philosophical football question: who is right? Or, perhaps more suitably, whose do you prefer?
"Would you take Klopp getting a team playing rousingly cacophonous football soon or Guardiola getting a team playing to a glorious crescendo in time?
"The answer probably depends on a side’s circumstances but also requires proper appreciation of how they work and what they try to do."
Sports Mole's Barney Corkhill highlights Klopp's impressive record against his top-six rivals.
He says: "Reds fans around the world would have been bemoaning the same old Liverpool when defending set pieces proved to their Achilles heel during the topsy-turvy 3-3 with Watford on the opening day of the season, but their most recent outing would have reminded them that there are positives to their identity under Klopp.
"Liverpool have been notorious for thriving against their direct rivals since the German took charge, and they enhanced that reputation further still with a resounding 4-0 over Arsenal before the international break - a scoreline which flattered the Gunners more than it did Liverpool.
"The Reds are now unbeaten in their last 16 league matches against the teams who finished in the top seven last season, winning nine of those and drawing seven in a run which stretches back to January 2016."
The Guardian's Jamie Jackson writes: "This should be a feast of attacking play as Pep Guardiola’s possession-based tactics take on Jurgen Klopp’s aggressive forward line.
"Manchester City and Liverpool each harbour title hopes so this should offer a gauge of how close they may go. Last season’s corresponding match ended 1-1 and two years ago City suffered a 4-1 thrashing."
"Expect either manager to be jubilant with a mere 1-0 win
Footbal365 have also given their take on Saturday's big match, picking it as their 'Game to Watch'.
"Had you offered Jurgen Klopp three points from this tough Premier League double header either side of the international break, he might well have taken it," they write.
"Had you offered him four points, he would have snapped your hand off before asking why you suddenly had the power to give out wishes like some sort of football genie.
"With that in mind, you might expect Klopp to play safe against Manchester City’s fluid and dangerous attack. Yet therein lies the beauty of Saturday lunchtime’s game.
"Neither side could defend properly last season, undermined by their own defensive incompetence, and yet both managers spent the summer adding to their attacking armoury and failing to buy central midfielders or central defenders.
"So rather than a cagey contest, we’re far more likely to have a version of football-basketball between the top six’s two most top-heavy teams, where both sides take it in turns to invite the other on before counter-attacking at speed. If that doesn’t sound sexy to you, we can’t be friends."This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Why is President Correa not addressing the U.N. General Assembly like so many world leaders are?
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] President Correa doesn’t have a lot of expectations about what is said in the meetings of the General Assembly. He attended one General Assembly and addressed the hall, but there were no world leaders in the room at the time to hear what he had to say. It seems like only the first speeches are given importance, and the rest… So, there’s concern about the methodology of how things are organized here. And since he had the experience that he had here in the U.N., he was, quite frankly, just frustrated, and he’s not really interested in participating in an event where nobody really seems to be interested in hearing each other.
AMY GOODMAN: Foreign Minister, what about Edward Snowden and the—what you have learned from the leaks of this NSA contractor, the exposé after exposé of surveillance inside the United States and outside?
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] Edward Snowden opened the eyes of the world to an international crime: the NSA’s spying on the whole world. And that’s a violation of international law. And furthermore, it doesn’t just violate international law, it violates international trust, not just of one’s friends and enemies, as you say. And that, in and of itself, is grave. In the world, there are not countries that are friends and countries that are enemies. We all deserve respect and shouldn’t be categorized as such. But in the rhetoric of the U.S. government, in that even the U.S. government’s so-called friends were respected—they wanted to know absolutely everything that was going on. So, the—what Snowden denounced, this is very useful and allows us to correct what’s been going on. And the U.N. should take take that up. Unfortunately, sometimes the power relations are such that these issues are not addressed. For example, it’s not on the agenda of the U.N. General Assembly. And that’s unfortunate.
AMY GOODMAN: President Rousseff of Brazil has canceled her state visit to Washington because of the information that has come out, based on the leaks, that she was being spied on, that the [Brazilian] energy company Petrobras was being spied on. Do you think you, here at the mission, at the embassy in Washington, that Ecuador is being spied on?
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] Well, I couldn’t tell you. But when I was visiting Julian Assange a few weeks ago in—
AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange in London.
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] Julian Assange.
AMY GOODMAN: In your embassy.
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] In London, in the Ecuadorean embassy, they found a few days before my visit a hidden microphone in the office of our ambassador. And we still haven’t been able to ascertain who planted it. But we can imagine who might have put it there. The information that Snowden provided indicates that everybody is spied on. And so, one should probably assume that we’ve been spied on, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Venezuela has offered Edward Snowden political asylum. Is Ecuador weighing this, like you have Julian Assange?
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] Well, let’s see. We are a very sovereign country with very firm positions, and Julian Assange is protected by asylum that Ecuador has provided him with. When the case of Edward Snowden arose, Ecuador was the first country that offered to analyze his asylum request, while many countries immediately rejected the request. Ecuador considered that it was best not to be alone in this fight, because it’s a very difficult, sticky matter, given the political landscape of the world, and we can’t ignore that fact. That’s why we spoke with the ALBA countries, and we addressed the issue of Snowden, and we told them that we thought that it was important that other countries also offer a possible asylum to him. And because of that, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia offered asylum to him directly. And we thought that was good, because Ecuador can’t carry the weight of all these issues as if we were a very powerful country. That’s not the case. That’s why we’re pleased that these other countries have offered asylum and made that decision, so that they don’t gang up on us.
AMY GOODMAN: And Julian Assange’s fate? He remains in the Ecuadorean mission in London, in the embassy in London. It’s been more than a year.
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] Yes. And, unfortunately, the United Kingdom still has not provided him with safe conduct. I have spoken a number of times with William Hague, and we’ve also provided him with the legal arguments which don’t just allow the United Kingdom, but actually compel and force the United Kingdom to provide safe conduct, but they continue to refuse to provide it. So, the decision is in the hands of the U.K.
AMY GOODMAN: President Correa was just visiting with Fidel Castro in Cuba, spent several hours with him. What is Fidel Castro’s influence on Latin America and his significance? And also, if you could end, finally, by talking about the legacy of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez?
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] Well, Fidel Castro is an international figure. He is a man who managed to liberate his country from the Batista dictatorship and laid the foundation for a society that is beneficial for all of the Cubans. Unfortunately, the reaction of the United States government was to attack Cuba and to impose a criminal embargo. But the Cuban government, despite these problems, has managed to defend the life and well-being and health of its people. And not only, it has also offered international cooperation. Despite its economic limitations, it’s offered international cooperation with other countries. They offered it to Ecuador, in fact. I say it with a certain amount of concern. We would have loved that Europe and the United States offer the thousands of scholarships that Cuba has offered to Ecuadorean students to study medicine. There are 2,000 Ecuadorean students who are studying medicine in Cuba. Other countries only want to train our military personnel. That’s quite a contrast. So, that’s just a way to begin to respond to your question: What is the influence of Fidel Castro? I think it’s a moral influence. I participated in the conversations that President Correa has had with Fidel Castro. In fact, I was present at the last conversation. And Fidel Castro never offered advice to us. We talk about the state of the world and how to achieve better development, how to improve healthcare and protection of our natural resources. That’s what we talk about.
AMY GOODMAN: How is Fidel Castro’s health?
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] He is a bit challenged in terms of mobility. But in terms of lucidity and reasoning and his concern for world issues, it’s quite extraordinary what one learns from him. He has an incredible memory and a capacity to analyze current events and to foresee what’s going to happen. He is already 30 or 50 years ahead of the curve. But his mobility is a bit problematic.
AMY GOODMAN: And the legacy of Chávez?
RICARDO PATIÑO: [translated] The legacy of Hugo Chávez is extraordinary. After the Cuban revolution, it’s in 1998, when Hugo Chávez took office. And he was totally alone in Latin America. There were a lot of right-wing and neoliberal governments, and he would take a really strong stance in international events. And it was really hard, because he was isolated. Imagine how difficult it is to be the lone voice and have everybody against you. But, little by little, other progressive governments came to power, and now there’s many progressive governments—Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua—many other progressive governments in the Caribbean, as well, that have changed the face of Latin America. But the strength and power of the discourse and the proposals of Hugo Chávez to create the integration of Latin America is legendary. Also, he contributed to strengthening a Latin American and Caribbean consciousness about the need for greater unity. And so, that’s why we always speak of Hugo Chávez with a lot of respect and endearment, because he stood with Ecuador when times were tough, like he did with other countries. He supported our process and contributed to the dream of Simón Bolívar and contributed to making that dream a reality.
AMY GOODMAN: Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño. I interviewed him on Monday at the permanent mission of Ecuador to the United Nations. President Correa has decided not to address the U.N. General Assembly this year. You can visit our website at democracynow.org to watch more of our interview, as the foreign minister talks about the crisis in Syria, Ecuador’s controversial new media law and Patiño’s time working with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we head north to talk about the Keystone XL, not here in the United States, but in Canada. Stay with us.One of the discouraging features of economic debate today — maybe it was always thus, but it seems especially intense now — is how much of it rests on “facts” that aren’t, but which become articles of faith. I’ve been surprised, for example, to encounter assertions that Fannie and Freddie held a third of subprime mortgages, which I knew wasn’t remotely true. Where did that come from? Mike Konczal points us to James Kwak, explaining that the source for that number is a consultant to the mortgage industry who made up his own definition of subprime — one that bears little resemblance to the standard definition, and which happens to produce a vastly inflated number for Fannie/Freddie.
Anyway, one alleged fact I keep hearing is that recessions were short and shallow under the gold standard. I don’t know where that’s coming from, but it just ain’t so. The data aren’t as good for the pre-1933 era as they are now, but for what it’s worth they suggest that there were a number of nasty, prolonged slumps under the gold standard. In particular, the Panic of 1893 was associated with a double-dip recession that left industrial production depressed and unemployment high for more than 5 years. Here’s the estimated unemployment rate from Historical Statistics Millennial Edition:
Historical Statistics of the United States
That’s a pretty ugly, prolonged slump. Gold is no panacea.41 Shares 0
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As the Saudi-led war continues in Yemen killing more civilians and destructing infrastructure and heritage sites, Connecticut Democrat Senator Chris Murphy, who is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned the solid US support of America for Saudi Arabia, which stands behind the killing of at least 3,000 civilians in Yemen last year alone.
“It's hard for me to figure out what the US national security interests are inside the civil war in Yemen,” sources quoted Senator Murphy as saying, who expressed fears there might be another 9/11 if such unquestioned support to the Saudis continues.
“It |
has to wonder if further expansion of the police state to include entrapment schemes designed to “prevent” mass shootings will be met with much outrage from Americans if they find out a person accused of planning a shooting was caught with these tactics. The population is likely to react how they have reacted to the use of entrapment schemes on Muslims by simply accepting that these individuals targeted were probably dangerous people and it may look sketchy but something had to be done. Police have to be vigilant and they can take no chances.
Both terrorist attacks and mass shootings are media events that induce sharp emotional reactions in Americans. Especially when children are killed, they leave people wishing something, anything, had been done to catch those responsible before they carried out the act of violence.
The problem is targeting “potential” criminals does not ensure horrific acts no longer occur. Without addressing the root causes that drive people to commit acts of violence, whether they be mass shootings or acts considered terrorism. And, if a police state remedy drives the response to violence, there is likely to be more resources and trust infused in this remedy and less resources and trust put into tightening up background checks, imposing stricter gun regulations and increasing the availability of mental health services. It may make it less likely that work is done to address the poverty or economic despair, which makes it impossible for a family to afford mental heath care or makes it difficult for parents to raise their children because they have to work two or three jobs.
Finally, there is a post, “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” that went viral immediately after the Newtown shooting. A mother, Liza Long, wrote a gut-wrenching piece about her son, Michael, who suffers from severe mental or emotional problems, has violent fits and has taken medication that apparently has not worked. His mother loves him, but she is afraid of what he might do to her and he wants to get him help but is not sure where her son should go. She was told by a social worker the only way he could get help is if he were charged with a crime and became part of the American correctional system. (Of course, that could have even worse implications especially if he was placed in conditions of solitary confinement.)
Would these be the kind of people the NYPD targeted? How young might they be? Teenagers? Ten year-olds? Younger?
Would there ever be a situation where agents tried to get a family help instead of making it worse by using an informant to convince a person to carry out a crime? Would arrests, as with terrorism, became a metric to show authorities were winning some “war” or “battle”? Would we be putting mentally ill people in small cells that numb their senses, make them feel even more isolated from the world and drive them even more crazy than they already are?
What is being considered by NYPD intelligence officials just seems morally reprehensible (not to mention it is exceedingly dystopian). Moreover, if the police are going to use tactics of pre-crime to catch “terrorists” and “potential deranged gunmen,” what category of “criminals” will we try to catch next before they commit a crime?Hillary wants the alt right to take over the right, to become the Republican party.
Which means that the alt right gets all the lovely beltway gravy that the Republicans are getting today – and like the Republicans, gets no power. Like the Republicans, becomes the outer party.
The Republican party then becomes the white male party because white males are about to permanently outvoted and rendered politically irrelevant.
It is an improvement on the current plan of the Republican leadership, which is that elections from 2020 out consist of the Republicans saying “White males are hateful, evil and deserve to suffer”, and the Democrats saying “White males are really horribly hateful and evil and we are going to make them suffer even worse”. And the beltway gravy will be nice.
But remember. Demotic politics is never where the power is, it is just theater to manufacture legitimacy for rulers, never a source of power. It can, however, be a source of beltway gravy, which is not nothing.
The booby trap is that we will rationalize pursuit of the lovely beltway gravy by coming to believe, or at least pretend to believe, that demotic politics is where power comes from. The alt-right taking over the Republican party is not the booby trap. The alt right being exposed to the same incentives as the Republican party is the booby trap.The tenuous peace that broke out two weeks ago over a compromise medical-marijuana ordinance has gone up in smoke, as Santa Barbara City Council member Frank Hotchkiss has announced that he’s changing his vote and will push for an outright ban instead. What makes Hotchkiss’s change of heart so striking is that he sits on the Ordinance Committee that crafted the compromise language, which he voted for after exacting many tougher restrictions on how and where medical marijuana dispensaries could operate. Without Hotchkiss’s support, the proposed ordinance — all but approved two weeks ago — lacks the five-vote super-majority required for passage. Given that there aren’t five votes for the ban Hotchkiss is pursuing, the regulatory future of dispensaries remains uncertain. For the time being, the existing ordinance — approved two years ago — will hold sway even though seven council members have agreed it’s inadequate.
Now entering his sixth month on the council, Hotchkiss has alternately voted in favor of allowing as may as seven dispensaries within city limits — that’s two more than the compromise language would allow — as well as for an outright ban. On the Ordinance Committee, he emerged as a horse trader and deal maker, trading his vote of support for more stringent regulations. Since the vote two weeks ago, Hotchkiss said he was surprised to discover that the exactions he won did not win support from the anti-pot coalition, growing bigger and more passionate with each passing week. “Everybody I talked to thought it was a bad idea,” he explained. “Everybody — people trying to get off drugs, the school superintendent, the Boys and Girls Club, the Police Officers Association — everybody.”
Procedurally, Hotchkiss said he’ll ask his council colleagues to reconsider their vote from two weeks ago. As part of the prevailing majority, he is entitled to do so within certain time deadlines. Should he succeed, that opens the door for reconsideration of a ban. But should he fail to garner the four votes necessary for a reconsideration — and it’s likely he’ll only get the support of councilmembers Dale Francisco and Michael Self — then Hotchkiss can vote against final adoption of the ordinance. Either way, the compromise measure appears doomed.
Councilmember Bendy White, who served on the Ordinance Committee with Hotchkiss, expressed frustration that so much time — 20 hearings in the past two years — had been spent deliberating about medical marijuana, when so many other pressing issues were clamoring for council attention. White acknowledged that medical marijuana has elicited an unusual degree of passion and intensity. “We may not be able to do anything about the oil spilling in the Gulf; we may not be able to do anything to stop jihadists from hating us; but we can ban medical marijuana from retail distribution,” he said. “This is a tunnel into the anxiety and angst people feel about their children and their sense of safety.” While White did not support a ban, he did push for an even more restrictive compromise measure — three dispensaries allowed rather than five — that the council seemed to embrace.
Hotchkiss said he’s hoping to woo Mayor Helene Schneider into supporting a ban, but based on Schneider’s recent remarks, that’s not too likely. Schneider spent the Memorial Day weekend in Morro Bay and was struck by how little effect such bans actually have. “The weekly paper (the San Luis Obispo New Times) had ads all over the place for dispensaries and doctors who prescribe medical marijuana, and this in a place that theoretically does not allow dispensaries,” she said. Schneider has argued in the past that dispensaries address a pressing need for people dealing with medical crises.
Hotchkiss and Councilmember Francisco both said they knew nothing about rumored plans to place a ban on next November’s ballot. Francisco said he had heard talk about initiating a recall against councilmembers who supported medical marijuana dispensaries, but cautioned that such recalls are politically difficult, and that the intensity of community outrage was not yet sufficient to propel such an effort. In the meantime, the L.A. Times and USC released the results of a new statewide survey showing that 49 percent of respondents favored the statewide initiative on the November ballot that would legalize marijuana for recreational use and give city and county governments responsibility for regulating and taxing its sale. Forty-one percent opposed. Support was strongest among younger voters, males, and Democrats. But a majority of married women opposed the measure, a demographic that strategists for both sides agree will be crucial for political success come the fall.Lucy Flores uses her life experiences to push for policies like better sex education.
Courtesy of Lucy Flores Democrat for Lt. Governor/Facebook
Midterm elections are heating up, and the race for lieutenant governor in Nevada is shaping up to be one of the more interesting statewide battles of the year. It’s not just because there’s a slight chance that the winner of the race could become governor if the current one (Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval, set for an easy re-election) manages to successfully challenge Sen. Harry Reid for his seat in 2016, but also because the Democratic nominee, a state representative in Nevada, bucks a stunning array of expectations that people have for politicians: Lucy Flores grew up poor, dropped out of high school, has done time in prison, and has a regrettable ankle tattoo. Oh yeah, and she’s open about having had an abortion.
Benjy Sarlin of MSNBC profiled Flores over the weekend and concludes that none of this is holding her back from becoming a rising star in the Democratic party. On the contrary, Flores campaigns heavily on her biography—after a rough start, she got a GED and eventually a scholarship to USC that led to a career in law and now politics—and she connects it all to the policies she fights for. Example: She talks about her own horror story of having to flee an abusive boyfriend when pushing for a state law allowing domestic violence victims to break their leases. An even more remarkable example: Flores admitted that she had an abortion at 16 during a debate over a bill to improve sex education in schools. After pointing out all six of her sisters (Flores is one of 13 children) got pregnant as teens, Flores went on to talk about her own life:
“Since I’m sharing so much this session, I might as well keep going,” she said. “I always said that I was the only one who didn’t have kids in their teenage years. That’s because at 16, I got an abortion.”
Her eyes welled up and her voice caught as she described how she’d convinced her father to pay the $200 cost for the procedure. She didn’t want to end up like her sisters, Flores told him.
“I don’t regret it,” she said. “I don’t regret it because I am here making a difference, at least in my mind, for many other young ladies and letting them know that there are options and they can do things to not be in the situation I was in, but to prevent.”
Admitting that you personally have had an abortion is almost unheard of in politics. Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier talked about her abortion on the floor of the House in 2011, but that termination was done out of medical necessity, which is traditionally assumed to be a more sympathetic reason to abort. Flores admitted to the most controversial kind of abortion, the kind done simply because a woman does not want to have a baby at that time. Unsurprisingly, Flores was bombarded with abuse and shaming from anti-choicers.
Despite this, Democratic leaders and local political observers, Sarlin writes, don’t think Republicans will be able to attack Flores over the abortion or any other biographical details she has shared, at least not without it backfiring “if a less-than-sensitive critic decides to take up the issue.”
Even many Republicans agree that going after Flores for her past is a bad idea. “I don’t think it would be wise for anyone to get into the mud about (Flores’s) former life,” GOP strategist Robert Uithoven told Sarlin. Polling data supports this idea, showing that 59 percent of people like Flores more after hearing her life story and only 17 percent like her less. Turns out that it’s one thing to describe a generic woman as “selfish” if she has an abortion, but putting an abortion in the context of a woman’s life story makes her much harder to attack—and her choice much easier to understand.Primary Water
New Water for Humanity Most of the world's wells rely on ground water, water produced by rain or other precipitation which seeps into the soil to form aquifers and water tables below the surface. As the major water supply, ground water has many problems. Ground water not only depends on the vagaries of weather, it can be contaminated by pollutants or salt water in coastal regions intruding when fresh is pumped out. In deserts, low rainfall and rapid evaporation prevent the formation of significant ground water, precluding agriculture or development. Remarkably, there is an answer to all of these problems. This marvelous source of relatively untapped water is called Primary Water. Primary Water is new water formed by chemical reactions deep in the earth. This water, driven by massive pressure, works its way toward the surface through faults and fissures in normally impervious crystalline rock. While you may have to drill deeper for Primary Water, it is generally not subject to pollution or variations in rainfall, and usually sustains production for decades. Also, Primary Water sources are available in areas of the world where ground water is exhausted or does not exist in significant quantity. Fresh Water Facts: Although two-thirds of the earth is covered with water, only 3% of it is fresh.
99% of all of the earth's fresh water is frozen in ice caps and glaciers.
The remaining 1% of the earth's fresh water is all that is readily available for personal agricultural or industrial use.
More than 300 million people live in countries with too little fresh water. By 2025, scientists predict that number will increase to 3 billion.
The human need for clean water is escalating because of rapid population and industrial growth. In addition, rising standards of living are increasing our total need for water.
In 1990, 26 countries were experiencing water scarcity with that number expected to grow to 65 by 2025. Currently, 10 countries in the Middle East and North Africa overdraw their national renewable water supply and make up the difference from ground water stocks. See also: www.dowsing.comIn the literary arena, there are several myths that comic books pull from to feed their storylines. Often times, they come from Greek and Roman mythology, others come from the supernatural sources such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. One of the legends that is sometimes touched upon slightly is King Arthur and the Round Table, made famous in the Anglo-Saxon period. Literary consumers have seen bits and pieces of it all over movies, television, books, and comics. Readers would see little tidbits of Arthurian themed ideas such as Excalibur as being a sword that endured due to its magical properties for centuries. There are also many references to Camelot and even the characters such as Lancelot and King Arthur himself. In “The Wild Hunt” storyline, Mike Mignola brings several Arthurian aspects into the Hellboy universe.
The Hellboy series has always used any sort of creature and demon from a variety of cultural stories, but Mignola finally brings in the Arthurian legends to the forefront of the Hellboy mythos. We see many characters such as Merlin being discussed, the armies of Arthur, and especially Excalibur being used to fuel these chapters of the Hellboy series. Mignola creates a new linage to the Pendragon family by bringing in the characters of Morgan Le Fay.
The storyline kicks off when Hellboy is invited to hunt down zombie giants with a few of the noble families of Britain. While he is talking to a few of them, they spring a trap and attempt to kill him. During the attack, the traitors speak cryptically about not letting a monster on the throne. Mignola starts to leave the reader clues as to the familial revelation that Hellboy would soon be receiving. All throughout this time, Hellboy is having visions about a woman named Alice. A character the Mignola had created in the Hellboy world earlier as a child whom he had saved. She grew up, and after Hellboy survives the attempt on his life and killing a few giants along the way, they are reunited. The reader quickly learns that she has also been having visions and soon it becomes evident that there is some sort of connection between Alice and Hellboy.
It turns out that Queen Mab (also of Arthurian lore) has been talking to Alice to bring Hellboy to her. Soon what is presented to the reader is oncoming storm of an army of violent demons, elves, witches, and other various supernatural entities that want to destroy the world of man for no other reason than to spill blood.
As Alice and Hellboy are given a guide to hurry them along on their journey, the guide keeps calling Hellboy an Englishman. Even though Hellboy corrects him, the guide continues to call him that even as the guide betrays him and he is once again led into a trap. As Mignola keeps dropping hints to the reader, it seems as though the entire supernatural community knows about Hellboy’s current predicament and his linage. All except Alice and Hellboy himself.
As the plot continues on, the reader is introduced to Morgan Le Fay. Historically, Morgan Le Fay is the half-sister of King Arthur. She is also the mother of Arthur’s bastard son Mordred. In Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (the last real Arthur tale), Mordred and Arthur killed each other. It’s one of the most revealing and violent tales of the Arthur legend, as both Mordred and Arthur commanded large armies that completely decimated each other until only four men remained. Mignola capitalizes on this trend of violence and alludes to vastness of Arthur’s fallen army.
It is revealed that Hellboy’s mother, Sarah Hughes, is the descendant of Mordred. This makes Hellboy heir to the Excalibur and therefore the throne of England. This explains the first surprise attack that Hellboy suffered at the hands of the hunters. It also explains the guide that kept referring to Hellboy as Englishman.
Morgan Le Fey is introduced into the plot for multiple reasons, key of which in this particular volume as exposition. She reveals that the Queen of Blood Nimue (a witch) has been resurrected and is orchestrating a war with men just to spill blood. She also tells Hellboy that he has to pull Excalibur out of the stone and raise Arthur’s undead army to fight and defeat the Queen. What the writer has done is recreate the tides of war that the Arthur legend often used; two armies preparing to fight in a confrontation between good and evil.
The Queen of Blood herself is a very simple character. Her hunger is for destruction and death. When she is resurrected, she arises from a pool of blood. The visual is a solid red naked woman dripping. Mignola uses this particular visual a lot in his work. It was even used in the first Hellboy movie.
Supernatural themes and conventions were not strangers in the Arthurian lore. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Green Knight is beheaded and continued to speak with his head detached from his body. The paranormal aspect of Hellboy and the supernatural elements of the Arthur legend fit together almost perfectly. The use of the Arthur legends works in favor of Mignola’s world and add depth to it. Mignola melds the two worlds together by having Hellboy pull Excalibur from the stone and essentially becomes the king of England. It’s a rather interesting turn in events. The writer brings the world of Arthur back to life while creating a new level to Hellboy’s own already complicated world.Soon after another party, Ganemos Jerez, unsuccessfully attempted to get rid of grid girls at the Spanish track, the Catalan party has now presented a proposal to the Montmelo town government.
The initiative seeks to end a tradition seen as a stereotype - that is, the use of women as sexual objects - at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
Unlike the Jerez case, ICV is not seeking a full ban on grid girls, but the introduction of certain codes, especially related to dress, and for the normalisation of gender with the addition of grid boys.
This would apply to all events held at the Barcelona track, including future F1 Spanish Grands Prix.
For this initiative to go ahead, ICV will need the support from at least one councillor from another party from the township, something that does not appear difficult.
However, it remains to be seen whether the Montmelo government would have the jurisdiction to be able to force MotoGP promoter Dorna into a change of approach.
"The role the grid girls play today at the Circuit de Catalunya is not fitting of the 21st century, of a society that aims to be modern and egalitarian," ICV's Jordi Manils told radio station Cadena Ser Catalunya.
"What it does is objectify and vex women with a role in which they are a simple object and an ornament of the situation."In its annual report to shareholders, Bharti Infratel Ltd’s chairman as well as its chief executive officer makes a case that the ongoing consolidation in the industry is a positive development for the company. “The consolidation leading to a few but strong participants is good for the tower industry in the medium to long term... (as these) financially stronger operators (would have) the ability and inclination for enhanced data networks," they say.
Investors, for some strange reason, are buying the argument. Infratel’s shares have risen over 40% from their lows in end-February to around Rs410, paying no mind to the fact that chief insider, parent company, Bharti Airtel Ltd, sold a large block of shares at Rs325 apiece only around three months ago.
Besides, it’s less than six months since the company lost close to $2 billion in value because of concerns that the consolidation among telcos will result in a drop in tenancies and lower revenues. Now the argument is pretty much being turned on its head.
Investors look hopelessly lost. Perhaps it’s true that the impact of consolidation among telcos may not be as bad an outcome for tower companies as was earlier expected. But to now conclude that the development is a net positive—Infratel shares are up 15% since Vodafone India Ltd and Idea Cellular Ltd said they were in merger talks—is absurd.
When companies merge, they no longer need as many towers and related infrastructure as they did when they ran separate operations. It’s true Vodafone and Idea said the overlap on tower tenancies amounts to only around 20% of the total, lower than some analysts’ estimates; but it’s also true that this fact was known before Airtel sold its stake in the company at a much lower valuation
Infratel’s management argues in the annual report that the reduction in revenue on account of the said overlaps will be more than offset by exit charges telcos have to pay when they prematurely terminate a contract, as well as the incremental revenue on account of faster rollouts by operators. “Jio is now expected to front-load its network expansion plans, to cater to a possible surge in demand after it launches its affordable feature phone," says an analyst with a domestic institutional brokerage.
Even so, it will be naive to expect this to offset the pressure on revenues owing to consolidation in the medium term. In any case, growth has already been slowing.
And as analysts at Kotak Institutional Equities wrote in a recent note to clients, it’s foolhardy to think that tower companies will prosper at a time when telcos are struggling. “We are amused with the Street’s increasing excitement on Bharti Infratel; tower companies derive their revenues (and ultimately their value) from the wireless industry that is under tremendous pressure. Can telcos continue to (refrain from) rationalizing their single-largest cost line item?" they ask.
One of the arguments used to support Infratel’s surge in valuations is that Airtel will sell down its stake in the company, besides which it will combine with Indus Towers and become an independent tower company, rather than one being controlled by a telco, who is also a customer. Some analysts point out that independent tower companies trade at higher valuations in overseas markets.
Be that as it may, it’s naive to gloss over the fact that consolidation will result in a fall in revenues, besides which, telcos will push for price cuts to stop/prevent losses. It’s high time investors did a reality check.This is one in a series of stories looking back at the Kalamazoo bike crash that killed five cyclists and injured four, and the year since the June 7, 2016 tragedy. Go here to read more stories in the series.
KALAMAZOO, MI -- Earlier in the day, Paul Runnels installed new bike components in anticipation of a cycling tour across Colorado with his brother. He didn't make it to the airport.
Runnels, 66, is one of nine "Chain Gang" cyclists who were struck by a speeding pickup truck on June 7, 2016 just north of Kalamazoo. Five died and four were injured, but a year after the violent crash prevented him from heading west, Runnels has recovered enough to make the trip this spring.
Runnels has participated in weekly Tuesday rides with the informal social cycling group for five years. He decided to join in the ride, from the Kalamazoo Community Services campus northwest to Plainwell and back, to log some miles before taking off for the Centennial State the following week.
Unlike other survivors, Runnels remembers most of the trip before the crash. The scars continue to mark his body.
But the actual impact, the memory of bodies being thrown as the blue Chevy pickup tore through his friends, remains lost.
"I remember taking off for the ride. It was a dreary day, and we were making pretty good time," Runnels said. "I saw a sign for Markin Glen Park. By all accounts the crash happened right after that."
He sustained a subdural hematoma, but a helmet prevented Runnels from experiencing severe brain damage. Plenty of other injuries were caused by the crash, but he speculates that the shock of what happened was enough to make him forget.
"Maybe it's a protective mechanism," Runnels said. "I'm kind of glad I don't remember. I'd probably be feeling a lot more fragile on a bicycle."
He remembers waking up to people outside his hospital room talking about the crash. Once someone explained what happened to him, he began to understand the extent of his injuries.
Runnels retired from a long career in animal health care in 2015. The former associate director at Zoetis describes the various wounds that permeated his body with clinical precision.
"I had a fractured pelvis and separation of the pubic symphysis, the entire right side of my pelvis was unstable," Runnels said. "I also had a penetrating perineal wound, (which) in a guy is the area between the scrotum and anus. Something punched through there and did some damage."
He also had fractured ribs, a fractured shoulder blade, a compression of his first vertebrae, a collapsed lung and lacerations across his body. Luckily for him, Runnels was not thrown into poison ivy bushes near a ditch off North Westnedge Avenue like the other survivors.
Five of the bicyclists were pronounced dead at the scene: Tony Nelson, 73; Larry Paulik, 74; Debra Bradley, 53; Melissa Fevig Hughes, 42; and Suzanne Sippel, 56.
Runnels rode close to the front of the pack, along with Sheila Jeske, Jennifer Johnson and Paul Gobble, who all sustained severe injuries but lived. In the hospital, Runnel was able to speak with Jeske and Johnson, who were in worse condition.
Runnels underwent eight surgeries in total. While in Bronson Methodist Hospital, physiological stress caused him to develop a stomach ulcer.
"I was pretty angry," Runnels said. "I figured I'd never ride a bike again, and this incident has probably aged me 10 years. I was having those kinds of thoughts. I wouldn't say they lasted more than a day or two."
While he has come to terms with what happened, Runnels said he harbors some resentment and a bit of sympathy for Charles Pickett Jr., the 51-year-old Battle Creek man who is charged with five counts of operating while intoxicated causing death, five counts of second-degree murder and four counts of operating while intoxicated causing serious injury.
Pickett's trial is scheduled to start Sept. 18. He could face life in prison if convicted of murder.
"We weren't doing anything wrong," Runnels said. "You think about what you could have done differently and there's nothing really. We were out enjoying a ride and just really got mowed down. It is a tragedy that it happened."
According to a police report, officers found marijuana, a small amount of methamphetamine, rum, vodka, beer and wine in Pickett's pickup truck after the crash. His girlfriend told police he downed handfuls of pain pills and muscle relaxers before taking the wheel.
Charles Pickett Jr. was 'completely out of it' after crash, police testify They testified in Pickett's preliminary examination Monday morning in Kalamazoo County District Court.
"It was completely unnecessary, he took the pills he took, believing he was invincible and he could deal with it," Runnels said. "You can't overcome the effect of any intoxicating agent. I don't feel a sense of hate toward him, but he certainly needs to come to justice."
Runnels has tried to attend each court appearance for Pickett and is prepared to testify. He said he hopes the second-degree murder charges stick.
A long journey of physical therapy awaited him after returning from the hospital. Initially, Runnels couldn't support any weight on his right leg.
Other members of the Chain Gang, which has grown since the crash, sometimes passed by Runnels' house while taking trips. He would often wave from his wheelchair as they rode by.
In January he was well enough to play tennis and remain fairly active during another planned vacation in Hawaii. By April, Runnels was riding short 3-mile loops near his home in Richland.
"I didn't have any real fear of riding on the roads," he said. "I thought I would be a little more uncomfortable. If there's traffic coming in both directions my adrenaline spikes more than it used to."
In March, he visited the site of the crash for the first time.
If any good can come of the incident, he said it's an increase in awareness among drivers. Motorists need to share the road, Runnels said, but bicyclists should obey traffic laws as well.
"Any car out there outweighs me 10-to-1, so I won't get in a battle about who has the right of way," Runnels said. "Recently, I was stopped at a stop light and a bicyclist came ripping right through. There was no traffic coming the other way, but that doesn't help the cause of cyclists in general."Foroohar is an assistant managing editor at TIME and the magazine’s economics columnist. She’s the author of Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.
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During a campaign stop in Kentucky on May 15, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said her husband, Bill, would be in charge of “economic revitalization” were she to win the election.
This is a terrible idea and, possibly, the most tone-deaf suggestion Clinton has made during the current campaign.
Bill Clinton’s economic legacy is not a net positive to Hillary politically. Sure, economic growth was relatively strong in the 1990s. But what kind of growth was it? I’d argue it was growth of the short-term, saccharine variety, fueled by a brief tech productivity boom (now ended) and a stock-market bubble which corrected much of the asset wealth created during that period. This period was also the point at which wages began flattening not just for poor Americans but for nearly everybody. The high-tide of the late-1990s did lift a lot of boats, but plenty of wreckage was left in its wake as soon as it was sucked back to sea.
That’s in part because many on President Clinton’s team bought into notions of trickle-down economics Republicans before them had. The history of deregulation and economic policy shifts under his tenure contributed in many ways to some of the problems that we face in the financial markets today. (For more on these, read TIME’s current cover story on saving capitalism, adapted from my book, Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.)
Many now acknowledge that derivatives deregulation under Clinton was, in retrospect, unwise. But a less well understood legacy of his economic policy is the pressure for companies to make short- rather than long-term decisions.
A little bit of history: Robert Rubin, who served as both Treasury Secretary and head of the National Economic Council, and Larry Summers, the deputy who succeeded him at Treasury, favored allowing greater corporate compensation in stock as well as tax breaks for the rich. There were a few, like Joseph Stiglitz, the former head of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, who were concerned about income inequality. That’s one reason back in the early ’90s, in response to the growing debate about the divide between CEO pay and what the majority of American workers took home, legislation was introduced that would limit the tax-deductible portion of CEO compensation to $1 million. To get around that cap, Rubin and others wanted an exemption for “performance-based” pay, which on Wall Street and in corporate America was typically awarded in options. The loophole camp prevailed.
Stiglitz now views this as one of the most problematic legacies of Clinton’s tenure. The tax code, which was relaxed to favor corporate debt over equity, only perverted incentives further. “The whole stock-options boom caused so many incentives for bad behavior of all kinds, and for making each [corporation] look better than it was. It’s all directly responsible for what I’d term ‘creative accounting,’ which has had such a devastating effect on our economy,” he says.
The Clintons surely recognize how much America’s economic ailments have changed since the 1990s. But it is important for Hillary to spell out exactly which parts of Bill’s legacy were valuable—and which she’d discard. As any number of surveys, including some by the Clintons’ own pollsters, show, a lot of voters don’t really want to go back to the 1990s. They’d rather see more fundamental change. Candidate Clinton needs to grapple with this fact, or risk losing the economic debate to a populist opponent.
Contact us at editors@time.com.HBO’s Game of Thrones received two MPSE award nominations this year for Season 5, Episode 8: “Hardhome.” Supervising sound editor Tim Kimmel was recognized for both the dialogue/ADR editing and the sound effects and Foley editing on the episode. Kimmel took time out from working on Season 6 to chat with us about sound details on the series.
Game of Thrones has been through five seasons now. From a sound standpoint, how has the show evolved?
I came on at Season 3 and there has been a lot of evolving since then—new locations to explore, the dragons getting larger, giants, and an army of White Walkers. There are a lot of opportunities for things to grow.
From the frozen North and Castle Black to the arid desert of Meereen, there are a wide variety of environments on this show. Do you have a library of sounds established for each location?
We do. Once we have something we like, and the producers like, we don’t go changing it. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. I think we’ve done a good job of keeping these locations and these areas as different sounding as we can. From the deserts of Meereen to the harbor town of King’s Landing, and Castle Black up North, and even beyond the wall, these are locations that we have established and now have a good library of sounds to make them work.
For the MPSE awards, you’re nominated for both dialogue/ADR editing, and sound effects and Foley editing. That’s a lot of editing per show. Can you walk us through your typical workflow for an episode?
We usually start working on the show early on, with unlocked picture. I meet with the producers and we spot the show. We start figuring out what it is they’re looking for, especially with new locations and new sound design elements.
The episode we were nominated for, “Hardhome,” had probably over 300 ADR lines, and tons of loop group to be shot. Plus, there was a lot of production audio that we were trying to save. So on the dialogue and ADR side, there was a lot of work between the dialogue editor, the ADR editor, and our loop group crew. Everyone was working together to try and create a clean soundtrack without going with all ADR, but we still had to do a lot because there were snow machines, wind machines, extras yelling, and a lot of noise on set. A lot of scenes shot in the North had to be redone on the ADR stage.
From the sound effects side, we start creating pretty early. With our already established locations, we can put those together quickly and then start focusing on the new locations. “Hardhome” was a new location. It was cold, windy, and had lots of people around, so we had to create that environment. It was also by the water, so we had to add that element. Of course, once the White Walkers come in, we really had to feel it going from cold to everything freezing over. The water is getting rough, and there is chaos with all of the people. I work with the sound effects editor and the sound designer and we start figuring out how we want to attack the scenes. We keep chipping away at it bit by bit.
Can you tell us about the design of the White Walkers?
The White Walkers came in at the very end of Season 2 with just a war cry. We had to do more vocalizations and the sound of them shattering into pieces of ice when killed. Sound designer Paula Fairfield, who really designed those unique sounds, and I get together and start talking about what it is we are looking for in the sounds. She starts putting together some really cool elements and then she sends them to me to listen to. We work together to find that perfect balance for what works on screen, from their vocals to their movements and actions. We do a lot with ice crackling but |
. The information obtained from them and what is obtained independently by BPD detectives will determine the course of BPD's investigation.
There is no pre-determined timeline for how long this inquiry might take and it is unknown at this time when it might be completed.
"We're playing this close to the vest and I don't want to make a comment at this time. Our deepest sympathies to the family," said Brown County Prosecutor Ted Adams.NBC
Call it what you will -- we like to think of it as a case of No Effs Given-Itis -- but Amy Poehler has been on a roll with the last season of "Parks and Recreation." The ever-lovable sitcom about the trials and tribulations of workers in small town government is midway through its farewell season, and now that the pressure is off, Poehler has been free to make strong statements, including in last night's episode, when she literally spoke the line, "you're ridiculous, and men's rights is nothing."
The episode, "Pie-Mary," finds Leslie in hot water after she declines to participate in a pie-baking contest against other candidates' wives. When she tries to satisfy her feminist leanings by letting Ben compete (making a "dessert calzone" and wearing a custom apron to match, of course), men's rights activists attack her.
"Behind every successful woman is a man that she has oppressed!" one of the activists shouts after Ben explains why he's participating in the contest.
The real treat, however, is Leslie's takedown of the group during a press conference designed for her to apologize for the pie debacle.
She also threw in a little monologue that women in the public eye would do well to memorize. It closely mirrors Poehler's real-life "Ask Her More" campaign, a hashtag she kicked off on her Smart Girls group Twitter page pleading with the media to ask actresses about more than just their outfits or their bodies. Leslie's speech is just too good for us not to include the whole thing here.
Third, I'm now going to give you permanent answers to all the silly questions that you're going to end up asking me and every other woman in this election in the next few months. Why did I change my hairstyle? I don't know, I just thought it would look better or my kids got gum in it. Are you trying to have it all? That question makes no sense, it's a stupid question, stop asking it, don't ask it. Do you miss your kids while you're at work? Of course I do! Everybody does. And then, you know, sometimes I don't.
And, of course, there's nothing like a big finish. Can someone try and work up a design so we can get this tattooed on our forearms to reference every time we're feeling doubt in our lives?
If you want to bake a pie, that's great, if you want to have a career, that's great too. Do both or neither, doesn't matter, just don't judge what someone else has decided to do. We're all just trying to find the right path for us as individuals on this earth.
Bye, haters. "Parks and Rec" and Amy Poehler have no time for you.ARMONK, N.Y. - 08 Mar 2017: IBM (NYSE: IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today announced it has created the world’s smallest magnet using a single atom – and stored one bit of data on it. Currently, hard disk drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit. The ability to read and write one bit on one atom creates new possibilities for developing significantly smaller and denser storage devices, that could someday, for example, enable storing the entire iTunes library of 35 million songs on a device the size of a credit card.
Today’s breakthrough builds on 35 years of nanotechnology history at IBM, including the invention of the Nobel prize-winning scanning tunneling microscope. Earlier this week, IBM announced it will be building the world’s first commercial quantum computers for business and science. Future scanning tunneling microscope studies will investigate the potential of performing quantum information processing using individual magnetic atoms.
“Magnetic bits lie at the heart of hard-disk drives, tape and next-generation magnetic memory,” said Christopher Lutz, lead nanoscience researcher at IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, California. “We conducted this research to understand what happens when you shrink technology down to the most fundamental extreme -- the atomic scale.”
Dr. Christopher Lutz of IBM Research - Almaden in San Jose, Calif. with IBM Research's Nobel-prize winning microscope he used to store data on a single atom magnet. (Photo credit: IBM Research - Almaden)
By starting at the smallest unit of common matter, the atom, scientists demonstrated the reading and writing of a bit of information to the atom by using electrical current. They showed that two magnetic atoms could be written and read independently even when they were separated by just one nanometer – a distance that is only a millionth the width of a pin head. This tight spacing could eventually yield magnetic storage that is 1,000 times denser than today’s hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. Future applications of nanostructures built with control over the position of every atom could allow people and businesses to store 1,000 times more information in the same space, someday making data centers, computers and personal devices radically smaller and more powerful.
The study was published today in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature.
The IBM scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), an IBM invention that won the 1986 Nobel Prize for Physics, to build and measure isolated single-atom bits using the holmium atoms. The custom microscope operates in extreme vacuum conditions to eliminate interference by air molecules and other contamination. The microscope also uses liquid helium for cooling that allows the atoms to retain their magnetic orientations long enough to be written and read reliably.
A view from IBM Research's Nobel prize-winning microscope of a single atom of Holmium, an element used as a magnet to store one bit of data. Photo credit: IBM Research - Almaden (San Jose, Calif.)
For more information about IBM Research, visit www.ibm.com/research.
About IBM Research
For more than seven decades, IBM Research has defined the future of information technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research have produced six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of Technology, five U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing Awards, 19 inductees in the National Academy of Sciences and 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame. For more information about IBM Research, visit www.ibm.com/research.Posted by Sir Cucumber at on Wednesday, April 15, 2009
If a quarter-century’s worth of video gaming has taught me anything, it’s that people take shortcuts. Time is finite, and work infinite; it’s understandable. We all do it.
But most of us don’t do it like this:
no, no that’s alright…
That’s right, eyeballs. Suikoden Tactics features over 50 playable characters, each with their own semblance of a personality, but I guess there wasn’t any left over for non “plot” related characters…
You rich, white, heterosexual males are all the same! With your power, and your privilege, and your eyeballs!
I mean, okay, overlook some frame skipping here, unbalanced enemies there, it’s expected. Unintelligible interface, unskippable animations, unavoidable loopholes, whatever...
Couldn’t have seen that one coming…Oh, wait. I guess he couldn’t…
But is it that hard to slap a couple eyeballs in an NPC’s skull? It’s not like you aren’t going to recycle their faces a hundred times anyway!
Doesn’t it just break your heart? The young idealistic hero really cared about that guy, in the blue, who was a merchant…what was his name again?
Oh and by the way, that plot? It's about a kid looking for a bunch of cannons that turn people into fishmen. No, seriously.CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - A candidate with plans to merge Alberta’s splintered right-leaning factions has won the leadership of the province’s Progressive Conservatives (PC), the party said on Saturday, heralding a political shift in Canada’s oil heartland.
Conservative Member of Parliament Jason Kenney speaks following Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada, February 1, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Wattie
The merger plan by former federal cabinet minister Jason Kenney has a high chance of going through as the other right-leaning faction, the Wildrose party, has agreed to it.
But Kenney may not get to shepherd the merged conservative party, as Brian Jean, the head of the currently bigger Wildrose, has said he would vie for the new leadership. Terms of the merger are also unclear and subject to talks.
Nonetheless, a tie-up would bolster the pro-business right against the incumbent left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), which has drawn the ire of conservatives by imposing a carbon tax on the emissions-heavy energy sector and by what critics see as heavy government spending despite budget deficits.
“Today we are sending a message to the NDP... You will be facing a strong, united opposition.” Kenney said after his victory in the province’s largest city of Calgary.
“To our friends and fellow travelers in the Wildrose party... let us reunite the family.”
The next election has to take place on or before May 31, 2019. A victory by the merged conservative party would restore the status quo for the mostly right-voting province and could bring drastic changes, as both the PC and Wildrose have opposed most of the NDP’s policies.
The NDP rose to power in 2015 after nearly half a century of PC rule in Alberta, aided by a divided right and voter anger over low oil prices, entitled politicians and government budget woes.
Now in its second year, the NDP government takes credit for federal approvals of pipeline projects that would boost the province’s economy by exporting its landlocked crude. But low global oil prices have largely persisted, taking a toll on Alberta’s commodity-dependent economy. The provincial government projects deficits until 2024.
Representing an Alberta federal electoral district, Kenney served in multiple portfolios in former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet. He survived the 2015 federal election in which his party lost power, but resigned his parliamentary seat shortly after to seek the leadership of the aligned but separate PC party in Alberta.
NDP leader and Alberta Premier Rachel Notley tweeted her congratulations minutes after Kenney’s victory.A recent Buckeye decommitment, OH OL Kyle Kalis has committed to Michigan's class of 2012, per a tweet (and accompanying article) from Scout's Allen Trieu. As you will see, this is a Big Deal:
GURU RATINGS
Scout Rivals ESPN 24/7 Sports 5*, #6 OT,
#21 Ovr 4*, 6.0,
#4 OT, #18 Ovr 4*, 80, #20 OT,
#140 Ovr 4*, 96, #8 OT,
#2 Ohio, #52 Ovr
There's a bit of a range in the sites' opinions of this kid. Scout and Rivals (which, to be fair, are the most-established recruiting sites) have him in the top 25 prospects in the country, and he's a 5* to Scout and the guy directly ahead of him in Rivals's overall rankings has five stars. Taking one step back from that is 24/7 Sports, which still likes him, but not nearly as much, calling him a good-not-great 4-star, and outside of their national top 50. ESPN is the most down on him, barely including him in their ESPNU150, and ranking 19(!) offensive tackles ahead of him (as a comparison, the other sites combined have 15 OTs ahead of him, DJ Humphries, Andrus Peat, and John Theus the only ones ahead on all three sites).
In terms of size, there's near-unanimity between the services. All of them say he's 6-5, and weights have a HUGE range from 300-305 pounds, with two votes cast for 302. Thus, 6-5 and 302 pounds seems to be just about perfect.
Let's kick off the evaluations on a negative note, as ESPN is by far the least impressed:
Kalis is a tough run blocker capable of controlling defenders with his upper body playing strength. Has the size with enough athleticism for the offensive tackle position at the major level of competition. If edge speed becomes a factor this prospect could end up inside at the offensive guard spot.
And there we see the first reason that he's probably not an elite prospect to them: he might play guard, a way less important/glamorous position on the football field.
This guy is a tough customer; displays a nasty finishing attitude while dominating his present level of competition. His arm length and short set ability should serve him well in pass protection; can bend and play flat footed, displaying the ability to play stout vs. the bull rush. Although his playing strength is a positive we see the need to polish his initial location and arm extension in pass pro.
Oddly, they say he doesn't have the length to play tackle, then praise the length of his arms. In a single-game report, they also praised his pass-blocking. Scout, on the other hand, admits that's one of his shortcomings, listing "Arm Length" as his only area for improvement (I guess they think he's got access to a medieval stretching rack?). His positive points are considered "Feet," "Nasty Streak," and "Power and Strength," echoing the ESPN evaluation of those aspects. Allen Trieu on his abilities:
Kalis is a tough, strong lineman who dominates consistently. He plays the game hard and is an excellent run blocker and drive blocker. He plays with good leverage and finishes his blocks strong. He shows the ability to pull and lead, and is coordinated and athletic in the open field. He has good feet all around, which is also evident in pass pro. If there's a knock, it's that he may not be long enough for left tackle. - Trieu
That arm length is starting to sound like a liability, but with his excellent feet, guard is sounding more and more like a possibility with everything I see. Duane Long discusses his game on Bucknuts:
One of the best offensive line prospects it has been my pleasure to evaluate in my time scouting players in Ohio. One thing that I believe has helped the Ohio State offensive line become better is bringing in players who like to play football. When I am talking about offensive linemen liking to play football I mean they like beating people up.
This speaks more to his nasty streak than anything, but calling him among the best all-time is a big deal; Long has been evaluating Ohio prospects for a few years, so that "all-time" puts Kalis among Aundrey Walker, Andrew Norwell, the late Matt James, and Marcus Hall. Long got more specific later in the process:
One of the finest tackle prospects I have seen in my time covering players in Ohio. I have yet to see Orlando Pace's equal but other than him I see Kalis in the same argument as Korey Stringer, Alex Boone, Marcus Hall and Andrew Norwell. He is very mobile, doing a great job of getting downfield and blocking on the second level. At the point of attack he is a dominating run blocker.
A report from Long before Kalis's commitment:
He is as technically sound as any lineman I have seen in the last couple of years. Once he gets his hands on a defender it is over. He is going to punish him until the whistle blows.
His father is former NFL lineman Todd Kalis, who (oddly enough) played for former Ohio State coach John Cooper at Arizona State. Sons of NFL players typically are a bit more polished than others, as Long implies. Duane's one question mark? If he has the ability to play LT, a recurring theme in other evaluations. Long couldn't contain his excitement after watching Kalis's physical play in the State Championship game:
Kalis should not be allowed to play against high school players. What he does to opponents borders on assault. He beats up the opposition... I don't like to project offensive linemen to play as freshman. Kalis is one that I think can. Love the nasty. Love the motor.
He'll play in the Army All-American Bowl ($, info in header).
Long story short on Kalis: an elite run blocker, mostly unknown as a pass blocker (from the sound of things, St. Eds doesn't pass a lot, and Kyle has played on the right side to date). He has the mobility the pull-block, and with shorter arms, might be a better fit as a guard, but a great one.
OFFERS
I like this part. Here are a few of Kalis's top offers: Alabama, Auburn, Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Wisconsin. Those schools are either recruiting powerhouses, reigning National Champions, or Offensive Line Of Doom machines, so that offer sheet is very impressive.
Some of his other offers include Arizona State, Cincinnati, Illinois, Iowa, Miami (YTM), Michigan State, Nebraska, Pitt, and West Virginia. Penn State showed interest, but did not yet offer Kyle (though there's a good chance it's due to his long-standing commitment, rather than a negative evaluation of his talent).
STATS
Kalis is an offensive lineman, and therefore doesn't have stats. However, Lakewood St. Ed's is one of the top programs in Ohio, and Kyle played a key role in leading them to a State Championship last year. They're MaxPreps's #9 team this season.*
FAKE 40 TIME
None of the recruiting sites have listed a 40 time for Kyle, so I get to give out my default five FAKEs out of five.
VIDEO
Junior highlights from ScoutingOhio, which has taken to posting obnoxiously-short videos:
(Insert joke here about The Killers as the soundtrack to him burying a bunch of dudes). Sophomore(!) highlights. There are a couple Rivals Amp videos available, as well.
PREDICTION BASED ON FLIMSY EVIDENCE
This kid is a 5-star (or close to it) for a reason. He has the potential to play as a true freshman, and with Michigan's questionable depth at offensive line, he could see a backup role in his first year on campus. There are a couple RT/G prospects in the class ahead of him though, so hopefully he can take a year to learn.
After that, however, three interior linemen depart, and Taylor Lewan could also be out the door to the NFL Draft if he has an excellent redshirt junior season. Playing time should be easy to come by, even if it's only a key backup role.
As an upperclassman (or redshirt sophomore), I wouldn't be surprised if Kalis took an iron grip on a guard spot, and became a dominating Big Ten offensive lineman. With his recruiting rankings, it's hard to project anything short of potential multi-year all-conference honors, and possibly even an early entry to the NFL Draft.
UPSHOT FOR THE REST OF THE CLASS
The need at offensive line is all-but completely taken care of. Michigan will stay after several blue chips -- 5-star IL OL Jordan Diamond would be a very nice final piece of the puzzle, as a versatile lineman that can play pretty much any position -- but otherwise that big need has been filled.
Class needs remain re at defensive tackle and wideout, with smaller needs at QB and RB - positions the coaching staff could take a pass on if they can't land anyone elite.
---------------------------------
* [Ed-M: Michigan was looking at three more of Kalis's teammates for 2012. Two - tight end Sam Grant and OL Tyler Orlosky have committed elsewhere (BC and WVa. respectively). DT Greg Kuhar is a 3-star DT deciding between Northwestern and West Virginia, and seems to be behind other M offers for his position).Arisa closed her eyes and wished desperately, "I want to be a High School Girl..."
Here we have a small sketch that goes with a Character background for my OC Arisa. She is a cute shapeshifter who dreams of a normal life! I'm going to be posting these CB sketches often and linking to our Tumblr page where you can read the full intro for our on going project: Sector 27
Don't mind the black smudge on the small Polaroid picture. It was supposed to a small image of our cute Dragon from Dora La Session but our writer strictly forbid me from adding it...she's mean. She forced me...
Anywho~~~ here is the link to our blog post where you can find all the posted content for Sector 27: www.studiouyu.tumblr.comThe anonymous trading platform Whaleclub has added Dash as one of its base currencies, providing yet another high-profile partnership for the asset.
Privacy-focussed Dash, which saw huge sustained price gains this year before its fortunes tailed off, is now set to become a basis for trading a wealth of traditional commodities.
Dash’s vice president of business development Daniel Diaz commented on the deal:
“Not only will this allow current Dash investors to trade traditional markets like, stocks, metals, forex and bonds, it may also attract new investors that want to trade traditional markets. It also may find regulatory hurdles and minimum trading requirements on those markets too big of a challenge to overcome.”
Hong Kong-based Whaleclub has likewise seen huge success since its debut in 2016. Over $1.5 bln worth of trades have occurred on its books, with around $10 mln changing hands every 24 hours.
Chief Product Officer at Whaleclub Ian Glindro said he foresees “strong demand” for Dash as the altcoin’s success story continues its broad upward trend.
“We were impressed with Dash’s payment network growth, innovation and DAO structure. We expect strong demand as the Dash ecosystem continues to grow globally and investors look for a capable and ambitious Bitcoin alternative,” he stated.
Over the past, month Dash has traded at over $100 and as low as $54 per coin. It is currently hovering at around $70, while at the beginning of the year cost just $11.You think rents are high in San Francisco? Try Williston, North Dakota. No wait, don't—there's nowhere to live. According to a new study by Apartment Guide, the most expensive rents in the country can be found in this relatively tiny North Dakota town.
The study looks at the price for "entry level apartments," defined as one-bedroom, one-bath units around 700 square feet. Here's what that kind of space will set you back per month in the five priciest cities:
Williston, North Dakota: $2,394 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California: $1,881 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, California: $1,776 Dickinson, North Dakota: $1,773 Key West, Florida: $1,640
The area widely considered to be the most expensive place to rent in the country, the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island region, didn't even crack the top five, at $1,504.
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Two North Dakota cities are in the top five thanks to a burgeoning oil industry that's building instant cities in the Great Plains. The explosive increase in oil production has transformed Williston and other cities into boom towns with dramatic population spikes. In Williston, a city on the edge of the Bakken Oil Fields, the population has doubled in the last five years, from 14,700 in the 2010 census to over 30,000 people today. The growth is akin to the way the Gold Rush quickly urbanized parts of California in mid-1800s.
In fact, so many people are moving to the area to work for oil companies that so-called "man camps" made from temporary structures were built over the last few years to keep up with demand. That means your $2,394/month apartment might look something like this:
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The housing shortage is so dire that people are living in their cars and the homeless population has swelled 200 percent over the last year. Since there are no official homeless shelters, churches apply for temporary permits to help house the thousands of workers who come seeking employment. A $35 million housing incentive fund was introduced in 2011 with the hope of subsidizing the cost of new, affordable housing. Unfortunately, the fund was depleted late last year.
We hear so much about the way the tech boom is shaping the Bay Area, but if you look at where the most astounding growth is happening in the country, it's not startups that are making the most dramatic changes to U.S. cities. It's oil. [Apartment Guide via KGO-TV]
Top image: Pump jack outside Williston, North Dakota by Matt Novak; Bakken oil fields in Williston, North Dakota by AP Photo/Gregory Bull, FileThe Deal
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View the Groupon Goods FAQ for additional information, including how list price is determined.HERMES
Greek Name Ἑρμης Transliteration Hermês Latin Spelling Hermes Translation Mercurius, Mercury
HERMES was the Olympian god of herds and flocks, travellers and hospitality, roads and trade, thievery and cunning, heralds and diplomacy, language and writing, athletic contests and gymnasiums, astronomy and astrology. He was the herald and personal messenger of Zeus, King of the Gods, and also the guide of the dead who led souls down into the underworld.
Hermes was depicted as either a handsome and athletic, beardless youth or as an older, bearded man, with winged boots and a herald's wand.
HERMES MYTHS
As a new-born infant Hermes snuck out of his crib, stole the cattle of the god Apollon, and crafted the first lyre from a tortoise-shell. Zeus was so amused by the young god's antics that he granted him a place as one of the twelve supreme gods of Olympos. <<More>>
Hermes transformed the tell-tale, herdsman Battos into a stone as punishment for reporting his theft of Apollon's cattle. <<More>>
He was sent by Zeus to slay the hundred-eyed giant Argos Panoptes who had been commanded by Hera to guard Zeus' paramour Io. <<More>>
He assisted the hero Perseus in his quest to slay the Gorgon Medousa, providing guidance and gifts from the gods. <<More>>
Hermes seduced the beautiful princess Khione (Chione) on the same night as his half-brother Apollon. <<More>>
He gave Odysseus a magical herb to protect the hero from the magic of the treacherous witch Kirke (Circe). <<More>>
Many other myths are detailed over the following pages.
SYMBOLS & ATTRIBUTES
Hermes' most distinctive attribute was the herald's wand (Greek kerykeion, Latin caduceus) but he was sometimes armed instead with a short sword. The god was clothed in a knee-length robe (chiton) with a short cloak (chlamys), winged boots, and a brimmed, traveller's hat. The hat was often winged. <<More>>
Another unique symbol of the god was the herma, a stone road-marker which doubled as a small wayside shrine. The most primitive hermae were simple, upright standing-stones while the more elaborate were rectangular statuettes sculpted with the head of the god, a phallus, and his herald's wand symbol. <<More>>
Below are some examples of his attributes as depicted in ancient Greek art:-
1. Herald's wand; 2. Herald's wand head; 3. Short sword; 4. Herma;
5. Winged boots; 6. Winged hat; 7. Traveller's hat (worn); 8. Traveller's hat (slung over shoulder).
SACRED ANIMALS & PLANTS
Hermes' sacred animals were the ram and the hare. In ancient art he rode on the back of a large ram. As the god of herds he was also closely associated with cattle, sheep and goats.
His sacred plants were the crocus flower and the strawberry-tree. <<More>>
Below are examples of the god's animals as depicted in ancient Greek art and photos of his sacred plants:-
1. Ram; 2. Hare; 3. Crocus; 4. Strawberry-tree.
HERMES PAGES ON THEOI.COM
This site contains a total of 13 pages describing the god, including general descriptions, mythology, and cult. The content is outlined in the Index of Hermes Pages (left column or below).
FAMILY OF HERMES
PARENTS
[1.1] ZEUS & MAIA (Hesiod Theogony 938 & Astronomy Frag 1, Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes, Homeric Hymn 17, Alcaeus Frag 308, Simonides Frag 555, Aeschylus Libation Bearers 683 & Frag 212, Apollodorus 3.112, Philostratus Elder 1.46, Ovid Fasti 5.79)
[1.2] ZEUS (innumerable references)
[2.1] DIONYSOS & APHRODITE (Orphic Hymn 57)
OFFSPRING
See Family of Hermes
Hermes was a son of Zeus and the Pleiad-nymphe Maia and a grandson of the Titans Kronos (Cronus), Rheia and Atlas and the nymphe Pleione. His half-brothers and sisters included the gods Apollon, Artemis, Athena, Ares, Persephone and Dionysos. He was the second-youngest of the twelve Olympian gods and was often depicted as a beardless youth.
Hermes was the father of the goat-legged god Pan by the nymphe Penelopeia. He also had many mortal offspring. <<More>>
Below are two graphics depicting Hermes' family tree, the first with names transliterated from the Greek and the second with the common English spellings:-
ENCYCLOPEDIA
HERMES (Hermês, Hermeias, Dor. Hermas), a son of Zeus and Maia, the daughter of Atlas, was born in a cave of Mount Cyllene in Arcadia (Hom. Od. viii. 335, xiv. 435, xxiv. 1; Hymn. in Merc. 1, &c.; Ov. Met. i. 682, xiv. 291), whence he is called Atlantiades or Cyllenius; but Philostratus (Icon. i. 26) places his birth in Olympus.
In the first hours after his birth, he escaped from his cradle, went to Pieiria, and carried off some of the oxen of Apollo. (Hom. Hymn. in Merc. 17.) In the Iliad and Odyssey this tradition is not mentioned, though Hermes is characterised as a cunning thief. (Il. v. 390, xxiv. 24.) Other accounts, again, refer the theft of the oxen to a more advanced period of the life of the god. (Apollod. iii. 10. § 2; Anton. Lib. 23.) In order not to be discovered by the traces of his footsteps, Hermes put on sandals, and drove the oxen to Pylos, where he killed two, and concealed the rest in a cave. (Comp. the different stratagems by which he escaped in Horn. Hymn. in Merc. 75, &c., and Anton. Lib. l. c.) The skins of the slaughtered animals were nailed to a rock, and part of their flesh was prepared and consumed, and the rest burnt; at the same time he offered scrifices to the twelve gods, whence he is probably called the inventor of divine worship and sacrifices. (Hom. Hymn. in Merc. 125, &c.; Diod. i. 16.) Hereupon he returned to Cyllene, where he found a tortoise at the entrance of his native cave. He took the animal's shell, drew strings across it, and thus invented the lyre and plectrum. The number of strings of his new invention is said by some to have been three and by others seven, and they were made of the guts either of oxen or of sheep. (Hom. l. c. 51; Diod. i. 16, v. 75; Orph. Argon. 381; Horat. Carm. i. 10. 6.) Apollo, by his prophetic power, had in the meantime discovered the thief, and went to Cyllene to charge him with it before his mother Maia. She showed to the god the child in its cradle; but Apollo took the boy before Zeus, and demanded back his oxen. Zeus commanded him to comply with the demand of Apollo, but Hermes denied that he had stolen the cattle. As, however, he saw that his assertions were not believed, he conducted Apollo to Pylos, and restored to him his oxen; but when Apollo heard the sounds of the lyre, he was so charmed that he allowed Hermes to keep the animals. Hermes now invented the syrinx, and after having disclosed his inventions to Apollo, the two gods concluded an intimate friendship with each other. (Hom. l.c. 514, &c.) Apollo presented his young friend with his own golden shepherd's staff, taught him the art of prophesying by means of dice, and Zeus made him his own herald, and also of the gods of the lower world. According to the Homeric hymn (533, &c.), Apollo refused to teach Hermes the art of prophecy, and referred him for it to the three sisters dwelling on Parnassus; but he conferred upon him the office of protecting flocks and pastures (568; comp. Lucian, Dial. Deor. 7; Ov. Met. ii. 683, &c.).
The principal feature in the traditions about Hermes consists in his being the herald of the gods, and in this capacity he appears even in the Homeric poems; his original character of an ancient Pelasgian, or Arcadian divinity of nature, gradually disappeared in the legends. As the herald of the gods, he is the god of skill in the use of speech and of eloquence in general, for the heralds are the public speakers in the assemblies and on other occasions. (Il. i. 333, iv. 193, vii. 279, 385, viii. 517, xi. 684; comp. Orph. Hymn. 27. 4; Aelian, H. A. x. 29; Hor. Carm. i. 10. 1.) As an adroit speaker, he was especially employed as messenger, when eloquence was required to attain the desired object. (Od. i. 38, Il. xxiv. 390; Hom. Hymn. in Cer. 335.) Hence the tongues of sacrificial animals were offered to him. (Aristoph. Pax, 1062; Athen. i. p. 16.) As heralds and messengers are usually men of prudence and circumspection.
Hermes was also the god of prudence and skill in all the relations of social intercourse. (Il. xx. 35, xxiv. 282, Od. ii. 38.) These qualities were combined with similar ones, such as cunning both in words and actions, and even fraud, perjury, and the inclination to steal; but acts of this kind were committed by Hermes always with a certain skill, dexterity, and even gracefulness. Examples occur in the Homeric hymn on Hermes (66, 260, 383; comp. Eustath. ad Hom. p. 1337; Hom. Il. v. 390, xxiv. 24; Apollod. i. 6. § 3).
Being endowed with this shrewdness and sagacity, he was regarded as the author of a variety of inventions, and, besides the lyre and syrinx, he is said to have invented the alphabet, numbers, astronomy, music, the art of fighting, gymnastics, the cultivation of the olive tree, measures, weights, and many other things. (Plut. Sympos. ix. 3; Diod. l.c. and v. 75; Hygin. Fab. 277.) The powers which he possessed himself he conferred upon those mortals and heroes who enjoyed his favour, and all who had them were under his especial protection, or are called his sons. (Od. x. 277, &c., xv. 318, &c., xix. 397; Soph. Philoct. |
basketball “expert”
Any basketball fan in America
Any basketball
The guy at Decca records who passed on the Beatles
Kahn
Grady Little in the 8th
Andy Reid in the last 5 minutes before the season started
James Dolan
The guy in the Donner party who said, “I think this weather will hold”
—Mark, Baltimore
SG: First of all, words hurt. Second of all, the East was definitely going to be atrocious, so I thought one “lottery team” might swerve the other way and improbably sneak into the playoffs. The five possibilities: Milwaukee, Philly, Boston, Toronto and Charlotte. I just backed the wrong team — the Charlotte Hornbobnetcats would have been an even more ridiculous pick, and they’re headed for a 7-seed. Technically, my logic was sound! My exact words from the Bill & Jalen Bucks preview (13:15 mark) …
“I think the Bucks are going to be a 7-seed with a chance to be a 6-seed if the Knicks totally self-combust.”
I was halfway there! I had it! You just switch “Bobcats” with “Bucks” and I’m right there! Of course …
Q: The bucks are like that weird roommate that just wont leave, the guy on the couch in half-baked. No one knows why he lives here — we found him on Craigslist or something. He hogs the couch, makes our place reek, brings home monsters from the bar, leaves his bong on the bathroom. But we need the rent money so we don’t say shit. Same with the bucks. We need a 3rd team.
—Owen, Milwaukee
SG: There’s your WTF case for my Bucks/playoff pick. I backed THAT franchise. Poor Owen sounds like he needs some cheering up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrXOEcyB-A8
Q: If DJ Augustin keeps playing at the level he’s playing now, and Derrick Rose never comes back to where he used to be, do you amnesty D-Rose? Think that might be why the Bulls haven’t amnestied Carlos Boozer yet?
—Sam, Oxford, Mississippi
SG: They can’t amnesty Rose because the Bulls signed that deal after the new CBA went into effect. But Rose’s situation reached “elephant in the room” status the moment Chicago unexpectedly resurrected its playoff hopes around Taj Gibson (making a mini leap), D.J. Augustin (super-belatedly looking like a lottery pick) and especially Joakim Noah (a first-team All-NBA candidate who suddenly turned into Bill Walton circa 1977). With multiple Ewing Theory Committee scouts attending their games, every Bulls fan suddenly feels guilty about loving this team so much. And that’s before you broach Rose’s sobering potential to be this generation’s Penny Hardaway.
Basically, Bulls fans are in a glass case of emotion right now. Here, look. Watch what happened when I forwarded Sam’s admittedly ridiculous email to Grantland’s Rafe Bartholomew (our staff provocateur) and Robert Mays (our staff Bulls fan).
Simmons: Oh no, Mays! OH NO!!!! OH MY GOD NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Rafe: Isn’t the provision only for players signed before the current CBA? Also — Amnesty Rose sounds like the name of the baby Kanye and Amber Rose should’ve had. Mays: The fact that I gave this more than five seconds’ worth of thought makes me want to jump off a bridge.
Q: If you’re an NBA GM, how much do Joel Embiid’s back issues scare you? Is he the next Dikembe Mutombo or Greg Oden?
—Mark Killian, Newton Centre, Massachusetts
SG: I don’t mess around with lower-back issues, herniated discs, surgically repaired knees, legs that aren’t the same size, slow-healing stress fractures or phrases like “getting a second opinion” when I’m thinking about taking a big guy first overall. History just says, “Run the other way! RUN!!!!!” We also watched Andrew Wiggins and Jabari Parker emerge as real contenders for the top spot, and everyone loves Dante Exum even if we don’t know if he’s Australian Penny Hardaway or Australian Larry Hughes. I bet Embiid returns to Kansas next season. That reminds me …
Q: How about a rule that restricts one-and-done players to a five year rookie deal and anyone who stays in college two years or longer to get a 4 year rookie deal?
—Charles Smith, Brooklyn
SG: I like it! That’s the biggest obstacle to Adam Silver’s desire for an under-20 age limit for the draft — every powerful agent despises that idea because it delays the second contract by one year. If Jabari leaves Duke this summer, he’d sign his max extension in 2018 and the contract would officially start in the 2018-19 season. If he doesn’t leave until 2015, that timetable gets pushed back to 2019 (extension) and the 2019-20 season (when it kicks in). That’s why you’ll see Jabari Parker awkwardly putting on a Jazz/Sixers/Celtics/Lakers/Bucks cap and hugging Adam Silver on June 26, 2014. It’s not about the first contract; it’s about the second one.
I’d suggest this tweak: five-year rookie deals for one-and-done guys and under-20-year-olds; four-year rookie deals for two-and-done guys and 20-year-olds; and three-year rookie deals for everyone else. That would give prospects a real incentive to stay in school, right? Sadly, Silver can’t discuss this idea (or any draft-related tweaks) with the National Basketball Players Association because there’s nobody running it right now. Billy Hunter didn’t just run that thing into the ground; he packed it with explosives and detonated 60 years of history. Nobody seems to care. By the way? I’m not sure Silver and the owners care, either — they say publicly how it’s frustrating not to have anyone to negotiate with, but really, everything gets to stay the same for them as long as the players’ union is fractured. Right now, it’s an owner-friendly CBA. They’re raking in money. I don’t see the age limit thing changing any time soon.
Q: Trying to time this for next Wednesday’s NBA Bag — let’s say you are answering this on Tuesday night March 11. Who is the MVP right now at this very moment Simmons?
—Kent, Glendale, Arizona
SG: Durant by a hair. He’s playing for a 1-seed and averaging a 32-8-6 with 51-40-87 shooting splits and a 30.3 PER. It’s one of the greatest non-MJ/non-Wilt offensive seasons ever. This is NOT a 1993 Barkley/MJ or 1997 Malone/MJ situation — Durant is a better all-around player than Barkley and Malone, and LeBron isn’t quite MJ (it’s true). And yet, LeBron could absolutely pass him with a monster finish.
Quick aside: I love MVP races and even devoted an entire chapter to them in my basketball book. One of my dopier proposals: that the weight of the MVP trophy should vary depending on the impressiveness of the MVP season. So if Derrick Rose’s 2011 MVP was a 10-pound trophy, then Shaq’s 2000 MVP or MJ’s 1996 MVP were 40-pounders. I mention this only because you rarely see head-to-head 40-pound trophy seasons battling for the same MVP. That’s what makes this one of the best MVP seasons ever — it’s right up there with 1962, 1987, 1990 and 1993. And that’s why LeBron vs. Durant is better than every other 2014 regular-season story line except for “When will Patrick Beverley start the next Artest melee?”
Q: Read your tanking piece. How would you fix the lottery Simmons? You never said what you would do.
—Thomas B., Chicago
SG: It’s a two-part idea …
1. Guarantee only the first seven playoff spots in each conference.
Everyone else gets thrown into a single-elimination, 16-team tournament (my old Entertaining As Hell Tournament idea) as the 14 playoff teams rest up. Your final two EAHT teams get 8-seeds, then play a “championship” game. The stakes? The winner gets the choice of which no. 1 seed to play in Round 1, as well as lottery eligibility for that year’s draft.
2. Every lottery team gets the same odds for the first four picks.
We’re returning to the late 1980’s model — 14 lottery teams plus our EAHT winner get 1-in-15 odds for the no. 1 pick, 1-in-14 odds for no. 2, 1-in-13 odds for no. 3, and 1-in-12 odds for no. 4. After that, every subsequent pick goes by record (worst team picks fifth, etc). Would the 2014 Sixers commit self-sabotage if the end result was “You’ll embarrass yourself at the EAHT, and you’re only guaranteeing yourself no better than the no. 5 pick”? Maybe not.
Last point (and I’ve made it before): It’s not the worst thing ever if a decent team wins the lottery. Was it bad when the Bulls got Derrick Rose, or the Magic teamed up Shaq and Penny Hardaway? If you’re making the case “Don’t we have the right to protect certain bumbling franchises from being stuck at the bottom year after year?” — I mean, isn’t that their own fault?
Here’s an idea: If you want to avoid the bottom, make better picks, make smarter trades and spend your cap money wisely. Minnesota had four top-six picks in three years and ended up with Jonny Flynn, Ricky Rubio, Wes Johnson and Derrick Williams. Sacramento had the no. 4, no. 5, no. 7, no. 5 and no. 7 picks in the past five drafts and has only DeMarcus Cousins and Ben McLemore left. The Wizards earned the no. 5, no. 1, no. 6, no. 3 and no. 3 picks in the last five drafts and batted 40 percent on moves. The Cavs had the no. 1, no. 4, no. 4 and no. 1 picks in the past four drafts and can’t make the 2014 playoffs.
I’ve joked before about being an NBA Republican, but seriously, why enable these losers? If you can’t produce a winning franchise, sell it to someone else. The league needs to stop protecting teams from themselves — we give them amnesties to make up for boneheaded roster moves, luxury tax money to reward them for being cheap, and better lottery odds to make up for being dumbasses. We need more of a Lord of the Flies mind-set. Sink or swim. If there’s a way to steal soccer’s relegation system — the top 26 teams stay in the league, the bottom four get relegated — I’m all for it. Could you “add” five European teams, beef up the D-League so it’s made up of five loaded D-League teams, then create a separate 14-team league that operates like a poor man’s NBA? It’s not the craziest idea in the world, right?
Q: At what point does Detroit’s “Pissed-On” Fans stage a Malice at the Palace Episode II: The Palace Strikes Back in an attempt to coerce Josh Smith and Brandon Jennings into getting themselves suspended for the rest of the year?
—Rick D, Vancouver
SG: Right now! Yesterday! Don’t you realize that Detroit loses its lottery pick unless it can drop into the top eight? Where’s John Green? PAGING JOHN GREEN!!!!!!!!
Q: You’ve given names like Sorry for Jabari and Riggin for Wiggins for this year’s Tankapalooza. What would have been the best hypothetical tanking taglines for names of actual top historical NBA picks? My favorite historical ones are “F-ing Up Games For King James” and “Coward for Howard.”
—Justin, Indianapolis
SG: Thanks for ruining the last two hours of my life — I just went down a Basketball-Reference.com rabbit hole to come up with dumb phrases like “Tragic for Magic,” “Unworthy for Worthy” and “P.U.-ing for Ewing.” Your historical winner: Joe Smith in 1995 … that’s right, “Shitty for Smitty.” Unbeatable.
Q: Eating dinner at 6:30 pm and not making yourself fall asleep by 10:00 pm is exactly what’s going on with the Rockets right now. Everyone is celebrating our recent one-week takedown of the Heat, Pacers and Blazers. Couldn’t I have just waited one more hour to eat dinner? I just had to takedown that pizza, indian food and grapefruit at 6:30. Couldn’t the Rockets have just waited til next week, when everyone would have been immersed in March Madness, so that they could go unnoticed? Nope, they had to do it with 19 games remaining. Like my constant struggle with weight loss, they too will be setting screens in the kitchen at midnight, bouncing back and forth between warming up leftover fajitas in the microwave, and toasting Tuna cutlets in the toaster over …. WE PEAKED TOO EARLY!!!
—Aiyasawmy Dave Dorairajan, Space City, Texas
SG: And on cue … they lose to OKC last night! I still like this Rockets team. Dwight looks like 88 percent of the old Dwight. Harden nudged himself into the MVP Not Named Durant or LeBron race with his recent offensive explosion; I even saw him play defense two or three times. Chandler Parsons is gunning for a title, a new contract and the chance to redeem The Bachelor franchise after Juan Pablo nearly ruined it. Patrick “Red Bull” Beverley inspired a Grantland Appreciation Email Thread with me, Andrew Sharp and Chris Ryan just yesterday. Their supporting cast (Terrence Jones, Omer Asik, Jeremy Lin, etc.) isn’t terrible. Even if Houston fans might never get over losing out on Jeremy Lamb, Steven Adams and a non-lottery pick to be determined this decade, Houston could beat any Western contender in a series. You know … unless they peaked too soon.
Let’s go to a Speed Round just for the hell of it.
Q: Is there a NBA equivalent of Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar win?? Maybe something like Tyreke Evans winning the MVP some day??
—Zvonimir, Split, Croatia
SG: Yes — Dirk’s 2011 Finals MVP.
Q: Can we start working on a new term for Posterizing? Can we change it to Gif’ed, Youtubed, Instagrammed or something else?
—Clint Hovey, Austin, Texas
SG: I mean, even I switched to “YouTubed” at this point. And I’m the same guy with a BlackBerry and AOL.
Q: What would LeBron make per year if the NBA had no salary cap?
—Akiva W, Jerusalem
SG: $75 million per year. I wrote about this last year.
Q: So my buddy and I were just texting back and forth about Carmelo going after KD’s scoring title and if he could do it. My response — ‘If Ray Felton put a gun to my head, I would say yes he could.’
—Troy F, Melbourne, Australia
SG: Still a little too soon.
Q: I live three miles from where a few World Cup games will be held in a few months. The street next to the stadium is such a hot mess, Joe Dumars is trying to trade for it.
—Francisco, Porto Alegre, Brazil
SG: And he’s doing it with two phones!
Q: I watch and read everything from Grantland and I can see we are all struggling with your Kevin Durant nicknames … may I submit “The Slendertainer?”
—Paul, Macau
SG: You cannot.
Q: It would be really great if you could, in one sentence, say a nice thing about the Nets in this mailbag. So here we go … Bill Simmons is about to say something nice about the Nets! I’ll start you off: The Nets are really …
—Adam, Chappaqua, New York
SG: Lavish?
Q: What are your thoughts on the addition of a four-point line?
—Cody, San Luis Obispo
SG: Only for the first three quarters, and only for half-court shots.
Q: The NBA has to start over and you are building a team from scratch. Which power forward do you take to build this team around? Love or Griffin?
—George B, London
SG: Let’s see one Kevin Love team finish over.500 before we compare him to the league’s no. 3 MVP choice and breakout superstar.
Q: If Magic’s era was the Showtime Lakers, what should this year’s team be called?
—Nate Hoss, Appleton, Wisconsin
SG: The Blowtime Lakers. Come on, that’s a layup.
Q: I was at a Hawks game at Philips Arena last night, and among the 5,000 or so other attendees were Julius Erving and Glenn Frey, both of whom were shown back to back on the Jumbotron. This led to a spirited debate (or at least as spirited as you’re going to find at the mausoleum the Hawks play in) about who was the bigger star. Opinions were split 50/50. Your take?
—Chris, Atlanta
SG: Julius Erving for any NBA game or Philly sporting event; Glenn Frey anywhere else. The Eagles sold more than 150 million records and were/are one of the five best-selling concert bands ever. So you have to go with Frey. Regardless, I like any question that allows me to link to one of my favorite pieces I’ve written AND one of my favorite podcasts I’ve done! SPEED ROUND IS OVER!
Q: Do you remember Otto Porter? I’m generally concerned because he was drafted third overall. Is he still alive?!
—Danny D., Philly
SG: He’s actually still alive. I Googled it and everything. He’s played a whopping 254 minutes this season! Since 1990, only three top-three picks have played less than 500 minutes as rookies: Greg Oden (missed the year because of knee surgery), Darko Milicic (played 159 minutes for Detroit) and Otto Porter. To put that in perspective, Kwame Brown, Pervis Ellison and Hasheem Thabeet all passed the 800-minute mark as rookies. Even Anthony Bennett played 647 minutes before recently going down with a knee (h/t Al Michaels). On the other hand, anytime you can spend the third overall pick on a third-string small forward, you have to do it. I ask you again: Why do we insist on enabling dumb teams?
Q: How bad are the Knicks? Recently I changed the channel to NBA TV during a Spurs-Mavericks game, just as something was being described mid-sentence as, “They’re hard to watch sometimes, the ball does not move, it stops,” followed by “No defense, no trust.” My stomach did that roller coaster drop of dread, like sighting your ex-boyfriend talking with your current boyfriend. I hoped I was wrong, that it was just me, that maybe they weren’t talking about the Knicks. Then I heard, “Especially paying the prices people do in New York to watch that team…” Seriously, people watching a totally unrelated game that includes “Vince Carter, shooting more than ever” are outright pitying me?? Seriously? Ladies and Gentlemen, your 2014 New York Knicks!
—Kimberly, Brooklyn
SG: So you’re saying this 2011 commercial campaign lost a little luster for you?
My four follow-up questions …
1. Could you put absolutely anything with “Coming Home” and get everyone’s goose bumps going? I’m convinced that J Cole and Skylar Grey intentionally made the intro of that song 30 seconds long so commercials would use it. I’m also convinced that ABC’s Resurrection did big ratings on Sunday solely because they used it. That song works. Maybe ABC’s Paul Lee can save his job by using “Coming Home” to promote every ABC show — even the sitcoms.
2. Has any song with the possible exception of Eminem’s “Not Afraid” landed on YouTube for more reasons? If you search for it, “Coming Home” comes up for anything and everything: LeBron, Kobe Bryant’s last comeback (whoops), John Cena, Cristiano Ronaldo, a 2013 Blue Jays promotional campaign, Randy Orton, the Assassin’s Creed commercial, David Beckham, Allen Iverson (gotta say, I loved this one), Derrick Rose, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and the 2011 Masters, Kevin Durant, Peyton Manning’s first NBC game back in Indy, WrestleMania 29’s commercial campaign, Kyrie Irving (???), and best of all, Paul Walker/Fast & Furious tributes (I might have gotten a little choked up, I can’t lie).
3. What would be the single most inappropriate montage subject for “Coming Home”? Probably O.J. Simpson getting released from prison and returning to Brentwood, right? And why aren’t there more “Coming Home” parodies? Should this Metta World Peace/Knicks parody really be the best one right now? Couldn’t someone just dub the song over this clip from The Shining until we come up with a better idea?
4. Part of me wants to fake my own ESPN firing so we can make a “Coming Home” video for my eventual return. I might do that anyway. Hell, I might do that for next week’s mailbag. You think that would be weird? Well …
Q: I just spent a few hours thinking of what the best title would be for your celebrity sex tape. My choice was “Yup, these Are My Testicles.” Any ideas?
—Jeremy Gurstel, Washington, D.C.
SG: At least I’m not as weird as Jeremy Gurstel! Since we’re here, um … “Now I Can Grind in Peace”? “Dirty for Thirty”? “Yup, These Are My Liters”? Wait, why am I helping you? More importantly, we’re in range!
Q: Three of my totally straight friends and I were trying to decide who the best-looking NBA player is. The four finalists were: Chris Paul, DJ Augustin, George Hill, and Courtney Lee. Next question: “Whom would you LEAST want your wife to sleep with?” Everybody changed their answers and the new finalists were Kendrick Perkins, Reggie Evans, Nikola Pekovic, and Blake Griffin. We all agreed Ibaka could not be considered for a reason that you once mentioned a few months ago. We took the following into account: ferocity, physique, consistency of effort, and crazy factor. So my question to you is, if you could guarantee your wife stayed away from one current NBA player who could toss her like uncooked pizza dough, who would it be (besides Ibaka)?
—Joey, Ann Arbor
SG: I forwarded this email to my wife, if only to see if she’d laugh at the “uncooked pizza dough” joke. (She did.) Her response …
“Ibaka then JJ Redick then Blake. Why didn’t Redick make the list?”
(Yup, that’s my wife.)Image: Donald Trump. Stock Photo. Pixabay.com
Donald Trump's munchkins would have us believe that the new American president is going to usher in a period of prosperity for the United States and the world.
But Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman and other top economists believe Trump will make policy mistakes that will touch off a global recession, if not a depression.
"When the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold," is a longstanding maxim about the global economy that became only too true again in 2008.
In fact, many countries are still struggling to right their economic ships seven years after the crisis struck.
Those countries include three of the largest economies in the former Soviet Union -- Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
One of the greatest ironies I could envision under a Trump presidency would be the Donald sparking a global recession that further roils Russia's economy.
I doubt he will be able to refrain from starting the trade war he has threatened against China, which he complains is not playing fair against the United States in bilateral commerce.
Given that economics is so complex, whatever Trump does has the potential to generate unpredictable consequences that, together, tank the global economy.
Let's say he slaps a 35 percent duty on Chinese goods coming into the United States, as he has threatened to do.
An immediate consequence would be middle-class and poor Americans paying more for Chinese goods, many of which they would be unable to obtain from other sources. This would likely make the "angry white men" whom Bill Clinton said Trump was able to appeal to in the 2016 election even angrier -- but this time, against Trump.
Then, of course, there would be the Chinese retaliation against a hefty duty on their goods.
No one knows what the retaliation would consist of, but one thing is certain: It would be designed to hurt the U.S. economy -- and it would likely do so.
I don't think even Krugman could predict how quickly a U.S.-China trade war could spread economic malaise across the globe, or how much damage it could do. But one of his, and other economists', biggest fears is an amateur economic policy-maker like Trump letting any angry cat out of a bag that no one could get back in without massive clawing of the furniture.
A key reason the wrong move by Trump could hammer many of the already weakened economies in the former Soviet Union is the sorry state of the region's banks.
Two announcements in the past week brought this weakness home: the revelations that Ukraine was nationalizing its biggest bank, Privatbank, and that Kazakhstan was providing an emergency loan of $4.5 billion to keep its biggest bank, Kazkomertsbank, from going under.
It should come as no surprise that in graft-ridden Ukraine, corruption was a key factor in Privatbank's travails.
Privat was bleeding cash due to the recession and questionable loans, a full 97 percent of which were made to companies connected with its shareholders. Talk about loaning money to insiders that you never expected to get back!
Kazakhstan's financial system has never recovered from a greedy loan policy that almost all banks employed before 2008, and the theft of about $15 billion at two of its largest banks.
The greedy policy was borrowing money at 5 to 7 percent from the West, then loaning it out to Kazakhs at 14 percent or more, and pocketing the difference. The bottom fell out when the American-sparked global recession landed on Kazakhstan, and many Kazakhs were unable to repay their loans.
The thefts involved the chairman and vice chairman of Alliance Bank absconding with $1.2 billion and the chairman of BTA, a world-class scoundrel named Mukhtar Ablyazov, stealing a whopping $14 billion, then fleeing to the West.
Just this month, Ablyazov fooled France's highest administrative court, the Council of State, into believing his claim that he is a dissident who would be punished for his political views if he had to go to Russia or Kazakhstan to face embezzling and other charges.
Dissident my foot! Martin Luther King Jr., Mohatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela were dissidents. Ablyazov is a common criminal -- albeit a big-time one.
Russia, whose economic problems have affected countries like Armenia that are tried to its economy, had to bail out some of its biggest banks earlier than Ukraine and Kazakhstan did.
In late 2014 it pumped $1.2 billion into state-owned VTB, its second-largest bank, with VTB expected to get an additional $1.7 billion in early 2015. Also in late 2014, it spent $449 million bailing out state-owned Gazprombank, which said it needed another $345 million in early 2015.
The bailouts were needed because of a drop in the price of oil, the mainstay of the Russian economy; Western sanctions that hurt Russian banks' ability to borrow in the West; and a plunge in the value of the ruble.
Russia desperately wants the sanctions to end, because they're keeping its economy from recovering.
Just how angry Moscow is about the sanctions came to the surface this week when the Russian government screamed about a new round of sanctions. Barack Obama slapped the punishments on six high-ranking Syrians and nine board members of a Russian bank connected with the two countries' brutal crushing of opposition forces in Allepo, Syria's second-largest city.
The U.S. had already sanctioned Moscow's Tempbank for providing financial services to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government. This time it added the nine bankers.
Russia hopes that President Vladimir Putin's buddy Trump will lift all the sanctions the United States has imposed since the spring of 2014, when the Kremlin seized Crimea and sent thousands of troops to help eastern Ukrainian separatists ward off government forces.
Putin has worked hard to stroke the ego of the narcissist Trump, so the new American president may well lift the sanctions.
That would be an injustice, since it would send a message that Putin could impose his will on his neighbors with impunity.
I do believe that Trump will lift the sanctions, although there will be a nasty political battle over the issue in the United States between the Trump forces and those Americans who still see Russia -- as I do -- as the gravest threat to democracy.
If he does lift the sanctions, I hope Trump starts a trade war with China or makes some other economic miscalculation that slams the global economy so hard that it further damages Russia.
The only way the Kremlin can be slowed from trying to reconquer more of its neighbors is if its economic problems are so bad that it has to spend energy and money dealing with the economy instead of unleashing its military on others.
Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia. A columnist with the Kyiv Post and a blogger with The Huffington Post, she writes on human rights and democracy in Russia and the former Soviet Union.By IAN DRURY, Daily Mail
Last updated at 16:17 12 May 2006
[created] |
A girl is to become Britain's youngest mother after becoming pregnant at 11.
The girl smokes 20 cigarettes a day despite being eight months' pregnant. She conceived aged 11 when she lost her virginity to a boy of 15 on a drunken night out with friends.
The 15-year-old has since been charged with rape by police, and is due to appear again at Edinburgh sheriff court on July 10.
Her 34-year-old mother, who gave birth to her youngest child eight months ago, said she was 'proud' of her daughter.
She will be 12 years and 8 months when she has the child next month. Jenny Teague, Britain's youngest mother until now, was a month older when she gave birth in 1997.
How can we best tackle this problem? Tell us in reader comments below
The youngster, who lives near Edinburgh, says looking after her younger brothers has prepared her for motherhood.
But the girl admits she "panics and cries" when babies are unwell and does not feel able to bathe them.
The mother-to-be, who cannot be named for legal reasons, had unprotected sex with the teenage boy, who also cannot be identified, while drunk last August.
'Excited'
She told the Sun: "I didn't think I'd get pregnant because it was my first time. But I'm really excited and looking forward to being a mum.
"I can't wait to take the baby swimming and out for walks in the pram. I think I'll be able to cope as I've had lots of practice looking after my brothers.
"I know how to feed a baby its bottle and I can change nappies. But I panic and cry if they're sick and I don't like giving them a bath because I'm a bit frightened.
"It's good to know I'll have my mum here to help me if I need her."
Concerned she might be pregnant, the girl visited a GP three times but tests proved negative. She learned the truth after buying a home-testing kit from a supermarket.
After the device displayed two blue lines, indicating she was pregnant, she pleaded with a female relative to break the news to her mother. The girl, who has been suspended from her first year of secondary school for fighting, said: "I was paranoid about what my mum was going to say and just frightened about being pregnant too.
"I knew straight away that I couldn't have an abortion because that's something I don't believe in.
"I was upset and so was my mum, especially as she'd just had my wee brother. We had a big argument and I ended up locking myself in my room and running away to a friend's.
"It was really hard but it's brought me and my mum closer, which is good. I knew my mum would stand by me no matter what, but I told her straight away I was going to keep the baby.
"The social worker suggested I got rid of it but I'd never do that."
Smoking at nine
The girl, who has shoulder-length dark hair, began smoking at nine and started drinking tonic wine and vodka cocktails at ten. She claimed her cigarette habit was not harming the health of her unborn child.
She said: "I can give up smoking at any time, but I don't find it affects my pregnancy."
The girl, whose parents split up several years ago, said she would like a baby boy - and may call him Leo.
She is currently being educated at a local community centre but knows she must return to school.
She told the Sun: "My mum has said she will look after the baby so I can go to school. I don't know what I want to do with my life when I leave. I used to want to be a nursery nurse, but now I'm not so sure."
'Proud of my daughter'
Her mum said: "I'm not ashamed of my daughter at all - in fact, I'm proud of her for keeping the baby.
"I know she's worried what other people will say but she can walk out there with her head held high.
"At first I wasn't too happy about becoming a gran. But now I'm used to the idea. I'm really looking forward to having another baby in the house."
The Scottish Conservatives has called for society and families to unite to change attitudes towards sex following the news.0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
After Donald Trump suggested that people be put in jail for burning the flag, top Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and John McCain reminded Trump that flag burning is protected under the First Amendment, as McConnell signaled to reporters than any legislation banning flag burning would be DOA.
Video of McCain:
https://youtu.be/12acpZAOZXc
McCain said, “I do not approve of burning the flag. I do believe there should be some punishment, but as of right now, the Supreme Court’s decision is that people are free to express themselves that way. But I do not approve of it, and I think there’s other ways for people to express their views.”
Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told reporters:
Sen McConnell on flag burning: "The Supreme Court has held that that activity is a protected First Amendment right" — Erica Werner (@ericawerner) November 29, 2016
Mitch McConnell on flag burning: "People like that pose little harm to our country. But tinkering with our First Amendment might." — Phil Mattingly (@Phil_Mattingly) November 29, 2016
McConnell has opposed every bill to criminalize flag-burning and has not brought a single flag burning amendment to the floor as leader.
If Mitch McConnell doesn’t want it to happen, then Donald Trump’s dream of putting people in jail for burning the flag is dead on arrival. Trump isn’t even in office yet, and already Senate Republicans are disagreeing with him and refusing to take up some of his ideas.
One can almost count the days until President Trump is angrily attacking Senate Majority Leader McConnell on his Twitter account. The Trump/McConnell marriage looks destined to fail in spectacular fashion.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:Metasepi's going year and coming year, 2015
project Posted on December 31, 2015 / Tags: ats
Table of contents
This year is learning deeply ATS proof for me. Unfortunately, I can’t create any products for Metasepi project, however the learning was very fun. Let’s look back on 2015, and dream next year!
January, 2015
I start to write textbook of ATS language named “ATS Programming Foundations”. Writing the document stopped at September, 2015. Please keep going me…
list of the things done
Started to write “ATS Programming Foundations”.
February, 2015
Nothing.
March, 2015
I introduced ATS language in Japanese local academic meeting “PPL 2015”.
list of the things done
Made a presentation “ATS Programming Tutorial”.
April, 2015
I translated examples of Book “Getting Started with Arduino” into ATS lanugage. The project is arduino-ats and seed for paper “Arduino programing of ML-style in ATS”.
list of the things done
Re-write examples of Book “Getting Started with Arduino” using ATS language.
May, 2015
I tried to use Rust language on mbed platform. It needed many “unsafe” keyword and didn’t have well-established method to build binary without run-time. Then, I stopped to use Rust in embedded system, more.
And I tried to translate “Software Foundations Prop_J: Propositions and Evidence” into ATS. It was good idea to compare ATS with the other languages such like Coq. Also I believe that comparing view of ATS with Rust or doing statics of it with Alloy will be useful to understand ATS.
list of the things done
June, 2015
I created palindrome library in ATS to understand proofs of ATS. It became seed for presentation “ATS/LF for Coq users”.
list of the things done
Created palindrome library in ATS.
Tried to manage multiple-pointer in ATS.
July, 2015
This month, I had an idea to create merge sort using proof and linear type. The idea’s base is that “in-place merge sort” can be shaped using some proof and linear type. Why need such library? The purpose was to get proof of concept for proof driven development on Arduino Uno platform can’t use any malloc. But the implementation is very |
. I think that to look at Trump as fundamentally expressing economic anxieties surely is a mistake. In fact, I think that Trump himself views these things as more economic than the voters who support him do. Trump talks a lot about trade. His voters don’t seem to care a lot about trade. They’re much more impressed with the Muslim ban; they’re much more impressed with the concern about immigration.
But it does seem to me that some of the anxieties we see channeled in the Trump phenomenon are things could be addressed by a different approach to public policy. Trying to understand the concerns voters are raising as a question to which there could be an answer within our system of government is kind of what politicians do.
What worries me, and really the essence of the book I’ve just published, is that neither the left nor the right is actually doing this very well. Both of them are trying to ignore some key realities of 21st-century life and to have an argument about whether we should go back to the high points of late-20th-century conservatism or late-20th-century liberalism, whether we should relive the late 1960s or the early 1980s. I think there’s a very plausible left/right politics of 21st-century America, but it’s not the politics we have.
The deep nostalgia of both political parties
EK: Let’s talk a bit about that nostalgia argument. You could barely get a better object lesson for your book than a guy who runs around saying, "Make America Great Again." And the "again" in that slogan is so brilliant. "Make America Great," I think you could easily forget about.
"Make America Great Again" — the whole thing works because of that "again." But tell me why you think the two parties are so gripped by nostalgia, because, having read your argument on this, I’m conflicted on it. I’m not sure I’m persuaded — or at least I’m not sure I’m clear on what a politics that did not use the past as a framework for looking at the future would look like.
YL: Yeah, so I’m certainly not arguing for a politics that doesn’t use the past as a framework for the future. I’m a conservative, so I’m even more inclined than most to use the past as a reference. But I think looking to the past for lessons is not the same as nostalgia. And part of what we’re seeing in our politics now is a sense that we had all the answers at some point. I think Hillary Clinton, in the interview you did with her, literally said this: "We were on the right track and we lost our way."
EK: About the '90s.
YL: About the '90s, yeah. And, you know, she kind of has to say that about the '90s. A lot of liberal economic rhetoric says that now about the '70s or the pre-'70s and thinks that we lost our way with the resurgence of excessively market-oriented economics in the late '70s. Conservatives say this about everything that happened after 1989.
On the left, people tend to think about this in economic terms, so you look to the postwar decades as a time when the economy worked for workers, when people had a lot of opportunity regardless of their skill level, unions were very strong, people had a lot of faith and confidence in government. And you had this kind of corporatism where large corporations working together with a powerful labor movement and a powerful government seemed to be managing things.
On the right, people talk about the culture of that period — strong families, probably the peak in American history in church attendance, very low divorce rates, and very low immigration.
EK: I think you’re right to say that there’s nostalgia, but it’s certainly not an uncomplicated nostalgia. The Democratic Party is very aware that that period worked a lot better for straight white men than for other groups. Republicans look at a lot of the economics of that era with distaste.
YL: The nostalgia of the left and right are selective in quite different ways that prevent us from seeing what are really two sides of the same coin. Conservatives are nostalgic for the culture of midcentury America and are very happy, generally speaking, with how things have changed in economic terms. We love the dynamism of the modern economy, but we don’t love the chaos of modern culture.
Liberals are roughly the other way. They very much miss the structure and order and security of the midcentury economy, the stability for workers, the breadth of opportunity, but liberals are very happy with what’s happened to the culture over this period. It’s more diverse, it's much more open and dynamic, it’s much more accepting of traditionally mistreated groups, there’s much more immigration, we’re a much more diverse society.
The trouble is that these are two sides of the same coin. Liberalization has happened both in the culture and in the economy. In the culture it has meant that our society is more open, is more diverse. At the same time, if you want to look at the dark side of it, there is less structure, there is less social order. Families are more broken than they used to be — communities too. That can’t be separated from the greater market orientation of the economy.
I think the hardest thing about living in a basically functional, free society is always to see that our problems are the costs we pay for our strengths.
EK: But that’s partly because which parts are progress and which parts are problems is contested, right? I think when we operate at the level of abstraction, when we just say social progress comes along with cost, everybody nods their head. That’s actually an easy thing to say. It’s when you get specific that things get harder.
I think that’s partly because we tend to flatten these issues into debates over efficiency. We are very comfortable debating whether or not something works and not very comfortable debating its fundamental morality. We just saw the Supreme Court case on abortion where laws meant to curb the overall numbers of abortions in Texas were being sold as an effort to improve women’s health, and the Supreme Court ultimately just said, "That’s ridiculous."
The values argument is hard to have, it’s fuzzy to have, and there’s no real way to resolve it, so things get transmuted into these much more technical, wonkish arguments where at least we can pretend to ourselves, "Oh, if we could only convince everyone that it did help the economy or it did help this group," then it would be okay.
YL: I think that’s right, and it runs very deep in classical liberal politics. We want to say that what it means to be a free society is that people can believe what they want to about moral issues, but we can have a debate about how to create the right environment for people who have the freedom to do what they choose. That means that a lot of our governing equations only make sense to us, only seem legitimate to us, when they are questions about utilitarian matters, when they’re questions about what works and what’s efficient.
But of course we can’t actually have a society that doesn’t argue with itself about moral questions — and we shouldn’t.
EK: Let’s say that in this election, Donald Trump loses to Hillary Clinton. Say he loses by 6 points — a reasonably significant but normal margin. What do you think happens in the Republican Party after that?
YL: The only honest answer is I have no idea. If you talk to members of Congress, most of them would say that what happens is a return to what they consider normal, pre-Trump politics. The Republican Party, below the level of the presidency, is the governing party of the country. It’s very dominant in governorships and state legislature seats and in Congress. That Republican Party has 10,000 elected officials, none of them is Donald Trump, and none of them is much like Donald Trump. They think that party is still there. If this stops at the presidential level, that’s the party that comes back.
I think more would change than that. I think the lessons of this campaign season will sink in over time. I will not pretend to know what they’re all going to be. An optimistic take on that, from my point of view, would be that there is a modernization of the party’s understanding of the country’s challenges. That there would be a generational change. There’s a huge difference between older Republicans and younger Republicans among the elected officials and among voters. I think that kind of generational change could be a good thing.
EK: What is the difference, in your experience, between older elected Republicans and younger elected Republicans?
YL: Well, I think the core difference has to do with whether your political consciousness was formed in the Reagan era or after. Many Republican politicians, those over 55, 60, really live with a Reagan-era sense of who the voters are, what the country’s like, what the party’s for.
Younger Republican politicians are much more at home in 21st-century America. They don’t look at the country and say, "I don’t recognize my country." This is their country. I think they’re less inclined to just repeat the policy agenda of the 1980s; they’re looking for ways of applying conservative ideas to 21st-century problems.
[Utah Sen.] Mike Lee is a great example of that. Mike Lee, in some ways, is the most conservative member of Congress, but in other ways is the most impressive policy entrepreneur among the Republicans. I think those two things are connected. It’s not that being younger means you’re less conservative; it means you have a different attitude about what the purpose of politics is and what conservatives might have to offer.
The difference is enormous, and it’s not just about the politicians. People my age — I’m 39 — people my age and younger don’t watch Fox News at all. We haven’t in years. They don’t live in quite the political culture that seems to be defining this presidential race. And on the whole, they are mystified and horrified by what’s going on in this presidential race.
EK: What is the most interesting policy idea on the right and on the left in the past couple of years?
YL: I think the most interesting thing going on in the left is the debate about the guaranteed minimum income. It’s not a new idea, and in fact there’ve been debates about it several times in our history. If you look at the fall 1969 issue of the Public Interest [journal], it was devoted to a debate about a guaranteed minimum income.
But circumstances have changed, and I think that argument on the left now is a very, very interesting argument. On the whole, the left has tended to want to double down on a kind of Great Society vision of how public programs work. I think the [universal basic income] is quite different from that and suggests something interesting about what might be coming. I think there are also ideas about offering public programs as options in private markets. That’s a very interesting debate on the left, and in some ways very promising.
On the right, I think a lot of what’s going on is about making public policy, including at the national level, to enable experimentation at the local level. Now, in the abstract, conservatives have talked about that forever, but I think we have seen more work being done in recent years — both at the local level, especially in education, and somewhat at the national level — that tries to make that a little more real.
The promising thing for me is that these two actually fit together pretty well. They suggest a kind of 21st-century policy debate that’s about how to enable more private sector options from the right, more public sector options from the left. These two could actually work together pretty well and in some respects could even improve one another somewhat.
So there’s a promise thereof a potentially constructive 21st-century policy debate, in a country where everyone expects to have a lot of choices in every realm of life. That makes sense to me to have as a debate. But that’s an optimistic way of thinking about where our policy debates are going.
How the Republican Party went from Lincoln to TrumpApril and May were really exciting months for us with the release of the new Construction System, base revamp of Indar, and new population caps to improve battle flow. It’s been exciting to watch all of you experiment with base design and shift battles in new directions. A big thanks to all of you who have jumped in to try it out and given us feedback.
While we hope you are as excited as we are about the recent changes, we do have to make a more solemn announcement. On July 1st, at 4:00 PM PT, we will be closing the PlanetSide 1 server. PlanetSide 1 has a very important history with Daybreak Games and a special place in the hearts of those who work on its successor. While we have run the game for free since 2014, due to evolving business needs and technical requirements it has become necessary to conclude this service.
We hope you will take this opportunity to enjoy the remaining time available with each other and please help us give PlanetSide 1 the sendoff it deserves.Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o will appear on the second week of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” CBS announced Monday.
Other guests for week two will include “House of Cards” star Kevin Spacey, “Everest” star Jake Gyllenhaal, and Oscar nominee Naomi Watts. Colbert will also speak with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush is due to appear on “The Late Show” during Colbert’s first week on the air ahead of Sanders. Bush will join George Clooney and musical guest Kendrick Lamar for the premiere episode.
Also Read: Stephen Colbert Mercilessly Mocks His Own Time Magazine Cover
Colbert takes over the desk previously occupied by David Letterman on Sept. 8.
See the full line-up for Colbert’s second week below:
Monday, Sept. 14: Emily Blunt; Justice Stephen Breyer; musical performance by The Dead Weather
Tuesday, Sept. 15: Jake Gyllenhaal; musical performance by Run The Jewels with TV On The Radio
Wednesday, Sept. 16: Kevin Spacey; Carol Burnett with comedians Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer; musical performance by and interview with Willie Nelson
Thursday, Sept. 17: Naomi Watts; United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
Friday, Sept. 18: Lupita Nyong’o; Sen. Bernie Sanders; interview with and performance by “An American in Paris'” Christopher Wheeldon, Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope“Why not book an Airbnb?” That was the suggestion which caused a rift in a long friendship.
Malika Oyetimein and I met in 1996, when we were high school freshmen. Fast forward to summer 2015, and we were planning a trip to Portland, Oregon. I was flying to Seattle, where Malika lives, and then we’d take a bus to Portland to see the hipster utopia that neither one of us had ever visited. We agreed that I would reserve the rental car for our trip, while Malika would book the accommodations.
At the time, I had only used Airbnb once, for a trip to Vancouver—which I also visited during my stay on the West Coast. But the room had been inexpensive and exactly what was promised, and I had heard plenty of other wonderful reviews about the service. I told Malika all this when I persuaded her to book the room on Airbnb. As an added incentive, I had a $100 credit we could use from my American Express card that we could apply to room. Malika was on board. She had heard good things about Airbnb too.
But what I didn’t consider was that it might be harder for her to get access to people’s homes. I’m a white man; she’s a black woman.
How Airbnb failed my friend
Because Malika had never used Airbnb before, she set up a profile and linked up her Airbnb profile with her Facebook account. It showed a clear picture of Malika, and she added a short, upbeat description of herself for good measure. “I filled it out like an online dating profile. I made sure I sounded personal and nice,” Malika told me later. “I wanted to be someone you would want to stay in your house.”
Fortune reporter John Kell (right) and his friend Malika while on their Portland, Oregon trip. Courtesy of John Kell
When reaching out to hosts in Portland, Malika—a Seattle-based theater director and MFA candidate in her final year at the University of Washington—mentioned she had finished the first year of her graduate program and was planning a trip to Portland to celebrate.
Malika estimates she tried to book between eight to ten different rooms. She was unable to get us a room.
“Everyone was polite about it,” she told me. But she kept hearing, “I’m sorry it just booked up” or “I am in the process of deleting my profile.”
While continuing with her search, she’d see that rooms she had reached out to were still options that came up as she searched for an Airbnb rental.
Throughout her search, we stayed in touch and she was telling me about her frustrations. The service—or more to the point, the users on it—weren’t willing to rent my friend a room. She knew that I had just booked that room in Vancouver (a process that was speedy as I got instant approvals despite never using the service), and so Malika told me what she thought was the issue: Racism.
A test of my own
Once Malika told me that the problems she was encountering, I decided I would try to book a room in Portland. Looking back, I realize I wasn’t fully processing what my friend was telling me about the service—how messed up it was that the service wasn’t treating her equally, how it made her feel to be rejected over, and over. I reached out to two listings and was approved by both hosts immediately.
Within a half an hour, I’d booked our room. Fast, almost immediate approval. Malika and I didn’t really discuss this—though in retrospect, there seemed to be some uncomfortable silence about how easy it was for me (and impossible for her) to use this platform.
An unspoken rift
Until I started preparing and writing this story for Fortune, I wasn’t aware of how much I’d upset Malika by using Airbnb when she was having such problems. I am disappointed in myself for how I handled the whole situation. I never tried to put myself in her shoes, and I just didn’t understand what she was feeling. “I was upset with you for going and using your white privilege and never having to experience a second of pain or doubt,” she told me.
While she was getting rejected from various hosts on Airbnb, she told me that she kept asking herself if there was something in her profile that made her less desirable. “You didn’t experience a minute of that,” she said, “and you didn’t want to.”
Her criticism stung but she was right. At the time, I didn’t want to be inconvenienced. The room we stayed in was very nice and the Portland host was friendly—though I do recall wondering when he shook our hands if we would have even been there if Malika had reached out instead of me. (To be fair to this host, he wasn’t one of the individuals that Malika had reached out to during her original search. There is no way to know how he would have felt if Malika had tried to book that room).
Looking back, I have so many regrets. I wish I had talked to Malika back then and heard her explain what it felt like to be discriminated against. I also wished I had proposed that we take our money elsewhere and pay for a hotel room.
While researching this story, I apologized many times, and Malika and I are on wonderful terms again.
But Malika also told me she never plans on using Airbnb again. “Why would I go back somewhere where people have told me I’m not wanted?”
“Three white guys” at work
She’s not alone in feeling that way. As more and more black users complained about being shut out of the service, using the trending hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack, rival services were launched.
Now that I’m aware of the pain the discrimination on this platform causes, I need to ask myself: Am I still comfortable using the service to save myself a little money, knowing some of my friends may have problems trying to book the same rooms? I know it is a privilege that I’m even able to ask myself this question in the first place.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and his team have publicly acknowledged there there is a problem that needs fixing. “Three white guys designed the program but there’s a lot we didn’t think about when we designed it,” Chesky said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference earlier this year.
And just last week, Chesky sent out an e-mail to Airbnb users (including myself) apologizing for the discrimination that has, in his view, jeopardized the company’s core mission that people “are fundamentally good and every community is a place where you can belong.” Chesky went on to say that beginning November 1, all hosts must agree to a new anti-discrimination pledge, an expanded “instant book” program which allows guests to make reservations without pre-approval from the host, better reporting systems for aggrieved customers, and new technology that would block the calendar for dates that were declined by a host, to make sure those dates aren’t later booked by someone of a different race.
Of course, some potential customers are lost for good. When I asked Malika about what she thought of Airbnb’s efforts to improve the service, she wasn’t persuaded. “It’s a problem that’s bigger than Airbnb. I don’t know how Airbnb would go about making sure that its users aren’t racists.”
But others who have been discouraged may still be interested in trying Airbnb again. The report Airbnb put out last week, written by Laura Murphy—the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington D.C. Legislative Office—found that a majority of the victims of discrimination on Airbnb’s platform wanted to use the site and were hopeful reforms could be put in place to at the very least diminish bias.
Will these changes solve the issue of discrimination for good on Airbnb? Even the report doesn’t make such grand promises.
“These changes are only Airbnb’s first steps,” writes Murphy. “Fighting discrimination will require constant and ongoing work.”
I asked Malika about these changes as she prepares to jet back to Seattle after a short trip on the East Coast. She laughed when I listed some of the promises Airbnb made. Malika said the following: “Airbnb saying ‘Don’t show that you are black and book quicker so they don’t know you are black’ is not changing the fact that people don’t want me in their house because I am black.'”
She points out she had tried Instant Booking a couple times, too—and she was still rejected.Some have put his silence down to shyness, others have called him aloof and a few have said it is just plain bad manners. But, five days after Bob Dylan was given the Nobel prize for literature, the singer’s lack of comments on the subject may have been broken.
In a subtle update on Dylan’s website, a page promoting a new book of his lyrics now includes the declaration “winner of the Nobel prize in literature”.
It is the first time the elusive singer has made any acknowledgement of the prize. Sara Danius, the Nobel academy’s permanent secretary, said on Monday that numerous attempts had been made to contact Dylan, including emails and calls to those closest to him, but had heard nothing back from the man himself.
Nobel panel gives up knockin’ on Dylan’s door Read more
Dylan, 75, played a gig in Las Vegas on the night the accolade was announced, but made no mention that he had been given the prize, which comes with 8m kronor (£740,000) prize money, or if he intended to turn it down.
Danius said she was “not at all worried” that Dylan would fail to appear at the ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, where the Nobel winners are celebrated and where the singer will be invited to give a lecture.
“I think he will show up,” she said. “If he doesn’t want to come, he won’t come. It will be a big party in any case and the honour belongs to him.”
The decision to award Dylan the Nobel prize was not without controversy. The French Moroccan writer Pierre Assouline described the decision as “contemptuous of writers” while Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, said that although he was a Dylan fan “this is an ill-conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies”.
Will Self also called on Dylan to follow the example of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and turn down the prize.
“My only caveat about the award is that it cheapens Dylan to be associated at all with a prize founded on an explosives and armaments fortune, and more often awarded to a Buggins whose turn it is than a world-class creative artist,” Self said. “Really, it’s a bit like when Sartre was awarded the Nobel – he was primarily a philosopher, and had the nous to refuse it. Hopefully Bob will follow his lead.”
However, it is not technically possible to turn down the award. Even Sartre, who refused the prize in 1964 because “a writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution” was still listed as the winner.
“The fact that he has declined this distinction does not in the least modify the validity of the award,” the Nobel committee said at the time.
• This article was amended on 25 October 2016 because an earlier version said the Nobel prize ceremony would take place on 10 November. The ceremony takes place on 10 December each year, on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.File photo: a New Delhi neighbourhood Source: Shutterstock/Mikadun
AN INDIAN CHAUFFEUR has been arrested after a German woman accused him of masturbating in front of her in an upscale New Delhi neighbourhood, according to police.
Police arrested 32-year-old Tarun Kumar from neighbouring Haryana state after the doctorate scholar accused him of unzipping his trousers and masturbating while she was walking her dog in a public park yesterday afternoon.
The 33-year-old woman, who is studying at a premier Delhi university, gave chase to the accused before taking pictures of his car as he fled the scene.
“The woman provided us pictures of the registration number of the car and we tracked the owner before swooping in on the accused,” Anil Kumar, investigating officer with Delhi police, told AFP.
The driver had dropped off his employer’s wife at a shopping complex before engaging in the indecent act, the officer said.
India faced international scrutiny over levels of sexual violence against women following the fatal gang-rape of a medical student in New Delhi in December 2012.
But the country’s sexual violence crisis continues unabated with nearly 100 rapes reported across the country every day despite the government bringing in stringent laws in 2013 to clamp down on sexual violence.
The latest incident comes a week after a 22-year-old woman posted a video on social media of a man who masturbated in front of her and five other women while on a busy train in Mumbai.
The incident caused further outrage after the woman accused a police officer of refusing to take action against the voyeur following a complaint. The accused was eventually arrested.
Last month a traveller on a Delhi-bound flight was arrested after he allegedly masturbated in front of a female passenger.
© – AFP, 2017Judge Lucy Koh has just ruled that the Galaxy S GT-i9000, the S II GT-i9100, and Galaxy Ace are no longer part of the Apple v. Samsung trial — the jury will not answer the all-important questions of whether or not they copied the iPhone's trade dress or infringed Apple's patents.
After Apple wrapped up its testimony earlier today, Samsung provided an hour-long argument for a judgement as a matter of law (JMOL), asking the judge to rule that Apple hadn't proved its case sufficiently, and that Samsung be allowed to walk out the door without mounting a defense.
Amongst other issues, Samsung argued that Apple hadn't provided a reason why the international Galaxy S, S II, or Ace should be included in the list of accused devices. All three products weren't offered for direct sale in the United States by Samsung or any of Samsung's subsidiaries — carriers received their own variants — and with the trial only covering devices sold in the US, the burden of proof was on Apple to argue why they should have been included in the first place. Koh agreed that Apple hadn't sufficiently proven why the international devices should be part of the case, and granted Samsung's motion to exclude them.
The trial started with Apple accusing more than 20 devices of infringement, so losing these three won't make or break its case — but Cupertino can't be happy.Officials said they were determined to “meet the intent of the presidential directive” within the boundaries set by the Supreme Court, which issued an interim opinion when it agreed to consider the issue in its next term. Administration officials said their definition of a “family connection” was based on existing immigration law and directions from the court.
Hours before the new guidelines went into effect Thursday evening, officials predicted little of the chaos that engulfed airports in January, when the president issued his original travel ban. This time, officials said, people already booked to travel to the United States would be allowed to enter. And they made it clear that legal permanent residents were not affected by the ban.
But the administration’s newest move could prompt another wave of litigation as advocates for those trying to enter the United States ask courts to halt enforcement of the ban. Already, lawyers in Washington have asked the court to allow the entry of refugees with no “credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.”
Other lawyers representing people who have been blocked from visiting the United States described the government’s actions as meanspirited and said they made unreasonable distinctions about family relations.
“Allowing a U.S. citizen to bring their Syrian mother-in-law but not their Syrian brother-in-law doesn’t make us any safer, and doesn’t even really make any sense,” said Gadeir Abbas, a staff lawyer at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Mr. Trump has said that his travel ban does not directly target Muslims, although the six countries on the list that the president has deemed dangerous — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — are majority Muslim.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, condemned the administration’s move. “U.S. now bans Iranian grandmothers from seeing their grandchildren, in a truly shameful exhibition of blind hostility to all Iranians,” he tweeted.When Florida Governor Rick Scott, a prominent Republican opponent of ObamaCare, decided that his state would participate in the health law’s Medicaid expansion, the law’s liberal backers responded triumphantly. Think Progress wondered if Scott’s decision might serve as a model for others. Ezra Klein wrote a post declaring that “ObamaCare is winning.”
If so, it’s a limited win, at best. And it hasn’t won with the public. The public remains divided and skeptical about the law and its effects. ObamaCare has always struggled in the court of popular opinion, and two new polls highlight the public’s continued lack of support for the law. Indeed, after a brief post-election rise in support, public opposition to ObamaCare is on the rise again.
February's Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll puts opposition to the law at 42 percent and support at 36 percent; in Kaiser’s November poll, 43 percent said they supported the law and 39 percent opposed it.
A newly released Reason-Rupe poll offers some confirmation that more Americans hold negative views of the law. Asked an open-ended question about what comes to mind when they hear the term “ObamaCare,” 50 percent gave a negative response of some sort. At 24 percent, the largest single response was a generalized comment that the law is a bad thing.
Overall, the poll shows pessimism about the law. Asked about the law’s impact on the country, meanwhile, 37 percent responded that ObamaCare made the nation worse off, compared to 31 percent who said it made the country better off. Another 24 percent said it made no difference, which suggests a large strain of indifference in addition to the positive and negative reactions.
Since the law passed, Democrats have (not surprisingly) tended to be much more supportive of the law than Republicans. That’s still true, but Kaiser’s poll finds that Democratic support has dropped substantially since last year’s presidential election, from 72 percent in November to 57 percent in the February month's poll. That’s the second weakest level of support Kaiser has found amongst Democrats since it began the monthly tracking poll in April 2010.
Why did support drop for the law in the months since the election? The parade of news stories about rising health premiums may have had an impact. The Reason poll reports that 26 percent of respondents believe the law will make it harder to afford coverage, compared with just 13 percent who think it will be easier.
In general, the news about ObamaCare has not been particularly encouraging this year. Yes, ObamaCare has successfully enticed several Republican governors into participating in its Medicaid expansion, but a majority of states won’t participate in what is arguably the law’s biggest innovation, the health insurance exchanges. But in the last few weeks, the Government Accountability Office just released a report highlighting the uncertainty about the law’s budget projections, ObamaCare-friendly states have warned about the potential for health premium “rate shock,” and the Congressional Budget Office has expressed skepticism about the law’s implementation prospects. To me, at least, this sounds less like a law that is winning and more like a law is simply surviving.If you have the millions to spare and the derring-do, your chances of being strapped in and launched to the international space station improved markedly Wednesday when two major companies agreed to join forces to make space travel significantly more available.
The Boeing aerospace company announced an agreement with Space Adventures Ltd. of Vienna, Va., to establish a space taxi system that will launch its passengers into low Earth orbit.
Boeing has been developing a capsule and has years of experience building rockets, while Space Adventures has organized seven trips to the space station aboard the Russian spacecraft Soyuz. The obstacles remain high, but the two companies say they think they can begin their service by the end of 2015.
The agreement "creates another opportunity to jump-start the human migration to space," said Brewster Shaw, Boeing's vice president and general manager of space exploration. The goal of his division, he said, is to create a "Boeing commercial aircraft of human space commerce."
It's all part of the still-fragile blossoming of a commercial rocket and spacecraft industry that could transform the way people think about and use the space beyond Earth.
Boeing is also in the running to provide low-cost commercial transport to the space station for NASA astronauts - an initiative pushed by President Obama but facing opposition in Congress, especially in the House.
The Boeing-Space Adventures announcement was made as Senate and House staffers are working - with what participants say is limited success - to craft a bill that would provide funds to encourage private space companies to expand their efforts. The commercial space initiative has become embroiled in resistance to Obama's desire to kill the Ares I rocket program, the Bush administration's behind-schedule and overbudget effort to provide transport to the space station.
Space Adventures has sent seven private space travelers to the space station on Soyuz capsules, most recently at a cost of about $40 million for one seat.
Company Chairman Eric Anderson said the linkup with Boeing will not make future space travel cheap but could make it much cheaper.
"With our customer experience and Boeing's heritage in human spaceflight, our goal is not only to benefit the individuals who fly to space," he said. It's "also to help make the resources of space available to the commercial sector by bringing the value from space back to Earth."
The joint project envisions launches from the Kennedy Space Center and landings at the White Sands base in New Mexico.
Boeing is one of seven companies selected by NASA in February to research and potentially develop rocket service to the space station for NASA crews. The company won an $18 million federal Space Act agreement to begin the work, which Boeing officials said is now two-thirds complete.Business travelers, shift workers, college students, and overworked tech workers, beware. Unusual sleep patterns, particularly sleeping during the day and staying up late at night, wreak havoc with the activity of your genes, new research shows.
Researchers at the Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey in the UK interrupted study participants' sleep at regular intervals over three days, taking blood samples to monitor gene function. The findings: Daytime sleeping disrupted the rhythms of up to one third of the participants' genes.
Using a light-controlled sleep lab, Dijk and team manipulated the study participants' sleep patterns, postponing their bedtime by four hours a day until the subjects were 12 hours out of sync with their normal day/night biological clock. The purpose was to mimic the effects of jet lag or working the night shift, the researchers said.
Blood tests revealed decreased gene expression, which can affect the body's circadian rhythms, as well as bodily functions such as metabolism, inflammation, stress and immune response. Because genes carry the instructions for making proteins, which in turn make up the chemical signals and hormones that regulate the body, disrupted gene expression has profound implications for overall health.
The study, published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), helps to shed light on the mechanism for previously established connections between interrupted sleep and serious health problems such as heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and cancer.
Research has linked late nights, shift work, and ambient light to health conditions ranging from depression to early death. Research shows too little sleep can cause stroke and early death, and that a regular sleep schedule can help you lose weight.
"This research may help us to understand the negative health outcomes associated with shift work, jet lag, and other conditions in which the rhythms of our genes are disrupted."said lead researcher Derk-Jan Dijk, professor of Sleep and Physiology and director of the Sleep Research Centre.
The research has worrisome implications not only for shift workers, but for business travelers, college students, and sleep-deprived workers of all stripes, who often nap or sleep during the day to make up for working late into the night. (As evidence, consider the fact that more and more companies are setting up nap rooms to offset employees' late work hours.)
And those long work days are taking their toll - according to the most recent poll by the National Sleep Foundation, 43 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 rarely or never get a full night's sleep during the work and school week.
In the past few years, scientists have been honing in on the connection between sleep patterns, light exposure at night, and serious health problems. Last year the American Medical Association (AMA) house of delegates went so far as to issue a policy statement warning that "nighttime electric light can disrupt circadian rhythms in humans" and that this disruption " |
izant of the powder keg in the strike-bound city, pleaded with the court for more time to “develop” their “response to the situation.” A frustrated Judge Gordon then intoned, “The police have not acted, to my knowledge, in a single incident. In the three days that the barricades have been up, the police have ignored them.”
With the rank-and-file action growing in strength, the union leadership’s overriding concern was to shut down the blockade lest it trigger a broader mobilization. Membership meetings were suddenly announced for Wednesday so as to provide the strikers with an update on last week’s failed negotiations—negotiations that the union initially denied were even being held. (See: “Canada: No concessions strike against Vale Inco in jeopardy”)
For several weeks, it has been an open secret in Sudbury that the union bureaucracy has capitulated before the company’s concession demands and that the major sticking point in ending the dispute has become the back-to-work protocol. Vale management, intent on completely emasculating the union, is adamant that none of the nine fired strikers will be allowed to regain their jobs. The union officialdom, for its part, is arguing that in order to force through ratification and otherwise continue to be able to police the membership, the company needs to provide them with a face-saving agreement concerning the dismissed workers.
As the blockade grew in open defiance of the courts at the beginning of this week, USW lawyers stepped up pressure, including behind-the-scenes appeals, for the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB) to expedite adjudication of a bad-faith bargaining complaint against the company concerning the nine fired strikers. The OLRB was not due to continue hearings on this and other bad-faith bargaining grievances filed by the USW against Vale Inco until the end of June, but by midweek the board relented so as to help the union in shutting down the blockade.
On Wednesday morning, Local USW 6500 President Fera and Canadian Steelworkers District 6 President Wayne Fraser attended the two blockades so as to announce that a Labour Board hearing on the fate of the nine has been scheduled for Friday. (What they did not say is that the company has objected to separating the complaint concerning the nine from the rest of the bad-faith bargaining grievances and that Friday’s OLRB hearing will begin with company lawyers filing a motion for the matter to be put off till the previously scheduled June 25 hearing.)
Many at the blockade were reluctant to end their action. But with it ever more clear that the union was lining up with the police, the courts and the company to suppress their initiative, the protestors took down the blockades. A striking smelter worker said, “It was very difficult this morning to hear our leaders tell us to leave.” Alan Asher, a supporter from the community at the blockade, said, “I don’t think this is the time now to end the blockade. We can recognize a bully when we see one and [Vale Inco] is acting like one.”
This has not been the first time that the union bureaucracy has sought to channel the determined struggle of the striking workers into political and judicial dead ends. At the outset of the dispute, union officials lobbied the federal Conservative government of Stephen Harper to release information on the conditions that the government imposed on Vale when the Brazil-based company purchased Inco in 2006. The government refused, citing legally binding confidentiality provisions.
Next up was a series of international publicity stunts—lobbying stockholders in New York and bringing birthday cake to the company’s headquarters in Brazil. Then the union fell back on appeals to the labour board, which in the face of the continuing scabbing operation undertaken by the company, have proven fruitless. Indeed, a New York metal market spokesman breathlessly announced this week that Vale Inco would resume refined nickel ingot shipments to U.S. markets next month. This he declared was “tangible evidence that Sudbury production is now making its way into the supply chain”.
Recently the union has resurrected the demand that the big-business government of Ontario Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty adopt a provincial anti-scab law. Liberals in both the federal and Ontario parliaments, alongside Conservatives, have consistently voted down such proposals. For their own part, the New Democratic Party (NDP), which provides lip service to anti-scab proposals, has refused over the past decade to pass such legislation in any of the provinces where it has held power. On Wednesday, McGuinty was unequivocal in his rejection of the USW’s entreaties, calling instead for negotiation and conciliation. In other words, the government continues to give Vale Inco carte blanche for its strikebreaking offensive.
According to press reports, at Wednesday’s union membership meetings workers who had participated in the disbanded blockade action made angry statements blaming the hundreds, if not thousands, of union members who did not actively participate in the five-day protest for the strikers’ current predicament. Their emotions, however heartfelt, were entirely misplaced. It has been the union leadership—the USW, the Ontario Federation of Labour and the Canadian Labour Congress—and their allies in the social-democratic NDP that have isolated and demobilized the strikers, slowly smothering their militant struggle under a barrage of worthless appeals to the capitalist state and the big business political parties. Workers voted down Vale’s punitive concessionary contract by some 88 percent last July. In March, after eight months walking picket lines in the frigid cold of Northern Ontario, they voted down another miserable contract offer by an even larger margin!
If the Inco workers’ no-concessions struggle now stands in mortal jeopardy, it is entirely due to the actions of the union bureaucracy, which acts not as the representative of the membership but rather as an arm of the corporations within the rank and file. They have policed the anti-worker injunctions issued by the courts and signalled their readiness to accept massive concessions. Now they are imploring Vale Inco management—and the labour board—to allow them to play a role in designing the back-to-work protocols in hopes that, by doing so, they will maintain a semblance of credibility amongst their membership.
This week’s blockade shows the way forward. Workers must take the strike out of the hands of the bureaucracy and organize rank-and-file committees independent of the USW to shut down scab production and strive to make their struggle the spearhead of a working-class counteroffensive against big business’ drive to make working people pay for the capitalist crisis through wage and job cuts and the dismantling of public and social services.
Above all, Vale Inco workers and their supporters must draw the political lessons.
The traditions of militant working-class struggle associated with cities such as Sudbury must be revived and imbued with a program to mobilize the working class in independent industrial and political struggle against concessions and in defense of the jobs of all workers, the world over. If capitalism is incapable of providing working people with a decent standard of living—and it cannot—then working people, those whose collective labour produces society’s wealth, must advance their own plan to organize production and employment internationally based on human need, not private profit and shareholder value.Human body weight refers to a person's mass or weight. Body weight is measured in kilograms, a measure of mass, throughout the world, although in some countries such as the United States it is measured in pounds, or as in the United Kingdom, stones and pounds. Most hospitals, even in the United States, now use kilograms for calculations, but use kilograms and pounds together for other purposes.
Strictly speaking, body weight is the measurement of weight without items located on the person. Practically though, body weight may be measured with clothes on, but without shoes or heavy accessories such as mobile phones and wallets and using manual or digital weighing scales. Excess or reduced body weight is regarded as an indicator of determining a person's health, with body volume measurement providing an extra dimension by calculating the distribution of body weight.
Estimation in children [ edit ]
An example of a half unfolded Broselow tape.
There are a number of methods to estimate weight in children for circumstances (such as emergencies) when actual weight cannot be measured. Most involve a parent or health care provider guessing the child's weight through weight-estimation formulas. These formulas base their findings on the child's age and tape-based systems of weight estimation. Of the many formulas that have been used for estimating body weight, some include the APLS formula, the Leffler formula, and Theron formula.[1] There are also several types of tape-based systems for estimating children's weight, with the most well-known being the Broselow tape.[2] The Broselow tape is based on length with weight read from the appropriate color area. Newer systems, such as the PAWPER tape, make use of a simple two-step process to estimate weight: the length-based weight estimation is modified according to the child's body habitus to increase the accuracy of the final weight prediction.[3]
The Leffler formula is used for children 0–10 years of age.[1] In those less than a year old it is
m = 1 2 a m + 4 {\displaystyle m={\tfrac {1}{2}}a_{m}+4}
and for those 1–10 years old it is
m = 2 a y + 10 {\displaystyle m=2a_{y}+10}
where m is the number of kilograms the child weighs and a m and a y respectively are the number of months or years old the child is.[1]
The Theron formula is
m = e 0.175571 a y + 2.197099 {\displaystyle m=e^{0.175571a_{y}+2.197099}}
where m and a y are as above.[1]
Fluctuation [ edit ]
Body weight varies throughout the day, as the amount of water in the body is not constant. It changes frequently due to activities such as drinking, urinating, or exercise.[4][5] Professional sports participants may deliberately dehydrate themselves to enter a lower weight class, a practice known as weight cutting.[6]
Ideal body weight [ edit ]
Ideal body weight (IBW) was initially introduced by Devine in 1974 to allow estimation of drug clearances in obese patients;[7] researchers have since shown that the metabolism of certain drugs relates more to IBW than total body weight.[8] The term was based on the use of insurance data that demonstrated the relative mortality for males and females according to different height–weight combinations.
The most common estimation of IBW is by the Devine formula; other models exist and have been noted to give similar results.[8] Other methods used in estimating the ideal body weight are body mass index and the Hamwi method. The IBW is not the perfect fat measurement as it does not show the fat or muscle percentage in one's body. For example, athletes' results show that they are overweight when they are actually very fit and healthy. Machines like the dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) can accurately measure the percentage and weight of (fat, muscle, bone) in a body.
Devine formula [ edit ]
The Devine formula for calculating ideal body weight in adults is as follows:[8]
Male ideal body weight = 50 kilograms (110 lb) + 0.9 kilograms (2.0 lb) × (height (cm) − 152)
Female ideal body weight = 45.5 kilograms (100 lb) + 0.9 kilograms (2.0 lb) × (height (cm) − 152)
Hamwi method [ edit ]
The Hamwi method is used to calculate the ideal body weight of the general adult:[9]
Male ideal body weight = 48 kilograms (106 lb) + 1.1 kilograms (2.4 lb) × (height /cm − 152)
Female ideal body weight = 45.4 kilograms (100 lb) + 0.9 kilograms (2.0 lb) × (height /cm − 152)
Usage [ edit ]
Sports [ edit ]
Participants in sports such as boxing, mixed martial arts, wrestling, rowing, judo, Olympic weightlifting, and powerlifting are classified according to their body weight, measured in units of mass such as pounds or kilograms. See, e.g., wrestling weight classes, boxing weight classes, judo at the 2004 Summer Olympics, boxing at the 2004 Summer Olympics.
Medicine [ edit ]
Ideal body weight, specifically the Devine formula, is used clinically for multiple reasons, most commonly in estimating renal function in drug dosing, and predicting pharmacokinetics in morbidly obese patients.[10][11]
Average weight around the world [ edit ]
By region [ edit ]
By country [ edit ]
Global statistics [ edit ]
Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine published a study of average weights of adult humans in the journal BMC Public Health and at the United Nations conference Rio+20.[21]
Rank Country Kilograms Pounds Relative size 1 Micronesia 87.398 192.68 192.68 2 Tonga 87.344 192.56 192.56 3 United States 81.928 180.62 180.62 4 Samoa 78.544 173.16 173.16 5 Kuwait 77.791 171.50 171.5 6 Australia 77.356 170.54 170.54 7 Malta 76.956 169.66 169.66 8 Qatar 76.866 169.46 169.46 9 Croatia 76.412 168.46 168.46 10 United Kingdom 75.795 167.10 167.1 11 UAE 75.532 166.52 166.52 12 Greece 75.038 165.43 165.43 13 Cyprus 74.802 164.91 164.91 14 Egypt 74.271 163.74 163.74 15 Barbados 73.831 162.77 162.77 16 Belarus 73.663 162.40 162.4 17 Bahrain 73.550 162.15 162.15 18 Germany 73.042 161.03 161.03 19 Solomon Islands 72.797 160.49 160.49 20 Austria 72.743 160.37 160.37 21 Saudi Arabia 72.638 160.14 160.14 22 Iceland 72.584 160.02 160.02 23 Trinidad & Tobago 72.538 159.92 159.92 24 Argentina 72.434 159.69 159.69 25 Bahamas 72.380 159.57 159.57 26 Finland 72.348 159.50 159.5 27 Israel 71.912 158.54 158.54 28 Czech Rep. 71.640 157.94 157.94 29 New Zealand 71.631 157.92 157.92 30 Bulgaria 71.459 157.54 157.54 31 Russia 71.418 157.45 157.45 32 Slovenia 71.200 156.97 156.97 33 Slovakia 71.060 156.66 156.66 34 Albania 71.019 156.57 156.57 35 Bosnia 71.001 156.53 156.53 36 Switzerland 70.987 156.50 156.5 37 Rep. of Moldova 70.978 156.48 156.48 38 Venezuela 70.788 156.06 156.06 39 Chile 70.593 155.63 155.63 40 Georgia 70.561 155.56 155.56 41 Spain 70.556 155.55 155.55 42 Azerbaijan 70.484 155.39 155.39 43 Hungary 70.443 155.30 155.3 44 Libya 70.429 155.27 155.27 45 Luxembourg 70.270 154.92 154.92 46 Tajikistan 70.234 154.84 154.84 47 Portugal 70.193 154.75 154.75 48 Lithuania 70.153 154.66 154.66 49 Grenada 70.139 154.63 154.63 50 Panama 69.939 154.19 154.19 51 Ireland 69.926 154.16 154.16 52 Canada 69.767 153.81 153.81 53 Jordan 69.649 153.55 153.55 54 St Vincent & Grenadines 69.590 153.42 153.42 55 Belize 69.377 152.95 152.95 56 Poland 69.241 152.65 152.65 57 Macedonia 69.209 152.58 152.58 58 Italy 69.205 152.57 152.57 59 Jamaica 69.064 152.26 152.26 60 Sweden 69.064 152.26 152.26 61 Turkey 69.046 152.22 152.22 62 Cuba 69.037 152.20 152.2 63 Mexico 69.023 152.17 152.17 64 Mongolia 68.910 151.92 151.92 65 Uruguay 68.873 151.84 151.84 66 Belgium 68.801 151.68 151.68 67 Suriname 68.778 151.63 151.63 68 Latvia 68.778 151.63 151.63 69 Norway 68.774 151.62 151.62 70 Netherlands 68.746 151.56 151.56 71 Ukraine 68.674 151.40 151.4 72 Guatemala 68.579 151.19 151.19 73 Saint Lucia 68.438 150.88 150.88 74 Armenia 68.424 150.85 150.85 75 Nicaragua 68.415 150.83 150.83 76 Vanuatu 68.229 150.42 150.42 77 El Salvador 68.220 150.40 150.4 78 Lebanon 68.170 150.29 150.29 79 Ecuador 68.166 150.28 150.28 80 Fiji 68.048 150.02 150.02 81 Bolivia 68.034 149.99 149.99 82 Dominican Rep. 67.993 149.90 149.9 83 Denmark 67.957 149.82 149.82 84 Costa Rica 67.853 149.59 149.59 85 Tunisia 67.726 149.31 149.31 86 Iran 67.608 149.05 149.05 87 Turkmenistan 67.563 148.95 148.95 88 Paraguay 67.445 148.69 148.69 89 Peru 67.440 148.68 148.68 90 Syria 67.422 148.64 148.64 91 Guyana 67.032 147.78 147.78 92 France 66.782 147.23 147.23 93 Estonia 66.732 147.12 147.12 94 Equatorial Guinea 66.451 146.50 146.5 95 Romania 66.401 146.39 146.39 96 Colombia 66.370 146.32 146.32 97 Uzbekistan 66.351 146.28 146.28 98 Kazakhstan 66.265 146.09 146.09 99 Brazil 66.093 145.71 145.71 100 Mauritius 66.052 145.62 145.62 101 Iraq 66.034 145.58 145.58 102 Lesotho 65.966 145.43 145.43 103 Honduras 65.834 145.14 145.14 104 Oman 65.803 145.07 145.07 105 South Africa 65.667 144.77 144.77 106 Kyrgyzstan 65.413 144.21 144.21 107 Botswana 65.045 143.40 143.4 108 Cameroon 64.832 142.93 142.93 109 Morocco 64.764 142.78 142.78 110 South Korea 64.392 141.96 141.96 111 Mauritania 64.179 141.49 141.49 112 Algeria 63.639 140.30 140.3 113 Gabon 62.845 138.55 138.55 114 Ghana 62.491 137.77 137.77 115 Cape Verde 62.296 137.34 137.34 116 Papua New Guinea 62.251 137.24 137.24 117 Swaziland 62.097 136.90 136.9 118 Djibouti 62.015 136.72 136.72 119 Haiti 61.698 136.02 136.02 120 Comoros 61.044 134.58 134.58 121 Zimbabwe 61.022 134.53 134.53 122 Brunei 60.945 134.36 134.36 123 Sierra Leone 60.854 134.16 134.16 124 Nigeria 60.745 133.92 133.92 125 Malaysia 60.682 133.78 133.78 126 China 60.555 133.50 133.5 127 Angola 60.387 133.13 133.13 128 Senegal 60.373 133.10 133.1 129 Benin 60.282 132.90 132.9 130 Mali 60.078 132.45 132.45 131 Yemen 59.802 131.84 131.84 132 Philippines 59.715 131.65 131.65 133 Namibia 59.584 131.36 131.36 134 Sudan 59.407 130.97 130.97 135 Togo 59.280 130.69 130.69 136 Guinea 59.112 130.32 130.32 137 Japan 59.017 130.11 130.11 138 Pakistan 58.976 130.02 130.02 139 Singapore 58.935 129.93 129.93 140 Thailand 58.786 129.60 129.6 141 Côte d'Ivoire 58.727 129.47 129.47 142 Laos 58.436 128.83 128.83 143 Chad 58.196 128.30 128.3 144 Niger 57.933 127.72 127.72 145 Maldives 57.647 127.09 127.09 146 São Tomé and Príncipe 57.561 126.90 126.9 147 Burkina Faso 57.456 126.67 126.67 148 Congo 57.384 126.51 126.51 149 Tanzania 57.293 126.31 126.31 150 Gambia 57.071 125.82 125.82 151 Uganda 57.007 125.68 125.68 152 Afghanistan 56.935 125.52 125.52 153 Malawi 56.681 124.96 124.96 154 Rwanda 56.635 124.86 124.86 155 Myanmar 56.354 124.24 124.24 156 Kenya 56.264 124.04 124.04 157 Guinea-Bissau 56.087 123.65 123.65 158 Mozambique 55.955 123.36 123.36 159 Central African Rep. 55.946 123.34 123.34 160 Zambia 55.910 123.26 123.26 161 Cambodia 55.742 122.89 122.89 162 Liberia 55.533 122.43 122.43 163 Somalia 55.375 122.08 122.08 164 Madagascar 55.157 121.60 121.6 165 Burundi 54.127 119.33 119.33 166 Congo 53.501 117.95 117.95 167 Ethiopia 53.057 116.97 116.97 168 India 52.943 116.72 116.72 169 North Korea 52.589 115.94 115.94 170 Indonesia 52.467 115.67 115.67 171 Eritrea 52.041 114.73 114.73 172 Timor-Leste 51.950 114.53 114.53 173 Bhutan 51.142 112.75 112.75 174 Vietnam 50.725 111.83 111.83 175 Nepal 50.476 111.28 111.28 176 Sri Lanka 50.421 111.16 111.16 177 Bangladesh 49.591 109.33 109.33 — world average 61.997 136.68 136.68
See also [ edit ]Photo
In July 2012, a top official at the European Central Bank emailed the head of the central bank of Cyprus with some advice on how to keep the country’s second-largest financial institution from failing.
Benoît Coeuré, a member of the E.C.B.’s six-member executive board, advised against the institution, Cyprus Popular Bank, using government bonds to secure more loans. Instead, he proposed an “alternative measure” that his Cypriot counterpart might “wish to consider.”
“The Central Bank of Cyprus has in principle the possibility to apply less stringent valuations and haircuts compared to the approach followed by the Eurosystem in credit operations,” he wrote in the email, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.
As The Times reported last month, the central bank’s decision to approve such lending practices in Cyprus provoked a tense debate within its 24-member governing council.
Yet Mr. Coeuré’s email and related documents indicate that it was the E.C.B., and not Cyprus, that came up with the idea, a hands-on role that had not been previously revealed.
In effect, he was proposing that the central bank of Cyprus inflate the value of Cyprus Popular Bank’s collateral, so that it might funnel more emergency loans to the failing bank.
Photo
In so doing, Mr. Coeuré appeared to be violating the E.C.B.’s core principle: that it may not become involved in the rescue of a bankrupt bank — or a government, for that matter — by resorting to its printing press.
The E.C.B. defended its activities in Cyprus.
Michael Steen, a spokesman for the European Central Bank, said in a statement: “The executive board prepares and informs the governing council in its biweekly discussions on emergency liquidity assistance. This is so that the Governing Council can exercise its prerogative to object to E.L.A. if warranted by interference with monetary policy. The email you have is a reflection of this process.”
Almost two years after the Cyprus banking crisis, the E.C.B. is pushing to restore confidence in its banking system and revive the Continent’s economy while struggling to find consensus and follow rules that narrow its options.
Now, confidential communications from the central bank show how it has been willing to ignore its own bylaws and dictate policy to sovereign governments to prevent wider financial contagion in the eurozone.
This willingness was recently illustrated in documents from Ireland’s fiscal crisis in 2010. Letters that have emerged show the central bank threatening to cut off emergency financing unless Ireland entered an austerity program.
In the case of Cyprus, which like Ireland faced bankruptcy as a result of the failure of its banks, similar warnings went unheeded, prompting the E.C.B. to funnel more than 10 billion euros, or $12.5 billion, in last-ditch loans, via the country’s central bank, to its second-largest financial institution, behind the Bank of Cyprus, despite overwhelming evidence that it was failing.
President Nicos Anastasiades of Cyprus recently commissioned a study that examines in detail how the collapse of a single midsize bank could have such a devastating effect on the economy of Cyprus.
The 40-page report draws on thousands of pages of nonpublic documents and blames the previous government, the two governors of the central bank, Athanasios Orphanides and Panicos Demetriades, and to a lesser extent the European Central Bank for keeping a dead bank alive for more than a year.
As a result, a €17 billion economy was saddled with €10 billion in onerous short-term obligations.
The Times was provided with a copy of the report and some supporting documents.
When asked about the 2010 Irish correspondence, Mario Draghi, the president of the E.C.B., recently said: “It’s a very big mistake to look at past events with today’s eyes. You should go back and consider what was the situation at that time.”
Still, the questions now being raised about the bank’s actions in Cyprus and Ireland reflect deep divisions within it just as it seeks consensus on the most radical step in its 18-year existence: printing money to buy, in large quantities, the bonds of indebted countries, like Italy, Spain and Portugal.
