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. Throughout the 530s and into the 540s, these meteor showers may have been unusually heavy, and continued to top-up Earth's atmosphere with cooling dust – and perhaps more. There are other surprising clues in the ice. Cores from around the beginning of 536 contain the frozen remains of microorganisms normally found in shallow tropical seas, while samples from 538 also contain fossils of much more ancient marine microorganisms. Abbott thinks there is only one way these microorganisms could have ended up in Greenland ice. Halley's comet might have shed a few especially large fragments during its journey through the inner solar system in 530. In the following years, perhaps including 536 and 538, these fragments slammed into Earth's oceans. When they did, dust and debris – containing living marine microbes in the water and fossils in the rocks that were struck – were thrown high into the atmosphere and global temperatures plummeted. Abbot's team may have even found where one of these collisions occurred. Gravity anomalies and metallic spherules in a sediment layer suggest a large object struck Australia's Gulf of Carpentaria sometime in the first millennium AD, she says.
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It's a fascinating theory, and one that we'd need a lot more evidence to embrace as the answer. Still, it's a possibility, and one worth exploring.
Read the whole article on New ScientistAn Australian research group from Flinders University has found a way to apply WiFi mesh networking onto the Android operating system, allowing phones to act as access points over radio waves to transmit voice calls as data. While the system currently only works between phones relatively close together, the researchers hope the use of transmitters will extend the service to remote areas for emergency use.
The system, named Serval, can relay VoIP calls between phones using their WiFi networking. Individual phones can also act as relay points, and theoretically should be able to bridge together a phone in a remote area with no service to one with access to the cellular network, where the call can finally be relayed to its intended recipient.
In its present state, Serval can only connect between phones that are no more than a few hundred meters away from each other, and the call quality is horrendous. But its creators say that coverage could be extended in areas with no reception by installing transmitter boxes that could pass along the call, which would be good enough for an emergency situation.
In a demonstration video, the Android phones with Serval also seemed to be a decent substitute for walkie-talkies, as two phones can connect and exchange voice data without network access. The researchers are planning to make the software free and open-source, though no release date has been set.Update: New BEG album is reportedly due out late September/Early October through Nega Network, despite the members’ individual contract terminations.
Jea, Miryo, and Narsha –the remaining Brown Eyed Girls members signed to Nega Network– have officially left the agency after almost a decade.
The trio are currently free agents and have yet to start shopping for a new label, but now that the cat is out of the bag I’m sure that they’ll be fielding offers left and right.
If you’ve read any of my recent BEG posts (such as this one on Miryo’s busted solo comeback) then you’ll know that Nega’s been a terrible agency for years now and lacked the financial means to support a group as big as BEG. I’m not going to go over all that crap again since I’ve already said it, I’m just glad that the girls are finally free and may now be able to get the group back on track after years of mismanagement.
Ga-In is currently signed as a soloist to APOP Entertainment, a subsidiary of the popular Mystic Entertainment, which is how she’s been able to continue her solo career (Nega was not picking up that cheque).
Although BEG are all over the place right now, they’ve been working on a comeback album for the past few months and have previously indicated that they plan to continue promoting as a group, so I don’t think we need to worry about disbandment. Even the worst case scenario, if Ga-In left the group or couldn’t contractually promote with them (which wouldn’t happen, but this is a hypothetical), BEG would still most likely continue on as a trio.
Now let’s all remain hopeful and optimistic about BEG’s future. After years of fuckery at Nega, these divine queens are finally going to get the support they need and deserve to come back and slay us with their future Golden Disk Award winning album.
Note to Nega: You motherfuckers better not pull some legal shit like not giving BEG the rights to their name or back catalogue!
Here’s a video of BEG performing at some event this year… They look flawless.Image copyright AFP Image caption Rescuers carry one of the injured men to safety following the bus attack
Nine people have been killed after attackers hurled petrol bombs at a bus and truck in Bangladesh, police say.
Police reportedly blamed opposition activists for the violence, which also injured 30 others.
At least 70 people have been killed in attacks since anti-government protests began last month.
The opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) called for a general shutdown in January, on the anniversary of last year's disputed election.
The BNP had boycotted that election, saying it would be rigged, and is now trying to force Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to step down and call new polls.
Six people died when petrol bombs hit a packed bus from the northern district of Gaibandha to Dhaka on Friday, police said.
A similar arson attack on a truck in the southern district of Barisal killed three people early on Saturday, police added.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Security is tight amid the anti-government protests
Last week, police charged BNP leader Khaleda Zia with instigating an arson attack on a bus which killed seven people.
Ms Zia denied responsibility and condemned the violence.
The BNP has been blockading roads, railways and waterways as part of anti-government protests that began last month, and says they will not end the protests until the government resigns.
More than 7,000 opposition activists have been arrested since the protests began.
The BNP has called for another 72-hour countrywide general strike from Sunday, and demanded that schools and businesses remain closed.
Bangladeshi politics has been mired for years in bitter rivalry between Ms Zia and Ms Hasina, who is head of the ruling Awami League party.
Both women are related to former national leaders, and they have alternated as prime minister for most of the past two decades.Come one, come all -- let's gather and act shocked, shall we? It's no secret that Google's Android Market is far easier to penetrate than Apple's App Store, which is most definitely a double-edged sword. On one hand, you aren't stuck waiting a lifetime for Apple to approve a perfectly sound app; on the other, you may end up accidentally downloading some Nazi themes that scar you for life. A curious team of scientists from Intel Labs, Penn State and Duke University recently utilized a so-called TaintDroid extension in order to log and monitor the actions of 30 Android apps -- 30 that were picked from the 358 most popular. Their findings? That half of their sample (15, if you're rusty in the math department) shared location information and / or other unique identifiers (IMEI numbers, phone numbers, SIM numbers, etc.) with advertisers. Making matters worse, those 15 didn't actually inform end-users that data was being shared, and some of 'em beamed out information while applications were dormant. Unfortunately for us all, the researchers didn't bother to rat out the 15 evil apps mentioned here, so good luck resting easy knowing that your library of popular apps could be spying on you right now.
Update: A Google spokesperson pinged up with an official response to the study, and you can peek it after the break.
Update 2: Looks as if the full study (PDF) has been outed, with the 30 total apps named. Here they are: The Weather Channel, Cestos, Solitaire, Movies, Babble, Manga Browser, Bump, Wertago, Antivirus, ABC - Animals, Traffic Jam, Hearts, Blackjack, Horoscope, 3001 Wisdom Quotes Lite, Yellow Pages, Dastelefonbuch, Astrid, BBC News Live Stream, Ringtones, Layer, Knocking, Barcode Scanner, Coupons, Trapster, Spongebob Slide, ProBasketBall, MySpace, ixMAT, and Evernote. Thanks, Jordan!
Update 3: Flixter, the company that makes Movies, has chimed in with this: "At Flixster, we do not and never have sold any personal or identifiable confidential information with anyone. We do use non-identifiable location information (e.g. metro-area) to show more relevant ads, as does almost every mobile app that relies on advertising. Users have to opt-in to sharing their location when they install the app, and how we use information is explained in detail (for those that care) in our privacy policy."
Update 4: And here comes The Weather Channel's comment: "Regarding our Android app – Our customers and their privacy are very important to us. In our Android application, TWC does not share any of your personally identifiable information with advertisers or third parties. TWC does track location – which users consent to at install – for the purpose of providing you the most relevant and accurate weather conditions based on your location."
Update 5: And there's more, this time from Barcode Scanner: "Barcode Scanner has never collected or sent personal information. There is no "third party" server to receive such info any way. Barcode Scanner has never requested location information, or phone or user ID ("phone state" permission in the TaintDroid paper). It didn't help that the paper originally reported that the app had these permissions -- it has been fixed since. The app can't send information it can't collect in the first place. The application has always been open source; anyone can inspect exactly what it does (http://code.google.com/p/zxing). We have a complete statement on app permissions (http://code.google.com/p/zxing/wiki/FrequentlyAskedQuestions). Finally, the authors of the paper have in fact confirmed Barcode Scanner was not one of the "guilty" apps: http://appanalysis.org/letter_oct-01-10.html"
Update 6: The hits just keep on coming. Today, the developers of Astrid have both addressed privacy concerns and added a detailed EULA to the newest build. They've also added the ability for users to opt-out of analytics through the settings menuA video! About Osana! Please check it out!
From July 15th to August 1st, a lot of my time was spent fixing bugs. After those bugs were behind me, I finally got back to work on Osana. The process of implementing her Wednesday event was completed much quicker than I expected! It must be the result of the C# and Unity 5 conversion! If I can keep up this pace, then Osana’s Thursday and Friday events should be done in less than a month, and then I can move on to the confession cutscene, and then you’ll see a true progress report about Osana!
There’s also a new build available today! You can read about all the changes below.
Fixes, Changes, and Additions
It is now possible for the player to move back through the accessory list by holding down the “change accessory” key and then pressing the “left” key.
Fixed bug that would cause the Loading Screen animation to be super fast if the player entered the Loading Screen with time sped-up.
Updated the names of schemes in the Schemes menu to make it clear that each scheme can only be done on a specific day of the week.
Fixed bug that was causing the “Set Trap” prompt to appear above single doors (it was only meant to work on double doors).
Fixed bug that was preventing the kitten from using the same lighting as the rest of the models in the school scene.
Fixed bug that prevented the player from returning the speed of time to normal speed in Yandere-chan’s home.
Fixed bug that would cause Kokona to emit hearts from her head during her Thursday locker room event.
The emergency gate outside of school will now swing open when the player approaches it.
Adjusted crouch-walk and crouch-run movement speed and animation speed.
Touched up the graphics on the title screen a little bit.NEW YORK (CBS 2) — As you sit down to dinner, this story illustrates eating out like you have never experienced before. We are talking about super-secret, illegal dining experiences hosted in homes.
CBS 2 investigative reporter Tamara Leitner went undercover to see firsthand how this underground world works.
It may look like a dinner party, but it’s really an underground supper club.
The diners are a mix of New Yorkers and tourists. CBS 2’s undercover cameras captured one experience — eight people who didn’t know each other eating a meal in a stranger’s home.
That hostess, Naama Shafi, writes about food but is not a chef. Leitner found her through a website, which connects amateur foodies and professional chefs in 20 different countries with people who want unique dining experiences.
Clandestine dinner parties like the one Leitner attended have become more common in New York City. And insiders told Leitner they are completely unregulated.
When asked at the dinner, “do you ever worry about getting caught?” Michael Patlazhan responded, “I definitely do.”
Patlazhan is a professional chef who also hosts underground supper clubs. He cooks with blow torches, nitrogen and even a vacuum machine to create unusual meals.
“That’s the things with supper clubs, they’re in a sense illegal just because they are underground no one knows about them. So if the Health Department did come they would obviously shut it down. So there’s always a little bit of worry,” Patlazhan said.
To stay under the radar, Patlazhan changes the location every time and keeps the guest list exclusive through a members-only website.
“It’s definitely kind of a secret and I think that’s the interesting part about it. And a lot of it is word of mouth,” Patlazhan said.
But some critics have concerns about these unregulated dinner parties.
“It definitely falls into a gray area,” said Leon Lubarsky, owner of Letter Grade Consulting.
Lubarsky’s staff of retired New York City health inspectors advises restaurants on health regulations.
When asked if the underground restaurants should be regulated, Lubarsky told Leitner, “Yes, they should be regulated by the same system that regulates every restaurant in New York City.”
The Health Department refused to discuss the issue on camera but in a statement told CBS 2: “In New York City, people who offer meals to the public for money are considered food service establishments and need permits. The city does not allow meals to be served to members of the public in someone’s home.”
So, Leitner went back to ask Shafi about the dinner parties.
Leitner: “You guys are breaking the law by serving people meals and charging.”
Shafi: “Yeah. The reality is they are here and people really love them.”
In the meantime, foodies like Shafi and professional chefs like Patlazhan continue to host these covert supper clubs.
“I want to do it as much as possible so my goal would be to do it two to three times a week, so kind of like a restaurant on the weekends,” Patlazhan said.
But if caught hosting an underground dinner party, the hosts could be fined $2,000 and ordered to shut down.
The price to get into one of these underground supper clubs ranges from $40 to several hundred. Some of the hosts say they are in it simply for the love of food, while others hope to turn a profit.
You May Also Be Interested In These StoriesThe non-waiver trade deadline was last week. The Colorado Rockies did nothing. This was surprising to many baseball writers and talking heads – not to mention infuriating to many Rockies fans – because teams in the Rockies’ position (namely: well out of contention) are usually anxious to turn present assets into future ones that can provide value at a more useful time (namely: a season in which the team can play meaningful games deep into the summer).
But the Front Office stood pat. Not only are the likes of Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez still around, but guys like Brett Anderson, Jorge De La Rosa, and LaTroy Hawkins remain, as well. The team is stating publicly its desire to pick up team options on Anderson and Hawkins, and taking steps to ensure that De La Rosa remains for at least one more year, as well. Why? Because the Front Office believes the team can contend next year with the players it already has.
Maybe the idea of fielding a completive team in 2015 is pure lunacy and maybe it’s healthy optimism, but even if you tend to believe it’s the latter – as I actually do myself – it’s still difficult to understand how standing pat at the trade deadline made much sense. I’m not even talking about the players mentioned above – the big names. I’m glad the Rockies’ have seemingly committed to keeping the core of its lineup and what’s left of its rotation together for at least one more season. But there were other opportunities forgone last week, and even regardless of the intrinsic baseball value of the players the Front Office choose not to trade, and regardless of whether or not the team would have received equal baseball value in return, there are a couple of compelling reasons to have moved several players.
One of those compelling reasons is pure dollars and cents. In this space last week, I broke down the difficulties the Rockies will face this offseason from a payroll perspective. Without even adding any veteran free agents, the Rockies’ total salary obligations will increase substantially because of raises due existing players under escalating contracts (most notably: Tulo and Cargo), as well as to several players in, or just entering, their salary arbitration years. Unless team ownership raises the payroll budget substantially from an already-record high amount in 2014, it simply will not be able to keep the current group together even if it wants to. Trading some of our expensive/soon-to-be-expensive non-essential players – I mentioned guys like Drew Stubbs and Wilin Rosario in particular – would have been a great way to ease that budget pressure and/or free up those resources to use elsewhere.
Another compelling reason to have made a trade or three is the pending roster crunch, and that is the topic I’d like to explore further today. Many fans know that teams are limited to 25 men on an active roster. Fewer fans know there is another roster, a 40-man roster, that is just as relevant, and fewer still are familiar with all of its associated rules. For example, just this past week we lost Ryan Wheeler to the Angels after he was cut from the 40-man roster and put on waivers. I don’t pretend to be qualified to teach a course of this subject (please click here if you’re interested), but there are really only a few key concepts to understand for purposes of the discussion today.
Here’s a quick primer (skip the next two paragraphs if you already know this stuff): The 40-man roster is made up of the 25 players on the active roster plus up to 15 additional players that are playing in the minors (mostly in AA or AAA) or are on the 15-day disabled list (the one you hear about most often). Whenever a team calls up one its minor leaguers to the big club, it must make room for that player on the 40-man roster if he isn’t on there already. Once a player is on that 40-man roster, the team may, subject to many complex limitations, remove him from the active roster and demote him back to the minors, but it cannot remove him from the larger 40-man roster without risk of losing him to another team through the waiver process. The only way a team can remove a player from the 40-man roster without risk of losing him is if that player is injured and placed on the longer 60-day disabled list. That essentially gives team “extra” 40-man roster spots, but after every season, even if a player is still injured, he most be moved back onto the regular 40-man roster. So, in other words, those extra 60-day disabled list spots vanish.
There is one more key point to understand for this discussion: the Rule 5 Draft. Not to be confused with the Rule 4 Draft, which is the standard amateur baseball draft that occurs each June, the Rule 5 draft was created to prevent teams from hoarding too many good players in their minor league systems – players that are already good enough to be playing for some other team at the highest level. It helps “spread the wealth” so to speak. After a player has been playing in the minor league a certain number of years (which varies – again, the rules are quite complex), that player becomes eligible to be poached by another team so long as the player is put on the poaching team’s active roster and kept there. The Rule 5 Draft, which happens at the beginning of each offseason, is how the Rockies got Tommy Kahnle (Joke’s on you, Yankees!) The only way a team can assure itself that its best minor leaguers won’t be poached is by adding those players to the 40-man roster. Because of this, several of them are added to the 40-man roster right after the World Series each year, even if the team doesn’t have any expectation of actually playing them at the major league level the following season.
So, here’s where the Rockies 40-man roster stands right now, along with the five injured players on the 60-day disabled list:
Adam Ottavino – Active
Boone Logan – Active
Brandon Barnes – Active
Brett Anderson – Active
Carlos Gonzalez – Active
Charlie Blackmon – Active
Charlie Culberson – Active
Corey Dickerson – Active
DJ LeMahieu – Active
Drew Stubbs – Active
Franklin Morales – Active
Jason Pridie – Active
Jorge De La Rosa – Active
Josh Rutledge – Active
Justin Morneau – Active
LaTroy Hawkins – Active
Matt Belisle – Active
Michael McKenry – Active
Nick Masset – Active
Nolan Arenado – Active
Rex Brothers – Active
Tommy Kahnle – Active
Tyler Matzek – Active
Wilin Rosario – Active
Yohan Flande – Active
Ben Paulsen – Minors
Brooks Brown – Minors
Chad Bettis – Minors
Chris Martin – Minors
Christian Friedrich – Minors
Cristhian Adames – Minors
Eddie Butler – Minors
Jackson Williams – Minors
Jayson Aquino – Minors
Juan Nicasio – Minors
Kraig Sitton – Minors
Kyle Parker – Minors
Rob Scahill – Minors
Rosell Herrera – Minors
Troy Tulowitzki – 15-Day DL
Christian Bergman – 60-Day DL
Jhoulys Chacin – 60-Day DL
Jordan Lyles – 60-Day DL
Michael Cuddyer – 60-Day DL
Tyler Chatwood – 60-Day DL
The first roster crunch will come when Bergman, Lyles, and Cuddyer come off the 60-day disabled list. Lyles will be activated on Wednesday, Bergman is on a rehab assignment and will be activated himself soon thereafter. Cuddyer has started hitting off of a tee and will begin his own rehab assignment in a couple weeks. This means three players will be kicked off the 40-man and exposed to waivers. Some of them are players one could fairly deem “expendable.” My best guess is that Pridie, then Scahill, and then Friedrich end up getting bumped when Lyles, Bergman, and then Cuddyer come back (with Pridie subjected to waivers, and Barnes and Flande remaining on the 40-man but demoted to AAA).
While having competent starting pitchers like Flande, and reliable defensive backstops like Williams readily available is more valuable that it might seem, potentially losing players of this caliber certainly isn’t a franchise-crusher. However, is a second roster crunch coming soon thereafter, when Tyler Chatwood and Jhoulys Chacin need to be added back, and when several of our most promising prospects need to be added for the first time. Assuming the Rockies are being forthright when stating their plans to bring Anderson, De La Rosa, and Hawkins back next year; and assuming free agents Matt Belisle, Franklin Morales, and Nick Massett aren’t resigned, I count the following 29 players as being certainties for the 40-man roster (baring trades, of course):
Adam Ottavino
Boone Logan
Brandon Barnes
Brett Anderson
Carlos Gonzalez
Chad Bettis
Charlie Blackmon
Christian Bergman
Corey Dickerson
Cristhian Adames
DJ LeMahieu
Drew Stubbs
Eddie Butler
Jayson Aquino
Jhoulys Chacin
Jordan Lyles
Jorge De La Rosa
Josh Rutledge
Justin Morneau
Kyle Parker
LaTroy Hawkins
Michael McKenry
Nolan Arenado
Rex Brothers
Rosell Herrera
Tommy Kahnle
Troy Tulowitzki
Tyler Matzek
Wilin Rosario
There are three prospects I feel are locks (or at least near-locks) to be added for Rule 5 draft protection:
Tyler Anderson
Ryan Casteel
Dan Winkler
Dan Winkler’s injury status certainly make him less likely to be selected, but he would be allowed to sit on the poaching team’s disabled list for all but 90 days of the 2015 season, meaning it couldn’t be ruled out, and given the Rockies’ need to take every shot the team can at producing a quality young starting pitcher, I doubt they take even a small risk on Winkler.
So that leaves only 8 spots – but really it will be fewer than 8 based on the number of free agents the team signs; it’s hard to imagine they’ll sign none. We should expect to lose at least five of the following players.
• Dustin Garneau – Garneau is a potential additional Rule 5 protection. He’s a defensive catcher in AAA and, if not protected, could be poached to be some other team’s backup next year. He’d be a great depth option for the Rockies if he’s still around.
• Charlie Culberson – Culberson is having a horrible year at the plate, and will never be a starting-calliber player, but nobody thinks his current results represent his true talent level either. And while he isn’t a defensive star at any position, he’s turned himself into a jack-of-all-trades sort that is often handy to have at the end of the bench.
• Ben Paulsen – Paulsen is never likely to hit enough to star in this league– the offensive bar is just set too high for first basemen. But he’s probably the best option the Rockies have at that position after Morneau, and his late blooming this year suggests there may remain just a smidgen of upside left to his game.
• Brooks Brown –A couple bad outings have marred his stat line – and those bad outings count, of course. He’s clearly not the next coming of Mariano Rivera. But for just a moment there, Brown looked like the best relief pitcher in the organization.
• Chris Martin – Martin, like Brown, has seen a couple bad outings tarnish is stat line. Also like Brown, he’ll probably be called upon again to provide relief innings. Every team needs guys like this stashed in AAA.
• Jackson Williams – Williams is currently 3rd catcher in our depth chart. He’s very limited offensively, but provides good defense.
• Juan Nicasio – A tough call. Cutting Nicasio could save the team a key couple of million dollar, and at this point, it’d be hard to make a case that Nicasio should be on the Opening Day roster next year. However, it could really come back to haunt the Rockies if he succeeds in making the transition to reliever, a role in which he profiles quite well.
• Kraig Sitton – Sitton, a relief pitcher, was added to the 40-man last November to protect him from the Rule 5 Draft. His main virtue is his left-handedness, something the Rockies don’t have a lot of in the system.
• Michael Cuddyer – The Front Office has said it wants to resign Cuddyer after this season, but between his injury and the emergence of Corey Dickerson, I have a hard time believing that will happen – not because of any 40-man roster implications, but simply because he’s become a poor fit on the roster and in the team’s budget. However, if he IS resigned, that’s one fewer 40-man roster spot, as well.
• Tyler Chatwood – Perhaps the toughest case of all. His second Tommy John surgery means he wont’ pitch next year or maybe ever again. It may be difficult for the team to justify paying Chatwood an arbitration-level salary to do nothing but rehab for a year, but he flashed the ability to be a great starting pitcher, and the Rockies simply can’t get their hands on enough of those kind of players.
Each of these guys are flawed in some way – be it limited upside, injury status, expense, or basic on-field performance – but each also offers his own sort of baseball value, as well. One of the less obvious negative consequences of the team not making any trades last week – of not exchanging players like Stubbs, Rosario, for pre-40-man roster prospects – is that we’ll end up losing more of the players in the list above than we otherwise would have, even if the payroll is raised high enough for money to become a non-issue. Again, while these players on the bubble are not all-stars, having roster spots available to stash MLB-ready players in AAA is no small thing, as the Rockies injury-riddled 2014 season has shown all too well. Stubbs and Rosario both have value themselves, sure, but they are redundant and ill-fitting on this particular team, and keeping them around represents an opportunity cost this team cannot afford. The Rockies limited resources – including roster spots – should be used more wisely.
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TumblrA best selling Algerian author warns that the “refugee welcome” culture is “naive,” and that Islam will fracture European society.
Algerian writer and best selling author Boualem Sansal paints a bleak vision of Europe’s future in his new work 2084: The End of the World, the title evoking George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Mr. Sansal sees a Europe —not governed by a totalitarian Big Brother as Mr. Orwell did, but rather — subjugated by radical Islam.
Promoting the book, the author warns that the “refugees welcome” attitude that Germans have shown is “completely naive,” and warns of the perils of radical Islam on European society in a new interview, reports Kronen Zeitung.
Mr. Sansal blames what he calls an overly tolerant society as the reason for his vision of the future of Europe. He says that in Germany in particular that the experiences of the Second World War have made the nation an easy prey for Islamists. He told media that many of the radical Islamists in his native Algeria were forced out for their agitations against the government and many of them have found asylum in Germany.
Europe is experiencing a “return of religion” according to Mr. Sansal, who says that the problem is not just a German issue but pan-European. He claims that Islam is gaining more traction among the population in European countries and especially among youths.
Young people in Germany and elsewhere have even begun attempting to join Islamic State over the past year — some even committing attacks on its behalf. The author warns that the trend among young people will contaminate the entirety of European society.
The consequences for women in an Islamised Europe are dire, Mr. Sansal says. Women’s equality will be a thing of the past he claims, explaining: “In the Islamic universe, there is only a mother’s love, the love of God. In love, the women hide. The woman herself does not matter.”
Blaming the weakness of Europe to come to its own defence, he says that groups like Islamic State are using the tolerance of Europe against itself. According to him, the attacks in Paris and Brussels are directed at the Western way of life and shared common values. “You can not even defeat the weak Arab states, so they have brought in fifth columns to bring the West to destroy itself. If they succeed society will fall,” he said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not escape criticism from Mr. Sansal. The author sees the Turkish leader as trying to behave like an Islamic Caliph by centralising his own power in Turkey and trying to force conditions on the European Union to stem the migrant crisis.
Mr. Erdoğan has repeatedly threatened to unleash millions of migrants into the European Union if he does not get visa-free travel for Turkish citizens. The EU has maintained that Erdogan must reform terror laws used to prosecute critics of the government, but the Turks have stood firm against any efforts to scrap them.(Washington D.c., July 11, 2011) Today, on the International Day Against Stoning, the American Humanist Association is raising awareness of the brutal practice of stoning and demanding the end of stoning as a form of punishment around the world.
The American Humanist Association stands beside the International Committee Against Stoning and its effort to eradicate the cruel tradition of stoning, an inhumane method of punishment which affects predominantly women and girls in developing countries. Fundamentalist religious zealots around the world are responsible for enacting laws based on stringent and unforgiving moral codes, sometimes punishable by sentences such as stoning to death. Women are stoned for “offenses” such as giving birth out of wedlock, extramarital affairs, and even in response to false accusations of murder.
Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who has been imprisoned along with her lawyer for four years, was sentenced by the courts of the Islamic Republic of Iran for various charges of being an accessory to murder, public indecency (for appearing in court without the traditional Islamic veil) and adultery. International pressure has resulted in a stay of her execution, but she and her lawyer still remain in prison. This pattern of indicting women on false accusations, and on grounds of violating strict religious requirements, places a heavy burden on women to obey laws set in place by the influence of male clergy and lawmakers.
The American Humanist Association condemns the act of stoning as brutal and inhumane. Humanists worldwide strive to protect the dignity of all and work to protect those accused of crimes based on fundamentalist restrictions on women. We are proud to support the International Committee Against Stoning and the Save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani Campaign in their efforts to end this practice.
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The American Humanist Association (www.americanhumanist.org) advocates for the rights and viewpoints of humanists. Founded in 1941 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., its work is extended through more than 100 local chapters and affiliates across America.
Humanism is the idea that you can be good without a belief in God.An infectious virus has spread worldwide, killing almost the entire population. This disease is spread by breath.
Two brothers, Brian and Daniel "Danny" Green, along with Brian's girlfriend, Bobby, and Danny's school friend, Kate, are heading to Turtle Beach in the Southwestern United States, a secluded beach and motel where they believe they can wait for the viral pandemic to die out, so they can start a new life. They strictly follow a set of rules Brian created that they believe will keep them all alive and prevent them from becoming infected.
En route, they meet a man, Frank Holloway, and his infected young daughter, Jodie, whose Suburban has run out of gas, stranding them in the middle of a deserted back road. After driving off-road to get away from the pair, the group's car breaks down. The four end up returning to acquire Frank's car and are forced to take Frank and Jodie to a nearby high school where a serum for the pandemic is rumored to have been developed. Upon arrival they discover that the serum does not work, and the only doctor still alive is about to commit suicide with a remaining group of infected children (whom he plans to kill through non-voluntary euthanasia).
Meanwhile, Bobby is accidentally infected by Jodie, who coughs blood on her while Bobby is trying to help her stop choking. Bobby hides her infection from the others by wiping her face and hiding her blood covered shirt.
Jodie tells her father that she needs to use the toilet, but she is too weak to walk there alone. Frank carries Jodie to the toilet, telling Danny that he knows he's a good person (in hopes Danny will prevent the group from abandoning him and Jodie). However, despite Danny's protests, Brian leaves Frank and Jodie behind and takes their car.
After this, the four stop at a golf course hotel. Brian almost becomes infected after nearly slipping into a swimming pool containing the body of an infected man, but Danny manages to grab him in time. Bobby talks herself into believing she is not infected, as she is unsure that Jodie's blood contaminated her. However, despite Bobby's efforts to prevent it, Brian kisses her and inadvertently infects himself.
While Bobby berates Kate for believing her parents may still be alive, a small group of armed survivalists, who are using the golf course as a base, ambush and capture the group at gunpoint. After a tense Mexican standoff, they declare their intent to keep the girls. As they force the girls to disrobe to check them for infection, the men discover Bobby's rashes and bruises, and force the entire group away at gunpoint. Kate stresses that they will end up dead if Bobby continues to travel with them, and Brian ends up leaving a weeping Bobby behind at a deserted gas station.
The trio almost runs out of fuel but encounters two women driving toward them from the opposite direction. After Brian blocks the road with their Suburban, Danny asks the women for help, stating that he has a pregnant wife in the car and that he is a fellow Christian, but they refuse. A desperate Brian shoots them for their fuel when they try to drive away, and ends up being shot in the leg himself.
Danny breaks into a seemingly abandoned house in search of medical supplies to treat his brother's wound and is forced to shoot a stray dog that attempts to attack him.
Danny soon discovers that his brother is also infected while tending to Brian's wound. Kate urges Danny to leave Brian whilst he is sleeping, but as the two try to leave Brian wakes up, and Danny and Kate discover that Brian has the car keys. Brian refuses to give them to Danny unless he can continue to travel with them, despite Danny |
of the world is to make sure that every worker has at least a modest and decent standard of living."[67]
In January 2019, Sanders sponsored the Senate version of a bill to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2024, saying, "We are living today in an American economy that is doing very well for the people on top. Not so well for working families."[68]
Labor [ edit ]
In May 2018, Sanders was one of twelve senators to sign a letter to Chairman of the Federal Labor Relations Authority Colleen Kiko urging the FLRA to end efforts to close its Boston regional office until Congress debated the matter, furthering that the FLRA closing down its seven regional offices would cause staff to be placed farther away from the federal employees they protect the rights of.[69]
Company mergers [ edit ]
In February 2019, Sanders was one of eight senators to sign a letter to the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice advocating for regulators to renounce a proposed $26 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, writing that American enforcers have understood for the last thirty years "that fostering robust competition in telecommunications markets is the best way to provide every American with access to high-quality, cutting-edge communications at a reasonable price" and the merger would result in a return for "Americans to the dark days of heavily consolidated markets and less competition, with all of the resulting harms."[70]
Environment [ edit ]
Global warming [ edit ]
Campaign video on climate change
Sanders views global warming as a serious problem.[71] Along with Senator Barbara Boxer, Sanders introduced the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act of 2007 on January 15, 2007.[72] In a July 26, 2012 speech on the Senate floor, Sanders addressed claims made by Senator Jim Inhofe: "The bottom line is when Senator Inhofe says global warming is a hoax, he is just dead wrong, according to the vast majority of climate scientists."[73] He was Climate Hawks Vote's top-rated senator on climate leadership in the 113th Congress.[74]
Believing that "[we need to] transform our energy system away from fossil fuel," Sanders voted against the Keystone Pipeline bill, saying, "Unless we get our act together, the planet that we're going to be leaving to our kids and grandchildren will be significantly less habitable than the planet we have right now... I think it's a good idea for the president, Congress, and the American people to listen to the overwhelming amount of scientists who tell us loudly and clearly that climate change is one of the great planetary crises that we face."[75]
Sanders also stands with the Great Sioux Nation as opposed to constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline, stating:
Like the Keystone XL pipeline, which I opposed since day one, the Dakota Access fracked oil pipeline, will transport some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet. Regardless of the court's decision, the Dakota Access pipeline must be stopped. As a nation, our job is to break our addiction to fossil fuels, not increase our dependence on oil. I join with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many tribal nations fighting this dangerous pipeline.[76]
In April 2015, Sanders was one of five senators to sign a letter to American governors saying the climate change views of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were not in line with that of Kentuckians and urging them to comply with the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan.[77]
In April 2017, along with Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson, Sanders wrote an op-ed for The Guardian on the need for the US to "aggressively transition our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward clean, renewable energy solutions", citing climate change as already having caused "severe weather events like prolonged droughts, record-high temperatures, and rising sea levels because of melting Arctic sea ice." Sanders and Jacobson also warned that "the people who had least to do with causing the problem will be impacted the most, including low income families and communities of color across America."[78]
In February 2019, in response to reports of the EPA intending to decide against setting drinking water limits for Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) as part of an upcoming national strategy to manage the aforementioned class of chemicals, Sanders was one of twenty senators to sign a letter to Acting EPA Administrator Andrew R. Wheeler calling on the agency "to develop enforceable federal drinking water standards for PFOA and PFOS, as well as institute immediate actions to protect the public from contamination from additional per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)."[79]
Nuclear energy [ edit ]
Following the 2011 Japanese nuclear accidents, Sanders called for a moratorium on licensing new nuclear plants and re-licensing of existing ones, in an effort to slow down what has been touted as a nuclear renaissance in the United States.[80] Sanders wrote to President Obama, asking him to appoint a special commission to review the safety of U.S. nuclear plants. Sanders also wants to repeal the Price–Anderson Act, which leaves the taxpayers to pay most of the costs of a major nuclear accident. He says, "in a free-enterprise system, the nuclear industry should be required to insure itself against accidents."[80]
Sanders has gone on record against the government financial backing of the nuclear industry, which he calls "nuclear welfare".[81] Additionally, he expresses concern over the logistics and fiscal challenges of nuclear waste.[81] He has spoken in favor of sustainable alternatives and cites Vermont as a state leading such endeavors, saying in regard to opposition of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's 2011 extension (just one week after the Japanese accidents) of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant's operating license, "In my state there is a strong feeling that we want to go forward with energy efficiency and sustainable energy. I believe that we have that right. I believe that every other state in the country has that right. If we want to move to sustainable energy and not maintain an aging, trouble-plagued nuclear power plant, I think we should be allowed to do that."[82]
Pipelines [ edit ]
At a September 2016 rally near the White House, Sanders called on President Obama to ensure the Dakota Access Pipeline "gets a full environmental and cultural impact analysis" and stated his position that the pipeline would not continue in the event of such an analysis taking place, citing findings by Oil Change International that the Dakota Access Pipeline would have the same impact on the planet as adding 21 million more cars on the road along with constructing 30 more coal plants.[83]
In October 2016, Sanders led four senators in a letter to President Obama requesting the administration halt work on the Dakota Access Pipeline until the permitting process of the Army Corps "be transparent and include public notice and participation, formal and meaningful tribal consultation, and adequate environmental review" and stating their support for the "tribes along the pipeline route in their fight against the Dakota Access pipeline project."[84]
In December 2016, following the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers's block on the Dakota Access Pipeline, Sanders released a statement praising President Obama for listening to Native Americans as well as others opposed to the pipeline's construction and said the United States should neither "endanger the water supply of millions of people" nor "become more dependent on fossil fuel and accelerate the planetary crisis of climate change." He called for a transformation of the American energy system that would see a departure from the usage of fossil fuels.[85]
Transparency and corruption [ edit ]
Campaign finance [ edit ]
Sanders supports the DISCLOSE Act, which would make campaign finances more transparent and ban U.S. corporations controlled by foreign interests from making political expenditures.[86] He has been outspoken in calling for an overturn of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court overturned McCain-Feingold restrictions on political spending by corporations and unions as a violation of the First Amendment.[87] Saying that he believes that the Citizens United decision is "one of the Supreme Court's worst decisions ever" and that it has allowed big money to "deflect attention from the real issues" facing voters,[88] he has proposed a constitutional amendment to undo the ruling.[89] He warns: "We now have a political situation where billionaires are literally able to buy elections and candidates."[90]
In October 2016, while stumping for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Sanders advocated for Trump supporters to vote for Clinton due to her promise to propose a constitutional amendment in the first 100 days of her presidency to overturn Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission as well as her intent to nominate a Supreme Court justice to fill the vacancy by the late Antonin Scalia that would support overturning Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: "This issue of Citizens United is a profound issue impacting the entire country. I say to Mr. Trump's supporters: most of you understand that system is rigged in favor of wealthy and power."[91]
Instant runoff voting [ edit ]
In 2007, Sanders testified to the Vermont Senate Government Operations Committee that he "strongly supports instant-runoff voting" because it "allows people to vote for what they really want without worrying about the possibility of them getting what they really don't want."[92] The committee and legislature ultimately passed legislation that would have enacted instant runoff voting for U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators, but the governor vetoed it.[93]
Media reform [ edit ]
Sanders has been a leader in calling for media reform and opposes increased concentration of ownership of media outlets,[94] as well as being a contributing author for OpEdNews.[95] He appeared in Orwell Rolls in His Grave and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, two documentaries on the subject.[96]
Internet privacy [ edit ]
In April 2017, after President Trump signed a law undoing a Federal Communications Commission rule requiring internet service providers to obtain permission from customers prior to selling their data to advertisers, Sanders was one of eleven senators to sponsor legislation undoing the repeal and reinstating the regulations.[97]
Net neutrality [ edit ]
Sanders opposes the repeal of net neutrality in the United States, as voted by FCC commissioners in a 3-2 vote on December 14, 2017 — his statement on the issue from his U.S. Senate website on the same day as the vote, partly reads: "The FCC's vote to end net neutrality is an egregious attack on our democracy. With this decision the internet and its free exchange of information as we have come to know it will cease to exist... At a time when our democratic institutions are already in peril, we must do everything we can to stop this decision from taking effect."[98]
In March 2018, Sanders was one of ten senators to sign a letter spearheaded by Jeff Merkley which lambasted a proposal from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai that would curb the scope of benefits from the Lifeline program, which provided access to high-speed internet to roughly 6.5 million people in poor communities, citing that it was Pai's "obligation to the American public, as the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to improve the Lifeline program and ensure that more Americans can afford access, and have means of access, to broadband and phone service".[99]
In May 2018, Sanders voted for a bill that would reinstate net neutrality rules and thereby overturn the FCC's repeal via a law authorizing Congress to reverse regulatory actions by a simple majority vote.[100]
Foreign policy [ edit ]
California. Bernie Sanders at a May 2016 rally in Vallejo
Afghanistan [ edit ]
Sanders voted for the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists[101] that has been cited as the legal justification for controversial military actions since the September 11 attacks.[102] In February 2011, Sanders traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan with fellow senators Bob Corker, Chris Coons, and Joe Manchin, opining afterward that Afghanistan was "one of the most backward countries in the entire world" given its massive poverty, lack of literacy, and corruption. He stated his belief that the US could afford to reduce its funding for the American and Afghanistan armed forces, Afghanistan police, and Afghanistan's economic development.[103]
Cuba [ edit ]
Early in his career, Sanders had praised the Cuban government for their reforms, including widespread education and health care in Cuba.[104] On April 14, 2015, after the White House announced that President Obama had intended to remove Cuba from the United States' list of nations sponsoring terrorism, Sanders issued a statement saying, "While we have our strong differences with Cuba, it is not a terrorist state. I applaud President Obama for moving aggressively to develop normal diplomatic relations. Fifty years of Cold War is enough. It is time for Cuba and the United States to turn the page and normalize relations."[105]
Iran [ edit ]
Sanders supports the agreement with Iran reached by President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. While calling it less than a perfect agreement, he believes that the US needs to negotiate with Iran rather than enter in another war in the Middle East.[106]
During the January 17, 2016 Democratic debate in Charleston, South Carolina, Sanders criticized Iran by saying "their support for terrorism, the anti-American rhetoric that we’re hearing from of their leadership is something that is not acceptable" and espoused the view that the US should apply the same policy it did toward normalizing relations with Cuba to Iran through a "move in warm relations with a very powerful and important country in this world."[107]
In 2017, Congress took up a bill designed to impose sanctions on Russia, for its alleged interference in the 2016 election, and on Iran. Sanders announced that he supported the sanctions on Russia, but he voted against the bill because of the Iran provisions. He stated:
I have voted for sanctions on Iran in the past, and I believe sanctions were an important tool for bringing Iran to the negotiating table. But I believe that these new sanctions could endanger the very important nuclear agreement that was signed between the United States, its partners and Iran in 2015. That is not a risk worth taking....[108]
In October 2017, Sanders said that "the worst possible thing" the United States could do was undermine the Iran nuclear deal if it was "genuinely concerned with Iran's behavior in the region" and that the president's comments against the deal had isolated the US from foreign allies that had retained their commitment to the agreement.[109]
In May 2018, Sanders was one of twelve senators to sign a letter to President Trump urging him to remain in the Iran nuclear deal on the grounds that "Iran could either remain in the agreement and seek to isolate the United States from our closest partners, or resume its nuclear activities" if the US pulled out and that both possibilities "would be detrimental to our national security interests."[110]
Iraq [ edit ]
Sanders strongly opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and voted against the 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force against that country. In a 2002 speech, he said, "I am opposed to giving the President a blank check to launch a unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq" and "I will vote against this resolution. One, I have not heard any estimates of how many young American men and women might die in such a war or how many tens of thousands of women and children in Iraq might also be killed. As a caring Nation, we should do everything we can to prevent the horrible suffering that a war will cause. War must be the last recourse in international relations, not the first. Second, I am deeply concerned about the precedent that a unilateral invasion of Iraq could establish in terms of international law and the role of the United Nations."[111]
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ edit ]
Sanders has called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) "a barbaric organization" and "a growing threat," but does not believe that the U.S. should lead the fight against it. Sanders believes that "the United States should be supportive, along with other countries, but we cannot and we should not be involved in perpetual warfare in the Middle East – the Muslim countries themselves have got to lead the effort."[112]
On November 15, 2015, in response to ISIS' attacks in Paris, Sanders cautioned against "Islamophobia" saying, "During these difficult times as Americans, we will not succumb to racism. We will not allow ourselves to be divided and succumb to Islamophobia. And while hundreds of thousands have lost everything, have nothing left but the shirts on their backs, we will not turn our backs on the refugees!"[113]
Sanders criticized Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and UAE, saying that those "countries of enormous wealth and resources – have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS". Sanders said Saudi Arabia, instead of fighting ISIS, has focused more on Houthi rebels in Yemen, and Kuwait has been a well-known source of financing for ISIS, and Qatar is spending $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup, yet very little to fight against ISIS. "Wealthy and powerful Muslim nations in the region can no longer sit on the sidelines and expect the United States to do their work for them."[114]
In April 2018, in a statement, Sanders said President Trump had "no legal authority for broadening the war in Syria" and recommended Trump approach Congress if he believed "expanding the war in Syria will bring stability to the region and protect American interests".[115]
Israeli–Palestinian conflict [ edit ]
Sanders supports a two-state solution, saying that "the Palestinian people, in my view, deserve a state of their own, they deserve an economy of their own, they deserve economic support from the people of this country. And Israel needs to be able to live in security without terrorist attacks."[116] Sanders has said Israel must have a right to live in peace and security.[117]
In 2008, Sanders was a co-sponsor of a Senate Resolution, "recognizing the 60th anniversary of the founding of the modern State of Israel and reaffirming the bonds of close friendship and cooperation between the United States and Israel." The resolution reaffirmed Israel's right to defend itself against terror. It also congratulated Israel on building a strong nation and wished for a successful Israeli future.[118]
According to Sanders' senate webpage, David Palumbo-Liu wrongly noted in Salon that Sen. Sanders "voted" for a resolution supporting Operation Protective Edge which had actually passed without a vote.[119] A statement published on his Senate website reads in part: "Sanders believes the Israeli attacks that killed hundreds of innocent people – including many women and children – in bombings of civilian neighborhoods and UN controlled schools, hospitals, and refugee camps were disproportionate, and the widespread killing of civilians is completely unacceptable. Israel's actions took an enormous human toll, and appeared to strengthen support for Hamas and may well be sowing the seeds for even more hatred, war and destruction in future years."[116]
Rania Khalek, writing in The Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian publication, has argued there is "little reason to believe a Sanders administration would be all that different on Palestine than the current one".[120] To The Intercept's Zaid Jilani, however, Sanders "stood out in contrast to the remarks from the other four major party candidates" in the 2016 presidential election, criticizing Israel's policy of settlement expansion after violent episodes and defended self-determination, civil rights, and economic well-being for Palestinians. After AIPAC's refusal to accept Sanders's telepresence at their 2016 debate, former U.S. ambassador Marc Ginsberg explained the event saying that Bernie Sanders "has never really extolled his Jewishness, much less any support for Israel".[121] Sanders was criticized for hiring IfNotNow founder Simone Zimmerman as his Jewish Outreach Coordinator, and she was fired from the campaign after critical social media posts about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the conflict surfaced.[122][123]
While being interviewed in April 2016 by the New York Daily News, Sanders said that Israel killed over 10,000 innocent civilians in Gaza,[124] an unnecessarily high death toll.[125] The Anti-Defamation League subsequently called on Sanders to withdraw remarks he made about the casualties, which the ADL said exaggerated the death toll of the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, citing a number far in excess of Palestinian or Israel sources' estimates.[126] Sanders later clarified that he was quickly corrected in that the death toll was closer to 2,000 civilians.[127]
In November 2017, Sanders was one of ten Democratic senators to sign a letter urging Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to halt the planned demolitions of Palestinian villages Khan al-Ahmar and Sussiya on the grounds that such action would further diminish efforts to seek a two-state solution and "endanger Israel's future as a Jewish democracy."[128]
In April 2018, shortly after the commencing of the 2018 Gaza border protests, Sanders stated, "From what my understanding is, you have tens and tens of thousands of people who are engaged in a nonviolent protest. I believe now 15 or 20 people, Palestinians, have been killed and many, many others have been wounded. So I think it's a difficult situation, but my assessment is that Israel overreacted on that." He furthered that Gaza remained "a humanitarian disaster" and called on the United States to play "a more positive role in ending the Gaza blockade and helping Palestinians and Israelis build a future that works for all."[129]
During an October 2018 speech, Sanders said it was "hard to imagine that Israel's Netanyahu government would have taken a number of steps— including passing the recent 'Nation State law,' which essentially codifies the second-class status of Israel's non-Jewish citizens, aggressively undermining the longstanding goal of a two-state solution, and ignoring the economic catastrophe in Gaza — if Netanyahu wasn't confident that Trump would support him."[130]
Bernie Sanders supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, opposes attempts at a one-state solution, opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel (BDS), and maintains that the United Nations has a bias against Israel.[131][132] He has also maintained that antisemitism plays a role in the BDS movement.[133]
Following Sanders' signing of a US congressional letter denouncing a bias at the UN against Israel and calling upon UN General Secretary Antonia Guterres, urging him to remedy the problem, he defended his signature on an interview hosted by the Qatari news agency Al Jazeera, saying:[131]
there are many problems with Israel... On the other hand, to see Israel attacked over and over again for human rights violations -- which may be true -- when you have countries like Saudi Arabia or Syria, Saudi Arabia – I'm not quite sure if a woman can even drive a car today. So I think the thrust of that letter is not to say that Israel does not have human rights issues — it does — but to say how come it's only Israel when you have other countries where women are treated as third-class citizens, where in Egypt, I don't know how many thousands of people now lingering in jail, so that's the point of that, not to defend Israel but to say why only Israel."
Asked if he "respected" BDS as a protest tactic, Sanders has said "No, I don't", adding that it was counterproductive if the goal is trying to bring about peace talks.[131] In 2016, Sanders averred that there was "absolutely" antisemitism in the BDS movement, elaborating:[133]
Israel has done some very bad things, so has every other country on earth," Sanders said. "I think the people who want to attack Israel for their policies, I think that is fair game. But not to appreciate that there is some level of anti-Semitism around the world involved in that I think would be a mistake... I spent many months on a kibbutz on Israel, so I know something about Israel. Israel has got to be defended, has a right to exist, but you cannot ignore the needs of the Palestinian people.
Sanders supports a two-state solution, and regarding the possibility of a one-state solution, he has stated:[131]
I think if that happens, then that [a one-state solution] would be the end of the State of Israel and I support Israel's right to exist... I think if there is the political will to make it [peace and a two-state solution] happen and if there is good faith on both sides I do think it's possible, and I think there has not been good faith, certainly on this Israeli government and I have my doubts about parts of the Palestinian leadership as well.
In a December 2018 letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sanders and Dianne Feinstein advocated against a provision of a spending package barring companies from endorsing anti-Israel boycotts promoted by governmental groups, writing that while they did not support "the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, we remain resolved to our constitutional oath to defend the right of every American to express their views peacefully without fear of or actual punishment by the government."[134] In February 2019, Sanders voted against a controversial Anti-Boycott Act initiated by Republicans,[135] which would make it illegal for U.S. companies to engage in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.[136]
Henry Kissinger [ edit ]
During the February 11th democratic debate, Sanders took issue with Hillary Clinton's admiration of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, noting that he was "one of the most destructive" in US modern history, stating:
I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. In fact, Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in who then butchered some 3 million innocent people – one of the worst genocides in the history of the world.[137]
Nicaraguan Revolution [ edit ]
During the Nicaraguan Revolution, Sanders opposed funding the Contra Rebels and praised the leadership and popularity of the Sandinista Party. Sanders stated that the support for the Sandinistas in their country was higher than the support of American voters for President Ronald Reagan and even those who did not vote for the Sandinstas did not want an invasion.[138][104]
Venezuela [ edit ]
Since the deterioration of Venezuelan living standards under the direction of the self-described socialist government in the country, concerns and comparisons to Venezuela were raised over Sanders' desires to implement socialist policies in the United States.[139][140][141] Sanders responded by attempting to distance himself from Venezuela's Bolivarian government, replying to such worries by stating, "When I talk about Democratic socialist, I'm not looking at Venezuela. I'm not looking at Cuba. I'm looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden".[142] Sanders also furthered himself from the Venezuelan government by calling the leader of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution, former President Hugo Chávez, a "dead communist dictator".[143]
During the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis, Sanders cautioned about President Donald Trump’s decision to back a competing claim for the government in Venezuela, citing US support of coups in Chile, Guatemala, and Brazil. At the same time, he condemned the anti-democratic actions of the Nicolás Maduro government.[144]
Clinton Foundation [ edit ]
When asked by CNN's Jake Tapper in June 2016 if it was fair to criticize the American charity, the Clinton Foundation, for taking money from foreign governments which do not represent our values, Sanders responded, saying, "Yes it is. It is. If you ask me about the Clinton Foundation, do I have a problem when a sitting secretary of state and a foundation run by her husband collects many millions of dollars from foreign governments, governments which are dictatorships -- you don't have a lot of civil liberties or democratic rights in Saudi Arabia. You don't have a lot of respect there for opposition points of view for gay rights, for women's rights. Yes, do I have a problem with that? Yes, I do."[145][146] In September 2016, Sanders told NBC's Chuck Todd that if Clinton becomes president of the United States, she should cease all contact with the Foundation, but stopped short of agreeing it should be closed, noting, "I don't know enough. They do a lot of good things with A.I.D.S. and so forth. I can't, you know, definitively answer that."[147][148]
Insights regarding Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party [ edit ]
In August 2016, Sanders praised Jeremy Corbyn in his candidacy in the Labour Party leadership election. Corbyn said that he had received a message from Sanders saying that Sanders was dismissed as unelectable but that the real reason many dismissed him was that he was electable and a threat to the American political establishment.[149]
In June 2017, he again saw parallels between his efforts and those of Corbyn in the 2017 UK general election. During a speech promoting his book at the Brighton Festival,[150] Sanders said: "What Corbyn has tried to do with the Labour Party is not dissimilar to what some of us are trying to do with the Democratic Party, and that is to make it a party that is much more open and inviting for working people and young people and not have a liberal elite making the decisions from the top down. I think what Corbyn is doing is trying to revitalise democracy, bring a lot of new people into the political process and I think that's an excellent idea..."[151] He added: "...he has taken on the establishment of the Labour Party, he has gone to the grassroots and he has tried to transform that party..."[150]
After the 2017 general election, Sanders wrote in The New York Times that "the British elections should be a lesson for the Democratic Party" and urged the Democrats to stop holding on to an "overly cautious, centrist ideology", arguing that "momentum shifted to Labour after it released a very progressive manifesto that generated much enthusiasm among young people and workers".[152][153]
Russia [ edit ]
In December 2010, Sanders voted for the ratification of New START,[154] a nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russian Federation obliging both countries to have no more than 1,550 strategic warheads as well as 700 launchers deployed during the next seven years along with providing a continuation of on-site inspections that halted when START I expired the previous year. It was the first arms treaty with Russia in eight years.[155]
In February 2017, Sanders was one of twenty-six senators to sign a letter to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) requesting the commission detail cybersecurity challenges to state and local officials amid their attempts to safeguard future elections and also secure the 2016 election from Russian hackers.[156]
In July 2018, following Special Counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of twelve Russian intelligence officers in the 2016 hacking of the DNC, Sanders said the indictments "strongly suggests that the interference was directed from the highest levels of the Russian government." Sanders advocated for Mueller to be allowed "to continue his investigation free of pressure" and called for President Trump to relay to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the United States would not tolerate Russian interference in either American elections or those of the country's allies.[157]
In December 2018, after United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the Trump administration was suspending its obligations in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 60 days in the event that Russia continued to violate the treaty, Sanders was one of twenty-six senators to sign a letter expressing concern over the administration "now abandoning generations of bipartisan U.S. leadership around the paired goals of reducing the global role and number of nuclear weapons and ensuring strategic stability with America's nuclear-armed adversaries" and calling on President Trump to continue arms negotiations.[158]
Myanmar [ edit ]
Sanders condemned the genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar and called for a stronger response to the crisis.[159]
North Korea [ edit ]
In April 2017, after President Trump acknowledged the possibility of a "major, major conflict" between North Korea and the US, Sanders said such a conflict equated to a nuclear war and advocated for the US to lean on China, citing China's receiving of exports from North Korea and thereby being in "a position to tighten the screws on North Korea and tell them they cannot continue their missile program or their nuclear program."[160]
In October 2017, Sanders and six Democrats were led by Chris Murphy in introducing legislation prohibiting "funds from being used for kinetic military operations without congressional approval unless the United States faces an imminent threat or such action is necessary to defend citizens or our allies" in light of rhetorical escalation between the US and North Korea as well as "contradictory behavior from Trump and officials in his administration".[161]
In February 2018, Sanders was one of eighteen senators to sign a letter to President Trump arguing that striking North Korea with "a preventative or preemptive U.S. military strike would lack either a constitutional basis or legal authority" without congressional approval.[162]
In April 2018, when asked by a reporter about the US pursuing diplomatic relations with North Korea, Sanders said, "I think the idea of sitting down and having direct negotiations with North Korea is a step forward, and I hope it works out well."[163] After President Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during the 2018 North Korea-United States summit, Sanders called the summit "very light on substance" but also representing "a positive step in de-escalating tensions between our countries, addressing the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and moving toward a more peaceful future."[164]
Mexico [ edit ]
In a January 2018 statement, Sanders said he was "not sure why President Trump wants to shut down the government over a multi-billion dollar wall that no one wants, is not needed and will not be paid for by Mexico" and that Americans instead overwhelmingly favored providing "legal protection to 800,000 Dreamers and a path toward citizenship for them."[165]
United Nations [ edit ]
In June 2018, following the United Nations releasing a report on poverty in the United States and condemning "President Trump's administration for pursuing high tax breaks for the rich and removing basic protections for the poor", Sanders was one of twenty lawmakers to sign a letter to United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley calling for the Trump administration to develop a plan to address poverty. Haley responded to Sanders in a letter, writing that it was "patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America" and charged the report with misstating "the progress the United States has made in addressing poverty and purposely used misleading facts and figures in its biased reporting." Sanders disputed Haley in a subsequent letter, defending the appropriateness of the U.N.'s report and noting that poverty was occurring "in the richest country in the history of the world and at a time when wealth and income inequality is worse than at any time since the 1920s."[166]
Saudi Arabia [ edit ]
In October 2018, Sanders said that if Saudis murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the US should "not only stop military sales, not only put sanctions on Saudi Arabia, but most importantly, get out of this terrible, terrible war in Yemen led by the Saudis." He maintained that the US could not "have an ally who murders in cold blood, in their own consulate, a critic, a dissident".[167] Later that month, Sanders was one of eight senators to sign a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats requesting a classified briefing on what the American intelligence community knew about threats to Khashoggi so that the senators may fulfill their "oversight obligation" as members of Congress.[168]
In November 2018, Sanders confirmed his intent to force a vote on ending American support for the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in an email to supporters, writing that despite President Trump's "venal support for the Saudi regime, I am confident that we now stand an excellent chance to win this vote which I plan on bringing back to the Senate floor this week."[169] On November 28, as the Senate weighed the resolution to end American military support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen's civil war, Sanders said, "In my mind it is imperative today that the United States Senate tell Saudi Arabia and tell the world that we are not going to be continuing to be part of that humanitarian disaster. We have to make the decision as to what happens in the war in Yemen and our role in that, and that's what the vote today is about." The resolution passed in a vote of 63 to 37.[170]
National security [ edit ]
Surveillance [ edit ]
Sanders has long been critical of U.S. government surveillance policies. He voted against the USA PATRIOT Act and all of its renewals and has characterized the National Security Agency as "out of control." He has frequently criticized warrantless wiretapping and the collection of the phone, email, library, and internet browsing records of American citizens without due process:[171]
In my view, the NSA is out of control and operating in an unconstitutional manner. I worry very much about kids growing up in a society where they think 'I'm not going to talk about this issue, read this book, or explore this idea because someone may think I'm a terrorist.' That is not the kind of free society I want for our children.[172]
In October 2015, during the first Democratic presidential debate, the candidates were asked for their opinion of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. When asked the question "hero or traitor?" Sanders replied, "I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American people to the degree in which our civil liberties and our constitutional rights are being undermined. He did—he did break the law, and I think there should be a penalty to that. But I think what he did in educating us should be taken into consideration." Journalist Norman Solomon praised Sanders's reply saying, "I think Bernie Sanders handled it the best in terms of scoping out and describing the terrain. And for the most part, I think Edward Snowden would probably agree with what he said."[173]
Veterans [ edit ]
Sanders won the 2014 Col. Arthur T. Marix Congressional Leadership Award from the Military Officers Association of America for his leadership in support of veterans.[174] Sanders introduced the Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act of 2013 (S. 893; 113th Congress) into the Senate on May 8, 2013.[175] The bill would increase the disability compensation rate for American veterans and their families.[176] Sanders co-wrote, with Senator John McCain, the Veterans' Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act of 2014, a bill intended to reform the United States Department of Veterans Affairs in response to the Veterans Health Administration scandal of 2014.[177]
In December 2018, Sanders was one of twenty-one senators to sign a letter to United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs Robert Wilkie calling it "appalling that the VA is not conducting oversight of its own outreach efforts" in spite of suicide prevention being the VA's highest clinical priority and requesting Wilkie "consult with experts with proven track records of successful public and mental health outreach campaigns with a particular emphasis on how those individuals measure success."[178]
Education [ edit ]
Early childhood [ edit ]
Drawing figures from a recent report ranking |
Paul Cret to design the new building, which was opened in October 1927. By this time, William Valentiner, the German-born historian and critic, who was to contribute so much to the museum, had been appointed director.