As for Cyprus, the main question that divided the E.C.B.’s governing council from fall 2011 through March 2013 was whether Cyprus Popular Bank was solvent.
Rocked by bad loans and outsize losses from its Greek bond holdings, the bank was already hemorrhaging deposits in late 2011, when the European Central Bank approved a plan by the national central bank to provide it with short-term loans.
Throughout this period, the two governors of the Cyprus central bank, Mr. Orphanides, a well-known international economist who now teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his successor, Mr. Demetriades, insisted that the bank could return to profitability, according to presentations they made to their colleagues in Frankfurt.
In March 2012, after Cyprus Popular Bank, which would change its name to Laiki Bank, reported a €3.3 billion loss for 2011 that wiped out its equity, Mr. Orphanides presented a last-ditch capital-raising plan for the bank, one that would be rejected by his skeptical colleagues,
Given the bank’s horrid finances, it was highly unlikely that such a sum could be raised from investors, the European Central Bank noted, according to minutes from a governing council meeting in March.
Executives also highlighted that more than half of the bank’s loan book was directed toward the sinking Greek economy. “The planned recapitalization may prove insufficient owing to the large exposure to the Greek private sector,” E.C.B. executives concluded, according to minutes from the meetings.
At a governing council meeting in Barcelona on May 3, 2012, Mr. Coeuré, the executive board member, took note of the bank’s large losses and pointed out, according to minutes, that by the bank’s own analysis, “the core Tier 1 regulatory capital ratio was negative.”
Nevertheless, documents show, it was decided to approve more emergency financing for the bank.
As the Cyprus Popular Bank’s figures deteriorated in spring 2012, senior officials at the E.C.B. began to worry that it was violating its own rules by approving loans to a bank that was virtually insolvent.
Among the most vocal in making that argument was Jens Weidmann, president of Germany’s central bank. Throughout 2012, he had railed against what he saw to be a backdoor bailout in Cyprus and persistently argued that loans to the bank should be withdrawn, given its financial distress.
Driving Mr. Weidmann’s frustration was the plan proposed by Mr. Coeuré in July 2012 to let the central bank of Cyprus inflate the value of Cyprus Popular Bank’s collateral to direct more loans to the failing institution.
Not only did Mr. Coeuré seem to be ignoring a bylaw decreeing that the E.C.B. keep its distance from emergency lending decisions by national central banks, he was pitching a plan that would have the Cyprus central bank secure loans on dubious collateral.
“If E.L.A. was provided without adequate collateral, this would be a grave issue,” Mr. Weidmann concluded, according to internal documents from governing council meetings.
Mr. Demetriades, desperate to keep the loans flowing, disregarded Mr. Weidmann’s concerns.
In a letter to Mr. Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, in September 2012 he explained, in detail, how his staff had devised a system of increasing the worth of the collateral in question, without, he was careful to note, “extending the valuation beyond the appropriate levels of prudence.”
A few months later, with questions increasing in the governing council about this unorthodox approach, Mr. Demetriades wrote another letter to Mr. Draghi defending the collateral valuation techniques.
These emergency loans were “vital” not just for the bank but for Cyprus and neighboring Greece, the letter said. And he warned of a “catastrophic scenario” if emergency loans to such a “systemically highly important bank” were withdrawn.
In separate statements Mr. Orphanides and Mr. Demetriades rejected claims made in the report that they had approved loans to an insolvent bank.
Mr. Demetriades said that the collateral valuations carried out by the Cyprus central bank were “sufficiently conservative.”
Cyprus Popular Bank was finally wound down in March 2013. By then, the bank, and Cyprus, had accumulated €10 billion in short-term loans thanks in part to the collateral plan devised by Mr. Coeuré. And in the end it was the Cypriot bank saver that picked up the bill, not the European Central Bank.
Cyprus Government Report Points Fingers on Bank Collapse “The Cyprus Popular Bank was insolvent before the haircut of the Greek bonds. After the haircut, the bank had little chance to survive,” the 40-page study concludes.
Regulators Are Gauging Europe’s Banks, and Remedy May Sting a Little Echoing a U.S. move from 2009, the European Central Bank is taking a hard look at banks’ books, but its findings may further rattle the markets.Advertisement
As much as we love the PR2, it's not a robot that anyone would likely describe as "quick." Not that it's trying to be quick or anything, but it does have a tendency towards being absurdly slow, generally because it's doing very complicated things.
However, for a robot like the PR2 to be useful in any sort of versatile industrial setting (which is slowly but surely becoming a huge market for robotics), speed, efficiency, and reliability is very important. Some talented roboticists have been working away at this problem, and they've managed to get a PR2 to pick and place (or at least, pick and drop) objects at a rate of one every seven seconds from a conveyor belt moving at over a foot per second. This is quite possibly the fastest I have ever seen a PR2 move.
For the PR2 to pull this off, it has to combine 3D object recognition, object pose estimation, collision-free arm and gripper trajectory generation, and grasping, which is a lot to do in under seven seconds. It's the grasping bit that's especially tricky, since a delay in the grasping task of just 100 milliseconds means that the object's position will have changed enough to cause the robot to miss. The grasps themselves were learned from humans, with a user teaching the robot a set of several workable ways to pick up each object, while arm movements were planned using the CMU's SBPL (Search Based Planning Library).
Overall, the robot managed a success rate of 87 percent at picking objects off of the conveyor, which is really quite good, considering that (as far as the hardware goes) it's not optimized for this sort of work. Better grippers would have helped, and the primary constraint on the speed of the pick and place was that the PR2's arms just can't move any faster.
Now, if this all reminds you of a certain other two-armed factory robot, well, yeah. It's not like PR2 is going to be stealing jobs from Baxter anytime soon, but teaching mobile manipulation platforms to robustly perform tasks like this may eventually lead to more robots like Baxter doing all kinds of work all over the place. Plus, both robots rely on ROS, so maybe they can even learn something from each other.
"Perception and Motion Planning for Pick-and-Place of Dynamic Objects," by Anthony Cowley, Benjamin Cohen, William Marshall, Camillo J. Taylor, and Maxim Likhachev from UPenn's GRASP Lab, Lehigh University, and CMU, has been submitted to IROS 2013. For the record, Anthony Cowley and Benjamin Cohen are two of the guys behind the (now legendary) POOP SCOOP demo. No word on how much overlap there is between the two, but we have to assume that they've at least cleaned PR2's grippers since then.
[ GRASP Lab ]The Orlando shooting increases my daughter’s worries about me, her gay father. But I reassure her that there are more people who believe in the value of love, and human life, than not. Evil doesn’t rule. It just gets more press.
I woke up Sunday morning blissfully unaware. It was a rare opportunity to sleep in, not having to get up and hustle the day into action. When I did roust myself, I leaned over, kissed my husband good morning, and shuffled into the kitchen to pour my morning cup of coffee. And, of course, I checked my phone.
The first thing I saw: a text from a good friend of mine.
“When I saw the news this morning, I immediately thought of you and Chris, and wanted to express my sadness and outrage that even in the most powerful country in the world, we are so flawed, so full of hatred and fear,” it said.
She went on to let me know that she loves me and my family, and was thinking of us.
I didn’t know what prompted her message.
A quick web search revealed facts about the Orlando shooting. |
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Federal contractors are prohibited from donating to political groups under the federal laws.
A Massachusetts-based company, Suffolk Construction, was fined $34,000 for making two $100,000 donations in 2015 to a pro-Clinton Priorities USA Action group while having a million-dollar government contract.
The company has been awarded more than $168 million in government contracts since 2008 and held a contract with the Department of Defense worth more than $1.2 million between at the time of the donations, according to an FEC letter published by the Campaign Legal Center.
Priorities USA Action is known as one of the Democratic Party's most powerful PACs that supported Barack Obama in 2012, and was the leading pro-Clinton group during the 2016 presidential elections, spending more than $126 million against now-President Donald Trump.
Suffolk Construction argued that the government contracts they hold represent only a “small fraction” of their work and the PAC refunded the donation in June 2016. FEC officials did not accept the company’s justification, noting that the donations were not refunded urgently.
“While Suffolk may consider its federal contract work a ‘de minimis’ portion of its overall work, its $200,000 contributions to the Committee are not de minimis,” FEC wrote in the letter.
The complaint against the federal contractor was brought by the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 in 2016 pointing out the illegal donations. They celebrated the penalty, hoping the example will deter companies from donating to political groups.
“Hopefully this decision by the FEC deters companies with business before the government from attempting to buy influence in the future,” Democracy 21 general counsel Donald Simon said in a statement.
Brett Kappel, a political campaign finance expert, told the Boston Herald “There had been no precedent” for the FEC decision to fine the federal contractor.
“This is actually similar to other issues with pay-to-play laws,” the expert said. “If you make a contribution (as a contractor), it’s a violation of the law. It doesn’t matter how small a portion of your business it is.”
The fined federal contractor has since “implemented new internal controls” to ensure no other illegal donations will occur in the future. The FEC claims the company did not knowingly break the laws.Hammond has been studying tobacco marketing for 15 years and is interested to see what the marketing will look like, since the government's legalization plan includes allowing some marketing although not to children.
He doesn't know why it needs to be promoted, and how to craft a message that warns of the risk while use is being normalized.
"How do you achieve the right balance of risk perception?"
People have very different opinions on the issue, Hammond said, but he thinks there's a genuine interest in learning more and ensuring this change actually reduces harm. Objectively, marijuana causes much less harm than alcohol or tobacco, which are both government controlled.
Regulating marijuana will take it out of the hands of criminals and give more control over what people are actually getting.
"We will see where we end up and I'm not sure anyone really knows where we will end up," Hammond said.
The event is being held from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. at the applied health sciences building.
Admission is free, but registration is required at uwaterloo.ca/public-health-and-health-systems/events/anne-mclellan-public-lecture.
jweidner@therecord.com, Twitter: @WeidnerRecordBy Chris Cummins
Photographer, poet, songbird,
Vulcan, TV salesman, Friend of Bigfoot. Leonard Nimoy is all of these things
and more. Working steadily as an actor, director and writer since the early
1950s, Nimoy has proven himself to be a true Hollywood renaissance man over the
years despite never truly being able to emerge from the shadow of Mr. Spock.
His ambivalent feelings over this matter are discussed at length in his memoirs
I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock, both of which should be required
reading for nerds everywhere (Zachary Quinto may want to check them out as
well). As you are doubtlessly aware, Mr. Nimoy recently emerged from a
self-imposed break from the entertainment industry to take high-profile roles
in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek and Fringe. In honor of Leonard Nimoy’s
welcome return to the public eye, let us pay tribute to his greatest
achievements that didn’t require the donning of rubber ears.
10) The Outer Limits’ “I, Robot”
This spot was
originally going to be taken by Leonard Nimoy’s 2007 photography book The
Full Body Project. Packed with artsy photos illustrating the unconventional
beauty of plus-sized women, the tome sadly does not feature robots. Therefore,
it had to go. In its place is this installment of The Outer Limits that
was based on Eando Binder’s short story about an artificial being that learns
about prejudice following the accidental death of his creator. An obvious
influence on Isaac Asimov’s short story collection of the same name, the tale
features themes were also explored in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode
“The Measure of a Man.” Nimoy’s supporting role here–his second major sci-fi
appearance following a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone–still draws
raves some 45 years later. When the episode was remade for the 1990s updating
of The Outer Limits, Nimoy appeared as pro-robot attorney Thurman
Cutler. The episode’s director? His son, Adam. Fascinating.
9) Vincent
As Spock, Leonard
Nimoy would wrap up each day of shooting by removing his fake ears. As a
tortured genius, Vincent van Gogh cut off the lower part of his left earlobe.
So is it mere coincidence that Nimoy so fascinated by van Gogh? Um, yeah, it
probably is. Nevertheless, Nimoy’s respect for the artist resulted in a
memorable episode of In Search Of… as well as this one-man play about
the correspondence between Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo that Nimoy
directed and starred in. If you only know van Gogh as the dude who made that
poster with the stars you used to stare at while high in your college dorm, Vincent
is an essential primer to the post-impressionist’s life.
8) Baffled!
Exclamation point
alert! In the 1973 TV pilot Baffled!, Leonard Nimoy stars as a race car
driver who crashes after he experiences a psychic vision. Teaming up with a
believer in the occult (Susan Hampshire as a proto-Mulder), he is thrust into a
satanic adventure that pushes his otherworldly abilities to their limits. The
above opening credits sequence gives you a taste of the television wonderment
that is Baffled! Admit it; you swooned a little bit when you saw the
Nimoy running in slow-mo. There’s no shame in that. Baffled!
7) Transformers:
The Movie
When Orson Welles
went and died before Transformers: the Movie was released, his passing
took attention away from the fact that Leonard Nimoy fucks up all sorts of
Autobot shit as the voice of Galvatron. (Wasn’t Citizen Kane enough PR
for Welles? Attention whore). No disrespect to Frank Welker’s vocal work as
Megatron, but Nimoy portrays Galvatron with a menacing urgency that feels right
at home in a flick that revels in hardcore animated robot death.
6) The Three Men
and a Baby Ghost
As the director of Three
Men and a Baby, Leonard Nimoy is indirectly responsible for the classic
urban legend that the film features the ghost of a child who committed suicide.
It’s a great story for sure, but it doesn’t have a shred of truth to it. In the
heady days before you could debunk misinformation various blowhards in your
life spewed out by heading over to Snopes.com, this bit of bullshit spread like
wildfire. The above video meticulously analyzes the legend in more detail that
you would ever possibly want or need, but suffice to say people are stupid and
cardboard stand-ups of Ted Danson exist solely to fuck with you.
5) This Magnavox
Ad
A true product of
the MTV age, this ad from the early 1980s is lousy with shadows, quick cuts and
pseudo-symbolic imagery that probably seemed really deep to the commercial’s
coked up director. But it also features Nimoy rocking a porn stache and
flashing a Spockesque raised eyebrow that will have you running to eBay in
search of a Magnavox Star System color TV. Salesman, thy name is Nimoy.
4) Seaman
Gamers who yearned
to spend hours raising a sarcastic fishy thing got their wish when Seaman was
released for the Sega Dreamcast in 1999. The virtual pet title gave players the
opportunity to oversee the complete life cycle of a carp/human hybrid that was
more than just a little reminiscent of the talking fish from Monty Python’s
The Meaning of Life. Designed to be played for only minutes a day, the game
frustrated those expecting Tamagotchi-style instant gratification. Things got
even stranger once the Seaman began acting like an amateur psychologist and
bombarding players with personal questions that they were forced to answer via
the game’s included microphone. If you survived the shame of discussing your
relationship (or lack thereof) with Seaman and then managed to avoid
accidentally killing him, he would reach his final stage of evolution and beg
you to release him into the wild. At the start of every Seaman session,
the voice of narrator Leonard Nimoy would update you on your creature’s status.
Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still hear him telling me that “Gillman is
dead” without a hint of emotion. Damn you Nimoy, have you no compassion?
3) The Ballad of
Bilbo Baggins
William “Rocketman”
Shatner isn’t the only Star Trek cast member with musical skeletons in
his closet. This tribute to “the bravest little Hobbit of them all” originally
appeared on the Two Sides of Leonard Nimoy LP. As this song proves, one
of those sides is clearly fucking insane. Nevertheless, the tune’s Reese’s
Peanut Butter Cup-style fusion of Trek appeal with Tolkien worship made “The
Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” a defining moment in nerd rock.
2) The Simpsons’ “Marge vs. the
Monorail”
The Simpsons has been on the air now for what, 40 years?
Airing in the fourth season, Marge vs. the Monorail is arguably the
series’ finest moment. Written by Conan O’Brien, the episode features conman
Lyle Lanley (voiced by Phil Hartman) convincing the residents of Springfield
that a city-wide Monorail system is the answer to their woes. From the song and
dance interlude straight out of The Music Man to an opossum named Bitey,
the laughs are unrelenting. In a bit of cartoon kismet, Nimoy’s
self-deprecating cameo occurred only after transit advocate George Takei
decided not to participate in the episode. The cosmic ballet goes on…
1) In Search
Of…
The world is full of
mysterious shit, and there’s no one better to help sort it all out than Leonard
Nimoy. From 1976 to 1982, he brought Bigfoot, Nessie, the Bermuda Triangle and
poltergeists aplenty into living rooms across the country. No matter how
ridiculous the topic at hand was (psychic plants anyone?), he treated each
subject with reverence. Almost 30
years after the show left the airwaves, the majority of questions raised by the
show remain unanswered. Not that it matters. Besides, what fun would living in
a world without the possibility of Sasquatches be?The Brabus Company started to promote their new BRABUS PowerXtra D6 BLUE Power Kit that it is suitable for Mercedes E300 Bluetec and it can supply a power of 47 hp (35 kW). Not too bad, isn’t so?
The Mercedes E 300 BLUETEC with Brabus tuning stayed below permissible exhaust limits of EURO V by up to 65%.
The Brabus development team had made a special module for the electronic engine management system for Mercedes E300 Bluetec. BRABUS mapping is specifically calibrated to the environmentally friendly Bluetec concept that features an oxidation catalyst, particulate filter and Bluetec SCR catalyst.
If you are interested, you can buy this product for €1,790.
BRABUS PowerXtra D6 BLUE Power Kit
Tags: cars, cars engines, Brabus, power kit, Mercedes-Benz, Bluetec, electric cars, concept cars, car news
You may be interested in:A battle between leaders of the two parties over campaign finance rules intensified this week as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accused Republicans of flat-out threatening the Internal Revenue Service after they warned the agency not to tighten oversight of anonymous money groups misusing the tax code.
The squabble is about how forcefully to crack down on groups approved under special 501(c)(4) tax status by claiming to primarily engage in “social welfare,” but which pour significant resources into political activities. Democrats want a strict cap on how much money they may spend for politics; Republicans prefer the ambiguity of the status quo. Beneath the issue is a sea of anonymous spending in which pro-GOP groups are drowning Democrats.
By using 501(c)(4) status, these “political charities” are allowed to keep their donors anonymous, leaving voters unable to evaluate which interests might be funding ads or what their motives are.In March, Schumer and six Democratic colleagues sent IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman a letter asking for a “bright line test” for approval of tax-exempt status that imposes “a strict, percentage-based cap on the amount of a nonprofit group’s spending that can go towards political activities.”
“We urge the IRS to take these steps immediately to prevent abuse of the tax code by political groups focused on federal election activities,” the Democratic senators wrote. They continued that “if the IRS is unable to issue administrative guidance in this area then we plan to introduce legislation to accomplish these important changes.”
In response, 12 Republican senators — including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Finance Committee Ranking Member Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — sent the IRS a letter warning them not to do just that, arguing that stricter enforcement could get mired in a political agenda.
“It is critical that the public have confidence that federal tax compliance efforts are pursued in a fair, even-handed, and transparent manner — without regard to politics of any kind,” the Republican senators wrote.
Then on July 17, Shulman wrote to groups petitioning for the tighter oversight saying the IRS “will consider proposed changes” — like the ones Democrats called for — that “identify tax issues that should be addressed through regulations and other published guidance.”
On Monday, top Republican senators fired back, seeking an update from the IRS and warning the agency not to go there. “We believe these petitions have less to do with concerns about the sanctity of the tax code and more about setting the tone for the upcoming presidential election, and we urge you to resist allowing the IRS rulemaking process to be subverted to achieve partisan political gains,” they wrote in a letter.
That didn’t sit well with Schumer.
“The only thing missing from the Republicans’ letter is the ‘or else’. This unsubtle threat is clearly designed to put a chilling effect on the agency’s enforcement of the law,” the No. 3 Democratic senator said in a statement Monday afternoon. “The IRS should not be bullied into looking the other way when blatantly political groups are claiming non-profit status.”New York State Assemblymember Walter T. Mosley, with State Senator Ruben Diaz, is introducing legislation to make the illegal use of chokeholds a crime in New York State that extends to all, including police officers, his office announced in a memo on Monday.
The bill would amend the New York State Penal Law to “establish the crime of strangulation in the first degree.”
This legislation is in response to the recent death of Eric Garner, who passed away as a result of a chokehold while in police custody.
Currently, the use of a chokehold is an illegal form of restraint. But, according to Mosley, exceptions are made for police officers, who regularly use the tactic but are rarely punished.
“The NYPD already banned the chokehold as a means of force or restraint. However, they can be disregarded as being held under the same standards because they’re police officers, and they’re given another standard that regular people could not exercise,” Mosley told The Reader.
“The New York City Police Department has received over 1,000 [chokehold] complaints from residents over the past few decades. Yet, no one has ever been charged.
“With this bill, whether you’re a police officer or a layman, the use of a chokehold would be considered an assault in the first degree,” he said.Season 3 of Netflix's hit series “Last Chance U” is live, continuing its run of chronicling the lives of junior college football players.
The new season focuses on Jason Brown and the Independence Pirates in Independence, Kan., though the show's roots will always be at East Mississippi Community College. Both ICC and EMCC are landing spots for many talented — and often troubled — college football players who couldn’t quite make an impact in Div. I schools, whether it be for academics, lack of playing time or simple disagreements with coaching staffs.
MORE: Players you never knew went to EMCC
Regardless, Season 3 prompts the question: Where are the players who starred in "Last Chance U"?
Several players actually went on to Div. I schools — one even made it to the NFL — while others failed in their attempts. Here’s a look at what some of them are up to now:
Season 1: EMCC
John Franklin III, QB
EMCC’s backup QB in Season 1, John Franklin used his incredible showing in the last game of the 2015 season (accounting for 291 yards and six touchdowns) to land a spot on Auburn’s roster. He was less than impactful for the Tigers, however, completing 14 of 26 passes for 204 yards and a touchdown while rushing for 430 yards and two scores. Franklin transferred to FAU for 2017, completing 1 of 2 passes for 49 yards and rushing 229 yards and two touchdowns. Unfortunately for Franklin, he may be best remembered in Boca Raton for dropping the ball before crossing the goal line after a long run. He went undrafted out of FAU and is now transitioning to defensive back with the NFL's Chicago Bears.
Gary McCrae, OLB
McCrae, like John Franklin, made the jump from EMCC to a successful FBS program in 2016. Unlike Franklin, however, McCrae only appeared in two games at Louisville (against Charlotte and N.C. State), and did not register any stats. It wasn't much better for him in 2017, as he registered four tackles in limited playing time — most of it on special teams. He will enter his senior season with Louisville in 2018.
Wyatt Roberts, QB
EMCC’s starter at quarterback in 2015, Roberts did not receive any offers from Div. I schools, instead walking on at Mississippi State. He was not expected to compete for a job, instead coming on to get a head start on a coaching career. The Bulldogs have since settled on Nick Fitzgerald as their go-to signal-caller, though Roberts at least was on the 2016 roster. That was not the case in 2017. According to a May report from AthlonSports, Roberts got married in December, finished his degree online and has a job lined up at a steel mill in Columbus, Miss.
D.J. Law, RB
D.J. Law signed with UAB ahead of 2016 and went off in training camp, impressing Blazers coach Bill Clark. But a nagging knee injury caused him to undergo surgery and “miss” the 2016 season (he didn’t lose any eligibility since UAB didn’t play that season). He was expected to take a big role in the Blazers’ run game in 2017, but is no longer with the program. Clark intimated it was because of academic struggles, adding he is working with Law to figure out his next step in football: “Is it NAIA or Canada?”
Ronald Ollie, DT
The affable defensive tackle played for FCS program Nicholls State in 2016, recording 41 tackles (6.5 for loss) and two sacks. He has since been granted his release, and has one year of eligibility remaining in his college playing career. He was unable to find a place to compete on the FBS level and will return to Nicholls for his final season of eligibility in 2018.
SN's Top 25: QBs | RBs | Defensive players
Season 2: EMCC
Isaiah Wright, RB
Wright and his older brother, Camion Patrick, both of "Last Chance U" fame, were arrested in September 2017 and charged with criminal homicide in connection to a stabbing death in Alcoa, Tenn. Patrick was arrested in Bloomington, Ind., where he was a student after failing to continue his college football career due to several injuries. A judge dismissed the charges against Patrick, and Wright later reached a plea deal to have his charges dropped. He pled guilty to one count of facilitation of aggravated robbery, and received five years probation and time served.
Wright left EMCC after the 2016 season to enroll at West Georgia (where he later withdrew).
Brooks Shannon, WR
Shannon was expected to be a big part of the EMCC Lions' passing game in Season 2 — until he signed with Div. II school West Georgia in January. Shannon played in 11 games for the Wolves, nabbing 16 catches for 258 yards and a touchdown in an 8-3 season.
Dakota Allen, LB
Allen was kicked off Texas Tech after being charged with second-degree burglary. He became a stalwart at EMCC in 2016, helping the Lions to an 11-1 record. He later returned to Lubbock under coach Kliff Kingsbury, whose trust in Allen paid off big in 2017. He led the team with 102 tackles, two sacks and two interceptions. He'll be one of the Big 12's best defenders as a senior in 2018.
De'Andre Johnson, QB
The second Florida State quarterback to head to EMCC, Johnson spent one year in Scooba, Miss., after getting expelled for punching a woman in a bar. He later left for Florida Atlantic (again following Franklin's lead) where he spent most of the 2017 season on the sidelines dealing with complications from blood clots in his arm. He's expected to compete for the starting position in 2018 now that Jason Driskel is gone.
Vijay Miller, QB
Miller, the second-string quarterback in Season 2, is now playing baseball. He's currently playing in MLB as part of the San Diego Padres' minor league team. He was selected in the 14th round of the 2017 MLB Draft.
Chauncey Rivers, DT
Rivers came from Georgia after a string of marijuana-related arrests. He finished his time at EMCC and transferred to Mississippi State, where he had to sit out the 2017 season due to being academically ineligible. He should find a way to get into the Bulldogs' rotation in 2018.
MORE: Ranking college coaches 1-130 in 2018
Season 3: Independence Community College
Malik Henry, QB
Henry was the third quarterback to leave Florida State for community college, though he deviated from Franklin and Johnson in choosing Independence over EMCC. Henry and ICC coach Jason Brown got in several disputes during the 2017 season, the former saying he felt he was "better than this." He finished the season with roughly 1,300 passing yards and 10 touchdowns. He completed his junior college requirements but is still awaiting an offer from a Division I program.
Carlos Thompson, WR
Thompson was a bright spot on Season 3, buying into the team after early struggles and several clashes with Brown. He caught 48 passes for 544 yards and three touchdowns at Independence in 2017. Because his five years of Division I eligibility was up (he played for Texas Tech in 2013) he was ineligible to receive an offer from that level of play. He instead signed with Division II program Missouri Western State.
Rakeem Boyd, RB
A former three-star running back recruit at Texas A&M who didn't see the field in 2016 because of academic issues. He battled for the Pirates' starting running back position, eventually pulling away from his competition to rush for 1,211 yards and 14 touchdowns. He signed with Arkansas at season's end.
Kingston Davis, RB
The Michigan transfer had hoped to get more looks at Independence after struggling with injuries and lack of playing time with the Wolverines. He was plagued with ball-security issues at Independence, however, and eventually left the program feeling he'd wasted a year there. He signed with UAB.
Emmit Gooden, DT
Gooden was arguably one of Independence's best defensive players, racking up 81 tackles and a sack in 2017. He had a knack for late hits and personal fouls at Independence, though that apparently wasn't a big-enough hangup for Tennessee, which signed him at the end of the season.
Bobby Bruce, LB
Bruce, a talented player who had several academic and behavioral issues at Independence, was arrested for burglary over the summer. He is not expected back at Independence.
Kerry Buckmaster, OL
Buckmaster used Independence as a means of escaping a home life that saw his mother in jail and father using drugs. He maintained a close relationship with his father in Season 3 and overcame an injury to his right shoulder to transfer to Division II program Lindenwood University in Missouri.A new poll conducted by Public Policy Polling and released by the Marijuana Policy Project finds that 53 percent of West Virginians support legalizing medical marijuana for "seriously and terminally ill patients" who have a doctor's recommendation. The poll also finds that 63 percent of West Virginians think marijuana is a "safer treatment for debilitating pain" than Oxycontin, abuse of which has been rampant in Appalachia for over a decade.
MPP's announcement of the poll results included the news that West Virginia state Rep. Mike Manypenny will introduce medical marijuana legislation in 2013.
Considering how hard the state's been hit by prescription drug abuse, majority support for legalizing any drug is a big deal. But the real surprise is in the crosstabs:
When it comes to decriminalization of recreational pot, legalization of medical pot, and the drug's safety compared to Oxy, millennials and baby boomers are practically on the same page. When the 65+ crowd ages off the planet, will there be any generation-wide resistance to pot?Former Tulsa Police Officer Shannon Kepler's third murder trial ends in a mistrial.
After hours of deliberation, the jury was deadlocked 6-6.
A judge had decided to allow the jury in a former Tulsa police officer's third murder trial to consider a lesser charge if it will lead to a guilty verdict.
Shannon Kepler was charged with first-degree murder for shooting and killing his daughter's boyfriend Jeremey Lake in 2014. Kepler has gone to trial twice already, and both trials ended in hung juries.
Judge Sharon Holmes told the jury Friday that they will be allowed to consider the lesser charge of manslaughter. It has been argued that Kepler shot Lake in the "heat of passion," though the defense argued that Kepler shot him in self-defense because he feared Lake had a gun.
This is a developing story.Amidst calls for Christians to catch up with the times and be more like the world around them, Pope Francis said Wednesday that Jesus “was not one to adapt to the world” but came rather to transform it.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is an ongoing challenge to the world rather than a mirror of society, Francis suggested in his weekly General Audience before a crowd of tens of thousands gathered in Saint Peter’s Square.
“Jesus is not one to adapt to the world, tolerating that death, sadness, hatred and the moral destruction of the person should endure in it… Our God is not inert, but dreams of the transformation of the world, and He brought it about in the mystery of the Resurrection,” he said.
In every generation, Christians must struggle with the question of how far they should adapt to the ways of the world, and in what ways they should remain distinct from it.
As the “world” embraces same-sex marriage, abortion on demand, radical individualism, sexual libertinism and materialistic consumerism, Christians hold up God’s vision for the human person and society, which calls the world to a higher standard.
The Pope’s words Wednesday seemed to echo the thought of Saint Paul, who wrote in his letter to Christians in Rome: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Jesus himself told his followers that they must be like the salt of the earth, not just blending in but conferring a distinct flavor to the world around them.
“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot,” He said.
During his trip to Fatima, Portugal, last weekend, Pope Francis reminded all Christians and people of good will that human choices and actions have eternal consequences.
In her appearance at Fatima, the Virgin Mary “foresaw and warned us of the risk of hell where a godless life that profanes Him in his creatures will lead,” Francis said during the canonization Mass Saturday. Such a life is “frequently proposed and imposed,” he said.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsromeOver 90% of the questions I’m asked at the gym or via email are about the best weight lifting routine to get huge and strong. How many sets, reps, drop sets, super sets, rest time, frequency, duration etc…?
My answer is always the same. It doesn’t matter You don’t grow in the gym, you grow at the dinner table.
It’s never the training routine that’s limiting growth, it’s always the recovery phase, eating and sleeping. The vast majority of people who want to get bigger and stronger already train hard enough to grow, they just don’t eat and sleep enough to grow. They carry a notebook and want to show me every rep and set of every workout and routine they’ve done for the past three years, but there’s not one page with a record of their meals. I feel bad for them because I know they work hard in the gym and they rarely miss a workout, but the notebook just documents all the muscle they’ve broken down and has no record of what they’ve been doing to build it up. I know because I did it myself. When I started college nearly 30 years ago there was no Internet and few reliable resources to find information about getting big and strong. I started lifting two hours a day, six days a week, doing endless sets and reps of every exercise in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding. I struggled to put on five pounds a year until I finally came across an experienced lifter who told me I was wasting my time with all that lifting and told me to go home and eat. By cutting my training back to an hour three days a week and hiking my calories up to over 5,000 a day, I was able to put on 20 pounds in less than a year!
In the book outliers, they speak of the 10,000 hour rule as the necessary amount of time to become an expert at any given sport. It doesn’t apply to bodybuilding or powerlifting. PowerBuilding is not a skill like pitching a baseball, sinking a three pointer, hitting a golf ball or even playing the piano. Those pursuits require thousands of hours of practice to perfect the motor skills necessary to become an expert. PowerBuilding is very different. Lifting weights is not a skill (Olympic lifting not withstanding), it is simply a stimulus for size and strength, and it doesn’t actually build muscle, it just breaks down muscle. And lifting light weights that don’t force the body to adapt provide little to no stimulus at all for growth. Don’t get me wrong, walking around the neighborhood and doing a few curls with the pink rubber hand weights is great for your mom to stay healthy, but you’ll never get huge and strong doing her workout – I don’t care how many hours a day you do it!!
It really is this simple:
Lift heavy weights three times a week for an hour. Eat lots of food and sleep as much as you can.
That’s it. There’s nothing more to add. I’d love to be able to just stop there and trust that the person asking the question will do exactly those two things and get huge and strong.
But, there’s always a million nit picky questions to follow, the answers to which really make very little difference. People have become well informed and read everything they can about the sport, so they want to hear me confirm or negate every last theory, belief, bias, research study, proposal, hunch, testimonial and Dr. Oz episode they’ve ever watched. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. It’s always a good idea to educate yourself and keep track of your training and diet, but there is no holy grail. Using a bunch of words nobody understands and trying to explain to yourself or others every detail of the Krebs cycle has very little effect on your progress.
I’m as bad as anyone about trying to learn all the latest training and nutritional information, but I understand that 99% of progress comes from those 2 simple rules: Lift heavy weights and eat and sleep a lot. Therefore, I don’t let myself stray from the basics and I don’t waste half my time chasing the 1%, I spend most of my time and effort making sure I’m doing the 99% as hard and as consistent as I can. Train heavy, eat and sleep. Repeat.
What is heavy? Don’t over complicate the answer. If its too easy, add more weight. Repeat.
How much is enough food? If you’re not gaining muscle, eat more. Repeat.
Sure, if you try to lift too much weight with horrible technique, you’ll get hurt. Duh!
Sure, if you eat hot dogs and pizza all day, you’ll get fat. Duh!
Beyond that, don’t get caught up with all the details spewed out of the mouths of every card-carrying-weekend-online-personal-training certificate holder trying to tell you that you HAVE to keep your elbows tucked to your sides, arms perpendicular to the floor, don’t go past ninety degrees, slightly bend at the knees, breathe in, now breathe out, don’t lock out, two seconds on the way down, four seconds on the way up, 10 more, 9, 8, good, 7, 6 more, you can do it … Somebody shoot me in my “$&@:/#” face so I don’t have to listen to that any more!
Likewise, don’t stock up on bags of shiitake mushrooms, seaweed and fish eyes because you heard Japanese people eat it and they live longer. They live longer because they have 1/10 the obesity rate of Americans so the fish eyes aren’t the answer, just stop being a fat ass and you won’t drop from a heart attack four years before a Japanese person!
Don’t chase the 1%, there is no magic training routine or diet that’s going to provide any measurable results over the basic principles for getting huge and strong: Train heavy, eat and sleep more.
Again, I should stop there because I don’t care if I piss off the wanna-be’s and know-it-alls we hear advising everyone who mistakenly comes within earshot of these self proclaimed experts and perennial advisers of the masses, but I know there’s some very hard working and passionate lifters out there who are struggling to get better results and need just a little more to chew on so they don’t keep wasting endless hours in the gym and untold dollars on the latest worthless pill or potion at the store.
For them, I will peel back one more layer of this simple recipe for results, but don’t be disappointed when you see behind the curtain and find out the Wizard of Oz has no magic powers. You’ll see it’s all common-sense stuff you already know and it boils down to hard work, discipline and consistency.
1 Train heavy
Hypertrophy is best achieved in the 5-10 rep range. Lift the heaviest weight you can handle for at least 5 reps and if you can lift it more than 10 times, increase the weight. Google “Dorian Yates Workouts” to learn all about “growth sets” so you understand that maximum intensity provides the stimulus for muscles to grow, not endless reps and sets. For example, If you’re doing incline dumbbell presses and you do 10 reps with the 60’s, then ten reps with the 70’s, then 10 reps with the 80’s, then finally go to failure |
say definitively is that Satchel Paige pitched at the highest level of baseball for longer than any pitcher had ever done before, any pitcher ever did after and than any pitcher is ever likely to do in the history of baseball,” said Tye.
45 years ago today, the man known as Satchel got the call to join the elite of the National Pastime. From those who knew him, and those who played against him, it’s clear that he should be remembered and considered as one of the greatest of all-time.
Ryan Mayer is an Associate Producer for CBS Local Sports. Ryan lives in NY but comes from Philly and life as a Philly sports fan has made him cynical. Anywhere sports are being discussed, that’s where you’ll find him.New Westminster Police have issued a warning to the public after the driver of a suspicious van approached a young woman on Tuesday, March 8.
According to police, the male driver of the van approached the woman in the 200 block of 3rd Avenue, when he asked her to get inside as he opened the driver's door. The woman refused, and ran away.
The driver is described as:
A Caucasian male in his 50's or 60's
Grey hair, grey beard and moustache
Was wearing a straw cowboy hat.
The suspect vehicle was described as an older model red panel van.
The NWPD Major Crime Unit increased patrols in the area, and police describe the case as a priority investigation.
Police ask anyone with information to contact the NWPD Major Crime Unit at 604‐525‐5411.Now that you know how to import data and examine it, it’s time to get to the meat of RapidMiner: building a Process. And when you’re building a Process, the Design screen becomes really important.
Open RapidMiner, and if it doesn’t go straight to the Design page, click on the Design tab at the top right.
We’re going to work with a different data set than before, so download that by right-clicking here. Go through the process from our previous tutorial to pull that into your data repository. Once it’s there, click and drag the new dataset into the main work area and we’re in business.
In order to get through this tutorial we’ll first need to talk about Operators. The idea behind Operators is that they are little “black boxes” that perform a given function on the data you send through them. What makes RapidMiner so powerful is that you can combine these Operators (and the functions they perform) in so many different permutations. You can run them one after another in series, line them up to run in parallel, or any combination of the two.
Operators come in several varieties. There are ones that change your data based on criteria you specify (for example, if you need to clean data prior to analysis). There are Operators to output your data in various formats. And of course there are Operators that relate to statistical models: Regressions, Classifiers, etc.
Take a moment to browse through the folders in the “Operators” pane at the top left, and you’ll get a good idea of the various functions RapidMiner can perform on your data. When you realize that you can stack these in almost any logical combination, it should sink in how powerful a tool this really is. Go ahead and browse; I’ll wait.
Done? Good. What we’re going to do today is take the customer data from our new dataset and use it “segment” our customer base; to separate them into clusters based on things they have in common. Why would we want to do that? More efficient marketing comes to mind. Rather than send a mailer to everyone, why not just send it to the group of people who are most like to use it?
In order to segment our customers, we’ll need an Operator that performs some means of clustering. K-means is good for this, so we’ll go into the “Modeling –> Clustering and Segmentation” folder and drag the K-means Operator into the main design screen, like so:
Now pull a line from the output of the “Retrieve” Operator and to the input of the “Clustering” Operator. Do the same with the top output of “Clustering” and the “res” nub at the top right of the design window.
In the “Parameters” window tell the Operator we want six clusters (the “k” field). We’ll also tell it to add a “Cluster” attribute in the data to identify which cluster RapidMiner decided each row belongs to.
Click the blue “play” triangle at the top of the page to get the process to run, and……..oops. We’ve got a problem:
K-means expects numerical data to work with, and our ID field is not numerical. We don’t really need the ID field for what we’re doing, so we can just get rid of it. Pull the “Select Attributes” operator into the design area and drop it between our data and the Clustering Operator. The connections should automatically adjust. In the “Parameters” window at the top right, select “Single” in “attribute filter type” since we only want to select one attribute, then choose “id” to select it. Since we want to exclude ID rather than include it, check the “invert selection” box. Now the “ID” field will be missing from the data we pass on to the K-means Operator. Problem solved. Push the Play button to run the process again.
OK, still not quite there. Turns out K-means doesn’t like terms such as “Male”, “Female”, “Yes” and “No” either. We need those, so we can’t just exclude them. How do we fix this?
We’ll need to transform that data from text to numbers (for example, 1 for Yes, 0 for No). To do that we’ll use the “Nominal to Numerical” Operator. Drag and drop it between the “Select Attributes” and “Clustering” Operators and again the connections should automatically adjust. Your Process should now look like this:
Hit the blue play button to run the process and this time it should work. You’ll be taken to the results screen where you can see what K-means has done with our data:
We can see that RapidMiner formed six clusters just as we asked, but how did it group our customers? What criteria did it use? In order to discover that we’ll need to click on the “Centroid Table” tab to the left.
Now we can see more detail about our six clusters. For example, Cluster 3 is composed of mostly married, inner-city dwelling males who all have savings accounts. Age seems to play a major role in all of our clusters, as the average age differs dramatically across them.
Congratulations, you’ve just segmented a customer base. See what else you can do by experimenting with various Operators. Have fun!Originally Appeared at German Economic News. Translated from the German by Susan Neumann.
Numerous well-known AKP supporters have launched a campaign against the head of the Turkish Air Force in Turkey. It's claimed that he could have shot down the Russian jet without the knowledge and approval of the President. Members of Erdogan’s government are calling for the resignation of the Commander General.
According to the Turkish newspaper Sözcü, several Twitter accounts which have over the years been used to campaign against critics of the AKP government, are now railing against the Commander General of the Turkish Air Force, Abidin Ünal.
The argument is that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan didn’t know about the launch command against the Russian jet, but found out about it after the fact. The Air Force chief is said to have acted on his own and is accused of intentionally compromising Turkish-Russian relations. He’s referred to in the social media as "incompetent loser" who hides behind Erdogan's back, afraid to admit his guilt. Twitter users demand the immediate resignation of Ünal, according to the news portal Haberarti Türk.
The argument presented by the AKP-friendly Twitter users is incomprehensible because Erdogan had already said publicly that he was the one who had given the order to shoot down the plane. Under Turkish law, the President is the supreme commander of the Turkish Armed Forces. Apparently Commander General Abidin Ünal is going to serve as the fall guy to help take pressure off Turkish-Russian relations.
Erdogan had consistently tried to contact Putin in recent weeks to arrange a meeting with him. Putin categorically refused each of Erdogan’s requests and demanded an apology him (video at the beginning of the article). However, Erdogan says there is nothing to apologize for. The Russian pilots should have simply reacted to the warnings.
Yet Putin has also made a move towards Erdogan. On Tuesday the Kremlin sharply criticized the anti-Turkish violence in Russia.The Canadian government says it will not be bullied as the United States ratchets up pressure on Canada's heavily protected dairy sector ahead of what could be the final round of talks for a Pacific Rim trade deal spanning 12 countries.
More than 20 members of U.S. Congress have written a letter to the Canadian government accusing it of being "unwilling to seriously engage in market access discussions regarding dairy" during Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, by which they mean opening up Canada's sheltered milk, cheese and dairy industry to significant new foreign competition.
The challenge expands on recent comments from U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, his country's top negotiator, who has repeatedly prodded Ottawa to produce a "meaningful offer" and reveal to the United States what kind of agriculture concessions it will make.
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In their letter, the 21 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including Paul Ryan, chair of the influential ways and means committee, suggest Canada's protectionist dairy industry is unfinished business from the 1988 Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement and the 1992 North American free-trade deal.
"It is critical that Canada finally commit to finishing the work left undone in our prior agreements and finally commit to significant and commercially meaningful market access for all remaining agricultural products," said the letter, which was delivered last week to Gary Doer, Canada's ambassador to the United States.
A spokesman for Canadian International Trade Minister Ed Fast brushed off the congressional missive.
"We see this as another tactic to negotiate through the media," said Rick Roth, director of communications for Mr. Fast. "We'll negotiate at the negotiating table, and frankly, we won't be bullied into negotiating this through the media."
Next week, trade ministers from 12 countries including Canada, the United States, Japan, Malaysia and Australia gather in Maui, Hawaii, where Washington and Tokyo will push hard to reach a deal in principle. The United States and Japan have been conducting one-on-one talks as part of the transpacific negotiations and are expected to announce they have concluded in the days ahead, although a Canadian government source said Washington and Tokyo must still reach agreement on trade in auto exports and parts.
Chief negotiators for each country, including Canada's Kirsten Hillman, are starting this new round of talks on July 24 in Maui, four days before trade ministers arrive, in hopes of narrowing differences sufficiently that elected officials will be able to reach a deal.
The timing of the talks is bad for the Conservative government, which heads to the polls in October. Tariffs of as much as 300 per cent shield Canadian dairy and poultry farmers from foreign competitors. A rise in imports could mean cheaper chicken, milk and cheese for consumers. It could also destabilize the supply-management system, which tightly regulates the price and production of milk, chicken and eggs, endangering farm incomes.
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The U.S. dairy lobby expects major new access to Canadian markets as part of any TPP deal and it applauded the message from the members of Congress.
"The sentiment is that if Canada cannot come forward with part of a meaningful offer on dairy and poultry, then perhaps Canada is not prepared to be part of TPP," said Jaime Castaneda, senior vice-president of trade policy with the U.S. Dairy Export Council.
Canada has defended itself by saying countries traditionally reveal what concessions they will make in politically sensitive sectors at the 11th hour of talks. Mr. Castaneda said a substantive back-and-forth discussion usually happens beforehand. "You don't wait until the last minute to do an entire negotiation," he said.
He would not divulge precisely what U.S. milk producers want from Canada, but said the market access that Ottawa offered the European Union in a recently concluded trade deal is insufficient. In that 2014 agreement, Ottawa granted the EU the right to import 17,700 additional tonnes of cheese without paying steep tariffs. Mr. Castaneda said that level of access "is not enough."
The Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, which are expected to create a free-trade zone that would eclipse NAFTA in importance, are ambitious. Contentious issues that remain include agriculture, intellectual-property rights and how far states should go in protecting innovations such as medicines as well as the rights and obligations of state-owned enterprises when they operate in other countries.
Mr. Fast appears in no hurry to cut a deal and says he cannot predict whether the Hawaii gathering will produce an agreement. Last week, Japan's Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy Akira Amari raised the possibility of concluding without one or two of the negotiating countries. Mr. Amari would not name the countries, but Japanese-based news services cited sources identifying Canada as one laggard.Sign in
Apology == About the malicious tweak situation: I was mad because I felt like my content was stolen, which led me to say I’d be getting revenge, which was gonna merely be making all my tweaks conflict with this developer’s, but it wasn’t taken lightly, and soon I was banned from all jailbreaking related stuff except the reddit sub. I soon got mad and had a discussion with windexi, which he took the wrong way, because there was something that we both knew I could have released, that isn’t something that should be public, and he believed I was gonna release it to EndUniverse repository. I don’t blame anyone for the speculation, I was being very mysterious. Anyways, shit went down, I got doxed, and people were being VERY racist and mean in PMs, and sending death threats, calling my phone and saying fuck you and all of that shit, and it made me mad, which is why I responded the way I did. Now, the Priority Hub situation, was that my repository had all tweaks hidden (about 60) by the repository administrators, where I then took them out of hiding, but accidentally took Priority Hub out, so people thought I had messed with it. That claim is infact false, and you can throw the tweak in a disassembler, or verify hash sums of it. The person who posted the post didn’t test the tweet and was just throwing speculation, which is ending up to be false. Please do not believe the false or the hate. Now, all that’s left I can possibly do is to apologize, apologize for my insensitiveness, apologize for my bootlooping tweak, apologize for my threats, apologize for my slander, apologize for everything I’ve done wrong. I don’t even know if I can say I’m sorry, since I’ve said it, and done shit over again, just like a bad person. I don’t even know what you should view of me, since I’ve just hit rock bottom. Thanks for reading this post, and I guess I’m staying banned from r/jailbreak because of the false accusations. If you'd like to talk to me or send some death threats my way, just hmu: Twitter: @DillanCodez Skype: mcmatters123 Discord: https://discord.gg/22y47ec or, if you can find it, my phone number.RIAA: The Copyright Reform We Need Is To Make Everyone Else Copyright Cops
from the they-just-don't-get-it dept
The RIAA is gearing up for the big copyright reform battle doing the only thing it knows: whining that everyone else won't fix its own broken business model. Despite heavy budget cuts and layoffs, the RIAA hasn't yet realized that singing the same old debunked song isn't a winner. It's claiming that the DMCA's safe harbors are broken and need to be fixed. It's really quite incredible. They talk how they've sent 20 million DMCA takedowns to Google, and then complain that the process isn't working. Seems odd, then, that they would send so many. Perhaps they should have knocked it off earlier, and focused on things likeBut, that's not how the RIAA functions.Rather than having a useful employee, like a VP of new business models, the RIAA has a VP of anti-piracy (I actually believe they have a few), and one of them, Brad Buckles, wrote the latest misleading screed against the safe harbors. The short version is basically: everyone else needs to prop up our business models by randomly taking down content that might, possibly be infringing. Of course, this makes no logical sense, no matter how much the RIAA wants to play pretend. Already, we see stories practically every day about how the copyright holders themselves -- including the RIAA -- send bogus DMCA takedowns all the time. And those are the guys who areAnd yet they magically expect some third party, who has no idea if the content was put up in an authorized manner or not to make that determination for them? Really? Do they not realize (or not care) what a massive chilling effect that would have on innovation? If service providers are required to proactively guess at what is infringing and what's not -- and face liability for guessing wrong -- then the obvious is going to happen: a lot less innovation in any service that includes user generated content. The risk of liability would be way too high. That may not matter to the RIAA, who has never been a fan of the internet, but it sure as hell matters to the public, who has received tremendous value from the internet. I'd also imagine it matters quite a bit to tons of musicians who are not a part of the RIAA machine, who now use the internet to have a better career than they ever had under the old system.So, here's a suggestion for the RIAA, while they're laying off a bunch of staffers (despite giving boss Cary Sherman a hefty raise to $1.5 million per year). Maybe layoff the "anti-piracy" team -- since clearly that's not working for you -- and hire a "new business model" or "innovation" team, and give them a shot to help your members.
Filed Under: copyright, copyright reform, dmca, notice and takedown, safe harbors
Companies: riaaGeorges St-Pierre is not impressed with the lack of support from the UFC.
The welterweight champ has always been one to put on a big, wide grin and say all of the right things, but behind closed doors, his relationship with the UFC may not be as strong as originally thought.
During an interview with La Presse, which was translated by BJPenn.com, St-Pierre admitted he was “very disappointed” with the lack of support from his employer. While he was hesitant to fully divulge the troubling issue at hand, he suggested journalists were smart enough to read between the lines:
The only thing is that I do not know if they [UFC] are willing to support me. I thought they were ready to support me, but I was disappointed, very disappointed with this turn of events…There are things I can not say. I do not want to get back to the UFC because it is my employer. However, I do not take journalists for idiots. They are able to read between the lines. They are able to see what happens.
As the UFC’s biggest pay-per-view star, St-Pierre’s relationship with the promotion has been relatively smooth sailing since he joined in January 2004.
What “turn of events” might he be alluding to?
St-Pierre’s disappointment with the UFC appears to be a result of the whole VADA and WADA debacle with upcoming UFC 167 opponent Johny Hendricks.
As UFC champion, St-Pierre has been accused in the past by several opponents for using steroids. In an effort to eradicate those accusations and clean up the sport’s image, he suggested to Hendricks that they both sign up for the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association [VADA] to undergo random testing for performance-enhancing drugs before their November 16 bout.
St-Pierre even offered to pay for all of the testing out of his own pocket, which was expected to run him about $16,000.
Hendricks was initially onboard, but he quickly retracted from the gentleman’s agreement after a sneaking suspicion that St-Pierre was in league with VADA. During an appearance on The MMA Hour, he told Ariel Helwani that he had no problem undergoing pre-fight testing, but he would much rather “go to WADA, the world Olympic testing.”
St-Pierre fired back a few weeks later on The MMA Hour, claiming “there was no such thing” as WADA testing. Rather, WADA is only an “organization that makes the guidelines.”
In a nutshell, an initial gentleman’s agreement basically led to a confusing battle of acronyms between both sides, which in turn led to nothing.
St-Pierre is likely frustrated with the idle play of UFC President Dana White.
Instead of backing St-Pierre’s vision for stricter testing, White called the entire agreement “a little weird” at a charity event in Boston, according to MMAJunkie.com.
He likely furthered the growing wedge between him and the champ by claiming that the entire ordeal makes both St-Pierre and Hendricks “look stupid,” during an appearance on Fox Sports Google Hangout. The comment wasn’t meant as an insult towards St-Pierre. White just doesn’t believe going the extra mile with VADA testing is necessary when a standard procedure test is already in place:
I think it makes them both look stupid. These guys are going to get tested by the athletic commission," White told reporters on Fox Sports Google Hangout. This is something that Georges St-Pierre wants to prove to everybody, because for years, people have been saying [he's using PEDs]. When he fought B.J. [Penn], B.J. talked smack about him. Other people have talked stuff. The kid, not only is he another guy that's been with us since day one, he's never tested positive for anything even remotely close to anything bad. He's never tested positive for anything. He's always been a straight shooter and always professional, yet people keep talking smack about him. I just think it's crazy for him to even do this.
St-Pierre has defended the UFC welterweight title for a record eight times, and he has never tested positive for any banned substances in his professional career.
Is this simply a case of the champ doing too much to appease critics?The NFL recently announced the five finalists for the 2013 Pepsi Next NFL Rookie of the Year award. Fans can vote for one of these five players on www.nfl.com/rookies through Tuesday, January 28.
The finalists are:
Keenan Allen, wide receiver for the San Diego Chargers
Allen started 14 games for San Diego and helped the Chargers to a 9-7 record and a Wild Card berth in the AFC playoffs. He set the team record for the most receiving yards by a rookie in a season (1,046), surpassing John Jefferson’s mark of 1,001 yrads set in 1978. As the Chargers’ leading receiver, he became the first rookie in the NFL since A.J. Green in 2011 to eclipse 1,000 yards. Allen had 71 receptions and tied Eddie Royal for the team lead with eight touchdown catches.
Kiko Alonso, linebacker for the Buffalo Bills
Alonso, a second-round draft pick (46th overall) out of Oregon, played every defensive snap for the Bills this season. He ranked third in the NFL with 159 tackles and finished first in fan voting at the linebacker position for the Pro Bowl. Alonso’s career-high 22 tackles against Cincinnati in Week 6 were the second-most tackles by a player in a single game this season.
Giovani Bernard, running back for the Cincinnati Bengals
Bernard, drafted in the second round (37th overall) out of North Carolina, finished the season with 170 carries for 695 yards and five touchdowns. He was instrumental in helping lead Cincinnati (11-5) to an AFC North division title and a perfect 8-0 record at home. Bernard had 148 yards from scrimmage in the Bengals’ 42-28 victory against Indianapolis in Week 14.
Eddie Lacy, running back for the Green Bay Packers
Lacy, a University of Alabama product who was selected as the 61st overall pick, helped lead the Green Bay Packers (8-7-1) to their third straight division title and fifth consecutive postseason appearance. Lacy finished the season with 284 carries for 1,178 yards and 11 touchdowns, setting franchise rookie records in all three categories. He rushed for a career-high 150 yards on 22 carries in a Week 9 matchup against the division rival Chicago Bears.
Cordarrelle Patterson, wide receiver for the Minnesota Vikings
Patterson, selected in the first round (29th overall) of the 2013 NFL Draft, set a Vikings record for most kickoff return yards in a season with 1,393 and was selected to the 2014 NFL Pro Bowl as a return specialist. He finished his rookie campaign with 45 receptions for 469 yards and four touchdowns, adding 158 rushing yards and three scores. He tallied five receptions for 141 yards and a touchdown, and added 111 kick-return yards for the Vikings against Baltimore in Week 14.PHOENIX -- Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie said that if everything works out with Carson Wentz, there can be a book written on everything that went into the eventual acquisition of the quarterback. By the sounds of it, their pre-draft notes alone would get them at least halfway home.
“It was a very detailed, involved process,” said Lurie on Tuesday from the NFL’s owners meetings. “Very detailed. Multiple workouts. The testing was psychologically, medically, in every way you can imagine, in ways you’ve never even heard of.... Eighty pages of reports.”
Speaking publicly for the first time in a year, Lurie revealed new anecdotes about the lead-up to drafting Wentz at No. 2 overall. He pointed to the team’s trip to North Dakota as a defining moment in what turned into an aggressive pursuit of the signal-caller.
The intelligence, talent and leadership qualities of Carson Wentz have team owner Jeffrey Lurie pumped about the Eagles' future. "I couldn't be more excited about the direction of the franchise," he said. AP Photo/Patrick Semansky
“I’m sitting in the room in North Dakota, and they are grilling Carson for a long time. And after the meeting, Carson leaves and they all look at each other, and [coach] Doug [Pederson], [offensive coordinator] Frank [Reich], [quarterbacks coach] John [DeFilippo], they start talking and they each ask each other: ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’ Have you ever seen anything like this mentally in terms of what they challenged him to do? And the answer was yes, but extremely rarely. I won’t mention who, but it’s somebody we all hope he becomes.”
Pederson has already called Wentz’s preparation “Peyton Manning-ish” and said Wentz reminds him “a little bit of Brett Favre, honestly.” Reich said physically Wentz was like a blend of Jim Kelly and Andrew Luck.
Lurie tried to avoid going overboard in his assessment of Wentz, noting that one encouraging season does not a career make, but it’s as clear as ever that the front office is giddy about potentially hitting on a gem.
Lurie called the QB’s personality and leadership qualities “special” and believes “all the ingredients are there with Carson,” including physical ability and intelligence.
“He’s got a way with his teammates that’s impressive,” Lurie said. “He’s a humble person, very talented young man, humble and hard-working to the core. I think we’ve seen guys come into the league that have that, and you hope he’s one of those because the best quarterbacks in this league lead from hard work and being humble and they’re very smart.”
Lurie revealed that the Eagles tried very hard to acquire the top overall pick in last April’s draft, but it was the Rams who struck a deal with the Tennessee Titans. Top personnel executive Howie Roseman and Co. were able to ascertain that the Rams were going to draft Jared Goff, and the wheels were set in motion to make a deal with the Cleveland Browns for the second overall pick. It is a move that Lurie hopes will lead to a storybook ending.
“I give our guys a tremendous amount of credit for identifying a very special player and person and athlete who has a lot of the ingredients we’re looking for," Lurie said. "We made the move, the rest is history and we’ll see how it all plays out over the years because you never know. You don’t fool yourself into thinking you have something until it all happens and it all gets put together. But just as an owner, I couldn’t be more excited about the direction of the franchise.”My Facebook feed has been blowing up this week with posts raving about a solar panel system designed to be embedded into roads, driveways and other driveable surfaces. The story links to a video produced for an Indigogo fundraising campaign called Solar Roadways. Here's that video:
The campaign has raised more than $1.5 million as of publication of this post, well over the million-dollar goal. More than 38,000 people have contributed to that total.
At the expense of being labeled a crotchety old man (at the ripe old age of 36), let me state here for the record that I think this project is a bunch of smoke and mirrors and will fail hard. The Solar Roadways project has been kicking around since 2006 and has been collecting thoughtful detractors all the way (while failing to raise any kind of meaningful investment capital to implement their plans). Treehugger’s Lloyd Alter was pointing out the project’s flaws way back in 2009 and Jeremy Elton Jacquot did it even earlier than that in 2007. Lloyd’s post has a bunch of links to other writers’ takedowns of the concept.
The main arguments against Solar Roadways boil down to:
• The panels would cost too much both as a solar panel and as a road surface.
• They won’t produce enough energy relative to conventional solar panels.
• There is no shortage of space to mount solar panels, so no need to embed them in the road.
• They are a maintenance nightmare compared to conventional road surfaces.
In short, they are a (bad) solution in search of a problem. Even if they could do everything they purport to do, there is no need for them.
I think it’s unfortunate that thousands of people are throwing good money after this bad project, and I want to help shed a little light on the situation. In that spirit, I decided to run through the "Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways!" video second-by-second with some commentary.
0:00 || Intro: It’s catchy and well produced, you gotta give them that.
0:12 || What is it? “It’s technology that replaces all roadways, parking lots, sidewalks, driveways, tarmacs, bike paths, and outdoor recreation surfaces with solar panels.”
OK, so that sets the scope of the project. They want to replace all of those surfaces with their product. According to the Federal Highway Administration, there are a little more than 4 million miles of roads in the United States. There are somewhere around 1 billion parking spaces in the U.S., and who knows how many square miles of sideways, driveways, tarmacs, bike paths and recreational surfaces. We’re talking about a lot of surface space.
00:26 || “No more useless asphalt and concrete just sitting there baking in the sun needing to be repaved and filling with potholes that ruin your axle alignment on your sweet ride bro.”
So these solar panel modules will never break or need to be replaced?
0:36 || “These are intelligent solar panels replaced a panel at a time if they are damaged or malfunctioning.”
What’s more expensive? A blinged-up LED-embedded solar panel or a bucket of asphalt? Unfortunately we don’t know exactly how wide the difference is because Solar Roadways has not released any numbers in terms of costs, but I’ll take a stab in the dark that the solar modules are going to be MUCH more expensive than a bucket of asphalt. This matters. If a square foot of road costs 10, 20, or 40 times more to cover with solar panels than asphalt, then it will never get covered with solar panels, even if there is a purported multi-decade payoff period for the panels.
00:40 || “They’re covered with a new tempered glass material that has been designed and tested to meet all impact, load, and traction requirements.”
And that also greatly reduces the efficiency of the panels by partially blocking sunlight. So far we have a solar panel that costs a lot more and produces a lot less energy than a conventional free-standing panel. Not a great recipe for success in the renewable energy field.
It should also be pointed out that to date, Solar Roadways has only built a 400-square-foot parking lot. In relative terms, it’s like they’ve built a soda bottle water rocket and claiming their next step is a trip to the moon. Even worse, they’ve raised more than $1.5 million on that promised trip to the moon.
00:45 || “Oh and did I mention they’re also solar panels! They generate electricity, they generate capital. They pay for themselves and they keep paying more because we’re not going to run out of sun for like 15,000,000,000 years.”
They are correct in claiming these are attributes of solar panels, but fail to mention that you will generate a lot more electricity and a lot more capital at a lower initial cost if you just buy conventional solar panels and stick them up into the air.
1:36 || “Every panel has a series of LED lights on the circuit board that can be programmed to make landscape designs, warning signs, parking lot configurations, whatever. These roads never have to have lanes repainted, just reprogrammed to whatever we choose.”
This is starting to feel like the results of a late-night bull session between drunk freshmen electrical engineers. “Let’s add LED lights to it!”
LED lights and the circuitry needed to run them add a non-negligible premium to the cost of the modules and an extra layer of operational complexity (the more complex the machine, the higher the chances for failure). And while LEDs are more efficient than conventional lights, it would not be cheap to continually operate an entire parking lot full of LED lit markings, to say nothing of miles of roads.
The rest of this section is more of the same. “And we’ll let people chose their own sports configurations! Yeah! That’ll be so cool!” This is 100 percent pure hype — nothing more and nothing less. Shiny sparkly lights to catch your attention and your dollars.
2:13 || “But these panels are also pressure sensitive so they can detect when large debris like branches or boulders have fallen onto the road. Or if an animal is crossing it can warn drivers with LED text to slow down for an obstruction."
Gotcha. So add pressure sensitivity and the ability for individual modules to communicate and be remotely controlled to the cost of manufacturing. Throw in the development costs of the software that allows for this functionality and hope that Google will pick up the bill, because it’s going to be a big one.
2:29 || “Solar Roadways uses as much recycled material in their production as possible.”
This tells me nothing. And why is this paired with a video of the solar roadways founders shoveling dirt into a wheelbarrow? Are they forging components from the very ground itself?
“Plus the roadways have two channels that form what’s called a cable corridor that runs concurrently with the roadways themselves.”
Oh, that’ll be cheap to build and maintain. They also want to move all power lines and cable infrastructure to their cable corridors, freeing us from the scourge of utility poles. What a noble (and humble) enterprise.
2:53 || “The other channel captures and filters stormwater and melted snow, moving them out to a treatment facility or treating them onsite.”
We’re not even three minutes in and I’ve completely lost all ability to take this video seriously. Sure, why not add water transportation and treatment to the list of features. Let’s throw everything up on the wall and see what sticks.
3:11 || Prerequisite appeal to job creation. People like jobs; can’t go wrong there.
3:18 || “Is this thing even possible? I told you, YES!”
No.
There’s a self-labeled emotional interlude that combines artfully shot outdoor scenes with slow music and a general call to action to make the world a better place through taking action by giving money to fund Solar Roadways.
Then the shouty voice spins back up and yells some more about how awesome the future would look if the ground could light up. You won’t have to shovel your driveway. Mardi Gras will be more colorful. And you’ll enjoy candyflipping even more at Detroit raves, thanks to the pretty lights in the floor.
5:14 || “It has been estimated that if all the roads in America were converted to solar roadways, the country would generate three times as much energy as it currently uses.”
And if I had wings, I could fly. Does anyone want to estimate what it would cost to replace every road in America with super expensive solar panel models that are less efficient than conventional panels? I’m not sure there is enough money and raw materials in the world to build it or a annual budget big enough to maintain such a thing.
The Solar Roadways website is light on numbers when it comes to costs and for good reason — as soon as you actually run the numbers, this project becomes completely untenable. It costs more money, produces less electricity at a higher cost, and introduces major new complexities into an already complex transportation system. The numbers won’t lie.
From here, there is more shouting, centered around the repetition of “Solar roadways!” (We get it). In general, it feels like an infomercial. Do you like saving the world!? If so, act now and we’ll throw in LED lights! The video continues to throw spaghetti up on the wall and promises to fight high gas prices, eliminate snow shoveling and moose road deaths, provide jobs, and save the planet. But only if you give your money to Scott and Julie Brusaw.
The last minute runs through the credits and ends with a soulful and uplifting jam.
Technically speaking, the video is a work of art. It obviously accomplished its purpose of bringing in |
and now they’re saying that they created only 240 million jobs.”
“Senator, I’m going to ask you to restate that, I’ve never heard that in my life,” Velshi interrupted.
“If you look at the report that came out on Friday, the President’s own economic advisers said that the jobs stimulus package actually created fewer jobs over the period of time, since the stimulus package went in place than it did when they reported back in December. In other words, there’s 30 million less jobs as a result of the stimulus package,” Santorum explained.
“That’s not a loss of jobs, Senator, that’s a smaller aggregation of jobs,” Velshi noted. “You can’t go on a campaign, a national campaign with this kind of math Senator. It’s just incorrect.”
“One report says that there were 280 and now there are 240,” Santorum insisted.
“I know you’ve got a lot of interviews to do. You might want to check that math,” Velshi advised. “It’s dangerous to go around saying that the stimulus didn’t create jobs.”
“Look it up,” Santorum said.
“Let’s not make a campaign slogan out of something that’s incorrect. I think you might thank me for the guidance but it’s your campaign so you do what you see fit,” Velshi added. “Let’s just be clear: that’s just not right information.”
Think Progress pointed out that there are currently 13.9 million people unemployed, and only 153 million in the entire U.S. labor force.
“If the Obama administration had created 240 to 280 million jobs, the unemployment crisis would have been solved several times over, and America would have so many jobs that it would need to start employing workers from all over the world just to fill all the available positions,” Think Progress’ Pat Garofalo wrote.
Watch this video from CNN’s American Morning, broadcast July 5, 2011.Nearly 200,000 people living below the tallest dam in the United States have been asked to evacuate as a spillway appeared to be close to collapse.
Authorities issued the abrupt evacuation orders at about 00:30 GMT on Monday, saying that a crumbling emergency spillway on the Lake Oroville Dam could give way and unleash raging floodwaters onto a string of rural communities along the Feather River.
Officials said the cities of Oroville, Gridley, Live Oak, Marysville, Wheat land, Yuba City, Plumas Lake, and Olivehurst were all under evacuation orders.
"Immediate evacuation from the low levels of Oroville and areas downstream is ordered," the Butte County sheriff said in a statement posted on social media. "This is NOT A Drill."
Evacuation centres were set up in Chico, California, about 20 miles northwest of Oroville, but roads leading out of the area were jammed as residents sought to drive out of the flood zone.
Earlier, the California Department of Water Resources said on Facebook that the spillway of California's Oroville Dam was "predicted to fail within the next hour".
But several hours later the situation appeared less dire as the spillway remained standing.
The water resources department said crews using helicopters would drop rocks to fill a huge gouge in the spillway. Authorities were also releasing water to lower the lake's level after weeks of heavy rains in the drought-plagued state.
By 06:00 GMT, state and local officials said those efforts had paid off and, with water no longer flowing over the eroded spillway, the immediate danger had passed. But they cautioned that the situation remained unpredictable.
Bill Croyle, the acting director of the Water Resources, told a news conference: "Once you have damage to a structure like that, it's catastrophic."
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the National Guard said it would provide eight helicopters to assist with the spillway's reconstruction and said around 23,000 soldiers and airmen had been alerted to be ready to be deployed.
Aerial video shows strain on California's Oroville Dam's backup spillway hours before thousands ordered to evacuate. https://t.co/47O8hzBZOS pic.twitter.com/FGuRWFpP0u — ABC News (@ABC) February 13, 2017
The Oroville dam, which serves mainly for water supply, hydroelectricity generation and flood control, activated its emergency spillway after weeks of heavy rain caused the reservoir to rise above its capacity.
At 230 metres high, the structure, built between 1962 and 1968, is the tallest dam in the US, higher than the famed Hoover Dam by more than 12 metres.It may come as a surprise, but it’s quite likely the pistons in your engine are not particularly round. Well, parts of them are mostly round and other parts are not. It’s complicated, but for good reason. A piston’s operating environment dictates its overall shape and that form evolves to complexity when the piston is asked to perform multiple tasks while enduring ongoing abuse of the highest order. The piston’s primary job is to capture cylinder pressure via ring sealing so the connecting rod and crankshaft can convert that pressure to rotary motion to drive the vehicle. Pistons don’t really know if they are coming or going, but they do recognize factors that conspire to destroy them or otherwise render them less effective than desired; said factors being heat, pressure, friction, lubrication and inertial loads that constantly strive to tear them apart.
The upper portion of most pistons is indeed round because that is the part that holds the ring pack and round rings must match up to round cylinder bores to achieve proper sealing. Some exceptions do have ovality on the ring lands, but it is not mainstream practice. For the most part, everything above the bottom ring land is in fact round. Below the ring pack, however, modern pistons assume new and different shapes whose subtleties are not always clear to the naked eye. Piston skirts are necessary to stabilize the piston in the bore and promote the best possible ring seal by preventing the piston from rocking too much. Combustion forces result in significant side loading through the skirt which tries to deform the piston and cock it in the bore. Without skirts the ring pack would essentially represent a single point of contact allowing the piston freedom to rock and compromise critical ring function under both compression and combustion events. By adding a skirt, designers effectively create two areas of contact that improve ring seal and absorb thrust loading while stabilizing piston motion within the cylinder bore.
In performance circles piston skirts are typically recognized as either full skirt (full round) or slipper skirted. Symmetrical or asymmetrical skirt profiles further characterize slipper skirt designs with attending ovality and barrel profiles specific to any given design. Full skirting seemed logical in the early days. It created a robust piston that maintained its designed shape and held up well to extended abuse. These pistons typically utilized outboard pin bosses, longer wrist pins and had considerable mass. Full skirting is useful where combustion pressures and thrust loading are extremely high, as seen in a diesel engine. It helps to maintain piston shape and stabilizes the ring pack under these conditions. Full round skirts last longer due to less localized wear and a larger skirt contact area.
Slipper skirt designs evolved as engineers sought to lighten reciprocating components to improve performance and adapt piston designs to accommodate stroker engine combinations and the elevated engine speeds of many modern performance engines. While skirts are necessary to ensure piston stability and alignment, redefining the piston below the ring pack would lead to numerous advantages, some of which include:
Reduced piston weight which safely supports higher engine speeds
Minimized contact patch reduces friction while maintaining stability
Pistons can be brought closer to the crankshaft without counterweight interference
As new shapes evolved, designers employed substantial tweaks that significantly improved performance, chief among them, ovality and barrel face contouring. Both have been a staple of piston design for more than half a century.
SKIRT OVALITY
Designers long ago realized that full skirt contact with the cylinder walls was not only unnecessary, but detrimental to performance in the form of power robbing friction. Piston ovality or egg shape if you will, dictates that the piston body is narrower along the minor axis (piston pin) and broader along the major axis (thrust surface). In terms of skirt width, the widest part of the piston is in the load bearing area of the skirt. That’s why we measure piston-to-wall clearance at the center of the skirt and toward the bottom of it.
Ovality is used to address piston expansion from heat. It brings a controlled one-dimensional solution to the amount of contact the piston has on the thrust face. And it offers the strength you would expect to be missing from the removal of a full round skirt. FSR (Forged Side Relief) skirts are actually stronger than full round designs, but they require more fine tuning of the skirt profile to match full round wear characteristics.
The degree of ovality is dictated by the amount of thermal expansion and thrust loading engineers expect the piston skirt to encounter. The precise geometric shape varies according to application. Only a portion of the skirt contacts the cylinder wall even though it is surrounded by more skirt material. The intent is to present the carefully calculated load bearing area best suited to each application. Normally aspirated pistons require less ovality than supercharged and other artificially boosted applications due to the varying heat and loading requirements.
Pistons may incorporate single ovality or compound ovality based on application, loading, thermal characteristics, piston material and the thickness of the skirt. The shape can be surprisingly complex and is only arrived at via computer analysis and real-world dyno testing. Instead of one consistent curve, the degree of curve may change as you approach the load bearing area. Engineers can calculate this and simulate it on computers. Ovality shapes are cam-ground on special machines, but the process was time consuming and expensive. Today, CNC machining centers can cut these shapes much faster and more accurately.
BARREL CONTOUR
If the concept of ovality doesn’t make your head spin, barrel contouring might. While ovality directs skirt shape on the horizontal axis, barrel addresses skirt shape on the vertical axis and helps support the single point of skirt contact required for maximum skirt efficiency. If the load bearing area has width, it must also incorporate height which defines the exact contact patch the engineer deems appropriate for the application. Again, this can be calculated and simulated, but it must be validated by actual testing. To visualize barrel, imagine a side view of the piston skirt and select the widest part of the piston where piston-to-wall clearance is measure. In many cases this is approximately one inch down from the bottom ring groove.
From this point, the piston skirt also assumes a curved contour as it follows a defined arc to the bottom of the lower ring groove where the piston is in fact smaller in diameter. Recall that the ring belt and the top of the piston are always round and smaller in diameter because it requires more room for expansion due to high heat in that area. Below that point, barrel works in conjunction with ovality to define a multidimensional point of contact and load bearing area best suited to the final application. To some degree you can think of barrel as a type of vertical ovality as it is intended to minimize friction by controlling the contact patch.
It may be useful to imagine a small balloon being inflated in the cylinder. Contact with the walls changes with inflation pressure but it can only change so much horizontally before the entire surface of the balloon contacts the cylinder wall horizontally. However, the balloon can still expand vertically and the arc to the contact point will change and lengthen the contact patch. In a sense that is barrel because the shape of the balloon always arcs away from the cylinder wall at some point. In practice, the barrel is slightly more pronounced at the top of the skirt near the oil ring groove and less at the bottom of the skirt; the difference being on the order of.002-.004-inch.
SYMMETRY
Most pistons, whether full round or slipper skirted are symmetrical in skirt contour; that is, both skirts are identical in size and profile. When you look at one of these pistons you cannot observe any discernible difference between the minor thrust skirt and the major thrust skirt. Most pistons are made with symmetrical skirts, but a different type of piston skirt pioneered and popularized by JE Pistons offers significant performance gains by altering the skirt design on the minor thrust side of the piston. The major thrust side retains the traditional style skirt with ovality and barrel characteristics appropriate to the specific application. The minor thrust side, however, has a notably smaller skirt just large enough to still provide the stabilizing contact patch, but not as broad and robust as the skirt on the major thrust side. Because it is not subject to the higher thrust loads it can be reduced in size to reduce piston weight and frictional losses.
JE asymmetrical pistons use a forged-side-relief design (FSR) with major and minor thrust skirts, inboard pin bosses and a shorter and stiffer wrist pin. Over the years, the skirt designs were tweaked, sometimes significantly, as designers refined their function according to changing performance requirements. The primary focus of the asymmetrical piston design is weight and friction reduction via the FSR’s smaller, lighter skirt on the minor thrust side. A key design benefits of the asymmetrical piston is the shorter and lighter piston pin. On a Chevy LS engine, the piston pins are only 2.250 inches long, reducing piston weight by up to 10 grams.
Does this throw the piston out of balance, relative to the pin position? The answer is no. The combination of lighter pin and pin offset keeps the piston balanced. JE offsets the pin toward the major thrust side making the balance of the piston on the pin axis almost ideal. So, the smaller skirt has no effect on the balance unless you grind on the piston yourself during balancing. This should be unnecessary since the pistons are manufactured as balanced sets.
Each piston is different and will have its own unique skirt profile based on application and verification of anticipated loading. Engineers have a pretty good handle on this, but they will still test multiple skirt profiles, often in the same test engine to gain a real-world picture of how the skirt handles it requirement. The engine’s stroke, rod length and maximum cylinder pressure all contribute to any given skirt requirement. Supercharged and nitrous applications also play a factor and will normally have a very robust skirt on the major thrust side.
In addition to ovality, barrel and skirt symmetry considerations, the forged-side-relief configuration lends considerable strength to the skirt profile as it concentrates the greater mass of the piston toward the center and behind the major thrust surface. Piston are one of the few engine parts that incorporate multiple shapes and sizes that merge into an overall profile best suited for any application. The greatest gains in friction reduction are typically realized via strict engineering protocols that define skirt profiles to meet the wide variety of performance conditions encountered in motorsports. As ring packs have evolved to thinner rings, the skirt contact patch became the final frontier of frictional challenges.
In Conclusion
By combining some, or all the available skirt shapes, designers have been able to reduce friction while improving piston stability and ring function. That translates to greater performance and component durability for all racers. Exaggerated view of piston barrel shape illustrates how barrel is used to provide the ideal contact patch without placing the entire skirt in contact with the cylinder wall. The point of contact is positioned low on the skirt to provide ample separation from the ring pack for greater stability.
Asymmetrical pistons provide a unique way of reducing friction and piston weight by making the skirt on the minor thrust side smaller than the skirt on the major thrust side. The major thrust side of an asymmetrical piston is a full-sized skit designed with optimum load bearing and friction characteristics. The minor thrust side still requires a skirt for stability, but it can be smaller because that side sees less thrust loading.In Christian tradition the Churching of Women is the ceremony wherein a blessing is given to mothers after recovery from childbirth. The ceremony includes thanksgiving for the woman's survival of childbirth, and is performed even when the child is stillborn, or has died unbaptized.
Although the ceremony itself contains no elements of ritual purification, it was related to Jewish practice as noted in Leviticus 12:2-8, where women were purified after giving birth. In light of the New Testament, the Christian ritual draws on the imagery and symbolism of the presentation of Jesus at the Temple Luke 2:22-40. Although some Christian traditions consider Mary to have borne Christ without incurring impurity, she went to the Temple in Jerusalem to fulfil the requirements of the Law of Moses.
The rite is first mentioned in pseudo-Nicene Arabic canon law. The religious ceremony continues in Eastern Christianity, and the Anglican Communion offers the rite; but in the Roman Catholic Church, it is only found in the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite and in Anglican Ordinariate parishes.
History [ edit ]
The custom of blessing a woman after childbirth recalls the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary mentioned in Luke 2:22. The Jewish practice was based on Leviticus 12:1-8, which specified the ceremonial rite to be performed in order to restore ritual purity. It was believed that a woman becomes ritually unclean by giving birth, due to the presence of blood and/or other fluids at birth. This was part of ceremonial, rather than moral law.[1]
Natalie Knödel noted that the idea that a woman who has recently given birth is to be set apart and then re-introduced into religious and social life by means of a special rite is not a specifically Western, let alone Christian, idea. Such rites are found in a number of cultures. All things having to do with birth and death are understood as somehow sacred.[2] Paul V. Marshall suggests that in an agricultural society this could have been a simple means of protecting a new mother from resuming work too soon after giving birth.[3] Enforced rest after childbirth is known as postpartum confinement. Historically, European women were confined to their beds or their homes for extensive periods after giving birth in a custom called lying-in; care was provided either by her female relatives (mother or mother-in-law), or by a temporary attendant known as a monthly nurse. "Churching" served to mark the end of these weeks of separation, and re-integrate the new mother into her community.[4]
The rite became the subject of a good deal of misunderstanding as many commentators and preachers, in describing its scriptural antecedents, did not explain the concept clearly. Pope Gregory I as early as the 6th century protested any notion that defilement was incurred by childbirth and recommended that women should never be separated from the church in case it was seen as such.[5] As a blessing given to mothers after recovery from childbirth, "it is not a precept, but a pious and praiseworthy custom, dating from the early Christian ages".[6] David Cressy points out that the ceremony acknowledged the woman's labours and the perils of childbirth. At the conclusion of a month after childbirth, women looked forward to churching as a social occasion, and a time to celebrate with friends. For men it marked the end of a month during which they had to take care of the domestic affairs, commonly referred to as the "gander month".[7] In thirteenth-century France the rite focused on the woman's role as wife and mother.[8]
The Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, an American Roman-Catholic gathering held in October 1866, noted that churching after child-birth had been generally neglected in the United States, and was to be insisted upon,[9] and prohibited the practice of churching in places in which Mass is not celebrated.[6]
In the West [ edit ]
Roman Catholicism [ edit ]
The custom, referred to in many places as the “Churching of Women” was retained in the Church until very recent times.[10] The official title of the Rite was actually Benedictio mulieris post partum (the blessing of women after giving birth), and focused on blessing and thanksgiving. The rite was largely discontinued in the late 1960s following the Second Vatican Council. The Book of Blessings published in 1984 contains a now seldom-used “Blessing of a Woman after Childbirth” that is significantly altered from the old rite used before the Council. The current baptismal rite (which also incorporates a blessing of the father) contains a blessing for the mother, but the older rite is a special blessing.[1]
The concluding prayer reads,
Almighty, everlasting God, through the delivery of the blessed Virgin Mary, Thou hast turned into joy the pains of the faithful in childbirth; look mercifully upon this Thy handmaid, coming in gladness to Thy temple to offer up her thanks: and grant that after this life, by the merits and intercession of the same blessed Mary, she may merit to arrive, together with her offspring, at the joys of everlasting happiness. Through Christ our Lord.[1]
The "Order for the Blessing of a Mother after Childbirth" is still used, primarily for those mothers who were unable to attend the baptism, and is not necessarily held in a church. It may be imparted by a priest, deacon or authorized lay minister.[11]
Anglican Communion [ edit ]
The rite of the "Churching of Women" is still offered in the Anglican Communion.[12]
In the US-based Episcopal Church, the "Churching of Women" is a liturgy for the purification or "churching" of women after childbirth, together with the presentation in church of the child. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer, avoiding any hint of ritual impurity, replaces the older rite with "A Thanksgiving for the Birth or Adoption of a Child." The rite is to take place within the Sunday liturgy, after the intercessions, soon after the birth or adoption. In this service, parents and other family members come to the church with the newly born or adopted child "to be welcomed by the congregation and to give thanks to Almighty God" (Book of Common Prayer, p. 439).[13]
Lutheranism [ edit ]
The churching of women was offered to women in many Protestant Churches, including the Lutheran Church.[14][15] It takes place after the celebration of Holy Communion.[16]
Customs [ edit ]
Custom differs, but the usual date of churching was the fortieth day after confinement (or giving birth), in accordance with the Biblical date and Jewish practice. The Purification of Mary and the presentation of Jesus at the Temple are commemorated forty days after Christmas.
The service included in the English Book of Common Prayer dates only from the Middle Ages. While the churching was normally performed by a priest in the parish church there were exceptions of women being churched at home.[2]
inscription on bench used for churching women, Mariager church, Denmark
Prior to the English Reformation, according to the rubric the woman was to occupy the "convenient place" near the narthex. In the first prayer book of Edward VI of England, she was to be "nigh unto the quire door". In the second of his books, she was to be "nigh unto the place where the Table (or altar) standeth". Bishop Matthew Wren orders for the diocese of Norwich in 1636 were that women to be churched would come and kneel at a side near the communion table outside the rail, being veiled according to custom, and not covered with a hat. In some parishes there was a special pew known as the "churching seat". Conducting the ritual inside the church rather than on the porch is an outward sign that ritual impurity of a childbearing woman was no longer presumed.[2]
Churchings were formerly registered in some parishes. In Herefordshire it was not considered proper for the husband to appear in church at the service, or to sit with his wife in the same pew. The words in the rubric requiring the woman to come "decently apparelled", refer to the times when it was thought unbecoming for a woman to come to the service with the elaborate head-dress then the fashion. A veil was usually worn. In some parishes a special veil was provided by the church, for an inventory of goods belonging to St Benet Gracechurch in 1560 includes "a churching cloth, fringed, white damask."[citation needed]
In pre-Reformation days, it was the custom in Catholic England for women to carry lighted tapers when being churched, an allusion to the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin (February 2), and also celebrated as Candlemas, the day chosen by the Catholic Church for the blessing of the candles for the whole year. At her churching, a woman was expected to make some votive offering to the church, such as the chrisom or alb placed on the child at its christening.[citation needed]
Augustine Schulte described the ceremony in the early twentieth century: The mother, kneels in the vestibule, or within the church, carrying a lighted candle. The priest, vested in surplice and white stole, sprinkles her with holy water in the form of a cross. Having recited Psalm 24, "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof", he offers her the left extremity of the stole and leads her into the church, saying: "Enter thou into the temple of God, adore the Son of the Blessed Virgin Mary who has given thee fruitfulness of offspring." She advances to one of the altars and kneels before it, whilst the priest, turned towards her, recites the appropriate blessing, and then, having sprinkled her again with holy water in the form of the cross, dismisses her, saying: "The peace and blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, descend upon thee, and remain forever. Amen." [6] The fact that the priest goes to meet her and escort her into the church is in itself a mark of respect for the mother.[17]
It was formerly regarded as unwise for a woman to leave her house to go out at all after confinement until she went to be churched. In Anglo-Irish folk tradition, new mothers who had yet to be churched were regarded as attractive to the fairies, and so in danger of being kidnapped by them. However, the origin of the church ritual is unrelated to these later local superstitions, which accrued to it.
In the East [ edit ]
In the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches of the Byzantine Rite, many jurisdictions still observe the tradition of the woman coming to church on the 40th day after childbirth for special blessings. For forty days a new mother remains at home to recuperate and to care for her child. However, if the child has not survived, the woman still remains at home to heal physically and emotionally. During the time of her confinement, the woman does not normally receive the eucharist, unless she is in danger of death. As the service is practiced in the Byzantine Rite, it involves both the blessing of the mother and the presentation of the child to God. The churching should be distinguished from two other brief rites that take place at childbirth: the Prayers on the First Day After Childbirth, and the Naming of the Child on the Eighth Day. These usually take place in the home. In some traditions, it is customary to baptize the child on the eighth day, following the example of the Old Testament rite of bris or circumcision of boys. In that case, the naming of the child would take place in the temple (church building); however, the mother would not attend, the child being presented by its godparents.
Churching of the Woman [ edit ]
On the fortieth day after childbirth, the mother is brought to the temple to be churched; that is to say, to receive a blessing as she begins attending church and receiving the sacraments once again. The child (if it has survived) is brought by the mother, who has already been cleansed and washed, accompanied by the intended sponsors (Godparents) who will stand at the child's baptism. They all stand together in the narthex before the doors of the nave, facing east. The priest blesses them and says prayers for the woman and the child, giving thanks for their wellbeing and asking God's grace and blessings upon them.
Churching of the Child [ edit ]
Then, if the infant has already been baptized, he performs the churching of the child; if not, he does the churching immediately after the baptism.
Taking up the child, the priest lifts it up, making the sign of the cross with the child before the doors of the temple, saying: "The servant of God (Name) is churched, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."
He then carries the child into the center of the nave, as he says, "I will go into Thy House. I will worship toward Thy Holy Temple in fear of Thee." Stopping in the center, he says, "The servant of God (Name) is churched, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. In the midst of the congregation I will sing praises unto Thee."
He then walks up to the iconostasis, and stopping in front of the royal doors, he says, "The servant of God (Name) is churched, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."
He then carries the baby into the sanctuary and around the back of the altar and out again onto the soleas.
He then chants the Nunc dimittis and says a special apolysis (dismissal), after which he blesses the child with the Sign of the Cross on its forehead, mouth and heart, and returns it to its mother.
References [ edit ]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Churching of Women" Encyclopædia Britannica. 6 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 347–348.
Sources [ edit ]A YEAR ago, as Ashraf Ghani (above, right) was about to declare his candidacy to become Afghanistan’s president, he told confidants that his dream was to win the election and then persuade the man he perceived to be his biggest threat, Abdullah Abdullah (above, left) to join his government. On September 21st Mr Ghani got his wish, though not in the way he would have wanted. Since the second round of the presidential election on June 14th and the allegations by the loser, Dr Abdullah, of “industrial-scale fraud”, the country has been locked in a political crisis. Now, a deal between the two men has been struck that commits them to sharing power and its spoils. Just possibly, a more hopeful chapter in Afghanistan’s turbulent recent history is about to open.
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Mr Ghani, a 64-year-old anthropologist and former World Bank official who served his presidential predecessor, Hamid Karzai, as finance minister, will be inaugurated as president. Dr Abdullah, a 54-year-old former foreign minister and longtime de facto opposition leader, will take on a newly created role as chief executive officer, which looks much like the job of prime minister.
Unless Dr Abdullah decides to anoint someone else for that role, which seems unlikely, both will be inaugurated along with their deputies in Kabul, the capital, on September 29th. For the West, particularly America, it will be a welcome end to the 13-year rule of Mr Karzai, who was often mercurial and around whom a corrupt cabal grew. He was constitutionally barred from standing again.
The power-sharing compromise between Mr Ghani and Dr Abdullah was proposed and brokered by the American secretary of state, John Kerry, after Dr Abdullah had cried foul play in the run-off. (He had seen an election stolen from him once already, in 2009.) Mr Ghani attributed the turnaround in his electoral fortunes after the first round, which Dr Abdullah led, to more effective campaigning, particularly in his eastern and south-eastern stronghold, and to help from his vice-presidential nominee, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a thuggish warlord, who brought over a large chunk of the ethnic Uzbek vote in the north. Dr Abdullah blamed it on a conspiracy involving the Ghani team, Mr Karzai and a partisan election commission.
Many in Afghanistan’s political elite had long wanted to reduce the overwhelming powers of the presidency, and liked Mr Kerry’s proposal. Yet others decried the secrecy of the backroom deal. What was the point of Afghans risking Taliban wrath to go out and vote in huge numbers if the run-off candidates carved up power between them in the end? And after Dr Abdullah’s accusations of voting fraud and his demands for a full audit, it sticks in the craw that it was out of deference to him that the audit’s final result was not made public. Presumably, the audit confirmed both that he had lost and that his side had also committed fraud.
Even so, the outcome is probably the best possible one in a country with such messy politics and pressing concerns. The long stand-off was harming the economy and emboldening the Taliban to make more inroads, notably in Helmand province in the south. And it threatened to reopen old ethnic divisions, even prompting fears of a new civil war.
The four-page document Mr Ghani and Dr Abdullah have signed summarises how the unity government is to function. In effect, Dr Abdullah will run the government and chair a new council of ministers. For his part, Mr Ghani’s powers under the constitution will remain and the new chief executive will be answerable to him. Despite understandable scepticism, the arrangement could work, sort of. In Afghanistan, political alliances are fluid, and pragmatism usually trumps principle. (For instance, branding him a “known killer” did not prevent Mr Ghani last year from putting General Dostum on his ticket.)
There will certainly be road bumps. The first could be the allocation of the most coveted ministries and senior government posts. Both General Dostum and AttaMohammad Noor, the powerful governor of Balkh province in the north who played the role of Dr Abdullah’s attack dog after the disputed vote, must somehow be kept happy. Still, moving these old warlords aside to make room for fresher, more technocratic faces in government must be a long-term aim. Elsewhere, swift steps need to be taken to prove that this new government is serious about lessening its addiction to foreign aid. That means action to increase government revenues and an end to the culture of impunity for high-level corruption. The political impasse only added to the country’s economic fragility. Mr Ghani is already writing to world leaders seeking help (money, inevitably) to kick-start his reforms.
His immediate task is to sign a bilateral security agreement (BSA) with America, which Mr Karzai capriciously refused to do. A BSA would pave the way for 9,800 American troops and about 4,000 from other NATO countries to stay on past December to “train, advise and assist” Afghan security forces. It also locks in the commitment by the United States and its allies to keep picking up the $5.5 billion annual tab for the country’s 350,000-strong army and police force, which is now doing almost all the fighting and dying in the long counter-insurgency against the Taliban.
The political uncertainty has coincided with and contributed to what is likely to be the bloodiest fighting season of the 13-year conflict. The United Nations says that civilian casualties, mostly caused by the Taliban, are running at record levels. The Afghan army and police have been dying at a rate of about 100 a week, says General Joseph Dunford, outgoing commander of the NATO-led security mission.
Moreover, while Afghan security forces have been fighting well, the Taliban have been taking advantage of the withdrawal of foreign air power to mount large-scale attacks across the country. Yet the insurgents still have little popular support. If the new government can deal with the country’s most pressing needs—jobs, local justice and governance—the Taliban may find themselves forced to come to the negotiating table at last.I recently had the pleasure to meet up with fellow indie lover, Francesca (the owner of the fabulous Working with Monolids) and we had a lovely session of trading and decanting. She is the sweetest girl and thanks to her, I’m now the proud owner of a truckload of shiny indie goodness to dig into. I’ve always been envious when I read about meet and sniffs sessions that people organize. It’s pretty rare to find an established community in Southeast Asia, so imagine how excited I was when Fran told me that she would be making a weekend trip to Singapore and suggested that we meet up. It’s a great, and frankly, cost-effective way to try out new products too. After all, we international addicts need to band together. ♥
A quick brand overview
Today’s mini review will be focused on three scents from Wiggle Perfumes. I’ve heard great stuff about this company for the longest time, and people on the BPAL forums seem to have a great fondness for their blends. I have to say that I was really charmed by the adorable name. The aesthetic of this shop is luscious and bold and reminds me of a sexy bombshell who knows exactly how to strut her stuff while smelling absolutely fabulous. Wiggle is currently undergoing a massive scent upheaval so many of her blends are currently on clearance sale. This is a great chance to try out the company and get an idea of her signature style, so you’ll be prepared when the new permanent collection emerges from the wings.
Scent Reviews
I did a thorough test drive of all three scents and I have to say that across the board, I was extremely impressed by everything that I tried. Each blend is wonderfully complex and I cannot rave enough about how great the morphing power is. I actually had to keep my nose honed most of the time because the scents were constantly growing and blossoming and I didn’t want to miss out on a moment. The wonderful thing is that I never would have expected to love these blends quite as I much as I did based on the scent notes so it was very much a pleasant surprise.
Reviews are based on my individual impressions from a test drive of the individual samples. Everything is subject to my own skin chemistry, so your mileage may vary.
♥
Anna May
Lychee, peony, green tea notes, with a generous dose of wisteria layered over white musk, a touch of orchid, a kick of ginger, and the slightest hint of soft incense.
First Sniff:
This is a sweet, sweet, beautiful peony with the freshness of green tea and just the tiniest whiff of incense. There is a light fruity note as well, and I have to say that at this point, I am in love. This is such a delightfully light and crisp fruity floral scent and I can only hope that it carries on along this tangent.
This is a sweet, sweet, |
of these guys have work to do. But all three of them -- yes, even Geno -- has shown enough promise to remain employed. For rookie quarterbacks, even after last year, that is not always a given.
Mike Glennon, Buccaneers
The Good: Excellent arm strength. Can throw 60-yard bombs with accuracy and 40-yard corner routes on a clothesline. Fires the ball hard on out-routes and passes over the middle.
Has better-than-advertised pocket mobility and foot speed. Can slide around and step up to buy time, and is fast enough to pick up a first down if the defense leaves him a wide lane. Had a rep for getting rattled after sacks in college but has proven resilient in the NFL. Confidence has clearly grown as the weeks progressed, and Glennon is more likely to call adjustments at the line now than he was when he first took over the starting job.
The Bad: Stares down Vincent Jackson like he's Sophia Vergara in a cocktail dress. Has a hard time peeling off to his second reads and will lead safeties to the football. Has not shown touch or ideal accuracy on shorter passes, though the offense emphasizes bombs-and-dumps with little in between. Holds the ball too long and takes sacks. Doesn't have a great plan when he escapes the pocket and can look a little silly when he tries to be Russell Wilson.
About the Offense: Mike Sullivan's system is not friendly for inexperienced quarterbacks. There are few receiver screens or easy-reader training wheels. Even shallow crossing routes are almost as infrequent as end-arounds. Instead, quarterbacks are tasked to make long, pinpoint passes outside the hash marks. It is not unusual to see three receivers running deep routes and one fullback in the flat when Glennon drops to pass: his choices are a 25-yard needle threading or a three-yard surrender. Eli Manning ran hot-and-cold in this system, so it is no surprise that a rookie suffers long incompletion jags.
The schematic problems are more pronounced in Glennon's early games. The Buccaneers liked to run on first and second down, then force Glennon to execute on third-and-long, then make him rain footballs when the team fell behind. Some of Glennon's worst early-season games came in fat-chance circumstances, with coaches expecting Tom Brady comeback drives from deep in Cardinals territory, and other high-stakes tests.
Vincent Jackson gives Glennon a true No. 1 receiver to throw to, but the other Buccaneers receivers are drop prone, the tight end is a journeyman, and every good running back suffers a season-ending injury. Glennon's tendency to lock onto Jackson is understandable under the circumstances, but it is the first bad habit that he must correct in the offseason.
Offseason Curriculum
Wean Glennon from Jackson. Make him work on finding the second and third option.
Speed up the pocket clock. This item and the last work hand-in-hand: if he progresses through his reads more smoothly, Glennon will throw, find more open receivers underneath and take fewer sacks.
Open things up. The next coaching staff needs to institute a 21st century passing game.
Summary: I hated Glennon as a rookie prospect. Leaving North Carolina State, he appeared to be too slow, too likely to take a sack, and too easily rattled to take advantage of his marvelous arm. He's quicker and more resourceful than I thought, and he now looks like a member of the John Skelton-through-Joe Flacco category of lanky pocket fire-ballers. These passers need good protection and won't lead the NFL in completion percentage, but the ability to threaten the defense with 65-yard-in-the-air bombs and lasers along the sidelines can make them very valuable.
The next step for Glennon is to demonstrate that he is more of a Flacco than a Skelton. Part of that depends on his coaching staff and supporting cast. Glennon has played fairly well under awful circumstances this year, and he could benefit greatly from a new scheme, philosophy, and attitude in Tampa. Given an offseason in a non-circus with better coaches, he should grow into a capable starter.
EJ Manuel, Bills
The Good: Possesses the size, arm, speed, and coach's trust package. Executes a no-huddle offense confidently, making all the pre-snap designations and adjustments. Possesses better defensive reading comprehension and eye discipline than most inexperienced quarterbacks. Manuel may be seen consistently scanning the field and freezing defenders.
Throws underneath passes on time, giving his receivers a chance to turn up field. Diagnosis well and takes what the defense offers: The Jets, for example, kept blitzing while giving speedster Marquise Goodwin a huge cushion, and Manuel kept hitting Goodwin for short completions until he set up a bomb.
Bullish runner with some elusiveness. Can run options and keepers. Looks downfield when scrambling and will dump the ball to a flat receiver instead of trying to make a highlight reel rush.
The Bad: Throws behind receivers over the middle. Throws ahead of or over the heads of receivers near the sidelines. The poor short accuracy does not seem to come from any mechanical flaw: Manuel just misfires. Lacks touch on deep passes: Overthrowing Goodwin (as Manuel often does) takes some work.
Takes a lot of "fast guy" sacks: waits too long to throw, hopes his legs will bail him out, and gets surprised when NFL defenders run him down. Trusts his elusiveness too much and will attempt ill-advised superhero spin moves in the pocket, turning six-yard sacks into nine-yarders. Has suffered several injuries this season and must be wary of taking too many hits.
About the Offense: Doug Marrone's offense uses the no-huddle almost as often as Chip Kelly's Eagles do, so Manuel faces different advantages and disadvantages than his rookie peers dealt with. He's expected to make many more decisions than Glennon or Smith, but he also benefits from more short, safe throws. Manuel has running backs that Glennon and Smith would kill for but a mixed-blessing receiving corps. Goodwin is faster than Mercury but gets tangled up with defenders. Steve Johnson is open on every play, but does not drop passes so much as volleyball-set them to the nearest defender. Other receivers have proven mistake prone, and the most memorable image of the 2013 Bills season, besides one of Manuel's ninth-string backups warming up, is of a receiver catching a pass over the middle and fumbling it away.
Offseason Curriculum:
Figure out why the heck Manuel throws two yards behind a crossing receiver nine yards away, and fix the problem.
Improve the situational decision making. Manuel suffers some of his worst long-loss sacks when the Bills are on the fringe of field goal range.
Summary: Manuel left college with an "everything but the accuracy" reputation, and he has lived up to it when healthy in Buffalo. The downside for a quarterback with arm, legs, brain, and a malfunctioning targeting system is a Jake Locker-type, but the upside is Donovan McNabb or even John Elway. If you can throw bombs, throw on the run, scramble, check downfield, and audible your offense into the correct play, you can get away with a few misfires per game.
That said, Manuel and Marrone want to beat teams by sprinting to the line, making reads, and chipping away with seven-yard passes until the defense breaks. In such a system, Manuel cannot afford to leave a bunch of seven-yard passes on the table. Manuel looked terrible against the Buccaneers, who took away many of the easy underneath passes. A precision passer without precision will always be a liability.
The good news is that Manuel looks poised and generally makes good decisions, despite the fact that he barely played in the preseason and missed part of the year with injuries. Accuracy can be hard to improve, but when coaches can focus on it (instead of explaining Page 3 of the playbook), there's a chance of gaining huge dividends from a tiny mechanical correction.
Geno Smith, Jets
The Good: Size, speed, and arm. Can throw short passes with mustard and get the ball deep. Throws the slant with good location and velocity. Can throw strikes in the seam and over the middle to tight ends in the 15-25 yard range.
Will stand in the pocket and check downfield: not a "scared rabbit" scrambler. At his best, demonstrates sound eye discipline and the ability to look off defenders: see the Falcons game, when he moved the safety and linebackers by looking left before throwing a bomb to Jeff Cumberland on the right. Strong and fast on options and scrambles, though he lacks top-end elusiveness as a ball carrier.
The Bad: Guys, I think we're going to need a bigger Internet server.
If there's a bad quarterback habit you have seen or thought of in the last 20 years, Smith picked it up sometime between mid-October and late November. So the following is an incomplete list.
Lacks an internal clock and a feel for the blindside blitz, leading to sacks from the left side. Fails to differentiate real blitzes from fake, particularly up the middle. Can be snookered by defensive motion into throwing to the wrong place or taking a sack.
Ball placement, in general, is an adventure. When Smith fails to step into throws, the ball tails off low and away. Even when set in a clean pocket, Smith will misfire badly on routine throws, particularly along the sidelines in the 10-15 yard range. Some of these wayward passes look like "wrong page" throws, but it is hard to tell what page of the playbook calls for an out-of-bounds throw to an open receiver.
Eye discipline and decision making regressed badly as the season progressed. Will now lead defenders to the ball by staring down primary receivers. Will make head-scratching throws to blanketed receivers. All rookie quarterbacks will lose track of a safety, but Smith is willing to throw to a receiver whose man-to-man defender is running stride-for-stride, with safety help.
Mistakes snowballed and multiplied as the season progressed. Sunday's victory over the Raiders offered a slight reprieve, but Smith still threw an ugly interception, had two other would-be picks dropped, and needed Jeremy Kerley to out-jump two defenders to score the touchdown that got the Jets rolling. Before Sunday, Smith's performance rolled downhill in game after game until he was benched. The chatter about Smith's immaturity and fragile self-confidence needs to be taken into account here: Smith fell into a funk that lasted over a month, and while all young quarterbacks have their slumps, Smith's inability to climb out before reaching rock bottom raises some flags.
About the Offense: The Jets offense does Smith little favors. There are no receivers on the roster who threaten the defense deep, so all passing windows are constricted for any quarterback who takes the field. Watch the coaches film on many Smith sacks, and you won't find anywhere for him to throw. Smith's slump coincided with Kerley's absence, and the whole Jets offense looks better with Kerley on the field, since he is one of the few players able to wriggle open short and turn up field for a productive gain.
The constant Wildcat wrinkles and run emphasis are a mixed blessing: Smith does not have to throw 40 passes per game, but he also loses a chance to establish rhythm with short passes, and all of those first-and-second down handoffs result in a less-than-confident quarterback taking his first looks downfield on 3rd-and-7. The Jets habitually call direct snap plays to Josh Cribbs or Bilal Powell just after Smith completes a productive pass, which cannot be great for confidence or rhythm.
Offseason Curriculum:
Acquire some wide receivers. The Jets need more speed and elusiveness, even if they use a time machine to acquire Dan Marino 1984 at quarterback.
Emphasize blitz recognition. Smith must do a better job understanding when backside blitzers are coming and linebackers are dropping. He needs to become more comfortable tossing the ball underneath once he sees the blitz. There is lot of other defensive reading comprehension to be improved, but turning easy sacks into five-yard completions should take top priority.
Implement a more robust read-option package. It's shocking how rare it is for Smith to run an option keeper or throw from shotgun play-action. Smith needs more opportunities to at least threaten opponents with his legs while his other skills develop.
Summary: By November, no one on the Jets sideline had any confidence in Geno Smith, not even Geno Smith. Rex Ryan kept him in the lineup, possibly under John Idzik's orders, but more likely because the Jets have no feasible alternatives. The sink-or-swim approach will pay greater dividends than noodling with Matt Simms: if Smith flat lines, the Jets can easily replace the second-round pick in last year's draft. If he rebounds and plays like he did in the first six weeks, he will answer some questions about both his ability and his maturity/confidence, allowing the Jets can switch offseason priorities and start looking for receivers who sometimes get open.
Games like Sunday's win almost represent a worst-case scenario in Smith evaluation: What happens if Smith wins a few games with hot-and-cold efforts, then squeaks into the postseason? Idzik and whoever joins him in the decision process will have tough calls to make, but it is important to remember that we can only have this conversation because Smith showed so much early-season promise. Most of Smith's problems are correctable, and more importantly, Smith demonstrated in September that he has the capacity to correct them. You don't toss a quarterback like him away lightly, even if he goes a month or so without a touchdown.Mark Zuckerberg gave new insights about how he sees Facebook’s role in informing the world today during a Live video one-on-one year-end chat with COO Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook’s CEO also lent support to employees trying to fight fake news today, though reports indicated some employees were dissatisfied by his initially tepid response to the issue.
“Facebook is a new kind of platform. It’s not a traditional technology company,” he said today, mirroring his exact words from last week when Facebook launched product updates and partnerships with outside fact-checkers to fight fake news. But then he went a step further, now saying “It’s not a traditional media company. You know, we build technology and we feel responsible for how it’s used.”
That implies Zuckerberg does in fact see Facebook as some kind of media company, just not like the old ones that created the content themselves.
[Update: We’ve added more details on why the media label matters]
This is a significant shift from how Zuckerberg has discussed Facebook and media in the past. In August while in Rome to meet the Pope, Reuters reports that Zuckerberg responded to an Italian who asked if Facebook would become a news editor by saying “No, we are a tech company, not a media company.” He drew a line between Facebook and publishers, explaining that “The world needs news companies, but also technology platforms, like what we do, and we take our role in this very seriously.”
The reason this distinction matters is that pure technology platforms receive greater immunity regarding the content they serve, both legally and in the public eye. This stems from the 1996 Communications Decency Act’s Section 230(c), or the Good Samaritan act, that states “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Media companies are considered more directly responsible for their content.
Previous statements have seen Zuckerberg willing to have Facebook assume some of that responsibility voluntarily, while avoiding the title of ‘media company’ that could trigger more technical liability.
Looking closer at the Facebook product compared to the newsroom of a media company, you could see the users as the reporters creating the stories, while the News Feed algorithm acts as the editor, deciding which stories to run and how prominently. Meanwhile, Facebook’s leaders who write the community standards and content policies also act as editors, vetoing or allowing controversial content like reports of police shootings or nude historical photographs.
Facebook writes the code that applies these algorithms and policies like a technology company, but it also makes editorial decisions about what to prioritize and permit, like the editor of a media company.
[Update 2: What’s consistent in both statements this week is that Zuckerberg sees Facebook as a third institution that incorporates values of both tech and media: a place for “public discourse”. Like a town square, it’s both an inclusive venue for expression, similar to a technology platform. But it’s one bound by the values of the community that established the town and live in it, similar to a media company’s editorial policy. Though a diversity of thought can be shared, there are still laws and norms that guide what legally can and is socially acceptable to share.
A town square can support heated debate while banishing purposefully abusive citizens that break the social fabric. That seems to be the balance Facebook is hoping to strike on fake news.]
Later in the talk, he notes that “reflecting on 2016, this is just something that I’m proud that people in this company take so seriously,” referring to fake news. But immediately after the election, Zuckerberg was reluctant to admit fake news was a massive problem warranting urgent attention.
That prompted a “renegade task force” of employees to assemble and begin meeting in secret, BuzzFeed’s Sheera Frenkel reported on November 14th. By November 18th, Zuckerberg had changed his tone, discussing fake news as a more serious threat, and outlining six ways Facebook would fight it, several of which launched last week.
Now Zuckerberg is commending his team for taking the issue “super seriously,” displaying a wise course correction that could lead Facebook to use the full extent of its power to fight disinformation.
Here’s a transcript of the segment of today’s Facebook Live broadcast where Zuckerberg discussed fake news (emphasis mine):A deprecated feature in Perl 5 is a feature which is confusing, difficult to support, difficult to understand, difficult to use correctly, difficult to use safely, or an accident of implementation no one wants to maintain in the future.
There's no written deprecation policy for Perl 5. By rough consensus of practice, a deprecation notice must appear in at least one major release of Perl 5 before anyone can consider removing the deprecated feature. Thus deprecating, for example, the Switch module in Perl 5.10 means that it may not be a core module in Perl 5.12.
It may remain in core for Perl 5.12, but you the purpose of a deprecation period is to encourage you to migrate away from it before the release of Perl 5.12. (I chose this example deliberately; the given / when construct backported from Perl 6 to Perl 5.10 obviates the need for the fragile Switch module. It's easy to argue for its removal.)
Recent Deprecation Discussions
The issue of removing deprecated features comes up on p5p periodically. For example, George Greer suggested removing the Perl 4 pseudo-package separator; you can use the tick to separate package names like you use double-colons in Perl 5. Thus D'oh uses this old syntax where the modern syntax would be D::oh.
Is this a problem? Tatsuhiko Miyagawa gave an example:
use strict; my $name = "Joe"; print "$name's birthday is tomorrow
";
Add the warnings pragma for a hint at what might be wrong. If you're using anything older than Perl 5.10, good luck at guessing at the problem -- Perl 5.10's warning message expands the name of the variable to $name::s, which is substantially more helpful, if you know that'is synonymous with ::.
The correct way to write this code with interpolation is:
use strict; my $name = "Joe"; print "${name}'s birthday is tomorrow
";
That won't win any beauty contests. (Or should I say "That {won}'t win any beauty contests.")
On PerlMonks today, the hash reference question demonstrated code which worked but confused a novice terribly:
%package = ( 'zips' => {1,2,3,4} ); print %package->{zips};
You can dereference a hash (not a hash reference) with the dereferencing arrow, but if you enable warnings, you will receive the message:
Using a hash as a reference is deprecated...
A Selection of Deprecated Features
If you browse perldiag, you'll find several other deprecated features. Some of them are recent. Many of them have remained deprecated for several years. (Though it's tempting to put the Perl 4 pseudo-package separator in this category, it's more accurate to say that the Perl 5 syntax has superseded it for fifteen years.)
You won't get all of them; you have to dive into the source for all of them. Yet here are a few of my favorites.
Really old Perl let you omit the @ on array names in some spots. This is now heavily deprecated. my @nums = 1.. 4; push nums, 5; This throws a compilation error about an undeclared nums when run with strict, but the code gets through the parser.
Really old Perl let you omit the % on hash names in some spots. This is now heavily deprecated. This is similar; you can convince keys to operate on a hash if you omit the sigil as well.
You have used the attributes pragam to modify the locked attribute on a code reference. The :locked attribute is obsolete, has had no effect since 5005 threads were removed, and will be removed in the next major release of Perl 5. This message has been around for a while.
You have used the attributes pragam to modify the unique attribute on an array, hash or scalar reference. The :unique attribute has had no effect since Perl 5.8.8, and will be removed in the next major release of Perl 5. After 5.10.1, it should be safe to remove both of these attributes from bleadperl (what will become 5.12).
defined() is not usually useful on arrays because it checks for an undefined scalar value. If you want to see if the array is empty, just use if (@array) { # not empty }. This message has been around for a while. It might be more useful as a parser syntax error.
defined() is not usually useful on hashes because it checks for an undefined scalar value. If you want to see if the hash is empty, just use if (%hash) { # not empty } for example. This message has been around for a while.
You used a declaration similar to my $x if 0. There has been a long-standing bug in Perl that causes a lexical variable not to be cleared at scope exit when its declaration includes a false conditional. Some people have exploited this bug to achieve a kind of static variable. Since we intend to fix this bug, we don't want people relying on this behavior. This is a newer deprecation; the state keyword added in Perl 5.10 provides a better way to declare and use static lexical variables in Perl 5.
The $[ variable (index of the first element in an array) is deprecated. I believe this is on the removal schedule for Perl 5.12.
Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated It makes a lot of work for the compiler when you clobber a subroutine's argument list, so it's better if you assign the results of a split() explicitly to an array (or list). Michael Schwern posted a patch to Remove implicit split to @_. As his message points out, this is another Perl 4 feature deprecated with the release of Perl 5.000 in October 1994. What's the problem? The use of split in scalar context. When you use split that way, Perl 5 clobbers @_ with the list of results. This patch generated a lot of discussion.
You used the package keyword without specifying a package name. So no namespace is current at all. Using this can cause many otherwise reasonable constructs to fail in baffling ways. use strict; instead. This message baffles me, but apparently you can get around declaring variables in some cases if you write package;.
You tried to use a hash as a reference, as in %foo->{"bar"} or %$ref->{"hello"}. Versions of perl <= 5.6.1 used to allow this syntax, but shouldn't have. It is now deprecated, and will be removed in a future version. I like how the code examples quote hash keys. This is a newer deprecation notice; it's only been around for eight years.
You tried to use an array as a reference, as in @foo->[23] or @$ref->[99]. Versions of perl <= 5.6.1 used to allow this syntax, but shouldn't have. It is now deprecated, and will be removed in a future version. This has also been around for eight years.
The Deprecation Argument (and a possible solution)
The arguments for removing these deprecated features (with the appropriate deprecation period) are simple: they simplify Perl 5's internals, they remove confusing syntax corner cases, and they encourage people to write better code.
The arguments for retaining these features are likewise simple: modifying code may cause bugs and removing features may break existing code.
I have less sympathy for the con side; I find its arguments unconvincing. The arguments are especially thin as deprecating a feature means adding a warning for it. This means not only modifying code, but changing its behavior.
The problem, I believe, is that there's little impetus to migrate away from deprecated features; features can remain deprecated for 15 years. As well, there's too little feedback on the effect of removing deprecated features on existing code.
I ponder the existence of an alternate Perl 5 binary with deprecated features removed; would DarkPAN developers run it against their test suites and report any results where modifications are onerous? Would that provide sufficient data as to the effects of removing these features?Photo
“The suicide note — and I’m being deadly earnest — is moving, strange, harrowing and peculiar literature,” said Simon Critchley, an author and philosophy professor at the New School. “People’s interest in them is almost pornographic.”
Mr. Critchley was teaching a class billed as a “Suicide Note Writing Workshop,” part of a monthlong series of performances, installations and lectures called the School of Death and sponsored by Cabinet Magazine and the Family Business exhibition space on West 21st Street. The glass doors to his storefront classroom were flung open to the chilly rain falling outside, inviting passers-by to stop, listen, and sometimes contribute to the discussion.
The pop-up school came about as a smart-alecky reaction to a program in London called the School of Life, which Mr. Critchley described as “a particularly nauseating philosophy of self-help.”
“It’s also a way of mocking creative-writing workshops,” Mr. Critchley, 53, said. “We’re not mocking suicide. We’re doing this as a way to understand it. And why not be a little insensitive? People are terrified in talking about death.”
With Mr. Critchley kneeling before a blackboard on Saturday and his 15 attendees gathered tightly around, class began with a discussion of the shifting ethics of suicide, from antiquity to modern-day Christianity to right-to-die debates in the news media.
The suicide note, which he identified as a literary genre with a unique form, is a fairly recent invention coinciding with the rise of literacy and the press, he told the class.
“In antiquity, there was no need to leave a note,” he said. “It would have been obvious why you killed yourself.”
He then shared famous notes left by, among others, Virginia Woolf, Adolf Hitler and Kurt Cobain.
A student raised her hand to share a note she brought, a personal favorite found in an anthology.
“Dear Betty, I hate you. Love, George,” she read. The class laughed but quickly began talking about the dichotomies in the letter — love and hate, humor and anger — and then moved on to the larger question of the purpose of a suicide note.
“To not die alone,” said Sara Clugage, 33, an artist from Brooklyn. “To address someone.”
“They’re filled with pathos,” another student interjected. “They ultimately aren’t that interesting.”
“They are a last, desperate attempt at communication,” Mr. Critchley said. “They are failed communication, in a sense.”
Students then were given 15 minutes to imagine their own suicide letters, which they composed on 4-by-6 note cards and shared aloud with the class.
A mother with glowing features and a gentle British accent elected to go first. She had addressed the letter to her children.
“When you inevitably discover those things I kept secret, let these not diminish the reality nor the magnitude of my love for you,” she read.
The products of the exercise ranged from spiteful to existential to humorous.
“I am sorry, mostly to my dog. Love, Lauren. P.S. Please don’t bury me in Los Angeles,” one student read.
Nadja Argyropoulou, curator at Family Business, shared one of the afternoon’s more stark compositions, written by a classmate.
“I am so filled with love it is still all too much to bear,” the note read. “I cannot find my way. The world is all wrong and although I withstood the worst of it, I lost out.”
Andrew Riddles, 44, a Web developer visiting from Canada, read from a classmate’s note: “Offstage was always best.” He found tenderness in the experience of attending the workshop. “It’s very embracing of life, the opposite of what you’d expect,” he said.
The second half of the afternoon format focused on epitaph writing, led by Jeff Dolven, an English professor at Princeton University, who called the epitaph a “very different genre” from the suicide note. The students wrote their own epitaphs. Some were stoic, some self-aggrandizing, some humorous.
“An imprint light,/Or deeply pressed/She moved among us/Then she left,” wrote Karen Houppert, a journalist.
“He was kind to all animals, except his family,” Mr. Riddles wrote.
As evening approached Mr. Dolven dismissed class and left the students with a final epitaph from W.B. Yeats.
“Cast a cold eye/On life, on death./Horseman, pass by,” he read, and a chilly quiet permeated the room.
“I’ll leave you with that enigmatic epitaph,” Professor Dolven said. “Reconcilable, though not perfectly reconcilable.”With a Veni grant, psychologist Hans IJzerman is doing research into the function of temperature and body temperature in social relations. And guess what he found? A cold environment changes a house into a real 'home'. After all, people associate cold with an intuitive need to be sheltered and with huddling together to keep warm. He also found that potential house buyers are prepared to pay more for a house when it is cold, and they want to realise the transaction quicker. Together with Bram van Acker, IJzerman recorded his findings in the article 'Homelike Thermoregulation: How Physical Coldness Makes an Advertised House a Home' that has been accepted for publication in a special issue about 'preregistration' in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
People are a bit like penguins
Estate agents intuitively feel that each expression of 'warmth' ensures that a house is sold quicker. That is why an estate agent's office is always so snug and warm in winter. But is that the right approach to tempt potential buyers to place their signature? It does not seem to be the case.
IJzerman: 'We investigated the degree to which the need for protection among people influences their perception of houses that are sold through advertisements. In other words, what is the relationship between temperature, the need to be together, and the appreciation of the house? In two separate studies, we discovered that this influence is clearly present. People are a bit like penguins: cold drives them towards each other and increases the desire for contact with others. This subsequently leads to the need to find a "home" more than a house.'
It was already known that thermoregulation – an organism's ability to regulate its body temperature – influences how people view interpersonal relationships. Cold forces people and animals to seek each other out to share body heat, which is probably a universal and evolutionary need. Other research found that people want to watch romantic films as soon as it gets colder, for example.
Shelter from the cold
IJzerman: 'You want to huddle together. After all, it costs a lot of energy to keep yourself warm. The "closer" people are, the warmer they feel. As soon as people feel excluded, their peripheral temperature decreases. This is also the point at which the idea of looking for shelter comes up. The appearance of a house predicts a relatively new solution to an old problem: shelter from the cold.'
Two of the studies had 120 and 226 participants respectively. The participants were shown a picture of a typical terraced house with a neutral interior design. Subsequently, they were given the opportunity to classify the house with qualifications such as'safe', 'trusted', 'a home', 'calming', 'private' et cetera. A lower ambient temperature or even holding a colder cup of water gave people a feeling of oneness with respect to the house: they saw it more as a real 'home', were prepared to pay more for it and were more willing to buy it. Neither the suggestion that participants could soon be inside nor the assessment of their own house yielded such an effect.
The researchers made use of research methods such as pre-registration – recording how the research would be performed in advance – and making the data publicly available via the Open Science Framework.
Explore further: Murders deflate local house prices
More information: Bram Van Acker et al. Homely Thermoregulation: How Physical Coldness Makes an Advertised House a Home, SSRN Electronic Journal (2015). DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2576421One of the first modules I ever took over on CPAN is the venerable HTTP::BrowserDetect. I remember I was giving a talk at Toronto PerlMongers one night about a UserAgent parser I had worked very hard to build. When I was finished, one of the comments was “Why didn’t you just use HTTP::BrowserDetect”? The answer was pretty simple — I just didn’t know about it.
After I got familiar with HTTP::BrowserDetect, I saw that it was on some levels better that what I had written, but that it needed some love. To his credit, the module’s author (Lee Semel) gave me co-maint pretty much immediately. I even wrote a blog post about my efforts. It looks like that was only my second ever post on blogs.perl.org. Good times! That was 5 years ago (give or take a week), so now feels like a good time to revisit this topic.
About a year after my initial post, Neil Bowers did one of his very comprehensive module reviews. This time the topic was UserAgent Parsers. If you haven’t read it, it’s a very thorough and very good analysis of what was out there at the time. That was the good part. The bad part is that it sat up terribly with other modules in terms of how long it took to parse strings. Neil did, however, conclude that it was the best module at the time for recognizing bots.
After he published this, Neil and I had some back and forth about replacing the guts of some or most available UserAgent parsers with a common parser to reduce many of the duplicate efforts. I did put up a few rough ideas in the form of UserAgent::UeberAgent but got distracted by various things in the meantime. That however is a digression.
The one takeaway I want to leave you with is that fact that HTTP::BrowserDetect is alive and well. Over the past 5 years it has seen many, many pull requests. As a result of this, it recognizes even more bots, parses even more UserAgent strings, has better test coverage and has had some significant cleanups in the internals. (It’s still kind of weird on the inside, but it’s over 15 years old at this point — I’ll cut it a lot of slack).
What actually drove me to write this post is that Windows 10 was set to roll out on July 29, 2015. That’s the same date that I got a pull request which adds Windows 10 and Windows 10 Edge Browser detection. I was able to upload a new release to CPAN on the same day.
The cool thing about this is that it’s not an anomaly. I get lots of pull requests in a very timely manner. I don’t really advertise this module, but people find it and send patches. Because it sees a fair amount of use, it is also kept nicely up to date. It has come a long way since March 16, 2000. It’s a teenager, but it’s in a good place. It’s loved. It’s cared for and fed and it still does a great job.
As far as the benchmarking with respect to other modules goes, I’m not sure if Neil will find the time to run another report, but I’d be very interested to see what the current state of affairs is.
There is, however, one thing I am able to benchmark and that is the speed at which I’m traditionally able to merge pull request for this module. Recently I wrote github-mergevelocity, which can tell you how responsive a repository has historically been to attempts at collaboration. Let’s see how HTTP::BrowserDetect performs:
bash-3.2$ github-mergevelocity --url oalders/http-browserdetect.---------+--------------------+----------+-----+----------+------------+--------+------------+------+-----------. | user | repo | velocity | PRs | merged | merge days | closed | close days | open | open days | +---------+--------------------+----------+-----+----------+------------+--------+------------+------+-----------+ | oalders | http-browserdetect | 230 | 61 | 98% (60) | 3/PR (194) | 2% (1) | 2/PR (2) | 0 | 0 | '---------+--------------------+----------+-----+----------+------------+--------+------------+------+-----------' 1 2 3 4 5 6 bash - 3.2 $ github - mergevelocity -- url oalders / http - browserdetect. -- -- -- -- - + -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- + -- -- -- -- -- + -- -- - + -- -- -- -- -- + -- -- -- -- -- -- + -- -- -- -- + -- -- -- -- -- -- + -- -- -- + -- -- -- -- -- -. | user | repo | velocity | PRs | merged | merge days | closed | close days | open | open days | + -- -- -- -- - + -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- + -- -- -- -- -- + -- -- - + -- -- -- -- -- + |
edi is ready to be a starting right tackle.One day, while my daughter was happily distracted with her own marker drawings, I decided to risk pulling out a new sketchbook I had special-ordered. It had dark paper, and was perfect for adding highlights. I had only drawn a little in it, and was anxious to try it again, but knowing my daughter's love of art supplies, I knew if I wasn't sly enough, I might have to share. (Note: I'm all about kid's crafts, but when it comes to my own art projects, I don't like to share.) Since she was engrossed in her own project, I thought I might be able to pull it off.
I should have known better. Not long after I had drawn my first face (I love drawing from old black-and-white movie stills), she swooped over to me with an intense look.
"OOOH! Is that a NEW sketchbook? Can I draw in that too, mama?"
I have to admit, the girl knows good art supplies when she sees them. I muttered something about how it was my special book, how she had her own supplies and blah blah blah, but the appeal of new art supplies was too much for her to resist. In a very serious tone, she looked at me and said, "If you can't share, we might have to take it away."
Oh no she didn't! Girlfriend was using my own mommy-words on me! Impressed, I agreed to comply. "I was going to draw a body on this lady's face," I said.
"Well, I will do it," she said, and grabbed the pen. I had resigned myself to let that one go, to let her have the page, and then drop the matter. I would just draw on my own later, I decided. I love my daughter's artwork, truly, I do! But this was MY sketchbook, my inner kid complained.
Not surprisingly, I LOVED what she drew. I had drawn a woman's face, and she had turned her into a dinosaur-woman. It was beautiful, it was carefree, and as much as I don't like to share, I LOVED what she had created. Flipping through my sketchbook, I found another doodle of a face I had not yet finished. She drew a body on it, too, and I was enthralled. It was such a beautiful combination of my style and hers. And she LOVED being a part of it. She never hesitated in her intent. She wasn't tentative. She was insistent and confident that she would of course improve any illustration I might have done... and the thing is, she DID.
Soon, she began flipping through my sketchbook, looking for more heads.
"Do you have any heads for me today?" she would ask me each morning. So, I began making a point at night to draw some faces for her (which was my pleasure -- faces are my favorite part, anyway). She would then pick up a pen with great focus and begin to draw. Later, I would add color and highlights, texture and painting, to make a complete piece. Sometimes, she filled in the solid areas with colored markers, but I would always finish with acrylics later on my own.
Sometimes, I would give her suggestions like, "maybe she could have a dragon body!" but usually, she would ignore theses suggestions if it didn't fit in with what she already had in mind. But since I am a grown-up and a little bit (OK, a lot) of a perfectionist, I sometimes would have a specific idea in mind as I doodled my heads. Maybe she could make this into a bug! I'd think happily to myself as I sketched, imagining the possibilities of what it could look like. So later, when she'd doodle some crazy shape that seemed to go in some surrealistic direction, or put a large circle around the creature and filled the WHOLE THING in with marker, part of my brain would think, What is she DOING?!? She's just scribbling it all up! But I should know that in most instances, kids' imaginations way outweigh a grown-up's, and it always ALWAYS looked better that what I had imagined. ALWAYS.
For example, the filled-in marker of the one above, she told me, was a chrysalis, for the caterpillar to transform into a butterfly. Of COURSE it is. I never would have thought of that. And that's why kids make awesome artists.
Later, I would show her what I had done with our drawings -- the painting and coloring. She seemed to critique them pretty harshly. "That's silly, mama," or, "you put WATER behind her?" But for the most part, she enjoyed them. I enjoyed them. I LOVE them.
And from it all, here are the lessons I learned:
Try not to be so rigid. Yes, some things (like my new sketchbook) are sacred, but if you let go of those chains, new and wonderful things can happen. Those things you hold so dear cannot change and grow and expand unless you loosen your grip on them a little.
In sharing my artwork and allowing my daughter to be an equal in our collaborations, I helped solidify her confidence, which is way more precious than any doodle I could have done. In her mind, her contributions were as valid as mine (and in truth, they really were).
Most importantly, I learned that if you have a preconceived notion of how something should be, YOU WILL ALWAYS BE DISAPPOINTED. Instead, just go with it, just ACCEPT it, because usually, something even more wonderful will come out of it.
To see more collaborations between Mica Angela Hendricks and her daughter, click through the slideshow below, and visit Society 6 where they are available for purchase.Tracy McConnell is the titular character of the series. She is the wife of Ted Mosby and the mother of his children. She was a bass player and vocalist for an economics themed band called Superfreakonomics, which commonly played around New York in the 2010s. Her social circle included Cindy, Kelly, and Louis (who she dated from April 2012 to May 2013). She studied economics at Columbia University. She most likely lived at 317 West 115th Street, apartment 7A, until she moved in with Ted. In Last Forever - Part Two, it is revealed she dies of an undisclosed illness in 2024, about six years prior to Ted Mosby telling his children how he met her.
Prior to her full revelation, Tracy's name, physical appearance, and how she would meet Ted were only partially revealed over the course of several years. This slow reveal created much fan speculation as to who she was. As such, she was commonly referred to as "The Mother" by fans. Her first full appearance was in Something New, her name was revealed in Last Forever - Part Two, and where she would meet Ted was confirmed in Farhampton. Her name was possibly revealed in season one's Belly Full of Turkey, when Ted tells his children he met a stripper named Tracy, to which they respond "WHAT?".
Contents show]
Family
Character Background
In 2005, while celebrating her 21st birthday with her friends at a MacLaren's Pub on the west side of New York, Tracy finds out her long term boyfriend Max has been killed. A few weeks later, she returns home after the funeral to find a packaged ukulele he had gifted to her, which she keeps as a reminder of his spirit and presence. The sudden death deeply traumatizes Tracy and puts her off dating ever again.
In 2008, she reluctantly attends the St. Patrick's Day party seen in season three's No Tomorrow after being talked into it by her roommate and best friend Kelly. At the party, she runs into Mitch (The Naked Man) who is revealed as her music instructor from some years back, before either had moved to New York. Tracy offers Mitch a cello she no longer uses and invites him back to her place. They prematurely leave the party and she forgets her Yellow Umbrella at the club. At the apartment, Tracy brings out the cello only to find Mitch standing nude before her. Mitch explains the purpose of The Naked Man move and Tracy expresses more disillusionment with dating. Mitch asks Tracy what she wants to do with her life from now on. She decides she wants to end world poverty. Mitch tells her everything she does from now on should be in service of that goal. This inspires Tracy to go to university. Tracy then realizes she forgot her umbrella and rushes to retrieve it, just as Kelly arrives home (The Naked Man works on her). The club had closed before Tracy arrives, and when she returns the next morning, Ted had already taken the umbrella while looking for his lost phone.
In 2009, Tracy meets Cindy in her Econ 305 class. As Kelly has moved out, she invites Cindy - who is without a place to live - to become her new roommate. Cindy agrees, and Tracy tells her that she no longer dates after losing Max. She describes herself as "old fashioned," stating she believes that everybody has only one soulmate that they can truly connect with and that she'd already met him. Ted then walks into the wrong classroom and begins giving his lecture to the class, as seen in season 5's Definitions. It is here that Tracy first absentmindedly hears and laughs at Ted's infamous "shellfish" joke. Once Ted begins teaching architecture, Tracy believes she's in the wrong room and runs out. However, it is Ted who is in the wrong room. The two briefly cross paths again as Ted is running to the correct classroom and Tracy realizes she needs to go back.
Later that year, Ted briefly dates Cindy but they break up when he, like her other dates, becomes fixated on what he knows about Tracy. As seen in Girls Versus Suits, he leaves their apartment, forgetting the yellow umbrella and briefly glimpsing Tracy's foot as she walks into her bedroom. A short time later, Tracy notices the yellow umbrella. She bursts into Cindy's room excited and confused, but finds Cindy in tears. Cindy reveals to her that she had been dating "the architecture professor that walked into the wrong room first term," and that they had parted ways because Ted was unwittingly "already in love" with Tracy. Tracy is skeptical as he hasn't even met her, and Cindy begins lovingly describing Tracy's favorable traits. Cindy then kisses Tracy. When Tracy does not reciprocate, Cindy apologises and says she has to figure out her sexuality.
In 2010, Tracy meets Darren, who tells her he's a longtime fan of her band, "Superfreakonomics". She offers to let him sing vocals at their next show, which leads to Darren progressively taking over and corrupting the band, then later trying to kick her out.
In 2011, as Tracy, and an unhelpful Darren, are packing up equipment from a show, a man named Louis (Seen in The Time Travelers) appears and offers to load the rest of her equipment into the car. Louis asks her out. She objects, but when Louis hands her his number she accepts and meets him later at MacLaren's. Tracy once again explains that no longer dates after losing Max. Louis understands but leaves the possibility open. Eventually, Tracy gives Louis a chance, and they begin dating. They are happy together, but Tracy feels there is no true love evident.
Six months before Barney and Robin's wedding, seen in a flashback in Platonish, Barney accepts a series of complicated pick up challenges set by Robin and Lily. He succeeds at every one. In his final challenge, he goes to a drug store to hook up with a random woman while holding embarrassing objects. The woman he targets happens to be Tracy. As Barney attempts to woo her, she stops him immediately and tells him she can see this is a cry fro help. Barney initially dismisses her claim, but when he tries to pick up another woman, he realises Tracy is right. He pursues her for more advice. They sit on a bench outside the store and Barney opens up to her. Tracy tells Barney that she thinks he failed falling in love and now he's been trying to keep himself busy to escape it. She asks Barney: "Do you want to continue playing the game or do you want to win?". Barney begins realizing he's wanted to win Robin all along. He tells Tracy he could easily win the love of his life in 20 minutes but she stops him, telling him it'll be a long process, and it'll take all he has and is willing to give. Barney sits on the bench deep in thought as Tracy gets up and heads to the nearest subway. Later that night, Barney begins to write "The Robin" which culminates with his proposal later in the year. Simultaneously, Ted is choosing not to chase Robin again, a decision which inadvertently leads to Barney and Robin getting married, and Tracy meeting Ted at the wedding.
Before Barney and Robin's wedding, Tracy arranges to stay at Louis's beachside house. She remains there until Sunday night of the wedding weekend.
In The Locket, Tracy offers Lily some of the cookies (which she calls "sumbitches") that she brought with her on the train to Farhampton, after seeing Lily distraught about missing Marvin. She later sits beside Lily, who rants to her about her previous car ride with Ted and some of the annoying habits he'd displayed during their drive to the wedding. Tracy mocks Ted with Lily, but realises she also possesses all of Ted's travel habits. She later suggests to Lily that perhaps Ted deliberately got Lily to leave his car, which helps her realize that Ted wanted to beat Lily to the Farhampton Inn so she couldn't stop him from giving the locket to Robin in hopes of winning her back. She then tries to look at her phone to see Marvin, but Tracy takes her phone away, telling Lily it only makes her upset. They get into a fight and eventually Tracy gives in and allows Lily to have her phone to see if any new Marvin pictures have been uploaded. Just as she's about to see a photo revealing Marshall accepting his judgeship, Marvin accidentally deletes the photo in the Minnesota airport, and Tracy gives Lily a hug to help her feel better.
The night before Barney and Robin's wedding, during Bass Player Wanted, Tracy finds Marshall and Marvin on the side of the road on their way to the Farhampton Inn and offers them a ride. In the car, she reveals that Lily told her all about his plans to move to Rome with her. Marshall asks if Lily said anything to her about his accepting of a judgeship, and Tracy guarantees he'll be having quite the talk with his wife once he arrives. She tells Marshall that she's heading back into the city because she recently quit being the bass player for the band she created in college, "The Superfreakonomics," before her lead singer, Darren, could fire her.
Darren is revealed to be the man who's been causing trouble between Lily and Robin, and between Barney and Ted by revealing some large secrets, such as Ted's moving to Chicago. Tracy has a talk with Lily in the Farhampton Inn Bar prior to meeting Marshall, where Lily recommends she steal Darren's van and head back to New York. Tracy does so, but Marshall convinces her to stand up for herself and kick Darren out of the band she created instead of just giving in. Once they arrive at the Inn together, she immediately heads back to the bar and orders the "Kennedy Package", just as Lily had in Coming Back and even says "Thank you, Linus" after every drink. Linus is shown to have fallen for Darren's same charm, and Tracy sits, feeling down on her luck.
Meanwhile, Ted has stolen a 30-year-old bottle of Glen McKenna from a nearby liquor store to prove his friendship to Barney. After Marshall reunites with the gang, Darren rounds the corner and bumps into Ted after he begins pouring his friends glasses of the Glen McKenna. Ted turns around and punches Darren in the face, knocking him out. After hearing this news, Tracy tells the bartender she wants to buy "whoever the best man was" a glass of 35-year-old Scotch and leaves the bar just before Ted and the gang arrive cheering, Ted on. After Tracy leaves, future Ted remarks, "Kids, that was the first drink your mother ever bought me".
The same night, a few hours after Bass Player Wanted, she returns to Louis' house, where he proposes to her. In a panic, she walks onto his front porch and looks into the sky, asking Max if it's finally okay to let go of him, and if she should. She accepts that perhaps it's best to move on and find love, but when she returns to Louis she turns down his proposal in tears, grabs her umbrella and belongings, and goes to the Farhampton Inn. That night, she gets a key from Curtis, the desk clerk, who gives her the room right beside Ted's. She puts her stuff down, gets out Max's ukulele, walks onto the balcony of her room, and starts to sing a personal rendition of "La Vie en Rose". Ted, sitting just a few feet away on the balcony of his room, listens to the song, and Future Ted states that he has heard her sing "La Vie En Rose" many times since meeting her, but that time on the balcony would always be his favorite.
A few minutes before Barney and Robin's wedding ceremony, Robin runs away from the church in her dress and accidentally knocks Tracy down while she is setting up for the wedding reception. Tracy is hesitant to give advice to a bride she doesn't know, running from her wedding. She instead advises Robin to take three deep breaths, because doing so can sometimes change everything. (The End of the Aisle)
At the reception, Ted sees Tracy for the first time, playing the bass with the band. Barney sees and recognizes her and tells Tracy that he "got the girl" she once advised him to go after, referring to Robin. When he finds out that Tracy is now single, he tries to introduce Ted to her but is side-tracked when Ted announces that he is leaving. Later that night, Ted is waiting at the train station when Tracy arrives. Ted gathers up the courage and talks to her. Tracy tells him that he knows him through the Econ 305 class, and Ted knows that she was Cindy's old roommate. They then realize that they both owned her yellow umbrella at different points and realize that they found each other. They hit it off, and the following day, Ted cancels his plans for Chicago. He calls her and invites her to dinner.
Three days after Barney and Robin's wedding, she and Ted go on their first date. Ted tells her the story of Gary Blauman, and she sees Louis, which makes her uncertain she is ready to date again. Ted walks her home and finishes the story. Tracy and Ted share their first kiss then continue to walk around.
In 2014, a year after Barney and Robin's wedding weekend, seen in a flash-forward in Coming Back: Tracy and Ted are checking in to the Farhampton Inn, where Ted tells her a story of how one year earlier, he sat in the very chair across from them almost to the moment and told himself, "I'm coming back, and I'm bringing you". She remarks that Ted hadn't even met her a year ago, but Ted tells her he knew he would. He gets up and leaves to check them in, and Tracy looks around the room and eventually her eyes land on the very seat Ted from 2013 had been sitting in.
Soon after, as seen in The Lighthouse, Ted stands with Tracy on top of the Farhampton lighthouse, staring out into the sunset. She says it's "almost like going back in time", which Ted remarks was exactly what he'd said when he visited there with Cassie in 2013. She remarks how she pukes whenever Ted does, and she doesn't want that to ruin "the perfect evening"; Ted tells her he'll try to make it even better. He gets down on one knee and begins to propose, but before he can say her name and complete his sentence she automatically says yes without question, multiple times. He stands up, they kiss, and are officially engaged.
In 2015, Ted and Tracy are planning to get married in a grand ceremony in France in September that year. However, they postpone their wedding indefinitely when Tracy announces that she is pregnant. The couple continued living together in their house, unwed.
In 2017, at 2:17 in the morning, seen during a flash-forward in Unpause, Ted & Tracy are once again staying in the Farhampton Inn. Tracy is pregnant and begins having contractions. They quickly get into a car that's waiting outside, placing their two-year-old daughter in a carseat, and Ted tells Tracy that he's proud of her, as is their daughter, Penny. As Ted hurriedly drives toward the hospital, Future Ted tells his kids that the one exception to the "nothing good happens after 2 a.m." rule was the birth of his son, Luke.
In 2020, Ted re-proposes to Tracy and they are wed in a simple ceremony attended by Marshall, Lily, Barney, and Robin, who initially RSVP'd with "no", but was convinced by Tracy herself.
On New Years Eve 2022, Tracy and Ted attend a party celebrating Tracey's book being published. In the limousine outside the event, Ted recalls the vow he made (Rally) of not drinking as much as Barney drank in the night before his wedding (Unpause) so he wouldn't get such a terrible hangover. Tracy is skeptical he'll keep his word. However, the next morning, Tracy is the one with a terrible hangover, so Ted makes her the Stinson Hangover Fixer Elixir.
In 2024, Tracy and Ted are staying at the Farhampton Inn. Ted attempts to tell her stories like he told his children, but they both discover that they have told each other every story they have, finally considering themselves, "an old married couple." She then says that he should not live in his past stories, but instead live life moving forward (Vesuvius). When Ted recalls how Robin's mother nearly didn't attend her wedding, Tracy makes an offhand comment about mothers always attending their daughter's weddings. Ted is overcome with sudden emotion and Tracy quickly changes the subject back to their life stories.
In Last Forever - Part Two, Tracy dies of an illness sometime in 2024. Ted recalls the time he met her and he says from the moment that he met her, he had to love her for as long as her could. His daughter reveals that she has been gone for six years as of 2030. She also theorises that the reason he went into such detail about Robin throughout the retelling is because he still has feelings for her. The kids are enthusiastic about him dating Robin again, saying they have seen how they interact together. With his children's blessing, Ted decides to steal the blue french horn again and goes to Robin's apartment.
Known Facts
Over the course of the show, facts about the Mother reveal that she has a lot of common with Ted. Before Tracy's official introduction, the following was revealed throughout the series:
At the end of Lucky Penny, Future Ted says:
"Kids, funny thing about destiny. I thought I was destined to get that job, but I was wrong. My destiny was to stay in New York. Because if I hadn't, I never would've met your mother." This strongly suggested that Ted meets The Mother in New York. During Future Ted's narration, the scene flashes forward to Ted at the altar with the Mother, whose head is obscured by a bridal veil. Barney and Marshall are also present.
, Future Ted says: This strongly suggested that Ted meets The Mother in New York. During Future Ted's narration, the scene flashes forward to Ted at the altar with the Mother, whose head is obscured by a bridal veil. Barney and Marshall are also present. At the end of Something Blue, Future Ted closes the episode talking about his and Robin's futures: "And as hard as it was at the time, in the end we both got what we wanted. She did eventually go on to live in Argentina, and Morocco, Greece, Russia, even Japan for a little while. And I? Well, I met your mom."
, Future Ted closes the episode talking about his and Robin's futures: At the end of How I Met Everyone Else, Ted asks Marshall and Lily where his wife is, at his college reunion. As the reunion was held in 2020, it is revealed that, by 2020, Ted would have already gotten married. Many speculated this was a clue that The Mother would be dead in the future and, even though that was the case, the timeline suggests his comment was simply made due to Ted being high.
, Ted asks Marshall and Lily where his wife is, at his college reunion. As the reunion was held in 2020, it is revealed that, by 2020, Ted would have already gotten married. Many speculated this was a clue that The Mother would be dead in the future and, even though that was the case, the timeline suggests his comment was simply made due to Ted being high. In Wait For It, it is revealed by Future Ted that The Mother's yellow umbrella factors into the story of how she and Ted met.
, it is revealed by Future Ted that The Mother's yellow umbrella factors into the story of how she and Ted met. In No Tomorrow, Future Ted states that his future wife was at the same St. Patrick's Day party he went to, but that they didn't meet each other. When going back to the party to find his phone, he picked up the yellow umbrella that belonged to her. However, Ted bumps into a seemingly arbitrary woman and they share a moment, now proven to be a red herring.
, Future Ted states that his future wife was at the same St. Patrick's Day party he went to, but that they didn't meet each other. When going back to the party to find his phone, he picked up the yellow umbrella that belonged to her. However, Ted bumps into a seemingly arbitrary woman and they share a moment, now proven to be a red herring. In The Three Days Rule, Future Ted told his children that when he got their mother's phone number, he called her right away. This is then shown in Last Forever - Part Two.
, Future Ted told his children that when he got their mother's phone number, he called her right away. This is then shown in Last Forever - Part Two. In The Leap, Ted is shown teaching his first class at Columbia University. Future Ted narrates how this was the best job he's ever had, and that if it weren't for that job, he never would have met their Mother. In Definitions, it's revealed that Ted was in the wrong room for his first class, and all the students there were Economics students, Tracy being one of them. His taking the wrong class also leads him to meet Cindy, who was Tracy's roommate at the time.
, Ted is shown teaching his first class at. Future Ted narrates how this was the best job he's ever had, and that if it weren't for that job, he never would have met their Mother. In, it's revealed that Ted was in the wrong room for his first class, and all the students there were Economics students, Tracy being one of them. His taking the wrong class also leads him to meet Cindy, who was Tracy's roommate at the time. In Double Date, Future Ted told his kids that when he first told their mother his "shellfish-selfish" joke, she laughed. This appears to be slightly inaccurate as the first time he told the joke, he was actually telling it to the Economics class he mistakenly taught, and she was the only one in the room who laughed.
, Future Ted told his kids that when he first told their mother his "shellfish-selfish" joke, she laughed. This appears to be slightly inaccurate as the first time he told the joke, he was actually telling it to the Economics class he mistakenly taught, and she was the only one in the room who laughed. In Last Cigarette Ever, Future Ted reveals that he quit smoking two weeks into dating Tracy. This may be in part because, as an economist who wanted to end world poverty, she taught him to prioritise how he spends money.
Later in The Exploding Meatball Sub, a scene set in April 2021 (ten years into the future) shows Ted wearing a wedding ring, further implying he will have met and married The Mother by this time. Robin is not wearing a wedding ring, as she and Barney would have divorced five years earlier.
, a scene set in April 2021 (ten years into the future) shows Ted wearing a wedding ring, further implying he will have met and married The Mother by this time. Robin is not wearing a wedding ring, as she and Barney would have divorced five years earlier. In No Pressure, it is stated that the last person he said 'I love you' to before The Mother was Robin.
In Trilogy Time, Ted is watching the Star Wars trilogy with Barney and Marshall in 2015. Barney complains about Ted bringing his baby daughter along, but relents because she is too cute. Ted is also wearing a wedding ring. However, in season nine, it is revealed Ted and the Mother did not actually wed until 2020, after seven years together. The ring may be an engagement ring, as the two stay engaged for many years.
In Farhampton, Ted is waiting for the train back to the city at the Farhampton train station, after Barney and Robin's wedding. The Mother also arrives there, holding up her yellow umbrella and bass guitar in the rain. Show creator Craig Thomas confirmed this was the place where Ted and The Mother would finally meet[1].
In Band or DJ?, it is revealed that The Mother is the bass guitar player in the band playing at Barney and Robin's wedding.
, it is revealed that The Mother is the bass guitar player in the band playing at Barney and Robin's wedding. In Bad Crazy, Future Ted reveals that the last girl he dated before meeting The Mother was Jeanette.
, Future Ted reveals that the last girl he dated before meeting The Mother was Jeanette. In The Time Travelers, it is revealed that in April 2013, 45 days before she met Ted, The Mother was dating a man named Louis while living at 317 West 115th Street in apartment 7A and still obtaining her Economics degree. He imagines what he would say to her if he knew they were about to meet, and if he knew that he would eventually lose her to illness after eleven years together.
, it is revealed that in April 2013, 45 days before she met Ted, The Mother was dating a man named Louis while living at 317 West 115th Street in apartment 7A and still obtaining her Economics degree. He imagines what he would say to her if he knew they were about to meet, and if he knew that he would eventually lose her to illness after eleven years together. In Something New, The Mother's appearance was revealed for the first time. She is seen buying her train ticket for Farhampton, where eventually she'll meet Ted after Robin and Barney's wedding.
, The Mother's appearance was revealed for the first time. She is seen buying her train ticket for Farhampton, where eventually she'll meet Ted after Robin and Barney's wedding. In How Your Mother Met Me, it is revealed The Mother's 21st birthday was in September 2005, this makes her birth date 1984, which makes her 28 by the events of Barney and Robin's wedding. Her birthday falls on the same date Ted and Barney met Robin, and when Marshall and Lily got engaged.
, it is revealed The Mother's 21st birthday was in September 2005, this makes her birth date 1984, which makes her 28 by the events of Barney and Robin's wedding. Her birthday falls on the same date Ted and Barney met Robin, and when Marshall and Lily got engaged. In Vesuvius, she and Ted are addressed as "The Mosbys," implying she took Ted's surname after their marriage in 2020.
, she and Ted are addressed as "The Mosbys," implying she took Ted's surname after their marriage in 2020. It is revealed in the final episode of the series that the Mother had died six years prior to when Ted began telling his children their story. Tracy died in 2024, shortly after Vesuvius.
Possibilities and Theories
This is a list of identities and popular theories regarding The Mother, before she was revealed:
At the end of Belly Full of Turkey, Future Ted jokes to his kids that the stripper named Tracy he flirts with was their mother. Their shocked reaction when he tells them "And that, kids, is the true story of how I met your mother." - and subsequent relief when he laughs and says "I'm kidding." - suggest that their mother's name may be Tracy. The mother's name was confirmed as "Tracy McConnell" when she spoke it near the end of "Last Forever - Part Two", thus giving credence for the kids' shock mentioned above.
, Future Ted jokes to his kids that the stripper named Tracy he flirts with was their mother. Their shocked reaction when he tells them "And that, kids, is the true story of how I met your mother." - and subsequent relief when he laughs and says "I'm kidding." - suggest that their mother's name may be Tracy. The mother's name was confirmed as "Tracy McConnell" when she spoke it near the end of "Last Forever - Part Two", thus giving credence for the kids' shock mentioned above. Many fans theorised the woman Ted bumped into during the Saint Patricks Day party in No Tomorrow would turn out to be the mother.
Despite continual denials, theories of Robin being the Mother persisted until she was revealed to be infertile in season seven's Symphony of Illumination.
The mother being dead by the time Ted tells their life story was an extremely popular theory when the series aired, especially due to Future Ted's increasingly serious tone as the seasons continue.
This is a list of people who, in the past, were potential candidates for being The Mother. However, due to new information released later during the series, these people have been excluded from being potential candidates. Please note that only those who had a realistic chance of being The Mother are included in this list, such as those that have been in serious, long-term relationships with Ted.
Ted's Love Solutions Match
During Matchmaker, Ted has a date with Ted's Love Solutions Match, as they share a lot of similar interests and she wants the same things out of life as Ted does. However, Ted realizes that he doesn't want perfect, he wants Robin, and stands her up on their date to pursue Robin instead. Ted says she's 28, but Tracy turned 21 during the events of the Pilot, so it is very unlikely they are the same person. Coincidentally, Tracy was 28 years old when she met Ted.
In the Pilot, it was shown that Ted wanted to get married and loved Robin, so it was implied that she would be The Mother. However, at the end of the episode, Future Ted reveals that that girl turned out to be Aunt Robin, not The Mother. In Symphony of Illumination, it is revealed that Robin cannot have children, so she could not be The Mother. Lastly, in The Magician's Code - Part Two, it is shown that Robin is the bride at Barney's wedding, eliminating any possibilities of her being The Mother.
Relationship with Robin
So far, every step that has brought Ted closer to meeting The Mother has been indirectly connected to Robin in some way:
In The End of the Aisle, just as Robin tried to run off on her wedding, she bumped into the Mother as the latter was setting up on the stage. Robin admitted to the Mother her doubts about pushing through with marrying Barney. The Mother then advised Robin that taking three deep breaths before making a decision could change everything. Robin followed it and upon opening her eyes, she saw Barney who talked about his vow to her and they shared a kiss. If Robin didn't physically bump into the Mother, the former would have continued running off, thus jeopardising the wedding and possibly Ted's chances of meeting the latter. In Last Forever - Part Two, Robin lists Ted's relationship with Tracy as one of the reasons she doesn't hang out with the gang anymore. Robin reunites with the gang for Ted and Tracy's wedding, at Tracy's encouragement. Ted's kids comment on how the story about how he met Tracy focused more on his feelings for Robin. They conclude that after all these years, their father subconsciously still has feelings for Robin, and they reveal they have noticed romantic tension still existing between them. With his children's blessing, he decides to pursue Robin again.
Due to the seriousness of their relationship, it was suspected Victoria would be The Mother, but as was said earlier, in Lucky Penny, Future Ted states that he had not yet met The Mother. Since Ted met Victoria months prior to this episode, it's clear Victoria is not The Mother. Victoria leaves her fiancée at the altar for Ted and they started dating again in Season 8[2]. However, due to his continued friendship with Robin, they break up again. it's likely that if How I Met Your Mother had not been renewed for a second season, Victoria would have been a fallback option and become The Mother.
Stella was a likely candidate to be The Mother, due to the seriousness of her relationship with Ted, culminating with their engagement and subsequent wedding plans. In Ten Sessions, Stella tells Ted that the last party she'd been to was on St. Patrick's Day, whereas in the previous episode, No Tomorrow, he reveals to his kids that their mother was at a same party that he was on St. Patrick's Day. However, Stella left him on their wedding day to be with her ex-boyfriend, and father of her daughter, Tony Grafanello. Once again, if How I Met Your Mother had ended after Season 3, Stella would likely have been a fallback option (similar to Victoria) and she would have been The Mother, although Stella's daughter Lucy not being present while Ted is talking to his kids was an early indication Stella was not the mother since Lucy would have been in her early 30's in 2030. In a hypothetical flash forward, Ted pictures his kids with Stella as being blonde haired.
Zoey was never a possibility to be The Mother, since it had been stated before Ted met her that the day he met his wife was the day of a wedding further down the road. Zoey is further confirmed as not The Mother when Ted reveals to Wendy the Waitress, when they cross paths in 2021, that his and Zoey's relationship ended badly, and that he's since married and had children.
Until Ring Up, it was speculated that The Mother could be Barney's half-sister, Carly, as this would have literally made Robin and Barney aunt and uncle to Ted's future children. Not much was known |
the workforce. Do certain graduation years have better credit scores?
Data source: LendEDU
Despite a small dip in the class of 2009, graduates (2016 and earlier) have fairly consistent scores in the “good “range between 700 and 750. Current students, especially those near graduation (2017) fare the worst, with their median credit score at 636 in the “poor” range.
Since advanced degrees tend to have higher incomes, do they take on less credit card debt as well?
Data source: LendEDU
Higher income does not mean less credit card debt - in fact, it’s the reverse, with Associate degree earners carrying the least credit card debt. PhD and MBA graduates accrue the most credit card debt, racking up an average of over $4,000. Surprisingly, pharmacists are the conservative exception, taking on less credit card debt than all but Associate degrees.
With the rising cost of education, do current students rack up more credit card debt than established graduates?
Data source: LendEDU
Current students actually carry the least amount of credit card debt. Perhaps they can’t get or haven’t opened up credit accounts yet, or simply haven’t had the time to build a balance.
Students of the class of 2009 and 2010, who graduated in the thick of the recession, carry the most credit card debt - nearly double that of 2008 and 2011.
If MBAs take on the most credit card debt, do they also take out the biggest auto and home loans?
Data source: LendEDU
It turns out that pharmacists take out the biggest auto loans, with a median amount of $41,764 borrowed, followed closely by PhD and MBA degrees. These borrowers may be supporting multiple car loans rather than one luxury vehicle.
Lawyers are surprisingly conservative with auto loans, borrowing just slightly more than Associate and Bachelor graduates. It could be that they purchase cars with cash, or that they tend to live in bigger cities where owning a car isn’t feasible.
Do students who graduated longer ago and are more established in their careers take out larger auto loans?
Data source: LendEDU
There is a clear trend that borrowers with earlier graduation dates do take out more money to purchase cars - though there is a noticeable deviation from the trend in 2012. The economic recovery of 2012 may have inspired graduates of that year to borrow more money.
Do these trends hold for home loans too? If so, we’d expect to see pharmacists and graduates of earlier years taking out larger home loans.
Data source: LendEDU
Once again, MBAs are not afraid to take on debt, borrowing nearly $450,000 on average to purchase their home(s). Pharmacists and lawyers rank highly as well, though PhD graduates invest in home loans at similar amounts as Master’s graduates. Associate degrees borrow the least amount in home loans.
Data source: LendEDU
While we expected to see graduates of earlier class years borrowing more home loans, we instead see a trend indicative of the housing market over time - a peak in 2008 followed by a large recession and tentative recovery starting in 2012.
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After the recession hit and a college degree no longer guaranteed a job, many began to wonder: what’s the real value of a college education? With some patience, perhaps a good credit score.
In general, higher degrees do equate with higher credit scores and bigger home and auto loans. Students who graduated longer ago have better credit scores and bigger loans than current students. The class of 2017 has the poorest scores, but if the trend holds, they’ll be back up into the “good” zone soon enough.
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Note: If you’re a company that wants to work with Priceonomics to turn your data into great stories, learn more about the Priceonomics Data Studio.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opening the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. Thomson Reuters Israel's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that it was "reducing" working ties with 12 of the UN Security Council countries that voted to pass a resolution urging Israel to stop building settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
Foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon told reporters that Israel was "temporarily reducing" visits and work with embassies, refuting reports that Israel had completely suspended working ties with the countries. He did not provide further details.
Deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely said that the reduction in ties was meant to show the nations that "you can't take Israel for granted."
The Foreign Ministry confirmed that Israel was "reducing" the ties two days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned 10 of the nations' ambassadors to Jerusalem to personally reprimand them for the vote.
The Times of Israel initially reported that foreign ministers and ambassadors from Britain, France, Russia, China, Japan, Ukraine, Angola, Egypt, Uruguay, Spain, Senegal, and New Zealand would not be received at Israel's Foreign Ministry amid the suspension, and that they would not be granted an audience with Netanyahu.
It is unclear whether the "reduction" in ties will carry the same terms.
The US abstained from the UN vote on Friday, which has further increased tensions between Netanyahu and President Barack Obama stemming from the US-led nuclear negotiations with Iran and Obama's longstanding opposition to Israel's settlement policy.
Netanyahu called the US's refusal to veto the resolution "shameful" and "underhanded," and on Sunday he held a public cabinet meeting in which he accused Obama of conspiring with Palestine to craft the resolution and bring it to a vote at the UN.
"According to our information, we have no doubt the Obama administration initiated it (the resolution), stood behind it, coordinated the wording, and demanded it be passed," Netanyahu said.
The US's ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power. Reuters
The White House has denied that allegation, reiterating that it allowed the resolution to pass — instead of wielding its veto power — because it is concerned that Israel's settlement construction in Palestinian territory is not conducive to negotiations over a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Explaining her decision to abstain from the vote, the US's ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said that the US had "been sending the message that the settlements must stop, privately and publicly, for five decades" and that allowing its passage was "in line with bipartisan US policy."
She added that the US was still committed to Israel's security and working toward a two-state solution.
Palestinians say the West Bank and East Jerusalem should be part of their future state, but nearly 600,000 Israelis have settled there in what the Palestinians say is an illegal occupation of their territory.
Palestine's ambassador to the UN said that the vote would "alleviate the suffering of our people" and that Palestinian appeals to stop the settlements had "been calls for the council to contribute" to long-term peace in the region and in the world. He said "urgent efforts are needed" to hold Israel accountable for its settlement expansion.
The 15-member UN Security Council most recently adopted a resolution on Israeli settlements 36 years ago. The chamber broke into spontaneous applause after the latest resolution was passed, with 14 members voting "yes" and only the US abstaining.
The resolution "condemned all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character, and status of the Palestinian territory, occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem" and requested the UN secretary-general "to report to the council every three months on the implementation of the provisions of the present resolution."
"Over decades American administrations and Israeli governments disagreed about settlements, but we agreed that the security council was not the place to resolve this issue," Netanyahu said during his weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday.
"We knew that going there would make negotiations harder and drive peace farther away," he said. "As I told John Kerry on Thursday, 'Friends don't take friends to the Security Council.'"
This article has been updated.One of the terrorists who carried out Saturday night’s deadly rampage in London arrived in the UK as a refugee with his Pakistani parents.
“27-year-old Khuram Shazad Butt came to Britain as a child when his parents sought asylum from Pakistan,” reports Sky News.
Manchester bomber Salman Ramadan Abedi was also the son of “refugees” who arrived from Libya.
Butt also held misogynistic views, although don’t expect feminists to be kick up a fuss about it.
“One woman, who didn’t want to be named, said he stared angrily whenever he saw women cycling on the estate. She described it as “sinister” and “sexist”.”
Perhaps leftists will now demand that western women be banned from cycling so as not to offend potential terrorists.
Butt also featured in a Channel 4 documentary called The Jihadis Next Door in which he was seen displaying an Islamist flag and praying with other Muslim men in a park.
It has emerged one of the #LondonAttack terrorists was featured in a @Channel4 documentary ABOUT JIHADISM! What on earth are we playing at?! pic.twitter.com/GfEwDvfxLM — LEAVE.EU 🇬🇧 (@LeaveEUOfficial) June 5, 2017
The same documentary features another individual who sardonically laughs when he says that his Islamist views being in line with ISIS propaganda is just a “coincidence”.
Anither Vid of guy who insinuated death threat against me also in film Jihadis Next Door with Salafi Jihadist Terrorist #khurrambutt pic.twitter.com/CAi13h0FaV — Haras Rafiq (@HarasRafiq) June 5, 2017
When asked if he supports ISIS, the man responds, “no comment,” before subsequently admitting that he would be arrested if he properly answered the question.
This guy who insinuated death threat against me also in film Jihadi Next Door with Salafi Jihadist Terrorist #khurrambutt pic.twitter.com/qVWWKuKv3E — Haras Rafiq (@HarasRafiq) June 5, 2017
The fact is that at the bare minimum there are 3,000 such individuals roaming the UK who will never be arrested or deported for their jihadist views because Britain is a country where being politically correct is deemed to be more important than stopping terrorism.
Two evil losers who carried out London Bridge attack. How many more of these cretins are walking our streets right now? pic.twitter.com/XecJbCAnYt — Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) June 5, 2017
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.After his failure to denounce President Trump’s immigration ban was met with a scorching #DeleteUber campaign, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick today vowed to set up a $3 million legal defense fund for affected drivers, in addition to other promises. He also stepped up his criticism of the ban, calling it “unjust.”
“At Uber we’ve always believed in standing up for what’s right,” Kalanick wrote on Facebook. “Today we need your help supporting drivers who may be impacted by the President's unjust immigration ban.”
He repeated his pledge to compensate those drivers stuck overseas by the immigration ban, and promised to dispatch Uber’s “lawyers and immigration experts” to provide “24/7 legal support.” In addition, Kalanick said that Uber would “urge the government to reinstate the right of U.S. residents to travel — whatever their country of origin — immediately.”
Standing up for the driver community: Here's the email I'm sending to drivers affected by President Trump's unjust... Posted by Travis Kalanick on Sunday, January 29, 2017
Kalanick’s pledges follow a blistering response from people on Twitter and elsewhere to his original statement on Trump’s immigration ban, as well as Uber’s decision to continue serving JFK airport during a reported taxi strike. Kalanick has also been criticized personally for his involvement in a Trump advisory council comprised of a handful of prominent CEOs from tech and business. The hashtag #DeleteUber — in which people posted screenshots of themselves deleting the Uber app or their Uber accounts — quickly began trending.
To make matters worse for Uber, the company’s arch rival Lyft issued a more forceful statement against the immigration ban, and the company’s chief executives announced their intention to donate $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union. Lyft’s response was among one of the strongest from Silicon Valley to Trump’s controversial executive order.
“So here again Uber is its own worst enemy,” Brishen Rogers, an assistant professor of law at Temple University, who has written about ride-hailing services told The Verge. “If they’d refused to work with Trump and taken a stand against the executive order I don’t think they’d be having this issue. Lyft is just doing a much better job at understanding public opinion and headline risk.”
Donald Trump's executive order, explainedIf Miyamoto is the father of gaming and Kojima is the crazy uncle, Gabe Newell is the cool uncle who’ll let you have a few beers when you stay at his place – just don’t tell your mother. He’s also the uncle who delivers some great gems of wisdom, such as “the internet is way smarter than any of us.”
“Do not focus on anyone but your customers.” The Valve co-founder said to Develop when asked for one piece of advice for developers. “Your reputation will follow you forever so always be fair to your customers, and certainly one thing you need to always remember is that your customers are not going to be fooled.”
“Some people think they can get away with something and just hope people won’t see through the bullshit. The internet is way smarter than any of us. In terms of business, do not take out huge advances to fund projects, because they are only loans and have strings attached.”
Say what you want about Newell, but he’s rolling in cash right now, so it might be worth listening to him.
[Develop]America’s extraordinary reckoning with sexual harassment, which has concluded the careers of dozens of high-profile men, is ricocheting back to the most powerful alleged predator of all: Donald Trump. During the presidential campaign, Trump was accused by at least 16 women of sexual misconduct, allegedly grabbing breasts, touching crotches, and forcing kisses—and won the election anyway. Now, after endorsing Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore, who is also accused of multiple counts of sexual assault and impropriety, the president is once again being pressed to account for behavior that would have forced most other politicians to resign. “In an objective setting, without question, a person with this record would have entered the graveyard of political aspirations, never to return,” Rachel Crooks, a former receptionist who accused Trump of forcibly kissing her outside an elevator in 2005, said Monday at an event with other victims. “Yet here we are with that man as president.”
For the past year, Trump has dodged many of the questions that almost derailed his campaign in October 2016, when a leaked tape saw him boasting that he did, indeed, grab women’s genitals without their consent. Asked to respond to the allegations, the White House has repeatedly insisted that all of Trump’s accusers are lying. Among their ranks are his ex-wife Ivana, who once described her husband raping her in Trump Tower in a fit of rage after a botched scalp surgery. She later shifted her claim, saying she didn’t mean that her husband raped her in a “literal or criminal” sense. Monday, after three of Trump’s accusers were interviewed by Megyn Kelly, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that the Trump administration would be putting out “multiple reports” of eyewitness accounts refuting the allegations, echoing an official statement sent to NBC News earlier in the day, which deemed the allegations “false.”
The numerous eyewitness reports have yet to materialize. On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted that he didn’t know or had never met any of his accusers, in apparent contradiction of the White House line that witnesses to the interactions would exonerate him.
It is almost impossible to extricate Trump’s past behavior from his current support of Moore. Politico reports that, in private, the president has complained that the wave of women speaking out has become a problem, and has questioned the veracity of the claims against Moore, who denies all criminal wrongdoing. (One woman has accused him of attempted rape.) According to the Associated Press, Trump has explicitly linked the two, telling associates that charges against both are false.
It is an alliance that could prove disastrous for the president. Within the Republican establishment, there is an overwhelming feeling that the party’s association with Moore is toxic. On Monday, former secretary of state and Alabama native Condoleezza Rice issued a statement calling on Alabamians to “reject bigotry, sexism, and intolerance” and “insist that our representatives are dignified, decent, and respectful of the values we hold dear.” Richard Shelby, Alabama’s senior Republican senator, told CNN that he didn’t vote for Moore, doesn’t want him to win, and that if he does, the Senate should launch an investigation that could result in his expulsion. “There’s a tipping point,” he told Jake Tapper. “When it got to the 14-year-old’s story, that was enough for me.”
More dangerous is the heat that Moore’s scandals have brought back to Trump. “Women who accuse anyone should be heard,” Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said Sunday in an extraordinary rebuke to the president. “I know that he was elected, but women should always feel comfortable coming forward. And we should all be willing to listen to them.” Trump was reportedly infuriated and White House advisers “stunned” by the statement.
Across the aisle, Moore’s Senate race has galvanized Democrats to attack Trump. “President Trump has committed assault, according to these women, and those are very credible allegations of misconduct and criminal activity,” Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said Monday on CNN, calling on the president to be investigated and resign. “These allegations are credible; they are numerous,” she continued. “I’ve heard these women’s testimony, and many of them are heartbreaking.” Gillibrand is the fifth Democratic senator to call for Trump’s resignation in the last week, following similar comments by Senators Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley, Ron Wyden, and Cory Booker.
At least one of Trump’s accusers could take him to court, too. Former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos is suing the president for defamation in a case that could see Trump forced to testify about his claim that her sexual misconduct allegations were “all made up” and “all big lies.” Zervos is seeking an apology and almost $3,000 in damages. As the L.A. Times has noted, testifying under oath could “jeopardize Trump in the way that a similar case by Paula Jones jeopardized then-President Clinton”—especially given Trump’s history of saying things that are untrue.
The Zervos lawsuit, and the G.O.P. civil war over Trump and Moore’s conduct, leave both president and party in a tough position ahead of the 2018 elections. Supporting Moore was an easy way for Trump to re-align himself with his base, who stand firm in Alabama, but in the midterms, the Republicans will need to win over moderate voters, not just disciples of Trumpism. In the post-Weinstein climate, a president accused of sexual assault supporting another party member also accused of sexual assault could struggle to appeal to suburban women. As hopeful as the White House is that the issue was already litigated by voters in 2016, the court of public opinion is never over.The 2015 edition of the Dubai Tour will include a 17 per cent uphill finish overlooking the Hatta Dam and a 60 per cent increase in total race distance, with Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) confirming during the official presentation that he will make his season debut at the race. Related Articles 11 WorldTour teams expected for 2015 Dubai Tour
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The second edition of the Dubai Tour will be held from February 4-7, with four road stages totalling 663 kilometres. The race, organised by the Dubai Sports Council in partnership with Giro d'Italia organiser RCS Sport, has been upgraded to 2.HC status and so 11 WorldTour squads and four other teams will make up the 128-rider start list.
The Dubai Tour is officially part of the UCI Asia calendar but will mark the start of the season for many of the European-based teams and riders. The Tour of Qatar (February 8-13) follows on immediately after the Dubai Tour, with the Tour of Oman (February 17-22) offering a possible third race in the Gulf.
Nibali has spent a week in Dubai with his wife and young daughter Emma, escaping the European winter and the constant demands of being the Tour de France winner. He had hinted that he would ride the Tour of San Luis with the Italian national team but will make his 2015 debut with his Astana teammates in Dubai.
"I've been on well-deserved holiday with my family in Dubai after a long hard season. I haven't ridden my bike here this time but I'm going to start my 2015 season with Astana here," Nibali confirmed.
"I rode here last year and I think the changes in the route and the uphill finish at 17 per cent will change the dynamic of the race and suits the climbers more than the sprinters. It'll be a good place to test my legs. It'll help me find my form for the rest of the year. I'll probably ride the Tour of Oman and then Tirreno-Adriatico in Italy."
Nibali hinted that he is likely to focus on the Tour de France in 2015, with teammate Fabio Aru targeting the Giro d'Italia.
"For now the only races confirmed on my race calendar are the Dubai Tour and the Tour de France. Nothing has been decided about the Giro d'Italia," he said.
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663km of racing in four days
Taylor Phinney (BMC) won the inaugural edition of the Dubai Tour in 2014 after dominating the opening time trial, while Marcel Kittel (Giant-Shimano) won the three remaining stages. With no time trial in 2015 and the hilly third stage to Hatta Dam ending with the short but 17 per cent climb, the sprinters seem excluded from the battle for overall victory with the likes of Peter Sagan or John Degenkolb more likely winners.
All four stages of the 2015 Dubai Tour will start from the Dubai International Marine Club, with different finish locations after following routes along the coast and in the desert. The riders can expect to race in the sun, with temperatures of around 28C in early February. However cross winds could be a factor in the racing as the stage routes switch and turn across the UAE peninsula.
Stage one is called the Union flag stage and covers 145km, visiting the site of the Expo 2020 and covering four laps of a 8.2km circuit around the huge UAE flag overlooking the gulf. It is expected to produce the first sprint finish of the 2015 race.
Teams and riders asked for longer stages in the second edition of the Dubai Tour as they prepare for the season and the spring Classics, so stage two covers 185km. It visits the Camel Track, the Al-Qudra Cycletrack and the Jumeirah Islands. It finishes on the Palm Jumeirah artificial island, with a very fast finale, similar to the one in 2014 when cross winds affected the sprint.
In 2014, the hills in the Hatta enclave split the peloton but Kittel made a huge effort to come from the back of the peloton to snatch victory. In 2015 the 205km third stage will cover the same rolling roads but then end overlooking the Hatta Dam after a 200m climb at a painful 17 per cent gradient. The time gaps may only be small but the climb and the finale is likely to exclude the sprinters and decide the overall winner.
The winner of the 2015 Dubai Tour will be crowned after the final and fourth 128km stage around the old city before the finish at the foot of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper.
The Commercial Bank of Dubai is the new sponsor of the race and of the general classification blue jersey.
2015 Dubai Tour stages:
Stage 1: February 4: Union Flag stage: 145km
Stage 2: February 5 Palm stage: 185km
Stage 3: February 6 Desert stage (Hatta Dam): 205km
Stage 4: February 7 Burj stage: 128kmTrump: I'll debate Sanders for $10 million for women's health issues
CLOSE Donald Trump appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live, making the suggestion that he and Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders debate before the June 7th Calif. primary. Sanders immediately took to Twitter to accept. USA TODAY
Hillary Clinton has declined to debate Bernie Sanders ahead of the June 7 California primary, but Donald Trump says he might be willing to.
“I’d love to debate Bernie, he’s a dream," Trump said to reporters Thursday in Bismarck, N.D. But, he added, the debate would not come cheap: “I’d love to debate Bernie, but they have to pay a lot of money for it."
How much is a lot? "Something over $10 million," Trump responded. The money raised would come from the TV networks profiting off the ratings.
“If we can raise for maybe women’s health issues or something, if we can raise $10 or $15 million for charity," Trump said.
Sanders agreed. After Trump's comments, Sanders tweeted he was "delighted."
I am delighted that @realDonaldTrump has agreed to debate. Let’s do it in the biggest stadium possible. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 26, 2016
The comments followed Trump's appearance on ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live Wednesday night, during which he said he would be willing to debate Sanders if it was to benefit charity. "If I debated him we would have such high ratings," Trump said. "Take that money and give it to some worthy charity."
Sanders immediately responded to that offer.
Game on. I look forward to debating Donald Trump in California before the June 7 primary. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) May 26, 2016
Is this serious? "Of course we're interested. It was Bernie's suggestion," Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs told USA TODAY on Thursday morning.
Sanders — who will appear on Kimmel's show Thursday — submitted the request to debate ahead of time and Kimmel read it to Trump.
It's hard to imagine this happening, but one has to assume that the two would have a good time agreeing that they are better than Clinton.
Trump has had good things to say about Sanders.
"The system is rigged against him," Trump told Kimmel. "I think its very unfair."
Sanders — who lags far behind former secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the delegate count — frequently cites poll numbers that show him doing better against Trump than Clinton is.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1TGj9m8Editor’s Note: This story incorrectly attributed the denial to the Obama White House/Administration. Ben LaBolt, the source quoted by BuzzFeed, is the Press Secretary of Obama For America, Barack Obama’s Election Campaign.
This week the Obama campaign decided to double down on a claim about thePresident’s past involvement in a social democratic party in themid-’90s. In 2008 when Stanley Kurtz first raised the issue, the campaignlabeled it a “crackpot smear.” Now, despite two newly discovereddocuments that prove Obama joined the New Party in 1996, his campaign is still maintaining Obama was not a member.
The two documents were dug up by Stanley Kurtz last week and published at Buzzfeed yesterday. As previously reported,minutes of a January 11, 1996 meeting plainly state that Obama attended,spoke, answered questions, asked for an endorsement, signed a
The cache of documents published yesterday also includes analphabetical list of members who are caught up on their dues and aseparate list of members who are behind on their dues. The “Not Paid Up”list is dated April 17, 1997 and includes Obama’s name. There is also acolumn titled “DATEJOIN” which indicates the date that each delinquentmember first joined the New Party. The date 1/11/96 appears next toObama’s name (red arrow below). That is the date of the meeting inquestion, minutes of which state that Obama “joined the New Party.”
Despite this documentary evidence that Obama joined the New Party on1/11/96 and was listed in their (lapsed) membership rolls in April 1997,Buzzfeed spoke to several members of the Party who claim that Obamawasn’t a member and that the group didn’t really have membership:
“Obama was never a member, never active in anything,” said DanSwinney, a co-chair of the Party at the time and now the head of theCenter for Labor and Community Research in Chicago, who was present atthe 1996 meeting, according to the minutes. “I wish he was. He wasobviously a progressive Democrat, but not a member of the New Party.” “There was really no process” for becoming a member, Swinney said.
This is an astounding claim given documents which appeared on the Party’swebsite at the time. For instance, this1997 page titled “Join the New Party” which reads:
[T]he New Party’s work depends on our members. With yoursupport, we can continue to push for living wages, campaign financereform, strong public schools and a clean environment. The New Party offers two membership options; annual dues or monthly sustainer pledges.
The page then includes a form which applicants are to send (alongwith their check) to a New York address “ATTN: Membership Services.”Elsewhere on the same site (copyright 1997) the Party explains how chapters are formed from dues-paying members:
The New Party is run by dues-paying members, who are organizedinto chapters. The national organization provides support forchapter growth and coordination. Every member gets one vote.
Additionally, the documents Buzzfeed published contain a 13 pagelist of more than 300 members who had not paid their annual dues(including Barack Obama whose membership would have expired 1/11/97making him 4 months overdue at the time the list was published). Nearlyall of these delinquent members have a phone number associated with their name. The area codes are overwhelmingly 312 and 708, i.e. Chicago area codes.There are 3 exceptions out of 300+, all of which are in Illinois. Inother words, this is (lapsed) membership list for the Chicago chapter ofthe New Party. The claim that the Chicago group did not keep track ofmembership in 1996-1997 is demonstrably false.
In any case, what exactly is the argument being offered here? Twomembers of the Party, Dan Swinney and Amy Sherman, were at the meetingObama attended in 1996 according to the minutes. Both claim theydon’t recall him at all. Nevertheless they are both certain that even ifObama was there, he didn’t join. It’s a very selective memory lapse.
The purpose of keeping meeting minutes is to preserve a writtenrecord of what happened at a given meeting rather than rely on fadingand sometimes faulty recollections. In this case, the meeting minutes,the membership list with Obama’s join date, and the “Candidate Contract”which requires candidates receiving an endorsement join the Party–allthese documents trump the faulty memories of former Party members.And please note that none of the people interviewed offered anyexplanation for the meeting minutes. They simply “had no explanation for the document.”
But I can offer an explanation for why these former Chicago New Partymembers, Dan Swinney and Amy Sherman, might be motivatedto claim Barack Obama was never a member. Both Swinney and Sherman are Obama supporters. Sherman donated $301 to Obama for America last July. Swinney donated $250 to Obama in April of this year.Given a choice between showing the campaign was dishonest in 2008 or having a convenient memory lapse, it’s not hard to guess which option supporters of thePresident would find more appealing. For the record, I contacted bothSwinney and Sherman and asked them to explain their understanding ofmembership. Neither of them responded.
But the most striking fact about the Buzzfeed story is that OFA has chosen to double down on its claim that Obama never joinedthe New Party despite multiple, contemporaneous documents to thecontrary. So far, no one claims the documents are fake or have been altered inany way. The documents state clearly and unambiguously that Obama joinedthe New Party on 1/11/96 and further indicate that doing so meantwriting a dues check. And whether you believe Obama’s membership in aEuro-socialist party is a story or not, the fact that team Obama was dishonest about his involvement when this issue came up in 2008 is a story by any standard.History of Soccer in Cleveland
The sport of soccer originated in Great Britain and spread throughout the world during the second half of the 19th century. It is not surprising that immigrants of British origin first brought the game to Cleveland during that time. By 1906 distinct teams were formed, the most prominent being the Cleveland Soccer Football Club. In that year the organization was responsible for bringing the Corinthians, a world famous English amateur team made up largely of Oxford and Cambridge graduates, to Cleveland. The locals lost 8-0 before a crowd of nearly 1,000 at Case field. The spectators thoroughly enjoyed the game. Among them were Cleveland Schools Superintendent of Physical Instruction George Ehler, Physical Director Fischer of Lincoln High School and FRANK R. VAN HORN†, president of the Case Athletic Assn. All agreed that soccer would be a good addition to the high school program. In fact, a 2-game series between ST. IGNATIUS HIGH SCHOOL and CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL was played in the fall of 1907. Each team won a game in the first ever soccer contest in Cleveland between secondary schools.
The enthusiasm generated by the Corinthians' visit also contributed to the formation of the first amateur league. Play began in Oct. 1906 and the inaugural teams were the Thistles, Cleveland Club, Engineers, and Magyars. The Ohio State Soccer Football Commission was organized and affiliated with the U.S. Soccer Football Assn. in 1915. Growth was steady until the immigration restrictions following World War I began to slow the tide of Europeans coming to the U.S. During the 1920s and 1930s anywhere from 75 to 125 teams were registered in Northern Ohio. The names of the teams show them to be backed by business, fraternal, religious and ethnic organizations. Some well known Cleveland firms that sponsored teams were White Motor Co. (see WHITE MOTOR CORP.), Favorite Knitting Mills, TELLING-BELLE VERNON CO., Graphite Bronze, Ideal Rubber Co., Bruell Insurance, Rosenblum Clothes, Gold Bond, and Bartunik Clothes.
Other team names, such as Britannia, Shamrocks, Thistles, All Welsh, Swedish Americans, American Hungarians, Holland Americans, Banat German Sports, American Swiss, La Fraternidad de los Iberos en America, Danish Athletic Club, and Slavia, identified a variety of ethnic groups promoting the sport. A few teams, such as Chagrin Falls, Willoughby, Rocky River, Lorain and Cleveland carried the name of cities and towns from where players were drawn. Many teams in the 1920s and early 1930s had their own fields, such as American Hungarian Park (E. 80th and Kinsman), Sparta Field (E. 52nd and Harvard), Magyar Field (W. 73rd and Denison), Slavia Hooper Field (E. 55th St.), Shamrock Field (W. 65th and Herman), Welsh Field (E. 183rd and Coit), Banat Winton Field (W. 117th and Madison), and F.I.A. Field (E. 42nd and Harvard). Other sites were provided by the City of Cleveland and included two fields at Gordon Park, two at Edgewater Park, two at Woodhill Park, two at Woodland Hills Park, and one each at Garfield Park, and under the Clark Ave. Bridge. The Lakewood Elks made their field available and many important games were played at LUNA PARK Stadium (E. 105th and Woodland) and Baldwin Reservoir.
The growth experienced during the 1920s reached its climax during the 3-year period 1930-May 1932. During that time Bruell Insurance finished runnerup in the National Challenge Cup tournament and Goodyear and Shamrocks became National Amateur Cup champions. Bruell lost a 2-game series to the Marksmen of Fall River, MA, in 1930. In the following year, the Goodyear Wingfoots won the National Amateur title by defeating Black Cats of New Bedford, MA. Although Goodyear was an Akron team, they played in the Ohio Intl. Soccer League, which was centered in Cleveland. On 1 May 1932 the Shamrocks became the first and only Cleveland team to win a national soccer title by defeating Santo Christo of New Bedford, MA, at Slavia Field. A quieter phase ensued for Cleveland soccer following the Shamrock triumph, although in 1945 the Cleveland Americans were able to reach the National Challenge Cup Finals. The Cleveland team lost a 2-game series to Brookhatten of New York. The last Cleveland team to play for a National Title was the Inter-Italians. In 1971, 39 years after the Shamrock victory, they lost in the finals of the National Amateur Cup to Kutis of St. Louis in a game played at Brooklyn High School. The success of the Inter-Italians symbolized the revival of soccer following the period of decline which began in the mid 1930s.
Cleveland got its first whiff of professional soccer when the International Soccer League began playing some of their games in the city in 1964. The ISL had originally operated almost exclusively out of the New York City region. Not a true club based league, the ISL imported major foreign teams to play a league season during their offseason. These included such well known clubs as Kilmarnock, Bayern Munich, Red Star Belgrade, Real Valladolid, Rapid Vienna, Norrkoping, West Ham United. The teams considered this more of an exhibition series useful mainly for training, but the US fans attended matches enthusiatically as this was their best chance to see top-flight soccer. Unfortunately the ISL folded after the 1965 season, but fans of northeastern Ohio |
is going to change things.Now, some of this is new; some of it's old. The old stuff, we're going to fly through. Most of you have been reading me for a while now, and you've got the concepts down. So let's start.The first thing to note is that we're in a "muddle-through economy." We're in a recession fueled by the bursting of 2 bubbles: The housing bubble and the credit crisis. The real question is: When do we come out of the recession? At what time do we come back to trend growth, which is 3 to 3.5% per year?I believe that over the next 20 years the US economy will grow at a rate of roughly 3%compounded, in real terms. But I believe that we'll have some headwinds for the next year or two. So I think the real bottom of this economic cycle will be in the fourth quarter of this year, possibly going into the first quarter of next year. But it'll take 2 years, for reasons we're going to get into, to get back to long-term trend growth. It will take much longer than normal because the things that created the problem -- the housing bubble and the credit crisis -- aren't things that can respond to Fed policy or to normal cycles. It's going to take a long time to work through these.First, we had an investor-driven transaction bubble in housing. There were 48% more houses built since 2005 than should have been built, if you were simply looking at trends.What that means is there are 3.5 million homes we have to work through. Now, that means that the 800,000 or 900,000 homes that we're now building a year, is going to go down to 400,000. It's going to take some time to work through those excess homes - for prices to drop enough that people can go in and buy them or rent them. We're probably talking 2011 before we finally work through this housing crisis and get back to a normal market where housing contributes significantly to GDP growth.Sales activity is probably going to correct another 30%. That's not fun. By the middle to the end of this year, sales are going to be really low. As a side issue, those of you who like to invest in real estate and actually want to own a home to rent are going to have some good opportunities.Let's look at the credit crisis very quickly. We vaporized 60% to the shadow banking system, the SIVs and CDOs, the people who actually bought US mortgages, who bought student loans, who bought credit cards, who bought car loans. That's gone and it's never coming back. As we'll see, it's going to take well into the next decade for us to create a completely new infrastructure to replace the broken one.It took decades to get where we were last year. I don't think it will take decades to recover, but it's going to take five, six, seven years. That means things are going to be difficult if you want to borrow money. Credit spreads are going to be wider; it's going to affect you more. By the way, if you're in business, if you're paying more, it's going to put pressure on your profits.Let's look at GDP growth for the last ten years, with and without mortgage equity withdrawal (MEW).Without MEW, we would have had 2 years, 2001 and 2002, with negative GDP growth. We're not going to go get those levels of mortgage equity withdrawals today - not in this environment. We're still seeing some cash-out borrowing, but it's getting more and more difficult; as home values drop, there are going to be fewer and fewer people pulling less and less money out of the "home ATMs." As Paul McCulley says, your home ATM is starting to spit out negative twenty-dollar bills.That means consumer spending is going to continue to slow. We haven't had a consumer recession since 1990-91. There are a lot of people today who've kind of forgotten that consumer spending can actually slow down. That's going to happen from lower mortgage equity withdrawals, and it's going to happen because of higher gas and energy costs that are displacing normal spending. You've got to fill up your Ford F-150 to be able to get to work.I saw $4 a gallon gasoline when we arrived in La Jolla. I mean, I guess around here people don't really pay attention, but that means it would cost a hundred bucks to fill up my big SUV. That's just a lot of money. That's $100 I can't spend on other things - on clothes or kids or education. It means I'm going to be consuming less.We're in a recession. Recessions by definition mean that we're going to be seeing rising unemployment. We're already up past 5.5%. We'll probably see 6% and maybe higher.We're not going to see 9% or 10%, the way we did in the '70s or '80s, because we're not as subject to the manufacturing cycle as we were back then. That's both good and bad. We don't have that boom-bust in the manufacturing world. We're seeing a bust in the construction world and we're starting to see commercial lending and commercial building go down.But I don't think we're going to see the large 8% and 9% unemployment rates that we typically see in a recession. But still, if you see rising unemployment -- and unemployment has risen 20%, from 5% to 6% -- that means those people are going to have less money and they're not going to be spending it.We're seeing inflation in an environment of low real-income growth. Inflation is running over 4% now. Real-income growth is running a little bit less. While we may see some nominal growth in consumer spending, real spending is going to be dropping over the next year. That has some consequences we'll talk about later.Consumer spending is going to drop because easy credit is less available. Now, it probably hasn't hit this room. But there's a wave of letters going out from credit card companies, cutting people's credit lines, cutting people's home mortgage lines. There are a lot of people actually hitting their home equity credit lines and putting it in a savings account because they're afraid that it's going away. They're afraid that they may not be able to get the cash when they need it. "What happens if I lose my job? I better get the cash, and I'll pay the difference in interest costs just to make sure that I'm OK." That's happening a lot.In summary, lower mortgage equity withdrawals, higher gas and energy costs, rising unemployment, inflation in an environment of low real-income growth and less availability of cheap and easy credit are all contributing factors to slowing consumer spending.This has 3 major effects. First, lower corporate earnings. We're in a period where earnings disappointments are going to be the rule and not the exception. We're going to go into this in detail in just a little bit.But GE ) wasn't a one-off announcement. Yes, it was their financial system. But we're going to see a lot of earnings disappointments from all sorts of retailers, from all sorts of companies, for a variety of reasons. Second, lower corporate profits put pressure on the stock market. There's a relationship between earnings, valuations, and stock prices. And third, that also means we're going to see lower than expected long-term returns. That's going to be a problem for people who are looking for traditional assets to be the bulk of the growth for their retirement portfolios.Now, I think we're still in a bear market. Remember that in 2000 and 2001, we had 3 corrections of over +20% percent and one in the +30% range. It's not unusual to see large corrections inside an overall bear market.Why do I think we're in a bear market? Long-term markets -- and we're going to talk long term for a second and then come to the shorter term -- long-term markets in bear cycles have several characteristics. Number one, they all start with high P/E ratios. Now, Vitaliy Katsenelson, who wrote my e-letter this week so that I could be here, lays out what he calls "cowardly lion markets," as distinct from bear markets, because stocks tend to go sideways for a long period of time. We'll talk about why that is in a minute, but I think he's right on that.You're told that you should invest for the long run. For a lot of people, 20 years is the long run. However, what they don't tell you is that you can see negative real stock market returns over 20 years. It's happened four or five times. So when you're reading some book that says, "Hey, stocks are going to compound at 11% per year" or whatever la-la number can be deduced from the data, think twice.In secular bear markets, you can have returns for long periods of time from zero to 3% every 15 to 30 years. We're kind of starting one here again. If you went to Standard and Poor's website in March of 2007 and asked what the earnings were going to be for 2008, you wouldn have seen their analysts saying that earnings would be $92 for 2008. In December of 2007, they were projecting $84. In February 2008, it was $71.20. Today, MER ) estimates that earnings could drop to as low as $45 next year. Notice a trend here?When you go into a recession, analysts begin to project lower earnings. They keep ratcheting them down. What do they use to project future earnings? Past performance. There are very few analysts who actually go out and say, "OK, how is this company going to perform in a recession?" They all say, "The company that I cover is an exception." This is how they're going to cover it, because they're talking to management.And when's the last time management said, "Oh man, we're really going to get clobbered; there's a recession coming." Not if they want to keep their jobs. John Chambers will be telling us that Cisco's going to be doing wonderfully, just like he did in all of 1999, all of 2000 and all of 2001.Now, what does this mean for P/E ratios? About 30 days ago, it was estimated, based on prices, that the P/E ratio for the end of the last quarter would be 20.5. Today, as companies mark their earnings down, the P/E ratio is 22.5. For the end of September, third quarter, a month ago, they were saying the P/E ratio would be 21. Today they're projecting that if the market stayed at the same price, it would be 28. Now, does anyone think we're going to see a P/E ratio of 28 at the end of the third quarter? People are going to be projecting positive earnings forward – and we're going to see one earnings surprise after another.Remember, it takes 3 or 4 earnings disappointments to reach a point where investors really begin to understand that things are different, because we project future performance from past performance. When past performance disappoints us three or four times, then we begin to project negative performance, and that's when the stock market drops. It's not that the stock market is telling us that things are going to be better. It's that we have expectations of things getting better because that's what our past experience has been – so we need those disappointments.This is from Vitaliy Katsenelson's book: "If you take 10-year trailing P/Es -- you average them together so you don't have the effect of just one year -- you find that valuations go from high to low from where bull markets start, in what he calls a range-bound market or what I would call a secular bear."They go from high valuations to low valuations and back. Around 2000, we were at 48. It's down to 30 today on those long, 10-year runs, and it always corrects below the mean. Valuations are mean-reverting machines.If you just look at one year, you get the same effect. You have a P/E average of 15 – remember they're projecting 28. You don't have a projection of 28 in a recession and not have the stock market feel that.It takes a full day to get from Texas to Leen's Lodge in Grand Lake Stream, Maine. My son Trey and I make the last part of the trip by float plane. This is the third time I've gone with Trey, and I really look forward to the trip. It's just a great bunch of guys. As I have noted, we do make predictions about the markets. Last year, a number of readers sent in their predictions, and we have tabulated those. I will report back on how well we all did, and some of you will win a book for being the best predictors.It looks like I am going to Maryland for a day in a few weeks, and New York is looming on the horizon again, as well as another trip to Baltimore to be with my really good friend Bill Bonner (of Daily Reckoning fame) for his 60th birthday party. Now, that should be a blast.It is amazing how many details have to be worked out for a wedding. And it is just a few days away. Tiffani will be gone on her honeymoon for almost an entire month, so a lot of business details have to be worked out for the interim. She and Ryan will be in South Africa and Ireland, and I really do want to leave her alone. She deserves some time away. When she comes back, we will really start to work on our book.Have a great week. Enjoy the summer with friends and family.Your ready for some fishing analyst,John MauldinA photographer is on a mission to make sure children with special needs know they’re beautiful – and she’s doing it with a camera.
Stephanie Smith is an office manager, but in her free time she takes photos. Lots of them.
Smith takes photos of everything you’d expect – newborns, families, couples, weddings – and charges around $125 for an hour of work, but there’s a completely different side to her photography – some photoshoots are free and only for children with special needs.
“It’s to make them feel important. Make them feel special, make them feel original, and to make them feel no different than any other kid,” Smith explained. "I know the financial strains that special needs families, disabled families have, and it's a luxury to be able to get family portraits done.”
The self-taught photographer started donating photoshoots six months ago.
By Smith’s account, she was troubled after reading a story about a photographer refusing a customer with special needs.
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"I put it out on Facebook that I was willing to donate special needs photo shoots, and the amount of people that reached out to me was completely insane.”
Smith said some people told her they didn’t hire professional photographers because “they felt scared or intimidated” or worried about how they would be perceived if they “put their children's battle out there."
Smith was convinced she could help, in part, because she understood the concerns.
"I have a disabled sister,” Smith said. "She became paralyzed from the chest down. With a rare disease called transverse myelitis it's when your body attacks its spinal cord."
"Ever since then,” Smith explained, “I just felt like I have to lend my hand out to people in need because we were in need.”
Three times a month Smith does shoots for families who have children with special needs. She never takes a penny for it. The only thing Smith asks - is for a picture of her own - one with each child she photographs.
So far she has collected sixteen.
The single mother finds childcare for her son, and meets families from the DMV area for an evening of photographs.
One of those photoshoots happened last Wednesday – with Shane Lapsley and his family.
Lapsley is twelve years old. He also suffers from Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI) – or brittle bone disease.
"We didn't find out until he was two weeks old, in the NICU,” explained Lapsley’s mother, Christina Lanham. “He was born with nine broken bones."
Over the past twelve years, Lapsley has broken close to sixty bones.
“I can’t do anything crazy,” he said with a smile. "I can't like do anything that's going to hurt me and stuff.”
On Wednesday, Lapsley and his family met Smith in an Annapolis park to take photos. It’s a seemingly normal family outing, but for Lapsley’s family this is extra special.
Christina Lanham says she started setting up the photoshoot last winter, but every time something came up – a fall, a banged up nose, a broken tibia.
“It's just, one thing after another,” Lanham said. “When we get [Shane] and he's healthy and happy, these are such good moments for him.”
Thanks to the brown haired woman hunched behind the camera, a few of those moments will be captured forever.
“We almost got it!” Smith yells. “One, two, three –”One of AMD’s skills in recent quarters is the ability to drip feed information about upcoming products slowly to the point where even the breath of a clock speed becomes another several column inches about an upcoming platform. Today’s announcements are as juicy as an average minute steak, giving details confirming the launch dates for the first two Threadripper processors, some in-house performance comparisons, and also information about a third cut of the ingot coming at the end of the month.
Related Reading
Threadripper Gets a Launch Date
The news at the top of the hour is the date at which AMD is making Threadripper and associated TR4 based motherboards available at retail: August 10th. This is expected to be a full worldwide retail launch, so don’t be surprised if your favorite retailer starts posting teaser images about how much stock they have. August 10th will see both the 1950X and 1920X with their retail packaging, along with motherboards from the main four motherboard vendors.
The image used up the top was posted on Twitter a few days ago by AMD showing the retail packaging, and a Dr Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, for scale. The base retail package does not come with a cooler, but does come with a spacer and Torx wrench, as the socket requires a full Torx screwdriver to access it. AMD has engineered an ecosystem of both closed liquid loop coolers partners, as well as a few air coolers capable of meeting the 180W TDP required. We’re looking into exactly which models will have the appropriate support.
AMD is allowing pre-orders for partner systems and boutique OEMs to start from July 31st. Dell’s Area-51 Threadripper edition has been highly covered already, and it was always a question as to why they were allowed to announce earlier than everyone else. The answer was that they secured an exclusive, but it seems only for four days, from the 27th. Nonetheless, other system integrators such as MainGear, OverclockersUK, iBUYPOWER, Origin, Velocity Micro and others will be showing systems from today.
From the motherboard vendor side, this week has seen the main four companies lift the lid on some of their AM4 designs further to what we saw back at Computex. ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI will all be launching motherboards on day one, making full use of the quad channel memory with two DIMMs per channel and 60 PCIe lanes for add-in cards (using another four for the chipset, which we typically do not count to some users’ chagrin). We’re planning a full overview of each board, but keep eyes out for:
ASUS X399 ROG Zenith Extreme and ASUS PRIME X399-A
ASRock X399 Professional Gaming and ASRock X399 Taichi
GIGABYTE X399 Gaming 7 and MSI Gaming PRO CARBON AC
At present all the boards being shown are ATX or E-ATX. We’re unlikely to see any mini-ITX due to the size of the socket however microATX might be possible further down the line. No word on pricing for these yet, except that one of the system integrators has priced the ASUS X399 Zenith at +$227 over the GIGABYTE X399 Gaming 7 in their configurator, which suggests the boards will range in price from $300 to $600 pretty easily (add in some knowledge we already have on the BOM cost of some of these parts).
Threadripper 1950X Performance: AMD Gave A Number
Having a few threads in hand at a high frequency means that any benchmark which is thread dense and register light is going to scale very well. AMD shared one data point (which we cannot confirm) from their recent favorite benchmark, Cinebench R15.
The number given was 4122, representing a 5.2 GHz overclocked (under liquid nitrogen, so not a daily OC) Threadripper 1950X. If we scale this down to 3.5 GHz for the all-core turbo of 1950X, we get a score more around 2774. One of the scores in the screenshot above is 3099, which equates to a 3.9 GHz all-core frequency.
We have some old dual socket CB15 numbers in our database, under Windows 7. There are a fair number of old dual socket workstations around for compute tasks, and TR 1950X (if these numbers are true) beats systems such as a dual socket Ivy Bridge-EP based E5-2687W v3 when running all cores near turbo frequency, which would have retailed at launch for $4200+ just in processors and at a much lower TDP than two of the older processors combined.
Threadripper The Third: The Threadripper 1900X at $549, coming August 31st
To sprinkle some salt onto the steak today is the announcement of a third TR processor. The 1900X is an eight-core part, with a base frequency of 3.8 GHz, a turbo of 4.0 GHz, and +200 MHz of XFR.
AMD Ryzen SKUs Cores/
Threads Base/
Turbo XFR L3 DRAM
1DPC PCIe TDP Cost Cooler TR 1950X 16/32 3.4/4.0? 32 MB 4x2666 60 180W $999 - TR 1920X 12/24 3.5/4.0? 32 MB 4x2666 60 180W $799 - TR 1900X 8/16 3.8/4.0 +200? 4-Ch 60? $549 - Ryzen 7 1800X 8/16 3.6/4.0 +100 16 MB 2x2666 16 95 W $499 - Ryzen 7 1700X 8/16 3.4/3.8 +100 16 MB 2x2666 16 95 W $399 - Ryzen 7 1700 8/16 3.0/3.7 +50 16 MB 2x2666 16 65 W $329 Spire Ryzen 5 1600X 6/12 3.6/4.0 +100 16 MB 2x2666 16 95 W $249 - Ryzen 5 1600 6/12 3.2/3.6 +100 16 MB 2x2666 16 65 W $219 Spire Ryzen 5 1500X 4/8 3.5/3.7 +200 16 MB 2x2666 16 65 W $189 Spire Ryzen 5 1400 4/8 3.2/3.4 +50 8 MB 2x2666 16 65 W $169 Stealth Ryzen 3 1300X 4/4 3.5/3.7 +200 8 MB 2x2666 16 65 W $129 Stealth Ryzen 3 1200 4/4 3.1/3.4 +50 8 MB 2x2666 16 65 W $109 Stealth
There are some questions around why AMD would release an 8-core Threadripper, given that the Ryzen 7 1800X is also eight core and currently retails around $399 when distributor sales are factored in. The main thing here is going to be IO, specifically that the user is going to get access to quad channel memory and all the PCIe lanes required for multi-GPU or multi-add-in cards, along with a super high-end motherboard that likely contains multiple CPU-based PCIe x4 storage and/or 10G Ethernet and additional features.
Naturally, with the eight cores being split over two Zeppelin dies (see side note), there is going to be some extra latency between the cores on each of the dies. AMD is countering this by having a higher base frequency (due to the TDP headroom), and stating that the chip allows overclocking. Obviously, some fine-tuned crank is needed and with any luck, it should run 4.0 GHz on all cores.
That Side Note
In the last week, Caseking system builder and overclocker Der8auer (Roman Hartung) released a video de-lidding a supposed Threadripper engineering sample, to which the video was taken down at the request of AMD less than 24 hours later. In the video, he showed that underneath his engineering sample (the ones that AMD gives to system integrators like Caseking to configure systems they will make available) were four silicon dies:
Obviously with Threadripper only going up to 16 cores, and EPYC which uses a similar package going up to 32, we were expecting to see TR with only two bits of silicon, not four. Roman states that only two of the dies are enabled, which simplifies things, but there are a few caveats here to note.
First, this was a Threadripper ES and the retail chips could be quite different. Roman deliberately covered up the markings on the processor on the video (although some images got out), and it was unclear what stage ES this was – as AMD could very likely just give half-disabled EPYCs with different notches in the first ES batches. Simply put, retail Threadripper chips could only have two.
There are several reasons why there could be four though. One suggestion is that these are ‘failed’ EPYCs, although AMD would say that is not the case. If AMD were putting four die onto a chip and disabling two, that would be really bad for the price on return per die, so what is going on here? Simply put, the two ‘disabled’ die aren’t engineered silicon at all, just simple silicon that hasn’t been put through the manufacturing process and added in as spacers for package rigidity. With the Threadripper package being so large, having four places for the mass of the coolers to press onto in the socket for better contact with the socket pins, using spacers would help spread that weight around. There have been suggestions it might help with heat dissipation, but that is unlikely as any heat transfer would be through the TIM and the HS, not through the package itself which is fairly thermally insulating.
To sum up:
This is an early Engineering Sample, and might not be indicative of retail
Only 2 of the 4 dies are even active
If it is retail, 2 inactive dies are likely empty silicon for rigidity
If this is even indicative of a Threadripper retail sample (again, no confirmation it is), our guess is that these two extra ‘dies’ is just empty silicon used for rigidity. So anyone claiming to get 32 cores through unlocking software is not telling the truth. But consider that it should allow AMD to push 32 cores with a quad-channel memory design into the TR4 socket if they wanted in the future. That depends on how long this platform is expected to be around, likely through to Zen 2 at a minimum and perhaps Zen 3 as well. I’ll go ask AMD.Young people who cares, fights against drug dealers in Moscow. They search for drug spots and dealers after that punish them and mark with special permanent paint.Some translation:starting at 0:24, the guy with hidden microphone goes to cigarette tent. He asking for smocking drugs and talking about price. And get confirmation, here they sell drugs.1:30 guys take out the seller. And asking him why he sold drug to a kid who is not even get 18 of age.he refuses everything. They said that his drugs killing kids...at 2:27 the police car took one of the attackers. guys ask why they don't take drug seller? After insisting police also took the seller.at 2:55 guys take immigrants from south who sell smoking drugs (JVH) in the subway. Said them to go home and kill people with drugs at home. After, small execution with paint.This article is by Jocelyn Goldfein, angel investor and former engineering executive at Facebook and VMware. She’s well known for helping engineering teams scale their operations through periods of hyper-growth. At First Round’s last CTO Summit, she shared her experiences shipping software in different environments, and offered startups advice on how to structure their own release process.
I’ve been around the block and shipped a lot of software. I’ve worked at tech companies ranging from three to 10,000+ employees. I’ve built software that’s been given away for free and sold for $50M license fees — and just about every price point in between. Every one of these products was developed and delivered differently, and after having the chance to compare and contrast them all, I’d love to reveal the one true way to ship software.
I’m abashed to confess that I cannot.
I’ve discovered and rediscovered the “right” way to build and ship software many times. I’ve found near-religious zeal for certain practices (say, precise coding estimates, thoroughly detailed specs or UI design via A/B test) only to find the magic gone when I tried to apply it to some other product.
In a profession where we carry out decade-spanning holy wars over tab widths and capitalization, it’s no surprise that people get attached to their development and release habits. But if shipping so much software has taught me one thing, it’s to be an agnostic. Different methodologies optimize for different goals, and all of them have downsides. If you maximize for schedule predictability, you’ll lose on engineer productivity (as this turns out to be a classic time/space tradeoff). Even when you aren’t dealing with textbook tradeoffs, all investments of effort trade against something else you could be spending the time on, whether it’s building an automated test suite or triaging bugs.
My fellow engineers, please stop asking “Is this process good or bad?” and start asking “Is it well-suited to my situation?”
Consider two of my past lives:
When it was a startup, VMware needed to offer predictable dates and high reliability because they had to convince conservative enterprises to buy operating systems from an upstart new vendor. (At the time, virtualization sounded like science fiction!)
In Facebook’s startup days, they needed to move quickly because first-mover advantage meant everything for a product based on network effects.
One of them put a ton of engineering emphasis on predictability and reliability; the other put its effort toward driving user engagement. Not hard to guess which was which. As you might imagine, the development practices at these two companies could not have been more different. Neither one was right or wrong — they both made appropriate tradeoffs for what they wanted to accomplish, and each company’s practices would have been ineffective or disastrous if applied to the other company’s products.
First, Take a Look at Who the Customer Is
To determine “the right way to develop software,” you’ve got to understand what matters for your product and how to optimize for that. This isn’t based on personal preference. Ultimately it stems from your company’s mission, and the way you make money is a reasonable proxy for that.
Chances are, if you sell software at a high price tag, you are selling to businesses that are buying your software based on their need. The more expensive your software is, the more mission critical it is for your customers, the more likely you have to optimize for reliability, functionality and a predictable schedule. You might think business customers would like your software as soon as possible, but because they have a lot of dependencies — deployment, training, integration — it is generally much more important to them that you be predictable than you be fast. Larger deal sizes also go hand in hand with fewer customers, meaning that each customer has comparatively more power over you and satisfying their needs is more crucial to your startup’s survival.
Many of the most traditional, old school software process methods are aimed at ensuring schedule predictability: careful specification of features and estimation of tasks, dependency analysis and long soak times. More modern techniques like continuous integration, comprehensive unit testing and beta testing can also help surface technical risks earlier. In my seven years at VMware, all our effort rested on a three-legged stool, whose legs were: schedule, features and quality. All of them had to be served, which came at a high price in engineering effort and developer productivity at times seemed mysteriously low. We dabbled with new techniques that boasted faster cycle times, but they came with a tradeoff: a lack of foresight. That just wasn’t acceptable to our customers.
As a rule of thumb, expensive software means predictability is key while shipping. Customers need your product. If you have a lower (or no) price tag, focus on UX. Users who don’t need your product have to want it.
Well, what if your customers aren’t demanding enterprises? As you charge less and less (from millions to thousands, to hundreds, to freemium and free), your market goes higher volume and involves smaller businesses or consumers. For these products, schedules can be less important since people will generally accept your latest enhancements whenever they materialize. The influence of a single customer is small, so you might deprioritize a niche platform or bugs that affect only a few people.
However, you can’t just decide quality is no longer a priority because you charge less. If your product is inexpensive or free, people probably use it because they want to, not because they have to. Historically user experience (UX) has been much more important in consumer than enterprise products. Enterprise vendors are catching on to the value of great UX, but there’s a reason they describe excellence as “consumer grade UI.” You will find different practices that work to ensure UX quality, including empowerment of the design team, prototyping and iteration before committing to dates, close collaboration between design and engineering and user testing.
Stage matters here, too. If you are growing quickly, trading off quality might be acceptable if 80% of your users one year from now will be new and won’t remember your mistakes. On the other hand, if repeat business (aka recurring revenue) is your game, you’d better make sure current customers are delighted.
Next, Assess How You Deploy and How Much You’re Willing to Risk
There is another, equally fundamental difference between tech companies that affect your release tradeoffs, and that is your deployment model. Deploying in the cloud means you have total control over the runtime environment of your software. It means you don’t have to have the words “test matrix” in your vocabulary, which exponentially reduces testing time and volume of bugs to fix. You can update whenever you like; distribution is instantaneous and universal (and doesn’t require effort from users.) Code that you delete actually goes away. You don’t have to worry about fixing bugs in code that you abandoned two releases ago because a user has not moved on. Deploying onto a customer’s device (which includes everything from native mobile apps to operating systems) means the once and future cost of doing a release is radically higher.
You want reliability? Instead of weeks of lab-based stress testing, just ship to production and gradually turn up the load. Turn it down and fix the problem when you run into bottlenecks.
You want efficient testing? Well, you can probably catch 80% of the bugs with 20% of the testing, then quickly spot and fix the few that escape.
You want design quality? Expose yourself to quick feedback loops by putting prototypes in production for a small number of users and see how it works.
Of course, you don’t have the freedom to choose to deploy in the cloud just because it makes life easier for you. Some products (operating systems or video game consoles) simply can’t exist entirely in the cloud. If you build for consumers on mobile, you’ll probably choose a native app so you can deliver the best UX, because at least in consumer, rich UX trumps engineering productivity. I know it sounds preposterous, but be prepared for shipping mobile apps to have more in common with shipping operating systems than with shipping for the web. That’s why even if you are mobile first, you want all of the brains of your mobile apps to live on the server where you can easily change them.
Facebook’s struggle pivoting to mobile illustrates the potential for trouble. Facebook’s speedy, individualistic and iterative way of designing and shipping software was deeply embedded in product team culture. If you worked in the web tier, the cost of releasing was pretty close to zero and literally everything else about the way you worked was optimized to take advantage of that assumption. As the company’s focus shifted to native mobile apps, the engineers hired for their mobile expertise insisted on a heretofore unknown process like feature and UI freeze, functional specs and QA.
Learning new programming languages and frameworks wasn’t what made it hard for Facebook engineers to pivot to mobile. It was hard because they had to undo all their assumptions about how to make software. I’d like to tell you there was a cool-headed analysis of the merits of various practices given the constraints of native app development and what would be best for Facebook’s user community. What actually happened more closely resembled a discussion of religion or politics over the Thanksgiving dinner table. We were all family but violently disagreed in fundamental ways.
At the heart of that debate were different assumptions about tolerance for risk. Appetite for risk was baked into Facebook’s culture — after all, this company brought you the slogan “Move Fast and Break Things!” Longtime Facebook engineers viewed embracing risk as an essential cultural trait — and at the time, did not realize that mode of operating relied on assumptions about the universe that were true for the web but not for mobile.
Figuring out your own software development style means you have to contemplate your own |
week, on Christmas and other holidays.
The horrific crimes ended when the girl, who is now 23, moved out. Lopez was arrested in November 2013, after she reported the abuse to police, the Bee reported.
During the trial, jurors were read entries from a diary in which the victim chronicled the crimes against her.
The Washington Post generally does not name victims of sexual abuse.
The Post also is not naming the convicted man from Montana, as it could expose the identity of his victim, who is still a minor.
Testimony given at the sentencing hearings for the two men likely played a significant role in how they were punished.
In a statement explaining his decision, McKeon, the Montana judge, said the victim’s mother and grandmother wrote letters asking for the defendant to not be sent to prison, the Associated Press reported. While his actions were horrible, the man has two sons who love and need him, the women wrote.
Nobody spoke on the victim’s behalf, according to the AP.
In Lopez’s case, the victim testified about the abuse during the sentencing hearing on Friday.
“When my father abused me, I was young; I had no power, no voice — I was defenseless,” she said, according to the Fresno Bee.
Sarkisian, the judge, called the victim a “courageous young woman.”
[Councilman busted over 4-year relationship with teen — that began when she was 13, police say]
Lopez, who did not testify at his trial, wrote a letter to the judge saying his daughter lied to the witness stand. He also did not show any remorse, his daughter said in court.
Sarkisian found him to be a serious danger to society. After his daughter moved out, Lopez left love songs on her answering machine and drove by her new home, the judge said.
When she got pregnant, he paid for her abortion, the Bee reported.
"@Austynzogs: A 41yr old man in U.S.,Rene Lopez, has been jailed for 1,503 years for raping his teenage daughter pic.twitter.com/wt77XxEncu — GIDITRAFFIC (@Gidi_Traffic) October 23, 2016
In Montana, prosecutors did not challenge a psychosexual evaluation’s findings that the defendant could be safely treated and supervised in the community, the AP reported.
McKeon explained that although the plea agreement recommended a sentence of 25 years, it also provided for a lesser sentence depending on the results of the psychosexual evaluation. Under Montana state law, defendants may not face the mandatory 25-year prison sentence for incest involving children age 12 and younger if an evaluation finds that they can be rehabilitated.
Montana’s sentencing policies “encourage and provide opportunities for an offender’s self-improvement, rehabilitation and reintegration back into a community,” McKeon wrote in his statement, according to the AP.
[Ex-mayor charged in 4-year-old’s rape said girl was a willing participant, records say]
A clinical social worker also testified that the defendant is not likely to commit a similar crime if properly treated. Public defender Casey Moore said the man is remorseful and has cooperated with law enforcement, according to the Glasgow Courier.
McKeon’s sentence requires the defendant to register as a sex offender and to communicate regularly with a probation officer. He’s prohibited from having any contact with the victim or any minor and from accessing pornographic material.
Prosecuting attorney Dylan Jensen told the Glasgow Courier that he was “shocked and disappointed” with the 60-day sentence.
But while Jensen said he respected McKeon’s decision, the public’s fury likely will not dissipate anytime soon: The online petition calling for the judge’s impeachment has been signed more than 100,000 times.
It’s unlikely to make a difference, however: McKeon is retiring next month.
And according to the National Center for State Courts, a judge may be only impeached by a two-thirds vote in the state legislature. The state’s judicial standards commission also can make a recommendation to the state Supreme Court.
READ MORE
Judge could lose job for berating rape victim: ‘Why couldn’t you just keep your knees together?’
Brock Turner freed after serving half of his six-month jail sentence for sexual assault
‘The rest of her life was consumed by pain’: Man sentenced in rape, murder of 100-year-old womanChaka Mkali, also known as I Self Devine is a musician, Mc, community organizer, racial justice trainer, graffiti artist, muralist, program coordinator and director of organizing and community building at Hope Community Center in Minneapolis.
As an Mc, I Self is known as an integral part of the Atlanta and Twin Cities underground Hip Hop community as ½ of the duo Micranots, ½ of Semi Official, ¼ of the Dynospectrum, and as a soloist. Over the last decade I Self has released over 10 albums of political conscious socially aware music capable of moving the crowd as well as uplift the spirit and sustain the movement.
As a graffiti artist and muralist, Chaka Mkali is recognized as one of the crucial figures in the revitalization of graffiti art in the Twin Cities using the skills developed in the streets, alleyways, walls, and store fronts of Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Atlanta.
As The Director of Organizing and Community Building Chaka has developed impressive work with very diverse largely low income teens and young adults that is impacting individual lives and collectively helping to bring change to a challenged community.On Tuesday evening, about two dozen young socialists sat in a hodgepodge of rented armchairs in a small office tucked behind an Arby’s in a Lexington, Kentucky strip mall. The yellow walls were sparsely decorated with handmade signs like “Justicia para trabajadores” (“Justice for Workers”) and “May Day is Worker’s Day!” A box of Pabst Blue Ribbon sat on top of a bookshelf.
The assembled are members of the Kentucky Workers League. “We love freedom and justice,” its website reads, and “think those things are incompatible with capitalism, and… want workers to take over the world.” The group is three-years old, but membership has doubled in recent months thanks to the election of Donald Trump.
This week, they’re hosting a multi-day activism camp led by cofounder Greg Capillo, hoping to capitalize on a surge of interest among young, educated, and socially conscious Kentuckians in Lexington and Louisville, the state’s two largest cities and only liberal bastions among an overwhelming conservative populace.
The series of evening meetings aims to educate attendees on socialist politics and how to engage in nonviolent direct action. Tuesday’s meeting was specifically on “Organizing 101: The Art of the One-on-One.” Capillo lectured briefly on the power of active listening, a communication exercise intended to built rapport and trust among two people. He also discussed how addressing people individually is the most effective way to spread a message. The attendees then spent the majority of the meeting paired off in conversations about their passions, background, and interest in the League.
Other sessions in the Camp Cadre series include events like “Fight the Power, Serve the People” and “Managing Conflicts, Managing Ourselves.”
The affable tone of the meeting was set by Capillo’s wide smile and booming laugh.
“Folks in Kentucky are looking at the disaster that is the Kentucky Democratic Party and folks realize that it’s not a dumpster fire that is going to put itself out anytime soon,” Capillo said in an interview before the start of the meeting. “Folks want be involved in a politic that is transformative, liberatory and that respects women and repressed peoples.”
The dumpster fire Capillo specifically referenced was the victory Kentucky Republicans celebrated on Nov. 8 when they seized control of the state House for the first time since 1921. Before last year’s election, Kentucky had the only Democratically controlled law-making chamber left in the South. This historic win bolstered the Republicans’ existing control of the state Senate and governor’s office. The enormity of the moment wasn’t lost on Kentucky Republicans who’ve taken quick advantage of the political trifecta.
Kentucky made national news in early January when its State house quickly passed two controversial abortion laws. The first requires medical professionals to describe the images of pre-abortion ultrasounds to the patient and the other bans abortions after the 20th week of a pregnancy.
These particular moves against women’s rights, as well as Trump’s lewd comments from 2005 about women that surfaced during the lead-up to the 2016 election, inspired Mikie Cameron to join the League in early January.
Cameron, a discovery educator at the Lexington non-profit Living Arts & Science Center, was motivated by the variety of projects the League has spearheaded. These projects include a monthly radio show “Power to the People” with Lexington Community Radio and the Lexington Tenants Organizing Project which focuses on the rising rents and gentrification of Lexington’s historically black neighborhoods. The League also participated in Lexington’s Women’s March on Jan. 21 which attracted an estimated 5,000 people.
“I’m really glad I found this place because there are a lot of people who are upset and outraged and it’s important to channel that in a positive way,” Cameron said. “Positive, non violent, direct action that actually tries to make some changes.”
The League also offers a tutoring and mentoring program in collaboration with the Lexington Public Library. One person hoping to get involved in this ongoing project was John Winstead, who joined the League six months ago.
Winstead has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Western Kentucky University. He’s currently working in food service to survive but is putting his heart into the League. This newfound level of excitement is both inspiring and challenging from a direct action perspective, Capillo said. The challenge stems from an inconstant federal government that seems to rattle liberal nerves every passing week — the latest being its temporary ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
Overarching plans for the League are hazy though Capillo knows the League’s tenant program will formally resume once spring arrives.
“It’s a real struggle to maintain our identity and strategy and wanting to look toward the future while being with people who want to move right now,” Capillo said. “At some point, folks are going to burn out and get tired and we’re still going to be doing what we’re doing. Until then, we’re going to make it up as we go along.”Higher heat demand and use of brown coal for power behind estimated increase in climate pollution, says think tank Green Budget Germany
By Megan Darby in Berlin
Germany’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by an estimated 10 million tonnes from 2014 to 2015, in a blow to the country’s claims to climate leadership.
Higher demand for heating oil and diesel, plus use of lignite (brown coal) for power generation, were behind the 1.1% bounce, according to Green Budget Germany.
The think tank warned this set Europe’s largest economy off course for its 2020 target of a 40% cut from 1990 levels. Berlin needs to find 18% cuts in the next five years.
It is an inconvenient analysis to surface the week Germany’s foreign office hosts the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue, an international conference to promote cooperation on clean energy.
The country has gone all out for renewables, with biomass, wind, solar and hydro accounting for nearly a third of power generation last year.
Yet a 2011 decision to phase out nuclear power within a decade, lent impetus by Japan’s Fukushima disaster, has seen dirty coal maintain a significant share of the energy mix.
As a result, progress on emissions has slowed. A decrease in 2011 was followed by increases in 2012 and 2013.
The government is considering plans to end coal burning by 2040 or 2050. In January, energy minister Sigmar Gabriel called for patience. He told a conference, in remarks quoted by Euractiv: “When one considers the future of coal, I would urge that you do so less from an ideological standpoint and to think more about the economic consequences.”
Those consequences include eliminating the fuel that still supplied 44% of power in 2014 and closing down lignite mines that employ thousands of Germans.
On the other hand, after 195 countries agreed a global warming pact in Paris last December, the industrialised nation is under pressure to chart a low carbon path.
Clean Energy Wire is paying for Megan Darby’s travel to Berlin and accommodationJump to: Live blog | Live stats | Photos | Inactives | Intro | Pregame reading
The Washington Post's Gene Wang and Scott Allen discuss the Redskins' Week 13 loss to the Cowboys. (Thomas Johnson and Kyle Barss/The Washington Post)
Final
Toss those first 58 minutes out the window, because all anyone will remember is the final two (1:45 to be exact), starting from the point when DeSean Jackson tried to make something happen on a punt return and instead fumbled the ball, and seemingly the game, to Dallas.
But in a development fitting the quality of the rest of the game, Dallas scored a touchdown quickly instead of milking the clock and kicking the field goal that would have given it a 12-9 win. Trailing 16-9 with 1:09 left, Kirk Cousins marched Washington down the field for the first time all night, connecting with Jackson from 28 yards out with 44 seconds left. Then Dallas marched to midfield and set up Dan Bailey for the 54-yard game winner, which was low but true without a doubt.
Liz Clarke described the finish in the early version of her game story:
Washington Redskins Coach Jay Gruden had dangled the possibility of having DeSean Jackson return punts as if the infamous speedster were Washington’s ultimate weapon — the rarest of athletes to be deployed for the task in an end-game situation. So with the score knotted with one 1 minute 47 seconds remaining in a penalty-and-punt fest of a game against the Dallas Cowboys, Gruden tapped Jackson, who flapped his arms to rouse the crowd of 80,444 at FedEx Field as he awaited the punt. What followed was a horror show for Redskins faithful, forestalled by a momentary feel-good reprieve. In a dizzying span, Jackson fumbled the punt, the Cowboys’ Darren McFadden scored a go-ahead touchdown with 74 seconds remaining and Jackson atoned with a 28-yard touchdown reception that re-tied it with 44 seconds remaining. But Dallas had the final say, with place kicker Dan Bailey’s 54-yard attempt creaking over the goal post to seal the Cowboys’ 19-16 victory with nine seconds remaining. It was a wild installment to the NFC East’s most heated rivalry, in which Dallas now takes a 66-41-2 lead. The Redskins drop to 5-7 but remain atop the NFC East by virtue of the tiebreak they hold over both the New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles. It is a precarious perch. Monday’s defeat continued Washington’s season-long pattern of following each victory with a defeat and did little to build confidence in the offense, which managed just three points off a three turnovers forced by the defense. Quarterback Kirk Cousins was 22 of 31 for 219 yards and one touchdown but failed to make far too many important, third-down throws. Meantime, the Cowboys (4-8) got their first victory without quarterback Tony Romo.
Here are some more postgame links:
Redskins fumble away the game in frantic final two minutes | Box score
Brewer: An epic chance, but a basic finish
Boswell: Bad game ends up with one of the best finishes in a great rivalry
Dallas won the game in the trenches | ILB Foster a bright spot for Redskins
Bog: Best and worst from Redskins’ loss | Kicker Hopkins takes the blame
For the rest of our coverage, check out the Redskins home page and The Insider.
Start of fourth quarter
Kickers duel continues with Hopkins knocking down a 46-yarder to put his team up 9-6 with 14:15 left. — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) December 8, 2015
We’re updating the live blog frequently. Click on over; We’ll be back here after the game ends.
Photo gallery
1 of 21 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Dallas defeats Washington View Photos The Cowboys take out the Redskins,19-16, in a Monday night heartbreaker. Caption The Cowboys take out the Redskins,19-16, in a Monday night heartbreaker. Dallas Cowboys kicker Dan Bailey celebrates his game-winning field goal as the Redskins' Ryan Kerrigan hangs his head. Dallas defeats the Redskins,19-16. John McDonnell/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Halftime
Washington puts together a long scoring drive just before the half, tying it with a 45-yard Dustin Hopkins field goal. It’s been a not-that-exciting half.
Hopkins knots it with 45 yd FG. It’s 3-3 at the break of a miserable punt-and-penalty-fest here at FedEx — Liz Clarke (@lizclarketweet) December 8, 2015
For the half, Kirk Cousins is 11 of 17 for 107 yards and no touchdowns or interceptions. Matt Cassel hasn’t thrown either of those either, and is 6 of 12 for 74 yards. Washington’s Matt Jones is the game’s leading rusher, with eight carries for 22 yards, and Pierre Garcon’s three catches for 37 yards lead it for Washington.
The teams have combined for eight punts and 11 first downs. Washington is outgaining Dallas, 116-89.
More stats here.
Punt Fumble Punt Punt Punt Punt Punt Punt Punt FIELD GOAL FIELD GOAL Tied at 3 at the half. — ESPN Monday Night (@ESPNMondayNight) December 8, 2015
Second quarter
A 38-yard completion to Terrance Williams led to a 38-yard Dan Bailey field goal at the 6:30 mark of the second quarter. It’s 3-0, Dallas.
End of first quarter
It’s scoreless. It’s been sloppy. We’re updating frequently over on the live blog.
MNF 1Q: PLEASE LET IT END. 7 punts, 1 lost fumble, four sacks, both QB's recover own fumbles. — Thomas Boswell (@ThomasBoswellWP) December 8, 2015
We’re underway
The game has kicked off, and Washington has the ball first. We’ll be bringing the updates furiously over on the live blog, but feel free to stay here and discuss in the comments below. This thread will get its next update at the quarter mark.
In addition to the live blog, our reporters are there tweeting:
An ominous opening drive for Skins. 2 sacks & COusins dives on own fumble to save the turnover. Needless to say, 3 & out. — Liz Clarke (@lizclarketweet) December 8, 2015
Inactives:
The knee injury that kept Andre Roberts out of practice in recent days has landed the wide receiver on the inactive list for Monday night’s game against the Dallas Cowboys.
Meantime, DeSean Jackson, who also missed practice with an upper respiratory illness, will suit up for the game — a good sign for Washington’s passing game against their NFC East foe. So, too, will Quinton Dunbar, the wide receiver-turned-cornerback who suffered a compound dislocation of a finger in last Sunday’s victory over the New York Giants, in which he made a potentially game-saving interception.
Also inactive: cornerback Deshazor Everett, who has been battling a hamstring injury; tight end Derek Carrier, who has an ankle and Achilles’ injury.
Inside linebacker Perry Riley Jr., who requires foot surgery and is expected to miss three to six weeks as a result, joins the inactives list. His vacancy will be filled by recently signed Mason Foster.
Rounding out the list of inactives: Quarterback Robert Griffin III, defensive end Frank Kearse and guard Arie Kouandjio.
With a victory, the Redskins (5-6) would bolster their standing atop the NFC East, alone in the division at 6-6. A loss would relegate them to a three-way tie with the 5-7 New York Giants and Philadelphia Eagles. The Redskins currently hold the tiebreak over each, in such a scenario.
— Liz Clarke
Redskins-Cowboys through the years
1 of 33 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × 45 years of the Washington Redskins vs. the Dallas Cowboys, in photos View Photos The Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys will meet tonight for the 107th time in the history of the franchises. Caption The Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys will meet tonight for the 107th time in the history of the franchises. Nov. 16, 1969 President Richard Nixon joins thousands of fans watching the Washington Redskins play the Dallas Cowboys in an NFL game at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington. Charles “Bud” Wilkinson, presidential assistant and former football coach, is at left of Nixon. AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Intro:
There’s nothing like playing on Monday night in the NFL, but the drawback is the extra waiting. That’s where this thread comes in.
Wide receiver DeSean Jackson fights off Dallas Cowboys free safety Barry Church in last December’s meeting. Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post)
This is The Insider’s running game thread. It’s mainly for discussion, but will update leading up to and throughout the game, so refresh from time to time. We’ll include everything you could possibly need to follow the game online, beginning with pregame reading, TV and radio information and other basics. Inactives post about 90 minutes before the 8:30 p.m. kickoff. During the game, there are frequent updates on our live blog, and this thread updates infrequently. At game’s end, this thread will point toward the quick version of the game story and the D.C. Sports Bog’s best and worst, and that’ll be it here — the postgame news conferences and traditional coverage continue in separate Insider posts.
As for Monday night’s game, it will be the first with Redskins in sole control of first place; The Giants’ loss and Eagles’ win put both at 5-7, with Washington at 5-6. But the joy accompanying the ascent would be short-lived if the rival Cowboys, struggling through a 3-8 season spent mostly without star QB Tony Romo healthy, pull off a win. Washington players seem to be sounding all the right notes — they’re in first, technically, but they have to start to put some wins together. So we’ll see if they can accomplish it.
The basics:
Kickoff: 8:30 p.m. at FedEx Field
TV: ESPN.
Radio: 980 AM; 92.7 and 94.3 FM. SIRI 93, SiriusXM 226 and internet 831.
Line: Redskins by 3.5, o/u 42.
Box score: Updates every 60 seconds
Stats, Inc. game preview
Redskins roster | Depth chart | Injury report
Cowboys roster | Depth chart | Injury report
NFL Week 13 schedule & scores
Pregame reading:
Redskins’ ascension began with an attitude overhaul
Some of the fresh faces on the team brought a fresh attitude, bringing out the best leadership qualities of the Redskins who were already here.
It’s the season for McCloughan and Redskins to embrace
Washington’s general manager feels more comfortable at field level than the suites, and he hugs the players because he feels they’re all in it together.
● (Almost) all of the experts are picking the Redskins to win
● D.C. Sports Bog’s history of all 16 Dallas/Washington MNF games
● The Giants are simply handing the NFC East title to the Redskins
● Five Cowboys-Redskins story lines, the key matchups and coming on Monday, game-day notes.
● Here are all Insider posts, and all of them specific to Cowboys at Redskins.
● Roundup of all of Sunday’s NFL action, including the Seahawks again looking Super Bowl-worthy.
More NFL: Redskins | Around the league | Bog on Redskins | Fantasy
Follow: @MikeJonesWaPo | @lizclarketweet | @MasterTes | @Insider
Our live blog launches about 90 minutes before kickoff and runs through game’s end.WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (Reuters) - Bumbo International Trust is voluntarily recalling about 4 million Bumbo Baby Seats after scores of injuries, including skull fractures, the South African company and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said on Wednesday.
Since a 2007 recall, at least 50 incidents have been reported in which babies fell while the molded-foam seat was on a raised surface. Nineteen of the incidents included skull fractures, the company and the CPSC said in a statement.
Another 34 reports have been received of infants hurt while the one-piece seat was on a floor or an unknown elevation. Two babies suffered fractured skulls.
People with the seats are urged to stop using them until they install a repair kit.
About 1 million Bumbo molded-foam seats were recalled in October 2007 in order to provide more warnings against use on raised surfaces.
The CPSC move comes after consumer groups urged the commission in February to recall the seats, said Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety at the Consumer Federation of America, one of the advocacy groups.
“This is a very important action that they are taking,” she said. “These hazards shouldn’t happen. It should never cause these kinds of injuries.”
The Bumbo seat has several warning labels on the back. Seats made since 2008 have another label on the front warning against use on raised surfaces.
The seats, which were made in South Africa, were sold at Babies R Us, Sears, Target Corp, Toys R Us, USA Babies, Walmart and other stores and online sellers, the statement said. They were sold from August 2003 through August 2012 for between $30 and $50.Barcelona (CNA).- This year the events to commemorate Spain’s National Day in Catalonia have gathered less people than in the last 5 years. Around 4,000 Spanish unity supporters and extreme-right forces gathered together in Barcelona’s ‘Plaça de Catalunya’, far from the 38,000 of last year’s demonstration. With the slogan ‘Barcelona, capital city of Spanishness’, members of Falange –the fascist party of Franco, which is still legal in today’s Spain, groups opposing Catalonia’s independence and retired soldiers, displayed Spanish flags, shouted ‘Catalonia is Spain’ and burnt pro-independence flags in the centre of the square. Although this time neither the Spanish People’s Party (PP) nor anti-Catalan nationalism ‘Ciutadans’ confirmed their attendance, the PP’s leader in Catalonia, Xavier Garcia Albiol, in the end took part in the rally, together with other PP members.
‘Barcelona, capital city of Spanishness’ was this year’s slogan for Spain’s National Day commemoration in Catalonia, organised by Spanish Nationalist platform ‘Convivencia Cívica Catalana’. This Monday, nearly 4,000 people marched in the centre of Barcelona to defend Spain’s unity and shouted slogans against Catalonia’s independence. This time around the demonstration was smaller than on other occasions and a far cry from the massive pro-independence rallies of 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, which gathered nearly 2 million people each. “President Mas is planning a coupe d’état in convenient instalments” warned Convivencia Cívica Catalana’s President, Francisco Caja, whose references to President Mas were accompanied by shouts of “to the prison!”.
Different to other years, the Spanish People’s Party (PP) didn’t hire any bus to facilitate the demonstrators’ trip to Barcelona nor officially supported the rally. However, even though neither PP nor Ciutadans confirmed their attendance, PP’s leader in Catalonia, Xavier García Albiol, in the end took part in the rally, together with other PP members. “This is where I have to stay and where I want to stay” stated García Albiol and added that being in the institutional celebrations in Madrid this Monday was “much easier” than attending Barcelona’s rally. He also criticised Ciutadans’ absence “if this would have been before the Catalan elections, they would have attended”.
The demonstration finished with the playing of Spain’s national anthem and with several pro-independence flags being burnt in the centre of ‘Plaça de Catalunya’.
Military parade in Madrid
Spain’s capital city hosted the traditional military march, presided over by King Philip VI and attended by Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, to celebrate the National Day. 3,400 soldiers, 48 vehicles and 53 aircrafts paraded through the centre of Madrid and different to other years, there weren’t any tanks, as a cost-saving measure in a parade that, according to the Spanish Ministry of Defence, cost 800,000 euros. Current Catalan President Artur Mas has never attended the parade and did not attend again this year. Other Autonomous Community presidents, such as Basque Iñigo Urkullu and Navarrese Uxue Barkos, were also absent.
The judicial sphere was also represented in the commemorative military march. President of the Spanish Constitutional Court, Francisco Pérez de los Cobos, and President of the Supreme Court, Carlos Lesmes, attended the parade and had a long conversation with Spanish Minister for Justice Rafael Catalá, just three days before President Mas’ appearance in court for organising the 9-N symbolic vote.
A marginal extreme-right demonstration in another part of Barcelona
As happens every year, fascist, Nazi and extreme-right supporters demonstrated in another part of Barcelona, in Montjuic. Nearly 150 people related to the Falange and ‘Democracia Nacional’ fascist parties, gathered together in ‘Plaça d’Espanya’ and walked to Montjuic hill, flying Franco regime and Nazi flags, and shouting violent slogans against Catalonia’s independence and also against the reception of refugees. Franco’s Falange party’s leader, Manuel Adrino, stated that Catalan President Artur Mas was “committing a crime against the homeland” and accused Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy because he “hasn’t stopped” the pro-independence push in Catalonia. “If Mas and his traitors continue with this dare, we’ll have to use everything we have to stop them” warned Democracia Nacional’s vice-president, Pedro Chaparro, “including the army” he concluded. Chaparro lauded the fascist and Spanish nationalist group’s interruption of the institutional celebration of Catalonia’s National Day at the Catalan Government delegation in Madrid in 2013 and called to fight with violence Catalonia’s push for independence and the institutions which promote it.Saturday’s Omloop Het Nieuwsblad marks the beginning of the Classic season, the point where the big one-day specialists step forward and show their cards. Defending champion Greg Van Avermaet will be one of those, even if he’s still building prime form. The Olympic road race champion relives his biggest win, talks about how his life and mentality has been transformed since taking gold, and sets out what will be his biggest goal of the year.
When Greg Van Avermaet suffered a bad ankle injury in mid-November, it appeared almost certain that his Classics chances would be affected. He fell while mountain biking and incurred a non-displaced distal left fibula fracture. Surgery was needed, and his season build-up was hampered.
One month after the crash, he spoke to the press at the BMC Racing Team’s December training camp. He was still on crutches then, and admitted that he had to be careful not overdo things.
While he was already on the bike, he said that he was behind in his training. And, therefore, behind his rivals.
At the time the Olympic champion accepted that he could well be below par during the early races. “I feel already like training more, but I just have to stay a little bit more quiet,” he explained. “I think I will be a little bit later in [form] this season.
“But when the big goals will be there, I have to be at 100 percent level again.”
It’s a measure of the work he has put in that he is where he is now. On February 1 he was part of the victorious BMC Racing Team in the TTT at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana. In the two subsequent stages he was eighth and ninth, already rubbing shoulders with riders who had a more typical build-up to the season.
Equally importantly, he had a stint in the race’s yellow jersey, giving him a further morale boost.
The good indications continued after that. Less than a week ago he raced to a fine podium place on stage four of the Tour of Oman. Van Avermaet finished just behind Alexander Kristoff (Katusha-Alpecin) and Sonny Colbrelli (Bahrain Merida) in the gallop to the line and, in doing so, he proved he is well on track.
This weekend he will spearhead the BMC Racing Team in the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. The race gets the Classic season underway and the Belgian will aim for a strong result.
His recovery is already ahead of schedule, and few would bet against him being at 100 percent for the Tour of Flanders and beyond.
‘Finally I am where I want to be’
Regarded for several years as a nearly man, a rider who went close to big wins but often seemed to lose out, Van Avermaet made a big leap forward in 2016.
He won the Omploop Het Niewsblad in February, outsprinting no less a rider than the world champion Peter Sagan. “I’m never really winning that much,” he admitted afterwards, clearly also surprised by the result.
That got the ball rolling. He went on to win Tirreno-Adriatico, placed a solid fifth in Milan-San Remo and then raced into Tour de France yellow for the first time in his career when he won stage five.
Van Avermaet headed to the Olympic Games regarded as an outsider, but won on a course many felt was too hard for him. He capped things off with second to Sagan in the GP Cycliste de Québec and first in the GP Cycliste de Montreal.
“This is my best year so far,” he said at BMC’s pre-season training camp. “I had this a crash, but other than that everything went well. Okay, I missed my favourite races like Flanders, Roubaix and Amstel. But I think Tour de France, Olympic Games, Tirreno and Nieuwsblad, Montreal made a lot of good things about this season. There were more ups than downs.
“I was really, really happy with my season, especially with my victory in Rio. I think I was consistent the whole year again, from [the Tour of] Qatar until the worlds in Qatar. I was there.”
At the BMC Racing Team camp, Van Avermaet had the demeanour of someone who was very satisfied with how things were going for him. Years of near-misses had given way to success. He was on the crest of a wave, and winning some of the sport’s biggest races.
“This was my main objective,” he said. “So much big victories. Finally I can say I am where I want to be. I had to fight a lot of years for this place, but finally I made it. I’m 31 years old now and I think I’m on top of cycling now in the Classics.”
There is, it seems, a sense of destiny, or potential, being realised.
“Finally I could spread more out to the races what I thought was in me,” he states. “I was finally getting big victories in the season.”
Viewing the change as something that happened last season is, he suggests, misleading. Instead, he points back to the 2015 Tour de France and his stage win into Rodez.
That stage finished on difficult drag to the line and he went head to head with Sagan. Many expected the Slovakian to win but Van Avermaet went from a long way out, having the confidence to lead out the gallop and the strength to hold on to the line.
“I think this was a big victory,” he says. “But this also made a little click in myself to get more confidence. I think 2015 was a really nice year already. Maybe not that big for international people, but for me was a really nice year. Good victories, always there.
“I think 2016 gave this extra touch with, for sure, the Olympic medal. But also being there in every race, every Classic on the front, trying to do something. In the end it came out well. Like I always said, there isn’t that much difference between second and first.
“Everything has to go right.
“Everything went the way I wanted it to be.”
Stunning his family in securing gold
Back in 1980 the Olympic Games were held in Moscow. The US was absent because of its Russian boycott, denying riders such as Greg LeMond the chance to take part. In fact 64 other countries also decided not to travel, including Canada, China, West Germany, Norway plus several from South America, Africa and Asia.
Belgium was one of those that ignored the boycott and participated. Amongst its continent was one Ronald Van Avermaet, a 21 year old who went on to a modest pro career.
Greg Van Avermaet is his son and grew up hearing all about the Games.
“He was so proud about it,” he says. “Always talking about it. He had a medal that you get just to participate. He was like, ‘huh huh, I went to the Olympics. You see what I can do?’”
Cycling in the Olympics was limited to amateur riders until the 1996 Games. As a result it has taken time for it to grow in prestige: until recently, for example, winning a world title was seen by some as more prestigious than an Olympic gold medal.
Van Avermaet long felt different about the Games, though. His father’s preoccupation with the Olympics is likely one reason.
“I went to London. I had the feeling, ‘is this what I can do at the highest level?’
That first Olympic performance was modest. In 2012 he was 92nd, 40 seconds behind the winner Alexandre Vinokourov (Kazakhstan). However the participation triggered something in him, including a need to really focus on the Games and treat the contest like non-cyclists do.
“You can see how other athletes are working four years for one goal,” Van Avermaet explains. “Yet we are still these kind of riders who just go to the Olympics because there is a race there, and then hurry up to go back to the Eneco Tour because there is another race. That is a bit crazy.
“I saw other athletes preparing four years for this one race, for this one goal, and then it was over. So I had this always in my mind |
] Even worse, the involvement of Marcellus provided some measure of proof that Augustus' policy was to have the youth take his place as Princeps, instituting a form of monarchy – accusations that had already played out.[140]
Augustus as Jove, holding a scepter and orb (first half of 1st century AD)
The situation was so serious that Augustus himself appeared at the trial, even though he had not been called as a witness. Under oath, Augustus declared that he gave no such order.[151] Murena disbelieved Augustus' testimony and resented his attempt to subvert the trial by using his auctoritas. He rudely demanded to know why Augustus had turned up to a trial to which he had not been called; Augustus replied that he came in the public interest.[152] Although Primus was found guilty, some jurors voted to acquit, meaning that not everybody believed Augustus' testimony, an insult to the 'August One'.[153]
The Second Constitutional Settlement was completed in part to allay confusion and formalize Augustus' legal authority to intervene in Senatorial provinces. The Senate granted Augustus a form of general imperium proconsulare, or proconsular imperium (power) that applied throughout the empire, not solely to his provinces. Moreover, the Senate augmented Augustus' proconsular imperium into imperium proconsulare maius, or proconsular imperium applicable throughout the empire that was more (maius) or greater than that held by the other proconsuls. This in effect gave Augustus constitutional power superior to all other proconsuls in the empire.[144] Augustus stayed in Rome during the renewal process and provided veterans with lavish donations to gain their support, thereby ensuring that his status of proconsular imperium maius was renewed in 13 BC.[142]
Additional powers
During the second settlement, Augustus was also granted the power of a tribune (tribunicia potestas) for life, though not the official title of tribune.[144] For some years, Augustus had been awarded tribunicia sacrosanctitas, the immunity given to a Tribune of the Plebs. Now he decided to assume the full powers of the magistracy, renewed annually, in perpetuity. Legally, it was closed to patricians, a status that Augustus had acquired some years earlier when adopted by Julius Caesar.[143]
This power allowed him to convene the Senate and people at will and lay business before them, to veto the actions of either the Assembly or the Senate, to preside over elections, and to speak first at any meeting.[142][154] Also included in Augustus' tribunician authority were powers usually reserved for the Roman censor; these included the right to supervise public morals and scrutinize laws to ensure that they were in the public interest, as well as the ability to hold a census and determine the membership of the Senate.[155]
With the powers of a censor, Augustus appealed to virtues of Roman patriotism by banning all attire but the classic toga while entering the Forum.[156] There was no precedent within the Roman system for combining the powers of the tribune and the censor into a single position, nor was Augustus ever elected to the office of censor.[157] Julius Caesar had been granted similar powers, wherein he was charged with supervising the morals of the state. However, this position did not extend to the censor's ability to hold a census and determine the Senate's roster. The office of the tribunus plebis began to lose its prestige due to Augustus' amassing of tribunal powers, so he revived its importance by making it a mandatory appointment for any plebeian desiring the praetorship.[158]
Augustus was granted sole imperium within the city of Rome itself, in addition to being granted proconsular imperium maius and tribunician authority for life. Traditionally, proconsuls (Roman province governors) lost their proconsular "imperium" when they crossed the Pomerium – the sacred boundary of Rome – and entered the city. In these situations, Augustus would have power as part of his tribunician authority but his constitutional imperium within the Pomerium would be less than that of a serving consul. That would mean that, when he was in the city, he might not be the constitutional magistrate with the most authority. Thanks to his prestige or auctoritas, his wishes would usually be obeyed, but there might be some difficulty. To fill this power vacuum, the Senate voted that Augustus' imperium proconsulare maius (superior proconsular power) should not lapse when he was inside the city walls. All armed forces in the city had formerly been under the control of the urban praetors and consuls, but this situation now placed them under the sole authority of Augustus.[159]
In addition, the credit was given to Augustus for each subsequent Roman military victory after this time, because the majority of Rome's armies were stationed in imperial provinces commanded by Augustus through the legatus who were deputies of the princeps in the provinces. Moreover, if a battle was fought in a Senatorial province, Augustus' proconsular imperium maius allowed him to take command of (or credit for) any major military victory. This meant that Augustus was the only individual able to receive a triumph, a tradition that began with Romulus, Rome's first King and first triumphant general. Lucius Cornelius Balbus was the last man outside Augustus' family to receive this award, in 19 BC.[160] Tiberius, Augustus' eldest stepson by Livia, was the only other general to receive a triumph—for victories in Germania in 7 BC.[161]
Conspiracy
Many of the political subtleties of the Second Settlement seem to have evaded the comprehension of the Plebeian class, who were Augustus' greatest supporters and clientele. This caused them to insist upon Augustus' participation in imperial affairs from time to time. Augustus failed to stand for election as consul in 22 BC, and fears arose once again that he was being forced from power by the aristocratic Senate. In 22, 21, and 19 BC, the people rioted in response, and only allowed a single consul to be elected for each of those years, ostensibly to leave the other position open for Augustus.[162]
Likewise, there was a food shortage in Rome in 22 BC which sparked panic, while many urban plebs called for Augustus to take on dictatorial powers to personally oversee the crisis. After a theatrical display of refusal before the Senate, Augustus finally accepted authority over Rome's grain supply "by virtue of his proconsular imperium", and ended the crisis almost immediately.[142] It was not until AD 8 that a food crisis of this sort prompted Augustus to establish a praefectus annonae, a permanent prefect who was in charge of procuring food supplies for Rome.[163]
There were some who were concerned by the expansion of powers granted to Augustus by the Second Settlement, and this came to a head with the apparent conspiracy of Fannius Caepio.[147] Some time prior to 1 September 22 BC, a certain Castricius provided Augustus with information about a conspiracy led by Fannius Caepio.[164] Murena was named among the conspirators, the outspoken Consul who defended Primus in the Marcus Primus Affair. The conspirators were tried in absentia with Tiberius acting as prosecutor; the jury found them guilty, but it was not a unanimous verdict.[165] All the accused were sentenced to death for treason and executed as soon as they were captured—without ever giving testimony in their defence.[166] Augustus ensured that the facade of Republican government continued with an effective cover-up of the events.[167]
In 19 BC, the Senate granted Augustus a form of 'general consular imperium', which was probably 'imperium consulare maius', like the proconsular powers that he received in 23 BC. Like his tribune authority, the consular powers were another instance of gaining power from offices that he did not actually hold.[168] In addition, Augustus was allowed to wear the consul's insignia in public and before the Senate,[159] as well as to sit in the symbolic chair between the two consuls and hold the fasces, an emblem of consular authority.[168] This seems to have assuaged the populace; regardless of whether or not Augustus was a consul, the importance was that he both appeared as one before the people and could exercise consular power if necessary. On 6 March 12 BC, after the death of Lepidus, he additionally took up the position of pontifex maximus, the high priest of the college of the Pontiffs, the most important position in Roman religion.[169][170] On 5 February 2 BC, Augustus was also given the title pater patriae, or "father of the country".[171][172]
Stability and staying power
A final reason for the Second Settlement was to give the Principate constitutional stability and staying power in case something happened to Princeps Augustus. His illness of early 23 BC and the Caepio conspiracy showed that the regime's existence hung by the thin thread of the life of one man, Augustus himself, who suffered from several severe and dangerous illnesses throughout his life.[173] If he were to die from natural causes or fall victim to assassination, Rome could be subjected to another round of civil war. The memories of Pharsalus, the Ides of March, the proscriptions, Philippi, and Actium, barely twenty-five years distant, were still vivid in the minds of many citizens. Proconsular imperium was conferred upon Agrippa for five years, similar to Augustus' power, in order to accomplish this constitutional stability. The exact nature of the grant is uncertain but it probably covered Augustus' imperial provinces, east and west, perhaps lacking authority over the provinces of the Senate. That came later, as did the jealously guarded tribunicia potestas.[174] Augustus' accumulation of powers were now complete. In fact, he dated his'reign' from the completion of the Second Settlement, 1 July 23 BC.[175]
War and expansion
Augustus chose Imperator ("victorious commander") to be his first name, since he wanted to make an emphatically clear connection between himself and the notion of victory, and consequently became known as Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus. By the year 13, Augustus boasted 21 occasions where his troops proclaimed "imperator" as his title after a successful battle. Almost the entire fourth chapter in his publicly released memoirs of achievements known as the Res Gestae was devoted to his military victories and honors.[176]
Augustus also promoted the ideal of a superior Roman civilization with a task of ruling the world (to the extent to which the Romans knew it), a sentiment embodied in words that the contemporary poet Virgil attributes to a legendary ancestor of Augustus: tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento—"Roman, remember by your strength to rule the Earth's peoples!"[156] The impulse for expansionism was apparently prominent among all classes at Rome, and it is accorded divine sanction by Virgil's Jupiter in Book 1 of the Aeneid, where Jupiter promises Rome imperium sine fine, "sovereignty without end".[177]
By the end of his reign, the armies of Augustus had conquered northern Hispania (modern Spain and Portugal) and the Alpine regions of Raetia and Noricum (modern Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria, Slovenia), Illyricum and Pannonia (modern Albania, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia, etc.), and had extended the borders of the Africa Province to the east and south. Judea was added to the province of Syria when Augustus deposed Herod Archelaus, successor to client king Herod the Great (73–4 BC). Syria (like Egypt after Antony) was governed by a high prefect of the equestrian class rather than by a proconsul or legate of Augustus.[178]
Bust of Tiberius, a successful military commander under Augustus before he was designated as his heir and successor
Again, no military effort was needed in 25 BC when Galatia (modern Turkey) was converted to a Roman province shortly after Amyntas of Galatia was killed by an avenging widow of a slain prince from Homonada.[178] The rebellious tribes of Asturias and Cantabria in modern-day Spain were finally quelled in 19 BC, and the territory fell under the provinces of Hispania and Lusitania. This region proved to be a major asset in funding Augustus' future military campaigns, as it was rich in mineral deposits that could be fostered in Roman mining projects, especially the very rich gold deposits at Las Medulas.[179]
Conquering the peoples of the Alps in 16 BC was another important victory for Rome, since it provided a large territorial buffer between the Roman citizens of Italy and Rome's enemies in Germania to the north.[180] Horace dedicated an ode to the victory, while the monument Trophy of Augustus near Monaco was built to honor the occasion.[181] The capture of the Alpine region also served the next offensive in 12 BC, when Tiberius began the offensive against the Pannonian tribes of Illyricum, and his brother Nero Claudius Drusus moved against the Germanic tribes of the eastern Rhineland. Both campaigns were successful, as Drusus' forces reached the Elbe River by 9 BC—though he died shortly after by falling off his horse.[182] It was recorded that the pious Tiberius walked in front of his brother's body all the way back to Rome.[183]
To protect Rome's eastern territories from the Parthian Empire, Augustus relied on the client states of the east to act as territorial buffers and areas that could raise their own troops for defense. To ensure security of the Empire's eastern flank, Augustus stationed a Roman army in Syria, while his skilled stepson Tiberius negotiated with the Parthians as Rome's diplomat to the East.[184] Tiberius was responsible for restoring Tigranes V to the throne of the Kingdom of Armenia.[183]
Yet arguably his greatest diplomatic achievement was negotiating with Phraates IV of Parthia (37–2 BC) in 20 BC for the return of the battle standards lost by Crassus in the Battle of Carrhae, a symbolic victory and great boost of morale for Rome.[183][184][185] Werner Eck claims that this was a great disappointment for Romans seeking to avenge Crassus' defeat by military means.[186] However, Maria Brosius explains that Augustus used the return of the standards as propaganda symbolizing the submission of Parthia to Rome. The event was celebrated in art such as the breastplate design on the statue Augustus of Prima Porta and in monuments such as the Temple of Mars Ultor ('Mars the Avenger') built to house the standards.[187]
Parthia had always posed a threat to Rome in the east, but the real battlefront was along the Rhine and Danube rivers.[184] Before the final fight with Antony, Octavian's campaigns against the tribes in Dalmatia were the first step in expanding Roman dominions to the Danube.[188] Victory in battle was not always a permanent success, as newly conquered territories were constantly retaken by Rome's enemies in Germania.[184]
A prime example of Roman loss in battle was the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, where three entire legions led by Publius Quinctilius Varus were destroyed by Arminius, leader of the Cherusci, an apparent Roman ally.[189] Augustus retaliated by dispatching Tiberius and Drusus to the Rhineland to pacify it, which had some success although the battle of AD 9 brought the end to Roman expansion into Germany.[190] Roman general Germanicus took advantage of a Cherusci civil war between Arminius and Segestes; they defeated Arminius, who fled that Battle of Idistaviso in AD 16 but was killed later in 21 due to treachery.[191]
Death and succession
The illness of Augustus in 23 BC brought the problem of succession to the forefront of political issues and the public. To ensure stability, he needed to designate an heir to his unique position in Roman society and government. This was to be achieved in small, undramatic, and incremental ways that did not stir senatorial fears of monarchy. If someone was to succeed Augustus' unofficial position of power, he would have to earn it through his own publicly proven merits.[192]
Some Augustan historians argue that indications pointed toward his sister's son Marcellus, who had been quickly married to Augustus' daughter Julia the Elder.[193] Other historians dispute this due to Augustus' will being read aloud to the Senate while he was seriously ill in 23 BC,[194] instead indicating a preference for Marcus Agrippa, who was Augustus' second in charge and arguably the only one of his associates who could have controlled the legions and held the Empire together.[195]
After the death of Marcellus in 23 BC, Augustus married his daughter to Agrippa. This union produced five children, three sons and two daughters: Gaius Caesar, Lucius Caesar, Vipsania Julia, Agrippina the Elder, and Postumus Agrippa, so named because he was born after Marcus Agrippa died. Shortly after the Second Settlement, Agrippa was granted a five-year term of administering the eastern half of the Empire with the imperium of a proconsul and the same tribunicia potestas granted to Augustus (although not trumping Augustus' authority), his seat of governance stationed at Samos in the eastern Aegean.[195][196] This granting of power showed Augustus' favor for Agrippa, but it was also a measure to please members of his Caesarian party by allowing one of their members to share a considerable amount of power with him.[196]
Augustus' intent became apparent to make Gaius and Lucius Caesar his heirs when he adopted them as his own children.[197] He took the consulship in 5 and 2 BC so that he could personally usher them into their political careers,[198] and they were nominated for the consulships of AD 1 and 4.[199] Augustus also showed favor to his stepsons, Livia's children from her first marriage Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (henceforth referred to as Drusus) and Tiberius Claudius (henceforth Tiberius), granting them military commands and public office, though seeming to favor Drusus. After Agrippa died in 12 BC, Tiberius was ordered to divorce his own wife Vipsania Agrippina and marry Agrippa's widow, Augustus' daughter Julia—as soon as a period of mourning for Agrippa had ended.[200] Drusus' marriage to Augustus' niece Antonia was considered an unbreakable affair, whereas Vipsania was "only" the daughter of the late Agrippa from his first marriage.[200]
Tiberius shared in Augustus' tribune powers as of 6 BC, but shortly thereafter went into retirement, reportedly wanting no further role in politics while he exiled himself to Rhodes.[161][201] No specific reason is known for his departure, though it could have been a combination of reasons, including a failing marriage with Julia,[161][201] as well as a sense of envy and exclusion over Augustus' apparent favouring of his young grandchildren-turned-sons Gaius and Lucius. (Gaius and Lucius joined the college of priests at an early age, were presented to spectators in a more favorable light, and were introduced to the army in Gaul.)[202][203]
After the early deaths of both Lucius and Gaius in AD 2 and 4 respectively, and the earlier death of his brother Drusus (9 BC), Tiberius was recalled to Rome in June AD 4, where he was adopted by Augustus on the condition that he, in turn, adopt his nephew Germanicus.[204] This continued the tradition of presenting at least two generations of heirs.[200] In that year, Tiberius was also granted the powers of a tribune and proconsul, emissaries from foreign kings had to pay their respects to him, and by AD 13 was awarded with his second triumph and equal level of imperium with that of Augustus.[205]
The only other possible claimant as heir was Postumus Agrippa, who had been exiled by Augustus in AD 7, his banishment made permanent by senatorial decree, and Augustus officially disowned him. He certainly fell out of Augustus' favor as an heir; the historian Erich S. Gruen notes various contemporary sources that state Postumus Agrippa was a "vulgar young man, brutal and brutish, and of depraved character".[206]
On 19 August AD 14, Augustus died while visiting Nola where his father had died. Both Tacitus and Cassius Dio wrote that Livia was rumored to have brought about Augustus' death by poisoning fresh figs.[207][208] This element features in many modern works of historical fiction pertaining to Augustus' life, but some historians view it as likely to have been a salacious fabrication made by those who had favoured Postumus as heir, or other of Tiberius' political enemies. Livia had long been the target of similar rumors of poisoning on the behalf of her son, most or all of which are unlikely to have been true.[209]
Alternatively, it is possible that Livia did supply a poisoned fig (she did cultivate a variety of fig named for her that Augustus is said to have enjoyed), but did so as a means of assisted suicide rather than murder. Augustus' health had been in decline in the months immediately before his death, and he had made significant preparations for a smooth transition in power, having at last reluctantly settled on Tiberius as his choice of heir.[210] It is likely that Augustus was not expected to return alive from Nola, but it seems that his health improved once there; it has therefore been speculated that Augustus and Livia conspired to end his life at the anticipated time, having committed all political process to accepting Tiberius, in order to not endanger that transition.[209]
Augustus' famous last words were, "Have I played the part well? Then applaud as I exit"—referring to the play-acting and regal authority that he had put on as emperor. Publicly, though, his last words were, "Behold, I found Rome of clay, and leave her to you of marble." An enormous funerary procession of mourners traveled with Augustus' body from Nola to Rome, and on the day of his burial all public and private businesses closed for the day.[210] Tiberius and his son Drusus delivered the eulogy while standing atop two rostra. Augustus' body was coffin-bound and cremated on a pyre close to his mausoleum. It was proclaimed that Augustus joined the company of the gods as a member of the Roman pantheon.[211]
Historian D. C. A. Shotter states that Augustus' policy of favoring the Julian family line over the Claudian might have afforded Tiberius sufficient cause to show open disdain for Augustus after the latter's death; instead, Tiberius was always quick to rebuke those who criticized Augustus.[212] Shotter suggests that Augustus' deification obliged Tiberius to suppress any open resentment that he might have harbored, coupled with Tiberius' "extremely conservative" attitude towards religion.[213] Also, historian R. Shaw-Smith points to letters of Augustus to Tiberius which display affection towards Tiberius and high regard for his military merits.[214] Shotter states that Tiberius focused his anger and criticism on Gaius Asinius Gallus (for marrying Vipsania after Augustus forced Tiberius to divorce her), as well as toward the two young Caesars, Gaius and Lucius—instead of Augustus, the real architect of his divorce and imperial demotion.[213]
Legacy
The Augustus cameo at the center of the Medieval Cross of Lothair
Augustus' reign laid the foundations of a regime that lasted, in one form or another, for nearly fifteen hundred years through the ultimate decline of the Western Roman Empire and until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Both his adoptive surname, Caesar, and his title Augustus became the permanent titles of the rulers of the Roman Empire for fourteen centuries after his death, in use both at Old Rome and at New Rome. In many languages, Caesar became the word for Emperor, as in the German Kaiser and in the Bulgarian and subsequently Russian Tsar (sometimes Csar or Czar). The cult of Divus Augustus continued until the state religion of the Empire was changed to Christianity in 391 by Theodosius I. Consequently, there are many excellent statues and busts of the first emperor. He had composed an account of his achievements, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, to be inscribed in bronze in front of his mausoleum.[216] Copies of the text were inscribed throughout the Empire upon his death.[217] The inscriptions in Latin featured translations in Greek beside it, and were inscribed on many public edifices, such as the temple in Ankara dubbed the Monumentum Ancyranum, called the "queen of inscriptions" by historian Theodor Mommsen.[218]
There are a few known written works by Augustus that have survived such as his poems Sicily, Epiphanus, and Ajax, an autobiography of 13 books, a philosophical treatise, and his written rebuttal to Brutus' Eulogy of Cato.[219] Historians are able to analyze existing letters penned by Augustus to others for additional facts or clues about his personal life.[214][220]
Many consider Augustus to be Rome's greatest emperor; his policies certainly extended the Empire's life span and initiated the celebrated Pax Romana or Pax Augusta. The Roman Senate wished subsequent emperors to "be more fortunate than Augustus and better than Trajan". Augustus was intelligent, decisive, and a shrewd politician, but he was not perhaps as charismatic as Julius Caesar and was influenced on occasion by Livia (sometimes for the worse). Nevertheless, his legacy proved more enduring. The city of Rome was utterly transformed under Augustus, with Rome's first institutionalized police force, fire fighting force, and the establishment of the municipal prefect as a permanent office. The police force was divided into cohorts of 500 men each, while the units of firemen ranged from 500 to 1,000 men each, with 7 units assigned to 14 divided city sectors.[221]
A praefectus vigilum, or "Prefect of the Watch" was put in charge of the vigiles, Rome's fire brigade and police.[222] With Rome's civil wars at an end, Augustus was also able to create a standing army for the Roman Empire, fixed at a size of 28 legions of about 170,000 soldiers.[223] This was supported by numerous auxiliary units of 500 non-citizen soldiers each, often recruited from recently conquered areas.[224]
With his finances securing the maintenance of roads throughout Italy, Augustus also installed an official courier system of relay stations overseen by a military officer known as the praefectus vehiculorum.[225] Besides the advent of swifter communication among Italian polities, his extensive building of roads throughout Italy also allowed Rome's armies to march swiftly and at an unprecedented pace across the country.[226] In the year 6 Augustus established the aerarium militare, donating 170 million sesterces to the new military treasury that provided for both active and retired soldiers.[227]
One of the most enduring institutions of Augustus was the establishment of the Praetorian Guard in 27 BC, originally a personal bodyguard unit on the battlefield that evolved into an imperial guard as well as an important political force in Rome.[228] They had the power to intimidate the Senate, install new emperors, and depose ones they disliked; the last emperor they served was Maxentius, as it was Constantine I who disbanded them in the early 4th century and destroyed their barracks, the Castra Praetoria.[229]
Although the most powerful individual in the Roman Empire, Augustus wished to embody the spirit of Republican virtue and norms. He also wanted to relate to and connect with the concerns of the plebs and lay people. He achieved this through various means of generosity and a cutting back of lavish excess. In the year 29 BC, Augustus gave 400 sesterces (equal to 1/10 of a Roman pound of gold) each to 250,000 citizens, 1,000 sesterces each to 120,000 veterans in the colonies, and spent 700 million sesterces in purchasing land for his soldiers to settle upon.[230] He also restored 82 different temples to display his care for the Roman pantheon of deities.[230] In 28 BC, he melted down 80 silver statues erected in his likeness and in honor of him, an attempt of his to appear frugal and modest.[230]
The longevity of Augustus' reign and its legacy to the Roman world should not be overlooked as a key factor in its success. As Tacitus wrote, the younger generations alive in AD 14 had never known any form of government other than the Principate.[231] Had Augustus died earlier (in 23 BC, for instance), matters might have turned out differently. The attrition of the civil wars on the old Republican oligarchy and the longevity of Augustus, therefore, must be seen as major contributing factors in the transformation of the Roman state into a de facto monarchy in these years. Augustus' own experience, his patience, his tact, and his political acumen also played their parts. He directed the future of the Empire down many lasting paths, from the existence of a standing professional army stationed at or near the frontiers, to the dynastic principle so often employed in the imperial succession, to the embellishment of the capital at the emperor's expense. Augustus' ultimate legacy was the peace and prosperity the Empire enjoyed for the next two centuries under the system he initiated. His memory was enshrined in the political ethos of the Imperial age as a paradigm of the good emperor. Every Emperor of Rome adopted his name, Caesar Augustus, which gradually lost its character as a name and eventually became a title.[211] The Augustan era poets Virgil and Horace praised Augustus as a defender of Rome, an upholder of moral justice, and an individual who bore the brunt of responsibility in maintaining the empire.[232]
However, for his rule of Rome and establishing the principate, Augustus has also been subjected to criticism throughout the ages. The contemporary Roman jurist Marcus Antistius Labeo (d. AD 10/11), fond of the days of pre-Augustan republican liberty in which he had been born, openly criticized the Augustan regime. In the beginning of his Annals, the Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56–c.117) wrote that Augustus had cunningly subverted Republican Rome into a position of slavery. He continued to say that, with Augustus' death and swearing of loyalty to Tiberius, the people of Rome simply traded one slaveholder for another.[233] Tacitus, however, records two contradictory but common views of Augustus:
Intelligent people praised or criticized him in varying ways. One opinion was as follows. Filial duty and a national emergency, in which there was no place for law-abiding conduct, had driven him to civil war—and this can neither be initiated nor maintained by decent methods. He had made many concessions to Anthony and to Lepidus for the sake of vengeance on his father's murderers. When Lepidus grew old and lazy, and Anthony's self-indulgence got the better of him, the only possible cure for the distracted country had been government by one man. However, Augustus had put the state in order not by making himself king or dictator, but by creating the Principate. The Empire's frontiers were on the ocean, or distant rivers. Armies, provinces, fleets, the whole system was interrelated. Roman citizens were protected by the law. Provincials were decently treated. Rome itself had been lavishly beautified. Force had been sparingly used—merely to preserve peace for the majority.[234]
According to the second opposing opinion:
filial duty and national crisis had been merely pretexts. In actual fact, the motive of Octavian, the future Augustus, was lust for power... There had certainly been peace, but it was a blood-stained peace of disasters and assassinations.[235]
In a 2006 biography on Augustus, Anthony Everitt asserts that through the centuries, judgments on Augustus' reign have oscillated between these two extremes but stresses that:
Opposites do not have to be mutually exclusive, and we are not obliged to choose one or the other. The story of his career shows that Augustus was indeed ruthless, cruel, and ambitious for himself. This was only in part a personal trait, for upper-class Romans were educated to compete with one another and to excel. However, he combined an overriding concern for his personal interests with a deep-seated patriotism, based on a nostalgia of Rome's antique virtues. In his capacity as princeps, selfishness and selflessness coexisted in his mind. While fighting for dominance, he paid little attention to legality or to the normal civilities of political life. He was devious, untrustworthy, and bloodthirsty. But once he had established his authority, he governed efficiently and justly, generally allowed freedom of speech, and promoted the rule of law. He was immensely hardworking and tried as hard as any democratic parliamentarian to treat his senatorial colleagues with respect and sensitivity. He suffered from no delusions of grandeur.[236]
Tacitus was of the belief that Nerva (r. 96–98) successfully "mingled two formerly alien ideas, principate and liberty".[237] The 3rd-century historian Cassius Dio acknowledged Augustus as a benign, moderate ruler, yet like most other historians after the death of Augustus, Dio viewed Augustus as an autocrat.[233] The poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus (AD 39–65) was of the opinion that Caesar's victory over Pompey and the fall of Cato the Younger (95 BC–46 BC) marked the end of traditional liberty in Rome; historian Chester G. Starr, Jr. writes of his avoidance of criticizing Augustus, "perhaps Augustus was too sacred a figure to accuse directly."[237]
The Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), in his Discourse on the Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome, criticized Augustus for installing tyranny over Rome, and likened what he believed Great Britain's virtuous constitutional monarchy to Rome's moral Republic of the 2nd century BC. In his criticism of Augustus, the admiral and historian Thomas Gordon (1658–1741) compared Augustus to the puritanical tyrant Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658).[238] Thomas Gordon and the French political philosopher Montesquieu (1689–1755) both remarked that Augustus was a coward in battle.[239] In his Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, the Scottish scholar Thomas Blackwell (1701–1757) deemed Augustus a Machiavellian ruler, "a bloodthirsty vindicative usurper", "wicked and worthless", "a mean spirit", and a "tyrant".[239]
Revenue reforms
Augustus' public revenue reforms had a great impact on the subsequent success of the Empire. Augustus brought a far greater portion of the Empire's expanded land base under consistent, direct taxation from Rome, instead of exacting varying, intermittent, and somewhat arbitrary tributes from each local province as Augustus' predecessors had done. This reform greatly increased Rome's net revenue from its territorial acquisitions, stabilized its flow, and regularized the financial relationship between Rome and the provinces, rather than provoking fresh resentments with each new arbitrary exaction of tribute.[240]
The measures of taxation in the reign of Augustus were determined by population census, with fixed quotas for each province. Citizens of Rome and Italy paid indirect taxes, while direct taxes were exacted from the provinces. Indirect taxes included a 4% tax on the price of slaves, a 1% tax on goods sold at auction, and a 5% tax on the inheritance of estates valued at over 100,000 sesterces by persons other than the next of kin.[241]
1st century coin of the Himyarite Kingdom, southern coast of the Arabian peninsula. This is also an imitation of a coin of Augustus.
An equally important reform was the abolition of private tax farming, which was replaced by salaried civil service tax collectors. Private contractors who collected taxes for the State were the norm in the Republican era. Some of them were powerful enough to influence the number of votes for men running for offices in Rome. These tax farmers called publicans were infamous for their depredations, great private wealth, and the right to tax local areas.[240]
The use of Egypt's immense land rents to finance the Empire's operations resulted from Augustus' conquest of Egypt and the shift to a Roman form of government.[242] As it was effectively considered Augustus' private property rather than a province of the Empire, it became part of each succeeding emperor's patrimonium.[243] Instead of a legate or proconsul, Augustus installed a prefect from the equestrian class to administer Egypt and maintain its lucrative seaports; this position became the highest political achievement for any equestrian besides becoming Prefect of the Praetorian Guard.[244] The highly productive agricultural land of Egypt yielded enormous revenues that were available to Augustus and his successors to pay for public works and military expeditions.[242] During his reign the circus games resulted in the killing of 3,500 elephants.[245]
Month of August
The month of August (Latin: Augustus) is named after Augustus; until his time it was called Sextilis (named so because it had been the sixth month of the original Roman calendar and the Latin word for six is sex). Commonly repeated lore has it that August has 31 days because Augustus wanted his month to match the length of Julius Caesar's July, but this is an invention of the 13th century scholar |
Ex, reference ANR-11-LABX-0051 (to H.P., L.G., G.N., Z.K., and C.K.). The labex GR-Ex is funded by the program “Investissements d'Avenir” of the French National Research Agency, reference ANR-11-IDEX-0005-02. Additional support was provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (T.A.B.) and National Institutes of Health Grants F32 DK098866 (to Y.Y.Y.), K01 DK106156 (to Y.Y.Y.), F32 DK095726 (to J.R.K.), R01 GM049224 (to T.A.B.), R01 DK020503 (to J.D.P.), U54 DK083909 (to J.D.P.), R01 DK070838 (to B.H.P.), and P01 HL032262 (to B.H.P.). J.R.K. and T.A.B. are employees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Footnotes Author contributions: Y.Y.Y., S.D., L.N.v.d.V., J.R.K., H.M., C.K., H.A.B., M.D.K., Z.K., L.G., T.A.B., H.P., J.D.P., G.N., and B.H.P. designed research; Y.Y.Y., S.D., L.N.v.d.V., J.R.K., H.M., C.K., H.A.B., M.D.K., Z.K., L.G., and G.N. performed research; S.D., J.R.K., and G.N. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; Y.Y.Y., S.D., L.N.v.d.V., J.R.K., H.M., C.K., H.A.B., M.D.K., Z.K., L.G., T.A.B., H.P., J.D.P., G.N., and B.H.P. analyzed data; and Y.Y.Y., J.R.K., T.A.B., H.P., G.N., and B.H.P. wrote the paper.
Reviewers: T.L., University of Cologne; and C.C.P., National Institutes of Health.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1700632114/-/DCSupplemental.Canada were eliminated at the 2017 CONCACAF Men's Under-20 Championship after an 0:5 loss to defending champions Mexico. Canada put forth a valiant effort, but were eventually stretched in a must-win situation on the second match day of the competition in Costa Rica.
MATCH REPORT: CANADA 0:5 MEXICO
Canada played well in the opener, but fell 0:1 to Honduras on the opening day. Their loss to Mexico, combined with the Honduras Monday win over Antigua & Barbuda, means Canada can only aim for third place in a tough Group A.
Canada will close group action on Thursday when they face Antigua & Barbuda at Estadio Saprissa. The match is scheduled to be broadcast live on CONCACAF's Facebook channel, kicking off at 18.00 ET / 15.00 PT. Canada Soccer will provide in-match coverage from Estadio Saprissa via Canada Soccer's digital channels including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Flickr.
"We need to regroup, recover, and respond in our tournament finale," said Rob Gale, Canada Soccer's Men's National U-20 Team Coach. "The first goal is critical in these games. Once we tried to chase the game, we got caught on the transition and that's when you are most vulnerable."
Mexico remain undefeated across all three CONCACAF men's youth competitions for 43 matches over nine years since 2009. They lead the way with 13 CONCACAF U-20 titles while Canada, Costa Rica and Honduras share second place with two U-20 titles each.
While qualification dreams for the FIFA U-20 World Cup Korea Republic 2017 have ended, Canada will look to regroup to finish the CONCACAF Men's Under-20 Championship on a positive note. The group has shown a positive attitude throughout the competition and will look to build on the lessons learned throughout the two-year cycle.
Of note, Canada featured their four youngest players in the squad, all of whom will be eligible for the next CONCACAF cycle in 2019.
In 2017, Canada will compete in three CONCACAF men's youth competitions: the CONCACAF Men's Under-20 Championship in February, the CONCACAF Men's Under-17 Championship in April, and the CONCACAF Boys' Under-15 Championship in August.
Canada Soccer’s Men’s EXCEL Program channels our nation’s exceptional players into the best soccer environments. The Canada Soccer Pathway works in collaboration with our provincial and territorial partners as well as the professional clubs and academies. For Canada’s elite players, the program emphasizes player development on the pathway to representing Canada’s Men’s National Team in international soccer.Mitt Romney Calls Donald Trump 'A Phony, A Fraud'; Trump Hits Back
Enlarge this image toggle caption Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The most recent Republican presidential nominee is taking shots at Donald Trump's fitness to be president.
And he's not mincing his words.
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, called the current GOP front-runner "a phony, a fraud" in a speech Thursday morning in Salt Lake City. And he didn't stop there.
Romney described Trump as "a con artist" whose demeanor is "recklessness in the extreme." As for Trump's record as a "huge business success"? "No, he isn't." And when it comes to Trump's prescriptions to bring back jobs from China and Japan? "Flimsy at best."
Trump quickly hit back at Romney during a rally Thursday afternoon, again calling him a "choke artist" and saying he was disappointed by his 2012 campaign. "The guy ran one of the worst campaigns in the history of politics," Trump said.
Trump added that Romney "chickened out" from running in 2016 because of Trump's candidacy.
Romney spoke for 20 minutes at the Hinckley Institute at the University of Utah and got specific, digging into aspects of Trump's record as a businessman.
"His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat," Romney said, referring to a real estate seminar Trump launched in 2005 that was forced to change its name because it wasn't a real university. It is now the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging fraudulent behavior.
Romney then added to the list of failed business ventures: "There's Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, and Trump Mortgage?" Romney concluded, "A business genius he is not."
Then came the attacks on Trump as a human being.
"After all, this is an individual who mocked a disabled reporter, who attributed a reporter's questions to her menstrual cycle, who mocked a brilliant rival who happened to be a woman due to her appearance, who bragged about his marital affairs, and who laces his public speeches with vulgarity."
Romney remarks are unprecedented in the way he — the party's most recent presidential nominee — attacks the man who seems on track to secure this year's GOP nomination.
Romney began the speech by saying he is not declaring his own candidacy, adding, "I am not going to endorse a candidate today."
He said one of three others still in the race — Sens. Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, or Gov. John Kasich — should be the nominee. Then, without saying so specifically, he seemed to endorse a strategy to bring about a brokered GOP convention this summer.
"Given the current delegate selection process, this means that I would vote for Marco Rubio in Florida, for John Kasich in Ohio, and for Ted Cruz or whichever one of the other two contenders has the best chance of beating Mr. Trump in a given state," said Romney.
The goal would be to deny Trump the 1,237 delegates he needs to win the nomination on the convention's first ballot in July.
After reports surfaced that Romney was planning to speak out against Trump on Thursday, the billionaire was quick to fire back at Romney on Twitter.
Will Romney's blunt words have any impact? It's not likely Trump supporters will be moved by the critique of a man they see as the ultimate establishment insider — who failed in attempts to win the presidency.
In the past year, Trump has hardly needed excuses to lay into Romney. In stump speeches, he regularly calls Romney a "loser" who blew the chance to defeat President Obama in 2012.
In an interview Thursday morning with the Today show, Trump called Romney a "stiff."
But it wasn't always so contentious between these two wealthy Republican businessmen. Trump endorsed Romney's 2012 White House bid, and Romney eagerly reciprocated the love.
"I spent my life in the private sector — not quite as successful as this guy," Romney said at the time, turning and gesturing toward a gushing Trump. "But successful nonetheless."
Romney has been critical of Trump's tone for months, but this speech comes as Trump has won 10 of the first 15 nominating contests, holds a lead in convention delegates and shows little sign of flagging. While many Republican insiders are eager to rally around a non-Trump candidate, there's no indication voters are consolidating around an alternative.
In addition to criticizing his temperament, Romney argued that Trump is unelectable in a general election.
"Trump relishes any poll that reflects what he thinks of himself. But polls are also saying that he will lose to Hillary Clinton," said Romney.
This week, a group of more than 60 conservative foreign policy experts wrote an open letter denouncing Trump's statements, concluding that Trump is "fundamentally dishonest" and would "use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world."Three University of Louisville students will spend part of their summer overseas as international scholars.
Sahadat Mohammad Wali, Megan Wurth and Brigid Connelly have earned a Gilman Scholarship, a prominent award given each year to about 2,700 U.S. college students and valued up to $5,000. The Gilman program is intended to help students with limited financial means pursue academic studies or internships abroad.
Wali, a junior psychology and criminal justice major from Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan, is the son of Sediqa Abdul Shukor and Noor Mohammad Wali. He will study Russian in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Wurth, a junior health and human performance major from Paducah, is the daughter of Dwayne and Mary Ellen Wurth. She will study stroke research in Newcastle, Australia.
Connelly, a senior women's and gender studies major from Crestview Hills, is the daughter of Tom and Mary Beth Connelly. She will spend four weeks studying Spanish in Santiago, Chile.
“The benefits of study abroad are many,” said Virginia Hosono, associate director of study abroad in international affairs at UofL. “Students who study abroad come back as different people; it creates lasting effects that influence how they see the world and interact with others.”
UofL has previously announced several international scholars for 2016, including 14 Fulbrights.
- From University of Louisville/Image via FacebookWhy Scientists Think Salvia Could Lead To Medical Treatments
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Salvinorin A. It's the chemical that gives the herb Salvia divinorum its hallucinogenic kick. My news peg at the time was not Miley Cyrus' experimentation with the drug, but a scientific paper evaluating the drug's toxicity. Turns out that if you can tolerate the intense hallucinations, the drug appears to be relatively harmless.
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine researcher Matthew W. Johnson, the paper's author, said he didn't conduct the research to reassure Miley and her drug-dabbling friends about the safety of their fun and games, but because compounds similar to Salvinorin A might someday be used as therapies. That got me wondering just what kind of therapy it might provide.
Salvinorin A activates something called the kappa opioid receptors. When turned on, opiod receptors are responsible for the high you get from drugs like heroin and opium. But opium and heroin work by stimulating the mu opiod receptors.
The kappa receptors have been referred to as the mu receptors' evil cousin, because when activated they elicit depression. That's not a particularly desirable quality in a party drug, but potentially valuable as a therapeutic.
How? A drug that activates the kappa opiod receptors might be used to control the mania of manic depression. Activating the kappa receptors also seems to eliminate pain. Find a chemical cousin of Salvinorin A that doesn't get into the brain, and you might have a powerful new analgesic.
Someone sees potential in this approach. At least three patents have been issued on Salvinorin A-related compounds.
Even though causing hallucinations is a drawback for Salvinorin A as a therapeutic, Bryan Roth sees it as a potential boon for neuroscientists. He's a pharmacology professor at the University of North Carolina. "One of the things that's interesting about drugs that are hallucinogens is they alter the way we see reality," he says. Studying how Salvinorin A affects brain circuits may provide clues about how the brain makes sense of the world. That's a question worth pursuing, in Roth's opinion. "What could be more important than how we view reality?"
Can't argue with that.Guillem Balague spoke to Santi Cazorla about his time as a Malaga player and why he had to leave the club for Arsenal
Arsenal midfielder Santi Cazorla admits he still feels guilty for not being able to say goodbye to Malaga fans properly.
Cazorla helped Malaga qualify for the Champions League in 2012 for the first time in the club's history after signing from Villarreal.
However, after just one season in southern Spain, Cazorla joined the Gunners after the Andalusian club encountered financial difficulties and had to offload several of their key players.
It was a huge turnaround after Malaga's Qatari owners had spent so much to make the club competitive on the continent.
Cazorla, who is the club's record signing, admitted to Revista that it all happened very quickly, and before he knew it, he was an Arsenal player.
"I left because the club needed money," Cazorla said
"Arsenal was a good opportunity, but Malaga wasn't stable and it wasn't clear where they were headed.
"I know that in Malaga lots of people haven't forgiven me for the way I left.
"When I signed for Arsenal, everything happened so quick, I had to go to London.
Guillem Balague said that Malaga boss Javi Gracia executed a perfect game plan in his side’s win against Barcelona
"Arsenal had already started their pre-season and I had to go over there for a medical, and then I had to go to Holland to start to train with the squad.
"That all meant that I couldn't go to Malaga to hold a press conference to say goodbye to everyone face to face.
"In the end, I could only write a letter in which I expressed my gratitude and my affection for the club. I know a lot of people didn't like that.
Scott Minto and the Revista team answer your tweets on the pressing issues in La Liga
"I'd like to apologise for not being able to say goodbye properly as I know that would have been the best thing.
"It still bothers me that I didn't get to do that for the fans."
Cazorla admitted that despite spending just one year with the Albicelestes, he still looks back fondly on what was a successful period for the club.
"It was a big thing for Malaga because in those days, they had never competed to get into Europe," Cazorla added.
"We exceeded expectations and ended up playing in the Champions League.
"It was an unforgettable experience."So, you finished your new WordPress creation, fresh theme is shining in your local development environment, site is full of awesome content. Everything is ready for a migration to production server/domain. But, how to migrate WordPress site properly?
There are plenty of guides and tutorials around the internet covering migration. They suggest plugins or manual search and replace in the database.
Both ways can help you, but as WordPress stores some of the content and data in serialized way, by search/replacing stuff through PhpMyAdmin can corrupt that serialized data and cause you a lot of headache.
I am going to show you a step by step way of migrating WordPress and the content safely and flawlessly to your production server.
What is serialized data?
Serialization is a process of transforming data into a format that can be safely stored (in the memory, file or database) and can be later easily retrieved.
Serialization has become a standard in many programming languages. Problem with serialization is data portability. Let’s an example of serialized data:
a:2:{i:0;s:59:"C:\wamp\www\beta/wp-content/themes/twentythirteen/style.css";i:1;s:0:"";}
As you can see, data is organized in a way that it has data types and number of elements in every data type. And that is the problem.
If you have something.home as your local development domain and somethingelse.com as production domain, they don’t have the same number of characters and if you search and replace domain in your database, you could get in trouble and corrupt your content data.
Migrate WordPress safely
1. Migrate files
First step of migration is to migrate all your files to production server. You can use FTP or SFTP or whatever method you see fit. After uploading files, open up your wp-config.php file and set database credentials.
2. Download and install Safe database search and replace tool
After that, go to WordPress search and replace database tool and download it. After you have done that, upload the file into the root of your production WordPress installation. You can rename it (so nobody evil can find it!) and you MUST delete it after you use it.
3. Migrate local database to production server
Go ahead, open up PhpMyAdmin (or another database tool of your choice) and export the whole database. Import it in your production server database.
4. Search and replace time
Point your browser to your production domain and the script for safe database search and replace. Then just follow the on screen instructions. In the first step, the script will ask you to pre-populate the database connection form with values from wp-config.php.
Leave that checkbox checked and press Submit.
On the next screen you can change database details (but it should be right if you correctly changed wp-config file) and submit.
On the next screen select all database table for scanning and press Continue.
Finally you get to the form in which you enter search and replace strings. After you hit the button, the tool will search and replace whatever you entered (so be careful).
EDIT: If you had WordPress install in a subdirectory locally, you need some additional steps, so read this article.
5. Test
Point your browser to production server domain and enjoy your new WordPress site with content and all. If everything works as expected, don’t forget to DELETE search and replace script!
That’s it, I hope that these tips will help you next time you try to migrate WordPress site to another server. Be sure to check some other tips on WordPress Codex.It’s been six years since we first introduced the Edison Nouveau Premiere, our exclusive collaboration with the Edison Pens. We offer three “regular” editions on an ongoing basis, and a limited run color that rotates each season.
We’ve decided to discontinue two of our regular edition colors, and next week we’ll be introducing two new regular edition colors.
Discontinued: Cobalt
Discontinued: Pearlized Purple
New: Caribbean Sea
New: Cherry Blossom
You may recognize these two new colors from past seasonal editions. We still plan to continue introducing new seasonal colors every three months, so stay tuned this year for those (the next one will be the Spring edition in March).
We’re keeping Cappuccino as part of the regular line as well.
As with all of our regular editions of the Premiere, the price will remain at $149 and includes a steel nib (EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm, or 1.5mm) or option to upgrade to an 18kt gold nib. Both of these new colors will have silver trim and a polished steel nib to match. The Cappuccino model comes with gold trim and a two-tone steel nib. All three come with a converter, accept standard international cartridges, and are eyedropper-convertible.
What do you think of the two newest regular edition colors? Are there any other past editions you’d like to see make a comeback in the future?
Write On,
Rachel GouletA bomb disposal robot blew up a suspicious suitcase left near a propane tank in Kissimmee, central Florida. Businesses were evacuated after a police alarm.
Downtown Kissimmee evacuation orders for Broadway should be over soon. No bomb... @news965wdbopic.twitter.com/ePvQ3seaN2 — Joe Ruble (@JoeRubleWDBO) April 21, 2017
Bomb squad detonated the suitcase. All clear has NOT been given yet. — Kissimmee Police (@kissimmeepolice) April 21, 2017
A bomb squad investigated the suspicious package which was left in the downtown area of Broadway on Friday morning. The town is 16 km (10 miles) away from Disney World.
Bomb Squad on scene — Kissimmee Police (@kissimmeepolice) April 21, 2017
A bomb disposal robot was sent in to take an x-ray of the abandoned suitcase.
It returned with the x-ray to bomb squad technicians, who are located a block away from the propane tank.
Bomb squad investigating suspicious package in Kissimmee, Florida https://t.co/VptJuH2s2lpic.twitter.com/QLHFkNiSI8 — Disney Trends (@Disneylizer) April 21, 2017
Detectives went over the x-rays to determine what's in the case.
Two bomb squad technicians walked towards the suitcase with detonation wire, according to WKMG, Orlando.
The detonation wire was placed down in the middle of the street, about a stone’s throw away from the suitcase, which is still located near the propane tank.
The bomb disposal robot then dragged the suitcase away from the propane tank, and placed it near the detonation wire.
The suitcase was then blown up releasing what looks like clothing and paper.
Scene on Broadway and N. Stewart St. in Kissimmee pic.twitter.com/Vx8uK2nwii — Julie Salomone (@JSalomoneWFTV) April 21, 2017
According to Kissimmee police, the person who left the package “openly stated it was a bomb.”
The package appears to be a large black suitcase.
Person who left package openly stated it was a bomb. Suspect talking to detectives now. Pkg left in front of propane tank. — Kissimmee Police (@kissimmeepolice) April 21, 2017
Police told people to evacuate from the back of their buildings.
Detectives are talking to the person who first alerted them about the alleged bomb.
Kissimmee PD: The suspect is in custody. Someone flagged down an officer & said suspect was acting erratically. — Julie Salomone (@JSalomoneWFTV) April 21, 2017
Police officers are telling people to avoid the area.
All clear has been given. Area is still closed for Crime Lab to collect evidence — Kissimmee Police (@kissimmeepolice) April 21, 2017Staying Friends with Your Ex Might Mean You're a Psychopath Just delete his number already
As nice and mature as it sounds to stay friends with exes, we've never been very good at it. There's just something weird (and forced and unnecessary) about maintaining a relationship with someone you're trying to move on from.
Turns out, science is on our side.
According to a study from Oakland University, people with "dark personality types" stay friends with their exes for "practical" reasons, which is as devious as it sounds. "Practical" reasons can be anything from sex to wanting to be able to use or control you.
So, if your ex wants to stay friends with you, there's a good chance he's either a narcissist, a psychopath or both. (Shudder.)
We knew there was a reason we've been ignoring gross David's gross Facebook messages.
RELATED: Science Confirms: Women Need More Sleep Than MenRay Wilkins insists Chelsea will be wasting their money by splashing out £35million on Tiemoue Bakayoko.
The Premier League champions are understood to be closing in on the signing of the Monaco defensive midfielder.
But Wilkins reckons Antonio Conte should abandon a deal for the 22-year-old and instead put his faith in Nathaniel Chalobah [below].
Chalobah, who is the same age as Bakayoko, has impressed for England Under-21s at the European Championship finals this summer in a defensive midfield role, and Wilkins believes the homegrown star can be a key player for Chelsea if given a chance.
Speaking on the Alan Brazil Sports Breakfast, the former Blues star and assistant boss said: “I was really disappointed to read they are looking at Bakayoko from Monaco. He is 22 years of age, French and doesn’t get near the national side, but it was quoted Chelsea might be paying £32million.
“Well, in Nathaniel they have got a footballer that can play exactly the same but just needs an opportunity to get in there and play.
“You have seen already in the two games he has played up to now [at the European Championship] he looks a class act in and amongst people of his own age. Playing with the top quality players that they have at Chelsea, he can only improve week to week.”Nadia Oxford By Nadia OxfordStaff Writer Got a news tip? Is there something you think we should be reporting on? Email news@usgamer.net.
Super Mario Run is coming up on its first birthday, and Nintendo admits the mobile game hasn't met "an acceptable profit point" yet.
The news, which Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima delivered in the company's most recent earnings report, probably doesn't come as a big surprise. Super Mario Run's method of monetization—making the game free to download, then charging $9.99 to unlock the full game after four levels—didn't have a lot of fans.
According to the report, the weekly user base for Super Mario Run declined significantly and steadily since the app's debut, though the 3.0 update released in September has helped those numbers recover.
Super Mario Run's latest update brought some fans on board.
Overall, Nintendo regards Super Mario Run as an important learning experience. "We have learned a lot in terms of game development and deployment that we want to take advantage of moving forward," says Kimishima.
By contrast, Nintendo's other noteworthy mobile game, the free-to-play Fire Emblem Heroes, is enjoying steady success and is expected to meet Nintendo's "overall business objectives." The report also points out that the audience for the game is growing outside Japan. Nintendo has plans to bring Fire Emblem Heroes to five more regions by the end of the year: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Thailand, and Singapore.
The upcoming Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is likewise free-to-play and supports in-app purchases. Given widespread love for the franchise in Japan and beyond, it's likely to be another mobile success for Nintendo.
This is fine. That's not supposed to be dog-associated sarcasm, by the way, the game's actually doing well.
As for Super Mario Run, Nintendo says it plans to keep supporting the game. "Our aim is for this application to be the definitive Mario application for smart devices."
The rest of the financial report was filled with good news for Nintendo, including strong sales for the Nintendo Switch, its games, and the New Nintendo 2DS XL. Moreover, Super Mario Odyssey, and the SNES Classic sold 2 million units each within a matter of days. It's going to be a green Christmas for Nintendo.Former Ninjas in Pyjamas member Robin "Fifflaren" Johansson has been hired to cast DreamHack Winter's CS:GO tournament.
Robin "Fifflaren" Johansson retired from gaming earlier in the month in the aftermath of NiP's group stage exit at the ESWC finals, with the Swedish team eventually bringing in Mikail "Maikelele" Bill as a stand-in for the upcoming major.
A leaked screenshot from what appears to be a private website used by DreamHack's crew now shows Fifflaren among the casting crew for the tournament, together with Scott "SirScoots" Smith, who recently hosted the FACEIT Finals, and RoomonFire's Anders Blume.
Fifflaren will cast the upcoming CS:GO major
Meanwhile, DreamHack's Head of eSports, Tomas Lyckedal, confirmed the news, telling Aftonbladet: "Outside play-by-plays, there's a lack of good expert commentators so it will be fun trying something new. We've contemplated this ever since he quit NiP. He’s in a very unique position, having played there for almost three years and he can give some insights and depth that the other casters can’t."
DreamHack Winter will run from November 27-29, with 16 teams from all over the world battling it out for the first prize of $100,000.Before we begin designing our stage, it is good to know how stuff works. Today we create a simple OpenGL ES app. I will try to design it in a way that we can easily conform it into our engine’s library. So buckle up and open Android Studio.
Setting up the environment
Creating the project
First we need to create a project. We target the latest version of Android, while keeping it still compatible with API Level 9 (Android 2.3 Gingerbread). Thus our app will be compatible with almost 99.5% of the devices in market. So, in case you have any doubts, make your New Project’s options look like the following (click to enlarge):
As you can see, we have selected to create no activity (in newer versions of Android Studio, this choice will appear on the next screen). This is to avoid the excess files that are automatically generated, as we want it just simple. We will create the activity manually. When you create your project in Android Studio, you will probably get an empty environment. Just press Alt+1 to see the project tree.
Creating GLSurfaceView
GLSurfaceView is a special type of View that contains OpenGL ES content. We are going to extend GLSurfaceView and add it to our main activity’s layout. This very first class will play the role of our game engine’s Stage entity later on in this guide. Open the project tree to your project’s package name.