At the ground-breaking for the new building in 1922, Ralph H. Booth, another newspaper magnate, noted that Detroit had achieved “first place in industry and an enviable place in wealth,” but that “our true ambition is not mechanical production only.” The new museum, suggested Booth, would “give tangible evidence to the world that Detroit is a city of enlightenment and progress. Where we claim the best that civilization offers in order that our lives may be fuller, and richer, and contribute to the true betterment of future generations.”
In the depth of the Depression, Valentiner commissioned the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera to paint his Detroit Industry murals, which were first open to the public in March 1933. (See, “Eighty years of the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts”)
The decline in the DIA’s fortunes and the beginning of the assault on Detroit’s cultural life more generally began in the 1970s, coinciding with the decline in the automobile industry and the global position of American capitalism. In 1975 the state of Michigan took over as the primary financial guarantor of the DIA. In 1992, the state government cut allocations to the museum by 40 percent, and six years later museum operations were subcontracted to the DIA Founders Society. A condition of more or less permanent crisis has existed for several decades.
A few facts about the DIA: it is the second largest municipally owned museum in the US. It is the sixth largest art museum in the country, with 100 galleries and 65,000 works (not all of them of course on display). The DIA’s collection of American paintings, third largest in the US, is especially fine. It was the first public museum in the country to collect Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse (1922).
Artist, critic and historian Walter Pach was a significant figure in the art world in the first half of the 20th century. One of the organizers of the famed Armory Show of modern art in New York in 1913, Pach knew American and European artists as varied as Robert Henri, Claude Monet, Marcel Duchamp and Diego Rivera.
In his The Art Museum in America (1948), Pach had this to say: “Detroit Institute of Arts: A museum of the highest importance, having been developed with knowledge of the great classics European, Oriental, American, and modern, the applied arts (notably textiles), and also the relationship of the collections to the public.... The frescoes by Diego Rivera, painted on the walls of the museum, and showing the great industries of the city, have caused vast numbers of working people to come frequently to their galleries which have also had active support from Detroit’s men of wealth. Important showing of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Byzantine, Gothic, Renaissance, and modern art. Among the paintings, the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, French, and American sections are particularly important. The first great art museum in this country to include the Indians (especially the ancient Mexicans) on the same footing as the people of the Eastern Hemisphere.”
Pach’s comment about the appeal of Rivera’s frescoes to “vast numbers of working people” has special importance for us.
The establishment of the DIA in the 1880s was part of a national process. The opening of art and science museums was associated in the US in the 19th century with the ideals of the Enlightenment, with the development of public education and the general socially and cultural progressive agenda. An enlightened, cultured population was viewed as a bulwark against monarchy and royalism, which still dominated Europe, by America’s progressive thinkers.
The Civil War and radical Reconstruction were the high point of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in the US. The destruction of the slavocracy was seen as a blow against the aristocratic principle. The creation of the major museums was made possible by both the immense wealth that American business was accumulating and the democratic, self-confidence of the people, which had reached a new level with the victory over slavery.
A comment by Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens from Pennsylvania in 1865 spoke to this egalitarian mood: “Our fathers repudiated the whole doctrine of the legal superiority of families or races, and proclaimed the equality of men before the law. Upon that they created a revolution and built the Republic. They were prevented by slavery from perfecting the superstructure whose foundation they had thus broadly laid. For the sake of the Union they consented to wait, but never relinquished the idea of its final completion. The time to which they looked forward with anxiety has come. It is our duty to complete their work.”
The generation, the population that emerged from the Civil War, which had gone through tremendous hardships to defend the Union and defeat slavery, was hungry for knowledge, progress, culture. One sees it in the architecture, for example, in Chicago, or what’s left of downtown Detroit.
It has to be kept in mind that, as opposed to the situation confronting European art institutions, which had much of the work at hand, museums in the US largely had to go overseas in the late 1800s and early 1900s and expend considerable resources if they were to fill much of their space with the classic art works. Enlightened robber barons did much of this work, or their advisors. These businessmen were swine in relation to the working class, but they had some feeling for art and culture, or they hired people who had that feeling.
In his work on the history of museums in the US, Pach commented: “The Civil War had interrupted the interest in art which had been taking such firm root and spreading so widely among us … But the conflict ended, railroads spread across the nation, manufacturing increased, new settlements dotted the West, shipping crammed the harbors of the East, and more money than ever was devoted to the arts. The centenary of American independence was approaching and, for years, preparations were made for the great Exposition at Philadelphia. Its art exhibit is one of the landmarks in our history. But the showing, important as it was, would not have had its effect if men’s thought had not been turned in that direction by events six years earlier, when the museums of New York and Boston were founded; Cincinnati, with a long record of previous effort, got under way with its permanent gallery at about the same time. Thus, 1870 is the most significant date in our record, the American Museum of Natural History, moreover, being founded the same year.”
Walter Pach
In 1869 the authorities in New York agreed, as they publicly explained, to “the establishment of a Museum in the [Central] Park that shall become an aid in the Great Educational System of the City, concentrate and develop Scientific efforts in all departments of Natural History, and at the same time be an instructive and acceptable resort for the people of the city, and for the throng of strangers that visit it.”
This entire historical process is being unraveled today, which involves as well the destruction of the public education system.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was founded in 1870, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the same year, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1876, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1879 and the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1881.
We don’t idealize these institutions. They were also built to bolster the prestige and power of the ruling elite, and they are run by elements of the elite—they have never been truly accessible to the entire population, including the DIA, for that matter, because we live in class society. The working class is an oppressed class and cut off from culture under the profit system.
As Trotsky noted in Literature and Revolution, “The proletariat is forced to take power before it has appropriated the fundamental elements of bourgeois culture; it is forced to overthrow bourgeois society by revolutionary violence for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture.”
Nonetheless, the presence and threat represented by the working class in an earlier period, along with the great wealth of American capitalism, made possible certain cultural gains, which are now in the process of being taken away in the period of the latter’s decline and putrefaction.
Pieter Brugel's The Wedding Dance
t is not possible to point to more than a handful of the extraordinary works in the DIA collection. One of the greatest works, undoubtedly, is The Wedding Dance by the Flemish master, Pieter Bruegel (c. 1525-1569). The painter, known as the “peasant Bruegel,” went among the ordinary people in the Netherlands and present-day Belgium in disguise to capture the reality of everyday life—this in the mid-1500s. He was also enormously innovative in the field of landscape painting, depicting everyday life without apparent religious or classical reference points.
Another outstanding work in the collection is Vincent van Gogh’s Self-portrait (1887). I would be remiss if I did not take note of van Gogh’s comments about art profiteers in an 1883 letter. The “art trade,” he wrote, has become “all too much a sort of bankers’ speculation and it still is—I do not say entirely—I simply say much too much ….
Vincent van Gogh - Self Portrait
“I contend that many rich people who buy the expensive paintings for one reason or another don’t do it for the artistic value that they see in them. …
“True, there are real, sterling art lovers. But it’s perhaps only 1/10th of the total of the business that’s done, perhaps it’s even a much smaller proportion—of which it can be said: this or that transaction was genuinely out of belief in art.”
It should be noted, speaking of art speculation, that of the 48 most expensive paintings ever sold, seven are by van Gogh. They were sold for more than $700 million combined, all within the last 25 years. His Portrait of Dr. Gachet was bought for $82.5 million in 1990 ($155.7 million in current dollars). What might van Gogh have said?
As already noted, Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industryfrescoes form the physical and intellectual centerpiece of the DIA. At the time of their painting in 1932-33, the murals came under furious attack by anti-communist and religious bigots. They were denounced as “blasphemous” and “atheistic” for their tribute to nature and industry and exclusion of God and religion, and “communistic” for their placement of industrial workers in the foreground. Rivera created a work of genuinely world-historical importance, the coming together of high art and high politics, in the birthplace of modern industry and on the eve of massive class explosions.
Diego Rivera's Detoit Industry Murals
One can only pass quickly over the presence of 19th century American painters and the breathtaking collection of African art. The DIA is an encyclopedic museum, which includes samples of the works of ancient peoples and the art of the classical era.
The development of the art museum as an institution has a connection in this country to the second American Revolution, the Civil War, and it has profound connections to the great social revolutions in other countries.
In the Western world, art was originally displayed publicly in churches, for whom the artists carried out commissions. The first art museum proper, the Uffizi in Florence, was founded during the Renaissance, which involved the economic and social struggle against feudalism and the intellectual struggle against the dominance of the Church.
The Louvre in Paris, the largest and most visited art museum in the world (more than 9 million visitors annually), was the direct product of the French Revolution of 1789. As David Gordon, former director of the Milwaukee Art Museum, observes in his article, “The Art Museum,” “egalitarianism” was an important factor in the development of art museums. Gordon writes, “While several art collections were opened to the public voluntarily by rulers … it was the French Revolution that decisively put art into the public domain.”
Under France’s old regime, plans for a public art museum were discussed for decades. Kings and ministers dithered. This was precisely the aristocratic principle in practice: if the king was interested, the process went forward; if he lost interest or became absorbed by other matters, the process stagnated.
The government brought to power by the revolution of 1789 took decisive steps. One year after the arrest of Louis XVI (in August 1792), the museum was opened to the public.
Nike of Samothrace at the Louvre
The new minister of the interior wrote a letter to the painter Jacques-Louis David in October 1792: “France must extend its glory through the ages and to all peoples: the national museum will embrace knowledge in all its manifold beauty and will be the admiration of the universe. By embodying these grand ideas, worthy of a free people … the museum … will become among the most powerful illustrations of the French Republic.”
French revolutionary leader Henri Grégoire argued that those treasures “which were previously visible to only a privileged few … will henceforth afford pleasure to all: statues, paintings, and books are charged with the sweat of the people: the property of the people will be returned to them.”
The Russian Revolution of October 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, took this process to a higher level. The new revolutionary government initiated far more decisive and democratic-revolutionary steps, with the assistance of the left-wing and avant-garde artists in the early days of the revolution. This process was brought to a brutal halt by Stalin after 1930.
In her 1993 article, “The Creation of the Museum of Painterly Culture,” Svetlana Dzhafarova took note of some of the measures taken by the first workers’ state: “In the outlying districts of Moscow, fourteen proletarian museums were created, distinguished by the heterogeneous contents of their temporary exhibits. …
“Such small district museums stood in contrast to ‘supermuseums’ with holdings numbering in the thousands, and were intended for workers from nearby factories, who would not need to expend any extra effort traveling about the city from their place of work in order to visit the realm of the beautiful and to be exposed, very often for the first time, to the storehouse of culture—which was henceforth the property of every proletarian.
“The idea of making artistic treasures accessible to the masses, together with the belief in their educative value, constituted the cornerstone of all museum creation.”
Dzhafarova commented on the establishment of the first art museum in history run by artists: “Among the new museums that proliferated in Moscow in the first years of the Soviet state, the Museum of Painterly Culture [1919-1929] was clearly the most distinctive; it was without precedent anywhere in the world. The museum was exceptional, above all, because it had been created and was administered directly by artists themselves … It was the artists who were in charge of acquisitions, registry and storage, and the assembling of a central collection in Moscow and of collections to be sent to the provinces, and the artists who organized representative exhibits, engaged in analytical and scholarly work, amassed a library, and arranged the most timely exhibitions, as well as tours and lectures on issues in contemporary art.”
The institution was closed down by the Stalinist regime in 1929.
In short, the opening and accessibility of art (and science) museums has been associated with democratic and revolutionary social movements, or their consequences, with the effort to raise the cultural level of the population, with confidence and interest in human progress. It is not possible here to describe the impact of a visit to a major art exhibition or museum, an experience that obviously varies with the individual and the institution.
But these are some of the thoughts and feelings I’m aware of having after an encounter with a major artist or exhibition:
An inspiring sense of what human beings are capable of, at their best; a sense that, in fact, human beings are capable of overcoming any obstacle through their endless ingenuity, curiosity and sense of beauty; a renewed confidence therefore in humanity and its possibilities; a desire to do important work oneself, work that will have an impact on others; a dissatisfaction with the trivia and ugliness of so much of everyday life, including relations between people.
Art is one of the ways we know the world. It makes human beings more flexible, sensitive, compassionate and aware.
The enemies of art are the enemies of the people, the enemies of the working class.
Taking all this into account, I repeat the question I asked earlier: Is it possible to imagine a situation in which the anti-democratic, crisis-ridden, aristocratic ruling elite in the US, which cares only for its own wealth, which hates and fears the population, could permit the Detroit Institute of Arts, with its vast artistic richness, to continue operating as a museum open and accessible to the public?
As far as the rulers of this country are concerned, the working class population is riff-raff. If workers have anything of their own of value, it is something that is not in the pockets of the rich, where it should be. Including the art of the DIA. The ability of ordinary people to visit the museum and experience the artwork is a provocation to the aristocratic principle. As we speak, the powers that be are thinking up ways to get their hands on the art.
We are not speaking here in defense of the status quo. The present situation is impossible, the DIA has to be properly funded, along with other cultural institutions, and its works made genuinely available to the population through art education at every level, pouring funds into art and music programs.
In our view, access to art and culture is a social right, which has to be fought for against the ruling class. In the program of the Socialist Equality Party, adopted in August 2010, we write, under the heading, “The right to culture”:
“Access to art and culture is a basic component of a healthy society. Yet, like everything else, it is under relentless attack. American culture—film, television, music—was once a pole of attraction because of its innovation and powerful democratic and humanistic spirit. The subordination of culture to the profit motive has led to an immense degeneration.
“Culture has suffered from funding cuts for the arts, a right-wing ideological assault on artistic expression, and the general brutalization of American society. Government subsidies to museums, orchestras, theaters and public television and radio have been gutted. Art and music education has been drastically curtailed or eliminated outright from most public schools. Library hours and services have been scaled back, and education funding cuts have included the closure of school libraries. The media, owned by giant corporations, function as mouthpieces of the government and the wealthy, polluting public airways and spreading lies. The damage to the intellectual and moral fabric of society resulting from such a mercenary and philistine approach is impossible to quantify.
“To enable all working people to have full access to art and culture requires massive public funding and the creation of new schools and centers for music, dance, drama and art, either at a nominal fee or for free. Decisions on subsidies and grants for the arts must be taken out of the hands of the politicians and bureaucrats and placed under the control of committees of artists, musicians and other cultural workers.”
The defense of art and culture, and the right of ordinary people to experience art and culture, is a political, revolutionary question today
This program can only be implemented through the building of a new, mass socialist movement and the coming to power of the working class, which will radically redistribute wealth, break the corporate stranglehold, take control of the great business and financial enterprises and put them under democratic control, and place culture at the disposal of the people. The trillions that go for war, the vast wealth in society, currently monopolized by the one percent at the top, will go toward the needs and interests of the vast majority. We encourage you to take part in our campaign against the emergency manager in Detroit, to mobilize the population against the bankers’ dictatorship, and to join the Socialist Equality Party.
For more information on the campaign to defend the DIA, visit defendthedia.org.Bell’s Brewery Unveils First Look at Refreshed Packaging and Logo, Coming Later this Year
Bell’s Brewery out of Comstock, Michigan is unveiling a fresh new look. The megalithic Michigan brewery is introducing new branding and packaging on some of their flagship offerings.
For more than 30 years, Bell’s Brewery has focused on brewing beer that follows the vision of its President and Founder, Larry Bell.
Bell’s dedication to quality begins with sourcing the finest raw ingredients and continues into the brewhouse, the quality lab, all the way to your glass. It is continuously adding to, and refining its process in every aspect, to ensure and reinforce those expectations of quality.
“As we continue to brew the best beer we can, we wanted to make sure our packaging reflected the quality of the beer inside,” -Bell’s Vice President Laura Bell.
Over the past year, Larry Bell and Laura Bell, have been working with a team at Kaleidoscope to look at the imagery of each member of the Bell’s family of beers.
“We wanted to make sure our packaging and logo maintain the heritage and vision of our brands while highlighting the style of each beer, in a way that is consistent with who we are as a brewery,” -Larry Bell.
Today, Bell’s is very excited to share a first look at its new logo and packaging before both begin to roll out later this year.
The Bell’s logo is changing to better reflect the Bell’s name and the branding it is so proud of. Certain brands will also change to highlight the flavor and characteristics of the beer inside.
“We are incredibly thankful to the artists who created the iconic art featured on so many of our brands. They have helped showcase our creative side and in turn, helped our brewery grow,” – Larry Bell.
Fan favorites, like the Two Hearted Brook Trout and Oberon Sun are not going anywhere. They will actually be displayed more prominently.
While being respectful to those works of art, Bell’s also wanted to pay homage to where it has been. In line with its commitment to quality, Bell’s wanted its packaging to reflect the beer inside by highlighting styles and descriptions more clearly.
“The essence will remain the same. That will always be a part of who we are,” – Larry Bell
In keeping with Bell’s commitment to sustainability and its environment, these changes will be introduced over time to cut down and eliminate waste.
This is the culmination of 30 years of inspired brewing. Bell’s 30th anniversary and Funvitational were just the beginning of another chapter for the family-owned brewery.
“We’re proud of where we’ve been and are just as excited about where we’re going, something we are excited to share more about in the months ahead,” – Laura Bell
So what do you think? Do you think the new packaging is noticeably different? Do you think it is a good look going forward for the brewery? Let us know in the comment section below.Several studies have demonstrated that chewing helps to maintain cognitive functions in brain regions including the hippocampus, a central nervous system (CNS) region vital for memory and learning. Epidemiological studies suggest that masticatory deficiency is associated with development of dementia, which is related to spatial memory deficits especially in older animals. The purpose of this paper is to review recent work on the effects of masticatory impairment on cognitive functions both in experimental animals and humans. We show that several mechanisms may be involved in the cognitive deficits associated with masticatory deficiency. The epidemiological data suggest a positive correlation between masticatory deficit and Alzheimer's disease. It may be concluded that chewing has important implications for the mechanisms underlying certain cognitive abilities.
Tooth loss and impairments in occlusion and masticatory force are known as oral health problems without major repercussions for dentition. Nevertheless, several studies have shown an association between chewing and cognitive functions 6 - 10. In this paper, we review investigations of the relationship between masticatory capacity and age-related cognitive impairment. We also discuss the implications for human health of experimental findings in this research field.
Several studies 6 - 10 have shown that some systemic factors, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, nutritional changes, diabetes, postural abnormalities, osteoporosis, etc. may interfere with the stomatognathic system. However, the relationship between the central nervous system (CNS) and the stomatognathic system is still the subject of numerous investigations. In this context, the relationship between chewing ‑ the main function of stomatognathic system ‑ and CNS function is of considerable importance.
The challenge of chronic disease management and improvement of oral and general health can only be effectively tackled through approaches focusing on risk factors. In order to address these issues in public health programs, it is important to understand the interaction between oral and general health 5.
The Oral Health Program of the World Health Organization encourages public health administrators to design strategies and programs for effective and affordable oral healthcare in order to provide a better quality of life for elderly people 4.
According to the United Nations, the world population will grow by 37% by mid-century, with an increase of around 9 billion individuals in absolute terms. People over 60 years old represent 32% of the world population, and for the first time in history they outnumber children. Health conditions resulting from ageing and the health services offered to the elderly, such as access to specialized dental services, should be considered together 1 - 3.
Literature Review
Kato et al.10 first described the association between loss of molars in senile rats and spatial memory deficits. In this study, after molar extraction, animals were maintained with diet powder for 135 weeks and were subjected to behavioral testing to assess their spatial memory. Animals without molar teeth showed worse performance in behavioral tests than control animals maintained on a solid diet. This experimental study raised another important question: what caused the failure of spatial memory? Loss of teeth or absence of the masticatory act?
The regulation of masticatory function on memory and learning Further studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) revealed that during mastication there is an increase in cortical blood flow11 and activation of somatosensory cortical areas, the supplementary motor area, insula, and other areas including the striatum, thalamus and cerebellum12,13. Since these regions of the CNS receive sensory information from some areas of the stomatognathic system, and control the movements and rhythm related to mastication and facial expression, they have been termed a central pattern generator14. The hypothesis that mastication, rather than the presence of the teeth is paramount to functional activation of those CNS areas was derived from these studies. Other reports show that chewing immediately before learning a cognitive task increases oxygen levels in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and hippocampus, both CNS areas important for processes of learning and memory15,16. Distinct forms of memory are mediated by different CNS regions17. Memories can be classified as follows: (i) declarative or explicit; the ability to recall past events deliberately, hippocampus-dependent and (ii) non-declarative or procedural, also called implicit; unconsciously performed skills (motor or cognitive), mainly dependent on the striatum and cerebellum, regions in which habits are formed18-20. Of the areas involved in cognitive processes, the PFC has considerable importance as it receives projections from both motor and sensory areas important for learning. It has been shown that there is an intricate neuroanatomical correlation between PFC and the basal ganglia (mainly the striatum)21..The PFC seems to be related to learning and the basal ganglia to consolidation routines in automatic habits or procedures22,23. Other reports have suggested that the basal ganglia plays a pivotal role in learning24,25. The hippocampus is involved in anxiety-like behaviors, as well as in memory and learning processes, as result of its connections with other limbic areas involved in emotional behaviors, including the amygdala26,27. The hippocampus and striatum are interconnected with areas involved in cognitive and motivational processes, such as the basal ganglia, substantia nigra, ventral tegmental area, thalamus and amygdala. It is well established that cognitive and motivational processes depend on the connections between PFC and the brain areas cited above28-30. The hippocampus play a key role in the functioning of these pathways19. As reported previously, chewing increases blood flow in cortical regions, including PFC, and cerebellar regions11. It also promotes increased cardiac activity, suggesting greater sympathetic nervous activity31 and increases blood glucose levels and the level of arousal during a cognitive task32,33, which is essential for the improvement of cognitive performance. Several studies using brain imaging and memory tasks support the hypothesis that chewing increases brain function, including working and spatial memories33-40. Wilkinson et al.33 reported that in humans (mean age 24.6 years old) a masticatory stimulus can improve episodic and working memories, but not attention. On the other hand, Hirano et al.41 suggested that chewing induces an increase in arousal level and alertness as well as an effect on motor control and suggest that these effects could lead to improvement in cognitive performance. There is also debate about the role of chewing in cognitive function. The reasons for these discrepancies are, at least in part, due to the fact that only middle-aged subjects have been used in these studies32-34,41,42,43. Onyper et al.43 investigated the effects of gum chewing on cognitive function with students and reported that using chewing gum improves cognitive task performance when it is chewed for 5 minutes prior to, but not during the cognitive task; the benefits persisted for the first 15-20 minutes of the testing session. The authors suggested therefore that the benefits attributed to chewing gum were time-limited and related to mastication-induced arousal. The consistency of the chewing gum may contribute to the discrepancies in effects observed in studies using fMRI and PET. Onozuka et al.12 have shown that brain regions, such as sensorimotor cortex, the supplementary motor area and the cerebellum have different blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals when stimulated by different consistencies of chewing gum. Another study from the same research group showed increased performance on memory retrieval when elderly people (60-76 years) used chewing gum15. This effect was absent in younger individuals (19-26 years). Studies using similar experimental paradigms, have found increased BOLD signal intensity in the right PFC in an age-dependent manner12,13. On the basis of data from Ono and colleagues9 it can be concluded that chewing is a simple non-pharmacological way of preventing senile dementia, which is often associated with cognitive dysfunctions, such as loss of spatial memory and amnesia. Alzheimer's disease involves formation of many senile plaques of amyloid-β and neurofibrillary tangles44. Ekuni et al.45 suggested that psychological stress induced by occlusal disharmony induces amyloid-β expression in the rat hippocampus through glucocorticoid signaling. According to this hypothesis, reduced masticatory ability would contribute to a reduction in rhythmic and coordinated movements, leading to reduced stimulation of mechanoreceptors in the orofacial region. Decreased activity of these receptors can lead to quantitative changes in afferent inputs from sensory receptors to the CNS, resulting in alterations in signaling in the neuroanatomical pathways from the orofacial region. It follows that the reduction in masticatory activity can alter the brain circuitry in these patients46. Evidences suggest that the presence of teeth and the stimulation of chewing help to retain cognitive function. This is reinforced by epidemiological studies which show that a decrease in the number of teeth decreases the use of dentures, and that a chewing lower force is directly related to dementia47. Yamamoto et al.48 reported an association between having few teeth but no dentures and lack of regular dental care, and higher risk of dementia onset in older Japanese. Nevertheless, Lexomboon et al.49 concluded that people who use dentures did not have chewing difficulty or cognitive impairment. Other studies have suggested that decreased bite strength associated with tooth loss and reduced chewing is also a risk factor for dementia6,7,50-53. It is thought that there is a direct relationship between cognitive impairment in elderly women and the decrease in average number of teeth, maximum bite force, chewing capacity, and occlusal contact area7.
Masticatory hypofunction produces cognitive impairment Several studies have investigated the possible association between masticatory hypofunction and cognitive deficits using animal models10,44,45,46. In some experiments, authors induced loss of functionality in the molar teeth by performing extraction or reduction of the crown rather than a long-term soft diet10,44,46. Animals subjected to these methods remained able to chew, but the occlusal hypofunction caused degenerative changes in their periodontal mechanoreceptors54 suggesting a suppression of sensory stimulation from the periodontal ligament during chewing. In these experiments, animals showed poor performance on tests of memory and learning. Interestingly, in these studies, cognitive deficits were observed only in adult animals and preferentially in the aged animals subjected to the loss of molar functionality over a short period of about 7-10 days55-60. The cognitive deficit did not occur in young animals subjected to the same experimental treatment. In these studies, restoring the damaged molars with artificial crowns resulted in reversal of the learning deficits, even in older animals59. Some reports provided histological data suggesting that the hippocampus is the main CNS region affected by masticatory hypofunction. The hippocampus is involved in some types of memory, especially declarative memory, which relates to facts and precise events10,61. With age, this brain region becomes highly susceptible to morphological10,57 and physiological changes55,62. It has been reported that masticatory dysfunction contributes to a decrease in the density of pyramidal neurons55 and dendritic spines60, and is associated with increased astrocytosis and hypertrophy in the hippocampal CA1 field in mice56,57. These morphological alterations were correlated with spatial memory impairment in a water maze test. The observation of hypertrophic astrocytes suggests inflammation and degeneration. In these studies, activated microglia seems to release pro-inflammatory cytokines, which may contribute to hippocampal damage63,64. Astrocytes may also be damaged, contributing to impairments in neurotransmitter uptake and release of growth factors which have important effects on neurotransmission and the mechanisms underlying learning and memory65. Masticatory hypofunction may also affect neuroplasticity. Watanabe et al.59 have shown that hippocampal Fos induction, which is associated with a poor performance of aged mice in the water maze test is altered in the absence of molar teeth. In addition, decreased synthesis66-68 and release of acetylcholine10,68 and dopamine44 concomitant with reduced levels of synaptophysin have been observed in the hippocampus following removal of molar teeth 68. Clinically, drugs that promote cholinergic activity contribute to reduction of cognitive deficits69. Dopaminergic inputs to the hippocampus originate in the ventral tegmental area and are important for hippocampal function. According to Kushida et al.44, masticatory deficits were associated with reduced dopamine levels in the hippocampus, but there were no effects on dopaminergic synthesis, suggesting that hippocampal damage was related to the reduction in dopamine release from local dopaminergic terminals but not to reduced dopamine synthesis. Dopamine reduction impairs cognition in both rodents44 and primates70 likely contributing to dementia. Combined depletion of dopamine and acetylcholine induces cognitive deficits in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease 71. It follows that cholinergic and dopaminergic depletion induced by masticatory deficits may promote or contribute to neurological and cognitive impairment. The hippocampus is an important neurogenic region of the adult CNS72. It has been reported that reduction of chewing promotes suppression of cell proliferation in the hippocampal dentate gyrus, a source of new neurons in adult rodents73,74. Some experimental evidence suggests that hippocampal neurogenesis plays a role in learning and memory, even in humans 75,76. Some authors have suggested that neurogenesis is regulated at the systemic level, and that physical activity leads to increased neurogenic potential. It is possible that activity of masticatory muscles during the act of chewing may be sufficient to influence cell proliferation and neurogenesis74.
Occlusal disharmony induces deterioration of hippocampal cells Hormones may be involved in the mechanisms underlying the effects of masticatory hypofunction on cognition. Loss of molar teeth was associated with increased adrenal volume in mice58. It has been hypothesized that increased plasma levels of corticosterone promote hippocampal neuronal damage77. In this experimental condition, stress in the oral cavity was observed, especially in the periodontal mechanoreceptors, which are more sensitive to corticosterone than any other type of somatosensory receptor77. An experimental model was created with the purpose of inducing a form of occlusal disharmony in the stomatognathic system78. The researchers induced an increase in vertical occlusion by applying acrylic caps to the lower incisors of rats. This occlusal disharmony was intended to model chronic stress in the stomatognathic system. Increased levels of plasma corticosteroids might suppress learning and memory, given that the hippocampus is a major target for corticosteroid actions and is one of the CNS regions that contribute to the regulation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis 78. Kubo et al.79 found increased plasma levels of corticosterone after vertical occlusion in aged mice. Similar results were obtained by Ichisachi et al.80. These authors reported decreased mRNA expression and immunoreactivity for glucocorticoid receptors in both hippocampal CA1 and the dentate gyrus. In fact, the extraction of molar teeth in aged mice increased plasma levels of corticosterone and was associated with deterioration of hippocampal neurons, glial cells and spatial memory56-59. Furthermore, Onozuka et al.58 reported that the glucocorticoids ‑ such as cortisol and corticosterone ‑ secreted by the adrenal cortex, inhibited the production of new neurons to suppress the proliferation of granule cells in the dentate gyrus region in adult mice. It is likely that the activity of masticatory muscles is one of the factors regulating cell proliferation in the hippocampal dentate gyrus. It follows that modulation of corticoid levels as a result of masticatory alterations such as those induced by the loss of molars or by changing the occlusion, may lead to loss of neurons and inhibition of hippocampal neurogenesis resulting in cognitive impairment10,46.As the supply of soft drinks slowed to a trickle recently in Arctic Bay, Nunavut, some residents of the community sold off cans and bottles at outrageous prices on |
the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter Twelve, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot?”
This is not the reasoned analysis of someone interested in making a point in an argument, but the appeal to the ridiculous of someone trying to score points on the playground. And as a novelist like Ms. Shriver, I can tell you that any time someone in our trade insists on only the literal meaning of words that cannot, in fact, be interpreted literally, she’s lying. Whether she’s lying to herself or just to you is a different question, and you’ll have to take my word that I’m not hiding behind apophasis when I say that I don’t know enough about Shriver to know whom she’s lying to.
What I do know is that her faux-naif dissertation on the cultural significance of the sombrero (“as a German-American on both sides, I’m more than happy for anyone who doesn’t share my genetic pedigree to don a Tyrolean hat, pull on some leiderhosen, pour themselves a weisbier, and belt out the Hoffbrauhaus Song”) could’ve been lifted straight from Ann Coulter’s set at the Rob Lowe roast. Because, you know, Germans and Mexicans occupy historically analogous positions on the entitlement scale. The Germans killed nine million people in just under a decade, and the Mexicans are the descendants of a handful of Castellaños and the remnants of a decimated Native American population who’ve had to endure repeated invasions of their territory from El Norte. Totally the same thing. And can she really be so clueless that she thought wearing a sombrero while giving her speech would actually help her cause?
Shriver claims that charges of cultural appropriation stand in opposition to fiction’s capacity to be a “vital vehicle for empathy,” yet empathy is exactly what she’s lacking here. She’s removed emotion from her metric and hides her failure behind a rubric of rights—as if anyone’s actually preventing her from writing about whatever she wants, c.f., her invitation to the Brisbane festival, the reprint of her speech in the Guardian, and her op-ed in the Times, which willfully misrepresents both her position and the people who called her out on what she actually said, which is that the line she adopted is a little bit racist. (Which, if I wasn’t white, I’d probably just say was racist.)
Which is to say that, as a white liberal of a certain age, I’m pretty familiar with the stale underarm odor of white liberal frustration. You know it: it’s the heavy sighs and “But I’m on your side!” protests of the “lifelong Democrat” who thinks that white privilege couldn’t possibly be something that applies to her. It’s the “Oh, stop being so sensitive!” public scolding by the 40- or 50-something white liberal who’s exhausted by having to do a fraction of the tongue-biting self-censorship that minorities are forced to do every day, not because they’re afraid of offending someone, but because they’re afraid of being killed. It’s the person who wants to be held accountable only for his conscious actions: who wants to pretend that buying a blood diamond he kind of sort of knows was mined my slave labor isn’t an endorsement of slave labor, or that reading a white guy’s possibly literarily superior book about a Nigerian girl is somehow more informative than the sloppily ghost-written memoir of an actual Nigerian.
Again, there are so-called progressives and radicals out there who have a dream of a world where all human beings will be able to speak and interact with all other human beings in perfect harmony, and are willing to call anyone who doesn’t believe in this utopian fantasy a racist or sexist or homophobe in the hope of shaming them into silence. But this isn’t the fight Shriver is picking when she says: “In my youth, liberals would defend the right of neo-Nazis to march down Main Street. I cannot imagine anyone on the left making that case today.”
Shriver wants to scapegoats those millennials or liberals who disagree with her mid-century view of liberalism, while simultaneously pretending that those of us who actually agree with her hardline conception of free speech über alles (even as we disagree with her cultural diagnosis) don’t exist. But when she takes a position that Trumpishly fake, all she’s really saying is that she’s tired of caring about the needs of people who for untold generations were forced to cater exclusively to hers. Seriously: If you can’t see just a wee smidge of hypocrisy in defending the right of Neo-Nazis to march down Main Street or turn Reddit into a cesspool of racism even as you refuse to countenance the not-altogether unreasonable objections some people have to said neo-Nazis’ right to egg people on to genocide, then you might as well paint a swastika on that sombrero and write your next novel in scrimshaw on elephant ivory, because it’s clear which side you’re on.September 15, 2011 12:21 pm ET — Walid Zafar
Reading from prepared remarks at a Senate Finance Committee hearing yesterday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the ranking member on the committee, repeatedly claimed that "taxes are heading higher than they have been historically."
Those who promote tax increases don't come right out and announce their support, because they know that the American people rightly believe that their taxes are heading higher than they have been historically. [...] Even without any new tax increases, taxes are already headed higher than they have been. [...] So the question the American people are asking is, if taxes are already heading higher than they have been historically, should we raise them even more? [...] If tax hike proponents actually engage in a factual debate over whether taxes should be raised, even though they are already headed higher than their historical average, I am confident that they will lose. [...] I know where I stand on that question. Taxes are already heading higher than they have been historically. I can confirm that many in Utah agree with me, and I suspect that the vast majority of Americans do as well.
It's probably true that the majority of Utahans believe taxes are headed higher than they have been historically. But that likely has more to do with the fact that their senior senator is dishonest with them, just as he was at the hearing. Here, for instance, is a USA Today story from last year about how little taxes Americans pay.
Amid complaints about high taxes and calls for a smaller government, Americans paid their lowest level of taxes last year since Harry Truman's presidency, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data found. [...] Federal, state and local income taxes consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.
Now, Hatch isn't saying that taxes are currently at the highest they've ever been. The implication, however, is that they're close to the highest and that, under the policies of the Obama administration, Americans will soon pay higher taxes than ever before. That's untrue, according to comments Hatch himself has made in the past.
Over the last several months, Hatch has repeatedly complained that 51 percent of Americans weren't paying income taxes (because they don't earn enough money to qualify, though they do pay many other kinds of taxes). "We should help the poor," he said in an interview in May. "But to make sure that there's a civic duty on the part of every one of us to help this government to, uh, to be better." "The poor need jobs," he said on the Senate floor in July. "And they also need to share some of the responsibility."
How is it possible that the majority of Americans simultaneously pay too little in taxes and the "vast majority of Americans" agree with Hatch that taxes "are already heading higher than they have been historically"?About
To stream, is my dream.
I am extremely passionate about gaming. I love every aspect of it, from the heart-wrenching feels of games like Metal Gear Solid and Beyond Two Souls, to the fast paced competitive action of Counter-Strike.
My goal is to be able to share this passion with the world through mediums like Youtube and Twitch. I want to make people laugh. I want people to be able to share my victories, and to learn from my defeats. I want people to look forward to my stream going live, like for so long I have done with others.
Most importantly I want to be able to give like the greats. I want to be able to share what I possess with those who deserve and desire it.
To do all this, I need certain things. I need a gaming capable computer. I need a decent internet connection, and I need start-up funds for things like giveaways. This, I believe, you, the greater world, can help me with.
Even the smallest fund will mean a lot to me, and I firmly believe that it will mean a lot to my viewers down the track, who hang with me everyday!
One of the extremely important parts of the streaming process is the internet connection. My current residence is beautiful, but the internet connection leaves something to be desired. To rectify this, I need at the least the starting costs of upgrading our areas connection. This doesn't just benefit me. There are close to 20 permanent residents and about 50 houses in the area, and each of us shares the one connection. This upgrade would greatly enhance the lives of all the residents in the area, as well as increase the attraction for new permanent residents.The National Policy Institute
For Immediate Release
Thursday, August 25, 2016
ARLINGTON, VA—Over the past few months, Hillary Clinton has engaged, rhetorically and directly, with an array of groups that support an anti-White agenda. Whether that’s endorsing the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which is directly responsible for a rise in violence throughout America, or her surrogates chastising European-Americans for their background and heritage.
And she’s at it again.
Reports are surfacing that today (August 25, 2016) she intends to make a speech castigating what has become known as the “Alt Right,” a term coined by The National Policy Institute’s president, Richard Spencer.
Clinton’s surrogate John Podesta says that they intend to “call out this ‘alt-right’ shift and the divisive and dystopian vision of America they put forth.”
The truth is, the ones with a “dark” and “dystopian” vision are those people—many of whom actively support Clinton—who are setting our streets aflame and stoking violence throughout our country.
Secretary Clinton, no doubt, intends to use guilt-by-association to tie the Alt Right to the Trump campaign and its CEO, Steve Bannon. There is no basis for these accusations. Neither Spencer nor anyone else at NPI has any involvement with the Trump campaign, Steve Bannon, or Breitbart.com.
While Spencer has written favorably about both Trump and Breitbart, he has consistently emphasized they are not exactly the Alt Right.
As Spencer explained,
Trump and Bannon deserve credit for asking “is this good for us?” when considering issues of trade, immigration, and foreign policy. This is far preferable to Clinton choosing her policies based on the interests of foreigners and financial interests. However, as civic nationalists, their idea of “us” is the people who occupy the current multiracial landmass known as the United States. The Alt Right fundamentally differs from Trump’s civic nationalism by considering “us” to be all people of European ancestry across the globe.
While Hillary & Co. condemn the Alt Right—non-violent activists seeking social change, largely through a vibrant Internet presence—she allows noted supporters of terror to attend her rallies and has never once disavowed the actions of domestic terrorists associated with Black Lives Matter.
Hillary and her allies in “conservative” media will stop at nothing to portray peaceful European-American advocacy as a dark specter haunting America. In reality, she and her allies, especially so-called “conservatives,” are only giving comfort to the most radical and violent elements in our society.
We disavow any attempts by Clinton or any of her surrogates on the left, right, or center to tag the National Policy Institute or the work we do as violent extremism. We call on her and her allies to issue an apology to European-Americans everywhere and confront her own troubling links to extremism and the civil unrest she has stoked for months.EVEN before the disaster, Scranton had been having a poor century. In 1902 the Lackawanna Steel Company left north-east Pennsylvania in search of better access to transport and a less assertive labour force. The area still had coal, and enough spark to start new industries: in the 1920s a local button-maker became the country’s leading presser of 78rpm records. But after the second world war demand for coal fell. Then, in 1959, miners working coal seams broke through the bed of the Susquehanna river, which flowed into the caverns below like bathwater swirling down a plughole. The mines never recovered.
The damage is in plain sight. The valley through which the Susquehanna runs is lined with shuttered factories. The city of Scranton faced near-bankruptcy in 2012. Yet despite almost a century of economic blows, more than half a million people remain in the area. It is a similar story in a host of other once-proud parts of the industrialised world. They have not found ways to thrive in a digitised, globalised economy. But they have not disappeared.
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Politicians have tried to help. State and local governments have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade on infrastructure and redevelopment projects in the Scranton area, just as they have in Britain’s Teesside, and France’s Pas-de-Calais. By one estimate Pennsylvania spent over $6bn between 2007 and 2016 on corporate subsidies, more than any other state. Much of that was dished out in its depressed north-east. But throwing money around is not enough. To improve the lot of left-behind places, policymakers need more determination and greater consensus on what works.
Playing catch-up
Do better they must. The forces that drive regional disparities are built into the mechanisms of globalisation, which makes them hard to resist. It is true that globalisation could stall or go into reverse. Indeed the desire that it should do so was part of the reason that voters in north-east Pennsylvania swung heavily to Donald Trump in 2016, delivering him the state. It was in a similar spirit that areas of alienation in Britain, like Teesside, voted for Brexit and France’s economically battered north offered strong support to the Front National of Marine le Pen. But even if globalisation were to stop in its tracks, the regions it has weakened would not magically improve.
Economists once thought that, over time, inequalities between both regions and countries would naturally even out. Rich places with more money than investment opportunities would sink money into poorer ones with untapped potential; technological know-how would spread through economies. For much of the 20th century there was evidence to back this up.
Lagging industrialised countries grew much faster than the richest ones in the decades after the second world war. In 1950, for example, real output per person in Italy was 33% of that in America; by 1973 it was 62%. From 1880 to 1980, income gaps across American states closed at an average annual rate of 1.8%: real personal income per person in Florida rose from 33% of that in Connecticut to 82%. Similar convergence occurred across Japanese prefectures and European regions.
At the same time, as geographical differences dwindled within and between industrialised economies, the gap between those economies and the rest of the world widened. American incomes, adjusted for living costs, were a bit less than nine times those in the world’s poorest countries in 1870, but nearly 50 times larger by 1990.
As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, both trends changed. Regional inequality within rich countries increased. Poorer economies began catching up with richer ones.
Between 1990 and 2010 the rate of economic convergence across American states slowed to less than half what it had been between 1880 and 1980. It has since fallen close to zero. Rich cities started pulling away from less well-off counterparts (see chart 1). According to the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, in the decade to 2015 productivity growth in American metropolitan areas was highest in the top 10% and the bottom 20% (where, by definition, the baseline was low). Struggling middle-income cities like Scranton fell further behind. A recent report by the OECD found that, in its mostly-rich members, the average productivity gap between the most productive 10% of regions and the bottom 75% widened by nearly 60% over the past 20 years.
It is no coincidence that fissures opened within the rich world’s economies as poor countries began catching up. It was a predictable result of political and technological change—one that governments in the rich world largely ignored and that their advisers, and economists in general, made too little effort to point out.
When countries with lots of low-wage workers begin trading with richer economies, pay for similarly skilled workers converges. Those in poor economies grow richer while in rich countries workers get poorer. The effects are felt more in some places than others, and not only because the sort of people who lose out to trade tend to live in similar places. Globalisation did direct damage to many local and regional economies because of the way those regions work.
Not going global
Firms—particularly manufacturers—often do better when they are close together. A maker of industrial machinery saves on costs when it is near the firms that provide it with raw materials or components, as well as to its customers. A cluster of manufacturers attracts workers. Where there are a lot of firms and workers, new ideas are spawned and spread.
Similar dynamics apply in other industries. Financial firms do well in New York because they are close to the banks that finance them and clients that hire them, and there is a vast pool of specialised talent. Startups in Silicon Valley have access to financing, customers and new ideas they will not easily find elsewhere, not to mention competitors’ employees to filch.
The size of such clusters depends on the size of the economy. Open a national economy to a world’s worth of trade and the scale changes. Firms can sell to customers in other countries as well as in their own, and those in the most productive clusters see their existing advantages pay off. More sophisticated financial firms in London outcompete those in Frankfurt; California’s internet firms overwhelm competitors in Paris. Producers in less fortunate regions either have to up their game, specialise, move or go under.
Increasing returns of this sort do not imply that trade is a zero-sum game. A larger, more integrated market enables production at more efficient scale and increased global output. Consumers gain access to cheaper and better goods and services (including new foreign varieties). They do imply, however, that production will become more geographically concentrated. Cities with long-standing industrial traditions that could get by in a smaller economy find themselves bleeding talent and jobs.
The past few decades have been good for the richest firms and places. They are as productive as ever; America’s slowing productivity is the result of increasingly poor performance by firms below the upper ranks. Across a wide range of industries the share of output generated by America’s top four metropolitan areas for each industry has risen, often substantially. In the financial industry their share of output rose from 18% to 29%, and in retail, wholesale and logistics from 15% to 21% between 2002 and 2014 (see chart below).
Since 2013, the share of high-salary tech jobs found in America’s eight largest technology hubs has risen, according to a recent analysis by Jed Kolko, an economist at Indeed, an online jobs site. Similarly, from 1997 to 2015 London’s share of Britain’s gross value added rose from 19% to 23%.
There are several reasons why the poorer regions of rich economies did not adjust as well to the winners-take-more geography of globalisation. One is that technology seems to be moving from place to place less easily than it used to. An OECD study published in 2015 looked at the way in which productivity gains spread from “frontier” firms operating at the highest productivity levels. Since 2001 new technologies have percolated from leading firms in one country to equivalent firms in other countries more quickly. Globally competitive firms have got better at mastering complex new technologies. And fending off global rivals seems to sharpen the incentives of managers at these firms to copy other successful ones.
But it is a different story within borders. Diffusion of technology from top firms in one country to laggard firms in the same country has slowed down. The authors of the study reckon that a lack of interest in adapting technologies to local circumstances may account for part of this, suggesting that the more the best firms focus on a global (rather than domestic) market, the slower productivity-improving techniques and technologies spread locally. The rise of superstar firms means that fewer places are home to businesses operating at the productivity frontier and that domestic investment is lower than it should be. In less dynamic local markets, nonsuperstars seem neither willing nor able to adopt the best technology.
Mobile moans
The rational response to such divergent economic fortunes is to up sticks. In the most successful developing countries people move to new centres of progress with alacrity, as they did in America and Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The population of Shanghai doubled from 1980 to 2010, just as Manchester’s did from 1811 to 1841.
But people in the rich world are less able and willing to move to thriving places than in the past. America, once inveterately itinerant, has settled down a lot (see chart 3). Even so, it is still more footloose than Europe. Each year just over 2% of Americans move across state lines, whereas only 1.5% of Europeans move between regions within their home country. Despite the freedom of movement created by the EU’s single market, only 0.37% move from one country to another. But mobility in America is on the decline.
The pull exerted by successful places is offset by policies that restrict population growth and that were not imposed a century ago. Stringent planning rules, and homeowners who prefer low-density living, limit new building in rich cities. That makes housing hard to afford. Though the wages available in rich American cities are higher than in poorer ones, even for those without many qualifications, high housing costs more than offset the pay increase.
At the same time, the push to leave failing places has weakened. The growth of the welfare state limits the chances that declining cities will disappear. In the 19th century, mining towns like Bodie, California—which once boasted several thousand people, a newspaper and a railway station—emptied out entirely when local mines closed. Today government benefits and pension payments spare people the horrible choice between moving or penury. Indeed, they can encourage people who would otherwise move to stay put, because meagre fixed incomes go further in places where living costs have tumbled.
Recent work by David Schleicher, of Yale University, recounts the ways that state and local benefits also impede movement. Public employees face strong incentives to stay put; according to one estimate, the pension of a teacher who spends 30 years in one school system is about twice that of a teacher who splits her career between two. Some benefits are tied to staying put, precisely because the authorities fear a brain drain. A new affordable college programme in New York, for example, requires beneficiaries to stay in the state after graduation for as many years as they received assistance.
A diminished tendency to leave places that are not doing well is not just a matter of welfare policy and the size of the state. People do not just change jobs if they move home. They also sever social ties, from churches to hunting clubs. Lighting out for new territories means leaving behind family and friends, something that today’s ageing populations may find harder than the younger populations of the past. Ageing populations have other effects. Grown-up children may need to care for ailing parents; grandparents may provide a crucial source of child care. For these and other reasons, many working-age adults are finding it harder to move far from their parents than previous generations.
Finding your place
Help—either to make it easier to set up in a successful place, or to leave a failing one—would be a boon to many, especially the young, skilled and ambitious. By making them more productive, it would probably boost GDP. But it could make life harder still for the least mobile members of society. Were New York more accessible to young Pennsylvanians, Scranton’s problems would not disappear; they would just be concentrated in a smaller, older and poorer population. Hence the attraction of policies that help people by helping the places where they find themselves.
The subsidies and tax incentives showered on north-eastern Pennsylvania are hardly unique; the rich world abounds in efforts to jump-start the economies of benighted places. Economists are generally sniffy about them, with some justification. In January, for example, American Paper Bag moved its corporate headquarters near to Scranton, thanks in part to employment tax credits, funding for workforce training and a $1.4m subsidised government loan. But the firm’s arrival is expected to create only 38 jobs.
“Enterprise zones”, which typically use tax incentives and hiring subsidies to encourage businesses into areas of concentrated poverty and joblessness, do little good. California’s 42 enterprise zones have failed to raise employment in targeted areas, according to analysis by Mr Kolko and David Neumark, of the University of California at Irvine.
Other studies find increases in employment and wages that are modest at best. In the zones franches urbaines with which France started to experiment in the 1990s, small businesses are temporarily exempted from taxes and some social-security contributions. Most of the employment these zones have created appears to be due to firms from elsewhere moving in, which may explain why surrounding neighbourhoods typically experienced employment falls roughly on a par with the zones’ gains.
Analysis of the effects of EU structural funds—money invested in poorer regions to promote convergence—finds that such spending appears to boost local output and reduce unemployment, but not necessarily in a sustainable way. A recent study of Cornwall and South Yorkshire showed that the funds improved the economic outlook of those British regions, with unemployment rates in the two declining towards the national average. In 2006, though, South Yorkshire lost access to the funds, and its gains fell away.
Some interventions do seem to produce lasting change. Just over 1,000km south-west of Scranton sits the city of Greenville. It is the largest population centre in the north-west of South Carolina, which was once a thriving centre of textile manufacturing; its fast-flowing rivers powered scores of mills, which remained long after the waterwheels were replaced by other sources of power. In the second half of the 20th century, however, foreign competition gutted the industry and employment collapsed.
In the early 1990s South Carolina’s leaders learned that BMW had plans to open an American factory. Hundreds of cities offered the Bavarians all manner of appetising inducements. South Carolina’s winning offering included more than $100m in tax incentives and a $1-per-year lease for the four square kilometres on which the plant would sit. State and local governments promised meaty investments in infrastructure. Clemson University and local community colleges were helped to develop training programmes that could be co-ordinated with the carmaker and its suppliers. A centre for automotive research in Greenville gave the offer an appetising touch of high-tech umami.
The plant BMW has built there is now the firm’s largest in the world. But the state’s dowry bought more than a dashing groom. The network of firms that supplies BMW has attracted other companies to the region, as have improved transport links to cities in North Carolina and Georgia. Recently Volvo, a Swedish carmaker owned by Geely, a Chinese firm, announced plans to build a factory close to Charleston, a city on South Carolina’s coast. Volvo will buy many parts for its vehicles from suppliers which first came to the state to serve BMW.
South Carolina has not become an all-purpose manufacturing powerhouse. In fact, manufacturing employment is lower in the region than it was when BMW set up shop. But real incomes are growing and the population is booming. Greenville is 70% bigger than it was in 1990.
Its success shows the value of co-ordination. There is a chicken-and-egg problem in establishing a cluster. Firms would like to be where there are workers, suppliers and infrastructure; workers want places where firms are already offering good new jobs. Neither will go where the other isn’t. But action on a number of fronts can, under the right circumstances, attract both at once, creating a kernel round which a cluster can grow large enough to become self-sustaining. After that, it may well invigorate other areas of the local economy.
Strategies which build clusters through such two-way seduction are hard to assess. Work by Michael Greenstone and Richard Hornbeck of the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley compares places that lose out in competitions for big plants to those that win. They find that the arrival of a new plant raises productivity in existing factories—those that were there before the arrival of the big fish. This suggests that within clusters spillovers of technological and organisational know-how are genuine; attracting successful firms is a way to channel knowledge into lagging regions.
Although a new plant can promote the diffusion of technical knowledge and provide jobs that pay well in other companies nearby, not every place can nurture a manufacturing cluster. The success of South Carolina has come about because BMW chose to put its plant there rather than somewhere else.