Right-click the package-name and choose New > Java Class. Name the class Stage. We then have it extend GLSurfaceView :
package com.annahid.hessan.mygame; import android.content.Context; import android.opengl.GLSurfaceView; import android.util.AttributeSet; /** * Our stage is born here! */ public class Stage extends GLSurfaceView { public Stage(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) { super(context, attrs); } }
For now we have only coded one constructor. This specific constructor is needed by the layout inflater. When our layout is being built by calling the setContentView on our activity, it is this constructor of each View that is called. The last line in the constructor is required, and it instructs GLSurfaceView to use RGBA color with 8 bits for each component.
Creating the main layout
Next, we create a layout file that contains our Stage. Right-click the res folder of your project and choose New > Android resource file.
We choose FrameLayout as our root element, which will cover the whole container with only one element. As this is going to be a game and not an app, that’s exactly what we want. Now open main_layout.xml in the editor. At the bottom of the editor, there are two tabs, reading Design and Text. Go to the Text tab to view the XML code. We now add our Stage to the layout:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <FrameLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent"> <com.annahid.hessan.mygame.Stage android:id="@+id/my_stage" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent" /> </FrameLayout>
Note: In the above code, com.annahid.hessan.mygame should be replaced with the package name you chose when creating the new project, if different than this.
Creating the main activity
The final step is creating the activity. Again, add a new Java class to your project’s package. I would like to call it MainActivity but you can call it as you please. Extend the class from Activity and load main_layout into it. If you are unsure how to do this, your code should look like the following:
package com.annahid.hessan.mygame; import android.app.Activity; import android.os.Bundle; import com.annahid.hessan.mygame.R; public class MainActivity extends Activity { @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main_layout); } }
We want this activity to be the first thing that is brought to view when the user taps our app’s icon in the launcher. For that we need to modify the application’s manifest file. So, open your AndroidManifest.xml file and add the following XML snippet within the application tag.
<activity android:name="com.annahid.hessan.mygame.MainActivity" android:label="@string/app_name" android:theme="@android:style/Theme.NoTitleBar" android:screenOrientation="landscape" > <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" /> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" /> </intent-filter> </activity>
This code simply introduces our MainActivity as the main activity of the app. That’s what the children are intent-filter are doing. We also give it a title and a theme with no title bar. There is not much need for a title bar in a game!
Warning: You cannot run the project yet at this point. More coding needs to be done for GLSurfaceView before you can run the app without errors.
Coding the surface
Assigning a renderer
Before we can use an object of type GLSurfaceView, we must assign a renderer to it. A renderer is a Java interface that plays these roles for a GLSurfaceView:
Initialize the OpenGL ES context
Modify the context when necessary
Draw frames (render)
We create a private inner class in our Stage, which implements Renderer :
private class MyRenderer implements GLSurfaceView.Renderer { public final void onDrawFrame(GL10 gl) { } public final void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) { } public final void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { } }
To use this class, add the following lines at the top of Stage ‘s constructor (below the super call):
setEGLConfigChooser(8, 8, 8, 8, 0, 0); setRenderer(new MyRenderer());
The first line configures OpenGLES with RGBA_8888 color scheme (8 bits for each of R, G, B, and A components). The second line creates a new instance of MyRenderer, and appoints it to handle the current instance.
Initializing OpenGL ES context
The function onSurfaceCreated of the renderer is used to initialize OpenGL ES. It is called as soon as the View is created and is ready. However, you should have two things in mind:
Be careful that at this stage, the View might be not laid out yet and dimensions might not be available.
This code is run only once when the object is created. So we should only do one-off tasks here.
We do all the initial tasks as follows. I have put comments in the code so you know what each part is doing:
public final void onSurfaceCreated(GL10 gl, EGLConfig config) { // Set up alpha blending gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_ALPHA_TEST); gl.glEnable(GL10.GL_BLEND); // We will discuss this line later along with textures gl.glBlendFunc(GL10.GL_ONE, GL10.GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA); // We are in 2D. Who needs depth? gl.glDisable(GL10.GL_DEPTH_TEST); // Enable vertex arrays (we'll use them to draw primitives). gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_VERTEX_ARRAY); // Enable texture coordinate arrays. gl.glEnableClientState(GL10.GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY); }
About vertex and texture coordinate arrays, don’t worry if you don’t know what they are. They will be covered in later days. Alpha blending is also better explained when we get to textures.
Responding to layout changes
The OpenGL context needs to know exactly the area it should render to, and it should be adjusted accordingly. In the previous section we mentioned that onSurfaceCreated was not a good place to do this, because the dimensions are essentially unknown. That’s why there is another function called onSurfaceChanged which is exactly for this purpose. Each time a layout is applied to the GLSurfaceView, this method is called. This includes manually handled screen orientation changes.
What we are going to do here is as follows:
Set the clear color of the stage to black (R:0 G:0 B:0 A:1). Set up a projection matrix based on width and height of the View (to project back to the basic cube). Load identity matrix. OpenGL’s visible space is a 2x2x1 cube. All the images you see on your HD screen in 3D are results of matrix multiplications that map all those big numbers onto these dimensions. Movement, rotation and scaling are also performed using matrices. So, loading the identity matrix in the beginning makes sure all objects are initially drawn straight and without any transformation.
Our final code for this function will be something like this:
public final void onSurfaceChanged(GL10 gl, int width, int height) { gl.glClearColor(0, 0, 0, 1); float w, h; if(width > height) { h = 600; w = width * h / height; } else { w = 600; h = height * w / width; } gl.glMatrixMode(GL10.GL_PROJECTION); gl.glLoadIdentity(); gl.glOrthof(0, w, h, 0, |
geographic center of Washington. Orchards extend north to the Lake Chelan region and west through Cashmere to Leavenworth.
At the Snowdrift Cider Co. on a rural hillside southeast of the urban area, I got my early education in cider-making from father and son Peter and Lars Ringsrud. Perhaps my most important first lesson was the discovery that the apples used in most hard ciders are distinctly different from sweet dessert apples.
Shortly after my arrival at the garage that served as Snowdrift’s first production facility, the Ringsruds took me for a walk through the 2-acre test orchard beside their farmhouse home. It is planted with 35 different varieties of cider apples, many of them grafted onto the root stock of trees that once bore Golden Delicious and Granny Smith apples.
When cider is made from dessert fruit, said Peter Ringsrud, an orchardist (like his father and grandfather) for more than 40 years, “Yeast removes sugar, and you’re left with an acidic, only slightly alcoholic beverage.” A far better solution, he said, is to blend the distinctive flavor profiles of true cider apples, with their tannins, acids and aromas.
Most of these apples came to the United States from England and France, where they have been used in cider for many centuries. Lars Ringsrud pulled a variety called Porter’s Perfection off a tree and handed it to me. I took a bite. “It has a lot of tannins,” he said, as I watched the white of the apple quickly turn brown. “It has some sweetness, but also a certain astringency. It dries in your mouth.”
These qualities, he said, make Porter’s a fine cider apple. It is considered a “bittersharp” fruit, one of four types, along with bittersweet, sharp and sweet, that are widely blended in cider production. “A lot of cider-making is in the art of blending,” Peter Ringsrud said.
Among his favorites, he said, are the bittersweet Bulmer’s Norman and Yarlington Mill, the bittersharp Kingston Black and Golden Russet, the consistent Dabinett and the estate Snowdrift Crab Apple, which has twice the sugar of many other varieties.
Growing business
Today, Snowdrift produces six commercial ciders, each using different apples and blends ranging from pale straw to deep amber in color. Its mainstay, Orchard Select, is light in color, with tropical overtones. Cliffbreaks is robust. Red Cider has a cranberry edge.
“Our focus is to have the fruit speak through the cider,” said Peter Ringsrud. The process of making cider takes nine to 10 months, he said: The apples are pressed for juice, fermented with added yeast and nutrients, chilled to remove lees, then matured for six months in stainless steel, as the fruit’s tannins recombine. Before bottling in July, the cider-makers add “a little carbonation to lift the aroma into the nasal cavities,” Lars Ringsrud said.
In 2014, Snowdrift produced the equivalent of 6,100 cases of cider, divided equally between bottles and kegs. But the little company is growing so rapidly that it is already planning an expansion of a new production facility. Snowdrift Cider is being shipped to California and the northeastern United States, and it won’t be long, Peter Ringsrud predicted, that they’ll be producing 40,000 case equivalents.
“There was no industry when we started in 2008,” he said. “Up until two to three years ago, cider was an unknown entity. There were only five cideries in the Northwest. Now, there are more than 50.”
And more are on the way. Just north of East Wenatchee, beside the Columbia River, Lisa Bee’s is one of those. Once a seasonal fruit stand, it was purchased last year by Oroville orchardist Jeff Bouilloun and his daughter Lisa Stanton.
“I saw more potential than a fruit stand,” said Stanton, a former dental hygienist with two small children. So she set to work turning it into a budget-priced bistro, bakery and produce market, complete with a children’s play area and a dog park. “My goal is to be the best kid destination in town.”
Already, Lisa Bee’s presses apples and pears from her family’s farm for sweet ciders. Stanton plans to move into hard cider production next year. “We already have all the equipment for it,” she said. “We have the square footage and the storage space. We’d be crazy not to do it.”
Tieton Cider
One of the oldest and largest producers of hard ciders in the Pacific Northwest is the Tieton Cider Works, whose new facility and tasting room in Yakima far exceeds the capacity of its original hub near the country village of Tieton.
Tieton planted its first cider apples in 2006 and made its first commercial release three years later. “Our production has grown from 7,000 case equivalents in 2013 to 70,000 in 2015,” said brand manager LeAnn Wane. “That’s about 200,000 gallons of cider this year.”
About a third of the distribution of Tieton’s 13 commercial ciders (to 20 states) will be in cans, said Wane. They have just been added to complement bottles and kegs. And to boost interest in ciders nationwide, Tieton has just announced a “Cider Shake” mixology contest, inviting its customers to create cider-based cocktails for $5,000 in prize money.
Production manager Rob McCurdy — Yakima-born, but with a master’s degree in brewing and distilling from Scotland — walked me through the cider-making process.
“At the upstream end, it’s similar to winemaking,” he said. “We pick in the fall, grind and press the fruit, warm it to about 60 degrees, then pitch in a proprietary blend of yeasts with the choppage. We dry and clear it to the sweetness level we want. Then the process becomes more like beer. The cider goes into a tank, where we force carbonate with CO2 into the container.”
Besides apple ciders, McCurdy said, Tieton makes apple-based infusions of cherry and apricot ciders. It also produces an effervescent pear cider from the small and bitter Perry pear, which spends five months in fermentation.
Marcus Robert — a sort of Renaissance man with a background in biology and wildland firefighting, a fourth-generation orchardist who has owned a boutique winery, the Fontaine Estate, for 15 years — is Tieton’s cider-maker. As we walked through a 55-acre orchard in the hills west of Yakima, he told me there are 7,000 varieties of apples in the world, and Tieton has chosen to produce just 11 of them.
“Industry acreage is down 11 percent,” he said, “but efficiency is up 35 percent.”
He indicated the tall spindle system of planting that he employs, forcing trees to grow upward rather than outward. “We can now get 2,000 trees an acre,” he said, which translates to 110 bins of apples. Especially productive in the desert climate of the Yakima Valley, Robert said, is the unique Harrison apple, popular in early America but obsolete by the 20th century. It was rediscovered only in 1976.
“We make ciders that I feel need to be better than the next guy,” Robert said.
Apple spirits
Thomas Hale, like Pam and Kevin Milford, has found a different use for apples. A partner in the 3-year-old Glacier Basin Distillery, he produces fruit brandies and a grape grappa from a small distillery linked with Gilbert Orchards in west Yakima.
“It’s an income-producing hobby and if we break even, it’s cool,” said Hale, who is also an assistant general manager for Gilbert and its winery.
To make the apple brandy, he said, Granny Smith apples are selected off the trees — “The block is right behind the distillery,” Hale said — with no rot or mold. “We distill a product that is fresh and clean, and as fast as possible,” the Yakima native said. “But there’s a lot of trial and error to make it right.”
In the works, he said, is a French-style Calvados brandy from Pink Lady apples. It has already been aging for a year and a half in chardonnay oak.
The Milfords own Swede Hill Distilling, also on Yakima’s west side, in an orchard established by Pam Milford’s Swedish-immigrant grandparents. Their best seller is a product called Apple Pie Moonshine.
“We start with cider, sugar, water, yeast and nutrients,” Kevin Milford said, as we spoke beside his hand-built still. “After two weeks of fermentation, I run it twice through distilling, then I carbon-filter it. Afterward, I transfer it to 25-pound vats for aging, adding 100 pounds of ground apples. It stays there for two to three weeks, after which I filter it again, proof and bottle.
“The only thing I don’t like is not enough time.”
Oregon cider
Across the Columbia River in Oregon, Hood River is a vanguard of the growth of hard cider nationally: It has 11 cideries (and counting) in a county with just 23,000 people.
One of the local leaders is Rack & Cloth, a small but diversified farming operation in Mosier, 5 miles east of the city of Hood River. Owner Kristina Nance hand-sorts all fruit and runs it through a small press; the pomace (solid fruit remains) feed the farm’s livestock, whose waste fertilizes the orchard. Nance also has a farm-to-table store in downtown Mosier, where cider and other products are sold.
At Rivercider, cider-maker Jordan Struck represents the sixth generation of a family at home at the 130-year-old Riverside Farms. He makes two types of small-batch hard cider, Crazy Crow and Screech Owl, using heirloom Newtown apples. Cider is fermented in European-made tanks, then transferred into white-oak barrels for a minimum of six months. The results are dry, Old World ciders with just a touch of local beekeeper honey for sweetness.
Fox-Tail Cider has at least 10 hard ciders on tap at its tasting room on State Highway 35 in the Hood River Valley, where there are more than 400 apple orchards. It opened in 2013 after four years of batch testing by Bob Paasch, whose great-great-grandfather, German immigrant August Paasch, planted an orchard here in the late 1800s.
Almost across the highway is The Gorge White House, a landmark Dutch Colonial home built in 1908. The family farm now has a tasting room for its home-produced ciders, including apple, apple-pear, blueberry and sparkling Perry pear.
Well off the beaten path is Mt View Orchards, better known for its u-pick orchards than its cider production. Katrina McAlexander, who grew up on the farm, purchased it from her parents this year and immediately set out to make hard ciders. Her formula is a blend of Gravenstein and Honey Crisp sweet apples, and five different cider apples.
“I’m just waiting for licensing from the OLCC (Oregon Liquor Control Commission),” she said. “The labels are ready.”
On its website, the Columbia Gorge Cider Society recommends a “cider route” to visit 10 different cider producers in the region. Most appealing is a final stop at the Crush Cider Café in downtown Hood River: Along with light gourmet cuisine, the shop offers 12 rotating taps with local ciders, both hard and soft.
“There’s a growing movement in the valley to remove old apple trees and put in cider apples,” said Crush co-owner Guntram Jordan. “I think in another three to five years, it will really take off.”
— Reporter: janderson@bendbulletin.com
11361330In the past few days, the PM and immigration minister have praised Australia’s record on refugees. But their claims are often contested or inaccurate
Tony Abbott and his immigration minister, Peter Dutton, have claimed that Australia is generous to refugees and that the “stop the boats” policy has helped save lives. Here, Guardian Australia disentangles the rhetoric to explain the facts.
1. Tony Abbott, on 6 September, 2015: “We are a country which, on a per capita basis, takes more refugees than any other. We take more refugees than any other through the UNHCR on a per capita basis.”
The first sentence is not true. The second is, but it represents a tiny fraction of the world’s response to the refugee crisis.
The vast majority – somewhere around 86% – of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing nations, usually near to the one they have fled. The countries that host the greatest number of refugees are: Turkey, 1.58 million; Pakistan, 1.5 million; and Lebanon, 1.15 million. Fully one-quarter of Lebanon’s resident population are refugees.
Australia currently hosts 35,000 refugees, ranking it 48th of 187 countries. These are people who are here as recognised refugees but have not yet been given a permanent home here.
The Abbott government cut the number of new refugees accepted each year by almost a third, to 13,750, when it came into office (see below).
However, Australia does, on a per capita basis, take the largest proportion of refugees under the UNHCR’s resettlement program. Resettlement is the process of transferring recognised refugees from the country where they initially sought refuge to a third country that has agreed to accept them.
But formal resettlement represents only a tiny fraction of the world’s refugee program, less than 1%.
The United States is the largest resettler of refugees under the UNHCR program, taking more than 70% of all resettlements, 73,000 a year. Canada takes the second-largest number, 12,300, while Australia is third on 11,600. Per capita, Australia takes the largest number.
2. Tony Abbott, also on 6 September: “Like just about every other Australian, I was moved by the horrific imagery of that little boy washed up on a beach in Turkey... Australia is a country which has always taken its international obligations seriously. Australia is a country which has always done what we can to assist when people are in trouble around the world... obviously this is a very grave situation in the Middle East. People in Syria are caught between the mass execution of the Daesh death cult [Islamic State] on the one hand and the chemical weapons of the Assad regime on the other. It is important that there be a humanitarian response.”
An estimated 250,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war since March 2011. The conflict has both political and religious elements. War crimes, including murder, torture, rape and enforced disappearances, have allegedly been committed by both the military and Shia Alawites loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, and by rebel forces, representative of the Sunni majority. Neighbouring countries and distant world powers have been drawn into the conflict, further complicated by the rise of Isis.
The civilian humanitarian crisis is far greater than those who have managed to flee the country. An estimated 7.6 million Syrians are displaced within the borders of the country, compared with 3.8 million refugees outside.
“The Syrian situation is the most dramatic humanitarian crisis the world has faced in a very long time,” the UNHCR has said.
As to how good a global citizen Australia has been in this regard, it’s record on Syria, and the region, is mixed. Australia has donated additional funds to the Middle East region ($100m this year) and to Syria itself ($155m in humanitarian assistance since 2011), but Australia’s broader aid budget to the Middle East and North Africa has been cut by 82%, from $2.8m to $0.5m in the last federal budget.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stuck on Manus Island: isolated and desperate, refugees tell their stories – video
Both Labor and Liberal governments have been actively deporting refused asylum seekers to Syria. In 2014, Guardian Australia reported that the current government was preparing to remove Syrian asylum seekers despite the men being, in the words of one public servant, “quite adamant that I would be sending them home to their death”.
Recordings obtained by Guardian Australia also revealed the Australian government told Syrians on Manus Island they would be passing on their details to the Syrian consulate if they opted to return.
3. Immigration minister Peter Dutton on 4 September: “As soon as we were elected the Coalition government implemented strong policies to put the people smugglers out of business and end the deaths at sea. Our policies are lawful. They are safe. And they work. They save lives.”
The much-trumpeted success of the “stop the boats” policy is contested.
Boats are being stopped – Australia has stopped 20 boatloads of asylum seekers since December 2013, and the rate of boats attempting to arrive has slowed dramatically.
But boats have not “stopped”. People continue to attempt to come to Australia by boat: two have been stopped in the past three months alone.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people continue to seek asylum by sea in Australia’s region.
In south-east Asia last year, 63,000 people travelled irregularly by sea to seek asylum, and at least 750 are believed to have drowned.
Peter Dutton hits back at New York Times attack on 'inhumane' boats policy Read more
Australia-style policies of boat turnbacks have this year been employed by other nations, including Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, which led to the situation of nearly 8,000 Rohingyan and Bangladeshi migrants being stranded at sea in vessels that the UN feared would become “floating coffins”, because they were unable to land anywhere. Asylum seekers on board fought each other to death over dwindling food and water supplies, according to observers.
There are also questions over how legal Australia’s stop-the-boat practices are.
It is not legal for Australia to intercept, detain or “turn back” boats in international waters.
It is also not legal for Australia to turn back boats (from within Australian waters) if that would send a person back to a place where they faced persecution (the non-refoulement principle under the 1951 refugees convention), or back to a place which does not provide effective refugee protection (such as non-refugee convention countries like Indonesia and Malaysia).
The high court found Australia’s practice of “screening at sea” asylum seekers’ claims for protection was legal. However, the UNHCR says it has “deep concerns” about the process.
4. Peter Dutton, also on 4 September: “Because of the success of our policy in restoring the integrity of our borders, the Coalition government is increasing our offshore humanitarian program by almost 40%. By 2018-19 places in resettlement program will increase to 18,750.”
The 18,750 is not an increase, it is a decrease on the figures of recent years.
In 2012, Australia accepted 20,019 refugees (this figure was an unusual spike on previous years). The Abbott government cut that number in 2013 to 13,750. The government has vowed to increase the number of refugees accepted to 18,750 over four years.
But Australia’s refugee intake is significantly smaller, in gross terms and proportionally, than it used to be: in 1980-81, Australia accepted 22,500 refugees, at a time when the country’s population was only 15 million.
In 2012, the Labor government-commissioned Houston expert panel on refugees recommended progressively increasing Australia’s refugee intake to 27,000.
Visas granted onshore (to people physically in Australia) and offshore (outside the country) are not intrinsically linked. This is a government construction. Australia’s onshore and offshore programs were directly linked by the Howard government. As a result, every time an onshore applicant is granted a protection visa, a place is deducted from the offshore program. Australia is the only refugee-accepting nation in the world to do this.
The conflation of the offshore and onshore components has given risen to the argument that people arriving by boat are “queue jumpers”, taking places from more deserving people who remain abroad. In reality, there is no queue.
In countries where people are facing persecution, it is rarely possible for them to present themselves to an embassy or UNHCR office (if those places exist). On their journeys seeking asylum, many asylum seekers have come either directly from home countries (such as Sri Lanka) or without passing through any country that offers legal protection for refugees (Malaysia, Indonesia).
Finally, the UNHCR’s resettlement process works less like a queue than a hospital triage system, where individuals with an acute resettlement need (severe sexual abuse, disability, continuing vulnerability) are prioritised ahead of those whose need for resettlement is less urgent. At current resettlement rates, the UNHCR “queue” – if no more people were to join it – is estimated at 117 years long.Microsoft is currently developing an “instant video social network” called Huddl. This has not been officially announced yet, and might not even release at all. It also currently requires a Microsoft employee account to sign in to the website, so there’s no way to see how it actually works yet.
The website boasts features like being able to “discover video conversation serendipitously”, instantly jumping between video calls, and connecting with people who share common interests. It seems like it might be similar to the web version of Skype, but with a focus on meeting and talking to people you don’t already know.
Interestingly, the site currently doesn’t work on Microsoft Edge, instead asking you to download Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. It’s possible that later on it might use some of the same technology that makes it possible to use Skype for Web on Microsoft Edge.
It appears that each “huddl” will be a group video chat where users can invite their friends. Inside of the page’s HTML, there are a couple of references to it.
<h1 class=”invite-message-title”>Invite someone to this Huddl</h1>
<h2 class=”invite-message-section-text”>Invite message:</h2>
<input class=”invite-message-section-textbar” type=”text” placeholder=”Body for your invitation…” ng-model=”body” />
<h2 class=”invite-participant-section-text”>Enter aliases to invite seperated by semicolons:</h2>
<input class=”invite-participant-section-textbar” type=”text” placeholder=”Type user name or alias…” ng-model=”invitees” /> <div class=”invite-section invite-buttons”>
<button class=”invite-button” ng-click=”sendInvites()”>Invite all</button>
<button class=”cancel-invite-button” ui-sref=”site.lobby.room”>Cancel</button>
According to even more HTML, the term “huddl” will be used as a verb, too.
<div class=”text”>No one is huddling. Why not start your own?</div> {{(person.userStatus == 2)? ‘Huddling’ : ‘Available’}}
This is all pretty interesting, and we’re excited to find out more about Huddl – if we do – as the year goes on. It looks like it has the potential to be a very promising service if development continues.
What do you expect Huddl to be like? Let us know in the comments below!Something a little fun that I had the opportunity to work on was building a Xbox Live widget using PowerShell that does a nice job of capturing all of the relevant information that a Xbox live person would like to see along such as online friends, gamer score and the most recent activity.
What got me started down this road was a few blog posts from fellow PowerSheller Jonathan Tyler (Twitter | Blog) that described how he found an API for performing queries to gather information on Xbox Live.
The API site is: https://xboxapi.com/
It is also important to note that this is an unofficial API and the current API limit is 250 calls per hour. If you go over that amount by too great a deal that you IP will get blocked automatically for Spam and you will need to email the owner of the site to request it to be unblocked (as I found out while building this widget). If the API site goes down or is unavailable for whatever reason, this this widget will fail. I do know of another API site, but some of the features available on this widget do not line up properly with that site.
Just supply a gamertag to the script via the –Gamertag parameter. In this case, I will look at Major Nelson’s information.
.\xboxlivewidget.ps1 -Gamertag "Major Nelson"
You can access the context menu be right clicking anywhere on the widget and either select Exit to close the widget out or viewing Online Friends.
Once you select Show Online Friends, a new window opens up displaying all of the online friends. Even better is that this is an auto-updating window, so as the main window updates the number of friends, this window will update as well!
I am still working on a better way to refresh the online friends window to just remove the offline friends instead of clearing the window and re-building the list. That will be hopefully ready for the next release.
The basics of this is using Invoke-WebRequest (PowerShell V3 only) to query the API while providing the Gamertag in the url request, using my gamertag: El Gato Rabioso.
$tempGamertag = "El Gato Rabioso" Add-Type System.Web $Gamertag = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($Gamertag.Trim())($tempGamertag.Trim()) [xml](Invoke-WebRequest -URI ("https://xboxapi.com/xml/profile/{0}" -f $Gamertag) | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Content)
To quickly break this down, I am first supplying a Gamertag that will be used in the request to get the information I need. But, before I can do that, I need to take care of those spaces in the name, otherwise the request will fail miserably. To handle the proper encoding I will enlist the help of [System.Web.HttpUtility] with the UrlEncode method to take those spaces and replace them with a “+” sign instead. If there were other special characters in the name, they would be properly translated as well into their respected character.
With that out of the way, I then perform the request to the API site and download the content which I cast to XML using [xml] so I now have a nice structured object to work with and select only what I need from it.
But this isn’t really about using the API from the command line, if you want more information about that, I highly suggest you check out Jonathan’s articles and play with the APIs yourself.
The Code
I won’t go over each and every line of code as it is fairly large and somewhat redundant in areas. Instead, I will go over the parts of the code that I feel is interesting enough to talk about.
Param ( $Gamertag = "Major Nelson" ) #region Gamertag Encoding Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Web #Encode the gamertag so it works in the API call $updatedGamertag = [System.Web.HttpUtility]::UrlEncode($Gamertag.Trim()) #endregion Gamertag Encoding #region Build Synchronized Collections $xboxLive = [hashtable]::Synchronized(@{}) $ui = [hashtable]::Synchronized(@{}) $childui = [hashtable]::Synchronized(@{}) $runspace = [hashtable]::Synchronized(@{}) #endregion Build Synchronized Collections #region Default Settings and Items for Collections $xboxLive.Gamertag = $updatedGamertag $xboxLive.apiLimit = 250 $childui.onlineFriendsActiveWindow = $False $runspace.Flag = $True $runspace.errors = $Error $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit = $False #endregion Default Settings and Items for Collections #region Main Runspace
Here I set up the parameter to accept a Gamertag and then handle the encoding to make it more http request friendly as well as setting up the synchronized collections to handle the data that is being shared between each runspace thread. I also set up some settings such as the API limit and whether the child window for Online Friends is active.
#Internal function to update child UI Function New-GridItem { [cmdletbinding(DefaultParameterSetName='Body')] Param ( [parameter(ParameterSetName='Object')] $InputObject ) #region Build Parent Grid $grid = New-Object Windows.Controls.Grid $grid.Width = 250 $grid.tag = $InputObject.Gamertag $column1 = New-Object Windows.Controls.ColumnDefinition $column1.Width = "Auto" $column2 = New-Object Windows.Controls.ColumnDefinition $grid.ColumnDefinitions.Add($column1) | Out-Null $grid.ColumnDefinitions.Add($column2) | Out-Null #endregion Build Parent Grid #region Child Grid $childGrid = New-Object Windows.Controls.Grid $row1 = New-Object Windows.Controls.RowDefinition $row1.Height = "Auto" $row2 = New-Object Windows.Controls.RowDefinition $row2.Height = "Auto" $childGrid.RowDefinitions.Add($row1) | Out-Null $childGrid.RowDefinitions.Add($row2) | Out-Null [Windows.Controls.Grid]::SetColumn($childGrid,1) [Windows.Controls.Grid]::SetColumnSpan($childGrid,2) $grid.Children.Add($childGrid) | Out-Null #endregion Child Grid #region Add Controls to Child Grid $nameTextBlock = New-Object Windows.Controls.TextBlock $nameTextBlock.Text = $InputObject.Gamertag $nameTextBlock.FontWeight = 'Bold' $nameTextBlock.FontSize = '14' $nameTextBlock.Foreground = 'White' [Windows.Controls.Grid]::SetRow($nameTextBlock,0) $notesTextBlock = New-Object Windows.Controls.TextBlock $notesTextBlock.TextWrapping="Wrap" $notesTextBlock.Text = $InputObject.Presence $notesTextBlock.Foreground = 'White' [Windows.Controls.Grid]::SetRow($notesTextBlock,1) $childGrid.Children.Add($nameTextBlock) | Out-Null $childGrid.Children.Add($notesTextBlock) | Out-Null #endregion Add Controls to Child Grid #region Add Controls to Parent Grid $image = New-Object Windows.Controls.Image $image.Source = $InputObject.GamerTileurl $image.Width = 50 $image.Height = 50 [Windows.Controls.Grid]::SetRow($image,0) [Windows.Controls.Grid]::SetColumn($image,0) [Windows.Controls.Grid]::SetRowSpan($image,2) $grid.Children.Add($image) | Out-Null #endregion Add Controls to Parent Grid Write-Output $grid } #Internal Function to quickly create tooltip Function New-ToolTip { Param ( [parameter()] $Header, [parameter()] $Body, [parameter()] $HeaderColor = "Black" ) $stackPanel = New-Object Windows.Controls.StackPanel If ($Header) { $headerText = New-Object Windows.Controls.TextBlock $headerText.FontWeight = 'Bold' $headerText.Text = $Header $headerText.Foreground = $HeaderColor $stackPanel.AddChild($headerText) | Out-Null } If ($Body) { $bodyText = New-Object Windows.Controls.TextBlock $bodyText.TextWrapping = "Wrap" $bodyText.Text = $Body | Out-String $stackPanel.AddChild($bodyText) | Out-Null } Write-Output $stackPanel }
New-ToolTip and New-Grid are my helper functions that make it easier to build dynamic UIs into the Widget. The tooltip function just adds a richer tooltip for the recent activity while the grid function is used on the child window for online friends to output a grid that has a couple textblocks and image controls to a listview to make viewing online friends easier. I originally had this as another tooltip, but quickly realized the disaster that it would have been.
#Allow API calls if an hour has passed and currently unable to make call due to limit If ($xboxLive.isAtAPILimit -AND ((Get-Date).AddHours(-1) -gt $initalTime)) { $initalTime = Get-Date $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit = $False } #region API Calls If ([int]$xboxLive.api -lt [int]$xboxLive.apiLimit -AND -Not $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit) { $xboxLive.xboxProfile = [xml](Invoke-WebRequest -URI ("https://xboxapi.com/xml/profile/{0}" -f $xboxLive.Gamertag) | Select-Object -ExpandProperty Content) $xboxLive.api = ($xboxLive.xboxProfile.data.API_Limit -split "/")[0] } Else { $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit = $True } If ([int]$xboxLive.api -lt [int]$xboxLive.apiLimit -AND -Not $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit) { $xboxLive.xboxGames = ([xml](Invoke-WebRequest -URI ("https://xboxapi.com/xml/games/{0}" -f $xboxLive.Gamertag))) $xboxGames = $xboxLive.xboxGames.Data.Games | Select -First 5 $xboxLive.api = ($xboxLive.xboxGames.data.API_Limit -split "/")[0] } Else { $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit = $True } If ([int]$xboxLive.api -lt [int]$xboxLive.apiLimit -AND -Not $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit) { $xboxLive.xboxFriends = [xml](Invoke-WebRequest -URI ("https://xboxapi.com/xml/friends/{0}" -f $xboxLive.Gamertag)) $xboxLive.api = ($xboxLive.xboxFriends.data.API_Limit -split "/")[0] } Else { $xboxLive.isAtAPILimit = $True }
This is the API calls to get all of the information needed to properly update the widget. I have checks in place to make sure that I do not go over the API limit within an hour. Once an hour is up, the API limit resets itself. Of course, if you go over the API limit the widget will wait a full hour before it will allow another call. I am still working a better way to handle this other than a full hour wait, but that will be in the next version.
#region UI Update $ui.gamertagpicture.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ #region Xbox Live Profile If ((("{0}" -f $ui.gamertagpicture.Source) -ne $xboxLive.xboxProfile.data.Player.Avatar.Gamerpic.Large)) { $ui.gamertagpicture.Source = $xboxLive.xboxProfile.data.Player.Avatar.Gamerpic.Large } }) $ui.achievementpoints.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ $ui.achievementpoints.Text = $xboxLive.xboxProfile.Data.Player.Gamerscore }) $ui.gamertag_txt.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ $ui.gamertag_txt.Text = $xboxLive.xboxProfile.Data.Player.Gamertag If ($xboxLive.xboxProfile.Data.Player.Status.Online) { $ui.onlinestate.Text = 'Online' } Else { $ui.onlinestate.Text = 'Offline' } }) $ui.status.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ $ui.status.Text = $xboxLive.xboxProfile.data.Player.Status.Online_Status }) #endregion #region Xbox Live Friends $totalFriends = @($xboxLive.xboxFriends.data.Friends) $xboxLive.onlineFriends = @($xboxLive.xboxFriends.data.Friends | Where {$_.IsOnline}) $online = $onlineFriends | Select -Expand Gamertag $ui.friends.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ $ui.friends.Text = ("{0} / {1} Friends Online" -f $xboxLive.onlineFriends.count,$totalFriends.count) }) If ($xboxLive.onlineFriends.Count -gt 0 -AND $childui.onlineFriendsActiveWindow) { $childui.onlineFriendsListView.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ $childui.onlineFriendsListView.Items.Clear() }) $xboxLive.onlineFriends | ForEach { $xboxLive.onlineUser = $_ $childui.onlineFriendsListView.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ $childui.onlineFriendsListView.Items.Add((New-GridItem -InputObject $xboxlive.onlineUser)) | Out-Null }) } } If ($xboxLive.onlineFriends.Count -gt 0 -AND $ui.onlineFriendsActiveWindow) { $childui.onlineFriendsListView.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ $childui.onlineFriendsListView.Items.Clear() }) } #endregion #region Recent Games $ui.game0_image.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ If ((("{0}" -f $ui.game0_image.Source) -ne $xboxGames[0].boxart.large)) { $ui.game0_image.Source = $xboxGames[0].boxart.large } $ui.ui.NavigateUri = $xboxGames[0].MarketplaceURL $ui.game0_link.ToolTip = New-ToolTip -Header $xboxGames[0].Name -Body @" Achievements: $($xboxGames[0].Progress.Achievements) / $($xboxGames[0].PossibleAchievements) Points: $($xboxGames[0].Progress.Score) / $($xboxGames[0].PossibleScore) "@ }) $ui.game1_image.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ If ((("{0}" -f $ui.game1_image.Source) -ne $xboxGames[1].boxart.large)) { $ui.game1_image.Source = $xboxGames[1].boxart.large } $ui.game1_link.NavigateUri = $xboxGames[1].MarketplaceURL $ui.game1_link.ToolTip = New-ToolTip -Header $xboxGames[1].Name -Body @" Achievements: $($xboxGames[1].Progress.Achievements) / $($xboxGames[1].PossibleAchievements) Points: $($xboxGames[1].Progress.Score) / $($xboxGames[1].PossibleScore) "@ }) $ui.game2_image.Dispatcher.Invoke("Normal",[action]{ If ((("{0}" -f $ui.game2_image.Source) -ne $xboxGames[2].boxart.large)) { $ui.game2_image.Source = $xboxGames[2].boxart.large } $ui.game2_link.NavigateUri = $xboxGames[2].MarketplaceURL $ui.game2_link.ToolTip = New-ToolTip -Header $xboxGames[2].Name -Body @" Achievements: $($xboxGames[2]. |
"because he's never actually had to do it."
Read more:
.@realDonaldTrump it's a swamp not a hot tub. We both came here to drain it. #SwampCare polls 17%. Sad! https://t.co/4kjygV2tdS — Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) March 30, 2017
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2nDfzkqPopZette This Conservative Celebrity Might Run for Office He's glad to have a 'hell-raiser in the White House' and wants to do his part to help the country
Ted Nugent is ready to serve his country, whether that’s in office or as a musician.
The outspoken rock guitarist addressed rumors that began swirling in February that he planned to run for Senate in 2018.
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“Well, I’m a terminal ‘we-the-people American patriot,’ and I think I’m doing the most important political job in the world, and that is participating in the sacred experiment of self-government and demanding constitutional accountability from our elected employees,” he said on “Fox & Friends” on Friday.
Related: Jimmy Fallon’s Wimpy Comedy
He added, “There’s no limit to what I’d be willing to do to help make this country great.”
He’s still mulling a possible run for Senate and has been discussing his options with his “Republican friends.”
[lz_ndn video=32299398]
“I’m a hell-raiser,” he said. “I’m what the Founding Fathers wanted all Americans to be … and it’s all about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Ten Commandants, the Golden Rule, being the best that you can be, earning your own way.”
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He added sarcastically, “Wow, I’m a radical.”
While the 69-year-old weighs his options, he is glad to finally have a “hell-raiser in the White House.”
He praised President Trump’s efforts since assuming the presidency.
Related: ‘House of Cards’ Star Robin Wright Just Endorsed This Person for President
“[Put] America first, make America great again, job security, secure the border. You know, it’s so simple even guitar players can figure it out,” he said of Trump’s priorities.
“If you’re not pissing off the idiots you’re an idiot,” he added of Trump’s critics. “He’s not an idiot; he’s driving the idiots crazy, so I’m so proud of him.”
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Michigan GOP press officer Sarah Anderson told Fox News in February that they have not spoken with Nugent but that “Ted Nugent would be a great candidate to win against Debbie Stabenow.”
This article originally appeared in Fox News and is used with permission.
Read more at Fox News:
Steve Harvey’s Ex-Wife Mary Vaughn Sues for $60 Million, Says He Murdered Her Soul
Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson ‘Flattered’ by Fan Support for Presidency
Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino Gets Real on Sobriety and Ongoing Legal BattleA new crew has arrived at the International Space Station after what NASA called "a very successful launch today."
NASA flight engineers Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba and Russian Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 5:17 p.m. ET.
It took the Soyuz spacecraft about nine minutes to launch into an initial orbit 202 kilometres from Earth. A series of engine burns brought the crew in line with the orbit of the International Space Station.
Spotted! Spacecraft carrying <a href="https://twitter.com/Astro_Sabot">@Astro_Sabot</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/AstroAcaba">@AstroAcaba</a> & Russian crewmate seen approaching the <a href="https://twitter.com/Space_Station">@Space_Station</a>. Watch <a href="https://t.co/mzKW5uV4hS">https://t.co/mzKW5uV4hS</a> <a href="https://t.co/CExAVkXv6D">pic.twitter.com/CExAVkXv6D</a> —@NASA
The Soyuz reached the space station in six hours, docking around 11 p.m. ET.
NASA said that "the crew is feeling fine."
The space station is the only permanently occupied laboratory in space. It orbits about 400 kilometres above Earth.
Crew members Joe Acaba of NASA, Alexander Misurkin of Roscosmos and Mark Vande Hei of NASA pose for a photograph for the press outside the Soyuz simulator on Aug. 31, at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Star City, Russia. (Bill Ingalls/NASA)
The hatches were expected to open around 12:40 a.m. ET on Sept. 13, when the new arrivals would be greeted by the current crew, composed of NASA commander Randy Bresnik and flight engineers Sergey Ryasanskiy from Roscosmos and Paolo Nespoli from the European Space Agency.
U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei gestures to his relatives from a bus prior to the launch, his first trip to space. (Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press)
The mission is a first for Vande Hei.
"As a kid I never would have told anyone that I wanted to be an astronaut. My attitude about that was that it would have been like saying I wanted to be Spider-Man," said Vande Hei in a video released by NASA prior to the launch. "I always thought working at NASA would be amazing because of my physics background.… The fact that I get to be an astronaut is gravy."
Vande Hei said he's happy to be part of a "peaceful endeavour that could actually help out all of humanity."
Joseph Acaba of NASA is seen prior to launch. (Dmitri Lovetsky/Associated Press)
On Sept. 2, two NASA astronauts, Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer, as well as Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin, returned from the space station with a parachute touchdown in Kazakhstan. Whitson, 57, broke the U.S. record for cumulative time in space.
The Soyuz rocket blasts off today at 5:17pm ET carrying Exp 53-54 crew towards station. <a href="https://t.co/2yhQbkFuId">https://t.co/2yhQbkFuId</a> <a href="https://t.co/wXMdfq9fWP">pic.twitter.com/wXMdfq9fWP</a> —@Space_Station
The new space station crew will stay for five months. They'll continue work on hundreds of experiments in biology and biotechnology, as well as physical and earth sciences.The sound was ruined during Adele‘s performance at the 2016 Grammy Awards and everyone on Twitter is angry about what happened.
The 27-year-old singer took the stage to perform her song “All I Ask” from her album 25, but the sound went out just a few seconds into the performance. After the sound was restored, the volume was raised to a very high level for several seconds.
PHOTOS: See Adele walking the red carpet at the Grammys 2016!
While she still was amazing, the rest of Adele‘s performance was a little shaky as you can tell she was thrown off by the sound problems.
Make sure to watch Adele knock the song out of the park during her Live in New York City special!
The sound guy just messed up the sound during Adele's performance so everyone get your damn pitchforks — Michelle Bui (@TheMichelleBui) February 16, 2016
Click inside to read lots more reactions from Adele’s angry fans…Katheryn Luna
Santo Domingo
“A tres por 100 la piña”, vocifera uno de los tantos vendedores que hacen vida en la 27 de Febrero con Isabel Aguiar, “Pintura”, donde además de los vendedores haitianos el entorno es impactado por decenas de vehículos de concho que hacen fila para abordar pasajeros.
Desde fresas, calzados, dulces, refrescos, cintillos y ropa interior se pueden encontrar en esa intercepción, donde la gran mayoría de los vendedores informales son de nacionalidad haitiana.
Los puestos de venta en las aceras no son abundantes, pero sí los buhoneros que se movilizan entre los vehículos aprovechando el cambio del semáforo para vender sus productos.
Casi todos los vendedores de nacionalidad haitiana tienen sus documentos de legalidad para estar en el país, según un hombre conocido solo como Chichilo, un vendedor de fresas que dijo tiene en la zona ocho años.
Chichilo cuenta que él no ha completado el proceso de regularización porque tuvo un accidente y fue sometido a una cirugía y los gastos no le han permitido continuar.
Dijo que aunque la venta no está muy buena, continúan en la zona porque hay que buscarse el sustento diario.
Espacios públicos Con el Ayuntamiento de Santo Domingo Oeste y los agentes de la Autoridad Metropolitana del Transporte (Amet) siempre hay problemas, según los vendedores.
Lo que les molesta y consideran un abuso es que las brigadas del ayuntamiento cuando van a la zona para liberar el espacio público cargan con las mercancías, perdiendo así sus inversiones para la venta.
“Yo perdí 18 mil pesos los otros días, porque el Ayuntamiento vino y se llevó las fresas que tenía para vender”, contó Chichilo.
Las mercancías que se llevan no las vuelven a recuperar pues no saben hacia dónde las cargan.
Explica que las brigadas cuando van a la zona acuden en horas de la mañana y que con los agentes de la Amet tienen discusiones por estar en medio de las vías con las ventas.
En varias ocasiones el Cabildo de ese municipio ha desalojado buhoneros de esa intersección, pero cada día son más lo que allí hacen vida comercial.Incorporating various observations and assessments from the first year under the new enlisted evaluation and promotion systems, the Air Force is making several adjustments for year two to ease execution and strengthen processes.In 2015, the Air Force began execution of the new enlisted evaluation and promotion systems with the goal of ensuring performance as the main factor when promoting or evaluating Airmen. The new systems also increased a commander’s opportunities to identify top performers and clearly indicate an Airman’s promotion potential to the boards.Enlisted performance reports available for review by senior NCO evaluation boards will decrease from the previous 10 to five years beginning with the calendar year 2016 master sergeant evaluation board. This change allows an increased focus on recent performance and compliments implementation of restricted stratification and forced distribution rules that also emphasize recent performance.With the change from reviewing 10 years of reports decreased to five years, the Air Force is also transitioning to a single-phase process for the upcoming master sergeant evaluation board.Starting with the 2016 promotion cycle, the master sergeant evaluation board will be condensed into a single-phase process in which all weighted factors and board scores are combined into one score for each Airman. Accordingly, this single-phase approach will eliminate the EPR points as a separate weighted factor similar to senior and chief master sergeant evaluation boards.“After going through the first master sergeant evaluation board in 2015, we were able to assess our capacity to review all eligible Airmen. We now know our systems, facility and annual board schedule can support boarding all eligible technical sergeants,” said Brig. Gen. Brian Kelly, the director of military force management policy. “This adjustment allows every technical sergeant a chance to have their performance reviewed on its own merit directly by the board.”Under these adjustments the master sergeant evaluation board will review all eligible technical sergeant selection folders containing each Airman’s evaluation brief, EPRs closing out within five years of the promotion eligibility cutoff date (PECD), and all decorations received over the Airman’s entire career. Any Article 15 received within two years of the PECD and recommended for placement in the selection folder by a commander will also be visible.Another announced adjustment for 2016 is the continuation of the previously-planned reduction in points associated with time-in-service and time-in-grade. For calendar 2016, the multipliers for calculating total TIS and TIG points will be reduced again by another one-third, impacting the 2016 E-5, E-6, E-7, E-9, and 2017 E-8 promotion cycles. The Air Force will again conduct analysis on the impact of this change and determine if future reductions to completely eliminate the TIG and TIS weighted points from the Weighted Airman Promotion System will continue in calendar 2017.Finally, beginning in calendar 2016, EPR point calculations for promotion to grades E-5 and E-6 will be based solely on an Airman’s last three forced distributed reports in their current grade. This adjustment provides an equitable method for transitioning from the legacy to the new system. Accounting for legacy EPRs, if in current grade, is accomplished by considering and factoring them into an Airman’s promotion recommendation. This allows a clean break under the new Forced Distribution system where no points are awarded for legacy EPRs.For more information about senior NCO evaluation board processes or other adjustments related to enlisted evaluation and promotions, visit the myPers website'Posh and Becks should be dragged to the
edge of the village and flogged': Morrissey's scathing attack on the Beckhams
He is obviously not a fan of the Beckham clan.
Smiths frontman Morrissey has revealed just what he would like to do with Posh and Becks... and it doesn't involve taking the pair out for dinner.
In a scathing interview about the state of Britain, Morrissey reveals he thinks the quintessentially fashionable English pair are insufferable.
Not a fan: Smiths frontman Morrissey reveals just what he wants to do with the Beckhams... and it doesn't involve taking them out for dinner
The 53-year-old said: 'I'd... have the Peckhams (Beckhams) dragged to the edge of the village and flogged because they are insufferable to anyone of intelligence, and they actively chase the paparazzi.'
Talking to Loaded the grumpy singer admits that it is the level of admiration the country has for the Beckhams which really gets his goat.
And Morrissey even refuses to call the married pair by their real name, instead referring to them as 'the Peckhams'.
However, it is the pair's apparent lack of intelligence and love of the celebrity lifestyle which really rubs Morrissey.
He doesn't even know what a harp is: Morrissey refuses to believe David and Victoria Beckham know their musical instruments
He continuted: 'We don’t seem to realise that David and Victoria Peckham will soon be back and god forbid they will be bestowed with titles Sir and Lady Peckham, this is what’s wrong with this country, we don’t seem to care.
'Football often seems to me to have no meaning whatsoever other than just to be there. It can’t be elevated any higher because so many footballers are paid £200,000 a week, yet couldn’t identify a harp.'
And Morrissey's rant didn't stop there, as the singer includes former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and current leader David Cameron in his attack on the state of the UK.
Scathing: Morrissey just can't stand the Beckhams... or David Cameron
Under attack: David Cameron was also targeted by Morrissey
In fact the liberal vocalist admits he even considered voting UKIP, saying: 'I nearly voted for UKIP. I like Nigel Farage a great deal. His views are quite logical – especially where Europe is concerned, although it was plain daft of him to applaud the lavish expense of the Royal Wedding at a time when working-class England were told to cut-back, shut-up and get stuffed.'
No-one escapes the wrath of Morrissey, full name Steven Patrick, who even wades in on the Savile sex row: 'He was a profiteer, and those who protected him are still here. However, I’m not sure if witch-hunts against aged Radio Caroline DJs is quite the point.
'2013 enlightenment can’t be applied to dark and dim nights of 1972, otherwise every singer who ever slept with a 14-year-old would suddenly be behind bars – and that would take a lot of bars.'
But the frontman of The Smiths has the most derision for the state of modern Britain, which is where the Beckham venom originates.
And banning Routemaster buses, conversations on trains and animal experiments could be the way forward according to the singer.
But the star reserves his final thoughts for the hypocritical. He says: 'If I kicked a dog I’d be fined £200, yet we’re asked to accept Cameron shooting down a majestic stag just for a hoot. Weird world, isn’t it?'Women’s Fightback is a socialist-feminist paper. Sarah Wright examines another feminist trend, “liberal feminism.” Future issues of Women’s Fightback will explore more “other feminisms”.
In a few words, a liberal feminist campaign would oppose anything that gets in the way of gender equality.
But the fundamental thinking of liberal feminism lies in a belief in the capacity of the individual woman. Changing the basic structures of society itself is not the issue: it is more about changing the laws that block women’s liberation. If this is done, women can change themselves and prove themselves to be equal.
Personal rights predominate over society as a whole; and through women being able to exercise our own personal rights, society will change, not the other way around.
In generalised terms, the “liberal” perspective could be described as seeing freedom as the fundamental value that must be maintained by the state and greater society. This can apply too to the liberal feminist viewpoint: humans as self-owners who should be free to solely make decisions about their own lives, and this right should apply to both men and women equally.
Men and women should have equal right to things such as freedom of expression, freedom to control your own body, freedom to acquire and control property, all free from coercive interference. The role of the state then, is to protect the individual, man and woman equally, from such coercive interference.
If, then, we are in a situation in which men and women do not have equal rights to such freedoms, the state either does not have the correct laws to prevent this, or they are not maintaining them properly. The campaign of the liberal feminist therefore is a political one, in so far as they must target the political institutions to bring about equality through political reform.
They must challenge existing laws that obstruct women’s rights, or demand new ones that will eradicate violation of women’s rights. Liberation is therefore individualistic, as it comes from being free to make your own decisions away from the coercive interference of others.
The kind of things that liberal feminists will fight for, then, tend to centre around law and policy change, such as: equal education, voting, reproductive rights, abortion rights, protection against sexual harassment and domestic violence, and equal opportunities in the work place.
Yes, these are all important things that must be fought for, however, I would argue not only that these things can be fought for as part of the class struggle, but that they must be, in order to free the lives of millions of women from oppression.
Let’s take the example of abortion. A liberal feminist campaigns for abortion rights, as illegalising abortion interferes with a women’s freedom of choice regarding her own body. Yet does winning this campaign end oppression for women?
For example, it does not acknowledge the economic and social disadvantage and prejudice that a single mother would face, which could be a factor in her choosing abortion. It does not acknowledge the social or traditional values of a community that would factor in her choice. Or what about the cost involved to have an abortion, if free health care is not available?
Legalised abortion is a far better situation for a woman making a choice than illegalised, but legal/illegal is not the only thing that could interfere in her right to choose.
Statistically, middle-class teenagers are more likely to have an abortion, arguably perhaps because they foresee a child as having more of a detrimental impact on their life, career choices, etc. The availability of abortions in theory is the same for both middle class and working class young women in Britain, but their social/economic background plays a bigger part in their decision.
What we see here is not that fighting for a change in abortion law, or whatever law, is bad, but that it is limited. It is limited because of the society we live in: the capitalist society.
Whilst we live under capitalism, any rights that women fight for will always be determined or affected by her economic position. Individual empowerment is immaterial: people’s decisions are limited by class.
Liberal feminist campaigns have been at the forefront of many, many important things, but the barrier of capitalism will only let this go so far: either you will never escape your economic situation, or you will have to leave your class behind, and succeed as an individual, not a collective.
The women’s struggle needs to not just think in terms of making the best of the way society is currently structured, but to restructure society as a whole.
If we examine part of the definition of patriarchy (in this school of thought, the overall oppressor of women) given by the London Feminist Network, we can further exemplify this point.
Patriarchy is defined as the “current and historic unequal power relations between women and men whereby women are systematically disadvantaged and oppressed.
“This takes place across almost every sphere of life but is particularly noticeable in women’s under-representation in key state institutions, in decision making positions and in employment and industry.”
Is the solution, then, to ensure that more women are in positions of power, that we have an equal gender balance in law implementing, decision making and executive positions? How would this make a difference? A female Conservative MP implementing public spending cuts would affect women no more favourably than if it had been done by a man.
But wouldn’t more female MPs mean that women’s issues would be taken more seriously in parliament, and would be more likely to carry through legislation that protect women’s rights?
Would they be more sensitive to how the cuts disproportionately hit women?
Possibly, but I think this is ignoring the issue. A government with more female MPs may pass such laws, a law that is trying to tackle our sexist culture, the censorship of lads’ mags, for example.
But this implies that our sexist culture, lads’ mags, etc., is the cause of women’s oppression, and not rather it being symptomatic of something more fundamental. The fundamental cause is capitalism, and the sexist culture we live in is a product of that.
On the issue of cuts; yes, arguably a more heavily female government might distribute the cuts more equally, but can we say this is progress? How can terms of equality or fairness be applied to welfare cuts at all? As feminists we should be fighting against cuts, full stop, rather than hoping to convince the government to balance it out.
Essentially, by getting more women into positions of power, it is only passing on oppressive decisions to a woman: it makes no odds to a working woman whether a man or a woman fires her.
On the surface, society may seem less sexist because we see more women in “successful” positions, but this is simply masking the suffering of millions of women who are oppressed by their economic situation.
I do not want to undervalue the liberal feminist position: many liberal feminist issues are important, and if they were not fought for the women’s movement would be in a worse place.
It is important, for example, to recognise and fight against how gender roles are socialised — how masculine characteristics are idealised, and feminine ones undervalued: but part of this recognition is recognising that these are also Marxist issues.
Masculine qualities are held up because they are associated with the successful capitalist; feminine qualities are looked down on because they are associated with the underpaid and under-acknowledged carer, or free-labouring housewife.
Essentially, this is not necessarily a disagreement with what they are fighting for: it is challenging the motive and the method. If we change laws that allow some women to climb the ladder and have a successful career without coercive interference, and say that this is feminism, then we are forgetting the millions of women still oppressed.
We cannot forget that class itself divides: you cannot call for solidarity with women across the world, and ignore the fact that some of these women oppress others. Sisterhood cannot exist purely and indiscriminately whilst class society exists. The women’s struggle must be fought alongside the class struggle.
One final example. During the miners’ strike, we saw how struggle transformed people. Not just the women, who abandoned traditional roles, and became frontline activists, but also the attitudes of the men towards their wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters. Alongside the miners’ defeat, came a reversal of such attitude changes. A sign that in order for permanent change, the workers’ struggle must be won.There is very little downside to being one of ten companies (out of 1500 applications) accepted into the TechStars Chicago program. However, as great as that news is for GameWisp, the process has unfortunately left our readers bereft of guidance in the overwhelming gaming video universe for some time. Just when you thought all hope was lost, we are back to help you navigate the vast seas of gaming video. Welcome to a brand new edition of What To Watch This Weekend!
This weekend's featured channel is only about five months old (if the earliest YouTube video in the channel videos tab is to be believed), but displays an enormous amount of talent. That Cybert Channel, like so many other small channels just starting out, is low on YouTube subscribers in relation to the strength of his content. But with a fun sense of humor and content outside what is typically offered by the traditional Let's Play channel, we think he is going to be just fine.
So without further ado, here are the three video reasons why you should be watching That Cybert Channel this weekend.
The Top 5 (or 10) Lists
Today's header video is an example of a content type that I personally hope to see more of from Cybert. Cybert has only posted three gaming-related top [insert number here] lists, but each one is thoroughly enjoyable. In these videos, Cybert combines his fun sense of humor with some clearly strong gaming knowledge to create lists that are both entertaining and highly informative.
This video is Cybert's top 5 games that he would like to see in high-definition remakes. His list is necessarily made up of old school titles, including a few that I hadn't heard of before this video. He keeps his reasoning relatively concise, providing enough background information and game footage to justify his position, all while keeping the video light and humorous.
In addition to this video, Cybert's "Getting Friend Zoned (5 Top Teases)" is an excellent gaming themed tribute to the anti-Valentine's Day sentiment, and the opening to his "A New Dawn (Top Ten Franchise Beginnings)" may be my favorite piece of content on his channel.
Overall, this format seems to suit Cybert's personality and I, for one, look forward to seeing more of these lists in the future.
The Impossible Quiz
Traditional Let's Plays and other gameplay videos tend to be straight run-throughs with very little cutting. Good channels will edit out long mining session in Minecraft or multiple tries to pass a particular obstacle in a platformer. But Cybert's playthrough of The Impossible Quiz is one of the best examples of using editing to take what could have been incredibly repetitive and create an engaging experience.
For anyone who has played The Impossible Quiz, you know that it is basically a series of questions intended to frustrate you into yelling, hitting the desk several times, and eventually turning it off in disgust. All of these emotions make for excellent gaming video, especially for Cybert, whose usual happy sense of humor is quickly turned to yelling, pounding, hilarious frustration.
It is in the consistent failure and restart that Cybert's talent for editing shines through. Rather than always editing such that the video jumps right back to the question missed previously, he varies his starting point, sometimes continuing from the beginning, sometimes a few questions early. This gives a continuity to the experience without being boring or overly repetitive. I found myself laughing out loud on several occasions and enjoying each minute even as I watched him tackle the same questions over and over again.
Dan and Friends: Multiplayer Madness!
If you have read previous installments of this series, you have probably guessed that I tend to be critical of multiplayer videos. Often they involve too many personalities talking over each other until the audio is an incomprehensible jumble of screaming and swearing. Dan and Friends does have a tendency to devolve in this manner, but I've included this series here for a very specific reason: variety.
Rather than sticking to a particular game, Dan and Friends plays multiple games, from the first person shooter action of Halo 4 to the slimeball capture-the-flag featured in this video of TagPro. The cast of friends also varies from video to video. This, along with the rough-around-the-edges feel, gives the whole series a sense of impromptu fun, which works well as a counterpoint to Cybert's more edited and polished work.
Despite my lack of affinity for multiplayer videos, I found myself enjoying this series, and watching several episodes. If you are one who enjoys multiplayer or are just looking for something fun, this is a series worth checking out.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I enjoyed my time with That Cybert Channel. For a young channel, Cybert displays a significant amount of aptitude for the medium. I am really excited to see what happens with this channel in the future. That Cybert Channel is definitely worth your time this weekend.
We are so glad to finally be able to bring you more WTWTW. If you are a gaming video creator, make sure you post your videos to GameWisp for a shot at being spotlighted in next week's edition!Imagine you’re riding in an autonomous car down a narrow 2-lane road with a double-yellow center line. Suddenly you come upon a stalled car in your lane. How long does the self-driving car wait until it decides it is okay to break the law and cross the lines to pass?
Here’s an even tougher scenario: An out-of-control trolley with five people onboard is directly in the robot car’s path. The only way to avoid it is to swerve and run down a pedestrian. Does the autonomous car choose the lesser of two evils, or smash into the trolley?
These and thousands of similar ethical, moral and legal questions are being considered by engineers and programmers as they develop autonomous vehicles and try to take human error out of the driving equation. The effort underscores how difficult it will be to go from vehicles with autonomous features such as automatic emergency braking to cars that truly drive themselves.
So far, the driving style of Google’s autonomous cars is described by observers as that of an overly cautious elderly person: safe, but not able to avoid every mishap. The company says its self-driving cars have been involved in about a dozen crashes over six years, none of which were their fault.
It is easy to make autonomous vehicles drive in a more virtuous manner than humans, but this could make them vulnerable as more such vehicles mix with conventional cars and drivers on the road.
“We found very quickly that engineers and philosophers can talk to each other much better than we ever expected,” says Chris Gerdes, director of Stanford University’s Center for Automotive Research, at the recent TU-Automotive conference in suburban Detroit.
“We can take frameworks that had been developed in philosophy and map them to the actual software we were putting in the car.”
Gerdes is addressing complex autonomous driving issues by bringing philosophers, engineers and programmers together at Stanford to answer questions such as how to determine when the desire for safety outweighs the need for legality.
The trolley example is a famous topic among philosophers and ethicists known as “The Trolley Car Problem,” which deals with the weighing of consequences to come up with the best result. In practice, it is less about life and death and more about when it makes sense to cross double yellow lines and such. “Automated vehicle ethics revolve around trolley-car problems,” Gerdes says.
An autonomous vehicle’s “morals” are based on what are called deontological ethics. These are like the 10 Commandments, Gerdes says, and focus on what the vehicle should not do, such as speed and drive through yellow lights. All these wholesome values promise to make autonomous vehicles far safer than today’s cars and trucks, but they still do not fully prepare ultra-virtuous self-drivers to coexist with the millions of human drivers that will dominate roads for decades. And this is especially true in high-stress situations.
“A Google car would never be able to make a left turn, never be able to pull away from the curb and into traffic, because aggressive taxi drivers would quickly learn to exploit its algorithms,” Wall Street Journal writer Holman Jenkins points out in a recent commentary.
Why would a cab driver bully an autonomous taxi? You mean, aside from the fact it is designed to eliminate his job?
Unfortunately, Gerdes does not spend much time talking about the need for what I will call a NASCAR mode: an algorithm that directs the car to arbitrarily play chicken with aggressive human drivers and swap paint occasionally with conventional taxis, just to remind everyone it is a robot that does not know fear or pain. It should be a mandatory feature for all self-driving vehicles transporting anyone in New York or other large cities.
It’s important to send individuals out into the world with strong ethics and morals, but they still won’t survive unless they know how to demand respect and defend themselves if necessary. That goes for people, and soon, robot cars.
[email protected]ExxonMobil officials told President Donald Trump Tuesday that staying in the Paris climate agreement would reduce climate change and give a boost to natural gas production.
The Paris accord, an agreement signed by President Barack Obama in 2016, is “an effective framework for addressing the risks of climate change,” the oil company wrote in a letter to the president. The deal — forged between nearly 200 countries — aims to keep so-called global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
“It is prudent that the United States remain a party to the Paris agreement to ensure a level playing field, so that global energy markets remain as free and competitive as possible,” Peter Trelenberg, Exxon’s manager for environmental policy, wrote in the letter.
The company’s former CEO, Rex Tillerson, indicated last week that he would support the Paris agreement if Trump can reduce some of the objectives Obama agreed to. The former real estate tycoon turned president made breaking away from the climate agreement a key component of his presidential campaign.
Tillerson, who now serves as Trump’s secretary of state, believes staying on board with the contentious climate deal could help the country diplomatically. The former Exxon chairman is not the only person in the administration advocating the president stay in the climate agreement.
North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer, for one, said earlier this month that he was “impressed” with White House advisers who believe the agreement is not necessarily dead on arrival. Cramer, a Republican, is one of Trump’s top energy advisers.
The Exxon letter has emerged as Trump prepares to issue a pair of executive orders rolling back several of Obama’s climate policies, especially the so-called Clean Power Plan, which seeks to reduce greenhouse gasses by 30 percent over the next 10 years.
Exxon has given piecemeal pro-carbon tax arguments in the past, but has recently ramped up its call for the tax, especially as pressure mounts for the company to counter environmentalist claims it is contributing to so-called man-made global warming.
Investigations into the company’s history of supposedly hiding climate research is partially the result of a September report on Exxon conducted by InsideClimate News. The outlet’s probes found Exxon had allegedly played fast and loose with information concerning global warming.
InsideClimate News also alleges that Amoco, Phillips, Texaco, Shell, and others joined Exxon in misleading the public about the supposed effects global warming has on sea levels.
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The video was unveiled as an exclusive this morning on "Good Morning America." ABC was the first news organization to show the original tape.
ABC News has re-digitized video of George Zimmerman taken shortly after Trayvon Martin's shooting.
Reporter Matt Gutman said the clearer video shows "what appear to be a pair of gashes or welts on George Zimmerman's head."
Neighborhood Watch volunteer Zimmerman has said he shot 17-year-old Trayvon in self-defense. The video shows Zimmerman arriving at the Sanford Police Department within an hour after the shooting.
Gutman said the video had been "clarified" by Forensic Protection Inc. Former FBI Special Agent Brad Garrett told ABC that the clearer video shows "marks on the back of Mr. Zimmerman's head."Al Jean also reveals that a recent episode nearly became the premise of second 'Simpsons' film
The Simpsons‘ executive producer has spoken about making a second spin-off film, revealing that it’s a “50/50” possibility.
Released in 2007, The Simpsons Movie became a hit with critics and fans alike, raking in over $525 million (£345 million) at the box office worldwide. Now executive producer Al Jean has revealed that a recent episode in which Homer and his family were abducted by aliens Kang and Kodo – and taken to their home planet of Rigel 7 – nearly became the premise of The Simpsons Movie 2.
“Two of the allures were exploring the rules of the new world and the cinematic nature of doing something in space,” Jean told Entertainment Weekly. “But then we were worried that people might think it’s an idea that’s not canonical – it doesn’t really happen, unlike all of other 560 episodes that really ‘happened’ – so the ultimate decision was to air it as an episode.”
Jean continued: “It just got to the point where if we were unsure about it as a movie, then it would be good to air the episode. And then if we do a movie, we’d just think of something else… So if you want to know what was thought of a possible Simpsons Movie 2, we just aired it for free. You can see it for free!”
Asked about the chances of a second Simpsons film actually happening, Jean replied: “My guess [is] it |
to the staff surrounding him as a reason for the team’s struggles. Chase Stuart of FootballPerspective.com noted the Chargers had not spent higher than a third-round pick on an offensive lineman between 2007 and 2012 and wrote, “That’s a very long time to basically ignore five positions on your offense.”
In 2013 the Chargers invested a first-round pick in Alabama tackle D.J. Fluker and brought in free-agent tackle King Dunlap. Both have been upgrades, yet the rest of the line is composed entirely of spare parts. Interior pressure on passing downs has been an obstacle for Rivers in nearly every game. In addition, losing Hardwick meant Rivers had to assume a larger role in prescribing pre-snap blocking assignments, or as McCoy puts it, “speak and spell.” The only other quarterback doing anything close to all of this is Peyton Manning.
“His leadership, his athletic ability and his smarts are all coming together at the same time,” Hardwick says. “What you’re seeing is Philip at the pinnacle of his career.”
[widget widget_name="SI Newsletter Widget”]Amusingly the Japanese press is now “debunking” this article’s claims, which appeared in the Korea Times. Not that she didn’t say this, and not that she’s not having sex with the Chinese students. It’s just that Anri Suzuki apparently has no PhD!
Japanese AV star with a doctorate, Anri Suzuki, 24, is having sex with Chinese students for free in Japan to apologize for her country’s invasion of China.
Suzuki won her doctors degree in history at one of the prestigious universities in her home country. Unlike other graduates, she focused on the Japanese invasion of China; writing the paper “The History of the Japanese Invasion into China.”
“We have to respect history and cannot obliterate it. I want to cure the wounds of Chinese with my body, and I am practicing this by having sex with Chinese students in Japan,” she said. “I think it is psychological compensation to them. Actually, Chinese students treat me more friendly and comfortably than Japanese.”On Apple’s Insurmountable Platform Advantage
Strategy Posted on: October 10, 2015Posted in Mobile
Since the iPhone 6s was released last month anyone who has used the device says it feels like magic. Apple – as a platform company – is so far above the competition it’s hard to fully grasp.
There are reasons why pushing down on 3D Touch feels better than any device people have ever touched, and it’s not entirely clear whether it’s the software or what’s inside that plays the larger part. The iPhone 6s presents itself in a way that lets you feel unconsciously in control yet expressive and free.
Last week we saw news from Apple teardowns that both Samsung and TSMC were commissioned to produce different variants of the A9 processor, basically two designs of the same chip, each optimized using a different process and library. Many people focused on their performance discrepancy, when the interesting part is actually Apple’s power and control over suppliers.
Just as there are many misunderstood reasons for Apple’s overall success, justification as to how Apple produces superior products isn’t superficially visible. This is always the case with the silicon inside of computers.1
It always surprises me how few people talk of or understand Apple’s silicon-making advantages. In early 2010 when the A4 saw the light of day I wrote why assembling an internal chip team would allow Apple to become a truly dominant platform company.
So the move to vertically integrate chip development helps Apple erect barriers and become a dominant platform company. This spells a larger trend – it is no longer adequate to simply be a device or software company to succeed.
In the past five years these barriers have become totally insurmountable. iOS is the ultimate platform. Developers make unprecedented money off of it, consumers the world over love it, and Apple owns an entire market’s profits in a non-monopolistic way—unlike platforms past.
Platform dominance has also played out as I mentioned. Device makers (Samsung et al) and OS makers (Google, Microsoft) are not making money off smartphones.2 This is simply staggering to fully comprehend, and foretells ramifications few can see.
One of Steve Jobs’ biggest legacies was his decision to stop relying on 3rd party semiconductor companies and create an internal silicon design team.3 I would go so far as to argue it’s one of the three most important strategic decisions he ever made.
In 2007, when Steve Ballmer famously declared “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance”, Jobs was off creating a chip design team. If you study unit economics of semiconductors, it doesn’t really make sense to design chips and compete with companies like Intel unless you can make it up in volume. Consider the audacity back in 2007 for Apple to believe it could pull this off. How would they ever make back the R&D to build out a team and pay for expensive silicon designs over the long run, never mind design comparative performing chips? Well today we know. Apple makes nearly 100% of the profit in the entire smartphone space.
It is – in fact – these chip making capabilities, which Jobs brought in-house shortly after the launch of the original iPhone, that have helped Apple create a massive moat between itself and an entire industry.
Ultimately this chip advantage is one of the little spoken, but critical elements in Apple’s vertically integrated approach. Android OEMs can copy the fingerprint sensor or the 3D Touch mechanism. They just go to the supplier that Apple buys it from. But they can’t copy the underlying software powering these ‘commodity’ chips.
One lens that helps assess the asset value of a buy vs build strategy is called buyer / supplier bargaining power. Because of Apple’s scale in smartphones, and re-use of chips in other device categories like the watch and TV, Apple has massive influence with suppliers. They can plan 3-5 years out and decide what to license, build, invest in, or buy.4 It also has allowed Apple to decouple control. e.g. in producing two ‘different’ A9 chips, Apple thwarts abilities of TSMC and Samsung to hike prices or walk away.
So… making chips serves as the moat around untold strategic advantages: development secrecy, hyper optimization, supplier negotiating power, etc. And all the while smartphone market volume serves as ‘R&D lead gen’ for new products in entirely new industries (tablet, watch, TV, car). By owning its own silicon design team, Apple is able to leap into other markets which will be eaten by software running on cheap silicon.
Building competent semiconductor design capabilities is an absolutely massive endeavor. Especially as there isn’t much VC investment going in to chip startups anymore. Almost none actually. Owning this was quintessential strategy on the part of Jobs. In the past 7 years since Apple got serious about designing silicon, they have effectively surpassed the performance of Intel. This has been well documented.5 The fact that Apple’s sexiest new products don’t even consider using Intel’s latest technology is a lagging indicator of how innovation in PCs got blown away by what happened in the mobile ecosystem.
The truth is the best people in chip design no longer want to work at Intel or Qualcomm. They want to work at Apple. I have plenty of friends in the Valley who affirm this. Sure Apple products are cooler. But Apple has also surpassed Intel in performance. This is insane. A device company – which makes CPUs for internal use – surpassing Intel, the world’s largest chip maker which practically invented the CPU and has thousands of customers.
This pedigree that Apple developed now has a secondary powerful force: portable devices serve as the reference platform whereby all chip design starts. Components from the smartphone market now power almost all other markets, giving Apple’s in-house team a comparative advantage as they enter new product categories, like wearables and electric cars.
All of this supplier / buyer power that Apple has secured will be extended to cars. And because cars are lower volume by many orders of magnitude than phones, no other car maker will be able to enter the chip making game. Both the costs and the risks of designing chips are way too high. Tesla sells around 100K cars a year. Apple sold that many iPhones every 30 minutes on opening day weekend.
If you believe the leaks, Apple wants to have a car ready in 2019. So how will this comparative advantage manifest in cars? The best reference is Tesla, whose sheer mastery of electric vehicles undoubtedly kick-started Apple into this market. Last week Elon Musk made some fascinating remarks about Apple in a public interview:
It’s good that Apple is moving and investing in this direction. But cars are very complex compared to phones or smartwatches. You can’t just go to a supplier like Foxconn and say: Build me a car. But for Apple, the car is the next logical thing to finally offer a significant innovation. A new pencil or a bigger iPad alone were not relevant enough.
So is the Apple Car just an iPad on wheels? Of course not. The industrial design as well as everything associated with making a car as spectacular as Tesla is a massive undertaking. Apple may or may not be successful here.
But when you look through the lens of the car as a mobile device, the software and silicon look markedly similar. It’s clear electric cars will rely on 100% of the supply chain of the smartphone industry and will use the same operating systems that phones use. They will use the same CPUs, the same wireless chipsets, and run on the same advanced mobile networks.6
One posit you can derive from this is that no other car manufacturer in the world can support an internal chip team unless they also sell phones. The gravitational pull of the smartphone feels much more pronounced when you rationalize this.
How does this impact electric cars, and eventually autonomous cars? An Apple Car could be almost exclusively Apple under the hood—Apple software running on Apple silicon using Apple materials. Other car makers will be effectively running off the smartphone supply chain using a version of Android that Google promotes for cars or some variant of Linux (good luck running apps on that), or ironically, iOS.
All of this is why Apple exec Jeff Williams said in May at the Re/Code conference that “The car is the ultimate mobile device”. Provocative to think about. Everything smart in the car originates from a mobile device. It will run the same software and use the same chips as the iPhone and the Watch and the Apple TV. Apple will assemble metal and plastic around software and hardware and attempt to differentiate on an axis familiar to them – industrial design, user experience, marketing and brand.
Could Apple build a killer car by 2019? Yes. The real question is whether Apple could build a car with basically no design dependencies on any other suppliers.
One of the biggest missing components here is batteries. But all of Apple’s products also rely heavily on batteries (for a different reason of course – to power silicon and displays vs electric motors). One signal to watch will be CapEx investment (either R&D or outside investment) that Apple makes in battery tech. And of course any investments in battery tech will also serve them well in handheld devices and wearables.
It’s also known in inner circles that Apple has embarked on design of radio interface (RF) chips that traditionally were off limits to all but the most advanced chip makers like Qualcomm. These chips rival CPUs in complexity. Apple is now designing these to spec and will be putting its own radios into future mobile devices. This has physical layer impacts on bandwidth, connectivity, latency and user experience—all critical for autonomous vehicles.
Let’s go on a thought experiment and predict the future here. Actually let’s end on facts because we can’t. But one thing is very clear: we are entering an era where cars will become smart, navigate by themselves and autonomously courier people and goods. And just as computing spawns a different set of winners every decade, you can bet the next set of car makers will look much different than today’s. Google, Uber and Tesla will all be involved… And although we know almost nothing of Apple’s plans, they’ve built the platform foundation which gives them a chance to delight and inspire us, like only Apple can.Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson is pretty sure that when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told the Republican National Convention to "vote your conscience," what he meant to say was "vote for Gary Johnson." In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on Thursday morning, the former New Mexico governor clarified just how big of an opportunity he thinks Cruz's refusal to endorse Trump might have created for him.
"Well he did say to vote for Gary Johnson didn't he, and that was vote your conscience," Johnson said, promptly breaking out in self-satisfied laughter.
Cuomo surfaced an alternative explanation, mentioning that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had interpreted Cruz's remark as an endorsement of Trump, since Trump is "the only candidate in the race who will uphold the Constitution." Johnson responded by saying that he, too, "certainly would uphold the Constitution" — and then proceeded to remind Cuomo about Trump's plans to make it easier to sue the media. "First Amendment?" Johnson said. "What's that? First Amendment, that's in the Constitution of the United States."
Watch the exchange below. Becca StanekTo understand yesterday’s EU deal, one has to begin at the beginning – with ten renegotiation aims that David Cameron began to set out in opposition and develop in government. These were:
Taking back control over social and employment laws.
A complete opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Stopping the ECJ overruling our criminal law.
Stopping EU migrants coming to the UK without a job offer.
Removing EU jobseekers after six months.
Reforming the Working Time Directive.
Stopping the European Parliament meeting in two places.
Reforming the Common Agricultural Policy.
Reforming the EU’s Structural Funds.
Changing the EU treaties before a referendum.
Some of these aims fell by the wayside before the last election (such as taking back control of social and employment laws) and others made it into last May’s Conservative Manifesto. The most important one was the last – changing the EU treaties before a referendum, since only treaty change can guarantee any agreement binding effect. I have previously set out on this site how these were cut back, post-election, for the actual negotiation that concluded yesterday.
In January, David Cameron set out his aims for it in the Commons as follows:
“I have set out the four areas where Britain is seeking significant and far-reaching reforms: on sovereignty and subsidiarity, where Britain must not be part of an “ever-closer union” and where we want a greater role for national Parliaments; on competitiveness, where the EU must add to our competitiveness, rather than detract from it, by signing new trade deals, cutting regulation and completing the single market; on fairness for countries inside and outside the eurozone, where the EU must protect the integrity of the single market and ensure there is no disadvantage, discrimination or additional costs for a country like Britain, which is not in the euro and which in my view is never going to join the euro; and on migration, where we need to tackle abuses of the right to free movement, and deliver changes that ensure that our welfare system is not an artificial draw for people to come to Britain.”
In practice, this boiled down to four main items:
An emergency brake on welfare.
Child benefit.
Protection for non-Eurozone countries.
The red card system.
So let’s turn, with the help of the useful Daily Telegraph and Guardian snap guides – see here and here – to what the Prime Minister originally demanded and what he actually got. For a detailed analysis, see Christopher Howarth’s magisterial article on this site this morning.
– – – – – – – – – –
The emergency brake
This was originally to be a brake on migration itself, not access to benefits. So that it became one on access to benefits only (based on the popular but misconceived view that they are a major draw for migrants) was a climbdown.
Furthermore, the control of the brake will be in the hands of the European Commission, not the British Government – a second climbdown.
The Conservative Manifesto said that “we will insist that EU migrants who want to claim tax credits and child benefit must live here and contribute to our country for a minimum of four years.” But the deal struck agrees a gradual reduction in benefits – a third climbdown.
The brake itself will be able to last, if used, for a maximum of seven years. This is longer than the five years that the Visigrad group of EU leaders pushed for but shorter than Cameron’s original bid of 13 years.
Child benefit
The manifesto said that “If an EU migrant’s child is living abroad, then they should receive no child benefit, no matter how long they have worked in the UK and no matter how much tax they have paid.”
However, the terms of the draft deal said that child benefit should be paid to the children of EU migrants living abroad, though at local rates – unquestionably a climbdown.
And the deal itself says that it should be paid at these rates only to new claims (a second climbdown) and, furthermore, these new rates for new claims will not apply until 2020 – a third climbdown under this heading.
Protection for non-Eurozone countries
The manifesto said that “We will protect our economy from any further integration of the Eurozone…we will not let the integration of the Eurozone jeopardise the integrity of the Single Market or in any way disadvantage the UK.”
The draft deal proposed that an unspecified number of non-euro states could take objections to measures proposed by Eurozone states to the Council of Ministers, which would “do all in its power” to engineer a “satisfactory solution” – and seek to facilitate “a wider basis of agreement in the Council”.
The deal itself says that a single non-euro state can take objections to the council – an advance for the Prime Minister. However, there is, as in the draft deal, no guarantee that objections will be sustained, or indeed what will happen if there is deadlock on the council.
The Red Card system
The manifesto said that “we want national parliaments to be able to work together to block unwanted European legislation.”
The deal proposes that a minimum of 14 parliaments within the EU can raise a red card against a new law if each does so within a three month period. So the Prime Minister has his red card plan written into it.
However, the yellow card system, on which the red card one is based, has only been used twice. In opposition, William Hague dismissed the idea, saying that “even if the European Commission proposed the slaughter of the first-born it would be difficult to achieve such a remarkable conjunction of parliamentary votes.”
– – – – – – – – – –
There is much else in the deal, but three points stand out clearly.
First, the tale of both Cameron’s original renegotiation idea and his recent proposals, resulting in yesterday’s deal, is essentially a story of many steps backwards over time, including at the summit, and a few forward at the latter, too. If a man takes more steps backwards than forward, in which direction has he moved?
Second, as has been conceded, the European Parliament has the capacity to unpick the deal. In the vivid phrase of an EU official, MEPs “can be like monkeys with guns”.
Third, any aspect of the deal can be overturned by the European Court, since it is not enshrined in Treaty Change. Ominously, the Guardian’s Brussels correspondent tweeted post-deal: “EU negotiator confident Cameron’s terms will be challenged in court”.
So what does the tale of this negotiation and this summit tell us? ConHome believes as follows.
– – – – – – – – – –
There is a case for Britain leaving the EU, which this site holds and which has been put on it many times. There is also a case for Britain staying in the EU, which the Prime Minister made towards the end of his summit press conference, and put rather well.
What there is not is a case for Britain staying in the EU on the basis of this deal. When Cameron sought to suggest otherwise yesterday evening, his claims collapsed as fast as he made them. Let’s consider three examples from that post-summit statement.
He said that the deal has given Britain “special status” within the EU, because “today we have permanently carved Britain out of [ever-closer union], so that we can never be forced into political integration with the rest of Europe”.
But the Council said less than two years ago that “the concept of ever-closer union allows for different paths of integration for different countries…respecting the wish of those who do not want further integration”. This was attested to by the Prime Minister himself, who told the Commons afterwards that “we broke new ground, with the Council conclusions stating explicitly that ever-closer union must allow for different paths of integration for different countries and, crucially, respect the wishes fo those such as Britain that do not want further integration”.
He said that “we have permanently protected the pound and our right to keep it.”
But he has previously acknowledged that Britain already has an opt-out from the single currency.
He said that “we will be out of the parts of Europe that don’t work for us,” he proclaimed, “out of the open borders”.
This is simply untrue.
There is more. But the Prime Minister is relying on most voters being turned off by the detail, and there is little point in giving more when a few words will serve. They are those of the stupendously indiscreet Dalia Grybauskaitė, Lithuania’s President, who tweeted before the deal yesterday that it would be a “face saving and face lifting exercise”.
When Leader of the Opposition, Cameron had a phrase that he hurled at Gordon Brown, and which stuck. “He’s treating people like fools,” he would say. But in puffing this hollow negotiation, it is the Prime Minister himself who now is treating people like fools.
– – – – – – – – – –
Many Conservative MPs told their voters and Associations at the last election that Britain’s relationship with the EU cannot go on as it is. They are fully entitled to say now that they have changed their minds. That they have been persuaded that Britain’s future is brighter as an EU member state. That they will swallow any misgivings they have about the deal, and back their Party leader – who, after all, is on some measures the most successful Conservative leader of modern times bar Margaret Thatcher. That this is no time to campaign for a referendum result that would turn an election-winning Prime Minister out of office, and destroy the reforming work of the first majority Tory Government in over 20 years.
What they cannot say, if they have declared that Britain’s relationship with the EU must see real reform, is that this deal makes a difference. And if they want to see such change, the lesson of this summit is that it isn’t on offer. Which leaves only one option open to them, and to Party members of the same mind – to back Brexit.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption "I think that you have to be a mathematician"
Portugal has won this year's Eurovision Song contest with a poignant love song, sung in Portuguese. In the early hours of Sunday morning the winner met the world's press - glass microphone trophy still in hand.
Salvador Sobral entered the Eurovision Song Contest's press room last night with the same diffident, bemused demeanour he has projected since arriving in Kiev.
There was no swagger, no elation - just a quizzical befuddlement at the latest turn his musical journey had taken.
Like many watching at home around the world, the Lisbon-born 27-year-old had been baffled by the complex voting system that the contest adopted last year.
"I didn't understand the votes," he admitted to reporters. "I think that you have to be a mathematician or something to know what's going on."
Image copyright Twitter Image caption The winner wasn't alone in his confusion
Nor did he expect overnight fame and fortune to come with the honour of becoming Portugal's first Eurovision winner.
"I don't think anything will change," he shrugged. "You win today and tomorrow, no one remembers it.
"Honestly, man, I just want to live a peaceful life," he told another journalist.
"If I thought of myself as a national hero or champion of Europe, it would be a bit weird."
Even in such an eclectic line-up as the one Eurovision served up this year, Sobral stood apart.
While some countries offered amusing gimmicks (Romanian yodelling, Italy's dancing gorilla) and others sleek, assembly-line pop, his delicate, heartfelt ballad stood out precisely because it was so unassuming.
Written by Sobral's older sister Luisa, Amar Pelos Dois - whose title translates into English as Love for Both of Us - speaks to all genders and orientations with its inclusive, unadorned message.
Image copyright AFP Image caption A family affair: Salvador's sister Luisa wrote the song for him
Sobral said he would be delighted if its Eurovision triumph had some impact, however small, on how music is made, produced and marketed.
"People listen to songs because they're thrown at you," he said. "You have to like this because we're going to play it 16 times a day and force you to like it.
"This is music with content, an emotional song with a beautiful lyrical message and harmony - things people are not used to listening these days.
"If I can help to bring some change to music I would be really joyful," he said, dressed as ever in a modest dark suit.
"And I hope it will encourage people to bring different things and all sorts of music to future editions of this contest."
Image copyright AFP Image caption "We're going to play it 16 times a day and force you to like it," he said of the music business
Those future editions could learn much from this year, which offered audiences a spectacular, entertaining and endlessly quirky diversion.
For a contest whose slogan was "celebrate diversity", though, it was surprising more thought was not given to basic areas of presentation.
The final and the two semi-finals that preceded it were hosted by a trio of white male TV presenters who are all well-known in host nation Ukraine.
Commentator Graham Norton and one of his Australian counterparts were not alone in remarking that the line-up was hardly indicative of the contest's stated aim.
For the millions watching at home, however, it was the variety, the colour and the craziness that made it unmissable Saturday night viewing.
In keeping with Eurovision tradition, Portugal will host the 2018 iteration of an event that continues to unify Europe in a way politics never can or will.
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.Updated: The next steps — part 2
FelixA Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 22, 2016
Important: You can no longer split from the DAO, you will lose ALL of your tokens!
As of Wednesday June 22, 2016 The DAO has been emptied of all currently accessible Ether. A group of very smart people — as Alex van de Sande states — was able to perform a white hat attack that drained about 6M Ether into a Child DAO (Robin Hood DAO) of which they are the curator.
See this reddit post for more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4p7mhc/update_on_the_white_hat_attack/
Due to this, YOU SHOULD NO LONGER CALL splitDAO()! all splittable funds in The DAO have been drained. Ether does remain in the extraBalance but it is inaccessible. If you split now, you will burn your tokens without getting anything back. This does not affect split proposals creation, only executing a split by calling calling splitDAO().
The best strategy as a DTH is to sit tight for now, or to contribute to the fork-suggestion by either joining the conversations on
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/
https://www.reddit.com/r/thedao
https://forum.daohub.org/c/theDAO/fork-proposal
https://dao.consider.it/
Your twitter account
Or whatever social media channel you prefer
Or by voting directly via your mining power:
How can I vote on the soft- and hardfork?
as a solo-miner
As a miner, If you want to vote for the soft-fork, you can do the following:
Download the newest version of parity 1.2 which you can find here (1.2 beta branch) or as a binary package for windows here
Download the newest geth version 1.4.8 here: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases
If you want to vote against the soft-fork, just do not upgrade your minig software
The soft fork will start with block number 1800000.
So far we have no information regarding the hard-fork. We will update this post as soon as we hear something.
as a pool-miner
Voting is only allowed with the hash-power you had before the incident happened. So it is not possible to switch around pools to vote on all of them.
If you know of other pools that enabled voting, please let us know!
What is the current situation?
According to our user bitbuzzing we currently have the following vote distribution:
Please note: This graph only calculates yes vs. no votes. Miners who have not voted yet or voted ‘I don’t care’ are not taken into account.
You can find our data-sources here:
Dwarf-pool http://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting/
Ethermine http://ethermine.org/stats/votes
Ethpool http://ethpool.org/stats/votes
Coinotron http://coinwelt.de/2016/06/du-idaot-der-dao-diebstahl/
Nanopool https://nanopool.org/account/vote_yes and https://nanopool.org/account/vote_no
MPH confirmed through a direct message
Mining power https://etherscan.io/stats/miner?range=7
We will do our best to keep you informed about these numbers. Be aware that they are just an indicator and can change drastically in a short amount of time. Please feel free to contact us if you have any updates on the numbers.UPDATE: If you're interested in learning pandas from a SQL perspective and would prefer to watch a video, you can find video of my 2014 PyData NYC talk here.
This is part three of a three part introduction to pandas, a Python library for data analysis. The tutorial is primarily geared towards SQL users, but is useful for anyone wanting to get started with the library.
Part 1: Intro to pandas data structures
Part 2: Working with DataFrames
Part 3: Using pandas with the MovieLens dataset
In [61]: chicago [ chicago. department == "LAW" ][: 5 ] Out[61]: name title department salary dept_rank 21971 PATTON, STEPHEN R CORPORATION COUNSEL LAW 173664 1 6311 DARLING, LESLIE M FIRST ASST CORPORATION COUNSEL LAW 149160 2 17680 MARTINICO, JOSEPH P CHIEF LABOR NEGOTIATOR LAW 144036 3 22357 PETERS, LYNDA A CITY PROSECUTOR LAW 139932 4 31383 WONG JR, EDWARD J DEPUTY CORPORATION COUNSEL LAW 137076 5
We can now see where each employee ranks within their department based on salary.
Using pandas on the MovieLens dataset¶
To show pandas in a more "applied" sense, let's use it to answer some questions about the MovieLens dataset. Recall that we've already read our data into DataFrames and merged it.
In [62]: # pass in column names for each CSV u_cols = [ 'user_id', 'age','sex', 'occupation', 'zip_code' ] users = pd. read_csv ('ml-100k/u.user', sep = '|', names = u_cols, encoding = 'latin-1' ) r_cols = [ 'user_id','movie_id', 'rating', 'unix_timestamp' ] ratings = pd. read_csv ('ml-100k/u.data', sep ='\t ', names = r_cols, encoding = 'latin-1' ) # the movies file contains columns indicating the movie's genres # let's only load the first five columns of the file with usecols m_cols = ['movie_id', 'title','release_date', 'video_release_date', 'imdb_url' ] movies = pd. read_csv ('ml-100k/u.item', sep = '|', names = m_cols, usecols = range ( 5 ), encoding = 'latin-1' ) # create one merged DataFrame movie_ratings = pd. merge ( movies, ratings ) lens = pd. merge ( movie_ratings, users )
What are the 25 most rated movies?
In [63]: most_rated = lens. groupby ( 'title' ). size (). sort_values ( ascending = False )[: 25 ] most_rated Out[63]: title Star Wars (1977) 583 Contact (1997) 509 Fargo (1996) 508 Return of the Jedi (1983) 507 Liar Liar (1997) 485 English Patient, The (1996) 481 Scream (1996) 478 Toy Story (1995) 452 Air Force One (1997) 431 Independence Day (ID4) (1996) 429 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 420 Godfather, The (1972) 413 Pulp Fiction (1994) 394 Twelve Monkeys (1995) 392 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) 390 Jerry Maguire (1996) 384 Chasing Amy (1997) 379 Rock, The (1996) 378 Empire Strikes Back, The (1980) 367 Star Trek: First Contact (1996) 365 Back to the Future (1985) 350 Titanic (1997) 350 Mission: Impossible (1996) 344 Fugitive, The (1993) 336 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) 331 dtype: int64
There's a lot going on in the code above, but it's very idomatic. We're splitting the DataFrame into groups by movie title and applying the size method to get the count of records in each group. Then we order our results in descending order and limit the output to the top 25 using Python's slicing syntax. In SQL, this would be equivalent to: SELECT title, count(1) FROM lens GROUP BY title ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 25; Alternatively, pandas has a nifty value_counts method - yes, this is simpler - the goal above was to show a basic groupby example.
In [64]: lens. title. value_counts ()[: 25 ] Out[64]: Star Wars (1977) 583 Contact (1997) 509 Fargo (1996) 508 Return of the Jedi (1983) 507 Liar Liar (1997) 485 English Patient, The (1996) 481 Scream (1996) 478 Toy Story (1995) 452 Air Force One (1997) 431 Independence Day (ID4) (1996) 429 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 420 Godfather, The (1972) 413 Pulp Fiction (1994) 394 Twelve Monkeys (1995) 392 Silence of the Lambs, The (1991) 390 Jerry Maguire (1996) 384 Chasing Amy (1997) 379 Rock, The (1996) 378 Empire Strikes Back, The (1980) 367 Star Trek: First Contact (1996) 365 Titanic (1997) 350 Back to the Future (1985) 350 Mission: Impossible (1996) 344 Fugitive, The (1993) 336 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) 331 Name: title, dtype: int64
Which movies are most highly rated?
In [65]: movie_stats = lens. groupby ( 'title' ). agg ({ 'rating' : [ np. size, np. mean ]}) movie_stats. head () Out[65]: rating size mean title 'Til There Was You (1997) 9 2.333333 1-900 (1994) 5 2.600000 101 Dalmatians (1996) 109 2.908257 12 Angry Men (1957) 125 4.344000 187 (1997) 41 3.024390
We can use the agg method to pass a dictionary specifying the columns to aggregate (as keys) and a list of functions we'd like to apply. Let's sort the resulting DataFrame so that we can see which movies have the highest average score.
In [66]: # sort by rating average movie_stats. sort_values ([( 'rating','mean' )], ascending = False ). head () Out[66]: rating size mean title They Made Me a Criminal (1939) 1 5 Marlene Dietrich: Shadow and Light (1996) 1 5 Saint of Fort Washington, The (1993) 2 5 Someone Else's America (1995) 1 5 Star Kid (1997) 3 5
Because movie_stats is a DataFrame, we use the sort method - only Series objects use order. Additionally, because our columns are now a MultiIndex, we need to pass in a tuple specifying how to sort. The above movies are rated so rarely that we can't count them as quality films. Let's only look at movies that have been rated at least 100 times.
In [67]: atleast_100 = movie_stats [ 'rating' ]['size' ] >= 100 movie_stats [ atleast_100 ]. sort_values ([( 'rating','mean' )], ascending = False )[: 15 ] Out[67]: rating size mean title Close Shave, A (1995) 112 4.491071 Schindler's List (1993) 298 4.466443 Wrong Trousers, The (1993) 118 4.466102 Casablanca (1942) 243 4.456790 Shawshank Redemption, The (1994) 283 4.445230 Rear Window (1954) 209 4.387560 Usual Suspects, The (1995) 267 4.385768 Star Wars (1977) 583 4.358491 12 Angry Men (1957) 125 4.344000 Citizen Kane (1941) 198 4.292929 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) 219 4.292237 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) 264 4.291667 Silence of the |
process would presumably allow school districts to bypass compensation packages sought by teachers unions and let private companies compete for contracts with districts.
Pavlov didn’t respond to a request for comment on the teacher privatization plan. But Pavlov has publicly described his plan, which he said was still in the works, this way: “I look at it as offering options. If there is something out there that can offer school officials the same options at a lower cost, schools need to take a look at that. It needs to [be] part of the conversation on reform.”
The Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals (MASSP) says that teachers from private companies would be required to have the same credentials as existing public school teachers. Public school districts, MASSP notes, would begin soliciting bids from private “instructional services” companies once existing teacher contracts had expired.
Michigan Education Association spokesman Doug Pratt says Pavlov’s plan is a “terrible idea” that would erode the quality of public school teaching because districts will look for the lowest bidder, not the best teachers. “Instead of having teachers who care about their students learning and their personal growth as their top priorities, the corporation’s bottom line would be what they care about most.” Pratt also claimed this is a way to kneecap teachers’ unions in Michigan. “Privatization is a type of union busting,” he says.
Michigan Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, the state Senate minority leader, says she and the Democratic Caucus plan to fight Pavlov’s proposal if it is included in new education legislation. She describes teacher privatization as merely a continuation of Michigan Republicans’ education agenda. “Gov. [Rick] Snyder and Republicans have made no bones about it: they’re trying to dismantle public education in Michigan,” Whitmer says.
Michigan’s teacher privatization scheme comes after Republican Gov. Snyder and Republican state lawmakers passed a budget that shrunk public-school funding by $300 per student, or nearly $500 million overall. (Michigan has 1.65 million public school students.) With school budgets stretched thin, many districts already use outsourcing: A 2011 analysis by the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a cheerleader for privatizing public services, also found that 54 percent of the state’s 550 public school districts outsource at least one of three key services—food, transportation, and custodial. If Pavlov moves ahead with his teacher privatization plan, there’s a solid chance it could win passage. Republicans enjoy a two-thirds supermajority in the state Senate and a 63-47 majority in the state House of Representatives.
Pavlov’s plan takes a cue from pro-privatization, free-market-driven outfits like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank. (The Mackinac Center has received money from the charities of Charles G. Koch, one-half of the Koch brothers duo; the DeVos family, which amassed huge wealth by cofounding the Amway direct marketing company; and the family of Erik Prince, who founded the war-contracting company Blackwater.) While ALEC and the Mackinac Center have not publicly advocated outsourcing public teachers, they’ve come close. ALEC’s “School Board Freedom to Contract Act” model legislation would grant local school boards more power to outsource cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and custodians. (The co-chair of ALEC’s Education Task Force is a vice president at an online for-profit school company.) The Mackinac Center published its own guide, “A School Privatization Primer,” which shows Michigan school districts how to outsource various services and lists private companies ready for hire in districts around the state.
Diane Ravitch, one of the country’s foremost American education historians and a former Education Department official under George H.W. Bush, says Pavlov’s proposal is the first time she’s heard of actually privatizing teachers themselves. She adds that such a plan doesn’t make any sense from a cost-saving perspective unless Michigan Republicans, whom she described as a “tea party governor and tea party legislators,” plan to cut health care and pension benefits for public school teachers. “If you’re going to be a teacher, why would you go to some private company selling its services?” Ravitch asks. “Why wouldn’t you go straight to the school districts? I don’t understand this unless it’s a way to increase profits for someone and to increase privatization in education.”The Minnesota Senate version of a bill passed by the Minnesota House that would punish parents who subjected their daughters to female genital mutilation (FGM) is stalling in the Senate because some members of Minnesota’s immigrant and refugee communities oppose it.
The House bill, introduced by Rep. Mary Franson, would make the crime a felony, with a concomitant loss of custody and a prison term ranging from five to 20 years. It would also increase penalties for anyone performing the procedure. Female genital mutilation has been illegal in the state since Minnesota passed legislation in the 1990's.
On September 30, 1996, Congress criminalized FGM as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, writing, “Whoever knowingly circumcises, excises, or infibulates the whole or any part of the labia majora or labia minora or clitoris of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.” But the law was not enforced until recently, when a Detroit doctor was arrested for performing the procedure.
But even before that, Minnesota had addressed the issue, and in a more far-reaching way. In 1994, Minnesota was the first state to enact legislation related to FGM. The state amended its criminal code to declare “whoever knowingly circumcises, excises, or infibulates, in whole or in part, the labia majora, labia minora, or clitoris of another is guilty of a felony.” Thus the state did not limit the crime to female victims under the age of 18, but extended the range of victims to include all women.
But now, the Council for Minnesotans of African Heritage, a nonprofit titled Isuroon and other groups assert that the punishment for the crime in the proposed legislation is unduly harsh and thus parents from countries where genital cutting is common would not seek medical care for their children. The Senate bill’s author, Sen. Karin Housley, said she was considering delaying a vote on the legislation, adding, “We all agree this practice is absolutely horrible, and something needs to be done. How can we empower communities to address this practice from within rather than having Big Brother come down and say, ‘This is wrong'? ”
Franson said the Senate was “more concerned with perception than doing the right thing and protecting girls... Watering down the bill really does a disservice to the little girls who are in danger."
In the House, 124 out of 128 House members voted for the bill, including Rep. Ilhan Omar, the country’s first Somali-American legislator.
Opponents of the bill argue that parents who come to the United States with girls who have already undergone the procedure could be punished because the bill mandates reporting to authorities by health care providers.
Brikti Hiwet, a reproductive health lecturer at the University of Minnesota and St. Catherine University, commented, “How can you protect children when you take them away from their families and put them in foster care?”
But Franson pointed out the language in the bill limits penalties to those residing in the United States when the procedure is executed. She concluded, “America is the land of the brave and the home of the free. Little girls who moved here from other countries have the right to be free from the oppression of female genital mutilation.”Harley-Davidson announced first-quarter financial results yesterday, generally confirming evidence that the U.S. motorcycle market is muddling along, without any real growth.
The headlines were that U.S. motorcycle shipments were down 5.7 percent year over year (as expected) while international sales were down 1.8 percent. Earnings per share dropped 22.8 percent year over year, but were still slightly better than analysts expected. As far as outlook, Harley still expects 2017 sales to be flat or slightly down, compared to 2016.
Below the headlines, however, here are three other things I found interesting.
The crack in the wall?
Harley-Davidson is known for not discounting its product as part of its strategy to remain a premium brand. But one of the big problems the company has faced in recent months is excess dealer inventory. Dealers had too many 2016 models, especially since news of the new Milwaukee-Eight engine was out, which gave many buyers a reason to put off buying and get a 2017 Harley with the new engine.
Harley-Davidson counteracted that by making new 2017 models scarce. Shipments were reduced 30 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016, giving dealers time to move the old 2016s. The company also offered incentives to consumers, such as special financing offers, up until February. But then Harley-Davidson did something else it doesn’t usually do. It offered incentives directly to dealers.
Lemmy spotted and sent to me a Reuters story out yesterday quoting several dealers anonymously as saying Harley-Davidson was offering incentives to move 2016s, and confirming that such incentives are unusual, if not unprecedented. I was hoping one of the analysts on the earnings report conference call would ask, and fortunately the Goldman Sachs analyst did. CFO John Olin essentially confirmed the news report.
“Yes, we have provided incentives to the dealers to defray the costs of moving those motorcycles,” Olin said. “That is very atypical. But it’s also atypical that we have had this much model year carryover.”
Unusual measures are prompted by unusual times. Olin said the U.S. motorcycle market was down about six percent last year. New motorcycle sales have been sliding since the second quarter of last year and used bike prices have declined nine straight quarters. Despite lower sales, Harley-Davidson actually made a small gain in market share in its over-601 cc street motorcycle segment because others did even worse.
Loan delinquencies are ticking higher, matching events in the auto-financing world. Harley-Davidson illustration.
Did you make that loan payment on time?
Common Tread contributor Tom Byrne is not the only one who is noticing that consumers are having a somewhat harder time making those loan payments. Harley-Davidson Financial Services, the arm that provides financing for motorcycles, showed lower results in the first quarter mainly because it increased provisions for loan losses by $6.6 million.
Delinquencies and defaults are ticking up and Olin said that is consistent with overall trends in vehicle loans.
Those Harley-riding tree-huggers?
It’s well known that Harley-Davidson has been working for years to expand its customer base. It even has terms for its two kinds of customers: Core (white men over 35) and Outreach (women, people 18 to 34, African-Americans and Latinos). The Harley-Davidson Riding Academy, which offers how-to-ride training, is one part of that effort, but CEO Matt Levatich said he wants to see a more fundamental transition in the company.
Instead of talking about how many motorcycles the company built, “We need to be able to talk about how many customers we built today,” he said. “It starts with a mindset shift. When you think about building riders you think about the business differently.”
It’s a plan that applies not just to the U.S. market, but everywhere. Part of Harley-Davidson’s 10-year plan is to increase international sales to half of the company’s total.
What was less well known to me until recently is Harley-Davidson’s self-portrayal as a “green” company. This is not something new this quarter, but an ongoing program. On social media, you’ll see Harley-Davidson promoting its alliance with The Nature Conservancy to help plant 50 million trees. Or consider these words above Levatich’s signature in the annual “Sustainability Report,” that promise the company will “continue to lower our environmental impact — generating less waste, using less energy and creating fewer greenhouse gases.”
I’m pretty sure this is aimed at the Outreach customers. I’ve run into more than a few of Harley-Davidson’s Core customers who revel in ripping the “EPA bullshit” off their new Harleys as soon as possible, probably even before leaving the dealership. I wonder if they know the Motor Company is worried about greenhouse gases.
I wonder if they’re making their loan payments on time. I wonder if they are taking advantage of those now not-so-secret dealer incentives to move the 2016s.During his final take segment on ESPN’s “First Take,” Stephen A. Smith responded to Golden State Warriors forward Kevin Durant “waking up” to see how “rough it is for the average black man.”
Smith agreed with Durant, saying the black athlete also “has it pretty rough” because of their money and the expectations to do right with it.
“If we’re being honest, the black athlete has it pretty rough — not just in spite of the money, but actually because of it,” said Smith. “With money comes expectations to do right, to be right, regardless of the scrutiny or adversity one faces, which is why Kevin Durant was absolutely correct and righteous when alluding to his privileged relationship with the viewing public while making sure to lament the fact that it wouldn’t exist for him or anyone black were it not for riches and fame.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent(CNN) The Defense Department has identified the fourth service member killed in an ambush in Niger on Wednesday as 25-year-old Army Sgt. La David Johnson.
Johnson was killed by enemy fire in the ambush, the Pentagon said. His body was recovered by US personnel Friday in a remote area of the northwestern African country by Nigerian troops nearly 48 hours after he was discovered missing in the wake of the attack, US officials told CNN on Friday.
The attack
Johnson's group was attacked near the Niger-Mali border by up to 50 fighters thought to be affiliated with ISIS, a US official said.
The 12-member US team was leaving a meeting in unarmored pick-up trucks when they began taking fire from small arms, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, according to a US defense official.
With window glass exploding all around them, the service members, including multiple Army Special Forces soldiers, exited the vehicles, ran for cover, and began returning fire, killing some of the attacking militants.
It is unclear how Johnson became separated from the rest of the advisory team during the firefight. None of the other soldiers with Johnson witnessed him being captured or taken away by enemy forces.
The US military said it does not believe Johnson ever fell into enemy hands, but had reason to believe he might be alive. Military officials launched an urgent search-and-rescue mission after receiving electronic signals that indicated Johnson might be alive in the field.
The US military initially issued a statement Thursday saying the attack left three US service members dead and two wounded.
The large-scale search-and-rescue operation involving US, French and Nigerien troops was launched soon after US officials realized one of the US service members was unaccounted for.
Coordination of efforts
Elite US special operations forces troops were flown in from the continental US to aid in the recovery effort. US Navy SEALs were deployed to a US military base in Sigonella, Sicily, in anticipation of a possible rescue attempt, but never went into Niger.
"We had everything, jets, rotary wings, (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), various platforms, human intelligence, signals intelligence, you name it," US Army Col. Mark Cheadle, a spokesman for Africa Command told reporters at the Pentagon Friday via a phone call. "There was a full-court press by all of (the Department of Defense), the Nigerien government, the Department of State and the French to help us recover our lost one."
He added that the Nigerien troops who found the body in the vicinity of the attack transferred the remains to a team of US Special Operations Forces who flew the body to the capital, Niamey, where it was identified, Cheadle said.
Cheadle said the Nigeriens were "very respectful" and "fully aware of the need to honor the fallen."
CNN did not report the details of the search operation while it was ongoing and did not report the deceased service member's recovery until CNN was assured that his family was notified.
The investigation
A US official says a full investigation into what happened is underway.
Cheadle told reporters that Africa Command was reevaluating its force protection procedures for its advisory missions.
"This was not expected," Cheadle said, adding "had we anticipated this sort of attack we would have absolutely devoted more resources to it to reduce the risk and that's something we are looking at right now."
A spokeswoman for the French Ministry of Defense told CNN Thursday that French troops from the Barkhane anti-terror force based in neighboring Chad were involved in an operation in Niger. She said the operation was led by Niger with French troops supporting them. US officials told CNN Thursday that French military Super Puma helicopters evacuated the wounded Americans along with those killed in action while also providing covering fire. The wounded were first flown to the capital Niamey and later to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
French military attack aircraft also flew to the area in an attempt to support US personnel on the ground.
"Our allies the French were very quick to respond," Cheadle said.
Five Nigerien soldiers also were killed in the attack, according to a Nigerien security official.
About a platoon-sized element of Nigerien troops were accompanying the US team.
"We are resolved and stalwart in our efforts to go after those who attacked us," Cheadle said, adding that while the US military has "an idea" who was behind the ambush, he declined to identify the group involved.
Advise and assist mission
The US soldiers were part of a team advising and assisting local forces.
The Army issued a statement Friday identifying the three soldiers earlier reported killed in action as being two Green Berets, Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, and a third soldier, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson.
All three soldiers were assigned to 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne) at Fort Bragg, according to a statement issued by US Army Special Operations Command.
The attack occurred approximately 200 kilometers north of the country's capital, Niamey, in southwest Niger, according to the statement from Africa Command, which oversees military operations in Africa.
"US forces are in Niger to provide training and security assistance to the Nigerien Armed Forces, in their efforts to counter violent extremist organizations in the region," the statement from Africa Command said.
There are about 800 US troops in Niger and the US military has maintained a presence in the northwest African country for five years, with small groups of US Special Operations Forces advising local troops as they battle terrorist groups, including, Islamic State in Greater Sahara, the ISIS-affiliated Boko Haram and al Qaeda's North African branch, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
"US forces are in Niger to provide training and security assistance to the Nigerien Armed Forces, including support for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance efforts, in their efforts to target violent extremist organizations in the region," US Navy Lt. Cmdr. Anthony Falvo, a spokesman for US Africa Command, said Wedensday, adding, "one aspect of that is training, advising and assisting the Nigeriens in order to increase their ability to bring stability and security to their people."
"Niger is an important partner of ours, we have a deep relationship with them," Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon Thursday. "We are committed to that relationship, we believe that they are as well in fact I think it's a very good success story."
Terror group movement
US officials assess that these terrorist groups view Chad, Niger and Mali as being particularity important as they serve as bridges between north and sub-Saharan Africa, saying that local al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates use control of these transit routes to gain revenue that helps them recruit, expand and export attacks. ISIS uses these North-South transit routes to move fighters northward, where they can gain more easily access Europe and the West.
One official told CNN that ISIS is attempting to illegally infiltrate the gold mining industry in Niger to sell on the black market and finance world terrorism.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has maintained a presence in the Mali-Niger border area, despite a multi-year French-led military counterterrorism effort, Operation Barkhane, which began in 2014.
The US military has largely played a supporting role, providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets in support French forces operating in Mali and Niger. The French operation involves thousands of French troops as well as forces from Germany, Mali, Niger and other countries in the region.
And while US troops largely play a supporting role in Niger, military leaders acknowledge the risks they face.
"Clearly there's risks for our forces in Niger," McKenzie said while declining to discuss the specifics of Wednesday's attack, citing "ongoing partnered operations."
"Any time we deploy full forces globally, we look very hard at the enablers that need to be in place in order to provide security for them and that ranges from the ability to pull them out if they're injured to the ability to reinforce them at the point of a fight if they need reinforcement," he said.
"Certainly to the soldiers in the fight it was combat," McKenzie added.
The Pentagon is in the process of establishing a drone base just outside the city of Agadez in Niger in an effort to bolster regional counterterrorism efforts. The US has been using a local Nigerien airport while the base is under construction, according to US Africa Command.Full Disclosure: I’m no longer using Vim as my full-time editor. I’m giving Atom a shot, because I really do like the energy around it and every once and a while I like to mix things up. (I even became an Emacs user for a year, just to see what the other side looked like!)
I while back I really enjoyed reading Mike Kozlowski’s piece Why Atom Can’t Replace Vim, and I completely agree with the sentiment 100% (even considering the above disclosure!). Emacs is an editor I have enormous respect for, and not just for what it is but the heritage it serves as for so many editors to come after it.
Emacs’ big idea has been thoroughly learned — and how vi’s big idea hasn’t.
From TextMate to SublimeText to Atom, modern editors have all adopted the extensibility lesson so much to heart that it is, essentially, a part of the fabric of what it means to be a (decent) text editor. More or less, you’re either notepad or you’re extendable.
Thank you, Emacs, and all you stand for, for the influence you’ve had on for more developers’ editors than those who use your.
Emacs’ big idea was that it could be modified and extended cleanly.
But, it seems that while the balance between Emacs and Vim in their respective camps has remained steady, there is an obvious place where Emacs won out, even among those who don’t care about either.
Vi’s big idea hasn’t been nearly as influential.
And this is a hurtful truth to agree with, but truth it is. If you aren’t a Vim user, and even if you are, it might be hard to articulate exactly what that Big Idea really is. Mike sums it up nicely.
Vi is fundamentally built on command composability. It favors small, general-purpose commands that can be combined with objects to compose larger commands.
And he wraps up with a note about what is needed to really replace Vim, if any editor ever really will.
A new, shiny, modern editor could one-up Vim by fixing some (or hopefully all) of these issues. But before an editor can replace Vim, it needs to learn everything that 1976 has to teach — not just the lesson of Emacs, but also the lesson of vi.
The lesson I really took from this is something that isn’t entirely obvious at first, but grew out of absorbing this writing and letting it stew with other thoughts in my head about tools like LightTable and the research of Jonathan Edwards.
What I think will really take off is when we are able to reproduce the composable nature of Vim in a tool that is less bound to the limits of ASCII flat files. The composable nature of Vim is perfectly suited to working with scopes of code at levels that really only exist as rules of syntax, and would likely be better bound not in a text editor but an AST editor. I imagine tools that parse and export between source and AST, but never actually give you access to edit text directly. I imagine beyond that formats that serialize ASTs and are never intended for direct editing in tools other than AST editors that parse that binary format.
And I think we’re headed to places where this starts to creep into our world, and the lessons of Vim will be waiting. I am tempted to use the phrase “ahead of its time”, but I won’t. Not because i think it cliche or untrue, but because the more true framing is that it was we who were behind our time.The Phoenicians, based on a narrow coastal strip of the Levant, put their excellent seafaring skills to good use and created a network of colonies and trade centres across the ancient Mediterranean. Their major trade routes were by sea to the Greek islands, across southern Europe, down the Atlantic coast of Africa, and up to ancient Britain. In addition, Arabia and India were reached via the Red Sea, and vast areas of Western Asia were connected to the homeland via land routes where goods were transported by caravan. By the 9th century BCE, the Phoenicians had established themselves as one of the greatest trading powers in the ancient world.
Geographical Extent
Trade and the search for valuable commodities necessitated the establishment of permanent trading posts and, as the Phoenician ships generally sailed close to the coast and only in daytime, regular way-stations too. These outposts became more firmly established in order to control the trade in specific commodities available at that specific site. In time, these developed further to become full colonies so that a permanent Phoenician influence eventually extended around the whole coastline of the ancient Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Their broad-bottomed single-sail cargo ships transported goods from Lebanon to the Atlantic coast of Africa, Britain, and even the Canary Islands, and brought goods back in the opposite direction, stopping at trade centres anywhere else between. Nor was trade restricted to sea routes as Phoenician caravans also operated throughout Western Asia tapping into well-established trading zones such as Mesopotamia and India.
Phoenician sea trade can, therefore, be divided into that for its colonies and that with fellow trading civilizations. Consequently, the Phoenicians not only imported what they needed and exported what they themselves cultivated and manufactured but they could also act as middlemen traders transporting goods such as papyrus, textiles, metals, and spices between the many civilizations with whom they had contact. They could thus make enormous gains by selling a commodity with a low value such as oil or pottery for another such as tin or silver which was not itself valued by its producers but could fetch enormous prices elsewhere. Trading Phoenicians appear in all manner of ancient sources, from Mesopotamian reliefs to the works of Homer and Herodotus, from Egyptian tomb art to the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible. The Phoenicians were the equivalent of the international haulage trucks of today, and just as ubiquitous.
Methods of Exchange
As with many other ancient civilizations the Phoenicians traded goods using a variety of methods. Prestige goods could be exchanged as reciprocal gifts but these could be more than mutual tokens of goodwill as, by bestowing on the receiver an obligation, they were a method to initiate trade partnerships. Luxury goods given as gifts may also have been a deliberate attempt by the Phoenicians to create a demand for more such items and help the Phoenicians acquire the local resources they coveted.
Goods were bought or sold in a relatively controlled manner where quantities and prices were fixed beforehand through the drawing up of trade agreements and treaties.
Goods could be collected as a form of tribute in return for military protection or under compulsion. These were then stored in large quantities and then redistributed either locally or traded elsewhere. Goods could be bartered for and exchanged in kind on the spot. Alternatively, and perhaps the most common method employed by the Phoenicians, goods could be bought or sold in a relatively controlled manner where quantities and prices were fixed beforehand through the drawing up of trade agreements and treaties controlled by the state. The exchange value of goods was, therefore, fixed and so coinage was unnecessary, which is not to say there was no system of written arbitrary values and credit arrangements. The Phoenicians may not have produced coinage precisely because their trade was truly international and they had no use for coins which could not be used far from the place of their mint.
Completely free trade where prices fluctuate due to supply and demand is a mechanism thought by some historians not to have been in operation prior to the 4th century BCE but the view is much debated amongst scholars. Phoenician trade was likely, then, carried out by state officials working on commission but also by consortiums of traders closely associated with royal households. These latter would have been high-ranking nobles, as described in Isaiah 23:8, "Tyre, the crowning city, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of the earth." Perhaps from around the 8th century BCE the quantity of trade carried out by private merchants increased and the direct intervention of the state was reduced, again, the point is still subject to academic debate. The trading of goods most often took place in state-sanctioned trade centres which were generally recognised as neutral by the different regional states. The Phoenician city of Tyre is a classic example.
Exported Goods - Wood
Phoenicia was a mere coastal strip backed by mountains. Despite the paucity of land available they did manage to produce cereals through irrigation of the arable terrain and cultivate on a limited scale such foodstuffs as olives, figs, dates, walnuts, almonds, pomegranates, plums, apricots, melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, and wine. However, the Phoenicians were most noted as exporters of wood. This commodity came from their abundant cedar and fir forests and had been traded since the beginning of recorded history. The cedar is a tall tree with a thick girth, making it ideal for timber. It also has the additional benefit of possessing an aromatic odour. Mesopotamia and Egypt were the most notable customers, the former receiving their trunks via caravan up to the Euphrates River while ships carried the wood to the African coast. The trade is recorded in reliefs of Sargon II and an inscription of Nebuchadnezzar. According to the historian George Rawlinson, Phoenician cedar wood was used by King Solomon for his celebrated temple, by Herod in Zerubbabel's Temple, and by the Ephesians for the roof of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
Textiles
The other famous Phoenician export was textiles which used wool, linen yarn, cotton, and later, silk. Wool (sheep and goat) probably dominated and came from Damascus and Arabia. Linen yarn was imported from Egypt while silk came from Persia. Taking these raw materials, the Phoenicians transformed them into uniquely colourful items, especially clothes and carpets. Fine multi-coloured clothing from Phoenicia is referenced both in Homer - where Paris gives Helen a gift of the cloth prior to whisking her off to Troy - and in Egyptian art when depicting Phoenicians from Sidon. The dyed fabrics were then exported back again, for example, to Memphis where the Phoenicians even had their own quarter in the city.
Cloth died purple using fluid from the murex shellfish brought the Phoenicians fame throughout the ancient world.
Cloth dyed purple (actually shades ranging from pink to violet) using fluid from the Murex trunculus, Purpura lapillus, Helix ianthina, and especially the Murex brandaris shellfish brought the Phoenicians fame throughout the ancient world. Living in relatively deep water, these shell-fish were caught in baited traps suspended from floats. The dye was then extracted from thousands of putrefied shellfish left to bake in the sun. So popular were these textiles that vast deposits of the shells have been excavated on the outskirts of Sidon and Tyre and the species was all but driven to extinction along the coasts of Phoenicia. The highest quality cloth was known as Dibapha, meaning 'twice dipped' in the purple dye. The Phoenicians not only exported the dyed cloth but also the process of extracting the dye, as indicated by the shell deposits found at Phoenician colonies across the Mediterranean. Besides their vivid colours, Phoenician textiles were also famous for their fine embroidery. Popular designs included repeated motifs such as scarabs, rosettes, winged globes, lotus blossoms, and mythical monsters.
Glass
The Phoenicians also traded glassware. The Egyptians had already been long-time producers but from the 7th century BCE the Phoenicians began to produce transparent glass, as opposed to merely opaque glassware. Important centres of glass production were Sidon, Tyre, and Sarepta. Transparent glass was used to manufacture mirrors, plates, and drinking glasses but the Phoenicians seemed to have appreciated semi-transparent coloured glass (blue, yellow, green, and brown) for their more elaborate productions as well as for jewellery and small plaques which were sewn onto clothing. Phoenician glassware, especially in the form of small perfume bottles, has been found as far afield as Cyprus, Sardinia, and Rhodes.
Imported Goods
The Phoenicians imported metals, especially copper from Cyprus, silver and iron from Spain, and gold from Ethiopia (and possibly Anatolia). This raw material was transformed into ornate vessels and art objects in Phoenician workshops and then exported. Tin (from Britain), lead (Scilly Isles and Spain), and brassware were also traded, the latter principally coming from Spain. Ivory was imported from either Punt or India, as was ebony, both coming to Phoenicia via Arabia. Amber came either from the Baltic or Adriatic coast and was used in Phoenician jewellery. Embroidered linen and grain were imported from Egypt and fine, worked cloth from Mesopotamia. Grain, barley, honey, and oak timber used for oars on Phoenician ships, came from Palestine.
Phoenician markets also traded in slaves (from Cilicia and Phrygia but also captured by the Phoenicians themselves), sheep (Arabia), horses and mules (Armenia), goats, wool (Damascus and Arabia), coral, perfumes (Judah and Israel), agate, and precious stones such as emeralds (from Syria and Sheba). Spices came from the Arabian peninsula (some coming from distant India) and included cinnamon, calamus, cassia, ladanum, frankincense, and myrrh.
Legacy
From the 7th century BCE the Phoenicians' trade network was eclipsed by the efforts of one of its most successful colonies - Carthage, by the Greeks, and then the Romans. But the Phoenicians had been the first Mediterranean trading superpower, and their early dominance led to those empires which followed adopting similar trading practices and even adopting Phoenician names for certain exotic goods from distant lands. The Phoenicians had dared to sail beyond the horizon and transport commodities to where they were most prized. As the prophet Isaiah (23:2) stated, "you merchants of Sidon, whose goods travelled over the sea, over wide oceans."From the New York Times:
When a Rapist’s Weapon Is a Drug … But assaults involving the drugs appear to be on the rise in the United States and elsewhere, and have earned a more menacing reputation than liquor-induced incidents.
One annoying rule of newspaper reporting is that whatever you are writing about has to be portrayed as “on the rise” even when it’s innately interesting whether or not it’s part of a trend.
New York Magazine has a hard-hitting report on the epidemic of people having date rape drugs secretly dropped in their drinks … but then not getting raped:
October 7, 2014 12:50 p.m.
What You Might Not Know About ‘Getting Roofied’ By Jordan Kisner Within a few weeks of casual inquiry, I’d found more than 20 people who’d also been “roofied.” Now, after over a year of talking to friends, acquaintances, and strangers in New York about their experiences with drug assault (as I’ll call it for lack of a better term — despite reading studies, consulting with clinicians and victims’ advocates, and looking through city and state laws, I still haven’t encountered any official terminology), it seems clear that this phenomenon has evolved. Roughly half of the people I’ve spoken to, found through friends and colleagues, are men. No one reported having been sexually assaulted while drugged, which was for most a source of both relief and confusion. For my part, I was stunned by how easy it was to find other victims once I started asking, and how many of them there were. Why wasn’t this more widely discussed? Had the men been specifically targeted or were they collateral damage of a botched attempt to prey on a young woman? It also seemed, in light of the number of people I was meeting who had been rendered completely vulnerable but otherwise left unharmed, to expand the range of common motives beyond sexual predation. (Although, of course, that motive remains.) It’s important to stress that I’ve been conducting conversations, not a scientific study. My sample is relatively small and local to New York City, and I didn’t control for age, neighborhood, or tax bracket. No one I spoke to admitted to being sexually assaulted, but that remains a horrible problem in the population at large … But when I looked for studies that examined drug assault as its own criminal or medical phenomenon in New York, there wasn’t much to find. … This is one of the stranger injuries of drug assault: It robs you of the ability to narrate your own experience. It places you in that conversation’s negative space, and it quickly becomes easier to not have the conversation at all. When victimhood isn’t tidy it has a tendency to disappear … We fail to create systems of support because we can’t see the people who need it, and the lack of system ensures we never will. This is, in part, how widespread problems go unnoticed, undocumented, unstudied, and unsolved.
On the other hand, some “widespread problems” that “go unnoticed, undocumented, unstudied, and unsolved” might not, you know, be all that widespread.
Here’s a study from Perth, Australia, which is pretty far from New York City, but might be informative.
Drink spiking all |
a series of posters carrying the band’s lemon logo appeared around Manchester.
Images of the lemon, which has appeared on the band’s posters and album artwork in the past, have appeared around Manchester with sightings confirmed at Close barber’s shop on Greater Ancoats Street and the Vinyl Revival record store on Hilton Street.
Eagle eyed fans have spotted that there are 16 lemons on each poster and are speculating that this means an announcement about 2016 is imminent. The posters appear in several shops in the Northern Quarter area of the city. One shop keeper told Manchester Evening News that he had been “sworn to secrecy about an announcement due in the next 24 hours”.
Press
Gordon Smart, editor of the Scottish Sun, has also speculated that two gigs at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium could be in the pipeline. “I’ve felt a disturbance in the force @thestonerosesofficial blue seats, two nights, baggy jeans and a beanie hat…”, he wrote on Instagram.
Manchester musicians Liam Fray (The Courteeners) and Tim Burgess of The Charlatans have also tweeted about the posters, leading some fans to ask if all three bands will play live together. Other persistent rumours include that of a Glastonbury headline slot and the band’s long awaited third album.
NME has approached a representative for The Stone Roses but has not received a reply at the time of writing.
Sharethrough (Mobile)
http://storify.com/nmemagazine/stone-roses
Noel Gallagher recently suggested that there could soon be renewed activity from the band when he appeared on Sky’s Soccer AM last month.
Appearing on Soccer AM on October 24, the former Oasis guitarist was asked if he had “any idea what’s going on with the Roses”, to which he replied coyly: “Yes. I know exactly what’s going on… They’re blooming.”
The Manchester band reformed in 2011 after originally breaking up in 1996. They played a series of gigs around the world in 2012 and 2013, but have remained inactive for the past two years.
In June 2013, The Stone Roses released the documentary The Stone Roses: Made Of Stone, directed by Shane Meadows. It charted their reformation, triumphant homecoming gigs at Manchester’s Heaton Park and beyond.
Pressed on any information about forthcoming Stone Roses material at a charity event last year, Ian Brown remained taciturn. “Is something happening? You never know, but I’m not here to talk about that,” he said.
https://link.brightcove.com/services/player/?bctid=3262512313001In a July 11 entry on The Page, Mark Halperin declared "Republicans" the "winner of the week" over Democrats without noting any of the admitted falsehoods by or controversies involving the McCain campaign over the previous week.
In a July 11 entry on his website, The Page, Time magazine senior political analyst Mark Halperin declared "Republicans" the "winner of the week" over Democrats without noting any of the admitted falsehoods by or controversies involving the McCain campaign over the previous week, as Steve Benen pointed out on his blog The Carpetbagger Report. Halperin asserted: "Despite Obama's splashy news that he'll deliver his nomination acceptance speech in a 76,000-seat stadium, his campaign is still proceeding with caution -- leaving Obama open to aggressive GOP attacks." In addition to naming Republicans the overall winners, Halperin named the Republicans winners of three categories: "Public Image," "Iraq," and "Arrival of the Calvary." He pronounced there to be a "tie" on the remaining issue, "Economy."
From Halperin's July 11 entry:
The admitted falsehoods by and controversies involving the McCain campaign that Halperin did not mention in his weekly campaign assessment include the following:
As Benen noted, during a July 7 town hall meeting in Denver, McCain said: "Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed." On the July 8 edition of CNN's American Morning, McCain said during a discussion of Social Security that young people "pay their taxes and right now their taxes are going to pay the retirement of present-day retirees. That's why it's broken, that's why we can fix it." As The Washington Post reported on July 9, "If that payment system is a disgrace, it has been one since Social Security was created during the Great Depression. For as long as the popular program has existed, today's workers have paid the benefits of today's retirees." The Post added: "Reaction to McCain's statement has been slow to burble, but it is beginning to burst."
On July 7, Sen. John McCain's falsely asserted: "If you are one of the 23 million small business owners in America who files as an individual rate payer, Senator Obama is going to raise your tax rates." In fact, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center's table of 2007 tax returns that reported small-business income, 481,000, not 23 million, of those returns are in the top two income tax brackets -- which include all filers with taxable incomes of more than $250,000. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on July 10 that "McCain's camp acknowledges that only individual business owners making more than $250,000 would pay higher taxes under Obama's plan -- but it insists those businesses will be hurt by the Democrat's proposals."
In the wake of Iran's test of long-range missiles, McCain asserted: "It's my understanding is that this missile test was conducted by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. This is the same organization that I voted to condemn as a terrorist organization when an amendment was on the floor of the United States Senate. Senator Obama refused to vote. He called it provocative, a provocative step. The fact is, this is a terrorist organization and it should have been branded as such." As CNN.com's Political Ticker blog reported on July 11, "McCain also missed that vote" on designating the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. Political Ticker reported that "[t]he McCain campaign admits the error." Additionally, as Political Ticker noted, Obama also sponsored legislation that "would have designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization."
The McCain campaign issued a press release on July 7 stating: "McCain's presidential campaign today released a statement signed by over 300 professional economists in support of John McCain's Jobs for America economic plan." However, a Politico article reported:
Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don't actually support the whole of McCain's economic agenda. And at least one doesn't even support McCain for president. In interviews with more than a dozen of the signatories, Politico found that, far from embracing McCain's economic plan, many were unfamiliar with -- or downright opposed to -- key details. While most of those contacted by Politico had warm feelings about McCain, many did not want to associate themselves too closely with his campaign and its policy prescriptions.LG was one of the first companies to demonstrate a Moorestown based phone as recently as earlier this year. Just 54 minutes ago however LG announced that starting in Q4 2010 it will be shipping smartphones based on NVIDIA's Tegra 2.
We first introduced you to Tegra 2 back at CES 2010. It's NVIDIA's second generation smartphone SoC with a pair of ARM Cortex A9 cores (ARM's first out-of-order architecture). The dual core CPU will run at 1GHz. Tegra 2 also features NVIDIA's own mobile GPU, although we know nothing of its architecture or how well it stacks up to high end GPUs from Imagination Technologies. NVIDIA calls it a GeForce GPU however I'd be surprised if there's any similarities between it and what's shipping in desktop GeForce GPUs today.
LG's press release is pretty light on details although we do get some performance projections. LG states that web browsing can be up to 2x faster and gaming performance can be up to 5x faster compared to single core processors running at 1GHz. If we're conservative and assume that is in comparison to Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC then we'd expect Quake 3 frame rates at just under 100 fps. Web browsing at 2x the speed of Snapdragon would be much faster than anything we've seen to date.
LG mentions that Tegra 2 will enable 1080p HD video playback however with no indication of bitrate it's too early to get excited about that claim. TI's OMAP 4 will also have 1080p support when it ships in phones next year. The same is true for Intel's Moorestown based devices.
Obviously SoC speed isn't all that matters, LG has to deliver a compelling smartphone design. The first LG Tegra 2 smartphones will be a part of its Optimus Series of smartphones, most likely running Android.
Below is the full press release from LG:
LG DEVELOPS POWERFUL SMARTPHONES WITH NVIDIA TEGRA 2 PROCESSOR
LG First to Announce Smartphone with Dual-Core CPU based on NVIDIA Tegra, the World’ s Most Advanced Mobile Processor
SEOUL, Sept. 7, 2010 – LG Electronics (LG) announced today that it will introduce a series of fast, powerful smartphones starting in the fourth quarter of 2010 utilizing the second generation NVIDIA® TegraTM mobile processor, Tegra 2. Tegra 2 includes the world’s first dual-core CPU, which powers through complex tasks to achieve significant leaps in performance.
LG will integrate Tegra 2 into its smartphones, providing them with unprecedented power, speed and graphics capability. These smartphones will be part of LG’s Optimus Series, a new line of innovative mobile products.
LG selected NVIDIA Tegra because it enables a new mobile experience and content capabilities. Tegra 2 features a number of mobile “firsts”: the first mobile dual-core CPU, the only ultra low-power NVIDIA GeForce® GPU and the first 1080p HD mobile video processor. Taking full advantage of the two speedy 1 GHz processors sharing the workload in Tegra 2, consumers can experience up to 2x faster web browsing and up to 5x faster gaming performance over single core processors running at 1 GHz. NVIDIA’s leadership in graphics also delivers flawless 1080p HD video playback, console-quality gaming and amazing 3D capabilities.
“LG is committed to making its Optimus Series smart devices the de facto standard in speed and graphics performance,” said Chang Ma, Vice President of Marketing Strategy Team, LG Mobile Communications Company. “We selected NVIDIA because it is the visual computing leader and has a long history of creating amazing consumer experiences.”
Global Web Site www.lg.com
“The ultimate smartphones will be powered by Tegra, the world’s most advanced mobile processor,” said Phil Carmack, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s mobile business. “LG is one of the most popular consumer brands, and their Optimus Series of devices with Tegra is further validation of the processor’s ability to deliver an unrivaled, turbocharged media experience.”
LG’s Optimus Series smartphones featuring the NVIDIA Tegra 2 mobile processor will debut starting in the fourth quarter of the year.Oops! Wrong Series Gets Emmy Award
"From a night of triumph you just go to a moment of humiliation," he said. "Far better that nothing had happened than that this happened."
Having to tell his writers that they hadn't won after all "was the most unpleasant job of my life," William J. Bell, co-executive producer of "The Young and the Restless," said in an interview Monday.
A spokesman for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences blamed the mix-up on "a clerical error" by the accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand.
In an unfortunate turn of events that might easily qualify for their soap opera, the writers of "The Young and the Restless" have been told that the Emmy Award they accepted on national television last week for best writing on a daytime drama doesn't really belong to them.
What happened, according to Academy spokesman Murray Weissman, was that in compiling a news release announcing the winners of the 13th annual Daytime Emmy Awards, someone at Coopers & Lybrand correctly listed the writers of "Guiding Light" but incorrectly identified them as working for "The Young and the Restless."
That news release was used as the basis for writing the names of the winners that were sealed in envelopes to be opened on the national telecast last Thursday, he said. Because there were so many writers names, though, the card inside the envelope simply said, "The writing staff of 'The Young and the Restless.' "
Such a mistake involving the national Emmy Awards had never been made before, Weissman said Monday. Coopers & Lybrand had never previously handled a national Emmy Awards process, he said.
The academy's auditing committee met with Coopers & Lybrand officials and reviewed all the ballots to confirm that there were no other errors, he said. The academy still believes that the accounting agency is "an outstanding, very reliable firm," he continued, and plans to continue using it for the Emmy Awards, including the prime-time ceremonies that are in the nomination process now.
Bell said that he had no reason to believe there was anything other than human error involved, but he branded the mistake "unforgivable" and said it hurt the accounting firm's credibility.
"Obviously the whole system broke down if they let just one person make up the (winners') cards without anyone checking it," he said.
"The greatest impact," Bell said, "is that a group of awfully fine, talented people were hurt the way few people can be hurt, because ultimately it became a great indignity, and it never should have happened."
Bell said that he was prepared to let the matter drop. Noting that "The Young and the Restless" had won the Emmy as best daytime drama for the second year in a row and also had picked up awards for directing, editing and sound, he said, "We have much to be proud of."
The winning team of writers from "Guiding Light" consisted of Pam Long Hammer, Jeff Ryder, Addie Walsh, John Kuntz, Christopher Whitesell, Megan McTavish, Stephen Demorest, Victor Gialanella, Mary Pat Gleason, Trent Jones, Pete T. Rich, Gail N. Lawrence and Nancy Curlee.When I was 20 years old I moved to Cairo for one year of study. I said good-bye to my grandma at a Chinese food restaurant and it was the first time I'd seen her cry. It was as if we both began mourning her death then, fearful she would die while we were continents apart. While I was away my grandma wrote me letters.
She wrote about how much she missed me, missed hearing the roaring sound of my car engine and amped up music that signaled the start of my visits. She wrote to me the inanities of daily life, trying to get the dog to play fetch, pulling weeds in the garden, and growing old. Once I wrote to her reflecting on what my next steps should be in life, and she responded:
"Now, wondering what to do with your life is not nearly so difficult as wondering what you should have done -- Is this relationship good for me? Do I need a therapist? Do I want children? Do I need organized religion in my life? Should I move? Should I consider traditional marriage? Have I always been gay? Should I take a year off and move to Bali? Is 40 too old to join a cult? These questions or ones like them are always with us. Until you ask yourself, 'why didn't I?'"
My grandma died on Christmas Eve. Cancer consumed her body. When the doctor told her she was going to die, she asked everyone else to leave the room and struggled to drag her frail, IV-tangled body up to stand. She looked me square in the eyes and said, "This is how it's supposed to be." The next week I sat with her through the night, listening to her rattling breaths. And then the breathing stopped, and I had lost a friend.
The entire family gathered around the body. Someone suggested saying the Lord's Prayer, but it didn't seem fitting, as my grandmother wasn't religious. I began to read from Khalil Gibran's The Prophet: "For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?"
It's funny, my grandma may have been an atheist, but after her death, my little sister said, "I didn't really believe much in 'the Spirit' until Granny died." The face off with mortality is also in some ways a face off with meaning, and with God. I struggled to build new routines without my grandma in my life. I went to work. I went home. I floundered.
The closest place of worship to my house happens to be a mosque. I live just one block from Lighthouse Masjid in Oakland, and I began to go there on Tuesday nights with a friend, listening to Imam Zaid Shakir talk through the meaning of the Fatiha. I sat in the back. My grandma's words echoed in my mind, "Do I need organized religion in my life?" Another part of me wondered if humans just invent God because we're scared of death, finding our God out of our own fear.
This Ramadan I decided to fast. The first days I was flat out from caffeine withdrawals and I began throwing up after Iftar, the meal to break the fast. I continued on. I memorized Quran verses. I prayed. Fasting was an exercise of focus and humility and, for me, solitude. I ate Suhour, the pre-dawn meal, alone, I broke my fast alone, and I prayed alone. On the weekends, without work to distract me, I cried. My fast was not out of devotion to God, but out of desperation to find Him.
When I'm running on the back roads in my small hometown, or watching the sunset into the haze of a megacity, I know that God is real. My life is bigger than me, and the world is bigger than us. When I'm in the mountains, I have no doubt that each individual, while finite, is interconnected with the eternal threads of the universe.
My favorite part of prayer is Sajdah, the part of prayer where your forehead is on the ground. I linger in Sajdah. There is something about the immense humility of placing your face on the ground that has brought me to Islam, or literally "submission." In Sajdah I feel that while I'm small in the face of the mysteries of eternity, through my recognition of this I can also be a part of something bigger. In Sajdah I've learned to accept with grace that I can't always know my next steps. What will happen will happen, and as my grandma said, "This is how it's supposed to be."‘Relationships were a problem, as there aren’t many men who like smart women. I tried socialising in Mensa. I don’t any more. Being intelligent doesn’t make you empathic or honest’
I’m almost certainly smarter than you. That’s not a boast, it’s a fact. I’m smarter than most. I can think and make connections, and spot discrepancies, too.
I’m a member of Mensa and I know what my IQ is (164). I’ve never held a high-powered job, I don’t have a string of qualifications. I don’t do terribly clever things in my spare time, although I enjoy the odd pub quiz. And I don’t tell many people. If I do, then if I say or do something stupid, there is glee and sarcasm: “And you’re a member of Mensa?”
At primary school I was fast-tracked a couple of years, which seemed like fun, until I ended up as a 12-year-old brat in a class of cool teenagers, who ignored or bullied me. I left education after A-levels, because I was bored. I could do most school work without a thought, so when subjects came along that needed hard graft, I gave up (although I’ve graduated through the Open University since. They let you work at your own pace, which for me means fast).
Relationships were a problem, as there aren’t many men who like smart women, but I did find some. I’ve stayed gainfully employed, but I wouldn’t say I’ve done anything remarkable in any job.
I tried socialising in Mensa. I don’t any more. Being intelligent doesn’t make you empathic or honest. Mensa was full of intellectual point-scoring. It’s an organisation for the smart-ass rather than the wise.
If you know me at all, you know me as sarcastic, impatient, but (I hope) caring and considerate. I will bite my tongue when you say something completely stupid. But I hope you do the same for me.
• Tell us what you’re really thinking – email mind@theguardian.com.A A
SEATTLE - The Emerald City's growing parking problem will be a big topic at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon as council members receive a new report on the hot-button issue and debate what to do next.
Parking woes affect nearly everyone in Seattle. But there is some good news in the new report - although it may not be what everyone wants to hear - more money is available to make it easier to use the bus.
The city is looking at using $45 million to ease overcrowding on popular bus routes, increase frequency and improve reliability.
It's the wave of the future.
Right now, 75 percent of all apartment building projects in the city provide some parking, but more than a dozen new developments do not. Most of those are on Capitol Hill, in the University District and Central District.
This is where the City Council says transportation money comes in handy - to expand transit service in those areas. And this is where the council could change the city's land use code to require one or more of several options:
Require transit passes for new residential development
Require other amenities such as car share memberships or bike share memberships
Or guarantee residents a ride home.
Council members will debate all those ideas at Tuesday's council meeting.Wealth in the United States can buy many things: education, homes, vacations. It can even buy the best doctors and diet, but it can’t buy health. Why not?
Ask Stephen Bezruchka, a public health researcher at the University of Washington. While training Nepalese doctors and students in 1991, he stumbled upon research that revealed a disturbing trend in U.S. health indicators: Life expectancy was falling behind other developed countries while mortality rates were rising past them. He wondered why.
After leaving a career in medicine to study public health, he was shocked to learn that people in more economically unequal societies live shorter lives. What was startling was that this was true even for the rich. In the United States, the most affluent die at a greater rate (912.2 per 100,000) in counties with higher income inequality than the poorest (883.3 per 100,000) in counties with lower income inequality. More than 170 studies support these findings.
Researchers don’t know why, but they have theories. Some say more people in unequal societies can’t buy what they need to stay healthy. That’s the materialist perspective. Bezruchka subscribes to the psychosocial theory, which assumes people are more influenced by societal expectations than their own needs. In the United States, individuals are expected to go the extra mile to fulfill responsibilities—rich or poor. What does this all inevitably lead to? Stress.
Health functions at the macro level, and it can’t be improved unless structural problems are addressed and solutions are offered. That includes early-life programs. Bezruchka is now working with Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility to support a paid family leave act, because a baby’s first thousand days are some of its most critical.
“Roughly half of our health as adults today is determined sometime between conception and before you go to school,” Bezruchka explained. “Hillary Clinton used the term ‘the first thousand days,’ and that is sort of a label for nine months in utero and the first two years afterward.”
The United States needs a lot more than a thousand days to catch up to the rest of the developed world. It would actually need at least a generation, maybe two. Until then, rich and poor alike will continue to suffer the effects of income inequality. But catching up starts with change. Just ask Bezruchka.Missed the Kickstarter? Go to our website for more information! Follow us on Twitter @LeafyGames!
PULSAR: Lost Colony is a cooperative starship simulator that takes you and your crew to the farthest corners of the universe on a mission to find the mysterious Lost Colony. It features a procedural galaxy generator so every journey will be unique and contain new challenges for you and your crew.
The game has been designed from the ground up to provide an amazing cooperative multiplayer experience (up to five players), although it is entirely possible to play offline with AI bots as your crew.
It will be released in the Summer of 2014 with a closed alpha test beginning in February 2014.
The game will also fully support the Oculus Rift and game controllers (such as Xbox 360 gamepad).
Here's an early example of the gameplay in PULSAR:
Infinite replayability. Every journey begins in a different galaxy, procedurally generated, so no two galaxies will ever be the same
12+ awesome starships across 5 diverse playable factions to support a vast range of play styles.
Five player CO-OP across LAN or Online connections.
A robust singleplayer adventure with AI that learns with you, all the way from the Academy to the Stars.
Five classes with multiple upgrade paths.
Crew permadeath. Be careful out there in the void of space! If your crew perishes, your save is deleted and it's time for a brand new adventure!
Challenge modes galore! Captain's Challenge, the Academy Challenge, etc.
Journey down to the surface of the planets you find. You'll never know what to expect!
Music is an important part of PULSAR. We are creating a full-length soundtrack that will capture the essence of each faction and how they operate. Check out these demo tracks below! We will be releasing more over the course of this campaign!
"Progress Above All" - W.D Corporation Theme (by Isaac Vail)
"Together We Survive" - Colonial Union Theme (by Isaac Vail)
"Never Trust A Gentleman" - Alliance of Gentlemen Theme (by Isaac Vail)
We are lucky enough to have two very talented composers onboard:
Alex Yoder - Website | Twitter
Isaac Vail - Website | Twitter
Nearly every major decision falls into the Captain’s hands. He calls the shots, and thus the success of the voyage is more often than not a reflection of his leadership. Diplomacy, aggression, trade – the Captain chooses the direction of the crew, and he gets to sit in a fancy chair at the center of the Bridge while he does it. Upgrade paths include Diplomacy, Leadership, and Teamwork.
The Pilot is directly responsible for the ship’s safety. Maneuvering through space debris and locking onto targets during combat fall within pilots’ job descriptions, but they are also skilled at navigation and oversee a variety of sensors. In addition, Pilots align the ships for warp-jumps and ensure safe passage between sectors of the galaxy. Upgrade paths include Evasion, Personal Combat Training, and Navigation.
On any serious expedition, no team is complete without a Scientist. They are crucial members who provide the crew with medical assistance and information regarding their status or environment. As they possess superior technological skills, Scientists are also responsible for ship security, breaching enemy firewalls, and teleportation control. Upgrade paths include Hacking, Medical, and Advanced Research.
Guns. Turrets. Mini-nukes. The Weapons Specialist manages them all. With a passion for bullets and lasers, missiles, and really anything that makes a loud enough bang, Weapons Specialists are the go-to guys for any combat related needs. They maintain their ships’ offensive technologies and fervently man turrets during battle. Upgrade paths include Nuclear Technology, Laser Armaments, and Advanced Armory.
Despite any obstacles, the Engineer keeps the ship flying. Engineers have the duty of the continual maintenance and repair of vital ship systems, as well as preventing the engines from overheating and controlling ship power flow. They also assume the task of charging warp drives. Upgrade paths include Engine Improvements, Reactor Power Management, and Automated Repair Tools.
Colonial Union “Together We Survive” “Together We Survive”
Year zero of the Union Era marked an end to a war-stricken age. The founding of the Colonial Union created stability among the sectors of the galaxy, joining the remaining 60 billion survivors under the protection of one political body. The Colonial Union is a multispecies administration with a focus on exploration and diplomacy. Its officers uphold the law, operating in over half of the known galaxy with ships well-equipped for both combat and voyaging. They scout for new planets, species, and allies, striving for the discovery of the galaxy and the unification of its inhabitants.
W.D. Corporation “Progress Above All” “Progress Above All”
The Wolden-Dorf Corporation is the most powerful organization in the galaxy – second only to the Colonial Union itself. Dominating the production of advanced technologies and weaponry, the Corporation also possesses the majority of mining operations, including the largest known tritium deposit. The W.D. fleet is massive, being the biggest in both number and individual ship size, and it is extremely defensive of its technology. When one of its ships goes unaccounted for, it will stop at nothing to retrieve it. Because of its uncompromising tendencies, W.D. has been the instigator of numerous conflicts over the years. In addition, many of its whopping 33 billion employees have reported the Corporation for unethical working conditions, maltreatment, and unusually high casualty rates. The Colonial Union has hounded down W.D. for years, but all attempts at bringing the offenses to light have failed. With its control in nearly half of the colonial sectors, the W.D. Corporation has proven itself a force to be reckoned with, unobstructed by common rules or standards.
An Alliance of Gentlemen
“Never Trust A Gentleman”
Nobody knows how or when the Alliance was founded. Some speculate it began as a group of pirates who banded together under trying circumstances. Others say they were criminals exiled from Colonial Union sectors, and they formed their own society as an act of defiance. Whatever its story may be, the Alliance of Gentlemen has accrued a following of 40,000 members, and it has grown to be a formidable force in the galaxy. With a community comprised of freelancers, outlaws, and seedy individuals of all kinds, the Alliance operates and profits outside Colonial jurisdiction. Alliance members are notorious for hijacking ships and plundering valuable assets; they circumvent the law, scoping out the galaxy for their next targets. While some are nobler than others – basing decisions upon a personal moral code, others are ruthless, greedy, and willing to do just about anything for that big payoff. As they do not occupy entire sectors of space, these fine Gentlemen roam and pillage freely in restricted territories, congregating only to exchange jobs and tales of battle at their haughty Alliance headquarters – a captured W.D. flagship.