So rather than attempting to seed clusters, governments could instead focus on spreading know-how in order to increase the attractiveness of laggard regions to productive firms. Improving the investment climate in struggling areas could help. In 2015 the Economic Innovation Group, an American think-tank, published a report by two economists—Jared Bernstein, a Democrat, and Kevin Hassett, a Republican, who now heads Mr Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers—which proposed a way of doing just this.
The idea was to use tax incentives to create new financial vehicles, not unlike venture-capital firms, with a place-specific investment mission. The intention would be to provide access for investors to regional-investment opportunities, turning struggling parts of rich countries into domestic versions of emerging markets. Because a “Cleveland Fund”, say, would be run by a single manager or management team, its investments could be co-ordinated. Investment aimed at enticing businesses and attracting workers could be designed with each other in mind. Legislation based on the idea has been introduced in Congress, with bipartisan support.
The public sector might also play a more direct role. In the late-19th century, America’s federal government set up what are now known as land-grant universities. The legislation gave federal land to states, which were meant to sell it to raise money to create agricultural and mechanical colleges. Those colleges were initially intended to provide a solid technical education for young farmers and engineers across the great American expanse.
They were fairly soon given additional missions: first, to carry out agricultural and engineering research, and second, what was termed “extension”—connecting with working farmers and mechanics in order to spread knowledge of new techniques and best practices. Today, many of those institutions have become fully-fledged research universities, which often co-operate with local firms to commercialise research findings, develop curriculums and place students in new occupations.
Germany has its own, more recent version of this model, called the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. Started in 1949, the system now consists of a network of 69 applied research institutions, which receive 30% of their funding from national and local government, with a mission to develop and improve technologies in partnership with German firms.
Governments could invest in an effort to expand the reach and remit of such institutions (or to create new ones). These could be given resources to expand training for working adults. And they could prioritise extension once again by helping local firms to master new technologies such as machine learning, augmented reality, additive manufacturing and so on. The better understood a new technology is, the less important it is for those wishing to use it to be near the people and firms where it originates. Post-secondary education could expand its focus from equipping individuals with skills to speeding the flow of knowledge from those who generate it to everyone else, companies included.
If there is a particular reason to favour dispersion of technological know-how and economic activity, it is that the concentration of such things also corresponds to a concentration of power. Since the late 1990s, as you would expect given the logic of globalisation, American industry has become more concentrated and more profitable. Superstar firms can draw on their financial and political capital to quash or take over would-be rivals, leaving fewer high-growth companies with the potential to anchor local economies. Not all these superstar perks are necessarily invidious, but looked at in the context of regional economies they can have striking effects. The announcement in June that Amazon would purchase Whole Foods, a grocer, led to a sharp drop in the share prices of companies like Walmart (headquartered in Bentonville, Arkansas), Target (Minneapolis, Minnesota) and Kroger (Cincinnati, Ohio). Amazon has since asked America’s cities what they would be willing to offer to get its planned second headquarters, equal in status to the original in Seattle. Scores of cities responded with detailed investment plans and juicy incentives: a testament to the power wielded by America’s corporate superstars. But Amazon’s demands—which include a large, skilled workforce, lots of big-city amenities and extensive transport links—suggest that the prize will go to somewhere already thriving, rather than a place in need of the lift a firm like Amazon could provide.
Concentrated politics
It is much harder for a new communications technology to take root in an unpromising place than it was when Scranton rose to dominate the creation of newfangled shellac records. Efforts to accelerate technological diffusion—which might include the more rigorous application of antitrust rules—could raise competitive pressures in the national economy in a way that favoured regional competitors.
But the segregation of cities into a small set of haves and a much larger set of have-lesses tends to mean that elites (in business and politics) rub elbows only with each other. That makes them ever less sensitive to the costs of regional inequality. The growing concentration of corporate offices in the vicinity of Washington, DC is a particularly obvious example of this.
Votes for Brexit and for Mr Trump were often cast as an expression of anger at a system that seems rigged. Unless policymakers grapple seriously with the problem of regional inequality, the fury of those voters will only increase.
Correction (October 21st 2017): The text preceding the second chart originally referred to various industries' share of output growing between 2001 and 2014. This has been corrected to 2002 and 2014.national
Amphibious patrol boats, which were acquired for Rs 1.6 crore in 2009, have been lying unused for several years after they developed snags. They are now going to be scrapped
Interestingly, the state had planned to buy 18 more Sealegs, but were put off by the malfunction. File pic
Eight years after 26/11, authorities haven’t learnt how to run a tight ship. One of the state’s key moves after the attack was to invest in foreign-made advanced amphibious Sealegs boats. But now, thanks to the government’s incompetence, the only place the boats are going are to the scrap yard.
The boats began to malfunction soon after they were commissioned in 2009 but the authorities did not get them repaired. File pic
This will be the first time since the 26/11 attacks that the state is not announcing a new defence scheme, but is instead scrapping a security measure which was once considered crucial to preventing a similar attack.
Eight years ago, after realising that the 26/11 attackers had sneaked into the city from the sea, the state went the extra mile to plug all holes in coastal security. A crucial part of this exercise was to procure the Sealegs Amphibious Marine Crafts — touted as the most sophisticated patrolling boats that would run on both land and sea and block any infiltration. In 2009, the state bought four of these boats at the cost of R1.6 crore, with the intention of buying another 18 to build an entire fleet of amphibious patrol boats.
Broken system
But soon after they were pressed into service in November 2009, the four boats began to malfunction one after another. What’s surprising is that even though the equipment was under warranty till the end of 2010, the authorities did not bother with repairs. Mumbai Police had not even procured spare parts or tyres for the seacraft at the time of procurement, which meant only the New Zealand manufacturer could repair the vessels.
But the officials had not bothered to renew the annual maintenance contract either, so the boats began to gather dust. In 2011, the police proposed to send a team to New Zealand so they could be trained in repairwork, but the idea was rejected.
‘Repair or scrap’
After contemplating all possibilities to make the boats functional again, Mumbai Police finally wrote to the state government, asking them to either get the manufacturer to do the maintenance work or scrap the vessels permanently.
An IPS officer confirmed to mid-day that around a week ago, the home department finally gave the green signal to scrap the Sealegs. The officer added that these boats were little more than scrap anyway, as they had been lying damaged and unused for years, and the state failed to come up with any plan to make them useful again. Repeated attempts to contact to the Additional Chief Secretary (Home) KP Bakshi did not yield any result.HERE'S some rather Friday-ish news. A man on a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles was arrested on arrival at Salt Lake City earlier in the week and charged with assaulting a flight attendant. Apparently Pogos Paul Sefilian, Gulliver's new favourite name, was twice asked to stop using an electronic cigarette, both after boarding and then again after take-off. He became agitated and, in the words of a complaint filed at a federal court (and quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune) "threw peanuts and pretzels at the flight attendant and at the flight deck door in an apparent attempt to protest the airline's policy banning electronic cigarettes". He also opened the overhead luggage compartments as the plane came in to land and ignored six requests to sit down.
Mr Sefilian's behaviour was clearly nutty, though he may have thought he was within his rights to light up, |
al says. “We’re getting to see the results together, and they’re so excited, because now they’re in school, or they’re working to get a job.”
Dr. Segal recalls one man who underwent multiple sessions to remove his facial tattoos. “It was so dramatic because when you first looked at him, you only saw his tattoos,” she says. “But when you start taking them off, you start to see his eyes and how beautiful they are. He would go and look in the mirror, and after a few [sessions] he said, ‘Well, I have to go and get a new driver’s license.’”
Tattoo removal is a highly specialized procedure in which the physician uses a laser to break apart the ink into infinitesimal pieces that are then carried away to other parts of the body. It is a painful process and can sometimes cause hypo- and hyperpigmentation and scarring, but Dr. Segal explains that many people would rather risk having a scar or a slight change in skin color than keep the tattoo that was once in its place.
Removing a tattoo requires several laser sessions. The ink gradually fades from its original hue to a gray, ashen color or a light-blue blot, leaving only a ghost of the former tattoo. As several weeks are needed to heal between each session, some people choose to remove different tattoos at different times, alternating with each visit.
Jeremy Morris has been visiting Project Erase since February 2014, removing tattoos from his chest, neck, and hands. He didn’t get his first tattoo until he was twenty years old, but, like Alonzo, many of his later tattoos he got while incarcerated.
“At that time in my life, I glorified crime,” he says. “I was caught up in it. I wanted to be a part of that violence because that’s where my head was at.”
An Oregon native, Morris was arrested in 1995 and charged with second-degree burglary. He was first sent to Wyoming State Penitentiary then transferred to Crowley County Correctional Facility in Olney Springs, Colorado.
“When I first went in, I didn’t think it was my fault I was in prison,” he says. “I’d thought it was because the judge was crooked, the cops were crooked, the prosecutor had it out for me. Three years into my sentence, I realized, “Wait a second. Nobody ever put a gun to my head and forced me to commit crimes.” It was like this paradigm shift. No longer was someone else to blame. That was a pivotal turning point.”
Morris was released after serving nine years. He was thirty-four years old and ready to turn his life around, though his tattoos remained a visible reminder of the lifestyle he was trying to leave behind. He began looking into tattoo removal services but found that most of the clinics were much too expensive. After an online search, he discovered Project Erase and set up an appointment. He began with the most visible tattoos, first removing a flaming skull from his hand followed by neck tattoos of flames and the bat-winged logo of the metal band Dark Angel. On his chest, he’d gotten what he describes as “Satanic artwork,” including a pentagram dripping with blood and the logo of another metal band, Morbid Angel. While he has chosen to keep some of his less visible and less offensive tattoos, many of them—especially the ones he got while incarcerated—had been reminders of the life he gave up, and he is ashamed now, even reluctant, to talk about them. After multiple sessions, the tattoos on his neck look more like a bruise than wings. The tattoo on the top of his hand looks more like a mild case of varicose veins than a flaming skull. In neither case would they be the first thing a prospective employer, or a stranger on the street—or even a family member—would notice.
I REALIZED, ‘WAIT A SECOND. NOBODY EVER PUT A GUN TO MY HEAD AND FORCED ME TO COMMIT CRIMES.’ IT WAS LIKE THIS PARADIGM SHIFT. NO LONGER WAS SOMEONE ELSE TO BLAME.
“About a year ago, I was sitting on the couch with my brother,” he says. “And he looked down at my hand and was like, ‘Didn’t you used to have a tattoo there?’”
Now, at age forty, Morris has been practicing meditation and learning about Eastern philosophies. He also serves on the client advisory board for Outside In.
“Part of doing this, for me, it’s not to undo the past, but to give back,” he says about volunteering for the nonprofit organization. “I wanted to do something right rather than just take from the world or take from the community. I wanted to be an asset to the community.”
BUT ONCE THE TATTOO BEGINS TO FADE, THE HISTORY BEGINS TO FADE WITH IT.
Even before his first treatment, Morris had renounced his former fixation on violence and crime. Removing the tattoos is only the final step in his long process of healing and recovery.
“The psychological shift had already taken place, and these are just the remnants,” he says. “It’s just a formality, cleaning up the remnants. The real change, obviously, is in the mind.”
Madeline Adee, tattoo removal program coordinator, has seen a wide range of people come through the door of Project Erase, many of them having driven long hours to make their appointment. Project Erase is unique among tattoo removal clinics, she explains, because their program doesn’t discriminate against an individual’s decision for removing their tattoo.
“There aren’t a lot of programs like ours out there,” she says. “As far as I know we are the only low cost tattoo removal program in the western United States that operates on a regular basis, and will accept anyone below a certain income—not just people with gang tattoos, for example. So we see a lot of different tattoos that are important for people to get removed. We definitely have patients with gang and prison tattoos, but also tattoos that are related to past domestic violence or substance abuse, tattoos that are a barrier to employment, and more. I’ve had people cry on the phone when I call them to tell them they are approved for our tattoo removal program because they couldn’t afford it anywhere else and thought they’d never be able to have them removed.”
For many who find their way to Project Erase, the first appointment is often the most difficult to make. Though some may be excited to remove their tattoos, it can also be an acknowledgment of a painful past. But once the tattoo begins to fade, the history begins to fade with it. The person who enters the clinic for the first time is not the same person who emerges later on.
Jorge Alonzo admits he was scared when he decided to pursue a straight life, with all the pressures and responsibilities that that brings.
“I’ve fought dudes that are six feet tall,” he says. “I’ve gotten my ass beat by scary dudes—tattoos on the face, swole dudes. I can tell you this for a fact, what scared me most was coming out into the world, paying taxes, getting a job, being a family man. That scared me so much, knowing that I could try that and fail so quick. That was the biggest fear.”
THE TATTOOS HE HAS REMOVED ATTESTS TO THE VIOLENCE HE HAS OVERCOME.
Alonzo is now twenty-five years old, a loving husband, and father of two. He has been married since 2014 and has a steady job, working at a metal manufacturing plant. He still lives near the same park where he’d committed his assault, but now he passes by with his wife and kids on their way to the grocery store or the coffee shop. Though he still has more to remove, none of his tattoos are immediately visible, and looking at him is the same as looking at any other husband or father. The tattoos he has removed attests to the violence he has overcome. He has been offered a blank canvas, on which to compose the rest of his life.LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A slavery exhibition featuring black actors as live models to represent African slaves was canceled by a London art center after protests of racism, sparking a debate on Thursday about freedom of expression.
The show, Exhibit B, by South African director Brett Bailey, at London’s Barbican Centre, aimed to tell the stories of African slaves and asylum seekers under British colonialism using black actors in a series of live scenes.
These 12 installations included a black woman shackled to a bed and a black man in a metal mask which Bailey said were designed to recreate the horrors of slavery and the “human zoo phenomenon” when African tribespeople were displayed in the 19th century for the entertainment of European and American audience.
But over 200 demonstrators took to the streets outside the show staged in underground tunnels by Waterloo station in central London on Tuesday, prompting organizers on Wednesday to cancel the show’s eight scheduled performances this week.
“It became impossible for us to continue with the show because of the extreme nature of the protest and the serious threat to the safety of performers, audiences and staff,” a spokesman from the Barbican said in a statement.
“We believe this piece should be shown in London and are disturbed at the potential implications this silencing of artists and performers has for freedom of expression.”
It is the first time that the Barbican has been forced to withdraw a show since its opening 32 years ago.
The “Boycott the Human Zoo” campaign, led by Sara Myers, an activist from Birmingham, voiced concerns about what she called “a complicit act of outrageous racism” with a petition campaign over the past month escalating to a street protest on Tuesday.
The campaigners hailed the cancellation as a victory.
The show had been staged in around 12 cities around Europe before coming to London, receiving largely favorable reviews.
The cancellation of the show sparked a debate on Twitter about what constitutes art and the boundaries of exploring race under the #boycottthehumanzoo hashtag.
Bailey, a award-winning controversial artist and director who focuses on post-colonial “atrocities” in Africa and has previously run a show on conflict or “blood diamonds”, said Exhibit B was challenging but never sought to offend.
“Do any of us really want to live in a society in which expression is suppressed, banned, silenced, denied a platform? My work has been shut down today, whose will be closed down tomorrow?” he wrote in an op-ed in the Guardian newspaper.Embalming Invented During Civil War
HOW THE CIVIL WAR CHANGED FUNERAL PRACTICES
Wars are often responsible for medical and scientific advances, and the Civil War drove the need for a new science: an improved way to handle the dead. So many men died and so many were far from home, there was a growing need for a way to preserve a body for a decent burial once the body arrived home. Families wanted to see their fallen sons once more, and railroads added to the urgency by refusing to carry decaying bodies (identifiable by smell).
Today there is increasing interest in “green funerals” (for those looking for eco-friendly solutions), and about one-third of all Americans who die are cremated, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. However, the traditional funeral, along with embalming of the body that began in the Civil War, is still the most popular choice of how to handle the newly departed.
In the mid-19th century, the French developed a method of arterial embalming, and an American, a Dr. Thomas Holmes (1817-1900), who trained and worked as a coroner’s physician in New York in the 1850s, had begun experimenting with embalming methods used by the French.
First Military Fatality Embalmed
The first military fatality of the war, Colonel Elmer Ephraim Ellsworth (1837-1861), had worked for Lincoln in Springfield and later helped with the presidential campaign. Ellsworth died on May 24, 1861, when Union troops entered Alexandria, Virginia. Ellsworth sent his men to take over the railroad station, while he went to remove a Confederate flag from the roof of the Marshall House Hotel and was killed on his way down the stairs.
It was said that Dr. Holmes visited Lincoln and offered to embalm the body of Lincoln’s friend at no charge. Ellsworth lay in state at the White House and then was taken to City Hall in New York City where Union soldiers lined up to pay their respects. Ten days after his death, Ellsworth was buried in his hometown, Mechanicsville, New York.
From an account in the New York Times (May 27, 1861), it seems that embalming was still a developing art: “The remains [of Ellsworth] were encased in a metallic coffin, the lid of which was so arranged that through a glass cover the face and breast could be seen. The body was dressed in the Zouave uniform of Colonel Ellsworth’s corps, but it was generally remarked, did not bear that natural look so often seen in cases of rapid death. The livid paleness of the features contrasted strongly with the ruddy glow of health that always characterized the Colonel during his lifetime. The marked features and the firm expression of the mouth were, however, sufficient to remind the beholder of what once was Colonel Ellsworth….”
As a result of this successful effort to preserve the body, Dr. Holmes was given a commission from the Army Medical Corps to embalm the corpses of dead Union officers in order that they might be sent home for burial. Holmes is said to have embalmed as many as 4,000 bodies himself, but he also created a fluid that could be used for embalming and sold it to other physicians for $3 per gallon. (At that time, the chemicals were a mixture of arsenic, zinc and mercuric chlorides, creosote, turpentine and alcohol. Formaldehyde, which soon became the primary ingredient, was not discovered until after the war.)
As physicians began to practice embalming, one challenge was lining up paying customers.
“At first, the embalming physicians approached soldiers directly before they went into battle,” says James W. Lowry, a Charleston, West Virginia-based embalmer with the Charleston Mortuary Service, who participates in Civil War reenactments as an embalming physician and is also a frequent speaker on Civil War embalming at conventions of funeral directors and embalmers. “The physician provided soldiers with a card that stated that they had arranged for payment for embalming and transportation if they died.
“It soon became clear that this sales method was bad for morale, so the military put a stop to it,” adds Lowry.
“As the war continued, embalming physicians began to follow the action and would take over a barn or shed near the battlefield or set up a tent and embalm bodies there,” he continues. “Since officers tended to be from well-to-do families, embalming physicians instructed soldiers to bring the bodies of officers only. Then the physician would work out payment with the grieving family.”
Some physicians were unscrupulous and charged extraordinary fees or threatened to hold the body “hostage” if the family didn’t pay.
On December 26, 1862 the New York Times ran a revealing letter to the editor, written by H.W. Rivers, who is identified as a surgeon and medical director of the Ninth Army Corps. Rivers points out that embalming of the remains is a great advance of science but that the expense of the process is beyond the reach of people of modest means… Rivers’ letter provides a recipe of sorts that could be used to preserve a body, but it is doubtful that this letter offered much help to the common man.
When President Lincoln died from a gunshot wound on April 15, 1865, Mary Lincoln had been aware of the treatment received by Colonel Ellsworth, and she requested that Lincoln be embalmed. The funeral train carrying his body left Washington D.C. on April 21, 1865 and stopped for public viewing in Baltimore, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Michigan City, and Chicago. The procession finally pulled into Springfield on the morning of Wednesday, May 3, 1865 with the body well-preserved.
With the end of the Civil War, the practice of embalming died out for a time since people were likely to die near home and could be buried more quickly. Embalming surgeons became a thing of the past, and when interest in embalming returned again in the 1890s, undertakers began to perform these duties. Companies that wanted to sell embalming fluid sent salesmen around the country to demonstrate the process and provide certificates of training, and the practice grew. (State licensing finally entered the picture in the 1930s.)
Though the practice of embalming established itself during the Civil War, the actual numbers of people who were embalmed were actually relatively small. Because of the difficulty in identifying bodies and communicating with families about sending a body home, only about 40,000 of the approximately 650,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War were embalmed.
The reality was that the carnage was often so vast that there was no hope of getting the majority of the soldiers home. Communities near battlefields had little choice but to go out to help cover the dead or put them in mass graves.
Another week I’ll write about the post-war efforts to locate these bodies and get these soldiers properly buried.
For more information, visit the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland. This area is part of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground.Spread the love
Sugar Creek, MO — A family in Sugar Creek, Missouri grew the beautiful vegetable garden in the photo above.
They’ve been given four days to tear out the entire garden or face a fine.
Why? Because it is in their front yard, and city officials and a few neighbors don’t like it.
Nathan Athans said he planted the garden in his front yard because it gets optimal sunlight. His backyard only gets sunshine for about two hours per day, and only in certain areas.
Athans told KSHB that he grows several different types of vegetables on his lawn and loves tending to his garden.
I’d probably say about 300 hours [so far this year], I spend all my free time out here. I want my family to know where their food is coming from, I don’t want to have to go to the grocery store and worry about what was done to that food.
Last summer, the city cited Athans for weeds in his garden, and he complied with the order to clean things up, and paid the fine.
But now, the city has passed a shiny new ordinance – one that Athans believes is part of a witch hunt against him.
The family started an online petition, which explains why they feel targeted:
The city of Sugar Creek, Missouri passed an ordinance two days ago on March 28th, forbidding front yard gardens to grow food, within the first 30 feet of front yard space from the street. Mayor Matt Mallinson both passed and approved this ordinance. They gave us until April 1st to comply. We are the only house in the city with a front yard garden, and just happen to be exactly within those first 30 feet. They have been targeting us since we moved in last year, because we grew a garden in the front yard.
The city’s building official, Paul Loving, told KSHB that city received many complaints and that the ordinance is their solution.
The petition goes on to explain the reasons the garden is so important to Athans and his family:
We believe in sustainability, growing our food locally without pesticides and excessive fertilizer use, reducing our need for fossil fuels to import produce from other countries, countries that have little or no regulations on pesticide use. Sugar Creek is also prone to flooding, as it is located next to the Missouri River, so using our yard for growing plants instead of grass is beneficial because our garden takes in water as well as holding the soil together to prevent erosion, all while filtering out pollutants. It has helped our basement not flood during storms, prevented storm water runoff pollution, reduced fossil fuel use, helped us eat healthier, and prevented us from consuming pesticides and GMOs.
Unfortunately, Athans isn’t the first to be subjected to harassment over growing his own food. People have been charged with crimes, threatened with jail time, and had their property destroyed for growing gardens in their own yards.
Remember, in the US, you never truly own anything.
Delivered by The Daily SheepleSketch released of Candlestick attacker 49ers-Raiders game
SAN FRANCISCO -- Police released a sketch Thursday of the man who beat another man into unconsciousness in a Candlestick Park restroom during Saturday's violence-marred exhibition game between the San Francisco 49ers and Oakland Raiders.
The assailant attacked a 26-year-old San Rafael man in a restroom by sections 54-56 in the upper deck at about 7:20 p.m. Police say the attacker grabbed the victim by the neck and slammed him into a wall, then fled.
The victim was hospitalized in fair condition.
The assailant is described as a Pacific Islander in his late 20s, with a goatee and ponytail, who stands more than 6 feet tall and weighs more than 220 pounds. He was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans.
The attack was one of a series of incidents that marred the game. Two fans were shot in the parking lot, a dozen were arrested and dozens more were ejected.
The 49ers have asked the National Football League to stop scheduling the Raiders during the exhibition season.
Sketch of the assailant who beat a fan unconscious in a men's restroom at Candlestick Park during a 49ers-Raiders exhibition game Aug. 20, 2011. Sketch of the assailant who beat a fan unconscious in a men's restroom at Candlestick Park during a 49ers-Raiders exhibition game Aug. 20, 2011. Photo: San Francisco Police Department Photo: San Francisco Police Department Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Sketch released of Candlestick attacker 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Anyone with information in the any of the Candlestick incidents is asked to call police at (415) 575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411.Image: Trump campaign image with Waffen soldiers (Screen capture)
On Tuesday afternoon, the Donald Trump 2016 campaign tweeted an image that contained a stock art photo of World War II Nazi Waffen soldiers on the march along with the hashtag #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.
Mother Jones reported that within minutes, sharp eyes had identified the soldiers.
#MEGAFAIL ===> Yes, those aren't just WW2 Germans, they're Waffen-SS in the Trump campaign pic https://t.co/BSFNuNrK6R
— John Schindler (@20committee) July 14, 2015
The campaign yanked the tweet down, but not before dozens of screen grabs had been taken.
At length, the source of the stock images was identified.
In the end, the campaign responded by blaming an intern, saying, “Mr. Trump has been in Charlottesville, Virginia all day at the opening of a development. A young intern created and posted the image and did not see the very faded figures within the flag of the stock photo. The intern apologized and immediately deleted the tweet.”
Understandable enough, but as commentator Simon Maloy said:
Trump interns are apparently making campaign publicity materials. On their own initiative. With no approval process. Tight ship over there. — Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) July 14, 2015
Here is a screen capture of the original tweet:
UPDATE: Mother Jones has more on the origin of that photo:Dying Light's upcoming The Following DLC has an abandoned post office in it, and developer Techland needs help filling it with letters.
The team is creating a unique mission that takes place inside an abandoned post office and wants fans to have their messages of distress, horror, or bravery be scattered around the level. The design team will pick their favorite letters and place them into the game along with full credit for the authors.
Techland is taking submissions on its Facebook page, which you can find here. In a post on its page, Techland wrote, "We want you to send us a 200 words max letter in English of you being the survivor that is writing from the quarantine zone to the outside world." To submit a letter, just your 200 words max as a message to Techland's Faebook page.
For more on The Following, a geographically huge DLC area for The Following, head here. For our review of Dying Light, head here.Air Canada says one of its pilots diverted an international flight to ensure a dog could travel in safety. The dog, identified in media reports as Simba a French bulldog, was travelling in the cargo hold of a flight bound to Toronto from Tel Aviv.
A French bulldog is reunited with its owner at Pearson International Airport after an Air Canada pilot diverted the flight when temperatures dropped in the cargo hold. ( CityTV )
En route, however, the unidentified pilot got an indicator that one of the heaters in the cargo hold had malfunctioned. Air Canada rules state that minimum ambient temperatures need to be 10 degrees when dealing with canine travellers. Air Canada spokesman Peter Fitzpatrick says the pilot recognized that the cargo hold would soon be far colder than that as the plane flew over the Atlantic Ocean and realized that the dog might not survive.
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Fitzpatrick says the pilot diverted the plane to Frankfurt, transferred the dog to another plane, and made it to Toronto only 75 minutes behind schedule. “While we recognize this was an inconvenience for our customers, the overall reaction was positive, particularly once people understood the dog was in potential danger but safe as a result of the diversion,” Fitzpatrick said in an email. Dog and owner were reunited at Pearson International Airport, where the unnamed dog lover told a local TV station that Simba was like his child.
Read more about:Easy Shell Automation
Ian Miell Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 27, 2017
Regular readers will be familiar with ShutIt, a framework I work on that allows me to automate all sorts of workflows and tools that I publish on GitHub.
This article demonstrates a new feature that uses this platform to make doing expect-type tasks trivial.
Embedded ShutIt
In response to a request, I recently added a feature which may be useful to others.
All this is available in python scripts if you:
pip install shutit
You can now automate interactions in python scripts. This script just gets the hostname and logs it:
import shutit_standalone
import logging
shutit_obj = shutit_standalone.create_bash_session()
hostname_str = shutit_obj.send_and_get_output('hostname')
shutit_obj.log('Hostname is:'+ hostname_str,
loglevel=logging.CRITICAL)
Since ShutIt is a big wrapper/platform built onpexpect, it takes care of setting up the prompt, figuring out when the command is done and a whole load of other stuff you never want to worry about about terminals.
Log Into Server Example
This example logs into a server, taking the password from user input, and ensures git is installed on it before logging out:
import shutit_standalone
import logging
shutit_obj = shutit_standalone.create_bash_session()
username = shutit_obj.get_input('Input username: ')
server = shutit_obj.get_input('Input server: ', ispass=True)
password = shutit_obj.get_input('Input password', ispass=True)
shutit_obj.login('ssh'+ username + '@' + server,
password=password)
shutit_obj.install('git')
shutit_obj.logout()
ShutIt takes care of determining what package manager is on the host. If you’re not logged in as root it prompts you for a sudo password before attempting the install.
Pause Mid-Flight to Look Around
If you want to insert yourself in the middle of the run, you can add a ‘pause_point’, which will hand you back the terminal until you hit CTRL+[, after which it continues:
import shutit_standalone
import logging
username = shutit_obj.get_input('Input username: ')
server = shutit_obj.get_input('Input server: ', ispass=True)
password = shutit_obj.get_input('Input password', ispass=True)
shutit_obj.login('ssh'+ username + '@' + server,
password=password)
shutit.obj.pause_point('Take a look around!')
shutit_obj.install('git')
shutit_obj.logout()
Send Commands Until Specific Output Seen
If you need to wait for something to happen, you can ‘send_until’ a regexp is seen in the output. This trivial example runs a command to wait 20 seconds and then create a file, and the ‘send_until’ command does not complete until the file is created.
import shutit_standalone
import logging
username = shutit_obj.get_input('Input username: ')
server = shutit_obj.get_input('Input server: ', ispass=True)
password = shutit_obj.get_input('Input password', ispass=True)
shutit_obj.login('ssh'+ username + '@' + server,
password=password)
shutit_obj.send('rm -f newfile && sleep 20 && touch newfile &')
shutit.obj.send_until('ls newfile | wc -l','1')
shutit_obj.logout()Lord Chancellor Liz Truss. Reuters LONDON (Reuters) - The process of Britain leaving the European Union is irrevocable once it has been triggered, a government minister said on Sunday.
Prime Minister Theresa May says she will invoke Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty by the end of March, beginning two years of formal divorce talks.
Lawyers for the government have said that, once started, the process is irrevocable, but some EU leaders say Britain can change its mind and a legal challenge to determine whether it can be reversed has been filed with an Irish court.
"People can take cases to court. My understanding is it is irrevocable and when we press the button that will go forward," Justice Secretary Elizabeth Truss told the BBC's Andrew Marr show when asked about whether Britain could reverse the process.
(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan; Editing by Mark Potter)Pirate Bay cofounder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has been charged on suspicion that he hacked into a variety of companies, as well as fraudulently withdrawing money from the Swedish Nordea bank.
Prosecutors claim he—along with three others—hacked IBM mainframes belonging to tax firm Logica and the bank. The crimes are said to have occurred between 2010 and 2012. Prosecutor Henrik Olin told the local press:
"A large amount of data from companies and agencies was taken during the hack, including a large amount of personal data, such as personal identity numbers of people with protected identities... I'd say that Svartholm Warg is the main person and brains behind the hacker attack."
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Apparently the four men withdrew almost $900,000 from a number of different bank accounts. Svartholm Warg was deported back to Sweden from Cambodia last year—and is currently serving a jail term on separate charges related to Pirate Pay. Oh dear. [Naked Security]Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I-Vt.) has distanced himself from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE supporter embroiled in criticism after the death of an unarmed black teenager in 2014.
“If the question is, do I want or need Rahm Emanuel’s support for president, with all due respect for the mayor, no I don’t,” Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate, told reporters Wednesday during a swing through Chicago, according to The Washington Post and other media outlets. Sanders continues to promote his commitment to racial equality in the hopes of winning African-American support.
When asked if Emanuel’s “vision for criminal justice reform matches” his own, Sanders added, “I expect not.”
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Emanuel, a former White House adviser to Presidents Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonInviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 Trump says he never told McCabe his wife was 'a loser' MORE and Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE, continues to face criticism and some calls to resign in light of the death of Laquan McDonald, specifically over the delay in releasing police dashcam video from the death for more than a year.
Sanders responded to that criticism earlier this month by calling for a federal investigation in to the Chicago Police Department. While he didn’t expressly side with protestors calling for Emanuel to resign, he said that “any official who helped suppress the videotape of Laquan McDonald's murder should be held accountable.”
“And any elected official with knowledge that the tape was being suppressed or improperly withheld should resign,” he said.
Democratic candidate Clinton also supports the federal investigation, but she told reporters in Iowa earlier this month that she’s “confident [Emanuel is] going to do everything he can to get to the bottom of these issues and take whatever measures are necessary to remedy them,” according to Bloomberg.
Emanuel endorsed Clinton for president in May 2014, several months before McDonald was killed.
Sanders visited the Windy City this week accompanied by Commissioner Jesús García, Emanuel’s main challenger for reelection earlier this year who had been endorsed by Sanders.
He also emphasized, both on the stump and during a press conference, the need for criminal justice reform, calling it “one of the most important things that a president of the United States can do.”
Rapper Killer Mike, civil rights activist Cornel West, former Clinton supporter and Ohio State Sen. Nina Turner, and co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice cream Ben Cohen also joined Sanders in Chicago.Nothing ANY Republican says can be considered truthful until it is proven to be so. Let’s face it, part of the strategy for a fascist party like the GOP is to lie to any group and tell them exactly what they want to hear.
McConnell, and GOP senators like McCain, Graham, Collins are going to shove Trump’s cabinet nominees down our throats without letting the American public know the truth about their backgrounds.
The head of Office of Government Ethics, the federal agency charged with investigating the backgrounds of Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, told Senate Democrats on Saturday that the process of vetting Trump’s picks is overwhelming the agency. Director Walter Shaub Jr. also emphasized his concern that Republicans are pushing forward with confirmation hearings for Trump’s nominees before the appropriate paperwork has been completed, and thus before the OGE can confirm that the nominees have no financial, ethical, or criminal red flags.
The Hypocrisy and strong arm tactics of the Grand Ole Fascist party are a direct threat to our democracy. The GOF has learned well from Trump that you can lie to the public, the media will simply publish your lie in a headline, and the public’s biggest concern will be, who’s on dancing with the stars tonight.
Resist!
UPDATE: Damn! You people are good! I can’t believe how many comments from people who have already contacted their Senators! Resistance is NOT futile!Nathaniel 'Ataraxia' Mark is a Welsh ADC player and founder of European SPL top 3 team 'Hungry For More' alongside CaptainTwig (Jungle), PrettyPrime (Mid), Frezzyy (Support) and Variety (Solo) with Zindurn as a sub. The team is managed by Prime's girlfriend ArcticPrime. He was previously the driving force behind Aquila's run to worlds second place in the 2015 Smite World Championship, losing out to Cognitive Red. This success enabled them to get picked up by the now defunct organisation Titan. He is seen as an innovator of hunter builds and god usage and often changes the meta with them, but is equally adept at taking the standard builds and god picks and making them work to his advantage.
We caught up with him to talk all things Smite, enjoy!
What exactly does Hungry For More mean to you, was the forming of it just down to not getting picked up for an established team and knowing you were good enough to compete, or were you just looking for a different direction without possible sponsor pressures?
Ataraxia: A bit of both. I know it's not a popular opinion among the pros, but I am not one to go into the sponsorship for the goodies you get out of it. I care a lot about appearances, and it's important to me that if we're picked up for a brand (i.e Titan), we do our utmost to represent it at the highest level, in and out of the game. It's a privilege to belong to such distinguished orgs like Dignitas, TSM and C9, and one I won't go into unless I know we can represent it at a high enough level.
When Hungry For More formed you were perhaps seen as a bit of a 'last chance saloon' for all 5 original members, you seem to have disproven that but what were your thoughts when forming the original roster?
Ataraxia: Hungry for More was quite the opposite for me, in fact. Following the split of Titan, I had a short list of players that I felt I could build a top-tier team with, and really make a strong go at making SWC this year. This year is all about winning above all else for me, and everyone we picked for our roster were people that I had absolute faith in to take us there. It started with Prime; we have a great friendship and have a good relationship for discussing the game; it was a great foundation for the team. From there, we discussed together the jungle role. We both only had one person we wanted, and that was Twig. He's very clearly a great player, and we had a hunch the atmosphere in Fnatic wasn't clicking for him, and I felt that the similarities he and Prime have in terms of attitude and approach to the game would make them a fantastic mid/jungle combo. After bringing Twig into the fold, our next step was the solo laner. Similarly to the situation with Twig, we all held Variety in high esteem, especially after his then-recent performance at Super Regionals. Support was a bit more complicated, we actually had a few trials and ending up going on Zindurn for the long goal of improvement. Unfortunately that didn't work out, but it did give us the opportunity to bring the savior of HFM onto the team - Frezzy |
proves that Li-ion batteries still blow up on occasion, as did an incident this week when a Samsung Galaxy Note battery caught fire in a man’s pocket. Why haven’t we solved the problem?
Battery technology has been pushed over the years, but no incredible breakthroughs have come along. Instead, we see the same rechargeable cells packaged differently, shrunken down, and packed in more tightly. This makes more energy-dense batteries, but when something goes wrong it’s a much bigger deal.
A defective or improperly-handled battery can overheat, causing the cells to break open and result in a chain reaction of other cells rupturing. This is called thermal runaway, and it’s the cause of most battery explosions and, less dramatically, battery swelling. The defect can be a simple short circuit, or a design defect that improperly insulates individual cells from the heat of neighbors. That’s what causes cell phones and laptops to catch fire on rare occasions.
Any Li-ion battery has the potential to go up in flames, and that’s a product of its chemistry. Lithium is used in batteries as an anode because it has extremely high electrochemical potential. That is, lithium-ion moving to the electrode produces a lot of energy. Lithium’s low atomic weight is also useful in reducing the mass of batteries.
While lithium is great for making high-capacity batteries, these same properties make it highly reactive and more prone to thermal runaway. Lithium is an Alkali Metal along with sodium, potassium, and the rest of the first group of the periodic table. Not only are these elements highly flammable, but they are so reactive that tossing a few grams into water will cause an explosion. So when a Li-ion battery does heat up, the lithium in it can accelerate the breakdown of other cells.
There is always the possibility that the occasional battery is going to have a manufacturing defect, or that it will be damaged, leading to a failure. However, some folks are starting to chime in on the situation with the Boeing 787. The plane has been grounded after two battery fires in recent weeks. Boeing says the design is sound, but maybe there is something more serious going on.
Elon Musk, the man behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors, is talking about the differences between his Li-ion car batteries and the ones used in the 787. Whereas the Tesla battery has thousands of small cells insulated from each other to prevent thermal runaway, the 787 has batteries with eight large cells. Because these cells get warmer, they are more likely to rupture and release a lot of energy when they do. Now that Musk has broken the ice, others have agreed, including an engineering professor at MIT.
So what can we take away from all this? Batteries are still very hard to engineer. Even Boeing might have made some mistakes, and it has more engineers than you can shake a slide rule at. The thing you’re carrying in your pocket could potentially catch fire, but it isn’t likely. There has to be damage or a serious manufacturing defect to turn your phone into a bomb. Just relax, and maybe check back on this 787 situation before your next flight.Pope Francis holds a press conference aboard the flight back to Italy from Rio de Janeiro (AFP)
During a ceremony on Sunday in which he baptized 32 children, Pope Francis implored the mothers in attendance — one of whom wasn’t married in the Church — to breastfeed their children, should they become hungry.
“Today, the choir will sing, but the most beautiful choir of all is the choir of the infants who will make a noise. Some will cry because they are not comfortable or because they are hungry,” the Pope said, according to The Independent.
“If they are hungry, mothers, feed them, without thinking twice. Because they are the most important people here.”
The Pope, who arrived at the Sistine Chapel in a Ford Focus, said in an interview last month that mothers should not feel uncomfortable breastfeeding their children during ceremonies he officiates.
His decision to allow mothers not married in the Church to attend the baptism service is a first, but is in keeping with his recent statements about not letting children in “irregular situations” feel like “second-class faithful.”
Pope Francis also christened 16 new cardinals, including many from what he’s called the “periphery” of the Church: Nicaragua, Canada, Ivory Coast, Argentina, Brazil, South Korea, Chile and Haiti.
[Image via AFP]Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Police divers attended the scene of the crash
Six people have died after a seaplane plunged into a river in Australia some 30 miles (50km) north of Sydney.
Five of those killed were British nationals - one of them was an 11-year-old girl. They died alongside the pilot, who was Australian.
The crash happened on the Hawkesbury River near the suburb of Cowan.
The single-engine aircraft belonged to sightseeing flight company Sydney Seaplanes. Investigators do not yet know why it crashed.
Acting Superintendent Michael Gorman from New South Wales police said the "recovery operation continues" at the site.
The wreckage is lying in 13m (43ft) of water.
The Foreign Office in London said: "Officials from the British consulate are in contact with local authorities in relation to a seaplane accident near Sydney. Staff are ready to provide consular assistance."
An eyewitness, Myles Baptiste, told the broadcaster 9News that the plane was 500m (1,640ft) from him when it hit the water.
"It made a tight right-hand turn and as it actually turned around, the wings dipped and it nosedived straight into the water," he said.
A woman at the scene told local TV the weather had been "a bit bumpy" but "nothing to be concerned about".
Some debris was recovered from the water on Sunday.
Image copyright EPA Image caption Officers recovered some debris from the seaplane
Image copyright EPA
Sydney Seaplanes offers scenic flights over local tourist attractions and waterways including the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and Pittwater, as well as the Hawkesbury River region.
The firm said it was suspending all operations until further notice and was helping police with the investigation into the cause of the crash.
"All at Sydney Seaplanes are deeply shocked by this incident and the resulting loss of life. We wish to pass on our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of the passengers and pilot who were tragically killed," the company said in a statement.
Are you in the area? Did you witness the crash? Share your experiences by emailing haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk.
Please include a contact number if you are willing to speak to a BBC journalist. You can also contact us in the following ways:Looking back at Daft Punk's discography, there music has varied greatly from Homework to Human After All but the main similarity was that they
Looking back at Daft Punk's discography, there music has varied greatly from Homework to Human After All but the main similarity was that they were all electronic albums. On R.A.M, the duo who have been at the front of French House, have taken a risk; they have used live instruments to blend a mix of the 70's and the 80's, they have captured that cross over period, and they blend the two era's seamlessly.
The first song is called "Give Life Back to Music", just by looking at its name you can see that Daft Punk are trying to resuscitate Music itself, despite the continuing Robot themes on the album. It's a solid start to the album and it gives you a real feel of what is to come. It's well produced and recorded, it's Daft Punk showing all their mastery.
"The Game of Love" is one of the songs off the album that are quieter, but Daft Punk have done quiet before, look at "Make Love" and "Night Vision", they can do it well, and they do. With the vocoder vocals that are present on various tracks around the album, you get that Daft Punk feel, but even without the electronic drum kits, you know you are getting a Daft Punk album.
"Giorgio by Moroder", a track that has Giorgio Moroder narrating his life style, and you listen in interest to hear this guy's life story, the man responsible for songs like, "Call Me" "Take My Breath Away" and "I Feel Love". Daft Punk have made a nine minute song dedicated to him; their inspiration. It's one of the highlights on the album. With a spiralling Space Disco synth pattern and a Jazz break in the middle to go back into the synths and then escalate into this epic finale with drums and strings, everything is happening in this song and it never feels crowded.
"Within" is another slow track but it is so beautiful. A love song in essence, it gives the album emotion, and Guy-Manuel says that the album has more soul then the technical Human After All. It's not just a beautiful song, but it's one of the first really catchy songs, I feel this goes well with "The Game of Love" and it just feels so smooth, as do all the songs.
"Instant Crush" featuring Julian Casablancas feels robotic, but I like that. I like that in this song because, whilst you can say it feels detached, it's welcome, it's not out of place because it keep the album moving at a good pace, not to say it's a filler because it isn't. The song is good in its own right, I just feel it doesn't hold up to the songs that came before, and that's the album's flaw. Some songs are just so good, the album can't keep it up for it's long length of well over an hour.
"Lose Yourself to Dance" follows and I can't just feel disappointed with this song. It's definitely one of the weaker ones on the album because of Pharell's singing. His voice, in the higher regions doesn't sit comfortably, whereas he does a better job on "Get Lucky" which is a song that has mid-range vocals, and I think he does that well. Overall the song, apart from the vocoder parts which I like, the song, just feels there. It's just there and I can't place it properly, it feels too much like a combination of other songs on the album, I'm sure people like it, the song just doesn't want to make me dance so to speak,
"Touch" is another epic song on the album, a sound that Daft Punk have really done well on this album, creating long Progressive Rock type songs on an album with so much Funk and Disco elements and I'm glad to see this. The song starts with a very futuristic sound, a sound which is almost the semantic field of the album, but Daft Punk, taking that Moroder influence, can be said to have always had that futuristic feel to them.
And then we have "Get Lucky". In comparison to the rest of the album, whilst having and insanely catchy hook and chorus, is actually one the weaker songs on the album. I feel it get's a bit repetitive over six minuets, yet I prefer it to the Radio Edit because there is more to it, so maybe they could have gone halfway between the song mixes.
"Beyond" is enjoyable but just sits there, I still think it deserves to be on the album though, as well as "Motherboard" which is completely instrumental and takes you back to Discovery. Whilst it feels slightly disjointed I still think it flows well, although, whilst I do love the song, I wish that the track has electronic drums on it because I just feel that it would have given the song more substance because they actually seem a bit weak to me on this song.
"Fragments of Time" is by far the weakest song. I just don't like it too much, it feels too cheesy, too much. Now, "Doin' it Right" took me some time to like. At first I thought R.A.M fell apart at the end, but it doesn't. "Doin' it Right" featuring Panda Bear on vocals is so catchy. The vocals don't deter from the song but they add to the song, they make it even better. It works really well together and Daft Punk have just added another strong song to the collection. I also feel that the song is, dynamically, far from the 70's veering more towards the 80's and electronic music from era's after, and I think that might be because of Panda Bear's vocals. I even get slight Homework vibes, it's great.
And then, we reach "Contact". This, is how you close an album. It's just so good. It's a six minute crescendo. It just builds and builds and it screeches and the drums are rolling and it's electronic chaos. I can really see this to become a closer for future live sets.
Overall, Daft Punk have taken a risk, and it worked. It may have it's flaws, it could do with being shorter, maybe ten, eleven songs instead of thirteen, but I'll make do with I've got because I love this album. I think this album will be listened to and appreciated even more by this generation for years to come, and then the next generation will discover it. I think our love will continue to grow for it, it has that potential because they haven't done anything revolutionary. What Daft Punk have done, is an homage to music of old, and they have done it masterly, but they have still kept it current.
…I love my husband - but respect him? Don't make me laugh!
Novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford said the key to marriage was admiring your husband. What tosh, says KATIE HOPKINS
Across the dinner table, I could hear my husband waxing lyrical to his neighbour about the fantastic game of tennis he’d enjoyed that morning. On and on he talked about volleys and drop shots, his commentary droning on and on, until finally I could bear it no longer.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, can’t you stop going on about that hideously boring game?’ I asked. ‘It’s bad enough that you have to play it. Only dogs should be interested in ball games’.
As I glanced around the room, I could see my fellow guests gaping at me. The look on their faces was all too obvious: how on earth could I be so rude to my husband?
A little disrespect: Katie and her husband Mark, who she said she'll never put on a pedestal
But Mark just smiled. We’ve been married for three years and he’s used to me by now. But the truth is that, although I love Mark to bits, and we have a wonderful life with our children — India, eight, Poppy, seven, and Max, four — I don’t respect him. And he knows it.
As far as I’m concerned, every one of his views — from his wishy-washy leftie politics to his hopeless timekeeping — is either plain wrong or intensely irritating. And I have absolutely no hesitation in telling him so.
So you can imagine how horrified I was to read, in these pages last week, the author Barbara Taylor Bradford writing that the secret to a happy marriage is respecting your husband.
'Mark has stubble and wears an earring. I think his style shows a lack of good taste and standards'
Barbara, 78, says she is appalled by couples who row in public. ‘When I open my mouth to say something, I edit my answer before it leaves my lips,’ she trills. Her husband Bob is a terrible time-keeper and often wears clothes she loathes. But does she criticise him? No. She believes that would be showing a lack of respect. Instead, she suggests, we should all bite our tongues and put our husbands on a pedestal.
Well, balloons to that! Why on earth would I want to put my husband on a pedestal when I simply don’t respect him — and, indeed, disagree with virtually every word that comes out of his mouth?
To a certain extent, I believe the reasons I feel this way towards Mark stem from our very different backgrounds.
Brought up in Devon, I come from the quintessential Tory countryside milieu of hunting, shooting and fishing.
Different backgrounds: The former Apprentice star thinks her husband's cockney accent is 'uncouth'
I went to a private all girls’ convent school and was sponsored through Exeter University by the army.
I got a job with the Intelligence Corps on graduation and trained at Sandhurst military academy.
In contrast, Mark was brought up in East London where he attended bog-standard state schools. I never once envisaged myself marrying someone with a cockney accent, and must admit that I hate it.
When he talks to his friends from home, his London accent becomes even stronger and much harder to understand.
At 49, he still revels in Cockney rhyming slang and uses hideous phrases like: ‘let’s have a butcher’s’ — meaning ‘let’s take a look’ — which drive me mad. It’s so uncouth. I fight it — but when he speaks like this, I wonder how on earth we’ve ended up together.
For although Mark is at least as bright as me and has a masters degree, to listen to his accent you would think he worked as a market trader, not the City trader I envisaged marrying.
And if he’s talking like a barrow boy, how can I respect what he’s trying to tell me?
It’s not just his accent. Before working with leading advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi, Mark dreamt of being a footballer — he actually played for Tring. I don’t even know where that is and have never bothered to find out. Football is the most pointless sport — to me, all football fans are idiots.
Whenever Mark mentions to people that he was a semi-professional footballer, it sets my teeth on edge. ‘How could you bear to spend any time with those people?’ I sigh. ‘Don’t you know that all footballers are thick and stupid?’
Indeed, if you were to look at us both, you certainly wouldn’t have put us together. I love to wear smart business clothes from Jaeger or Hobbs. Think of a modern day Margaret Thatcher and that’s me. Mark, in contrast, has stubble and wears an earring. I think his style shows a lack of good taste and standards. How can I respect that?
It is true, though, that I was first attracted to Mark because he was so different to my first husband, who left me for another woman.
Damian, my ex, was the chief executive officer of a big company, a typical Alpha Male. He had a huge handshake and commanded every room he stepped into. Mark, who I met three years after our split, is quiet, unassuming and humble; he could not be more different.
When I met him at Devon’s Met Office where we were both working, some seven years ago, I was attracted to his kindness and his gentle nature.
Who knew? Opposites don’t attract. We’re twice as likely to be attracted to someone when we agree on six out of ten issues, than if we only agree on three
I also admired his creative streak — while I was a commercial director there, he was a creative director. In addition, he’s unassuming and unflappable. And I adore him for this.
But, however much I love him, I simply can’t respect him. Not only are his hobbies, accent and dress uncouth and immature, his political views are those of Neil Kinnock in the Seventies.
I’m a total capitalist. I believe fundamentally in a world where the brightest get pushed to do even better. For Mark, the priority is ensuring that everyone is happy.
He disapproves of encouraging excessive achievement because he thinks it’s unfair to children who aren’t from middle-class families. He doesn’t see that this sort of egalitarian nonsense will just lead to lower standards. His politics are, quite frankly, better suited to socialist France.
For someone with such emotional intelligence, it astounds me that he doesn’t see that a fierce aspiration is the only way to make it to the top.
Education debate: Katie said her biggest arguments with Mark are over whether their children will go to private school
Our biggest rows, though, are about the children’s education. I attended private school and want our children to do the same. Mark, being a state-educated leftie, doesn’t see the point. I despise his attitude, which is that happiness is more important than qualifications. I think it’s very telling that if the children want something really useful — like help with their homework — they come to me.
Meanwhile, they’ll go to Mark for finger-painting and climbing trees.
I do know, however, that I will never change him. Probably the only quality we have in common is that we are both phenomenally stubborn.
Women of Barbara Taylor Bradford’s generation were brought up to tiptoe around their husbands, bite their tongues and keep the peace. I can’t think of anything mor e demeaning.
I am also convinced that — far from being the way to a happy marriage — putting your husband on a pedestal is unhealthy, and treating every one of his utterances like part of the Sermon on the Mount can only end in tears.
I suspect a reason behind the recent rise in women getting divorced in their 60s is because they’re sick of feigning respect for their husband’s stupid views.
Married for 50 years: Author Barbara Taylor Bradford said the secret to a happy marriage is respecting your husband
Friends of mine have tut-tutted: ‘Mark’s so nice, how can you be so rude to him?’
How hypocritical. Hardly any of them truly respect their husbands — and I know they all moan about them, too. The only difference is that they do it behind their backs while I do it directly. Personally, I think they’re much more disloyal.
Pretending that I respect Mark would make for a quieter life. But it wouldn’t make me happy. And what’s the point in being married if you’re not happy?Britain's reputation for "libel tourism" is driving American and foreign publishers to consider abandoning the sale of newspaper and magazines in Britain and may lead to them blocking access to websites, MPs have been warned.
Publishers, human rights groups and campaigners have expressed "substantial and increasing concern" because comments that would be protected under the freedom of speech in the US constitution are actionable in London courts once published here, no matter how small the readership.
A memorandum submitted to a Commons select committee, ahead of a meeting with US publishers, states: "Leading US newspapers are actively considering abandoning the supply of the 200-odd copies they make available for sale in London – mainly to Americans who want full details of their local news and sport. They do not make profits out of these minimal and casual sales and they can no longer risk losing millions of dollars in a libel action which they would never face under US law. Does the UK really want to be seen as the only country in Europe – indeed in the world – where important US papers cannot be obtained in print form?"
The submission, on behalf of a number of US media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and MacMillan (US), as well as Human Rights Watch, Global Witness US and Greenpeace International, added: "The consequences of making media organisations liable for putting articles – perfectly lawful by the law of their own domicile – on websites which are occasionally accessed in England should be obvious. The cost of fighting libel actions may lead internet publishers to build 'fire walls' against access from the UK, in order to avoid such actions."Watch the Kickstarter campaign video to produce a documentary unmasking Florida's very creepy "Wrinkles the Clown." (Anomalous Films)
He lingers on street corners, wanders local fairs and materializes outside of children’s bedroom windows.
Those are some of the reasons that the creepy clown known as “Wrinkles” has been the talk of Naples, Fla., for the past few years.
But beyond his unsettling stoicism and willingness to punish naughty kids for cash, the 65-year-old Rhode Island transplant remains shrouded in mystery.
Some documentary filmmakers hope to change all that by revealing the man behind the terrifying mask.
“Wrinkles has agreed to let Anomalous Films follow him and document his life on and off the clock,” they wrote on Kickstarter, where they’re attempting to raise $45,000 to fund the film. “This means we will get to see first hand how Wrinkles lives and works in and out of the mask.”
[This creepy 65-year-old clown will terrify your misbehaving kid for cash]
Wrinkles confirmed his participation in the production via text.
“They are gonna make a movie about me,” he wrote to The Washington Post. “Yes, they are going to follow me around with a camera.”
“Wrinkles” the clown has become a viral sensation. Soon, he may be the star of a documentary film, too. (Courtesy of WXII 12)
Although Wrinkles remains anonymous, he’s an unmistakable presence in southwest Florida, where locals track and publicize sightings of the clown on social media. In addition to wearing a sunken-eyed mask, he favors a polka dot onesie and black rubber gloves, and he’s rarely seen without a bundle of colorful balloons in one hand.
For a few hundred bucks, he told The Post in November, he’ll make an appearance at your party or gathering, prank your friend, or even scare your misbehaving kid straight. But attempting to hire him for a party or personal pleasure means adding your name to a waiting list several months long, he boasted.
Wrinkles, who speaks with a heavy New England accent, told The Post that he’s a divorced military veteran who worked various jobs throughout his career. After retiring a few years back, he moved to Florida to escape the cold New England winters and settle into a more relaxed lifestyle.
Not long after he arrived, he said, he began putting on a clown suit as a way to escape.
“It’s fun,” he told The Post. “You get to be someone else. You get some people who are petrified and some people who want you to come home with them.”
[This barber will publicly shame your misbehaving kid with an old man’s haircut]
Since his story began to spread Wrinkles has been featured in numerous media outlets. He has appeared on NPR’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me” and been impersonated by Jimmy Fallon.
The filmmakers say they’re not sure what to expect when they begin documenting the clown’s existence, but they plan to get “up close and personal.”