The Fluffy Biscuit Company “Eat Biscuits, Feel Butter” “Eat Biscuits, Feel Butter”
In 3102 U.E., the Fluffy Biscuit Company was first established as a wholesome, family-friendly biscuit delivery service with one goal in mind: to spread warm n’ buttery biscuits across the reaches of space. Over the years, their business skyrocketed, and they expanded tremendously, acquiring 8 billion employees and a fleet of delivery ships fitted with advanced replicators. Although they retained the name “Fluffy Biscuit,” they now cater to the cravings of billions of customers, providing them with innumerable selections of food items for every meal throughout the day. Rumor has it, with Fluffy Biscuit’s massive recent influx of traffic, their profits exceeded those of the W.D. Corporation last year. Do you smell tension in the air?
Polytechnic Federation What's this? A Secret Faction? Your Own Galaxy To Explore and Conquer At the start of every Voyage a unique randomized galaxy is born just for you. Each contains hundreds of points of interest that you will need to explore to find clues about the location of the Lost Colony. A Voyage can last anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 hours depending on the skill of the crew and the encounters you face. If your crew perishes, the galaxy dies with you and the save file is deleted. Journey Alone or with Friends Each crew in PULSAR consists of up to five members. You can play offline with bots as your crew, or play cooperatively with friends in Online + LAN modes. Alternatively, you could take a ship out by yourself and perform all tasks of the crew, although it’s quite a challenge! Everyone Plays a Key Role on the Ship Captain, Pilot, Scientist, Weapons, and Engineer. These are the five classes available in the game – each having their own unique responsibilities and roles during the journey. Crew Permadeath If your crew perishes on their journey (and your on-board respawner is destroyed) there is no coming back. This means if your ship is obliterated and your entire crew is on-board it’s game over. The game will delete your save file and you get to start over at the beginning. This adds a layer of strategy that we absolutely love – plus it makes each journey special. Join The Away Team Your Voyage will bring you to unexplored sectors containing planets or space stations that can contain valuable resources imperative to surviving your journey. Use extreme caution as they also can also contain dangers to your crew – such as hostile ambushes and booby traps. Five Unique Playable Factions (So Far) The Colonists are unlocked by default. The other factions will need to be earned by playing the game and discovering the secret of each faction. You can play as anything from a ruthless weapons manufacturer such as the W.D. Corporation to an intergalactic biscuit delivery service: The Fluffy Biscuit Company. Online Leaderboards We are working on an extensive online profile system which will track and analyze each of your journeys, to see how you are improving compared to other explorers. Challenge Modes PULSAR features multiple challenge modes for players who love to die. The Captain’s Challenge puts players in the Captain’s chair without any crew. That’s right! You and you alone will face the adventure ahead with your own personal starship (meant for a crew of five). You can do it! Currently the game is still pretty bare-bones. We have three ships, two planets types, a character with a few animations, and around half of the core ship systems. We overcame quite a lot to determine how various aspects of the game will work and to become familiar with the project pipeline. Now, we are ready to flesh out the features and mechanics to deliver a more cohesive and refined experience. Our goals for the game will include deep system mechanics, the creation of many more polished ships, a range of characters with some basic customization, an array of planets to explore, and a huge collection of scenarios for players to encounter. We've been working on PULSAR: Lost Colony outside of our day jobs whenever we can find some free time and aren't too burned out from the day's previous duties. The goal of this Kickstarter is to fund the rest of the game's development so that we can work on PULSAR: Lost Colony full-time. This is what we've been dreaming about since starting work on the game in July 2013. With your help, over the next 9 months, we can work full-time to deliver a memorable and biscuit filled experience! Every dollar pledged through this Kickstarter will go directly to making PULSAR: Lost Colony. Below is a tentative budget for the Kickstarter funds (post taxes). NOTE: We've gotten a few comments requesting more information about the chart we provided especially when it comes to the Programming and Art side of things. Since we are an indie developer we work pretty frugally, the funds allocated towards programming and art will simply help cover living costs while we produce the game. The Kickstarter funds combined with our own personal savings will give us the ability to work on PULSAR full-time and give it our complete focus until it's completion. Leafy Games is a small, young independent game studio comprised of three biscuit-loving space cadets. We have made a number of early prototypes exploring various ideas and styles, all of which has helped us move in the direction where we now find ourselves. PULSAR: Lost Colony will be our first commercial product and the beginning of many great games we plan to release over the lifetime of this company. George Stoll - Artist Jennifer Feran - Writer Preston Stoll - Programmer Keep in mind we take our release date very seriously. If any stretch goals are reached, we will do our best to implement them by release but we do not guarantee they will be completed by Summer 2014. We are going to focus on the base game first and only when it is finished will we move on to these goals. If they are not implemented by release they will be included in a free update soon after. We hope you will understand! $50,000 (UNLOCKED) - Extended Soundtrack + Additional Playable Ship (civilian ship)
We are big fans of the Extended Soundtrack! We also threw in a new ship, for those who want an interesting challenge. We’ll create a playable civilian ship that is initially not well equipped for combat. You will need to use diplomacy and careful trading to survive for long! The crews who start in this ship will no doubt have the hardest time overcoming the challenges that await, this is definitely for those who want a bit of a challenge!BEREA, Ohio -- Cleveland Browns head coach Hue Jackson used the word win (or some variation) at least eight times during his press conference on Wednesday. That's more times than the word has been used to describe on-field results for his new team in a season since 2007.
That's not expected to change in 2016, nor is it fair to expect them to change so quickly. The loss of multiple starters in free agency and the reality that this will be a young team with many holes is a clear signal that those who fear a long season this fall aren't simply doomsayers.
Unsurprisingly, Jackson isn't buying into what those outside the organization are predicting in 2016. He can't, not if he expects his players to come in this off-season and buy into what he and his staff are selling.
"I don't get caught up in what everybody else thinks," Jackson said. "I can only worry about what this organization thinks and what our players think. We know we have a job to do and, like I said, we're just going |
eco-Apocalyptics, and their ritual tributes to the lesser gods of recycling, the compost heap, and the Parisian Convention.
Wall had the courage to defy the approved sanctities
Whenever there is a soft aura of agreeable thought on matters of policy—social and economic—it is imperative that there be a responsible dissenter at hand to irritate the lazy dogmas of the age, to add a little grit to the smooth sanctimonies of the politics of platitude. Such was the retiring premier.
Wall had the courage (and it takes courage in the era of Google Inquisitors) to defy the approved sanctities, none more so than the unctuous unanimities of climate revivalism, the primary pseudo-intellectualism of our time, an enthusiasm (in the class understanding of that term) rather than a rigour.
Time and again he gave evidence that he did not need, and surely did not seek, that esteem and welcome of all “right thinking people” in the policy, political and press establishments. His connection with the people, and his ready intuition of how people in less rarefied atmospheres work and live, gave real anchor to his judgment of ideas and the policies that flow from them. He knew the ground on which voters actually walk and had the instinctive determination to prioritize their views, apprehensions and day-to-day concerns. He wasn’t in politics for status, but service.
National PostThis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Supplemental digital content is available for this article. Direct URL citations appear in the printed text and are provided in the HTML and PDF versions of this article on the journal's Website ( www.md-journal.com ).
Conclusions: The clinical history, blood and urinary catecholamine and serotonin levels, and response to treatment strongly suggest that PRES was induced by duloxetine. Duloxetine should be added to the list of causes of PRES.
1 Introduction
Posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome (PRES) is a clinicoradiological entity that has been increasingly recognized since its first description by Hinchey et al[1] in 1996. We managed a patient who presented with impaired consciousness and myoclonus because of PRES complicating hypertensive encephalopathy. Duloxetine, a serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, had been recently added to her drug regimen. We discuss the possible causal contribution of this drug to development of hypertension and PRES.
2 Case presentation
An 82-year-old woman with a history of hypertension, bipolar disorder, exertional angina, and recent spinal stenosis surgery was found at home with acute left upper limb monoplegia and right central facial palsy, following up on severe headaches. One week earlier, depressive symptoms had prompted her to visit her usual physician, who had found a normal neurological examination and a blood pressure of 188/82 mm Hg and prescribed duloxetine hydrochloride to be added to her usual regimen of celiprolol, atorvastatin, clorazepate, pregabalin, and tramadol. Two days into treatment with duloxetine, she experienced a transient impairment in consciousness. Computed tomography (CT) of the brain was unremarkable (Fig. 1A and B). Five days later she was taken to the emergency department after the acute appearance of focal motor loss. At arrival, she was conscious and breathing normally, with a blood pressure of 240/110 mm Hg, heart rate of 76 beats per minute, and blood glucose of 134 mg/dL. The limb monoplegia and facial palsy noted at her home were unchanged, and there were no other neurological abnormalities. Emergent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed extensive, bilateral, high signal predominating in the temporal, parietal, occipital, and posterior fossa white matter on fluid-attenuated inversion recovery sequences (FLAIR), with corresponding low signal on T1 sequences (Fig. 1B and C). The cortical gray matter was normal. Diffusion-weighted MRI and magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) showed no vascular abnormalities.
Her neurological status deteriorated rapidly to a coma with a Glasgow Coma Scale score of 7; bilateral mydriasis; downgaze eye deviation; and diffuse abdominal, palpebral, and distal myoclonus for 30 minutes. Prompt anticonvulsant therapy consisted of intravenous clonazepam (1 mg) followed by intravenous phenobarbital (1000 mg). The myoclonus stopped but the coma remained unchanged. She was promptly intubated and mechanically ventilated. Simultaneously, the hypertensive crisis was managed with intravenous nicardipine (up to 4 mg/h). Her blood pressure stabilized at about 145/55 mmHg with oral urapidil hydrochloride 90 mg/d. Her anticonvulsant treatment was changed to levetiracetam. She recovered and was extubated on day 3 and discharged to the neurological ward on day 6.
Laboratory tests showed no metabolic disturbances. Serum duloxetine was found below lower limit of quantification after 5 days post dose. During the first 2 days in the intensive care unit, findings were normal from urinary assays of catecholamine metabolites, platelet serotonin (5-HT), and the urinary 5-HT metabolite 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid (5-HIAA) (normetanephrine 0.75 μmoL /24 h [normal range 0.4–2.1 μmoL/24 h], metanephrine 0.34 μmoL /24 h [normal range 0.2–1.0 μmoL/24 h], 5-HT 0.10 μmoL/L [normal range 0.55–1.70 μmol/L], and 5-HIAA 18 μmoL/24 h [normal <40 μmoL/24 h]). Thus, no cause of secondary hypertension was identified.
Follow-up evaluations showed complete resolution of the clinical (Fig. 2) and imaging (Fig. 1 E and F) abnormalities. The final diagnosis was duloxetine-related PRES.
3 Discussion
PRES is a clinicoradiological entity that presents as variable combinations of seizure activity, consciousness impairment, headaches, visual impairments, nausea/vomiting, and focal neurological signs.[1–3] Acute hypertension is a common, albeit not consistent, feature.[4] The cerebral imaging abnormalities are often symmetric and predominate in the posterior white matter. However, the cortex may be involved also. CT is easiest to perform for first-line imaging but is often normal, although nonspecific hypodensities in a topographic distribution suggestive of PRES may be visible.[5–7] MRI is superior over CT and is the key investigation for diagnosing PRES.[7] The FLAIR sequence typically shows regions of high signal indicating edema. T1-weighted images demonstrate low-intensity foci in the same regions. Diffusion-weighted MRI is usually normal but the apparent diffusion coefficient is increased in the absence of ischemic complications.[2] Finally, enhancement is seen in about half the cases.[7] Exposure to toxic agents (Supplemental Table 1, http://links.lww.com/MD/B182) and hypertension are the most common conditions associated with PRES. Finally, the diagnosis rests on a combination of suggestive clinical manifestations and radiological criteria occurring in an etiological setting consistent with PRES. In doubtful cases, the clinical and radiological improvement that occurs with appropriate treatment confirms the diagnosis. However, full reversibility is not consistently observed, and permanent complications or death may occur.[8–10] As illustrated by our case, the severity of the clinical manifestations varies and may require ICU management and life-supporting treatments. Emergency symptomatic treatment combining anticonvulsants and drugs to control the hypertension is in order, and causative factors must be corrected without delay.[9]
We searched PubMed for reports of PRES associated with exposure to serotonin reuptake inhibitors, using the indexing terms “serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” “hypertensive encephalopathy,” “posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome,” and/or “reversible posterior leukoencephalopathy syndrome.” The date limits were 1996 to March 2016 and the language limits were English, French, and Spanish. We identified only 1 case report, associated with the use of venlafaxine.[11] Patient had acute hypertensive crisis, impaired consciousness, and seizures, in keeping with the clinical manifestations in our patient. He recovered fully after withdrawal of the serotonin reuptake inhibitor and symptomatic treatment to control the seizure activity and hypertension. Follow-up cerebral imaging demonstrated full resolution of the FLAIR MRI abnormalities within 6 weeks.
The two main pathogenic hypotheses are cytotoxic edema and vasogenic edema.[12] Interestingly, both mechanisms may be set in motion by serotonin reuptake inhibitors.[13] Excess serotonin not only exerts proinflammatory effects,[14] but also directly induces contraction of the vascular smooth muscle cells and excessive capillary permeability.[15,16] These actions may impair blood–brain barrier function, thereby producing the vasogenic and extracellular edema that characterizes the hypertensive encephalopathy seen in PRES.[2]
Several differential diagnoses may deserve discussion in patients who experience neurological events while taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors.[17,18] The first is serotonin syndrome, a triad of mental changes (confusion and/or agitation), neuromuscular hyperactivity (tremor, inducible ocular and/or limb clonus, myoclonus, and/or hyperreflexia), and autonomic hyperactivity (diaphoresis and/or temperature elevation above 38°C). The diagnosis relies on the Hunter Serotonin Toxicity Criteria described by Dunkley et al[19] in 2003. This syndrome may be induced when patients take simultaneously several drugs stimulating the serotonin receptors leading to drug–drug interactions. Several agents have been potentially incriminated. Among them are antimigraine agents, triptans, serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, lithium, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, buspirone, antiparkinsonian agents, analgesics (e.g., tramadol) and even some antibiotics.[18] Symptoms may start as early as 6 hours after the first drug dose.[20] The treatment is nonspecific and combines immediate discontinuation of the offending drug and emergent symptomatic measures appropriate for the severity of the manifestations. The second differential diagnosis is drug discontinuation syndrome, a cause of various nonspecific neurological signs that are often benign but can occasionally mimic serious conditions such as stroke.[21] The signs usually resolve after the transient administration of a different serotonin reuptake inhibitor. The third diagnosis is a serious complication of serotonin reuptake inhibitors known as reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome, a clinicoradiological entity that causes severe headaches and can be revealed by seizures or focal neurological deficits.[22] The diagnosis relies on the cerebral angiography finding of segmental narrowing and dilation of 1 or more cerebral arteries. A full recovery is usually achieved within 3 months after drug discontinuation and the initiation of symptomatic measures (analgesics, anticonvulsants, and antihypertensive drugs when indicated).[23] Vasodilators may be helpful in the most severe cases. Complications include intracerebral bleeding and/or cerebral infarction or even PRES in 9% of cases.[22] Fatal cases are exceedingly rare.[24]
In our patient, neither the initial clinical presentation nor the levels of platelet serotonin and catecholamine metabolites supported a diagnosis of serotonin syndrome. The plasma duloxetine level was not consistent with an overdose. MRA findings were unremarkable, and cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome was rapidly discarded.
4 Conclusion
The data from our patient strongly suggest a diagnosis of PRES induced by duloxetine. This agent deserves to be added to the list of causes of PRES. Early recognition of PRES and prompt management combining causative agent withdrawal and appropriate symptomatic measures are required to ensure full resolution of this potentially severe or even fatal condition.
5 Consent
Written informed consent was obtained from the patient for publication of this Case Report.
Acknowledgment
The authors thank A. Wolfe for helping to prepare the manuscript.If you studied the traditional sort of biology, you’re probably carrying around an unfortunate prejudice.
You see terrestrial habitats as a simplified nutrients-and-energy pyramid. At the bottom are green plants, feeding on sunlight, carbon dioxide and soil water and minerals. Next layer up on the pyramid is the herbivore mob: leaf and stem eaters, sapsuckers, root nibblers, seed and fruit gobblers. Above these green feeders are a couple of layers of predators. And that about sums up the world, right?
Wrong. That’s only part of the world, and a small, very specialised part of it, too. To begin with, most animals can’t eat green food. Herbivores are dietary specialists among the insects, mollusks, birds and mammals. Your average green leaf or stem doesn’t show much herbivore damage, and for good reason. It’s mainly water boxed in by cellulose and other structural carbohydrates, which are impossible or extremely hard for animals to digest. Other nutrients are present, but at low concentrations. You need to eat a great mass of indigestible green stuff to get a decent return of elements like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and calcium. As for animals eating wood, which makes up most of the biomass in a forest – well, there are termites, and…um…termites…
The truth is that in the real world outside the biology classroom, only a tiny proportion of terrestrial primary production goes through the stomachs of the few evolutionary lineages brave enough to tackle what green plants produce. In any terrestrial habitat, the great bulk of primary production just does *not* get eaten. It sits, instead, at the bottom of a very different food pyramid. I call it the Dead Plants Society (DPS), as opposed to the Green Feeders Guild (GFG).
In the absence of fire, all that uneaten primary production is first attacked by fungi and bacteria. By ‘attacked’ I mean ‘converted from low-nutrient indigestibles to concentrated yummies’, i.e. fungal and bacterial bodies. Stacked on top of this microbial layer in the pyramid are microbivorous layers of nematodes, mites, springtails, earthworms, millipedes and other soil animals. On top of those are predators – but picture ‘centipede’, not ‘eagle’.
The GFG and DPS animal communities differ in many ways. To begin with, in any given habitat the GFG has very high species diversity (think of plant-eating insects) but low higher-taxon diversity, while the DPS has great higher-taxon diversity (lots of strange sorts of animals), but low species diversity. Next, GFG herbivores tend to specialise on particular plants, while DPS microbivores will eat anything that’s rotting nicely. There are also a lot of winged GFG members (‘gotta find that particular plant I like…’), whereas almost no DPS members have wings, at least in their younger, feeding stages. There’s an architectural difference, too. The GFG extends well up in the air, to ca. 100 m in some tall forests, while the DPS is largely confined to the ground.
Then there’s the matter of heritage. The earliest DPS fossils are of mites, springtails and millipedes, and they’re more than 400 million years old, from a time when terrestrial vegetation was mainly mossy and ground-hugging. The first solid evidence for green feeding (early insects with spores in their guts) appears much later in the fossil record, from coal swamp times. The DPS is vastly older than the GFG, and when you handle richly organic soil you’re holding animal communities which are spectacularly ancient and robust. You can almost imagine a springtail thinking: ‘Seen the dinosaurs come and go, mammals are nearly done. Wonder what great lumbering dopes we’ll see in the next 100 million years? Yum, love these hyphae with yeast sprinkles!’A campaign aide for former President Obama said Sunday that President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s use of Twitter could be his undoing.
“Having a full-out meltdown on Twitter is not helping his case. Generally if you’re doing all caps and exclamation points, it is the opposite of inspiring confidence,” Lis Smith, former director of rapid response for Obama's campaign, said on MSNBC.
“What’s sort of ironic about this whole thing is Donald Trump always likes to say Twitter helped make him become president, but Twitter could actually now be the undoing of his presidency,” she continued.
Spoke w/@davidgura about how @realdonaldTrump's use of twitter, once seen as a strength, is turning into serious liability w/r/t investigations https://t.co/hZYhmKatOK — Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith) December 3, 2017
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Trump’s tweets have come under particular scrutiny after former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
"I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies," Trump tweeted on Saturday.
"It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!" he added.
The tweet caused shockwaves, as legal experts suggested that if Trump knew that Flynn had lied to the FBI and then asked James Comey to drop the investigation, as the former FBI director has testified to Congress, it could amount to obstruction of justice.
Trump's personal lawyer, John Dowd, reportedly wrote the tweet, and on Sunday said it was "my mistake."
On Sunday morning, Trump again took to Twitter to lash out, this time at the FBI. He said the bureau's reputation is in "tatters" because of Comey, whom Trump fired in May.Oakland general manager Reggie McKenzie is adding another impact player to a free-agent haul that already includes guard Kelechi Osemele, cornerback Sean Smith and linebacker Bruce Irvin.
The Raiders have signed former Bengals safety Reggie Nelson, the team announced. Nelson's deal is a two-year contract worth up to $12 million, NFL Media Insider Ian Rapoport reported, via a source informed of the deal.
At No. 22, Nelson was the highest remaining player on Around The NFL's list of the Top 99 free agents. This signing means the Raiders have picked up four of the top 25 players available.
Nelson, 32, earned his first Pro Bowl selection in nine NFL seasons after tying for the league lead with eight interceptions last year. The Bengals are moving on because 2013 third-round pick Shawn Williams is ready to step into the starting lineup opposite George Iloka.
The addition of Nelson solidifies a secondary that not only struggled to contain tight ends last season, but also lost future Hall of Famer Charles Woodson to retirement.
By signing four high-caliber starters to round out his roster, McKenzie now has the luxury of taking the best player on the board in the upcoming draft rather than reaching to fill positions of need.
Mixing in the new faces with an impressive young nucleus, the Raiders are a franchise on the rise, prepared to give the Broncos a run for the AFC West title in 2016.Ramallah: In coordinated raids at dawn on Tuesday, Israeli regime forces arrested relatives of two Palestinian suspects wanted for separate attacks on Monday in Tel Aviv and the West Bank, according to local Palestinian sources.
In Nablus, police detained the father and brothers of the alleged assailant who stabbed a 20-year-old Israeli soldier at a train station in Tel Aviv. The soldier died hours later from his injuries.
The suspect in the stabbing was identified as Nour Al Deen Abu Hashiyeh, 18.
In the West Bank town of Hebron, Israeli security forces arrested Jameel Al Hashlomun, the brother of Maher Al Hashlomun, who allegedly stabbed to death a 25-year-old woman and wounded two others near a Jewish colony.
The alleged attacker was admitted to a hospital in occupied Jerusalem after being shot by a colony security officer.
“Usually after a terrorist attack, a security operation is carried out and the relatives of the perpetrators are picked up to investigate the incident,” Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told Efe news agency.
The Israeli regime often demolishes the homes of family members of Palestinian attackers, a practice described as collective punishment by critics.
Israeli police have boosted their presence in Tel Aviv and occupied Jerusalem as security officials raised the alert level.Vilmar Mendonca, who has worked as a human resources manager for several companies in Brazil and has been living on the streets for a year and a half, gets ready to sleep on a park bench in front of the Santos Dumont airport in Rio de Janeiro
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Rio de Janeiro (AFP)
Vilmar Mendonca used to be a human resources director for several companies in Brazil. Now he is homeless, sleeping outdoors along with thousands of other victims of the country's economic crisis.
Mendonca lost his job in 2015 and for a while, he lived off his savings. But now, at age 58, he sleeps on a bench outside Santos Dumont Airport in Rio de Janeiro.
He leaves some of his stuff at a bank where he is a client, cleans up in public restrooms and lives off food handed out by charity organizations.
"It is a terrible situation but I have no choice," said Mendonca, a thin, divorced man who has no children, as he looks at job offers on his laptop using the airport's wifi.
He wears stylish glasses, a dress shirt and nice shoes. He does not at all look like one of the thousands of other homeless people in this city of six million.
In late 2016, the Rio city hall said there were 14,279 people living in the street -- triple the number in 2013.
Dozens of them have advanced degrees, including Mendonca, who studied business administration in Sao Paulo.
His plight reflects the sting of a recession that has taken Brazil's jobless ranks up to 13.5 million people and tarnished Rio, a city that just a year ago hosted the summer Olympic Games.
"When you are like this, no one wants to come near you," said Mendonca.
Like many in his situation, he has not told anyone how far he has fallen, still hoping it will be temporary.
During the day he exercises, reads in cafes and book stores, posts on Facebook -- where his photo shows him in a suit and tie -- and goes to job interviews where he competes against hundreds of younger candidates.
By night, he puts on simpler clothes and a hat to go unnoticed and stretches out on a bench outside the airport, near its security cameras.
"I try to stay on my own so as to remain focused because if I start to hang out with others, I might get into things I do not want, like alcohol, drugs or filth," he said.
- Unpaid civil servant -
The homeless population is an especially common sight in Rio's most popular tourist areas, including Copacabana and Ipanema.
In the old quarter, groups of up to 20 homeless people take up entire streets every night, sleeping on cardboard and wrapped in blankets.
Most are black and come from poor backgrounds. Many are drug addicts, with psychological or family problems.
Among their ranks is a mix of people from street vendors to retired civil servants like Gilson Alves.
Alves, 69, worked for 35 years as an X-ray technician in Rio's public hospitals. But his pension payments were late and he ended up selling his belongings and giving up his rented apartment.
The tall, kindly looking man says he never had an easy life. At five, he was run over by a street car and lost a leg.
Two months ago he ended up on the street and the bag containing everything he owned was stolen. He was taken in by social services and transferred to one of the city's 64 shelters, which have room for 2,200 people.
"I feel sad, humiliated, struck down for having put in so many years and then being here because of this government," said Alves, who shares a room with six people of around his age.
- 'Critical' -
"The situation is critical," said Rio's social aid secretary, Teresa Bergher.
Many Brazilians came to Rio looking for work when the city hosted the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. But today oil-producing Rio state's coffers are empty, hit by corruption, low crude global prices and the Olympic bill.
Former state governor Sergio Cabral, whose 2007-2014 administration was crucial to preparing the World Cup and Olympics, was convicted of embezzling millions of dollars and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Part of the money recovered from him was used to pay back wages to 150,000 retired civil servants.
But the accounts are still in the red and help for the most vulnerable is insufficient.
"The swift increase in the number of homeless people in Rio is due mainly to the economic crisis but also to the lack of public policy," said citizens' ombudsman Carla Beatriz Nunes.
To fill the vacuum, networks of volunteers from churches and NGOs provide social services, serve breakfast and some even offer yoga classes to homeless people.
"Those of who are paying for the crisis are the ones with less money and less education," said Robson, a 43-year-old jobless construction worker.
© 2017 AFPYahoo wants its readers to be more connected via its latest mobile app.
Called Yahoo Newsroom, the app offers a personalized feed of news stories. Rather than simply having articles ranked by clicks and views and by the company's own editorial curation, the algorithm is influenced by a user's behavior and by what they choose to follow — not unlike other popular social networks.
"I see this as Reddit for the masses," Simon Khalaf, Yahoo's senior vice president of publishing products, told Mashable."It’s not cultish, and this is the wedge that we believe Snapchat and Instagram has not focused on. It's a very strong community feel."
The release comes as Yahoo is investigating a hack of at least 500 million user accounts and Verizon is still finalizing its acquisition of the company's core assets. It also follows years of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer recasting Yahoo as a mobile-first business yet struggling to release any influential apps.
Unlike other social networks, Yahoo Newsroom is dedicated to news. "There's no social pressure. There's no vanity. It's all about true news. This is not hiding between baby pictures that you just have to like," Khalaf said.
Image: yahoo
Yahoo Newsroom has three newsfeeds, Khalaf said. The first "My Feed" is the main newsfeed influenced by what you choose to follow. "Explore" is categorized by topics. The third is your personal profile that displays what you choose to like and share.
App users can choose to follow topics, or what Yahoo Newsroom dubs "vibes." In addition to the dozen categories on the Yahoo homepage, such as finance, tech and politics, the app features hundreds of more niche categories, such as U.S. news, artificial intelligence and Hillary Clinton.
The app also encourages users to share their own stories. App users can search through Yahoo's feeds or post their own links. Users can then re-post, comment and like other posts.
The vibes do not have any human moderators, yet. To prevent fake news from appearing, Yahoo has several tools in places. "There are a lot of sources that we actually blacklist, but there's also ranking signals that we use. We call it internally, the gravitas. That's a dimension that we give to the algorithm to reject low gravitas or rank very, very low, stories that don't have what we call gravitas," Khalaf said.
Image: yahoo
Yahoo Newsroom isn't a brand new app. It's a redesign of its old Yahoo app, which offered little more than what was already in the mobile web experience.
The team behind the project said they've been working on the idea since January as a way to further support its 300 million monthly unique visitors, tens of millions of whom comment and share articles, and to attract a younger audience.
"The impetus for adding community-related features and the ability to create posts and start conversations, we really believe is geared toward a younger audience that expects that capability today. They want to participate in the conversation, not just consume it," said Dave Bottoms, vice president of product management for global homepages and Yahoo Media Experiences.
The team plans to introduce more sharing and commenting features in the future, such as stickers and other "fun stuff," in an effort to lure those in Generation Z, Bottoms said.
That may be difficult, but not impossible.
"Yahoo's app strategy is pretty clear, be relevant with users in Yahoo's strongest user categories," Johnny Won, managing director at tech consultancy Hyperstop, wrote in an email. "While millennials might not need yet-another-news app and get their news from Twitter amongst bits of vitriol, Yahoo's older audience of homepage and app users are probably going to be enthusiastic about another well designed Yahoo experience."Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has announced an August 23 release date for the Lucifer: The Complete First Season DVD and Blu-ray box sets. In doing so, they’ve also announced some extras and box art.
Here’s the press release; if you’d like to pre-order Lucifer Season 1 on DVD from Amazon.com you’ll be helping KSiteTV! Amazon will honor any lower price between now and the August release, making this a good deal!
From Powerhouse Producers Jerry Bruckheimer Television
Lucifer: The Complete First Season
Extras Include Featurettes, Character Profiles, Comic-Con Panel, Deleted Scenes and a Gag Reel!
Satisfy Your Deepest Desires and Own It On Blu-rayTM & DVD August 23, 2016
BURBANK, CA (May 25, 2016) – Just in time for the second season, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment brings you the “hottest” new series with the release of Lucifer: The Complete First Season on Blu-rayTM & DVD on August 23, 2016. Lucifer delivers over 8 million Total Viewers weekly, and is the #3 scripted series on FOX with Households and Total Viewers*. Fans will feel the burn as they binge on all 13 devilishly delightful episodes from the first season, and indulge in the gripping extras including the 2015 Comic-Con panel, featurettes, character profiles, deleted scenes and a gag reel.
*Source: Nielsen National TV View L+7 US AA%; excluding repeats, specials, sports, movies, and <5 TCs; Season To-Date = 9/21/15-3/20/16
Lucifer: The Complete First Season, on DVD from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, will be available at all major retailers, and is priced to own at $39.99 SRP. Lucifer: The Complete First Season comes to Blu-rayTM courtesy of Warner Archive, and will include all bonus features on the DVD. The Blu-ray releases will also be available starting August 23, 2016 at Amazon.com and all online retailers.
Based on the character from DC Entertainment’s Vertigo comic, Lucifer is bored and unhappy as the Lord of Hell, and has resigned his throne and retired to the City of Angels where he is indulging in a few of his favorite things — wine, women and song. When a beautiful pop star is brutally murdered before his eyes, he feels something awaken deep within him – for the first time in roughly 10 billion years. Is he actually capable of feelings for a human being? The very thought disturbs him — as well as his best friend and confidante, Mazikeen (aka Maze), a fierce demon in the form of a beautiful young woman. The murder attracts the attention of LAPD homicide detective Chloe Decker, who finds herself both repulsed and fascinated by Lucifer. As they work together to solve the murder, Lucifer is struck by Chloe’s inherent goodness. Used to dealing with the absolute worst of humanity, he begins to wonder if there’s hope yet. Maybe everyone’s got a chance for redemption. Even the Devil.
The series stars Tom Ellis (Rush, Merlin), Lauren German (Chicago Fire), DB Woodside (Suits, 24), Lesley-Ann Brandt (The Librarians), Kevin Alejandro (Southland, True Blood), Scarlett Estevez (Daddy’s Home), Kevin Rankin (Dallas Buyers Club) and Rachael Harris (The Hangover). Based upon the characters created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth and Mike Dringenberg for Vertigo from DC Entertainment, Lucifer is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Television in association with Warner Bros. Television. Tom Kapinos (Californication) developed the series and serves as executive consultant. Returning for a second season on FOX, the series is executive produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (CSI franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean films), Jonathan Littman (The Amazing Race, CSI franchise), Joe Henderson (White Collar, Almost Human), Ildy Modrovich (CSI: Miami, Californication) and Len Wiseman (Underworld films).
DVD SPECIAL FEATURES
• Lucifer: 2015 Comic-Con Panel
• Character Profile: Amenadiel
• Character Profile: Linda
• Character Profile: Chloe Decker
• Character Profile: Dan
• Devilish Duo
• Lucifer Morningstar
• Deleted Scenes
• Gag ReelYesterday we had the nerve to criticize a high school t-shirt depicting a woman having sex with horses. Thanks to some helpful commenters, many of them students at the high school, we learned what losers we were for doing so!
We've since learned that "the underground shirt" (one student helpfully clarifies: "for all of your old people that means no one except students knew and the way you got them was an 'under the table' transaction") is a tradition at Houston's Memorial High, in which a group of seniors designs a T-shirt denigrating rival Stratford High in some sexual way, and then sells it in secret. Students apparently wear the "underground shirt" to the big Memorial-Stratford football game under their regular shirts, presumably warmed by the feeling of keeping bestiality close to their hearts. According to the Memorial High students and alums who commented on our post (not all were approved), everybody at Memorial pretty much thinks the shirts are awesome and hilarious. Of course, while no student would admit to buying a shirt on KPRC-TV (clip above), two female students criticized this year's shirt, saying "no girl should be like that on a shirt," and "I think it's offensive."
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But no matter — the real point, as many commenters have hastened to tell us, is that we are humorless feminazis for denigrating their cherished apparel. The comments on yesterday's post offer a veritable Hall of Fame of anti-feminist clichés. Their vitriol reveals that misogyny starts young, and its similarity to more established outlets of feminist-hate shows that it never really grows up! We've selected four of our favorites (plus one bonus).
1. Feminists Can't Take A Joke.
How about we all stop and think about this for a second? Do we really, honestly believe that the shirt was created with the intent to degrade women? No. I am a senior at Memorial High School, and I find it disturbing that there are actually people in this world that cannot comprehend a simple, meaningless joke.
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In fact, we at Jezebel and, I'm pretty sure, the girls who criticized the shirt to KPRC, are aware that it was intended as a joke. We are also aware that some jokes are degrading to women, and that we are not obligated to find these jokes funny. A joke is not a magic form of speech that is above all criticism. Ann Bartow, author of the original Feminist Law Professors post that broke this story open, helpfully elaborates:
As far as the shirts being "a joke" I just have to ask what is funny about images of sexual assault. There are a lot of powerful and creative ways to mock an opponent without leveraging gender and rape. And given it's a football rivalry at issue, in which all the players are male, why the focus on raping cheerleaders? Maybe if the Memorial students learned about the ways that rape has been used as a tool of terror and genocide (see e.g. WWII, Bosnia, the Congo) they wouldn't find rape imagery so funny.
2. Some Girls Like [X], So It Must Be Okay (Also Known As The Tucker Max Theorem).
Just as many girls, if not more girls than guys, buy and wear the shirt. I was just interviewed by major Houston news station up at the school, and immediately afterwards a sophomore girl approached me and asked if I knew where she could get one.
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Much as men sometimes differ in their opinions on important issues, women are also capable of disapproving of something that some women like. I, for instance, find Ann Coulter offensive. The fact that she, a woman, likes herself and believes her views are accurate does not make my viewpoint invalid. Nor does the fact that some women enjoy wearing a certain shirt bar other women from being upset by it. I should also note that what women tell men, especially in high school, about what does or does not offend them may be quite different from what they actually feel.
3. Criticizing Misogyny Is A Waste Of Time.
Chill people, find better things to do with your time and real issues to fight. The fact that you are all freaking out about this is simply pathetic. Get a fucking life!
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This particular commenter didn't offer any examples of "better things to do with our time," nor did s/he indicate whether leaving anonymous comments would be one of them. Putting aside the irony of criticizing, on a blog, people who criticize things on blogs, we should note that anti-feminists usually consider criticism "pathetic" only if it is aimed at things they themselves support. Insulting women is called "free speech."
4. Feminists Have No Lives, But Many Cats.
I feel that the people getting over worked about something like this truly need to find something better to get there panties bunched up about. As for the feminist law professors have fun cooking dinner tonight telling each one of your 9 cats how your day was and then watching re-runs of Growing Pains, and inspiring romantic comedies as well as dreaming of the life that could have been had |
but once we had our formulas - there were six different mix designs - the real work of mixing and compacting could begin. It is much more complicated to create a wall of multiple colors and variable lift depth than a monochromatic wall of uniform lifts. Each mix pile was labeled and the equipment operators had written instructions on when to change colors. Khyber had his list of lift heights and where to introduce the infusion lines. And remember, each of the four panels was a different combination of color and strata to create the overall composition of the mural. This was definitely not a blow and go type of install. It’s more like painting a watercolor landscape while wearing a blindfold.That month he had canceled his participation at a conference in New Delhi where Rushdie was expected, citing the offense caused by “The Satanic Verses” to Muslims worldwide. Rushdie, in turn, suggested Khan was a “dictator in waiting,” comparing his looks with those of Libya ’s former dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
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“What is he talking about? What is he talking about?” Khan started, “I always hated his writing. He always sees the ugly side of things. He is — what is the word Jews use? — a ‘self-hating’ Muslim.
“Why can’t the West understand? When I first went to England, I was shocked to see the depiction of Christianity in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian.’ This is their way. But for us Muslims, the holy Koran and the prophet, peace be upon him, are sacred. Why can’t the West accept that we have different ways of looking at our religions?
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“Anyway,” Khan said in a calmer voice, “I am called an Islamic fundamentalist by Rushdie. My critics in Pakistan say I am a Zionist agent. I must be doing something right.”
Those adept at playing Pakistan’s never-ending game of political musical chairs have begun to take note of Khan. His party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice, or P.T.I., as it is called), has never won more than a single seat in Pakistan’s 342-member National Assembly. But a recent Pew opinion poll reveals Khan to be the country’s most popular politician by a large margin, and his growing appeal has drawn together two rivals from the establishment parties — the suavely patrician figure of Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister from 2008 to 2011, and Javed Hashmi, an older street-fighting politician from Punjab, Pakistan’s politically dominant province — who are now, in Khan’s hastily improvised hierarchy, vice chairman and president of the P.T.I. respectively.
Khan’s campaign strategy is simple: he has promised to uproot corruption within 90 days, end the country’s involvement in America’s war on terror and institute an Islamic welfare state. His quest for a moral Pakistani state and a righteous politics is clearly informed by his own private journey. Famous in the 1980s as a glamorous cricketer, he is at pains to affirm his Islamic identity in his new autobiography, “Pakistan: A Personal History.” A rising politician’s careful self-presentation, the book fails to mention his friendship with Mick Jagger, his frequenting of London’s nightclubs in the 1980s and other instances of presumably un-Islamic deportment, like the series of attractive women with whom he was linked by racy British tabloids. It does devote one chapter to Jemima Goldsmith, the daughter of a wealthy British businessman, Jimmy Goldsmith, whom he married in 1995 — he was 43, she was 21 — but this serves largely as a backdrop for his early, self-sacrificing immersion in politics.
His political enemies in Pakistan, he writes, used Jemima Khan’s partly Jewish ancestry to depict him as a Lothario with dubious Zionist affiliations — attacks that, Khan claims, made Pakistan a taxing place for Jemima and eventually led to their divorce. The marriage ended in 2004. Khan’s two sons now live with their mother in London, but he and his wife have remained friends. In an article in The Independent, Jemima revealed that Khan stays with her mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, when in London, and noted that Khan told her not to worry about how their marriage is depicted in the book: “You come across as you always wanted to — Joan of Arc.”
References to Allah’s grace cropped up early on in Khan’s public utterances, but they multiplied as he struggled to break into Pakistani politics. He now casts himself as the archetypal confused sinner who has discovered the restorative certainties of religion and is outraged over the decadence of his own class. “In today’s Lahore and Karachi,” he writes, “rich women go to glitzy parties in Western clothes chauffeured by men with entirely different customs and values.” His avowals of Islam, his identification with the suffering masses and his attacks on his affluent, English-speaking peers have long been mocked in the living rooms of Lahore and Karachi as the hypocritical ravings of “Im the Dim” and “ Taliban Khan” — the two favored monikers for him. (His villa is commonly cited as evidence of his own unalloyed elitism.) Nevertheless, Khan’s autobiography creates a cogent picture out of his — and Pakistan’s — clashing identities. There is the proud young man of Pashtun blood born into Pakistan’s Anglicized feudal and bureaucratic elite — an elite that disdained their poor, Urdu-speaking compatriots. There is the student and cricketer in 1970s Britain, when racism was endemic and even Pakistanis considered themselves inferior to their former white masters. Then we meet the brilliant cricket captain who inspired a world-beating team; the D.I.Y. philanthropist who pursued his dream of building a world-class cancer hospital in Pakistan; the jaded middle-aged sybarite who found a wise Sufi mentor; the political neophyte who awakened to social and economic injustice; and finally the experienced politician, who after 15 years of having his faith tested by electoral failure is now convinced of his destiny as Pakistan’s savior.
The day before our evening walk on his estate, I sat in the living room of Khan’s Moorish-style villa, where Pakistan’s future was being plotted by young men in designer shalwar kameezes and sunglasses, huddled mock-conspiratorially in small groups, and older politicians sprawled on sofas on the long veranda. The country’s broiling summer was approaching, and violent street protests over power failures had erupted in many Pakistani cities, adding to the general unease fed by a floundering economy, gang warfare in Karachi, sectarian killings of Shiites, the C.I.A. ’s drone attacks in the northwestern tribal areas and the drip-drip of revelations about a defiantly venal ruling class.
Khan was running nearly three hours late for a rally in the northwestern town of Mianwali — one of his mass-contact campaigns that had in recent months galvanized his tiny party. But no one at the villa seemed at all worried by the delay. After all, Khan is offering nothing less than revolution of the kind that has swept the Arab world, a “tsunami,” in his own ill-chosen metaphor.
After many attempts, he has succeeded in provoking a popular response now, perhaps because Pakistan’s institutions are suffering their deepest crisis of legitimacy. Contempt-of-court charges were filed this year against two prime ministers. And the debased ancien régime Khan rails against is gaudily personified by Pakistan’s leaders past and present: Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator from 1999 to 2008, who now lives in exile in London and Dubai ; the current president, Asif Ali Zardari, who after the assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, conveniently unearthed her last will declaring him her political heir, then appointed his teenage son, Bilawal, chairman of his party, the Pakistan Peoples Party (P.P.P.); and Nawaz Sharif, who, exalted to prime-minister in 1990 by Pakistan’s all-powerful military establishment and then banished by it into long exile in 1999, has re-emerged as the leader of the country’s main opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League — Nawaz ( PML -N).
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Outside on the veranda, the P.T.I. chieftains, Qureshi and Hashmi, were confabulating with Hamid Mir, an influential TV anchor — he interviewed Osama bin Laden both before and after 9/11 — with a checkered political history. Once known for his links to Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex, Mir has lately reinvented himself as a critic of the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (I.S.I.) — the country’s dreaded intelligence agency, accused by the United States of supporting anti-American militants in Afghanistan. Army rule ostensibly ended with the enforced departure of Musharraf in 2008, but the men in uniform, according to Mir, were still manipulating things behind the scenes.
Snatches of the conversation between Mir and the P.T.I. chiefs drifted through to the living room. Mir was saying that Khan’s party must dispel the growing impression that it was an I.S.I. front. Mir failed to mention that it was he who tweeted recently that the head of the I.S.I. at the time, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, was responsible for the text messages many politicians received asking them to support Khan.
Suddenly, the many separate conversations in the living room and veranda ceased, Qureshi and Hashmi stood to attention and even Mir, who hosted Khan often on his TV show “Capital Talk,” looked a bit star-struck, as the P.T.I. leader finally bounded in, all coiled energy and purpose.
Khan had returned late from a rally in Sialkot the previous night, but his gym-toned frame, encased in a dark gray shalwar kameez, radiated the supreme assurance of an athlete configured for routine success. In 2009, I ran into him on a flight from Lahore to London and was impressed by his unflagging drive. Widely regarded then as a miserable failure in politics, he seemed eager to claim proximity to powerful men and large events. During a visit to the United States the previous year, he met with Senator Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and told him how the long opposition to the American war in Afghanistan stoked extremism in Pakistan. He said he expected Barack Obama to understand that the Pashtun tribes, fighting foreign occupiers of their land, would never be vanquished. He understood their mind-set: after all, he himself belonged to a Pashtun tribe.
Khan’s intense nationalism, aroused on cricket fields in the late ’70s when darker-skinned cricketers from the former British Empire finally began to beat white teams regularly, was whetted in the 1990s by the anti-West rhetoric of Asian leaders like Malaysia ’s Mahathir Mohamad and Singapore ’s Lee Kuan Yew, and then by the post-9/11 perception that the United States had bribed and bullied Pakistan into its misconceived war on terror and was now controlling the country’s internal affairs. “The Musharraf years were so shameful,” he told me. “The Westoxified Pakistanis have been selling their souls and killing their own people for a few million dollars. And then the Americans come in with shady deals to bring Benazir Bhutto back and let crooked people like Zardari go scot-free. I was so disgusted, and if I hadn’t been in politics I would have left Pakistan.”
Moving now through the crowd of his supporters gathered at his estate, Khan struggled to adopt the politician’s pose of humility. After quick salaam aleikums, he sprang across the villa’s courtyard to his gleaming black S.U.V., Mir, Hashmi and Qureshi struggling to keep pace with him. Within minutes, the convoy led by Khan’s Land Cruiser was hurtling down the hill on narrow, potholed roads, past walled mansions and small dark shops, to the highway to Rawalpindi and the tribal borderlands of Mianwali.
I sat with Anila Khawaja, Khan’s British-born international media “coordinator.” A vivacious woman in her early 40s, Khawaja was one of the many expatriate Pakistanis either bankrolling or volunteering for Khan’s political campaign. They, along with the tony youth of Lahore and Karachi, hold up one end of Khan’s diverse fan base that also includes lower-middle-class youth from small Punjabi towns and the tribal regions of the northwestern Khyber -Pakhtunkhwa province. “Imran speaks our language,” Khawaja told me in her British-accented English.
But it was becoming clear that few other people in his party did. I had heard about her constant struggles with the P.T.I.’s frustratingly inefficient, all-male organization, and the heartburn generated among Khan’s stalwart supporters by the rapid promotion of such opportunistic late-joiners as Hashmi and Qureshi. Khawaja had wanted me to travel with Khan to the rally in Sialkot but was overruled by her male seniors. They wanted Khan to themselves at all times, crowding into his car, jostling to be photographed next to him at his rallies.
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I had heard similar complaints from other members of the party: that the P.T.I. was a one-man show, with a superstar chairman self-absorbedly pied-pipering a gaggle of squabbling egos and craven flatterers. For the moment, however, any anxieties about lack of internal democracy were balanced by the routinely renewed spectacle of mass support for the P.T.I. In between tweeting from Khan’s account (“Such beautiful scenery!”), Khawaja pointed excitedly to the crowds of young men on motorcycles that awaited us at the approaches to small towns along our route; waving the green-and-red flag of the P.T.I., they raced Khan’s car at dangerous speeds, trying to catch his eye.
Driving to Khan’s rally in Sialkot from Lahore the previous day, I saw car and motorcycle convoys that extended for miles, freezing traffic whenever they stopped. The forests of posters and banners in passing bazaars all featured Khan, photoshopped with Pakistan’s revered founding fathers, the poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and the politician Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and dressed in a variety of clothing, from solemn high-collar jackets to Western bluejeans and leather jackets. Drowning out the faded signs and symbols of Pakistan’s other political parties, they pointed to Khan’s extravagant spending in anticipation of the general elections, scheduled for next year.
Big money had clearly arranged for the buntings. But it had not paid for, not entirely at any rate, the crowds in Sialkot; and the P.T.I. had failed to anticipate their size and intensity. I squeezed into the stadium where the rally was held by the narrowest of gates, tearing my shirt in the mini-stampede and curtailing the arc of a policeman’s offhandedly swung baton. Most of the young rallygoers, dressed in counterfeit brand-name jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, had traveled to Sialkot on their own, unlike some of their upper-middle-class peers in Lahore and Karachi, who were bused into Khan’s massive rallies in October and December. They sat patiently through the long and often boring warm-up speeches, waiting for Khan’s turn at the microphone, and then did not fail to cheer their hero’s own lackluster invocations of the country’s founding fathers, Iqbal and Jinnah.
Talking to the young fans, I discovered an almost-mystical reverence for Khan. Many of them were cricket enthusiasts who recalled Khan’s exploits with awe, especially his captaincy of the team that won Pakistan the Cricket World Cup in 1992 — the country’s greatest sporting success. They also knew of his philanthropic work — the cancer hospital in Lahore and a university near Mianwali. Pressed on policy specifics, they went blank, claiming that an honest leader like Khan was all that was needed to turn Pakistan around, and it could be done in 90 days.
For many in this new generation of Pakistanis — more than 60 percent of the population is below age 25 — there is little choice between the untried and evidently incorruptible Khan and such repeatedly discredited leaders as Zardari and Sharif. His long and uncompromising opposition to American presence in the region not only pleases assorted Islamic radicals; it also echoes a deep Pakistani anger about the C.I.A.’s drone attacks, whose frequency has increased under the Obama administration. Expatriate and local businessmen, tormented by the stagnating economy (while neighboring India has boomed), line up to donate money for his massive rallies (though Khan himself does not believe, he told me, in “neoliberal capitalism”). Many rich Pakistanis, like Walid Iqbal, the Harvard-educated, Porsche -driving grandson of Pakistan’s spiritual founder, whose embrace of the P.T.I. in November had, he told me, made “national news,” see Khan as someone they themselves would like to be: devoutly Muslim, proudly nationalist, sophisticated, successful. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s private media, which include several raucously partisan news channels, help obscure Khan’s obvious handicaps — the P.T.I.’s lack of a political base in large provinces like Sindh, a P.P.P. stronghold — with extensive coverage of his made-for-television rallies. And it is not inconceivable that the army and the I.S.I. — or elements within — have spotted a likely winner and potential partner. Najam Sethi, the editor of a prominent English-language weekly, The Friday Times, which for years ran a satirical column titled “Im the Dim,” told me that various known sympathizers of the I.S.I. had asked him to support Khan.
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Like all populist politicians, Khan appears to offer something to everyone. Yet the great differences between his constituencies — socially liberal, upper-middle-class Pakistanis and the deeply conservative residents of Pakistan’s tribal areas — seem irreconcilable. The only women I could see during the Sialkot rally were on the remote stage, wives of local politicians and businessmen, the sun glinting off their big sunglasses. At the rally in Mianwali, huge clouds of dust kicked up by tens of thousands of men bleached the reds and greens of the flags and banners, and the speeches alternated with earsplitting eruptions of P.T.I.’s theme music, Dil Nek Ho Neeyat Saaf To Ho Insaf Kahay Imran Khan (“A good heart and pure intentions will deliver justice, says Imran Khan”). Reports later emerged of many women at the rally, but I could only see one, on the overcrowded stage. She was a P.T.I. activist, another recent convert, belonging to one of the feudal and clan networks that still largely determine who will vote for whom in Pakistan’s elections. There were many such local impresarios of bloc voting: the uncle of one politician I spoke to defeated Khan in his very first election in 1997; he had now brought, he claimed, a 25-kilometer-long convoy of supporters from his tribe to the rally. These traditional middlemen of Pakistani politics were all keen to catch the eye of the TV anchor Hamid Mir, who sat in the front row, seemingly untroubled when the speakers pointed to his presence as an endorsement of the P.T.I.
Khawaja, covering her head with a thin shawl she said she had packed especially for conservative Mianwali, kept working Khan’s twitter feed: “Such enthusiasm esp from youth! P.T.I.’s wave rides high!” Khan himself seemed aloof from the cheering crowds and the party members keen to be near him as he sat, in reading glasses, marking up his speech. Given the setting, a region adjacent to the tribal areas where the C.I.A.’s drones are perennially hovering, I expected more rhetorical onslaughts against the United States and loud avowals of Islamic piety. (Next month, Khan plans to lead a massive protest march through Waziristan, accompanied by women from the antiwar American group Code Pink, as well as armed members of Pashtun tribes.) Khan, who claims that Obama is “worse than Bush,” has been known to pray in public during his rallies, and one of his party’s many vice presidents had in recent days shared a platform with Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist organization implicated in the attacks on Mumbai in 2008. While Pakistan’s death toll during its participation in the war on terror — 40,000 — was deplored, the harshest words were directed at Zardari, Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif. Their corruption scandals were brought up and then, unfairly, the brothers’ recourse to hair transplants, which had plainly improved the looks of many of the politicians hovering around Khan.
The sun, flame-red and huge behind the dust, had nearly set before Khan took the lectern. Abruptly, many began leaving. More surprising, the crowd onstage suddenly thinned. Hamid Mir, followed by a group of autograph seekers and politicians hoping to be on his show, made a particularly grand exit. Khan’s groupies, having registered their proximity to their idol, were now trying to avoid the massive traffic pileups resulting from the wholly unsupervised exit of tens of thousands of rallygoers. “It always happens,” Khawaja told me later. “People want to get close to him, and then they leave him all alone on the stage.”
Khan’s disparate constituencies can make for some strange bedfellows. Senior members of his party have shared a platform with Difa-e-Pakistan (Pakistan Defense Council), a coalition of extremist groups that includes anti-Shiite militants as well as promoters of jihad against India and America. Khan looked exasperated when I brought up allegations about his party’s links to the I.S.I. and Islamic extremists. “It is these Westoxified Pakistanis who call me ‘Taliban Khan,’ ” he said, using his favorite description for Anglicized Pakistanis of his own class. “But how can they compare me with these uneducated boys of the Taliban or connect me to mullahs? If you read my book, you will find that the Islam I relate to is Sufi Islam. Our policy is to talk to all political players. These so-called extremists in Pakistan should be brought into the mainstream; if you marginalize them, you radicalize them.” (After the Americans began negotiating with the Taliban in Afghanistan, he told me with some satisfaction that they should have done so a long time ago.)
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There was another small explosion of anger when I asked him about his stance on women’s rights. Khan refused in 2006 to support reforms to the so-called Hudood Ordinance, which exposes rape victims to charges of adultery unless they can produce four males who witnessed their violation. Khan claims he voted against the reform bill as a protest against Musharraf and would repeal the Hudood law altogether if elected. Many liberal-minded Pakistanis still worried about his positions, I told Khan.
“Morons!” he exclaimed. “First you have to guarantee basic social and economic rights before you get to gender rights! What is the point of these NGO workers showing up in conservative tribal areas wearing bluejeans?!”
He then turned to his party’s prospects. The conspiracies against him were mounting, he said. In Lahore, he had received extensive live coverage; the Sialkot and Mianwali rallies were shown only briefly on the private television channels. Both Zardari and Sharif were putting pressure on the media. “They are getting scared,” Khan said. “They can see that the tsunami is coming.”
Fortunately, he did not need to rely so much on the compromised TV channels. “The social media is changing Pakistan,” Khan said. Most Pakistanis had a mobile phone. They were signing up for Twitter and Facebook in the millions. Direct access to voters meant that the P.T.I. could ignore the old constituency politics of appeasing the middlemen. “I always knew,” Khan said, “that a mass movement would take the P.T.I. to power, not wheeling and dealing with power brokers.”
Still, could he dispense with their help entirely? The newspapers were full of stories of discord between Hashmi and Qureshi and of discontent among older members of the P.T.I. Khan pondered the question and then said: “Today in the party meeting we made a breakthrough. We are going to have a membership drive and then elections through mobile phones. The youth want new faces. They can elect their own from the ground up. There has to be democracy in our own party before we bring it to the country. This is what we decided in the meeting today, and I feel liberated.”
Yet both the media elite that Khan says he can sidestep and the bloggers and tweeters who shape public opinion in the new media have been vocal in their criticism. “He says we are working for Nawaz Sharif,” Sana Bucha, one of Pakistan’s leading anchors, told me. “But how many rallies can we cover? The ratings for shows in which Khan appeared have already fallen; he is overexposed. He is worried of course because he knows that the media is becoming the most powerful entity in Pakistan now.”
Mehmal Sarfraz, a journalist I met in Lahore, said that Khan’s young online supporters had “fascist” tendencies. Many of them viciously trolled her whenever she criticized Khan on her blog and on Twitter. (This is a common experience for Khan’s critics. Two weeks after I spoke to Bucha, Khan appeared on her talk show, apologizing for how some P.T.I. supporters had harassed her online.) They were particularly angry, Sarfraz said, laughing, that Khan’s critic was a hijab -wearing woman. She derided Khan’s view of extremism in Pakistan as the offshoot of the American war on terror. “These jihadists supported by the I.S.I. were in Kashmir well before 9/11. And why does Imran blame Zardari for the drone attacks when everyone knows that the president has no power and the military gave the Americans permission to use the drones? It is because the military and intelligence agencies are backing Imran.”
In the small world of the Pakistani elite, many were equally convinced of Khan’s dubious allegiances. There were stories circulating about how he recently met the C.I.A. and MI6 in London, then about how the tsunami was being reversed. The head of the I.S.I., Khan’s greatest supporter, retired in March; the military had decided to support the PML-N in the next elections; it was why the media were turning away from Khan. It was hard to navigate this murk of Pakistani politics, the frenetic conspiracy-theorizing and free-floating malice.
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Some things did, however, seem truer than others. An academic who dislikes Khan said he was too egotistic to be manipulated by the military establishment. Many others voiced an apparent consensus that the long years of Musharraf’s misrule and humiliations like the undetected American operation against Osama bin Laden had damaged the army’s reputation and undermined its authority. It was why politicians like Nawaz Sharif, or journalists like Hamid Mir, felt emboldened enough to stand up to the men in uniform.
The army itself was changing under its chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a “remarkable man,” according to a senior Western diplomat. Battered by the previous decade of the war on terror, it was, the diplomat claimed, moving out of politics and shifting to a focus on economic growth and a new policy of détente, if not peace, with its old enemy, India. The novelist Mohammed Hanif had another interpretation of the army’s chastened mood. As he told me, with a wry smile, “They have no one left to lie to, no one left to betray.”
The next time I saw Khan, it was April and he had just returned from a trip to Turkey, where he met Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Khan’s tweets, with their characteristic exclamation marks, kept me informed about his progress. “Turkey today has embraced its past & moved forward as a confident nation proud of its history & present achievements. We can learn so much!” He seemed more pumped up than usual, his pre-big-game go-get-’em zeal spilling over into repetitive praise for the Turkish leadership.
“ Abdullah Gul and Erdogan — they are such impressive people. I last went to Turkey on my honeymoon. In 15 years, they have totally transformed the country!”
“The most interesting thing,” he added later “is how they have controlled the army which ruled Turkey for such a long time. You can of course do that if you have moral authority invested in you by the people.”
We were driving to yet another rally, this one in Abbottabad (Khawaja had briefly triumphed over her male colleagues and managed to insert me in Khan’s Land Cruiser). Khan sat next to the driver; I was placed between the two rivals, Hashmi and Qureshi. As we drove past the villa’s wrought-iron gates, again late for the rally by nearly three hours, Khan said, “Inshallah, we will make history today.” “Inshallah, Inshallah,” Hashmi and Querishi repeated. It wasn’t clear initially what they were referring to, but eventually it transpired that the hilly town of Abbottabad, which had become famous around the world as Osama bin Laden’s last residence, the place where he settled into discreet domesticity with his multiple wives and was killed by American forces, could now re-enter history for hosting a massive P.T.I. rally.
The event also marked a return to the generous media coverage the P.T.I. had enjoyed. Many channels promised to cover the rally live, even though President Zardari was visiting India the same day after a long gap. It explained the buoyant mood in the car, and Khan’s own cheerfulness. The mood was absorbed by the driver, who declined to pay at a tollbooth on the winding road to Abbottabad, gesturing to his V.I.P. passenger. As we moved off, Khan reprimanded the driver, good-humoredly: “Tuu abhii se baadshah ho gayaa hai!” — “You are already behaving like an emperor!”
Khan chortled over the fact that the previous week, President Zardari’s son, Bilawal Bhutto, the 23-year-old chairman of the P.P.P., had apparently made a speech in English to his party members. “The poor guy doesn’t know any Urdu.” Khan took a few swipes at various “Westoxified” Pakistanis sought after by deluded Westerners: the editor Najam Sethi (“State Department’s man”); the journalist Ahmed Rashid (“totally bogus”). He then gossiped with Qureshi and Hashmi about the wealth of various politicians, like the former interior minister, Rehman Malik, a “frontman for Zardari,” who, they said, had a personal fortune of $300 million.
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Khan tittered when I told him that many people thought of him as an I.S.I. frontman. “The I.S.I.,” he said, “was unable to muster up an audience for even Pervez Musharraf’s rally when he was in power. They cannot manufacture people’s enthusiasm for change.” As he spoke, three boys at a slow turn in the road ran toward his car, and Khan, gesturing to them, drawled, “You can see the tsunami coming. It cannot be stopped.
“The man who says we are the I.S.I.’s creation,” he added, “is Nawaz Sharif — and he himself was a creation of the I.S.I.!” I felt Hashmi, once Sharif’s close colleague, stiffen by my side.
While Khawaja was busy tweeting on his behalf from another car (“Route to Abbottabad a reminder of the intense beauty of our wonderful country! Green hues of plants, golden wheat, fruit trees — God’s gifts”), Khan continued his jaunty disparagements. “The Americans are making such big mistakes. They should have tried Osama bin Laden like Saddam Hussein was; even the Nazis, who killed millions, received a trial.” He kept returning to Turkey as an instructive lesson for Pakistan. “At least their army actually fought and defeated European armies, and created a nation.” Hashmi made a joke, which I couldn’t really follow, about the Pakistani Army as the “defender of faith.” Both Khan and Qureshi laughed heartily.
As we drew closer to Abbottabad, some text messages on Khan’s Blackberry punctured the cheerful mood. Khan was told that he couldn’t speak before 5 p.m. if he wanted to avoid clashing with Zardari’s photo-op in India. The rally itself, held in a sports stadium, was the usual bedlam, except that this time there was a large gallery filled with women.
I had already read Khan’s speech, peering over his shoulder in the car; it was not much different from what he said in previous rallies. Like many in the audience, I left before 5 p.m., late in Abbottabad’s valley, where darkness sets in early. On the way back to Islamabad, I stopped at a grocery store to buy some water. The owner, watching wrestling on his small television set, was a bit reluctant when I asked him to switch over to Khan’s rally. “Has Imran come?” he asked. “Is he speaking now? People have been waiting since noon.”
I told him the crowd was starting to disperse. “Of course they will,” he retorted. “They have to travel long distances in the hills.” He snorted when I said that the lateness of Khan’s speech was due to the media’s schedule. After some channel-hopping, I caught a brief clip of Khan at the rally repeating his gibe about Bilawal Bhutto’s lack of Urdu. The depleted crowd, it seemed clear, was not going to make history for Imran Khan, or supersede Abbottabad’s reputation as the town where a semiretired terrorist found marital bliss. But he seemed more relaxed than he was in Sialkot and Mianwali. The TV channels had clearly not betrayed him. And for once his groupies, spellbound by the cameramen, had not abandoned Khan onstage.Antagonistic New Yorkers Parquet Courts may have spent the majority of their 2017 in uncharacteristically mellow form – releasing their long-in-the-making collaboration ‘Milano’ with Italian composer Daniele Luppi and offering up guitarist Andrew Savage’s reflective debut solo offering ‘Thawing Dawn’, but their 2018 looks set to be an altogether more rampant affair. “I wanted to get back to writing raw songs. Things you can dance to and things I could harness my anger into, which is plentiful being in America right now,” explains Andrew, calling in from a studio break, mid-way through mixing their as-yet-untitled new record – tentatively set for a May release. “I didn’t write any love songs [for it]; it’s all rippers.”
Rippers they may be, but don’t go expecting a happy clappy burst of positivity and sparkle from the Courts just yet. Taking the outward-looking, political themes of 2016 track ‘Two Dead Cops’ and much of 2014’s ‘Content Nausea’, their newest is a record that squares up to the agitated realities of modern life; if it rips, then those rips are pulling at the threads of a world already unravelling. “Whatever inner turmoil and unrest was happening [on 2016 LP ‘Human Performance’], that’s been mooted and replaced by an outward turmoil and a general state of unrest at living in the US,” continues the guitarist. “I think that honesty of one’s own time is what people are connected to in art. It has to speak to the current condition or else it’ll have a very short shelf life.”Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Liverpool fans were in fine voice as they belted out one of their loudest ever renditions of 'You'll Never Walk Alone' ahead of their historic Europa League clash against old foes Manchester United.
With eight European Cups, four other European trophies, 38 League Championships, 18 FA Cups and 12 League Cups between them, English football's two most successful clubs met in continental competition for the first time.
The turbo-charged game at Anfield which was the first leg of a Europa League last 16 encounter pitted Jurgen Klopp's side against Louis van Gaal's charges and the atmosphere certainly lived up to the occasion.
Flags and banners are par for the course on the Kop in these games and along with the usual favourites, Reds unfurled a message declaring "European Elite" in reference to their five European Cups and three UEFA Cups opposed to United's three European Cups and one Cup-Winners' Cup.
Manchester United had issued their away fans with t-shirts to create a so-called "White Wall" in the Anfield Road End but the mass gesture failed to materialise as the two sets of supporters attempted to drown each other out.The Seventh Sons of Sycamore is a fictional book about werewolves. These are not the werewolves of old, but motorcycle riding, wheeling and dealing creatures in Arizona. Maxim Dwyer is a detective and Diego is a biker suspected of murder. The Seventh Sons Motorcycle Club thrives under the presidency of Deborah, or “Mom”. She has a truce with the local police that basically says, “You don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you.”
This arrangement is standing procedure until Maxim stirs the pot. A biker is murdered at the Sycamore Lodge and Maxim decides that it is time for someone to dig into the motorcycle club. Something is not right and he intends to find out just what it is. Diego |
ameshiwari/Breaking.[16] This is different from regular Karate punch which the shoulders do not protrude (the striking side's shoulder does not rotate beyond its waist) but be squared at the termination of punch. According to the Karate textbook "Black Belt Karate" by Jordan Roth (p 100), "It is important also that the shoulders be squared at the termination of this punch. The punching arm should be thrust forward (perhaps only an inch) without breaking this alignment so that the shoulder blade ceases to protrude."[17] Karate punch does not rotate shoulder beyond its own waist after hip rotation; the shoulders end up squared in Karate punch. Also, Karate punch is associated with explosion & implosion at the beginning of the punch in a jerky motion. The hand strike Mas Oyama taught to Karate's Tameshiwari/Breaking is like Korean hand strike historically documented.
According to the book "The fighting spirit of Japan and other studies" by Ernest John Harrison published in 1913, Japan also had had a sport called Kiaijutsu. Kihapsul/Charyuk/Kiaijutsu is not solely a Korean sport but also existed in Japan, including Breaking/Tameshiwari, before the time of Karate and Mas Oyama. Breaking/Tameshiwari concept existed in all China, Korea, Japan. However, Kamesuke Higashioona's Breaking shows hand strike techniques identical to Karate but different from Mas Oyama & Korean hand strike, which rotate shoulder while stacking speed & power without any implosion & explosion. Mas Oyama introduced such Korean strike into Karate's Tameshiwari/Breaking while he introduced Breaking to be a culture & curriculum of modern Karate practice.
Kamesuke Higashioona 1933 Hand Breaking without shoulder-push
Karate was seen Tameshiwari/Breaking in 1933 by Kamesuke Higashioona. Because this was before the time when Mas Oyama taught Korean striking techniques, his shoulders are squared instead of the striking side's shoulder being protruded (pushed, turned, rotated) forward. This was also before the time that Mas Oyama introduced Tameshiwari/Breaking to be a modern Karate's culture and curriculum.
Gichin Funakoshi was also videotaped for performing Tameshiwari as well as rotating hip for hand strikes. However, his shoulder does not rotate beyond squared shoulder after his hip rotation. This is different from Mas Oyama's hand strike technique which rotates shoulder beyond its own waist past squared shoulders. The level of Breaking/Tameshiwari was also inferior. Gichin Funakoshi & Kamesuke Higashioona managed to break only 3 wooden boards or a couple roof tiles. This is far below the level of Karate Breaking/Tameshiwari the world got used to since Oyama's Tameshiwari/Breaking era. Historically, Korean hand strikes were seen rotating shoulder beyond its waist (shoulder protruding beyond its own waist by rotation towards front) as well as stacking (Yong means stacking speed & power) speed in motion. The hand strike technique Mas Oyama taught resembles Korean hand strike technique. As for Karate performing Tameshiwari/Breaking before the time of Mas Oyama, it could be either from how Japan also had had Kiaijutsu (this is not a solely Korean sport) or from Chinese Iron Palm's Breaking/Tameshiwari culture (Iron Palm also has shown Breaking).
History of breaking in Korea [ edit ]
In 1934's reputable Korean newspaper, there's a sport called Yuk-ki breaking soft shingles (roof tiles) with fist strike.[18] There are many reputable & old Korean newspaper records that show the derivations of the name Charyuk (like Yuk-ki) as well as the explicit name Kihapsul together.[19] In 1692, Korean Ikmyung Yang broke a stone with hand strike using Yongryuk (stacking speed, power, mass in the entire body).[20] 400 years ago, there were many Korean history books all recording the same event of Korean Hand Breaking a large stone as big as a Soban table.[21]
In today's Korea, Breaking/Tameshiwari is often done by Taekwondo, Kooksundo (Korean Taoist Qigong), Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu, Taekkyeon, Gyeoksul, etc. Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu is a power circus, power performance art, power magic show, sidewalk performance art which had Breaking/Tameshiwari before Karate, predating Karate & Karate's Breaking. It is correlated with Chinese Qigong & Korean Kooksundo, Seonsul. Chinese Iron Palm is also known to have shown breaking layers of cinder blocks with a straight palm slap 100 years ago (photographed) as well as driving a car across a human belly lying on the ground (Charyuk shows such feats of strength as well, not just Breaking). Shoulder-push means turning (pushing, rotating) shoulder forward when punching instead of the shoulders being stationary & square. Yong means stacking speed, power, mass in an accelerating manner instead of impulse explosion & implosion at the beginning of punch.
Kooksundo (Seonsul) is also correlated with Kihapsul/Charyuk; Kooksundo's Qigong Yoga has striking motion including hand strikes. However, Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu itself comes from trial & error as feats of strength. Chinese Iron Palm also has been photographed 100 years ago for showing Breaking/Tameshiwari of layers of cinder blocks. Charyuk/Kihapsul's Breaking/Tameshiwari originally had no relation to striking martial art. Strikes were created in the power circus by trial & error trying with common sense strikes from everyday-life to improve, then to teach what's already been created & improved including various hand shapes like Knife Hand. (From common sense hitting, techniques are developed & more variety is added. Charyuk/Kihapsul's Breaking had no relation to striking martial art in concept nor techniques before the time of Karate.) Charyuk/Kihapsul Breaking typically uses everyday-life motions like headbutt, punching, Knife Hand (like massaging), stomping (no special kicking), etc rather than martial art exclusive motions such as roundhouse kick. After striking martial arts adopted Breaking/Tameshiwari from power circus, they added Breaking objects with more various moves which are not done in typical power circus Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu/Charyuk today or before.
Korean had martial arts (or Fight Game, pseudo-martial arts) like Subak which had frontal slap & punch like Taekkyeon (including Yetbub), Gwonbeop, Gitssaum (Flag Fight), Pyunssaum, Sibak. However, Breaking's strikes were created in the power circus Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu by trial & error trying with common sense strikes from everyday-life. The strikes improved; they started teaching what's already been created & improved (from common sense hitting, techniques are developed & more variety is added) including various hand shapes like Knife Hand. They teach the power circus (including Breaking's strikes) already created & improved without starting over the creation process at each generation. Strikes are learned by learning power circus including Breaking; martial arts were not involved. This is how Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu has worked in Korean society. Regardless of how Breaking's system and structure were for China & Japan (Iron Palm's Breaking culture or feats of strength like Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu), it was that way for Korea. This power performance art had Breaking as corroborated by Masato Tamura in 1940. Strikes were practiced by practicing Breaking. Not by practicing martial arts then doing Breaking. This is the nature of Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu. After the techniques are created, they have been passed down by teaching power circus including Breaking/Tameshiwari.
For hundreds of years, Korean has had a power circus (power magic show, power performance art) called Charyuk/Kihapsul which is pronounced Kiai-jutsu in Japanese for reading the same 3 Chinese letters in a different dialect. Breaking Game already existed before Karate in the category of power circus performance art, not a part of striking martial art but correlating with wrestling, circus, Qigong (also called Kooksundo, Seonsul).[22] Korean had Taoist Qigong Kooksundo/Seonsul already in 1922 as historically recorded by newspaper. Kooksundo has many Yoga motions which include hand strikes.[23]
As for the difficulty of this creation process which some people object (they claim Breaking must have gotten its strikes from martial arts), the difficulty level is about the same whether people invent powerful strikes in martial arts then adopt them in Breaking or whether people invent powerful strikes in Breaking/Tameshiwari power circus. The process & the difficulty of creating powerful strikes are the same whether it's done for martial arts or for circus. Mas Oyama is also famous for using dogs & cows as a target of Breaking/Tameshiwari, which doesn't necessarily involve Karate for hitting or fighting animals.
Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu does not train callus specifically. Instead, it strikes with the body parts with muscle pads such as the heel or edge of hand. Muscle pads are hard enough to break stone but bendy enough to protect the skin from being squashed even without callus. Typical Charyuk/Kihapsul/Kiaijutsu does not hit with boney body part but delivers collision impacts with muscle fiber pads. Also, callus develops naturally if practicing Breaking/Tameshiwari often enough.How to Install Mailpile with Nginx on Ubuntu 15.10
Mailpile is an open source mail client that focuses on encryption and users privacy. Mailpile makes the PGP setup easy, it allows you to create PGP keys directly in the email application and send PGP encrypted messages. Mailpile has been created by Bjarni R. Einarsson on 2013. The software can be installed on Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux as web based client.
In this tutorial, I will guide you trough the Mailpile installation on Ubuntu 15.10. We will install Mailpile as a web-based client with Nginx as a reverse proxy.
Prerequisites
Ubuntu 15.10 - 64bit.
Root Privileges.
Step 1 - Install Mailpile Dependencies
Mailpile is written in the python programming language and we need a bunch of python modules for the installation. I will install Mailpile in a python virtual environment with virtualenv and use python 2.7 for the installation. For encryption, I will install GnuPG version 1.4.x.
To get started, update your repository database and install the packages from Ubuntu repository:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnupg openssl python-virtualenv python-pip python-lxml git
Now check the python version and GnuPG version:
python --version
gpg --version
Mailpile requires the PIL (Python Imaging Library), therefore, we install libjpeg, zlib1g, and python-dev:
sudo apt-get install libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev zlib1g-dev python-dev
When the installation is finished we're ready for the next step of the Mailpile installation.
Step 2 - Install and Configure Mailpile
In this step, I will install Mailpile into the "/opt/" directory and then create a new python virtual environment for the installation. Before we begin with the installation, clone the Mailpile source code from the github repository to the opt directory.
cd /opt/
git clone --recursive https://github.com/mailpile/Mailpile.git
Now go to the Mailpile directory and create the virtual environment with python2.7 as the python version:
cd /opt/Mailpile/
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 --system-site-packages mailpile-env
-p = Use a specific python version, we use python 2.7.
--system-site packages = Give the virtual environment access to the global site-packages.
mailpile-env = Directory for new virtual environment.
Then activate the virtual environment, make sure that you are in the "/opt/Mailpile/" directory, and finally activate it.
cd /opt/Mailpile/
source mailpile-env/bin/activate
You can check the commandline if the virtual environment is active:
The virutal environment name should be in front of your username and hostname on the shell.
Next, install the mailpile requirements with the pip command in the mailpile-env environment:
pip install -r requirements.txt
Let's trest Mailpile with the command "./mp" in the virtual environemt:
./mp
In the screenshot we can see that Mailpile is running on localhost with port 33411.
So let's try to access it with the curl command from the server shell:
curl -I localhost:33411
It is working correctly when you get the following result:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: /setup/welcome/
Actually, in this step, we could tell Mailpile to run on our public IP so everyone can access it. But in this tutorial, we will use Nginx as reverse proxy for Mailpile on port 33411.
Step 3 - Install Nginx
Install Nginx with this apt command:
sudo apt-get install nginx
Now verify that Nginx is running on port 80:
netstat -plntu | grep 80
Step 4 - Create Self-Signed SSL Certificate
Let's go to the Nginx directory and create new SSL directory there:
cd /etc/nginx/
mkdir -p /etc/nginx/ssl/
cd ssl/
Then generate the SSL certificate file:
openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /etc/nginx/ssl/mailpile.key -out /etc/nginx/ssl/mailpile.crt
And change the permission of the private key to 600:
chmod 600 mailpile.key
Step 5 - Configure Mailpile Virtualhost
In this step, I will create new virtual host configuration for Mailpile. This virtual host is just proxy-ing incoming requests on port 80 to Mailpile on port 33411. Nginx is a secure and powerfull reverse proxy.
Go to the Nginx "sites-available" directory and create a new file called "mailpile":
cd /etc/nginx/site-available/
touch mailpile
Edit the mailpile file with the vim editor:
vim mailpile
Paste the virtualhost configuration below:
server {
# Mailpile Domain
server_name mail.mailpile.me;
client_max_body_size 20m;
# Nginx port 80 and 334
listen 80;
listen 443 default ssl;
# SSL Certificate File
ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/ssl/mailpile.crt;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/ssl/mailpile.key;
# Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
if ($scheme = http) {
return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}
# Nginx Poroxy pass for mailpile
location / {
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
proxy_set_header X-NginX-Proxy true;
proxy_pass http://localhost:33411;
proxy_read_timeout 90;
proxy_redirect http://localhost:33411 https://mail.mailpile.me;
}
}
Now activate the mailpile virtualhost and restart Nginx:
ln -s /etc/nginx/site-available/mailpile /etc/nginx/site-enabled/
systemctl restart nginx
Note: Make sure you do not kill the mailpile process in your virtual environment.
Next, visit the Mailpile domain (in my case mail.mailpile.me) and you will be redirected to https connection.
Select the default language, in my case "English" and click "Begin".
Now type in your password to login into the application, make sure you have a strong password.
And start using Mailpile.
The Mailpile setup is finished, enter your password and press "Enter".
You can see the mail page right after login:
Conclusion
Mailpile is a free OpenSource email client that focuses on encryption and user privacy. Mailpile has multi platform support, it can be installed on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Mailpile can be installed on your own server as a private mail client. Mailpile is based on python, it's easy to install and configure, just make sure you run python 2.7 with gnupg 1.4.x. We can use Mailpile as a standalone system, but for better performance we use Nginx as a reverse proxy.McMaster, Columbia International College and Mohawk students have a chance to win $250 in gift certificates for downtown businesses by simply submitting a name and logo for an exciting new mobile app that will highlight jobs, events, accommodations and transportation in downtown Hamilton.
Designed by Hamilton-based Weever Apps, the Hamilton Map App is the result of a partnership between The City of Hamilton, McMaster University, Columbia International College, Mohawk College and Weever Apps.
“The application keeps our young people in touch with the pulse of the city and will encourage growth,” says Gisela Oliveira, Employment Service Coordinator with the Student Success Centre. “It’s an opportunity for students to educate other students about Hamilton’s hidden gems.”
The contest runs from August 24 to September 9. Participants are asked to submit an app name and a 64 by 64 pixel logo in png or jpg format to Hamilton Map App Contest. The first, second and third prize winners will be announced on Sept 11. The creator of the winning submission will receive $250 from local businesses in the downtown, coverage from Hamilton media and a feature in a promotional video for the app. The second place winner will be awarded a gift certificate for his or her campus bookstore and the third place winner will receive a free mobile app from Weever Apps.
The app will be available to students during Welcome Week (September 1 to 9) and will focus on a downtown pilot area from the Escarpment to Bayfront Park and from Wentworth to Dundurn Street. Users will have access to job postings, coupons from local businesses and discounts for local events such as concerts. They will also be able to pin locations on the app and obtain directions and bus route information, making exploring Hamilton easier and more interactive.
Prizes
The awarded winner of the design contest will earn bragging rights for creativity and originality on a first-ever collaborative initiative between educational institutions and the city. As well, some sweet prize giveaways up for grabs. Here’s what you can win:
1st Place – Gift certificates with value of $250 from local businesses in the downtown core, coverage Hamilton media institutions and a feature in a promo video for the app.
2nd Place – Gift certificate from the winner’s campus bookstore.
3rd Place – Free mobile app from Weever Apps.
Rules for ParticipationVolume 21, Number 5—May 2015
Dispatch
Novel Eurasian Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A H5 Viruses in Wild Birds, Washington, USA, 2014
1, Mia Kim Torchetti1, Rocio Crespo, Paul Kohrs, Paul DeBruyn, Kristin G. Mansfield, Timothy Baszler, Lyndon Badcoe, Barbara Bodenstein, Valerie Shearn-Bochsler, Mary Lea Killian, Janice C. Pedersen, Nichole Hines, Thomas Gidlewski, Thomas J. DeLiberto, and Jonathan M. Sleeman Hon S. Ip, Mia Kim Torchetti, Rocio Crespo, Paul Kohrs, Paul DeBruyn, Kristin G. Mansfield, Timothy Baszler, Lyndon Badcoe, Barbara Bodenstein, Valerie Shearn-Bochsler, Mary Lea Killian, Janice C. Pedersen, Nichole Hines, Thomas Gidlewski, Thomas J. DeLiberto, and Jonathan M. Sleeman
Author affiliations: US Geologic Survey–National Wildlife Health Center, Madison, Wisconsin, USA (H.S. Ip, B. Bodenstein, V. Shearn-Bochsler, J.M. Sleeman) ; US Department of Agriculture, Ames, Iowa, USA (M.K. Torchetti, M.L. Killian, J.C. Pedersen, N. Hines) ; Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA (R. Crespo, T. Baszler) ; Washington Department of Agriculture, Olympia, Washington, USA (P. Kohrs, T. Baszler, L. Badcoe) ; Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Olympia (P. DeBruyn, K.G. Mansfield) ; US Department of Agriculture, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA (T. Gidlewski, T. DeLiberto)
Cite This Article
Abstract Novel Eurasian lineage avian influenza A(H5N8) virus has spread rapidly and globally since January 2014. In December 2014, H5N8 and reassortant H5N2 viruses were detected in wild birds in Washington, USA, and subsequently in backyard birds. When they infect commercial poultry, these highly pathogenic viruses pose substantial trade issues.
The novel Eurasian lineage clade 2.3.4.4 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N8) virus (http://www.who.int/influenza/gisrs_laboratory/h5_nomenclature_clade2344/en/) spread rapidly and globally during 2014, substantially affecting poultry populations. The first outbreaks were reported during January 2014 in chickens and domestic ducks in South Korea and subsequently in China and Japan (1–4), reaching Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom by November 2014 and Italy in early December 2014 (5). Also in November 2014, a novel HPAI H5N2 virus was reported in outbreaks on chicken and turkey farms in Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada (5). This H5N2 influenza virus is a reassortant that contains the Eurasian clade 2.3.4.4 H5 plus 4 other Eurasian genes (polymerase acidic protein subunit, matrix protein, polymerase basic protein subunit [PB] 2, nonstructural protein) and 3 North American wild bird lineage genes (neuraminidase [NA], nucleoprotein, PB1) (5). Taiwan has recently reported novel reassortants of the H5 clade 2.3.4.4 with other Eurasian viruses (H5N2, H5N3).
The appearance of highly similar Eurasian H5N8 viruses in Asia, Europe, and now the United States suggests that this novel reassortant may be well adapted to certain waterfowl species, enabling it to survive long migrations (6). These appearances also represent a major change in Eurasian H5 virus circulation. After the reported spread of HPAI H5N1 virus in Asia, a large, interagency avian influenza virus (AIV) surveillance effort was implemented throughout the United States during April 2006–March 2011 (7). Of nearly 500,000 wild bird samples tested, none harbored Eurasian subtype H5 AIV. The overall prevalence of AIV was ≈11%, and most viruses (86%) were detected in dabbling ducks (family Anatidae) (8). Although H5N8 subtype viruses have been detected previously in the United States, all have been low pathogenicity AIV of North American wild bird lineage.
Case Reports After the November 2014 report of H5N2 HPAI outbreaks among poultry in British Columbia, the US Departments of Agriculture and Interior, together with state agency personnel, increased surveillance of poultry flocks, hunter-harvested wild birds, and wild bird die-offs along the US–Canada border. A wild bird die-off was reported on December 1, 2014, at Wiser Lake (48.9039N, 122.4799W) in Whatcom County, Washington, USA. The lake, which has a history of waterfowl deaths caused by lead poisoning and aspergillosis, is located ≈32 km from the location of the index cases in Fraser Valley. Up to 10,000 waterfowl were on the lake when the deaths began. The dead birds consisted primarily of mallards (Anas platyrhynchos), American wigeon (A. americana), and northern pintail (A. acuta), along with smaller numbers of other waterfowl species. Nine carcasses were submitted to the National Wildlife Health Center (Table 1); 6 were examined in detail. Aspergillus fumigatus was isolated from 5 birds with characteristic lesions of airsacculitis (Table 1). In addition, cloacal and/or oral swab samples from 5 birds had molecular assay results positive for influenza A and H5 (Table 1). A Eurasian lineage H5 clade 2.3.4.4 AIV, A/northern pintail/Washington/40964/2014 (H5N2) (GenBank taxon no. 1589662), was isolated from a lung specimen. Whole-genome sequencing indicated the virus was highly similar to the H5N2 reassortant virus from Canada. Both viruses have 3 RNA segments of North American wild bird lineage (PB1, nucleoprotein, and NA) and 5 RNA segments (PB2, polymerase acidic, HA, matrix protein, and nonstructural protein) that showed >99% similarity to 2014 Eurasian clade 2.3.4.4 H5N8 viruses (Table 2). According to World Organisation for Animal Health guidelines (9), the virus was consistent with HPAI on the basis of the amino acid sequence at the hemagglutinin cleavage site and in vivo assay results (intravenous pathogenicity index 2.57). In a related event, on December 6, 2014, an American wigeon was captured and partially consumed by a captive-reared gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus) in Whatcom County, ≈8 km from Wiser Lake. The wigeon remains were also fed to 3 other gyrfalcon and gyrfalcon–peregrine hybrids at a farm with another 25 raptors and 40 pigeons. The first falcon (RW099878) died on December 8 and was submitted to the National Wildlife Health Center. The second falcon (RX085847) also died on December 8 and the third (RX093091) on December 11; the fourth (RX084955) was euthanized on December 11. Carcasses of these last 3 falcons were submitted to the Washington Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. No further deaths or illnesses have been reported among other raptors at the facility. Histologic and pathologic findings for the 3 raptors were consistent with those described in previous reports of H5N8 infections (1,6), and the severity of the lesions corresponded to virus concentrations detected in the tissues by molecular assays; results will be further detailed in a subsequent publication. Molecular assay results for oral and cloacal swab samples and major organ and brain samples from falcon RW099878 were positive for influenza A and H5 viruses. For falcons RW099878 and RX085847, partial HA and NA genes were directly sequenced from brain and oral swab samples. A Eurasian lineage H5 clade 2.3.4.4 AIV, A/gyrfalcon/Washington/41088-6/2014 (H5N8) (GenBank taxon no. 1589663), was isolated from the brain of falcon RW099878. All 8 RNA segments for the strain were >99% similar to those for 2014 Group A H5N8 strains from South Korea (3) (Table 2); the amino acid sequence at the hemagglutinin cleavage site and in vivo assay results (intravenous pathogenicity index 2.65) were consistent with HPAI. Figure 1 Figure 2 Phylogenetic analysis of the H5 clade 2.3.4.4 viruses detected in the United States resulted in 3 major findings (Figures 1, 2; Technical Appendix). First, the Eurasian lineage avian H5N8 clade 2.3.4.4 virus survived introduction into North America in its entirety. Second, introduction of Eurasian H5N8 virus into North America appears to be independent from introductions of the virus into Europe. Third, the duration of circulation of H5N8 virus in the Pacific flyway (California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington, USA) is unknown, but it was sufficient for reassortment with low pathogenicity North American lineage wild bird AIV (Figure 1).
Conclusions The ongoing circulation of these Eurasian HPAI H5 viruses in wild birds considerably alters the potential risks and subsequent consequences for US poultry and wildlife rehabilitation centers. Detection of HPAI H5N8 virus in apparently healthy common teal (A. crecca), Eurasian wigeon (A. penelope), mallard, spot-billed duck (A. poecilorhyncha), and tundra swans (C. columbianus) (3,5) suggests that wild birds may contribute to further spread of this HPAI H5 lineage in North America. However, culling and otherwise disturbing wild birds or their habitats has not been shown to be beneficial in the control of avian influenza (11). The scientifically supported management action (11) is to enhance biosecurity to minimize contacts between poultry, wild birds, and their fomites (11). In addition, hunters should be cognizant of risks from handling potentially infected carcasses (http://www.aphis.usda.gov/animal_health/birdbiosecurity/downloads/USDA_HntrCd_Hi.pdf). Examination of wild bird surveillance samples collected before December 2014 may provide further insight into the timing and route of introduction of the Eurasian clade 2.3.4.4 H5N8 virus into North America. In addition, enhanced and ongoing influenza surveillance in wild birds and poultry will contribute to a better understanding of the geographic distribution and species involved in the spread of these HPAI H5 viruses. Together, these data may enable waterfowl managers and poultry producers to better assess and manage disease risks. Human infections have not been associated with either virus; however, H5 clade 2.3.4 H5N1 virus has caused human death, so caution is warranted. During preparation of this article, H5N8 was reported in wild birds and poultry along the Pacific flyway; novel H5N2 virus was detected in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington; and another novel reassortant H5N1 was detected in Washington and British Columbia (5). These detections have had major effects on US poultry trade (12).
Dr. Ip is the section head of the Diagnostic Virology Laboratory, Wildlife Disease Diagnostic Laboratories Branch, US Geologic Survey–National Wildlife Health Center. His research interests include emerging diseases of wildlife, disease transmission and persistence in natural populations, and laboratory diagnostics development.
Acknowledgment
We acknowledge the dedicated staff at our respective institutions, who ensured timely field support, rapid response, and prompt and accurate laboratory testing; in particular, Renee Long, Katy Griffin, Jeffery Messer, Karin McMullen, Amber Itle, and Thomas Gilliom.
References
Kim Y-L, Pascua PNQ, Kwon H-I, Lim G-J, Kim E-H, Yoon S-W, Pathobiological features of a novel, highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N8) virus. Emerging Microbes and Infections. 2014 ;3:e75. Lee YJ, Kang HM, Lee EK, Song BM, Jeong J, Kwon YK, Novel reassortant influenza A(H5N8) viruses, South Korea, 2014. Emerg Infect Dis. 2014 ; 20 : 1087 – 9. DOI PubMed Jeong J, Kang HM, Lee EK, Song BM, Kwon YK, Kim HR, Highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (H5N8) in domestic poultry and its relationship with migratory birds in South Korea during 2014. Vet Microbiol. 2014 ; 173 : 249 – 57. DOI PubMed Zhao K, Gu M, Zhong L, Duan Z, Zhang Y, Zhu Y, Characterization of 3 H5N5 and one H5N8 highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses in China. Vet Microbiol. 2013 ; 163 : 351 – 7. DOI PubMed World Organisation for Animal Health. Summary of immediate notifications and follow-ups–2014. Highly pathogenic avian influenza [cited 2014 Dec 14].. Summary of immediate notifications and follow-ups–2014. Highly pathogenic avian influenza [cited 2014 Dec 14]. http://www.oie.int/wahis_2/public/wahid.php/Diseaseinformation/Immsummary Kang H-M, Lee E-K, Song B-M, Jeong J, Choi J-G, Jeong J, Novel reassortant influenza A(H5N8) viruses among domestic and wild ducks, South Korea, 2014. Emerg Infect Dis. 2015 ; 21 : 298 – 304. DOI PubMed Olsen B, Munster VJ, Wallensten A, Waldenstrom J, Osterhaus AD, Fouchier RA. Global patterns of influenza a virus in wild birds. Science. 2006 ; 312 : 384 – 8. DOI PubMed Bevins SN, Pedersen K, Lutman MW, Baroch JA, Schmit BS, Kohler D, Large-scale avian influenza surveillance in wild birds throughout the United States. PLoS ONE. 2014 ; 9 : e104360. DOI PubMed World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). Avian influenza. Chapter 2.3.4. In: Manual of diagnostic tests and vaccines for terrestrial animals. Paris: The Organisation; 2014. Tamura K, Peterson D, Peterson N, Stecher G, Nei M, Kumar S. MEGA5: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis using maximum likelihood, evolutionary distance, and maximum parsimony methods. Mol Biol Evol. 2011 ; 28 : 2731 – 9. DOI PubMed The Scientific Task Force on Avian Influenza and Wild Birds. Statement on H5N8 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in poultry and wild birds [cited 2014 Dec 14].. Statement on H5N8 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in poultry and wild birds [cited 2014 Dec 14]. http://www.ramsar.org/news/statement-on-h5n8-highly-pathogenic-avian-influenza-hpai-in-poultry-and-wild-birds United States Department of Agriculture, Food Safety Inspection Service. Recently revised export requirements [cited 2015 Jan 13].. Recently revised export requirements [cited 2015 Jan 13]. http://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsis/topics/international-affairs/exporting-products/export-library-requirements-by-country
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Tables
Table of Contents – Volume 21, Number 5—May 2015If you don’t protect your Wi-Fi connection with a password, does that mean it’s legal to tap your Internet and monitor what you’re doing?
The key part of the federal anti-wiretap law was written in the 1980s, long before anyone contemplated using Wi-Fi networks, so the answer isn’t clear. In fact, legal experts say, it’s possible that how well you’re protected by the law would depend on what channel your Wi-Fi router is set to.
“The fact that you can have a reading of the law that says channels 7 through 11 are covered but channels 1 through 6 are not just seems so arbitrary,” said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology, a tech policy organization. “This is what happens when you write very technologically specific legislation and the technology changes.”
Bankston will be debating the law and what should be done about it at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas today. He’ll be arguing that the law should be changed to protect people even if they’re using unprotected networks.Three-phase traffic theory is a theory of traffic flow developed by Boris Kerner between 1996 and 2002.[1][2][3] It focuses mainly on the explanation of the physics of traffic breakdown and resulting congested traffic on highways. Kerner describes three phases of traffic, while the classical theories based on the fundamental diagram of traffic flow have two phases: free flow and congested traffic. Kerner’s theory divides congested traffic into two distinct phases, synchronized flow and wide moving jam, bringing the total number of phases to three:
Synchronized flow
Jam
Free flow (F) Synchronized flow (S) Wide moving jam (J)
The word "wide" is used even though it is the length of the traffic jam that is being referred to.
A phase is defined as a state in space and time.
Free flow (F) [ edit ]
In free traffic flow, empirical data show a positive correlation between the flow rate q {\displaystyle q} (in vehicles per unit time) and vehicle density k {\displaystyle k} (in vehicles per unit distance). This relationship stops at the maximum free flow q max {\displaystyle q_{\max }} with a corresponding critical density k crit {\displaystyle k_{\text{crit}}}. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1: Measured flow rate versus vehicle density in free flow (fictitious data)
Congested traffic [ edit ]
Data show a weaker relationship between flow and density in congested conditions. Therefore, Kerner argues that the fundamental diagram, as used in classical traffic theory, cannot adequately describe the complex dynamics of vehicular traffic. He instead divides congestion into synchronized flow and wide moving jams.
In congested traffic, the vehicle speed is lower than the lowest vehicle speed v free min {\displaystyle v_{\text{free}}^{\min }} encountered in free flow, i.e., the line with the slope of the minimal speed v free min = q max k crit {\displaystyle v_{\text{free}}^{\min }={\frac {q_{\max }}{k_{\text{crit}}}}} in free flow (dotted line in Figure 2) divides the empirical data on the flow-density |
the simple margaritas, quality can vary wildly. You need good tequila, good triple sec, and fresh lime juice; nothing else will do (certainly not a “margarita mix”).
The classic margarita recipe calls for any triple sec, but for best results, use Cointreau. Grand Marnier also goes great in a margarita, but try replacing just a portion of the triple sec rather than all of it, or just adding a splash of Grand Marnier on top.
The day this photo was taken, we were serving them with homemade southwestern-style black bean veggie burgers, chips, and homemade mango salsa.Fairfax High School (officially Fairfax Senior High School) is a Los Angeles Unified School District high school located in Los Angeles, California, near the border of West Hollywood in the Fairfax District. The school is located on a 24.2-acre (98,000 m2) campus at the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and trendy Melrose Avenue.
Several sections of Los Angeles, including the Fairfax District, Park La Brea, portions of Hancock Park, and Larchmont, and the city of West Hollywood are served by Fairfax. Some areas (including parts of West Hollywood) are jointly zoned to Fairfax High School and Hollywood High School. In fall 2007, some neighborhoods zoned to Hamilton High School were rezoned to Fairfax High School.[2] Bancroft Middle School, Emerson Middle School, Le Conte Middle School, and John Burroughs Middle School feed into Fairfax. In 2009 some territory from the Los Angeles High School attendance boundary was transferred to Fairfax High School.[3]
History [ edit ]
Fairfax High School was founded in 1924 under the direction of Principal Rae G. Van Cleve, for whom the athletic field is named. The original Spanish Colonial Revival main building did not meet earthquake safety standards, and most of the original campus facilities were demolished in 1966. However, the historic D. S. Swan Auditorium and iconic Rotunda were spared by preservationists and retrofitted. The theater was renovated in 2014. Greenway Court, originally built in 1939 as a social hall by the students at Fairfax as a class project, was also spared and was moved to its current location on Fairfax Avenue, where it was converted into a theater in 1999 by the Greenway Arts Alliance and renamed the Greenway Court Theater.
Fairfax High School has been known since the 1930s as a breeding ground for future major figures in the entertainment industry.
In previous eras, the school had a reputation for academic excellence and it had a majority Jewish student body.[4]
Former NFL official Jim Tunney served as the school's principal from 1964 to 1970. Under his watch, most of the current campus facilities, except for those mentioned above, were built between 1966 and 1968, including the gymnasium.
When the 1971 San Fernando earthquake struck with a moment magnitude of 6.5–6.7, nearby Los Angeles High School was damaged severely and closed for repairs. Students from Los Angeles High attended Fairfax High on "double sessions," with Fairfax students using the campus from 7 am – 12 noon, and LA High students from 12:30 pm – 5 pm.
Fairfax was the foreign language magnet school in the 1960s and 1970s, offering Hebrew, German, Chinese and Latin, among other languages. The Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts opened in 1981 and remains the only visual arts magnet in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
In 1984, Dr. Virginia Uribe, an LAUSD teacher and counselor for 42 years, founded LAUSD’s Project 10 program, the first dropout prevention program specifically for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students in the United States.[5]
By the 1980s, the proliferation of magnet schools caused an exodus of many White students and several of the school's best teachers. By that time the test scores declined and many school clubs and activities ceased operations.[4]
Organized by a group of local theater artists, the first Melrose Trading Post was held in 1996 in the school's parking lot. Regarded as most successful on-going fund-raising activity in the LAUSD, the flea market evolved into the Greenway Arts Alliance, the Friends of Fairfax and the Institute for the Arts at Fairfax High School, all which are of immense benefit to the school and students.[6]
In Fall 2008, Fairfax High School was reconfigured from a comprehensive high school into a complex of five new small learning communities (SLCs) and the existing Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts.
Demographics [ edit ]
As of the 2015–2016 school year, there were 2,108 students enrolled in Fairfax High School.
The racial/ethnic composition (as of the 2015–2016 school year) was as follows:
According to US News and World Report, 92% of Fairfax's student body is "of color," with 79% of the student body coming from economically disadvantaged households, determined by student eligibility for California's Reduced-price meal program. [7]
In the 1950s, Fairfax High School was known for having a large Jewish student body,[8] as a Jewish community surrounded the school. It became known as a "Jewish" high school, and some non-Jewish parents withdrew their children from Fairfax as they felt discomfort with the Jewish character of the school.[9] In 1953, Fairfax High introduced Modern Hebrew classes, initially taught by the principal of the Beverly-Fairfax Jewish Community Center, Ronnie Tofield.[8]
The racial composition became significantly more multi-cultural following the integration efforts of 1968. As Fairfax principal William Layne told the Los Angeles Times in 1975, “Fairfax began changing in 1968. Then the boundaries were adjusted to include an area past Pico. It caused a trauma to what had been an all-white, academic school. There was strong reaction from the community as well. The senior citizens got upset when they saw a kid they couldn’t identify with. There was also unrest at school, fearfulness, and an increase in thefts, people being molested."[10]
Eventually, racial tensions subsided as the school worked toward an active integration plan led by Layne.
The table below represents the number of enrolled students at Fairfax High School through 2003–2007.
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2,838 2,949 3,131 3,174 2,889
Source:[11]
Small Learning Communities [ edit ]
Fairfax High School re-opened in Fall 2008 reconfigured into a complex consisting of the existing Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts and five new small learning communities (SLCs). The campus was divided into six areas of "contiguous space." Non-magnet students and staff were reorganized into five new schools-within-a-school. Subsequently, in 2010, two of the SLCs were replaced by a single SLC, bringing the total down to four SLCs and the Magnet. Currently, these SLCs are:
Academy of Media & Performing Arts (AMPA)
Academy of International Business and Communications (IBC)
Health Sciences Academy (HSA)
School of Mathematics, Science and Technology (SMST).
Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts [ edit ]
Fairfax is home to the Fairfax Magnet Center for Visual Arts, which attracts students from across the 700 square miles (1,800 km2) of the district. It opened in 1981 and is the only visual arts magnet in Los Angeles Unified School District.
Achievements [ edit ]
Athletics [ edit ]
In 1971, the Lions Boys Varsity Cross Country team went undefeated and won the Los Angeles City Championship under Coach John Kampmann.
In 1995, the Lions Boys Volleyball Team, under the coaching of Steve Cho/Linda Fadler, took the title of All-City Champions, Division 3A.
In 2007, the Lions Boys Basketball Team, under the coaching of Harvey Kitani, took the title of State Champions, Division 1A.
A special edition of the Zoom Lebron IV was produced for the basketball team using the school's colors.
In 2010, the Lions Football Team, under the coaching of Shane Cox, won the CIF Los Angeles City Section Division II championship.
In 2015, the Lions Football Team, under the coaching of Shane Cox, won the CIF Los Angeles City Section Division II championship.
In 2016, the Lions Junior Varsity Football Team, under the coaching of Christopher Carcamo, went undefeated (10 games streak) won the CIF Western League Championship.[citation needed]
Music [ edit ]
In 2007, the Fairfax Marching Lions and Color Guard, under the direction of Raymundo Vizcarra, First Place in the LAUSD Division I Band and Drill Championship 2010. It was the first year in more than 20 years that Fairfax had a band eligible to compete.
Greenway Arts Alliance [ edit ]
Fairfax High School is home to the Greenway Arts Alliance, which operates the Greenway Court Theater, a 99-seat Equity-waiver playhouse, and through the Institute for the Arts at Greenway, provides arts educational programs, mentoring, and employment opportunities to Fairfax students.
Since 1997, the Melrose Trading Post outdoor flea market has created opportunities for Fairfax High School and the surrounding neighborhood.,Money raised by this nonprofit organization from the low-cost patron admission and vendor booth fees fuels an arts education program on the FHS campus called, Institute for the Arts at Greenway.
Notable alumni [ edit ]Kirk Cousins, left, is averaging 9.5 yards per completion over the past three games instead of the 7.5 of the first seven, and he’s helped the Redskins offense improve to 31.3 points per game from 22.7. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post)
So they meet again. The Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day.
Four years have passed since the most recent such date between the rivals. Thanksgiving Day 2012 seemed to represent the full-on introduction of Robert Griffin III who, after using his legs to confound opponents for the first half of his rookie season, seemed to blossom fully. He completed 19 of 27 passes for 304 yards and four touchdowns, and the Redskins beat the host Cowboys, 38-31.
That victory helped jump-start Washington, which closed out the year on a seven-game winning streak to capture its first division title in 13 years. It looked like the start of a dynamic era.
But things started to crumble less than two months later when Griffin’s surgically repaired knee gave out on him in the first round of the playoffs against Seattle, requiring another surgery. His relationship with then-coach Mike Shanahan disintegrated. Following a miserable 3-13 campaign, owner Daniel Snyder and then-general manager Bruce Allen decided to blow the whole thing up.
Gone are Griffin and the Shanahans (Mike and his son, offensive coordinator Kyle). So is running back Alfred Morris, another key factor in that playoff run. He now serves as a backup for the Cowboys.
Robert Griffin III threw four first-half touchdown passes in a 38-21 victory on Thanksgiving Day 2012 in Arlington, Texas. But few Redskins from then are key players now, and only Ryan Kerrigan and Pierre Garcon are expected to start both games. (Jose Yau/The Waco Tribune-Herald, via AP)
Only five players on Thursday’s game-day roster (Chris Baker, Kirk Cousins, Ryan Kerrigan, Pierre Garcon and Nick Sundberg) remain from that 2012 Thanksgiving Day Redskins team. Left tackle Trent Williams is suspended, and three others — Kedric Golston, DeAngelo Hall and Kory Lichtensteiger — are on injured reserve.
“It’s kind of crazy to think about that,” said Kerrigan, an outside linebacker and one of only two lingering starters from that Thanksgiving Day lineup, with the other being Garcon.
“Obviously,” Kerrigan continued, “a lot has gone on here since then — some good and some bad. But it’s kind of crazy to think that we’re back in a similar spot and both the Cowboys and us are pushing for tops in the division, and there’s a lot riding on this game just like it was four years ago.”
Both Dallas and Washington hovered around.500 on Thanksgiving 2012. This year Dallas (9-1) owns the best record in the league and hasn’t lost since Week 1. Washington (6-3-1) has won six of its past eight.
The Cowboys, then, are the hunted. And instead of long shots needing a magical run to reach the postseason, the Redskins would be an NFC wild-card team if the season ended today.
Yet the Redskins remain in search of long-term stability at quarterback, with Griffin’s former backup trying to fill that need. After usurping Griffin last year and leading Washington on another improbable quest to a division title, Cousins received a big — but short-term — payday, the one-year, $19.95 million franchise tag.
“You never really know what’s going to happen,” Cousins said, reflecting on his drastically different standing this time around. “That’s why we don’t ever look too far forward beyond the next game because we don’t know. Four years from now, who knows where we’re going to be? You’re only going to waste energy trying to think too far forward. You just focus on the next game.”
1 of 84 Full Screen Autoplay Close Week 16: Washington 41, Bears 21 at Soldier Field Week 15: Carolina Panthers 26, Redskins 15 at FedEx Field. Week 14: Redskins 27, Philadelphia Eagles 22, at Lincoln Financial Field. Week 13: Arizona Cardinals 31, Redskins at University of Phoenix Staduim Week 12: Dallas Cowboys 31, Redskins 26 at AT&T Stadium Week 11: Washington 42, Green Bay 24, at FedEx Field. Week 9: Washington 26, Minnesota Vikings 20 at FedEx Field. Week 8: Washington 27, Bengals 27, at Wembley Field in London. Week 7: Washington 17, Lions 20 at Ford Field. Week 6: Washington 27, Eagles 20 at FedEx Field. Week 5: Washington 16, Ravens 10 in Baltimore. Week 4: Washington 31, Cleveland Browns 20 at FedEx Field. Week 3: Washington 29, NY Giants 27 at MetLife Stadium. Skip Ad × Photos from the Redskins’ season so far View Photos A look at the standout images from Washington’s games in 2016. Caption Washington went 8-7-1 and missed the playoffs by a whisker. Here’s a look at the standout images from 2016. Reed celebrated his touchdown, which he hoped would set the stage for a dramatic Washington win. Nick Wass/Associated Press Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Gaining momentum
More than halfway through his prove-it campaign, Cousins is gaining momentum. In his past three games, Cousins has averaged 365 passing yards and a 68.1 completion percentage while throwing seven touchdown passes and just one interception.
Sunday’s 42-24 win over the Packers represented Cousins’s most dynamic outing with three touchdown passes, no interceptions and a season-best 145.8 passer rating.
“He’s definitely stepping up, and last game he really showed us that he wants to be that guy and that he can be that guy,” Redskins linebacker Su’a Cravens said. “With a performance like that, I don’t know how anybody can say he can’t be.”
Intoxicated by the emotions of Sunday night’s big victory, Cousins greeted General Manager Scot McCloughan as he came off the field, asking “How do you like me now?”
The quarterback later said that he understands he’s under constant evaluation and that he meant no disrespect.
[Cousins says his celebratory postgame eruption had no hidden message]
But in reality, Redskins officials ask themselves that same question daily. Although Cousins put up yardage numbers in the first half of the season, his coaches and their higher-ups wanted to see more aggression — and, most of all, more points.
He displayed a good command of the offense but played it safe at times. Washington’s offense lacked a consistent deep-ball element and ranked among the worst in the league in the red zone.
“He started out a little bit slow,” Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon said in an interview this week. “I don’t know if it was the weight of the numbers he was being paid was getting to him and he was pressing a little bit or what. But the last three weeks... he’s playing really good football right now at the right time. You’re just hoping he continues, and I’m sure the Redskins are looking for that before they start talking long-term extensions. We’ll see if he continues this through the end of the year and leads them to the playoffs. I’m sure that’ll have a lot to do with it.”
Doing the little things
Cousins’s recent hot streak began at the midway point of the season, and his upward trend seems to resemble the pattern he displayed last year. After a modest start, he caught fire in the second half of the season, throwing 19 touchdown passes and just two interceptions while leading the Redskins on a 7-3 finish.
Cousins has said there’s no conscious switch he flipped, but with time, comfort and continued work, his confidence, recognition and execution have improved.
“I think it’s been a combination of factors,” Cousins said. “I don’t think it’s been one thing or even two things. We’ve got to have a great game plan. Sean McVay has to not only design the plays, but he’s got to call them at the right time. Then we have to execute them. We have to throw with accuracy, make the catches and protect.... It’s just so many factors that have to go together.”
Coaches do, however, see growth in Cousins’s game. The increase in production — over the past three games, Cousins is up to 9.2 yards per attempt from 7.5, and the offense is scoring 31.6 points per game instead of 22.7 — hasn’t come by chance.
Cousins has been doing more of the little things that add up.
“You can see it. It’s ‘Eye in the sky don’t lie,’ so to speak,” Coach Jay Gruden said. “He’s going through progressions. He’s hanging in there. He had a couple plays in that [Green Bay] game that really — the first touchdown to DeSean Jackson, that was his fourth progression. He hung in there and threw a great pass to DeSean. The check-down to Chris Thompson on third down — which he had to scramble out of the pocket, buy time, Clay Matthews came on a stunt, was unblocked — he made him miss and got two hands on the ball and threw a great pass to Chris Thompson for a big first down. Those plays are really difference-makers as far as the game’s concerned.
“The more comfortable he gets and the people around him and the system, the better he’s going to be. We like where he is, we like where he’s going, [and] he’s going to continue to work, which is also why we like him,” Gruden said.
Such play — and victories — will go a long way toward setting up the Redskins nicely, while also answering any remaining questions Redskins officials could have about Cousins.
A win Thursday would be a challenge, given Washington’s short turnaround and Dallas’s momentum.
“I’d like to see him down the stretch. That’s really when you see a quarterback at his best,” Moon said. “He’s got some divisional games coming up, starting with the Cowboys on Thursday. That’s where you can set yourself up in the division because you don’t want to give the Cowboys any more space.... This could really pull them back into the division race if [the Redskins] could win this game, and he’s going to have to play big for them to do that. I’d say over the course of the next three or four weeks, he’s either going to play himself into a long-term, big deal or there’s still going to be some questions.”There's a lot of criticism thrown at the girls on Teen Mom and Teen Mom 2, but when you look at many of the parents of these new mothers, it's no surprise their kids are struggling. Plenty of the reality stars are trying to turn into adults with little to no support from their parents. But South Dakota's Chelsea Houska and her uber-supportive parents Randy and Mary are the rare exception. The two are divorced but they've been there for their teen daughter and her little girl, Aubree, every step of the way.
And when Chelsea sat down with The Stir to talk about the third season of Teen Mom 2, she had plenty to say about what parents should and shouldn't do if their teen ends up pregnant. And Chelsea had her fair share of words for people who have criticized dad Randy for spoiling her.
Chelsea on why she isn't being "spoiled" by her dad:
The thing I hear most is that I'm like this spoiled brat or that I get everything handed to me. One, I don't think I'm a brat. I don't think I've ever really come off as a brat. I don't know why people say that.
And I think people thought that because in the first season of Teen Mom, I was 18, and my dad was helping me. But a lot of times when people don't have kids, and they're going off to college, their parents help them.
Not everyone has that, and a lot of people do. I was lucky enough to have that. I mean, I'm on my own now. My dad helps me if I need it, which I rarely do.
He's just a dad.
On how her parents are involved in her life now:
I think my parents are great. The support system I honestly think is a big deal.
If my parents had kicked me out and stuff like that... that doesn't help a child when they have a child young. It's already scary and stressful!
My parents are great. They supported me and gave me good advice, and they love me so much that I want Aubree to feel that love from me.
On how her life is different from some of her Teen Mom 2 castmates:
I feel like there are stereotypes when it comes to teen pregnancy. Like, it's going to be the girl that was, like, I don't know the word to use, this sounds awful, but trash. Trashy girls or whatever.
But anyone, anyone can get pregnant when they're young, whoever's having sex. It doesn't matter if you have a rich family or a poor family.
Some people, I've got tweets being like, "Why are you on Teen Mom, you have everything, blah, blah, blah." But really, I still was a teen mom. It happens to everyone. I think it's good that MTV shows that. It's not just one group of people that's getting pregnant at a young age.
Do you think Chelsea's parents are spoiling her or just being good parents?
Image by Jeanne SagerTable of Contents:
Introduction
Who is Wario?
“Two Warios”
Smash 64 and Melee
Footnotes
————————-Part Two————————-
Wario and Butts: A Retrospective
The Cross Eyed Fighter
Moveset Breakdown
Wario Isn’t That Gross!
Conclusion
Footnotes
Introduction
PushDustIn here. I’m so excited to finally bring you my epic on Wario. Ever since I saw the Brawl reveal trailer, I loved Wario. For me, Wario represents some of the best aspects of the Smash Bros. series, pure silliness and fun. Wario is undoubtedly my favorite character in the Smash Bros. game. Therefore, I wanted to go over the history of the character, references to Wario in all of the Smash games, and an explanation for Wario’s moveset.
The post is extremely long, and very image heavy, so in order to keep everyone invested I decided to break up the posts. The first post will cover the history of Wario, the difference in representation, and Super Smash Bros. 64 and Melee. The second post will go over Wario’s toilet humor, moveset representation in Brawl and the localization choices in Super Smash Bros for 3DS/ Wii U.
After Smash for Wii U/ 3DS DLC is finished, I would like to start a series called, “Project Omega.” Essentially, I would like to compile every single bit of information about various topics within the Smash Bros. series. These posts are a test for that series. I would greatly appreciate feedback on the style and format of this post, and it can help improve future posts. Also, like always please let me know if you feel I missed something, or if something I posted isn’t 100% correct.
Special thanks to Soma, Spin, and the other writers at Source Gaming for providing so much feedback on this article.
If you would like to help out, please consider donating to my patreon. All the funds will go back into making Source Gaming the best place for Smash information on the web. You can also like us on Facebook!
Who is Wario?
Super Mario Land 2 : 6 Golden Coins was developed by the Nintendo R&D 1 team. It was released on October 21st, 1992 in Japan for the Game Boy. It was produced by Gunpei Yokoi, instead of Shigeru Miyamoto (As Miyamoto was assigned to the home console versions of the Mario franchise). Hiroji Kiyotake was the director and graphic designer for Super Mario Land 2, and is considered the primary father of Wario. Hiroji Kiyotake also designed Samus Aran in the original Metroid game. Since Hiroji Kiyotake’s list of works is incomplete in English, I’ve listed them at the end of this article for everyone’s convenience. However, there has been another man — Takehiko Hosokawa who has been involved with all the Wario Land games, and some of the WarioWare games. What kind of input he’s had into Wario is currently unknown.
It is said that because of Nintendo’s R&D 1 team was not happy with developing someone else’s game, they decided to create a character that would symbolize their frustration. That character was Wario. Wario was an instant breakout success, selling enough to warrant numerous sequels across a variety of platforms.
After the success of Super Mario Land 2, the team began to work on Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land. This game started Wario’s own series. Embittered by the events of Super Mario Land 2, Wario sets off to get his own fortune. Later Wario Land games would focus on Wario either reclaiming his lost fortune or looking for new treasure. The games are notable for featuring branching paths and various abilities. In Wario Land 2 and 3, Wario is essentially invincible, but can be affected by a variety of enemies (“reactions”) that can either help or hinder him his progress. For example, eating just once slice of cake will make Wario become very fat, allowing Wario ground pound blocks. Wario Land 4 introduces a heart system, but Wario is still able to take multiple hits. This style continued with Wario World and later Wario Land: Shake It. Wario Land Shake It (July 2008) is currently the last entry in the Wario Land series.
In 2003, the WarioWare series was introduced to the world. In these games, instead of treasure hunting, Wario becomes the C.E.O. of WarioWare Inc. Wario seeks to become rich by releasing a bunch of short, unfinished games, which are played by the player. Yoshi Sakamato stated that Wario was chosen because “he’s always doing stupid things.” Wario’s new design, along with Wario’s friends and employees were created by Ko Takeuchi, who would later work on the Rhythm Heaven series. All mini-games are quick reaction-based games, challenging players to quickly read the prompt, and do the action within 5 seconds or less. In WarioWare, the games are themed after each of the characters. For example, 9-Volt’s minigames are mostly retro throwbacks whereas Wario’s minigames focus on the man himself.
His success isn’t limited to his own series either. Wario has appeared in every Mario Kart (since 64), Mario Tennis, Golf and Fortune Street spin-off games. He was even featured in Mario Kart 64 before Donkey Kong was introduced to the roster. Wario was also made into a playable character in the rerelease of Super Mario 64, on the Nintendo DS. Needless to say, Wario is a fundamental part of the Nintendo’s history and games.
I’ve listed all of Wario’s games at the end of this article.
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Note in cases where there is a comparison, the Japanese version is on the left side.
While comparing the marketing campaigns between the United States and Japan, I noticed something different about Wario. There seems to be a divide in how Wario Land games were marketed in the United States and Japan. Starting with the original Super Mario Land 2 commercial for the United States, Wario is attempting to hypnotize the viewer into stopping Mario. He starts off by saying “Obey me– Wario. I am your master. Mario is your enemy,” with the narrator calling him a “wicked imposter.” This really highlights the villain aspect of Wario.
This feels very different from the Japanese version of the commercial for Super Mario Land 2, which instead focuses on saving the six kingdoms. The ending of the commercial also introduces Wario, and uses his voice and personality that is featured in the other Wario commercials in Japan. However, Wario is seen as the butt of a joke (Mario promptly closing the book on him). Also notice that his eyes are cross-eyed. This is something that is actually part of Wario’s design and is never used in American commercials. I did my best to sum up the the two commercials in GIF format, but I highly suggest watching the full commercials.
This trend continues in later commercials, and the differences become only more stark. “It’s me. Wario! I’m great! Wario says in the Japanese version of the Wario Land 1 commercial. He’s hanging onto Tokyo tower, attempting to impress the crowd. At the end of the commercial he is flung away by a winking Mario.
The U.S. commercial for Wario Land 1, on the other hand, once again focuses on the “evilness” of Wario. Following the spirit of the first commercial, Wario is once again attempting to hypnotize the viewer into helping him. His tagline summarizes the commercial well: “Being bad is good and greed is good.”
While these aren’t the same games, the difference is still evident in later Wario Land games. Compare Wario Land Virtual Boy (US) and Wario Land 3 (Japan). Both commercials feature Wario “laughing” at the view. The Japanese version is once again more comical.
For Wario Land 4, the U.S. version focuses on Wario’s greed via shoppers trying to get all the money (US Commercial), while the Japanese version focuses on Wario’s powerups, and once again, Wario is treated like a joke. In the first part of the commercial Wario is yelling, “Where’s the treasure!?” over and over again. For the part where he’s running left, Wario is yelling, “Where’s the exit!?” quite frantically. Overall, it’s very light-hearted and fun, while the American version is very serious and evil.
In general, the U.S. interpretation of Wario focuses mostly Wario’s greed and wickedness. In the Japanese version of promotional materials, the focus is on Wario being the clumsy anti-hero. Most likely, the marketing team at Nintendo of America knew that a ‘stronger’, more ‘evil’ Wario could sell more in the region. The difference between Japan’s and America’s Wario is a localization choice. This is a very similar situation to the difference between Japanese and American Kirby.
Marketing has had a huge impact in how we perceive the character or a game. For example, marketing could be the reason why Earthbound didn’t sell well. This is because the U.S. marketing department decided to make the game seem as weird as possible (“This game stinks!”) in an attempt to sell the game. For additional information on marketing and the choice to even localize or not, I would highly suggest listening to Chris Pranger’s discussion on the Part-Timer Gamer podcast. He also discusses how some markets might be unsuited for certain games (He uses Captain Rainbow as an example).
That is not to say that I haven’t seen some Japanese users complain about the lack of Wario Land representation, or “powerful” Wario representation in Smash. However, it’s simply not on the scale in the West. I believe the reason many fans in the West have such a hard time accepting Wario’s character in the Smash Bros. series is because a lack of understanding of how the character has been portrayed in Japan.
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Smash 64 and Melee:
In Smash 64, Wario is not a fighter. However, Mario’s second alt is a direct reference to Wario. For the record, the third color alt is Foreman Spike (From Wrecking Crew), the fourth one is “Famicon Mario Bros.” and the last one is most likely inspired by Luigi (though not directly confirmed on the alt explanation page).
After Super Smash Brothers 64’s release, Sakurai answered fan questions. There he received this curious message from a fan:
Kyouhei:“Wario has a big butt, so he’s perfect for 2 [Sequel to Smash 64].”
Sakurai:“Gahhhh. See, for someone whose brain is the size of a piece of rice like myself, the formula ‘big butt = Smash’ is incomprehensibleeeeeee.” [Japanese]
Before working on Melee, Masahiro Sakurai collected votes on who should be in Smash. This is very similar to the current Smash Ballot. Wario placed third in the poll with Wario almost beating Peach to get 2nd place. In the end, he lost by a single vote. Despite placing third, Sakurai decided not to make Wario a fighter as he didn’t want to over represent the Mario franchise [Quote].
Sakurai stated that he could’ve made Wario into a Mario clone, but he decided against it. Furthermore, Sakurai stated that he would have had to cut either Mewtwo, or Marth and Roy for Wario to make it into the game. Based on Wario’s trophy text in Melee[Quote], and his comments on clones in general, it seems unlikely that Sakurai would have ever made Wario into a clone. The Japanese text slightly expands on a couple of points, but the English localization is more or less accurate. Once again, Mario’s second alt is a reference to Wario. Wario’s obsession with butts and toilet humor was already in full swing as Wario Land 4 was released three months prior to Melee…
Stay tuned as I’ll be going over the history of toilet humor in the Wario Land series, what inspired Wario’s moveset, and his representation in Brawl and Smash for 3DS/ Wii U in the next part.
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Footnotes:
NOTE: Japanese release dates are used.
Game and Watch Pinball (1983) — Design
Metroid (August, 6th 1986) character design
Kid Icarus (December 19th, 1986) Game design.
Metroid II Return of Samus (January 21st, 1992) Director, Graphic designer
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (October 21st, 1992) Director, graphic designer
Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land (January 21st, 1994) Director, graphic designer.
Wario Woods (February 19th, 1994)
Super Metroid (March 19th, 1994) Original design for Samus
Wario Blast featuring Bomberman! (November 1994) Graphic design
Wario’s Woods (US: December 10th, 1994)
Virtual Boy Wario Land (December 1st, 1995) Director
BS Excite Bike (May 1995) Technical support
Wario Land 2 (October 21st 1998) character design
Wario Land 3 (March 21st, 2000) graphic design
Wario Land 4 (August 21st, 2001) Graphic designer
Metroid Fusion (February 14th 2003) Samus original design
Warioware (March 21st, 2003) Wario original design
WarioWare: Mega Micro Minigames (October 17th, 2003) Wario design
Metroid Zero Mission (May 27th, 2004) Samus design
Wario World (May 27th, 2004) advisor
Wario Master of Disguise (January 18th, 2007) Wario supervision
Metroid: Other M (September 2nd, 2010) concept art
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List of Wario Games (Not including spin-offs like Mario Party):
Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (October 21st, 1992)
Mario and Wario (August 27th, 1993)
Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land (January 21st, 1994)
Wario Woods (February 19th, 1994)
Wario Blast featuring Bomberman! (November 1994)
Wario’s Woods (US: December 10th, 1994)
Virtual Boy Wario Land (December 1st, 1995)
BS Excite Bike (May 1995)
Wario Land 2 (October 21st 1998)
———————Super Smash Brothers 64 release date (January 21st, 1999)———
Wario Land 3 (March 21st, 2000)
Wario Land 4 (August 21st, 2001)
——————Melee’s release date (November 21st, 2001)————————-
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! (March 21st, 2003)
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Game$! (October 17th, 2003)
WarioWare TWISTED (October 14th, 2004)
Wario World (May 27th, 2004)
WarioWare Touched! (December 2nd, |
to the criminal underworld.
Since then there have been question marks over whether Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots or - if he did it - who was he working for?
There have also been suggestions that at least one of the fatal shots was fired from a nearby grassy knoll.
Lee Harvey Oswald (center) was accused of shooting the president from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository
There have been several conspiracy theories debating what actually happened that day - with everyone from the mafia to a mystery man on the Grassy Knoll blamed for the killing (pictured, a secret service agent jumps to the president's aid after a shot is fired)
Stone, 69, said his doubts about 'Ron' were dispelled. As a former marine in Vietnam, the film-maker was convinced by the'military jargon' and intricate details within an account that he describes as 'plausible' and'very authentic'.
He decided to reveal the man's confession for the first time to Matt Zoller Seitz, who is the author of a forthcoming book on Stone, the Oscar–winning screenwriter and director whose classics include Platoon, about the trauma of the Vietnam War.
Asked why Stone waited until now, Seitz says: 'I think it was because he trusted me, and also because both the father and the son have been dead for a while.
'Nobody has ever heard this story. I'm the first person.'
Stone's co-operated with the book by making himself available for interview giving Seitz free access to his extensive archive without any editorial control.
One of the most radical theories about JFK's death claims his wife Jackie (right) killed him
Stone - whose JFK biopic was sympathetic to conspiracy theories - decided to reveal the agent's confession for the first time to author Matt Zoller Seitz (pictured, John F Kennedy with his wife Jackie)
The book reproduces Stone's recollections of 'Ron'. In one passage, he says that he 'didn't have any ulterior motives': 'He came to me through a series of weird letters through post office boxes.
'Everything would go to a PO Box, and he'd locate it from offshore, from Bermuda.'
The scenario he laid out was very practical. It's the way I would do it, if [I] were going to do something like that Oliver Stone
Recalling their meeting in a hotel in Rochester, New York. Stone says: 'He said he didn't want money or recognition. He said something like, "I want you to know this is from my conscience".'
He adds: 'The scenario he laid out was very practical. It's the way I would do it, if [I] were going to do something like that.
'You kill the president, and your cover is security, and if the sniper or snipers who kill the president are hidden in with the guys who are supposed to protect him, guys who have no knowledge of this plot… It makes a lot of sense.
'The scenario he laid out was very practical,' said Stone of his conversations with the agent known only as 'Ron' (pictured, Kevin Costner in JFK's biopic)
'And his memory of it was so technical, filled with military jargon, details about radio communications right after the shots.'
Seitz points out that when Stone served in Vietnam, he 'participated in what he calls coordinated kill zones where you have a rifleman stationed at different locations to catch people in a cross fire in more than one direction'.Darcy Whyte’s life took a turn when his friend brought home an air compressor.
It was pulled from a dumpster.
Compressors can go for hundreds, even thousands of dollars, and the only thing this one needed was a new plug and it was as good to go.
“We said, ‘Oh! That’s interesting!’ and by the next day we had stuck our noses in a couple dumpsters hoping to find one,” said Whyte, a retired software developer and now a full-time artist.
“We were never the same again,” said Whyte about his eclectic group of friends — a retired electrical engineer and two young, full-time IT and infrastructure professionals with children. They call themselves Make 613 – a group of up-cyclers in an upstairs compartment of a 19,000-square-foot warehouse above Ottawa’s popular Art-Is-In bakery. Inside are oddball gadgets, piles of containers of chipped CDs and miscellanea, and a 12-foot mound of Styrofoam.
They have gone dumpster diving individually, but they are now going on “field trips” together to find materials to create up-cycled projects.
“It’s like you’re a kid on a bicycle, exploring the woods somewhere,” said Whyte. His friends take random routes around Ottawa and stop at dumpsters along the drive.
If it’s accessible with no fences, and reasonable that the waste is out there to be disposed of, it’s a go, Whyte said. “We just use common sense.”
Dumpster diving is a loose term given to people who scavenge dumpsters for reusable, recyclable material. It’s a hobby for some here in Ottawa.
There are some who dive for organic substances like food. But for Whyte and his crew, “If you smell a restaurant, it means we’re not there.”
Under city bylaws, it is prohibited to scavenge garbage that has been put out for collection unless authorized by the city. This does not apply to “uncontained items such as bulky items, furniture and similar items” such as large electronics and scrap metal.
Since Jan. 1, 2010, the city had 456 complaint calls about scavenging. Roughly three-quarters of those calls were for scavenging from recycling and garbage bins, and one-quarter were for making a mess while scavenging through garbage, said Marilyn Journeaux, manager of Ottawa’s solid waste services, in an email.
In 2015, the city gave seven warnings and one fine for a repeat blue box scavenging offender.
“We never leave a mess or disturb the peace,” said Whyte, who’s never had trouble with city authorities.
There’s a stigma around dumpster diving. Whyte said he has fun being at fancy dinner parties when someone asks what he did that day.
“People are surprised when you’re in a suit and find out you were dumpster diving,” Whyte said, before laughing.
Whyte explained he doesn’t dumpster dive solely for the widgets and trinkets. “It’s about exploring.”
On his most recent field trip with his buddies, Whyte salvaged a dolly and some oak wood.
“One of the things that I learned about Ottawa is that we really waste a lot,” said Whyte, who also tries to salvage materials from companies before they hit the dumpster.
“Everyone says they know, but it’s a whole different thing when you see it.”Update: A representative from Nintendo has reached out to let us know that the report is false and the release date will not be revealed on Friday.
The release date for the Wii U version of Super Smash Bros. will not be unveiled on Friday during the stream, but more information about the game will be showcased.
Original story
Nintendo held a presentation at the GameStop manager conference, where it teased that Super Smash Bros. Wii U's release date would be revealed on Friday.
According to a report from Kotaku, during its presentation at the conference, Nintendo revealed that Super Smash Bros. Wii U's release date would be announced on Friday during its 8 hour live stream. The stream will feature Super Smash Bros. 3DS, as well as other 3DS and Wii U games, but not much else is known. You can learn more about the stream here.
(Disclaimer: GameStop is Game Informer’s parent company)
[Source: Kotaku]
Our Take
On the official Super Smash Bros. website, the release date for the game (or window, rather) is still listed as Holiday 2014. I wouldn't be surprised to see it get pushed to 2015. Nintendo has been pushing the 3DS version of the game very hard, and it might be an preemptive attempt to make people less disappointed about a delay for the Wii version.The woman at the heart of Rolling Stone's retracted rape article has been ordered to appear in court.
Known only as 'Jackie', the then-18-year-old has remained anonymous since telling the magazine she was brutally gang-raped at UVa for a 9,000-word feature - then admitted she had made it up.
However, as the magazine now battles numerous defamation lawsuits over the retracted November 2014 article, a judge has ordered 'Jackie' to take to the stand for a one-day hearing in April.
'The court believes that a one-day, seven-hour deposition will be sufficient,' Judge Glen Conrad wrote in a court order on Friday, according to Newsweek.
She is scheduled to appear on April 5.
A judge has ordered 'Jackie' - the subject of Rolling Stone's retracted rape article - to take the stand for a one-day hearing in April as the magazine battles numerous defamation lawsuits over the November 2014 piece
The debunked Rolling Stone article 'A Rape on Campus' stemmed from the alleged victim's crush on a boy. 'Jackie' (left) faked a love interest and cried gang rape so Ryan Duffin (right) would come to her rescue
It comes after lawyers for UVa hit out at Jackie, claiming texts show she made up the story and her fictitious rapist in order to impress a love interest.
According to legal papers filed by the university's attorneys, Jackie claimed that a junior named Haven Monahan, who was later found to be made up, forced her to perform oral sex on five men at a university fraternity house in 2012.
Two years later, she became the main subject of a Rolling Stone expose about on-campus rape cases.
The magazine later retracted the story after the police determined Monahan was made up and the gang rape never happened.
'All available evidence demonstrates that 'Haven Monahan' was a fake suitor created by Jackie in a strange bid to earn the affections of a student named Ryan Duffin that Jackie was romantically interested in,' lawyers of the university's associate dean wrote in court papers filed last month.
It all began when Duffin sparked up a friendship with Jackie, according to the papers. But when Duffin rejected her advances for a more romantic relationship, she goaded him into texting a boy from her chemistry class named Haven Monahan.
On September 28, 2012, Jackie told Duffin that her date with Monahan had gone horribly wrong and he forced her to perform oral sex on five other men.
Duffin and some friends immediately rushed to see her, and later described her to be in a hysterical state, the Washington Post reported. He said she refused to report the crime to the police.
Two years later, Rolling Stone magazine wrote a 9,000 word story about the alleged attack in a campus fraternity house.
But an investigation by Charlottesville Police later determined that no one named Haven Monahan had attended the university.
The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house where 'Jackie' claimed she was gang raped. The fraternity is now suing Rolling Stone for $25 million over the discredited article
The photos Jackie sent to Duffin, claiming they showed Monahan, were actually of a boy she went to high school with in Northern Virginia.
Eventually, the police said no gang rape had occurred that night and Rolling Stone retracted its story.
With hindsight, Duffin wondered how he did not see through Jackie's lies. He told the Washington Post he found Monahan's infatuation with Jackie odd.
He told of how he received a text from Monahan saying: 'Get this she said she likes some other 1st year guy who dosnt like her and turned her down but she wont date me cause she likes him [sic].'
The texts sent by Monahan alluded to Jackie's romantic feelings for Duffin, the lawyers of associate dean Nicole Eramo wrote in court documents.
Duffin said Monahan once texted him to tell him Jackie was dying from a terminal illness, which she confirmed to him.
Duffin became suspicious of Monahan after Jackie told him she had seen him in person and forgave him for the alleged attack.
The account of the gang rape in Rolling Stone are said to have differed greatly from the facts given to Duffin in 2012.
She told the magazine the attack involved nine men - not five - and she identified Haven Monahan by a different first name.
The next time they spoke was after the Rolling Stone story was published and he confronted her over discrepancies in her account.(John Moore/Getty Images)
Urged by local media, minors from Mexico and Central America are clogging Border Patrol stations.
Border Patrol officials struggling to keep up with the increasing number of minors illegally crossing the Mexican border are not turning away persons with known gang affiliations. Chris Cabrera, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 in the Rio Grande Valley, explained that a Border Patrol agent he represents helped reunite a teenage gang member with his family in the United States. Cabrera notes the young member of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), a transnational criminal gang, had no criminal record in the U.S., but asks, “If he’s a confirmed gang member in his own country, why are we letting him in here?”
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“I’ve heard people come in and say, ‘You’re going to let me go, just like you let my mother go, just like you let my sister go. You’re going to let me go as well, and the government’s going to take care of us,’” Cabrera says. “Until we start mandatory detentions, mandatory removals, I don’t think anything is going to change. As a matter of fact, I think it’s going to get worse.”
Art Del Cueto, president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 2544 in Tucson, says agents who recognize the gang-affiliated tattoos of minors crossing the border must treat them the same as anybody else. He says these people are afforded the same rights provided to anyone crossing the border.
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“It’s upsetting that a lot of them are 16 or 17 years old and a lot of them are not going to face deportation,” Cueto says. He has visited the Nogales station, which he estimates is holding 1,100 children who crossed the border. The children have been sent from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and have also crossed the border near the Nogales station, he says.
Cabrera says the Rio Grande Valley has nine stations and the largest one, in McAllen, Texas, has a capacity of approximately 275 people. Cabrera says this station is seeing between 700 and 1,500 people daily and received 74 women and children in a 20-minute period earlier this week. Cabrera says he thinks the surge in unaccompanied children crossing the border is policy-based.
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He says the Border Patrol stations in the Rio Grande Valley are short-term facilities, not designed to hold people for more than a couple of days. As a result, Border Patrol officials have taken responsibility for the well-being of the illegal immigrants, providing sandwiches and water three times a day. “You would not believe how many sandwiches I’ve made over the course of my career,” Cabrera says. In Nogales, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have brought in vendors to provide food, while FEMA has sought to provide counseling and recreational activities, according to FoxNews.com. Cueto says the children are being vaccinated before being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. ICE is then transporting them to military bases in California, Oklahoma, and San Antonio, Texas, according to CBS Houston.
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“It’s just frustrating to know that we do all this paperwork just for them to walk out the door,” Cabrera says. “When these people get released they call back home and they say, ‘Hey, you know what? We got released, and if you come with your family they’re going to release you as well.’”
Both Cabrera and Cueto said local Central American media have played a role in encouraging the children to cross the border. Cabrera says he knows of television commercial spots that encourage people to go to the U.S. with their children because they won’t be turned away. KRGV Channel 5 News, in the Rio Grande Valley, reported that a mother and daughter traveled to America because they believed America’s borders to be open after Guatemalan news reports that said mothers and small children are getting bus tickets. “I said I need to act right now because this will end and my girl won’t have a future,” the mother said in Spanish to KRGV. Cueto says when he asked a group of children about their motivation, they spoke of the “announcer on the radio” who encouraged them to head for the United States. Cueto says Central American radio, television, other media, and religious groups have all encouraged people to move north to the United States.
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— Ryan Lovelace is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.A/N: This is where I write my first fic. This was from a sample test paper, where the question was to write a short story starting with"I was fst asleep. Suddenly there was a knock at the door". Includes an OC, i.e. Riku's older brother. Riku's POV.
I was fast asleep. Suddenly there was a knock at the door. No, I did not feel afraid, but I looked at the clock. The two metal hands were in perfect alignment, so much so, that it was hard to make out which was which. In short, it was exactly midnight.
"Wonderful!" I thought, with a hint of sarcasm in it. Things werenot as I had expected it seems.
It was a Friday, as far as I can remember, and my parents wereoff to some work trip. I knew Onii-Chan was coming around this weekend, but for the most part, I was home alone.
Just so that I don't die out of lonliness, I caalled Shin over. Oh yes, Shin Higaku, the occult guy.
Earlier that day, we had performed the prerequisites for the Midnight Man ritual. Legend has it that if you survive the midnight man, you'll be luck for the rest of your life.
No, no, I'm not superstitious.
I actually called Shin over to debunk the myth. But now, it seemed...supana churu...I mean, supernatural.
In the ritual, there is a part where you have to knock twelve times at the door. On the twelfth time, it is supposed to open. And it did. Did I mention that there was heavy rain that day?
But now, things seemed to click in place. The door flinging open. The knock at precisely midnight. Oh noes...
I woke Shin up, and told him about it. The two of us slowly creeped towards the main door, as if in a trance, but I snapped out of it as soon as I reached the door. My rationale was more than active now. I ent back to my room and picked up my trusty baseball bat, and back at the door was I again.
Shin asked me if I was sure. I nodded with determination. I rotated the doorknob. Here goes-
I saw aa shadowy figure. I drove my baseball bat, point first, straight into his abdomen, as if on figure fell, giving out a rather humanly scream.
"Seriously? Are you a baka?" was all I heard.
The figure, now partially lit by the moonlight was none other than-
"Is this how you welcome family?"
Onii-sama.
Apologising, I helped him to his feet, and within moments, the three of us were in the living room, with no fear of the said monster, laughing at the messed up incident.
So much of what a gust of wind and un untimely knock can do!× Expand Scott Pruitt caricature by DonkeyHotey
Editor's Update: On February 17th, Senators voted 52-46 to confirm Mr. Pruitt to head the EPA. The confirmation comes after an all-night attempt by Democratic Senators to prevent his confirmation, and just one day after the Oklahoma County Court found Trump EPA nominee Scott Pruitt in violation of the state’s Open Records Act. The Center for Media and Democracy had filed a lawsuit against Pruitt for improperly withholding public records. Pruitt's office released some 400 emails last week. The judge gave Pruitt’s office until Tuesday, February 21, to turn over more than 2,500 emails it withheld from CMD’s January 2015 records request, and just 10 days to turn over an undetermined number of documents responsive to CMD’s 5 additional open records requests outstanding between November 2015 and August 2016.
Just days before the full Senate votes on his appointment as director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has been hit with an Open Records Act lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed on February 7 by the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy, asserts that, as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Pruitt has refused to provide public access to almost 3,000 official emails and other documents requested under the Oklahoma Open Records Act.
“Attorney General Pruitt had two years to respond to a lawful request for documents from his office,” Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the Oklahoma ACLU, which is helping represent CMD in the case, stated in a press release. “Instead of complying with the law, he has stonewalled public interest groups, the United States Senate, and the American people.”
Since 2015, CMD has filed seven records requests seeking information about communications between Pruitt’s office, Koch Industries, and other coal, oil, and gas corporations. The requests are part of a years-long effort by the investigative group to expose compromising relationships between corporate energy interests and Pruitt and other attorneys general.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Pruitt faced repeated questions about his support from, and for, fossil fuel interests. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, displayed a chart listing ExxonMobil, Murray Energy, and Koch Industries, among other companies that he says have contributed to Pruitt’s campaigns and organizations.
× Expand Youtube Senator Sheldon Whitehouse questioning Scott Pruitt on his associations with the fossil fuel industry.
During the past fifteen years, members of the fossil fuel industry have donated almost $350,000 in campaign money to Pruitt, according to CMD. Donors include Continental Resources, whose CEO served as Pruitt’s 2014 campaign chairman. The fracking company Devon Energy and coal company Alliance Resources provided “substantial” funds to Pruitt’s two federal PACs—Liberty 2.0 and Oklahoma Strong. In 2014, The New York Times published an investigation showing that letters Pruitt sent to the EPA and Department of Interior as his own—in which he claimed that the EPA was “overestimating methane emissions from natural gas production”—were in fact drafted by lobbyists for Devon Energy.
Last year, Pruitt orchestrated an effort by Republican state attorneys general to oppose the confirmation of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. In March, according to CMD, Pruitt sent an email to supporters of one federal PAC boasting of his efforts to block Garland’s confirmation as well as “successfully [blocking] the President’s Clean Power plan, his immigration rule and his attempt at a massive takeover of the waters of the U.S.”
Pruitt has also failed to take legal action to protect Oklahoma residents impacted by swarms of fracking-induced earthquakes. Oklahoma, a seismically inactive area before gas fracking operations began, had 857 earthquakes last year, more than the rest of the continental United States combined.
More than 490 former employees of the EPA have sent an open letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressing their concerns over Pruitt’s nomination, stating: “Mr. Pruitt’s record and public statements strongly suggest that he does not share the vision or agree with the underlying principles of our environmental laws.”
Pruitt has not released a single document, although he has acknowledged that his office has 3,000 emails relevant to CMD’s original request in January of 2015.
According to Nick Surgey, CMD’s director of research, “Families in Michigan and Pennsylvania grappling with unsafe drinking water, communities from California to Florida dealing with damage to our climate, and parents looking for ways to clean up the air their kids breathe all deserve the facts behind whose interests Pruitt really serves.”WHEN Catherine Mulligan, a part-time economist at a non-profit group, commutes from her home in south-west London to her office in Clerkenwell, in the centre, she chooses her departure time carefully. Either she gets on the London Underground early, at around five o’clock in the morning, or she works at home and travels in when the rush hour is over. Such early and late starts may seem an annoyance, but neither is as bad as the alternative. “I avoid the peak hour because it’s hell,” she says.
London’s Underground system is heaving. Since 2007 the number of journeys on the Tube has increased by 30%; passengers now make 4m trips on it each day. The rush hour—which today lasts for nearer three hours—has become even more crowded: since 1991 the number of people crammed on to carriages in the morning and afternoon peaks has increased by nearly 50%. But the congestion is also spreading out. Over the same period the number of people travelling off-peak has almost doubled, with much of the increase in the past decade (see chart). Such shifting patterns hint at the ways in which Londoners are changing the way they live and work.
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Much of the overall increase is down to a booming population: some 8.6m people now live in the capital, and more commute in from its outskirts and beyond. Since 2004 the number of people travelling to work in central London has increased by nearly a third. Alongside this, more tourists are coming to the city: between 2004 and 2014 the number of overseas visitors on holiday increased by 52%.
Another reason is that using the Tube has become much easier. In 2003 Transport for London (TfL), the transport authority, introduced the Oyster card, an electronic ticket. This bit of blue plastic “changed the whole equation” of how people get around the city, according to Shashi Verma, TfL’s head of customer experience. Rather than having to buy different tickets for different zones, times and modes of transport, customers can now hop on and off with ease. Since last year “contactless” credit and debit cards have made payment smoother still. All this has persuaded passengers to take more trips.
But the boom in off-peak travel also reflects fast-changing patterns of work. Between 2004 and 2015 the number of people self-employed in London increased by 44%—much faster than the growth in overall employment in the city, which went up by 20%. London has the highest proportion of self-employed people in the country. “Work is a bit more off-the-grid these days,” says Simon, a self-employed artist waiting for the Tube at Old Street station. This means more people travelling to and from work at odd times. In 2003 commuters made up just under half the passengers on the Tube between 7pm and 10pm. By 2013 they accounted for 62%. Their share of traffic in the middle of the day also went up, from 48% to 54%.
Some of those who are self-employed or who work part-time, such as taxi drivers, will not be zipping around the Tube at off-peak hours. But those in other sectors, such as the tech business or service industries, often do. At Second Home, a former carpet-factory in east London which now serves as a trendy workspace for microbusinesses and self-employed people, things are pretty quiet until 10am, says Rohan Silva, its co-founder. But by midday the space is buzzing, he adds—and some people stay there until three in the morning.
The Tube is starting to change to accommodate these unusual working hours. Over the past two decades the number of off-peak trains has gradually increased, making it a more reliable service; recent upgrades have improved things further on this front. In January Boris Johnson, the mayor, changed the way that fares are capped each day, moving to a system that has made occasional commuting cheaper for people who work from home a few days a week. From September, five Tube lines will stay open through the night on Fridays and Saturdays; the change is partly motivated by TfL’s discovery that nearly half of those travelling on night buses were on their way to or from work.
Will the off-peak working trend continue? Although many people who work for themselves report high job satisfaction, it is not easy to be self-employed in London, complains Mr Silva. Arranging a mortgage is harder, especially given London’s soaring house prices, and offices often have to be let on strict long-term leases which leave little flexibility for growing businesses. These factors may push people farther out. But for those who still want to work in the capital, avoiding the daily crush will become ever more difficult. Ms Mulligan may find that her five o’clock start becomes a little busier.An Israeli filmmaker went into hiding on Tuesday after his movie attacking Islam's Prophet Muhammad sparked angry assaults by Muslims on U.S. diplomatic missions in Egypt and in Libya, where one American was killed.
Speaking by phone from an undisclosed location, writer and director Sam Bacile remained defiant, saying Islam is a cancer and that he intended his film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion.
Protesters angered over Bacile's film opened fire on and burned down the U.S.consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, killing an American State Department officer on Tuesday. In Egypt, protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and replaced an American flag with an Islamic banner.
Bacile, a California real estate developer in his fifties who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew, said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam's flaws to the world. "
"Islam is a cancer, period," he repeatedly said in a solemn, accented tone.
The two-hour movie, "Innocence of Muslims," cost $5 million to make and was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors, said Bacile, who wrote and directed it.
The film claims Muhammad was a fraud. An English-language 13-minute trailer on YouTube shows an amateur cast performing a wooden dialogue of insults disguised as revelations about Muhammad, whose obedient followers are presented as a cadre of goons.
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It depicts Muhammad as a feckless philanderer who approved of child sexual abuse, among other overtly insulting claims that have caused outrage.
Muslims find it offensive to depict Muhammad in any manner, let alone insult the prophet. A Danish newspaper's 2005 publication of 12 caricatures of the prophet triggered riots in many Muslim countries.
Though Bacile was apologetic about the American who was killed as a result of the outrage over his film, he blamed lax embassy security and the perpetrators of the violence.
"I feel the security system (at the embassies) is no good," said Bacile.
"America should do something to change it."
The film was dubbed into Egyptian Arabic by someone Bacile doesn't know, but he speaks enough Arabic to confirm that the translation is accurate. It was made in three months in the summer of 2011, with 59 actors and about 45 people behind the camera.
The full film has been shown once, to a mostly empty theater in Hollywood earlier this year, said Bacile.
The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is seen in flames during a protest by an armed group said to have been protesting a film being produced in the United States September 11, 2012. Reuters
skip -In my over 50 years at the University of California, Berkeley, as a student, professor, department chair, dean, and architect, I have witnessed many wonderful milestones. Be it intellectual, scientific, social, or architectural, the campus has shown leadership, creativity, innovation, and initiative making me proud and grateful to be a part of it. There is, however, one glaring exception, and that is People’s Park. The park has been a problem for over 40 years, and the University has been unwilling to address it.
I was present at the inception of People’s Park in the spring of 1969. For many years I have also tried through architectural consultation, service on the People’s Park Community Advisory Board, and several other park-related committees, to motivate the campus to come to terms with the many problems caused by its neglect. Nothing has happened.
I realize that people who read blogs are used to pieces that are short, pithy, and to the point. I therefore apologize that what follows is not that. I feel that the 46-year history of, and the various attempts to change, People’s Park need an airing in order to give context and rationale to what I propose. I have divided my comments into four sections: history of People’s Park, the current situation, previous park proposals, and what I believe should happen now.
My proposal assumes that the University will continue to own this land, and therefore must take responsibility for the homeless who now frequent People’s Park. UC cannot act alone, as the City of Berkeley is complicit by not meeting its responsibility to the city’s most vulnerable citizens. I come to this determination based on my 20 years of writing about, and designing facilities for, the homeless.
What follows in the four sections are answers to questions I hear frequently when people know of my association with UC, and my history of efforts relative to People’s Park.
PART 1 – HISTORY
When did it all begin?
In the mid-1950s the University announced its intention to develop a 2.8-acre parcel of land a few blocks south of the University of California campus. Among the stated needs was additional student housing. As a public agency, it acquired the land for $1.3 million through the eminent-domain process, and eventually removed several houses. Among them was the home of one of my professors, the living room of which served as his architectural office. The funds for development never materialized, and university’s plans had several iterations and false starts. By default the land became an unpaved, and often muddy, parking lot.
How did it become a park?
In the spring of 1969 the University began to plan recreational fields on this site, a low-density use requiring far less funding than housing. The original idea for an alternative park began when a group of young activist who lived nearby held an evening meeting in their apartment and began devising an idealized vision. One participant wrote a story for the Berkeley Barb, a new alternative newspaper, seeking volunteers to bring materials to the site. Over the next few days, a few hundred park-building volunteers grew exponentially. Some local activist, among them principals of the 1964 Free Speech Movement five years earlier, envisioned this grassroots effort as creating a place of free speech and community gathering. There was no formal planning or design, but they believed this organic development was superior to the plans of UC.
Negotiations ensued between Berkeley campus administrators and the park builders, but before their conclusion, Gov. Ronald Reagan, in an attempt to solidify his conservative political reputation, intervened by sending police to remove landscaping that had already been planted by park proponents, and to fence the park. After a noon rally at Sproul Plaza, students and community members, at the urging of the ASUC president to take back the park, marched to the site and a riot erupted. Student James Rictor was shot and killed by police, who reported that he was throwing reinforcing bars at them from a rooftop. Alan Blanchard was blinded by police buckshot.
On May 30, 1969, a peaceful demonstration of 30,000 people marched through Berkeley, not just to support the park, but also to protest the intervention by, and action of, police, most notably the Alameda County Sheriff’s officers. I was among them. Ultimately, the University capitulated on the use of the land, and People’s Park was born.
The late 1960s was the height of the counter-culture movement, and a time of great mistrust of institutions. The park was a symbol of community autonomy and self-determination that many feel must be preserved as a touchstone of the historic societal changes of the times, and as a memorial to victims of the police action in 1969. I feel the park no longer reflects the intensions of the original park activists and volunteers.
Why hasn’t the park been improved?
Over 46 years, whenever the University has attempted not just to change the use of the land, but also to alter the park, protests followed. The prominent physical features of the park, such as the stand of trees on the east, were a result of random placement during the initial flurry of activity. In 1979 the campus paved the western portion for a student fee parking lot. It lasted one day. Park activists, among them Berkeley Mayor Gus Newport, tore up the asphalt and formed it into mounds that are now grass-covered berms. Attempts at altering any of these features are seen as a desecration by park advocates.
During Chancellor Tien’s tenure in the 1990s, two volleyball courts were proposed. One of the protestors, Rosebud Abigail Denovo, who earlier had been arrested for vandalism and for carrying a concealed weapon while protesting in the park, broke into University House, the chancellor’s residence, with a machete. She was killed by police. Subsequent chancellors were understandably reluctant to deal with People’s Park. The current chancellor has erected a fence around University House to protect against protestors.
The year-long tree-sitting protest over the rebuilding of Memorial Stadium further dissuades Chancellors from initiating change on this politically charged land.
PART 2 – THE PARK TODAY
Why do homeless frequent the park?
A place of repose, a supply of food, and access to a bathroom (the only roofed structure in the park), have enabled homeless to stay in the People’s Park throughout the day.
Food Not Bombs is an international organization that began in 1980 as an anti-nuclear group advocating nonviolent social change. Each chapter is autonomous and decides how to further the group’s mission. The local chapter has determined that its sole activity is to provide food to the homeless in People’s Park, and each day its volunteers drive a truck into the park to make a delivery.
Beginning in the late 1950s, with the idea that the mentally ill should be cared for within their own communities, California began de-funding mental institutions. While seemingly a sound premise, the concomitant local funding never materialized. Homeless advocates and experts estimate that as many as 30% of nation’s homeless are mentally ill, and another 30% have drug or alcohol addiction. Many people who cannot fare independently |
tesgaden
Injured researcher reportedly helped discover caves in 1995
Mapping of cave system began in 2002
The initial aim was for alpine experts to set up a base station at a depth of 300m and then establish communications with the rescue team.
Stefan Schneider from Bavaria's mountain rescue said bringing up the injured climber would be even harder than reaching him had been: "You have to imagine it's 1,000m almost vertically, where you have to climb up with ropes and crampons."
Very few specialists were equipped to deal with such depths, he added.
Image copyright AP/Bavarian Red Cross Image caption Some 200 people were involved in the rescue operation near BerchtesgadenOn Thursday, residents of the Los Angeles gayborhood in West Hollywood were shocked to discover streets covered in rainbow posters emblazoned with the slogan #ShootBack.
Only a few days had passed since the Orlando mass shooting at the gay bar Pulse, which took 49 lives and severely injured dozens more. The Pulse massacre fell on the same weekend as West Hollywood’s annual pride celebration, and much of the festival took place under a newly subdued, mournful tone—not only due to the Orlando shooting, but also because police had apprehended a heavily-armed man on his way to the West Hollywood Pride parade.
Calling for LGBT people to arm themselves with guns, the posters were an LGBT-themed variation on the Gadsen flag—the “Don’t tread on me” icon traditionally associated with the Libertarian and Tea Party political sects.
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In an exclusive interview with conservative blog PJ Media, controversial street artist Sabo took credit for the #ShootBack posters—while also claiming they were a “group effort” that “came out of the gay community.”
Sabo’s previous statements in interviews have revealed him to be a somewhat LGBT-tolerant conservative, such as this December 2015 excerpt from a chat with LA Weekly.
“I’m Republican but only because there’s not much of an option,” Sabo told LA Weekly. “I’d probably be better off saying I’m Libertarian, but they’ll never get elected. I don’t care who you marry, I don’t care about gay people, I’m not a bigot — I’m socially liberal but I like to keep government as small as possible.”
But Sabo’s previous LGBT-themed artwork has been incendiary to say the least: One T-shirt line read “Muhammad is a Homo,” while another project proclaimed that “Fag is the New N**ger.”
The flag could have also been inspired by the rainbow Gadsen flag that appeared behind ultra-conservative and openly gay man Milo Yiannopoulos at his Orlando press conference Wednesday.
The sentiment began to spread online on Friday, with conservative supporters tweeting the #ShootBack message and LGBT Twitter users reacting to the concept in both negative and laudatory ways.
#ShootBack is absolutely the wrong message after the massacre in Orlando. https://t.co/dyGumo2bSQ — Asher Huey (@asherhuey) June 17, 2016
When the posters appeared in West Hollywood, locals appeared largely put off. West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister told the Los Angeles Times that it was the wrong message.
“We are disturbed by them,” Meister said. “We don’t believe in an eye for an eye, and we advocate against gun violence.”
Many of the signs appeared outside popular local gay bar the Abbey in the days following the city’s weekend pride celebration. The owner of the bar, David Cooley, also told the Los Angeles Times that he disagreed with the #ShootBack message.
“The best way to shoot back is to enact serious change to our gun policy,” said Cooley. “We need an outright ban on all assault weapons and better protections to keep all guns away from bad people.”
While there is a pro-gun presence in the LGBT community, mostly channeled through the national network of LGBT gun clubs Pink Pistols, the community response in the days after the Orlando massacre leans heavily toward efforts to increase gun control and restrictions.
On Thursday, a coalition of 50 powerful LGBT groups including National LGBTQ Task Force, The Trevor Project, Lambda Legal, GLAAD, Equality Federation, and more signed a letter asking Congress to increase background checks and close the terrorist watchlist gap for gun buyers.Hundreds of thousands of people could become eligible for deportation from the U.S. over the next two years if President Trump phases out an Obama-era program for certain undocumented immigrants, a move that reportedly may soon be announced. But the Trump administration may have already had an effect on who participates in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, commonly known as DACA.
For months, some pro-immigrant groups have warned against sending in new applications for the program, saying that the detailed information given to confirm eligibility could be used to deport enrollees or family members in the future. And a new poll shows that some of the people who are already enrolled may be afraid to renew their applications as a result of that possibility.
An online survey of DACA recipients found that about 20 percent of respondents who were eligible to renew their status had not yet done so. Roughly 1 in 4 of that group cited fears that the government would use the updated details to identify them for law-enforcement purposes, according to the soon-to-be published report from United We Dream and other groups that was provided to FiveThirtyEight.
Of those who are in the program but not yet eligible for renewal, 28 percent said they would be less likely to reapply when the time comes because of law-enforcement concerns. The estimates are rough, because of the challenges inherent in polling undocumented people, but they provide a glimpse of the concern from some so-called dreamers that their personal information could be used for deportation.
We’ll have to wait for a clearer sense of whether the concerns over personal data have, in fact, kept many people from reapplying to the program. The next quarterly report including the number of actual applications and approvals, the first one to reflect data under the Trump administration, is expected to be released next week, according to a public affairs officer at the Department of Homeland Security.
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But there’s reason to think fears about how their data will be used is as widespread as the survey suggests. Since Trump took office, some of the largest organizations that work with people eligible for DACA have been encouraging them to think carefully before applying for the protected status. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, which helps immigrants apply for various kinds of legal status, including DACA, has warned that it’s risky for people not already in the program to apply. They also warned people who are renewing to consult with a lawyer.
And it’s not just activist groups that have told potential applicants to be cautious. After the election, the University of California system issued similar guidance to students, writing that “Applying for DACA provides your contact information, immigration history, and other important information to DHS, which can then use that information to go after you or your family members that reside at your address,” in an online FAQ.
Meanwhile, a key date looms for the administration to make a decision on the program. Officials in 10 states have said they’ll sue the administration if it doesn’t end the program by Tuesday.
There’s no way to know whether the online survey, which was conducted by Tom K. Wong, a professor at University of California, San Diego in connection with several immigrant activist groups, is representative of DACA recipients at large because it’s impossible to randomly sample the group.
“There’s no directory to randomly select participants from,” said Wong. For that reason, researchers often partner with networks that support DACA recipients in order to conduct research on the group. Dreamers who respond to surveys are generally believed to be more educated than the group at large.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was enacted in 2012 by then-President Barack Obama through an executive action. Only a small share of the approximately 11 million undocumented people in the country qualify for the program. Among other things, they must have arrived in the U.S. before age 16, have continuously been in the country since 2007, have little to no criminal record, and be enrolled in the military or school or be a high school graduate. The Trump administration has continued to issue new and renewed work permits through the program, despite Trump’s campaign promises that he would end the practice.
But if even a small percentage of DACA enrolees opt not to renew their eligibility, it would mean thousands of people might lose their legal status. Nearly 800,000 people have been granted this status since the program began, the majority of the 1.3 million people currently eligible for the program, according to the Migration Policy Institute. Participants include medical students, lawyers, employees of large tech companies and college students.
But that status is only temporary, stretching for two or three years depending on when a person last enrolled. Some 110,000 people are up for renewal in 2017, according to an analysis by David Bier at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, based on quarterly reports from the Department of Homeland Security. To apply for or renew DACA, applicants must send in what can be pounds of paperwork, often including information on where a person lives, names of family members, their school, travel and medical records. They then often go through biometric screening that involves providing fingerprints and photographs.
Because applications have been granted over a number of years, eligibility could phase out over time if the administration ended the program but allowed those with current permits to use them until they expire. Bier estimated some people would maintain their legal status through part of 2019, though for hundreds of thousands it could be as early as this year if DACA is ended.John Rhys Davies, pictured in 2002 (Picture: Reuters)
Welshman John Rhys-Davies is best known for his role as bungling Egyptian Sallah in the Indiana Jones films, but he’s also had major parts in The Living Daylights and King Solomon’s Mines. More recently, he played dwarf Gimli in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. The 1980 television adaptation of James Clavell’s Shogun, in which Rhys-Davies starred, is out now.
How bad was the plane crash you had in 1985?
I went up in a light plane filming King Solomon’s Mines in Africa with a young model called Sharon Stone, who clearly had no future. I was a student pilot myself at the time and was telling the real pilot we wouldn’t be able to take off. We needed 1,200 metres. We had 800. That’s not an insignificant miscalculation. We got two metres off the ground and hit a tree. I looked down and my leg was between a space like that [shows a small gap with hands]. I could smell gas and knew what that meant. I kept thinking: ‘You’re only 46’. It gave me a much better sense of how I should treat death.
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Life’s supposed to begin at 40.
I can assure you I started living way before that.
What’s better – TV work or movie work?
Shogun was a mini-series, so even though it went on television, we filmed it like a movie. But both are like burning energy – you just focus it a different way on TV than on a movie. What you can do on stage is even more different. When people are in close proximity, just a dilation of the pupils can impress. If you can consciously dilate your pupils, that is. Which, of course, you can if you’re really good at this job [laughs].
What was the biggest culture shock you found in Japan?
We were filming at sea, and the door swung open and started banging. The director shouted: ‘Shut that door.’ The American carpenter picked up a saw and started sawing a two-by-four. After about ten seconds, he let out a yelp of surprise. As most men know, a saw is designed to cut on the push stroke – when you push, that’s supposed to be the most efficient way of using your weight. Except the Japanese know exactly the opposite. Their saws cut to the pull stroke, because they know the most effective way to cut is with a pull. At that wonderful moment, the gulf between East and West was revealed.
You were in Japan for five months with Shogun. How did you find it?
I didn’t have a Western meal the whole time I was there until we found a McDonald’s on the way home and devoured the food. They were very different people with a very different culture and a very different background. That banal thing: ‘We’re all the same really’ is wrong. We’re not, in terms of culture, a belief in the after-life, even beliefs in what our place in the universe is. It isn’t just the being of men that determines their consciousness; it is sometimes that the consciousness of men determines their being.
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How did someone taller than Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom end up playing a dwarf in The Lord Of The Rings?
You couldn’t physically have a natural dwarf doing the fighting or the running in the way that was necessary. My stunt double was a small person, though. There were three of them, and one was a woman.
John Rhys-Davies playing Gimli the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Picture: Pierre Vinet/New Line Cinema)
Did you really send one of your doubles along to get the tattoo the cast promised each other they’d receive on completion of TLOR?
Absolutely right. Brett Beattie was his name. You think I’m going to be tattooed by some drunken Maori with a dirty needle? Think again. If I had a bloody tattoo for every film I’d done, I’d be a walking billboard.
Isn’t that just wimping out?
No. I’m a little smarter than most. I did say publicly on television that if The Return Of The King didn’t win Best Picture this year [at the Oscars], I’d have the tattoo wherever they wanted me to have it. But then I’m an Academy member [winks]. Oops, did I say that out loud?
Was yours the heaviest armour on set?
There was, with the costume and the axes, 70lbs there. After donning that little lot, I ran up the hill after Viggo and Orlando. That was an interesting experience. It was the most physically intense film I’ve done.
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Was it more intense than Indiana Jones?
Indiana Jones wasn’t physically tough, but they are the only two films I’ve ever been ill on. On The Last Crusade I got sciatica. That’s when the sciatic nerve, which goes through the funny hole in your pelvis down your leg, swells and rubs against the nerves. Painkillers depressed the sensation but they also depressed me. I’m looking forward to the fourth Indy just to show Steven Spielberg I can get through a movie without moaning. I got cholera and nearly died on the set of The Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
Is that an exaggeration?
I lost 20lb in two days. There were so many flies that you couldn’t avoid eating them when having dinner. I remember lying in a bed in which I’d excreted and vomited, when there was a knock at the door. In comes our nice Australian lady doctor, looks at me in the eyes and says: ‘Christ, John, have you got it too?’ She ran into my toilet, doubled up. At that point the little flame of hope I had blew out.
Whose stomach dealt with the conditions the best?
Spielberg was the smartest of us all. He arrived with a suitcase full of tinned food, and it was all he ate. He would occasionally join us at the meal, and he’d pick at burnt lamb. We thought him rather prissy. In retrospect, if I ever go back to Tunisia, that’s exactly what I’ll do.
Are we to take it there will be a fourth?
I was talking to Spielberg the other day and he said it was likely I’d be asked this. It depends on the agreement of Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford, and none of those guys are in the business to make a quick buck. They know we have a huge and expectant audience. If we make another one, there has to be a serious prospect that it will be the best of the lot. That means the script has got to be extraordinary. I think it will be made.There's something irresistible about spandex. Part of the appeal has to rest with the fact that nylon-spandex fabric is just so comfortable, shiny and stretchy.
Spandex fabric composition: 80 % Polyamide (nylon), 20 % Elastane (lycra)
Spandex is almost like a shape-shifting fabric. It can adhere to anyone's frame. This shiny fabric has been popular enough to create a craze over and over again, which has happened for a reason.
The popularity of spandex clothing in the mainstream culture has waxed and waned over the years just like everything else. In the 1980s, for instance, it seemed as if almost everyone was wearing spandex, especially the variety that came in neon shiny colors (pink, blue, green and black). Lots of women looked like dancers at the time, whether they were any good at dancing or not. Part of the comfort factor involved with spandex is a simple fact that the material doesn't restrict one's movements. There's a reason why dancers go to the dance floor, gym and elsewhere wearing their shiny clothing.
Another part of the comfort factor with is the fact that it is just smooth to the touch. A women's legs feel effortlessly soft and silky when they're wrapped in shiny spandex, which is an inherently sensual type of material. A woman who wore an entire suit (catsuit) made of this material is going to look like she is wearing an additional layer of skin, except this skin is smooth, clear, glossy and perfect.
Bodysuits and catsuits have been popular motifs in science fiction for a long time. Perhaps people look at these comfortable suits and imagine an ideal future in which the most important part of all clothing is comfort and sensuality. In this future, women will be free of some of their physical insecurities. They will be more expressive and free to be themselves. Nylon spandex may truly be the fabric of the future on many different levels, but you can enjoy it just as surely today.Figure 4 - Basic overall of Open Source Hardware courtesy of DIY Space Exploration
Making space hardware open source comes with many challenges and benefits as outlined by our friends at DIY Space Exploration and Mach 30. Making sure not to get arrested for International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Export Administration Regulations (EAR), and Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) for US federal violations is key :)
That said, SpaceVR’s Overview One hardware will be posted on Mach 30’s Open Design Engine after the Kickstarter campaign. As a preview to that, you can view and comment on our Go Pro interface PCB, which connects 2, 4, 6, 8, or 12 cameras together enabling synced content capture. To make the Overview One Go Pro interface PCB space tolerant, key manufacturing specs include using reduced tin whisker solder paste, Roger 4003 or Thermoset PCB material, ULTEM 1010 & ABS-ESD7 3D printed material and NASA outgas compliant via paste PHP-900 Series IR-10FE. Lets get to space as a community of artists, engineers, and explorers!
Tech updates will be released every 3 days. The next topic... Space Batteries. You can ask other technical questions in the comments below and on Twitter using the hashtag #AskSpaceVR, which we will answer in our mid campaign Tech Q&A Google Hangout 9/23 at 1 pm PST and our Reddit AMA 9/24 at noon PST.
73,
Blaze Sanders - Sr. Electrical EngineerThe TVs with CNET's highest review scores in picture quality are LG's OLED models, including the new C7. But what TVs do you think scored best among LCD TVs?
The answer last year was Vizio's P series, which earned one of only two 9s I awarded in overall image quality. That score matched a significantly more expensive Sony and fell short of only those OLED models, which cost even more.
Apparently Vizio didn't want to mess with a good thing. For 2017 the "new" P series is exactly the same as last year. The panel, processor, inputs and other hardware are identical, according to Vizio, and so is the external design.
What has changed, and will continue to evolve, is the software. Since I first reviewed the 2016 P series it has gone through a series of software updates, many addressed at improving its high dynamic range (HDR) picture quality. I haven't had the chance to review the latest version yet, but I expect it to continue to offer some of the best image quality available in a non-OLED TV.
Both the 2016 and 2017 TVs will receive updates in the future, and Vizio says they'll continue to exhibit identical performance throughout the model year. In my experience reviewing TVs that kind of next-year future-proofing is a first. And it's pretty cool.
Sarah Tew/CNET
Vizio says the P series delivers "some of the industry's best full-white brightness performance" and also claims a color gamut that's close to DCI P3. In my most recent review of the P series showed very good full-field light output, but narrower P3 color gamut than Vizio's claim. I plan to re-test soon to see if any of that has changed, as well as compare the P to other 2017 TVs.
The P series' full-array local dimming is the main driver of its excellent picture quality. Both the 2016 and 2017 models have "up to 128 zones" of dimming in the 65- and 75-inch sizes, while the 55-inch size has 126 zones. The 2017 M series, meanwhile, has 32 zones on all sizes.
Vizio also confirmed that, just like in 2016, the 55-inch member of the P series will use an IPS-based panel, not a VA panel like the others. In my experience IPS (in-plane switching) has worse image quality, in particular worse black levels and contrast, compared to VA (vertical alignment), so I will continue to recommend against the 55-inch P series. If you want a 55-inch Vizio, I'd go with the M series -- none of the sizes in the 2017 M series use IPS panels.
Sarah Tew/CNET
The 2017 P series does offer some changes unrelated to image quality. No longer does the TV include a touchscreen Android tablet remote in the box and ask you to use an app to access most TV settings. I wasn't a fan. Instead the 2017 P series comes with a traditional multibutton clicker, which you'll use to access traditional onscreen settings menus. Yay, tradition!
For Smart TV you still have the option to Cast stuff like Netflix from your phone using Vizio's Chromecast built-in feature, which also allows control via Google Home. New for 2017 there's also an onscreen menu, called Smartcast TV, that allows you to launch apps using the traditional onscreen approach. It's coming via software update later this year, although it still doesn't support Amazon video. Boo lack of Amazon, but you can always add a Roku.
And just like last year there's no built-in tuner, so you can't watch over-the-air antenna broadcasts unless you attach a separate tuner.
Here's pricing and basic specifications for the Vizio P series, which is shipping now.
Vizio 2017 P series P55-E1 55-inch $1,300 P65-E1 65-inch $2,000 P75-E1 75-inch $3,500
Vizio P series 2017 specifications
4K resolution
HDR compatible with HDR10 and Dolby Vision formats
Full-array local dimming (up to 128 zones)
240Hz "effective" refresh rate
Chromecast built-in, Google Home compatible
Onscreen apps interface coming in summer 2017
No built-in tuner for antenna TV broadcasts
The company also announced the step-down M series at the same time, and the cheaper E series and D series are shipping now as well.
Correction: This article originally stated that brightness was higher and other characteristics were improved on the 2017 P series compared to the 2016 model, but that is not the case. The two are identical but for the lack of an included tablet on the 2017 model.Immigration top concern for Swiss voters
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Immigration is the number 1 concern for Swiss voters, according to a poll by Sotomo for Swiss news channel RTS.
The poll says that 21% of voters in Switzerland say immigration is their number one concern, ahead of healthcare (20%) social security (17%) and the environment (13%).
Somoto note that the news probably had an influence on the poll, as the survey was conducted right after an announcement that healthcare premiums would rise in 2018, a retirement scandal and hurricanes in the Caribbean, which they believe affected the number of people who said healthcare, social security and the environment were their top concern.
The poll will also make bad reading for Europhiles, as further European Integration ranked bottom of the Swiss list of concerns, with just 2% of people saying it was a top priority for them. 1% of those asked said their top issue was not included in the list.
With two years to go until the next General Election, 8 in 10 Swiss voters say they would vote the same way as they did in 2015, which is incredibly high for a mid-term poll.
Another non-EU country focused on stronger border controls rather than joining the Brussels bloc!Riot police fired tear gas, pepper spray and flash bombs in downtown Vancouver Wednesday night to try to disperse angry rioters who set cars on fire, looted stores and taunted police officers after the Canucks' 4-0 Stanley Cup final loss to the Boston Bruins.
Police declared the downtown fan zone area near the CBC building and the central post office a riot zone. Anyone not leaving the West Georgia Street area immediately could be arrested, they warned.
Police used batons and also turned police dogs on the rioters, slowly pushing the crowd back along Georgia Street from Hamilton Street to Cambie Street.
Two police cars were set on fire in a parking lot on Cambie Street near one of the areas where police were being confronted by a few dozen people among the hundreds present who were throwing debris at officers.
The riots shook Vancouver residents, and prompted thousands to sign up to a Facebook campaign that aimed to identify rioters and looters. There is also a campaign underway to get people to clean up the city, beginning Thursday morning.
Witnesses were encouraged by Facebook campaign organizers to post pictures of rioters in the act, in the hopes that they might be recognized and identified. More than 20,000 people had joined by the morning Thursday.
"Prosecute the thugs," wrote Lorraine Bennett on the site. "Clearly they hate the Canucks, they hate Vancouver."
'Unfortunately, the tables have turned tonight'
Most people who stayed in the riot areas were watching the confrontation, while a few young men who covered their faces were confronting police.
"You don't ever hope for a situation like this," said Vancouver police Const. Jana McGuinness.
Rioting can carry a life sentence Under Sections 67-68 of the Criminal Code of Canada, a public official may read what's colloquially called the "Riot Act" in order to disperse an unruly crowd: "Her Majesty the Queen charges and commands all persons being assembled immediately to disperse and peaceably to depart to their habitations or to their lawful business on the pain of being guilty of an offence for which, on conviction, they may be sentenced to imprisonment for life." People who do not "peaceably disperse" within 30 minutes are "guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life."
"You celebrate the good times and you prepare for the bad times and that's exactly what we've done. Unfortunately, the tables have turned tonight."
In addition to the riot police, officers were also called in from several neighbouring departments to help control the unruly crowd.
Vancouver fire department Capt. Gabe Roder said it was not clear how many fires had been set. Fire crews were instructed to leave the downtown core by police, and the department made a decision early in the evening to respond to fires only where the public was in danger.
Officials say dozens of people were injured, but most were being treated for tear gas or pepper spray exposure.
Vancouver General Hospital officials said there were two major traumas, three stabbing victims and one head injury.
A spokesperson for St. Paul's Hospital said the emergency room had seen at least 57 people with injuries related to the riot, most of whom were treated for tear gas exposure and released. Others, officials said, were cut with broken glass or had fractured bones. There was one major trauma, officials said, but released no further details.
B.C. Ambulance also confirmed that a man had fallen or jumped off the Dunsmuir Viaduct and was in critical condition in hospital.
Bus transit suspended
A number of cars had also been set alight in a parkade at West Georgia Street and Seymour Street.
Vandals were seen jumping on a pair of police cars in a parking lot on Cambie Street. One of the cars had been turned on its side but later was righted.
TransLink had stopped all bus service to and from the downtown area, but SkyTrains were still running to and from downtown stations.
Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson said the situation was "despicable."
"It's absolutely disgraceful and shameful and by no means represents the city of Vancouver," said Robertson. "We've had a great run in the playoffs here, great celebrations, and what's happened tonight is despicable."
"We are dealing with a small number of troublemakers," said the mayor. "They will be held accountable. There's a lot of photographic evidence. We're asking people to keep whatever pictures they're taking… because these people will be held accountable for this."
Cambie Street Bridge was also closed for several hours Wednesday, blocking access to downtown Vancouver.
The second Facebook group called for Vancouver residents to clean up after the riots.
The "Post Riot Clean-Up - Let's help Vancouver" group had more than 11,000 members by the morning.
"I'm living in it so I will definitely be helping," wrote Beverly Akhurst. "I would love to see the people who did this to my home forced to do the cleanup though."
Robynn Mexican-Wonder wrote: "I love this city and will be there to help for sure! I won't trash the people who trashed the place, instead I'll just pick the trash up."
Vancouver police, who were using Twitter throughout the night to get information to the public, said on the micro-site they will let people know Thursday how to post videos and photos of suspects.
Game was winding down
Trouble started in the closing seconds of the game when a thick plume of smoke, believed to be from fireworks, wafted above the crowd on West Georgia Street in front of the central post office building. Moments later, a car burst into flames and fights broke out.
One of the several cars set alight by angry hockey fans in downtown Vancouver Wednesday. (CBC)
The number of arrests is expected to be in the dozens.
Glass windows were broken at the Bank of Montreal on West Georgia and at the Hudson's Bay Company.
Widespread looting was reported at the Bay store, at the downtown London Drugs, Chapters, Sears and Future Shop.
In addition, a fire was reported at a parkade on Seymour Street. Few details were available, but reports indicated several cars were on fire. There were also reports of garbage cans and portable toilets on fire throughout the downtown core.
Some in the large crowd that gathered outside to watch the game on big-screen TVs decided it was prudent to begin leaving early as it looked like the home team was going to lose the game. Many of those taking an early exit were parents with young children, concerned at the threat of over-crowding.
Violence not anticipated
Earlier, before and during the game, fans were packed tight but good-natured as they cheered on their team, which had won at home in every previous game against Boston in this Stanley Cup final series.
Police had consistently used a strategy of engagement with the crowds that had gathered for the previous games. Officers readily exchanged high-fives and good natured banter with fans.
The engagement technique was considered a major success during the 2010 Olympics, when similar numbers of fans flocked to the downtown core.
Police tried to nip the violence in the bud by closing liquor and beer stores early, but it appeared to have no effect.
"We will have to sit down and evaluate exactly what happened here. It's going to be a black mark for a very, very long time," McGuinness said.
The strategy was also part of an effort to avoid a repeat of the 1994 Stanley Cup riot, which occurred in Vancouver's downtown area on June 14 that year, after the Canucks lost in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup final in New York against the Rangers.
It's expected the damage from Wednesday's riot will far exceed that of 17 years ago.(Page 2 of 3)
Fake Paintings : 81 and Ill, Dali Still Confounds
The three people closest to Dali now are Descharnes, who commutes between Figueras and his apartment in Paris; Miguel Domenech, a Madrid lawyer, and painter Antoni Pitxot, son of an old friend of Dali. Pitxot lives in nearby Cadaques and sees Dali almost every afternoon. Dali has shown his gratitude by alloting an entire floor of the Dali museum to the works of Pitxot.
After a series of articles in the Spanish, French and American press in 1980 accused Dali's secretary and manager, Enrique Sabater, of mismanaging Dali's business affairs and using the job to enrich himself, Dali pushed Sabater aside and replaced him with an old friend, the photographer and critic Descharnes. After the fire, Spanish newspapers accused Descharnes of neglect, but they produced no evidence, and a government investigation absolved him of all blame.
The seclusion of a great and immensely rich artist, who sees very little of his closest living relative, a younger sister, lends itself to all kinds of suspicion about the people who hover near him.
Descharnes, a French photographer and author of books on Dali, said the artist has not done any work since he completed a series of 26 drawings to commemorate Spain's acceptance into the European Community more than a year ago. Dali titled the series "We Are the Bull That Has Abducted Europa," and presented the drawings to King Juan Carlos of Spain.
On His Own
In an interview, Descharnes insisted that this coterie of associates cannot control what Dali does, not even in matters of health. "We are his friends," Descharnes said. "We are not his family. We cannot tell him what to do."
Dali's popularity, carelessness and, by all accounts, greed have contributed to the creation of a monstrous market in fake Dalis, especially in the United States. Photographic reproductions of Dali lithographs and drawings with false signatures are often sold as original, signed works by Dali. On top of this, there is a brisk trade in Dali-style lithographs done by other artists under what is advertised as Dali's signature.
In February, a New York County grand jury indicted seven people on charges of selling fake Dali lithographs. Customers were sold photographic reproductions of Dali works--worth about as much as a $10 poster--for $3,000 each. But these indictments barely touched the problem. Michael Stout, a New York lawyer who represents Dali, has estimated that $625-million worth of fake Dali lithographs have been sold in the United States in the last few years.
The Dali print market has long been confused by an old Dali habit of signing blank sheets of lithograph paper, supposedly for artisans to use to run off genuine Dalis from plates in his absence. There are stories that two aides would stand by his side, one pushing a sheet under his pen and the other pulling it away, so that he could sign a huge number in an hour.
Judge Quinta said that when he was a reporter he once discovered that Hotel Meurice in Paris had 50,000 blank sheets with Dali's signature in its storeroom. A former manager, John Peter Moore, has estimated that Dali signed 350,000 blank sheets in his lifetime.
Unknown Number
It is not clear how many of these signed sheets were obtained by counterfeiters. But Descharnes said that the practice of signing blank sheets, which stopped at the end of 1980, was "an open door."
Fighting the counterfeiters has been made difficult by Dali's reluctance to involve himself in any legal action against a dealer, partly because of the illness, partly because of a distrust of the courts, partly because of a pride over being faked.
"My problem as an assistant and friend of Dali," Descharnes said, "is that it is very difficult to have the efficient help of Dali on this. And Dali is the only man who can definitely say that a work is a fake. I give only my opinion."
The eccentric and playful Dali Museum is the only side of Dali that most visitors to Figueras can see these days. Its genesis reveals a good deal about the flamboyant painter.Oh my dear, sweet little Finner. Getting his custom-made coat is taking a little more effort than he’d bargained for (see previous posts PupCycled: Sustainable Clothing For Your Furry Friends and Finn’s Second Fitting).
Part of what’s happening is that the good folks at PupCycled have been extremely busy putting on many different fashion shows to promote their work. I certainly don’t want to mess with that! Finn’s coat can definitely be a back-burner project.
In fact their next show will be this Saturday, May 12th, at the Penasco Theater at 4PM. It’s part of a Mother’s Day Cabaret that will include circus, music, spoken word and, of course, fashion. It’s $20 per ticket and all proceeds benefit the Penasco Theater Summer Season (see previous post The Sugar Nymphs Bistro, Penasco, NM to learn a little bit about the theater and its programs). I highly recommend that any of you in the area attend. I’m certainly going to be there!
But back to Finn’s coat. Between their schedules and mine, not to mention Finn’s packed calendar, just getting together has been a big challenge. (For those of you who don’t know Finn, you should check out his original rescue story, Rescue Dog: Meet Finn (Survivor), and |
positive and the type of comments you see about the virus. What happened on Grindr that day? Tom Knight: I'd been talking to this guy for a few days, and he first of all asked me, "Are you clean?" I hate that term, as if HIV means you're dirty. I just said, "I'm HIV positive." And he didn't reply. So I said, "If you've got a problem with that, fine, let's just not talk." And after not hearing from him for a couple of hours he said, "Oh, you've got HIV? I'm just not ready for that kind of complication in my life." Which was frustrating and which was why I responded in the way that I did. What did he say in response [to the fashion comment]? TK: "That's a bit immature." I said, "Me?!" He didn't reply again.
Tom Knight / Facebook Tom Knight / Facebook Tom Knight and singer Rebecca Ferguson.
When someone asks if you're "clean" are you not tempted to just ignore them? TK: Yeah, half of me is, and the other half feels I should challenge them. I'm open about my HIV status, I'm quite a strong person, and I can deal with most crap people throw my way about it, so I'm trying to change attitudes a little bit. I like to see where such attitudes stem from, because some people make flippant comments and don't realise what they're saying. It can be complete ignorance; it doesn't always come from a malicious place. People like him don't have any knowledge about HIV and don't know what "undetectable" means [an undetectable viral load occurs when medication suppresses the virus to such low levels it doesn't show up on lab tests], and don't realise that it means you can't pass the virus on. How did you feel when that guy said he's "not ready for that complication"? TK: It's a kick in the teeth. Every time it's a kick in the teeth. It's not easy telling people I'm positive. You worry about what they're thinking about you. I get some people who are simply extremely curious about it and will ask what it's like for me and how I'm doing. Sometimes I sense they're not interested in pursuing anything other than a conversation after that.
Tom Knight / Facebook Tom Knight / Facebook
What's the worst comment you've had? TK: It wasn't online. I was on the scene, and someone came up to me when I was talking to his friends in the smoking area, and he said to them, "Be careful what you're gonna catch off her," and then walked away. What was that like for you? TK: Soul-destroying. That just feeds the insecurity that comes with HIV. That [insecurity] is the biggest thing that changed when I became positive: the anxiety around not knowing who knows and what they think about it. It's a game-changer. It affects your self-esteem. My doctor wants me to try meditation to stay on the right [psychological] track, because it's so easy to drown yourself in the negativity that's around. I saw a story the other day from the Evening Standard and he [an HIV-positive man] was saying, "HIV isn't a problem, it's the attitudes around it."
Tom Knight / Facebook
How did you react when you were diagnosed? TK: My immediate reaction was being numb. I boxed it in and didn't deal with it. I was surprised at how much I didn't know about HIV. It was a struggle because of that. What education did you have about HIV at school? TK: None. Literally none whatsoever. How have you found dating generally since the diagnosis? TK: I've found it more difficult but a lot of that comes from myself. It's not always other people. It's the worry of what other people will think. If I meet a guy and we get on I won't pursue it because sometimes I presume it's not going to go anywhere. I am learning to deal with my feelings around it and dating. Have you had any relationships since becoming positive? TK: No. Before diagnosis I had a three-year relationship and a couple of relationships of six months. Have people said they were fine with you being positive and then it transpired that they weren't? TK: Yeah. I started dating someone last summer, someone I'd known for about four years. He'd liked me all that time, and we started dating and he was always saying, "I'm here for you," but the moment it became a physical relationship? The next day I didn't hear from him again. It was upsetting because we connected on so many levels and we got on, we had a really good foundation in friendship, and it was so sad because I knew how much he liked me. It was so frustrating that he couldn't handle the physical side of it – the worry about the HIV stuff.
FS magazine / Facebook Tom Knight on the cover of gay men's health magazine FS.The Tuesday Club was the unofficial name for the weekly alcohol-fuelled gatherings that took place during the height of the Premier League's drinking culture.
Paul Merson (left) and other players who played in Arsenal's double-winning season in 1997-98 have spoken about their epic drinking sessions.
Steve Bould, who is now the club's assistant manager, once ordered a mammoth 35-pint round for five team-mates during Arsène Wenger's first summer as manager in 1997.
Those days of boozy excess in sport appeared to have gone. But a Canadian company is seeking to profit from launching a specially formulated beer as a "recovery ale".
The Lean Machine drink is being marketed as a low-calorie, low-alcohol sports recovery drink, designed to help people after an "aggressive workout" while making drinking "socially fun".
The marketing material for Lean Machine says the "fit beer" will be aim primarily at young adults aged 19 to 32 – the age group which is the largest consumer of ready to drink beverages, an industry which is estimated to be worth US$10 billion a year.
"New drinkers are active socially and search for brands that embrace their active afternoon lifestyles and support the night", it says.
The drink touts itself as a healthy alternative to traditional ales, with only 77 calories and 0.5% alcohol by volume. The manufacturers claim it's backed by science and will help promote a "faster and more effective recovery".
The science does have a vaguely plausible sounding basis. Beer contain small amounts of electrolytes and fluids, which are lost through sweat when we exercise, as well as carbohydrates and some proteins, which the body needs for recovery after a muscle-strengthening workout.
In previous studies, researchers have reduced the alcohol content of beer substantially and added certain kinds of salts to make a recovery beer that rehydrated athletes better than normal beer – but still didn't rehydrate athletes any more than a conventional sports drink.
The downside is that other studies have shown that drinking alcohol after a workout can undo any good work by reducing the body's ability to repair the muscles after exercise.
Previous attempts to market low-alcohol alternatives, including a whisky-like, non-alcoholic beverage called Claytons which hit the shelves in New Zealand in the 1970s, proved unsuccessful.
But Ian Toews, the founder of Vampt Beverage Corp, is bullish about Lean Machine's chances of getting funding: "We just thought that maybe we could do something that would support a drinker, make it still socially fun, and help them accomplish what needs to be accomplished after an aggressive workout."Allrounder Kieron Pollard has challenged the West Indies selectors' rationale for dropping him for the tri-series in Zimbabwe in November. Pollard said he was told that he had not been "committed to batting" during the recent limited-overs games against Pakistan in UAE.
Calling the decision "funny", Pollard said he would not "campaign or do anything to convince them" to select him and instead focus on looking after himself in the future.
What confused Pollard about his axing for the Zimbabwe tri-series was that, according to him, the West Indies chairman of selectors Courtney Browne had agreed during a conversation in the UAE that his experience would be good in a young squad.
"When chairman of selectors Courtney Browne notified me via email of my axing, I reminded him of why my exclusion was funny because during the Twenty20 and one-day series, the two of us had a long conversation, speaking about wanting to have guys such as myself around going forward in West Indies cricket," Pollard told ESPNcricinfo.
Pollard said he sought clarification from Browne on why he had been dropped. "He said I wasn't 'committed to batting' during the tour, which I pressed him to clarify further because it was a broad statement. I asked specifically if this commitment he interpreted I wasn't giving also related to my bowling, fielding and advice to captain Jason Holder. And he said no, and stressed it was just batting and, in his view, I was not trying."
Pollard was angry his commitment had been questioned. "A lot people tend to say Pollard and many of us are mercenaries and have given nothing to West Indies cricket. While it's clear I don't have the stats or the figures of a Brian Lara, nobody, as some were trying to suggest, can ever question my commitment or integrity while playing. Why would I wake up one morning and just decide I wouldn't want to try? Scoring runs is how I survive."
Browne said he stood by the decision to drop Pollard. "Kieron's performance in the ODI series was far below what one expects from a player of his experience and his effort level was not what is expected from West Indies cricketers," Browne told ESPNcricinfo. "Kieron is therefore urged to compete in our domestic competitions, where he will have an additional opportunity to demonstrate his ability and can be considered again for selection."
Before the tour of the UAE, Pollard had made 22 and 13 in the Florida T20Is against India in August, and prior to that he made 205 runs with two half-centuries in the home tri-series against Australia and South Africa in June. Pollard had been on the sidelines in ODIs for a year and a half from October 2014, before he returned for the tri-series in which West Indies finished runners-up.
Kieron Pollard made 43 runs in three T20Is and 42 runs in three ODIs against Pakistan in the UAE Getty Images
In the UAE, Pollard scored 43 runs and bowled only two overs in the three T20Is against Pakistan in September. In the three ODIs that followed, Pollard made 42 runs and took one wicket in 12 overs. West Indies lost both series 0-3 to Pakistan. During the tour, former Pakistan fast bowler Waqar Younis, who was working as a commentator, had also said Pollard should be dropped for lack of effort.
Defending his performances, Pollard said that had he batted aggressively and failed, he may have been labelled as irresponsible. "I referred to him [Browne] in detail the match scenarios of each of my innings on tour and stated that if I had played a typical Pollard aggressive innings, in situations where the team was always in trouble - they would have claimed 'irresponsible batting from a senior player.'"
Pollard said the West Indies team was not in the right mind-set during the UAE tour because the coach Phil Simmons had been sacked by the WICB the day the squad left the Caribbean. Poor communication between players and coaching staff, lack of clear inputs in team meetings from the coaches, and "very ridiculous" training schedules, were problems Pollard highlighted.
"One minute the team's media manager, or even oddly the physio, was answering various questions," he said. "And when pressed they said their instructions came from the 'top', which is a line I've never heard when Simmons or any other West Indies coach I played [under] used."
Pollard said he had been "prepared mentally" to be "targeted" by the WICB after West Indies pulled out of the India tour in October 2014 because of an issue with player contracts. "It's an attack on senior players. Look at the team right now. Only Marlon Samuels is a senior guy around in most formats, other are ineligible outside of T20s because of their selection policy which inadvertently targets us. You could say our axing is the final puzzle of removing the seniors and they have come up with any reason that suits them to get certain individuals out of the set-up." Samuels had not been in favour of West Indies not completing the tour of India.
What now then for Pollard? Will he play domestic cricket in West Indies, like Browne had recommended? "I'm 29 years old, but the way people talk of me being a senior player or veteran you would swear my age is 39. Realistically now I just have to look after Kieron Pollard. So I'm not going to campaign or do anything to try and convince them to pick me again."The five-year saga is a story of a giant mistake of a contract and an overmatched pitcher, a huge organization digging in and a quiet, somewhat mysterious Japanese pitcher with a sense of honor and a durable love of the game. The Yankees made it pretty clear Igawa would never pitch again in the Bronx, but they were determined that he pitch somewhere for his $4-million-a-year salary. They tried to return him to Japan, too. Igawa refused to go, standing fast to his childhood dream of pitching in the American big leagues.
And so, the stalemate — remarkable, if almost entirely un-remarked upon — continues.
The Yankees let him gobble up innings before small crowds in distant outposts as a cavalcade of younger prospects push past him on their way to Yankee Stadium. Igawa never complains, and in a tribute to either willpower or lower level longevity, he has set farm system pitching records. And with just a few months left on his contract, he still dreams of the major leagues, if no longer as a Yankee.
About two weeks ago, on a rare day off, Igawa celebrated his 32nd birthday alone at his Manhattan apartment. He did not consider attending a Yankees game in the Bronx, nor did he tune them in on his television.
“I don’t watch their games anymore,” Igawa said. “I never follow them.”
“I feel a burden of anxiety at the opening of my first season in the Majors but it is overwhelmed by the excitement of being a home player standing on the field at Yankee Stadium. I will strive to do my best at all times.” — a post from Kei Igawa’s baseball blog, April 1, 2007
“The manager told me to report to the minors.... Wherever I am, this is the choice I made, so I have to move forward. As long as there’s a place to pitch, I’ll do my best and want to contribute to the team.” — Aug. 9, 2007
Igawa had a 2-3 record and a 6.79 earned run average when the Yankees sent him to Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre in August 2007. Three pitching instructors had already executed a kind of pitching intervention. Igawa had been told to give up his old motion and learn a new delivery, which included changes in the coil of his left arm, the swing of his right leg and even where he stood on the pitching rubber.
“That didn’t work out too well,” Igawa said last week, recalling the spring of 2007 as he sat in the small, crowded locker room of the Yankees’ Class AA Trenton Thunder affiliate. This season, Igawa has been shuttled between Trenton and Scranton, frequently making just one start at Class AAA before being demoted again to Class AA.
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“In 2007, I did what the coaches told me in Tampa, but I was not effective,” he said. “They let me go back to my old delivery, and I produced for the team.”
Indeed, he produced a 5-4 record with a 3.69 E.R.A., but that team was still the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees.
“Yes, Scranton,” Igawa said with a laugh, something he does easily and often. “About 2 hours and 10 minutes from Manhattan.”
Because his English is limited, Igawa travels everywhere with an interpreter, Subaru Takeshita (pronounced tah-kah-SHE-tah). Igawa will engage in brief conversations in halting English, especially when joking with teammates, but relies on Takeshita, who is paid by the Yankees, for most communication. Takeshita helps Igawa answer reporters’ questions, picks him up for the daily commute, accompanies him on road trips and goes onto the field during games should the manager or pitching coach visit Igawa on the mound.
“I have learned some English and Spanish,” Igawa said through Takeshita. “I can use it to get around my neighborhood. I know restaurant menus. But a Broadway show or a movie? I can’t do that because I don’t understand what they are saying.”
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He has made some friends in New York, but not many, he said. In the five years he has maintained an online diary, he has rarely mentioned another person. The only photo on his personal blog is a picture of himself, jogging alone.
In the locker room, even on a team where the players are 8 to 10 years younger, Igawa is welcomed into the frequent poker games, popular for having an iPad that teammates can borrow and appreciated for his sense of humor.
“For someone who doesn’t speak much,” Trenton catcher Austin Romine said, “he has a lot of funny one-liners.”
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Currently on the disabled list with tightness in his elbow, Igawa usually sits in his corner locker by the door and reads. Several players said Igawa’s curious predicament — a celebrated Yankees free-agent acquisition and a three-time Japanese league all-star now playing in places like Bowie, Md., and Altoona, Pa. — rarely comes up. Although on payday last week, his fellow pitcher Pat Venditte did switch the envelope left in his locker with the one left for Igawa.
Igawa returned Venditte’s check and said, “No, thanks.”
An average salary at Class AA is about $2,500 a month; Igawa makes roughly 130 times more.
“Everybody respects what he’s done and he never has an attitude that he’s too big for this,” Romine said. “Whether they send him up or down, whether they put him in the bullpen or the starting rotation, his disposition is always the same. But come on, we know how he feels.”
During Trenton games, there is often no room for Igawa to sit in the dugout. He will trundle out to the makeshift bullpen in foul territory along the right-field line. He sometimes sits under an umbrella beside a children’s playground. He rarely reacts to the action on the field.
“He doesn’t want to be here,” Romine said. “He’s doing what he’s told. It’s hard when someone owns you.”
Igawa is occasionally recognized as a professional baseball player on the streets of New York. People think he is Hideki Matsui. Until recently, he said a common second guess was Chien-Ming Wang, the former Taiwanese Yankees pitcher. At 6-foot-1 and 215 pounds, with a thick shock of black hair, Igawa has a calm but notable presence, although he says he dresses conservatively to avoid attention.
During his first years in New York, Igawa struggled to find Japanese food stores, especially ones open late, and he lost weight. It bothered him that he might go weeks without hearing his native tongue. The winter temperatures were new to him so he remained inside. If he felt lonely and missed Japan, he would visit an electronics store because examining all the new models and emerging technologies reminded him of something he would do at home.
It has been 16 years since Hideo Nomo became the first modern-era Japanese professional to play in the United States. There have been other distinguished Japanese successes since, like Ichiro Suzuki, and dozens of largely unnoticed flame-outs — about 15 players have returned to play in Japan; an equal number retired.
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Igawa fits neither category. He is the still-famous flame-out. He cannot escape that he was a big star in Japan, winning 75 games in his last five years and leading the Japan Central League in strikeouts for three of those years. In recent years, when a Japanese team has qualified for the Little League World Series, the players have made the pilgrimage to Scranton to greet the great Igawa, before whom they stood in awe. A few days ago, the Trenton sales office got a call — a group of 20 Japanese-Americans wanted to come to a game, but only when Igawa was scheduled to pitch.
“My fans’ support adds motivation,” said Igawa, who is accessible and good with crowds in public, even English-speaking ones.
But away from the ballpark, Igawa is exceedingly private, almost reclusive. Takeshita said in the two years he has been his interpreter, he has been inside his apartment once, very briefly. Takeshita lives in Queens and keeps Igawa’s car, picking him up on the street when they are driving to the ballpark.
Igawa decided years ago to commute from Manhattan for the simplest of reasons: he thought his stay in Scranton would be temporary. After the first year, once he had learned his way around New York, it seemed easier to stay than to pick up and learn a new city. Besides, wouldn’t his second season be mostly in the Bronx? Or, in some way, wouldn’t moving from Manhattan be admitting failure?
By the time his minor league existence became more permanent, the driving habit had become routine, and Igawa likes a routine. Somehow, his minor league managers say, he has never been late to the ballpark in five years.
Igawa is married and has children, and they visit him in New York for a couple of months each year, usually just as the baseball season is ending. But Takeshita has never met any member of the family. Asked when he was married and how many children he has, Igawa smiled and said he does not give out that information. He also declined to give the name of his wife.
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“It is just safer that way,” he said, somewhat cryptically.
On trips, teammates said Igawa keeps to himself and does not accompany groups of players going out after a game. The one place they do see him is outdoors running during the day. Maintaining a grueling exercise regimen is customary for Japanese professional baseball players. For the last five years, Igawa’s teammates arriving at the ballpark knew they would see Igawa already doing sprints in the outfield or running the stadium steps. Then he would do the running assigned by the team as well.
During Igawa’s first spring training in America, Joe Torre, then the Yankees manager, was astonished when his coaches discovered Igawa throwing a baseball against a fence unsupervised. The Yankees had their own throwing schedule for Igawa, but he wanted to throw more and was perplexed that the Yankees disapproved.
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Bobby Valentine, now a broadcaster with ESPN, has managed in the American and Japanese professional leagues.
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“The concept that less might be more does not compute in Japan,” Valentine said. “It’s a problem for Japanese pitchers over here. If Igawa was throwing when the Yankees didn’t know it, he wasn’t doing it to be a contrarian. In Japan, they think if you don’t throw every day you not only won’t be successful, you don’t deserve to be successful.
“So that doesn’t surprise me.”
But Valentine was surprised that Igawa was still in the Yankees minor league system.
“I thought he had gone back to Japan years ago,” Valentine said.
“The other day, the GM (Brian Cashman) informed me that I had been removed from the 40-man roster. I have had a dream to pitch in the Majors since I was in Japan. This dream won’t change in the future. I think this opportunity is part of the process where I can realize that dream. I’m not going back to Japan and still believe there will be chances here. I will keep challenging myself, with a positive outlook, until I can play in the Majors and have consistently good performances there.” — July 30, 2008
Asked last week to assess Igawa’s five years in the Yankee organization, General Manager Brian Cashman answered: “It was a disaster. We failed.”
Cashman quickly added that in 2008 and in 2009 he had negotiated a deal to return Igawa to two different Japanese professional teams.
“I drove to Scranton, sat him down and told him it was our assessment that his abilities didn’t translate into a major league career,” said Cashman, who added the Yankees would have been relieved of some financial obligations in the Japanese deals. “I told him that it was our fault — our mistake — not his. But I said, ‘If you stay, you’re not going anywhere.’ And he refused the trade both times.”
Major league teams have not expressed an interest in trading for Igawa in the last four years, Cashman said, although he conceded Igawa’s five-year, $20 million contract — the Yankees also paid $26 million in bidding rights — could be keeping some teams away.
In 2007, the San Diego Padres claimed Igawa off waivers and Cashman was ready to make the trade but he said, “ownership was not willing to let him go yet.”
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Kevin Towers, who was the Padres’ general manager at the time and now holds the same title with the Arizona Diamondbacks, said he thought Igawa might have had more success in the National League and at San Diego’s Petco Park.
“Getting him out of the New York market might have helped,” Towers said by telephone. “The expectations in New York are enormous and immediate, and if you don’t succeed right away, for Japanese players, there has to be added pressures and cultural adjustments.”
Last year, Towers was a special assistant scout to Cashman and spent two weeks with the Scranton team.
“I was amazed that Kei was still there grinding it out,” Towers said.
Igawa’s best minor league season was in 2008 when he had a 14-6 record with a 3.45 E.R.A. The next year he was 10-8 with a 4.15 E.R.A. In time, using a deceptively sharp curveball and sneaky changeup while spotting an average fastball, Igawa set the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre franchise record for career victories with 33. He has set or is close to setting several other franchise pitching records.
But Cashman said none of Igawa’s minor league accomplishments brought him closer to the Bronx. Looking at his 2008 minor league totals, Cashman noted that Igawa’s QERA or QuikERA — a statistic that estimates what a pitcher’s E.R.A. should be based on his strikeout rate, walk rate and ground ball-to-fly ball ratio — was 4.52.
“That tells me he’s a fly ball pitcher and that’s not good in the major leagues,” Cashman said. “Look, we’ve had plenty of pitching holes. If he could have filled one, he would have been here.”
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Cashman called Igawa “a great clubhouse guy” and denied that he was taking a spot normally reserved for a top prospect. He said luxury tax penalties — sometimes cited for Igawa’s lengthy minor league stay — had no impact on how Igawa was used. “He didn’t block anyone who was moving up,” he said. “Again, if he could help us or help us get another player we could use, the luxury tax wouldn’t have stopped us.”
In the end, Cashman sounded mystified by Igawa. “It’s the most curious case I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “And frustrating. The lesson is to be very careful with Japanese pitchers. I give him credit for living a dream and for fighting the fight. It can’t be easy. It has to bother him, too.”
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Cashman added, “He does things his own way.” Like commuting to and from Manhattan.
“Yeah, he’s passed me on the drive down to Trenton,” Cashman said. “He drives faster than his fastball.”
“I also got a chance to watch the Japan Series on TV. I hadn’t seen many of the participating players for a long time and I really felt that time is going by very fast because there were also several players I didn’t know. I looked on in envy of them playing in packed stadiums in November.” — Nov. 4, 2009, upon a return visit to Japan.
Igawa, who often snickers when he begins to answer a question, was stoic and straight-faced last week when he was told he had now pitched in 104 minor league games and thrown more than 525 minor league innings. He had sat on the bench or waited in the bullpen through more than 5,700 innings, riding buses from Maine to Kentucky and from Richmond to Rochester. Teammates, managers, trainers and pitching coaches came and went. Igawa stayed, the only journeyman left who could tell new prospects where to park their cars so they would not get hit by a foul ball or explain how the outfield walls were different at the home park five years ago.
Was this the odyssey he envisioned when he agreed to leave Japan in 2007?
“No,” Igawa answered before another Trenton game, sweaty from the pregame sprints and toweling off so he could slip into his game uniform. “But it is still baseball. I get to pitch. I love being on the mound. It is my job, but it’s also what I want to do. I get to see new places I would never have seen otherwise. And it is my duty to do my best.”
Igawa, whose complete major league record from 2007-8 was 2-4 with a 6.66 E.R.A., concedes he did not pitch well in his time with the Yankees. But he also thinks he could have done better had he been given more than 16 pitching appearances.
“America is a different world from Japan and so is American baseball,” he said. “I had never pitched out of the bullpen. I had never pitched on four days rest. The hitters here also have more power — another adjustment. I look back now and I have developed a cut fastball, I throw my changeup differently. I understand American hitters better. So I think I would have done better if I had more time the first season. And I wish I had then what I have now.”
The goal next year is to show off what he has learned to another team, anywhere in the world. He would even return to the minors again, if he thought he had a legitimate chance to make his new team’s major league roster.
Towers believes some American and Japanese clubs will show interest.
“Once his Yankees contract is out of the way,” Towers said, “the landscape might change. It’s like he’s been out of sight in the minors forever.”
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As Valentine said, “I’ve seen lefties with less stuff than he has have success in the majors.”
Igawa is aware that baseball fans, and especially Yankees fans, view him as a renowned bust.
“Yankees fans may always think of me as not being successful,” said Igawa, whose record this season at Trenton and Scranton is 3-2 with a 3.68 E.R.A. “But I’ve grown as a pitcher and as a person. I’ll be better for these five years. I do not regret coming here.”
Spend enough time with Igawa, however, and it becomes clear that he has moments when he is dismayed. On July 14, the Yankees signed J. C. Romero, a 35-year-old left-hander who had just been released by the Washington Nationals. Romero was assigned to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre.
Igawa got the news standing at this locker in Trenton. His shoulders sagged slightly and he slumped to a chair.
He was asked if he ever wants to shout, “What about me?”
He shook his head.
“I am Japanese,” he said. “I don’t go crazy too often. I’m not going to throw things or make a scene. In five years, I have seen this happen over and over.”
Four days later, Cashman burst through the Trenton clubhouse door and nearly stumbled over Igawa, whose locker is next to the entrance. The two have not had a conversation longer than “hello” since 2009, but Cashman gave Igawa a smile and a playful jab in the arm as he walked toward the office of Trenton Manager Tony Franklin.
Cashman was there to discuss a promotion to the big leagues.
Back in his Yankee Stadium office the next day, Cashman summoned to the Yankees Igawa’s Trenton teammate, Steve Garrison, a 24-year-old left-hander with no major league experience. Garrison’s Trenton record this season is 3-6 with a 6.26 E.R.A.
The team made the announcement in the early afternoon. Igawa was already in his car, on the road from Manhattan to Trenton. He had to be on the field for a pregame workout at 3 p.m.Man Stabbed In Chest Repeatedly During Lakeview Robbery
By Mae Rice in News on Dec 13, 2016 4:22PM
Photo via Tony Webster on Flickr
A 21-year-old man was stabbed in the chest multiple times during a robbery in Lakeview early Tuesday morning, according to police.
The man was parking a car in the 2800 block of North Halsted Street at about midnight, when two cars pulled up and several unknown people—one visibly armed—got out and said they were robbing him. They then pulled him out of the car and stabbed and beat him, according to police.
The victim was with another man, 37, at the time of the robbery. The older man was outside the vehicle and uninjured, though his gold chain was stolen during the incident.
The 21-year-old man was taken to Illinois Masonic Hospital in good condition. This case is ongoing, and no one is currently in custody.On Wednesday, Commissioner Gary Bettman and Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly joined hundreds at Detroit's Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament for a funeral service that celebrated Mr. Hockey's life and career.
The NHL is catching its breath after an eventful week that saw the passing of the legendary Gordie Howe at age 88 and the Pittsburgh Penguins winning the Stanley Cup for the fourth time.
For days, Commissioner Bettman has heard suggestions from fans and those inside hockey for ways to honor Howe, who truly was a pioneer of the game for his sensational performance on the ice and exemplary manners and generosity off it.
Some, including Wayne Gretzky, have been quoted as saying Howe's No. 9 should be retired from the game forever, as Gretzky's No. 99 was retired Feb. 6, 2000, at the 50th NHL All-Star Game. Others have suggested all 30 NHL teams wear a No. 9 patch on their jerseys next season.
"We're going to come up with something that's an enduring testament to Gordie," Commissioner Bettman said Thursday from his office in New York. "There will be something that appropriately celebrates his life and creates a lasting tribute to his immortality. It will be something that will be special and enduring and permanent."
Video: Gordie Howe's life eulogized by son Dr. Murray Howe
An emotional Commissioner Bettman didn't speak with reporters outside the Detroit church where Howe was remembered during a funeral service that touched upon the player, husband, parent, grandparent and timeless fan favorite.
"The service was beautiful, done with elegance and grace. Which was so befitting," the Commissioner said. "This was clearly a testament to a man who was not just respected and revered, but beloved.
"The most moving part of the day, and what told me he was Mr. Hockey, weren't necessarily the same thing. To me, the eulogy at a funeral is the most important thing, and Murray [Howe] couldn't have been more eloquent in encapsulating his father, as a father, a family man and as Mr. Hockey."
Commissioner Bettman said he believes he first met Howe at a League event; perhaps it was an All-Star Game or another event, or maybe just a Detroit Red Wings game at Joe Louis Arena.
"He couldn't have been more welcoming, more gracious. But he did start with an elbow," the Commissioner said, laughing.
Commissioner Bettman recalled the way Howe would walk into a convention center, the site of an NHL All-Star Game Fan Fest, simply wading into a sea of people and being swallowed whole by the throng.
"There are a lot of players, a lot of people, who don't like being in those crowds," he said. "Gordie relished it. Little children who never actually saw him play would react to Mr. Hockey. It looked like this was his greatest joy: playing with and smiling at or giving autographs to these young people, taking pictures with them."
Many have tried to define how much this legend meant to hockey and to the NHL. His almost-surreal statistics, longevity in the game and folksy appeal off the ice all make up the man who was Gordie Howe.
"The essence of Gordie is in his nickname," Commissioner Bettman said. "Why else would you call someone Mr. Hockey if he didn't exist at the very roots and foundation of our game? He was a unique blend of player. He was in the top five of NHL scoring for 20 years in a row. To have somebody that skilled and at the same time that physical was fairly unique. It still is.
"If you went around the room," the Commissioner said with a chuckle of any gathering of Howe's former opponents, "they'd probably each have a memento."
By that, of course, he meant a scar, worn like a badge of honor. Indeed, several players at Joe Louis Arena for the public visitation Tuesday proudly showed creases and thin valleys in their faces that came courtesy of Howe, who gave at least as good as he got.
"Gordie was emblematic of the game, |
causing that stream of income to be negatively impacted or wiped out altogether. This clearly impacts the overall asset value.
You WILL have an asset with resale value if you build a beast of a business. If you go the other route, do you really think you have an asset someone is dying to buy? Of course not.
“But can’t I outsource most of the work and still have 10 sites?”
That’s a nice thought… but then you’re going to be spending time finding/managing va’s instead of on making money. The more time you waste managing/randomly doing other “chores” that don’t equal money, is poorly spent time. ESPECIALLY if you haven’t created your first successful one yet. A lot of newbies are trying to be moguls with a million sites rather than making 1 actually work first.
“So where do I start?”
Knowledge is the #1 thing at this stage in the game for you.
You’re going to learn a lot more trying to create a legit business that can make money, rather than trying to figure out the latest spam techniques and “diversifying” your spammy shit across multiple sites. Stop thinking like broke bloggers.
“Is it okay if I just spread my risk to maybe 2 or 3 sites?”
I’ve said it before but it’s important enough to say again– diversifying when you’re talking about such small numbers is the silliest thing ever.
If you make $5 do you put it in your pocket or do you diversify and put 50 cents under the mattress, 50 cents in the stock market, 50 cents in the bank, etc… Your thought process is crazy. You don’t have anything to diversity yet, you’re WAY to early in the game.
Get KNOWLEDGE. People building these shitty sites don’t acquire the knowledge they need to build a real business. They’ll have to learn something totally new when they want to start making real money and create a real business. Even if it takes a little longer to learn the knowledge and execute building a real business, that knowledge will stick with you. One route gives you skills you can build on, one route doesn’t.
10 pieces of trash, is still trash… you have to decide – would you rather be a garbageman or a businessman?
I know a lot of people who used to run a huge amount of sites. They made a little bit on each one, and just pumped out more. Most of their sites don’t make money anymore because Google decided the quality wasn’t any good. Since they relied 100% on one strategy, and they didn’t have control(Google did) it’s often going to wipe out an entire strategy when Google makes a change. If they had built 1 site they could have spent all their time building a high quality authority site, which would be much more resilient to the Google gods.
As I’m writing this, a friend I haven’t talked to in a while skypes me to catch up, and mentions he lost a bunch of $5k/month income sites due to the latest Google updates. It happens at every level. If he had 1 monster site instead of a bunch of smaller sites, would he be in the same situation? No.
I got hit by the same updates. I had a collection of e-commerce stores doing around $40k/month revenue, and got chopped down to around $20k/month overnight after the Google changes. The business was mainly built on SEO, so we felt the hit pretty good. If instead of having a bunch of sites under that business, I’d focused on building 1 big authority site, I guarantee there’s a substantially less chance the site would have been affected.
Something that no one will think about when making a decision like this, and ought to be considered… your network.
What do I mean by that?
You’re substantially holding yourself back from expanding your network if you’re focusing on shitty little sites. The only people you’ll be able to relate to are other shitty site owners. You won’t have any real connections with people doing real businesses. The beauty of having a good network is, as you grow, your network grows and progresses as well. Many people move up to bigger and bigger deals, and it helps to be associated with people like that and see what type of big opportunities are out there. You can learn and grow along with other people you’re associating with. If you stay in the tunnel vision that is ‘shit marketing’, no one legit has any reason to want to associate with you. You don’t realize it, but you lose great connections because you’re not working on anything worthwhile. Call it, “networking opportunity cost.”
Long term, quality destroys quantity. It’s not even close.
Quality is not going to happen if a business is getting 10% of your efforts.
Focus on building a business where you can confidently say, “if I wanted this product/service, I would buy from this business over anywhere else”. If you’re building a business where you’re not able to say that, it’s probably time to re-evaluate what you’re doing.
If you’re doing things the same way most ‘make money’ bloggers are doing it, you’re doing it wrong.
If you change your route and it seems “risky”, consider that it might just feel unnatural because you’ve never done business the right way before.
–
If you found value in this post, please share it and leave a comment with your thoughts. 🙂PATRICK KLUIVERT'S nine-year-old son Shane has signed for his dad's former club Barcelona.
The promising kid - who was playing for French giants Paris Saint-Germain - is already hot property in the football world with a sponsorship deal with Nike in the bag.
4 Shane Kluivert with his dad and Holland legend Patrick
Instagram 4 The Barcelona kid already has a deal in place with Nike
And now the Holland legend's youngest lad will follow in his old man's footsteps by going to the Nou Camp club.
He will play for FC Barcelona Alevin - the club's Under-11s.
Kluivert senior was technical director at Neymar's club but left in June after just a year in charge.
He now lives in Spain so the move for Shane makes sense and he will begin training at the famed La Masia on Monday.
Shane - whose older brother Justin, 18, plays for Ajax - made headlines last month when he penned a deal with Barcelona and PSG sponsors Nike.
He is believed to be the youngest athlete in Europe to put pen to paper on such a contract.
Reuters 4 Patrick Kluivert is a Barcelona legend
Reuters 4 The Holland hero celebrates with Brazil icon Rivaldo during Barcelona's La Liga-winning season in 1999
The deal was announced on Instagram by his chuffed father, who posted a picture of the duo with the caption: "My son so proud of you. Just signed his first contract with Nike at 9 years."
Last July Shane and his dad visited the facilities at Ciutat Esportiva - the training ground and academy base of Barcelona.
His arrival spells some good news for the crisis-hit Barcelona club.
Legend Andres Iniesta has admitted for the first time he is considering his future.
And Lionel Messi's father Jorge held talks with Manchester City chiefs over a possible move.CHICAGO NETFLIX TAX
NEWSBUG: "The city of Chicago has imposed a new Netflix Tax on their residents... With me now are the officials responsible for the tax... Could you please explain to us the reason behind this seemingly... arbitrary taxation?":
OFFICIAL: "Gladly. You see, little bug, we was getting da monies from da movie rentals... Den Netflix muscles in and we ain't gettin' da moneys no more...So we tells Netflix subscribers it would be a shame if sumpin'...'Happened' to Netflix...Now we gets da moneys"
NEWSBUG: "S what you're saying is: To cover for your own budgeting ineptitude, you're creating new taxes out of thin air. What's next?... A tax on webcomics?"
CITY OF CHICAGO: "You wanna read dis panel?... Pay da tax. Dat goes for dis one too... Pay up. Double Tax on second-to-last panels... Hand it over. You likes da funny pictures, huh?... Be a shame if sumpin' 'happened' to 'em..."Transcript for Meet the Brazuca - 'The Most Advanced Soccer Ball Ever Made'
-- did business. -- I told you the most important city for the World Cup plus three you know -- -- up here. London are over here in Milan. Politically told you it was clearly over here. In a place -- probably never heard of Protestant. You'd never thinking but in this tiny little town's soccer is a huge deal. It started when British soldiers stationed here in the 1850. Personal scruples fixed took him to a local should there who eventually learned how to make them on his own. The rest is history. Today factories here produce up to sixty million soccer balls a year the industry now so people. Seven out of every ten soccer balls in the world. You were given a rare look inside the at dean gets factory that produces -- for some of the world's top leagues with coincide. Including the Bundesliga UEFA champions league even adolescent North American companies do not think for the all -- -- -- -- -- -- all of -- -- covered -- Some of the designs are so new -- top secret -- already been allowed to film them. But we were allowed to film this it's -- the presume get the official World Cup soccer ball. So what makes the present is so unique. Well take a look at this is a regular soccer ball -- usually made of around 32 cigar shaped handles all of -- stitched together. The presumed has opened six panels they kind of look like splashes of -- and there -- no stitches. Due to hold them together for the design supposedly makes -- one of the most aerodynamic -- in history. Here's how it's made at least pay attention. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- The process is so precise there's hardly any variation from one ball to the next. And this is why that's pretty cool. So all -- Lionel Messi will be kicking. In the World Cup is the same as somebody goodbye and play at home with the same same old same technology. And materials everything's the -- Speaking at the -- plus six. -- all right we'll slow down for yet this blur that -- usable. 45 miles an hour that's about the same speed as a guy like this season. This is how the polls are tested to 5000. Times -- should make sure they can handle the world's best strikers. If you're wondering about the climate the polls are tested for that to take a look this is a water tester and as you can see. Football is soaking wet. The polls aerodynamics mean to rain drips right off shortly anything is a -- And to test for heat the falls are baked for seven days -- a 130 degrees. The problem this game has report that brings whenever the -- together and that is what this corners of. Course here in Pakistan the -- represented something else it's a chance to change the country's image. Look around this is a huge success story. And Pakistan many women can't -- but here is -- 40% of the workforce. Soccer has made this city so stable hasn't seen a single terrorist attack in years. Proof that the beautiful game really is doing something beautiful. Police when it begins. Right now that we see how the ball is made there's only one thing left you -- -- it is let's see how it performs. On the -- ABC news them cl go to Pakistan Jimmy -- shots. But I got -- and.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.Virginia Brown-Waite (born October 5, 1943) is the former U.S. Representative for Florida's 5th congressional district, serving from 2003 until 2011. She is a member of the Republican Party and a founder of Maggie's List.[1]
The district stretches along several counties in western and central Florida, including territory in the metropolitan area of Tampa Bay.
Early life, education, and career [ edit ]
Brown-Waite was born in Albany, New York as Virginia Frances Kniffen, and graduated in 1976 with a BS in Interdisciplinary Studies at Empire State College, State University of New York (Northeast Center). She earned a master's degree in public administration from Russell Sage College. She served as a staffer in the New York State Senate, eventually rising to legislative director. She moved to Brooksville, Florida, in the 1980s.
Florida Legislature [ edit ]
After serving one term as a county commissioner in Hernando County, Florida, Brown-Waite was elected to the Florida State Senate as a Republican from Hernando County. She served as Senate Majority Whip from 1999 to 2000, and was elected president pro tempore of the state senate in 2000.
Brown-Waite has expressed support for the death penalty. She says she believed she saw "a message" in a nosebleed suffered by death row inmate Allen Lee Davis during his execution on July 8, 1999. Brown-Waite, who saw in the blood the shape of a cross, believes that it either indicated Davis had made peace with God, or it was a message from God giving his blessing to the execution.[2]
U.S. House of Representatives [ edit ]
Committee assignments [ edit ]
Caucus memberships [ edit ]
Co-Chair of the Unexploded Ordnance Caucus
Tenure [ edit ]
Since entering Congress, Brown-Waite has garnered a lifetime rating of 90 from the American Conservative Union.[3] However, she broke with her party on a few occasions. She criticized George W. Bush for fielding questions from hand-picked crowds. "Let me tell you the difference between a GWB town-hall meeting – George W. Bush – and a GBW – Ginny Brown-Waite – town-hall meeting: I don't load the audience with just the choir," she once said.[4] She was one of five Republicans who voted against a bill to give Terri Schiavo's parents the right to sue in federal court to keep her alive (Schiavo's home was located in the 5th).[5] She is a member of Republican groups such as Christine Todd Whitman's It's My Party Too, Mike Castle's Republican Main Street Partnership, and The Wish List.
Brown-Waite's district has one of the highest concentrations of retirees in the country.[6] In early 2005, she referred to the current Social Security system as a "Ponzi scheme".[7] However, she was skeptical of the president's proposal for personal accounts, saying that he hadn't done a good job of selling it to seniors.[4]
On April 6, 2005, Brown-Waite introduced the Jessica Lunsford Act, named for Jessica Lunsford, a nine-year-old from her district who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered in Homosassa, Florida, by John Couey. The bill, modeled after the Florida law of the same name, had the objectives to punish sex offenders and reduce their ability to re-offend. It had 107 cosponsors and was referred to a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, but it was never voted upon (either by any committee or the full Congress), and it died when the 109th Congress finally adjourned.
On Iraq, after reports that Brown-Waite supports the withdrawal of U.S. troops within a year, her spokesman said in an e-mail that "it was taken out of context" and that "she said that if the Iraqis did not work toward troop and police deadlines, then Congress would put pressure on them to do so with the threat of denying funds for reconstruction and possibly withdrawing some troops." He also said that Brown-Waite would support "a properly-worded resolution" that would put forth a no-confidence vote in Congress for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who resigned in 2007).[8]
Brown-Waite voted against an amendment that would have cut off funding for Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations.[9]
Brown-Waite is a staunch advocate of a federal prohibition of online poker. In 2006, she supported H.R. 4411, the Goodlatte-Leach Internet Gambling Prohibition Act[10] In 2008, she opposed H.R. 5767, the Payment Systems Protection Act (a bill that sought to place a moratorium on enforcement of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act while the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve defined "unlawful Internet gambling").
An ardent opponent of gun control, Brown-Waite was known for proudly carrying a gun on trips to her district.[4] She proposed the American Heroes Repatriation Act, to move American soldiers buried in France and Belgium back to the United States.,[11][12] in the process angering French officials and constituents.[13]
She also caused a minor controversy when, commenting on the economic-stimulus package proposed by President Bush in early 2008, she referred to the peoples of Puerto Rico and Guam as "foreign citizens"[14] (when they are, in fact, American citizens and nationals, respectively). She has since clarified those comments with an article on the Orlando Sentinel.[15]
On September 29, 2008, Brown-Waite voted against the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008,[16] and also voted against the amended version which was enacted.[17]
The House version of the American Recovery and Investment Act was passed on January 28, 2009. Brown-Waite was the only Republican to abstain from voting. All other 177 House Republicans voted against the Act.[18]
Mark Foley scandal [ edit ]
In September 2006, Brown-Waite was told about an incident from 2003 or 2004 when an apparently inebriated Mark Foley had tried to gain access to the pages' dormitory. On September 28, 2006, an inappropriate e-mail that Foley sent was posted on ABCNEWS.com's "The Blotter". Brown-Waite launched her own investigation and alerted Republican leadership on September 29 both about the dorm incident and about pages who had been made to feel uncomfortable by Foley. Foley resigned that day and the scandal erupted that evening with news of the lurid instant messages he had sent former pages.[19]
Political campaigns [ edit ]
2002 [ edit ]
The 5th District had been represented by Democrat Karen Thurman since its formation in 1993. After the 2000 Census, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature redrew the 5th to be more friendly to Republicans. For the most part the new 5th overlapped Brown-Waite's state senate district.[20] Brown-Waite won a narrow victory in November 2002 over Thurman despite the unfavorable publicity that came in October when police caught her husband, former New York state trooper Harvey Waite, stealing pro-Thurman lawn signs.[21]
2004 [ edit ]
Brown-Waite was re-elected in 2004 with 66% of the vote against attorney Robert Whittel.
2006 [ edit ]
Brown-Waite was re-elected to a third term in 2006, receiving 59% of the vote against Democrat John Russell.
2008 [ edit ]
Brown-Waite was re-elected to a fourth term in 2008, receiving 61% of the vote against Democrat John Russell.
Land O' Lakes Republican Jim King joined the race as a conservative candidate, attacking the moderate Congresswoman from the right on matters of national security, immigration, taxation, and supporting the troops, which is one of Brown-Waite's signature issues.[22] He also made an appeal to conservative Christian primary voters. In the first three fundraising quarters, King raised $40,000, an amount dwarfed by the $176,000 Brown-Waite raised during that period, yet still large enough for King's campaign to have begun running local radio ads nine month in advance of primary day.[23][24] Three Democrats declared their candidacies: 2006 nominee John Russell, H. David Werder and Carol Castagnero. Castagnero placed third in the Democratic primary for governor in 2006[25] and took 40% of the vote against State Senator Paula Dockery in 2004.[26] John Russell was the Democratic nominee in the general election against Ginny Brown-Waite in 2006.
On November 26, 2007, it was reported that after years of hosting town hall meetings on the issue and calling for full hearing on the implications of the FAIR Tax,[27] Brown-Waite had endorsed the FairTax proposal on September 24. King accused her of only changing her stance because of his support for it.[28]
2010 [ edit ]
On April 30, Brown-Waite announced she will be retiring at the end of her current term.[29] In a statement, she cited long-running health problems, particularly with her pancreas. Brown-Waite has endorsed Hernando County sheriff Richard B. Nugent as her successor.[30]
2012 [ edit ]
Brown-Waite considered running for local office in 2012.[31]
Notable statements [ edit ]
February 15, 2007: "Git-R-Done" During a February 15 floor debate on US participation in Iraq, Brown-Waite invoked Larry the Cable Guy and professed the following: "In the South, we have a wonderful saying and it goes like this: Get ‘er done. Our soldiers want to get it done and come home, and our President wants the same thing, and this Congress should demand the exact same thing. Let’s get out there and get ‘er done."
See also [ edit ]Please enable Javascript to watch this video
AKRON, Ohio - An Akron police officer was involved in a shooting at Van Everett Avenue and Bittaker Street Monday afternoon.
According to Lt. Rick Edwards, Public Information Officer for the Akron Police, a 23-year-old male was driving a rental car when police observed him making several traffic violations. When they tried to pull him over, the driver took off in the car toward McKinley Avenue. He stopped the car there and ran from the scene.
At one point as they chased him on foot, police noticed that the suspect had a gun. They repeatedly told him to stop and to drop the weapon.
Eventually, the chase led to Roscoe Avenue. Officers confronted the suspect in the driveway of a home there, continuing to tell him to drop his gun. One shot was fired by an officer, hitting the suspect in the stomach. He is in stable condition at Akron City Hospital. No officers were injured. They did recover a handgun near the suspect.
The officer involved has been on the force for at least 4 years and per departmental procedure, is now on paid leave as the incident is investigated. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation has been called to the scene and will assist in that.Since the orchestrated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the establishment effort to censor the Internet has gone into overdrive. It started with the take down of unsavory white supremacist, neo-Nazi-type websites such as the Daily Stormer — it always starts with the easy targets. Google and GoDaddy, a hosting service, practically banned the site from the Internet. Then it was Stormfront, another such hate site. But smelling blood in the water, it did not take long for the pro-censorship establishment in America and around the world to demand full-blown censoring of not just racism and hate, but virtually everything they disagree with. Some of the efforts appear to have backfired. But without a change in course, free expression on the Internet is in grave danger.
The trend toward restrictions is picking up steam, with an alliance of Big Government-linked tech firms and crony Big Business working hard to squelch free speech online. For almost a year, giants such as Youtube were banning advertising on conservative and liberty-oriented channels, all but crushing budding commentators hoping to make a profession out of it. And already, mainstream voices such as former Congressman Ron Paul have had some of their videos “de-monetized,” as the increasingly Orwellian video site calls it. Every day, the net gets wider and the targets more numerous. Google and Facebook have both been exposed censoring the alternative media, and especially conservative media. And the chief of Facebook has become increasingly brazen in his political activism on behalf of mass immigration, big government, and other “progressive” causes.
After Charlottesville, it got worse, fast. The examples of conservatives, libertarians, truth seekers, Christians, constitutionalists, patriots, and others being banned, censored, demonetized, and more are practically impossible to count at this point. On August 30, as just one example among many, Shane Trejo at The Liberty Conservative reported that Google sent a letter threatening the website that unless a particular article is removed, all of its ad revenue opportunities would be lost. “This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control,” Trejo explained. While the article itself contained nothing offensive, it was targeted by Google for having been written by a so-called “unperson” who reportedly played some role in organizing the demonstrations in Charlottesville, which included some racists and provocateurs. The same website had previously been censored by Facebook over a post defending Congressman Ron Paul from a smear.
The danger is obvious, he said. “An incredibly dangerous precedent is obviously being set here, and if you think that it won’t impact you directly at some point, think again,” continued Trejo. “We look forward to the day where rival ad platforms who respect the intellectual freedom of their customers can outcompete Google, but those days have not arrived yet. These tech companies have us all by the short hairs, and post-Charlottesville, they are all working in unison to enforce the Orwellian nightmare. Nobody is safe.” Indeed, even “mainstream conservative provocateurs” such as Lauren Southern and Paul Joseph Watson with massive followings are being targeted, he added.
“All conservatives and libertarians must realize that the Orwellian nightmare enforced by private hands is just as harmful to human freedom as if the dystopia was enforced by the hands of government commissars,” said Trejo. “The results will be the same, as freedom of expression will be sacrificed to the God of political correctness. After they destroy free speech, the rest of our rights won’t be far behind. A world where digital lynch mobs can ruin people’s entire lives — harming their reputations, making it impossible to feed their families, and potentially subjecting them to retaliatory violence — for merely expressing an honest opinion would amount to a dark age for liberty.”
“A world where Big Brother is judge, jury and executioner is right on the horizon, and that does not bode well for anyone except a small handful of oligarchs and elites,” Trejo concluded. “We all must band together, eschewing mindless partisanship, to defeat the burgeoning Orwellian surveillance state before our rights are lost forever.”
But while some see the censorship spree as alarming, some of those targeted, ironically, see it as a major victory for their cause. For instance, all of the banning and hysteria had Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, the first to be dropped by GoDaddy and later Google for a post ridiculing the woman killed in Charlottesville, expressing utter delight with the way Big Tech companies reacted. Gloating over the fact that the CEO of GoDaddy was pushed out about a week after the decision to ban the hate site, Anglin wrote that “it is now absolutely clear that the decision was a mistake for them and for the whole of the tech industry, hence the resignation.”
As a result of the banning, not only did Anglin get more free publicity than he could have ever obtained through other means, he believes that his “joke” will have positive repercussions for his cause. “Right now, we are talking about a complete transformation of the tech industry,” he wrote on a new website he created, adding that the “results were more than I ever could have hoped for.” “Some of the most powerful people in the world, as well as society at large, are considering the fact that these few mega-corporations are capable of unifying together in order to ban legal content from the internet, and beginning to draw the conclusion that this situation is incredibly dangerous.” Across the political spectrum, Anglin's virtual banning did, indeed, spark alarm bells.
Among other perceived victories, Anglin celebrated the “beginnings of a real conversation about the government regulating the domain registry system.” He also speculated that any government effort to regulate the tech industry would go further than that, something he viewed as positive because the industry “has become much, much too powerful to remain in private hands.” “Excluding the media and the mega-corporations themselves, no one on any side of the political spectrum likes the idea of a cabal of billionaires effectively being able to unilaterally control the direction of society,” he added, expressing a point of agreement with anti-business, pro-big government forces seeking regulation of quasi-monopolies in the Internet business.
Indeed, even prominent left-wing media sites such as Vice sounded the alarm. Calling the Big Business ban on the hate site “a flashpoint in a long-overdue debate,” two writers at Vice wondered “how much control should a few powerful internet companies have over user content?” Even the CEO of one of the companies that tried to disappear the Daily Stormer expressed concerns. “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet,” the CEO of Cloudflare was quoted as saying in the Vice article as part of an e-mail to employees. “No one should have that power.”
Also sounding the alarm was the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “All fair-minded people must stand against the hateful violence and aggression that seems to be growing across our country. But we must also recognize that on the Internet, any tactic used now to silence neo-Nazis will soon be used against others, including people whose opinions we agree with,” explained a trio of EFF analysts in a very insightful piece. “Protecting free speech is not something we do because we agree with all of the speech that gets protected. We do it because we believe that no one — not the government and not private commercial enterprises — should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t.”
On the arguably “conservative” end of the spectrum, the (increasingly irrelevant) National Review, which published its founder William F. Buckley defending white supremacy and denying voting rights to blacks, warned about the consequences, too. “This was an ominous development for free speech — and not because there is anything at all valuable about The Daily Stormer’s message,” wrote David French, an attorney, adding that the lines of Internet communication were in “progressive” hands. “Instead, The Daily Stormer’s demise is a reminder that a few major corporations now have far more power than the government to regulate and restrict free speech, and they’re hardly neutral or unbiased actors. They have a point of view, and they’re under immense pressure to use that point of view to influence public debate.”
All of the backlash from across the political spectrum had Anglin, the first target to be removed from the Web, gloating about his success. “Needless to say, I am extremely happy with the results of this particular piece of performance art,” Anglin continued, suggesting his ridicule of the deceased victim in Charlottesville was somehow art. “The fallout from it shows that the ruling powers are extremely unhappy with the way things shook out. They miscalculated, they made me into a folk hero and a martyr, and they turned themselves into megalomaniac super-villains intent on using suppression of speech to direct the course of society. It could not have came together more perfectly. I will overcome these setbacks, as I always have, and the amount of people listening to me will grow to numbers I could never have imagined two weeks ago.”
He is probably right. Indeed, many millions of people who in July had never heard of Anglin or his hate site now know all about him. Some of those millions will no doubt agree with his extreme agenda — and others on the fence will certainly become converted. And now, talk of having government nationalize the tech giants, albeit often for other reasons, is in the headlines worldwide. Plus, across the political spectrum — from libertarians and conservatives to liberals and progressives — there is a growing awareness that a tiny, interconnected “cabal,” as David Rockefeller labeled his fellow "conspirators," wields tremendous power and has an anti-freedom agenda. So basically, unless the goal of the Internet giants was to get themselves (unconstitutionally) regulated by government while promoting white supremacist views, their effort to ban a lone hater from the Web backfired in spectacular fashion.
But the threat of Internet censorship at the national and global level is very real. With Obama having surrendered control over key Internet infrastructure to globalist “stakeholders” unbound by the First Amendment, and with the United Nations actively campaigning for censorship worldwide, Internet freedom has never been in more grave danger. If the Orwellian trends are not halted, it will only be a matter of time before the World Wide Web — even in the United States, famous and admired around the world for its absolutist protections of free speech rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution — will be facing full-blown censorship by a rogue alliance of governments, dictators, international institutions, and their Big Business cronies.
It must be made clear that the issue is not simply Big Business. Indeed, the leaders of Big Tech firms regularly cavort with their Big Government allies behind closed doors at events such as the annual Bilderberg summit. The chiefs of Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Amazon, among others, meet regularly with establishment politicians, cabinet officials, royalty, mega-bankers, Rothschild agents, NSA and CIA bosses, and more — along with some senior Chinese Communists for good measure — at the secrecy obsessed confab. And statements by attendees reveal an agenda for global government, something that will become increasingly difficult for globalists to achieve if free speech continues to flourish online as humanity wakes up to what is going on.
The companies have more direct links to Big Government, too. Google, for example, which owns Youtube, “has been a partner with the CIA since 2004,” reported CBS News, pointing to its myriad links to the CIA's investment arm known as In-Q-Tel. “Google is already helping the government write, and rewrite, history,” the report continued. Other sources, such as investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, went even further. “Google is a smokescreen behind which lurks the US military-industrial complex,” he wrote. One of the first investors in Facebook, meanwhile, was In-Q-Tel. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos signed a contract with the CIA worth several times more than the purchase price of the increasingly dishonest Washington Post, which never mentions its owners’ ties to the CIA even on stories about the agency. The tech firms are also lawlessly helping authorities spy on people worldwide. And that is just the start of it.
In Europe, mega-corporations based in the United States such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and more are proudly working with unelected, unaccountable transnational bureaucrats at the European Union to censor the Web. Last year, those firms joined with the EU to unveil an online “Code of Conduct” to remove and prosecute “illegal” speech, while promoting government propaganda. Everything from the Christian Bible and the Islamic Koran to criticism of Islam or concerns about uncontrolled immigration could fall under the vague new censorship rules. Alongside the censorship and propaganda, the EU touted “a robust system of enforcement” to effectively apply “criminal sanctions against the individual perpetrators” of illegal speech.
In Communist China, the situation is even worse. The Great Firewall of China has long blocked access to any information the mass-murdering dictatorship wishes to conceal from its victims. Even the pro-censorship American tech giants — some of which largely agreed to Beijing's censorship demands — have been mostly blocked from China. And as if to prove its hostility to free speech and Internet freedom, the UN installed an actual Chinese Communist agent, who claims censorship is in the eye of the beholder, at the top of the UN International Telecommunications Union. That is the agency currently being groomed by the establishment for the role of world Internet regulator and censor.
Now, the United Nations is even demanding censorship in America. Following the violence in Charlottesville, the UN disgorged an avalanche of press releases, statements, warnings, and condemnations demanding that the U.S. government take action against “hate speech.” Aside from the fact that “hate speech” was a bogus narrative pushed by the mass-murdering hate regime enslaving the Soviet Union to ban speech it did not like, the U.S. Constitution specifically prohibits any government restrictions on speech — whether hateful or otherwise. But as if more evidence were needed of the danger, a quick look at Europe, where pastors are literally thrown in jail for defending the Biblical understanding of marriage, and politicians are arrested for quoting Winston Churchill, should suffice to make the point.
Of course, private companies are well within their rights to refuse service to anyone, even if that means denying some people or viewpoints a platform. And Americans should be careful to resist the urge to have the federal government regulate businesses without constitutional authority. But when the line between the mega-corporations and the government is so blurred, and when Big Government operatives are meeting behind closed doors with the Big Business tycoons running the architecture of the Internet, the danger becomes obvious. Because of the Internet, and the free expression it has enabled, many millions of people around the world now understand the threat posed by the establishment to freedom, nation-states, and humanity. It is crucial that Americans, as the guardians of free speech and the free Internet, do not allow the establishment's war on free speech to succeed.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.
Related articles:
U.S. Tech Giants Join EU to Censor the Internet
How Google Censors The New American (and Other Conservatives)
U.K. Leaders: Fight Terror With Global Internet Censorship
After Charlottesville, UN Demands U.S. Quash First Amendment
Facebook Fraud: Ex-workers Admit They Censored Conservative News
EU “Police” Will Censor Internet to Fight “Extremism”
UN Plots War on Free Speech to Stop “Extremism” Online
Tyranny: Police Raid Apartments Over Anti-Muslim-migrant Internet Posts
Hate Speech: U.K. Political Leader Arrested for Quoting Winston Churchill
UN and Obama Launch Global War on “Ideologies”
Chinese Communist to Lead UN Agency Seeking to Control Internet
UN Seeking Global Internet Surveillance for Terror, Propaganda
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nation’s Constitutional Court struck down several austerity measures enacted by the government in compliance with European Commission requirements. That prompted Commission officials to pressure the country’s government to simply ignore the ruling, under threat of losing badly needed funding — prompting a constitutional crisis.
In such ways, EU officials are inserting themselves into the governance of member nations. Yet the ordinary people whose lives are seriously affected by such measures have no recourse — they can’t vote to “throw the bums out” as we might say here in the States. This lack of democratic accountability poses a serious problem for member states and the system as whole.
It’s time to revisit the EU’s founding purposes.
The lofty purposes the EU originally set for itself included: to give Europeans the convenience of one currency, to enhance mutual prosperity, and to reduce political tensions after centuries of animosity and war.
We’ve seen how mutual prosperity is coming along. As for political tensions, a system whose officials are responsible for the region’s faltering economies but who are not accountable to the tens of millions of unemployed people in them, is obviously exacerbating those tensions rather than alleviating them.
Moreover, by giving up their national currencies, member countries who experience wage inflation can no longer temporarily deflate their currencies to make their exports more attractive. Those that fall into an economic slowdown or recession can’t “print money” to finance their safety nets for people who are unemployed or who face extreme poverty. Having your own currency may not be such a bad idea after all. Fears that the use of such tools will lead to runaway inflation and interest rates have proven completely unfounded. In the US, despite the relatively sizable stimulus enacted by the Obama Administration, interest rates here remain near all-time lows, and our deficit is now half what it was at the depth of the recession in 2009..
Meanwhile the costs and risks of the EU system are enormous. To take just one example, fiscal debt or banking problems in tiny countries like Greece and Cyprus have touched off major crises for the EU. A comparable situation in the US — where a state such as Rhode Island or Louisiana, or even huge California, were to go bankrupt — would amount to nothing more than a blip on the radar here.
However, the US system requires a substantial transfer of power to the center. This brings me to my final point.
The prospects for effective EU integration are slim to none.
For the EU project to work, it would require, at a minimum, substantial political power at the center to tax, control fiscal policy, and create a region-wide safety net capable of protecting people in a downturn. Furthermore, that centralized power would need to be accountable — voted in, not appointed.
Few Europeans seem to believe such integration is actually possible — many recoil at any suggestion of a “United States of Europe.” Given the widespread ambivalence and lack of clarity on how a reformed EU would look, the prospects for a successful integration look bleak. That’s because even under the best of circumstances, achieving it would be an extremely difficult and long haul.
It took the US the better part of 80 years — and a horrific Civil War — to complete our own integration, transitioning from a loose confederation of colonies, and then states, into a true union. Why should Europeans expect to have an easier time of it, particularly in view of their deep cultural differences and centuries-long history of wars and acrimony?
My guess is that Europe will muddle on trying to “reform” the EU system around the margins. European economists and officials will likely remain steadfast in their belief that their policies have been right all along, that all they need is yet more time, and that the real fault lies with the moral defects of those living in the periphery nations — who must be compelled to do what’s good for them and for the EU as a whole.
This sounds too much like old Europe to me (and not in a good way). It would be better to start now directing our efforts and energy to winding down the whole EU project as quickly as possible; and in parallel to ramp up efforts and policies to help European economies to prosper as separate nations, learning how best to work together.
A more recent WSJ article contained the news that a new book by a Portuguese economist shot instantly to the top of the best seller list in that country — even beating out Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s called, “Why We Should Leave the Euro.”
Perhaps it’s the start of a trend.From the very beginning the Fujifilm X system has put a strong emphasis on fixed focus lenses and has practically based further development on them. As a result they offer a series of fast (f/1.2 – f/1.4) lenses with focal lengths starting from 16 to 56 mm and try to supplement that line-up by smaller and cheaper f/2.0 instruments. Apart from the Fujinon XF 18 mm f/2 R which was launched at the very beginning of the system in October 2015 they also showed the Fujinon XF 35 mm f/2 R WR and less than a year later the Fujinon XF 23 mm f/2 R WR. Today we present our test of the last one – enjoy your lecture!
We would like to thank the Fujifilm company for their very quick reaction and lending us one specimen for our tests even before the official launch of the lens.
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You are also invited to get acquainted with our test procedure, described in the article "How do we test lenses?" If you feel it’s still not enough, please go to our FAQ section where you can find some further explanation.Nearly US$3 trillion of the world’s private wealth is held in owner-occupied residential properties, a value greater than the GDP of India, a new report by Wealth-X and the Sotheby’s International Realty® brand released today showed.
There are 211,275 ultra high net worth (UHNW) individuals – defined as those with US$30 million and above in net assets – in the world and 79% of them own two or more residences.
Some of the main hubs for luxury residential real estate are New York City, London and Hong Kong, but niche locations – such as Lugano, the Hamptons outside New York City, and rural areas around the world – are gaining in popularity.
The Wealth-X and Sotheby’s International Realty Global Luxury Residential Real Estate Report forecasts that the ongoing shift in the wealth creation cycle from the West to the East, and the growing significance of intergenerational wealth transfers will have significant consequences on the luxury residential real estate market – with a noted emphasis on new developments and a change in investment grade cities.
Below are other key findings from the inaugural report:
The value of UHNW-owned residential real estate assets increased by 8% globally in 2014.
On average, UHNW individuals own 2.7 owner-occupied residences.
As of 2014, over 7% of the world’s UHNW population made their wealth through real estate, up from 5% in 2013.
Ultra affluent women value real estate assets more than their male counterparts, holding 16% of the net worth in such assets, on average, compared to less than 10% for men.
Luxury residential real estate is an asset class typically favored by UHNW individuals with inherited wealth: these individuals hold 17% of their net worth in such assets, compared to just under 9% for self-made UHNW individuals.
UHNW individuals with net worth between US$30 million and US$50 million typically keep their primary residences for over 15 years and their secondary residences for over 10 years.
Billionaires change one of their four properties, on average, once every three years.
Secondary residences are typically 45% more valuable than primary residences; twice the square footage and have 10 acres of land.
At 83%, Monaco has the highest density of foreign-owned UHNW residences.
Over 6% of the world’s UHNW population have relocated their primary residence to a different country from which they were born – these individuals often keep a secondary residence in their home countries, and India is the leading country in this respect.
The Wealth-X and Sotheby’s International Realty Global Luxury Residential Real Estate Report 2015, which looks at trends in the UHNW population’s appetite for luxury residential real estate across the world, identifies specific attitudes, behaviors and locations that matter to this industry and this wealth segment.
Wealth-X President David Friedman commented: “Wealth-X is pleased to partner with the Sotheby’s International Realty brand for this inaugural report, which underscores Wealth-X’s commitment to conducting groundbreaking research on the world’s ultra high net worth (UHNW) population. Expert commentary from the Sotheby’s International Realty team complements Wealth-X’s global intelligence on the world’s UHNW population, producing a report that demonstrates a true collaboration between the world’s leading UHNW intelligence provider and the global leader in luxury residential real estate. Luxury residential property is a core component to the anatomy of the ultra affluent at the intersection of their lifestyle and investment.”
“We are proud to partner with Wealth-X to provide valuable insights into today’s luxury real estate market and the buying behaviors of the ultra high net worth consumer,” said Philip White, president and chief executive officer, Sotheby’s International Realty Affiliates LLC. “We believe that a solid investment in real estate is one of the single best factors for building long-term wealth, and that many of today’s ultra high net worth consumers would agree.”
Download the report >Talking on Fox & Friends Monday, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump said that “we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind.” Trump was chastising President Barack Obama for policies that invite acts of terror like the recent attack in Orlando.
The fact that Trump was blasting Obama is nothing new, but the media – fixated on extracting bombshell stories from every word Trump utters – ran with Trump’s comment that Obama may have had “something else in mind.”
“And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable,” Trump said.
Trump doubled down the next day with a Facebook post that read “Hillary Clinton — is CROOKED! Hillary Clinton received a classified intelligence report stating that the Obama administration was actively supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that became the Islamic State.” The post linked to a Breitbart article reporting the same.
Was Trump saying that Obama was a Benedict Arnold in our midst? Was Obama the ultimate sleeper agent? Or was Trump saying that Obama’s failed Arab policies have created an environment in which ISIS thrives?
Cable talk shows ran with the sensationalized story for days, and the headline was splashed on frontpages across the country. The question asked: How could a nominee from a major political party ever accuse a sitting president of aiding and abetting the enemy?
The media’s preconceived answer: He must be nuts. Much to the chagrin of the media, however, Trump was not nuts; he was spot-on.
Trump was arguing that for eight years, Obama has fumbled his way through Middle Eastern diplomacy. From the red line that did not exist to the regretful toppling of Gaddafi to indirectly aiding ISIS by opposing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Obama has failed.
America has felt the sting of a terror attack every year since Obama took the oath of office. And while Islamic terrorists continue to hit America, Obama has led the charge to admit Muslim refugees.
“The Obama administration believes it will be able to process many more Syrian refugees in the last half of fiscal 2016 than in the first six months, allowing it to meet its goal of admitting at least 10,000 by Sept. 30,” Reuters reported with a gleeful tone. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, as Obama is poised to import 1,000,000 Muslims before he boards Marine One in January.
But what does that mean for an America in which two acts of terror – one in San Bernardino and the other in Orlando – have occurred within a time span of just over six months? What does that mean for a Western world in which acts of terror can be executed with minimal cost yet dramatically alter the policies of the nation hit?
Europe – the cradle of Western civilization – is undergoing a demographic shift. European nations are overrun with Arab migrants who have arrived with no intentions of abandoning their fighting faith. Why should they?
Today, mosques are being built in Europe while cathedrals remain echo chambers with empty pews. Though London rejected plans from a Muslim group to build a mega-mosque three times larger than St. Paul’s, with the mayoral election of Sadiq Khan, a Muslim, it is a safe bet that a mega-mosque will be in London’s future.
But this is not the first time the West has faced a crisis with Islam. In 732, Muslim invaders had the West on the run. It was at this time Charles Martel intervened. While he was burdened with every tactical disadvantage, Martel waged a miraculous victory at the Battle of Tours. His victory was so smashing that in its aftermath he earned the nickname “The Hammer.”
Historians credit his win with saving the West from Islamic colonization. Had Martel failed, the West would have fallen.
But almost 13 centuries later, Europe is besieged by Muslim migrants who not only refuse to assimilate to the West; they refuse to tolerate any criticism of their fighting faith. Just ask Charlie Hebdo.
Where Martel expelled the Muslim invaders from the West, Obama is opening the door for a Muslim Trojan horse via his refugee program. Where Martel saw an enemy and fought with urgency, Obama sees a peaceful religion that means no harm. At the very moment the West needs a hammer, Obama has opted for an olive branch. This is exactly what Trump means when he says that Americans “cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts.”
How is Trump wrong?
Joseph R. Murray, II, is the administrator for LGBTrump, former campaign official for Pat Buchanan, and author of Odd Man Out. He can be reached at jrm@joemurrayenterprises.com.The New York Times notes that the Roll-n-Glow "miracle heaters" are going out the door by the cartload after the Amish carpenters, well known for their use of high tech electrical appliances, have finished building them. So what is the miracle?
The Miracle is in the marketing. Amish carpenters do actually make the mantles; mantels; according to the Times,
[company VP] Mr. Baker credits the Roll-n-Glow's success in large part to the association with the Amish — a partnership that he said began in 2007 soon after an executive at Arthur Middleton, Heat Surge's parent company, befriended an Amish builder. The company was looking to sell electric fireplaces and decided it would be advantageous if Amish workers made the mantels instead of foreign ones. Or, as Mr. Baker put it: "It became clear through test marketing the American population is infatuated with — and understands the quality of — an Amish product."
But in fact it is just a dumb electric heater, notwithstanding what the company says:
The HEAT SURGE miracle heater is a work of engineering genius from the China coast, so advanced you simply plug it into any standard wall outlet. It uses about as much energy to run, as some coffee makers. Yet, it produces an amazing 5,110 BTU's. An on-board Powerful hi-tech heat turbine silently forces hot air out into the room so you feel the bone soothing heat instantly. It even has certification of Underwriters Laboratories coveted UL listing and comes with a full 30-day Money Back Guarantee.
Of course, electric coffee makers don't run all day long at 1500 watts, electric heaters are all pretty much the same efficiency, every electric heater in the United States has to have Underwriters Laboratories approval to be sold, and 5100 BTUs is exactly 1500 watts, which everyone understands to be a circuit breaker full of electricity. They just convert it into BTUs to confuse.
And does it save money?
Sure. If you turn the heat off everywhere else in your house. As the site says,
If only one room is occupied why heat the rest of the house? For single people and couples zone heating makes perfect sense. Even people in California and Florida are flocking to get them so they may never have to turn on their furnace all winter.
But the electric heat you are getting costs about twice as much per watt as gas heat.
Even Vice President David Baker sees the contradictions, and tells the Times:
"I think a lot of it goes back to the irony of the Amish and an electric fireplace," he said. "How can that be? It's like skintight baggy pants."
Engineering consultant Lee Devlin summarizes his objections to the heater in his blog:
My objection to the company is that it uses deceptive advertising practices such as:
1. Implied scarcity of the product (and then trying to sell 2 to each customer).
2. Misrepresenting the potential for energy savings.
3. Significantly overcharging for the heater based on the price of products that perform the same function.
4. Associating the company with the Amish in an effort to coopt attributes like honesty, hard work, integrity, and high quality workmanship.
5. Inducing the customer to act quickly with a "discount code" that expires in 48 hours.
6. Upselling an extended warranty.
7. Implying that UL certification for a heater is 'coveted'. No legitimate company would sell a heater in the U.S. without it.
8. Implying that customers are getting something for 'free', when free means spending a minimum of $385.
See Also:
Those Slow-Teching Amish
Amish Love that Crazy Solar ThingThe cyclospora outbreak,which sickened more than 600 people this year, was the number one foodborne outbreak of 2013, according to the website Food Safety News (FSN).
The website compiled a list of 10 of the biggest U.S. outbreaks in 2013 and I had the opportunity to talk to the publisher of FSN and Managing Partner at the Food Safety Law Firm, Marler Clark, Bill Marler on Monday about some of the outbreaks and to have him give a clearer understanding of food safety law (Listen below).
Mr. Marler gave me his thoughts on how preventable the Hepatitis A from Townsend Farms frozen organic berries was, which sickened some 162 people. In addition, we discussed the Salmonella outbreak from Foster Farms chicken that sickened over 400 and is still ongoing.
At least 162 people have been hospitalized after likely undercooking the contaminated raw chicken or handling it in a way that lead to accidental cross-contamination. Who’s to blame? Some blame the consumer, others blame the company, Marler gives his perspective on that issue.
The Top 10 Infectious Disease and Outbreak News stories of 2013
I also asked the “E. coli Attorney” to explain the chain of events on how his firm decides what cases to take, who to sue and the operations of a food safety law firm.
Marler discussed what was behind his recent post on Marler Blog– “My 5,000th Blog Post – Ode to the Beef Industry”, which sheds some light the history of Marler Clark and the work they do and gives props to the beef industry.
For more infectious disease news and information, visit and “like” the Infectious Disease News Facebook page and the Outbreak News This Week Radio Show page.
Looking for a job in health care? Check here to see what’s availablePeople walk past the AT&T store in New York's Times Square, June 17, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
NEW YORK (Reuters) - AT&T Inc, the No. 2 U.S wireless provider, said on Wednesday that it would roll out a new data plan that does away with overage fees and reduces data speeds for wireless customers who surpass their data allowance.
Beginning Sunday, customers can choose the new Mobile Share Advantage plan and pay for extra data, if needed, or work with slower data speeds instead of paying for overages, the company said in a statement. Its current plan includes a $5 data overage charge per 300 megabytes on its 300-megabyte plan and $15 per 1 gigabyte on other plans.
AT&T and its rivals are locked in an aggressive battle for subscribers in the saturated U.S. wireless market. Data overage charges have long been a gripe for wireless customers who increasingly spend time on their mobile devices watching streaming video services such as Netflix and playing games such as Pokemon Go.
The move came after AT&T’s bigger rival, Verizon Communications Inc, announced a feature last month called “safety mode” that protects users against data overages and slows down speeds.
“In a competitive market, Verizon and AT&T cannot afford to ignore each other,” Recon Analytics analyst Roger Entner said. “If one does something, the other one has to follow suit.”
Moreover, Verizon and AT&T have been reworking their plans as smaller competitors T-Mobile, which eliminated data overage charges in 2014, and Sprint, which offers half-off dicsounts, are luring customers away to their services, Entner added.
AT&T has also revised prices and data bucket sizes. For instance, its larger 25-gigabyte plan now costs $190 per month for four smartphone lines. It previously cost $235.
All the new plans include an access charge of $10 to $40 per month for each device, AT&T said.
The new plans will continue to have features such as unlimited text and talk and rollover data. Plans above 10 gigabytes also include unlimited talk and text to Mexico and Canada and no roaming charges in Mexico.The Apex Court has named its former Judges, Justice J.M. Panchal and Justice K.S. Radhakrishnan as members of the supervisory panel appointed by it to scrutinize the Special Investigation Team’s decision to close 199 cases in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots case, reports the Tribune.
The panel will also examine the SIT’s decision to close additional 42 riots-related cases. It will begin working from 5 September, and is expected to submit its report within three months. The Centre will provide “requisite assistance” to the panel members, who will get “all financial benefits as permissible in law”.
The Supreme Court had, on 16 August, appointed the supervisory body, while hearing a PIL filed by the Sikh Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee member S. Gurlad Singh Kahlon, seeking various directions to the SIT for speedy justice to the victims of 1984 riots.
The decision to examine the 199 cases which were closed by the SIT 32 years ago was taken by the Apex Court on 24 March. It had then directed the Home Ministry to place on record the files pertaining to these cases for examination.
At that time, the then Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had referred to the SIT report from the Home Ministry and had informed the Court that in total, 293 cases were taken up by the SIT, out of which 199 cases were closed after scrutiny.UKIP chief Nigel Farage has sacked Scottish party leader Lord Christopher Monckton in an attempt to end infighting north of the Border.
The move has prompted the chairman and chief fundraiser of Ukip in Scotland to quit in protest. The party's administrative body has also been dissolved.
Monckton told the Sunday Herald: "There isn't any Ukip in Scotland. It's been wiped out."
This newspaper recently revealed the internal divisions ripping apart the anti-Europe party in Scotland.
Key figures, including Monckton and chairman Mike Scott-Hayward, believed a trio of senior party members, including former by-election candidate Otto Inglis, were plotting a takeover.
The grievances came to a head when six of Ukip Scotland's nine shortlisted candidates for the European parliament elections, including Monckton, resigned.
They did so in protest at Inglis's alleged tactics during the selection contest, which was eventually won by Farage ally David Coburn, who is Ukip's London chairman.
Relations are now at an all-time low and last Monday, Farage fired Monckton by email.
The party leader wrote: "After much thought and many weeks of dialogue between yourself, your committee and the officers of the party I have decided, with the support of the NEC, to remove from you the position of leader of Ukip Scotland."
Farage said a "new team" was required to support Coburn, adding: "This requires a clear management structure, so we are now focusing around a lead candidate rather than a leader in Scotland, and reconstituting the Ukip Scotland committee to make sure that it is in the best shape to support the campaign to elect the first Ukip MEP for Scotland."
Speaking to the Sunday Herald, Monckton said Ukip had been "slow" to deal with "a very tiresome faction" that was destabilising the party in Scotland, saying: "They prevented Ukip from functioning for nearly a year."
On Farage sacking him, Monckton said: "I'm not happy he didn't telephone me before he sacked me. I thought Nigel would have had the common sense to ring me."
He added: "In Ukip, there is an absence of professionalism."
Monckton said the recent changes left the party without any structure or purpose, adding: "There isn't any Ukip in Scotland. It's gone. It's been wiped out."
And he said: "London now realises it has made the most ghastly mistake."
A senior source said: "This sacking is an example of Farage's control freakery."
Ukip's national executive has also wound up the party's ruling "Scottish committee" and an extraordinary general meeting scheduled for today has been scrapped. In an email to members, national Ukip chairman Steve Crowther said: "There has been some difficulty within the Ukip Scotland committee for some time, and the NEC has decided that the best way forward, instead of an EGM to discuss a series of no-confidence motions in the officers, would be to dissolve the current committee and take stock."
Scott-Hayward, chief fundraiser Malcolm Macaskill and several senior branch figures have all walked away from their positions to show solidarity with Monckton.
Although Ukip has had considerable success in England, the party has not made a breakthrough in Scotland.
At recent Holyrood by-elections, Inglis polled 4.83% in Aberdeen Donside and Adams secured only 3.75% in Dunfermline.
A recent trip to Edinburgh also ended badly for Farage, with the leader getting heckled in a pub by protesters and having to be bundled away by a police escort.
Scott-Hayward said: "Lord Monckton has been removed for standing up for his principles. That is wrong."
An SNP spokesperson said: "Lord Monckton, of course, famously said that Scots are'subsidy junkies', but the problem for Ukip in Scotland isn't the messenger, it's the toxic message they're trying to sell.
"As Ukip drags Westminster politicians further and further to the right, one of the dangers of voting No in next year's referendum is of Scotland being dragged through the EU's exit door against our will."
A Ukip spokesman declined to comment.On Sunday (Aug. 7), John Oliver aired a segment on his HBO TV show lamenting the demise of local newspapers due to financial pressures. “Sooner or later we are all going to have to pay for journalism,” said Oliver, “or we are all going to pay for it.”
The segment was widely discussed and shared across newsrooms around the US. But one criticism came from an unexpected source—the Newspaper Association of America.
David Chavern, president and CEO of the non-profit trade association, published an open letter Monday (Aug. 8) criticizing Oliver. He argued the host ”doesn’t offer any answers” to the questions the industry faces beyond encouraging people to pay for newspapers, and added:
The fact is that we are in a transitional phase within the entire industry. People want, need and consume more hard news than they ever have. The core demand for the product isn’t decreasing at all, and based upon that we will find our way to the far shore where the industry is thriving and growing once again. But in the meantime, there is going to be a lot of experimentation and evaluation of new business models. Some experiments will work and some won’t, and our VP of Innovation, Michael MaLoon is committed to keeping you up-to-date on what is happening on that front. But making fun of experiments and pining away for days when classified ads and near-monopolistic positions in local ad markets funded journalism is pointless and ultimately harmful.
The NAA represents the newspaper business by gathering data about the businesses and advocating for media on matters of policy, including the First Amendment.
Never ones to shy away from the painful truth, many journalists and media executives were quick to express their disappointment with Chavern’s piece.
Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for the Washington Post (which Oliver singled out as a paper relieved from economic pressures due to its owner’s deep pockets) published a response piece defending Oliver for accurately summarizing the state of the industry, and criticizing Chavern for not taking the satire in stride.
“When someone hilariously and poignantly celebrates the industry that you are paid to defend and protect, you ought to laugh at the funny parts and then simply say “thank you.” Or maybe nothing at all,” she wrote.While every other day, a team of tech fanatics collaborate to build a new engine, it’s very few who deliver an un-witnessed phenomena to the world. One of such rare entrepreneurs is Stewart Hamel who recently introduced an all-terrain vehicle that is also doubles up as a full functional aircraft! The recreational vehicle is the final word when it comes to adventure and presents to the world a fine combination of off-roading styles and safe aviation.
Fittingly named as “SkyRunner”, the engine, with its patented pending technology easily transforms from an all-terrain form into a light sports aircraft within a matter of seconds. With the use of the latest ram-air parafoil wing technology, the magic motor can attain air speeds of 40mph at a maximum regulated altitude of 10,000 feet. Built from Chromoly seamless air-hardening heat-treated steel tubing bonded with carbon fiber composites, this tough terrain motor is optimally light weight, providing the driver robust off terrain and landing protection. Furthermore, the SkyRunner also comes with inverted double wishbone suspension and inherent chassis control that render a supreme grip and supple precision to your drive. When airwards, it can be controlled with two flight controls- the left and right steering via handheld toggles and throttle pedal to climb or descend.
What started off as Hamel’s blueprint of creating a fine recreational vehicle for his family, is today gaining extreme popularity. So advanced is this ultra-light tactical vehicle, that the U.S. special operations forces are also rumored to be interested in its buy. If you too fancy this thrilling drive, you can make it you very own with a $139,000 paycheck!
[ Flyskyrunner ]Govt broadband network a 'pipedream'
Updated
The Federal Opposition says the Government's plans to roll out a national broadband network are looking increasingly like a pipedream.
The tender for the Government's $4.7 billion fibre-to-the-node network closes later this month.
Opposition broadband and communications spokesman Nick Minchin says bidders are frustrated about the lack of detail from the Government.
The project is already months behind schedule and Senator Minchin says that is just one of a litany of problems.
"They've given no indication of legislative and regulatory arrangements that would be for such a bid," he said.
"They're giving no indication whether the $4.7 billion they're talking about of taxpayers' money is going to be a subsidy, or is it going to be a loan, or are they going to buy shares in the business?
"Telstra have said they won't bid unless the Government gives an indication on the issue of structural separation."
Senator Minchin says without Telstra's cooperation, the project will be a disaster.
"Telstra must be part of the scheme because what's being proposed by Labor is an upgrade of the existing network," he said.
"So Telstra's cooperation is essential, one way or the other. And if they don't bid at all, it's hard to see how you can have a realistic bidding process."
The Opposition says the Government needs to rule out structural reform of Telstra to encourage the telco to be a part of the project.
Topics: internet-culture, business-economics-and-finance, industry, telecommunications, government-and-politics, federal-government, information-and-communication, australia
First postedTo increase the impact and contribution of the North of England to the UK economy.
The North contains communities with a strong industrial heritage and a distinct culture all surrounded by a beautiful natural environment. By encouraging these communities to work more closely together, we believe we can make the whole of the North greater than the individual parts. This will create the prosperous, modern economic powerhouse that has the critical mass to drive a wealth of opportunities; a North where companies choose to invest and create jobs, and people choose to live because there is a high quality of life, rising living standards and everyone is supported to reach their full potential.
NPP is business led, and will foster the partnership with local and national government. We will focus on where, by working better together across the North, we can make the biggest difference to growth and quality of life, putting in place the evidence base needed to support action, and driving specific initiatives.Dr. Keith Ablow—the right-wing moralist masquerading as a psychiatrist—has declared that we’ll see rampant group marriages if LGBT couples continue to adopt children.
Somebody tell the Sister Wives the good news!
Ablow was talking to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs about President Barack Obama‘s marriage-equality announcement. Now what a shrink is doing talking about marriage on a business show we don’t know, but Keith laid out some very important facts:
“Children in same sex households, unless the donor of sperm or ova—eggs—is known… don’t know their biological parents. Now, we don’t know the psychological impact of that at all and we need the data, we really do.”
Aren’t there millions of adopted kids who don’t know their birth parents? We’re pretty sure they turned out fine.
“This is narcissistic,” Ablow said of LGBT people adopting. “‘I feel like it so I’m going to do it, no matter what the science might show.’ And we need the data.”
Keith, we have the data. There have been several major studies done that make it apparent a parent’s sexuality doesn’t impact how well his or her child turns out. (It’s also doesn’t affect the kid’s orientation.) Just because you’re terrible at your job doesn’t mean the studies haven’t been done.
“How did we decide that kids are just fine to grow up absent their biological parents? Because why? ‘Because we love each other.’ Well, three people can love each other, so polygamy has to be close behind. How can you have same-sex marriage and not believe that three people can fall in love, which they absolutely can?”
You’re right—we read that in the Bible!
It’s surprising Ablow is so down on gay parents. When he defended adulterer Newt Gingrich’s presidential aspirations—saying his three marriages would make him a better president—Ablow claimed a candidate’s sex life predicted nothing about his ability to lead.
But our sex life predicts our ability to change diapers and pick kids up from ballet?
Still, Keith does make one fair point—gays and lesbians are being narcissistic when they adopt children. All parents are narcissistic on some level: They want to see their gifts and/or genes passed on in posterity. And they think they have so much wonderful love to give they simply must bring a child into the world.
If it wasn’t for some degree of narcissism, the human race would’ve died off ages ago.
Source: Media MattersGov. Steve Beshear has declared a State of Emergency for Kentucky.The declaration authorizes the National Guard to help with relief efforts and empowers state officials to close roads in the interest of public safety.Click to see: Weather alerts | Get WLKY Weather App | Belski's blog | WLKY Weather on Facebook | Live weather updates A full day of rain on Wednesday meant it was impossible for road crews to prepare roads in advance of the snowfall that began about 5 p.m. EST and continued well into Thursday morning.Heavy snowfall hindered road clearing efforts and Beshear urged Kentuckians to not travel if possible and to check in on elderly neighbors.Winter weather moved in Wednesday evening and snow continued to fall through Thursday morning.A statewide declaration does not automatically close schools and businesses. Check school and business closings and delaysKentucky National Guard soldiers are firing up Humvees to make emergency medical runs and rescue motorists stranded by a winter storm that has dumped up to 20 inches of snow in parts of the state.Kentucky Guard spokesman Lt. Col. Kirk Hilbrecht says more than 75 guardsmen have been dispatched for emergency missions since the storm hit.Hilbrecht said Thursday the Guard has helped rescue stranded motorists along Interstate 65 and the Western Kentucky Parkway in the Elizabethtown area. Stranded motorists are being taken to a warming center in Elizabethtown.He says guardsmen are also picking up stranded motorists along I-24 in the Paducah area in western Kentucky.In Marshall and Hardin counties, guardsmen are helping transport emergency personnel and medical patients.
Gov. Steve Beshear has declared a State of Emergency for Kentucky.
The declaration authorizes the National Guard to help with relief efforts and empowers state officials to close roads in the interest of public safety.
Click to see: Weather alerts | Get WLKY Weather App | Belski's blog | WLKY Weather on Facebook | Live weather updates
A full day of rain on Wednesday meant it was impossible for road crews to prepare roads in advance of the snowfall that began about 5 p.m. EST and continued well into Thursday morning.
Heavy snowfall hindered road clearing efforts and Beshear urged Kentuckians to not travel if possible and to check in on elderly neighbors.
Winter weather moved in Wednesday evening and snow continued to fall through Thursday morning.
A statewide declaration does not automatically close schools and businesses.
Check school and business closings and delays
Kentucky National Guard soldiers are firing up Humvees to make emergency medical runs and rescue motorists stranded by a winter storm that has dumped up to 20 inches |
MachineName “MyServer”
This will create a folder with the same name as your configuration name and will contain our MOF output file.
Applying a DSC configuration
Now that we have a MOF file which can be consumed by DSC, we can apply it by using the “Start-DscConfiguration” cmdlet:
001 Start-DscConfiguration –Path.\ContosoWebsite –Wait –Verbose
The “Path” parameter (the path where your MOF file is stored) can be a UNC or a local path.
How to detect configuration drift
If you want to compare the current and the actual configuration, you can use the cmdlet “Test-DscConfiguration” in the following way:
001 Test-DscConfiguration –CimSession $session
This will either return a “True” (when the current and actual configuration match) or “False” (if there’s a mismatch).
Why is DSC so cool?
First of all declaring a DSC configuration is PowerShell based. So you can leverage all your PowerShell skills to not only define a configuration, but also for troubleshooting.
DSC is designed to support “continuous deployments” which means that you can deploy your configuration over and over without breaking anything
When a DSC configuration is being applied only those settings which do not match will be set, the rest will be skipped which can result in a faster deployment time
You can separate the configuration data from the logic of your configuration so that you can reuse your configuration data for different resources, nodes, and configurations, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn249925.aspx
DSC can be used on-premise, in a public or in a private Cloud environment. You just need either Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 8.1 and local administrator permissions to execute the DSC PowerShell scripts
You can integrate DSC with any Microsoft or non-Microsoft solutions as long as you can execute a PowerShell script on the target system. Using DSC within the Windows Azure Pack portal in conjunction with SMA is a good example
I hope you found this explanation useful and would encourage you to start testing it. As always we appreciate your feedback and suggestions for content.
Until next time where we will take DSC to the next level!
Some useful links:
Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration Overview
Desired State Configuration in Windows Server 2012 R2 PowerShellU.N. ATT Conference Comes to an Impasse
The Conference on the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (U.N. ATT) has broken down and will not report a draft treaty to the member nations.
This is a big victory for American gun owners, and the NRA is being widely credited for killing the U.N. ATT.
For nearly 20 years, the NRA has worked tirelessly to warn American gun owners about the United Nations’ efforts to undermine the constitutional rights of law-abiding American gun owners by putting in place international controls on small arms.
NRA became a recognized Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and has monitored all U.N. activities that could impact on our Second Amendment rights. As a result, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre testified before the U.N. (2012 remarks, 2011 remarks) making it clear that the NRA would fight any international treaty that included civilian arms.
NRA worked with our allies in the U.S. Congress and successfully assembled strong bipartisan opposition to any treaty that adversely impacts the Second Amendment. On two occasions NRA was successful in convincing a majority of the U.S. Senate to sign letters to President Obama that made it clear that any treaty that included civilian arms was not going to be ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Yesterday (July 26), Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) gathered the signatures of 51 Senators on a letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposing any treaty that infringes on our rights. The letter stated "As the treaty process continues, we strongly encourage your administration not only to uphold our country's constitutional protections of civilian firearms ownership, but to ensure--if necessary, by breaking consensus at the July conference--that the treaty will explicitly recognize the legitimacy of lawful activities associated with firearms, including but not limited to the right of self-defense. As members of the United States Senate, we will oppose the ratification of any Arms Trade Treaty that falls short of this standard."
NRA members made their voices heard on this issue as well, calling their elected representatives and urging their opposition to the treaty. As a result, 130 members of the U.S. House of Representatives have voiced strong opposition to the treaty.
During the past week, it became increasingly possible that the Conference would fail to come to an agreement on draft language. On Thursday, the Conference President produced yet another draft of the ATT in an effort to salvage the process. The new draft, like previous ones, was wholly incompatible with the Second Amendment rights protected by our Constitution.
The proponents of the treaty have goals that are clearly at odds with the American Constitution. Their refusal to remove civilian arms from the treaty was one major issue that led to the breakdown in negotiations. The U.S. delegation made it clear that they could not move forward with the language as it had been drafted.
While this conference has failed to complete a treaty, the proponents will not give up. It is likely that a new conference will be held in the future and NRA will continue to fight to protect the rights of American gun owners.
NRA maintains its steadfast opposition to any treaty that includes civilian arms in any way. NRA will continue to work with our allies, particularly in the U.S. Senate, to insure that the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is not threatened by this or any future international treaty.Two years after Edward Snowden leaked information about the US government’s mass surveillance to reporter Glenn Greenwald, the two were joined by other journalists and leaders to draft an international pact for privacy rights called the Snowden Treaty.
Officially called The International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers, the global agreement seeks to “curtail mass surveillance and protect the rights of whistleblowers,” according to the website.
“Protecting the right to privacy is vital not just in itself but because it is an essential requirement for the exercise of freedom of opinion and expression, the most fundamental pillars of democracy.”
Greenwald, who originally broke Snowden’s story, and other journalists were joined at a Thursday forum in New York by the image of Edward Snowden being broadcasted remotely.
Data sharing deal with US must end due to'mass surveillance' – EU court advisor http://t.co/ySYvbxnCnCpic.twitter.com/jQqWsphLqH — RT America (@RT_America) September 24, 2015
Over his video link from Moscow, Snowden called mass surveillance “a global problem,” and said that the treaty was “the beginning of work that will continue for many years.” The pact aims to institute international protections for whistleblowers and pressure governments to recognize privacy as a human right.
Snowden also warned against the creep of government surveillance into more mundane parts of life.
“The same tactics that the NSA and the CIA collaborated on in places like Yemen are migrating home to be used in the United States against common criminals and people who pose no threat to national security,” he said.
The draft treaty, which is designed to gain nation-states as signatories, is the creation of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda, with whom he resides in Brazil.
The gathering coincided with the annual United Nations General Assembly, which is also being held in New York City.
The Snowden Treaty is supported by figures such as academic Noam Chomsky, security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, and actor John Cusack.
Snowden currently faces charges in the US for revealing the extent of mass surveillance conducted by the NSA and other government agencies.
LISTEN MORE:From the D.C. v. Heller Supreme Court Decision:
"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons."This article is an electronic version of an article originally published in Cultic Studies Journal, 1997, Volume 14, Number 1, pages 106-144. Please keep in mind that the pagination of this electronic reprint differs from that of the bound volume. This fact could affect how you enter bibliographic information in papers that you may write.
Wifely Subjection: Mental Health Issues
in Jehovah’s Witness Women
Kaynor J. Weishaupt, M.S., M.F.C.C.
San Rafael, California
Michael D. Stensland
Athens, Ohio
Abstract
The Watchtower Society, commonly referred to as Jehovah’s Witnesses, exerts a great deal of control over the everyday life of its members. Women, in particular, suffer from psychological stresses in this high-control environment, as it is also a culture where patriarchal attitudes limit women’s personal power and predominate in their relationships with men. A group of women responded to a questionnaire about their experiences during membership in the Watchtower Society and after leaving. The results indicate that while in the Watchtower Society, women experience a higher degree of mental health problems than they do after they leave the group. They also report experiencing more egalitarian attitudes in their relationships with men after exiting the group.
Little research has been done focusing on the experience of women in “high-control” or cultic groups, despite the fact that women make up a large proportion of the membership of such groups. The type of group referred to here as high-control is defined by the degree of control and restriction the group exercises over the everyday life of its membership. Such a group can be focused on religion, politics, militarism, psychotherapy, meditation, commercialism, or simply a “special” leader (Tobias & Lalich, 1994). A high-control group differs from other groups in that individual behavior is excessively limited by rules and regulations, access to information is restricted or managed (especially information critical of the group), pressure is high to conform in thought and behavior to group norms, and members must put the group’s interests before their own. The leadership in this type of group is absolute and considered infallible; outsiders are generally viewed as dangerous or evil; and members leaving the group are generally punished or shunned. While all members of such groups pay a psychological price (as well as reap certain psychological dividends, such as a sense of belonging and purpose), women often face particular difficulties in groups that are patriarchally based.
This article explores the relationship between women and the high-control social climate of the Watchtower Society (WTS), commonly referred to as Jehovah’s Witnesses. The article reviews literature bearing on the Watchtower Society’s control practices and patriarchal organizational structure, analyzes psychological implications of WTS’s social climate, and reports on the results of a survey of 20 female former members of the Watchtower Society. The survey explored three areas: (1) the degree of patriarchal versus egalitarian attitudes subjects felt existed while they were members of WTS compared to what they experienced after having left the group, (2) subjects’ perceived psychological distress while in the group and after exiting, and (3) subjects’ perceptions of the degree to which the group controlled everyday life and isolated members from outsiders. The latter area included a comparison group of women from other religious backgrounds.
The Watchtower Society as a High-Control Group
The Watchtower Society was founded in the late 1800s by Charles Taze Russell, a charismatic Adventist preacher who predicted that Armageddon would usher in God’s kingdom in 1914. Since that time the group has predicted the end of the world numerous times (Franz, 1991), and has made its primary focus to convert as many people as it can before this end-time occurrence. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that only they will survive when God’s great cataclysm arrives and that they will have the privilege of living on a perfect earth throughout eternity. Despite numerous failed prophecies as to the date of Armageddon, Jehovah’s Witnesses continues to be a large and successful religious group, numbering more than five million members in 233 countries in 1996 (Watchtower Society, 1997, p. 40).
Women in WTS occupy a position of decreased personal power relative to men in the group. Women are commonly exhorted to “remain in submission” to their husbands, and are banned from instructing baptized male members about spiritual matters and from addressing the congregation from the pulpit. A woman is regarded as a “weaker vessel” who should manage her household “under her husband’s approval and direction,” owing to her “duty of submission to her husband” (Watchtower Society, 1971, p. 1665). The seminal WTS text just cited goes on to define a wife’s role as “caring for the family--prepare nutritious meals, keep the home clean and neat and share in instructing their children--subjecting themselves to their own husbands” (p. 242).
In addition to a relative lack of power compared to their male compatriots in the congregation and in relationship with their husbands in the home, women as well as men must cope with a community gestalt that discourages “independent thinking” (“Fight Against,” 1983), mistrusts higher education, controls access to information critical of the group, restricts members from expressing doubts, discourages diversity, and severely punishes nonconformists.
Not all groups exert this level of control on their members. In many groups, both religious and otherwise, guidelines for living and doctrinal wisdom are provided, yet individuals may retain a great deal of control over their lives on many levels. In a high-control group, the individual relinquishes her control to the group’s zeitgeist. Individuals are seen as incapable of directing their own lives and are in constant need of direction and structure from those who are more capable and wise or who are more in touch with “God’s will.”
In speaking about the structure of fundamentalist families in general, which some might consider to be a form of high-control group, one author relates her experience:
The primary goal of relationships in a rigidly religious family centers around control, because it is believed that people cannot be trusted. Obedience is stressed as a primary value. Using biblical support, fundamentalist families are usually patriarchal. Women are subject to their husbands. I was told that there had to be a hierarchy, otherwise how would decisions be made? The implication was that without such a control system there would be conflict and chaos. (Winell, 1993, p. 119)
The first author of this article defines a high-control group by the following characteristics:
1. Members experience negative consequences for nonconformist behavior or attitudes (such as questioning doctrine or disagreeing with the party line).
2. Information is controlled, especially if critical of the group.
3. Leadership is absolute and not bound by checks and balances.
4. Individual behavior is excessively limited by rules and regulations (legalism).
5. Outsiders are generally viewed as dangerous or evil, and associations with outsiders are primarily in order to convert them.
6. Members are required to give up their own interests or make sacrifices in favor of group activities.
7. Members leaving the group are punished or shunned.
According to this definition, WTS qualifies as a high-control group on a number of levels. Members’ lives are bound by explicit and implicit rules governing their behavior in public as well as in private. Rules range from the insignificant, such as dress code, to the life threatening, such as the prohibition on blood transfusions. Association with outsiders (“worldly people”) is discouraged, except to conduct necessary business or try to convert them. Throughout its history, WTS has encouraged its members to dedicate themselves to preaching work over other activities, “as the end is very near.” For this reason, preaching work is paramount in a member’s life, often to the exclusion of higher education, professional careers, and pursuit of personal interests, at times, even marriage and parenthood.
Members experience negative consequences for questioning doctrine or expressing doubts and can be severely punished if they continue to have questions after being “corrected” by the Elders. Access to information that could be construed as critical of the group is severely restricted, and members are told to “loath” ex-members who publish and speak out about why they left (“Search Through Me,” 1993). In addition, members who leave are almost always subject to “disfellowshipping” or are “disassociated” (supposedly a less harsh judgment, but with essentially the same results), which involves a ban being placed on the disfellowshipped person that requires members to shun and avoid contact with that person for the rest of his or her life, or until the ex-member submits to a process of “reinstatement.”
Legalism in Daily Life
For Jehovah’s Witnesses, life is constricted by innumerable spoken and unspoken rules and regulations, that is, the locus of control for an individual’s life lies almost entirely with the organization. Members are not permitted or are highly discouraged from a number of activities, including celebrating birthdays or holidays, attending other churches, working for the government, smoking cigarettes, listening to many kinds of modern music, joining the army, wearing beards, dating non-Witnesses, joining 4-H, and voting, to name just a few. Some of these “sins” result in censure or “marking” and loss of status within the group; others can lead to the cruel shunning treatment of disfellowshipping. Recently, for example, an elderly woman was disfellowshipped because she began smoking cigarettes. Instead of being helped by the congregation with this issue, she was cut off from the community and left on her own, depressed and suicidal at the age of 68 because of her “sin” (personal communication, 1992). Franz (1991), a former member of the WTS governing body (now disfellowshipped himself), cites an instance of a member who made a living installing burglar and fire alarm systems and who was disfellowshipped for providing monitoring services for a system he had installed in a local church (pp. 351B352). Doing work for a church is seen as “supporting the work of the devil” who, in the eyes of WTS, is at the head of all other religions. Franz also discusses the case of a 91-year-old man who, after 56 years of active membership, was disfellowshipped for talking about the Bible to a disfellowshipped friend (pp. 353B356). Since 1975, it is estimated that more than 40% of those who were involved with WTS have left or were forced out, and that between 1975 and 1985 alone, more than 880,000 people exited the group (Bergman, 1992, p. 308). This makes it entirely possible that there are as many or more former Jehovah’s Witnesses in the world as there are current members.
The Watchtower Society puts forth innumerable “suggestions” as to what members should wear, whom they should date and marry, what medical procedures they may not have, how they should wear their hair, what kinds of jobs they should perform, how many hours a month they should preach, how many meetings they must attend, what kind of people they should spend their time with, how much and what kind of education is acceptable, what material to read and not to read, and so on. Many of these edicts are put in the form of suggestion, yet are actually disguised rules. For an example of how this is accomplished, note how Awake! magazine (one of WTS’s two primary publications, along with The Watchtower magazine) basically bans the computer game Doom in the following statements: “Many computer games are thinly disguised violence, bloody massacres, or even blatant pornography”. Is this type of game appropriate for peace-loving Christians?. Parents, have you checked the home computer games your children use lately? Need we say more?” (AIs This the Game,” 1995, p. 25).
Some statements can be very influential without actually prohibiting an activity, such as “The latest movie, video or disc may look appealing”. How might it affect you to expose yourself to such entertainment?” (“Young People Ask: How Can I Get,” 1994, p. 17). A well-trained Jehovah’s Witness knows the answer without having to ponder the question further.
Another example of how WTS sets rules for the membership is found in an Awake! article in which “heavy metal” music is defined as a satanically-inspired activity: “Heavy metal is to heavy drug use as lotteries are to compulsive gamblers--a youngster becomes easy prey to Satan’s influence when sanity is flushed from his brain and thoughts of perversion and violence take its place” (“Satanism’s Handmaidens,” 1994, p. 8). This article goes on to link heavy metal music to murder, gang rape, mayhem, and drug use. Another article reminds members that “music is one of the means Satan uses to mislead young people” and intimates that the devil “is trying to poison your outlook and attitude” with modern music (“Alternative Rock,” 1996, pp. 22, 23).
Another example of “rules by suggestion” is found in The Watchtower’s condemnation of the celebration of birthdays, explaining that “the only two birthdays the Bible does mention were for rulers who were enemies of God...[and] included an execution” (“Birthday Celebrations,” 1994, p. 25). As former Jehovah’s Witness Randall Watters (1994) states:
These guidelines are never phrased in terms of rules, but rather in terminology such as “would it be wise to wear a beard...” or some other phrase that pretends to show the “choice” one has in a moral matter, whereas in reality the phrase indicates a new unspoken rule for Witnesses to follow. Fear of punishment by God and/or the organization is used to enforce these unspoken rules. (p. 1)
While marriage is not forbidden, remaining single is encouraged because single people can devote more time to preaching, the staple activity of the Jehovah’s Witness. The Watchtower states this reason for preferring singleness to marriage:
Single Christians can focus on Jehovah’s service with greater concentration. Compared with those who are married, single Christians are in a better position to be in “constant attendance upon the Lord” without distraction. (“Singleness,” 1995, p. 29)
You may be in a better position than you would be if you were married and responsible to provide for children. The difficulties you face now are temporary; they will be done away with in God’s new system. (p. 30)
In this way a strong influence is exerted on members to forfeit fulfillment in their present lives in order to serve Jehovah and therefore earn their way into “God’s new system” and paradise.
Relationships with Outsiders Frowned Upon
WTS is generally suspicious of outsiders, referring to them as “worldly people.” Jehovah’s Witnesses tend to avoid associating with nonmembers except as necessity demands, or to try to convert them. A popular and common WTS saying is “Bad associations spoil useful habits.” Witness children are warned not to develop friendships with “worldly” children and are not allowed to participate in many clubs, activities, or celebrations (birthday and holiday) that would bring them into contact with non-Witnesses. Adults are encouraged to keep their necessary relationships with outsiders on superficial levels, yet are expected to always keep an eye out for an opportunity to “bear witness” to try to convert outsiders.
The freedom to choose one’s mate is also restricted. Awake! magazine is very clear about who is not to be chosen: “It would displease God for one of his servants to get romantically involved with someone who has not dedicated his or her life to Jehovah” (“Young People Ask: What If,” 1994, p. 19). In a discussion about romances with unbelievers, WTS states that “such a relationship is not only displeasing to God but also a serious threat to one’s happiness and well-being” (“Young People Ask: How Can I Stop,” 1994, p. 17). One former member wrote in her survey response that she resented “the restrictions on friends and dating” that she experienced during her membership. Another said, “Having children was strongly discouraged as Armageddon was coming. Because my husband was not--a Witness, I was doubly looked down upon for having children.” This woman also poignantly stated her fears “that because my husband wasn’t a Witness, God was going to kill him, that I would fail and God would kill my children.”
Professionalism Discouraged in Favor of Group Activities
An example of how the group discourages professional careers is found in the following excerpt from The Watchtower:
Peter ‘realized that it would not be wrong for him to study with a view to becoming a neurosurgeon. But what was most important to him? It was his activity in the Christian ministry, considering the urgency of this work’. Peter decided to specialize in radiology and to do ultrasound scans. Some might consider this a less prestigious position, but it would allow him more time to devote to spiritual pursuits. (“Seize This Unique,” 1996, p. 22)
Many times former members have expressed their anger and disappointment over the fact that they gave up career opportunities while in WTS. “I feel like those years are wasted, now I have to start all over with a career and I feel like it’s too late,” one former member stated. One woman wrote that she had difficulty working while a Witness because she was “afraid [my] job would take me away from God.” The Watchtower discourages career advancement by providing examples such as the following:
[He] continued to follow the popular course--striving to get rich and get ahead [which] led to his going out on drinking sprees [which] soon led to a stroke. [Later he] put on the Christian personality and adjust[ed] his view of material possessions. As a result his values changed, and his health improved. (“Principle or Popularity,” 1993, p. 28)
One former Witness woman wrote that “females weren’t allowed to have responsibility.” Women do work outside the home, but as a married member of a group for ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses stated in a counseling session, “Getting a job was something I had to do out of necessity; when we caught up financially, I felt pressured to quit my job so I could spend more time in service (preaching). People considered it strange that I would actually want to continue to work, when my husband could support us both.” Another survey respondent wrote that she “was encouraged to not work while a single parent--[but to] pioneer [preach full-time] instead.” Because WTS women are not as active in the workforce as are the men, women tend to perform the lion’s share of door-to-door preaching activities. A married woman who chooses to work when her husband can support her financially is often seen as taking time away from God’s work and perhaps even lacking in faith.
Higher education has traditionally been discouraged for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Statements such as that found in the Awake! are typical: “So by guiding their children away from so-called ‘higher’ education of today, these parents spare their children exposure to an increasingly demoralizing atmosphere, and at the same time prepare them for life in a new system as well” (“Second Thoughts,” 1967, p. 5). Another article warns students that
Many schools now have student counselors who encourage one to pursue higher education after high school, to pursue a career with a future in this system of things. Do not let them “brainwash” you with the Devil’s propaganda to get ahead, to make something of yourself in this world. Make pioneer service, the full-time ministry your goal. (“What Influences,” 1969, p. 169)
Members who defy these instructions are not necessarily expelled from the congregation, but typically lose status among their peers and are seen as being “weak in the faith.” Until recently, most of the membership did not pursue higher education, and some members dropped out of high school to pursue preaching work. In recent years WTS has stopped its wholesale discouragement of higher education and now leaves the decision to the discretion of the individual. This, of course, does nothing to comfort older Witnesses who sacrificed their chances for education because of organizational instructions such as those cited above. Even now, WTS reminds students that “your goal in pursuing an education should not be to equip yourself for some secular career. Rather, it should be to learn skills that will prove useful to you in your career as a minister of God” (“Young People Ask: What Can,” 1993, p. 14).
Sacrifice of Personal Health Required
Besides the personal sacrifices involving career advancement, material success, time spent preaching, and so on, members are commanded to make another sacrifice. They are required to refuse blood transfusions for themselves and their children, regardless of the consequences, because Witnesses are taught that God prohibits the intake of blood. At one time this prohibition extended to vaccinations (Reed, 1993) and organ transplants (WTS referred to transplants as “cannibalism”) (“Questions from Readers,” 1967). WTS has since reversed its policy on these issues, although it is unknown how many deaths and disabilities resulted during the time period these policies were in effect.
The prohibition on blood transfusions, however, even if not having one would lead to certain death, remains in effect. It is estimated that as many as 1,150 deaths a year worldwide could be attributed to WTS’s stance on blood transfusions (Reed, 1993), a figure that over time quickly outweighs even the Jonestown tragedy, where more than 900 followers of Jim Jones died. In fact, WTS regularly publishes articles that glorify the deaths of children who died refusing transfusions (see, for example, “Youths Who Have,” 1994, and “Wyndham’s Faith,” 1992).
Any WTS member who has a transfusion or allows their child to have one is punished by disfellowshipping. Reed (1993) cites one instance where a member was disfellowshipped while still in the hospital following a blood transfusion. He died several days later, and his friends and relatives were forbidden to attend his funeral on pain of being disfellowshipped themselves (pp. 103B104). Clearly, using the threat of disfellowshipping to keep members from turning to life-saving medical procedures constitutes a very high degree of control exercised by WTS over a very personal issue in the lives of its members (whether to live or die if in need of a blood transfusion).
Control of Information
One defining characteristic of a high-control group is the prevention of access to information that can be interpreted as critical of the group in any way. Jehovah’s Witnesses receive very clear instructions about exposing themselves to any kind of information, whether through written materials or in discussion, that may reveal problems or inconsistencies in WTS. WTS has a tendency to demonize and dehumanize its critics, as seen in this example:
Yes, apostates publish literature that resorts to distortions, half-truths, and outright falsehood. They even picket Witness conventions, trying to trap the unwary. Hence it would be a dangerous thing to allow our curiosity to move us to feed on such writings or to listen to their abusive speech!… What would you expect from the table of demons? (“At Which Table,” 1994, p. 12)
An apostate, by WTS definition, is one who “rebels against God and rejects his truth,” that is, a person who disagrees with WTS’s version of “truth” (Watchtower Society, 1971, p. 91). Another article states that
Some apostates…reject teachings or requirements set out in his word. Others claim to believe the Bible, but they reject Jehovah’s organization…. True Christians share Jehovah’s feelings toward such apostates; they are not curious about apostate ideas. On the contrary, they feel a loathing toward those who have made themselves God’s enemies, but they leave it to Jehovah to execute vengeance. (“Search Through Me,” 1993, p. 19)
Members who choose to leave because of disagreement over doctrine, or who are forced out of the organization because of nonconformist behavior, are subject to disfellowshipping--a form of shunning that does not allow any current member to associate with the disfellowshipped person. The Watchtower states:
Baptized servants of Jehovah who deliberately follow a wicked course and refuse to change must be viewed as unrepentant and thus unfit for Christian fellowship…. They must be expelled….it removes from their midst one who could exercise a bad influence on them. It also protects the purity of the congregation. (“Disfellowshipping,” 1995, p. 25)
If the disfellowshipped person disagrees publicly in any way with WTS teachings, he or she automatically becomes an “apostate.” Since members are not allowed to associate with disfellowshipped members, information potentially critical of WTS is handily kept out of members’ reach by not allowing them to discourse with former members about their reasons for leaving the organization.
Shunning as a Form of Control
Disfellowshipping in WTS does not simply bar a person from practicing religious rites, but also serves to cut the victim off from friends and family, who are not allowed to speak with that person except, in some cases, to deal with “important family business.” Members are encouraged to “loath” the individual in question. In personal and professional contacts, the first author is familiar with a number of cases in which family members--including children, grandchildren, and parents--have completely shunned a disfellowshipped person for years; she has also experienced this herself.