“Wrinkles will be wrinkles, we’ll just be there to capture it,” they write on Kickstarter.
In addition to spotlighting Wrinkles himself, the filmmakers say they want to explore coulrophobia (the fear of clowns) and figure out why some parents “are taking advantage of these fears and using them against their children.”
So, I've been talking to Wrinkles for the past month about doing a doc. I think he's gonna do it, fingers crossed! pic.twitter.com/hWwrDl6xSF — HvUSeen Wrinkles? (@spotwrinkles) December 22, 2015
Asked whether he was going to reveal his true identity on camera, Wrinkles sidestepped the question.
“Well, you’ll get to see my face in the film,” he texted. “Hope you don’t drop dead when you see how handsome I am.”
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Mother shaved misbehaving son’s head, paraded him around Wal-Mart in a tutuTehran, Iran, May 25
By Milad Fashtami - Trend:
Iran is ready to supply Nigeria with its experience in fighting terrorism to secure the release of over 200 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram militants.
Hossein Amir Abdollahian told Iran's Press TV that Tehran condemns the abduction of schoolgirls by terrorist groups in Nigeria.
"Given our experience in combating terrorism in our country, we are ready to supply the Nigerian officials with necessary consultation in this regard," Iran's deputy foreign minister explained.
"We share security concerns with Africa," he said.
"Nigeria, itself, has already taken serious measures to tackle the crisis," he added.
Back in April, Boko Haram Takfiri militants kidnapped more than 200 girls from a school in northeastern Nigeria.
Follow Trend on Telegram. Only most interesting and important newsFor the 1876 hurricane with a similar name, see 1876 San Felipe hurricane
The Okeechobee hurricane of 1928, also known as the San Felipe Segundo hurricane, was one of the deadliest hurricanes in the recorded history of the North Atlantic basin; it was the fourth tropical cyclone, third hurricane, and only major hurricane of that year's season. It developed off the west coast of Africa on September 6 as a tropical depression, but it strengthened into a tropical storm later that day, shortly before passing south of the Cape Verde islands. Further intensification was slow and halted late on September 7. About 48 hours later, the storm strengthened and became a Category 1 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale. Still moving westward, the system reached Category 4 intensity before striking Guadeloupe on September 12, where it brought great destruction and resulted in 1,200 deaths. The islands of Martinique, Montserrat, and Nevis also reported damage and fatalities, but not nearly so severe as in Guadeloupe.
Around midday on September 13, the storm strengthened into a Category 5 hurricane and peaked with sustained winds of 160 mph (257 km/h). About six hours later, the system made landfall in Puerto Rico; it remained the only recorded Category 5 hurricane to strike the island until Hurricane Maria in 2017. Very strong winds resulted in severe damage in Puerto Rico; 24,728 homes were destroyed and 192,444 were damaged throughout the island, leaving over 500,000 people homeless. Heavy rainfall also led to extreme damage to vegetation and agriculture. On Puerto Rico alone, there were 312 deaths and about $50 million USD ($730 million today) in damage. While crossing the island and emerging into the Atlantic, the storm weakened slightly, falling to Category 4 intensity. It began crossing through the Bahamas on September 16, where it resulted in 18 fatalities.
The storm made landfall near West Palm Beach, Florida early on September 17, with winds of 145 mph (233 km/h). In the city, more than 1,711 homes were destroyed; the effects were most severe around Lake Okeechobee. The storm surge caused water to pour out of the southern edge of the lake, flooding hundreds of square miles to depths as great as 20 feet (6.1 m). Numerous houses and buildings were swept away in the cities of Belle Glade, Canal Point, Chosen, Pahokee, and South Bay, Florida. At least 2,500 people drowned, while damage was estimated at $25 million. The system weakened significantly while crossing Florida, falling to Category 1 intensity late on September 17. It curved north-northeast and briefly emerged into the Atlantic on September 18, but soon made another landfall near Edisto Island, South Carolina with winds of 85 mph (137 km/h). Early on the following day, the system weakened to a tropical storm and became an extratropical cyclone over North Carolina hours later. Overall, it caused $100 million in damage and at least 4,112 deaths.
Meteorological history [ edit ]
Map plotting the track and the intensity of the storm, according to the Saffir–Simpson scale
On September 6, ships reported a tropical depression developing just off the west coast of Africa near Dakar, Senegal. On the next day, a ship reported winds of 60 mph (97 km/h), or tropical storm status; on this basis, the Atlantic hurricane reanalysis project estimated that the system attained tropical storm status late on September 6. However, lack of observations for several days prevented the system from being classified in real time as it moved generally westward across the Atlantic Ocean.[1] On September 10, the S.S. Commack first observed the storm about 900 mi (1,450 km) to the east of Guadeloupe, which at the time was the most easterly report of a tropical cyclone ever received through ship's radio. Later that day, two other ships confirmed the intensity of the storm,[2] and the Hurricane Research Division estimated it strengthened into a hurricane at 18:00 UTC on September 10.[1]
As the storm neared the Lesser Antilles, it continued to intensify.[3] Between 17:30 and 18:30 UTC on September 12, the hurricane's eye moved over Guadeloupe with a barometric pressure of 937 mbar (27.7 inHg), suggesting maximum sustained winds of 140 mph (230 km/h), or Category 4 intensity on the Saffir–Simpson scale.[1] Continuing to the west-northwest, the hurricane passed about 10 mi (16 km) south of Saint Croix before approaching Puerto Rico. On September 13, the 15 mi (24 km) eye crossed Puerto Rico in eight hours from the southeast to the northwest, moving ashore near Guayama and exiting between Aguadilla and Isabela.[4] A ship near the southern coast reported a pressure of 931 mbar (27.5 inHg), and the cup anemometer at San Juan reported sustained winds of 160 mph (257 km/h) before failing.[1] As the wind station was 30 mi (48 km) north of the storm's center, winds near the landfall point were unofficially estimated as high as 200 mph (320 km/h).[2] On this basis, the hurricane is believed to have made landfall in Puerto Rico as a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, although there was uncertainty in the peak intensity, due to the large size and slow movement of the storm.[1]
After emerging from Puerto Rico, the hurricane had weakened to winds of about 140 mph (230 km/h), based on a pressure reading of 941 mbar (27.8 inHg) at Isabela. The storm brushed the northern coast of Hispaniola while moving west-northwestward, gradually restrengthening. On September 15, it passed within 35 mi (56 km) of Grand Turk, by which time the winds increased to 155 mph (249 km/h). The storm continued through the Bahamas as a strong Category 4 hurricane, passing near Nassau at 10:00 UTC on September 16.[1] Initially, Richard Gray of the U.S. Weather Bureau was optimistic that the storm would spare South Florida.[5] However, at 00:00 UTC on September 17, the large hurricane made landfall in southeastern Florida near West Palm Beach, with estimated winds of 145 mph (233 km/h). This was based on a pressure reading of 929 mbar (27.4 inHg) in the city,[1] which at the time was the lowest pressure reading in the mainland United States; this broke the previous record of 935 mbar (27.6 inHg) set during the 1926 Miami hurricane. Peak gusts were estimated near 160 mph (260 km/h) at Canal Point.[2]
The hurricane quickly weakened as it progressed inland and moved over Lake Okeechobee, although its large size enabled it to maintain hurricane status for several more days. Late on September 17, the hurricane recurved to the northeast and passed near Jacksonville early the next day with winds of 75 mph (121 km/h). At 08:00 UTC on September 18, the storm again reached open waters. Later that day, the hurricane restrengthened slightly over open waters, making a second United States landfall near Edisto Island, South Carolina, at 19:00 UTC with winds of 85 mph (137 km/h). Accelerating northeastward, the system quickly weakened into a tropical storm over North Carolina. On September 19, the storm evolved into an extratropical cyclone, although it restrengthened slightly to hurricane status. The cyclone turned to the north-northwest, moving quickly through the eastern United States.[1] On September 21, the former hurricane dissipated over Ontario,[1] having merged with another disturbance.[2]
Effects [ edit ]
Leeward Islands [ edit ]
The hurricane moved directly over the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean Sea, strengthening as it did so. On the island of Dominica, winds were clocked at 24 mph (39 km/h); there were no reports of damage,[2] though one fatality occurred.[6] In Martinique, further south of the storm's path, there were three fatalities. Guadeloupe received a direct hit from the storm, apparently with little warning; the death toll there was 1,200,[9] and damage reports relayed through Paris indicated "great destruction" on the island.[2] About three-fourths of the island's residents were left homeless. In the community of Saint-François, the only structure to remain standing was the police station, which was built with reinforced concrete. To the east of the town, the merchant ship Albatros sank; it had been carrying 80 casks of rum. The crew and the five men attempting to save the ship drowned.[6] Approximately 85%–95% of banana crops were destroyed, 70%–80% of tree crops suffered severe damage, and 40% of the sugar cane crop was ruined. The people struggled to survive both in the short and longer term after the storm.[10]
Montserrat, just north of the storm's center, was warned in advance of the storm but still suffered £150,000 (1928 UKP) in damages and 42 deaths; Plymouth and Salem were devastated, and crop losses caused near-starvation conditions before relief could arrive.[7] All commercial and government buildings on the island were destroyed, as were more than 600 homes. Saint Kitts and Nevis also suffered heavily. On the island of St. Kitts, a number of homes built on wooden foundations were demolished. Nine deaths were reported, six of which occurred in a schoolhouse collapse. Thirteen people were killed on the island of Nevis.[6]
The storm destroyed hundreds of home on Antigua, including a doctor's home and a "poor house". Government offices, hospitals, and school were also damaged. On Saint Croix, nearly all of the island's 11,000 residents suffered some degree of loss. A total of 143 buildings were destroyed, including a sugar mill. The storm resulted in nine deaths on the island. Throughout the Virgin Islands, as many as 700,000 people were rendered homeless.[6 |
and took two more photos of the object.
It was reported the object rotated to project its “tentacles” downward and landed. The witnesses said a bridge with two children on it could be seen behind the landed object, and one of the children began running to the site. That’s when the witnesses took off.
The investigator interviewed the four and found them to be serious people with zero interest in the UFO topic. Film negatives were examined by Roberto Padilla, Special Services Director for Kodak of Mexico and it was determined that a real object was photographed with no evidence of faking or fraud.
Popular Posts:Nokia has filed its amicus brief yesterday in court in order to support Apple in the ongoing patent case between Apple ans Samsung. Nokia is supporting Apple’s argument that U.S. patent holders have access to injunctive relief even if a defendant can argue that the accused products potentially implement (or infringe) vast numbers of patents.
Here is the part of the Nokia’s brief submitted to the court,
DESIRABILITY OF AMICUS BRIEF The district court’s ruling that in order to obtain a permanent injunction against an infringing competitor, a patent holder must also establish a “causal nexus” between the patented feature and the source of demand for the infringing product could cause wide-ranging damage to the United States patent protection landscape. By creating such a rule, the district court has diverged from the precedent of this court and could severely restrict, if not outright eliminate in some circumstances, the ability of a patent holder to obtain injunctive relief. Amici urge this court to reverse the district court’s order denying permanent injunctive relief, because the new “causal nexus” requirement set forth therein sets a dangerous precedent. This Court has previously determined that while the Supreme Court’s decision in eBay v. MercExchange, L.L.C., 547 U.S. 388, 393 (2006) eliminated any presumption that the holder of an infringed patent is automatically entitled to a permanent injunction, that decision was in no way intended to eliminate the availability of injunctive relief altogether. See Robert Bosch LLC v. Pylon Mfg. Corp., 659 F.3d 1142, 1149 (Fed. Cir. 2011). The “causal nexus” requirement as applied by the district court here, making the evidentiary standard for obtaining a permanent injunction so burdensome and strict that it may rarely, if ever, be met, will essentially lead to a compulsory-licensing system wherein patent holders are forced to license patented technology to competing firms, which could in turn harm incentives to innovate.
Read about it in detail from the link below.
Source: FOSS PatentsJules Verne imagined this limitless power source in Victorian times – now 21st-century engineers say heat trapped in the oceans could provide electricity for the world
Marc Pagani/Getty
IF ANY energy source is worthy of the name “steampunk”, it is surely ocean thermal energy conversion. Victorian-era science fiction? Check: Jules Verne mused about its potential in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870. Mechanical, vaguely 19th-century technology? Check. Compelling candidate for renewable energy in a post-apocalyptic future? Tick that box as well.
Claims for it have certainly been grandiose. In theory, ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) could provide 4000 times the world’s energy needs in any given year, with neither pollution nor greenhouse gases to show for it. In the real world, however, it has long been written off as impractical.
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This year, a surprising number of projects are getting under way around the world, helmed not by quixotic visionaries but by hard-nosed pragmatists such as those at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. So what’s changed?
“Jules Verne mused about getting energy from stored heat in the ocean in 1870”
It’s possible that Verne dreamed up the idea for OTEC to help out Captain Nemo, the protagonist of Verne’s deep-sea yarn who needed electricity to power his submarine, the Nautilus – it is the first written mention of the idea. “By establishing a circuit between two wires plunged to different depths, [it should be possible] to obtain electricity by the difference of temperature to which they would have been exposed,” Nemo told his shipmate. Eleven years after the book was published, French physicist Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval proposed the first practical design for a power plant that does exactly that. Instead of using wires, he used pipes to exploit the temperature difference …Haiti Rocked By Magnitude 7 Earthquake Near Capital; Catastrophe Feared
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The U.S. Geological Survey is reporting a magnitude 7 earthquake near Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince.
The U.S. places the epicenter 10 miles southwest of the capital. Unfortunately, the earthquake was relatively shallow at about 6.2 miles below the earth's surface. Generally. the shallower the earthquake, the worse the shaking and damage it causes.
A tsunami warning has been issued with other Caribbean islands being told they could be in the path. Haiti, the Dominican Republic which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, Cuba and the Bahamas have been warned.
There are reports that a hospital has collapsed.
Haiti is the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation and does not have the search and rescue resources to deal with a disaster of this magnitude.
We'll be updating this story through the evening. Be sure to hit your "refresh" button so that you'll see our latest updates.
Update: 5:43 pm ET — Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, has told CNN that he spoke with a friend in Petionville, a suburb of Port Au Prince, the capital, and his friend reports many collapsed homes and buildings. Joseph is clearly shaken and says that he had feared that because of the type of flimsy construction, houses built on the sides of hills "it was a catastrophe waiting to happen."
Meanwhile, the USGS has reported that two aftershocks of magnitude 5.5 and 5.9 which would add to this disaster's destructive power.
Update at 5:54 pm ET -- Frank Williams, national director for the aid organization World Vision, is also talking with CNN. He is in Petionville, a Port Au Prince suburb and reports that walls of buildings have fallen into the streets making them impassable for his staff as they tried to leave their headquarters for other parts of the area. He reports a lot of people wailing in the streets. He also said a worker at the presidential palace reports damage to that building. It's getting dark in Haiti and he said he's worried about the possibility of looting, "opportunists" as he called them.
Update at 6:15 pm ET -- An Associated Press story has eyewitness details. Here's an excerpt:
An Associated Press videographer saw the wrecked hospital in Petionville, near Port-au-Prince, and a U.S. government official reported seeing houses that had tumbled into a ravine.
No further details on any casualties or other damage were immediately available.
Don Blakeman, an analyst at the USGS in Golden, Colorado, said such a strong quake carried the potential for widespread damage.
"I think we are going to see substantial damage and casualties," he said.
Blakeman said Haiti had already been hit by many aftershocks, the two largest registering magnitude 5.9 and 5.5.
"We expect more aftershocks because this is a large, shallow earthquake," he said.
The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares a border with Haiti on the island of Hispaniola. Some panicked residents in the capital of Santo Domingo fled from their shaking homes.
Another USGS analyst, Dale Grant, said this was "the largest quake recorded in this area." He said the last strong quake was a magnitude-6.7 temblor in 1984.
"Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture visiting Haiti."The sky is just gray with dust."
Bahn said he was walking to his hotel room when the ground began to shake.
"I just held on and bounced across the wall," he said. "I just hear a tremendous amount of noise and shouting and screaming in the distance."
Bahn said there were rocks strewn all over the place and he saw a ravine where several homes had been built. "It's just full of collapsed walls and rubble and barbed wire," he said.
Update at 6:21 pm ET -- The CIA World Factbook has good background information on Haiti. The national population is about 9 million people. Port-Au-Prince has about 2 million people and because the earthquake was near the heart of the metropolitan area and the inferior construction of much of the housing, the fear is that there will be very significant casualties.
Dr. David Wald is telling CNN that the concern is about shaking and less tsunami since this was a "strike slip" type of earthquake and not an "uplift" earthquake.
Update at 6:29 pm ET -- President Barack Obama has issued a statement:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_____________________________
For Immediate Release January 12, 2010
Statement by the President on the Earthquake in Haiti
"My thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been affected by this earthquake. We are closely monitoring the situation and we stand ready to assist the people of Haiti."
Background information: The President was informed of the earthquake at 5:52pm. The President asked his staff to make sure that embassy personnel are safe, and to begin preparations in the event that humanitarian assistance is needed. The Department of State, USAID and the United States Southern Command have begun working to coordinate an assessment and any such assistance.
###
Update 6:44 pm ET -- Ian Rodgers of Save the Children told CNN that electrical power is off. He said his organization's compound is damaged and that it's one of the better built. Water is in STS offices so Rodgers and his people can't go in because of fears of safety hazards caused by water and downed electrical cables. As we heard from another manager of a charitable organization, workers are unable to get to their homes because the streets are blocked with rubble.
He also expressed concerns that rescues will be hampered by the darkness and the poor security situation, raising the possibility that unknown numbers of people could be trapped by damaged and destroyed buildings until daylight.
Update at 6:50 pm ET -- Miami has one of the largest Haitian populations in the U.S. So the Miami Herald can be expected to cover this disaster closely. Here's an excerpt from some of its early reporting:
But there were growing reports of mass destruction — a hospital is believed to have collapsed, along with a section of the National Palace. Haitian President Rene Preval is said to be seeking safe haven on the island, The Miami Herald has learned.
Part of the road to Canape Vert has collapsed, as have housesin the mountains of Petionville, where the quake was centered. Petionville is a suburb some 10 miles from Port-au-Prince, the capital...
...Haitian businessman Georges Sassine, who was in Washington, D.C., on his way back to the island nation, told The Herald he spoke to his wife minutes after the quake.
"She said, suddenly her car started shaking, and she saw houses crumbling and she could not understand what was happening. And finally she understood," he said.
He also spoke to Antwan Edmund, former head of the Caribbean-Central American Action. He told him "he was sitting in Port-au-Prince watching the mountain crumble."
The quake rattled the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, just after 5 p.m. where there was no immediate report of damage or injury.
"It felt like when a building shakes when a subway goes by. But I know there's no subway here and the island's not moving," said Army Maj. Diana R. Haynie.
Updated at 7:04 pm ET -- The tsunami warning for the Caribbean was canceled by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center at 23:45 UTC which would have been 6:45 pm ET.
Updated at 7:15 pm ET — Mike Godfrey of USAID told CNN that when the earthquake occurred the shaking seemed to last for 15 seconds to 20 seconds though it seemed much longer to him. Things were coming off the wall of his apartment in Petionville, a Port-Au-Prince suburb. He made his way to the open courtyard and called for people in the building to join him where it was safe.
Godfrey also reported that a minute after the earthquake a giant dust cloud rose up over the city of Port-Au-Prince and hung their for 20 minutes. He said it was an "amazing" site.
He also reported that just before he got on the phone with CNN, he saw a large plane take off from the airport. That's significant since there was an American Airlines flight that was boarding just as the earthquake occurred. There is a flight from Haiti that is due to land in Miami at 8:42 PM ET.
Update 7:31 PM ET -- NPR's Greg Allen reports the following:
Worldvision said it's lost contact with its people on the ground in Haiti and is very concerned.
Update 7:44 pm ET -- The State Department has briefed reporters, telling them that the embassy in Port-Au-Prince survived the earthquake. But the deputy chief of mission reported back to the State Department that he saw destruction and casualties because he was on the streets after the earthquake. The embassy has been unable to reach Haitian officials.
Update at 8:10 p.m. ET For those looking for ways to help, among the international aid agencies that work in Haiti are:
-- World Vision.
-- Doctors Without Borders.
-- UNICEF.
-- The Red Cross.
-- CHF International.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has announced the U.S. government will provide assistance as quickly as possible.
Update at 8:21 p.m. ET: On CNN earlier, as Frank said, aid worker Ian Rodgers from Save the Children described the devastation he's seen. Here's a video clip:
Update at 8:30 p.m. ET: The Miami Herald reports that "the American Red Cross was poised to move aid from a warehouse in Panama — blankets, kitchen sets and water containers for about 5,000 families — as soon as a flight or means of delivery could be found, said Eric Porterfield in Washington D.C."
Meanwhile, the social media sites are all over the story, as you might imagine. "Haiti" is the No. 1 "trending topic" on Twitter. At Picfog, many photos said to have been taken in Haiti today are showing up — but beware, several have already been debunked because they're photos taken in other parts of the world after previous quakes.
Sticking with technology for a minute, Skype is turning out to be one of the more useful ways for the news media to get information about what's happening. CNN just wrapped up a Skype-enabled interview with an aid worker who's in Haiti (he's about 80 miles away from the epicenter, so didn't have too much direct knowledge of the damage, but could still relate some of what it was like to feel the shocks).
Update at 8:40 p.m. ET. Earlier this evening, Haiti's ambassador to the U.S., Raymond Joseph, spoke with All Things Considered's Robert Siegel. The ambassador said the reports he's getting warn of a "major catastrophe". Some houses, he said, have "collapsed like cardboard".
"Please come to Haiti," the ambassador asked of the U.S. and other nations that can help:
Update at 8:55 p.m. ET: Just before the connection was cut off, a man speaking via Skype with CNN (who said his home is just outside Port-au-Prince) described a body he said he'd seen. It was a woman who had been buried and "had blood coming out of her eyes, nose and ears," said the man, identified as Jonathan de la Durantaye.
A moment ago, NPR's Michele Kelemen forwarded us an e-mail from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which says it is "dispatching a Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) and has activated its partners, the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Team and the Los Angeles County Search and Rescue Team. The USAR teams will be composed of up to 72 personnel, 6 search and rescue canines and up to 48 tons of rescue equipment."
Update at 9:05 p.m. ET. Here's another way of looking at the quake — a "shakemap" produced by the U.S. Geological Survey. The red area is where the earthquake was most severe, and you can see how the shocks moved outward:
Update at 9:11 p.m. ET. An information line: NPR's Michele Kelemen tells us the State Department has set up a toll-free phone number "for Americans seeking information about family members in Haiti." It is: 1-888-407-4747.
Because communications into and out of Haiti are difficult at this time, though, State cautions that information may be limited for a while.
Update at 9:35 p.m. ET. This may complicate relief efforts:
The headquarters of the U.N. Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti sustained "serious damage" in Tuesday's earthquake and a large number of UN personnel in Haiti are unaccounted for, the U.N. peacekeeping chief said late Tuesday. Alain Le Roy says other U.N. installations in the Caribbean nation were also seriously damaged. (Associated Press.)
Update at 9:40 p.m. ET: NPR social media guru Andy Carvin has set up a Twitter list of a few selected feeds with information about what's happening.
Update at 9:55 p.m. ET: It looks like Richard Morse, a musician with some following for his work with the band RAM, is tweeting from his hotel in Haiti. "People in large numbers are singing prayers downtown" he wrote earlier.
Update at 10:15 p.m. ET. A sobering report from Reuters:
Major buildings like offices, hotels and shops in the Haitian capital collapsed in the massive earthquake, burying hundreds, possibly thousands of people beneath rubble, an aid worker with a U.S. charity said. "The whole city is in darkness, you have thousands of
people sitting in the streets, with nowhere to go," Rachmani Domersant, an operations manager with Food for the Poor, told Reuters.
Update at 10:20 p.m. ET. More information from the social media world:
-- This live UStream broadcast — mostly in French, but with some English translation in audio and an adjoining chat box — has been showing live conversations with a man in Haiti.
-- The creator of this Facebook page is trying to gather information about the locations of aid facilities in and around Port-au-Prince.
Update at 10:40 p.m. ET. CBSNewsOnline has taken some Reuters video to produce a short clip showing some of the aftermath. Advisory: Some parts of this may be disturbing to some:
Update at 10:45 p.m. ET. We're going to close up this post. The Two-Way's coverage of the crisis in Haiti will resume early Wednesday morning — and of course NPR.org and NPR's newscasts will stay on the story overnight.
As we wrap up for the night, here's the top of the latest AP story:
The largest earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years rocked the Caribbean nation Tuesday, collapsing a hospital and heavily damaging other buildings. U.S. officials reported bodies lying in the streets and an aid official described "total disaster and chaos."
Update at 7 a.m., Jan. 13: We've updated the grim news here.Marie Antoinette San Diego becomes an International Master at the East Asian Junior Chess Championship in Tagaytay City
Published 11:04 AM, June 06, 2017
MANILA, Philippines – Novendra Priasmoro of Indonesia won the East Asian Junior Chess Championship in Tagaytay City on Sunday, June 4, as the Philippines ended up with consolidation prizes with breakthrough performances from two players and a new Woman International Master in Marie Antoinette San Diego.
Priasmoro, shaking off an upset from 13-year-old Daniel Quizon in the eighth and penultimate round, defeated Kyz Llantada in the ninth and final round. He scored 7 points for a one-point winning margin against countryman Yoseph Taher, Cuizon, and Stephen Rome Pangilinan of the Philippines.
Pangilinan, a 16-year-old Philippine Science High School student, had a chance to tie Priasmoro at first place but his bid was spoiled by Paulo Bersamina, who was expected to contend for top prize but could not get going in this event.
San Diego salvaged Philippine chess' honor by tying for first with China's Cuo Ruotong in the girls division. Cuo and San Diego had 7.5 points each. San Diego became the country's newest Woman International Master, a rank which Cuo also obtained. Azman Hisham Nur Najiha finished third with 6 points.
By winning this tournament limited to players under 20 years old, Priasmoro also got a grandmaster norm. He needs two more norms to become a grandmaster.
Quizon, who hails from Dasmariñas, Cavite, shocked Priasmoro by confronting him in a tactical battle and the Indonesian lost his way against the fast-moving Filipino.
Cuo lost in the second round but then won 6 games and drew one game to keep pace with San Diego, who lost to the Chinese in the fifth round. – Rappler.comThe last known member of a rare tree frog species has died.
The male Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog was found dead in its enclosure at the Atlanta Botanical Garden during a routine daily inspection on Monday, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Staff had nicknamed the frog "Toughie," and the animal was estimated to be at least 12 years old.
But even a frog named "Toughie" couldn't tough it out alone. The only other Rabbs' frog known in captivity died at Zoo Atlanta in 2012, and that one was also a male.
Scientists didn't even know about the Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) until 2008, when Zoo Atlanta herpetology curator Joseph Mendelson first identified the new species.
A team of researchers from the zoo and Southern Illinois University had traveled to central Panama in 2005 to collect live animals in a race to beat a fungus that devastates amphibian populations to the region. When the team returned, Dr. Mendelson discovered the new species of frog among the new collection. He named the frog for conservationists George and Mary Rabb.
Subsequent field studies suggest the deadly chytrid fungus swept through Toughie's former home in central Panama, wiping out as much as 85 percent of all the amphibians in the region. In that area, the Rabbs' frog lived in a very small range, so it's presumed that the Rabbs' frogs are extinct in the wild, making Toughie the last of his kind.
"Science had a very short window to learn about the species in the wild before this disease struck the only known locality for the frog and the species vanished," Mary Pat Matheson, the garden’s president and CEO, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The staff at the Garden tried to save the species, and had successfully bred the male with a female, she added. But the tadpoles did not survive.
Still, Toughie has left his mark on the world.
This frog's image was projected onto St. Peter's Basilica, his call was played for the world to hear him, and he met race car drivers and movie directors, National Geographic reports. Toughie even has his own Wikipedia page.
"A lot of people were moved to tears when they saw him," photographer Joel Sartore told National Geographic. "When you have the very last of something it's a special deal."
Although the frog had quite the following, his own voice wasn't heard by the world until 2014. Then, Mark Mandica, the head of the Amphibian Foundation who worked with Toughie for seven years, recorded the Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog's call one morning.
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"I heard this weird call coming out of the frog [area], and I knew it had to be him, because I knew what all the other species sounded like," he told National Geographic. "I was able to sneak in and record him on my phone."
This report contains material from the Associated Press.About
Drug cartel conflicts in border towns like Tijuana have taken their toll. Nowhere is this more obvious than in area orphanages, many of which are stretched beyond their capacity as more and more children find themselves without a home.
Thousands of children in Tijuana live in extreme poverty. Fortunately some of their lives are made better by the amazing people I met there.
This August, Zucchero, a gallery in Mexico City, will host a month-long exhibition of my work with Baja California orphanages.
I hope that this exhibition will help to raise awareness and show people in Mexico City the urgency of the issue. It will also serve as a springboard as I continue my exploration of the lives of children in the wake of the border cartel wars, and make possible future exhibitions and publishing opportunities.
For a deeper look at this and other work, please visit my website http://shotbyandrew.com
ドラグ戦争の一番の犠牲者は孤児院の子供達で、孤児院に収容できない子供達には住む場所がありません。何千人もの子供達が最悪の貧困状態にありますがティファナの孤児院と共同で写真展を開いて救いの手をさしのべてます。
この展示会を通してこの問題の重大性をメキシコシティーの人たちに広める機会になることを望んでいます。On Thursday, Mr. Icahn, now ImClone’s chairman, received a $4.5 billion takeover offer for the company from the drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb. Bristol, which already owns 17 percent of ImClone, offered to buy the rest for $60 a share — almost precisely the price at which Ms. Stewart sold her shares way back when, after apparently learning that her friend, Samuel Waksal, and his family were dumping theirs.
But investors on Thursday, betting that Bristol-Myers or another buyer would end up raising that offer, bid ImClone’s shares higher. They rose $17.49, or 38 percent, to close at $63.93.
Neither Mr. Icahn nor ImClone would comment on Thursday, beyond saying the company had received the Bristol-Myers offer and would study it.
To ImClone supporters, that offer is a validation of the company’s cancer drug, Erbitux, whose potential they say had been obscured during the height of the stock trading scandal.
“It is a great vindication of the great company that Sam and I put together,” said Harlan W. Waksal, who helped his brother start and run ImClone. He said the proposed deal showed that the company “has the value we always thought it would have at the end of the day.”
The events began in 2001. As part of a deal announced that September, Samuel Waksal and Harlan Waksal, ImClone’s chief operating officer, sold $111 million in company stock to Bristol-Myers, which was buying a stake in the company and rights to Erbitux, which was then a promising experimental drug. In early December, Harlan Waksal sold an additional $50 million in ImClone shares.
Later that month, as ImClone was awaiting word on its application for federal approval of Erbitux, Samuel Waksal was vacationing in the Caribbean. Harlan Waksal called to say the Food and Drug Administration was about to reject the Erbitux application.
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Correctly assuming that the news would send ImClone’s stock plunging, Samuel Waksal tried to sell some of his own shares and tipped off his father, Jack, and his daughter, Aliza. The father and daughter were not indicted, as a result of a plea bargain by Samuel Waksal.
Ms. Stewart, a good friend of Samuel Waksal — he had once dated her daughter, Alexis — also sold her nearly 4,000 ImClone shares at about $60 each. Prosecutors said that her broker, who was also Samuel Waksal’s broker, had told her that the Waksals were selling their shares.
Both Ms. Stewart and the broker, Peter E. Bacanovic, were convicted of obstructing the investigation into her stock sale, and both served time in prison.
But even so, work continued on Erbitux, which eventually won F.D.A. approval in 2004. It had sales last year of $1.3 billion.
Bristol-Myers helps ImClone sell the drug in the United States and Canada while Merck of Germany sells it in Europe.
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Erbitux is now approved as a treatment for head and neck cancer and as a last-ditch treatment for colorectal cancer. But ImClone and Bristol hope to win approval to sell the drug for lung cancer and as an earlier treatment for colorectal cancer.
“There’s a lot of history there,” Michael King, a biotechnology analyst at Rodman & Renshaw. “But you’ve got to put that aside and realize this is a really good product.”
He said that based on Erbitux alone, not counting other cancer drugs it is trying to develop, ImClone would be worth $70 a share to Bristol-Myers.
It is Mr. Icahn, another friend of Sam Waksal, who helped ImClone realize that value and who stands to profit handsomely from an acquisition.
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Mr. Icahn took control of ImClone’s board of directors following a proxy fight in October 2006. He had complained that the previous board and management had not been aggressive enough in trying to test Erbitux for use against different types of cancer.
Mr. Icahn said at the time that he had accumulated most of his 14 percent stake in ImClone for less than $20 a share, though regulatory filings suggest he paid more than $30 a share on average. He vetoed an offer to buy ImClone made by a large pharmaceutical company for $36 a share, saying the price was too low.
Mr. Icahn now owns about 11.7 million shares, or about 13.5 percent of the company, according to the most recent available public records.
If Mr. Icahn sells ImClone for about two or three times what he paid for the shares, it will not be the first time he has profited from his involvement in the company.
Mr. Icahn has said he first was enticed into investing in ImClone in the mid 1990s “over drinks and tennis” with Samuel Waksal at a time when ImClone was struggling to stay alive. Mr. Icahn has said he bought 2 million shares at $2 each, then later sold them when they rose as high as $130 before a split.
He has said he was out of the stock before the crash that occurred after the initial F.D.A. setback — the shares went as low as $5.85 in mid-2002 — then began accumulating shares again.
Bristol-Myers bought a nearly 20 percent stake in ImClone in the fall of 2001 for $70 a share. When the stock was at its nadir in 2002, Bristol-Myers could have picked up the rest of ImClone for a song. At that time, though, it was uncertain if Erbitux could recover from its regulatory setback. As it is, if Bristol succeeds in buying the rest of ImClone it will probably end up paying about the same price per share as in its initial purchase in 2001.
But that would be below the peak ImClone’s stock reached — above $86 — in 2004, after Erbitux was approved. So the Waksals and Ms. Stewart might have been able to cash out for a handsome profit back then, had they held their stock.
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Samuel Waksal, who holds a doctorate in immunology, borrowed heavily against his ImClone stock to finance his opulent lifestyle, characterized by lavish parties and intellectual salons that drew celebrities to his art-filled SoHo loft. People who know him say they believe he had to sell shares and other assets, including the loft, to pay his debts as the stock plummeted and the trading scandal played out.
The less-flashy Harlan Waksal, a medical doctor, took over as chief executive for his brother, but left ImClone in July 2003. Harlan Waksal said he still held ImClone shares and options but did not say how many.
ImClone has long since replaced most managers and board members from the days of the scandal. While an acquisition by Bristol-Myers or another company would help remove any lingering taint, some investors say things might have turned out even better — if only.
Charles Berner of Yardley, Pa., has owned ImClone stock since its initial public offering in 1991. “If Sam didn’t do the thing that he did way back and it wasn’t tainted by the Martha Stewart thing,” Mr. Berner said Thursday, “I think the stock would be $120.”MOSCOW (Reuters) - When Donald Trump named a little-known U.S. energy consultant as part of his foreign policy team, the adviser’s ex-boss was puzzled; how could the relatively junior banker he knew in Moscow a decade ago be qualified to brief a presidential candidate?
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Tampa, Florida, U.S., August 24, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri
Carter Page, who worked in Russia at U.S. investment bank Merrill Lynch, paints an impressive picture of his three-year stint from 2004, saying on his company’s website that he advised on “key” transactions involving some of the country’s biggest energy groups.
But Sergey Aleksashenko, who became head of the bank’s Moscow operation toward the end of Page’s assignment, expressed doubts about whether he has the experience to act as an adviser on Washington’s fraught ties with the Kremlin.
“For me it was a strange choice,” said Aleksashenko, who served as a deputy finance minister and deputy central bank governor in the 1990s before running Merrill Russia in 2006-2008. “Carter was never a person who would discuss foreign policy or U.S.-Russian relations.”
The achievements of Page - whom Trump named as an adviser in March - are summarized on the website of New York-based Global Energy Capital LLC, a firm that he founded after leaving Merrill. He did not respond to Reuters questions about his time in Russia and Merrill Lynch declined comment.
When contacted by Reuters, Trump’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks played down Page’s role in the campaign. “Mr. Page is an informal adviser named as part of a much larger group several months ago. He does not speak for or represent the campaign in any official capacity,” she said.
Trump, who is now the Republican nominee, named Page as being among five foreign policy advisers in an interview with The Washington Post on March 21. Hicks did not answer Reuters questions seeking to clarify what Page had done since then for the campaign and why Trump had picked him.
Aleksashenko, a Kremlin critic, was Page’s boss in 2006-07 and is now a nonresident senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington.
Three other former Merrill employees in Moscow also told Reuters that Page could not have played a leading role in the bank’s deals due to his rank, and at the time showed no real interest or expertise in foreign policy.
Shortly after Trump named his foreign affairs team, campaign member Sam Clovis said the aim was to recruit people with “real-world” and military experience rather than the retreads that other candidates relied on.
“These are people who work for a living,” the New York Times quoted Clovis as saying. “If you’re looking for show ponies, you’re coming to the wrong stable.”
Clovis was not immediately available for further comment.
FLATTERING COVERAGE
Russia has been a central issue in the U.S. election campaign, with Trump calling President Vladimir Putin a “strong leader”. Flattering coverage of Trump in Russian state media has left little doubt that he would be the Kremlin’s preferred candidate over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Like Trump, Page holds views that contradict the Obama administration’s stance on Russia and in recent years he has expressed them, reflecting the Kremlin’s views on occasions.
In a February 2015 article in the journal Global Policy, he said U.S. policy toward Russia had been “misguided and provocative” and blamed the State Department for precipitating the Ukraine conflict.
In a speech given in Moscow last month, Page also criticized Western countries for what he said was their “hypocritical focus on democratization” in the post-Soviet world. At the event, he did not respond to questions about his time in Russia.
Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, said Trump wanted to show the incompetence and weakness of the foreign policy pursued by the Democrats. Page was useful as his views fit with that aim, added Kortunov, who does not know the Trump adviser personally.
“There are people in the U.S. who are bored with Ukraine, who think it is not an American problem that Washington should be involved in,” said Kortunov, whose think tank is close to the Russian Foreign Ministry but who has also expressed independent views.
Despite Hicks’s comments, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told Reuters that when he left the campaign in late June, Page had “definitely” been an adviser to Trump.
Another member of the five-strong foreign policy team, Walid Phares, told Reuters on Aug. 19 that Page continued to advise Trump.
A MID-TIER BANKER
The Global Energy Capital LLC website says Page was responsible for opening Merrill’s Moscow office and that he was “an advisor on key transactions” for Russian firms including Gazprom, the world |
. Maybe they're all a bunch of statists and ex-NASA employees who resent the intrusion of the private sector into space. That's all possible. But that doesn't change the fact that Mars is an average of 140 million miles away and that Mars One is still on the ground.Marvel and Disney have put together a cartoon lineup of their own to go against DC's new showcase. However, the format seems... familiar.
Last weekend, DC premiered DC Nation, their hour-long block of comic-based cartoons on Cartoon Network. Only two days later, DC rival Marvel announced their official line-up for Marvel Universe, their hour-long block of comic-based cartoons on Disney XD. While browsing their listing, I quickly noticed similarities between the two programs.
Again, both Marvel Universe and DC Nation are hour-long blocks featured on the weekend (DC took Saturday, Marvel took Sunday). Both programming blocks feature two half-hour shows and a slew of comic-themed shorts to mingle between commercials. On top of that, the two half-hour shows on both sides include an already established show with an ensemble cast (Young Justice for DC, The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes for Marvel) and a new show with a single lead hero (Green Lantern for DC, Ultimate Spider-Man for Marvel). Even the “Universe” and “Nation” in their names are similar.
Now, this isn’t the first time that very similar programming is created at the same time on different networks, but the formats seem far too similar to be coincidence. To Marvel’s credit, more than half of the shorts listed aren’t cartoons like in DC Nation, but instead looks into the animation process and beyond. “What Would it Take?” actually looks like a Mythbusters-eque challenge to recreate the technology from the Marvel Universe into real world applications.
As far as the cartoons themselves, I am interested in seeing them. I haven’t watched it yet, but The Avengers has been on Disney XD for a season — showcasing the cartoon’s second season right before the Avengers film premieres is a smart move. The ’90s Spider-Man cartoon will always have a place in my heart, but Ultimate Spider-Man looks promising for its cast alone and it’s another way for Marvel to connect their TV projects to the upcoming films. Tara Strong is Mary Jane Watson, Tom Kenny is Doc Octopus and Clark Gregg is reprising his role as Agent Coulson from the Marvel films — according to Wikipedia, Coulson will be undercover as Peter’s Principal. But perhaps my favorite choice of cast is the incomparable J.K. Simmons coming back as old-timey newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson. Also, the voice of Stan the Janitor will be played by Stan Lee … no, I’m not making that up.
With cartoon icon Paul Dini as creative consultant and writer for the showcase, Marvel Universe does look promising. It starts Sunday, April 1st … will you be checking it out?
Photo Credit: DisneyVeteran character actor Dennis Farina, best known for playing his fair share of weathered tough guys in films like " Out of Sight," " Get Shorty," " Midnight Run," has died at age 69, his publicist confirmed today. A former Chicago police officer, Farina is best known to most for his portrayal of Detective Joe Fontana in NBC's long-running drama series "Law & Order." Long relegated to supporting roles, Farina experienced a late career breakthrough in 2011 with the release of Joe Maggio's solemn character study " The Last Rites of Joe May," starring Farina as the titular short-money hustler clinging to the belief that he has a future in the game. In an interview with Indiewire, Farina said of the role, "Every character I’ve enjoyed doing, but this was another kind of character. Everybody likes to do that. Switch it up." Following that acclaimed turn, Farina continued his great run on the small screenMaven Gig, the car-sharing service for gig economy workers owned by General Motors, is expanding to a few more cities. Starting today, the service is available in Los Angeles. Later this fall, it will launch in Boston, Phoenix, and Washington, DC. And Baltimore and Detroit will follow soon after.
The program is aimed at drivers for rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft, and delivery apps like Postmates, GrubHub, and InstaCart. Someone who’s interested in driving for any of these on-demand services, but doesn’t own a vehicle, can rent a Chevy Bolt through Maven Gig for $229-a-week. The weekly price includes insurance, maintenance, and electric vehicle charging.
170 million miles
Maven first launched its gig worker product last May in San Diego and San Francisco. Since then, Maven says its customers have logged 170 million miles driving for various on-demand apps.
Just last November, Maven announced that it was partnering with Uber in San Francisco on a 90-day pilot program. Drivers could take out GM vehicles for $179 a week plus additional taxes and fees to earn money on the ride-sharing platform. The deal raised more than a few eyebrows at the time considering GM was a major investor in Uber’s main rival, Lyft.
Presently, there are a handful of options available to someone who wants to make money as a gig economy driver but doesn’t own a vehicle. Uber has a partnership with Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Denver, while Lyft, GM, and Hertz have a rental service called “Express Drive”available in 19 cities. (Uber just recently decided to scrap its auto leasing business after higher-than-projected losses.) All offer discounted prices to freelance drivers.
When it launched in January 2016, GM said that Maven would be its new “personal mobility brand,” reflecting a trend in the auto industry of spinning off new, millennial-friendly businesses as a hedge against perceived declines in personal car ownership. Since then, Maven has grown to 17 cities in the US and Canada, boasting 35,000 members who have made more than 45,000 reservations. Maven says that users in 11 of those cities have reported using the car-sharing service to make money driving for companies like Uber and Lyft.Central Loop Busway Will Reorganize, Expand Downtown Bike Lanes
Bicycle routes through the Loop suffer from “poor connectivity,” admits Mike Amsden, assistant director of transportation planning at the Chicago Department of Transportation. At yesterday’s Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Council meeting, Amsden revealed details about how the Central Loop BRT project will improve the situation by spring of 2015.
The Central Loop BRT project, Amsden said, will “move people more efficiently across the Loop,” ending the days when it’s faster to walk than take the bus across downtown, and also “optimize use of space, because most of it is devoted to cars” right now. Not only will buses get dedicated lanes, but so will bikes — a sea change from present conditions, where, as Amsden says, “I’m ashamed to say we don’t have a network in the Loop.”
By next year, new protected bike lanes will be added to Clinton Street, Washington Street, and Randolph Street.
Clinton will have a two-way, protected bike lane from Fulton to Harrison. The lane, similar to Dearborn Street’s, will be on the east curb, with direct access to Ogilvie Transportation Center and the Union Station Transit Center.
Washington will have a one-way, protected bike lane from Wacker to Michigan. It will be protected from car traffic by parked cars on some blocks, and bus stop islands on others.
Randolph will have a one-way, protected bike lane from Michigan to Clinton, separated from traffic by a parking lane. Amsden said they will be improving the existing bike lane on upper Randolph, but didn’t provide specifics.
We’re awaiting more information from CDOT about how cyclists will cross on Washington and Randolph west of Wacker or Clinton, particularly to the bike lane along Desplaines through the West Loop.
Meanwhile, the existing bike lanes on Canal and Madison, the latter of which Amsden called “not the best example of a bike lane,” will be removed.
Anne Alt, president of the Chicago Cycling Club and paralegal at FK Law Illinois (a Streetsblog sponsor), was relatively unfazed by the proposed switch-up. “Looking at the big picture, balancing the uses, and considering the overall nearby uses and the chaos factor” by Union Station, she said that “getting the bike lane out of [Canal] is a good thing… Making a two-way [bike lane on Clinton] should be a safer approach.” She said that Washington and Randolph are a little out of the way for her trips, “but those streets make sense” as an alternative to Madison going west and, well, nothing going east.
To connect people bicycling eastbound on Washington to the existing bike lane on Randolph, which leads to the Millennium Park bike station and the Lakefront Trail, CDOT will add a one-block bike lane northbound on Michigan Avenue. When asked about how bicyclists will make the tricky left turn from Washington onto Michigan, Amsden said the intersection was still being designed.
Amsden explained that removing the bike lane from Canal would clear up significant conflicts between bicyclists, taxis, and both CTA and intercity buses. Streetsblog asked how people will bicycle to destinations on Canal and Madison. Amsden replied, “People can bike on all streets, and we believe these better bike facilities are [being installed] so they can spend the least amount of time on those [other] streets,” adding that the new bus and bike facilities will “calm traffic much more than today.”Without any fanfare at all, the Patriots signed a TE named Kyle Auffrey. Kyle started his college career on scholarship as a quarterback at Mississippi State. Following a dislocated knee in his first few months, Kyle was quickly on the bottom of the four QB depth chart. Following a coaching change, he decided his best chance at playing time would be to try his hand at the University of New Hampshire.
Once there, head coach Sean McDonnell told him his best chance to see the field would be a position change. Unlike a certain QB from Florida who is no longer employed in the NFL, he listened and spent his final two years at college playing tight end. Oh, and for a change of pace, he earned the job of punter his senior year averaging 37.7 yards per punt. In their run first, run often, and run some more offense, he was primarily a blocking tight end.
Still, he was invited to the combine:
You can read more about his interesting journey here.
At the 2013 Super Regional Combine in Dallas he put up the following numbers:
6' 6" 252 lbs (Aaron Hernandez posted 6' 3" 245 lbs)
34" vertical (Aaron Hernandez posted 33")
4.57 s 40 yard dash (Aaron Hernandez posted 4.64 s)
28 reps of 225 lbs ( Aaron Hernandez posted 30)
4.15 s short shuttle (Aaron Hernandez posted 4.18 s)
6.72 s 3 cone (Aaron Hernandez posted 6.83 s)
my apologies on not having his hand size available, Doc.
Strictly from a measurables stand point he doesn't remind me of um, any particular player at all *cough* Hernandez *cough*. He's just an athlete at a position where we are short an athlete or two. What he does lack is experience, and that has hurt him to date. BTW, he wore number 81 with the Cardinals. I mention that for um, no particular reason.
Revenge of the Birds had this to say last year:
For a bigger body used primarily as a blocker in college, he does a decent enough job catching the ball. He ran a 4.73 40 a couple years ago and has been training hard this off-season to get back into the game, saying he's in the best shape of his football life. A stand-out at the NFL's Super Regional Combine, Auffray survived a field of over 2,600 other NFL hopefuls to reach the final event and parlayed that chance into a roster spot with the Cardinals. Pretty good for a guy who was ready to go play in Poland a few months ago.
Then there's this praise from the Hooded One:
"The week of the draft before I signed with Arizona, I had a private workout with the New England Patriots," he said. "It was a very challenging workout and at the end of the workout [Patriots head coach] Bill Belichick walks over to me and told me, and his exact words were, ‘that was pretty impressive.’ For him, being a multi-Super Bowl winning, Hall of Fame coach to say that my skill set and my abilities were impressive kinda reinforced all the hard work and perseverance I’ve been through."
So why didn't Bill sign the guy? At the time we had Gronk, Hernandez, Sudfeld (who was still Studfeld), Ballard, and pretty much any other free agent TE on the roster. Unlike Pokemon, you can't catch'em all, so he popped up on the Cardinals roster. A rash of injuries to the Cards' defensive players (sound familiar?), and he was a roster casualty once again.
"I didn’t get let go in Arizona because of lack of talent or lack of ability," Auffray said. "I’m a hard-working guy. I do all the right things off the field. I’m very knowledgeable of offenses and defenses, and I know how to study film. I am very versatile, I’ve played quarterback, receiver, tight end, punter and H-back. I’ve done it all. … A team has nothing to lose with me and everything to gain."
Now I'm not going to pretend that Auffray is a lock to make the roster. He's not. In fact he's a long shot. He is worth keeping an eye on as the position battles progress though. He's played both Y and F roles, but his measurables place him firmly in the Move TE role which is currently pretty vacant, unlike a prison cell somewhere. He is also playing with a chip on his shoulder like a certain 6th round QB we know.
Kyle Auffray is a long shot to make the roster, but if he sticks, he may be just what we've been missing. For his sake and ours, I hope so.People in the Return of Names action stand in the queue on the rostrum at the Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka Square in Moscow. The event is held each year on the eve of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression, at which anyone can read lists with names of victims in the Great Purge of 1937-1938.
Every year on Oct. 29, Moscow residents line up for the microphone for hours to take part in "The Return of the Names," a memorial event to honor the victims of Stalin's repressions.
Name, surname, age, profession, date of execution. And again – name, surname... People read this data into a microphone in the center of Moscow for 12 hours.
"The Return of the Names" civil campaign has taken place every year on Oct. 29 for the past 10 years, with people reading out the names of those secretly shot during the Stalinist repression between the late 1920s and early 1950s.
In such a way, Russians are trying to preserve the memory of thousands of Soviet engineers, doctors, teachers and workers who were taken from their apartments and never heard from again.
"The totalitarian state did not just kill people – it sought to erase their names from the history, destroying all memory of them," says a representative for the organizers, the Memorial International Society. "The return of the names, the return of the memory of those besmirched and killed is the negation of the dictatorship, this is our step to freedom."
The list contains more than 40,000 names, but participants have managed to read out only half over the years. Every year, on the eve of Day of the Victims of Political Repressions, people gather near the Solovetsky Stone (Russia’s principal monument to these victims) on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square, in front of the main symbol of repression – the state security building, which now houses the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB). People line up for the microphone for two to four hours to read out a few names into it.
‘The most meaningful line in the world’
More people attended this year’s event than a year ago. They stood for a long time in silence, then read out the names given by the organizers for a few minutes and left, to come back next year and continue reading.
Participants braved temperatures of around zero degrees Celsius to read out names from the list, with one calling the line for the microphone "the most meaningful line in the world."
"In the queue for #vozvrascheniyeimen [The Return of the Names], a pregnant woman said on the phone that either she reaches the Stone or she’ll give birth right here," wrote Marina Dedales, a participant, on Facebook. "The names and dates of execution sound the scariest when said in children's voices."
Another participant, Mikhail Danilov, recalled how he had traveled with his parents as a child to a boarding house near Shcherbinki (a city district near Moscow). "We went <...> to swim in a small lake," he wrote on Facebook. "And we did not know that a few hundred meters from there, at the Butovo shooting range, there were covered ditches with tens of thousands of those who were shot."
The relevance of the Gulag
According to participant Yekaterina Mamontova, more and more people are coming to the Solovetsky Stone “because of the increased pressure, because of the return of monuments to the tyrant [Joseph Stalin], because of the justification of his crimes by ‘efficient economy.’”
"But we need not look far," she wrote on her Facebook page on Oct. 29. "I saw the need to go there right now just last year. For this is not just a memorial and mournful event, this is an expression of civil protest against the rehabilitation of Stalin."
In the end, everyone who goes to Lyubyanka Square believes that without massive public repentance for the crimes of the Soviet regime, Russia can have no future.
And for someone, a line in Memorial's lists is the only thing that has left of their great-grandfathers. "In 2014, I came to the Return of the Names on October 29 for the first time," wrote Igor Kononkov, who attended a same similar event in London on Oct. 29. "On my way there, I read Memorial's lists and found my great-grandfather Nikolai there.... And I do not know how to turn him from a line into a person."
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All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.On December 6th, singer Katy Perry ("I Kissed a Girl") posted a nude picture on her Twitter page of what appears to be a transgender man. She tweeted: "http://twitpic.com/sdf45 - NSFW! I knew those little white last week of the birth control pills would still have an effect on your body! FU." The photo posted on Twitpic (photo blurred by GLAAD): Perry is referring to the last week of birth control pills that are typically taken as a placebo but largely thought to not have any effect on the body. Making fun of transgender people's bodies is deeply offensive. Perry's ridicule dehumanizes this person and ignores the courage and resolve it takes to live within a transphobic society. Some of Perry's transphobic fans responded immediately with more crude jokes at the expense of the transgender community. On Sunday, the LGBT community began its response, calling Perry out for her exploitation. While it appears the pic was removed this morning, we urge those offended to tweet Katy Perry directly and educate her about how jokes like this contribute to a climate that puts transgender people in harms way. If you're on Twitter, please post this tweet to Katy Perry:FEATURES
Maclaine Diemer Brings Musical Magic to the Path of Fire Soundtrack
Sounding Out the Crystal Desert
The first time I stepped outside Amnoon, I took a rare moment of respite to just sit under the stars and listen to my surroundings. The wind that graces the sands around the port city brings more than a cooling breeze for those who take a moment, it delivers promises of a sweeping adventure, new exotic encounters, and a grandeur that Guild Wars 2 sorely needs. This was my first moments in the reimagined Crystal Desert and I quickly discovered Guild Wars 2’s Path of Fire is more than beautiful landscapes. While the beautiful vistas and incredible graphics included in Path of Fire might be worth a thousand words, the music of Guild Wars 2 really communicates in ways that dialogue cannot.
From the bombastic opening moments of the very first loading screen, through the quagmires of the Maguma Jungle, to the launch of the latest adventure, the Guild Wars 2 soundtrack has accompanied players on epic adventures. Now, ArenaNet release the latest edition to their musical adventure, the Path of Fire Soundtrack. The work of Maclaine Diemer, Wilbert Roget, Stan LePard, Brendon Williams, and a host of collaborators, this sweeping expansion was recorded across the globe, taking In performances from Seattle, London, and across Europe.
We had some time to chat to Maclaine Diemer about the music that make the Path of Fire.
When the player steps into Path of Fire one of the first locations to set the tone of the expansion is Amnoon. Aesthetically it borrows a number of cultural ideas from the real world. How did you go about setting this scene and building a musical canvas that you could represent this with?
Two of the pieces that play in Amnoon were actually the first two pieces I wrote for the game, about a year and a half before it was released. I was asked to set the tone for the map and the expansion itself, and it seemed like a good opportunity for me to establish the palette we’d be using and breaking away from the Heart of Thorns sound. At that point, the game itself barely existed. If I remember correctly, there was only a very early version of the Crystal Oasis map. It was barely populated with anything beyond a few structures and some rough terrain. There was, however, lots of concept art. Concept art and ambient music serve a similar function, in that they are designed to convey the high level emotions of a map or scene. The tone of the map was very clearly established in that art, with grand architecture, sweeping desert vistas, and vibrant and exotic color combinations.