Members are condemned to suffer this extreme punishment for reasons that include a wide range of behaviors from adultery and criminal activity, to such things as cigarette smoking, disagreeing with doctrinal points, celebrating birthdays or holidays, attending another church’s services, and accepting a blood transfusion, to name a few. One respondent expressed a common sentiment, writing, “I was never good enough, if I said the wrong thing I would be disfellowshipped, I was forced to wear a ‘mask’ so none would see how I really felt.”
Disfellowshipping is a serious and often psychologically devastating punishment. Members of the congregation are required to treat the disfellowshipped as if they were dead. Lifelong friends no longer acknowledge former members when they see them on the street. Eye contact is avoided. Socializing in any form with a disfellowshipped person may lead to censure and possible disfellowshipping of the current member. The disfellowshipped person is viewed as “dead to God,” with no hope of salvation and as belonging now to the camp of the devil. Those who stay in the organization do so with the threat of disfellowshipping always hanging over their head. As Franz (1991) bluntly writes, “To use the threat of organizational disfellowshipment, with all its consequences, to intimidate people into conforming to a particular policy when their conscience dictates otherwise…is a form of spiritual extortion, spiritual blackmail” (p. 387).
The Issue of Patriarchy
The Concept of Patriarchy
In a patriarchal society, men are the holders of power. Patriarchy is defined as a “male dominated social system, with descent through the male line” (Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 1992, p. 653). Patriarchy is thought to have arisen in conjunction with the concept of private property and the need to pass property on to an heir (Engels, 1972), usually male. In a traditional patriarchal society, women usually do not earn wages by working outside the home, which places them in a financially dependent position to their male partner and eliminates or decreases outside contacts and information about the world at large. In a patriarchal society, women generally do not hold positions of power or influence in the community. It is the men who sit on the village counsel, who vote, instruct, police, and guide the community. A woman’s primary role is to provide care and nurturance to her husband and children. Without financial resources and with little community recognition or power, a woman in this kind of society either adapts to her role and “fits in,” struggles against the order of things and becomes a “problem,” or, if possible, leaves in search of a society with more egalitarian values.
Historically, women have been viewed in many societies as inferior in intellectual ability and subordinate in position to men (Bullough, 1973). In many societies over the centuries, a woman’s right to choose her own destiny has been limited, her ability to pursue an avocation outside the home has been restricted, and she has not always been allowed a vote. In some countries, women are still seen outside the home only when veiled from head to foot. In many societies women have, at times, been prohibited from owning property and, in some cases, have been regarded as property, useful as objects to trade in marriage contracts for benefits, alliances, cattle, or status. Similarly, daughters have been seen as a poor second choice to sons who could carry on the family name and inherit property. As recently as the 19th century, philosophers and writers were firm in their beliefs that women were unable to reason or deliberate logically and that submissiveness was good for a woman. As Chafe states, “Since women’s ideal role was to be supportive of their husbands, care for their children, and provide a haven from the troubles of the outside world, the idea that they might wish an independent life or career of their own seemed unnatural” (1977, p. 7). The common view was that a woman’s “natural inclination” to nurture others and her lack of logic and intelligence precluded her from participating in public life, much less adopting a leadership role in the family or society (Bullough, 1973).
In Western society, women are now able to inherit property, run for office, and develop careers that place them in competition with men. Women, for the most part, are able to guide their own destinies. Nevertheless, unequal pay, sexual harassment, “glass ceilings,” and “pink ghettos” are remnants of the patriarchal system that continue with us today. As recently as 1990, authors Johnson and Ferguson stated:
The present arrangement almost guarantees that women will suffer from a disproportional amount of depression, anxiety, submerged or ineffective anger, lack of sexual fulfillment, and other emotional disturbances…the symptoms associated with these conflicts will continue until the basic inequality between women and men is addressed |
or possible perceptions of corruption.”
Potential members of the NIU are highly screened for intelligence and physical ability, and their background checks are more stringent than other branches of the security forces. Their unique understanding of Afghan law combined with the respectful treatment of people they encounter further elevates their status among the ANSF.
“They have much deeper knowledge, and certainly more experience, dealing with Afghan counternarcotics law,” said Boehlert. “They have a clear sense of purpose when it comes to their job.”
“I wanted to do something to help my people and my country,” added Farouk. “When people use these drugs they are throwing their lives away.”
Lasting effects
During the four-month period 2nd Bn., 9th Marines and the NIU conducted raid missions in support of Operation Psarlay Taba, the partnered force captured over 26,000 pounds of opium products. The bulk of the finds came in the form of dry opium, but significant amounts of wet opium, morphine and heroin were also recovered from production facilities and vehicles transporting narcotics.
“By taking their funding, we disrupted their ability to organize any spring or summer fighting season, “said Styskal.
Though these counternarcotics operations appear to have prevented the manifestation of the annual fighting season, Styskal cites other factors that have contributed to steady progress in Marjah.
“We were able to get in front of the poppy harvest through our narcotics interdiction,” said Styskal. “But what we see now is also the result of three years of coalition presence and an aggressive eradication campaign led by the police in Marjah.”
Gradual progress is a measure of success in the district. Over the last seven months, Marines have seen a growth in the confidence of the Afghan forces in Marjah. Perhaps more importantly, they’ve noticed the people of Marjah grow more confident in their security forces as well.
“There is no threat that can defeat the ANSF in Marjah today,” said Styskal. “They just have to be confident in themselves and their ability to secure the district.”
Though emphatic in his assessment of the ability of Afghan forces to maintain security in Marjah, the Marine commander understands the challenges the district will face in the future.
“Continued support from the provincial (Helmand) government for the police and ANA is critical,” said Styskal. “As we transition from coalition to Afghan lead in security, there has to be support from the international community.”
Ongoing counternarcotics operations will contribute to continued stability of Marjah, but the departure of 2nd Bn., 9th Marines leaves a significantly reduced coalition presence. Their replacements with India Company, 3rd Bn., 8th Marines will carry on their work advising and mentoring an Afghan force that has clearly taken the lead in providing security in the district.
One thing is certain – the coming months will be telling for the future of Marjah and the rest of southern Helmand province.
Editor’s Note: Quotes from NIU Capt. Farouk were taken from a March 30, 2102 article by Lance Cpl. Tyler Reiriz, “Afghans take lead in anti-drug operations." Second Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment was assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5, 1st Marine Division (Forward), which heads Task Force Leatherneck. The task force serves as the ground combat element of Regional Command (Southwest) and works in partnership with the Afghan National Security Forces and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to conduct counterinsurgency operations. The unit is dedicated to securing the Afghan people, defeating insurgent forces and enabling ANSF assumption of security responsibilities within its area of operations in order to support the expansion of stability, development and legitimate governance.As if dating – and meeting potential mates online – weren't tough enough, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports online dating sites come with big holes in security that compromise at least the privacy and possibly the financial security of their users.
EFF points out six major weak points in the security and practices of online dating sites, most of which appeared first among Facebook's menu of privacy eroding and were universally panned, but have never been eliminated.
First, as with Facebook, information you put up on dating sites doesn't remain yours, at least as far as the site's data-purging practices are concerned. Dating profiles remain online for months or years after a member has let a subscription lapse. Theoretically it's necessary to type in the URL to see a photo or profile after it's been deleted from the index, but clever searching can turn up almost any photos or profiles that still exist.
Second, the authentication on most sites isn't what you'd call bulletproof. Grindr – a mobile app that allows men to find other men looking for sexual partners nearby – was hacked in a way that allowed the hacker to impersonate other members and view photos, messages and passwords.
The straight version of the app – Blendr – appears to have the same weaknesses.
Third, Google spiders your profile, though more for some sites than others. Julian Assange's OKCupid profile showed up in public searches, but many others don't.
Fourth and fifth: Even if you use a fake name, you're likely to be identifiable using TinyEye, Google Image Search or other photo-search functions. Most sites also package your preferences and profile information (theoretically sans identifying data to sell to marketers).
The last item is the no-hoper, or at least the indication that there isn't much hope of protecting or recovering your privacy once you lose it to an online dating service: HTTPS implementations are supposed to protect a user's browsing history, messages and links to other activity.
EFF's survey of online dating sites found some with only partial support and others with none at all. No HTTPS means if you're browsing wirelessly from a public place you could unknowingly be sharing your hopes of finding a mate with any of your fellow coffee-shop dwellers.
EFF suggests a few solutions, but none are absolute. Some, like reviewing the privacy settings and policies of the sites you use should be routine by now. Settings that are counterintuitive, others that are impossible to find and yet others that change in between visits, exposing standard as they do, make due diligence more difficult, though not impossible.
EFF did put together a handy reference for different sites. The information is good but the result is not. Online dating sites clearly don't have privacy as a priority, even Ashley Madison, the one aimed at married people wanting to have an affair.
If even the skulker's social-networking site doesn't do HTTPS by default, prevent the mixing of secure and insecure content or use secure cookies, it would be too much to expect other sites to do it. Fortunately for those trying mainly to avoid disappointment, it's not necessary to get, your hopes up.
In security at least, especially in online dating sites, you're on your own.The census collected statistics rather than information on individuals (although it was extended 10 years ago when the bureau began to ask us about our exact date of birth rather than our age). Illustration: Matt Davidson This provision of our names will be compulsory. At least that's what the bureau says, although it is hard to see what legal basis it would have to prosecute someone who refused to hand over their name. The Census and Statistics Act empowers it to direct people to provide "statistical information" and requires it to "publish the results of these statistical collections". Names aren't usually thought of as statistics, and there would be an outrage if the bureau actually published them. Bill McLennan, a former head of the bureau who helped rewrite the Census and Statistics Act in the early 1980s, says flatly that it doesn't have the authority to demand names. The bureau says they will be stored separately from the rest of the census for up to four years and released only in an "anonymised" form for projects "approved by a senior-level committee and subject to strict security provisions". Those projects will link what the bureau knows about us from the census with other information authorities know about us, "in the public good".
I can think of any number of such worthwhile linkages in the public good. One would be linking the census to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to find out what drugs are prescribed to people in what occupations and what family circumstances. Examples the bureau uses are weaker, including the better targeting of mental health services, something that could probably just as easily be done without names. Illustration: Dionne Gain Tell the ABS this is the first you've heard of its decision to retain everyone's name and it'll scoff. It outlined it in a press release issued the Friday before Christmas with the misleadingly vague title of ABS response to Privacy Impact Assessment. It conducted the privacy impact assessment itself and found that "retaining names and addresses for the purpose of richer and more-dynamic statistics and more-efficient statistical operations has very low risks to privacy, confidentiality and security". One of the risks it dismissed as low was "function creep" - a gradual increase in the use of names as more and more government agencies pressed the bureau to exapn its use of them. In place of broad consultation (it appears not to have approached the Australian Privacy Foundation) it convened its own small focus groups. "In working through examples, focus groups were generally comfortable with the protections that the ABS would put in place," it says.
Which would be a change. The first time it put forward the idea in the lead-up to the 2006 census, it was rewarded with a damning (genuinely independent) privacy impact assessment by privacy expert Nigel Waters. It considered trying again in the lead-up to 2011 census but but was overruled by then Australian Statistician Brian Pink amid concern about a public backlash. Tell the ABS this is the first you’ve heard of its decision to retain everyone’s name and it’ll scoff. Since Pink left in 2014, the ABS has rumbled along in a leadership and oversight vacuum. He wasn't replaced for 11 months, during which time the bureau suffered appalling problems with its unemployment survey and drew up cost-saving plans to abandon the 2016 census and move to 10-year surveys rather than five. Pink's successor, David Kalisch, flicked the switch to "go" only last May when the parliamentary secretary, Kelly O'Dwyer, managed to secure enough money to both upgrade the bureau's ageing computer system and retain the census. Four months later O'Dwyer was promoted and replaced by Alex Hawke who has just been promoted and replaced by... well this week no one was quite sure, but the census will probably become the responsibility of the Treasurer, Scott Morrison.
The daftest thing about the bureau's poorly communicated decision to retain and use our names is that it'll run alongside its existing "time capsule" program in which we are invited to give our consent for our details to be accessed in 99 years, but not before. "Information is only kept for those persons who explicitly give their consent," the bureau's website assures us, somewhat redundantly. McLennan says what's planned is without doubt "the most significant invasion of privacy ever perpetrated on Australians by the ABS". When the Crikey website wrote about it earlier this year, the ABS accused it of undermining the "complete public trust" it needed to conduct the census and get accurate rather than falsified information. It's making a good fist of it itself.VEGGIE Adele has left her roadies fuming after banning them from eating meat.
The singer has reportedly ordered chefs to alter menus for her Australia and New Zealand tour to make all meals vegetarian. Her crew are said to be fuming at the prospect of swapping pies for quinoa for three weeks.
GETTY NO MEAT: Adele has reportedly banned her roadies from munching on meat on tour
The 28-year-old will take to the stage in Perth on Tuesday before dates in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Auckland and Melbourne. And it is not just her tour helpers Adele has upset.
Adele at the Grammy Awards 2017 Grammy superstar: Adele wins song, record and album of the year 1 / 17 Getty Images for NARAS Adele performs onstage during The 59th GRAMMY Awards
“They feel disappointed if it’s true” Inside source Her family are shocked at reports the singer has held her wedding in secret. She thanked her “husband” Simon Konecki at the Grammy Awards earlier this month – but had been expected to tie the knot in the UK this summer.
GETTY RUMOUR: An inside source reveals Adele and Simon may have had a secret weddingDoubutsu Sentai Juuouger Sentai Hero Series 1-5
Price- 800 yen each
Description- Sofubi figure for all 5 Juuouger
Doubutsu Sentai Juuouger Punch Fighter
Price- 2,400 yen
Description- blow up punching bag (as per every year)
Kyarrachi! Doubutsu Sentai Juuouger
Price- 1,800 yen
Description- Apparel for Juuouger (non-toy related, likely a wrist watch)
Henshin Choujuu DX Ocarinas (Transformation Wildlife DX Ocarinas)
Price- 4,980 yen
Description- Henshin device, possibly for the first 3 rangers. "Choujuu" with the characters used, means "wildlife". Separately, the characters are "bird" and "beast." Seems to be an Ocarina (like Link
uses from Zelda.)
Zangeki Inu GittaGuitar (Slashing Dog GittaGuitar)
Price- 4,000 yen
Description- Apparently, a guitar/sword weapon in the motif of a Dog. Likely the team weapon. Like the transformation device, it is a musical instrument.
Oukan Dash DX Buckle Monkey (Crown Dash DX Buckle Monkey)
Price- 2,500 yen
Description- Belt Buckle for the Juuouger. Will hold this year's collectibles, called "JuuouKan", or "Beast Crowns." In the motif of a monkey.
King Animal Series 01-02 Doubutsu Gattai DX Juuoujin & KingTiger Set
Price- Undecided
Description- Apparently, a set of four mecha. The core 3 forming Juuoujin, with KingTiger belonging to the 4th ranger.
Doubutsu Sentai Juuouger Dream Safari Board Game
Price- 3,980 yen
Description- Unknown, though likely unrelated to the main toy line, and just a board game of some kind.
JuuouKan Set 01
Price- 750 yen
Description- First set of JuuouKan
King Animal Series 03 KingRhinos
Price- 2,600 yen
Description- 5th King Animal released. Likely for the 5th ranger.
King Animal Series 01-03 Doubutsu Gattai DX ChouJuuoujin
Price- Undecided
Description- Combination of all 5 ranger mecha. The Super Combo for this year.
To be released in March 2016
King Animal Series 04 KingGorilla
Price- 2,600 yen
Description- Gorilla Type Auxiliary Mecha
King Animal Series 05 KingGator
Price- 2,600 yen
Description- Alligator Type Auxiliary Mecha
JuuouKan Set 02
Price- 750 yen
Description- Second set of JuuouKan
Henshin DenHane ZubatPhone (Transformation Electric Wing ZubatPhone)
Price- 4,980 yen
Description- Apparently the henshin device for the 4th and 5th Juuouger
Juuouger Narikiri Buki Set (Juuouger Personal Roleplay Weapons set)
Price- 3,800 yen
Descriptions- Apparently a set of individual weapons for the rangers
Again boys and girls, take this one with a tasty grain of salt. It's just a moment of time before an official scan of the toy catalog is released.
Again ladies and gentlemen, it's time to take that grain of salt as Super Sentai rumor master Dukemon22 has given us some information about the 1st quarter toy catalog listings for the 40th Super Sentai Series.A couple of cooks in Corner Brook are taking a break from the kitchen to turn their quirky homebrews into a new craft beer business.
Bootleg Brew Co. was started by Matt Tilley and Morgan Turner, who began experimenting with beer making about nine months ago after they started working together at a local sushi restaurant.
"The first one we made, we actually did a spruce tip beer, we foraged for spruce tips last spring and it was really hard but we managed to make it work in a pot on the stove with a bunch of thermometers," said Turner.
Matt Tilley and Morgan Turner are up-and-coming craft brewers planning to set up shop in Corner Brook. (Brian McHugh/CBC)
"[We] didn't really know what we were doing at first, but it turned out really good and all of our friends tried it and said, 'Man, you should open a microbrewery.'"
Both Tilley and Turner noticed the boom in craft beer popularity while working in restaurants in other provinces, and they both felt the time was right to join the growing industry here at home.
"Everyone is looking at local now, everyone wants to know where their food comes from and where their drinks come from. People like to know what's behind everything," Tilley told CBC Radio's Corner Brook Morning Show.
While they have been working on almost 20 different recipes, the pair has narrowed it down to three favourites which they plan to offer year-round — an IPA, an amber rye ale and a pale ale — with seasonal offerings to "show off the best of what Newfoundland has to offer."
Custom sample cases created for restaurants in St. John's. (Facebook)
"Depending what we can get … we might do a partridgeberry saision, or a blueberry ale or a spruce tip beer like we did last year," said Turner.
"The hardest part is going to be finding enough, because we've been doing five-gallon batches, and to do a single batch for us right now is hard," added Tilley.
"And when we scale up it's going to be 20 times that size, so just getting the amount at the certain time when everything is ripe, it's going to be fun."
A small batch of East Coast Pale Ale, which will be produced on a larger scale once the brewery is up and running. (Facebook)
Tilley expects most of Bootleg Brew Co.'s business will come from restaurants and bars, but he said they're in talks for a location in Corner Brook where they hope to have their own pub or tasting room.
Tilley and Turner have started a crowdfunding campaign to help with the set up, and if all goes according to plan, the pints will start flowing this summer.Ex-NFL Star Braylon Edwards Named in Battery Report For Alleged Photog Attack
Ex-NFL Star Braylon Edwards -- Named in Battery Report For Alleged Photog Attack
EXCLUSIVE
NFL free agenthas been named in a battery report -- after a photog told cops the ex-49er grabbed him by the ankles outside a Detroit nightclub... and shook him upside down, TMZ has learned.A rep for the Detroit PD tells us... the guy who filed the report claims he shot video of Braylon pushing someone outside a club in Downtown Detroit -- and that's when things turned ugly.Edwards allegedly told the photog he needed to look at the video -- but when he refused... Braylon flipped him upside down Suge Knight style to the concrete.The victim refused medical attention because he only had minor injuries... and luckily, he held onto the phone containing the video.A rep for Braylon tells TMZ... the football player was NEVER physical with the photog -- and the guy only filed a report to "take Braylon's money."16 year-old Franziska Handke performs as Christ Child during the opening ceremony of the famous Christmas market on November 25, 2011 in Nuremberg, Germany. *** Local Caption *** Franziska Handke File photo of children singing. (credit: Franziska Handke/Getty Images)
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (CBS Washington) – A Charlottesville-area elementary school has been accused of making students sing a pro-Occupy Wall Street movement song.
Written and performed in October as part of the Kid Pan Alley group at Albemarle County schools, “Part of the 99” has resulted in a backlash from parents nationwide, and has given the foundation reason to train its facilitators to steer students away from controversial subject matter in their songs.
As part of the regular Kid Pan Alley activities, children are asked about the topics of songs they want to write and sing about. In October, one of the children participating in the activities at Woodbrook Elementary School mentioned that he wanted to write about “having it all and losing it all,”Albemarle County schools spokesman Phil Giaramita told CBS Washington.
“The words ‘Occupy’ or ‘Wall Street’ were not mentioned in the classroom,” Giaramita said.
In the past couple of days, the song from the October performance has been resurrected, with parents from Tennessee, Texas, and California accusing the third-graders of not being capable to come up with an idea so closely related to the Occupy Wall Street movement. There haven’t been any complaints from the parents of the children involved in the performance, Giaramita said.
Blogs such as Big Government have criticized the song as being “Marxist rhetoric.”
“The simplistic left wing economic nonsense of this ditty boggles the mind. But to an impressionistic third grader, it plants poisonous seeds at odds with long egalitarian American traditions that disdain class hatred,” the blog states.
Officials with Kid Pan Alley, a foundation that works with elementary school children through songwriting workshops, has emphasized that the group has restated its guidelines concerning the lyrical content of the songs.
“Kid Pan Alley does not promote nor condone any personal or political agenda. As a result, our programming over the years has consistently received high praise and commendation from children, parents and schools,” the statement said. “Our sole mission has been and continues to be to inspire and empower children to work together to become creators of their own music and to rekindle creativity as a core value in education.”
Giaramita said that a Kid Pan Alley official told him that in the 1,800-plus songs that Kid Pan Alley has produced and performed, none of them have come across the issue like this one with its alleged Occupy link. He added that the song itself came in October when the movement was first starting up and maybe meant something different in October than it does now.
“There’s been a lot of sensitivity raised over this in the last couple days,” Giaramita said, adding that greater oversight will be put into the lyrical content of the songs before they are performed. “If you’re writing about pets or a holiday, those kinds of things are very enjoyable and not controversial. If you’re writing about an issue such as a family that has it all and loses it, we need to be very sensitive about the circumstances around it.”Synopsis: Chiral Magnetism Under Electric Control
An applied electric field can be used to control a twisted form of magnetic ordering inside small domains of multiferroic materials.
M. Braden/University of Cologne
Magnetic ordering usually involves a parallel or antiparallel alignment of spins, but in some cases it is characterized by a spiraling pattern. This so-called chiral magnetism might one day prove useful for high-density data storage. Researchers have now demonstrated that electric fields can switch the magnetic chirality of multiferroics—materials that are both ferroelectric and magnetic. The experiments were performed at temperatures in which long-range correlations in the magnetic ordering were absent. This implies that chiral magnetism could be controlled within small domains that could store a single bit of information.
Multiferroics exhibit long-range chiral magnetic ordering when cooled below a critical temperature. Recent work has shown that applying an external electric field while cooling below this critical temperature can fix the orientation (clockwise vs counterclockwise) of the magnetic chirality. This electric control, however, works only on large, fully ordered samples and not on small domains that would allow dense packing of data.
To explore electric control without long-range order, Jonas Stein from the University of Cologne, Germany, and his colleagues performed polarized neutron scattering on two multiferroics: TbMnO 3 and MnWO 4. By measuring the flipping of the spins of neutrons scattered by the samples, the researchers extracted information about the magnetic ordering in the material. They found that an applied electric field could locally induce chiral magnetism even when the temperature was above the critical temperature, that is, when the sample was too warm for the long-range order to be frozen in. This suggests that electric control could work on small, individual domains, without requiring long-range ordering. Besides showing the potential for data storage, the experiments also highlight the role of excitations, called electromagnons, in establishing long-range order in multiferroics.
This research is published in Physical Review Letters.
–Michael Schirber
Michael Schirber is a Corresponding Editor for Physics based in Lyon, France.Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft is set to return to International Space Station (ISS) resupply duties in December, hitching a ride on an Atlas V, prior to resuming operations with the modified Antares rocket in 2016. Cygnus has been out of action since the CRS-3/OrB-3 failure that occurred in October 2014 – with the full investigation results yet to be released to the public.
ORB-4:
The return of Cygnus resupply missions will prove to be a welcome boost for the ISS, following an unprecedented loss of three Visiting Vehicle missions in close succession, including the OrB-3 Cygnus that was lost shortly after launch.
The loss of the CRS-3/OrB-3 Cygnus was followed by the failure of the Russian Progress M-27M spacecraft and the destruction of the CRS-7 Dragon when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 v1.1 failed during ascent.
The dramatic failure of the Antares rocket T+14 seconds into ascent from its Wallops pad was the result of a “probable turbopump-related failure” in one of the two Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-26 main engines.
The initial investigation into the failure was conducted earlier this year.
“The Antares Orb-3 Accident Investigation Board (AIB) sent its final draft report to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) on March 30 for review,” noted L2 information in March. “They will have the first review of it per commercial launch regulations. That review is expected to take no more than a week.”
However, alleged disagreements over the ultimate root cause that resulted in the turbopump failure required further evaluation.
“The AJ-26 engine failure caused that rocket to crash. The investigation focused on ruling out Foreign Object Debris (FOD),” L2 notes added in May. “Information is pointing to an internal engine fault and an issue on a turbo pump, but that investigation is still ongoing.”
The latest conclusions were recently provided to the FAA, although a projected release date of the results to the public has slipped on a weekly basis since earlier this year.
Ultimately, the troubled AJ-26 engine will no longer be used on Antares missions, with Orbital ATK opting to switch to a different engine – a decision made early into the post-failure recovery process.
The replacement engine – on what will be known as the Antares 200 – will be the RD-193, or RD-181 as they are known when labelled under their “foreign export” designation.
The first of those new engines have already been shipped to the United States from Russia under what is believed to be a $1 billion deal between Orbital ATK and Energiya/Energomash. The deal is understood to include the purchase of 60 engines.
During a conference call with investors this week, ATK Orbital noted it had successfully concluded acceptance testing on the new engine, allowing for a projected return to flight for the Antares rocket in 2016.
Progress on the upgraded Antares has proceeded well, with NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) noting it had supported the completion of the Critical Design Review (CDR) earlier this year.
“LSP Propulsion Engineering supported the Antares 230/330 hydraulics CDR, providing comments to CRS to improve the robustness and operability of the system,” per L2 notes.
“LSP Vehicle Systems Engineering, Propulsion Engineering, Stress, Avionics and SMA (Safety and Mission Assurance) participated in the Antares Stage 1 CDR for the modifications necessary to integrate the RD-181 engine at both the 230 and 330 thrust levels.”
With the Wallops facility at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) now returning to an operational status following the physical damage caused by the OrB-3 failure, the first major milestone for Antares’ return will be a hot fire test – which will take place either at the end of this year or early in 2016.
The conference call noted all new Antares hardware is expected to be on site by mid-August.
While preparations are made to return Antares to launch operations, Cygnus will be back in action before the year is out, hitching a ride on the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V – specifically AV-061 – for the CRS-4/OrB-4 mission.
The launch will take place from Space Launch Complex -41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral.
The interim solution was arranged between the two companies to ensure ATK Orbital continued to fulfill its obligations per the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA.
The return of Cygnus is expected to take place in December, with the current launch date showing on Flight Planning documentation (L2) as December 3, with Cygnus arriving at the ISS for berthing on December 6 for a 60 day mission.
Key processing milestones are expected to pick up the pace this month, with the OrB-4 Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) – built by Thales Alenia Space in Italy – set to arrive in the United States as soon as this weekend.
It is then scheduled to be trucked to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) early next week.
Processing will involve integration with the Service Module to “create” the Cygnus spacecraft, prior to its checkout, payload installation and fairing encapsulation. The Atlas V will await the spacecraft’s arrival for mating at her SLC-41 complex.
There remains the possibility the return of the Cygnus may also – depending on processing flow schedules – be pushed up by a number of weeks.
NASA managers noted this could become a potential request during comments made shortly after the failure of the CRS-7 Dragon mission.
However, ISS managers will likely wait for SpaceX’s updated manifest, when it will reveal its own return to flight plans in the coming days/weeks – which may include when the next Dragon will be launched to the ISS.
SpaceX’s updated schedule is understood to be eyeing a tightly packed salvo of launches, potentially opening with a Return To Flight mission from Vandenberg in October – per the latest source information in L2.
Both SpaceX and ATK Orbital have a series of resupply runs to conduct under their ongoing CRS contracts.
NASA recently extended the current CRS requirements, adding missions for both ATK Orbital and SpaceX.
During Thursday’s teleconference, ATK Orbital noted it now has two additional missions that will be added to its ISS cargo resupply contract. These missions are being scheduled to occur between mid-2017 and early 2018.
NASA will then move into the CRS2 phase, aimed at resupplying the ISS through what is now an extended lifetime on orbit.
(Images: via L2’s Antares/Cygnus Section – Containing presentations, videos, a vast set of unreleased hi-res images, interactive high level updates and more, with additional images – including the new Atlas V with ORB-4 Cygnus via L2 artist Nathan Koga. Other images via Orbital and NASA).
(Click here: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/l2/ – to view how you can support NSF and access the best space flight content on the entire internet).'I think way more people smoke weed than the media likes to acknowledge,' actor tells MTV News at Toronto Film Fest.
"That dude gave me the greatest gift I've had in the last five years," Kevin Smith told MTV News earlier this year about his "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" star Seth Rogen.
Smith wasn't talking about some meaningful postproduction keepsake — say, the bubble-blowing ring ex-porn star Traci Lords uses for unclean purposes in the movie — but rather a joint Rogen and the filmmaker shared on the last day of shooting in 2008. "We sat back, watched some footage and sat there smoking," Smith explained. "And I loved who I was."
Smith is now a gleeful proponent of weed, which he credits with spurring the most creatively productive years of his career, and Rogen is happy, as he put it recently to MTV News at the Toronto International Film Festival, to take credit for Smith "being stoned all the time."
"I either get people started smoking weed or I put them out of business smoking weed," Rogen added with a laugh while promoting "50/50," a comedy about a young guy with cancer in which the actor and co-star Joseph Gordon-Levitt's characters get high for suspect medicinal purposes. "I'm either your first or last."
While Smith credits pot as a sort of mind-expanding artistic gateway, Rogen says he lights up to ease the drudgery of the creative process. "I smoke a lot of weed when I write, generally speaking," he told us. "I don't know if it helps me write. It makes me not mind that I'm writing. And I don't know if it makes me work better, but it makes me not care that I'm working. Who wants to work? But if you're stoned, it doesn't seem like work."
To help you work better, to make you forget you're actually working, to just have a good ol' time — why and when people get blazed may differ. But Rogen is convinced that no matter how it goes down, it's most certainly going down (and up in smoke).
"I think a lot of people smoke weed," he said. "I think way more people smoke weed than the media likes to acknowledge. Maybe it's just the people I'm around, but I don't think so. Pretty much everyone that I know smokes weed sometimes — with the exception of my parents."
Check out everything we've got on "50/50."
For breaking news, celebrity columns, humor and more — updated around the clock — visit MTVMoviesBlog.com.The first complete draft of an upcoming Princeton University textbook on bitcoin is now available.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies takes comprehensive look at the technology behind bitcoin. The free download is the first complete draft of the book, with an official version expected to be published this summer.
Citing its “conversational style”, co-author Arvind Narayanan, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton, wrote in an introductory blog post:
“If you’re looking to truly understand how bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity with computer science and programming, this book is for you.”
In addition to Narayanan, the book was authored with Electronic Frontier Foundation technology fellow Joseph Bonneau; University of Maryland computer science PhD student Andrew Miller; Princeton University computer science PhD student Steven Goldfeder; Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering assistant professor Jeremy Clark; and Ed Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton who was named as a technology advisor to President Barack Obama last year.
Homework included
The book assumes a basic understanding of computer science, and is aimed at students, software developers, entrepreneurs, and technology hobbyists.
The work addresses a number of questions about bitcoin, focusing on how the technology functions as well as what the future might bring for the network.
Further, the authors examine a number of other aspects of the cryptocurrency, including security, user anonymity, regulation and the types of applications that can be built using bitcoin as a platform.
For those that want to delve even deeper into the technology, the book’s chapters also include a series of “homework questions”. In addition, there are programming assignments with which readers can implement various components of bitcoin using simplified models.
“After reading this book, you’ll know everything you need to be able to separate fact from fiction when reading claims about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies,” the authors say. “You’ll have the conceptual foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the bitcoin network. And you’ll be able to integrate ideas from bitcoin into your own projects.”
Image via ShutterstockImage copyright Science Photo Library Image caption Houses like this one near Fairbanks have collapsed because of permafrost melt
One of the world's leading experts on permafrost has told BBC News that the recent rate of warming of this frozen layer of earth is "unbelievable".
Prof Vladimir Romanovsky said that he expected permafrost in parts of Alaska would start to thaw by 2070.
Researchers worry that methane frozen within the permafrost will be released, exacerbating climate change
The professor said a rise in permafrost temperatures in the past four years convinced him warming was real.
It was assumed it would be stable for this century but it seems that's not true any more Prof Vladimir Romanovski, University of Alaska
Permafrost is perennially frozen soil that has been below zero degrees C for at least two years.
It's found underneath about 25% of the northern hemisphere, mainly around the Arctic - but also in the Antarctic and Alpine regions.
It can range in depth from one metre under the ground all the way down to 1,500m.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Matt McGrath explores the permafrost "time tunnel"
Scientists are concerned that in a warming world, some of this permanently frozen layer will thaw out and release methane gas contained in the icy, organic material.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and researchers estimate that the amount in permafrost equates to more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere.
Melting fast
Worries over the current state of permafrost have been reinforced by Prof Romanovsky.
A professor at the University of Alaska, he is also the head of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost, the primary international monitoring programme.
He says that in the northern region of Alaska, the permafrost has been warming at about one-tenth of a degree Celsius per year since the mid 2000s.
"When we started measurements it was -8C, but now it's coming to almost -2.5 on the Arctic coast. It is unbelievable - that's the temperature we should have here in central Alaska around Fairbanks but not there |
, his metaphor was a bit of a stretch. But the imagery of Thompson, the "country bumpkin," maneuvering through traffic in a bustling metropolis, captures the dichotomy of where he's from and where he is now, his journey from a rural farm boy who dreamed of leading the Packers — yes, seriously — to a suite atop an NFL shrine.
At 63 years old, Thompson recently completed his 12th draft in charge of the Packers. But despite his high-profile position in the nation's most popular sport, his fleeting public appearances and a well-known reticence with the media shroud him in mystery.
Which makes the memories of those who knew him before the fame so fascinating, so pure. Those who knew Thompson growing up in Atlanta, Texas, his hometown, remember a five-sport star, a student council president and class officer, an usher for senior activities and actor in a school play. They remember him as someone who never smoked or drank, who led by example.
"Just one of them fellas that everybody liked," said Johnny Rosser, a teammate in basketball and football. "You could call him your friend whether you was or not."
These are the stories you've never heard, from the place Thompson proudly calls home.
•••
U.S. Route 77 leads into Atlanta, a farming and forestry town of 5,600 people hard by the Arkansas and Louisiana borders. Signs of spring straddle the road in early April; a shirtless man throws fertilizer, and a yard sale advertises tractors in bulk. Ted's parents, Jimmy and Elta Thompson, initially lived in Douglassville, a speck of land, with a population of 239, about 15 minutes away. They later moved to a rental home in Atlanta before building the house where Jimmy still lives almost 50 years later. The couple had four children — Frank, Debbie, Ted and Jim. A new high school was opened in 1970, and Ted's class was the first to graduate the following spring. Elta Thompson passed away in 2007.
Ted Thompson: In a small place like Atlanta we played football when it was football season, basketball when it was basketball season, then baseball, then track, and then we played golf in the summertime and for the school. It's a small school, and if you could do anything athletically, you usually got to do it.
George Jackson, varsity football coach: He just kind of stood out. He was a really good athlete even when he was in junior high. And he started growing. He was a pole vaulter and he got so big he had to give up the pole vault.... He had a bunch of junior high records in track and the pole vault. Atlanta was a big track town. It was important that you do good in track.
Bill Dupree, class president and football teammate: I can remember — I think it was maybe our freshman year — we'd work out and then after workouts Ted would go home and lift weights. He actually overdid it. He lifted weights so much he got muscle-bound and he could hardly run. He got so stiff and everything that he got slower, couldn't move and everything. The doctors looked at him or the trainers looked at him and said, 'Look, you're just going to have to back off the weights. Working out at school is enough.'... But that's just how he was — he worked.
Roger Sessions, assistant football coach, track coach, JV basketball coach: Ted ran the high hurdles. Within the last few years I was looking through some old files, and Ted and (former Chicago Bears coach) Lovie Smith were in the same heat in hurdles one time in one of our home meets. Lovie went to Big Sandy, which is not too far away. I believe Ted beat Lovie. Neither one of them was a great high hurdler, but they were fairly good.
Danny Harp, football and track teammate: During track season our coach told us to sit down and take a rest. We got to talking about what we wanted to do when we grew up. When it came to Ted, he said, 'When I grow up I'm going to be the general manager of the Green Bay Packers or the New York Yankees.' That's exactly what he said. We all laughed, and he looked at us like, 'I'm not kidding.'
Thompson does not recall a specific conversation with Harp about the Packers but acknowledges it could be true. He made a similar statement when Bob Harlan hired him as general manager in 2005. "It's almost a dream-come-true-type job," he said at the time. "You think about, when you're a young kid, some of the things you'd like to do when you grow up and you think maybe manager of the New York Yankees or maybe the general manager of the Green Bay Packers. So it's a thrill, it's an honor."
When news broke of Thompson'spromotion, Harp immediately remembered their conversation from 35 years prior.
Danny Harp: I was really proud for him. I just thought, 'My God, I can't believe that.'
Golf was Thompson's second-favorite sport. He and his younger brother, Jim, were both terrific players and spent hours at Indian Hills Country Club, a 9-hole course. The brothers often return to the course when Ted visits, and an employee at the country club said they are known to play their rounds in virtual silence.
Barron Christensen, football and track teammate, student council member: There's a club championship every year. I remember Ted played in that when he was a junior or senior in high school. I wasn't much of a golfer, so at the club championship I said, 'Ted, why don't you let me carry your bag for you?' So I caddied a round for him. It was great fun. He hits the ball a long way.
Jimmy Thompson, father: When he got in pro ball, he had been in there about two years (with the Houston Oilers), and I think in Florida they had a golf tournament I guess for pro ball players. I don't know what hole, but the one that got the closest to that hole got to drive an Excalibur. It's got things out the side, kind of a convertible fancy thing. Old Ted got closest to the hole, and he drove that (car) a year.
The new home of the Atlanta Rabbits football and track teams was built in the 1990s. Credit: Michael Cohen
In Atlanta, Texas, every football game was a sellout, and fans without seats packed the edges of the field to see the Rabbits. By kickoff on Friday night, former players estimated the attendance was nearly 5,000 — essentially matching the population of the town. Thompson made the varsity team as a sophomore and played both sides of the ball during his final two years, starting at linebacker and fullback in a run-heavy offense. As a junior, he carried the ball 129 times for 910 yards and made 139 tackles on defense. As a senior, he carried the ball 219 times for 957 yards and eight touchdowns. He also handled the kicking, sometimes without a shoe.
Ted Thompson: It was a typical small-town football stadium. We thought it was the neatest thing in the world because when you're 14 or 15 that's how you think. You think if I could ever get to play on that field and play with the varsity and that sort of thing it would be the neatest thing ever.
Bill Dupree: Even back then they were lined up on the fences three deep all the way around the field, standing room only most of the time. That's what they did on Friday nights in East Texas is go to high school football games.
Bobby Christensen, football teammate and student council member, younger brother of Barron: I always kidded with people that if you ever wanted to rob somebody, you would rob them on a Friday night. No one would know.
George Jackson: I coached '69 through '72. We put on the wishbone while I was there. I can remember the first time we scrimmaged. We were scrimmaging a real good team. Our first play from scrimmage we ran the inside veer with Ted and no one took him. So the quarterback handed him the ball and he ran about 30 yards before anybody could stop him. We went back to the huddle and we were running option, and the same thing happened again. The coach of the other team was a really good coach. He came up there and he put his foot on the ball and wouldn't let the center snap the ball. He said, 'What in the hell are y'all doing?' And I explained the veer to him, you know?
Sidney Harrist, football manager and current superintendent in Atlanta: (Ted) was the captain of the team. I can see him standing right yonder giving a speech at the pep rally the week it was his turn as captain. He did a good job.
Bill Dupree: Ted was what our team was built around, pretty much. When we were seniors, especially, it was Thompson right or Thompson left or Thompson up the middle. He was our best player.
Tommy C. Coats, football teammate: Ted was always just a stalwart guy. You could count on him as a middle linebacker. He could hold that line. My junior year I was a defensive tackle and I always knew that if I could just hold my guy up, Ted could get through.
Barron Christensen: His nickname in high school, we used to call him Ted the Toe. He kicked extra points and field goals for us.
Ted Thompson: I realized I could actually kick it farther without a kicking shoe. Most of the time, 90% of the time, I was using a square-toed shoe.... I kicked with just a sock a couple of times when we were rushed to get a kickoff. I can't recall the exact reasons. And like I said, I could kick it farther with just a sock.
Roger Sessions: He was always an intelligent football player. Paid a lot of attention to the brain end of the game as opposed to just playing football.... We graded people on each play, whether or not they did their job. Ted probably made 80% or better probably every game for three years. He was that good of a player.
Many of Thompson's former teammates and coaches repeated a story about the final game of his career, a 9-6 victory over the De Kalb Bears. The starting quarterback for Atlanta left the game injured, and the backup struggled to protect the ball. Thompson, according to his coach, devised a plan to preserve the win and force a three-way tie for the district championship.
George Jackson, varsity football coach: Ted called timeout and came over to the sideline and said, 'Coach, I can run the clock out.' We put him at quarterback. We had put him at quarterback some in case somebody got hurt, and that's what happened here. He ran the quarterback sweep from side to side until we ran the clock out.... We didn't have any choice. Well, we did have another choice: We had Ted, naturally. He could do the job.
Bill Dupree, class president and football teammate: We just ran him all the time, ran him to death. He wanted it that way.... And they knew it was coming every time, but they still couldn't stop him.
Ted Thompson: All I did was take the snap and run one way or the other.
Ted Thompson rushed for 957 yards and eight touchdowns in his senior year. Credit: Atlanta Independent School District
Outside of sports, Thompson was revered in a graduating class of approximately 160 students. He developed a reputation as having an enviable blend of book smarts and athletic ability. He was described by those who knew him as well-built and handsome, with more friends than most. He was the embodiment of what it meant to be successful in a town like Atlanta.
Bill Dupree: Ted was good at everything he did. He was a straight-A student. Very, very smart. Very intelligent guy. He had a good head on him, always did.
George Jackson: A lot of times football players aren't the smartest guys in the world, but Ted was always up on everything. He was ahead of everybody else in his books and everything. All the teachers knew that he was one of the top kids in his class.
Jean Pratt, librarian: I only remember the library delinquents. He was not one.
Danny Harp, football and track teammate: He's just one of the most fantastic people — and a good friend — that I've ever known.
Thompson was a member of student council for three years. He became an officer as a junior and senior, first serving as vice present and eventually taking over as president for Barron Christensen, whose younger brother, Bobby, was also a member.
Bobby Christensen: My recollection is student council was more of a popularity contest than anything else. If you were on the student council, it's because you were well-liked in the school.
Ted Thompson: It was a political thing I think. (sarcasm) I don't know. I guess I was a pretty good student and because I played a lot of sports I think name recognition helped me get elected.
Jimmy Thompson, father: Well, he was kind of a shy student council president. He talked but he said some of (the guys) called him an introvert. (laughs)
Roger Sessions, assistant football coach, track coach, JV basketball coach: I would say other people pushed him to do those things more than he pushed himself to do those things. Because I think people recognized his leadership skills and expected things out of him.
Atlanta was dry during Thompson's high school years, which complicated things for upperclassmen in search of beer. The national minimum drinking age was 18 at the time — it would not be raised to 21 until 1984 — so the students often turned to their neighboring states for the chance to imbibe. But not Ted.
Johnny Rosser, basketball and football teammate: We live right here at three states, where Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas all come together. At that point right there, there's a beer joint. You could go get your beer if you wanted one. But I don't remember Ted drinking. He just didn't do it.
Danny Harp: If we got to drinking or something like that, he wouldn't do it. He was just a real good Christian guy.
Barron Christensen, football and track teammate, student council member: I don't recall ever having seen Ted smoke a cigarette or drink a beer, and we were in a lot of social events and occasions together. He pretty much had the same mindset (as me). He was taking care of his body and getting ready to play. He was always in-season because we all played basketball, played baseball, ran track. You just go from one season to another, so you're always training.
Danny Harp: The only team we could find to (complete our schedule as seniors) was in the division above us, West Rusk. And Ted all those years would get in the huddle and he'd say, 'Give me the ball, give me the ball, give me the ball!' We get in the huddle that night, about halfway through the second quarter, and the quarterback called his number. Ted said, 'Ain't there somebody else on this team that can rush the damn ball?' That's the only cuss word I ever heard the guy say.
The Thompson family had a strict curfew of 10:30 p.m. for all four kids, and Jimmy Thompson recalls only one instance in which Ted broke the rule.
Jimmy Thompson: He just graduated, and I can't think what kind of car we got. It was a Torino, I believe, Ford Torino. Brand new. Well, it wasn't like him, and for some reason, he hadn't come home. My wife, she was worried.... Well, about 11 (o'clock) I got in my pickup and drove around, went over to the old football field. There that new car was and Ted wasn't there. I said, 'My God.' At 11:30 I came in and said, 'I'm going to ride around (again). I don't know what to do.' Well about 12 o'clock, (I went to) an old city park. There was a woman sitting in the car not too far away when I pulled up there. I saw a bunch of folks way down there, they were kind of in a circle. I said, 'Ma'am, what is this?' She said, 'That's the Baptist church youth.' Ted finally came in at 12:30.... 'Where have you been, boy? I found your car.' He said, 'I got with a Baptist youth and they were over there praying in a circle. I couldn't get away.' I said, 'Ted I don't know a better place I'd rather you be, but you can't drive that car for one week.' I hated to do it.
Through the years, the people of Atlanta followed Thompson — sometimes literally — as football carried him to a collegiate career at Southern Methodist and a professional career with the in-state Houston Oilers. When the Packers won Super Bowl XLV in 2011, the local McDonald's hung a celebratory banner. Some residents went as far as dropping the Dallas Cowboys as their favorite team, and nearly everyone points out the character differences between Thompson and Jerry Jones, the Cowboys' owner. Still, some of his longtime friends have trouble reconciling the Ted they know with the general manager they view from a distance.
Barron Christensen: Since the Packers have done well, Ted is not a guy that enjoys the limelight now. But that's a different Ted than I know. Back in high school and college he was very outgoing, very gregarious, pretty much the life of the party. I'm not surprised that he does a good job as GM of the Packers. That doesn't surprise me at all. I'm surprised he doesn't get into the PR part of that job a little better.... I'm surprised that he's not a little more outspoken, a little easier in front of the camera than he seems to be. He just seems to really shy away from the camera, and that's really not the Ted I knew. I knew the Ted that was footloose and fancy free, and enjoyed being around people.
Bobby Christensen: I just see him so serious when I see pictures of him. Obviously, that's typically during a game and he's just like emotionally all-in. I just remember a guy that had an easy smile, liked to joke around and just be one of the guys. It does paint a different picture when I see him on TV than what I remember him to be.
Jimmy Thompson: He's shy. He said a lot of times when he first started, he would tell somebody something and they would put it out of context, and he just kind of built up (a wall).
Sidney Harrist, football manager and current superintendent in Atlanta: He was at one of (his nephew) Jake's football games this year. A couple of people saw him and would go up to him. Then two or three wanted to know if I wanted him to announce it (over the loudspeaker). He really didn't want that. He's mellow, behind the scenes.
Ted Thompson: Some of these people that you've talked to I might not have seen in 30 years, but I remember conversations with them. Like anybody, you remember how you were when you were growing up, who you talk to and that sort of thing. And you cherish those memories.
•••
On a sun-soaked Thursday afternoon in April, with Ted Thompson in the throes of preparation for the NFL draft, two dozen freshman football players sweat through a workout in the weight room at Atlanta High School. Among the varsity hopefuls is a solidly built 15-year-old with a buzz cut. He is Jake Thompson, Ted'snephew and a promising multi-sport athlete who made the varsity baseball team as a freshman pitcher.
The workout ends and players retreat to the football locker room, the epicenter of a town's passion. The cinderblock walls are filled with motivational posters, three of which quote former Packers coach Vince Lombardi. A sign above the cold tub — "48 Minutes to Play... A Lifetime to Remember" — serves as the ethos of Atlanta, perhaps explaining why Ted Thompson returns to the football stadium and school grounds when he's in town and wants to exercise.
The following morning, at 11:15 a.m. sharp, Jimmy Thompson is waiting for a visitor in the foyer of Bryce's Cafeteria, a favorite spot for father and son whenever Ted returns home. He is wearing a Packers hat and scanning the morning paper; his 1999 Lincoln sedan sits outside.
Now 87, he still lives alone in the same single-story house tucked away behind Atlanta's main drag. When Ted returns to Atlanta, he stays with his father and sleeps in a room that used to belong to Frank, the oldest brother. After lunch, Jimmy Thompson unearths a number of scrapbooks the family made during Ted's football career. He hauls them to the kitchen table. For the better part of an hour, he flips through newspaper clippings that tell the story of his now-famous son.
Sidney Harrist: He was probably every parent's dream as a son. I know he was his dad's.
Jimmy Thompson: I wish Ted would quit and come back and live with me. But I don't know if he ever will.... He came a little more often last year. He told (the Packers) he was going to try to spend a little more time with his family.
Ted Thompson: I don't know that my family is different than anybody else's family. If you could gather all the chicks up and put them in one place, that would be easier for me to see my nephew and things like that. I think that would probably be preferable....
It's not so much the place, it's the people. It's your family and your friends, all the people that you've talked to. You grow up with them, and so what if I haven't seen them in 35 or 40 years. They're still the same people, you know? I think small towns foster that sort of attitude.Following the hack of Zappos.com and 6pm.com there are probably quite a few of you looking for a way to create strong passwords and also remember them. Back in December, our safety-conscious friends at Consumer Reports ran a guide to creating strong passwords that are also easy… well, easier, to remember. Here it is.
You can create strong passwords that don’t make you memorize a cryptic string of letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols. Here are three techniques:
Use a sentence. It’s easy to remember the first letters of the words in a sentence. For example, children have used this sentence to remember the names of the nine planets: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles. You could use the first letters of those words to generate this strong 9-character password: m*Emjsu9p, where Venus (the morning or evening star) is represented by *, the letter for Earth is capitalized, and nine is a numeral. In practice, it’s best not to use such well-known sayings to generate acronyms.
Use a pass phrase. Several words mixed with numbers and punctuation symbols is known as a pass phrase. For example: stitch9clock^handsapplausE. The longer the pass phrase, the more secure it is, though you’ll be limited by the maximum length the site allows.
Growing the haystack. Developed by security expert Steve Gibson, president of California-based Gibson Research, growing the haystack takes advantage of the ways hackers crack passwords. “The first thing they’ll try is the well-known dictionary of most common passwords,” Gibson says. “Then, if they know something about you, they will try to guess things from your life.”
To foil that part of the process, Gibson suggests starting with a phrase that’s short but not a common word. That forces the hacker to resort to the slower brute-force approach by trying every combination in existence, which is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Once you’ve accomplished that, “the length of the password matters more than its absolute complexity,” Gibson says. In other words, make the haystack larger by padding the password with numerous easy-to-remember symbols. For example, the password “c – @T – – 9 – – -” is 10 characters long and is probably not in any dictionary, but it’s not very hard to remember.
A caveat: Don’t use any of the above examples as actual passwords. Now that they have been widely published, hackers might add them to their dictionaries.
How to create a strong password and remember it [CR]The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has temporarily reversed its earlier order that call records collected by the National Security Agency should be destroyed after the current five-year limit.
The court modified its stand after a District Court in California on Monday ordered the government to retain phone records it collects in bulk from telecommunications carriers, as the metadata could be required as evidence in two civil lawsuits that challenge the NSA's phone records program under section 215 of the Patriot Act.
The conflicting directives from federal courts puts the government in "an untenable position" and are likely to create confusion and uncertainty among all concerned about the status of the data collected over five years ago, Reggie B. Walton, presiding judge of the FISC, wrote in his order on Wednesday.
It is appropriate for the District Court rather than the FISC to decide what telephone metadata would be required as evidence in the civil suits, he added.
In view of the restraining order by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, hearing the two civil cases, the Department of Justice filed Tuesday for temporary relief from a FISC order on Friday to destroy the phone data within the five-year limit.
District Judge Jeffrey S. White of the California court had issued a temporary restraining order that the call data should be retained as evidence after the government informed plaintiffs and courts hearing civil cases against the NSA program that in line with the FISC order, it would start destroying the records on Tuesday in the absence of a court order to the contrary. A hearing on whether the District Court order should continue is set for March 19.
Judge Walton had on Friday denied a DOJ motion for relief from the current five-year limit for holding the data, citing privacy interests and the absence of any preservation order from a court or the indication of a request from a plaintiff for the retention of the phone data.
The data preserved beyond five years cannot be accessed by NSA intelligence analysts for any purpose, and can only be accessed by technical personnel for ensuring continued compliance with the government's preservation obligations, Judge Walton wrote in his revised order.
The government will have to give prior notice to the surveillance court if any further access to the data is required for civil litigation, and also notify it of a resolution in the temporary restraining order proceedings in the California court, he added.
John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.comA list of hyperventilating explanations of why men with beards is the finer choice
The power of a man’s beard is like no other.
Lately all the craze on social media and fashion trends show muscular men with thick and bushy facial hair that can easily make your heart melt. Males who have this amazing feature feed the rustic attraction that many crave and lust over.
If you’re not 100% sold on this phenomenon, here are seven reasons that seeking a man with a beard will change your life.
1. It gives a guy a mature look
The desire of dating an older and more established man is as old as time itself. Even if a bearded wonder isn’t older than you, this image of a more profound specimen makes you feel okay with your decision.
2. You have something to play with
Guiding your fingers through a beard is like having an orgasm for your fingers. I hate to call men dogs, but in this case they share the want to be rubbed. Don’t massage a bare face when you can lose yourself in a mainly paradise.
3. A suit and beard is a knockout combination
Lawd! Seeing a guy all dressed up in a fitted suit and a well groomed beard is like getting your favorite sweet treat, it’s delicious. It also gives him a look of sophistication, control and confidence which are three characteristics that are a must.
4. A beard feels great on the lips….all of them
No matter if he’s kissing, carpet munching, or salad tossing your nerve endings will surely appreciate the fuzzy prickles, enough said.
5. It’s like having a bear to cuddle with
Many men who have a lot of facial hair often have a nice amount of chest hair. This helps you stay warm and cuddled while his protective arms are wrapped around you. Also, if you are laying on his chest that’s a perfect position to finger play in the beard!
6. He’s not afraid to commit
Keeping a full bushel of hair clean, sculpted and lengthy isn’t easy and what I hear one hell of a job. If a man can give his time, patience and tender loving care to that, it’s a good chance he can do the same with your heart.
7. Big beard, Big member
People say assumptions killed the cat (in this case let’s hope), but a thick long beard brings the thought that a man may be as equally gifted down under. You never know! Get you a bearded mate and see for yourself.
Want to see some of the most beautiful rustic men? Visit a personal favourite Instagram page of mine, @postbadbeards and get your life!Photo
By the end of the week, Roman Abramovich’s latest bill for parking in New York City will reach $100,000. And by the time his ship sails, the tab could exceed $150,000.
Mr. Abramovich, the Russian billionaire who owns the Chelsea soccer team in London, also owns the world’s largest yacht, the 533-foot Eclipse. The boat is so big that the only place to dock it in Manhattan is at the terminal on the West Side where cruise ships load and unload.
But cruise ships usually stay in port less than 12 hours. The Eclipse has been at Pier 90 since mid-February and intends to stay another month, according to a spokesman for the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which controls the terminal.
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The fee for parking at the terminal is $2,000 a day, said the spokesman, Patrick Muncie. That may sound steep, but the rate has not risen in more than two years – unlike subway fares or the charge to park a car at a meter in the city.
Providing shelter for the megayachts of Russian billionaires could be a source of significant revenue for the city, which splits the fee evenly with the company that operates the terminal, Ports America.
The Eclipse is reputed to be decked out with three helipads, a submarine and a swimming pool whose bottom can be raised for use as a dance floor. Its construction cost has been estimated at more than $500 million.
In November 2011, the 440-foot yacht Serene parked at the terminal for several days. It was the first personal boat to do so, according to the development corporation. Boating publications have reported that the Serene, whose unusual features include an indoor saltwater pool and a room in which it snows, belongs to Yuri Shefler, whose company distributes Stolichnaya vodka.
The Serene’s owner also was charged $2,000 a day, according to the development corporation. But if the city charged by the foot, Mr. Abramovich would be paying $422 more per day for the Eclipse, which has been the biggest private yacht in the world since it was launched in 2010, according to Superyachts.com.
The Eclipse is about two feet longer than the Dubai, a yacht owned by the ruler of Dubai. But soon the Eclipse may be eclipsed by a much larger yacht under construction in Bremen, Germany. That boat, known as Azzam, is estimated to be about 50 feet longer.
It is too soon to know if Azzam will ever be moored in Manhattan. But its owner, whoever that turns out to be, is unlikely to be a better customer of the city’s development corporation than Mr. Abramovich.
The only yacht ever to dock at the city-owned cruise terminal in Brooklyn spent a month there last spring, at a cost of $1,800 a day, Mr. Muncie said. That boat, a 377-foot vessel named Luna, reportedly belonged to Mr. Abramovich, too.Why we should be grateful to immigrants
In 1929, the great economist Irving Fisher found his fortune and reputation ruined by his utter failure to forecast the great crash. Rival forecaster Roger Babson commented, not without sympathy, that Fisher’s problem was that “he thinks the world is ruled by figures instead of feelings”.
What a pitiable error. And it’s a warning to economists like me. We like to believe that the numbers speak for themselves, but the political world prefers to think with its gut. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of immigration, which economists tend to conclude is broadly a positive force. Politicians, aware that the world is ruled by feelings, tend to view immigration as something closer to a series of prison breaks: if you can’t get a grip on it, apologise and resign.
Immigration was a centrepiece of Donald Trump’s “build the wall” election campaign. It is a stated reason that the British government intends to go well beyond the referendum result and leave not only the EU but the single market. Immigration inspires strong feelings, and those feelings aren’t of happiness and gratitude. That is a shame.
Is there a gut-based case that we should be grateful to immigrants? I’d like to think so. Perhaps we should start with the golden rule of “do unto others”. It has a clarifying effect on our thinking about immigrants — or “expats”, as the golden rule suggests we call them, since that is what we call ourselves if we go to live overseas. The words are synonyms but the difference in perspective and respect is enormous.
The golden rule quickly exposes much of the talk about immigrants — expats — as hypocrisy. One popular idea is that immigration should be based on some kind of “points” system — or as the White House describes it, “merit-based” immigration. It seems reasonable. But not for a moment would we think of telling someone they couldn’t move from Detroit to Dallas because they “lacked merit”. Vox columnist Matthew Yglesias observes that he wouldn’t get away with describing white Americans without college degrees as people “without merit”. Quite.
Another seductive folly is the idea that the authorities should in their bureaucratic wisdom decide how easy it would be for different industries to recruit workers. As migration expert Madeleine Sumption has recently pointed out, an attempt to fine-tune the labour market through immigration policy might seem attractive, but it would require an extensive and expensive bureaucracy that would swiftly be surrounded by eager lobbyists. We need only ask how we’d feel if such a policy applied to us, with a Whitehall department deciding whether Cambridge required another software engineer.
We might also think that concerns about the “brain drain” were not a persuasive reason to force people from Leicester to stay there on the grounds that Leicester needs their skills. All these policies have managed to pass as moderate, sensible and even compassionate when applied to foreigners. The instant we ask if we’d apply them to ourselves we see them for what they are: a ludicrously cumbersome attempt at economic planning, and a woefully illiberal way to treat human beings.
There are many analyses of the costs and benefits of immigration. What’s not widely appreciated is that most of them simply ignore any benefits to the migrants — expats — themselves. Given this handicap, it’s striking that many serious studies find some modest net economic benefits. If I told you that a school or a hospital could pass a cost-benefit test even after ignoring the benefits to the pupils or patients, you might reasonably conclude that the school and hospital were impressive organisations. You’d also tell me it was a very strange way to do cost-benefit analysis.
In 18th-century France, workers had to show their papers to get permission to move from one town to another. The objection wasn’t that immigrants might arrive. It was that valuable workers might leave.
The French nobles were on to something. In most circumstances we’re keen to live close to other people. Densely populated areas tend to be richer, more productive, and more innovative. Because housing is compact and people travel on public transport, cities are also more environmentally friendly. And we know that cities are desirable places to live because people are willing to pay so dearly to live in them. Usually we view other people as customers, colleagues, and friends. From the church to the high street to the nightclub, other people are the lifeblood of our communities. It is only when we call other people “immigrants” that they seem to cause such anxiety.
I think we should be more grateful to the people who have the courage and energy to leave their homes and make a life somewhere new. But perhaps I’m the one who should be more grateful. As the economist Paul Seabright observes in his 2004 book The Company of Strangers (UK) (US), we humans are the recent descendants of shy, murderous apes. Somehow we have figured out a way to live together and co-operate. We have some way to go, but I am grateful for the progress we have made so far.
First published in the Financial Times on 7 April 2017.
My book “Messy” is available online in the US and UK or in good bookshops everywhere.The Breaks, VH1’s original series about hip-hop in the early ‘90s, provides a window into the genre at a crucial turning point in its history. Though the series is full of true to life details and real music from the era, The Breaks is driven by a talented ensemble cast playing fictional characters that bring 1990 New York to life. We spoke to three of those actors, Antoine Harris, Ali Ahn, and Sinqua Walls, to get some insight into what they learned about ‘90s hip-hop while making the show, what music they grew up on, and what they miss about the music from back then. And for more of the signature flare that made ‘90s hip-hop so iconic, tune in to The Breaks series premiere Monday, February 20th at 9/8 Central on VH1.This video is no longer available
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his diet, so it often changes.
In "Escape from the Citadel," Finn's right arm is actually torn off and then coated by the blood of a Citadel Guardian, which grows a small flower. He later got his arm back in the episode, "Breezy," where the flower stub matured into a tree and broke away like a cocoon, revealing a new limb, with a green thorn protruding from the palm. This thorn was later revealed in "The Comet" to be part of the Grass Sword sticking out from his skin, as his new arm was made of grass.
In "Reboot," Finn's Grass Sword detached from his arm and fused with the Finn Sword which combined into Fern. Because of this, Finn is an amputee again. However this time there is no flower growing out of where his arm should be and as of "Two Swords" Finn has a mechanical arm but in "Come Along With Me" his mechanical arm fell off when entering Golb's mouth.
Hair
Finn has blonde hair which is first seen in "To Cut a Woman's Hair," where Finn removes his hat, and long, golden locks of hair flows out. His hair has a glowing sheen and extended his body length until he cuts it off and gives it to the Tree Witch. His hair slowly begins to regrow throughout several episodes until "Another Way" where it has grown to his shoulders. By "The Lich," Finn has grown his hair slightly longer than in its appearance in previous episodes. However, in the episode "Davey," Finn shaved off almost all of his hair for the second time so he can disguise himself as 'Davey', but begins to regrow it in "Little Dude," and the episodes after it. In "Puhoy," an adult Finn is shown to have grown facial hair and his hair becomes curly although since that part of the episode was a daydream it may not be 100% accurate. In "May I Come In?" Finn's long hair is shown to have grown back to around the length it was in "To Cut a Woman's Hair," when Finn takes off his hat while acting as bait to lure out The Hierophant. Finn has once again shaved off most of his hair as revealed in "Temple of Mars" as a result of catching lice from Marceline. Finn's hair became mostly stubble after shaving it. Finn takes his hat off again in "Come Along With Me" unveiling that he has grown back some of his hair since the episode, "Temple of Mars."
Finn appears to not care for his hair much whatsoever, showed in how he frequently cuts it completely bald when asked (such as in "To Cut a Woman's Hair"), and in "Davey" when he shaves and slathers his hair in molasses, while BMO cries and claims Finn's "beauty is detroyed" and then says he looks like "the devil!"
Clothing
Finn typically wears a munsell blue ("color #0093AF") t-shirt, denim shorts, a two-colored lime green circular backpack, rolled-down white socks, and a pair of black shoes. Finn's most prominent attire is a white hat with two "ears" (which Joshua calls "nubs") sticking out on top that covers his entire head minus his face. The hat is inspired by a character called Bueno, a bear from a Pendleton Ward comics. Finn can occasionally be seen in variations of his standard outfit. In "Ocean of Fear," his footwear appears to be black booties with white cuffs. In "It Came from the Nightosphere," Finn has a small pocket sewn onto his shirt that he carries Jake in. This appears again in "Davey" where he uses it to hide Jake while Finn steals the keys from the guards as he breaks the former out of jail. During "In Your Footsteps," the Bear wears Finn's clothes, which suggests that Finn has multiple sets of the same outfit, including his hat. However, in "Little Dude," when Finn's hat comes to life and is set free, Jake tells Finn, "Okay, let's go skin an evil bear," which may imply that Finn only had one hat.
Aside from his normal outfit, Finn can be seen wearing a cream-yellow sweater in colder areas such as the Ice Kingdom but would wear his pink sweater made by Princess Bubblegum occasionally. In "Holly Jolly Secrets Part II," he wears a dark blue sweater with Christmas decorations on it and a green scarf. Finn also wears white briefs that make their first appearance in "City of Thieves" when Penny steals his shorts at the end of the episode. In "Who Would Win," he was shown to wear a different pair with red elastic. Finn sleeps in red footie pajamas that appear in many episodes, but in the animated short, he sleeps in a red sleeping bag in his regular clothes. In the series, the sleeping bag is beige.
Weapons
Finn has had a total of five major swords, plus temporary borrowed ones. (1) He originally favored Scarlet, the Golden Sword. After being first turned into a 4-D Sword and then destroyed by a black hole in "The Real You," (2) Finn is shown using the Root Sword (having a pink/silver blade and a red, twisted "root" handle) as seen in "Mystery Train." Along with this sword, his backpack has a new side strap that can hold the sword while walking. (3) In "Dad's Dungeon," Finn and Jake venture into Joshua's dungeon, built by Joshua to toughen Finn up. There, Finn retrieves the Demon Sword, which uses now as a primary weapon. (4) After being first turned into the Grape Sword and then forced to destroy it in "Play Date," he replaces his weapon with the Grass Sword, as seen in "Blade of Grass." However, this too was lost, along with his right arm, after Finn's encounter with his father in "Escape from the Citadel." Though the sword did actually was still in him internally until "Reboot." There have been a number of other swords used by Finn, but all were used only for a short period of time. (5) After Finn's grass sword was destroyed, he acquired the Finn Sword in "Is That You?" It was created by interacting with an alternate Finn from the past, creating a paradox. Finn uses this sword first in "Dentist." However, when the glass on the Finn Sword is broken, Finn ceases to use it for a while and started using the Root Sword again. He started using the Finn Sword again in "Preboot" and "Reboot" however at the end of the two-part episode it was merged with Finn's grass sword creating Fern, making Finn lose his arm again, and permanently destroying the Finn Sword. The Night Sword was created by Peppermint Butler in "Marcy & Hunson." He gave it to Finn to protect himself from, Princess Bubblegum's family. It is said to be very powerful, as it contains dark magic from the Nightosphere. It has a demonic eyeball and a compass in the middle of it.
In "Conquest of Cuteness," Finn was shown to have a crossbow. He uses a different one in "The New Frontier," although it appears he is less proficient with them than with his swords.
Personality and traits
Although at times impulsive and aggressive, Finn is a kind, brave, selfless, and righteous boy. His aspirations to become a great hero makes him somewhat of a moral sheriff in the Land of Ooo, as he is willing to help and protect any innocent person or creature. Finn has a very strong sense of responsibility and becomes upset when he is unable to help others. Due to this and being somewhat simple-minded, Finn often feels conflicted when it is unclear whether something is good or evil as exemplified by his dealings with Marceline in the episode "Henchman."
Despite his heroic nature, Finn also takes a liking to a "normal life" without any recognition or praise for being a hero and demonstrates this in "Davey."
Finn is also almost incapable of doing anything evil or unjust, and will struggle greatly against doing such things, as seen in several episodes such as taking part in thievery in "City of Thieves" or killing a neutrally aligned and in "The Enchiridion!." However, Finn undergoes a slight change in "Wake Up" after he realizes that his father, whom he had high hopes of being a great hero, is nothing more than a selfish criminal. This, coupled with the loss of his favorite arm and sword due to his father's selfishness, pushes Finn to the point of wanting revenge. This is shown in "The Tower," where he attempts to go into space by building up a tower so that he could find his father, punch him, and take his arm. However, in the end, Finn learns to control his feelings of revenge with the help of Princess Bubblegum.
While he portrays himself as a rough and tough hero, Finn has a tender side that is capable of love and compassion, as shown by his boyhood crush on Princess Bubblegum and his brotherly relationship with Jake. Finn is also able to act like a gentleman when it comes to ladies. However, Finn seems to hate romantic scenes to the point of vomiting as seen in "Go With Me." However, Finn demonstrates growth in accepting romance and physical love as he willingly kisses Princess Bubblegum in "Too Young" and his latest ex-girlfriend, Flame Princess, in "Burning Low." His tolerance is seen again near the end of "Dream of Love," as he is no longer disgusted by Tree Trunks and Mr. Pigs' passionate kissing. Finn's care for his friends makes him very protective of them as demonstrated when Tree Trunks almost gets killed in the episode "Tree Trunks" and Jake in "The New Frontier." Overall, Finn is a very kind and selfless person who is always putting the safety of others above his own. Jake comments on his adopted brother by saying that "he is a good kid with a kind heart."
In the episode "Rainy Day Daydream," it is shown that Finn believes that "imagination is for turbonerds who can't handle how kick-butt reality is" and that he finds real life to be better than anything imaginary. Finn then refuses to use his imagination until he has to reactivate Jake's "bombastic personality" in his imagination land, (which was just a basic gray and white empty plane hinting that Finn is not very imaginative). However, this is disputable when the gnomes harness the energy from Finn's imagination in the episode "Power Animal" despite it being inhabited with a few dainty creatures such as Bellamy Bug. The gnomes state that Finn's imagination is powerful enough to affect the real world (like Jake's but to a lower degree) and turn on Jake's imagination.
Finn can also be very stubborn; such as in "Memories of Boom Boom Mountain," "Wizard," "Dungeon," "Rainy Day Daydream," and especially in "Another Way." This is likely a reason why Finn is often determined to work without taking the easy way out as seen in "Business Time" and "The Real You." Finn can also be easily tricked, as in "The Eyes" when Jake convinces him that the giant hawks would take the horse to a land of sunshine and love stuff and take care of him. He can get overly angry and yell as in "Trouble in Lumpy Space" and "Tree Trunks," but immediately feels guilt and remorse and apologizes when he can. Finn is also quick to try and resolve problems that he may have caused, such as when he caused Flame Princess to get hurt by the Ice King. Finn is also empathetic and this was developed when he was an infant since no one (except Jake's parents Joshua and Margaret) helped him.
As a courageous warrior and a fearless thrill-seeker, Finn enjoys putting himself in the midst of danger simply because he enjoys a challenge as shown in "Jake Suit." However, he is also shown to have several fears. In "Another Way" and "King Worm," he demonstrates a fear of clowns. Also, in "King Worm," he shows a fear of Bubblegum calling him too young. In both "King Worm" and "Ocean of Fear," Finn has an unexplained phobia of the ocean, or thalassophobia, despite the fact that he can effortlessly come into contact with any other body of water. Other fears that Finn has are the Ghost Lady, King Worm, and the Lich. Finn's fears change in "Billy's Bucket List," after he destroys Fear Feaster, a manifestation of his fears, with his grass sword while attempting to go into the ocean to fulfill Billy's wish. The Fear Feaster's death seems to have eliminated all of Finn's fears, or at least his fear of the ocean.
Despite being mischievous from time to time, Finn is a very kind-hearted person. It's shown multiple times that he shows clear concern for others, even for those who have willingly hurt him, such as in "The Enchiridion," he returned the dollar to the giant (note that this was the very same giant who ate his beloved brother Jake and even kept insisting that he was dead). Furthermore, he shows clear contempt for anything that is done out of immoral reasons.
Finn is also afraid of unknown vampires, as shown in "The Empress Eyes" when he hears Ice King breaking twigs. Thinking that it was a vampire, he starts throwing vampire hunting sticks into thin air.
Finn is also shown as willing to sacrifice himself in order to save others, as seen in the episode "James." With all other plans of escaping the Oozers showing no promise, Finn offered himself as a sacrifice without hesitation, so the others may escape. Though, He was knocked out and Princess Bubblegum convinced James to be the sacrifice instead.
Abilities
Physical
Despite his age and appearance, Finn seems to be quite strong and athletic; he can be seen wrestling full-grown Marauders, the large grass ogre Donny, and a general variety of monsters and creatures several times his size. Finn is also capable of lifting up Princess Bubblegum, as shown in "Mortal Recoil" when he picks her up and puts her in her bed, and capable of lifting up Marceline as seen in "Daddy's Little Monster." In addition, he is able to pick up a tree and hit Barb, a giant spider, in "Web Weirdos." In "Another Way," Finn is able to run long distances while carrying a giant cyclops' eye. Lastly, in "Dad's Dungeon," when Finn stabs the Evil Monster in the eye, he is able to lift it up slightly off the ground and flip it into the pit. Being the size it is, the giant Evil Monster should have weighed at least several tons, thus showing Finn's strength. Finn is also agile as he can jump very high and even make his arms and legs bend in inhuman ways, as during the Science Dance and when he uses "spaghetti limbs" (waving his arms and legs, which Jake can also do). In "The New Frontier," it is shown that Finn can make fire only with his hands.
Finn is very tolerant to pain as in "No One Can Hear You" he merely says "whatever," when the Stag breaks his legs. Finn can also endure high temperatures, as seen in "Jake Suit" as he allows Jake to dip his head in lava, and also in "Rattleballs," when he sits in a mini-barbecue. This may be because he is already accustomed to heat from his relationship with Flame Princess. Also, in "The Lich," he is able to break the Enchiridion on his knee without any sign of pain, demonstrating considerable strength and resilience. He even tries to teach Jake how to tolerate pain in "Jake Suit," when he says, "just pretend like every bruise is a hickey from the universe." Finn seems to have impeccable balance, as he is able to balance himself on two wheels in his wheelchair in the episode "No One Can Hear You." However, he refers to it as "skills." Finn is known to have deuteranopia, a form of heredity dichromatism that makes it difficult to distinguish green hues from red, as shown in "Red Starved." As this is a sex-linked genetic condition inherited on the X chromosome, Finn must have inherited the condition from his mother.
Magic wise Finn has obtained an immunity to electricity as well as electric based attacks thanks to magic spring water in Flute Spell this ability seems to have stuck with him as we see him display the non-effectiveness of electricity in Preboot against a giant electric eel and again in The Light Cloud against the Great Guardian.
Mental
Finn has the ability to mentally fight psychic abilities. The first time he shows this during the Lich's attempt to control his mind. The second time was against Goliad, as he was constantly able to manipulate his own thoughts in order to avoid revealing the plan to defeat her, allowing Princess Bubblegum to create Stormo. Finn can focus for a very long time as shown in "Still" when he spends hours telepathically summoning an Astral Beast. As demonstrated in "The Creeps," Finn can lock unwanted memories in "The Vault," which is later seen in "King Worm." However, this is considered a normal human ability that occurs where certain memories are removed from the consciousness if it is too painful or traumatic for them to recall. Finn also has the ability to read and write, and he can also do simple math.
Fighting style
Finn is proficient in several forms of combat, including hand-to-hand, magic, and swordsmanship. When using hand-to-hand combat, he is an aggressive fighter, combining some forms of martial arts or his amazing swordsmanship skills. Finn prefers overpowering his opponents, but he is also quick enough to understand an opponent's weakness or using his environment to win a fight. He also received training from the old gumball robot Rattleballs which dramatically improved his sword skills and his reflexes to greater levels.
Creativity
Besides combat, Finn displays many other impressive abilities in handicraft. He has some origami skills, as shown in "Ricardio the Heart Guy," in which he makes Princess Bubblegum a paper crane, as well as in "Marceline's Closet," in which he makes a paper airplane. In addition to that Finn can also draw as seen in "The Thin Yellow Line" which he states that he isn't very good at it, as well as in "Mysterious Island" where he draws BMO and Susan. He is shown to be able to construct a sculpture of the Candy Kingdom from his saliva for Princess Bubblegum in "The Real You." Finn is also somewhat gifted at constructing simple machines, such as the catapult in "The Witch's Garden."
Musical
Finn enjoys singing; after swallowing a tiny computer, he gains the ability to Auto-tune his voice on command, although he can sing without it as well. Apparently, Finn can also play the flute, as seen in "Prisoners of Love," where he plays a short lick before javelin-throwing it at Ice King. Unfortunately, the flute falls apart before it could hit him. Because of this, Finn is not seen playing the flute until "The Lich" as Farmworld Finn and near the climax of "Finn the Human" when he shoves it into Tromo's nose. He is also very good at beatboxing as seen in "It Came from the Nightosphere" and "What Was Missing." In "Gut Grinder," Finn tries to play Jake's viola, but Jake says he stinks. Jake even imitates his footprints and said: "I'm Finn the Human, and I stink at viola." However, during "Death in Bloom," Finn panicked over what instrument to pick, supposedly because he could not play any of them, and settles for sleigh bells. In the episode "Go With Me," Finn is seen playing the lute. In "Daddy's Little Monster," he is seen playing the tambourine.
Miscellaneous
Finn is very good at playing a video game called Adventure Master, which he and Jake play on BMO from time to time. Finn can also spit very long distances, as he demonstrates in "Evicted!," when he spits on Marceline, "My Two Favorite People," when he spits on Tiffany's face, and in "Web Weirdos," when he spits on birds flying overhead, while suspended upside down on a giant spider web. In "Dungeon," one of the trials that Jake says Finn would have breezed through is a spitting competition against a goblin-like creature. In "Burning Low," Finn is shown to be able to spit water incredibly high into the air. In "Who Would Win," Finn showers Jake with an abnormal amount of saliva through spitting. He also handles his sword with his right hand, suggesting he may be ambidextrous, able to use both hands with equal skill. This is also seen in "Frost & Fire," where Finn writes with his left and right hands and, occasionally, both at the same time. Finn is able to cook, although he leaves this task mostly to Jake. However, in "In Your Footsteps," it mentions and shows him making Finn Cakes.
Temporary
Finn and Jake gain magical abilities in the episode "Wizard," but they never use those abilities in any other episode. Pendleton Ward later revealed on his Spring that all of the magic that Finn and Jake gained in that episode was contained in their robes, which were destroyed.[citation needed] Likewise, in "The Chamber of Frozen Blades," Finn and Jake gain ice-ninja skills, but it is unlikely they will use them again because, according to Adam Muto, "They didn't have enough time to commit the incantations and hand positions to memory."[citation needed] Finn seems to speak Latin (as evident in "Morituri Te Salutamus,") although this may be caused by the magical powers of Fight King's arena. In "Daddy's Little Monster," for the first time, he becomes an antagonist by wearing the Nightosphere amulet, although it is only temporary. In "The Tower" Finn gains a new mental arm with the ability to interact with the physical world. His emotions seem to cause this, along with the ability of telekinesis. Since it was linked with his emotions, it exploded into a huge arm of spikes when he confronted his "dad," and disappeared when Finn's animosity abated.
Age
Finn is twelve years old at the start of the series and progressively grows older relative to the passing of time in real life.[citation needed] As of "Mystery Train" (March 14, 2011), he is thirteen years old. Finn is shown going through puberty throughout the series. This is seen whenever when he screams as his voice cracks. Finn's voice is noticeably deeper at fourteen than it was at age thirteen as a result of his voice actor aging. Episodes with early production codes have Finn with a very childlike voice such as "The Enchiridion!," "Prisoners of Love," " Evicted!" and "Ricardio the Heart Guy."
In an interview in early 2012 (at the end of season three), Pendleton Ward stated that Finn was fourteen.
Finn was later confirmed to be fifteen years old in the second half of Season Five, according to Adam Muto.
In "The Comet," he is revealed to be sixteen years old.
Finally, in "Seventeen," he turns seventeen years old.
Relationships
Various forms
Alternate universe Finns
Farmworld Finn
Main article: Farmworld Finn
This is Finn Mertens' alternate universe form. He came into existence because of the wish that Prismo granted normal-universe Finn in the episode "Finn the Human," and he was also in "Jake the Dog." Here, he has a pointed nose, wide eyes, a robotic arm, and a munsell blue sweater instead of a shirt. He was later the bearer of the Ice King's crown after using it to save his family.
Older/Pillow world
In the episode "Puhoy," Finn travels to a realm full of pillows where he cannot escape and eventually starts a new life, becoming an adult and elder. Elder Finn loses his right arm and replaces it with an artificial one.
Past lives
In "The Vault," along with Shoko, a few other of Finn's past lives are shown. He was once a comet, then a butterfly, and a strange blob-like creature (probably a candy elemental).
Shoko
Main article: Shoko
In "The Vault," it is revealed that the strange, amorphous, ghost that has seemingly been haunting him is Shoko, his former self in a past life, who was horribly mutated before her death. Finn completes her dying wish by returning Princess Bubblegum the amulet that Shoko had stolen from her in the past.
Disguises and forms
Lute suit
In the episode "Go With Me," Finn is shown wearing a "lute suit" provided by his friend, Jake, in his attempt to convince Princess Bubblegum to go to the movies with him. It is also shown later in the episode when he tries to get Marceline to go to the movies with him.
Magic Fist
Magic Fist is the alter-ego of Finn and Jake that first appears in "Wizard Battle." He is not a real wizard; he only enters the Wizard Battle to prevent Princess Bubblegum from potentially having to kiss the Ice King on the lips as the prize for winning the battle. He wears a blue eye mask, electric-green hood, and a large red robe. Finn is the head, while Jake is the body. See the gallery section for more images.
Cat Finn
Finn is transformed into a cat by the Grand Master Wizard when Finn forfeits the Wizard Battle; however, Finn was able to break out of it after becoming enraged by Abracadaniel's decision to take the kiss from Princess Bubblegum.
Prince Hotbod
In "The Creeps," Finn wears a black tuxedo with a blue trimmed collar that has a split tail end. He also has a matching blue bow tie, a gray vest, a brown and tan fox mask over his characteristic hat, and brown "fancy gloves."
In the episode "Freak City," Finn is turned into a foot by Magic Man who poses as a beggar. As a foot, Finn has great difficulty moving at first, and only musters the effort to make himself fall over. Finn is upset at his physical handicap while Jake tries to make him realize that being a foot is a blessing. Finn is unconvinced and later becomes motivated to return to his original body after discovering that Magic Man has turned many others into body parts as well. After working with the other victims, Finn seemingly defeats Magic Man as the Super Freak. Magic Man restores Finn and the rest of the freaks to their original bodies.
Zombie Finn
Zombie Finn looks like Finn, and apparently appears in "Slumber Party Panic." Zombie Finn appears in the bottom left corner of the first window to be broken when the zombies break the barricades. Zombie Finn also appears in the Adventure Time game, Rhythm Heroes. In the game, Finn appears as a zombie just like in "Slumber Party Panic." He seems to be controlled by Marceline in the game, and he is next to two other zombies, a cupcake and a candy heart. He was most likely added as a joke or Easter egg.
Lumpy Finn
In the episode "Trouble in Lumpy Space," Finn turns into a Lumpy Space person after giving the antidote to Jake so that he can return back to his normal body.
By doing this, he turns into a Lumpy Space person as well. Lumpy Finn hates Lumpy Jake.
Demonic Finn
In "Daddy's Little Monster," Finn puts on the Nightosphere amulet to rescue Jake and Marceline from the Nightosphere. This causes him to transform into a huge, monstrous, demonic form similar to Hunson Abadeer. Afterward, he tries to pull Jake and Marceline back into the world but stops after Hunson reverts Finn back into his original form.
Paper plate demon Finn
In "Daddy's Little Monster," Finn disguises himself as a demon in order to sneak into the Nightosphere. He puts on his red pajamas, cuts a paper plate and puts it on his face, and tapes forks to his hat.
Hug Wolf Finn
In the episode "Hug Wolf," Finn is hugged by the Alpha Hug Wolf on a full moon, causing him to transform into a Hug Wolf during the night. When he is in this form, he must go on a hugging spree to fulfill his hug lust. However, in the morning, he does not recall anything he did in the night before. As a Hug Wolf, Finn has shaggy gray fur, heart-shaped hands and feet, and wears torn clothing. He is cured when he hugs the Alpha Hug Wolf which cures her as well.
Jake's shadow
In the episode "Princess Cookie," Finn dresses in a black bodysuit and pretends to be Jake's shadow in order to get into the grocery store and take out the Chocolate Chips.
Prince Finn of the Grasslands
Although not directly used by Finn, in the episode "Incendium," Jake introduces himself as 'Baron of the Grasslands' to Flame King and calls Finn 'Prince Finn'.
Davey
In the titular episode, Finn disguises himself as "Davey" in an attempt to hide from his followers. Davey eventually evolves into his own character, possibly hinting that Finn temporarily develops a dissociative identity. However, later it's revealed that Finn was just acting. Davey is also seen in issue 60 of the Adventure Time comic showing that he was a possible previous reincarnation of Finn.
Finn Sword
The Finn Sword is created in "Is That You?" after Finn sacrifices an alternate version of himself to save Prismo. After visiting a much more elaborate version of Prismo's Time room, created as a "Plan B," Finn makes a choice to save Prismo by creating a paradox that vaporizes his dream world duplicate. Instead of turning to dust, Finn's body turns into a sword, dubbed the Finn Sword by Prismo.
Arm occurrence
During the first five seasons, every alternate-reality, past-life, dream, and future version of Finn—with the exception of Fionna—is shown to have no right arm, or have an artificial right arm. These would include Shoko, Farmworld Finn, and the older Finns in "Puhoy," "Mortal Folly," and "Dungeon Train." The real Finn loses his arm in "Escape from the Citadel," although it regrows in the episode "Breezy." However, it is technically not his arm, but the Grass Sword, which means that it is functionally a prosthetic. In "Reboot," Finn tries to prevent the Grass Sword from attacking Susan but accidentally causes it to merge with the Finn Sword and create a Grass Person, leaving Finn without a right arm yet again. As of "Two Swords," Finn has a metal arm, just like the alternate versions of him. In "Three Buckets," it is revealed that this arm can transform into many different weapons. Finn loses his metal arm in the series finale "Come Along With Me," leaving him with just a nub where his right arm was once more.
Bread Finn
After being turned into an egg by Magic Man in the episode "You Forgot Your Floaties," Finn falls into a bowl of flour where he was then accidentally baked into bread by Betty Grof. Finn breaks out of the oven and stumbles onto Jake who had previously been transformed into soup by Magic Man. Finn then proceeds to smash Magic Man's transmutation apparatus which disrupts Magic Man's transmutation with Glob's helmet.
Grass Finn
Main article: Fern
When the Grass Sword combined with the Finn Sword in the end of Reboot it created a humanoid Grass Finn which is shown to be Finn Swords mind inside a grass body called Fern the Human. Finn has many doubts about it. It is technically the same Finn because the Finn Sword is Finn from another timeline turned into a sword.
Flame Finn
After attempting to save the Fire Kingdom and retrieve the fire jewel, Finn fights many times and almost gets consumed by the flame war element before finally succumbing to it.
Episode appearances
Major appearances
Every episode except the following:
Absences
Quotes
See Finn/Quotes
Songs
Trivia
Cultural references
Finn McCool was an adventurer and hero of Irish mythology. "Finn" is actually a nickname meaning "blonde."
Rand al'Thor is the main protagonist of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series. Finn's abandonment as an infant on a mountain to be raised by step-parents is similar to Rand's origin.
series. Finn's abandonment as an infant on a mountain to be raised by step-parents is similar to Rand's origin. Tyr the One-Handed is the Norse god of war, sometimes equated with Mars. He lost his hand to Fenrir, the great wolf sired by Loki. This is another connection to Rand al'Thor who is also modeled after Tyr.
Production notes
In the original short, Finn was named "Pen." In Issue 9, it is revealed that Finn had been called "Pen" in the original short because of his love for pens. Although originally, he was most probably named after the creator of Adventure Time, Pendleton Ward. A future Finn then takes his red sleeping bag when him and Jake leave to help Lady Rainicorn, also leaving a note of advice telling Finn to use his real name. This, however, is most likely non-canon.
In the pilot, Finn is voiced by Zack Shada. However, in the series, he is voiced by Zack's younger brother, Jeremy Shada. Jeremy Shada can make Finn's voice crack when asked during episode recording to better represent his youth and growth.
In the original storyboard of "The Lich," it is revealed that Finn's father was unlawfully imprisoned years ago in the Crystal Citadel, which houses the most dangerous criminals from other dimensions. This does not appear in the final product; Finn's father's existence is not revealed until "Billy's Bucket List" and is not seen until "Escape from the Citadel."
Appearances in other media
Main article: References in other media
Gallery
The full image gallery for Finn may be viewed at Finn/Gallery.Driving my daughter to daycare today, she was talking to me about some of her classmates. She mentioned that a boy in her class pushes and kicks her. Instinctually, I turned around and said, “It’s okay. You know, sweetie, that just means he likes you.”
I said that without even thinking about the words. They just rolled off my tongue. This is what my parents and babysitters and teachers told me and every other little girl who has ever been pinched, pushed, bitten, or picked on by a boy. And saying it aloud, I suddenly realized how messed up that is. We’re instilling in our daughters at a very, very young age that if a boy cares about you, he’s going to be an ass and maybe even hurt you. We tell them that it’s nothing to worry about. That if a boy is rude, that means he’s pining for you. We explain it away like it’s okay, like it’s normal, and then we wonder why those little girls grow into teenagers that chase after the jerks and bad boys. We wonder why they grow into women who put up with mental and sometimes, even physical abuse.
Now, I’m not a moron. I know that telling a little girl that boys pick on her to show her affection isn’t going to single handedly transform her into a subservient, passive woman, but I can’t help but wonder what negative affects it might have. Is this why every single woman alive has dated at least one huge, raging asshole and told herself that it’s okay – because from the time we were in diapers, we were conditioned to believe that sometimes, boys act like douchebags when they’re actually trying to express interest? Did this subconscious conditioning somehow contribute to some of my own issues with men?
Either way – my daughter will never hear that from me again.Lindsay McDougall, Frenzal Rhomb guitarist and "The Doctor" of Triple J fame, spoke before the Sydney March To Close All Slaughterhouses on 4 June 2016. Here is his speech.
I want to start by taking you inside the life of a living being in a slaughterhouse.
She was born here. Or near here. Had to be, she's never been anywhere else. Grew up here, running around these fields. Was fed here, became mature here. Her parents aren't around anymore, though they never really were. She wasn't alone, she spent a lot of time with ones just like herself. Not quite family, not quite friends. She vaguely remembers happiness, but that is a distant memory. These days, it's all death and pain, all around her. She's seen so much. Heard so much on the inside of those heavy doors.
Every day it's the same. It's crowded and hot. There's nowhere to escape. There's nowhere else to go. It's all she knows. There are brawls, scuffles, violence. The more powerful ones brutalising the weaker. No one notices. No one does anything. There no one coming to help them.
A couple of the ones like her died last week. She saw hooks though necks, or bodies crushed in machines. She can't remember exactly, it's all blends into one bloody mess.
Sometimes, as the sky darkens, she wonders if this is all there is. If this is as good as her life gets, or if one day she'll make it out of here. Or maybe one day she's going to be the one on the end of the hook or between the clutching cogs of the machine.
It doesn't seem fair. She's a living being. A living, feeling being.
But that is the life. The dark, horrible life, of a human being who works in a slaughterhouse.
Now don't worry, I care about non-human animals too. Deeply. When I went vego and then vegan back in the 90s, incidentally before it was cool, I didn't know anything about the lives of slaughterhouse animals. Or maybe I did, but it was at arms length; a scene in a movie or an article in a newspaper. It took a bunch of people who knew better to educate me, to lift me out of my kind of innocent ignorance.
I grew up in the Sutherland Shire though. Less than an hour away from here, the city of Sydney. A city full, even back then, of vegetarian options and vegan menus and your choice of various bean and nut milks and activated almonds. (Actually fuck that, activated almonds have nothing to do with saving animals. You activate an almond you're saving yourself, not an animal.) Anyway. Because of where I grew up |
-states, jumping the border whenever things got too hot. At a particularly high-stakes game of cards, he found himself seated opposite Twisted Fate. They both flipped four aces on the final hand. It was the first time either conman had met his equal. The two formed an alliance, swindling marks at the tables and scrapping back-to-back in the alleys afterward. Together, they ran the streets � stacking chips, decks, and charges. Unfortunately Graves made the mistake of hustling a hefty sum from Dr. Aregor Priggs, a high-ranking Zaunite official and businessman. When Priggs discovered how he'd been played, he became obsessed with revenge. He learned about Twisted Fate's all-consuming desire to control magic and he promptly offered him a trade: serve Graves up in exchange for enrollment in a procedure which would grant his wish. Twisted Fate took the deal � both he and Graves knew the stakes of their arrangement, but the offer was too good. Once acquired, Priggs had Graves taken to a special location built to hold men whose crimes � or more precisely their punishments � were meant to stay off the books. Graves endured years of captivity at the hands of Zaun's most unscrupulous wardens before he managed to escape. One of his fellow detainees introduced him to an eccentric gunsmith who modified a shotgun exactly to his specifications. After he paid a visit to Priggs, Graves joined the League of Legends with two targets in his sights: Twisted Fate and payback. ''They got a saying in the locker: ain't got nothin' but time to plan.'' -Graves [spotlight_embed_url] => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWzyB4xe7Y8 [role] => Marksman [defense_rating] => 5 [magic_rating] => 3 [attack_rating] => 8 [difficulty_rating] => 3 [damage_rating] => 3 [mobility_rating] => 2 [cc_rating] => 1 [toughness_rating] => 2 [utility_rating] => 2 [health] => 551 [health_increase] => 0 [mana] => 322 [mana_increase] => 0 [movement_speed] => 340 [armor] => 24.4 [armor_increase] => 0 [magic_resistance] => 30 [magic_resistance_increase] => 0 [attack_damage] => 66 [attack_damage_increase] => 0 [critical_strike] => 0 [critical_strike_increase] => 0 [health_regeneration] => 8 [health_regeneration_increase] => 0 [mana_regeneration] => 7.9 [mana_regeneration_increase] => 0 [attack_range] => 425 [attack_speed] => 0.625 [ability_power] => 0 [ability_power_18] => 0 [attack_speed_18] => 1.016 [health_18] => 2115 [mana_18] => 1002 [movement_speed_18] => 340 [armor_18] => 82.2 [magic_resistance_18] => 38.5 [attack_damage_18] => 117 [critical_strike_18] => 0 [health_regeneration_18] => 19.9 [mana_regeneration_18] => 19.8 [attack_range_18] => 425 [tip_playing_as] => [tip_playing_against] => [client_id] => 104 [riot_points] => 880 [influence_points] => 4800 [icon] => [is_published] => 1 [is_deprecated] => 0 [is_deleted] => 0 [is_buildable] => 1 [is_free] => 0 [views] => 0 [view_count] => 8120222 [comments] => 0 [comment_count] => 8 [votes] => 0 [vote_count] => 0 [community_tier_list_vote_count] => 481 [community_tier_list_score] => 0.445322 [community_tier_list_rank] => 2 [score] => 0 [lastpost_ts] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00 [last_comment_ts] => 2014-02-16 04:00:44 [critical_strike_chance] => 0 [critical_strike_chance_18] => 0 [preferred_skin] => 147 [create_ts] => 2011-10-19 00:00:00 ) ) [6] => Array ( [champion_id] => 116 [rank] => 5 [description] => Easiest matchup for draven. She has no chance at all as long as you all in and avoid Flame Chompers. [champion] => Array ( [champion_id] => 116 [display_name] => Jinx [url_str] => jinx [title] => the Loose Cannon [key] => [description] => Jinx lives to wreak havoc without a thought for consequence, leaving a trail of mayhem and panic in her wake. A manic and impulsive criminal, she despises nothing more than boredom, and gleefully unleashes her own volatile brand of pandemonium to the one place she finds dullest: Piltover. With an arsenal of deadly toys, she unleashes the brightest explosions and loudest blasts - all the better to shock and surprise the hapless authorities. Always just out of the law's reach, Jinx's favorite game is to toy with Piltover's finest - especially Vi. Piltover had long been known as the City of Progress, a place where peace and order reigned. That serenity was challenged when a new kind of criminal arrived, the likes of whom had never been seen. This mysterious outlaw unleashed a series of warped and destructive capers that endangered the entire city, and left its people reeling from the worst crime spree in Piltover's history. As the string of crimes without rhyme or reason hit the city, sightings of the lawbreaker emerged. Though the young woman's origins were a mystery, some saw traces of Piltover hextech in her firearms, while others described the street fashions of Zaun in her dress. Because her arrival always brought trouble with it, those who crossed her path soon gave her a name: Jinx. Jinx's rampage escalated. Caitlyn - the sheriff of Piltover - responded by declaring a state of emergency and organizing a city-wide manhunt. In typical Jinx fashion, the criminal marked the Piltover treasury, the city's most secure building, with a direct challenge to its most abrasive officer. With a caricature of Vi's face splashed across the treasury's facade, and with a time and date of her supposed raid, Jinx was openly daring the enforcer to stop her from robbing it. Determined to put the troublemaker behind bars, Vi watched and waited outside the treasury until Jinx's time had finally come. True to her scrawled promise, the smiling menace showed her face. Knowing this was her chance to capture the outlaw, Vi gave chase into the building's interior. She smashed through wall after wall to chase down Jinx, who giggled as she lit up the evacuated treasury with fiery explosions. Vi finally cornered the criminal inside the vault, but Jinx wasn't done just yet. With a maniacal laugh, she fired a barrage of rockets, bringing the entire building down upon them both. When Vi finally crawled out of the ruins, the battered enforcer found no trace of Jinx. Adding insult to injury, not a single ounce of gold had been taken from the ruined vault. Instead, the criminal left a parting message to her favorite officer of the law - a challenge only now visible through the gaping opening in Piltover's skyline. The lights of the city spelled out a simple taunt: you'll never catch me. As Vi read the message, she heard the distant laughter of her new nemesis, and the city plunged into utter darkness for the very first time. [spotlight_embed_url] => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN3OYwP8nHE [role] => Marksman [defense_rating] => 2 [magic_rating] => 4 [attack_rating] => 9 [difficulty_rating] => 6 [damage_rating] => 3 [mobility_rating] => 1 [cc_rating] => 2 [toughness_rating] => 1 [utility_rating] => 1 [health] => 518 [health_increase] => 0 [mana] => 246 [mana_increase] => 0 [movement_speed] => 325 [armor] => 22.9 [armor_increase] => 0 [magic_resistance] => 30 [magic_resistance_increase] => 0 [attack_damage] => 58.5 [attack_damage_increase] => 0 [critical_strike] => 0 [critical_strike_increase] => 0 [health_regeneration] => 5.8 [health_regeneration_increase] => 0 [mana_regeneration] => 6.7 [mana_regeneration_increase] => 0 [attack_range] => 525 [attack_speed] => 0.625 [ability_power] => 0 [ability_power_18] => 0 [attack_speed_18] => 0.738 [health_18] => 1912 [mana_18] => 1011 [movement_speed_18] => 325 [armor_18] => 82.4 [magic_resistance_18] => 38.5 [attack_damage_18] => 99.4 [critical_strike_18] => 0 [health_regeneration_18] => 14.3 [mana_regeneration_18] => 23.7 [attack_range_18] => 525 [tip_playing_as] => *Rockets aren't always the best choice! Jinx's minigun is incredibly powerful when fully ramped up. Switch to it whenever an enemy champion gets too close. *Jinx's rockets deal full damage to all enemies in the explosion. Use them on minions in lane to hit nearby enemy champions without drawing minion aggro. *When a fight starts, try to stay on the edge of fray by poking with rockets and Zap!. Do not run in and unload with the minigun until you feel it is safe. [tip_playing_against] => *Jinx's minigun takes time to ramp up. If you see her poking with rockets, try to jump on her and burst her down. *Jinx's ultimate does less damage the closer you are to her. *Jinx's snare grenades have a long cooldown and are her primary means of protecting herself. If she misses with them she will have a hard time escaping if engaged upon. [client_id] => 222 [riot_points] => 975 [influence_points] => 6300 [icon] => [is_published] => 1 [is_deprecated] => 0 [is_deleted] => 0 [is_buildable] => 1 [is_free] => 0 [views] => 0 [view_count] => 5363909 [comments] => 0 [comment_count] => 12 [votes] => 0 [vote_count] => 0 [community_tier_list_vote_count] => 589 [community_tier_list_score] => 0.425806 [community_tier_list_rank] => 2 [score] => 0 [lastpost_ts] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00 [last_comment_ts] => 2017-08-01 14:14:24 [critical_strike_chance] => 0 [critical_strike_chance_18] => 0 [preferred_skin] => 687 [create_ts] => 2013-10-10 00:00:00 ) ) [7] => Array ( [champion_id] => 122 [rank] => 2 [description] => Do not let her stack more than 4 or 5 Rend stacks on you and you should be good to all in. Avoid trading 2v2 and just try to auto trade with her [champion] => Array ( [champion_id] => 122 [display_name] => Kalista [url_str] => kalista [title] => The Spear of Vengeance [key] => [description] => Kalista is an eternal spirit of retribution, who possesses a cold-burning hatred for all betrayers, deceivers, and traitors. In life, she was a legendary warrior, but while trying to avert tragedy she was betrayed and slain by those she trusted most. Now, she is an undying entity that can be invoked to exact vengeance, but only at great cost: the supplicant’s soul becomes forfeit, bound to her for eternity. [spotlight_embed_url] => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCR-tMpKtt8 [role] => Marksman [defense_rating] => 2 [magic_rating] => 4 [attack_rating] => 8 [difficulty_rating] => 7 [damage_rating] => 3 [mobility_rating] => 3 [cc_rating] => 1 [toughness_rating] => 1 [utility_rating] => 2 [health] => 518 [health_increase] => 0 [mana] => 232 [mana_increase] => 0 [movement_speed] => 325 [armor] => 19 [armor_increase] => 0 [magic_resistance] => 30 [magic_resistance_increase] => 0 [attack_damage] => 63 [attack_damage_increase] => 0 [critical_strike] => 0 [critical_strike_increase] => 0 [health_regeneration] => 6 [health_regeneration_increase] => 0 [mana_regeneration] => 6.3 [mana_regeneration_increase] => 0 [attack_range] => 525 [attack_speed] => 0.644 [ability_power] => 0 [ability_power_18] => 0 [attack_speed_18] => 0.918 [health_18] => 1929 [mana_18] => 827 [movement_speed_18] => 325 [armor_18] => 78.5 [magic_resistance_18] => 38.5 [attack_damage_18] => 112.3 [critical_strike_18] => 0 [health_regeneration_18] => 15.4 [mana_regeneration_18] => 13.1 [attack_range_18] => 525 [tip_playing_as] => *Rend is a valuable last hitting aid, since its cooldown resets if it kills a target. *Entering a move order once to trigger Martial Poise will not clear Kalista's basic attack target. Due to her passive, Kalista's Movement Speed is effectively increased by Attack Speed. [tip_playing_against] => *Kalista's mobility is dependent upon attacking. This means it is low when she is outside of her attack range and that Attack Speed slows reduce the amount of distance she can cover in an engagement. *Kalista cannot cancel her basic attack wind up. While she is very mobile, this offers a window to land spells on her if you anticipate when she will begin attacking. [client_id] => 429 [riot_points] => 975 [influence_points] => 6300 [icon] => [is_published] => 1 [is_deprecated] => 0 [is_deleted] => 0 [is_buildable] => 1 [is_free] => 1 [views] => 0 [view_count] => 4695906 [comments] => 0 [comment_count] => 0 [votes] => 0 [vote_count] => 0 [community_tier_list_vote_count] => 501 [community_tier_list_score] => 0.521357 [community_tier_list_rank] => 3 [score] => 0 [lastpost_ts] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00 [last_comment_ts] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00 [critical_strike_chance] => 0 [critical_strike_chance_18] => 0 [preferred_skin] => 676 [create_ts] => 2014-11-20 00:00:00 ) ) [8] => Array ( [champion_id] => 127 [rank] => 4 [description] => All in, don't let her proc her mounting dread. [champion] => Array ( [champion_id] => 127 [display_name] => Kindred [url_str] => kindred [title] => The Eternal Hunters [key] => [description] => "Tell me again, little Lamb, which things are ours to take?" "All things, Dear Wolf." Separate, but never parted, Kindred represents the twin essences of death. Lamb's arrow offers a swift release for those who accept their fate. Wolf hunts down those who run from their end, delivering violent finality within his crushing jaws. Though interpretations of Kindred's nature vary across Runeterra, every mortal must choose the true face of their death. [spotlight_embed_url] => https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Pwn7G-eLE [role] => Marksman [defense_rating] => 2 [magic_rating] => 2 [attack_rating] => 8 [difficulty_rating] => 4 [damage_rating] => 3 [mobility_rating] => 3 [cc_rating] => 2 [toughness_rating] => 1 [utility_rating] => 2 [health] => 540 [health_increase] => 0 [mana] => 595 [mana_increase] => 0 [movement_speed] => 325 [armor] => 20 [armor_increase] => 0 [magic_resistance] => 30 [magic_resistance_increase] => 0 [attack_damage] => 57.4 [attack_damage_increase] => 0 [critical_strike] => 0 [critical_strike_increase] => 0 [health_regeneration] => 7 [health_regeneration_increase] => 0 [mana_regeneration] => 6.97 [mana_regeneration_increase] => 0 [attack_range] => 500 [attack_speed] => 0.625 [ability_power] => 0 [ability_power_18] => 0 [attack_speed_18] => 0.891 [health_18] => 1985 [mana_18] => 895 [movement_speed_18] => 325 [armor_18] => 79.5 [magic_resistance_18] => 38.5 [attack_damage_18] => 95.8 [critical_strike_18] => 0 [health_regeneration_18] => 16.4 [mana_regeneration_18] => 13.77 [attack_range_18] => 500 [tip_playing_as] => * Moving around between attacks while jungling will help you avoid damage and also generate more heals from Wolf's Frenzy. * Pick which Hunts you want to pursue carefully; getting many of them is the key to success as the game goes on. * Don't go in first to a large team fight. Wait for your teammates to initiate. [tip_playing_against] => * Kindred is fragile - turn the pressure up on her, and she will be forced to play cautiously. * Clear the Hunts Wolf activates on jungle camps to slow down Kindred's damage output. * When Kindred uses Lamb's Respite get inside, it stops all champions from dying. [client_id] => 203 [riot_points] => 975 [influence_points] => 6300 [icon] => [is_published] => 1 [is_deprecated] => 0 [is_deleted] => 0 [is_buildable] => 1 [is_free] => 0 [views] => 0 [view_count] => 4784446 [comments] => 0 [comment_count] => 7 [votes] => 0 [vote_count] => 0 [community_tier_list_vote_count] => 490 [community_tier_list_score] => 0.579184 [community_tier_list_rank] => 3 [score] => 0 [lastpost_ts] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00 [last_comment_ts] => 2018-02-14 05:35:22 [critical_strike_chance] => 0 [critical_strike_chance_18] => 0 [preferred_skin] => 772 [create_ts] => 2015-10-14 00:00:00 ) ) [9] => Array ( [champion_id] => 54 [rank] => 5 [description] => Trade when his Bio-Arcane Barrage is on cooldown and pressure him heavily if he overextends. [champion] => Array ( [champion_id] => 54 [display_name] => Kog'Maw [url_str] => kogmaw [title] => The Mouth of the Abyss [key] => [description] => When the prophet Malzahar was reborn in Icathia, he was led there by an ominous voice which thereafter anchored itself to his psyche. From within, this voice bestowed upon him terrible purpose, and though Malzahar was no longer tormented by its call, the voice did not cease its unrelenting summons. This baleful beacon's gentle flicker -- now fastened to Runeterra -- drew forth a putrid beast that ambled across a threshold it did not understand, widening a fissure between the spaces which were never meant to meet. There amongst the haunting ruins of Icathia, Kog'Maw manifested in Valoran with unsettling curiosity. The spark which led him to Runeterra teased him still, urging him gently towards Malzahar. It also encouraged him to familiarize himself with his new environment, to the stark horror of everything he encountered on his journey. The enchanting colors and aromas of Runeterra intoxicated Kog'Maw, and he explored the fruits of the strange world the only way he knew how: by devouring them. At first he sampled only the wild flora and fauna he happened across. As he traversed the parched Tempest Flats, however, he came upon a tribe of nomads. Seemingly unhampered by conventional rules of physics, Kog'Maw consumed every nomad and any obstacles they put in his way, amounting to many times his own mass and volume. The most composed of his victims may have had time to wonder if this was due to the caustic enzymes which stung the ground as they dripped from his gaping mouth, although such musings were abruptly concluded. When his wake of catastrophe reached the Institute of War, and enthusiastic Malzahar greeted him with an enticing prospect: taste the best Runeterra could offer...on the Fields of Justice. 'If that's just hungry, I don't want to see angry.' --Tryndamere, the Barbarian King [spotlight_embed_url] => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uZ1ltl-qPM [role] => Marksman [defense_rating] => 2 [magic_rating] => 5 [attack_rating] => 8 [difficulty_rating] => 6 [damage_rating] => 3 [mobility_rating] => 1 [cc_rating] => 1 [toughness_rating] => 1 [utility_rating] => 1 [health] => 517 [health_increase] => 0 [mana] => 322 [mana_increase] => 0 [movement_speed] => 330 [armor] => 19.9 [armor_increase] => 0 [magic_resistance] => 30 [magic_resistance_increase] => 0 [attack_damage] => 57.5 [attack_damage_increase] => 0 [critical_strike] => 0 [critical_strike_increase] => 0 [health_regeneration] => 5.9 [health_regeneration_increase] => 0 [mana_regeneration] => 8.7 [mana_regeneration_increase] => 0 [attack_range] => 500 [attack_speed] => 0.665 [ability_power] => 0 [ability_power_18] => 0 [attack_speed_18] => 0.965 [health_18] => 1911 [mana_18] => 1002 [movement_speed_18] => 330 [armor_18] => 79.4 [magic_resistance_18] => 38.5 [attack_damage_18] => 98.4 [critical_strike_18] => 0 [health_regeneration_18] => 15.3 [mana_regeneration_18] => 20.6 [attack_range_18] => 500 [tip_playing_as] => [tip_playing_against] => [client_id] => 96 [riot_points] => 880 [influence_points] => 4800 [icon] => [is_published] => 1 [is_deprecated] => 0 [is_deleted] => 0 [is_buildable] => 1 [is_free] => 0 [views] => 16997 [view_count] => 4903039 [comments] => 3 [comment_count] => 9 [votes] => 10 [vote_count] => 17 [community_tier_list_vote_count] => 529 [community_tier_list_score] => 0.455955 [community_tier_list_rank] => 2 [score] => 17 [lastpost_ts] => 2011-03-02 20:10:04 [last_comment_ts] => 2012-10-12 06:16:48 [critical_strike_chance] => 0 [critical_strike_chance_18] => 0 [preferred_skin] => 220 [create_ts] => 2010-06-24 00:00:00 ) ) [10] => Array ( [champion_id] => 115 [rank] => 2 [description] => One of the hardest lanes. Avoid standing in minion line to dodge Piercing Light. Be very careful of going aggressive at level 6. The culling will kill you. [champion] => Array ( [champion_id] => 115 [display_name] => Lucian [url_str] => lucian [title] => the Purifier [key] => [description] => Lucian wields relic weapons imbued with ancient power and stands a stalwart guardian against the undead. His cold conviction never wavers, even in the face of the maddening horrors he destroys beneath his hail of purifying fire. Lucian walks alone on a grim mission: to purge the spirits of those ensnared in undeath, his eternal beloved among them. Like the twin relic weapons they wielded, Lucian and his wife Senna were carved from the same stone. Together they battled evil in Runeterra for years, bringing light to darkness and purging those taken by corruption. They were beacons of righteousness: Senna’s dedication to their cause never faltered, while Lucian’s kindness and warmth touched the hearts of the many lives they saved. Two parts of one whole, they were devoted and inseparable. Though Lucian and Senna witnessed terror that would break most warriors, nothing they had seen compared to the horrors wrought by the Shadow Isles. When the spectral denizens of that accursed place began to manifest across Runeterra, Lucian and Senna hunted them down wherever they appeared. It was grim work, but the fearless pair prevailed until one tragic encounter with the soul-collector Thresh. Lucian and Senna had faced such nightmarish undead before, but never one so deviously clever and cruel. As the terrible battle unfolded, Thresh sprung an unexpected ploy. To Lucian's horror, the creature tricked Senna and ensnared her soul, trapping her in a spectral prison. Nothing could bring her back. Senna was lost, and for the first time, Lucian faced his mission alone. Though the Warden had taken half of Lucian's heart, he had also created the Shadow Isles' most dangerous foe. Lucian became a man of dark determination, one who would stop at nothing to purge the undead from the face of Runeterra. In honor of Senna's memory, he took up her fallen weapon and vowed to see their mission through to the end. Now wielding both relic weapons, Lucian fights to slay the undead and cleanse the souls of the Shadow Isles. He knows that Senna’s soul is lost, but never loses hope that one day he will bring her peace. "Be grateful. By slaying you now, I spare you an eternity of torment." – Lucian [spotlight_embed_url] => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rIiuLXXGEg [role] => Marksman [defense_rating] => 5 [magic_rating] => 3 [attack_rating] => 8 [difficulty_rating] => 6 [damage_rating] => 3 [mobility_rating] => 3 [cc_rating] => 1 [toughness_rating] => 1 [utility_rating] => 1 [health] => 554 [health_increase] => 0 [mana] => 349 [mana_increase] => 0 [movement_speed] => 335 [armor] => 24 [armor_increase] => 0 [magic_resistance] => 30 [magic_resistance_increase] => 0 [attack_damage] => 57.4 [attack_damage_increase] => 0 [critical_strike] => 0 [critical_strike_increase] => 0 [health_regeneration] => 6.2 [health_regeneration_increase] => 0 [mana_regeneration] => 8.2 [mana_regeneration_increase] => 0 [attack_range] => 500 [attack_speed] => 0.638 [ability_power] => 0 [ability_power_18] => 0 [attack_speed_18] => 0.996 [health_18] => 1914 [mana_18] => 995 [movement_speed_18] => 335 [armor_18] => 75 [magic_resistance_18] => 38.5 [attack_damage_18] => 98.4 [critical_strike_18] => 0 [health_regeneration_18] => 17.2 [mana_regeneration_18] => 20.1 [attack_range_18] => 500 [tip_playing_as] => * For optimal burst, try to combine Relentless Pursuit into Piercing Light. * Ardent Blaze actually explodes in a star pattern. Try to line it up so the spokes hit enemy champions. * Once you have chosen an angle for The Culling, you cannot change it. Pick your moment well! * Because of Lightslinger, Lucian benefits more from Attack Damage than he does from Attack Speed. [tip_playing_against] => * Lucian has strong burst, but little sustained damage. * Lucian cannot change the aim of The Culling. Take advantage of this by avoiding the angle of the bullets. * Piercing Light does not give Lucian extra Attack Range. He still needs to find a target in range to line up his shot. Avoid Piercing Light by anticipating the angle Lucian will choose. [client_id] => 236 [riot_points] => 975 [influence_points] => 6300 [icon] => [is_published] => 1 [is_deprecated] => 0 [is_deleted] => 0 [is_buildable] => 1 [is_free] => 0 [views] => 0 [view_count] => 5579677 [comments] => 0 [comment_count] => 18 [votes] => 0 [vote_count] => 0 [community_tier_list_vote_count] => 630 [community_tier_list_score] => 0.404444 [community_tier_list_rank] => 2 [score] => 0 [lastpost_ts] => 0000-00-00 00:00:00 [last_comment_ts] => 2014-06-17 12:57:56 [critical_strike_chance] => 0 [critical_strike_chance_18] => 0 [preferred_skin] => 596 [create_ts] => 2013-08-22 00:00:00 ) ) [11] => Array ( [champion_id] => 59 [rank] => 4 [description] => Pretty simple matchup. Avoid being behind low health minions to dodge Double up damage and Stand Aside her Bullet Time. [champion] => Array ( [champion_id] => 59 [display_name] => Miss Fortune [url_str] => miss-fortune [title] => The Bounty Hunter [key] => [description] => For those who brave the harsh seas of Runeterra, attaining one's own ship and crew is the pinnacle of success. Sarah Fortune, a well-respected (some would say legendary) bounty hunter from Bilgewater, was able to achieve this feat just after her sixteenth birthday, etching out her name as the go-to gal for resolving special troubles. No bounty was too difficult or too dangerous for her feminine charm and her renowned use of her twin pistols, ''Shock and Awe''. Her success gave her the means to legitimately purchase her own ship... with a little flirtatious haggling, of course. Things weren't always so fortunate for Miss Fortune, though. When she was young, trade ships began to dot the horizon of her quiet home in the northern shores of Blue Flame Island's largest chunk. Trade routes brought piracy, and the inhabitants soon found themselves caught in a frenzy of pillage. One day, Young Sarah returned home to hear gunshots and screaming. Her front door was smashed open; inside, she saw her mother lying in a pool of blood. A sudden blow to her head made her collapse next to her slain mother. The last thing she could remember were her attacker's red eyes, as his face was blocked by a rogue's bandana. Miss Fortune has a strong distrust for pirates and she finds herself constantly bickering with the infamous Gangplank (the only captain to resist her charms) over the direction of Bilgewater politics. Her two goals: to unite the people of Bilgewater, making them into a strong and independent society, and to find the pirate who killed her mother. To that end, she has entered the league of legends as a champion, trading her skills for the wealth and influence that will help her accomplish both. [spotlight_embed_url] => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZh_hN-62YA [role] => Marksman [defense_rating] => 2 [magic_rating] => 5 [attack_rating] => 8 [difficulty_rating] => 1 [damage_rating] => 3 [mobility_rating] => 1 [cc_rating] => 1 [toughness_rating] => 1 [utility_rating] => 1 [health] => 530 [health_increase] => 0 [mana] => 326 [mana_increase] => 0 [movement_speed] => 325 [armor] => 24 [armor_increase] => 0 [magic_resistance] => 30 [magic_resistance_increase] => 0 [attack_damage] => 46 [attack_damage_increase] => 0 [critical_strike] => 0 [critical_strike_increase] => 0 [health_regeneration] => 6.2 [health_regeneration_increase] => 0 [mana_regeneration] => 8 [mana_regeneration_increase] => 0 [attack_range] => 550 [attack_speed] => 0.658 [ability_power] => 0 [ability_power_18] => 0 [attack_speed_18] => 0.995 [health_18] => 1975 [mana_18] => 921 [movement_speed_18] => 325 [armor_18] => 75 [magic_resistance_18] => 38.5 [attack_damage_18] => 63 [critical_strike_18] => 0 [health_regeneration_18] => 17.2 [mana_regeneration_18] => 19.1 [attack_range_18] => 550 [tip_playing_as] => * Miss Fortune ramps up speed if she isn't attacked by an enemy target. Avoid getting hit to move very fast. * Use Double Up on the furthest enemy minion if enemy champions are hiding in back; it will bounce to them for lots of damage. * Double Up applies On-Hit effects, making items like Frozen Mallet and Bloodthirster very effective. [tip_playing_against] => * Miss Fortune's speed boost is removed if she is damaged or debuffed by an enemy. * Miss Fortune is easy to kill if you can reach her; target her first in team fights. [client_id] => 21 [riot_points] => 790 [influence_points] => 3150 [icon] => [is_published] => 1 [is_deprecated] => 0 [is_deleted] => 0 [is_buildable] => 1 [is_free] => 0 [views] => 2301 [view_count] => 7155370 [comments] => 2 [comment_count] => 16 [votes] => 0 [vote_count] => 8 [community_tier_list_vote_count] => 640 [community_tier_list_score] => 0.40625 [community_tier_list_rank] => 2 [score] => 8 [lastpost_ts] => 2011-04-16 21:07:54 [last_comment_ts] => 2017-12-31 10:10:18 [critical_strike_chance] => 0 [critical_strike_chance_18] => 0 [preferred_skin] => 648 [create_ts] => 2010-09-08 00:00:00 ) ) [12] => Array ( [champion_id] => 111 [rank] => 3 [description] => All in her when her blind is down. [champion] => Array ( [champion_id] => 111 [display_name] => Quinn [url_str] => quinn [title] => Demacia's Wings [key] => [description] => Quinn and Valor are an elite ranger team. With crossbow and claw, they undertake their nation's most dangerous missions deep within enemy territory, from swift reconnaissance to lethal strikes. The pair’s unbreakable bond is deadly on the battlefield, leaving opponents blind and riddled with arrows long before they realize who they're fighting: not one, but two Demacian legends. As a young girl, Quinn shared a hunger for adventure with her twin brother. They dreamed of becoming knights, but lived a quiet, humble life in the rural borderlands of Demacia. Together they imagined triumphant battles in faraway lands, seizing glory for their king and slaying foes in the name of Demacian justice. When daydreams alone could no longer satisfy their warriors’ souls, they embarked on daring wilderness adventures in search of true danger. One such quest turned |
China’s online shopping platforms after the news broke last week, state media reported.
Demographer Lu Jiehua of Peking University warned that many of the women rushing to take advantage of the policy shift would be those born in the 1970s, potentially involving greater health risks for mothers and babies.
For Gao, the balance had shifted. Her parents could become sick at any time, and she thought she lacked the energy to look after and educate another young child, she said.
Then there was the stigma of being an older mother, and a fear that she would spoil the child.
Gao said she didn’t go into all of this with her mother. To avoid an argument, she simply said she was too old to have another baby.
The following day, she said, her phone was full of information about the change in government policy.
“It was more stressful than ever,” she said. “Everyone was talking about having a second child. It felt like a time bomb. I felt I had betrayed my mother’s wishes. I was scared I might regret it one day.”
So Gao sat down and wrote her future self a journal titled “Why I don’t want a second child.”
“If one day my only child leaves me, and I am all alone, I will read the journal, and I will understand why I didn’t have a second child, and it will stop me suffering from regret,” she said.
“My tears fell when I was writing. The feeling was complicated and bitter.”
Xu Jing contributed to this report.
Read more:
The human suffering caused by China’s one-child policy
See where women outnumber men in the world (and why)
Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the worldIn order to qualify for this position, your resume must provide sufficient experience and/or education, knowledge, skills, and abilities, to perform the duties of the specific position for which you are being considered. Your resume is the key means we have for evaluating your skills, knowledge, and abilities, as they relate to this position. Therefore, we encourage you to be clear and specific when describing your experience.
Your resume must demonstrate at least one year of specialized experience at or equivalent to the GS - 09 grade level or pay band in the Federal service or equivalent experience in the private or public sector OR possess a Ph.D. degree or have three full years of progressively higher level graduate education leading to a Ph.D. degree or equivalent doctoral degree in computer science, engineering, information science, information systems management, mathematics, operations research, statistics, or technology management or a doctoral degree that provided a minimum of 24 semester hours in one or more of the field's identified above and required the development or adaptation of applications, system or networks. Specialized experience must demonstrate the following: 1) Developing specifications to ensure compliance with system security requirements; 2) Troubleshooting and recovering systems and files to resolve customer problems; 3) Disseminating IT security tools, procedures or practices to protect information assets; and 4) Assisting with security evaluations and reviews to ensure proper levels of security are implemented. AND have IT-related experience demonstrating the following four competencies: Attention to Detail - Is thorough when performing work and conscientious about attending to detail; Customer Service - Works with clients and customers (that is, any individuals who use or receive the services or products that your work unit produces, including the general public, individuals who work in the agency, other agencies, or organizations outside the Government) to assess their needs, provide information or assistance, resolve their problems, or satisfy their expectations; knows about available products and services; is committed to providing quality products and services; Oral Communication - Expresses information (for example, ideas or facts) to individuals or groups effectively, taking into account the audience and nature of the information (for example, technical, sensitive, controversial); makes clear and convincing oral presentations; listens to others, attends to nonverbal cues, and responds appropriately; Problem Solving - Identifies problems; determines accuracy and relevance of information; uses sound judgment to generate and evaluate alternatives, and to make recommendations.
Additional qualification information can be found from the following Office of Personnel Management web site: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/2200/information-technology-it-management-series-2210-alternative-a/
You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer and part time experience. You must clearly identify the duties and responsibilities in each position held and the total number of hours per week. Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., professional, philanthropic, religious, spiritual, community, student, social). Volunteer work helps build critical competencies, knowledge, and skills and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment. As part of the application process, you must complete and submit an occupational questionnaire. To preview this questionnaire and determine if your experience matches the required skills for this position, click the following link: View Assessment Questions Please follow all instructions carefully. Errors or omissions may affect your rating and/or appointment eligibility.Sixty-five years after their forced dispossession, Palestinian refugees are forbidden from returning home. Issam Rimawi APA images
May and June are once again upon us, which means Palestinians are commemorating the Nakba (the catastrophe of their 1948 dispossession) and Naksa (the disaster of the 1967 War and subsequent occupation). Meanwhile Israelis celebrate the establishment of their state and the conquest of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Sinai. This inevitably leaves one to ask the banal question: “Will there be peace in our lifetime?”
In a mass email sent on 5 May, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of the pro-Israel lobby group J Street, wrote to his supporters: “I’ve just arrived in Israel with a delegation of J Street leaders on our annual fact-finding mission to the region.” He added: “It’s an energizing time to be here. After years of frustrating deadlock, talk of peace is in the air again.”
What air is he breathing?
US Secretary of State John Kerry recently told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that “the window for a two-state solution is shutting” (“Kerry: two years left to reach two-state solution in Middle East peace process,” The Guardian, 18 April 2013).
Myths and double standards
In fact, it’s been shut for decades. Kerry is merely regurgitating the old, numbing talking points. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deadlocked because of the myths and double standards that dominate the debate.
Zionists claim that Jewish people have a right to “return” to Palestine — or the Land of Israel, as they call it — because they are related to the ancient Hebrews, a tribe that lived there thousands of years ago. Yet Palestinians who lived in Palestine only 65 years ago and remember when they were forced to leave as refugees are forbidden from returning to their homes and their land.
A nation whose connection to the land is based on something that took place thousands of years ago is telling a nation that still has the keys to their homes and the deeds to their land that they must stay out.
The State of Israel was established on the ruins of Palestine, but today close to half of the population residing under Israeli control are Palestinians. Israel maintains laws that discriminate against the Palestinian portion of the population — or what it calls the non-Jewish population.
Catastrophe continues
One may wonder why Palestinians call Israel’s establishment a catastrophe, or Nakba. It might be hard to grasp how this historic marvel, the revival of the Jewish state, could be called a catastrophe. However, a closer look will show that characterizing the war of 1948 as catastrophic is not only justified, it involves understating what happened.
The war of 1948 was an act of terrorism initiated by Zionist militias that ended up in the destruction of Palestine and the forced displacement of its people. What makes it even worse is that the catastrophe did not just take place in 1948. It began in 1948 and has been going on ever since.
The catastrophe continues with thousands of Palestinians in jail, 1.6 million living under siege in Gaza, another 1.5 million living as second-class citizens in Israel, close to three million in the West Bank living at the mercy of the Israeli army, which knows little mercy, and approximately seven million Palestinians living as refugees outside of Palestine who are not permitted to return to their homes.
This May and June, it is time to reflect on the reality in which Palestinians are forced to live, and separate it from the virtual reality that Israel and its supporters try to paint. Perhaps this year it is time to assert in clear terms that supporting an exclusivist and discriminatory Jewish state means supporting a state that violates the most basic human and civil rights of millions of Palestinians, including the right to life itself.
If peace is indeed in the air then one would hope that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the refugee camps and in Israeli jails are also breathing it. If so, they can leave their cells and their makeshift homes, close the camps, open the prisons and return home, to Palestine. It also means that a bi-national democracy that respects and represents the rights of all people is on its way.
Miko Peled is an Israeli writer and activist living in California. He is the author of The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.This is HUGE.
It may not look like much, but if you’re involved in music production, recording, mixing or mastering, this image could be the most important thing you’ll see all year.
What is it?
It’s the loudness output of a YouTube playlist, as measured by the MeterPlugs LCast loudness meter.
So what?
First – it’s quiet. The loudness levels are all quite low, especially by modern “loudness war” standards.
Second – it’s very consistent. More importantly than the low loudness, they’re almost all playing at the same loudness.
What does this mean?
It means that YouTube have been using loudness normalisation on their music videos – and they’ve been doing it since December 2015. Louder songs are turned down to stop us being “blasted” by changes in level, and as a result almost everything plays at a similar loudness, regardless of how it was mastered.
Hear it for yourself – this playlist is composed almost entirely of current releases, with a wide variety of loudness on CD – and some of them are REALLY loud:
So for example, at the more dynamic end of the spectrum, Mark Ronson & Bruno Mars’ massive hit “Uptown Funk” measures(Min PSR 8 as measured with my Dynameter plugin) from CD. Whereas “Love Me Like You Do” by Ellie Goulding is squashed up to(Min PSR 5) on CD, and later in the playlist, Madonna’s “Living For Love” clocks in at an eye-watering (and heavily distorted)(Min PSR 4!)
But on YouTube, all of these songs are being played back at a similar loudness of roughly -13 LUFS.
And that’s HUGE, because YouTube is the single largest online discovery source for music. More people are looking for music on YouTube than on Apple Music, TV or radio, or anywhere.
This is where they hear new music for the first time, decide if they like it, and whether to share it with their friends.
And YouTube just took “loudness” out of the equation.
Dynamic is the new Loud
It’s now irrelevant how high the mastering levels of your music are – as I’ve shown before, on on Spotify, Pandora and now on YouTube, we have no control about how loud people hear it – just as it’s always been on FM radio.
In fact, heavily crushed, distorted “loudness war casualties” will often sound worse than more dynamic releases.
And if you ever wanted proof that the extra dynamics in “Uptown Funk” are a crucial part of it’s success, press Play above and see which song it is that gets your head nodding and foot tapping first…
When music is loudness normalised, “loudness war” mixing and mastering sounds worse – and music with balanced dynamics sounds better.
This is the final nail in the coffin. The loudness war really is over – the only remaining question is, how long will it take for people take to notice, and start releasing music with great dynamics again?
But we still haven’t heard the whole story, yet.
The plot is actually thicker…
This is such an important issue, I’ve glossed over a few interesting details in this post – and a big problem with YouTube’s loudness control.
The main point – YouTube is using loudness normalisation – still stands. But if you’ve been thinking “Why are some of songs in that graph quieter or louder that -13 LUFS?” – you’ve asked a good question.
If you’re wondering “How have YouTube implemented this?” – you deserve a straight answer.
And if you’ve spotted the big problem with the way it works, you know it needs to be discussed.
And I address all those points, and more, in my next post:
YouTube loudness normalisation – The Good, The Questions and The Problem
Meanwhile if you want to optimise the dynamics of your music for maximum impact and ensure competitive playback levels online, you might like to check out the plugin I developed with MeterPlugs. It’s called Dynameter, and it’s designed to help you do exactly that. For more info, click here.New Ratings Help Buyers Scan TV Energy Use
Enlarge this image toggle caption Kirk Radish/NPR Kirk Radish/NPR
Flat screen televisions deliver dazzling pictures, but they also consume huge amounts of electricity. Some big TV sets can use more electricity than a refrigerator, even ones that meet the government's newly revised "Energy Star" efficiency standard.
If you're shopping for a new dishwasher, you can read that yellow "energy guide" label to figure out how much electricity it'll consume. No such luck if you're shopping for a new wide-screen TV. While certain TVs do have the Energy Star efficiency sticker, some experts say even that has been misleading.
"Energy Star was woefully behind on TVs. In order to earn the Energy Star label, it only dealt with how much power did the TV consume when it was off," says Noah Horowitz of the Natural Resource Defense Council.
New Energy Star Ratings
Now, for the first time, the Energy Star ratings measure the power that TVs use while they're actually on. But an Energy Star listing alone doesn't mean the TV uses less power. It only indicates that the TV is relatively efficient — within its class.
For example, when measured with a wattmeter, the high-end Pioneer Elite, a 50-inch plasma TV, idles at about 390 watts. That's like turning on 30 compact fluorescent light bulbs all at once. And if you assume that the set will be on for five hours a day, the set consumes a lot more electricity than a typical refrigerator. When the TV is in a slightly dimmer, energy-saving mode, it only uses 300 watts, which matches its Energy Star listing.
Still, your friendly neighborhood coal-burning power plant would emit a half-ton of carbon dioxide every year to keep this one TV on for five hours a day — and that's in energy-saving mode.
For comparison, the 32-inch LCD in its brightest setting pulled about 115 watts. That's the equivalent of about two incandescent light bulbs or nine or 10 compact fluorescent lights.
In part, this TV consumes less because it is smaller, but it also has an LCD screen — technology that is typically more efficient than a plasma screen, like the first set tested.
That's encouraging news to Horowitz, who has been documenting a discouraging trend about TVs. He says not only are people buying bigger and bigger TVs, but also the TVs are using more power, and people are watching more than ever.
"It's almost like we've been dealt a losing trifecta ticket there. If all new TVs are made more efficiently, we can easily cut our nation's electric bill by more than a billion dollars, and in terms of environment, we can help prevent more than a million tons of CO2 per year," Horowitz says.
Power-Hungry TV Trappings
In many homes, the TV comes with a series of accoutrements, Horowitz says. For example, TiVo, in order to function properly, must be left on all day and night.
"It's a great product, but it's a disaster from an energy-efficiency point of view," Horowitz says. "It uses as much energy as a new dishwasher."
Another big drain on energy is video-game consoles. They are like "souped-up computers" and draw about a 100 watts, Horowitz says.
"Many people leave those on 24 hours a day. They'll turn off their TV but forget to hit the on/off button on the game console," he says. "If you leave that thing on all the time, you'll spend about $100 a year in electricity."
The new Energy Star rating system is the first step toward helping consumers make smarter choices about the TVs they buy, Horowitz says. But he's still waiting for the government to follow through on a new law that requires yellow Energy Guide stickers on every set, so people can easily compare when they shop. He says those yellow stickers are caught up in red tape at the U.S. Department of Energy.The Sounds of Realism in 'Master and Commander' Historical Film Strives for Sonic Authenticity in Recreating Naval Life
Hear Neal Conan's 1995 Interview with Patrick O'Brian Only Available in Archive Formats. Real Media
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The Sounds of Battle To recreate the sounds of naval warfare, King blended several sound effects. Listen to the component elements and the final mix:
Rounding Cape Horn 'Master and Commander' hero Capt. Jack Aubrey chases his foes across the storm-tossed Cape Horn. Listen to the sound effects involved:
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World sails into movie theaters Friday. Like the Patrick O'Brian books on which it is based, the film strives to recreate naval life during the Napoleonic era as authentically as possible, paying close attention to everything from uniforms, flags, ships and armaments, to perhaps the most challenging element: the sound of it all.
To create a rich sonic world of naval warfare and high seas chases, sound designer Richard King and director Peter Weir spent months in a silent pursuit: reading O'Brian's novels for inspiration. The late author penned 20 historical adventures centered around Captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon and naturalist Stephen Maturin. King says none of the sound effects in the film, which stars Russell Crowe, were prepackaged.
NPR's Michele Norris talks with King.Happy Memorial Day! But if you’re in Wisconsin, and relying on food stamps, remember that Republicans don’t want you to have ketchup on your hamburger. They’d probably rather you didn’t have a hamburger at all, but Wisconsin farmers and ranchers have clout, and so proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program made room for Wisconsin products. But they still don’t want you to have "crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish." Or ketchup. Or spaghetti sauce. Really.
For now, that’s all grandstanding. SNAP is a federal program, and the Obama administration hasn’t allowed states to restrict food purchases that way. But that hasn’t stopped GOP legislators from trying. Maine and Missouri want to ban SNAP “junk food” purchases. Wisconsin and 16 other states are also trying to drug test recipients.
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And Wisconsin has nothing on Brownbackistan, I mean Kansas. The state has already outlawed the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program debit cards at a range of businesses, including movie theaters, college sports games (?) and cruise ships. (There goes the welfare cruise ship business!) Kansas TANF recipients also are unable to withdraw more than $25 a day from their accounts. That means to withdraw $100, they’ll pay five bank fees (since ATMs only dispense $20s). Banks win, the poor lose.
All this is happening against the backdrop of GOP policy failure. We’ve had a 30-plus year experiment in Republican approaches to the problems of poverty and declining economic opportunity – and it’s turned out abysmally. Ronald Reagan convinced a lot of people that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” so Democrats came together with Republicans and slashed the largest welfare program for families with children, first in the states, then federally. Bill Clinton signed the federal bill into law, thinking he could get the issue of the lazy poor behind him, and then concentrate on the supports low-wage workers might need to climb.
Of course, Clinton never completed that part of his agenda; he got distracted by the GOP witch hunt known as impeachment. Republicans still didn’t want to make friends even after Clinton gave them punitive welfare reform; go figure.
Then George W. Bush became president, and we got a lesson in the way tax cuts create jobs – as in, they don’t. In eight years of the Clinton administration, which raised top tax rates, 23 million jobs were created, compared with 3 million in the eight low-tax Bush years.
It might be time to try a whole new approach to fighting poverty – raising the minimum wage; strengthening workers’ ability to bargain; investing in infrastructure to shore up our roads, bridges and rail system but also to create jobs; expanding access to college. Instead, red state GOP legislators are pushing ever crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage.
Sam Brownback’s Kansas is becoming an ever more awful dystopia. It’s an absolute laboratory for tax-cutting, welfare-slashing schemes, and it’s circling the drain economically. Scott Walker is an amateur compared to Brownback, but he’s working hard to make sure Wisconsin ties Kansas for the most dysfunctional economy.
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The Wisconsin GOP’s bogus health claims for the SNAP cuts are belied, the Huffington Post observes, by the fact that the amended law now allows the purchase of any and all dairy products, thanks to the power of the state’s dairy lobby. Theoretically, a SNAP recipient could spent the whole month’s allotment on “Dippin’ Dots,” one legislator notes. "The 'ice cream of the future' is now on the list of what’s acceptable to pay for, but a bottle of ketchup is not," he noted.
But of course this isn’t about the keeping the poor healthy; it’s about punishing them. The fact that the cuts almost certainly won’t be enacted makes them more cynical, in a way. This is how you tell the Kochs, and scared white people, that the slackers and moochers are being punished. It accomplishes nothing, but it’s good politically. That’s still the core premise of Republican politics, and it will remain so through the 2016 election, at least.Euro area export growth slowed further in Q1 (0.8% q/q after 1.0% in Q4) reflecting a slump in shipments to several major emerging markets and OPEC countries. Notably, exports to China declined significantly (-4% q/q) after having risen continuously since mid-2012. The biggest decline in export volumes in relative terms, however, continues to be recorded for shipments to Russia, which have fallen by more than 30% so far in 2015 (January-April, y/y). Because of Russia's recession and EU sanctions, lower exports to Russia is likely to subtracted about 0.25% from 2015 GDP growth in Germany, says Barclays.
The US is set to become the most important export destination for German firms this year as export volumes to the US are on track to exceed those to France (Germany's main trading partner for many decades). Exports to other euro area countries are recovering gradually, but their relative share, at about 35%, remains far below the early-2000 level (about 45%). The latest trade and factory order figures indicate a rebound of export growth in Q2 and a robust performance in H2 is expected on the back of better demand from Asia and other parts of the euro area, where gradual recovery of investment demand seems to be under way, estimates Barclays.The Story Behind this Isolated House on a Rock
The story behind this isolated house on a rock goes back to 1968. This unique house was built was almost 50 years ago on the river Drina, near Bajina Basta, a town located in western Serbia. A group of young people who enjoyed exploring the great outdoors considered that this rock located on the river Drina was the perfect spot for a shelter.
Leave it to nature lovers to put their huge dose of fantasy in action and build a very resistant house in the most unexpected place. The shelter is so well-built that even after half of century it is still standing proud. Since this isolated house is located on a river, constant floods keep testing its structure.
The house was built completely out of wood from a nearby demolished shed, which the group of young people decided to reclaim. All the wood was brought to the rock by kayak and in some cases it was thrown in the river and let to float downstream where somebody was waiting on the rock in order to catch the materials.
This isolated house is now a gem that makes all the locals proud and since it has been around for almost 50 years, it has become a place of many legends and stories, besides its primordial shelter role for nature enthusiasts caught in water while crossing the river.
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Here’s a video of the river Drina flooding up and hitting the shelter really, really hard.China Weighs Ban On Homework; Teachers, Students Argue Against
Enlarge this image toggle caption Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images
Chinese officials hope to rein in teachers who assign too much homework, as the country's Ministry of Education considers new rules that ban schools from requiring students to complete written tasks at home. Citing undue stress on students, the ministry would also limit the number of exams students take.
The goal of relieving pressure on students was also cited in July, when China's Education agency issued a ban on written homework for first and second graders during the summer vacation. Readers may recall that last autumn, French President Francois Hollande declared his wish to ban homework, as well.
Chinese officials presented a draft version of a long-term education reform plan for public comment last week. The plan calls for cutting homework, replacing it with visits to museums and libraries, and boosting "students' hands-on capabilities through handicrafts or farm work," the Xinhua state news agency reports.
The plan's goals include "raising the senior high school gross enrollment rate to 90 percent, and increasing the higher education gross enrollment rate to 40 percent," according to a press bulletin at the ministry's website.
One rule would prohibit any unified exams for students in the third grade and younger. Students in the fourth grade and above could not be required to take more than two exams per subject in each semester.
The plan would also require that "exam scores and contest awards shall not be used as criteria for school admission in the compulsory education phase."
Another proposal targets extracurricular academic classes, which many Chinese parents rely on to help their kids get ahead.
"Parents of one Shanghai second-grader said they have this year spent nearly 30,000 yuan (US$4,901) on extra classes such as English and mathematics," reports the SINA news site.
In the fight over homework, it seems the teachers may have an unlikely ally: their students.
"It's not that much work," one girl tells The Shanghaiist, in a video that some of her classmates probably hope goes unseen. "Sometimes it takes just half an hour to 40 minutes."
"It takes just 40 minutes to do the homework," another girl says. "If there's more from my mom, then it takes me just a little over an hour."
That's right — Chinese parents sometimes assign homework of their own. As another student explains, his parents require him to complete exercises that are separate from his school studies.
"My parents just bought me some workbooks," he says. "They just want me to learn better and get into a good junior high school."
The push to cut homework has also met with resistance among educators, who say it would undermine their efforts to have students retain what they learn. And teachers tell SINA that for issues like literacy, homework is crucial. Others say homework isn't the real problem.
"If homework or academic assignments are stopped, schools and parents will worry about the possible decline in enrollment rates, which remains the main assessment of education quality," elementary education director Wang Ming, of the National Education Development Research Center, tells China Daily.
"If we want to have a real impact on easing the burden, the assessment and enrollment systems, which still heavily count on examination results, should be adjusted," he says.
In June, Xinhua reported four recent instances of Chinese students killing themselves after they received poor scores on college entrance exams.
And The Shanghaiist reports that in 2011, three young girls "allegedly killed themselves over stress related to school work."
The site also notes that China's education officials have been urging cuts to homework burdens since 1988, with few positive results.In a strongly worded response, China stressed the South China Sea as one of its "core interests", putting the issue up there with Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang in terms of its importance to Beijing.
China warned its rival claimants and neighbors not to be emboldened by U.S. support - a line it has repeated ever since.
An arbitration court hearing the dispute between China and the Philippines over the South China Sea is set to hand down its ruling on in the Dutch city of The Hague on Tuesday. Legal experts expect at least some substantive findings to go against China, which has vowed to ignore the ruling.
Strength, respect
China's military, which is ramping up its presence in the South China Sea as part of a major modernisation programme, is also watching the election closely.
"Hillary is very fierce when it comes to China," a Chinese official close to the military establishment told Reuters.
While the Chinese government has been largely quiet about the U.S. election, state media has not been so restrained, with one paper even equating Trump to Hitler.
In May, China's official Xinhua news agency noted Trump's more isolationist campaign compared to Clinton's, who it described as an "old foreign policy hand" and important backer of the Asia-Pacific "pivot" that China considers a threat.
"As far as she's concerned, being tough on foreign policy is perhaps the best way to show America's so-called 'leadership'," it said in a commentary.
Laura Rosenberger, a Clinton campaign foreign policy adviser who worked with her in the State Department, told Reuters Clinton would remain tough on the South China Sea issue.
"She believes that we need to be very strong in terms of standing up to many of the actions the Chinese have taken," Rosenberger said.
"She believes in the principles of freedom of navigation in international waters, that commerce on the high seas in incredibly important to the United States, and that these are really very direct interests that we need to continue to stand up for."
Trump adviser Peter Navarro, an economist at University of California Irvine and the author of the book, "Crouching Tiger: What China's Militarism Means for the World," said a Trump presidency would lead to respect.
"The central difference between a Trump administration and the current administration or a Clinton administration is respect. The leaders of Russia, the leaders of China will respect Mr. Trump, will respect America because we will be strong economically, militarily and politically."
Unknown quantity
Trump may actually find some sympathy in China, even if he is seen as an unknown quantity.
"Who is Trump? We don't really know. We do know he hates Muslims though - and that will be well received in some circles here," said the Chinese official with ties to the military, pointing to what China views as its war on terror in its Muslim-populated far western region of Xinjiang.In an effort to end the Mifflin Street Block Party for the foreseeable future, the city of Madison will no longer permit or sanction this year’s event on May 4, police told residents at a neighborhood meeting Wednesday.
Madison Police Department will step up the strict enforcement of city ordinances started at last year’s event in an effort to end to the block party altogether, according to Ald. Mike Verveer, District 4. Police will particularly focus on violations of city alcohol, trespassing and disruptive behavior ordinances, he said.
In addition to further increasing enforcement and police presence, Larry Warman, chairperson of the Mifflin West Neighborhood Association said MPD is employing a zero-tolerance approach to house parties on Mifflin Street.
Despite seeing fewer sexual assaults and injuries, Warman said last year’s block party was still took a toll on the community.
“It was not a pretty picture last year, even with the efforts to control [the block party],” Warman said.
Officer Matthew Magolan, a member of the central district community policing team, cited a concurrent event, Revelry, as a possible alternative to the event.
“The sooner these illegal house parties are brought under control and the UW Revelry Music and Arts Festival replaces the spring student party with a safe alternative, the safer we can make our community as a whole,” Magolan said in an emailed statement to The Badger Herald.
Illegal house parties will be cited for any and all ordinance violations police find on the property, according to an MPD statement. This includes allowing underage drinking at the party and dispensing alcohol in a way that resembles a bar, the statement said. Police will also disperse any parties where they observe dangerous levels of overcrowding, the statement said.
Residents are responsible for controlling alcohol on their property and the people they allow into their home, the statement said.
This approach deviates from the previous year in that residents will no longer be able to work with police to combat disruptive behavior at house parties, Warman said. The police department had no interest reinstating the amnesty program the neighborhood association worked out with Mifflin residents last year, he said.
The number of arrests made at the block party increased from 2011 to 2012, and Verveer said it is possible with stricter enforcement May 4 could see even more.
“Not that many individuals were arrested for trespassing last year,” Verveer said. “The new crackdowns mean more this year.”
Mifflin Street will also remain open to traffic throughout the weekend, Verveer added.
Verveer added police plan extend their strict enforcement to the entire downtown area, specifically the Langdon Street neighborhood and residential area west of Park Street. He explained police are prepared for additional house parties likely to spring up outside the Mifflin neighborhood and intend to crack down on those as well.
Verveer said police have three main reasons for the decision to change their stance towards this year’s block party.
MPD views their decision to recall support for block party as the only way to control the event, Verveer said.
“[Police] see this as a natural progression from the stricter rules from last year,” Verveer said.
The views of Mayor Paul Soglin were also taken into account, with Soglin strongly believing the block party must end, Verveer said.
Verveer said Revelry was another contributing factor to the MPD decision. The festival will be the only city-sanctioned event held that day, he said.
Both Warman and Verveer declined to comment on whether these changes in MPD’s approach will have any effect on the event.
Resident Information Letter – 2013
UPDATE: Revelry’s executive committee issued a strongly worded statement early Friday morning responding to the new information about MPD’s plans for the Mifflin Street Block Party.
“We find it offensive that [Magolan] would use our festival as a scapegoat for the Madison Police Department’s decision to increase Mifflin St. enforcement on May 4th. That decision was MPD’s, and MPD’s alone,” the committee said in the statement. “This decision by the Madison Police Department is in our opinion, counterproductive to everything we have been trying to build. It is our view that Badgers should have the freedom to decide how they want to celebrate the end of the year, be it at Mifflin Street, Revelry, or none of the above.”01:19 pm - Thich Nhat Hanh : "God is a lesbian..."