From the real world, there was clearly an influence from Morocco, North Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Musically, that led me to featuring types of percussion that are common in those areas like the djembe, frame drum, riq, and a bunch of other fun stuff, as well as some wind instruments like the ney and duduk. For the orchestra, there’s already a kind of musical language we in the western world associate with that type of setting and landscape. A lot of it starts with Maurice Jarre’s music for Lawrence of Arabia, which I listened to a lot when I wasn’t feeling inspired. For the music nerds, a lot of it revolves around the Phrygian mode with a raised 3rd scale degree. In layman’s terms, it’s a variation on the normal minor scale that instantly gives a sense of mystery and exotic locales. Another sound I really wanted to use was entire string sections playing in octaves, with heavy use of portamento (a technique where you accentuate the leaps between two notes by sliding between them on the string). It’s like an instant recipe for “desert music”. Sometimes the old tricks are the best ones.
Much of the game play in Path of Fire seems to have moved back towards the kind of sense of wonder and exploration that ran throughout the core launch. Was there a move to replicate this in the soundtrack?
Absolutely. The soundtrack for Heart of Thorns intentionally mimicked the map setting and level design, i.e. dense, dark, and claustrophobic. One of the very early things that was discussed for Path of Fire was that the maps would be huge, bigger even than the core game. This was specifically so you could have a lot to explore with the newly added mounts. Guild Wars is no stranger to epic, sweeping music, but over the years I’ve tried to take it in a slightly more stripped down direction. Some of the music in Heart of Thorns, like the piece called Rata Novus, has a big cinematic feel to it, but the music itself is pretty minimalistic. I think it works really well for that game, but I knew we’d have to go back to big, soaring string lines, bold brass, and heavily layered percussion in a way that we avoided with Heart of Thorns. If you’re sailing across sand dunes on the back of a flying manta ray, you need music that matches that feeling, and “stripped down” isn’t quite the right vibe.
While the locations play a huge role in the soundtrack, characters and creatures also have their own distinct part to play in the game. How to you infuse the soundtrack with these new faces?
It was really important for me to make clear distinctions between the various creature armies you face in the game. I spent a lot of time (maybe too much) thinking about how to convey the essence of these creatures musically.
For instance, the Awakened are essentially undead, and their design incorporates elements like sand, tar, bones, and scarabs, so their music is slow and ominous, with dissonant passages of strings going slowly in and out of tune. It also features brass instruments played with mutes, which gives it a thin, hollowed out sound.
For the Forged, the idea is that they are souls captured in suits of armor. For their sound, I combined violin harmonics, which have a scratchy, whispy quality to them, with crotales played with a violin bow. Crotales are like tuned metal discs you normally play with a mallet, like a xylophone, but if you play them with a bow, you get a sharp, metallic ring that’s almost a little painful to the ear.
Even though these kinds of details don’t usually stand out to most players, I think it’s important to put some intention and thought into the musical choices for every piece. It helps solidify the connection between the music and the game, and that’s always my primary goal.
What, if any, influence did existing pieces for locations like the Silverwastes, and even the first Guild Wars soundtrack have on Path of Fire?
I wanted to separate the Path of Fire desert from the Silverwastes desert a bit. While they’re both desert locations, they’re pretty different beyond that one connection. The only thing that really crossed over was a heavy focus on woodwind instruments, particularly flutes. They are sorely underutilized as a section in movie and game soundtracks in general, in my opinion, so I think they instantly stand out when you hear them now. They blend together so beautifully and also shine as solo instruments, and to me they also do a great job representing a desert breeze shifting and shaping sand dunes in a wide open landscape.
There is also a good amount of thematic and melodic material from past Guild Wars games sprinkled in here and there. It’s primarily from the Nightfall expansion, however, since Path of Fire is set in a lot of the same locations, I didn’t want to completely recreate some of those old pieces. I felt I owed it to fans who spent time with the original game to pay homage when appropriate. Sometimes I would try to use a melody as a starting point or an anchor for a piece, and sometimes it would just be a chord progression to hint at the previous music. There are a few really sharp eared listeners out there who are good at putting the musical clues together, so I’m curious when and if they find the little bread crumbs I’ve left for them.
With the Heart of Thorns piece there's always one track I find sticks out as unique among the rest. The Jaka Itzel in particular. What was your stand out moment from the soundtrack?
There’s definitely a spiritual successor to Jaka Itzel on the Path of Fire soundtrack. It’s called Pricklepatch Hollow, and it’s the theme for the Choya, who are these goofy looking but dangerous little cactus people. I always like when I can do something a little out of the ordinary for Guild Wars, and those two pieces are it, almost completely lacking in orchestral instruments and relying more on percussion and silly or fun sensibility.
For me, one of the most fun tracks to work on was Maws of the Ruptured Heart. It might not be as in your face as some other ones, but it was a lot of fun to work on. It’s written as a bass flute solo, which is an instrument you should look up if you don’t know what it looks like. It’s massive and has such an amazing, unique sound. The soloist who we recorded is an expert at just about every kind of flute, and she came in with a lot of suggestions for additional techniques for playing the instrument. We ended up recording the piece as I wrote it and then just letting her go nuts. She would do things like growl in the back of her throat while playing a note, which made the flute sound alive, or hum the same note she was playing and then go slightly out of tune with the flute, so you would get these crazy, dissonant notes rubbing against each other. I ended up taking those pieces and manipulating them with effects to use as sonic textures in that piece and several others, so it was a very fruitful session for just one piece!
Looking back would you have done anything differently, with it being such a monumental project?
The only problem I have, and this is the problem I have with every Guild Wars soundtrack I’ve been a part of, is that I wish there was more music. Guild Wars is a game that you can spend a lot of time playing, and it’s easy to burn through all the music in a relatively short amount of time. In a perfect world, each game or batch of content would come out with two or three times as much music, but that’s just not feasible.
I will say that I had some wonderful collaborators on this project to help me bring the soundtrack to life. They are Stan LePard, who I’ve worked with for years both as a co-composer on occasion and orchestrator for every live recording we’ve done. He wrote four of the five pieces associated with the various mount creatures and did a terrific job. The others are Wilbert Roget II and Brendon Williams, who split the duties handling all the combat music. In a couple instances, I handed them a theme and they ran with it, but for the most part they just went nuts and did an incredible job. I love collaborating, since I think it makes the final product that much better, and these three gentlemen were about as good of collaborators as I could hope for.
If you want to hear the drums of war again or simply hear the songs of the desert then Path of Fire’s Digital soundtrack, it is available at Amazon or iTunes, while the stunning Vinyl version is available to preorder now.
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Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.I am aware of the controversy involving this film. If you are not aware, you can read about it here. The damage has already been done, if the 2.2/10 IMDB rating is any indication. The film isn’t great but it is better than that rating.
Synopsis: A devoted dog discovers the meaning of its own existence through the lives of the humans it teaches to laugh and love. Reincarnated as multiple canines over the course of five decades, the lovable pooch develops an unbreakable bond with a kindred spirit named Ethan. As the boy grows older and comes to a crossroad, the dog once again comes back into his life to remind him of his true self.
Starring: Josh Gad, Dennis Quaid, and K.J. Apa.
Writer: W. Bruce Cameron.
Director: Lasse Hallstrom.
Rating: PG
Running Time: 100mins
Trailer:
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Dog or not, the film did not offer absolutely anything new or original as the storytelling will be very familiar. The film is about a dog (voiced by Gad) who for some reason lives many lives over five decades and learns the meaning of life through his interactions with various humans. He gets to live with many people but his most important relationship was with a boy named Ethan (Bryce Gheisar).
All the dog’s lives or subplots were not overly original and all came off as contrived. The film’s main focus was on the pairing of Bailey (his second life) and Ethan, seeing them grow up together and forming a bond over that time. He and his parents (Juliet Rylance and Luke Kirby) live together in rural Michigan in the 1950s. They lived the usual rural life which went the way one would expect. They were a 1950s family so they had drama which didn’t really matter. Teen Ethan (Apa) and Bailey were very close even after Ethan meeting a girl named Hannah (Britt Robertson). Their relationship was in jeopardy after a freak accident that drove them apart.
Because of the focus on his relationship with Ethan, the film glossed over his other lives as a K-9 officer named Ellie, a little companion dog named Tino, and another dog adopted by a couple who ignored him before giving him up. These subplots almost didn’t matter as they were just a detour before going back to Ethan as an adult (Quaid). These subplots were just way too heavy-handed to get emotionally invested. The outcomes never came as much of a surprise which took away their impact.
Some may be touched but the film tried too hard at playing with emotions, making it feel forced. Kids may be entertained by the dog, but it was easy to be bored at times while tuning out the emotional manipulation. It was nice to look at however, as the cinematography was well done with its many shots of the countryside and the music was good as well.
The writing may not have been the best and the acting was good throughout but those won’t matter since everyone will be transfixed on the dogs. Gad was great at voicing the dogs. His voice seemed to fit well and he was fun to watch but a lot of his writing was cheesy and the dog humor felt forced.
Overall, this was an okay drama whose heavy-handed message really got in the way of enjoying it. This just felt like it would been better as a TV movie.
Score: 6/10
If you liked this, please read my other reviews here and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, follow me on Instagram, and also like me on Facebook. Would you like to write movie reviews for this site? Contact me above or via social media for more information.
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Like this: Like Loading...Monopoly Capitalism in the 21st Century: Neoliberalism, Monetarism, and the Pervasion of Finance
Colin Jenkins I Social Economics I Theory I June 30th, 2015
The following is the third part of a multi-part series, "Applying Poulantzas," which analyzes the work of Greek Marxist political sociologist, Nicos Poulantzas, and applies it to the unique political and economic structures found under neoliberalism and post-industrial capitalism.
Part 1: Calibrating the Capitalist State in the Neoliberal Era: Equilibrium, Superstructure, and the Pull Toward a Corporate-Fascistic Model
Part 2: Neoliberalism's Balancing Act: Shifting the Societal Burden and Tempting Fate
With industrial or "competitive capitalism," it was the "separation and dispossession of the direct producers (the working class) from their means of production" which created this multi-layered, class-based societal structure. [1] Globalization has resulted in a massive shift of national economies. Former industrialized nations are now considered "post-industrial" due to the ability of large production-based manufacturers to move their operations into "cheaper" labor markets. International and regional trade agreements have facilitated this shift. With post-industrial capitalism and the widespread destruction of "productive labor," or labor that produces a tangible product and is thus exploited through the creation of surplus value, it is the complete reliance on a service economy which produces no tangible value that allows for strict control through wage manipulation. The ways in which the working class interacts with the owning class has changed significantly, if only in regards to their physical worlds. In the US, financialization has replaced industrialization as the main economic driver. Alongside this shift, monopoly capitalism has effectively replaced "competitive capitalism," and globalization has ushered in the neoliberal era. These developments have rearranged the superstructure and forced capitalist states to develop new methods in maintaining a societal equilibrium that is constantly being pushed to the brink of unrest at the hands of a capitalist system that breeds concentrations in wealth and power, while simultaneously driving the working-class majority towards a state of functional serfdom.
The emergence of monopoly capitalism was inevitable. "The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities," explained Marx. "The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller."[2] Whether we are referring to technology and automation, the relation of finance and the varying degrees of access to capital, or merely the all-encompassing process of "cheapening commodities" which Marx refers to above, it all works in tandem to create a funneling effect whereas capital becomes concentrated. And with this concentration of capital comes the concentration of wealth, which in turn inevitably breeds concentrations of other forms of power, i.e. political. In this sense, what many have come to refer to as "corporatism" is more correctly viewed as a mature stage of capitalism, rather than a differentiation from capitalism. The "marriage of corporation and state" that Benito Mussolini once referred to is merely a byproduct of capitalist advancement - the natural consequence of concentrated interests relying on the state apparatus to both facilitate its progression and protect its assets.
The consequent development of financialization could also be seen as an inevitable late stage of capitalism. As Paul Sweezy explains, while paraphrasing Marx, "Further, the credit system which 'begins as a modest helper of accumulation' soon 'becomes a |
the sensory deprivation chamber.
Kary Mullis-Biochemist; he improved the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique and changed biomedical research forever. He won a Noble Prize for his work in 1993. Mullis even stated that his psychedelic use was “much more important than any courses he ever took.”
Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous
Yep, you read that right! Co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, was a big supporter of LSD use and the benefits that LSD provided to the user. Wilson, himself, credited his recovery and sobriety the use of LSD in his own personal battle with alcoholism. It was Wilson’s goal to include LSD treatment within the Alcoholics Anonymous program because he believed that AA alone wasn’t the answer to alcohol abuse and addiction. Of course, some of his followers and colleagues didn’t share the same feelings and LSD was made illegal a few years later so LSD never made it into the AA 12 step program. Wilson stated that LSD allowed him to have a “spiritual experience” that helped treat his depression and lead to his recovery. You can read more in Wilson’s autobiography, Pass It On.
Dock Ellis and the No-Hitter
If you are a sports fan then perhaps you may have heard about this already; either way, on June 12, 1970, Pittsburgh Pirate’s pitcher, Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter completely under the influence of LSD. It’s true! The Pirates beat the Padres 2-0 that day. Ellis later admitted that he had ingested LSD while relaxing at home around noon that day. It was his understanding that the Pirates had the day off, but his girlfriend discovered, while reading the newspaper, that the Pirates were actually scheduled to play a doubleheader that evening in San Diego. Oops! Ellis made it to the game in time and recalled the experience stating, “I can only remember bits and pieces of the game. I was psyched. I had a feeling of euphoria.” He went on to say,
“The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes, I tried to stare the hitter down and throw while I was looking at him. I chewed my gum until it turned to powder.”
Ellis was no stranger to various drug uses, but he stated that this was the only time that he had pitched with the help of LSD.
Steve Jobs and the Apple Empire
Let’s face it modern technology would not be what it is today without Steve Jobs and Apple. Steve Jobs credits LSD as being, “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life” and gave credit to LSD for a lot of Apple’s product inventions and success. Jobs thought his LSD (and marijuana) use helped him to “think differently” and to relax him, allowing the creative process to work in full force. Jobs stated,“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” I would like to think that my iPhone is the result of LSD inspired brilliance, but then again, maybe it really is! Maybe history wouldn’t be so different if these great people never actually used LSD, but that is something we will never know….
Image Credits: Alex Grey
SourceI couldn't stake them in numerical Pokedex order, because the later Eevee's (Sinnoh and Kalos) have extra head designs that the other Gen's dont, making the last 3 harder to stack when on top of 6 other Eevee lol.
As you can see here. It doesn't look horrible in reverse release order, but I think taking their photo in a way that showed them off best was more important, but I wanted to keep this one here to show that.
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So, a 4 month long journey has finally ended! My goal from the start of learning to crochet this past January was to make Eevee and her 8 Eeveelutions and I finally have! I've taken so many photos of them today that I'm sure I'll post up here eventually, but for now here's my favorite compilation of the EEVEE TOWER! Or... Eevee Rainbow? Either wayEach of them are my own design and pattern and they measure about 10in long, 5in tall and 7in wide give or take with each one since all of their designs vary from one another. I love all of them, I'm super proud of all of them and I could not be happier with the way they turned out!! I think Sylveon turned out to be my favorite (Even though Jolteon will always be my baby), but Vaporeon might have been the most fun to figure out next to GlaceonYou can see even more photos of them here: imgur.com/a/6KybV All of them have found homes except for Leafeon, but I do still make them all when ordered in my store!You can find each of them in these spots:Eevee: www.etsy.com/listing/279151996… Vaporeon: www.etsy.com/listing/279151462… Flareon: www.etsy.com/listing/279150542… Jolteon: www.etsy.com/listing/279150968… Umbreon: www.etsy.com/listing/269888201… Espeon: www.etsy.com/listing/268543606… Leafeon: www.etsy.com/listing/384811024… Glaceon: www.etsy.com/listing/272404636… Sylveon: www.etsy.com/listing/267507681… I also love, love, love comissions so if you're looking for a pokemon to be made (or even a Warcraft beast or Digimon) send me a message!! <3For fellow crocheter's, I'm slowly listing the patterns here: www.ravelry.com/designers/step… :3NEW YORK (Reuters) - Boeing Co said on Thursday it plans to lay off 211 employees in Washington state on July 22, a group that includes information technology workers that Boeing is letting go in a cost-cutting drive.
The logo of Boeing (BA) is seen in Los Angeles, California, United States, April 22, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo
The Chicago-based aerospace and defense company said last week it would cut an unspecified number of IT workers through involuntary layoffs.
Washington state’s Employment Security Department said late on Wednesday that it had received notice of 211 layoffs planned by the company.
Boeing is slashing costs as it battles for sales with European rival Airbus and tries to widen its profit margins to the mid-teens by the end of the decade, from 7.9 percent in the first quarter.
Boeing spokesman Kent Cato said the layoffs include the IT positions and a few jobs from its defense business and corporate organization.
The company is simultaneously laying off IT workers in other states, including 11 in Texas, but the bulk of the job reductions are in Washington state, Boeing spokeswoman Lauren McFarland said. She said Boeing has about 6,500 IT workers.
The layoffs include management and non-management workers and are being made across the company, McFarland said.
Separately, Boeing is using voluntary layoffs to cut about 4,000 positions by mid-year and up to 8,000 by year-end at its commercial airplanes division.
At the end of April, Boeing had 158,916 employees, including 77,497 in Washington state.
Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg told an investor conference in New York on Thursday that the company is cutting costs to remain competitive with Airbus, but is not cutting airplane prices “dramatically” to win orders.Ugh, Reddit. The popular social sharing site's users love to talk about their charity work, but they're also prone to trashing rape victims and bringing down servers with their eagerness to share racial stereotypes. Whether you're looking to avoid them or, for some reason, congregate with them, Columbia Heights is the place to focus on, according to a thread on the site's D.C.-area forum.
The thread's first poster asked people to post the names and then vote for the neighborhood they live in. Here are your top five Washington neighborhoods for Reddit users who voted in the thread, followed by the number of votes they received:
Columbia Heights (33 votes) Capitol Hill (27 votes) Dupont Circle (26 votes) H Street (21 votes) Mount Pleasant (15 votes)
Arlington and Alexandria also came in high with 45 votes and 25 votes, respectively.
Photo by AgnosticPreachersKid via Wikimedia CommonsSince the Roman Empire, leaders have used ideology to organize the masses and instil amongst them a common consciousness, and equally to conquer, assimilate, or repel alternative ideologies. Ideology has been used to help create, safeguard, expand, or tear down political communities, states, empires, and regional or world systems. The Power of Ideology explores the multiple effects that competing ideologies have had on the world system for the past 1,700 years, covering Christianity, Islam, secularism, liberalism, communism, fascism and Nazism. Ioannis Papagaryfallou finds that Hybel offers a balanced and well- informed book, firmly embedded in history.
The Power of Ideology: From the Roman Empire to Al-Qaeda. Alex Roberto Hybel. Routledge.
Find this book:
In The Power of Ideology, American academic Alex Roberto Hybel aims to illustrate the ways in which ideology has functioned as a force within the framework of the international system, and conditioned its development from the Roman Empire to the post-Cold War period. Hybel’s point of departure is not so much Political Theory but rather international relations theory in its Constructivist version.
Although Realists, Neorealists, and orthodox Marxists describe the development of the international system in terms of force and the distribution of material capabilities, Hybel argues that international actors actually aspire to impose their ideological norms upon the world system. Ideology is not just used in order to justify political action a posteriori but it also makes certain political choices appear far more plausible than others in the eyes of the actors concerned. The book covers a relatively huge historical period, it manages to substantiate the author’s main claim regarding the power of ideology. It is also worth emphasizing that Hybel does not adopt an exclusively Western point of view but shows particular sensitivity towards the value systems of non-European, and especially Asian, actors.
As far as it concerns the late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Hybel analyses the role of Christianity, Islam, and Confucianism. Christianity began its career as a religion of the oppressed, but it was soon rehabilitated by Emperor Constantine who used it for his own practical political purposes. Islam had from the very first a political dimension since, according to the Prophet Muhammad, the head of the Muslim community was supposed to make important decisions regarding war and peace and also to collect taxes. Of special interest is Hybel’s evaluation of the role of Confucianism in the world system and his claim that it exercised a restraining hand upon Chinese foreign policy during a crucial historical period. Confucianism’s appeal to an idealised feudal past and distrust towards trade with distant lands was one of main factors behind China’s decision to stop its maritime voyages in the 1430s and 1440s and in this way to enable Europeans to dominate the world system.
Hybel moves us forward through time to the twentieth century, which witnessed the clash between Enlightenment ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, and anti-Enlightenment ones such as Italian Fascism and German Nazism. All these ideologies played an important role in determining the actions of the states inspired by them, and in generating conceptions of enmity or friendship within the international system. The fascist glorification of war helps one to explain Mussolini’s decision to invade Ethiopia, and Hitler revised radically the traditional German foreign policy on ideological grounds. Leninist arguments regarding the relationship between capitalism and imperialism played their own role in convincing Soviet leaders that any modus vivendi between America and the Soviet Union would necessarily be fragile and moribund.
Although Hybel describes with clarity the motivation and ideas of totalitarian leaders, his account of liberal-democratic ideology is much less satisfying. The identification of American liberalism with negative freedom does not do justice to the complex thinking of politicians such as Woodrow Wilson or to the social-democratic compromise historically achieved between capital and labour in Western Europe.
According to Hybel, the end of the Cold War did not lead to the lessening of ideological conflict but to a resurgence of nationalism and religion as forces in world politics. Radical Islam and Latin American populism express their dissatisfaction with the cultural and economic content of the Washington consensus and make the claim that a different world is possible. Since Hybel adopts a constructivist point of view, he claims that the material advantages enjoyed by the United States and its allies within the world system, do not guarantee their ability to meet the challenges that the end of the Cold War has generated. Throughout history, minorities with limited material resources have managed to influence social development through their commitment to a cause and willingness to withstand costs. But by presenting radical Islam and certain Latin American leaders as the only opposition to the United States, Hybel fails to assess the potential of the European Union as an actor in world politics and the consequences of the Chinese combination of capitalist economics and authoritarian politics for the future of the international system as a whole.
All in all, Hybel offers a balanced and well- informed book, firmly embedded in history. The main objection that could be raised to his approach is that by adopting a wide and neutral definition of ideology, he fails to do justice to the specificity of the ideological phenomena he discusses, and to distinguish between negative and positive forms of ideology. Indeed, despite the writer’s declared constructivist sympathies, the book is marked by scepticism towards ideologies which, with notable exceptions, tend to augment and not limit the exercise of power within the world system.
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Ioannis Papagaryfallou is a Ph.D. candidate at the LSE Department of International Relations. He is working on the history of international thought, with particular emphasis upon the post-World War II English Realism expressed in the writings of Herbert Butterfield, Martin Wight, and E. H. Carr. Read more reviews by Ioannis.Like many people who started 10 to 20 years ago, I learned something that I’ll call “Generic Standard Rapier”. This isn’t a historic style, but rather an early amalgamation of various, partially translated fencing manuals cobbled together into a coherent system made to work with the 35 and 40” schlager style blades that were popular during that time period.
I don’t want to besmirch those who studied and taught generic standard rapier. Given the what we knew at the time, and the inferior equipment most of us had access to, one really couldn’t have expected much more. But since we now have access to much better research and equipment, I think this would be a really good time to revisit Fabris. Long out of print, this translation by Tom Leoni is available again for only 25 USD.
Crossing the Feet
For this comparison, lets start at the beginning by looking at the feet:
Scans made available by Guy Windsor and Petteri Kihlberg.
The first two illustrations show the common version of Prima, the first guard. The next two shows Prima when properly formed.
In generic standard rapier, one of the first rules regarding footwork is that you never cross you feet. There is sound reasoning for this, as one doesn’t want to risk tripping over the front foot when passing the rear forward, nor does one want to make a wide, circular step.
Here we can clearly see that Fabris prefers to cross the feet while in Prima. In some illustrations the heel is lined up with the opposite heel, in others the front heel is at or slightly past the toes. I included both the correct and incorrect version of Prima to show that he is rather consistent with this.
Gripping the Sword
In generic standard rapier one is taught to place one, if not two, fingers over the quillon (i.e. cross guard). Fabris doesn’t talk about this point, but thanks to the high quality images posted by Guy Windsor we can see that Fabris keeps his fingers behind the quillon.
In this illustration of Quarta (fourth), we also see that the thumb is on the flat of the blade or at least the flat of the quillon. This corresponds well with L’Ange, who is said to have based his material on Fabris.
But wait, what’s going on in plate 23?
Here you can clearly see a raised index finger and what appears to be a separation between it and the second finger. These are signs that indicate the finger is over the quillon.
What do we make of this? For the time being I’m of the opinion that the way you hold the sword is a combination of personal preference and hilt construction.
Use of the Off Hand
In generic standard rapier, the off hand is kept well extended. With cuts being rare, if not disallowed entirely, the hand only had to deal with easily deflected thrusts. Varying by time and location, the technique was either popular or distained as an unrealistic gimmick.
As it so happens, Fabris actually discusses the parry with the hand in the very first plate. Here we see the outstretched hands ready to defend the chest and face.
As I mentioned above, Fabris shows a common or inferior version of each guard before his preferred version. According to Fabris, the sword is so high that it cannot be used for parrying, thus the hand is essential.
Now lets look at the extended Prima.
In this version the hand is held close to the face, more as a failsafe than a tool for parrying thrusts. In the text, Fabris doesn’t mention it. Instead he extols the virtues of the guard, as the opponent’s sword will always be closer to your forte than your body.
The Cone of Defense
A key feature of generic standard rapier is the concept of a “cone of defense”. This says that you keep your point aimed at your opponent’s face or chest and your hilt pointed outside the silhouette of your body. As your opponent mutates his posture, your true edge tracks his sword.
The theory behind this is that no matter what guard you are in, your sword always directs your opponent’s blade away from you.
Fabris would disagree. While there are exceptions, generally speaking he considers the true edge to be the weak side of the sword. In Prima, he warns you about not letting your opponent get above your sword. In Seconda (second), he says that “since the hand has turned, the weak side of the guard has also changed from above the sword to the outside.” Likewise for Quarta (fourth) he considers the outside to be stronger and the inside (true edge) to be weaker. (See plate 16 for an exception.)
Aiming the Sword
In generic standard rapier we are taught to look through the tip of the sword at our target, that being the face or chest as seen in the illustration below. The arm is held at an angle, away from body, though not necessarily quite so far.
Fabris doesn’t like this posture. He complains that it offers too many openings, is too slow to parry high attacks, and needs too big a movement for the disengage. The only reason it can be used is that some fencers don’t know all of its strengths and weaknesses.
His preferred alternative is something generic standard rapier would scorn. A straight arm accompanying a straight blade.
He considers this version of Terza (third) to be much stronger and safer than the previous version, with the inside completely protected and the outside with a very small opening. Furthermore, you can find (i.e. constrain/dominate) your opponent’s sword just by moving the point and you can mutate into second or fourth with just a rotation of the wrist.
Looking at Fabris with New Eyes
I don’t want to say “everything you know is wrong” or that you must “unlearn” hard won skills from the past. But I do think you should try to put everything in a box and stick it on a shelf. Fabris does things differently; so to understand him you need to temporarily forget what you know about the rapier and look at his text with new eyes.
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A few weeks ago I wrote about how our brains make up what we can’t see, and people loved it. Here is something even more wild about how your brain is predisposed to follow a hive mind.
We all know other people influence how we think. Friends, family, and idols help us form opinions on just about everything. But how far can this impact go? What if someone could change not only what we think but what we see? Enter the Asch Conformity Experiments.
In 1951, social psychology pioneer Solomon Asch designed an experiment to test how individuals reacted to group pressure. The setup was simple: subjects were told they were participating in a perceptual experiment. Each was placed in a room with seven “confederates” (actors) posing as fellow participants. Groups were shown two cards, one with a single line and the other with three more lines, and told to match which of the three was the same length as the first. Seats were arranged so that the subject answered last. For the first two trials, everyone gave the obvious, correct answer. Then the real experiment began.
Confederates were instructed to unanimously choose a wrong answer for twelve of the remaining sixteen trials. These were called “critical” trials. While subjects had trusted their own opinions during the first two rounds, the changes were striking: in one-third of critical trials, subjects gave an incorrect response. These errors usually matched the confederates’ answers. Furthermore, three-fourths of subjects gave at least one incorrect response in the face of opposition.
Asch noticed key differences among subjects. Among those who gave the correct responses, some offered their views with confidence while others reacted with doubt or withdrawal, questioning their vision or trying not to draw attention. The conformists were more nuanced. During post-experiment interviews, most participants described to a “distortion of judgment,” that they had assumed the group was right and they were wrong. Others confessed to a “distortion of action,” having yielded to the group for fear of standing out.
The remaining conformists described a “distortion of perception.” Unlike the others, these subjects had actually believed the group was correct—they were unaware they had answered incorrectly at all. While these subjects comprised only a small portion of participants, their experience is the most profound. The group pressure convinced them they saw something that was not there, warped their perceptions until their reality matched the majority’s.
Asch’s experiment showcases the power of group dynamics. Our minds give precedence to the crowd, defer to the majority when our experiences do not add up. These tests have been repeated countless times, always with the same results. This highlights the dangerous pull of mobs and demagogues, those who draw people in without regard for facts or rationality. Moreover, Asch’s work demonstrates our susceptibility to a herd mentality. Our brains have evolved to follow, not lead, to take the beaten path instead of the unmarked trail.
Asch later modified his setup to test the extent of these influences. Among other things, he determined that unanimity of opposition is a key factor in deferring to the group and that having a dissenting “partner” greatly decreases conformity. You can read more about his findings here.
I find his study’s implications disturbing to say the least. The human mind is malleable, predisposed to conform to normalcy in even the most trivial of environments. This offers insight into the hive mind phenomenon that has caused such destruction throughout history. What do you think? Is this surprising? Terrifying? Share your thoughts in the comments section below. As always, please like, share, or reblog this post if you enjoy it. That small click really helps me out! Be sure to check me out on Twitter and Facebook as well. Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to subscribe for new content every Wednesday! IT’S FREE!
Click here for last week’s post: Misconceptions about evolution: why species, not individuals, evolve
Other related articles:
Could Humans Evolve into a Giant Hive Mind? (io9)
Top 10 Instances of Mob Mentality (Listverse)
5 Psychological Experiments That Prove Humanity is Doomed (Cracked)
Your Brain is a Liar and Can’t Be Trusted
Don’t Click This Link
Comment question of the week
Do humans follow a herd—or mob—mentality?German admiral
Carl Friedrich Heinrich Reinhard Scheer (30 September 1863 – 26 November 1928) was an Admiral in the Imperial German Navy (Kaiserliche Marine). Scheer joined the navy in 1879 as an officer cadet; he progressed through the ranks, commanding cruisers and battleships, as well as major staff positions on land. At the outbreak of World War I, Scheer was the commander of the II Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet. He then took command of the III Battle Squadron, which consisted of the newest and most powerful battleships in the navy. In January 1916, he was promoted to Admiral and given control of the High Seas Fleet. Scheer led the German fleet at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May–1 June 1916, one of the largest naval battles in history.
Following the battle, Scheer joined those calling for unrestricted submarine warfare against the Allies, a move the Kaiser eventually permitted. In August 1918, Scheer was promoted to the Chief of Naval Staff; Admiral Franz von Hipper replaced him as commander of the fleet. Together they planned a final battle against the British Grand Fleet, but war-weary sailors mutinied at the news and the operation was abandoned. Scheer retired after the end of the war.
A strict disciplinarian, Scheer was popularly known in the Navy as the "man with the iron mask" due to his severe appearance.[1] In 1919, Scheer wrote his memoirs; a year later they were translated and published in English. He wrote his autobiography in 1925. Scheer died at Marktredwitz. He is buried in the municipal cemetery at Weimar. The admiral was commemorated in the renascent Kriegsmarine by the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer, built in the 1930s.
Early career [ edit ]
Scheer was born in Obernkirchen, present-day Lower Saxony.[2] He came from a middle-class background, which initially hampered his naval career, as the Kaiserliche Marine was dominated by wealthy families.[3]
Reinhard Scheer entered the navy on 22 April 1879 aged 15 as a cadet. His first sea assignment was aboard the sail-frigate SMS Niobe. His first cruise aboard Niobe lasted from June to September 1879. During the cruise he was trained in navigation and engineering. Following his return to Germany in September, Scheer was assigned to the Naval School in Kiel to continue his officer training. He received only a "satisfactory" rating on his cadet evaluation in 1879, but received the second highest grade in his class for the Sea Cadet's Exam the following year. Following his graduation from the Naval School, Scheer embarked on a six-month-long special training program for gunnery, torpedo warfare, and infantry training. Afterward, he was assigned to the gunnery training ship SMS Renown.[2] Scheer was for a short time assigned to the armored frigate SMS Friedrich Carl. For his last year in cadet training, he was assigned to the frigate SMS Hertha, which conducted a world tour. The ship sailed to Melbourne, Australia, Yokohama, Kobe, and Nagasaki in Japan, and Shanghai, China during the trip.[4]
Following his commission into the German navy, he was transferred to the East Africa Squadron; his first tour with the unit lasted from 1884 to 1886. He was assigned to the crew of the frigate SMS Bismarck. Here he was promoted to Leutnant. He also made important connections in Africa; among those he befriended was Leutnant Henning von Holtzendorff, who would later serve as commander of the High Seas Fleet.[4] During the assignment, in December 1884, Scheer participated in a landing party that suppressed a pro-British indigenous chieftain in Kamerun.[5]
After his return to Germany in 1886, Scheer took part in torpedo training aboard SMS Blücher, from January to May 1888. In May 1888, Scheer returned to the East Africa Squadron as a torpedo officer aboard the corvette SMS Sophie. This tour lasted until early summer 1890, at which point Scheer returned to Germany, where he was made an instructor at the Torpedo Research Command in Kiel. Thus far in his career, Scheer had made a strong reputation for himself as a torpedo specialist. While stationed in Kiel, Scheer met Alfred von Tirpitz, who took note of his expertise. In 1897, following Tirpitz's promotion to Secretary of State of the Imperial Navy Office, he transferred Scheer to the Reichsmarineamt (RMA) to work in the Torpedo Section.[4]
After promotion to Korvettenkapitän, Scheer commanded the light cruiser SMS Gazelle.[1] Scheer was promoted to Kapitän zur See in 1905 and took command of the battleship SMS Elsass in 1907, a command he held for two years.[6] A report dated 1 December 1909 recommended Scheer for promotion; he became chief of staff to the commanding officer of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Holtzendorff,[7] under whom Scheer had served on the cruiser SMS Prinzess Wilhelm.[8] Scheer reached flag rank less than six months after taking his post on Holtzendorff's staff, at the age of 47. He held the Chief of Staff position until late 1911, when he was transferred back to the RMA under Tirpitz. Here, he held the position of Chief of the General Naval Department through 1912.[7] Following this appointment, Scheer returned to a sea command, in the form of squadron commander for the six battleships of the II Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet in January 1913.[9]
World War I [ edit ]
Reinhard Scheer
On 9 December 1913, Scheer was promoted to Vizeadmiral. He remained with the II Battle Squadron until January 1915, by which time World War I had begun. He thereafter took command of the III Battle Squadron,[10] which consisted of the most powerful battleships in the German fleet: the dreadnoughts of the Kaiser and König classes.[11] Scheer advocated raids on the British coast to lure out portions of the numerically superior Royal Navy so they could be overwhelmed by the German fleet. He was highly critical of Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, who he felt was overcautious.[10]
Following the bombardment of Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, during which Ingenohl had withdrawn instead of attacking a weaker British squadron, Scheer remarked, "[Ingenohl] had robbed us of the opportunity of meeting certain divisions of the enemy according to the prearranged plan, which was now seen to be correct."[10] Following the loss of SMS Blücher at the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, the Kaiser removed Ingenohl from his post on 2 February.[12] Admiral Hugo von Pohl replaced him as commander of the fleet. Pohl was exceedingly cautious; in the remainder of 1915, he conducted only five ineffective fleet actions, all of which remained within 120 nautical miles of Helgoland.[13]
Command of the High Seas fleet [ edit ]
Vice Admiral Scheer became Commander in chief of the High Seas Fleet on 18 January 1916 when Pohl became too ill to continue in that post.[14] Upon promotion to the position, Scheer wrote Guiding Principles for Sea Warfare in the North Sea, which outlined his strategic plans. His central idea was that the Grand Fleet should be pressured by higher U-boat activity and zeppelin raids as well as increased fleet sorties. The Grand Fleet would be forced to abandon the distant blockade and would have to attack the German fleet; the Kaiser approved the memorandum on 23 February 1916. Now that he had approval from the Kaiser, Scheer could use the fleet more aggressively.[15]
Following the Kaiser's order forbidding unrestricted submarine warfare on 24 April 1916, Scheer ordered all of the U-boats in the Atlantic to return to Germany and abandon commerce raiding.[16] Scheer intended to use the submarines to support the fleet by stationing the U-boats off major British naval bases. The U-boats would intercept British forces leaving the ports when provoked by a bombardment by the I Scouting Group battlecruisers under the command of Vice Admiral Franz von Hipper.[17] Scheer planned the operation for 17 May, but damage to the battlecruiser SMS Seydlitz from the previous month, coupled with condenser trouble on several of the battleships of III Battle Squadron caused the plan to be delayed, ultimately to 31 May.[18]
Battle of Jutland [ edit ]
Admiral Scheer's fleet, composed of 16 dreadnoughts, six pre-dreadnoughts, six light cruisers, and 31 torpedo boats departed the Jade early on the morning of 31 May. The fleet sailed in concert with Hipper's five battlecruisers and supporting cruisers and torpedo boats.[19] The British navy's Room 40 had intercepted and decrypted German radio traffic containing plans of the operation, and so sortied the Grand Fleet, totaling some 28 dreadnoughts and 9 battlecruisers, the night before in order to cut off and destroy the High Seas Fleet.[20]
At 16:00 UTC, the two battlecruiser forces encountered each other and began a running gun fight south, back towards Scheer's battle fleet.[21] Upon reaching the High Seas Fleet, Vice Admiral David Beatty's battlecruisers turned back to the north to lure the Germans towards the rapidly approaching Grand Fleet, under the command of Admiral John Jellicoe.[22] During the run to the north, Scheer's leading ships engaged the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships of the 5th Battle Squadron.[23] By 18:30, the Grand Fleet had arrived on the scene, and was deployed into a position that would cross Scheer's "T" from the northeast. To extricate his fleet from this precarious position, Scheer ordered a 16-point turn to the south-west.[24] At 18:55, Scheer decided to conduct another 16-point turn to launch an attack on the British fleet;[25] he later explained his reasoning:
It was as yet too early to assume 'night cruising order.' The enemy could have compelled us to fight before dark, he could have prevented our exercising our initiative, and finally he could have cut off our return to the German Bight. There was only one way of avoiding this: to inflict a second blow on the enemy with another advance carried through regardless of cost...It also offered the possibility of a last attempt being made to bring help to the hard-pressed Wiesbaden, or at least of rescuing her ship's company.[25]
This maneuver again put Scheer in a dangerous position; Jellicoe had turned his fleet south and again crossed Scheer's "T."[26] A third 16-point turn followed, which was covered by a charge by Hipper's mauled battlecruisers.[27] Scheer then ordered the fleet to adopt the night cruising formation, which was completed by 23:40.[28] A series of ferocious engagements between Scheer's battleships and Jellicoe's destroyer screen ensued, though the Germans managed to punch their way through the destroyers and make for Horns Reef.[29] The High Seas Fleet reached the Jade between 13:00 and 14:45 on 1 June; Scheer ordered the undamaged battleships of the I Battle Squadron to take up defensive positions in the Jade roadstead while the Kaiser-class battleships were to maintain a state of readiness just outside Wilhelmshaven.[30]
Scheer, from the frontispiece of his memoirs
After the battle was finished, Scheer wrote an assessment of the engagement for the Kaiser; in it, he strongly urged for the resumption of the unrestricted submarine warfare campaign in the Atlantic. He argued that it was the only option to defeat Great Britain. Scheer spent the majority of the remainder of the year debating the issue with the naval command.[31] Ultimately, Scheer and his allies prevailed and the unrestricted submarine campaign was resumed in February 1917.[32] Despite his conviction that only the U-boats could defeat Britain, Scheer continued to utilize the surface fleet. On 18–19 August 1916, the High Seas Fleet again sortied in an attempt to draw out and defeat Admiral Beatty's battlecruiser squadron. The Royal Navy again intercepted German communications and sent the Grand Fleet out. In this case, however, Scheer's reconnaissance worked as intended, and warned him of the Grand Fleet's approach in time to retreat back to Germany.[33] In later 1917, Scheer began to use light elements of the fleet to raid British convoys to Norway in the North Sea. This forced the British to deploy battleships to escort the convoys, which presented Scheer with the opportunity to attempt to isolate and destroy several battleships of the Grand Fleet.[34] On 23 April 1918, Scheer sent the entire High Seas Fleet to intercept one of the convoys. However, Hipper's battlecruisers crossed the convoy's path several times without sighting any ships; it was later discovered that German intelligence had miscalculated the date the convoy would depart Britain. The German fleet turned south and reached their North Sea bases by 19:00.[35]
Chief of Naval Staff [ edit ]
In June 1918, Scheer was informed that the state of Admiral Holtzendorff's health would not permit him to remain in his post as chief of the naval staff much longer.[36] On 28 July, Scheer was informed that Holtzendorff had submitted his resignation to the Kaiser.[37] Two weeks later, on 11 August 1918, Scheer was promoted to the Chief of Naval Staff; his subordinate Franz von Hipper succeeded him in command of the High Seas Fleet.[38] The following day |
the estimate is lower than a 2012 cost estimate from the Pentagon’s CAPE office, in part due to the fact that first production is slated for 2020 and not, as CAPE expected, 2022. He believes the program has cost NNSA about $2 billion through fiscal year 2016.
The Pentagon is seeking a sweeping recapitalization of its nuclear systems. In addition to the 3+2 plan, the DoD will spend the 2020s bringing online a new nuclear submarine design, replacing the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, and producing the B-21 Raider bomber.
During a cross-country trip in late September, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter made his case for the expensive and wide-ranging upgrades that are required to modernize the nuclear triad.
"If we don’t replace these systems, quite simply they will age even more, and become unsafe, unreliable, and ineffective. The fact is, most of our nuclear weapon delivery systems have already been extended decades beyond their original expected service lives," Carter said Sept. 26. "So it’s not a choice between replacing these platforms or keeping them. … It’s really a choice between replacing them or losing them. That would mean losing confidence in our ability to deter, which we can’t afford in today’s volatile security environment."
The nonproliferation community has targeted the Long Range Stand-Off (LRSO) cruise missile replacement as one arm of the nuclear force that could be potentially cut, something that was given a big boost when audio emerged last month of presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton expressing concerns about the program.United States Supreme Court case
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), also known as the Dred Scott case or Dred Scott decision, was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on U.S. labor law and constitutional law. It held that "a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,"[2][3] whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen, and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court,[4][5] and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. Dred Scott, an enslaved man of "the negro African race"[3] who had been taken by his owners to free states and territories, attempted to sue for his freedom. In a 7–2 decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the court denied Scott's request. The decision was only the second time that the Supreme Court had ruled an Act of Congress to be unconstitutional.[6]
Although Taney hoped that his ruling would settle the slavery question, the decision immediately spurred vehement dissent from anti-slavery elements in the North and proved to be an indirect catalyst for the American Civil War. It was functionally superseded by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1868, which gave African Americans full citizenship.
The Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford is largely denounced by modern scholars. Many contemporary lawyers, and most modern legal scholars, consider the ruling regarding slavery in the territories to be obiter dictum and not a binding precedent. Bernard Schwartz says it "stands first in any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions—Chief Justice C. E. Hughes called it the Court's greatest self-inflicted wound."[7] Junius P. Rodriguez says it is "universally condemned as the U.S. Supreme Court's worst decision."[8] Historian David Thomas Konig says it was "unquestionably, our court's worst decision ever."[5][9][10]
Background [ edit ]
Dred Scott
Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia in 1795. Little is known of his early years.[11] His owner, Peter Blow, moved to Alabama in 1818, taking his six slaves along to work a farm near Huntsville. In 1830, Blow gave up farming and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he sold Scott to U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson.[12] After purchasing Scott, Emerson took him to Fort Armstrong in Illinois. A free state, Illinois had been free as a territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and had prohibited slavery in its constitution in 1819 when it was admitted as a state.
In 1836, Emerson moved with Scott from Illinois to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin territory in what has become the state of Minnesota. Slavery in the Wisconsin Territory (some of which, including Fort Snelling, was part of the Louisiana Purchase) was prohibited by the United States Congress under the Missouri Compromise. During his stay at Fort Snelling, Scott married Harriet Robinson in a civil ceremony by Harriet's owner, Major Lawrence Taliaferro, a justice of the peace who was also an Indian agent. The ceremony would have been unnecessary had Dred Scott been a slave, as slave marriages had no recognition in the law.[5][12]
In 1837, the army ordered Emerson to Jefferson Barracks Military Post, south of St. Louis, Missouri. Emerson left Scott and his wife at Fort Snelling, where he leased their services out for profit. By hiring Scott out in a free state, Emerson was effectively bringing the institution of slavery into a free state, which was a direct violation of the Missouri Compromise, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Wisconsin Enabling Act.[5]
Before the end of the year, the army reassigned Emerson to Fort Jesup in Louisiana, where Emerson married Eliza Irene Sanford in February, 1838. Emerson sent for Scott and Harriet, who proceeded to Louisiana to serve their master and his wife. While en route to Louisiana, Scott's daughter Eliza was born on a steamboat underway on the Mississippi River between Illinois and what would become Iowa. Because Eliza was born in free territory, she was technically born as a free person under both federal and state laws. Upon entering Louisiana, the Scotts could have sued for their freedom, but did not. Finkelman suggests that in all likelihood, the Scotts would have been granted their freedom by a Louisiana court, as it had respected laws of free states that slaveholders forfeited their right to slaves if they brought them in for extended periods. This had been the holding in Louisiana state courts for more than 20 years.[5]
Toward the end of 1838, the army reassigned Emerson to Fort Snelling. By 1840, Emerson's wife Irene returned to St. Louis with their slaves, while Dr. Emerson served in the Seminole War. While in St. Louis, she hired them out. In 1842, Emerson left the army. After he died in the Iowa Territory in 1843, his widow Irene inherited his estate, including the Scotts. For three years after John Emerson's death, she continued to lease out the Scotts as hired slaves. In 1846, Scott attempted to purchase his and his family's freedom, but Irene Emerson refused, prompting Scott to resort to legal recourse.[13]
Procedural history [ edit ]
First attempt [ edit ]
Having been unsuccessful in his attempt to purchase freedom for his family and himself, and with the help of abolitionist legal advisers, Scott sued Emerson for his freedom in a Missouri court in 1846. Scott received financial assistance for his case from the family of his previous owner, Peter Blow.[5] Blow's daughter Charlotte was married to Joseph Charless, an officer at the Bank of Missouri. Charless signed the legal documents as security for Dred Scott and secured the services of the bank's attorney, Samuel Mansfield Bay, for the trial.[12]
Scott based his legal argument on precedents such as Somersett v. Stewart, Winny v. Whitesides,[14] and Rachel v. Walker,[15] claiming his presence and residence in free territories required his emancipation. Scott's lawyers argued the same for Scott's wife, and further claimed that Eliza Scott's birth on a steamboat between a free state and a free territory had made her free upon birth.
It was expected that the Scotts would win their freedom with relative ease, since Missouri courts had previously heard more than ten other cases in which they had freed slaves who had been taken into free territory.[5] Furthermore, the case had been assigned to Judge Alexander Hamilton, who was known to be sympathetic to slave freedom suits.[12] Scott was represented by three lawyers during the course of the case because it was over a year from the time of the original petition filing to the trial. His first lawyer was Francis B. Murdoch, who was replaced by Charles D. Drake. When Drake left St. Louis in 1847, Samuel M. Bay took over as Scott's lawyer.[16] In June 1847, Scott lost his case due to a technicality: Scott had not proven that he was actually enslaved by Irene Emerson. At the trial, grocer Samuel Russell had testified that he was leasing Scott from Irene Emerson, but on cross-examination he admitted that the leasing arrangements had actually been made by his wife Adeline. Thus, Russell's testimony was ruled hearsay and the jury returned a verdict for Emerson.[12]
Scott v. Emerson [ edit ]
In December 1847, Judge Hamilton granted Scott a new trial. Emerson appealed this decision to the Supreme Court of Missouri, which affirmed the trial court's order in 1848. Due to a major fire, a cholera epidemic, and two continuances, the new trial did not begin until January 1850. While the case awaited trial, Scott and his family were placed in the custody of the St. Louis County Sheriff, who continued to lease out the services of Scott and his family. The proceeds were placed in escrow, to be paid to Scott's owner or himself upon resolution of the case.
In the 1850 trial, Scott was represented by Alexander P. Field and David N. Hall, both of whom had previously shared offices with Charles Edmund LaBeaume, the brother of Peter Blow's daughter-in-law. The hearsay problem was surmounted by a deposition from Adeline Russell, stating that she had leased the Scotts from Emerson. The jury found in favor of Scott and his family. Unwilling to accept the loss of four slaves and a substantial escrow account, Emerson appealed to the Supreme Court of Missouri, although by that point she had moved to Massachusetts and transferred ownership of Scott to her brother, John F. A. Sanford.
In November 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the trial court's decision, holding that the Scotts were still legally slaves and that they should have sued for freedom while living in a free state. Chief Justice William Scott declared:
Times are not now as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not only individuals but States have been possessed with a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures, whose inevitable consequences must be the overthrow and destruction of our government. Under such circumstances it does not behoove the State of Missouri to show the least countenance to any measure which might gratify this spirit. She is willing to assume her full responsibility for the existence of slavery within her limits, nor does she seek to share or divide it with others.[17]
Scott v. Sanford [ edit ]
At this point, the case looked hopeless, and the Blow family decided that they could no longer pay for Scott's legal costs. Scott also lost both of his lawyers, as Alexander Field had moved to Louisiana and David Hall had died. The case was now undertaken pro bono by Roswell Field, whose office employed Dred Scott as a janitor. Field also discussed the case with LaBeaume, who had taken over the lease on the Scotts in 1851.[18] Following the Missouri Supreme Court decision, Judge Hamilton turned down a request by Emerson's lawyers to release the rent payments from escrow and to deliver the slaves into their owner's custody.[12]
In 1853, Dred Scott again sued his current owner, John Sanford,[1] but now in federal court. Sanford had returned to New York, so the federal courts now had diversity jurisdiction under Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. In addition to the existing complaints, Scott also alleged that Sanford had assaulted his family and held them captive for six hours on January 1, 1853.[19]
At trial in 1854, Judge Robert William Wells directed the jury to rely on Missouri law to settle the question of Scott's freedom. Since the Missouri Supreme Court had held that Scott remained a slave, the jury found in favor of Sanford. Scott then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case was recorded as Dred Scott v. Sandford and entered history with that title. Scott was represented before the Supreme Court by Montgomery Blair and George Ticknor Curtis, whose brother Benjamin was a Supreme Court Justice. Sanford was represented by Reverdy Johnson and Henry S. Geyer.[12]
Influence of President Buchanan [ edit ]
Historians discovered that after the Supreme Court had heard arguments in the case but before it had issued a ruling, President-elect James Buchanan wrote to his friend, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice John Catron, asking whether the case would be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court before his inauguration in March 1857.[20] Buchanan hoped the decision would quell unrest in the country over the slavery issue by issuing a ruling that put the future of slavery beyond the realm of political debate.
Buchanan later successfully pressured Associate Justice Robert Cooper Grier, a Northerner, to join the Southern majority in Dred Scott to prevent the appearance that the decision was made along sectional lines.[21] Both by present-day standards and under the more lenient standards of the time, Buchanan's applying such political pressure to a member of a sitting court would be regarded as highly improper.[22] Republicans fueled speculation as to Buchanan's influence by publicizing that Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had secretly informed Buchanan of the decision before Buchanan declared, in his inaugural address, that the slavery question would "be speedily and finally settled" by the Supreme Court.[23][24]
Supreme Court ruling [ edit ]
The Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott in a 7–2 decision that fills over 200 pages in the United States Reports. The decision contains opinions from eight different justices, but the opinion of the Court—the "majority opinion"—is the opinion that has always been the focus of the controversy.
Opinion of the Court [ edit ]
Seven justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney began with a statement of what he saw as the core issue in the case:
The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all of the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied [sic] by that instrument to the citizen? — Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. at 403.
In answer, the Court ruled that they could not. The Court held that slaves were not American citizens, and therefore a lawsuit to which they were a party could never qualify for the "diversity of citizenship" that Article III of the United States Constitution requires for an American federal court to be able to exercise jurisdiction over a case. Taney based the majority's opinion around a set of historical notions and assertions, and did not provide much actual legal reasoning for the Court's conclusions. His primary rationale for the decision was his claim that black African slaves and their descendants were never intended to be part of the American social and political landscape.
We think [...] that [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them. — Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. at 404–05.
Taney then spent many pages reviewing the laws of various American States that involved the status of black Americans at the time of the Constitution's creation in 1787. He concluded that these laws showed that a "perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery."[27] Thus, he concluded, black people were not American citizens, and could not sue as citizens in federal courts. This meant that U.S. states lacked the power to alter the legal status of black people by granting them state citizenship.
After concluding that the Court had no jurisdiction over Dred Scott's case because he was not a citizen, Taney continued further and struck down the Missouri Compromise as unconstitutional. Taney wrote that the Compromise's legal provisions would free slaves who were living north of the 36°N latitude line in the western territories. However, in the Court's judgment, this would constitute the government depriving slaveowners of their property—since slaves were legally the property of their owners—without due process of law, which is forbidden under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It also reasoned that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights implicitly precluded any possibility of constitutional rights for black African slaves and their descendants. Thus, Taney concluded:
Now, [...] the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. [...] Upon these considerations, it is the opinion of the court that the act of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning property of this kind in the territory of the United States north of the [36°N 36' latitude] line therein mentioned, is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void. — Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. at 451–52.
Because the Compromise exceeded the scope of Congress's powers and was unconstitutional, Taney wrote, Dred Scott was still a slave regardless of his time spent in Illinois and the parts of the Northwest Territory that were north of 36°N. Therefore, he was still a slave under Missouri law, and the Court had to follow Missouri law in the matter. For all these reasons, the Court concluded, Dred Scott could not bring suit in U.S. federal court.
Dissents by Justice Curtis and Justice McLean [ edit ]
Justice John McLean was the senior justice of the two dissenting opinions.
Justice John McLean dissented, writing that there was no basis for the claim that blacks could not be citizens. At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, black men could vote in five of the thirteen states. This made them citizens not only of their states but of the United States.[31] Therefore, Justice McLean concluded that the argument that Scott was not a citizen was "more a matter of taste than of law". In his dissent, Justice McLean cited as precedent Marie Louise v. Marot, an 1835 case in which Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice George Mathews Jr. ruled that "being free for one moment in France, it was not in the power of her former owner to reduce her again to slavery."[32]
Justice Curtis was the junior dissenting justice.
Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis, in dissent, attacked much of the Supreme Court's decision as obiter dicta, on the ground that once the court determined that it did not have jurisdiction to hear Scott's case, it must simply dismiss the action, and not pass judgment on the merits of the claims. The dissents by Curtis and McLean also attacked the court's overturning of the Missouri Compromise on its merits, noting both that it was not necessary to decide the question, and also that none of the authors of the Constitution had ever objected on constitutional grounds to the United States Congress' adoption of the antislavery provisions of the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Continental Congress, or the subsequent acts that barred slavery north of 36°30' N.
Consequences [ edit ]
Economic [ edit ]
Perhaps the most immediate business consequence of the decision was to help trigger the Panic of 1857. Economist Charles Calomiris and historian Larry Schweikart discovered that uncertainty about whether the entire West would suddenly become either slave territory or engulfed in combat like "Bleeding Kansas" gripped the markets immediately. The east–west railroads collapsed immediately (although north–south-running lines were unaffected), causing, in turn, the near-collapse of several large banks and the runs that ensued. What followed these runs has been called the Panic of 1857.
It differed sharply from the Panic of 1837, in that its effects were almost exclusively confined to the North. Calomiris and Schweikart found this resulted from the South's superior system of branch banking (as opposed to the North's unit banking system), in which the transmission of the panic was minor due to the diversification of the southern branch banking systems. Information moved reliably among the branch banks, whereas in the North, the unit banks (competitors) seldom shared such vital information.[33]
Political [ edit ]
The decision was hailed in Southern slaveholding society as a proper interpretation of the United States Constitution. According to Jefferson Davis, then a United States Senator from Mississippi, and later President of the Confederate States of America, the Dred Scott case was merely a question of "whether Cuffee should be kept in his normal condition or not".[34] At that time, "Cuffee" was a common slave name and there often used to refer to a black person, as slavery was a racial caste.[35]
Prior to Dred Scott, Democratic Party politicians had sought repeal of the Missouri Compromise. They were finally successful in 1854 with the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. This act permitted each newly admitted state south of the 40th parallel to vote as to whether to be a slave state or free state. With Dred Scott, the Supreme Court under Taney permitted the unhindered expansion of slavery into all the territories.
The Dred Scott decision, then, represented a culmination of what many at that time considered a push to expand slavery. Southerners at the time, who had grown uncomfortable with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, argued that they had a right, under the federal constitution, to bring slaves into the territories, regardless of any decision by a territorial legislature on the subject. The Dred Scott decision seemed to endorse that view. The expansion of slavery into the territories and resulting admission of new states would mean a loss of political power for the North, as many of the new states would be admitted as slave states. Counting three-fifths of the slave population for apportionment would add to the slave holding states' political representation in Congress.
Although Taney believed that the decision represented a compromise that would settle the slavery question once and for all by transforming a contested political issue into a matter of settled law, it produced the opposite result. It strengthened Northern opposition to slavery, divided the Democratic Party on sectional lines, encouraged secessionist elements among Southern supporters of slavery to make bolder demands, and strengthened the Republican Party.
Reaction [ edit ]
The contemporary reaction to the Dred Scott decision was harsh: "[Chief Justice] Taney's majority opinion in Dred Scott was greeted with unmitigated wrath from every segment of the United States except the slave holding states." However, the justices seem to have been unprepared for the public reaction against the decision, which was extreme. In his well-known history of the Supreme Court, the American political historian Robert G. McCloskey (1916–1969) wrote:
The tempest of malediction that burst over the judges seems to have stunned them; far from extinguishing the slavery controversy, they had fanned its flames and had, moreover, deeply endangered the security of the judicial arm of government. No such vilification as this had been heard even in the wrathful days following the Alien and Sedition Acts. Taney’s opinion was assailed by the Northern press as a wicked “stump speech” and was shamefully misquoted and distorted. “If the people obey this decision," said one newspaper, "they disobey God." McCloskey & Levinson (2010), p. 62.[36]
Opponents of slavery fiercely attacked the Dred Scott decision. The Evening Journal of Albany, New York, combined two themes and denounced the decision as both an offense to the principles of liberty on which the nation was founded, and a victory for slave states over the free states:[37]
The three hundred and forty-seven thousand five hundred and twenty-five Slaveholders in the Republic, accomplished day before yesterday a great success—as shallow men estimate success. They converted the Supreme Court of Law and Equity of the United States of America into a propagandist of human Slavery. Fatal day for a judiciary made reputable throughout the world, and reliable to all in this nation, by the learning and the virtues of Jay, Rutledge, Ellsworth, Marshall and Story! The conspiracy is nearly completed. The Legislation of the Republic is in the hands of this handful of Slaveholders. The United States Senate assures it to them. The Executive power of the Government is theirs. Buchanan took the oath of fealty to them on the steps of the Capitol last Wednesday. The body which gives the supreme law of the land, has just acceded to their demands, and dared to declare that under the charter of the Nation, men of African descent are not citizens of the United States and can not be—that the Ordinance of 1787 was void—that human Slavery is not a local thing, but pursues its victims to free soil, clings to them wherever they go, and returns with them—that the American Congress has no power to prevent the enslavement of men in the National Territories—that the inhabitants themselves of the Territories have no power to exclude human bondage from their midst—and that men of color can not be suitors for justice in the Courts of the United States!
That editorial ended on a martial note:
All who love Republican institutions and who hate Aristocracy, compact yourselves together for the struggle which threatens your liberty and will test your manhood!
Many abolitionists and some supporters of slavery believed that Taney was prepared to rule, as soon as the issue was presented in a subsequent case, as for instance, Lemmon v. New York, that the states had no power to prohibit slavery within their borders and that state laws providing for the emancipation of slaves brought into their territory or forbidding the institution of slavery were likewise unconstitutional. Abraham Lincoln stressed this danger during his "House Divided" speech at Springfield, Illinois, on June 16, 1858:
Put this and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits... We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.
That fear of the next Dred Scott decision shocked many in the North who had been content to accept slavery as long as it was confined within its then present borders. It also put the Northern Democrats, such as Stephen A. Douglas, in a difficult position. The Northern wing of the Democratic Party had supported the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 under the banner of popular sovereignty. They argued that even if Congress did not bar the expansion of slavery into those territories, the residents of those territories could prohibit it by territorial legislation. The Dred Scott decision squarely stated that they could not exercise such prohibition, even though, strictly speaking, that issue was not before the Supreme Court.
Without challenging the court's decision directly, Douglas attempted to overcome that obstacle by creating his Freeport Doctrine. Douglas insisted that, even if a territory could not bar slavery outright, the institution could not take root without local police regulations to protect it and a territory could refuse to pass such local support.
This doctrine was wholly unacceptable to Southern Democrats, who reached a different conclusion from the same premise. They argued that if hostile territorial governments could obstruct their right to bring their slaves into a territory by refusing to protect that right, then Congress must intervene to pass a federal slave code for all the territories. They often coupled this position with threats to secede if Congress did not comply.
At the same time, Democrats characterized Republicans as lawless rebels, provoking disunion by their unwillingness to accept the Supreme Court's decision as the law of the land. Many Northern opponents of slavery offered a legalistic argument for refusing to recognize the Dred Scott decision as binding. As they noted, the Supreme Court's decision began with the proposition that the federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear Scott's case because he was not a citizen of the State of Missouri. Therefore, so the opponents argued, the remainder of the decision concerning the Missouri Compromise was unnecessary (i.e., beyond the court's power to decide) and therefore a passing remark rather than an authoritative interpretation of the law (i.e., obiter dictum). Douglas attacked this position in the Lincoln–Douglas debates:
Mr. Lincoln goes for a warfare upon the Supreme Court of the United States, because of their judicial decision in the Dred Scott case. I yield obedience to the decisions in that court—to the final determination of the highest judicial tribunal known to our constitution.
Democrats had previously refused to accept the court's interpretation of the Constitution as permanently binding. During the Jackson administration, Roger B. Taney, working as Attorney General, wrote :
Whatever may be the force of the decision of the Supreme Court in binding the parties and settling their rights in the particular case before them, I am not prepared to admit that a construction given to the constitution by the Supreme Court in deciding any one or more cases fixes of itself irrevokably [sic] and permanently its construction in that particular and binds the states and the Legislative and executive branches of the General government, forever afterwards to conform to it and adopt it in every other case as the true reading of the instrument although all of them may unite in believing it erroneous.[38]
Southern supporters of slavery claimed that the Dred Scott decision was essential to the preservation of the union. As the Richmond Enquirer stated:
Thus has a politico-legal question, involving others of deep import, been decided emphatically in favor of the advocates and supporters of the Constitution and the Union, the equality of the States and the rights of the South, in contradistinction to and in repudiation of the diabolical doctrines inculcated by factionists and fanatics; and that too by a tribunal of jurists, as learned, impartial and unprejudiced as perhaps the world has ever seen. A prize, for which the athletes of the nation have often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it. The "nation" has achieved a triumph, "sectionalism" has been rebuked, and abolitionism has been staggered and stunned. Another supporting pillar has been added to our institutions; the assailants of the South and enemies of the Union have been driven from their point d'appui; a patriotic principle has been pronounced; a great, national, conservative, union saving sentiment has been proclaimed.
While some supporters of slavery treated the decision as a vindication of their rights within the union, others treated it as merely a step to spreading slavery throughout the nation, as the Republicans claimed. Convinced that any restrictions on their right to own slaves and to take them anywhere they chose were unlawful, they boasted that the coming decade would see slave auctions on Boston Common. These Southern radicals were ready to split the Democratic Party and—as events showed—the nation on that principle.
Frederick Douglass, a prominent African-American abolitionist who thought the decision unconstitutional and the Chief Justice's reasoning contrary to the founders' vision, prophesied that political conflict could not be avoided:
The highest authority has spoken. The voice of the Supreme Court has gone out over the troubled waves of the National Conscience... [But] my hopes were never brighter than now. I have no fear that the National Conscience will be put to sleep by such an open, glaring, and scandalous tissue of lies...[39]
The Scott family's fate [ edit ]
Irene Emerson had moved to Massachusetts in 1850 and married Calvin C. Chaffee, a doctor and abolitionist who was elected to Congress on the Know Nothing and Republican tickets. Following the Supreme Court ruling, proslavery newspapers attacked Chaffee as a hypocrite. Chaffee protested that Dred Scott belonged to his brother-in law and that he had nothing to do with Scott's enslavement.[19] Nevertheless, the Chaffees executed a deed transferring the Scott family to Taylor Blow, son of Scott's former owner Peter Blow. Field suggested the transfer to Chaffee as the most convenient way of freeing Scott, as Missouri law required manumitters to appear in person before the court.[19]
Taylor Blow filed the manumission papers with Judge Hamilton on May 26, 1857. The emancipation of Dred Scott and his family was national news and was celebrated in northern cities. Scott worked as a porter in a hotel in St. Louis, where he was a minor celebrity. His wife took in laundry.
Dred Scott died of tuberculosis only 18 months after attaining freedom, on November 7, 1858. Harriet died on June 17, 1876.[12]
Sanford as defendant [ edit ]
When the case was filed, the two sides agreed on a statement of facts that claimed Scott had been sold by Dr. Emerson to John Sanford. However, this was a legal fiction. Dr. Emerson had died in 1843, and Dred Scott had filed his 1847 suit against Irene Emerson. There is no record of Dred Scott's transfer to Sanford, or of his transfer back to Irene Chaffee. John Sanford died shortly before Scott's manumission, but Scott is not listed in the probate records of Sanford's estate.[18] Nor was Sanford acting as Dr. Emerson's executor, as he was never appointed by a probate court, and the Emerson estate had already been settled by the time the federal case was filed.[5]
Because of the murky circumstances surrounding ownership, it has been suggested that the parties to Dred Scott v. Sandford contrived to create a test case.[13][18][19] Mrs. Emerson's remarriage to an abolitionist Congressman seemed suspicious to contemporaries, and Sanford seemed to be a front who allowed himself to be sued despite not actually being Scott's owner. However, Sanford had been involved in the case since 1847, before his sister married Chaffee. He had secured counsel for his sister in the state case, and he engaged the same lawyer for his own defense in the federal case.[13] Sanford also consented to be represented by genuine pro-slavery advocates before the Supreme Court, rather than putting up a token defense.
Later references [ edit ]
Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared racial segregation constitutional and created the concept of "separate but equal". In his dissent, Harlan wrote that the majority's opinion would "prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case".[40]
Charles Evans Hughes, writing in 1927 on the Supreme Court's history, described Dred Scott v. Sandford as a "self-inflicted wound" from which the court would not recover for many years.[41][42][43]
In a memo to Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952 (for whom he was clerking at the time) on the subject of Brown v. Board of Education, future Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that "Scott v. Sandford was the result of Taney's effort to protect slaveholders from legislative interference."[44]
Justice Antonin Scalia made the comparison between Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Dred Scott in an effort to see Roe v. Wade overturned:
Dred Scott... rested upon the concept of "substantive due process" that the Court praises and employs today. Indeed, Dred Scott was very possibly the first application of substantive due process in the Supreme Court, the original precedent for... Roe v. Wade.[45]
Scalia noted that the Dred Scott decision, written and championed by Taney, left the justice's reputation irrevocably tarnished. Taney, while attempting to end the disruptive question of the future of slavery, wrote a decision that aggravated sectional tensions and was considered to contribute to the American Civil War.[46]
Chief Justice John Roberts compared Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) to the Dred Scott case, as another example of trying to settle a contentious issue through a ruling that went beyond the scope of the Constitution.[47]
Legacy [ edit ]
1977: The Scotts' great-grandson, John A. Madison, Jr., an attorney, gave the invocation at the ceremony at the Old Courthouse (St. Louis) in St. Louis, a National Historic Landmark, for the dedication of a National Historic Marker commemorating the Scotts' case tried there. [48]
2000: Harriet and Dred Scott's petition papers in their freedom suit were displayed at the main branch of the St. Louis Public Library, following discovery of more than 300 freedom suits in the archives of the U.S. circuit court. [49]
2006: A new historic plaque was erected at the Old Courthouse to honor the active roles of both Dred and Harriet Scott in their freedom suit and the case's significance in U.S. history. [50]
2012: A monument depicting Dred and Harriet Scott was erected at the Old Courthouse's east entrance facing the St. Louis' Gateway Arch.[51]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Citations [ edit ]
Works cited [ edit ]The way you move your mouse is unique, like fingerprints, and can be used by dark forces to track you on supposedly anonymous and secure networks like Tor, according to a Barcelona researcher.
Jose Carlos Norte discovered the snooping method in recent weeks.
“I have been able to fingerprint Tor browser users in controlled environments and I think it could be interesting to share all the findings for further discussion and to improve Tor browser,” he said on his website.
Using Javascript, a hacker could identify a user based on the movements in their mouse as Tor uses the programming language by default.
Networks such as Tor are vital resources for those wishing to use the internet securely like whistleblowers, journalists, and political dissidents.
Tor previously countered fingerprinting methods like analyzing local time, operating systems, and fonts through updates.
Clever! Fingerprinting a website user based on his mouse wheel moves, as reported by your browser. Has a demo, too. https://t.co/0MDkmpfxc5 — Mikko Hypponen (@mikko) March 8, |
Manager Contextual Additions
Open as root
Set as wallpaper
Right click check md5sum
Right click desktop trash empty
Below are screenshots and the download link. Enjoy.
Download NowManhattan Councilwoman Margaret Chin tore into comments yesterday by Brooklyn Councilwoman Laurie Cumbo about ‘blocs’ of Asian-Americans moving into public housing developments in the latter’s predominantly black district.
Ms. Chin, who represents Chinatown, hit the African-American Ms. Cumbo for claiming during a Council hearing yesterday that the New York City Housing Authority was allowing large numbers of non-English-speaking Asians into two of its developments to the apparent exclusion of other groups. The Hong Kong native also criticized Ms. Cumbo’s later suggestion to the New York Post that the city house people “by culture.”
“I am troubled by Council Member Cumbo’s recent comments regarding Asian-Americans who live in public housing within her district, as well as her comments about ‘housing people by culture,'” Ms. Cumbo said, adding that she personally respected her colleague despite the remarks. “I’m concerned about the potentially negative impact that her comments could have on Asian-American residents in her district.”
Ms. Chin, a leader in the Council’s dominant Progressive Caucus, said that Ms Cumbo’s statements had violated the duty of politicians to act as a unifying force in their districts.
“This is New York City, after all, and it is our responsibility as Council members to do everything in our power to bring our constituents together,” she said, adding that she had since offered to help Ms. Cumbo with outreach to Asian-American residents. “I hope to work with her office to arrange meetings or forums that will help her build stronger relationships with her Asian-American constituents. I look forward to speaking with her further about that.”
Ms. Cumbo did notimmediately respond to requests for comment. Her remarks yesterday were posed as a question to NYCHA Chairwoman and Chief Executive Shola Olatoye, and the councilwoman stressed that “we love” the new Asian residents of the public housing buildings in her district, even as she questioned why there were so many of them.
“We want to understand, what the tenants want to understand is how is it—because the way they’re understanding it is that people from all ethnicities could be moving into the district, but that’s not actually the case,” she said. “They are having challenges in terms of understanding how one particular ethnic group, that speaks the same language across the board—I know that there are many different languages and many different dialects—but how is it that one specific ethnic group, has had the opportunity to move into a development in large numbers.”
Ms. Cumbo later released a statement stressing that her purpose was only to find out if NYCHA was giving Asian-Americans a “cultural preference priority,” and apologized for hurt feelings.
“It was not my intention to offend the Asian community or any other cultural group that calls NYCHA home,” she said.
Queens Congresswoman Grace Meng, another Chinese-American, also criticized Ms. Cumbo on her personal Facebook page, on which she linked an article about the Brooklyn councilwoman’s statements.
“There are more effective and respectful ways to address the shortage of affordable housing and helping those in need regardless of the color of their skin or where they have come from,” Ms. Meng wrote.
The congresswoman expanded upon her comments in a press statement sent Friday night, noting that many Asian-Americans live in poverty despite “model minority” stereotypes. She singled out Ms. Cumbo’s comments about potentially distributing housing along ethnic lines for special opprobrium.
“The diverse mosaic of our city—and all the different cultures living together—is what makes it so great, and gives it its strength. That should never be tampered with, and segregating Asian Americans or any other ethnicity must never, ever occur,” she wrote.
Meanwhile Queens Assemblyman Ron Kim, the first Korean-American elected to the State Legislature, called Ms. Cumbo’s remarks “distinctly disturbing” and demanded a full apology to the Asian community.
“The latest comments by Ms. Cumbo raises clear red flags for me as I am still unclear of her intentions behind her questions,” he said in a statement to the press sent over the weekend. “I encourage Council Member Cumbo to stop making excuses and apologize to all New Yorkers for her ignorant comments. She keeps digging a bigger hole for herself and creating a divide between communities in her district and in our city.”
Updated to include comment by Mr. Kim, and Ms. Meng’s follow-up remarks.Remember when I said that these SJW nutcases reveal their true nature on Twitter? I would link you to the article, but I’m too lazy to search through and find it. I did say it though, and it happens to be true. Just look through the last few days of posts here on the site. We had the former write from The Verge saying he was going to go to Comic Con and punch the first person who said GamerGate. Yesterday, we reported on Matt Lees calling CH Sommers scum. That was on Reddit, but the point still stands. They show a fake face to the mainstream media. The real deal is on their social accounts.
Today, we have yet another anti-GamerGate thug acting in a despicable manner. This time, it’s former Jeopardy champion Arthur Chu. I never thought I would be writing a post that highlighted his advocacy of doxxing, back when I saw him on the venerable game show. But, here we are. It’s not in dispute, either. He explicitly takes a position in favor of doxxing. Take a look at his tweet from earlier, courtesy of Twitter user @Max_x_Milia:
At least we can say that Arthur didn’t actually do the doxxing. Let’s be clear, since some people get their panties in a wad about some of the things I write here. But, Mr. Chu’s encouragement of these sleazeball tactics is still noteworthy. If one of our members had said doxxing was OK, you better believe it would be blown up.
Yes, Chu is basically a nobody, outside of his Jeopardy fame. He’s trying to worm his way into a talking head position, but I don’t see that panning out. Maybe he can go back on the show when they have another tournament of champions. Although, now that he’s mixed up with doxxing, I’m not sure even they would want to have him back.These are the words from software guru Jim Coplien, who penned some of the most influential C++ books in the 90’s. The exact quote is:
TDD done strictly from the YAGNI principle leads to an architectural meltdown around iteration three.
It’s very refreshing to see the anti-TDD movement gather up some momentum, and I particularly enjoyed the discussion between Jim and Bob Martin, the notorious TDD extremist who thinks that every software developer who doesn’t TDD every single line of code she writes is unprofessional.
Jim and Bob had an interesting debate recently, which you can find transcribed at InfoQ. I have to give credit to Jim for his civility as he faces Bob, whose arguments never suffered much tolerance for people who don’t agree with his views.
I have been bothered by TDD for a long time now, and my skepticism and even opposition to some of its effects can be found either in the presentation I made with Alexandru at InfoQ called Designing for Testability or more recently, in the book I co-authored with Hani Suleiman.
Having said that, don’t expect me to become Bob Martin’s counterpart. I certainly don’t believe you should never use TDD, but I do believe that the benefits associated to TDD are vastly exaggerated and that the software community needs to keep in mind that TDD is just a tool, and that as a tool, it’s not adapted to all situations. I especially dislike the efforts of TDD extremists who are trying to make developers feel bad whenever they don’t use TDD, or lead them to think that something is wrong with the way they write their software.
If anything, it seems to me that most of these TDD extremists have been talking to conferences for too long and have become way too comfortable writing Stack classes or code that calculates the score of a bowling game. These toy applications are easy and they make TDD shine, but don’t be surprised if your audience leaves the room scratching their heads and wondering how they can apply it to their real job. Good luck using TDD to write a mobile application or to interface with a mainframe that needs to handle hundreds of thousands of two-phase commit transactions spreading over three continents while thread contention remains to a minimum.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a bit tired of fear mongering in the software community, whether it comes from TDD fanatics or from people who claim they wouldn’t hire someone who doesn’t use a Mac for development.
When it comes to testing, I live by the following rules of thumb:
“Tests first” or “tests last” is unimportant as long as there are tests.
Try to think about testing as early as possible in your development process.
Don’t let one liners contradict your experience. For example, don’t listen to people who tell you to write “the simplest possible thing that could possibly work”, also known as YAGNI. If your experience tells you you’re going to need this extra class in the future even if it’s not needed right now, follow your judgment and add it now.
Keep in mind that functional tests are the only tests that really matter to your users. Unit tests are just a convenience for you, the developer. A luxury. If you have time to write unit tests, great: they will save you time down the road when you need to track bugs. But if you don’t, make sure that your functional tests cover what your users expect from your product.
Don’t feel bad if you are not doing Test-Driven Development. There are a lot of factors that make this practice a bad fit for a lot of projects and developer personalities (aspects which are very often never mentioned by TDD extremists).
Don’t let extremists make testing a chore, because it can truly be one of the most rewarding aspects of our profession if you exercise it with judgment.Nov.18 (GMM) The particularly slippery conditions suffered by drivers at the new Circuit of the Americas this weekend is caused by oil, not dust.
That is the claim of the authoritative German publication Auto Motor und Sport, which said Texas' colder-than-expected temperatures and too-hard Pirelli tyres are also contributing to the problem.
But the biggest factor: "The brand new asphalt is sweating oil," said the report.
Pedro De La Rosa, HRT Formula 1 Team Photo by: xpb.cc
"(Circuit designer) Hermann Tike told Charlie Whiting that it is the same type of asphalt as in India and Korea," added journalist Michael Schmidt.
Pedro de la Rosa does not agree: "The asphalt here is different," said the HRT driver.
Fernando Alonso claims the Austin track - "very smooth and not at all porous" - reminds him of Portimao in Portugal.
Schmidt said the Spaniard is right.
De la Rosa confirmed: "You can see the oil shimmering when you look at the track in the morning."The back-and-forth between Gov. Christie and Sen. Paul over foreign-policy fundamentals, initiated by Christie’s blanket brush-off of libertarianism in that arena as a “dangerous thought,” died down earlier this week — if only for a little while. As Allahpundit already noted, Christie has all kinds of reasons for wanting to keep this thing going and set himself apart from what many in New Jersey likely interpret Paul’s fringe-y national security views — but on ABC on Sunday, George Will made the point that he might want to tread a little more cautiously on that front due to its national context. Paul has been arguing that having these open discussions is a great way to attract young people to the party, and that it might not be a wise idea to dismiss the ideas out of hand — an argument that Will basically reiterated. Starting around the 7:30 mark:
There is a rising libertarian stream that Chris Christie has said is a very “dangerous thought,” so let’s be clear about what libertarianism is and what it isn’t. It is not anarchism, it has a role for government. What libertarianism says, it comes in many flavors and many degrees of severity. It basically says, before the government bridges the freedom of an individual, or the freedom of several individuals contracting together, that government ought to have, A, a compelling reason, and B, a constitutional warrant for doing so. Now, if Mr. Christie thinks that’s a “dangerous thought,” a number of people are going to start saying Mr. Christie himself may be dangerous.Sacramento Republic FC return to US Open Cup action tomorrow when they host the PDL's Kitap Pumas at Bonney Field in the third round of the historic tournament. On the line is a fourth round match against four-time tournament winners, MLS's Seattle Sounders. To get to this point, the Republic handily beat CD Aguiluchos USA 5-0, while the Pumas beat Seattle Sounders U-23s 1-0.
Here are some things to consider ahead of tomorrow's match.
Fixture congestion
While the US Open Cup is usually a fun time for both teams and fans, the additional midweek games it brings to a team's schedule can make this time of year a particularly difficult one. Take the Republic's schedule for May through June, for instance. From May 14 to June 11, a space of 28 days, the Republic are playing a total of 9 games for an average of a game every 3 days. It is the Republic's busiest time of the year and a time when the depth of the roster will be tested.
Player rotation
One way to help deal with all the fixture congestion that the Republic is experiencing is to change up the lineups a bit in order to give some players a rest from playing a full match every few days.
However, Paul Buckle seemed fairly hesitant to change things up too much for tomorrow's game when asked about it after last weekend's tie against Swope Park Rangers.
It's dangerous to chop and change, I've said this before. We finished the opposition well in the last game but it wasn't at our best. It's not an easy call to change it. I don't foresee there being as many changes as last time out if I'm honest at this moment in time.
However, just because Buckle was hesitant last Saturday does not mean that we are not going to see at least some changes. After all, Buckle is not about to broadcast to the Pumas that he will be fielding a rotated and possibly weaker starting XI on Wednesday.
One player in particular who will hopefully benefit from a bit of roster rotation is Max Alvarez. Alvarez is one of the more talented wide midfielders on the Republic's roster and has proven in the past that he can be dangerous in an inverted winger role. Alvarez started in the Republic's last USOC match against CD Aguiluchos USA and was extremely influential in the team's win, notching a pair of assists and scoring a superb free kick goal to round out the 5-0 result.
With all the talent in midfield, Alvarez has had difficulty breaking into the starting XI for league matches. Tomorrow's contest against Kitsap Pumas could be a big chance for him to show that he belongs in the starting XI.
The return of Emrah Klimenta? Not quite yet.
Emrah Klimenta has been away from Sacramento on national team duty with Montenegro and missed a few games in that time. Now, with Sunday's friendly against Turkey having come and gone, the camp is over and Klimenta will soon return to Sacramento with his first international cap under his belt. However, it is not expected that he will be available for tomorrow's US Open Cup match, which means that the Republic will once again be starting a deputy right back.
Right now the choice seems to be Joaquin Rivas, who started there in Saturday's draw with Swope Park Rangers. Despite being listed as a forward and not having much experience in the back line, Rivas has done fairly well filling in for Klimenta and I have no problems with him starting again tomorrow.
We're going streamless.
If you want to catch tomorrow's US Open Cup action, I hope you have either a ticket or a vivid imagination because there is not going to be a stream of the match. There will only be a radio broadcast on Sports 1140 KHTK. In the last USOC match we all were a little lucky in that someone on the CD Aguiluchos USA bench streamed the match from their phone, but it seems unlikely that such a thing will happen again.
It is unfortunate that a competition with so much history as the US Open Cup is not more accessible. These type of matches have been streamed in past years and some fans are understandably frustrated with the lack of streams this year.
Predicted Lineup
Here is a possible starting XI for tomorrow's game.
With Buckle's comments above in mind, it does not seem likely that there will be too many deviations from what could be called a full strength starting lineup. However, two changes that we might see are Max Alvarez at right midfield for the reasons covered above and Carlos Rodriguez, who despite being only 19 has put on some good performances when given a chance.
Tomorrow's match also seems like a good chance for the Republic's two talented youngsters, Harry Williams and Trickett-Smith. The Prince has performed well when given a chance -- so much so that opposing teams seem to have him on a "foul first, ask questions later" policy -- and DTS has shown flashes of greatness and could use the time in US Open Cup to gel with his teammates in order to become a more effective chance creator.
What are your thoughts about tomorrow's match? Any predictions of your own? Sound off in the comments below.Image caption The town of Tachileik and surrounding villages in Shan state appear to have borne the brunt of the quake
At least 75 people are reported to have been killed and many more injured when a powerful earthquake struck north-eastern Burma on Thursday.
The magnitude-6.8 quake struck near the Lao and Thai borders, and was felt as far away as the Thai capital Bangkok, and in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi.
The town of Tachileik and surrounding villages in Shan state appear to have borne the brunt of the earthquake.
There are fears the casualties could be much higher.
Burma is ill prepared to deal with natural disasters, says the BBC's Rachel Harvey in Bangkok.
Communication systems and infrastructure are poor and the military government, still in charge until the handover to a new civilian-led administration, tends to limit the flow of information.
It is likely to take some time before a clear picture of the disaster emerges, our correspondent says.
Several hundred buildings collapsed north of the town of Tachileik, in mountains near the border with Thailand.
Local people told the BBC that in the villages of Tarlay and Mong Lin alone more than 60 people had been killed. Roads and bridges have been damaged making affected areas hard to reach.
"We are trying to reach the remote areas," one official told AFP news agency. "The military, police and local authorities are trying to find some people injured in those affected areas but the roads are still closed."
Shallow quake
The earthquake hit at 1355 GMT on Thursday and was centred about 70 miles (110 km) from the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said. The quake was shallow, at a depth of 6.2 miles (10km).
The tremor was felt in many parts of neighbouring Thailand.
One woman was killed in the border town of Mae Sai and slight damage has been reported to some buildings but major towns and cities appear to have escaped relatively unscathed, our correspondent says.
In neighbouring Laos, no casualties have been reported.
The head of the disaster preparedness for the Red Cross there, Bountheun Menevilay, said the quake was felt strongly in the thinly populated border provinces of Luang Namtha and Bokeo.
Earlier reports suggested there had been two strong earthquakes moments apart in the same area, but the USGS later clarified that there had been just one quake.
On 11 March, a 5.4-magnitude earthquake struck just north of the area, 225km (140 miles) southwest of Dali in Yunnan, southern China.
That was the same day as the 9.0-magnitude quake and tsunami hit Japan; however, Japan is on a different tectonic plate.See Also: The Technology Behind the NYTimes.com Redesign
The Blogs at the Times have always run on WordPress. The New York Times, as an ecosystem, does not run on one platform or one technology. It runs on several. There are over 150 developers at the Times split across numerous teams: Web Products, Search, Blogs, iOS, Android, Mobile Web, Crosswords, Ads, BI, CMS, Video, APIs, Interactive News, and the list goes on. While PHP is frequently used, Elastic Search and Node make an appearance, and the Newspaper CMS, “Scoop,” is written in Java. Interactive likes Ruby/Rails.
The “redesign,” which launched last week, was really a re-platform: where Times development needs to head, and a rethinking of our development processes and tools. The customer-facing redesign was 2 main pieces:
a new Article “app” that runs inside of our new platform
the “reskinning” of our homepage and section fronts
What is launching today is the re-platform of Blogs from a WordPress-only service to Blogs via WordPress as an app inside of our new platform.
The Redesign
Most people who use the internet have visited an NYTimes article page –
the old design:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/arts/music/lordes-royals-is-class-conscious.html
the new:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/arts/music/jay-z-offers-a-view-of-his-legacy-at-barclays-center.html?ref=music
What is not immediately obvious to the reader is how all of this works behind the scenes.
Non-Technical
To skip past all of the technical details, click here:
How Things Used to Work
For many years at the Times, article pages were generated into static HTML files when published. This was good and bad. Good because: static files are lightning fast to serve. Bad because: those files point at static assets (CSS, JavaScript files) that can only change when the pages are re-generated and re-published. One way around this was to load a CSS file that had a bunch of @import statements (eek), with a similar loading scheme for JS (even worse).
Blogs used to load like any custom WordPress project:
configured as a Multisite install (amassing ~200 blogs over time)
lots of custom plugins and widgets
custom themes + a few child themes
A lot of front-end developers also write PHP and vice versa. At the Times, in many instances, the team working on the Blogs “theme” was not the same team working on the CSS/JS. So, we would have different Subversion repos for global CSS, blogs CSS; different repos for global JS, blogs JS; and a different repo for WordPress proper. When I first started working at the Times, I had to create a symlink farm of 7 different repos that would represent all of the JS and CSS that blogs were using. Good times.
On top of that, all blogs would inherit NYTimes “global” styles and scripts. A theme would end up inheriting global styles for the whole project, global styles for all blogs, and then sometimes, a specific stylesheet for the individual blog. For CSS, this would sometimes result in 40-50 (sometimes 80!) stylesheets loading. Not good.
WordPress would load jQuery, Prototype, and Scriptaculous with every request (I’m pretty sure some flavor of jQuery UI was in there too). As a result, every module within the page would just assume that our flavor of jQuery global variable NYTD.jQuery was available anywhere, and would assume that Prototype.js code could be called at will. (Spoiler alert: that was a bad idea.)
WordPress does not use native WP comments. There is an entire service at the Times called CRNR (Comments, Ratings, and Reviews) that has its own user management, taxonomy management, and community moderation tools. Modules like “CRNR” would provide us with code to “drop onto the page.” Sometimes this code included its own copy of jQuery, different version and all.
Widgets on blogs could be tightly coupled with the WordPress codebase, or they could be some code that was pasted into a freeform textarea from some other team. The Interactive News team at the Times would sometimes supply us code to “drop into the C-Column” – translation: add a widget to the sidebar. These “interactives” would sometimes include their own copy jQuery (what version…? who knows!).
How Things Work Now
The new platform has 2 main technologies at its center: the homegrown Madison Framework (PHP as MVC), and Grunt, the popular task runner than runs on Node. Our NYT codebase is a collection of several Git repos that get built into apps via Grunt and deployed by RPMs/Puppet. For any app that wants to live inside of the new shell (inherit the masthead, “ribbon,” navigation automatically), they must register their existence. After they do, they can “inherit” from other projects. I’ll explain.
Foundation
Foundation is the base application. Foundation contains the Madison PHP framework, the Magnum CSS/Responsive framework, and our base JavaScript framework. Our CSS is no longer a billion disparate files – it is LESS manifests, with plenty of custom mixins, that compile into a few CSS files. At the heart of our JS approach is RequireJS, Hammer, SockJS and Backbone (authored by Times alum Jeremy Ashkenas).
Madison is an MVC framework that utilizes the newest and shiniest OO features of PHP and is built around 2 main software design patterns: the Service Locator pattern (via Pimple), and Dependency Injection. The main “front” of any request to the new stack goes through Foundation, as it contains the main controller files for the framework. Apps register their main route via Apache rewrite rules, Madison knows which app to launch by convention based on the code that was deployed via the Grunt build.
Shared
Shared is collection of reusable modules. Write a module once, and then allow apps to include them at-will. Shared is where Madison’s “base” modules exist. Modules are just PHP template fragments which can include other PHP templates. Think of a “Page” module like so:
Page - load Top module - load Content module - load Bottom module Top (included in Page) - load Styles module - load Scripts module - load Meta module...
In your app code, if you try to embed a module by name, and it isn’t in your app’s codebase, the framework will automatically look for it in Shared. This is similar to how parent and child themes work in WordPress. This means: if you want to use ALL of the default modules, only overriding a few, you need to only specify the overriding modules in your app. Let’s say the main content of the page is a module called “PageContent/Thing” – you would include the following in your app to override what is displayed:
// page layout $layout = array( 'type' => 'Page', 'name' => 'Page','modules' => array( array( 'type' => 'PageContent', 'name' => 'Thing' ),..... ) ); // will first look in nyt5-app-blogs/Modules/PageContent/Thing.tpl.php // if it doesn't find it nyt5-shared/PageContent/php/src/Thing.tpl.php
So there’s a lot happening, before we even get to our Blogs app, and we haven’t even really mentioned WordPress yet!
App-specific
Each app contains a build.json file that explains how to turn our app into a codebase that can be deployed as an application. Each app might also have the following folder structure:
js/ js/src js/tests less/ php/ php/src php/tests
Our build.json files lists our LESS manifests (the files to build via Grunt) and our JS mainifests (the files to parse using r.js/Require). Our php/src directory contains the following crucial pieces:
Module/ <-- contains our Madison override templates WordPress/ <-- contains our entire WP codebase ApplicationConfiguration.php <-- optional configuration ApplicationController.php <-- the main Controller for our app wp-bootstrap.php <-- loads in global scope to load/parse WordPress
The wp-bootstrap.php file is the most interesting portion of our WordPress app, and where we do the most unconventional work to get these 2 disparate frameworks to work together. Before we even load our app in Madison proper, we have already loaded all of WordPress in an output buffer and stored the result. We can then access that result in our Madison code without any knowledge of WordPress. Alternately, we can use any WP code inside of Madison. Madison eschews procedural programming and enforces namespace-ing for all classes, so collisions haven’t happened (yet?).
Because we are turning WP content in Module content, we no longer want our themes to produce complete HTML documents: we only to produce the “content” of the page. Our Madison page layout gives us a wrapper and loads our app-specific scripts and styles. We have enough opportunities to override default template stubs to inject Blog-specific content where necessary.
In the previous incarnation of Blogs, we had to include tons of global scripts and styles. Using RequireJS, which leans on Dependency Injection, we ask for jQuery in any module and ensure that it only loads once. If we in fact do need a separate version somewhere, we can be assured that we aren’t stomping global scope, since we aren’t relying on global scope.
Using LESS imports instead of CSS file imports, we can modularize our code (even using 80 files if we want!) and combine/minify on build.
Loading WordPress in our new unconventional way lets us work with other teams and other code seamlessly. I don’t need to include the masthead/navigation markup in my theme. I don’t even need to know how it works. We can focus on making blogs work, and inherit the rest.
What I Did
For the first few months of the project, I was able to work in isolation and move the Blogs codebase from SVN to Git. I was happy that we were moving the CSS to LESS and the JS to Require/Backbone, so I took all of the old files and converted them into those modern frameworks. The Times had 3 themes that I was given free reign to rewrite and squish into one lighter, more flexible theme. Since the Times has been using WordPress since 2005, there was code from the dark ages of the internet that I was able to look at with fresh eyes and transition. Once a lot of the brute force initial work was done, I worked with a talented team of people to integrate some of the Shared components and make sure we had stylistic parity between the new Article pages and Blogs.
To see some examples in action, a sampling:
Dealbook
Bits
Well
The Lede
City Room
ArtsBeat
Public Editor’s Journal
Paul KrugmanThe size of the appliances in a typical North Korean home says a lot about social standing. As such, the government uses refrigerators to reward loyal citizens, including its 2008 Olympic gold medalists. More of the country’s growing cadre of nouveau riche are buying refrigerators, and yet few outside the country’s capital are actually using the appliances to cool food. Why?
A small minority of elite officials and business people in North Korea, possibly totaling 3.5 million (p.45), are getting wealthier due to growing legal and illegal trade with China as well as other black market pursuits. And one of their first status buys tends to be a refrigerator, Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul, tells Quartz. ”North Korea is a very poor place, but its economy has improved much throughout the last five to ten years. These semi-legal activities of the new rich are one of forces behind this partial revival.”
Based on accounts with defectors and his own research, Lankov estimates that one in 15 to 20 families, mostly in Pyongyang and northwestern parts of the country, now own a refrigerator. That’s compared to one in 100 households (p. 44) before 1999, an estimate also based on accounts of Korean defectors.
Many of the refrigerators are likely imported from China. North Korean trade with China has ballooned in recent years, and informal markets within the country have been allowed since the collapse of North Korea’s state distribution system after a famine in the 1990s.
But using a fancy refrigerator isn’t easy in an entirely un-fancy country. Because of the frequency of power outages, few families actually keep food in their refrigerators, unless they have managed to connect their homes to a military or industrial power grid. What do the contraptions store instead? In some cases, books.Let’s talk about December 2015. In the interests of brevity—and so you can get away from this screen and outside where the weather, odds have it, is probably flipping gorgeous right now—I’d like to step through a brief montage of recent examples from around the nuzzlingly warm eastern U.S. and get to the point:
This warmth is due to several things, including global warming.
Some recent coverage has muddied this point, so let’s help with the clean-up.
Freakish warmth: t-shirts first, questions later
People are golfing and mowing lawns in Wisconsin. They’re gawking at cherry blossoms in Philly and D.C. My family recently played touch football in t-shirts on a field dotted with dandelions.
Day after day, popular outdoor spots in Northeast cities are transformed into a sea of naked arms, hatless heads, and the occasional bare chest, even as Christmas festoonery blinks incongruously nearby.
Santa, in an enigmatic move, was spotted water skiing in ice-free, snow-free, cold-free Buffalo, NY, and Coon Rapids, MN. My kids are saying things like “it’s practically CHRISTMAS!!” and “What the HECK??” And no one in my house has touched a mitten in weeks.
A friend and I recently traded notes about the previous night, when she had narrowly avoided the squashing of a non-hibernating frog, and I had squashed a non-waiting-for-spring-to-be-born mosquito.
The nightly news is covering black bears in New England who have put off hibernation to molest bird feeders. Bulbs are sprouting like its springtime and my March-flowering quince is December-flowering. There are scattered reports of birds acting badly: like the half-dozen species of warblers, who should by now be as far South as Central America, observed lingering on in Maine and thus courting death. And there are reports of monarch butterflies, as if they didn’t have enough problems, emerging in December in several New England states, briefly. Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, because migration is for suckers.
These things are due to the fact that it’s freakishly warm out there.
Freakish warmth by the numbers
We’ve all experienced unusual warm spells. But these numbers help explain the unique nature of recent warmth.
Warmest autum: “Meteorological autumn,” September through November, was the warmest for the lower 48 states since record-keeping began 121 years ago, and the warmest globally, in the 1880-2015 record, smashing the record set just the previous year.
Hottest months: Recent months are setting records individually as well. The top three warmest months on record globally (measured by NOAA in monthly departures from the 20 th century average) are:
1) 0.99°C, Oct 2015 (the “greatest departure from average of any month in the 1,630 months of record-keeping.”)
2) 0.97°C, Nov 2015
3) 0.91°C, Sep 2015 In all, “nine of the first eleven months in 2015 have been record warm for their respective months”, reports NOAA. And we have yet to count December, which is still steaming away.
century average) are: 1) 0.99°C, Oct 2015 (the “greatest departure from average of any month in the 1,630 months of record-keeping.”) 2) 0.97°C, Nov 2015 3) 0.91°C, Sep 2015 Record-breaking days: In recent weeks, across the eastern half of the U.S., thousands of local records—nearly 6,000 as of December 18—have been broken, some by wide margins and some dating back to the 1800s. In terms of daily record highs, these records were broken just last weekend: Lexington, Kentucky, saw 70 degrees, breaking a record from 1873 Joplin, Missouri, at 72 degrees, broke a record from 1907 Cleveland shattered its 1949 record by a full 7 degree Washington, D.C., and Detroit both broke records held since the 1880s Dubuque, Iowa, broke its 95 year-old record by 5 degrees
Record-breaking nights: New York City set a daily record high at 64 degrees on December 12. Three days later it set a new one at 68 degrees—at 2:03 a.m. Many other locations saw new daily high records set in the middle of the night. My weather app told me to expect 60 degrees at 3 a.m. the other night. In Massachusetts. In December.
Wide margins: From the Plains, through the Midwest and South, to the Northeast, temperatures clocked in at 20 and 30 degrees above average—more like October days (wait, see previous bullets; scratch that)—and for days at a time.
No snow in sight: Famously snowy Buffalo, NY, recorded no snow until last Friday—something it hasn’t done since 1899. And there is little in sight for many states that are normally snowy in December.
Warmth through the holidays: Weather forecasts for much of the eastern U.S. point to a very warm Christmas.
What to expect in the new year? Accurately predicting what happens next this winter is very hard, given the big and only partially-understood dynamics at play. For more, check out this post from my climate-scientist colleague, Brenda Ekwurzel, who outlines the key indicators that scientists will be watching this winter.
What’s going on?
It’s warm and snowless because of El Niño and the Arctic Oscillation AND global warming.
Some recent coverage has muddied the connection and disseminated the idea (mainly through poorly worded headlines; unlike mine) that this heat is not the result of global warming. But of course the vital underlying fact is that we |
$300 million venture that has various neighborhood groups stirred up over the impacts the project will have on City Park Golf Course (which would lose hundreds of trees and public access for more than a year while being recontoured as a stormwater detention facility) and the Cole neighborhood (site of a proposed fifteen-block open channel). My article noted that "those groups are now comparing notes, consulting lawyers, filing open-records requests and gearing up for what may be the most significant challenge to Mayor Michael Hancock's giddy-up, breakneck pro-growth policies since he took office nearly five years ago. "
The emissary e-mailed me shortly after the piece was published, requesting a "correction." My "editorializing" had gotten "a little over the top," the emissary complained, and she asked that the words "giddy-up, breakneck pro-growth policies" be removed forthwith.World Series of Fighting (WSOF) is consolidating a pair of its upcoming live events, WSOF 34 and WSOF 35, and committing all available resources to its end-of-year show scheduled for Dec. 31, 2016 inside Madison Square Garden in New York City.
According to a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity, existing match ups booked for Loveland, Colorado on No. 12 (WSOF 34) and Everett, Washington on Dec. 3 (WSOF), will be repackaged for the "Big Apple" fight card on New Years Eve.
That includes the Jon Fitch vs. Jake Shields welterweight title fight, among others.
WSOF will be the third major mixed martial arts (MMA) promotion to stage an event in New York following legislation earlier this year. Combate Americas held "Empire Rising" just last weekend in Verona, while Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) will counter with UFC 205 next month inside "The Garden."
Expect the full WSOF fight card and line up for its Dec. 31 live event in the coming weeks.The war on drugs is a cruel joke. The U.S. spends more than $50 billion a year on the "war on drugs" with the goal of creating a "drug-free society" – yet there has never been a “drug-free society” in the history of civilization. Virtually all of us take drugs every single day. Caffeine, sugar, alcohol, marijuana, Prozac, Ritalin, opiates and nicotine are just some of the substances that Americans use on a regular basis.
Drugs are so popular because people use them for both pleasure and for pain. Drugs can be fun. How many of us enjoy having some drinks and going out dancing? How many of us enjoy a little smoke after a nice dinner with friends? Many people bond with others or find inspiration alone while under the influence of drugs. On the flip side, many people self-medicate to try to ease the pain in their lives. How many have us have had too much to drink to drown our sorrows over a breakup or some other painful event? How many of us smoke cigarettes or take prescription drugs to deal with anxiety or stress? Throughout recorded history, people have inevitably altered their consciousness to fall asleep, wake up, deal with stress, and for creative and spiritual purposes.
The vast majority of Americans agree that the drug war is not working. So how should our society deal with people who use drugs? I propose three simple solutions: 1) Offer treatment and compassion to people who want help for their drug problems; 2) leave people alone who don’t want or need treatment; and 3) continue to hold people responsible for crimes that harm others.
Offer treatment and compassion to people who have drug problems. While our society gives lip-service to helping people struggling with drug misuse or addiction, 90% of folks who want treatment can’t get it. Meanwhile, thousands of people are forced into treatment every year simply because they were arrested for drug possession, even though many of them don’t meet the diagnostic criteria for substance dependence.
We should have free treatment on demand. We should remove barriers to entering treatment, which is far less expensive than criminalization. We need to reduce overdose deaths by getting the overdose reversal drug Naloxone into the hands of people who use opiates and their family members. We need laws that allow people to call 911 when witnessing an overdose without fear of arrest. We should make methadone and replacement therapy available to those who want it. We should acknowledge that relapse happens and not kick people out of treatment who slip up.
Leave alone people who don’t want or need treatment. Many people are surprised to learn that the vast majority of people who use drugs don’t have problems from their use. As Columbia neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart often points out, the federal government’s own data shows the overwhelming majority (80-90%) of all drug use is not problematic or indicative of addiction.
More than 1.5 million people are arrested every year in the U.S. simply for drug possession. Young people – especially those who are black and Latino – feel the brunt of drug enforcement. Despite similar rates of use, African Americans are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug use. The majority of these people don’t have drug problems and yet we are handcuffing them and saddling them with criminal records that will severely limit their opportunities in life.
Continue to hold people responsible for crimes that harm others. People who harm others, whether on drugs or not, need to be held responsible. Simply using or possessing drugs should not be cause for arrest, but if someone gets behind the wheel while impaired, or commits a predatory or violent crime against someone, they should continue to be held accountable.
The war on drugs is really a war on us. It is time to stop arresting people simply for using or possessing drugs. Let’s help people with drug problems, leave in peace those without a problem, and hold responsible those who harm others.
Tony Newman is the director of media relations at the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org)
View more blog posts.Sweden has The Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm in solitary confinement, locked up for 23 hours a day, says his mother. Svartholm was convicted of helping people to break copyright law by creating and running the file sharing website.
Two months ago, he was arrested in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, after the court sentenced him to one year behind bars in absentia. Shortly after the detention, Svartholm was extradited to Sweden.
Via email, the website vice.com corresponded with Kristina Svartholm, Gottfrid’s mother, regarding her son’s detention. Kristina has organized an email address to which fans, supporters can send letters to Svartholm in prison.
The co-founder’s mother said that “the prosecutor has claimed that Gottfrid could destroy evidence, disturb the investigation, and even commit crimes if he wasn't being held in custody with these restrictions… I wish to point out that there are two more persons involved in the same hack thing that he is suspected of now. Both have been kept in custody earlier, but both are free now, presumably free to do whatever they wish. This makes the need for ‘solitary confinement’ even more puzzling.”
In November 2010, the Swedish Court of Appeals found three of the other co-founders of The Pirate Bay guilty of contributory copyright infringement offenses. Svartholm, the originator of the website, could not be present at the hearings due to medical circumstances, and the court set a separate hearing for him. However, his location could not be verified and the verdict was issued in his absence.
The founders have also been ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor (US$3.6 million) to several entertainment giants, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures. The media companies sued them for loss of revenues due to The Pirate Bay’s “hacking” of their content.
The site founders have frequently indicated that no sentence or fine would interfere with the work of The Pirate Bay.
The portal was designed in 2003 as the engine for searching “torrents” – small files that give users access to data that other users make available. In that way, the site does not directly provide music, movies, or books, but allows them to be searched and downloaded, “shared” among users.
Svartholm argued that his activity is legal, and no theft takes place.
“In the way Swedish copyright law is written, you’re not actually committing a crime if you're referencing to pirate material,” the portal’s founder said.
Despite being accused of violating the copyright laws of most countries, The Pirate Bay reportedly has 22 million users a month. It allows anyone with a computer and an internet connection to download the latest media free of charge.Image caption The job advert for a fellowship in regional anaesthesia appeared online
A Liverpool hospital trust has launched an inquiry into how a job advert stating "the usual rubbish about equal opportunities" was published.
The advert, on the Royal Liverpool & Broadgreen University Hospital's website, invited applications for a trainee anaesthetist.
But it concluded by stating: "Usual rubbish about equal opportunities employer etc".
The description has since been updated to remove the statement.
A trust spokeswoman said: "The wording on this advert in no way reflects the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust's position in relation to equal opportunities, to which it is fully committed.
"The trust is conscious of its duty to promote equality and is a Stonewall Diversity Champion employer.
"The trust will be conducting an investigation into this incident to ensure that this cannot happen again."
The advert was for a one-year post as a fellow in anaesthesia.
As well as working alongside consultants at the two Liverpool hospitals, the successful candidate would also help more junior staff develop their careers.Media playback is not supported on this device Marriage to team-mate was 'amazing'
Kate and Helen Richardson-Walsh grew up together, became world-class hockey players together and won Olympic medals together. Nine months ago, they were married.
If two England footballers heading to this year's World Cup were set to celebrate their first anniversary, coverage would be difficult to avoid.
Back in January, former Premier League player Thomas Hitzlsperger announced he was gay "to move the discussion about homosexuality among professional sportspeople forwards".
Kate Richardson-Walsh Age: 34
Born: Manchester
School: Priestnall School, Stockport
Hockey clubs: Reading
Position: Central defender
Playing style: Anchor of the team and specialist in the drag-flick, a technique used to score from penalty corners
First England cap: 7 May 1999 v Russia
Caps: 205 England, 110 GB, 315 total
However, hockey's same-sex wedding sparked little coverage beyond congratulations. There was no discussion - players say none was needed.
"We are a couple, we love each other and we happen to be playing in the same team," says 34-year-old Kate Richardson-Walsh, the England captain.
"I feel quite proud that I was brought up around hockey, where there have been lots of different ethnicities, religions, sexualities and so on. It's normal, and I feel proud of that.
"We're very professional in that we draw a line and when we're at hockey we are Kate and Helen, hockey players and team-mates.
"Away from hockey we're Kate and Helen the couple. It's important that line is drawn and to be able to say to each other 'that's not good enough', and not start having a row about it afterwards.
"We do talk about hockey at home. We don't row about it but we have really good debates because we're so passionate about the game and passionate about the squad."
On the field, Kate and 32-year-old Helen have led the restoration of Britain as a hockey force.
Kate and Helen may not play as England team-mates again, with Kate retiring after the Commonwealth Games
Bronze at London 2012, Team GB's first Olympic hockey medal in two decades, would have been unlikely without influential defender Kate Walsh and tireless midfielder Helen Richardson.
Off the field, when they became the Richardson-Walshes, team-mates believe the couple demonstrated how little trouble hockey has with diversity - a word, and concept, some other sports have struggled to manage.
"The culture of hockey is so much more open. We're so lucky to be hockey players. Everyone is just accepted for who they are," says Beth Storry, who played in goal for Britain at the London Olympics and whose partner is Dutch defender Chantal de Bruijn.
"Ever since I've been young, hockey has been a very open environment if you're gay or lesbian. I couldn't imagine playing in a sport where you couldn't be yourself and not be open about who you are.
Helen Richardson-Walsh Age: 32
Born: Hitchin, Hertfordshire
School: West Bridgford School, Nottingham
Hockey clubs: Leicester, Reading
Position: Midfielder
Playing style: Energetic midfield playmaker known for covering large distances in games
First England cap: 21 July 1999 v Japan
Caps: 159 England, 90 GB, 249 total
"With football, I think it's a great shame - the odds are there are probably a lot of gay men playing in the Premier League. It's a shame you can't be open, you can't be who you want to be. In hockey, nobody judges you, nobody questions you."
The Richardson-Walshes made their Olympic debuts together at Sydney 2000 but only became an item at the Beijing 2008 Games, after Walsh had broken off her engagement to Brett Garrard, the former England and GB men's hockey captain.
The two came through London 2012 to win bronze despite Kate breaking her jaw in the opening group game, leaving Helen to deputise as captain - and worry not only about her loved one undergoing emergency surgery, but also about leading a team now missing a key player.
Kate missed just two games, returning to action with a plate in her jaw and a protective mask.
But now, two years later, something far more painful has happened.
Kate posted this selfie on Twitter prior to England's first EuroHockey final in 22 years. England lost 2-0 to Germany in a penalty shootout after a 4-4 draw
With hockey's World Cup beginning in the Netherlands at the end of this month, Helen has been left out of the England squad. The sport's star couple will be temporarily torn apart.
Having suffered longstanding problems with a ruptured disc in her back, Helen had major surgery earlier this year, followed by an intense battle for fitness ahead of the tournament.
The selectors decided she had not done enough.
"I know in time everything will be okay. For now though, it hurts," she wrote on a blog documenting her rehab.
The World Cup is the sport's pinnacle, alongside the Olympic Games. Winning the title had been one of her lifetime ambitions.
"I've lost the chance to achieve a goal of mine that, not only have I worked incredibly hard for over these last 11 weeks, but absolutely and completely dedicated my life to, 100%, for the past 15 years," she added.
England's World Cup fixtures Sunday, 1 June - 12:00 -England v United States
- 12:00 -England v United States Tuesday, 3 June - 12:00 -England v China
- 12:00 -England v China Friday, 6 June - 13:30 - South Africa v England
- 13:30 - South Africa v England Sunday, 8 June - 15:00 -England v Argentina
- 15:00 -England v Argentina Tuesday, 10 June - 15:00 -Germany v England Germany (All times BST)
"I have no idea when I'll get to the acceptance stage. I keep fluxing between the anger, bargaining and depression stages, meaning I'm not much fun to be around at the moment."