Excerpt from Dharma Talk given by Thich Nhat Hanh on July 20, 1998 in Plum Village, France.
Question : "Dear Thay, I feel very well and safe here in Plum Village, but there were times in my life when I experienced discrimination, so there is one question which really interests me. What does Buddhism say about homosexuality?"
Reply: "Discrimination is something that many of us know, and there were times when we wanted to cry out for justice. You might be tempted by violent means in order for injustice to be removed. There are very many of us who are seeking non-violent means in order to remove injustice and discrimination imposed on us. Sometimes those discriminating against us act in the name of God, of the truth. We may belong to the third world, or we may belong to a particular race, we may be people of color, we may be gay or lesbian, and we have been discriminated against for thousands of years. So how to work on it, how to liberate ourselves from the suffering of being a victim of discrimination and oppression? In Christianity it is said that God created everything, including man, and there is a distinction made between the creator and the creature. The creature is something created by God. When I look at a rose, a tulip, or a chrysanthemum, I know, I see, I think, that this flower is a creation of God. Because I have been practicing as a Buddhist, I know that between the creator and the created there must be some kind of link, otherwise creation would not be possible. So the chrysanthemum can say that God is a flower, and I agree, because there must be the element "flower" in God so that the flower could become a reality. So the flower has the right to say that God is a flower.
"The white person has the right to say that God is white, and the black person also has the right to say that God is black. In fact, if you go to Africa, you’ll see that the Virgin Mary is black. If you don’t make the statue of the Virgin Mary black, it does not inspire people. Because to us the black people, "black is beautiful," so a black person has the right to say that God is black, and in fact I also believe that God is black, but God is not only black, God is also white, God is also a flower. So when a lesbian thinks of her relationship with God, if she practices deeply, she can find out that God is also a lesbian. Otherwise how could you be there? God is a lesbian, that is what I think, and God is gay also. God is no less. God is a lesbian, but |
defensive end (2) creates a lane for the H-back to turn upfield and find the weakside linebacker (3), who is not decisive enough to fill hard and prevent a big crease.
In this version of the play, the TE gets to leave the DE to the guard and gets the more enjoyable task of clearing out the force defender, the cornerback (4), which has a predictable result.
With the battle up front won, now it becomes about Gordon and the defensive backs in the open field:
Nebraska's young safety Gerry breaks down too quickly. He is abused by the blazing Gordon, who's not caught until he's covered another 20 yards or so.
Given that straightforward game plan, it's interesting that Nebraska's defenders failed to make decisive fills. They were either confused by the variety of schemes and blocking patterns Wisconsin brought or unwilling to grapple with the Badgers in a 20-degree game.
The resulting capitulation meant a big victory for the Badgers, a record-setting day for Gordon, and probably an intriguing Big Ten championship matchup against Ohio State. Will the Buckeyes play the same two-read schemes against Gordon? If so, will they see better results than did Pelini's Blackshirts?The arrival of the immense Hurricane Matthew on Haitian land early on Tuesday morning has plunged the Caribbean’s oldest nation into another period of despairing uncertainty. Haiti is ill-prepared to deal with what Matthew brings – category 4 force winds and a 190-mile outer band of powerful rains pounding the towns and villages along the southwestern coastline and extending all the way to the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s soil already holds the lives of far too many of its children taken by extreme natural disasters.
Matthew comes at an especially tense moment for Haiti. This Sunday, Haitians were meant to go to the polls to choose from 27 candidates to cast their vote for the new president of the republic. However, in the wake of Matthew the election has been postponed indefinitely. The poll was to have been a restart of a controversial first round held in October 2015 that cost millions, only to dissolve in fraudulent results and widespread national protests. This time around, the campaign had been prolonged by repeated delays and clashes between the electoral council and the candidates.
Politics and natural disasters have a way of converging to disturb the state of things in Haiti. In most recent memory the devastating 2010 earthquake that struck the capital Port-au-Prince and its environs led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, bringing unimaginable trauma. A global outpouring of support drew sympathy and attention but few lasting resources. It also came in an election year. The elections were held at a time when the country, and the world, were still coming to terms with the earthquake. The cost was significant. International assistance addressed short-term needs while repeating the same approaches that had made the scale of the disaster so expansive. In 2004, seven months after the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Tropical Storm Jeanne deposited 13 inches of water in Haiti and claimed more than 3,000 lives. And as far back as the 19th century, a massive earthquake in the north of Haiti in May 1842 preceded an uprising against president Jean-Pierre Boyer less than a year later.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The presidency of Michel Martelly was dogged with claims of corruption and state abuse. Photograph: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
Rarely has a disaster occurred in such close proximity to a scheduled major political event as it has this week. Whenever the poll eventually takes place, the stakes will be high. The several political quagmires that followed the election of president Michel Martelly (2011-2016) have further undermined Haitian politics, with claims of corruption and state abuse. The forthcoming elections are expected to, at the very least, demonstrate a willingness to improve. Yet popular distrust of local and international powers is great.
Most upsetting are the effects of these conditions on Haitians. Programmes intended to expand the economy in areas such as tourism have brought little benefit for Haiti’s more than 10 million people. Instead, Haitian emigration has increased tremendously and to new locations in Central and South America as thousands of the country’s citizens find fewer reasons to endure the economic hardships and political instability. Any improvement hinges on a restoration of the political process through the election of a new president. It is also clear that other countries, particularly the United States, are expected to play a role in whatever direction Haiti takes. Last month, at an address to the United Nations, interim president Jocelerme Privert called for more support from the international community to restore stability after the elections.
Hurricane Matthew: UN says 350,000 Haitians in need of assistance Read more
All of that was before Tuesday morning. Now Hurricane Matthew brings a new challenge for Haiti’s leaders and the international community that has vowed to help the proud nation. The efficacy of the infrastructure repairs put in place since 2010 will be tested. Concerns that Haiti’s fragile democracy must not be knocked off course have to be weighed against the human tragedy that will result from ineffective action.
If Haiti’s contending politicians must do anything now, it is to insist that the lessons of the past six years, which saw a deadly cholera outbreak added to the impact of the quake, are heeded. For a vulnerable country that has suffered greatly from weaker tropical systems, the effects of Hurricane Matthew could be catastrophic. The Haitian state and the international community have a duty to provide an effective emergency response. But so do members of Haiti’s civil society and its large diaspora. It was these groups that made some of the strongest interventions after the earthquake. Haiti’s neighbours, including spared Jamaica, also have a role to play once the full impact of the hurricane is known.
Outside forces have much to atone for. In many ways it is the failures of international support since 2010 that have had greater consequences for Haiti than its longstanding political failures. There is now a desperate need for a new type of engagement with Haiti. After Matthew, Haiti simply cannot endure any more broken promises.
• This article was amended on 6 October 2016 to reflect the fact that the elections had been postponed indefinitelyI love the idea of bike camping, cyclocamping, velocamping, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve even bought special gear to go out and ride as far as I want to and settle down for the night. The only problem is that I’ve only gone out a few times.
It not because I am not experienced at camping, nor is it that there is a lack of places I could set up camp at… it’s just camping isn’t fun all by yourself. And really… who the hell wants to just go ride somewhere with twenty or thirty pounds of supplies so you can sleep on the ground and cook hot dogs.
Bringing people creates comradely and great stories This post is becoming Grant Peterson’s wet dream in the making. Proof of this Here and Here.
Surprisingly enough there are a lot of sites with sections dedicated to bike camping. These dudes are pretty extreme. I chatted it up with a few of them a few years ago. They have logged many hours and miles doing things like this. Like I said, I’m savvy and interested… but still wet behind the ears. Some people live out on their bikes with camping supplies enough to be misjudged as homeless folk. Seriously, and they love it. I don’t think I want to be one of these guys either. I just want to be able to bring an overnight backpack and be able to drink and chill with some friends.
Take a look at how many places there are around here:
Not all of these locations are 1oo% legit, but they are places I have stayed with friends or family. I think the one in the top, right corner; Audra State Park is only 15 miles away from home, and the Stonecoal Wildlife Reserve is roughly seven or eight miles? Regardless of the distance, Grant Peterson’s S240 philosophy is perfect:
On an S24O, going home is the plan from the get-go, so it’s not wimping out. You can have a miserable night like we did, your gear can get battered and soaked and packed away wet, and it just doesn’t matter. Plus you’ll have good stories to tell afterward. Like mine, they are not the most hilarious stories and maybe they won’t be death-defying, but they’re just the kind of experiences you need now and then to appreciate your day-to-day comfort — and they’re best done on S24Os.
Like I said, bike camping sounds fun and people should do it more often instead of reading my blog or watching American Idol or whatever is cool these days.
What I bring on my bike camping rides:
70oz camelbak (reservoir only)
Lighter
Digicam
Piepan and or bit of foil
Stainless Steel Cup
Floor Mat/Pad
6′ x 8′ Tarp
Lightest, Most Comfortable Tent I could buy
Sleeping Bag, or Sleeping Bag Liner depending on temperature and desired weight/space
Foods (no more than 3lbs)
Tea bags/Sweetener/?cervezas?
Inflatable Pillow
Frame Backpack to carry it all in.
For my bike, I typically put the rear rack on so I can mount my tent, sleeping bag and floor mat to it and it makes riding so much easier! I also suggest not bringing your brand new $4000 bike with you. Bring your commuter/rain bike. it will do well enough.
Back on the topic of S240s – these are great ideas. I love the thought of them with friends. Just riding out somewhere until a consensus is made and camp out. I really want to do one of these as soon as the weather clears up from the snow.
Here are a bunch of interesting links: (some are a bit over the top though)
http://www.rivbike.com/article/bike_camping/camping_vs_touring
http://www.rivbike.com/article/bike_camping/a_kit_for_one_night_out
http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/touring/index.htm
http://topeak.com/products/Bike-Tent
http://www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/touring/camping.htm
http://www.listphile.com/Bike_Camping_Checklist
http://www.adamk.ca/bike_camping.html
http://www.adventure-cycling-guide.co.uk/camping.htm
http://www.adventurecycling.org/resources/Petersen_S240s.pdf – BEST
http://kentsbike.blogspot.com/2007/07/very-vague-s240.html – I love his blog, and you need to check this out!
38.984702 -80.221746
AdvertisementsThis may come as a shock after the way many of us probably felt last night at the end of the game, but I'm strangely much more confident about the rest of the 2016 football season right now than I was even at the end of the game. This season could absolutely still nose dive into absolute horror, but it could take the opposite turn, too.
I haven't rewatched the game, so these are purely my thoughts based on what I was able to see in the stands from my seats in Section 52 and from looking over stats and comments by coaches after the game. So, here are 10 things on my mind after Auburn's near upset (which, amazingly, is a 100% true statement at the end) of #2 Clemson.
1) After a first half of looking absolutely inept, there were moments of hope on the offensive side of the ball in the 2nd half. After amassing just shy of 40 yards total offense (granted, there were two big sacks that might have put us over 50!) in the first half, Gus Malzahn & Co. made some great 2nd half adjustments to put up 200+ yards. The offensive line spent the first half getting absolutely destroyed from what I could see from the stands, but in the 2nd half that wasn't as much the case. They provided time for the QBs to make some throws. They still weren't opening the running lanes we needed, but at least there was progress. That's promising. It's even more promising when you think about the fact we were playing the #2 team in the nation. However...
2) Auburn's Maddening Magical Musical Quarterbacks. It's hard to get excited when seeing quick changes gets so incredibly frustrating. Sean White made some great throws last night only to see himself get yanked on the next play for another player playing QB. I could almost get behind it with the way it played out on the last two drives, since it did seem the running game opened up more with John Franklin III in, but overall I just don't understand the rotations.
3) If you had to ride with one... It would be Sean White. Sean is going to make some questionable throws at times, but he seems to play with the more aggressive and attacking style. He can make some fantastic throws, he can move in the pocket, and he doesn't play scared. Given the ability to run wide open with the offense, I really do think he could do just fine.
4) Where was Kamryn Pettway? After hearing about his move to running back all offseason, he didn't get a single carry and I'm not sure I ever saw him come in at all to be honest. Kerryon Johnson did a great job in the 2nd half with getting close to 100 yards rushing, but I can't help but feel like Pettway's big bruising style of running would have been beneficial at times. Particularly down close to the end zone on 4th and short when everyone in the whole stadium knew Jeremy Johnson was going to keep up the middle.
5) The Will Hastings Hype Was Real. Walk-on kicker turned wide receiver Will Hastings shocked a lot of people by being put in the 2-deep rotation. He more than justified that with his play last night. He made three great catches for 29 yards and made some nifty moves with the ball when he had it in his hands. He also made a great play to come back to the ball on a pass that resulted in the defender almost taking his head off on a pass interference that extended a 4th quarter drive.
6) Red Zone is still the Dead Zone. Holding Clemson to 19 points should have been enough for Auburn to win. It was enough for Auburn to win. The Tigers left so many points on the board last night that after an initial feeling of "I'm ok with a one-score game against the #2 team in the nation" I actually get to feeling angry that Auburn didn't win. Auburn reached the red zone four times in the 2nd half and only came away with 10 points. The other two possessions were an INT on a rushed 4th down call and a turnover on downs.
7) We have a defense. Clemson had some turnover last season, sure, but the core of the offensive playmakers (especially with Mike Williams back from injury) from a team that put up 40 points on Alabama's defense back in January and was very good the year before, too, was still there. They were still led by Deshaun Watson, a pre-season Heisman favorite. Auburn's defense bent a good bit with Watson connecting with Williams for 174 total yards on the night, but they still only allowed 19 points.
8) The young coaches acquitted themselves well. There are still some growing pains to be had, but overall I was ok with the blocking by the wide receivers. I don't recall too much in the way of egregious drops, either. The receivers may need work on getting open, but for a first game with only one real experienced wide receiver on the roster (Marcus Davis), I thought they played ok.
On the other side of the ball, there was Travis Williams' linebacker unit. There were a ton of questions about them going into this game. Tre Williams was the only returning Auburn Tiger with anything in the way of real experienced. They were all young with the exception of Williams. How would they hold up? Well. They held up quite well. I can't think of a bad play they made all night. Which leads to...
9) That's not how you go about making displeasure known. They've since been deleted, but graduate transfer linebacker T.J. Neal was not happy with his playing time - or lack thereof - last night and he put it on full blast on Twitter. I get his frustration. He transferred to Auburn intending to play. He wasn't guaranteed a starting job just because he was a senior graduate transfer, though, nor was he guaranteed playing time. Is there anyone who thinks the defense would have improved greatly if he'd played at linebacker? His method of voicing his displeasure was bad enough, but it wasn't even really based on merit. The linebackers that did play played very well. If there's any player on the team I feel had justification for questioning playing time last night, it's Kamryn Pettway.
10) Final Thoughts: There is promise. But there are still so many questions. The defense played well enough last night to beat most any team in the nation. The offense found something that worked in the 2nd half, but couldn't convert it into points consistently. If the offense ever does find something that works - at least, if they find it soon - then the rest of this season could still be pretty special.
Clemson was a losable game. There is no shame in an unranked team coming a true freshman WR making the wrong decision in the end zone on a Hail Mary away from knocking off #2 on the opening weekend. This was not a conference game. All of Auburn's goals - no matter how lofty - are still reachable.
I just don't know how Gus & Co. are going to get the red zone issues fixed. 200+ yards in the 2nd half and not falling into the usual 3rd quarter lull we've come to know so well in recent years was a significant improvement from the opening half of football of the season to the 2nd half. There's still just so many questions about play calling in the red zone.
It's hard to play the game of "what if." What if Auburn takes the FG in the two failed red zone possessions? Then would we have been looking at a chance for Carlson to win the game at the end? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what Clemson does on their subsequent drives if they're starting from the 25 rather than backed up inside the 20 or the 5? Still, though, with the way the defense was playing I think I take the points.
There are worlds where the two-QB system works. Florida won a national title with it in 2006 by letting Chris Leak do the majority of the work and then Tebow cleaned up in the red zone. I think there's a way Auburn could make a rotation work, as well. I just don't think rotating on the level that happened last night is the way to go.
Gus Malzahn said after the game that he was more concerned with getting the running game going in the 2nd half than he was with the QB rotation. I can understand that, and it did finally pick up a bit. That still doesn't explain the complete lack of Kamryn Pettway or Malik Miller.
They say teams make the biggest improvements between Week 1 and Week 2. Next week, Auburn welcomes defending Sun Belt champion Arkansas State to the Plains. The Red Wolves were blown out at home by Toledo in their opening game. I watched a good bit of it, and their offense was even more clueless than Auburn's. I have a very good feeling that the Auburn defense will eat them alive and give the offense a chance to find itself in Week 2. We'll see, though. I had similar thoughts last season between Week 1 and 2 and... yeah, about that.
There's a lot of football to be played. Auburn played horrifically on offense for an entire half and still had a chance to beat #2. There's something to be said for that. There is still promise in this team. A lot of it. It's entirely on the coaches to put them in the right position to make that promise a reality, now.Columbus Crew SC today announced that it has acquired midfielder Cristian Martinez on loan for the duration of the 2016 Major League Soccer season. Martinez, 19, joins Crew SC on loan from Chorrillo FC of the first-division Liga Panamena de Futbol. The midfielder will occupy an international roster slot on the Black & Gold roster.
“Cristian is a young, talented player with a bright future, and we're pleased that we were able to complete this deal after having him in training with us over the course of the last few weeks,” said Sporting Director and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter. “We're excited to work with him and do our best to help him realize his potential as a professional.”
Martinez joins Crew SC from his hometown Chorrillo FC in Panama. He started his soccer career playing for Chorrillo's Under-9 squad and progressed through the club's youth system to make his debut appearance for its first team four years ago, at the age of 15. He joined Crew SC as a guest player for the Black & Gold's international friendly against Liga MX side Veracruz on May 11, where he played 45 minutes and registered one shot.
WATCH: Martinez on joining Crew SC
He has earned two caps for the Panama National Team, both in 2016 during friendly matches. His first appearance for the side came in a substitute appearance against El Salvador (February 18), where he helped Panama close-out a 1-0 victory. His second cap also represented his first start for Los Canaleros, against Nicaragua (March 16).
TRANSACTION: Columbus Crew SC acquired midfielder Cristian Martinez on loan from Chorrillo FC for the duration of the 2016 Major League Soccer season on May 17, 2016. He will occupy an international roster slot on the Black & Gold roster.
Name: Cristian Martinez
Position: Midfielder
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 174
Born: February 6, 1997 in El Chorrillo, Panama City, Panama
Hometown: El Chorrillo, Panama City, Panama
Citizenship: Panama
Acquired: Acquired by Crew SC on loan from Chorrillo FC for the duration of the 2016 Major League Soccer season on May 17, 2016. He will occupy an international roster slot on the Black & Gold roster.
Previous Experience: Chorrillo FC (2012-present)Yuki Saito is hard at work in Chiba, at Kamagaya Stadium, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters’ ni-gun base, these days. He’s busy preparing for the upcoming season, which might turn out to be a pivotal one for the star pitcher.
The 2015 campaign will be Saito’s fifth as a professional. The 26-year-old will enter it searching for a modicum of consistency in a career that’s been a roller-coaster of highs and lows. His goal right now is to make it to spring training healthy and not only win a job in the starting rotation, but make sure he remains there throughout the season.
“The competition has already begun,” he told Sports Nippon last week.
Saito’s initial workouts consisted of some running and playing catch, and he’s since thrown a couple of bullpen sessions, stretching out the bothersome right shoulder that is at once both the main source of his troubles, a 2013 injury to his right labrum has mostly derailed his career for the past two seasons, and the major key to the revival he seeks.
It’s a rebirth that could begin in the bullpen, as some reports have Fighters manager Hideki Kuriyama thinking about using him as a reliever, for at least part of this season.
The main question is, what type of pitcher will Saito be this year?
He wasn’t exactly a flamethrower to begin with and his stuff isn’t jaw-dropping, so his fate will depend mostly on his command. Saito can be pretty good when everything is working, but has had trouble being very good on a consistent basis. There would be less pressure on him in a bullpen role, with a lighter workload and fewer chances for opposing hitters to get a real bead on him.
Saito, however, told reporters last week that he wants to start and is hoping to do enough to win one of the coveted places in the rotation.
Imagining Saito in the bullpen feels like a bigger fall from grace than it is in reality. He hasn’t tumbled down the mountainside from on high, he’d already slipped a ways — his pitches betrayed him before his shoulder did — and injuries set him back even further.
Saito was already a superstar when he arrived in the pro ranks. He was the prince of amateur baseball after leading Waseda Jitsugyo to victory in 2006’s summer Koshien, winning a final for the ages, and later embarked on a triumphant collegiate career at Waseda University.
The Fighters won a four-team lottery for his rights at the 2010 draft, and about 400 reporters, 50 television crews and even a helicopter, greeted the rookie on his first day of spring training.
The reality has so far failed to live up to the hype. Saito has been inconsistent and has an unimpressive 13-16 career mark with a 3.66 ERA in four seasons.
Partly, due to his injuries, he’s spent more time on the farm than with the top team over the last two seasons — Saito has appeared just seven ichi-gun games from 2013-2014 — and was hardly impressive on the ni-gun level, going 2-10 with a 5.55 ERA in 24 appearances on the farm since 2013.
Perhaps Saito was able to work out the kinks last year. Maybe this is the year he reclaims some of his lost luster and stands alongside current Fighters phenom, Shohei Otani as a member of the starting rotation. Only time will tell, but the first step will be putting on a good show for Kuriyama and the coaching staff during spring training beginning Feb. 1.
Yuki Saito, once on top of the baseball world, is working now just to remain at least a notable part of it. His work in Chiba is the foundation, as he steels himself for the challenge ahead, when he hopes to prove to the Fighters and the team’s fans that his best days are still ahead, and not just heroic tales of days gone by.Guardian Cities and Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL) have created the first comprehensive map of pseudo-public spaces in the UK capital. We’re looking for your help to make it better
In collaboration with Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL), the capital’s environmental records centre, Guardian Cities has identified approximately 50 sites in London that meet our relatively narrow criteria for pseudo-public space: namely outdoor, open and publicly accessible locations that are owned and maintained by private developers or other private companies.
Quick guide Pseudo-public spaces Show Hide What is a pseudo-public space? Pseudo-public spaces are large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and corporations. They are on the rise in London and many other British cities, as local authorities argue they cannot afford to create or maintain such spaces themselves.
What access do members of the public have?
Although they are seemingly accessible to members of the public and have the look and feel of public land, these sites – also known as privately owned public spaces or “Pops” – are not subject to ordinary local authority bylaws but rather governed by restrictions drawn up the landowner and usually enforced by private security companies. What rules govern them? Under existing laws, public access to pseudo-public spaces remains at the discretion of landowners who are allowed to draw up their own rules for “acceptable behaviour” on their sites and alter them at will. They are not obliged to make these rules public.
They include major areas of open land around Paddington Station (encompassing both Merchant Square and Paddington Central), nearly seven acres of open space owned by Arsenal Football Club in Islington, busy shopping and dining plazas in Covent Garden and Victoria, and the pseudo-public area around one of London’s most iconic attractions, the London Eye.
The dataset behind the map has been made public, and can be accessed on the GiGL website. You can see the full list in the table below.
This is the first comprehensive map of pseudo-public spaces in London, and we’re looking for your help to make it better.
Julie Cox, partnership manager at GiGL, says the organisation is keen to hear of any omissions and inconsistencies in the map as it plans to update and expand this dataset in future.
“It’s something we’d definitely like to keep updating as part of the suite of datasets we are responsible for, and ideally something members of the public can contribute to as well,” says Cox.
You can help us keep the map up to date with land ownership changes in London by contributing information on both new and existing sites with the form below. We’d also love to hear your general responses to the map, whether it was useful or interesting to you, as well as your experiences, good or bad, of privately owned public spaces.ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Some collectors are bringing the Metrodome's old right-field wall home after paying a combined $3,025 for pieces of the "Baggie."
A pair of 16-foot-high, 190-foot-long sections of the famed fence sold during an online auction that concluded Monday. One went for $2,025 and the other for $1,000. Together, the items drew 190 bids.
When the Minnesota Twins played at the Metrodome from 1982-2009, left-handed hitters took aim at the dark blue wall that stood only 327 feet from home plate. To make up for the short distance, the fence was extended for a total height of 23 feet. When balls bounced off the wall, it rippled like a garbage bag, spawning the nickname.
Several stadium features are being auctioned off, with demolition looming next year.
The Twins have the Baggie used from their final Metrodome season in team archives.Last night, CNN host Piers Morgan invited Texas-based radio host Alex Jones on his show. The ostensible reason was to allow Jones to defend his petition to get Morgan thrown out of the United States as a treasonous “Redcoat.” But the thing quickly degenerated into a confused debate about gun rights — a subject that figures prominently in Jones’ libertarian conspiracy theories (most of which involve New World Order “globalists” descending from Washington or the United Nations to enslave or slaughter disarmed — and therefore defenseless — American patriots).
Monday’s performance was very much in keeping with Jones’ intellectual pedigree. He suggested, for instance, that Barack Obama himself will lead the coming war against the American people: “The government buys 1.6 billion bullets, armoured vehicles, tanks, helicopters, predator drones, armed now in US skies, being used to arrest people in North Dakota.” Jones also declared that “1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!” and said that he owns about 50 weapons.
Since that broadcast, thousands of shocked viewers and pundits have taken to the internet, declaring that Jones has “lost his marbles” or “gone bananas.” But anyone who has followed Jones over the years knows that, to the extent he ever had any marbles, he lost them about two decades ago.
Three years ago, I interviewed Jones for a book I was writing about conspiracy theories. And he told me a little about where he got his paranoid (that’s my word) ideas about government.
Turns out, it all started with David Koresh and the Waco siege.
Jones grew up in the Dallas suburbs, just two hours’ drive from the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel. In 1993, when Jones was barely out of high school, a seven-week Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) siege ended in the incineration of 76 cult members. Jones remembers being transfixed by the congressional hearings into the fiasco, which were broadcast by C-SPAN. The episode turned Jones into a full-time crusader against the United States government.
Koresh and his followers, Jones believed, were harmless innocents who’d been murdered by Attorney General Janet Reno and cynical ATF agents looking to boost their agency’s profile. “I remember watching the TV screen and seeing that famous footage of the ATF loading their video cameras before going in,” Jones told me. “They were going to lose their funding. This was [a] PR stunt. They were about to be abolished. That’s why they did it.”
Two years later, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, an act intended to incite a popular revolt against the U.S. government. But Jones concluded the bombing actually was a part of a conspiracy, hatched by the feds themselves, to quash the nascent states’-rights movement.
By this time, Jones’ opinion mattered: The 21-year-old already had his own cable-access television program. A year later, he began airing on radio. By the time George W. Bush was in his second term, Jones arguably had become the most popular and influential conspiracist in America. His syndicated Alex Jones Show began to appear on dozens of AM, FM, and shortwave stations across the United States — a platform that gives him unparalleled influence within the Truther movement. He also became a pioneer of internet conspiracism, through the InfoWars.com site, and other web ventures.
Many of Jones’ theories are simply bizarre. In 2009, for instance, during the Copenhagen conference on climate change, he described the meeting to his listeners in this way:
Do you understand how diabolical this is? It isn’t a bunch of idiot tree-huggers that mean well and just got their science wrong. These are vicious Nazis—it’s the only way to describe them. But in truth, they’re worse than the Nazis … They [the Malthusians] came up with this idea to exterminate, and reduce births … It is life and death! These people are taking over right now! … Did you get the memo not to drink the water. Did you get the memo not to take the inoculations …? Do you like being sterilized? Do you like being killed?! You better grow up, ladies and gentlemen. You better realize that we’re facing a threat far more dangerous than Mao Tse Tung and Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin! … This is the New World Order crashing the gates. They’re spilling over the wall. If this was the Alamo … Those of us fighting the globalists, we’re like Davey Crockett, we’re out of ammo, we’re swinging our muskets. A lot of us are going to get killed, we’re going to get imprisoned. This is only going to get worse in the years to come. But, you take my life, I take yours, too.
Naturally, Jones also believes that 9/11 was an inside job, likely executed by using remote control technology to override the pilots of the commandeered aircraft. Under this theory, the 19 hijackers were stooges who believed they were participating in a legitimate military exercise (though many of Jones’ followers believe the men are still alive, and have developed a rich literature detailing their sightings).
This fact alone should have disqualified Jones from appearing on CNN. Yet, amazingly, the guy has somehow gained fans among mainstream journalists. He has been name-dropped on FOX News a few times (for what that’s worth), and even appeared as a guest on that network. The once quasi-respectable Drudge Report also has broadcast his paranoia in its trademark 80-point font.
Perhaps this is because Jones is somewhat charming — even if what comes out of his mouth is otherworldly.
He is also something of an egomaniac. When I spoke to him on the phone a while back, one of the first things he told me is that he “predicted” 9/11. (It’s a claim he’s made many times before.) What actually happened was this: On July 25, 2001, Jones warned viewers of his Infowars TV show that the U.S. government was planning a terrorist attack against its own citizens — flashing the White House’s phone number so that people could call in and beg the president not to go through with the dastardly plot. In the broadcast, which circulates widely on the Internet, Jones does not identify the World Trade Center as a future target, but he does declare (in typically Jonesian language) that “the United States is a shining jewel the globalists want to bring down and they will use terrorism as the pretext to get it done,” and that Osama Bin Laden is “the bogeyman [the government] need[s] in this Orwellian system.”
Talking to Jones is exhausting. He spits out every sentence as if he were calling the police to report a crime in progress — footnoting each eyebrow-raising claim with scattered (but oddly precise) references to Internet news sources. As Radar magazine writer Jebediah Reed put it, he speaks “in a gravelly baritone fit for the public address announcer at a monster truck rally — a voice so gruff it almost sounds like he’s faking it.”
He throws around acronyms such as “PNAC” (Project for the New American Century, a widely shared 9/11 conspiracist obsession), and talks casually of NATO’s role in engineering “the 888 attacks” (his term for the brief 2008 war between Russia and Georgia). Jones has lived and breathed these sorts of conspiracy theories for years. It’s not clear that this New World Order prophet could turn his obsession off — though he claims he’d like to … if only the world would let him.
“Once you discover reality, what is being admitted, all the crimes, and you go around to the zombie-like media and tell people to read all this stuff, and they just giggle and say none of this exists, that government is good, it’s upsetting, and so you try to wake people up,” he told me, slowing down the pace of his manic verbiage only slightly as he adopts the weary tone of a political martyr. “People laughed at us, and now it’s all coming true. Even though I’m sick of doing this, I do it anyway. Somebody’s got to do this.”
I spoke to Jones in 2009. At the time, one would have thought that the Republicans’ across-the-board losses in the 2008 elections would have provided Jones with peace of mind: Surely, one of the first things that Barack Obama and incoming administration officials would do is unearth the murderous 9/11 lies of their ousted opponents.
But Jones — like other 9/11 “Truthers” — scoffs at the illusion that Obama |
CMC tape needed to assemble CMC components. The City of Huntsville said the project will be developed over two phases, beginning with a $136 million initial phase that creates about 200 high-paying advanced manufacturing and engineering jobs.
Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said future uses for CMC materials are vast.
"GE is an innovation company and Huntsville is an innovation city," he said.
"This announcement by GE Aviation is just the latest chapter in that history of innovation. The products that will be manufactured here represent the future of aerospace."
Incentive details
The local contribution toward the 100-acre land purchase from Chase & Cook Partners includes $1 million from the City of Huntsville, $1.5 million from the Huntsville Industrial Development Board, $500,000 from Madison County, $150,000 and utilities assistance from Limestone County and $500,000 from GE, according to city spokeswoman Kelly Schrimsher.
Deputy Secretary of Commerce Angela Till said the Alabama Department of Transportation and state Department of Commerce also will provide a $2.2 million industrial access road and bridge grant toward the project. GE Aviation will receive benefits under the "Made in Alabama" Jobs Incentive Package, which took effect this summer.
Till said the estimated payroll for the facilities for the first 10 years is $102.5 million and average annual pay is expected to be $48,000 at full production.
Under the project agreement, GE is qualified to receive:
* Job-creation credit: $3.5 million (estimated total) over 10 years
* Investment credit: $12.4 million (estimated total) over 10 years
Till said a job-creation credit represents an annual rebate of up to 3 percent of a qualifying company's prior-year payroll for new, direct jobs. An investment credit can be taken against Alabama income tax and/or utility tax liability, she added.
The company will receive assistance from AIDT, the state's workforce development agency, valued at nearly $1.9 million. GE Aviation plans to use $21.9 million in funding from the U.S. Air Force Research Lab Title III Office for the ceramic fiber portion of the project.
'A significant step'
When the plant is open, it will sell fiber to the Department of Defense, GE businesses, Herakles (Safran) and other customers subject to U.S. regulations.
The CMC tape operation will be financed solely by GE. The ceramic tape produced in Huntsville will be used by GE Aviation at its CMC manufacturing facility in Asheville, N.C., which launched last year.
GE Aviation said the demand for CMCs is expected to grow "tenfold" during the next 10 years. CMCs, which are more heat resistant than metal alloys and require less cooling air, create a more efficient engine with less overall weight.
"Establishing the new GE factories in Alabama is a very significant step in developing the supply chain we need in order to produce CMC components in large volume," said Sanjay Correa, vice president of CMC Program at GE Aviation.
In 2013, GE Aviation opened a 300,000-square-foot plant in Auburn that makes machine parts for jet engines. The company announced last year it would spend an additional $50 million in Auburn on a new 3D printing initiative to mass produce fuel nozzles.
Dale Strong, chairman of the Madison County Commission, said the local GE Aviation project was possible through a coalition of the city of Huntsville, Madison County and Limestone County.
"Our team works together beyond geographical lines -- through regional collaboration -- working together as one for the benefit of our entire community," he said.THERE are dozens of Beatles-themed puns you could use to describe a stay in the Fab Four’s beloved home city.
You’ll want to be more than a ‘Day Tripper’, you’ll want to stay there ‘Eight Days a Week’ - I won’t go on.
The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
None could do justice to what a vibrant, warm and beautiful city Liverpool is.
Steeped in history and culture, the city boasts more museums and galleries than any other UK city region outside London.
It also has more Grade II listed buildings than any other city in the UK outside London, and more Georgian buildings than Bath.
Not to mention a buzzing nightlife, a mouth-watering smorgasbord of shops and some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet.
Hard Days Night Hotel in Liverpool
After just over an hour’s drive down the M62, my partner and I arrived at the four-star boutique Hard Days Night Hotel.
Located in the heart of Liverpool, the hotel opened in 2008 to coincide with Liverpool’s tenure as the Capital of Culture and yes, it is inspired by The Beatles.
There is artwork by world-renowned artists of John, Paul, Ringo and George all around the hotel, the restaurant is named after Sir Pete Blake who designed the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band, and Lennon and McCartney even each have their own suites in homage.
It is a real draw for the estimated 600,000 who visit Liverpool every year to follow in the band’s footsteps.
But even if you are one of those rare few who is not a fan of the musical legends, the swanky and luxury hotel would not fail to impress.
It proved a perfect base for our explorations of the city, which included a trip to Liverpool’s picturesque Albert Docks -a haven for tourists who can choose from several tours of the city, from the Magical Mystery Tour bus to the Yellow Duckmarine, or Wacker Quacker, which travels on city’s streets and waters.
It is also where we found Tate Liverpool, the Maritime Museum and the International Slavery Museum, which features some incredibly heart-breaking and amazingly inspiring stories originating from the city’s slave trade past.
Nearby is the Museum of Liverpool, which opened last year. There are not many places in the UK that could provide the subject for an entire museum but here there are fascinating displays illustrating Liverpool’s global significance through its unique geography, history and culture, including a particularly interesting sections on Liverpool’s history for trend-setting and popular culture.
And within walking distance is another culture hotspot - The Walker Art Gallery.
The stunningly-grand building is the national gallery of the North and has housed Liverpool’s most outstanding art collection for 130 years and we could probably have spent a good couple of days browsing its vast exhibits.
In the evening, we were eager to try out one of the city’s huge variety of restaurants and found on offer every kind of international cuisine we could imagine.
We decided to head up to the trendy Bold Street - an area where you can find vintage clothes, independent cafes and alternative boutiques by day, and bright young things at night.
There we stumbled upon The Kasbah Cafe Bazaar, and boy are we glad we did, Made to feel right at home by the friendly staff while at the same time like we were dining out in the centre of Morocco, my partner and I enjoyed some of the tastiest food we have ever had.
The city’s bars, clubs and pubs offer the same variety as the eateries, whether you want to hit the dance floor, enjoy some live music, or a sophisticated cocktail.
And if it’s shopping you’re after, you’re in for a treat. The city recently celebrated the opening of Liverpool One - boasting all the high street stores and more. There are also a range of designer, vintage, and independent shops dotted across the city centre.
We tried to pack as much of Liverpool into our weekend stay as we could, but found there were still a whole host of attractions not ticked off our list so - and be prepared for some more Beatles puns - we’ll be sure to getting a ‘Ticket to Ride’ so we can ‘Twist and Shout’ in the city again soon.
Travel Facts
Sarah and her guest stayed in the Hard Days Night Hotel in Liverpool.
The hotel offers a variety of different packages including The Ultimate Beatles, All Your Need is Love and Magical Mystery.
For more information visit www.harddaysnighthotel.com or call 0151 2361964.NASA's Curiosity Mars rover today completes its second Martian year since landing inside Gale Crater nearly four Earth years ago, which means it has recorded environmental patterns through two full cycles of Martian seasons.
The repetition helps distinguish seasonal effects from sporadic events. For example, a large spike in methane in the local atmosphere during the first southern-hemisphere autumn in Gale Crater was not repeated the second autumn. It was an episodic release, still unexplained. However, the rover's measurements do suggest that much subtler changes in the background methane concentration -- amounts much less than during the spike -- may follow a seasonal pattern. Measurements of temperature, pressure, ultraviolet light reaching the surface and the scant water vapor in the air at Gale Crater show strong, repeated seasonal changes.
Monitoring the modern atmosphere, weather and climate fulfills a Curiosity mission goal supplementing the better-known investigations of conditions billions of years ago. Back then, Gale Crater had lakes and groundwater that could have been good habitats for microbes, if Mars has ever had any. Today, though dry and much less hospitable, environmental factors are still dynamic.
DOWNLOAD VIDEO Curiosity Rover Report: Mars Weather Report
Curiosity's Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), supplied by Spain's Centro de Astrobiología, has measured air temperatures from 60.5 degrees Fahrenheit (15.9 degrees Celsius) on a summer afternoon, to minus 148 F (minus 100 C) on a winter night. Seasonal patterns in temperature, water vapor and pressure that Curiosity has measured in Gale Crater are charted in a new graphic at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA20600
"Curiosity's weather station has made measurements nearly every hour of every day, more than 34 million so far," said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "The duration is important, because it's the second time through the seasons that lets us see repeated patterns."
Each Martian year -- the time it takes the Red Planet to orbit the sun once -- lasts 687 Earth days. Curiosity landed on Aug. 5, 2012, (Pacific Time; Aug. 6, Universal Time). It begins its third Martian year on May 11, 2016, during the mission's 1,337th Martian day, or "sol," since landing. Each Martian sol lasts about 39.6 minutes longer than an Earth day, and a Martian year lasts 668.6 sols.
The similar tilts of Earth and Mars give both planets a yearly rhythm of seasons. But some differences are great, such as in comparisons between day and night temperatures. Even during the time of the Martian year when temperatures at Gale Crater rise above freezing during the day, they plummet overnight below minus 130 F (minus 90 C), due to the thin atmosphere. Also, the more-elliptical orbit of Mars, compared to Earth, exaggerates the southern-hemisphere seasons, making them dominant even at Gale Crater's near-equatorial location.
"Mars is much drier than our planet, and in particular Gale Crater, near the equator, is a very dry place on Mars," said Germán Martínez, a Curiosity science-team collaborator from Spain at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "The water vapor content is a thousand to 10 thousand times less than on Earth."
Relative humidity is a function of both temperature and water-vapor content. During winter nights, Curiosity has measured relative humidity of up to 70 percent, high enough to prompt researchers to check for frost forming on the ground. Other Mars landers have detected frost, but Curiosity has not.
Curiosity's air-pressure measurements confirm a strong seasonal trend previously seen by other missions. "There are large changes due to the capture and release of carbon dioxide by the seasonal polar caps," Martínez explained. Most of the Martian atmosphere is carbon dioxide. During each pole's winter, millions of tons of this gas freeze solid, only to be released again in spring, prompting very un-Earthlike seasonal variations of about 25 percent in atmospheric pressure.
Other seasonal patterns measured by Curiosity and repeated in the rover's second Martian year are that the local atmosphere is clear in winter, dustier in spring and summer, and windy in autumn. Visibility in Gale Crater is as low as 20 miles (30 kilometers) in summer, and as high as 80 miles (130 kilometers) in winter.
For tracking changes in the concentration of methane in the air above Gale Crater, researchers use the tunable laser spectrometer in Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite of instruments. These measurements are made less often than REMS measurements, though frequently enough to tease out seasonal patterns. For most of the two Martian years, the rover has measured methane concentrations between 0.3 and 0.8 parts per billion. For several weeks during the first autumn, the level spiked, reaching 7 parts per billion. The mission checked carefully for a repeat of that spike during the second autumn, but concentrations stayed at lower background levels.
"Doing a second year told us right away that the spike was not a seasonal effect," said JPL's Chris Webster of the SAM team. "It's apparently an episodic event that we may or may not ever see again."
However, the mission is continuing to monitor a possible seasonal pattern in the background methane concentration. The background level is far less than the spike level, but it appears to be even lower in autumn than in other seasons. If this pattern is confirmed, it may be related to the pressure pattern measured by REMS or to seasonal change in ultraviolet radiation, which is measured by REMS in concert with the rover's Mast Camera.
"This shows not only the importance of long-term monitoring, but also the importance of combining more than one type of measurement from a single platform," Webster said.
While continuing to study the modern local environment, Curiosity is investigating geological layers of lower Mount Sharp, inside Gale Crater, to increase understanding of ancient changes in environmental conditions. For more information about Curiosity, visit:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl
News Media Contact
Guy WebsterJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-354-6278guy.webster@jpl.nasa.govDwayne Brown / Laurie CantilloNASA Headquarters, Washington202-358-1726 / 202-358-1077dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov / laura.l.cantillo@nasa.gov2016-128The rumors are true. Amazon is providing cloud services to the CIA. But what's most intriguing about the multi-million-dollar deal is not what Amazon is doing, but how the company is doing it – and what that means for the future of that thing called cloud computing.
Word of the deal broke in mid-March by way of a publication called FCW, which reported that the king of cloud computing had inked a contract with the Central Intelligence Agency to provide cloud services over the next decade. Amazon finally confirmed the deal, if not the price tag, last week after rival IBM filed a formal protest over the pact.
The deal was big news across the web. Amazon, pundits said, had stepped up its effort to challenge old-school giants like IBM in an area the old guard had long dominated: federal contracting. The chorus of voices swelled Friday when the General Accounting Office responded to IBM's protest with a ruling that said the CIA chose Amazon over Big Blue due to a "superior technical solution." But Amazon's CIA contract is important for far bigger reasons, and marks a much bigger shift than most people realize.
You see, the GAO ruling on the matter reveals that the contract involves Amazon building cloud services inside CIA data centers. "The contractor generally was to provide a copy of its existing public cloud (modified where necessary) to be installed on government premises," the GAO ruling explains. That may seem like a small thing, but in the world of cloud computing, it's a seismic event.
For years, cloud computing has been defined by a sharp contrast in philosophy. New-age companies like Amazon and Google said computing power should be offered over the internet, much like electricity is offered over the grid. This, they said, was cloud computing. But old-school companies like IBM and HP – companies threatened by this new way of doing things – urged businesses to duplicate cloud computing services like Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine inside private data centers, arguing that this provided greater security and privacy. You could still have cloud computing, the old guard said, without the public internet.
Amazon, in particular, scoffed at this notion of the "private cloud." Behind such voices as Andy Jassy, the head of the company's Amazon Web Services business, and AWS chief technology officer Werner Vogels, the web giant made a point of telling the world a private cloud was not a cloud – that a cloud, by definition, was delivered to everyone, across the public internet.
Yes, some of this was just semantics, an effort to grab hold of a marketing term – cloud – that has become vitally important in the computing world. But underneath the bluster, Amazon and IBM truly held contrasting views. IBM was willing to build you a service inside your own data center. Amazon was not.
Until now.
Amazon declined to discuss its contract with the CIA. But in typically fashion, it did provide a canned statement, arguing that the CIA contract does not represent that big of change for the company. Amazon already offers cloud services, known as GovCloud and FinQloud, designed specifically for government agencies and financial institutions. "We can tell you that GovCloud and FinQloud are examples of 'community clouds' where we are delivering members-only implementations of AWS to groups of organizations who share specific requirements," the statement reads.
But GovCloud and FinQloud reside inside Amazon data centers. The CIA deal is something different. The GAO makes it clear that building cloud services inside CIA data centers is part of the pact, and a source familiar with Amazon's thinking confirms this represents a significant change in strategy for the web giant.
Amazon has been hugely successful offering its public cloud services to developers and startups – by one estimate, AWS now runs as much as one percent of the internet – but it's now looking for ways to expand its cloud business into much larger operations, the so-called "enterprise" and government agencies such as the CIA. The company already has told us it is building a network of partners that will help it sell services into traditional enterprises, and now, it has crossed another line, agreeing to embrace what was once a dirty term at the Seattle company: "the private cloud."
The truth of the matter is that many enterprises and government agencies still question the privacy and security of public cloud services. "This level of control is very important in regulated industries: financial services and healthcare," says Michael R. Overly, a lawyer with the international firm Foley & Lardner LLP. And it appears that Amazon is now willing to accommodate these concerns.
To be sure, a government intelligence agency such as the CIA is an extreme case, but rumors have long indicated that Amazon is building similar private services for others, including large companies, and with the recent revelations that the NSA, another intelligence agency, is now lifting data from public web services, concerns over security and privacy online may only increase.
Some might accuse Amazon of hypocrisy. As recently as December, when we visited AWS headquarters in Seattle, AWS head Andy Jassy reiterated that the company was opposed to the so-called private cloud – that the public cloud was vastly superior in every way. But with its CIA deal, Amazon is simply following the money. According to FCW, the CIA contract is worth $600 million to Amazon over the next ten years. And ultimately, that's worth a little egg on the face.
Additional reporting by Robert McMillianManitoba’s Progressive Conservative Premier Brian Pallister initially seemed very serious about confronting greenhouse gas emissions — a position that came as a surprise to many given the history of Canada’s conservative politicians sidestepping the tricky issue of climate change.
The party’s election platform pledged to “work with the federal government and other jurisdictions as we develop a made-in-Manitoba climate action plan.”
After winning a massive majority in April 2016, it hired Canadian climate policy legend and campaign manager David McLaughlin as senior adviser on the file.
An online survey was extended for an additional two weeks in March to allow for more public input.
These were all impressive things from a government led by Pallister, who had previously served as an MP in Stephen Harper’s notoriously anti-climate policy government.
But nearly 16 months later, the plan has never materialized.
The government effectively stopped talking about it. In fact, the latest action by the PCs has been to publicly announce that it’s seeking legal guidance on the constitutionality of a federally imposed carbon price, a move right out of recently resigned Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall’s playbook.
What on earth is going on?
Only Four Per Cent of Manitoba’s GDP Exposed by Carbon Pricing
Manitoba is in a near-ideal state to introduce climate policy that fulfills the federal requirement of carbon pricing.
The province has only a few “large emitters,” with a mere five sites that expel more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year.
A 2015 report by the Ottawa-based Ecofiscal Commission concluded that only four per cent of Manitoba’s GDP would be disadvantaged with carbon pricing. Meanwhile, a massive 18 per cent of both Alberta and Saskatchewan’s economies are deemed “emissions-intensive and trade-exposed.”
Furthermore, the federally mandated carbon pricing framework likely won’t require agriculture to be included, which is the second biggest contributor to greenhouse gases in Manitoba.
Agriculture Likely Excluded From Manitoba Plan
The federal government’s technical paper didn’t address nitrous oxides and methane, meaning the biggest sources of pollution from agriculture are not going to be included in Manitoba’s plan.
Almost all of Manitoba’s electricity is generated by the low-carbon and high-impact network of hydroelectric dams in the province’s north.
That leaves transportation and stationary combustion — such as residential and commercial building heat — affected by the carbon tax.
However, there are solutions for both of them via electrification and energy efficiency measures, which would be further incentivized by a price on carbon.
Disproportionate impacts on low-income residents could be easily addressed via a rebate program similar to Alberta’s.
Yet Manitoba is left without a plan, or any indication of when one will be released and implemented.
‘Sustainable Development’ Minister Suggests Plan Is Being Worked On
There are no easy explanations for what’s going on behind the scenes. The government itself has been mum beyond regurgitated talking points from their campaign platform.
For instance, Minister of Sustainable Development Cathy Cox has continually cited the ongoing creation of a “made-in-Manitoba climate plan with carbon pricing,” reflecting almost precise language contained in the mandate letter that she received from Pallister in May 2016.
She has also suggested that “the federal government should recognize the significant investments Manitoba has already made in renewable energy resources,” despite the fact that both B.C. and Quebec have large hydro resources while also implementing carbon pricing.
One potential reason for the delay is disagreements within the party itself about climate policy.
“It’s unclear whether or not there’s internal agreement within the government about how to proceed or whether to proceed,” Nathan Laser, campaigns coordinator for the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, told DeSmog Canada.
Similarly, Molly McCracken of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba said in an interview that “there are various schools of thought in the PC caucus.”
That may indeed be the source of delay.
But Pallister has also taken seemingly decisive action on a number of controversial issues, most notably healthcare: in recent months, the government has administered cuts to Winnipeg’s health authority that have in turn resulted in the closures of multiple emergency rooms and clinics.
There’s also a chance that Pallister is banking on the fact that a climate plan will be federally imposed on the province if not implemented provincially, meaning the Premier won’t have to unnecessarily spend political capital.
“The federal government has essentially provided an out to any provincial government that doesn’t want to act in saying that if you don’t act, we will,” Laser said.
It might be a clever political move, although it could result in the loss of $66 million in federal funding via the Low Carbon Economy Leadership Fund. And in the wake of Premier Wall’s resignation, it would make Pallister the most explicitly anti-climate policy leader in the country.
Carbon Pricing Coalition Created by Eleven Organizations
That’s why, on the morning of August 3, representatives from almost a dozen local organizations gathered on the steps of the Manitoba Legislature to officially launch the Manitoba Carbon Pricing Coalition.
They included Canadians for Clean Prosperity, the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Climate Change Connection, Prairie Climate Centre, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba, Green Action Centre and Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition.
McCracken said it’s quite rare for many of the organizations to take a public stand of this nature but “their participation just shows the urgency of this issue and how we need to move on it.”
The coalition partners hold a wide array of opinions on specific policy issues, but agreed on six principles about carbon pricing in Manitoba: that it’s a key part of climate action, it must increase over time in a predictable and schedule way, and that it must be applied across jurisdictions to ensure fairness.
“Ultimately, our organizations have varying opinions on how a carbon tax should be structured and what the revenue could be invested towards,” Laser explained.
“But what we agreed to do is come together on the side of a) climate change is real and b) carbon pricing is a reasonable and effective tool in the toolbox in tackling climate change.”
“It’s not the only thing but it’s a real tool that could give us some revenue to tackle climate change and make investments,” Laser said.
This launch occurred exactly three weeks after another campaign by “Manitobans Against Carbon Taxes Coalition,” consisting of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, Canadian Taxpayers Federation and Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association.
A poll from Angus Reid published in early July also suggested that 60 per cent of Manitobans oppose federally mandated carbon pricing.
Advocates Maintain Optimism for Climate Plan
That clearly leaves plenty of work for advocates of climate action.
Despite the government’s lack of visible progress on the file, local environmentalists and educators are indicating optimism that the Progressive Conservatives will make the most of the opportunity to re-position the province’s economy.
“The mere fact they did a press release on the same day that we did where they indicated they were seeking legal opinion says this is still on their mind,” Curt Hull, project manager at Winnipeg’s Climate Change Connection, told DeSmog Canada.
“We gave them a heads up that we were forming and they chose to time the release of their announcement of the seeking legal opinion on the same day. That’s fine: it means it’s still in their consciousness and they’re working towards it.”
Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister. Photo: Manitoba Government via FlickrThree Republican lawmakers have asked the Department of Homeland Security what can be done to bar or criminally penalize whistleblower sites that reposted a sensitive airport-screening manual that was published on the internet by a government worker.
They also asked about enacting regulations that would bar such publication in the future.
The congressmen are outraged that sites like Cryptome and Wikileaks republished the manual after it was posted online by a government contractor working for the Transportation Security Administration. The manual was posted last March on a government procurement site and was discovered Sunday by a blogger.
In their letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (.pdf) on Wednesday, Reps. Peter T. King (R - New York), Charles Dent (R - Pennsylvania) and Gus Bilirakis (R - Florida) asked, "How has the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration addressed the repeated reposting of this security manual to other websites, and what legal action, if any, can be taken to compel its removal?"
They also asked if DHS is "considering issuing new regulations pursuant to its authority in Section 114 of Title 49, United States Code, and are criminal penalties necessary or desirable to ensure such information is not reposted in the future?"
The letter from the congressmen was first posted by Secrecy News.
The TSA manual was not classified but was designated Sensitive Security Information, or SSI. Parts of the TSA manual were redacted, but the redaction was bungled and allowed anyone to easily uncover the concealed information. But even the unredacted parts of the document were never meant to be seen by the public. The Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure contained this warning: "No part of this record may be disclosed to persons without a 'need to know.'"
Even if the manual had been classified, the United States does not have a law prohibiting the publication of classified information, although the government has threatened on occasion to use espionage laws to prosecute journalists for publishing such information.
The 93-page manual provided details about which passengers are more likely to be targeted for secondary screening at airports, who is exempt from screening, TSA procedures for screening foreign dignitaries and CIA-escorted passengers, and extensive instructions for calibrating metal detectors and screening for traces of explosive materials.
It revealed the limitations of screening equipment to detect certain types of electrical wire and other potential bomb-making materials and provided details about what objects — such as wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs — are exempt from screening.
The manual also provided sample images of sensitive identification cards for DHS and CIA personnel as well as congressional representatives. And it disclosed that passengers carrying passports from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen or Algeria are to be designated for selective screening.
The manual was removed from the government site on Sunday, but not before someone had grabbed a copy of it and submitted it to Cryptome. Numerous copies have subsequently appeared on other sites, including Wikileaks – whose servers are located around the globe.
The three congressmen, who are members of the House Homeland Security Committee, wrote in their letter that the release of the information had security implications that went beyond aviation security.
"TSA screeners and equipment were utilized by the Secret Service frequently during the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns to augment Service Personnel and continue to be used by the Secret Service at National Special Security Events," they wrote.
In case terrorists didn't fully comprehend the point they were trying to make, the congressmen added that the leak of the document "could prove to have disastrous consequences for the security of President Obama."
Five TSA workers were put on leave this week pending an investigation into TSA's redaction procedures and the publication of the manual on the government site.
Photo: File photo shows unidentified passenger at an airport X-ray security scanner with TSA officer Tim Engelby in Phoenix.
Elaine Thompson/AP
See Also:Alan Moore helped to revolutionize the comic book industry in the 1980s with his bold, darker approaches to both horror comics and superhero comics. However, Moore is a bit of a rare case in that his bold, new approach to comics was accepted fairly easily by the audience. That is a very rare state of affairs for comic book readers, who tend to dismiss first before they begrudgingly accept (and then retroactively adore).
RELATED: The 15 Best Hidden Treasures in Watchmen
Because of how quickly he was accepted, Moore was given freer reign from the fans as to what kinds of stories he could do, so it was a lot harder for him to shock the fans with his work. Mostly, his biggest controversies have been for what happened outside of the comics (his disputes with DC Comics and with Marvel, his renunciation of the film adaptations of his work, his general denouncements of the American comic book industry as a whole, etc). Still, that doesn't mean that he hasn't had some controversial comic book stories. Here are his 15 most controversial.
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15 LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER GETS TWO LIBRARY WORKERS FIRED
"Black Dossier" was the first follow-up to Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's popular "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" series. Originally intended as a "sourcebook" (mostly to make sure that Kevin O'Neill wasn't wanting for work while Moore waited to do the third volume in the core series), it turned into a fascinating "file" book complete with maps, prose stories, comic stories and more. There were also some sex scenes in the book.
This did not sit well with library assistant Sharon Cook, who worked at the Jessamine County Public Library in Kentucky. She wanted the book transferred from the graphic novel section to adult fiction (because she felt that the library's graphic novel section was too close to Young Adults). When her request was denied, she then just put the book on hold herself for a year from 2008-09, to make sure no impressionable minds could read it.
However, eventually a computer hold was placed on the book designed that whenever Cook's hold expired, this computer one would take precedence (typically, Cook would just re-place it on hold whenever hers expired). Cook used her access to see that it was an 11-year-old who placed the hold, so Cook enlisted the help of a part-time employee to erase it. When they were found out, both Cook and the other employee were fired.
14 GRAPHIC ASSAULT IN NEONOMICON
"Neonomicon" was a four-issue miniseries by Alan Moore and artist Jacen Burrows that was published by Avatar Press in 2010-11. It was a sequel to a previous Moore/Burrow work from 2003. Both works are based on H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu" mythos. In "Neonomicon," Moore had a specific goal in mind. He noted that Lovecraft would often mention "certain nameless rituals" in his work that were clearly intended to involve sex, but Lovecraft (whether because he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s or because he was simply squeamish about sex) made a point of avoiding the details.
So here, Moore wanted to force the reader to deal with what Lovecraft tried to obscure, to confront them with the horrors of rape. So when FBI Agent Brears and her partner investigate a cult in the story, her partner is murdered and Brears is then brutally raped for multiple issues by both the cultists and then by a grotesque fish man. There were naturally a number of critics who felt that it was untoward to have a comic whose purpose was to show a lot of rape, even if the intent was to show the horrors of it.
13 MARVELMAN GETS A CEASE AND DESIST
"Marvelman" was really Alan Moore's breakout comic book work, as the lead feature in Quality Communications' "Warrior" was actually Moore's first regular comic book series. The concept of the book was to do a modern continuation of the classic Mick Anglo "Marvelman" series from the 1950s, which, in turn, were a continuation of the Fawcett Comics' "Captain Marvel" series after Fawcett lost the rights following a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against them by National Comics/DC Comics. Moore (first with artist Garry Leach and then with Alan Davis) did a brilliant post-modern adaptation of the character.
However, when publisher Dez Skinn introduced a "Marvelman Special," Marvel Comics sprung into action with one of its frequent 1980s attempts to sue companies that they felt were infringing on their trademarks, so with the series already in limbo with Moore and Davis no longer willing to work with each other, Skinn sold the character rights to Eclipse Comics, who then had to re-name the character "Miracleman."
Amazingly, both DC Comics and Marvel Comics had the chance to buy the rights to Marvelman at the time but both said no! This was within Alan Moore's first year on "Saga of the Swamp Thing," so while he was a critically acclaimed creator, he was not yet the Alan Moore, whose name alone could sell a comic book series.
12 SWAMP THING HAS SEX
"Saga of the Swamp Thing" #34 (by Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben) is the perfect example of what we were referencing earlier when we mentioned that Moore's early 1980s audience followed him to bizarre places with open minds. The issue dealt with Swamp Thing and Abby exploring their relationship, specifically Abby's willingness to take things to another, sexual level. The problem, of course, is how do you have sex with an animated pile of swamp vegetation? As it turns out, you do so by Swamp Thing producing a tuber that Abby would eat and then the two would share in a psychedelic wonderland of desire.
Bissette and Totleben did a stunning job depicting the experience, using a series of double-page spreads (cleverly going vertically instead of the typical horizontal double-page spread) to show what the two lovers were going through.
A problem came, though, when DC gave away the rights to do whatever the producers of the second "Swamp Thing" film, "Return of the Swamp Thing," wanted to do with Moore's work, and the end result was one of the most bizarre movie sex scenes ever (with Heather Locklear as Abby).
An embarrassing adaptation of a great work.
11 MR. HYDE RAPES THE INVISIBLE MAN
Hawley Griffin was the Invisible Man in Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." He was first seen in Volume 1 terrorizing a girls' boarding school before being enlisted to join the team of Victorian superheroes. In the second volume, however, Griffin turned on his colleagues during the Martian invasion, choosing to ally himself with the invaders (as he felt it was a given that they would succeed, so he might as well serve them and live than fight them and die). When Mina Murray discovered his deceit, he brutally assaulted her. Since he was invisible, the readers just see Murray as she is assaulted and degraded, left in a pile of her own vomit.
When Mister Hyde learned what Griffin had done, he revealed the fact that his enhanced senses allowed him to see Griffin. He then proceeded to rape Griffin nearly to death as revenge for what Griffin did to Murray. When Griffin finally died from his injuries, his blood became visible, so the reader got to see Hyde's clothes slowly turn red with Griffin's blood. Some critics took issue with the use of rape here as almost a heroic tactic.
10 GALLEY-WAG CAUSES CONCERN
In "League of Extraordinary Genetlemen: Black Dossier," Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill introduced the Galley-Wag, a noble being from the Black Matter Cosmos. Galley-Wag was Moore and O'Neill's attempt to redeem the character of the Golliwog, from Florence Upton's series of children's books from the turn of the 20th Century. Upton based the character of Golliwog on the black minstrel tradition. There's little doubt that what Upton was basing the character on was a racist depiction of African-Americans. However, people would argue that while the origin of the character's designs were racist, how Upton wrote the character was not racist, as the Golliwog was treated like a hero.
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＊想看中文字幕版預告片，請前往：http://youtu.be/VREirE8afggI used to be a marauding Internet Anti-Scientologist myself. Back in my day though, there weren’t as many of us. All the recent media on Scientology has really swelled their ranks. And they are more cock-sure of themselves than I have ever seen them.
It kinda sucks that I’m no longer part of that tribe because, as an Anti-Scientologist, this was the future that I always dreamed of: legions of us descending on anyone who says they are a Scientologist and ripping them to shreds. Splattering them with all kinds of nasty information exposing L Ron Hubbard’s and David Miscavige’s utter depravity. And generally browbeating a Scientologist into seeing how “wrong” he is to be one.
So I’m really missing out on a present that I helped to create in the past.
Story of my life, I guess.
What have I been doing instead?
Something much more productive, and much more aligned with my own purposes: I’ve been practicing Basic Skepticism on Scientologists & Anti-Scientologists.
Here’s how it works:
Basic skepticism requires 2 simple skills –
Recognizing when a claim is being presented for you to accept. Asking for, or looking for, positive evidence in support of that claim.
Seems easy, right? Ha! Just wait until you start practicing it!
Step 1 is very important. Sometimes people make claims and you don’t recognize that a claim is being made. This can lead you to accepting the claim without really noticing it. So here are some examples of claims that Anti-Scientologists routinely make about Scientology:
The Training Routines (TRs) in Scientology produce a hypnotic trance.
Scientology is a criminal organization.
The bad outweighs the good in Scientology, therefore it’s all bad.
Scientology is a CON and a SCAM
Scientologists are gullible.
David Miscavige is short.
If you go back in time on my own blog here, you will find me asserting almost every one of those claims. The recent shift in my perspective over the last couple of years has come as a result of my learning and applying basic skepticism to my own beliefs.
Once you recognize that a claim is being made – whether you agree with it or not – apply Step 2: Asking for, or looking for, positive evidence in support of that claim.
As an example, let’s take the first claim above:
The Training Routines (TRs) in Scientology produce a hypnotic trance in people who practice them.
When you apply step 2 to the claim, you will only be looking for evidence that positively supports that claim. You will not be looking for a negation of the claim, such as “No it doesn’t! I applied TRs and I felt quite refreshed afterward!” That’s simply a counter claim, and pursuing that ignores the evidence in support of the original.
So ignore counter claims and focus directly on the claim. You want to see positive evidence in support of that claim which demonstrates “The TRs produce a hypnotic trance.”
For this particular claim, you would need to first define exactly what a hypnotic trance is. Then you would need to look for, or ask for, the evidence that all people who practice the TRs – as they are written in Scientology – enter a hypnotic trance exactly as “hypnotic trance” is defined.
Are you starting to get the picture here?
It’s easy to believe a claim. That’s the easiest thing in the world. People normally believe claims because the claim feels good to believe it (Truthiness), or because the claim is consistent with their existing worldview (Confirmation Bias).
But to prove that a claim is true with positive evidence that supports it?
That’s very different. And quite a bit more difficult. And messy.
During the process of Step 2, your thinking changes. You get uncomfortable. And you realize the difficulty of the claim, and that its related issues aren’t so simple at all. You begin to see the problems associated with the claim and the oversimplifications people use to keep believing them.
Your feeling of certainty begins to wane. You realize how much you actually don’t know. And you grow up a little. The boiling temperature of your blood recedes, and you start to feel more peaceful.
So shouldn’t you apply a little Basic Skepticism to the claims of Anti-Scientology before you work yourself into an hysterical lather and launch marauding campaigns all over the Internet, shoving your beliefs down everyone’s throats?
Obviously, because I myself have engaged in such behavior in the past as an Anti-Scientologist, I didn’t used to think so.
But I’ve learned. And now I think it’s important to apply Basic Skepticism to the claims of Anti-Scientology, and to Scientology.
So I am passing this simple but completely subversive critical thinking skill over to my friends in the Anti-Scientology and Scientology Tribes.
Do you think they’ll use it?Jeff Steigers CAPI automation system
Well this new development over at CAPI looks incredible!! Here is what Jeff posted at **************. This will add DAW control and automation to any mixer or summing unit."Hey guys, sorry for not popping in earlier. I had to get all of my open orders shipped today since I'm having a small outpatient surgery tomorrow morning. :-X Just a laparoscopic hernia repair. Should not be a big deal.So, yes I have been busy. Actually its not me. This is mostly all above my pay grade. I am however lucky enough to be involved with some heavy hitter geniuses! Seriously, these guys have worked with some of the largest console manufactures in the world and have clearly made analog/digital/software integration their bitch. The project was started nearly 2 years ago and things have gone well and came a long way in that time.We call it DAWtomation™. Its an analog level control system that is run by a DAW. At present, it will run in ProTools, Logic and Nuendo. The system has many different uses and tiers. All are based around a high quality 8 channel VCA (THAT 2180) board that communicates with a DAW. Level and mute automation moves can be written to your session file and will be carried out during playback. Level controls are made ONLY in the analog domain POST outboard gear so fader moves do not mess with your outboard!The system runs on its own proprietary plugin. Connections from the DAW to the VCA board are via USB or Thunderbolt. This is not a HUI system.On a 32 bit system the resolution is 1024 steps. On a 64 bit system it is 2048.The first product release will be the 8 channel VCA board and the software plugin. The VCA boards will be fully assembled only. When you see them, you will know why. This board can be used in place of a fader or potentiometer gain control so high quality mute/level automation can be added to summing mixers or other DIY projects. You simply wire it in like a pot. 3 wires per channel.Along with that release will be a balanced analog insert based automation system. A simple box with 16 inputs and 16 outputs. This box will house the VCA circuitry which will be parked between a INA137 and a DRV134. Clean and sonically invisible. These will also be fully assembled. A clever DIY guy could easily build an all discrete version of the same thingThe second product release will be a motorized moving fader system that can be used with nearly any analog mixing console. The faders will (most likely) be TKD motorized faders in a facia along with the 4 typical pushbutton switches for Mute, Read (safe), Write and Latch (update). These are the same controls that will be on the final version of the GUI. The plugin will fully interact with the physical fader and vice versa. In the long run, this will most likely be the easiest and most economical way for folks to upgrade their old MCI's, Studer's etc etc.The third product release will be interactive linking to SSL's moving fader automation. The existing faders on your old SSL desk will read and write level/mute automation that will be stored in your DAW session file. This will require a daughter driver board along with the main 8 channel VCA board. In this situation, the VCA's will not be populated but that is where the daughterboard will connect.Other old automation systems may be supported in the future but time will tell on that. Integration with FlyFaders can be achieved but it may be less expensive in the long run to just replace the faders with our moving faders.As of now, we are nearing the end of R&D. My colleague is off to England for the final push. Soon we shall see an updated and more finalized GUI as well as some new faders that actually move!Following are a few videos that we took over the weekend. We had the VCA box connected to the insert point of an SSL console so the full level audio was never changed within the DAW.Keep in mind, this is a fast a dirty GUI that was written just for prelim testing.Vid 1 is a pass while writing level control. This was done with a mouse.Vid 2 is playback of what was written in vid 1:Vid 3 is showing that the audio coming from ProTools into the SSL channels is always at full level despite what you hear. The level control is done fully in the analog domain.As of now, we have no fixed release date. We also have no firm pricing but rest assured, you may gasp when you find out just how reasonable it is!!"By Sean Graham
There are certain universal experiences that go along with being involved in academics, one of which is explaining the publishing model of academic journals. This is particularly difficult for grad students, who, upon their first publication, are confronted by family members wondering how much they got paid. It’s a well meaning question, but it’s a bit of a downer to have to explain how academic publishing works and that, as today’s guest aptly puts it, it’s a gift culture. The work is done in the pursuit of knowledge with the primary goal not being monetary gain, but rather having the information available for public consumption.
Recently, that final point has increasingly been scrutinized by the Open Access movement, which is explored by Peter Suber in this openly accessible book. More and more scholars are moving away from journals with paid subscriptions in favour of open access publications. Sometimes that’s not possible, however, which is why some institutions are requiring their faculty to put copies of their publications in open access repositories in their libraries.
At Harvard University the push towards open access has been led by the Office for Scholarly Communication, which has been able to get each school to agree to participate in its open access repository. Through Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH), publications by Harvard faculty are freely available to anyone. The site has been quite successful since its launch, recently surpassing 7 million downloads. They also maintain an Open Access Directory, which includes listings of open access materials and different funding models for open access journals.
In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Peter Suber, the Director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication. We chat about his book, the challenges of getting faculty on board, and questions of funding. We also explore some of the generational challenges associated with open access and the benefits of public scholarship.
Sean Graham is a William Lyon Mackenzie King post-doctoral fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University where he studies the history of North American media and broadcasting. He is an editor at Activehistory.ca and host/producer of the History Slam Podcast.'Old' information theory makes it easier to predict flooding
Many different aspects are involved in predicting high water and floods, such as the type of precipitation, wind, buildings and vegetation. The greater the number of variables included in predictive models, the better the prediction will be. However, the models will inevitably become increasingly more complex. PhD student from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft, The Netherlands) Steven Weijs uses basic insight from the information theory (Shannon's Information Theory) to demonstrate the cohesion between this added complexity, the information from observational data and the uncertainty of predictions. He will continue his research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland thanks to funding from the prestigious AXA Research Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship. Surprise
In his research, the Delft PhD student Steven Weijs shows how Shannon's Information Theory can also be applied to studying high water and flooding. Information theory, first devised in 1948 by Claude Shannon, sees information and uncertainty as numerical quantities, measured in 'bits', that correspond with the extent to which the recipient of a message is surprised by that message ('surprisal'). The level of surprisal depends on how likely the recipient considered the event to be: rain in the Netherlands, for example, is hardly a surprise, but seeing rain in the desert is highly unlikely and surprising and therefore provides more information.
Pumping engines
Steven Weijs analysed the way information flows through models used to make certain decisions about 'water' (switching pumping engines on and off, for example). The golden rule was: the greater the amount of information, the better the decision. In fact not only the flow of water, but also the flow of information from measurements, via models and predictions, to the final decision should be optimised. This would be achievable by assessing the models according to the amount of information comprised in their predictions.
Lausanne
Acquiring the AXA Research Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship means that after obtaining his PhD in Delft later this year, Weijs will be able to continue his research at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
TU Delft Works closely with the EPFL in the area of innovative measuring technology. The EPFL is currently focusing on collecting vast amounts of information about the weather and hydrology in the Val Ferret area. This is a pilot district where a lot of high-tech measuring equipment and sensor networks have been set up. The researchers hope that the information can be used to make more accurate predictions about flooding and enable better management of reservoirs to cope with high water levels.
Follow-up
In his follow-up research, Weijs will be applying the information theory to determine the best locations for setting up measuring equipment (and the best type of measuring equipment) in order to collect as much information as possible about possible flooding. The detailed measurements obtained from Val Ferret can also be used to design cheaper, less intensive sensor networks, which can be deployed on a larger scale in similar, larger areas and ultimately be used to make more accurate predictions of flooding in the Netherlands.This article is over 9 years old
Italian prime minister causes controversy with quip made during interview following country's worst earthquake in three decades
The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, today sparked controversy when he said the 17,000 people made homeless by Monday's earthquake should think of themselves as being on a "camping weekend".
Berlusconi made the remark during an interview with a German television channel as he visited one of the emergency camps set up to cater for people who have lost their homes in the disaster.
The quake, which devastated the city of L'Aquila and surrounding towns and villages, has now claimed 260 lives.
Berlusconi told the reporter for the N-TV channel that the homeless quake victims "lacked nothing".
"They have medicaments. They have hot food. They have shelter for the night," he said.
"Of course, their current lodgings are a bit temporary. But they should see it like a weekend of camping."
His remarks – which seem to have been intended to reassure the public – scarcely correspond to the experiences of the homeless.
Between Monday and Tuesday, they had to endure a night of driving rain and hail during which temperatures fell to 4C (39F).
Yesterday, Berlusconi told a press conference in L'Aquila that 14,500 tents had been made ready and another 2,000 were available on standby.
However, tents were still lacking for 200 people by the time night fell.
Twenty "tent cities" have been set up to take the homeless, while other people driven out of their houses by the earthquake have been lodged in hotels and elsewhere.
Berlusconi's comments came as rescuers continued searching for survivors after a powerful aftershock brought two apartment blocks crashing down in L'Aquila today, causing panic among rescue workers and survivors.
The aftershocks caused chunks of masonry to fall from damaged buildings, including parts of the basilica in L'Aquila. The tremor – measured by the US Geological Survey at magnitude 5.6 – was felt as far away as Rome.
A 76-year-old Roman man was reported to have died of a heart attack following the tremor, according to Reuters.
Berlusconi said 260 people including 16 children, had died, while nine bodies remained to be identified. He said about 100 of the injured were in serious condition.
The Ansa news agency reported today that four students trapped in the rubble of a dormitory of the University of L'Aquila had died.
The first funeral of a victim was due to take place in the town of Loreto Aprutino today, led by the archbishop of Pescara.
Pope Benedict XVI said he would visit the shocked and injured people of the area as soon as possible.
The pontiff praised the relief operations as an example of how solidarity could help overcome "even the most painful trials".
The Vatican said he would visit the stricken area after Easter Sunday.
Berlusconi has said he will appeal for special European Union funding to deal with the consequences of the disaster, which came as his debt-laden government was struggling to respond to the global economic crisis.
He suggested that some of the cash earmarked for infrastructure projects designed to revive the economy could be spent in the L'Aquila area.Author's Note: Knowledge of Fire Emblem is unnecessary for this story. All will be self-explanatory or otherwise explained.
Chapter 1
"Who's next?!" Yang challenged. She clashed her metal gauntlets together, generating an ear-splitting metallic crash. A pair of men entered the ring and dragged her previous opponent away. The half-conscious man was bleeding from the nose and groaning. That was the fate of pretty much everyone who stepped into the ring against Yang. She dominated the tournaments sponsored by her liege Princess Weiss, but this was nothing of the sort. Instead of closely officiated fights held in the castle courtyard, Yang was fighting in the basement of a tavern. She was willing to take on all comers, armed and armored as they pleased, just so long as they were willing to risk their hard-earned cash.
As much as the tavern's owner Junior hated to see his patrons beaten to a pulp, he had to admit that Yang's visits were good for business. Men - and even some women - came from all over the city to see her fight. It helped that the only armor she was was her gauntlets, and the only clothing a few thin shreds of strategically placed cloth. On normal nights Junior struggled to turn a profit. When Yang showed up the combination of coin spent on drinks and a cut of the wagers meant he made as much in one night as he would usually expect in a week.
"Is that all?!" Yang shouted one last challenge. It was late. She was perfectly willing to take on another fight, and collect some more gold, but heading back to the castle to rest in luxury was an attractive prospect. "Pathetic. Junior, where's my gold?" Junior produced a hefty sack of coins. He took 50% of whatever Yang earned but that still left what for most people was a small fortune.
"Hold on just a second." A voice called from the crowd. A quartet of heavily armed and armored men pushed their way through the crowd. "We've got a proposition for you."
Yang recognized the man. Cardin Winchester. He was a small-time mercenary who led a tiny band of miscreants. He was arrogant. Yang had long wanted to punch the smug smile off his face. "Let's hear it." Yang said.
"I bet you can't beat the four of us at once." Cardin said.
"Why should I agree to fight you four?" Yang asked. "That hardly sounds fair."
"If you can beat us, I'll double your take." Cardin said. "If we win, you go home empty handed."
Yang sized up the challengers. Cardin, no problem. She was less familiar with his hangers-on, Russel, Dove and Sky. They had a reputation as brawlers, but they usually fought people much weaker than them. They were scum. Heavily armored scum, but scum nonetheless. She could take them. "Deal." Yang said. "I expect to be paid when I wipe the floor with you." She made her way back into the ring and awaited her challengers.
"You know I'm good for the money." Cardin said. Yang was not so sure, but hey, if that was what it took to kick Cardin's ass, fine. He and his pals entered the ring, immediately spreading out to surround Yang.
Yang was beginning to have second thoughts. Cardin and his pals had played her. They were trained warriors - even if their training was not nearly on the level of hers - not drunken morons. And their weapons were sharp. Yang was wearing pretty much nothing. One good hit and she would have to concede, lest she risk death. To win she was going to have to take out all four without even being touched. At the end of the night, she was fatigued too. A few hours of fighting had surely dulled her a bit.
What was Yang thinking? She was going to kick their asses, no problem. "Give the word Junior." She commanded.
"You sure about this blondie?" Junior asked. He was worried about his prize attraction.
"Just do it." Yang said.
"Okay." Junior sighed. "Ready...set...fight!"
All four opponents immediately lunged forward. Yang was expecting it and dropped to the ground. Cardin and his group ran into each other as Yang ducked out of the way. To avoid injuring one another they threw themselves off balance. Yang spun around on the ground and swept Sky's legs. He slammed down on his back. Yang leapt past him, punching him in the chin on her way. He was done, his jaw broken. Yang now had the three remaining fighters in front of her. Russel threw his daggers. Yang punched one out of the air and side-stepped the other. That put her right in Cardin's path. He brought his mace crashing down but Yang caught it. With a twist he was completely off balance. She lifted him up, spun around and tossed him into Russel. Both crashed to the ground, sliding out of the ring and out of the fight.
But Yang had lost track of Dove. She heard him grunt from behind her and she dive-rolled forward, spinning around to face him. Dove stood there with his sword at the ready, but a flash of yellow caught Yang's attention. It was some of her hair, a bit stuck on the edge of Dove's blade and more settling to the ground between them. "You monster!" Yang screamed. Her gauntlets, legendary weapons - collectively named Ember Celica - infused with magical material, burst into flames in response to the wielder's rage. She charged at Dove, flaming gauntlets at the ready.
"Oh gods I yield!" Dove screamed. He dropped his sword and shielded his face with his arms. Yang pulled up just short of the cowering man. Her anger faded and along with it the flames. Dove was simply too pathetic to be angry at.
"And our winner, Yang Xiao-Long." Junior said with a sigh of relief.
Yang raised her hands in triumph, running around the ring and playing to the cheering crowd. "I'm not done!" Cardin shouted from behind her. He lunged toward her with his mace. Yang was caught off guard and had no chance of blocking the heinous assault.
A chill filled the air and Cardin stopped dead, frozen in place. "You must be more careful." Weiss admonished, pointing her sword - Myrtenaster, a divine weapon that allowed the wielder to use magic without tomes - toward the now frozen Cardin. "What have I told you about letting your emotions get the better of you?"
"P-princess!" Yang exclaimed. She prostrated herself before the royal as did the rest of the crowd.
"You may rise." Weiss said. "And I suggest the rest of you leave. The show's over." The gathered crowd made for the exits. Weiss walked over to Cardin. "As for you…" She tapped her sword against him. He unfroze and dropped to the ground in a heap. "...I have decided to overlook this transgression against my retainer. Do not make me regret my decision."
Cardin groaned and stumbled to his feet. Russel helped him away while Dove dragged Sky out. "What about my gold?" Yang called after them. "Or do you need to be taught another lesson?"
Russel grabbed a pouch off of Cardin's belt. "I swear, it's all we have." He said, terror in his voice.
"Just give me the damn coins." Yang demanded.
Russel tossed the pouch. Weiss intercepted it just before it reached Yang's hands. It was clearly far less than promised. "Leave, now." Weiss commanded. Cardin and his group hurried out as best they could.
"Thanks for the save princess." Yang said. "Last time I turn my back on that asshole."
The expression on Weiss' face showed she was not amused. "What is my retainer doing fighting in this dive?" Weiss asked. "This is far beneath your station. And your state of dress! You look like a cheap whore!"
"I was just trying to make some money..." Yang replied.
"Do I not pay you enough?" Weiss demanded. "Is that it?"
"No, you pay me plenty." Yang said. "It's just a little boring sitting around the castle all day. I mean, it's nice and all, but exciting is not a word I would use to describe it."
"What would your father say if he saw you now?" Weiss pressed.
"Knowing him he'd probably be impressed." Yang laughed.
"Silence!" Weiss shouted. "This is no laughing matter. Is this the kind of example you wish to set for your sister? Brawling with drunks while half-naked? You should be ashamed."
"I'm sorry." Yang said, hanging her head. "You're right. This is unbecoming of a knight."
"You are forgiven." Weiss said. "But do not involve yourself in anything like this ever again, or I will be forced to find a new retainer."
"I'm very sorry Your Majesty, I hate to interrupt, but…" Junior cut in. He was holding the bag of coins Yang had earned.
"Keep it." Weiss said.
"Thank you for your generosity, Your Majesty." Junior said, bowing his head.
"You did not let me finish." Weiss said. "No more fights. Only officially sanctioned tournaments are allowed in my realm. I will not turn a blind eye while you support hooliganism."
"Yes, Your Majesty." Junior sighed. His haul from the night was sizable but he would have to go back to just scraping by soon enough. Still, as a royal princess and the Duchess of Chon'sin, Weiss' word was law.
"Now Yang, let us return to the castle." Weiss said. "I grow weary of these...surroundings."
As it turned out, Weiss had not entirely forgiven Yang. There was punishment in store the following day. Normally Yang would spend the day training with her sister and some of the other knights. She was the best unarmed combatant in Chon'sin and passed on those skills to the younger soldiers. Today she would be forced to accompany Weiss as she went about the business of ruling the Duchy. Weiss heard petitioner after petitioner, making decisions and dispensing justice. It was terribly boring. Weiss knew it was driving Yang crazy and that was the point. If Yang transgressed because she was bored, Weiss was going to show her just how boring things could be. Worse still, Yang was forced to wear her full set of plate armor, something she rarely did. It was hot and unpleasant to be in after any stretch of time. Yang normally wore more than she had at the tavern, but not nearly so much. Weiss was very, very good at making a point.
Weiss was also very good at ruling her Duchy. It was all the more remarkable because of her youth and inexperience. The same age as Yang, she had been granted the Duchy by her father, the emperor, only a little over a year before. Legally she was an adult, and as a member of the royal family she was expected to take part in the governance of the empire. Chon'sin had once been an independent kingdom, but war with the empire had seen its absorption and demotion. Weiss' father had prosecuted the war, and the late stages had been rather brutal. Now the original royal family of Chon'sin were all dead. But that was long ago. The emperor had been a young man then. Memories could be surprisingly short.
The people of Chon'sin still held a degree of resentment toward Weiss and her family. Being ruled by a foreign power was humiliating. But Weiss' fair and attentive rule made her popular. There had not been the slightest hint of unrest since she had taken her place as Duchess. It helped that she had been raised there in preparation for one day taking the position, and her government still included a large number of local aristocrats.
Yang was one. Her youth did not stand in the way of her being Weiss' Master of Soldiers, the Duchy's top military advisor and Weiss' effective second-in-command. She was a knight like her father - Taiyang - before her. He was a little too young to have taken part in the war, but his father had backed the empire. When he too threw his support behind the empire his wife - Yang's mother Raven Branwen - left him to join what little resistance to imperial rule remained. Not all memories were short. Then had come a marriage to a knight - Summer Rose - from Rosanne. The union produced Yang's half-sister Ruby but was sadly short lived. Summer died in battle against rebels. It was rumored that she had been sought out and killed by Raven herself. For his part Taiyang did not believe it. Yang and Ruby did not believe it either.
Ruby was a newly minted knight in her own rite. She was still in training but soon she would take her place alongside her sister as one of Weiss' top retainers. Her martial skill made that a given. Having always wanted to follow in her parents' footsteps, it was something she looked forward to. Just being knighted had been a dream come true. She was unconventional - wielding a scythe rather than the traditional sword, axe or lance - but that only made her a more dangerous fighter. Like Yang's, her weapon - Crescent Rose - was imbued with legendary properties, the blade forged from steel said to have been blessed by Naga. It gave its wielder super-human speed the way Yang's gauntlets lent her super-human strength.
The monotony of the day was broken by an unexpected arrival. "Ambassadors from Regna Ferox." Yang announced. A pair entered, a man and a woman. They did not look much like ambassadors, cloaked in rather simple black and white clothing rather than the ornate attire that would be expected. But with Ferox that was not surprising. Diplomacy was not their strong suit, and they often employed soldiers as their ambassadors. The pair did not look like they were Feroxi either, but that too was not a surprise. Ferox had long employed foreigners with exceptional martial skill. The pair approached, bowing before Weiss' throne.
"Welcome to Chon'sin." Weiss said with a bow. "What business do you have with my duchy?" The ambassadors did not respond. "Perhaps you require a translator." Weiss mused.
The ambassadors leapt up and the charade was broken. Both drew swords and lunged at Weiss. Yang was too far away to help, positioned as she was by the door, and Weiss was unarmed. The man swung his sword at Weiss. It was a katana, the traditional sword of Chon'sin. He must have been involved with the resistance. Weiss ducked and the blade struck her throne, cutting through the gilded wood chair. Weiss was off balance and the man was ready to strike again. To her shock the woman stepped between her and the would-be assassin and caught his blade on her own, a wakizashi. "What are you doing?!" The man demanded.
"The right thing." The woman declared. The pair strained against one another.
By now Yang was upon them. She leapt into a punch at the man but he spun around and blocked the strike before ducking out of the way to let the woman's blade slip toward Yang. The woman held up just before contact. The man got behind Yang and kicked her, sending her tumbling into the woman and Weiss. The assassin then turned and ran, bisecting a guard foolish enough to try to stop him. The rest of the soldiers present rushed to Weiss' side. They were unarmed in accordance with court procedure, but they would defend her with their lives.
Yang pinned the woman to the ground. "Who sent you?" She demanded. "Are you with the anti-Schnee resistance?"
"No, I'm an exile." The woman said. "That man, on the other hand, is. But the resistance is not responsible, nor is Regna Ferox. I'll tell you everything if you just release me."
"Yeah right." Yang said. "I'm not falling for that."
"Yang, confiscate her weapon and allow her to speak." Weiss commanded.
"Yes, Your Majesty." Yang sighed. The woman willingly handed over her blade and Yang allowed her to stand.
"Who are you?" Weiss asked.
"Blake Belladonna." The woman replied. "My family fled Chon'sin for Ferox when your father invaded. I am a soldier in the employ of the government-in-exile."
"That makes you my enemy." Weiss warned. "Why would you save me?"
"As much as I would like to see the monarchy restored, I will not support tactics as deplorable as assassination." Blake answered. "And from what I understand you are a just leader."
"You said the resistance did not send you." Weiss said. "Who did?"
"You will not believe me." Blake warned.
"Just tell me." Weiss demanded.
"The emperor." Blake replied. Weiss and the assembled crowd shared an audible gasp.
"That's preposterous." Weiss said. "Why would my father send assassins to kill me?"
"He wishes to start a war with Regna Ferox." Blake explained. "By posing as ambassadors of Ferox and killing his daughter, we were to provide him the justification he needs."
"I refuse to believe you." Weiss said. "You are a liar and an enemy. Take her away."
"I have proof, though I doubt it will sway you." Blake said as a pair of soldiers took hold of her. "In my pocket. I have the orders sent by the emperor." Yang reached into Blake's pocket and pulled out a letter. She handed it to Weiss.
Weiss read it over, becoming visibly distressed as she did so. "No, this is impossible." Weiss said, shaking her head. "There's no way."
"Is that not his handwriting?" Blake asked. "Is that not his seal?"
"It...it is." Weiss admitted. "How can this be?"
"He is an evil man." Blake said. "He values power and control more than his own daughter. Or his wife."
"What do you mean his wife?" Weiss asked.
"Another team of assassins has been sent to kill your mother." Blake replied. "It is his insurance against a failure to kill you."
"Yang!" Weiss shouted. "Have a warning sent to the capital. They must…"
"It's already too late." Blake said. "The attacks were to happen simultaneously. If the plan was successful, your mother is already dead."
"But...I...no...there has to be…" Weiss stammered.
"And now you know too much." Blake said. "Adam, your would-be assassin, will report to the emperor that not only did we fail, that the orders fell into your hands. The emperor will silence you. He cannot risk the truth coming to light." Weiss stared in silence. In an instant her world had been shattered. "You have three choices. You may accept your fate and die. You may go into exile. Or you may fight. Your father must be stopped. The world must not fall under his iron fist."
"I...I refuse to believe this." Weiss said. "Yang, send a Pegasus rider to the capital. Notify them of the assassination attempt and warn them of a possible attempt on the empress' life."
"This course leads to your death." Blake warned. "You must prepare yourself."
"And double my bodyguard." Weiss added. "Put the militia on alert as well."
"If you will have me, I will fight for you." Blake offered. "I know you cannot possibly trust me, but you will need all the help you can get."
"Put her in prison...for now." Weiss ordered. She was beginning to regain her composure. "Let us see how the situation develops."A video of student leaders at Saint Mary’s University participating in a chant that endorses sexual assault is causing outrage among college students, officials and local politicians alike.
The chant happened at a Monday event called "Turf Burn" for hundreds of incoming freshmen |
ian, repressive, and distinctly unworthy of respect or reverence.[45]
The Jewish people, too, are currently contending with questions related to the centralization of religious authority, and the relationship between halakha and government power in a Jewish state.[46] Any casual observer of Israeli religious politics is familiar with at least some of the issues that revolve around the official Israeli rabbinate, and in particular its government mandate of bureaucratic control over marriage, divorce, personal status, conversion, kashruth, and a variety of other issues related to the intersection of halakha and public life in Israel. Numerous articles and personal testimonies have suggested that this centralization and coercive enforcement of particular understandings of Jewish law have negatively impacted many Israeli’s and Jews’ respect for Judaism, halakha, and religious leadership.[47]
The issue is not limited to Israel. In the United States, too, there is substantial discontent, cynicism, and distrust with attempts to create centralized, uniform halakhic standards in areas like kashruth and geirut. Uniform policy, consistency, the establishment of best practices, predictability, and oversight are, to be sure, only some of the benefits of more centralized, organized, and uniform standards of halakhic practice.[48] But there are drawbacks as well.[49] Uniformity and centralization of religious authority and standards makes it harder for properly committed but unique and independent-minded members of our communities to find contexts conducive to their religious growth. Formal policies and bureaucratic regulatory processes also leave many halakhically legitimate modes of practice outside the mainstream. Although this is problematic in its own right, it has the added detriment of potentially contributing to a stagnation of creative and enriching developments in Jewish thought and halakhic practice. Several authorities have noted the importance of preserving non-normative viewpoints in order to maintain the potential for alternative modes of practice when circumstances call for it, l’fi haMakom v’haZeman. This becomes more difficult when religious standards are set from the top down, and communities and rabbinic leaders are expected to conform in order to situate themselves within broader centralized frameworks.
As we grapple with such issues, it may be helpful to look beyond our own daled amot to the experiences of other communities with characteristics similar to our own that have also experimented with various forms of centralized religio-legal authority and associations between religious law and state power. The Muslim example is a powerful one. Of course, the two situations are not exactly the same; important historical, cultural, political, and sociological differences urge thoughtfulness and caution in drawing uncritical conclusions about how Jews should think about these issues. Nevertheless, it is helpful to expand our horizons and consider what we can learn from others—even from other faith communities, including the Islamic tradition. If we are clear about our own commitments and objectives, we can use such interactions to enhance Jewish life and practice, raising the esteem of Torah and God in the process.Crew/Production: Written & Directed by the Blaine Brothers (Ben & Chris), starring Cian Barry as Rob, Abigail Hardingham as Holly, and Fiona O’Shaughnessy as Nina.
Plot: A drama/romance British horror. After the death of his girlfriend, Rob unsuccessfully tries to kill himself. This attracts the younger nice-girl-wanting-to-be-bad Holly; but when they finally have sex, they are literally interrupted by the appearance of his dead girlfriend, coming back to life to torment him.
Thoughts on the film:
• This isn’t strictly a horror film, the idea/premise of a dead person tormenting you (and the copious amounts of blood) make it so – it’s more a darkly romantic drama.
• Although Nina is sarcastic and dry-witted, and there are a few jokes in the film, this isn’t played for laughs. It’s not camp, it’s treated somewhat seriously (if that makes any sense!).
• I consider it a unique take on the stages of grief, in that the new couple have to take steps to rid Nina (i.e. Rob has to overcome his grief and move on), which includes acknowledging and including her appearance, saying goodbye, getting rid of her belongings, breaking ties with Nina’s parents etc. Nina coming up only when Rob is intimate with a new woman/it ending in blood speaks to him having to let go.
• Rob gets Holly into his music, which is indie music, which is both fitting and excellent. Wanted to find the soundtrack to this film straight afterwards.
• This off-kilter dark romance is well cast – the film hinges on the main three, who work very well together and is in tune with the film’s vibe. They really give this film it’s heart, well done!
• I love when characters test the rules of the horror premise, would’ve loved to see/hear more of it – they do see what happens when you have sex in another bed (Nina appears in Rob’s bed initially), and not on a bed at all.
• We get to see where Rob is in his grieving (that he hasn’t let go) as his initially introduces the two (ha!) as his co-worker Holly and his girlfriend Nina. It’s a great scene.
• It’s worth noting the gorgeous Abigail Hardingham has amazing breasts and numerous topless scenes. Even Nina gets in on it as she appears when Holly is lying down, and comes up through the bed while grabbing her breasts from behind. Ha! Nina is also naked (although covered in blood/her hair covers her breasts); and as a crux of the film, a lot of time is spent naked in the bedroom. I appreciate how nudity is portrayed (in that it just happens to be there/sometimes played for laughs), rather than shying away from it like most films (where couples have sex almost fully clothed).
• I appreciated also seeing Nina’s parents vent and their grief.
• The revelation at the end didn’t sit well with me – I didn’t think it made much sense for the characters.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Cleveland Metroparks is adrift off of Cleveland's East Side beaches.
The park system recently banned visitors to Euclid Beach and the adjoining sands from touching the water.
Then, on Saturday, when a father refused to forbid his 6-year-old daughter from getting her legs wet, Metroparks rangers put dad in handcuffs and wrote him two tickets.
I know this sounds unbelievable, but it's true. Even the Metroparks says it's so.
The new policy and its clumsy enforcement is sparking protest and questions about the Cleveland Metroparks, which took over the management of the city's lakefront properties from the state in June 2013.
News of the new policy and the ticket spread this week among neighborhood residents and activists. Some residents, upset by the policy change, plan to complain Thursday during the Metroparks' board of commissioners meeting. The commissioners are scheduled to vote Thursday on the swimming policy at Euclid Beach.
I have written several columns about Euclid Beach and the adjacent Villa Angela and Wildwood parks, which for years have been without lifeguards. Earlier this year, residents and city officials complained that the Metroparks was not recruiting lifeguards for this summer's beach season at Euclid beach while recruiting lifeguards for other beaches.
The Metroparks defended the decision at the time, explaining that East Side shoreline studies showed the beaches there were too dangerous for swimming. Safety, the park system said, is its top priority.
In April, the Metroparks did an about-face and started recruiting lifeguards for Euclid Beach. The park system said a small portion of the beach was suitable for swimming.
But in May, while placing markers in the water designating the new swimming area, Metroparks managers said divers discovered debris - including jagged scrap metal, rocks and discarded brick masonry -- that rendered the water too dangerous for swimming.
The Metroparks then applied for a permit with Army Corps of Engineers, which regulates the shoreline, to use equipment to clean the area. The park system is still waiting for approval.
The Metroparks also did something that caught many locals by surprise: It banned swimming altogether at Euclid Beach and the adjoining parks.
When the state managed the beaches along the shoreline, it placed lifeguards at Euclid Beach. The state eventually pulled the lifeguards, largely due to budget issues. But the state allowed visitors in some areas to swim at their own risk.
Under the Metroparks' new no-swimming designation, "swimming or body contact with water is not permitted," according to parks system's regulations.
Does that mean no wading into the water, filling pails or splashing along the water's edge? Can such a policy be enforced? What happens when hundreds of people hit the beach on a hot weekend?
We got some of the answers Saturday, when Bill Carroll, who lives in the North Collinwood neighborhood, sat on a log at Villa Angela beach around 5 p.m. as his daughter waded calf deep into the water with the legs of her tiny jeans rolled up.
That's when a Metroparks ranger approached Carroll and asked him to remove his daughter from the water. The ranger cited the new no-swimming policy, which the Metroparks signaled on May 29 with new signs along the beach.
Carroll refused, arguing that his daughter wasn't doing anything close to swimming. Carroll said he would accept a ticket for a swimming violation, so he could contest it later, but he had no intention of stopping his daughter from splashing around in the water.
The ranger left and returned with a second ranger, Carroll told me Tuesday. Carroll said the rangers asked him for identification, which he didn't have because he walked from his nearby home. The rangers demanded Carroll's Social Security number, which he initially refused to provide. One ranger then handcuffed Carroll and walked him to the Euclid Beach parking lot while the other ranger walked Carroll's daughter away from the water and explained to her why the lakefront is dangerous. Carroll told me he ultimately gave the rangers his Social Security number to avoid being arrested and separated from his daughter. He said he received two tickets, one for swimming and one for failing to comply with an order.
I asked the Metroparks about the incident between Carroll and the rangers and why rangers cited Carroll for swimming when his daughter was only wading and the policy prohibiting swimming has not yet been formally approved.
Spokeswoman Sanaa Julien said that rangers planned to "educate" the public about the policy last weekend, not ticket anyone. She said Carroll's refusal to cooperate forced the rangers to ticket him. She said the rangers reported that Carroll's daughter was thigh-deep in the water.
Julien also said the rangers have the right to enforce rules still under consideration by the board of commissioners in situations where public safety is at risk. She said Metroparks CEO Brian Zimmerman designated the beach area a safety hazard after the park system discovered the debris, clearing the way for immediate enforcement.
Julien also defended the park system's declaration that beachgoers must have no contact with the water, arguing that potentially rusty metal could be present even a few inches below the surface. She also said people can't wade into the water because shoreline depths could drop within feet of the shore.
"When we discovered the debris (in May), we couldn't allow people to go in the water knowing that," she said.
For many residents of North Collinwood, Euclid Beach and the adjacent lakefront are the reasons they have stayed in the East Side neighborhood along Lake Erie.
Carroll has lived in the neighborhood for 14 years. He built an addition on his house rather than leave for better housing and the amenities of the suburbs. He and his family have regularly enjoyed their lakefront without incident, which is why he is so incredulous.
"We love the water but now we can't touch it," Carroll said, sounding exasperated in a phone interview Tuesday.
Carroll said he supported the Metroparks' takeover of the beaches and its recent tax increase.
"But now we are paying more for less," he said, complaining that he believes the West Side's Edgewater Park is getting preferential treatment by the Metroparks.
Frustration by East Side residents is understandable and something the Metroparks needs to address in some way other than with handcuffs.
UPDATE: On late Wednesday afternoon, the Metroparks provided a copy of the incident report. The report was not completed until after the story was posted. The report confirms the major points of Carroll's story but portrays his actions as aggressive compared to Carroll's version. The rangers reported that Carroll "showed every indication of potentially becoming physically combative." Here is the report.Elsevier ( Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɛlzəviːr]) is a Dutch information and analytics company and one of the world's major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information. It was established in 1880 as a publishing company.[1][2] It is a part of the RELX Group,[3] known until 2015 as Reed Elsevier. Its products include journals such as The Lancet and Cell, the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, the Trends and Current Opinion series of journals, the online citation database Scopus, and the ClinicalKey solution for clinicians. Elsevier's products and services include the entire academic research lifecycle, including software and data-management, instruction and assessment tools.[4]
Elsevier publishes more than 430,000 articles annually in 2,500 journals.[1] Its archives contain over 13 million documents and 30,000 e-books.[5] Total yearly downloads amount to more than 900 million.[1]
Elsevier's high net profit margins (37% in 2017)[1][6] and its copyright practices have subjected it to criticism by researchers.[7]
History [ edit ]
Elsevier was founded in 1880 and adopted the name and logo from the Dutch publishing house Elzevir that was an inspiration and has no connection to the contemporary Elsevier. The Elzevir family operated as booksellers and publishers in the Netherlands; the founder, Lodewijk Elzevir (1542–1617), lived in Leiden and established the business in 1580.
The expansion of Elsevier in the scientific field after 1945 was funded with the profits of the newsweekly Elsevier, which published its first issue on 27 October 1945. The weekly was an instant success and earned lots of money.[9] The weekly was a continuation, as is stated in its first issue, of the monthly Elsevier, which was founded in 1891 to promote the name of the publishing house and had to stop publication in December 1940 because of the Nazi occupation.
In 1947, Elsevier began publishing its first English-language journal, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta.[10]
In 2013, Elsevier acquired Mendeley, a UK company making software for managing and sharing research papers. Mendeley, previously an open platform for sharing of research, was greatly criticized for the acquisition, which users saw as acceding to the "paywall" approach to research literature. Mendeley's previously open sharing system now allows exchange of paywalled resources only within private groups.[11] The New Yorker described Elsevier's reasons for buying Mendeley as two-fold: to acquire its user data, and to "destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model".[12]
In December 2013, Elsevier announced a collaboration with University College London, the UCL Big Data Institute.[13] Elsevier's investment is "substantial" and thought to be more than £10 million.[14]
Company statistics [ edit ]
During 2017, researchers submitted over 1.6 million research papers to Elsevier-based publications. Over 20,000 editors managed the peer review and selection of these papers, resulting in the publication of more than 430,000 articles in over 2,500 journals.[1] Editors are generally unpaid volunteers who perform their duties alongside a full-time job in academic institutions,[15] although exceptions have been reported.
In 2013, the five editorial groups Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis and SAGE Publications published more than half of all academic papers in the peer-reviewed literature.[16][17] At that time, Elsevier accounted for 16% of the world market in science, technology, and medical publishing.[18]
Elsevier breaks down its revenue sources by format and by geographic region. Approximately 42% of revenue by geography in 2017 derived from North America, 25% from Europe and the remaining 33% from the rest of the world. Approximately 81% of revenue by format came from electronic usage and 19% came from print.[1]
Elsevier employs more than 7,200 people in over 70 offices across 24 countries. Following the integration of its Science & Technology and Health Sciences divisions in 2012, Elsevier has operated under a traditional business structure with a single chief executive officer (CEO).[19] The CEO is Kumsal Bayazit,[20] who is in charge from February 15, 2019.
In 2017, Elsevier accounted for 33% of the revenues of RELX group (₤2.478 billion of ₤7.355 billion). In operating profits, it represented 40% (₤913 million of ₤2,284 million). Adjusted operating profits (with constant currency) rose by 3% from 2016 to 2017.[1]
Market model [ edit ]
Products and services [ edit ]
Products and services include electronic and print versions of journals, textbooks and reference works, and cover the health, life, physical and social sciences.
The target markets are academic and government research institutions, corporate research labs, booksellers, librarians, scientific researchers, authors, editors, physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, medical and nursing students and schools, medical researchers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and research establishments. It publishes in 13 languages including English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, Hindi, and Chinese.
Flagship products and services include VirtualE, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Scirus, EMBASE, Engineering Village, Compendex, Cell, SciVal, Pure, and Analytical Services, The Consult series (FirstCONSULT, PathCONSULT, NursingCONSULT, MDConsult, StudentCONSULT), Virtual Clinical Excursions, and major reference works such as Gray's Anatomy, Nelson Pediatrics, Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary, Netter's Atlas of Human Anatomy, and online versions of many journals[21] including The Lancet.
ScienceDirect is Elsevier's platform for online electronic access to its journals and over 6,000 e-books, reference works, book series, and handbooks. The articles are grouped in four main sections: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities. For most articles on the website, abstracts are freely available; access to the full text of the article (in PDF, and also HTML for newer publications) often requires a subscription or pay-per-view purchase.
Research and information ecosystem [ edit ]
RELX Group has been active in mergers and acquisitions, with dozens of deals completed for a total of over 5 billion dollars in ten years.[22] Elsevier has been joined by businesses which were either complementing or competing in the field of research and publishing and which reinforce its market power,[23] such as Mendeley (after the closure of 2collab), SSRN,[24] bepress/Digital Commons, PlumX.
The group contains additional information and analytics companies, particularly LexisNexis and ThreatMetrix.
Global conferences [ edit ]
Elsevier conducts conferences, exhibitions and workshop worldwide, with over 50 conferences a year covering life sciences, physical sciences & engineering, social sciences, and health sciences. In 2014 Elsevier conducted 48 conferences attended by 11,328 delegates from 128 countries.[25]
Pricing [ edit ]
In the 21st century, the subscription rates charged by the company for its journals have been criticized; some very large journals (with more than 5,000 articles) charge subscription prices as high as £9,634, far above average,[26] and many British universities pay more than a million pounds to Elsevier annually.[27] The company has been criticized not only by advocates of a switch to the open-access publication model, but also by universities whose library budgets make it difficult for them to afford current journal prices.
For example, a resolution by Stanford University's senate singled out Elsevier's journals as being "disproportionately expensive compared to their educational and research value", which librarians should consider dropping, and encouraged its faculty "not to contribute articles or editorial or review efforts to publishers and journals that engage in exploitive or exorbitant pricing".[28] Similar guidelines and criticism of Elsevier's pricing policies have been passed by the University of California, Harvard University, and Duke University.[29]
In July 2015, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) announced a plan to start boycotting Elsevier, which refused to negotiate on any Open Access policy for Dutch universities.[30] In December 2016, Nature Publishing Group reported that academics in Germany, Peru and Taiwan are to lose access to Elsevier journals as negotiations had broken down with the publisher.[31]
A complaint about Elsevier/RELX was made to the UK Competition and Markets Authority in December 2016.[32] In October of 2018, a competition complaint against Elsevier was filed with the European Commission, alleging anti-competitive practices stemming from Elsevier's confidential subscription agreements and market dominance.[33]
Shill review offer [ edit ]
According to the BBC, "the firm [Elsevier] offered a £17.25 Amazon voucher to academics who contributed to the textbook Clinical Psychology if they would go on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble (a large US books retailer) and give it five stars." Elsevier said that "encouraging interested parties to post book reviews isn't outside the norm in scholarly publishing, nor is it wrong to offer to nominally compensate people for their time. But in all instances the request should be unbiased, with no incentives for a positive review, and that's where this particular e-mail went too far", and that it was a mistake by a marketing employee.[34]
Blocking text mining research [ edit ]
Elsevier seeks to regulate text and data mining with private licenses,[35] claiming that reading requires extra permission if automated and that the publisher holds copyright on output of automated processes. The conflict on research and copyright policy has often resulted in researchers being blocked from their work.[36]
In November 2015 Elsevier blocked a scientist from performing text mining research at scale on Elsevier papers, even though his institution already pays for access to Elsevier journal content.[35][37] The data were collected via parsing of downloaded PDF and HTML files,[38] although Elsevier claimed that the method used was screenscraping.[39]
Academic practices [ edit ]
Who's Afraid of Peer Review [ edit ]
One of Elsevier's journals was caught in the sting set-up by John Bohannon, published in Science, called Who's Afraid of Peer Review?[40] The journal Drug Invention Today accepted an obviously bogus paper made up by Bohannon that should have been rejected by any good peer review system.[41] Instead, Drug Invention Today was among many open access journals that accepted the fake paper for publication. As of 2014, this journal had been transferred to a different publisher.[42]
Fake journals [ edit ]
At a 2009 court case in Australia where Merck & Co. was being sued by a user of Vioxx, the plaintiff alleged that Merck had paid Elsevier to publish the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which had the appearance of being a peer-reviewed academic journal but in fact contained only articles favourable to Merck drugs.[43][44][45][46] Merck described the journal as a "complimentary publication," denied claims that articles within it were ghost written by Merck, and stated that the articles were all reprinted from peer-reviewed medical journals.[47] In May 2009, Elsevier Health Sciences CEO Hansen released a statement regarding Australia-based sponsored journals, conceding that they were "sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures." The statement acknowledged that it "was an unacceptable practice."[48] The Scientist reported that, according to an Elsevier spokesperson, six sponsored publications "were put out by their Australia office and bore the Excerpta Medica imprint from 2000 to 2005," namely the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (Australas. J. Bone Joint Med.), the Australasian Journal of General Practice (Australas. J. Gen. Pract.), the Australasian Journal of Neurology (Australas. J. Neurol.), the Australasian Journal of Cardiology (Australas. J. Cardiol.), the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy (Australas. J. Clin. Pharm.), and the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine (Australas. J. Cardiovasc. Med.).[49] Excerpta Medica was a "strategic medical communications agency" run by Elsevier, according to the imprint's web page.[50] In October 2010, Excerpta Medica was acquired by Adelphi Worldwide.[51]
Chaos, Solitons & Fractals [ edit ]
There was speculation[52] that the editor-in-chief of Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Mohamed El Naschie, misused his power to publish his own work without appropriate peer review. The journal had published 322 papers with El Naschie as author since 1993. The last issue of December 2008 featured five of his papers.[53] The controversy was covered extensively in blogs.[54][55] The publisher announced in January 2009 that El Naschie had retired as editor-in-chief.[56] As of November 2011 the co-Editors-in-Chief of the journal were Maurice Courbage and Paolo Grigolini.[57] In June 2011 El Naschie sued the journal Nature for libel, claiming that his reputation had been damaged by their November 2008 article about his retirement, which included statements that Nature had been unable to verify his claimed affiliations with certain international institutions.[58] The suit came to trial in November 2011 and was dismissed in July 2012, with the judge ruling that the article was "substantially true", contained "honest comment" and was "the product of responsible journalism". The judgement noted that El Naschie, who represented himself in court, had failed to provide any documentary evidence that his papers had been peer-reviewed.[59] Judge Victoria Sharp also found "reasonable and serious grounds" for suspecting that El Naschie used a range of false names to defend his editorial practice in communications with Nature, and described this behavior as "curious" and "bizarre".[60]
Plagiarism [ edit ]
Plagiarism detection is considered an important component of journal publication.[61] Some Elsevier journals automatically screen submissions for plagiarism[62] but not all.[63]
Control of journals [ edit ]
Resignation of editorial boards [ edit ]
In November 1999 the entire editorial board (50 persons) of the Journal of Logic Programming (founded in 1984 by Alan Robinson) collectively resigned after 16 months of unsuccessful negotiations with Elsevier Press about the price of library subscriptions.[64] The personnel created a new journal, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, with Cambridge University Press at a much lower price,[64] while Elsevier continued publication with a new editorial board and a slightly different name (the Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming).
In 2002, dissatisfaction at Elsevier's pricing policies caused the European Economic Association to terminate an agreement with Elsevier designating Elsevier's European Economic Review as the official journal of the association. The EEA launched a new journal, the Journal of the European Economic Association.[65]
In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher,[66] at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth.[67] The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued.[68]
The same happened in 2005 to the International Journal of Solids and Structures, whose editors resigned to start the Journal of Mechanics of Materials and Structures. However, a new editorial board was quickly established and the journal continues in apparently unaltered form with editors D.A. Hills (Oxford University) and Stelios Kyriakides (University of Texas at Austin).[69][70]
In August 2006, the entire editorial board of the distinguished mathematical journal Topology handed in their resignation, again because of stalled negotiations with Elsevier to lower the subscription price.[71] This board then launched the new Journal of Topology at a far lower price, under the auspices of the London Mathematical Society.[72] After this mass resignation, Topology remained in circulation under a new editorial board until 2009, when the last issue was published.[73][74]
The French École Normale Supérieure has stopped having Elsevier publish the journal Annales Scientifiques de l'École Normale Supérieure[75] (as of 2008).[76]
The elevated pricing of field journals in economics, most of which are published by Elsevier, was one of the motivations that moved the American Economic Association to launch the American Economic Journal in 2009.[77]
In May 2015, Stephen Leeder was removed from his role as editor of the Medical Journal of Australia after its publisher decided to outsource the journal's production to Elsevier. As a consequence, all but one of the journal's editorial advisory committee members co-signed a letter of resignation.[78]
In October 2015, the entire editorial staff of the general linguistics journal Lingua resigned in protest of Elsevier's unwillingness to agree to their terms of Fair Open Access. Editor in Chief Johan Rooryck also announced that the Lingua staff would establish a new journal, Glossa.[79]
In January 2019, the entire editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Informetrics resigned over the open-access policies of its publisher and founded a competing journal.[80][81]
"The Cost of Knowledge" boycott [ edit ]
In 2003 various university librarians began coordinating with each other to complain about Elsevier's "big deal" journal bundling packages, in which the company offered a group of journal subscriptions to libraries at a certain rate, but in which librarians claimed there was no economical option to subscribe to only the popular journals at a rate comparable to the bundled rate. Librarians continued to discuss the implications of the pricing schemes, many feeling pressured into buying the Elsevier packages without other options.
On 21 January 2012, mathematician Timothy Gowers publicly announced he would boycott Elsevier, noting that others in the field have been doing so privately. The three reasons for the boycott are high subscription prices for individual journals, bundling subscriptions to journals of different value and importance, and Elsevier's support for SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act.[84][85][86]
Following this, a petition advocating non-cooperation with Elsevier (that is, not submitting papers to Elsevier journals, not refereeing articles in Elsevier journals, and not participating in journal editorial boards), appeared on the site "The Cost of Knowledge". By February 2012 this petition had been signed by over 5,000 academics,[84][85] growing to over 17,000 by November 2018.[87]
Elsevier disputed the claims, claiming that their prices are below the industry average, and stating that bundling is only one of several different options available to buy access to Elsevier journals.[84] The company also claimed that its profit margins are "simply a consequence of the firm's efficient operation".[86] The academics replied that their work was funded by public money and thus should be freely available.
On 27 February 2012, Elsevier issued a statement on its website that declared that it has withdrawn support from the Research Works Act.[88] Although the Cost of Knowledge movement was not mentioned, the statement indicated the hope that the move would "help create a less heated and more productive climate" for ongoing discussions with research funders. Hours after Elsevier's statement, the sponsors of the bill, US House Representatives Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney, issued a joint statement saying that they would not push the bill in Congress.[89]
Plan S [ edit ]
The Plan S open-access initiative, which began in Europe and has since spread to some US research funders would force researchers receiving some grants to publish in open access journals by 2020.[90] A spokesman for Elsevier said "If you think that information should be free of charge, go to Wikipedia".[91] In September 2018 UBS advised to sell Elsevier (RELX) stocks, noting that Plan S could affect 5-10% of scientific funding and may force Elsevier to reduce pricing.[92]
Relationship with academic institutions [ edit ]
Finland [ edit ]
In 2015 Finnish research organizations paid a total of 27 million euros in subscription fees. Over one third of the total costs went to Elsevier. The information was revealed after successful court appeal following a denied request on the subscription fees, due to confidentiality clauses in contracts with the publishers.[93] Establishing of this fact lead to creation of tiedonhinta.fi petition demanding more reasonable pricing and open access to content signed by more than 2 800 members of the research community.[94] While deals with other publishers have been made, this was not the case for Elsevier, leading to the nodealnoreview.org boycott of the publisher signed more than 600 times.[95]
In January 2018, it was confirmed that a deal had been reached between those concerned.[96][97][98]
Germany [ edit ]
Germany's DEAL project (Projekt DEAL) which includes over 60 major research institutions, including Göttingen University, has announced that all of its members are cancelling their contracts with Elsevier, effective January 1, 2017. The boycott is in response to Elsevier's refusal to adopt "transparent business models" to "make publications more openly accessible".[99][100][101][102][103][104][105] Horst Hippler, spokesperson for the DEAL consortium states that "taxpayers have a right to read what they are paying for" and that "publishers must understand that the route to open-access publishing at an affordable price is irreversible".[101] In July 2017, another 13 institutions announced that they would also be cancelling their subscriptions to Elsevier journals.[106] As of August 2017, at least 185 German institutions have now cancelled their contracts with Elsevier.[107] As of January 2018, whilst negotiations are ongoing, around 200 German universities who cancelled their subscriptions to Elsevier journals have been granted complimentary open access to them during 2018.[108][109] On 19 December 2018 the Max Planck Society (MPS) announced that the existing subscription agreement with Elsevier would not be renewed after the expiration date of 31 December 2018. The Max Planck Society counts 14.000 scientists in 84 research institutes, publishing 12.000 articles each year.[110]
Hungary [ edit ]
In March 2018, the Hungarian Electronic Information Service National Programme entered negotiations on its 2019 Elsevier subscriptions, asking for a read-and-publish deal.[111] Negotiations were ended by the Hungarian consortium in December of 2018, and the subscription was not renewed.[112]
Iran [ edit ]
In 2013, Elsevier changed its policies in response to sanctions announced by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control that year. This included a request that all Elsevier journals avoid publishing papers by Iranian nationals which are employed by the Iranian government.[113][114] Elsevier executive Mark Seeley expressed regret on behalf of the company but did not announce an intention to challenge this interpretation of the law.[115]
Netherlands [ edit ]
In 2015 a consortium of all of Netherlands' 14 universities threatened to boycott Elsevier if it could not agree that articles by Dutch authors would be made open access and settled with the compromise of 30% of its Dutch papers becoming open access by 2018. Gerard Meijer, president of Radboud University in Nijmegen and lead negotiator on the Dutch side notes that "it's not the 100% that I hoped for".[101][116][117][118]
South Korea [ edit ]
In 2017, over 70 university libraries confirmed a "contract boycott" movement involving three publishers including Elsevier. As of January 2018, whilst negotiations remain underway, a decision will be made as to whether or not continue the participating libraries will continue the boycott.[119] It was subsequently confirmed that an agreement had been reached.[120]
Sweden [ edit ]
In 2018, the Bibsam Consortium, which negotiates license agreements on behalf of all Swedish universities and research institutes, decided not to renew their contract with Elsevier[121] alleging that the publisher does not meet the demands of transition towards a more open access model, and referring to the rapidly increasing costs for publishing.[122] Swedish universities will still have access to articles published before June 30, 2018. Astrid Söderbergh Widding, Chairman of the Bibsam Consortium, said that "the current system for scholarly communication must change and our only option is to cancel deals when they don't meet our demands for a sustainable transition to open access".[123]
Taiwan [ edit ]
In Taiwan more than 75% of universities, including the region’s top 11 institutions, have joined a collective boycott against Elsevier. On 7 December 2016, the Taiwanese consortium, CONCERT, which represents more than 140 institutions, announced it would not renew its contract with Elsevier.[101][124][125][126]
United States of America [ edit ]
In March 2018, Florida State University's faculty elected to cancel its $2 million subscription to a bundle of several journals. Starting in 2019 it will instead buy access to titles à la carte.[121]
Dissemination of research [ edit ]
Lobbying efforts against open access [ edit ]
Elsevier have been known to be involved in lobbying against open access.[127] These have included the likes of:
Selling open access articles [ edit ]
In 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017,[150] Elsevier was found to be selling some articles which should have been open access, but had been put behind a paywall.[151] A related case occurred in 2015, when Elsevier charged for downloading an open access article from a journal published by John Wiley & Sons. However, it was not clear whether Elsevier was in violation of the license under which the article was made available on their website.[152]
Action against academics posting their own articles online [ edit |
Mika Minio-Paluello said
“In 2015, the UK public paid BP $6 per person to drill in the North Sea. In exchange for our subsidies, BP is polluting and spilling in our seas. Public monies should be driving a clean industrial strategy creating new jobs for workers and a just transition – not further profits for fossil fuel multinationals.”
The subsidies from the UK public purse to BP are expected to rise even further in 2016, after George Osborne slashed taxes in in his March 2016 budget. Osborne cut supplementary tax on oil and gas profits from 20% to 10% and effectively abolished petroleum revenue tax.
As a result, the Office for Budget Responsibility expects the taxpayer to make net payments to North Sea oil of £1.1 billion in 2016/17 and £1.2 billion in 2017/18.
The net transfer to North Sea North Sea operators is because the companies are permitted to ‘carry back’ their losses and offset them against tax paid in previous years, resulting in repayments from the Treasury to multinational oil corporations. This means cumulative revenues paid to the public in the past gradually shrink and go into reverse.
So we’re calling for a review of the North Sea fiscal system and a redirection of fossil fuel subsidies to protecting jobs and building 21st century energy.The team list for the event taking place in Atlanta is now complete as six squads have been invited.
Taking place from July 21-23, DreamHack Open Atlanta will feature eight teams. Two of those teams were determined in qualifiers as Binary Dragons earned the European spot while Misfits claimed the North American one.
DreamHack have now revealed that NRG, Renegades, Heroic, HellRaisers, Envy and GODSENT received invites to attend the $100,000 tournament where the winner will take home $50,000.
EnVyUs will be in Atlanta
The tournament will start with a group stage using the GSL format. The opening and winners' matches will be best-of-ones while the elimination and decider games will be played as best-of-threes.
The top two squads from each group will advance to the single elimination, best-of-three playoff where the victors will be decided. Here are all the teams that will be competing in Atlanta in a week's time:
You can visit our event page to find out more information about DreamHack Open Atlanta.When you get down to it, this is a great ink. It's well-behaved, has nice writing qualities, and looks great. My main caution is for the left-handed writers. This is a slow-drying ink. I've definitely smudged a lot of writing while using this ink, and I'm right-handed. Fair warning.
That said, it hasn't stopped me from filling the ink into pens again and again. It's a new favorite.
The ink is saturated and a bit on the wet side, but not very. I never have any skipping or starting issues with it, and it keeps up with my fastest writing, scribbling, and doodling.
There's a tiny bit of shading when writing quickly with a small nib – XF to M. Wider, specialty nibs really bring out the personality of this ink. I only have a calligraphy nib (2.0mm!), but I know that this ink would be great in a small stub. I need to get one of those pronto. Despite my terrible attempt at some form of fancy script in the title, you can see some of the shading aspects from the wide 2.0mm nib I used.
This ink does not like cheap paper. It bleeds and feathers like crazy on cheap notebook paper and copy paper.
Lastly, there's a small amount of sheen to the ink that also adds personality. It's a very small amount, and absorbant papers pretty much remove all sheen, but it's great when it works.
I've never really settled on a real-life example for this ink color, but I keep coming back to something like the ocean on certain days. It's a dark blue with green swimming around in the dark depths. Maybe it's just me, but I like to get lost in colors like this. It's a favorite, and I'll be buying my own bottle soon, along with a stub-nib pen.
(You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution, Twitter, and App.net.)JERUSALEM (JTA) — El Al’s first female haredi Orthodox pilot flew Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a summit in Greece.
Nechama Spiegel Novak, a mother of four who has been flying for the national carrier since earlier this year, left Ben Gurion International Airport on Wednesday morning guiding a chartered Boeing 737 to Thessaloniki, where Netanyahu is participating in a trilateral summit with Greece and Cyprus.
The prime minister and his wife, Sara, took several photos with the pilot, who was the first officer on the flight, before they took off.
We are now going to meet with the first ultra-orthodox woman pilot. You are invited to join. She is the first, but not the last. pic.twitter.com/ZEjYt0M8LE — PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) June 14, 2017
Novak attended flight school in the United States, where she worked to log enough flight hours. Unlike most Israeli pilots, she did not serve in the Israeli Air Force, where most pilots log their flight hours and get their licenses.
“Being a pilot has always been a dream of mine. My husband is very supportive, and he is helping realize this dream,” she said in 2015 when she started her flight training.
Novak lives in a a haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem and is reluctant to grant interviews.Bradley-James Grant Colban is sentenced to nine months' home detention and ordered to pay reparation of $12,838 that he racked up on a spending spree, charging tools and petrol to various companies.
In a Catch Me If You Can style spending spree, a Palmerston North man charged $12,334 of tools and petrol to companies, as well as tampering with a $444 cheque.
Bradley-James Grant Colban, 23, had 31 charges to his name when he arrived in the Palmerston North District Court on Monday, including a variety of dishonesty and deception charges.
He was ordered to pay back $12,838 in reparation and sentenced to nine months of home detention.
Judge David Smith took into account that they were Colban's first dishonesty charges, his early guilty plea, and a head injury Colban suffered eight years ago.
READ MORE: Porirua, Feilding, Wellington hardware stores hit by Rongotea man
Colban's offending began with a visit to Repco in Porirua in October 2015 where he purchased tools valued at $4400 and charged them to the Garratt Motor Group in Feilding. Colban took a variety of items including a 44-piece socket set, spanner set, spark plugs sets and wire.
Smith said Colban had given the excuse that he was "in a bind" after crashing his car.
That same month Colban visited a Bunnings in Porirua and repeated the act, purchasing a nail gun and charging items to another company.
He purchased another nail gun at Bunnings in Palmerston North and charged it to the company as well, in addition to other items including paint, plants and tools. The total value from both stores ended up at $9902.
In December he took a fuel card from former employer Lee Builders and used it without permission to buy petrol on 20 occasions, obtaining various amounts of between $50 and $100.
He went to Mitre 10 Palmerston North and purchased items ranging between $78 to $305, charging Lee Builders.
In total, reparation of $2432 was sought by Lee Builders.
Further charges were added, including tampering with a cheque of $444 by putting his name on it. He went to BNZ Feilding and cashed it.
On March 15 he stole fuel worth $60 from a private property and took an ASB eftpos card to top up a cellphone.
On April 15 he stole a $285 mountainbike from Green Bikes. Further, he approached someone at Green Bikes and told them he was authorised to take $80, before stealing another $100 from the till.
Lawyer Tony Thackery said Colban had suffered a head injury at age 15 after being hit in the head with a discus.
Thackery said there were "certainly" issues related to Colban's ability to consider long-term effects of his actions.
Colban had also been in a motor vehicle accident in January that gave him difficulty with memory, concentration and fatigue, Thackery said.
Smith said the head injury was a mitigating factor but there was no evidence that he was "incapable of reasoning right from wrong".
Smith also noted that the motor vehicle accident came after the majority of the offending.Giant Octopus—Mighty but Secretive Denizen of the Deep
Adopt a Giant Octopus!
With its writhing tentacles and eerie ability to figure things out, the octopus is one of the strangest animals in the sea, or on Earth, for that matter. Its alien appearance and sliminess unnerve some people, offering plenty of material for nightmares and legends. Octopus stories abound around the globe, including seafaring yarns about huge, blood-thirsty “devilfish” tearing ships to bits. While these stories are usually debunked, the uncanny abilities and physique of the remarkable giant octopus make these tales hard to let go.
Large, but Short-Lived Mollusk
The largest of at least 90 subspecies of octopus, the giant octopus can grow to 300 pounds and have a 30-foot arm span. However, mature males average only about 50 pounds and females, about 33 pounds. Their arm spans typically are about eight feet. Despite its fearsome appearance, the giant octopus—while quite resourceful—is very shy and poses little danger to divers, fishermen, or swimmers. These mollusks are distant relatives of garden snails and slugs, and closer relatives of squids and cuttlefish. The giant octopus can be found in the coastal waters of northern California through the Gulf of Alaska, and around the Pacific Rim to Japan and Korea. It lives in waters just beyond the low-tide mark to depths of up to 1,500 feet along the continental shelf. It usually lives about three to five years.
The giant octopus suffers from bad PR. This shy and reclusive creature is not the ferocious monster ready to drag sailors to their doom, as legends suggest.
A giant octopus spends most of its day lurking in a rocky crevice, emerging at night to forage for prey. When it ventures out, it typically crawls along the sea floor, often with surprising speed. Above the floor, it propels itself by a water jet thrust out through its gill chamber.
A giant octopus eats almost anything it can catch, with crabs at the top of its list of favorites. It also catches fish and other octopuses. It hunts mainly by sight. The octopus surges forward and envelops prey with its strong tentacles. Its suckers have touch sensors and chemical receptors that it uses to check out its catch, allowing it to reject anything that feels or tastes wrong. Sometimes the octopus paralyses its victim with venom from its salivary glands, but usually it just rips prey apart with its powerful suckers. The octopus kills crabs with a shell-crushing bite from the parrot-like beak concealed at the center of its tentacles. It then scoops out the flesh and discards any shell outside its lair.
See the world through a crab's eyes. Imagine facing the daily possibility of being engulfed by a giant octopus's powerful tentacles before becoming its lunch.
Male giant octopuses mature sexually before females. During mating, the male uses a specialized tentacle to insert a sperm packet into the female. The male dies soon after mating. The female produces up to 100,000 eggs, which she attaches to the ceiling of her den. She guards her eggs for six months, never eating or even leaving her den. She oxygenates her eggs by shooting water over them from her gills. Exhausted by breeding and starved by the vigil over her eggs, the female dies almost as soon as the eggs hatch. Each egg hatches into a tiny octopus about one-quarter of an inch long. Baby octopuses swim to the surface to live as plankton—tiny plants and animals that drift in the ocean—until settling on the seabed when about one-half ounce in weight where it grows at an amazing rate—reaching two to three pounds in one year and then continuing to gain about two percent of body weight per day! Few hatchlings, however, ever reach maturity before becoming food for fish, moray eels, sea lions, or other octopuses.
Intelligent Invertebrate?
The giant octopus has the largest central nervous system—mostly brain—of all invertebrates, rivaling that of many vertebrates, including birds and fish. It can do some really amazing things. But is it intelligent? Herein lies much debate-fodder for scientists. The fact that octopuses survive despite being soft, tasty creatures suggests to some that they are resourceful and intelligent. They also appear quite capable of solving simple puzzles, learning, and remembering. Scientists have trained captive specimens to negotiate their way through simple mazes and distinguish squares from crosses. They have been taught to unscrew lids from food jars and have been observed learning by watching the behavior of other octopuses.
But other scientists aren’t so sure that big brains mean greater intelligence. They suggest that a big brain may be necessary to operate such a complex animal with sophisticated eyes, eight versatile tentacles, ability to change color, sensitive suckers.
Dazzling Array of Defensive and Offensive Weapons
Suckers. The octopus uses its suckers to rip prey apart and anchor itself to a rocky surface. Sensors around each sucker allow the animal to reject anything that tastes or feels wrong.
. The octopus uses its suckers to rip prey apart and anchor itself to a rocky surface. Sensors around each sucker allow the animal to reject anything that tastes or feels wrong. Tentacles. The octopus has eight strong arms capable of pushing, pulling, and grasping prey tightly.
. The octopus has eight strong arms capable of pushing, pulling, and grasping prey tightly. Beak. The giant octopus uses its powerful beak to crush crab shells.
. The giant octopus uses its powerful beak to crush crab shells. Venom. Venom in its salivary glands contains a chemical that helps the octopus disable prey and break down its muscle tissue.
. Venom in its salivary glands contains a chemical that helps the octopus disable prey and break down its muscle tissue. Ink. The octopus can disorient a pursuer by squirting a burst of purplish-black ink.
. The octopus can disorient a pursuer by squirting a burst of purplish-black ink. Appendage Regeneration. Should the animal lose a tentacle to a predator, it can grow a new limb.
. Should the animal lose a tentacle to a predator, it can grow a new limb. Camouflage. The octopus can change the color and texture of its skin cells in less than one second to blend in with its surroundings. These cells in its skin called chromatophores are under muscular control, allowing different pigments to come into view as the cell walls are stretched or squeezed. One expert suggests that “Chameleons are just dead-boring compared to octopuses.”
Giant Octo-Facts
A giant octopus can live out of water for some time as long as it stays cool and damp. It may leave the water to search for food on land. To snatch quick snacks, octopuses have been known to climb aboard fishing boats and open fish holds full of crabs or to break out of aquariums to prow around rooms for tasty inhabitants in other tanks. They generally have up to one-half hour out of water before they die from lack of oxygen.
Octopus blood is a poor carrier of oxygen. To compensate, these animals have three hearts and permanently high blood pressure. As a result of these physiological inefficiencies, the octopus has poor stamina and an inability to struggle offensively or defensively for very long.
By day giant octopuses retreat to dens under rocks or in holes. At the entrance, one typically observes an “octopus’s garden” composed of a collection of bones, spines, and shells from past meals.
An octopus can squeeze through an opening no bigger than one of its eyes.
An octopus’s brain continues to grow throughout the life of the animal and consists of over 170 million nerve cells, three-quarters of which are involved in vision.
Conservation Status
Giant octopuses are important members of the oceanic web of life. As hatchlings they enter the low end of the food chain—the diverse plankton soup—that feeds myriads of animals. As they grow to maturity, they climb to almost the top of the ocean’s food chain to become a formidable predator.
Only the largest fish, such as halibut and ling cod, and marine mammals are any threat to adult giant octopuses. People collect them for food, display in aquariums, and bait in other fisheries.
The giant octopus is currently not considered endangered, and some intrepid enthusiasts keep them as pets, although this requires a major commitment. The giant octopus is vulnerable to pollution, but unlike its edible relative, the common octopus, it is not in direct danger from humans even though there is a small commercial fishery for it from Alaska to Northern California, mainly as a bait for halibut fisheries. In Oregon, many octopus are taken as incidental catch in the Dungeness crab pot fishery and the groundfish trawl fishery. Octopus overfishing, however, appears to have occurred in Japan and in sport dive fisheries in the straits between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia.
Enriching an Octopus’s Life—the Zoo Experience
The National Zoo currently has a female giant octopus in residence at its Invertebrate Exhibit. It is a very popular animal at the Zoo mainly because, unlike many Zoo animals, the giant octopus is familiar to most visitors through stories. Also, adding to its appeal, the animal is large and gregarious, never missing an opportunity to react and interact. Few can resist the opportunity to look the octopus in the eye and have it stare back. One keeper calls the giant octopus “the Invertebrate Exhibit’s giant panda.” This popular mollusk is fed a diet of shrimp, fish, and crab.
The giant octopus is a popular animal at the National Zoo. Visitors can get an up-close look at the mollusk's amazing suckers.
To provide this fascinating animal opportunities for exploration and interaction similar to those observed in the wild, the Zoo has implemented an Octopus Enrichment Program. Under the watch of a trained observer, a new object—such as a jar, tube, or rubber dog toy—is introduced periodically to the octopus. With each introduction the animal's behavior is recorded to identify the level of interaction with the object. In addition, the tank contains shelves, archways, and doors. New objects and complexities are planned for the future to give this mollusk with a sophisticated brain a new and broader array of challenges.
Adopt a Giant Octopus
Why not adopt this wild and wonderful giant from the deep for yourself or for a special someone? An Adopt a Giant Octopus package would make an especially wonderful educational gift for a child. Your adopt contribution will support exhibit improvement, medical care, and food not only for the giant octopus but also for the 2,000 other animals that reside at the National Zoo and its Conservation and Research Center at Front Royal, Virginia.
Adopt a Giant Octopus!
Because your contribution is dedicated directly to animal care, you truly make a difference!
Photos by Jessie Cohen and J'nie Woosley/NZPACTS 17:1-9
« Acts 16 | Acts 17 | Acts 18 »
Paul and Silas in Thessalonica
17:1 Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews.
2 And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures,
3 explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.”
4 And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.
5 But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd.
6 And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also,
7 and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.”
8 And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things.Sukeban Games have announced the release date for VA-11 HALL-A on PS Vita.
The cyberpunk bartending visual novel game will launch for the Sony handheld on November 14th, for $14.99. It’s worth reiterating the game is getting a limited physical run for PS Vita from Limited Run Games – you can read more about their other planned (or already released) physical versions here.
The Vita port for the game was handled by Wolfgame, and will be compatible with PlayStation TV. Featured above, you can view a new trailer for the game’s Vita port.
Here’s a rundown on the game:
VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action is a booze em’ up about waifus, technology, and post-dystopia life.
In this world, corporations reign supreme, all human life is infected with nanomachines designed to oppress them, and the terrifying White Knights ensure that everyone obeys the laws.
But, this is not about those people.
You are a bartender at VA-11 Hall-A, affectionately nicknamed “Valhalla.” Although it is just a small bar downtown, it attracts the most fascinating people this side of dystopia. Keep your clients lubricated and you will be made privy to the most interesting stories.
Key Features
Learn about daily life in the cyberpunk dystopia of Glitch City.
A branching storyline where your decisions do not depend on traditional choices, but through the drinks you prepare.
Visuals inspired by old Japanese adventure games for the PC-98, with a modern touch for an otherworldly experience.
Get to know your clients, their tastes, and prepare the drink that will change their lives.
VA-11 Hall-A has been available for PC, Mac, Linux. In case you missed it, you can find our review for the game here (we highly recommend it!). You can also read our interview with the game’s key development staff here.A few weeks ago, tenants’ rights activist Jon Grant announced that he’s running for City Council this fall as a Democratic Socialist. Although he is not, technically speaking, a member of any political party — the affiliation is more a kind of “shorthand to describe my values to voters,” he says — his second-time run for a Council seat is couched in the belief that, in Seattle, anyway, “it’s not enough anymore to be an establishment Democrat.”
The events of the past year, and especially of the past few months, seem to echo that sentiment. November 8, 2016, was an enormous day for socialists everywhere, as those who’d long opposed the then President-elect rushed to take a stand.
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for instance, has nearly tripled its membership since November, making it now the largest socialist organization in the country — not to be confused with the International Socialist Organization, which, according to the Seattle chapter’s website, is the country’s “largest revolutionary organization” (emphasis ours). The two groups have an active and engaged Seattle base, and yes, Seattle DSA membership “has exploded over the past year,” says local DSA member Andrej Markovčič. “Like locals all over the country, we’re seeing an incredible enthusiasm for socialist politics.”
Socialist Alternative (SA) — the party that helped elect socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant in 2013 — has also seen its ranks swell. “People’s interest in getting involved in mass movements in general, and socialism in particular, really has increased since 2011,” says Ted Virdone, an SA member for the past 18 years and a staffer in Sawant’s office. “The start of the Occupy Movement was a real turning point there,” followed by “a huge acceleration since this election.”
Then there’s the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), whose longtime member, Mary Martin, is running again for Seattle mayor this fall. She describes the group as “the only revolutionary working class party in the United States” and says she’s seen, if not more rank-and-file members, a much more receptive volunteer base in the past few months. “Many more people have a relationship to us. They show up with some coffee… they volunteer to paint a sign,” and they subscribe to The Militant, the Party’s newspaper.
As for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which has a small Seattle chapter: “Oh yeah,” says member Jane Cutter, enthusiastically; PSL, too, has seen an identical surge. “What is most striking is the number of people who not only are interested in socialist politics, but who are rearranging their lives to actively participate in organizing campaigns, protests, meetings, and conferences.”
The above is hardly an exhaustive list of socialist organizations and parties in Seattle. There are, at minimum, half a dozen such groups active in town, and this reporter could not reach them all on deadline. But it stands to reason: Seattle is a city that, for the most part, loves Bernie Sanders—he of Democratic Socialist fame—and abhors Donald Trump. It continues to lead the country on worker-centered, progressive legislation, from the $15 minimum wage to collective bargaining rights for Uber and Lyft drivers to socially responsible banking; Sawant and the Socialist Alternative movement are a big part of that. And Sanders, who garnered more per-capita donations from Seattle than any large city in the U.S. and has shared stages with Sawant, helped make socialism cool again, here and elsewhere.
Socialism, then—at least in Seattle—is neither a bad word these days, nor an outdated one. “For me, watching Bernie Sanders run for President,” says Grant, “was to demonstrate that the values of democratic socialism actually have broad appeal.”
Bernie Sanders describes those values, in their most simplified form, as “an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.” That is, arguably, the foundational approach of many of the socialist groups agitating in Seattle right now, whether they put eradicating poverty or ending racism at the top of their platforms. Most stand for the basic premise that capitalism is to blame for society’s problems, from massive student debt to environmental destruction to homelessness. Grant says a big priority for him is never to accept campaign donations from corporate interests “to communicate that we represent the interests of the community and of working people and of tenants.”
And Virdone points to new data released this January: Just eight of the world’s richest people now own as much combined wealth as half of the rest of the planet. Two of those people — Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — hail from King County (both have mansions on Lake Washington). “All around the world, we’re in a tumultuous time,” Virdone says. “Capitalism has reached an impasse. People can sense that it’s not working, that something’s got to change. People are looking for something different to happen.”
So, for many activists in Seattle, that means socialism — and not necessarily because they’re all donning red-star berets and reading Trotsky, but because they want to fight for the things they have always cared about. “Many of our new members,” says the DSA’s Markovčič, “have long-held socialist views without ever realizing it.”
From a layperson’s perspective, Seattle’s socialist legion is fairly consistent; delineating clear differences can be difficult, and all groups concede there’s a good deal of mutual respect and ideological overlap. Still, they differ a bit in strategy and focus.
If you support the Cuban Revolution, for instance, you might consider heading to the Socialist Workers Party headquarters; if you’re less into guerilla warfare, and more interested in the effect of a mass general strike, Socialist Alternative is planning one for May 1. The Freedom Socialist Party describes itself as a “socialist feminist organization,” specifically, although the SWP and the SA and the DSA all list women’s rights and reproductive freedom as big priorities. Socialist Alternative tends to use the language of the Occupy Movement — “the 99 percent” — whereas the Socialist Workers Party prefers a class analysis. “There’s a working class, and a ruling class,” Martin says, and the ruling class is larger than just 1 percent. “That’s how we explain things.” SA and the DSA have the largest Seattle following at the moment, but you’ll find that most of these groups have a presence at rallies to support the Standing Rock Sioux, climate justice, immigrants and refugees, or most anything that can shift the balance of power away from Wall Street. Grant says the base of support he’s built over the years in Seattle is “independent of… but also inclusive of” the base of support for Sawant and Socialist Alternative.
“The universal constant is that everyone hates their boss and knows the system is rotten,” says Markovčič. He explains that DSA, perhaps most closely affiliated with the Sanders and Grant platforms, takes a “big tent approach to organizing. DSA members range from social democrats all the way to committed Marxists” and “we want to bring as many people as possible into the movement.”
Some see the DSA, then, as the effort to push the Democratic Party to the left, while groups like Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Workers Party are adamant that the two-party system is a big part of the problem. SA believes “we do need to build a new party in this country,” says Virdone, “a party that unequivocally represents the interests of workers and not big business.” For the SWP’s Martin, Trump is not a fascist at all, as many left-wingers believe; he’s well “within the spectrum” of how things work in D.C.
In the main, people are looking for ways to plug into progressive causes right now, Grant says — and “it’s not enough just to theoretically, philosophically support these things” after November 8. If an uptick in Seattle’s socialist membership is any indication, it’s that people realize there is work to do. “That’s the shift we’re seeing.”INDIANAPOLIS - Before Thursday practice began at Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the 99th Indianapolis 500 Mile Race, race No. 6 in the Verizon IndyCar Series season and arguably the most important of the bunch, Chevrolet teams were told to remove the center wicker bill that runs the length of each car’s nose.
After some computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies, Chevrolet felt the wicker might have been a partial contributor to Helio Castroneves’ flight on Wednesday afternoon that left his car unable to perform but, thankfully, not its driver, who drove a backup later in the day and placing 15th with only 12 laps in the books.
As team co-owner Dennis Reinbold (No. 24 Chevrolet driven by Townsend Bell) explained to me, when the car initially got sideways the wicker might have caused the No. 3 to lift at the rear, thereby causing Castroneves to get airborne. According to Chris Berube, Chevrolet motorsports manager, the manufacturer asked the teams to remove it just to make ascertain - in the real world - that this won’t happen again?
Berube said they wanted to get the cars back to as-homologated status. Honda teams have not been advised to follow suit at this time.DETROIT, MI -- The city is anxiously awaiting a decision this week from the governor on appointing a emergency manager, a decision that could lead to even deeper cuts to city services in the pursuit of a balanced budget. Residents have seen widespread pay cuts, outsourcing moves, park closures and fire station closures over the past year as Mayor Dave Bing and City Council fought to keep control of the city. But a look at another historic major municipal turnaround indicates that the cuts Detroit could see under receivership could be even more painful. Historian Jonathan Soffer, author of "Ed Koch: and the Rebuilding of New York,"
on Monday about lessons Detroit can learn New York's financial turnaround in the 1970s. On the brink of bankruptcy in 1975, New York was taken over by an emergency financial control board, which led the city back to a balanced budget by 1981, Soffer said. "The initial impact of the austerity that was imposed by the Emergency Financial Control Board in 1975 cost more than it actually saved in the amount they cut out of the budget," Soffer said. "Cutting the fire department resulted in big parts of the city being burned down. Cutting probation meant that you had a higher rate of recidivism, by prisoners so you wound up having them in prison, which was more expensive than have them on probation and paying for probation officers." Although the cuts were brutal and New York had several advantages that Detroit doesn’t currently have, including a more diverse economy and more representatives in Congress, Soffer said there were things about that turnaround that Michigan could use in Detroit. "There’s a lesson for Detroit in what happened (in New York) in the 70s, because although the cuts were meat-ax cuts and they were terrible, there were elements that were somewhat better and that might help Detroit in that experience," Soffer said. "One was that the Emergency Financial Control Board was not just bankers.It was actually a tripartite board of bankers, government representatives from the state government and city government and unions. "And the unions were interested in this not only as workers, as public employees, but because to keep the city afloat, the state refinanced a lot of the city’s debt with... bonds. These bonds would not be bought on the open market, necessarily, so they had to persuade union pension funds to invest in these bonds. So the city’s workers, beyond just keeping their jobs also had a huge stake in keeping the city afloat financially." Listen to the
.Michigan State basketball will get one heck of a boost three games into Big Ten play.
Head coach Tom Izzo said Monday that star freshman Miles Bridges is expected to make his return for Wednesday's home game against Rutgers. He won't start, but the Spartans will begin working him back into the mix, assuming no setbacks.
"Our job is to try to get him some minutes if everything goes well tonight and tomorrow and then see if we can build on that," Izzo said.
Bridges has missed the last seven games with a foot/ankle injury. For the first time since the loss to Duke on Nov. 29, Bridges dressed in uniform and warmed up with the Spartans before their win over Northwestern on Friday.
Sunday, Bridges practiced some before his first day of full-contact work Monday.
"Not for any negative reason, just trying to bring him along slow," Izzo said. "Probably the main thing that we've talked to all the people about, it seems there is no pain at all. The big thing with him is don't let him get fatigued. Thank God, the way he killed himself for the last three and a half weeks on the bike and that (upper body machine), I think he's in decent shape.
"He's not going to be in playing shape, but decent shape."
In the seven games without Bridges, Michigan State went 6-1, losing only to Northeastern. The Spartans came up with two big wins to start the conference season, storming back from a 15-point deficit to beat Minnesota on the road and then building a 19-point lead on the way to beating Northwestern.
Before the injury, Bridges was MSU's leading scorer and rebounder at 16.6 and 8.8 rebounds per game. At 6-foot-7, his presence also meant the Spartans didn't have to play 6-foot-4 wing Alvin Ellis at the four.
While it will take some time for Bridges to get back into playing shape and be himself, his return is absolutely a welcomed one for the Green and White.
(Want to stay up to date on all the latest with the Spartans? Make sure you're in the loop by signing up for our FREE Michigan State newsletter)Tonight, pollster Frank Luntz assembled a focus group consisting of undecided Colorado voters. By the end of tonight’s debate, the group had moved dramatically toward GOP nominee Mitt Romney.
At least half a dozen focus group members who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 now say they will vote for Romney. Virtually everyone in the group said that Romney won the debate and exceeded their expectations.
Luntz, who has been in the polling business for at least two decades, says he has never seen such a dramatic shift in opinion as a result of a debate.
Frank Luntz focus group overwhelmingly sides with Romney, says Obama was "flat, slow" — Brad Schnure (@schnure) October 4, 2012
Frank Luntz says tonight's focus group represents the biggest swing he's EVER seen after a debate. — Bob Owens (@bob_owens) October 4, 2012
@DPJHodges Frank Luntz focus group of 24. 13 voted for Obama but 21 of them say Romney won. Of 24 undecideds 8 decided tonight for Romney — Niall (@NiallMFC91) October 4, 2012
Frank Luntz focus group of 24 people all thought Romney came out on top except for 3 — Wayne Dupree (@WayneDupreeShow) October 4, 2012
In related news, CBS News reported results of a post-debate poll of undecided voters:
CBS News Poll of uncommitted voters shows 46% pick Mitt Romney as debate winner. 22% say it was Pres Obama. 32% call it a tie. — Mark Knoller (@markknoller) October 4, 2012
Poll shows 56% of uncommitted voters say their opinion of Romney has changed for the better. 13% say that about the President. — |
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