An emotional Kate, speaking on the BBC programme Inspire, is almost in tears as she recalls the moment she realised Helen had not made the squad. "I kept on refreshing my emails. When it arrived I scanned for her name and it wasn't there. It's just really sad," says the England captain.
"She'd got herself back playing and because there was a month to go, with her experience and what she brings to the team - I am biased - I would have had her in the squad.
"I got myself to the point where I really believed her name would be on the sheet."
She must now lead England at the World Cup knowing her partner and team-mate of more than a decade is sitting at home.
"Kate's going to have to concentrate on the World Cup, yet at the same time needs to care for Helen. But you also just know they're going to get on with it," says Storry, 36, who retired from international hockey after London 2012.
"They're very good at keeping it separate - it's very much business when you're on the pitch, and your private life is separate.
Kate Richardson-Walsh captained Great Britain in 2012 to their first Olympic medal since 1992 - only the second in their history
"It helps when your partner understands hockey and what it takes to play at that level - to know that when you're going off training again, getting up at a stupid time, or only talking about hockey, it's because you love it."
Kate is now set to retire from the international scene - she will don an England shirt for the last time this summer, looking for the major title that has so far eluded her.
"This is my last season playing in the international team and this potentially could have been the last tournament Helen and I played together, if she'd been selected," she says.
"All of those things make it harder. My emotions are heightened because it is my last season. They say you kind of just know, and I know it is time."
On her blog, Helen wrote: "There's nothing more I would like to see than my wife, Kate, lift the World Cup.
"Of course, I wanted to be by her side when she did, but we've both shared so many highs and lows, and she truly would be worthy of this success."
Watch Kate Richardson-Walsh's full interview with Gabby Logan on Inspire: The Olympic Journey, Sunday, 8 June, BBC Two, 17:30 BST.A Gary woman is accused of accepting money so a man could use her 18-month-old daughter in porn movies.
Natisha Hillard, 24, is charged with selling her daughter for the purpose of making child pornography and for allowing the child to participate in the production of child pornography, according to a federal complaint.
Christopher M. Bour, 39, of Gary is charged with buying a child to produce child pornography, producing child pornography and possessing child pornography depicting a child under the age of 12, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday.
The charges cover a period between Aug. 1, 2011 and Feb. 14, 2013.
FBI officials were tipped off after a woman who worked for Bour as a masseuse saw child porn movies running on his computer when visiting him, according to the complaint. Bour rehabbed homes and lived in them during the work, officials said.
Bour tried to get her to photograph him having sex with the child, which he claimed had the mother's consent, according to the complaint.
On Feb. 13, Bour text-messaged the masseuse saying, "I was just seeing if u would hold the camera," the complaint states. The text messages continued with graphic depictions of what he planned to do.
The woman notified authorities, and the woman allowed an FBI agent to assume her identity and continue texting Bour.
Bour later text-messaged again describing what he planned to do with the child, according to the complaint.
The agent asked Bour if he trusted the child's mother and he replied, "Yeah ive done it several times its cool" and said the mother would not be present. He said the child was 1 1/2 years old and that the arrangement began when the child was 4 months old.
FBI agents searched Bour's home the day after the text messages were sent. Bour told investigators he had become interested in child pornography two years ago and would download it, according to the complaint.
Bour and Hillard have been ordered held without bond, according to records.
chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter: ChicagoBreakingA Massachusetts couple has been fighting for three years to regain cash they say was wrongfully seized from them. In October 2012, the Illinois State Police pulled over Adam and Jennifer Perry for speeding as they were driving through Henry County on Interstate 80. The Perrys said they were headed to Salt Lake City, Utah to see a hearing specialist for an ear infection Adam was suffering from.
A drug dog sniffed and indicated on the car. Officers then searched the vehicle and found $107,520 in cash in a suitcase and in Jennifer’s wallet. The Perrys claimed the search was without their consent and without a warrant. According to the officers, they also found a duffel bag that reportedly smelled of marijuana.
No drugs were found in the car, nor did the government file criminal charges against the Perrys. Nevertheless, officers seized the cash and eventually transferred it to the federal government.
In a letter filed earlier this month, Adam claims that the taken cash came from savings and disability settlements and payments. “Our faith in the United States legal system has been shaken. Why are officer’s [sic] allowed to be judge, jury and executioner on the side of the road?” the Perrys asked in a 2013 response to federal prosecutors.
Unfortunately, their case is not unique. An extensive investigation by The Washington Post into one federal forfeiture program found nearly 62,000 cash seizures since 9/11 where police did not use warrants or charge the owners with a crime. Out of those seizures, more than 1,700 were in Illinois alone.
Moreover, for federal civil forfeiture cases, property owners are not presumed innocent and do not have a right to an attorney. With few safeguards, police and prosecutors can profit from forfeiture. Illinois agencies received more than $186 million in federal forfeiture funds between 2000 and 2013 from the U.S. Department of Justice, according to the Institute for Justice’s report, Policing for Profit.Note: This article has been edited to correct a previously published version. A man charged with assaulting two lesbians outside an Oshawa school will not be charged with a hate crime, despite pressure from community agencies. On Nov. 3, two women were physically assaulted and verbally abused just after classes let out at Gordon B. Attersley Public School. Many children and parents witnessed the attack, including the women's 6-year-old son. Another student's father was arrested at the scene and charged with two counts of assault causing bodily harm. If convicted, he could serve up to 10 years in prison.
Article Continued Below
Following the attack, Anji Dimitriou and Jane Currie used a Facebook group to tell their stories. The couple received an outpouring of support from the community and members of the group staged a rally in Oshawa to demand the charges be elevated from an assault to a hate crime. Police said although the attack was disturbing and offensive, it did not meet the narrow definition of a hate crime. Specifically, the attack did not advocate genocide and there was no clear evidence the man incited others to join him in the attack. "Any act of violence should not be tolerated by our society, especially violence in plain view of children," said police chief Mike Ewles. "In instances of this nature, we are obliged to consult with the Crown Attorney and we will not lay a charge unless the evidence supports a charge."
Mark Scott, 44, of Oshawa, is scheduled to appear in court on Jan. 8. Scott's lawyer, Mark Jacula, said in a recent news release that his client, who is black, has been a victim of racial and physical abuse. "The truth surrounding this incident will come to light. The parties responsible will be held accountable for the racially motivated and unprovoked attack he suffered." Durham Regional Police investigate 20 to 25 incidents involving hatred each year. Few of them meet the definition of a hate crime.FALLUJA, Iraq — As Iraqi forces move through Falluja, the city is yielding the grim remnants of more than two years of Islamic State rule. Beheaded and decaying bodies. Clumps of facial hair from fighters who shaved their beards to blend in with fleeing civilians. A prison where detainees were held in cages suitable for a medium-sized dog.
The forces have found books on Wahhabism, the extreme version of Sunni Islam from which the Islamic State draws inspiration, and on Saddam Hussein, whose rule by fear and secrecy the group has replicated.
Yet even as the picture of what life was like inside Falluja under the Islamic State is becoming clearer, a visit over the weekend to areas of the city taken by pro-government forces made clear that there is still heavy fighting.
Days after Iraqi forces raised the national flag over the main government compound and declared victory, the battle has moved to western neighborhoods, where some Islamic State fighters, many of them foreigners, remain, officials said.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 8, 2016, 1:14 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 8, 2016, 5:02 PM GMT By Andy Eckardt
ESSEN, Germany — After a year in which established political leaders have fallen like skittles, Angela Merkel has launched her reelection bid against a backdrop of criticism within her own party and the rising popularity of far-right politics in Germany.
Ranked by Forbes as the second most powerful person in the world after Russia's Vladimir Putin, Merkel is seen by many as the last bulwark against rampant populism that has already defeated Hillary Clinton, Britain's David Cameron and Italy's Matteo Renzi.
Both chancellor Merkel and her center-right Christian Democrat (CDU) took a dive in popularity following her "open door" policy, which welcomed nearly one million refugees fleeing the Middle East and Africa to Germany.
Related: Angela Merkel Calls for Ban of Full Facial Veiling
However, her approval ratings have begun to recover after she toughened her stance on immigration and on Tuesday she was reelected leader of the CDU, winning 89.5 percent of delegates' votes.
CDU leaders believe Merkel has no serious challenger, but many within her party remain nervous.
“Angela, you are needed in Europe,” Joseph Daul, president of the CDU-affiliated European People’s Party and member of the European parliament said at the opening of this week’s conference.
The outcome of the conference held in the western German city of Essen, formally clears her path to contesting next year's national election.
CDU leaders including Angela Merkel, second right, sing the national anthem at the party conference in Essen, Germany. Martin Meissner / AP
Applauding from the floor was 65-year old Karl-Heinz Sundheimer from the western German town of Kempenich, who told NBC News that a majority of CDU members “and many Germans from other parties” believe that Merkel remains “the best solution.”
Sundheimer, who has been a CDU member for 33 years, said he and many of his fellow voters are increasingly concerned about anti-European, anti-immigration tendencies in Germany, which has seen strong gains in regional elections for the populist, far-right AfD party. This change could also endanger coalition-building for a Merkel-led government next year.
The CDU leads in the polls, but would likely have to work with mainstream rivals to form the next government.
Following her “open door policy” in 2015, Merkel began to face strong political headwinds and harsh criticism, even from some members of her own party.
Arguing that Merkel should have never let the refugee crisis happen, Christine Arlt-Palmer, a local CDU politician from the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, said the chancellor and the party had allowed "the populist AfD to grow on the right — we will not regain this terrain."
Angela Merkel votes during a the CDU party congress in Essen, Germany. TOBIAS SCHWARZ / AFP - Getty Images
Merkel attempted to reassure delegates this week, saying that “a situation like that of the summer 2015 can and should not repeat itself.”
CDU member Sundheimer hopes the party can adopt a clear policy on immigration and find better solutions to protect the idea of pan-European cooperation.
On Wednesday, delegates debated a resolution on tackling forced marriage and voted to scrap rules allowing the children of immigrants to be dual citizens.
This week’s party conference is “not a crowning ceremony” for Merkel and there are signs of “insecurity among party members”, experts say.
“The delegates are extremely uncertain on how to counter the globalization fears at the party basis,” Karl-Rudolf Korte, a political analyst and the president of the NRW School of Governance, told ZDF.
“Many questions, doubtful answers, open scenarios … because worldwide, there is no master plan on how to keep down populism,” Korte added, highlighting an icy political wind that is blowing across Europe.
Over the course of this year, Merkel has lost many of her key European allies: Britain’s David Cameron resigned after the shock Brexit vote, Italy’s Renzi quit after a failed constitutional referendum and French president Francois Hollande announced that he would not seek re-election.
Merkel acknowledged this in her speech, saying many people "feel that the world is in disarray.”
"2016 hasn't made the world stronger and more stable, but rather weaker and more unstable,” she said. "The 2017 election will be more difficult than any election before, at least since German reunification.”
But for some analysts, Merkel is the only remaining leader of the old order who can defend the European idea.
“Among the major nations, Germany stands alone as the bulwark of the liberal order established after World War II in order to prevent German-style fascism from destroying Europe’s peace once again,” James Traub wrote in Foreign Policy magazine.—fromInmy main character Major Nathaniel Truly works for the secret service of the U.S. War Department. His boss and occasional bane-of-existence is Colonel (later Brigadier-General) Lafayette C. Baker, one of those figures who could only have sprung from real life—especially from the Civil War, whose turmoil swept many natural-born scoundrels into positions of power. The grandson of a Revolutionary War hero, Baker was born in western New York in 1826. As a young itinerant mechanic, he landed in California around the time of the Gold Rush and joined San Francisco's ruthless Vigilance Committee, pledged to impose order and quash crime. Baker—gray-eyed, reddish-haired and a sharp dresser—stood out among the vigilantes, who recalled him as a crack pistol shot and paragon of physical stamina. These assets plus a disdain for legal niceties (and for liquor—rare in that time and place) would serve him well later on.Baker returned East in time for the Civil War's onset—an hour that gaped with nation-wide menace but also with opportunity, for men of certain skills. In July 1861, as the First Battle of Manassas loomed, he wangled an audience with General-in-Chief Winfield Scott. Baker proposed that he prove his worth with a daring, free-of-charge solo mission into northern Virginia, where he would learn the disposition of Confederate forces. Struck by his self-confidence, the elderly general agreed, giving him ten twenty-dollar pieces to finance the mission—which, even if you discount a detail or two of Baker's narrative, unfolded as an espionage drama and comedy in equal parts, requiring more nerve, luck and tenacity than a dozen ordinary spies could have shown.His first effort to cross the Potomac was thwarted when federal troops arrested him and sent him to General Scott, who chuckled and told him to try again. He did so and was once more arrested by Union soldiers, though this time he talked his way out of it. The third try proved a charm, when he paid a farmer to row him to the Virginia side. Now on Rebel soil, he tramped westward through the summer heat but was nabbed by a pair of Confederate pickets. Before they could march him to their commander, he persuaded them to stop at a tavern where he got them drunk and gave them the slip. He kept on toward the main Southern encampment at Manassas but was caught yet again by a cavalry patrol.Following a stern interview with General P.G.T. Beauregaud, he found himself in a stockade but then bribed an officer into letting him out for a spell, under guard. He got his guard drunk at a hotel bar and then took a leisurely stroll with him around the Confederate encampment, noting various units and learning the strength of each—including the Black Horse Cavalry, a special interest of General Scott's. When his tipsy, talkative guard wandered off, Baker wisely attempted no escape and returned on his own to the stockade. Confined again, he deflected his jailers' tricks to reveal him as a spy, as when a teenaged girl appeared with a whispered offer to smuggle out a note for him. (The girl was purportedly Belle Boyd, soon to be famous as "La Belle Rebelle" and the "Cleopatra of the Secession." Whether or not it really was her, the two would eventually cross paths—in reverse circumstances.)Baker declared himself an innocent Knoxville, Tennessee native who had returned South to settle legal claims for a California minister—he had a partially forged letter to this effect. Still under suspicion, however, he was sent to Richmond by train and imprisoned there, wondering whether he would be hanged or just left to moulder. But after a few days, he found himself at the Spottswood Hotel, being interrogated by the President of the Confederate States himself, Jefferson Davis. Baker's nimble performance under pressure won him a parole within Richmond city limits, though he assumed that he was being watched. In an unlikely chance encounter, an old acquaintance called out his name in the street—then needed a ton of convincing that he had made a mistake. Alarmed, Baker decided it was time to cut bait. He managed to obtain a temporary pass to Fredericksburg.His escape from Dixie was no less harrowing than his infiltration of it. Detained by Rebel cavalrymen north of the Rappahannock, he faked a limp to put them off guard, then stole a horse and a revolver as they slept. The next day, he evaded a Confederate search party by hiding in a haystack—into which an officer thrust his sword, coming inches from running the spy through. At last—starved, exhausted and with Rebel troops firing after him—he crossed the Potomac to safety in a stolen skiff.This exploit earned Baker a job as confidential agent, first to the Secretary of State and later to the Secretary of War. His suspicious nature helped make him effective as he shifted from intelligence to counterintelligence, ferreting out Confederate spies, smugglers and sympathizers. Military authorities and the District of Columbia police took a dim view of his brusqueness as well as his contempt for due process. Still, Edwin Stanton's War Department raised him to "Special Provost Marshal"commissioned him a colonel, lending greater scope to his zeal. He was therefore perfectly positioned when, in November 1862, President Lincoln sacked General George McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac, and McClellan's loyal hireling Allan J. Pinkerton left the scene as well, ending his role as the Union's chief spymaster.—fromBorn in Scotland in 1819, Allan Pinkerton immigrated to Illinois at age 23, working as a cooper until he helped foil a group of counterfeiters who were operating near his settlement. That episode led to his becoming Chicago's first police detective and in 1850, with an attorney partner, founding the private detective agency that came to bear his name. With cutting-edge business acumen, the firm advertised itself with the logo of a single unblinking eye (from which the term "private eye" would hatch) and the slogan, "We Never Sleep." Pinkerton was a constant reader and autodidact, as well as a lifelong atheist. He hired the first-ever female detective, the intrepid Kate Warne, and other women after her. He also hired the Union's first African American agent, John Scobell. And in the 1870's, he began compiling the world's first criminal database—a "rogue's gallery," with clippings, rap sheets and mug shots.Pinkerton's eventual close linkage with McClellan held one apparent contradiction: the former was a committed Abolitionist—his homestead was a stop on the Underground Railroad and he and his wife gave material support to John Brown—while the latter never hid his disdain for Abolitionism. Nevertheless, the relationship commenced after McClellan became chief engineer and vice-president of the Illinois Central Railroad, for which Pinkerton's agency solved a series of train robbery cases. The detective also became acquainted with the Railroad's top lawyer, Abraham Lincoln.Thus, with the eruption of the Civil War, did Pinkerton land at history's red-hot center. In February 1861, charged with ensuring President-Elect Lincoln's safe arrival in Washington, Pinkerton obtained intelligence concerning an assassination plot in Baltimore, where Lincoln's train would have to stop. He personally shepherded Lincoln onto a secret train that made Baltimore by night, then onto another train that left before secessionist mobs could get wind of it. That summer, when his patron McClellan took command of the Army of the Potomac, Pinkerton became head of the Union Intelligence Service. He threw himself into plugging intelligence leaks—both the government and the army high command were spouting like sieves—and arresting Confederate spies in and around the capital. He and his agents did a highly creditable job, breaking up the Rose Greenhow Ring and sending that celebratedto the Old Capitol Prison.But battlefield intelligence-gathering was another matter entirely—and when McClellan's lumbering Peninsular Campaign got under way in April 1862, Pinkerton's inexperience in that area yielded bitter fruit. His methodology reflected McClellan's already delusional fears about the forces opposing him, greatly magnifying their numbers and reinforcing the general's innate caution—and turning the campaign into a bloody failure. (See "Until A Dictator: Lincoln vs. The RISODS," https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog.... In, Truly recalls his frustration over this sorry performance and the final break it causes between him and Pinkerton.) For months, even through the sanguinary saga of Antietam, Lincoln found reason to tolerate McClellan's unchanging conduct, until he no longer could. And when the President at last fired Little Mac, handing Ambrose Burn |
down there.”
We had arranged in advance for me to spend a few hours accompanying Andrews on her rounds, but when we met at Queensbridge she told me she’d been unable to get permission from the supervisor of the complex’s north side to let me come along. We went to talk to the manager and I explained that City Hall had made all the arrangements; she said she couldn’t give permission without hearing from an NYCHA representative downtown. We gave her a phone number and went to sit and wait in the small office lobby, where it felt as though we’d been sent to the principal. We debated walking around while we waited for a call, but Andrews told me that she didn’t really get cell reception anywhere except the park by the river.
The office around us was completely wallpapered with a babel of notices: garbage tips, flu shots, outdated storm advisories. As we sat and waited, Andrews told me that once everyone at Queensbridge was online, the housing authority could put lease renewals on its website and save everybody the bother of filling out paperwork. It was easy to see why the NYCHA itself wanted to put everything on the Internet.
When we finally secured permission, Andrews and I went to find a guy who could open the right basement door; he passed us on to someone who passed us on to someone else, who finally pointed us toward a door that was already hanging open. We went inside and Andrews showed me the cabinet, an unmarked black box next to the trash compactor. The room, a choked effluvial depot, smelled intolerable, and Andrews said we could go. I mentioned that I thought she was supposed to take a picture, and she said she hadn’t gotten permission for that, so she was going to have to find someone to bring her back the next day—though she then realized that person was going to be on vacation, so maybe it wouldn’t happen right away.
“This is my community. I want all the other little girls to see, wow, you can make it in the boys’ club.”
As we walked out, I told Andrews it seemed to me that perhaps she was being underutilized in her role; after all, she’d told me that she had certificates in networking and cloud administration. She agreed that maybe spending days waiting for official permission to take a photograph of a black box by the door of a compactor room wasn’t what she’d been trained to do, but she was trying to stay positive, to remind herself that she had to pay her dues and work her way up.
Because she really liked and cared about Queensbridge. She liked knocking on doors and getting to know her neighbors. “This is my community,” she said. “I want all the other little girls to see, wow, you can make it in the boys’ club.” One of the things she’d come to quickly love about the complex was that, unlike most NYCHA properties, there’s little in the way of a buffer between the projects and the surrounding city. More than once she listed for me all the nearby subway lines: the F, and the 7, and the N and the Q, with the E, the M, and the R only one stop away. One time she walked home from Manhattan with her kids across the bridge. But she knew that Internet wasn’t like the subway; it wasn’t something you just put in and left people to use. There had to be more to it than that if the real divides were to be breached.
She only hoped that, after the broadband was installed, there would be some follow-through—maybe training like she’d had. “I’d like to see classes,” she said. “Programs that bring people in.”
Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote about the world’s first robot hotel in issue 24.03. He is a fellow at New America.
This article appears in our special November issue, guest-edited by President Barack Obama. Subscribe now.The 38-year-old woman left her home between 4.30 and 5am for a jog in the city's Østerbro district. When she didn't return, her family contacted police. Officers searched for the woman but she wasn't found until over nine hours later when a family member discovered her behind some bushes at a football field shortly before 3pm.
She was taken to Copenhagen's Rigshospital and put in a medically induced coma. By Tuesday evening, officials said she was out of critical condition.
Police appealed to the public for help on Tuesday night and by early on Wednesday morning they had arrested a 29-year-old man who was seen in the area of the attack on surveillance video.
Copenhagen Police spokesman Hans Erik Raben told Ritzau news agency on Wednesday afternoon that the man has been charged with attempted murder and rape.
Police said that the female victim was found battered and partially unclothed.
"She was near death when she was found," Copenhagen Police spokesman Torben Svarrer said.
Ritzau reported that police believe the man attempted to strangle the woman after hitting her numerous times in the head and face. She is believed to have been raped after losing consciousness, police said.
Svarrer told TV2 news that video footage showed that the man "was in the area of the crime scene" at the time of the attack.
"That, and his behaviour on the video surveillance, led us to arrest the man early this morning,” he said.
Police did not detail how they identified and tracked down the man, saying only that he was arrested "somewhere in Copenhagen".
No details about the man's identity or nationality have been released but Ritzau reported that a Greenlandic interpreter was called to the preliminary hearing.The sleek front end design of the Tesla Model S makes it one of the most aerodynamic cars in its class. With a drag coefficient of C d =0.24, a measure of air resistance over the surface area of the vehicle’s body panels, the Model S is primed for amazing aerodynamic performance due to its low disruption of air flow around the vehicle. This is important on many levels especially in terms of its impact on range. Conservation of energy and efficient use of battery energy equates to more vehicle range.
So, how did Tesla engineers do this? Well, I came across a video from Exa Corporation (makers of the PowerFLOW software that handles predictive analysis of complex flow) which showcases the characteristics of airflow over the body of the Model S.
What intrigued me about the video is the fact that the engineers behind Tesla Motors used virtual technology, a digital wind tunnel if you will, as a way to quickly iterate through designs before embarking on the more traditional approach of clay sculpting and wind tunnel testing.
Rob Palin, Lead Aerodynamicist at Tesla Motors said, “We used Exa’s PowerFLOW transient solver that directly resolves very large eddies to deliver superior accuracy compared to conventional CFD codes,”according to SAE International. “This approach is especially beneficial in areas where flow physics are complex such as in the rear of a curved vehicle. The result is a full-size electric sedan with a drag coefficient of 0.24.”
Taking a look at the video, you can see the large disruption of airflow particularly around the rear-view mirrors.
Mirrors and wheels can account for as much as a 25% increase in aerodynamic drag
According to Tesla rear-view mirrors are said to increase aerodynamic drag between 3 to 6 percent. Palin goes on to say that wheels can generate an additional 20% of drag as seen in the following flow field diagram from Exa’s PowerFLOW software.
“One of the objectives with the Model S was to minimize the airflow around the front wheels and to line up the airflow so it hits the front wheels head on. We needed to avoid air hitting at an angle, as often the side of the tire acts like a bucket that catches the air, producing significant drag. This was an area where we made a huge improvement from the initial concept designs to the final design.”, said Palin.
It isn’t just the brutal neck-snapping, Hellcat smashing acceleration of the the Model S that makes it one of the quickest and most efficient cars in the world, it’s the amazing science and engineering that goes into every detail of this amazing spaceship.
Source: SAE.orgInterviews Interviews
November 07, 2017 Jack Matlock: Current tension in U.S.-Russia relations is result of political mistakes on both sides
Famous diplomat and political analyst, last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock has given an interview to Interfax in which he speaks about the first year of U.S. President Donald Trump in power and relations between Russia and the United States.
Question: Mr. Ambassador, you have been following Russia-U.S. relations for almost 60 years and have written several books on this subject. Could one speak about a new Col War? Answer: Statements by both Russian and U.S. information media, as well as those by representatives of our governments resemble the attitudes and rhetoric which was frequent during the Cold War. Q.: Just resemble? And what is it in deed? A.: The Cold War was caused by genuine and basic ideological differences which brought on a futile and expensive arms race. The current tension is the result of political mistakes on both sides. The current situation does not serve the genuine interests of the people in either country. In fact, the most basic Russian and American interests are compatible and should be the basis of cooperation rather than confrontation. Q.: And what are the spheres of these genuine interests? A.: First of all, the prevention of the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Then there is the threat of environmental degradation and terrorism, of failed states and the spread of disease. The future will not be determined by where political boundaries are drawn or by which countries influence others. We must all stop acting like the countries of Europe did before the war that began in 1914. Q.: You have already mentioned that the current state of affairs is the result of mistakes on both sides. Let‘s start with American ones. A.: The U.S. showed insufficient sensitivity to Russian attitudes in several actions, most of which were not in fact directed against Russian interests but were interpreted by Russia as hostile or demeaning. This prompted overreaction on the Russian part and actions that were in fact damaging to Russia‘s true interests. Q.: And an opinion is coming to shape in Russia that Moscow and Washington support normal relations for no more than two years, and then a new presidential cycle begins in the U.S., and we again turn into adversaries. A.: That is pretty ridiculous. Most Americans pay little if any attention to relations with Russia. The current "investigations" are quite exceptional. The Democratic Party seems unable to face the fact that they lost the election-I regret that they lost-and are looking for scapegoats. Our military-industrial complex, powerful in both parties, wants an excuse for high defense budgets. They certainly don‘t want war, but they want the profits from the defense industry. Russian reactions have strengthened our military-industrial complex and the result has been damaging to both countries. We are wasting money that is needed for other things and Russia is being rapidly surpassed in power not only by China but even by India. If we keep up the current competition, the U.S. can take care of itself even as its relative power declines, but Russia will be faced with choosing whether it wishes to be a junior partner with the U.S. and EU, or else a junior partner and tool of China. Q.: And where in your opinion was Russia wrong? A.: The treatment of Ukraine has been very damaging to Russian interests. No other country is as important to Russia‘s security and future as is Ukraine. Nevertheless, Russian actions have intensified anti-Russian feelings in Ukraine and the seizure of Crimea (even with a referendum) has created an irredentist claim that can persist for generations if not corrected. The main victims of the fighting in the Donbas are Russians. Q.: Was the introduction of economic sanctions against Russia legitimate? A.: So far as economic sanctions are concerned, the Russian annexation of Crimea and support for violent separatism in Ukraine were in violation of international law and previous agreements with the United States including especially the Budapest Memorandum which provided that Ukraine would transfer its nuclear weapons to Russia while Russia re-affirmed its respect for the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The United States and other countries could not recognize the legality of Russia‘s actions in Ukraine. Sanctions were declared rather than more forceful measures. I personally would have recommended a different reaction, but as the fighting in the Donbas continued with Russian support for the rebels it was impossible politically in either the U.S. or the European Union to lift them. Q.: Congress and the special counsel are now probing the ‘Russian trace‘ in the U.S. presidential election. What is your attitude to this story? And in general, could political contacts with representatives of a foreign embassy be a subject to criminal investigations? A.: Speaking to a foreign diplomat does not break any law and I do not expect anyone to be indicted for that. Revealing classified information to an unauthorized person is an infraction of the law whether the person receiving the information is a diplomat or anyone else. However, there is no evidence so far that there was any unauthorized disclosure of classified information. I have confidence in the integrity of our courts and doubt that anyone will be charged with a crime for discussing political issues with foreign diplomats. It is possible, however, that some of the people involved broke other laws such as not registering as a foreign agent after receiving money to represent a foreign government. Q.: Do you personally believe that Russia tried to influence voters in Trump‘s favor and succeeded in it? Is such a thing possible? A.: I think Russian sources with government connections did try to participate in the campaigns, often with assumed names. I don‘t think it had any significant effect on the final vote, but the fallout in the U.S. makes it politically difficult (maybe impossible) for President Trump to take steps to improve relations. There is widespread feeling that Russia has blackmailed him. I believe there is no real basis for this, but it is a political fact. That weakens his ability to settle current disputes, particularly in the absence of any Russian effort to end its proxy war with Ukraine. Q.: One year ago Donald Trump was elected U.S. president. Was the choice of your country to elect as president a non-systemic person without his own team justified? A.: I did not vote for Trump, but he won the votes in the Electoral College in accord with U.S. constitutional procedure. We do not live in a "directed democracy" with a "vertical of power." However, our system severely limits what a president can do. Both the Congress (when it wishes) and the courts (when they judge an action unconstitutional) limit a president‘s power. One final thought: we would have had better prospects for convincing a President Hillary Clinton to improve relations with Russia (despite what she had said earlier) than we have now to enable President Trump to do so. The idea that many Russians had that Trump would be a better candidate not only misunderstood the defects in Trump‘s character but also showed a profound misunderstanding of the American political process. Q.: May be, a personal meeting between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump could ease the situation in bilateral relations? A.: Given the political atmosphere in Washington today, it is hard to believe that an immediate personal meeting would be helpful. To be fruitful, these must be well prepared. Don‘t forget that, following the first meeting of Secretary of State [Rex] Tillerson and Minister [Sergei] Lavrov, the secretary of state stated that relations between the U.S. and Russia were bad and that this is ‘unacceptable‘ for the two principal nuclear powers. I am sure that both he and President Trump wish to improve the relationship. It would help, of course, if the Russian media would tone down their shrill anti-American stance. I do think that it would be helpful if both presidents were to state publically that they see no valid reason for the U.S. and Russia to consider the other an enemy and see compelling reasons for the two countries to cooperate to serve common interests. Now that Russia and the U.S. seem to be cooperating more in Syria, it is time for Russia to end the fighting in the Donbas. That would greatly facilitate a rapid improvement in relations. Q.: There are new U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman in Moscow and new Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov in Washington. What could be their role in improving bilateral relations? A.: Let me say first of all that our previous ambassadors were fine diplomats who were in no way responsible for the deterioration in relations. Our governments and some elements of our information media bear the responsibility for that. Both of the new ambassadors are experienced statesmen. I hope that the governments of both countries will make full use of them to end the confrontation which is damaging to both countries and dangerous for the entire world. more interviewsThe Conservatives are ramping up the pressure on federal Liberals to expand Toronto's Billy Bishop island airport as a way of helping Bombardier Inc..
The Conservatives plan to introduce a motion from Saskatchewan MP Kelly Block Tuesday that calls on Ottawa to reverse their opposition to expanding the airport.
The motion also calls for the recognition that "there is already a market solution available that could support Bombardier."
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Tuesday is an opposition day in the House of Commons, meaning the Conservatives can put forward a motion of their choice for a day-long debate and vote.
Montreal-based Bombardier Inc. is seeking at least $1-billion in federal support toward its C-Series jet program. The Quebec government has already pledged $1-billion and is urging the federal government to make a similar commitment. Ottawa has said it is studying the request, but has not made a final decision.
The Conservative motion does not directly address how Ottawa should respond to this request from Bombardier.
In 2013, Porter Airlines expressed an interest in purchasing up to 30 C Series aircraft from Bombardier under the condition that the jets were allowed to land at the Toronto island airport.
Porter's proposal stirred vocal opposition from groups in downtown Toronto who expressed concerns about increased noise, pollution and traffic if the island airport was expanded.
In an interview, Ms. Block criticized Transport Minister Marc Garneau for ruling out an expansion.
"As the critic, it's my job to hold the minister to account for decisions that don't make sense," said Ms. Block. "I think this motion is about jobs and economic growth and the airport is a major contributor to both of those."
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Ms. Block declined to say whether Ottawa should directly support Bombardier.
In a statement, Mr. Garneau said the existing rules for the airport create the right balance between commercial and local community interests, and the government will not be reopening the issue.Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway (Reuters/Carlo Allegri)
“This entire conversation had to be had. Republican presidential nominees usually aren’t bold enough to go into communities of color and take the case right to them, and compete for all ears and compete for all votes. They’ve been afraid to do that. So, Mr. Trump deserves credit for at least taking the case directly to the people.”
— Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, interview on “Good Morning America,” Aug. 26, 2016
In this interview, Conway was asked about Trump’s speech last week on the state of black communities, delivered to a mostly white audience. She said that Trump deserves credit for “taking the case directly to the people,” and that even though the audience was mostly white, she hoped black voters were listening.
The Trump campaign has begun its outreach to black communities. In the interview, Conway pointed to an Aug. 25 meeting held at Trump Tower with African Americans in a Republican National Committee leadership program. There were 13 people who were not with the RNC or the Trump campaign there. Conway painted Trump’s outreach as unique, because “Republican presidential nominees usually aren’t bold enough to go into communities of color and take the case right to them.”
Readers wanted to know: Is that accurate?
The Facts
Richard Nixon narrowly lost his first presidential bid in 1960, winning the white vote 51 percent to 49 percent over John F. Kennedy. But Nixon lost the nonwhite vote by 32 percent to 68 percent, and attributed his loss to his results in the black community. (Republican Dwight Eisenhower, whom Nixon served as vice president, won 39 percent of the black vote in 1956.)
In a 1962 interview with Ebony Magazine, geared toward black readers, Nixon lamented not reaching out to the black community more aggressively. He had decided not to comment on an arrest of Martin Luther King Jr., nor call the family, as Kennedy had — and his silence reverberated more than he had imagined.
Nixon said that Republicans can’t just sit and assume that black voters would judge them based on their record, whatever it may be. He learned he had to go out and make a case.
“We can’t say to Negroes, ‘Come to us,’ we’ve got to go after them,” Nixon said in the 1962 interview. “We’ve got to change the image of the GOP among Negroes. The Democrats are well organized and well financed — but we’ve got to get into the Negro areas if we expect to mold a party for all people. We’ve got to convince Negroes they’re better off economically under a GOP president.”
In his successful 1968 campaign, Nixon made an effort to win over black voters, visiting black communities and speaking to various black groups, including the Booker T. Washington political club in Portland, Ore. Nixon, and Ronald Reagan in 1980, took out full-page advertisements in JET and Ebony magazines, geared toward African American readers, about issues that affected black communities.
Every Republican presidential nominee since Nixon has made a direct overture to make their case to the community. They weren’t always greeted with enthusiasm, but black leaders and audiences nonetheless heard them out.
At the very least, nominees attended conventions of major gatherings of African American professionals or communities, such as the NAACP, National Urban League and National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). They also have gone to black religious organizations or talked to pastors.
By contrast, Trump has declined the invitation of the NAACP, National Urban League and NABJ to speak at their 2016 conventions.
Since 1976, three presidential nominees other than Trump have declined to speak at the NAACP convention in an election year, according to the organization. Reagan did not speak in 1980, but he did in 1981 and apologized, saying the invitation in 1980 had arrived late. Reagan instead spoke to the National Urban League in 1980. Reagan once visited the South Bronx and told residents he would work to rebuild the area — though he ultimately ended up in a shouting match with residents.
George H.W. Bush spoke to the NAACP during his 1988 campaign but not during his reelection campaign in 1992. George W. Bush spoke to the NAACP during his first run for the presidency in 2000. In 2004, he attended the National Urban League’s meeting.
Robert J. Dole did not speak at the July 1996 NAACP convention, citing a scheduling conflict. But he also had said that the president of the NAACP was “trying to set me up” to be embarrassed. Dole’s aides suggested that attending the meeting would have been like walking into a lion’s den, and his rejection was seen as a snub to black leaders. Two months later, Dole and his vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp attended the NABJ convention, where Dole apologized for declining the NAACP invite.
John McCain and Mitt Romney also spoke before the NAACP, in 2008 and 2012 respectively. McCain also spoke at the National Urban League in 2008, where he faced skeptical questions about his record on issues affecting black communities.
Talking directly to African American communities and audiences has been a routine part of general-election campaigning for both parties, said Leah Wright Rigueur, an expert on black Republican politics and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. It hasn’t always been sophisticated or nuanced, and it doesn’t always work, but the candidates have still made their pitch. There’s been no such direct outreach effort by the Trump campaign, Wright Rigueur said.
“One of the constants, one of the common threads that run throughout all of this is actually getting up and going into black communities, and not just talking about black people,” Wright Rigueur said. “Not just lecturing. Not preaching. But actually listening to African Americans and saying, these are the kinds of issues that you’re facing and I want to put forward solutions to really address these issues.”
Conway said in a response to The Fact Checker that Trump has taken steps to reach out to communities of color. Last week, there was a roundtable with black and Latino Republican leaders, where they laid out their concerns to Trump, she said. Trump is scheduled to speak at a black church in Detroit, where he will talk about issues affecting the community, such as unemployment, education and safety in the inner city, she said.
“It is important that Mr. Trump is taking his message to these communities of color,” Conway said. “In the past, Republicans have occasionally shown up at different forums, but they do not continue with this message trying to reach all Americans.”
Up against Barack Obama, the first African American president, “John McCain got 4 percent of the African American vote, and Mitt Romney improved that to a whopping 6 percent. We are fighting for every single vote,” Conway added. “That includes going where the voters are and not just checking the box; taking the case directly to them. Detroit is the first step; in the coming weeks you will continue to see Mr. Trump becoming more active in these communities.”
We noted to her our finding that every previous Republican nominee made a direct case in some way, such as the forums she mentioned, and our conclusion that her claim was inaccurate. Conway responded: “The claim is correct, unless one conflates official forums with ‘communities of color.’ They are different. We are saying the same thing, but your conclusion is different.”
The Pinocchio Test
As a longtime Republican pollster, Conway should know more about the history of Republican outreach to black communities than most others at the Trump campaign. On its face, this claim is not correct. Republican presidential nominees have routinely made a direct pitch to communities of color, taking their case right to them — at the most basic level, they have done so through a speech to the NAACP, National Urban League or religious groups.
Conway clarified her claim to say that Republicans “have occasionally shown up at different forums, but they do not continue with this message trying to reach all Americans” in communities of color. Trump is gearing up his black community outreach, and he certainly is doing it in his own way — like he has done so with the rest of the campaign. It remains to be seen whether Trump deserves credit, or whether he’ll go beyond what Republicans have done in the past. So far, by declining to speak at the NAACP, National Urban League and NABJ, Trump has not met the basic level of what his predecessors have routinely done.
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Sign up for The Fact Checker weekly newsletterJurgen Klinsmann and the U.S. national soccer team will face Mexico on Saturday in the CONCACAF Cup at the Rose Bowl. (Federico Gambarini/EPA)
IRVINE, Calif. – No matter how the U.S. men’s national soccer team fares Saturday against Mexico at the sold-out Rose Bowl, Jurgen Klinsmann will return home to his Orange County paradise without fear of losing his head coaching job.
He will beam with satisfaction over securing regional bragging rights and a 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup berth. Or, using his default expression in sour times, he’ll say, “It’s a real bummer.”
Either way, Klinsmann will then turn his attention to Tuesday’s friendly against Costa Rica at Red Bull Arena and the first two 2018 World Cup qualifiers next month.
To the disappointment of his noisy detractors, whose numbers have swelled since failure in the Gold Cup in July and embarrassment against Brazil in a September friendly, Klinsmann will remain gainfully employed by the U.S. Soccer Federation – even if the Americans lose to their bitter rivals in a game of consequence.
USSF President Sunil Gulati hired Klinsmann in summer 2011 – and extended his contract through 2018 before he took the team to a single World Cup – for the purpose of nurturing the program over many years.
This weekend’s CONCACAF Cup is a snapshot pinned to a wall smothered with photographs. Some are larger than others; this is a pretty big one. Through Gulati’s eyes, though, a few blurry images do not ruin the portrait.
If immediate results were paramount, Gulati would have ditched Klinsmann after the fourth-place finish in the Gold Cup, the Americans’ worst in 15 years. That’s just what Gulati did with Bob Bradley after losing to Mexico in the 2011 Gold Cup final. Bradley didn’t get the result and, in Gulati’s opinion, wasn’t advancing the cause.
Gulati is not judging Klinsmann wholly on results; in fact, some might argue, he has not begun judging him at all.
Gulati hired Klinsmann because he believed the former German player and coach would, in the long term, move the program forward.
Yes, there was an expectation to continue qualifying for the World Cup, to advance to the knockout stage of soccer’s premier competition and to show well in friendlies against world-class foes. In all cases, Klinsmann has met demands. Against Mexico, he boasts a 3-0-3 record, including the first U.S. victory at Azteca Stadium in a 2012 friendly.
There also was an expectation to finish first or second in the Gold Cup. Klinsmann raised the trophy in 2013 but couldn’t manage a consolation prize this summer after a semifinal fall against Jamaica and third-place defeat to Panama on penalty kicks.
In friendlies last month, the Americans came from behind to defeat Peru but were out of their league against Brazil. Beyond the 4-1 setback, fans and media scrutinized Klinsmann’s lineup selection and tactical approach, and were alarmed by the Americans’ lack of fight and cohesion. These issues cannot be ignored.
Klinsmann’s appointment, though, was never strictly about what unfolded on the field. So when people say defeat to Mexico should end Klinsmann’s reign, the criteria doesn’t apply here.
Retired U.S. star Landon Donovan, infamously cut by Klinsmann before the 2014 World Cup, was right in telling ESPN this week that “anywhere else in the world, if this coach had those [recent] results, and they lose this game against Mexico, they’d be fired. I think if Jurgen wants to hold all the players to that standard, then he has to be held to that standard too.”
Except, in this case, the standard is different. Klinsmann has broader duties; it’s not purely about the final score. Last year, he inherited the additional title of technical director, putting him in charge of restructuring player development and creating vertical integration to align playing styles from the youth national teams to the senior squad.
Such endeavors require years to take root, and Gulati is providing Klinsmann with many to accomplish it. Along the way, winning is a big thing but not the only thing.
There are other factors to take into account.
First, despite the feverish anticipation, the CONCACAF Cup is not going to make or break the U.S. team. Advancement to the Confederations Cup would, without question, help the delegation acclimate to Russia a year ahead of the World Cup there. And beating Mexico before a blockbuster crowd and national TV audience would lift team and fan morale. After a rough few months, both could use it.
But the outcome has no bearing on the next World Cup cycle and, if the Americans had not stumbled this summer, Klinsmann would be preparing for two friendlies this month instead of the Mexico game plus the Costa Rica exhibition. (The CONCACAF Cup pits the past two Gold Cup champions. If the same team had won both times, the match wouldn’t have been necessary. Until a few months ago, the CONCACAF Cup did not exist.)
There also is the money. Klinsmann is the highest-paid head coach in U.S. history, by a wide margin. Terms of his current deal, which runs through the 2018 World Cup, have not yet been disclosed, but the previous pact carried a base salary of $2.5 million.
If, for argument’s sake, he is now earning $3.5 million, the guaranteed compensation adds up to more than $10 million. The USSF does not want to pay out that kind of cash (or a multi-million dollar settlement) while also paying a new coach.
And then there is this: Klinsmann is Gulati’s guy. Gulati wooed him for years before securing his services. They are intertwined. This is not to suggest Gulati is stubbornly sticking with Klinsmann for the sake of his own reputation, but Gulati is not going to give up on him without extraordinary cause, either.
And Klinsmann would have to do much worse than lose to Mexico before a pro-Mexico crowd to lose his job.News in Science
Bird brains appeared before birds
Dino-bird insights New evidence has emerged that puts a dent into the reputation of the famous 'first bird' - Archaeopteryx, a feathered descendant of the dinosaurs, which lived around 150 million years ago.
Three-dimensional scans of skulls of early birds and dinosaurs suggests that at least a few species of dinos that were contemporaries of Archaeopteryx had brains with the likely neurological wiring for flight, according to a paper published in the journal Nature.
"Archaeopteryx has always been set up as a uniquely transitional species between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds, a halfway point," says Amy Balanoff of the American Museum of Natural History.
"But by studying the cranial volume of closely-related dinosaurs, we learned that Archaeopteryx might not have been so special."
Balanoff's team used computed tomographic (CT) scans to get a high-resolution image of brain size and regions in a dozen existing and extinct species.
Compared to reptiles, birds have large brains in relation to their body size -- a phenomenon called "hyperinflation" which provides them with the superior vision and coordination needed to flight.
But the comparison turned up some bad news for Archaeopteryx.
Several other non-avian dinos that were sampled, including the feathery oviraptosaur and bird-like troodontid, had in fact larger brains relative to body size than Archaeopteryx did.
"If Archaeopteryx had a flight-ready brain, which is almost certainly the case given its morphology, then so did at least some other non-avian dinosaurs," says Balanoff.
The finding adds to evidence that the gene pool that led to the first birds was far wider than thought.
Just a few years ago, biologists had a list of supposedly exclusive characteristics for birds, such as feathers and wishbones.
But these have been found to exist among non-avian dinosaurs, and now hyperinflated brains can be added to the list.If you ranked the things in life that Jobs seems perfectly content to ignore, license plates would be up there with Handicap parking spaces, three-piece suits and customer demands. The proof, as it were, is all over Flickr.
His 2007 Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG has been shot without proper attire more times than an HP marketing contractor.
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The only thing more abundant than the photos are the myriad theories behind how Silicon Valley's most notorious PL8 H8TR generates this special vehicular-code distortion field.
Some claim their absence is linked to certain privacy concessions. Others insist that overzealous fanboys swipe the roadster's tags every time they're mounted. These are usually these same folks who whisper of a special Back to the Future-style, state-issued barcode (it's actually the vehicle identification number), secret agreements with a shadow branch of DMV (nope), and even a custom-built mechanized plate retractor (Steve: You build it, we'll buy it. As usual.).
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The reality? Less Bond, more Occam's Razor. Yes, the man may pay an asston of taxes to the state every year, but even a fat bank account and wizardly charisma doesn't guarantee him (or any other celebrity) special treatment when it comes to the California vehicle code. Just ask Kim Kardashian.
So how's Jobs doing it? By playing the odds.
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"I don't care who you are-Lindsay Lohan or Governor Schwarzenegger-you have to display a plate or risk being pulled over or cited," says state DMV spokeswoman Jan Mendoza.
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This was the line echoed by CHP officers, traffic lawyers and DMV officials again and again. Not only did a legal precedent prove elusive, no one was even able to drum up a theoretical case where a public citizen-regardless or stature, office, or bank account size-could get away with non-display of plates.
"It simply wouldn't happen," says Mendoza of such an allowance.
Fine. But looking at nuances state law, traffic enforcement, and a few public records, the case of Steve Jobs' perpetually missing plates becomes less mysterious.
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First, it should be noted that it actually is legal is the state of California to drive without a license plate-for 90 days. Car dealerships generally have up to 30 days to file the necessary registration paperwork with the DMV when anyone buys a new or used car. Once received, those plates can take another 4-6 weeks to arrive at a person's doorstep. Yes, in the interim you must display a temporary registration tag in front driver's-side window, but it still grants you a degree of wiggle room.
Most local traffic enforcement officers admitted to being less than Bronsonian about singling out a car with no plates, using it more as an excuse to pull someone over if something else seemed suspicious.
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"Normally, an officer will not pull over a car that looks new to check the registration," notes Deputy Gregory Talyor of the Santa Clara Sherrif's Office.
"Frankly, we have better things to do with our time," says Cupertino Officer Sandra Powell.
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Here's the other thing: Even if you do get nabbed by the popo for failing to display your plates, the consequences are downright wimpy. While the fine can go up to $65 (assuming everything else is in order and you don't want to correct the infraction), in most cases, the worst you'll get what's known as a fix-it ticket. That's essentially a $10 slap on the wrist if you can later prove that you've remedied the offense.
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Public records only reinforce the fact the Jobs has absolutely no problems rolling plateless. A comprehensive search of traffic records in Santa Clara (where he lives) and other adjacent counties show the CEO has successfully avoided plate-related fines for the past four years. At least. Santa Cruz, San Mateo, and San Francisco county courts-all |
unionizing would ultimately be bad for the overall industry. The “unions are bad for business” myth is amazingly strong.”
It’s a shocking disconnect to me. How can a union be bad for the entertainment business? After all, the entertainment industry is one of the last bastions of a strong unionized workforce, and is more robust today than it ever has been.
Is the success and strength of the entertainment industry due to the union agreements in place that cover the industries working people? Those agreements are responsible for creating a skilled labor force that is eager to work under the conditions they provide. That workforce helps to make the industry strong and their ability to create a better workplace is the reason their careers are long, safe and result in dignified retirements. The fact that the content producers can count on those working professionals is certainly a factor in their success.
The same will come to the visual effects industry, once the agreements are written and have a chance to mature. The business of visual effects will benefit from having a unionized workforce, because the union agreements will bring the stability of a universal set of workplace standards and benefits that visual effects studios will use. The associated costs will be reduced as they will be set according to the scale of the industry, as opposed to a single visual effects studio. Visual effects studios will then enjoy a better relationship with their vfx staff as many issues that cause stress between the two can and will be managed by the agreement. Should a dispute occur, the union and the studio will work to resolve it per the remedies in the agreement (ie. the grievance procedure) alleviating the need for the visual effects artist to “just deal with it”.
The visual effects workforce will then be able to enjoy the benefits of an agreement that provides transparent wage minimums (making it easier to plan life events and goals), a portable health plan that allows for coverage even when the vfx artist is between jobs (making it possible to keep themselves and their families healthy), as well as industry standard workplace safety standards (making it possible to receive overtime pay, proper breaks for rest and meals as well as enough time between work shifts to get enough time away from work for family and rest). This will result in better visual effects artists since those burdens will have been lessened.
The industry will continue to thrive. The dependence on visual effects will continue to increase. With the union in place, the worth of the visual effects artist will as well.If we trace a path that starts with Gutenberg’s use of moveable type to Malcom McLean’s invention of the shipping container, we start to recognize a very interesting pattern: Each new layer of abstraction and standardization creates tremendous value out of the resulting increases in scale and efficiency.
Today’s digital innovators can trace a similar historical path that starts with mainframe computers and monolithic applications and then, step-by-step, reveals software’s interchangeable parts until we arrive at today’s cloud-based era of microservices and continuous integration.
Microservices is an approach to building software that shifts away from large monolithic applications toward small, loosely coupled and composable autonomous pieces. The benefit of this abstraction is specialization, which drives down costs to develop and drives up agility and quality — while operating much more resilient systems.
This approach is not new; Amazon and Google have been using it for more than a decade. Container technologies (like Docker), APIs and the availability of cloud infrastructure have made microservices something that is now practical for a much broader set of companies.
Companies like Airbnb, Disney, Dropbox, GE, Goldman Sachs and Twitter have seen development lead times cut by as much as 75 percent when using microservices. The concept sounds simple enough, but doing it is harder than it looks. This has given rise to a whole new ecosystem of companies and open-source software to help people with this transition.
Sixty engineering leaders gathered recently at Sequoia’s Microservices Summit to share stories about what it took to implement microservices at companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Netflix, Disney, Wells Fargo, Dropbox, Amgen, Citi, Nasdaq, Medallia, HP, Okta, Gilt, Instacart and many others.
Here are the 10 best practices for building and deploying microservices.
Determine if you really need microservices
Not every application is complicated enough to warrant being broken into microservices. Martin Fowler and Ryan Murray from Thoughtworks cite a “microservice premium,” where in many use cases the complexity of microservices hampers the productivity of your team. There comes a point when your application becomes very complex or your team begins to grow past 50-75 engineers that the benefits of this architecture begin to take off.
Put your house in order
Continuous delivery and automation are more important than microservices. Small, agile teams who can integrate their work frequently, at least daily, are an important precursor to microservices. Being able to automate your systems and push code updates regularly are critical to deal with the complexity you will incur with this architecture.
Appoint a master artisan
If you do not design and manage your evolution to microservices, the result can be an uncontrollable sprawl. It is critical to have a person or a small team responsible for controlling architectural decisions and helping to ensure standards adoption.
More pieces to manage make telemetry very important.
Google has a small team of master artisans who understand how pieces fit together and help guide the creation of new services. Twitter’s Alex Roetter refers to this oversight as “applying the right amount of salt.” You never want to overpower the great innovation that is coming from the bottom up.
Map your microservices to business processes
Teams should have bounded context and systems should follow the ordinary flow of business. Melvin Conway first came up with this principle in 1967, and it holds true today. When your services are not directly mapped, it makes troubleshooting or re-architecting in the future far more difficult.
Start every new product as a monolith
It is impossible to know the best way to divide the monolith until you can observe its usage. Once you have a sense for how your product will be used, you can decompose from there. Today, there is a bit of trial and error on sizing your services. There may be an opportunity in the future for someone to help with this process through software.
Move incrementally
Don’t throw away the monolith. This can have disastrous results. Take one piece at a time and break it off. Once that piece is working, move to the next natural piece. A few companies have found a more aggressive approach can lead to lost functionality and can make diagnosing issues difficult.
Create a shared repository
Consider creating one large shared repository of all services for teams to use in application development. You don’t want to have two or three active versions of a common service in use. Your artisan(s) should help in managing this repository.
Apply more comprehensive monitoring
More pieces to manage make telemetry very important. The microservices monitoring landscape is very fragmented. There is not a clear winner, and some companies are building their own products. Microservices require a much more comprehensive monitoring effort than you have had with your monolith.
Improve security and governance
More surfaces and complexity increase the need for security and governance. Consider how you will authenticate who can speak to whom and identify illegitimate traffic. Who has the authority to work on certain services? Can all services be used for all tasks in your company? How are shared services billed or managed?
Reap the rewards
When successfully implemented, microservices deliver huge increases in the speed and agility in which companies can build and deploy software. The cost to deliver an application is much less, and your systems will become more resilient. Development time can go from months to weeks.
If this sounds daunting, consider the alternative: longer development cycles, more brittle infrastructure and slower innovation than your competitors. Microservices are not for everyone, but — if implemented effectively — the results can be transformational in the creation of enduring companies.United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley Nimrata (Nikki) HaleyNikki Haley tapped to join Boeing board of directors Nikki Haley launches new policy group to tackle'socialism,' other issues Trump selects Kelly Craft for United Nations ambassador MORE slammed reports that said she is feuding with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Rex Wayne TillersonHeather Nauert withdraws her name from consideration for UN ambassador job Trump administration’s top European diplomat to resign in February Pompeo planning to meet with Pat Roberts amid 2020 Senate speculation MORE, calling it “dramatic” and “ridiculous.”
“That’s so dramatic. That’s so ridiculous. No. I think what you have is sometimes Secretary Tillerson and I have different opinions, but when we come into the NSC [National Security Council], everybody has different opinions,” Haley told ABC’s “This Week."
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Host George Stephanopoulos specifically asked Haley about a report in Politico that said a Trump administration official characterized her feud with Tillerson as approaching “World War III.”
But Haley slammed the report, saying she works with other members of the National Security Council to provide Trump with information and support his decisions.
“I have my relationship with Secretary Tillerson or General Mattis, or anyone else, it’s all a great relationship because we are all looking out for the best interest of America,” Haley added.
Haley also responded to the report on NBC's "Meet the Press," calling it "palace intrigue."
"I am glad to be living in New York just for that reason," she said.
"I don't want to be near the drama and I don't want to be near the gossip. I'm going to continue to do a good job, and so is every member of the NSC," she continued.
— Julia Manchester contributed.Jan 10, 2017; Tallahassee, FL, USA; Florida State Seminoles forward Jonathan Isaac (1) celebrates during the second half of the game against the Duke Blue Devils at the Donald L. Tucker Center. Mandatory Credit: Melina Vastola-USA TODAY Sports
New England Revolution get burned by the Chicago Fire at home by Tommy Butler
Jonathan Isaac would look great in a Boston Celtics uniform, but is he worth the No. 3 pick?
If the Boston Celtics love his upside, why not?
Jonathan Isaac is only 19, he’s 6’11” but only weighs 210 lbs. Of course, he will need to bulk up, but Isaac could be the next Kevin Durant. His lengthy frame matched with the ability to shot the ball well are his key attributes, and being a generous teammate.
Isaac grew up playing as a point guard, so of course, he developed the abilities to take the ball down the court and be the floor general. Isaac hit a massive growth spurt late in his high school career, which is why at 6’11” he almost still plays like a guard.
While that is a plus, he is still developing the skills of playing the 4 or 5 spot. Being skinny and not used to going up against big men, Isaac will need to improve his game down low.
Boston needs larger players and everyone knows that but has good a defender as Isaac is, he is too skinny to guard NBA PF/C’s down low.
Measurements
Jonathan Isaac: Age 19 | 6’11” | 210 lbs | 7’2″ Wingspan | 9’1″ Reach |
Stats – 32 Games played as a freshman at Florida State
| 12 PPG | 8 RPG | 1 APG | 2 BPG |
| FG% 50.8 | 3P% 34.8 | FT% 78.0 |
Vs. Ranked Opponents (6 Games / 5-1)
| 14 PPG | 9 RPG | 2 APG | 2 BPG | 55.3 FG% (26/47) |
ACC Tourney & NCAA Tournament (4 Games / 2-2)
| 10 PPG | 12 RPG | 2 APG | 2 BPG | 42.9 FG% (15/35) |
Strengths, Weaknesses, and overall review of Isaac’s short collegiate career.
As mentioned before, Isaac grew up a guard so you can ignore the fact he’s 6’11”, he is a scorer and an incredible ball handler. Isaac’s stats weren’t as great in his year at FSU because rather than just keep being a scorer, Isaac worked a lot on his down low play. Now for the NBA, he needs to hit the weight room.
The best comparison I can think of is Al Horford, a big man who can shoot assist rebound, basically do it all, but are not a physical presence down lowHere is Director of Scouting Mike Schmitz breaking down Isaac’s film.
His stats are lower than most because this was FSU’s best basketball teams in decades. Talent all around (for the usual FSU basketball team) and Isaac isn’t a ball hog. But can he help Boston? While Boston needs bigger men, Isaac isn’t there yet.
Isaac is unlikely to go to the Celtics, if Boston does trade down (as reported late Saturday night) it’ll be to get Josh Jackson. If by some miracle the Laker’s take Jackson at 2, Boston may target Isaac or Tatum at that No. 3 spot (due to the reported trade with the76ers).
To keep up to date regarding 2017 NBA draft rumors, news and projections, keep it locked here at Chowder & Champions.Saint Girons to Foix (101km)
The 14th of July is Bastille Day in France and, like our St Patrick's Day, it's the biggest national holiday in the country, which means the roadside is always full of fans and there is a party atmosphere.
Having taken two stage wins already on this Tour de France, through Arnaud Demare on stage four and Romain Bardet yesterday, it's been a good race so far for French riders.
Bardet got a full page in 'L'équipe' this morning under the heading 'Allez Bardet' although comparing him to former French favourite Richard Virenque wasn't exactly a great choice.
Even though they haven't had one since David Moncoutie did it in 2005, French cycling fans always expect a French winner on Bastille Day.
With the home riders always keen to impress, it was no surprise to see former French champion Thomas Voeckler and King of the Mountains leader Warren Barguil fire the first salvo on today's stage with an attack from kilometre zero this morning.
The duo hung a few seconds up the road for around 10km before constant counter-attacks from the peloton brought a 20-strong group containing myself and my team-mate Alessandro De Marchi across the gap and things stalled for a few seconds.
There are always fireworks on Bastille Day and as today, at 101km, was the shortest stage of this year's Tour, with three first-category mountains within 50km of each other, it was only a matter of time before somebody else lit the fuse.
I followed a few moves before 'Demma' jumped again after Direct Energie's Sylvain Chavanel and Philippe Gilbert of Quickstep.
Chavanel led the trio through the intermediate sprint in Seiz as I crossed the line in ninth, keeping watch for the next taxi across the gap.
As Demma rode away from his companions on the first-category Col de Latrape, the attacks kept coming behind, with Barguil very active and keen to add more points to his lead in the mountains competition.
Breakaway I put so much pressure on myself to be in the breakaway today that I spent the first 30km or so riding as if I was in a junior race.
As the aim of the team was to get a couple of riders into today's break, I tried to follow every move behind Demma's group in the hope of a free ride across to the front but by the time I got to the top of Latrape I had chased so many non-runners that I had put myself well into the red and was suffering.
With the peloton split in smithereens at the top, I was with seven or eight others in the fourth group on the road, about 30 seconds down on the yellow jersey group, who were in turn about 30 seconds down on Demma.
Coming into the next climb, the Col d'Agnes, after 40km, I was hoping the race would settle down and we would make it back into the yellow jersey group but when I heard on the radio that Alberto Contador and Mikel Landa had attacked, I knew there was little chance of that happening.
We were two minutes down at the top.
A group of maybe ten guys caught us on the climb and with four Fortuneo riders in the group they rode hard the whole way up to try and get their leader and climber Brice Feillu back into contention.
When we hit the bottom of the final climb, it was so narrow that they didn't let spectators onto it, so there was a massive crowd on the corner leading into it before we were greeted by silence on the slope itself.
After the Fortuneo guys attacked us and rode off, Demma was one of a handful of riders who came back to our group in the last 40km and we all took it steady to the top of the first-category Mur de Perguirre before taking turns into he wind on the descent.
On the fast twisting downhill, Voeckler pulled off a save that Packie Bonner would be proud of.
Descending at 75kph, we were heading into a chicane, which was one of those chicanes where there was no real need to brake, when I heard a loud BANG in front of me.
I looked up to see Voeckler's front wheel had exploded on the way into the first bend.
With the wheel wobbling underneath him he shot straight through the chicane, hurtling up onto the grass before somehow managing to get out the other side and back onto the road again, where he eventually came to a stop.
I was about three guys behind him and having just about had time to change my line to get around him safely, I was sure he was going to hit the deck.
It was some save, even if we didn't see him for the rest of the stage.
My group all took turns riding through into the wind for the last 20 kilometres before rolling across the line 15 minutes after Warren Barguil had ended the day as he had started it, at the front, and became the first Frenchman in 12 years to win on Bastille Day at the Tour.
Earlier on in the stage, Barguil had had a go at me after I'd followed him up the road a few times.
Thinking I was just marking him, he took it personally, when the truth was I was just following anything that moved in the hope that it would be the right one.
Barguil is a good friend of my room-mate Amael so I've got to know him a little bit this year.
At the Tour of Romandie in May his hands were so cold that he couldn't pull his brakes and he went straight into a roundabout, breaking his hip in the crash, so today was a great comeback for him.
Back on the team bus afterwards, I sent him a message to congratulate him on his win and tell him that maybe if I'd only followed him, instead of everybody else, I would have been up the road today too.
He hasn't answered it yet but he's probably getting his flowers and champagne now as I make do with my cup of tea.
Tour de France,
Live, TG4 1.10 / Eurosport 12.0
Indo SportThis article is over 3 years old
Dmitry Rogozin posted pictures of himself on Svalbard island, despite being on list of people banned after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine
Norway has sought an explanation from Moscow for a visit to a Norwegian island by Russia’s deputy prime minister, who is banned from Norway under international sanctions against him over Ukraine.
The EU and US imposed sanctions on a number of Russians, including Dmitry Rogozin after Russia annexed Crimea last year. Norway also adopted the sanctions, although it is not an EU member.
“We have earlier this spring clearly expressed to the Russian embassy in Oslo that people on the list are not wanted in Svalbard. It is therefore regrettable that Rogozin has been on Svalbard,” a spokesman from Norway’s foreign ministry said.
A representative of Rogozin declined to comment.
On Saturday Rogozin posted pictures on Twitter and Facebook of himself in front of a signpost for Svalbard airport in the Norwegian island’s main settlement of Longyearbyen.
“We arrived in Longyearbyen in Spitsbergen,” he wrote in one post.
Norway has asked for an explanation from the Russian authorities and will consider reinforcing entry procedures, including on Svalbard, the foreign ministry’s spokesman said.
According to Rogozin’s Twitter account he visited the village of Barentsburg, a Russian mining town left over from the days of the Soviet Union, before heading for the north pole.
The Svalbard islands are governed by a unique treaty, which grants Norway sovereignty, but signatories, including Russia, retain equal rights to residence and commercial activities.ARLINGTON, Texas -- It's not often you see a headline that intentionally undermines the piece below it. This, dear hoops fans, is one of those times.
Yes, the "Way Too Early" prefix in "Way-Too-Early Top 25" pretty much gives this game away. We are not even a day removed from the confetti-infested "One Shining Moment" madness of the 2014 NCAA tournament. There are six months of offseason between now and the start of practice in October, and seven months between here and the return of actual college basketball. This depressingly long stretch of calendar will comprise a rush of NBA draft decisions, at least one massive recruiting race (Myles Turner, a 7-foot center ranked No. 2 overall in the 2014 class, is still undecided), transfer market dominoes, a coaching change or two, and any number of minor surprises -- suspensions, dismissals, reclassifications, and all the rest.
In the infamous words of a former United States defense secretary, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. The Way-Too-Early Top 25 is a prisoner to these same predictive limitations. It is a glimpse at the landscape, and an educated guess. It is subject to change. It certainly will. And we will update it accordingly as the offseason rolls along.
This is especially true at the top of the Top 25. Any of at least three teams could, depending on draft decisions and Turner's final call, end up in the preseason No. 1 spot. Let's see how that plays out in the weeks and months to come. For now, the way-too-early No. 1 team in the 2014-15 season is...
While coach Sean Miller fell agonizingly short of his first-ever Final Four, he (and that legion of hungry Arizona fans) can be comforted knowing that their Wildcats will be every bit the national title contender next season. Miller has delivered so well in recruiting that Arizona could lose star freshman forward Aaron Gordon and junior All-American Nick Johnson and still project as one of the best, deepest teams in the country. Gordon's departure seems a given, and Johnson is reportedly leaning toward it. Center Kaleb Tarczewski and athletic pivot player Rondae Hollis-Jefferson seem likely to be back. Point guard T.J. McConnell will still be running the show. Brandon Ashley will have recovered from the foot injury that ended his season in February. And incoming recruit Stanley Johnson -- the No. 1-ranked small forward and the prize of a loaded five-man haul -- might be the most skilled all-around player in the Class of 2014. Miller's team had one real flaw in 2013-14: its dearth of depth after Ashley's injury. Even if Johnson, a probably second-round pick, leaves -- and that's a 50-50 proposition right now -- this team might be even deeper and more versatile on the offensive end, if not nearly as dominant defensively. Either way, it's a title favorite. Maybe the title favorite. The future in Tucson is as bright as the midday Arizona sun.
For more on how the Wildcats will look in 2014-15, check out Arizona's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
By all accounts, gifted Duke freshman Jabari Parker is genuinely weighing the notion of coming back to school. Stranger things have happened, we guess, but let's be real: Parker is almost certainly going pro. Same goes for smooth lefty wing Rodney Hood. And you know what? Duke should be even better. How? By replacing one of their best freshmen ever with perhaps the most highly touted recruiting class of Mike Krzyzewski's coaching career. Point guard Tyus Jones and center Jahlil Okafor are the top-ranked players at their positions, according to the ESPN 100 (No. 4 and No. 1 overall, respectively). Justise Winslow and Grayson Allen are five-star prospects in their own right. That group will mix in with a solid core of returners, from skilled guards Quinn Cook and Rasheed Sulaimon to rebound-gobbling forwards Amile Jefferson and Marshall Plumlee. Two big questions here: Will Myles Turner, who is still considering Duke, pair with Okafor in a frightening frontcourt? And can Coach K, who has never had a team as young as this, get the Blue Devils up to speed (particularly defensively) in time to make a national title run?
For more on how the Blue Devils will look in 2014-15, check out Duke's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Surprise, surprise: The Kentucky Wildcats have another stellar recruiting class arriving in Lexington this fall. Power forward Trey Lyles and center Karl Towns Jr. are two of the 10 best players in the class, per the ESPN 100, and shooting guard Devin Booker might grade out as one of the most efficient perimeter scorers in the country. As is custom, Kentucky is losing much of this season's roster, but it could return some important pieces, especially hyper-promising center Marcus Lee, who played a key, sudden role in UK's Final Four run. Whether coach John Calipari's latest batch of future NBA pros is as good as the world-destroying 2013 class -- which began with Fab Five comparisons and talk of an undefeated season, then waited until March to show everybody why -- is beside the point. What matters is how good the 2014-15 Wildcats will be relative to their competition. After four Elite Eights, three Final Fours, and one national title (and nearly his second Monday night) in Calipari's five seasons at UK, that answer should be fairly self-explanatory.
For more on how the Wildcats will look in 2014-15, check out Kentucky's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Don't get it twisted: Wisconsin's Final Four run was no fluke. Save a rough patch in January, the Wisconsin offense you saw in March -- the one that was a possession away from a crack at the national title -- really was that good all season. Next season, almost everyone is back. Ben Brust is the only significant contributor graduating this spring. Frank Kaminsky and Sam Dekker both declared their intentions to return almost immediately following their loss to Kentucky on Saturday night; both could compete for national player of the year honors next season. Josh Gasser and Traevon Jackson will be seniors. Rising sophomore Nigel Hayes will be a seasoned and even more polished frontcourt force. And if Bronson Koenig can re-create his stellar work against Kentucky on a regular basis, the Badgers have every chance of getting back to the Final Four a year from now.
For more on how the Badgers will look in 2014-15, check out Wisconsin's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Losing senior Cleanthony Early hurts for all the reasons he displayed in his remarkable 31-point performance in the Shockers' second-round loss to Kentucky. (Has any player helped his draft stock so much with one game? What a stud.) And role players Nick Wiggins, Chadrack Lufile and Kadeem Coleby won't be easy to replace. But coach Gregg Marshall has on the way another crop of sturdy junior college reinforcements who will join hyperefficient point guard Fred VanVleet and NBA-eschewing shooting guard Ron Baker -- to say nothing of Darius Carter and Tekele Cotton. The Shockers aren't going anywhere.
For more on how the Shockers will look in 2014-15, check out Wichita State's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Leslie McDonald graduated and James Michael McAdoo declared for the NBA draft, and those are the only two departures coach Roy Williams has to worry about. In other words, the Tar Heels are going to be good. Marcus Paige came of age in his sophomore year. McAdoo's departure creates room (and loads of deserved touches) for uber-efficient Brice Johnson. That swap may be addition by subtraction. Then there is addition by addition: Williams has the No. 3-ranked class en route to Chapel Hill, which includes Justin Jackson, Theo Pinson and Joel Berry, none of whom ranks lower than third at his respective perimeter position. With Paige running the show, UNC will be within range of national title contention once more.
For more on how the Tar Heels will look in 2014-15, check out North Carolina's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Much was made of the Cavaliers' experience and their long road to 2014's ACC title sweep, and the team's seniors -- lights-out shooter Joe Harris and imposing forward Akil Mitchell -- were crucial to this season's success. But that's it. Those are Virginia's only two senior contributors. Everybody else is back. Team usage leader Malcolm Brogdon will be a junior, as will Justin Anderson, Anthony Gill and Mike Tobey (the latter of whom looks capable of replacing some of Mitchell's interior work). Freshman London Perrantes shot 44 percent from 3 and should get many more looks with Harris gone; Perrantes is a breakout candidate waiting to happen. And coach Tony Bennett's team is still going to play the same brand of smothering, stifling pack-line defense.
For more on how the Cavaliers will look in 2014-15, check out Virginia's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Coach Billy Donovan, as is his wont, has another strategically perfect class coming in. It's a group of four-star players who should be able to contribute and fill needs right away, but they won't necessarily need major minutes or lots of touches right off the bat. That's good, because losing Scottie Wilbekin, Casey Prather and Patric Young creates a need for a smooth, structured transition. The talent is here: Kasey Hill flashed brilliance in a backup role before wilting in the Final Four; Michael Frazier II is a knockdown shooter; Dorian Finney-Smith is a highly skilled forward; and rising sophomore center Chris Walker is a complete athletic freak whose late start to the season gave him no time to develop. When he does, look out. Florida may have some growing pains, but Donovan will get them there.
For more on how the Gators will look in 2014-15, check out Florida's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
The general rule with lottery picks -- especially top-five picks -- is to plan for their departure. That's why it seems unlikely Kansas, having already lost Andrew Wiggins to the draft, will keep currently undecided center Joel Embiid on campus for another season. It just doesn't happen often. But if Embiid does leave, a spot would open up for Myles Turner, who has kept Kansas near the top of his list throughout his recruitment. The Jayhawks already have the No. 1 power forward in the country (Cliff Alexander) signed, as well as No. 4 small forward Kelly Oubre, and will put those two alongside Wayne Selden Jr., Perry Ellis, Naadir Tharpe, Frank Mason, Brannen Greene and Conner Frankamp -- a deep and versatile core. After 10 straight regular-season Big 12 titles, the first rule of Bill Self is to never doubt Bill Self.
For more on how the Jayhawks will look in 2014-15, check out Kansas' recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Losing Shabazz Napier is tough. (That's the kind of hard-hitting analysis you get from the Way-Too-Early Top 25.) Napier is the Huskies' heart and soul, and he was also a massively productive, efficient player -- replacing him won't be possible. But even without him, UConn has a promising 2014-15 on deck. If Ryan Boatright's jump shot develops, he could be a devastating ball-dominant point guard. DeAndre Daniels is rounding into an unstoppable wing scorer. Freshman center Amida Brimah blocked 15.4 percent of opponents' shots this season, fourth-most in the country; his future is limitless. Coach Kevin Ollie could get contributions from still-promising guard Omar Calhoun and incoming talent Daniel Hamilton. And NC State transfer Rodney Purvis -- whom Ollie referred to as "a Ferrari in the garage that I can't drive" in Arlington this week -- may be the best player of them all. The Huskies are in excellent hands.
For more on how the Huskies will look in 2014-15, check out UConn's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Wait... what? Don't refresh your browser, folks. This isn't a mistake. Coach Larry Brown got a long-moribund SMU program into tournament contention in 2013-14, just his second season, thanks to a deep and scrappy group of homegrown recruits and transfers. Nearly everyone will return in 2014-15. Meanwhile, Brown's aggressive staff managed to land fifth-ranked 2014 prospect Emmanuel Mudiay, a 6-5 lead guard with physical scoring skills, a tight handle, and a well-developed, crafty midrange game. (Think the Harrison twins, maybe. Or Tyreke Evans.) An already excellent defense will benefit next season from serious scoring punch, with a legendary coach still running circles around his contemporaries on a play-by-play basis. This is a fascinating team to watch moving forward.
For more on how the Mustangs will look in 2014-15, check out SMU's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
The Cardinals are losing a ton. There's Russ Smith, an All-American and the lead force on the Cardinals' 2013 national title team. There's Luke Hancock, the Most Outstanding Player of that Final Four. Stephan Van Treese leaves with size and hoops IQ in tow. And Montrezl Harrell, who became a dominant interior force this season, looks likely to enter the NBA draft. Yet coach Rick Pitino's team might still be a title contender by next March, and not just because Pitino has been masterful in working through roster changes in recent seasons. He also brings in the No. 4-ranked recruiting class -- including four solid, top-100 players in Shaqquan Aaron, Quentin Snider, Anas Osama Mahmoud and Chinanu Onuaku. Pitino may need to get more out of Mangok Mathiang and (especially) Wayne Blackshear, but the Cardinals won't lack for talent.
For more on how the Cardinals will look in 2014-15, check out Louisville's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
After a two-year lull, coach Jay Wright got Villanova back among the elite, and expectations will be similarly high next season. Four starters (Ryan Arcidiacono, Darrun Hilliard II, JayVaughn Pinkston and Daniel Ochefu) return alongside promising rising sophomore Josh Hart (who posted a 126.8 offensive rating this season). Two top-100 prospects (forward Mikal Bridges, guard Phil Booth) should be able to contribute right away. Villanova's season didn't end the way Wright wanted, but some of the sting comes off when the No. 7 seed that "upset" you streaks all the way to the Final Four. Wright's program is back in a big way.
For more on how the Wildcats will look in 2014-15, check out Villanova's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Could next season be VCU's best? Coach Shaka Smart will lose two four-year contributors this spring, but he has his best recruiting class (and it's not even close) on the way, including three top-100 players. Oh, and Briante Weber (maybe the most disruptive defender in the country) is back, along with Treveon Graham and Melvin Johnson. The Rams are going to be super-deep; Smart's ball-pressuring, turnover-inducing style may get its best exhibition yet.
For more on how the Rams will look in 2014-15, check out VCU's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
When Przemek Karnowski arrived at Gonzaga, he was little-known outside international circles, and his early struggles didn't earn him much fanfare. The 2014-15 season may be his coming-out party. He was excellent down the stretch for Gonzaga this past season. Next season's Bulldogs will keep Kevin Pangos, Gary Bell Jr. and Kyle Dranginis on the perimeter, with the 7-1 Karnowski as the featured post player, and they'll add former Kentucky forward Kyle Wiltjer. It's easy to see coach Mark Few playing a four-out, one-in configuration, with Wiltjer occasionally rotating into high-low and post sets with Karnowski. The results could be devastating.
For more on how the Bulldogs' will look in 2014-15, check out Gonzaga's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Fred Hoiberg hasn't merely had successful seasons in his brilliant four-year run as coach at Iowa State. He's also built the Cyclones into a program that can sustain annual losses and still expect to be really good. So it is in 2014-15, when the Cyclones will lose DeAndre Kane and Melvin Ejim -- both seniors, and two of the best players in the country -- but will still have Georges Niang and Dustin Hogue in even bigger roles, Monte Morris and Naz Long emerging from the wings, 3-point threat freshman Clay Custer, and frontcourt transfers Abdel Nader and Jameel McKay.
For more on how the Cyclones will look in 2014-15, check out Iowa State's recruiting profile and ESPN RecruitingNation's class rankings.
Early in the season, as Nik Stauskas morphed into an all-court killer, his father let slip that his son's sights were focused on the NBA. Stauskas had to deny it at the time, but there's little reason to pretend otherwise now: Stauskas |
0 gold rush and soon settled in Oregon where he pioneered in transportation. He was the guiding genius of river steamboat transportation and his Oregon Steam Navigation Co. grew tothe Pacific Northwest division of the Union Pacific Railroad. His Portland bank was the largest in Oregon. Was an incorporator and promoter of the Northern Pacific Railway. Was raised in Farmington Lodge No. 9, Ohio and became the first master of Multnomah Lodge No. 86 (Mo. register), now Oregon No. 1. He helped organize the G.L. of Oregon and served as grand master 1854-55. In 1865 he was grand high priest of the Grand Chapter. Inspector general 33° AASR (SJ).
Milburn P. Akers Editor, political and editorial writer. b. May 4, 1900. Assistant to Secretary of Interior 1939-41. Executive secretary of Illinois Development Council 1937-39. Editor of Chicago Sun, 1941-42. Mason.
George E. Akerson (1889-1937) Secretary to President Hoover 192931; Hoover's assistant when Secretary of Commerce 1925-28. Washington correspondent and asst. managing editor of Minneapolis Tribune 1912-25. 32° at Minneapolis Feb. 27, 1929. Received Shrine at Washington, D.C. Apr. 29, 1929 as courtesy to Zurah Temple in Minneapolis.
Spencer B. Akin Major General U.S. Army. b. Feb. 13, 1889. B.S. Virginia Military Institute 1910. 2nd lt. U.S. Army, 1910 advancing through grades to brigadier general in 1941 and major general in 1943. Chief signal officer on staff of General MacArthur and later chief signal officer, Department of Army. Cited by Poor Richard Club for his reorganization of Army's system of communication to needs of atomic warfare. Mason.
Sir Adeyemo Alakija (1884-1952) Nigeria spiritual and political leader. Headed the Executive Council of the Colony and Protectorate in Nigeria, also a spiritual leader among the natives and respected public figure. Member Star of Nigeria Chapter No. 255, R.A.M. 23° AASR. Appointed grand superintendent over Royal Arch in the district both English and Scottish constitutions as well as head of the District Grand Lodge. Died April 9, 1952.
Miguel Ricardo de Alava (17711843) Spanish general and statesman. He participated in the Peninsular War under Wellington in 1811 and in 1815 was in the service of Ferdinand VII. He was a liberal leader and president of the Cortes in 1822, in which year he aided in the deposition of Ferdinand. In 1814 he was imprisoned for being a Freemason. Upon Ferdinand's restoration by the French in 1823, Alava fled to England. He was later in' the service of Maria Christina against Don Carlos. Named ambassador to London in 1834 and Paris in 1835, retiring to France after the La Granja insurrection.
Leopold, Duke of Albany Youngest son of Queen Victoria was initiated in Apollo University Lodge No. 357, Oxford, England May 1, 1874 and in May, 1875 became a member of Lodge of Antiquity. No. 2. Served as master of Apollo Lodge, 1876.
Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810-1884) Distinguished Argentine statesman, jurist and publisher. He was noted principally for his Bases, a treatise on American public right. Hostile to Rosas, he exiled himself to Uruguay where he studied law, later practicing in Chile. On the overthrow of Rosas by Urquiza q.v. he was successively named by the latter as minister to Paris, Madrid, Washington and London. Mason.
Albert Victor Christian Edward (see Duke of Clarence) Carl Albert Congressman from Oklahoma, 80th Congress (1947-49) Lawyer. b. May 10, 1908. Member of South McAlester Lodge No. 96, Mc- Alester, Okla. (1946), 32° Indian Consistory, AASR (SJ) and DeMolay Legion of Honor.
Casimir August Albert Duke of Saxony-Teschen (1738-1822) Last governor of the Austrian Netherlands. Brother of King Karl Christian Joseph. Initiated in Dresden, Germany, in lodge Zu den drei Schwestern, 1764.
Prince Albert Duke of York. b. December 14, 1895, in London. Provincial G.M. of Middlesex.
Albert-Edward, Prince of Wales (1841-1910) (see Edward VII of England) Eldest son of Queen Victoria. Initiated in Stockholm in 1868 by King Charles XV and made past grand master in 1870. In 1875 he received the AASR degrees. In 1875 he succeeded the Marquis de Ripon as grand master of England, an office which he held until his death in 1910.
Manuel Masimino Alberti (17631811) Catholic priest and Argentine patriot. Although a Catholic priest he joined Freemasonry and was active in events that led to the "open forum" on May 24, 1810 and the revolution of that year. He was one of the "junta," or council, then formed to rule the country.
Henri Christophe Albrecht (17631800) German Masonic writer. Initiated 1785. In 1792 he published at Hamburg a work entitled Materialen zu einer kritischen Geschichte der Freimaurerei (Collections towards a critical history of Freemasonry).
Ralph G. Albrecht Specialist in international law. Prosecuted Herman Goering and others before International Military Tribunal, 1945-46. b. Aug. 11, 1896 at Jersey City, N.J. Graduate of Univ. of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Admitted to bar in 1924. Associate counsel for American claimants against Germany in "Black Tom" and "Kingsland" explosions, 1924-39. Commander, U.S. Navy, 1941-45. Naval observer with American Embassy London, England and with Pacific Fleet, Pearl Harbor and Australia. Assistant Director O.S.S. (War Crimes) and assistant to attorney general, 1945. Raised in Dalhousie Lodge, Newtonville, Mass. on Nov. 16, 1921.
Horace M. Albright Conservationist. b. Jan. 6, 1890. Director National Park Service 1917-18; asst. director and superintendent Yellowstone National Park 1919-29. In charge of Yosemite National Park, 1927-28. Director National Park Service Jan. 12, 1929 to Aug. 10, 1933. Advisor, director and official of many national conservation projects. Member of Livingston Lodge No. 32, Livingston, Montana, being raised in June, 1923. He was given his degrees in a period of five weeks while in charge of Yellowstone National Park so that he would be a member in time to entertain President Harding in Yellowstone on June 30 and July 1, 1923.
James L. Alcorn Former Governor and Senator from Mississippi. Member Coahoma Lodge No. 104, Friar's Point, Miss. and Jackson Chapter No. 6, Jackson, Miss.
Alvin B. Alden (1818-1882) Did much for laying foundation of Freemasonry in Wisconsin. Grand master 1861-63; grand high priest 1863; grand commander 1866-68; sovereign grand inspector general, AASR.
Chester H. Aldrich (1862-1924) Governor of Nebraska and jurist. Admitted to Nebraska bar, 1891. Member Nebraska Senate, 1907. Governor of Nebraska 1911-13. Justice, Supreme Court of Nebraska 1919-25. Mason and Knight Templar.
Kildroy P. Aldrich 1st Assistant Postmaster General, 1943-45. b. Feb. 16, 1877. With postal department from 1897 to 1945, serving in various ca-pacities from postal clerk to assistant postmaster general. Raised in Siloam Lodge No. 276, Oklahoma City, Okla. in 1913 and a life member. Member of Missouri Consistory No. 1, St. Louis, Mo. (SJ).
Nelson W. Aldrich (1841-1915) U.S. Senator from Rhode Island from 1881 to 1911. b. Nov. 6, 1841 at Foster, R.I.; Graduate of Brown Univ. Member of R.I. House of Representatives from 1875-77, serving as speaker of same. Elected five times to U.S. Senate and declined nomination for reelection in 1910. A member of What Cheer Lodge No. 21, (past master) Providence and Providence Chapter No. 1 as well as Cavalry Commandery No. 13 which he served as commander in 1871. In 1879 he was grand commander of the Grand Commandery of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. d. Apr. 16, 1915.
Elizabeth Aldworth Said to be the only woman ever regularly initiated into Freemasonry. See "Elizabeth St. Leger.”
J. Frank Alee Former U.S. Senator from Delaware. Member Union Lodge No. 7, Dover, Del.
Miguel Aleman President of Mexico 1947-52. Petitioned Antiquities Lodge No. 9 of Grand Lodge Valle de Mexico on Sept. 25, 1930 as a young man of 26. Initiated Oct. 20, 1930; passed April 27, 1931 and raised July 31, 1931. He later demitted to City of Mexico Lodge No. 35. Received AASR degrees 4th through 32nd Nov. 24, 1942 by Grand Commander Antonio Arceo. Made a noble of the Mystic Shrine in Anezeh Temple of Mexico City on Nov. 27, 1945. Son of General Miguel Aleman, who as a revolutionist against Porfirio Diaz, fled to the mountains as an open rebel for three years before the general revolution of 1910, leaving 8-year-old Miguel as head of the house. By sellingpapers he worked his way through the law school of the National University and on graduation set up a thriving law business principally with labor unions and individual workers. His public life began as magistrate of the Veracruz Supreme Court. Was elected to the Senate and in 1936 was appointed Governor of Veracruz, serving until 1940. He resigned as governor to manage the election of his friend, General Avila Camacho, who, when he won, appointed Aleman as Minister of Interior. At 37, he was the youngest cabinet member and Camacho's principal trouble shooter between the federal government and the 28 states. In this capacity he won international recognition for tracking down some 2,000 German and Japanese nationals in deference to the U.S. He was nominated as president by the head of the Latin-American Federation of Labor and his campaign manager was the editor of the labor newspaper, El Popular. Industrialists backed him because he understood the technical necessities of Mexican industry. Scholars and professional men cheered him for his ability and brains. The old revolutionary generals liked his background and political philosophy, and the masses voted for him because he had given them more in the way of social reform than anyone within their memory. He was particularly interested in public education and transportation.
Alexander I (1777-1825) Czar of Russia from 1801-1825. b. Dec. 23, 1777 and succeeded Paul I q.v. on the throne in 1801. While he prohibited all secret societies in 1801, in 1803 he rescinded this prohibition. It is said that he was convinced by Johann Boeber q.v., later grand master of Russia, of the benefits of Masonry and he not only lifted the ban, but became a member himself. Some sources claim he was initiated in Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Edinburgh, Scotland and in 1814 acted as master at the conferring of the degrees in a military lodge in Paris on William III, Emperor of Germany. He was, for certain, a member of the Polish Grand Orient. In November, 1815 the Polish Masons gave a banquet in his honor after which he left generous gifts for the Grand Orient. He has been accused of using Freemasonry for political purposes. d. Dec. 1, 1825 under mysterious circumstances. In 1822 he became suspicious of the political dangers inherent in some of the Russian lodges, and on the advice of Grand Master Kushelev of the Grand Lodge "Astra," banned Freemasonry on August 1, 1822. This date marks the destruction of Russian Freemasonry, for his successor, Nicholas I, confirmed the edict on April 21, 1826.
Alexander III (1241-1286) King of Scotland from 1349. Legend states he favored Freemasons and that Kilwinning Abbey was built under his guidance. Married Margaret, daughter of Henry III, in 1251. Defeated Norwegian invasion in 1263. United Hebrides and Isle of Man to the kingdom.
Abraham Alexander (?-1816) One of the founders of the Mother Supreme Council, Scottish Rite at Charleston, S. Car. He was born in London and emigrated to this country before 1764, settling in Charleston, where he became secretary to the collector of customs and later auditor. He became first secretary general of the Mother Supreme Council and seems to have been a member of Lodge La Candeur as his signature appears on the minutes of March 18, 1798. Of Jewish religion, he was chazan, or reader for Bayh Elohim congregation. He served as reader for 20 years, resigning in 1784. He died Feb. 21, 1816 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Charleston.
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Prince Alexander of Wurtemberg Ben Alexander (1894-1944) President of Masonite Corp. Started as a laborer in the wood pulp industry in 1919 and by 1926 was president of the Masonite Corp. Director or officer of many corporations. Mason.
George F. Alexander (1882-?) Jurist. U.S. Marshal of Oregon 1917-21. Judge, 1st Division of Alaska since 1933. b. Apr. 20 1882. Mason. 32°, Shriner, president of Juneau Shrine Club 1934-39. Deceased.
Grover C. Alexander (1887-1950) Early member of Baseball Hall of Fame (1938). A great National League pitcher for two decades with the Phil-lies, Cubs and Cardinals starting in 1911. In 1926 he won the world championship for the Cardinals by striking out Lazzeri with bases full in final crisis at Yankee Stadium. He was raised in St. Paul Lodge No. 82, St. Paul, Nebraska on Feb. 8, 1923 expelled for un-Masonic conduct March 20, 1930.
Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander 1st Viscount of Tunis. b. 1891. Served in France, 1914-18 and northwest frontier of India in 1935. Was commander of the 1st Division from 1938-40 and was in charge of the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk. Assigned to the Burma front in March, 1942, he became commander-in-chief of the Middle East in August. As deputy allied commander-in-chief in North Africa (1943), Alexander, with General Montgomery, who mapped the successful British campaign in Egypt. He commanded Sicilian (July 1943) and Italian (Sept. 1943) invasions. He was made field marshal in November, 1944 and was allied commander-in-chief of Italy in 1944-45. Since 1946 he has been Governor-General of Canada. Alexander is a member of Athlumney Lodge No. 3245 of London, serving as its master in 193839. He is a past grand steward andpast grand warden of the G.L. of England and a member of the house committee of the Royal Masonic Institution for Girls. He is active in Royal Arch Masonry. Born in New Zealand, he was a well known athlete and Olympic games record holder in his youth.
Hubbard F. Alexander Steamship executive. b. Aug. 14, 1879. Began as wharf agent in Tacoma, Wash. 1894. Later president of the following: Commercial Dock Co. 1901-27; Alaska Pacific S.S. Co. 1907-08; Alaska Coast Co. 1908-11; Pacific Alaska Navigation Co. 1908-26; Pacific Steamship Co. (Admiral Line), 1916-30. Mason, 32°.
James P. Alexander Judge. (18831948) Chief Justice Supreme Court of Texas (1941-48). Texas lawyer since admittance to bar in 1908. District judge, 19th district of Texas 1920-24; associate justice Court of Civil Appeals, Waco, 1931 to 1940; Mason and Shriner.
John L. Alexander (1878-1932) Executive Director of American Youth Foundation 1924-32. Served in executive or secretarial capacity for many religious and youth movements including Boy Scouts, Y.M.C.A. Mason.
Lord Alexander Scottish records show him to be one of the earliest of the speculatives (July 3, 1634) Lodge of Edinburgh. He was Right Honorable Master of the Work to His Majesty.
Nathaniel Alexander (1756-1808) Governor of North Carolina, 1805-07. Surgeon in the Revolutionary War. Served as an officer of the G.L. of North Carolina in 1802, '03, '06, '07 and was senior grand deacon at his death in 1808.
Prince Alexander of Orange (Netherlands) Grand Master 1832-84.
Prince Alexander of Wurtemberg Initiated in 1808 in the Phoenix Lodge in Paris. Was uncle of Emperor Alexander of Russia.
Robert Alexander (1863-1941) Major General U.S. Army. Advanced in rank from a private in 1886 through grades to Brig. General N.A., 1918 and Maj. General 1918-19 (temp.); Brig. General 1921 and retired as Maj. General 1927. Served in Indian campaign of 1890-91, Philippines, Cuba and Mexico as well as WW1. Mason.
Algert D. Alexis Rear Admiral U.S. Navy. b. June 25, 1897. Appointed lieutenant (jg) in 1921 and advanced through grades to rear admiral in 1950. His speciality in the service was naval construction and he commanded many naval installations both at home and abroad, including staff commander of the service force for the invasion of Japan. He retired in 1954 and is now a consulting civil engineer. Raised in Peter Williamson Lodge No. 323, Scranton, Pa. in 1920. Royal Arch membership in Norfolk, Va. Past president of Charleston, S.C. chapter of the National Sojourners.
Bernard Soto Alfaro Former president of Costa Rica. He developed a national spirit in the country and is one of the most eminent men produced by the Republic. He entered the lodge Esperanza when a young man and was made "Protector of the Order" in the Supreme Council, AASR.
Colon Eloy Alfaro Ambassador from Ecuador. b. Jan. 1, 1891, son of Eloy Alfaro, Ecuadorian patriot and president. Educated in Ecuador, U.S. Military Academy, German Cavalry School, and George Washington University. Served as consul general to Canal Zone, Panama, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatamala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Dominican Republic and United States. Was ambassador to U.S. 1936-44. He has also served his country on many special diplomatic missions. Has been a member of the Board of Governors of the Pan American Union at Washington, D.C., since 1947. Mason and 33° AASR. Shriner. Member of Canal Zone Consistory as are his three sons, Eloy, Jaime and Olmedo.
Eloy Alfaro (1842-1912) Ecuadorian liberator and president. b. June 25, 1842 in Montecristi. He led an uprising against President Cordero (1893-95) and declared himself anticlerical dictator and president of Ecuador from 1897-1901 and 1907-11. He led the revolt of 1906 that deposed President Lisardo Garcia and became constitutional president in 1907. As president he reduced the power of the Roman Catholic church. More laws for the betterment of public schools and social reforms for the people were enacted during his presidency than there had been in the 120 years since the Republic was established. Most of his life was spent in exile. As a disciple of Bolivar he advocated Pan-Americanism and convened the second Pan American Congress in Mexico City in 1896. Alfaro was responsible for the introduction of the "Panama hat" to the world. While in exile in Panama, he imported the Ecuador-made toquilla hats which he sold in great numbers to travelers passing through the Isthmus. Having been purchased in Panama, the hats were presumed to be products of the country and thus became known as "Panamas." Alfaro attempted to aid Cuba in securing its independence from Spain and in 1895 sent an impassioned letter to Queen Marie Cristina of Spain, pleading for Cuban independence. He resigned as president Aug. 12, 1911 hoping to prevent a revolt and continue the liberal regime. When a new revolt broke out, he returned from his exile in Panama hoping to effect a conciliation between the factions. He was seized in Guayaquil and sent over the railway which he had built to Quito where he was thrown into jail and a few hours later (Jan. 28, 1912) was murdered. Affectionately called "Citizen of the Americas," he has been honored with monuments and statues in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico and the United States. Busts of Alfaro in the U.S. are found in St. Augustine, Florida; Lincoln, Nebraska; House of the Temple, Washington, D.C.; Washington National Memorial at Alexandria, and Gainesville, Florida. Even Spain named a street in his ancestral town of Cervera del Rio Alhambra for him.
Bruce R. Alger Congressman, 84th Congress from 5th Texas district. b. June 12, 1918. Owner of Alger Development Co., Bruce Alger Realtor, Modernair Construction Co., all of Dallas. 32° AASR and Shriner.
Russell A. Alger (1836-1907) Major General in Civil War, working his way from the ranks. Served as governor of Michigan from 1885-87 and was Secretary of War under McKinley from 1897-99, resigning at McKinley's request because of criticism directed against the War Department for inefficiency. Member of Corinthian Lodge No. 241 of Detroit, being raised Dec. 9, 1895.
Francois D' Alincourt French gentleman, who, in the year 1776 was sent with Don Gyres de Ornellas Pracao, q.v. a Portuguese nobleman, to prison, by the governor of the island of Madeira, for being Freemasons.
Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867) English author. b. Dec. 29, 1792 at Kenley, Shropshire, England and d. May 23, 1867 at Glasgow, Scotland. Received his degrees at Glasgow Kilwinning Lodge in 1837. An historian; and as sheriff of Lanarkshire suppressed the riots of 1837. Author of History of Europe during the French Revolution (1833-42) in ten volumes and a nine volume continuation in 1852-59.
John S. Allard Brigadier General and corporation executive. b. Jan. 16, 1897. Served overseas with Air Force, 1942-45, and promoted from colonel to brigadier general in 1944. President of Curtis-Wright Export Corp. since 1929; vice pres. of Curtis-Wright Corp. since 1929 and director of Wright Aeronautical Corp., Curtis-Wright Airplane Co., and Curtis-Wright Airports Co. Mason.
Herbert J. Allemang Vice president of Philco Corp. since 1951. b. May 3, 1902. Raised in South Bend Lodge No. 294, South Bend, Ind. in 1923. Member of AASR (NJ) in South Bend and Medinah Shrine Temple.
Alfred G. Allen (1867-1932) Congressman from Ohio to 62nd, 63rd, and 64th Congresses (1911-17). Lawyer. Mason.
Charles H. Allen (1848-1934) First governor of Puerto Rico. b. April 15, 1848 at Lowell, Mass. He was a member of the Massachusetts house of representatives in 1881 and '82 and in the state senate in 1883. He was a member of the 49th and 50th Congresses (1885-89), and assistant secretary of the Navy from 1898-1900. After the United States freed the island of Puerto Rico from a 400-year despotic rule of Spain he became its first governor (1900-02). He was a member of William North Lodge of Lowell, Mass.
Ethan Allen (1738-1789) Major General in Revolution. Gained fame as a colonel commanding the "Green Mountain Boys," who with Benedict Arnold, q.v., seized Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775. He was captured at Montreal and held prisoner from 177578, exchanged and returned to Vermont. Although he has been described as one "who seems to have been a Master Mason" it is thought that he only received one degree at Windsor, Vt. on July 7, 1777. His brother Ira, q.v., was a member of Vermont Lodge No. 1. Probably not a Mason. Was a prisoner in England on date given for his first degree in Windsor, Vt.
Ethan N. Allen Baseball coach. b. Jan. 1, 1904. An outfielder with various National League teams 1926-36 and with Browns of American League since 1938; motion picture director of National League public relations dept. 1938-42; head coach at Yale in 1946. Has done sports announcing and written several books on baseball. Member of Yeatman Lodge No. 162, Cincinnati, Ohio, 32° Ohio Consistory at Cincinnati and Shriner.
Ezra G. Allen (1885-1952) Rear Admiral U.S. Navy. b. March 11, 1885 at Scranton, Pa. Graduated U.S. Naval Academy, 1907. Ensign. U.S. Navy in 1907, advancing to rear admiral. Mason. d. January, 1952.
Frank G. Allen Former governor of Massachusetts. b. Lynn, Mass. Oct. 6, 1874. Was raised in Orient Lodge, Norwood, Mass. June 23, 1920, receiving 33° in Northern Jurisdiction, Sept. 16, 1930.
George W. Allen (?-1928) Chief Justice Supreme Court of Colorado, 1926-28. Member Pennsylvania House of Representatives 1874-76 moving to Colorado in 1880. Judge district court, Denver 1888-1910. Republican nominee for governor 1896 and defeated for U.S. Senator 1896. Justice of Supreme Court 1916-26. Died Jan. 29, 1928. Mason, 32° AASR and Shriner.
Henry J. Allen (1868-1950) U.S. Senator and former governor of Kansas. b. Sept. 11, 1868 in Warren Co., Pa. Began as editor of Manhattan Nationalist in 1894 and later owned and operated several daily newspapers in Kansas; chairman of board of Wichita Daily Beacon Publishing Co. Governor of Kansas from 1919-23 and appointed U.S. Senator to succeed Vice-president Curtis in 1929. Assistant to Charles G. Dawes, pres. of Reconstruction Finance Corp. in 1932. Editor of the Topeka Journal from 1935 until death. Director of publicity for the Hoover-Curtis campaign in 1928 and as president of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Tidewater Assn., helped prepare treaty between U.S. and Canada on that project. Active abroad in WW1 in Red Cross work. Mason. d. Jan. 17, 1950.
Hervey Allen Author, who although not a Freemason, is one of the few writers of historical novels to give credit for the part Freemasonry played in our Revolutionary period. Among his writings are Anthony Adverse, 1933; The Forest and the Fort, 1943; and Bedford Village, 1944. b. Dec. 8, 1889. Mr. Allen wrote on May 23, 1944 as follows: "Several members of the fraternity have written in asking if I hold membership. I do not and never have. My father and grandfather and a great many other relatives have been Masons for many generations back, but for various reasons I have never joined. My interest in the theme of Masonry in American life is purely historical, and I think that my not being a member is at this time perhaps a help in my stressing the theme, as I can do so without any suspicion of being a special pleader from the inside. There is no doubt that for some reason or other American historians have overlooked one of the prime and deep-running influences in American life. As you know, there are many reasons for that.”
Hubert A. Allen (1872-1942) Brigadier General U.S. Army. Actively identified with Iowa national guard for 25 years. Served as captain in Spanish-American war and appointed brigadier general in 1917. Mason.
Ira Allen (1751-1814) Brother of Ethan Allen q.v. and politically active in the Revolutionary period. b. Cornwall, Conn., he with two other fellow members of Vermont Lodge No. 1 (now 18), led the fight for statehood of Vermont. The others were Thomas Chittenden q.v. and Dr. Jonas Fay q.v. Between 1780 and 1791 he was in negotiation with the British which was thought to force Congress to recognize Vermont's claims—which they did on March 4, 1791. He assisted in the founding of the Univ. of Vermont in 1789. He was initiated in Vermont Lodge No. 1 of Charleston, N.H. in 1782.
Ivan E. Allen Business executive who gave Fort Mountain to state of Georgia; it is now one of the state parks. b. Mar. 1, 1877 at Dalton, Ga. Chairman of Ivan Allen-Marshall Co.; Ivan Allen Bldg., Atlanta Blank Book Mfg. Co., and has served on many state political and civic boards including term as state senator 1919-21. A Knight Templar and Shriner.
James M. Allen General in the Civil War. A Mason.
J. Edward Allen Educator and writer. Instructor in public school system of Warrenton, N.C. since 1907 and served as superintendent of public instruction for Warren Co. since 1919. Member board of trustees Wake Forest College since 1922; board of trustees, state school for blind and deaf; on board of Oxford Orphanage. Grand Master G.L. of North Carolina 1939-40. Also headed state York Rite bodies and Shrine. Writer of many Masonic books and articles including revision of Goulds History of Freemasonry published by Scribners in 1936. b. March 21, 1887 at Warrenton, N.C.
John Allen 3rd Viscount Grand Master, G.L. of Ireland, 1744.
John E. Allen (1873-1945) Chief Justice, Supreme Court of New Hampshire, 1934-43. Educated at Dartmouth and Harvard, he was admitted to N.H. bar in 1897, serving as probate judge from 1899 to 1906. He was associate justice of Superior Court of N.H. 1917-24 and 1924-34 before becoming chief justice. Mason.
John M. Allen Major in Texas-Mexican War. He came to Texas attracted by the rumors of impending conflict between Americans and Mexicans. As commander of the armed ship Terrible, he had been ordered to New Orleans for the purpose of recruiting soldiers for the impending conflict. While in New Orleans he received a charter from the grand secretary of the G.L. of Louisiana for Holland Lodge No. 36 to be delivered to Anson Jones q.v. General Sam Houston q.v. sent an orderly to Allen advising him of the impending clash and urging speed to the reinforcements he had. Allen joined Houston's forces, carrying with him the charter and other communications from the G.L. of Louisiana. He met Anson Jones (to be first Grand Master of Texas) on the prairie between Croce's and San Jacinto, while Houston's army was on the march just before the battle of San Jacinto. Jones placed it in his saddlebags and carried it through the battle of San Jacinto.
Lee E. Allen Congressman from 16th district of Illinois to 73rd to 80th Congresses inclusive (1933-49). b. Oct. 5, 1898 at Elizabeth, Ill. Taught school, served as circuit court clerk and has practiced law since 1930. Mason.
Oscar K. Allen Former governor of Louisiana. Member of Eastern Star Lodge No. 151, Winnfield, La.
Peter B. Allen General U.S. Army. First master of Terre Haute Lodge No. 19, Terre Haute, Indiana.
William Allen Purchased the ground for the State House (Independence Hall) at Philadelphia in 1729 and gave a grand banquet in 1736 at the inauguration of the building. It was here that the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Roger Allin Former governor of North Dakota. Member of Golden Valley Lodge No. 6, Park River, N.D.
James B. Allison Major General, U.S. Army. b. Sept. 15, 1873 at York, S. Car. Appointed 2nd lieutenant in 1898 advancing through grades to major general in 1935 when he became chief signal officer. Retired in 1937. Served in Mexican War and WW1. Mason.
William B. Allison (1829-1908) U.S. Senator from Iowa 1873-1909. b. March 2, 1829 at Perry, 0. Admitted to bar in 1850, he practiced in Ohio until 1858 when he moved to Dubuque, Iowa. Raised troops for Civil War and was U.S. Representative in Congress from 1863-71. In 1888 and 1896 he was a candidate for Republican presidential nomination. A charter member of Mosaic Lodge No. 125 of Dubuque, Iowa, he was honorary senior grand warden of the Grand Lodge of Iowa in 1889.
James V. Allred Governor of Texas 1935-39. b. Mar. 29, 1899 at Bowie, Texas. Admitted to Texas bar in 1924. Served as district attorney 1923-25 and attorney general of Texas 193135. U.S. District Judge, southern district of Texas 1939-42. Practicing attorney since 1942. Raised in Bowie Lodge No. 578 July 6, 1920. Received Scottish Rite degrees in 1926. K.C.C.H.
Avery Allyn Anti-Masonic writer. Once a member of lodge, chapter and commandery in Connecticut.
Edward B. Almon (1860-1933) Congressman from Alabama to 64th to 72nd Congresses (1915-33). b. April 18, 1860 at Moulton, Ala. Admitted to bar 1883. Member Alabama state senate 1892-96 and speaker of house of representatives in 1911. Judge of 11th circuit 1898-1906. Mason.
James L. Almond, Jr. Congressman and attorney-general of Virginia. b. June 15, 1898 at Charlottesville, Va. Served as prosecuting attorney and judge at Roanoke and in the 79th and 80th Congresses from Virginia. Has been attorney-general of Virginia since 1948. Past potentate of Shrine.
Alfred S. Alschuler (1876-1940) Architect. b. Chicago, Nov. 2, 1876. Graduate of Armour Institute of Technology and studied at Art Institute of Chicago. Designed the following Chicago buildings: London Guarantee and Accident, Westminster, Cunard, John R. Thompson, John Sexton, Utilities, Lake Michigan, Mercantile Exchange, Adams Franklin and Garment Center buildings; plans of E. J. Brach & Son, Chicago Mail Order, Sinai Temple and Isaiah Temple. Mason.
Richard Alsop (1761-1815) American author and poet. b. Middletown, Conn. Was one of the Hartford wits, collaborating in the writing of The Echo, a verse satire which appeared in the American Mercury and published in book form in 1807. Among other works is A Poem, Sacred to the Memory of George Washington (1800). A member of St. John's Lodge No. 2, Middletown, Conn. There was a Richard Alsop who became a member of Hiram Lodge No. 1 at New Haven, Conn. in 1752 and may have been his father.
Wilbur M. Alter Chief justice, Supreme Court of Colorado since 1955. b. Dec. 17, 1879 at Allegheny, Pa. Admitted to Colorado bar in 1906. Judge of Supreme Court of Colorado from 1928-33; 1944-46 |
contract is one of the more upsetting deals for Rangers fans everywhere. The trade was not good, but at the time it made total sense. The Rangers needed to bring up Jurickson Profar and had a gaping hole at first base, so when Prince Fielder was offered, the team jumped at the chance. It didn’t turn out so well. Fielder had one good season for the Rangers, but it was between two incredibly injury riddled seasons that nearly jeopardized the team’s playoff hopes. If you take out the second year with the team, he hit.223 with only 11 homers and 60 RBIs. Meanwhile Kinsler never hit lower than.275 and hasn’t had less than 72 RBIs in a season. Not a fair trade. We get that Fielder couldn’t stop the injuries, but there was a lot of evidence before the trade that Fielder was on his last legs and would soon be bottoming out. However, it was shocking how quickly the decline happened.
1 Chan Ho Park
via sportsday.dallasnews.com
What do we have to say about Chan Ho Park? Well it was a terrible idea to give a $65 million 5-year deal to a below average pitcher who thrived in a pitcher friendly ballpark for most of his career. He made one All-Star team for the Dodgers and someone in the Rangers organization decided that was enough for him to be the opening day starter over the next 5 years. Not to say he wasn’t successful in LA, he had multiple 15-win seasons, but as we said it was a pitcher park and he had one of the highest fly ball rates in the MLB. Putting him in Texas was like telling batters that they were playing t-ball. Over his 3 and a half seasons for the Rangers he had a 5.85 ERA and gave up 55 home runs. He was also noted for being upset in the clubhouse at the manager for pulling him out of games “too early.” He was a head case in the club house and he never produced on the field. He was symbolic of the team’s ineptitude in the mid 2000s. With an offense of A-Rod, Pudge, and Rafael Palmiero, he’s not just a failed contract; he’s a failed opportunity.Climate change deniers are “ridiculous” and akin to “flat-earthers”, according to Sir Nicholas Stern, who advised the government about the economic threat posed by global warming. The respected economist compared climate naysayers to those who deny the link between smoking and cancer or HIV and Aids in the face of mounting scientific evidence.
Sir Nicholas Stern: Climate change deniers are flat-earthers | guardian.co.uk — This new meme around the word “denier” is cropping up all over the UK and starting to appear in the USA. In an effort to quash dissent about the mechanism of climate change (man vs natural) an all out attack has begun on anyone who has any question about the validity of the global warming promoters. So the “deniers” have been grouped with holocaust deniers in particular. Another track has them categorized as insane, literally. They are also being associated with the Creationists as much as possible. This is getting good.
Socialist/activist/columnist George Monbiot chimes in with another funny analogy. Apparently if you question the global warming agenda you think AIDS can be treated with beetroot and lemon juice. Interesting assertion by a non-existent association. I mean, cripes!
Sammy Wilson’s appointment as Northern Ireland environment minister appears to have been conceived as some sort of practical joke. It’s no longer very funny. He fills the same role as the former South African health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who claimed that Aids could be treated with beetroot and lemon juice.
Huh?Footage of how Victoria's medicinal marijuana is harvested, pruned and turned into oil has emerged.
In a video posted online by the state's Premier Daniel Andrews, forensic testers can be seen planting and tending to hundreds of cannabis plants – the country's first approved crop.
Victoria became the first state in Australia to legalize marijuana use to help treat chronic illnesses.
As of this year, children with severe epilepsy will have access to it.
Scroll down for video
Footage of how Victoria's medicinal marijuana is harvested, pruned and turned into oil was posted to Facebook on Monday by Premier Daniel Andrews
The country's first approved crop contains more than 150 plants
THC – the main constituent of cannabis - will be produced in oil, capsule and vapour form (pictured)
The state government spent close to $1 million in March to transport marijuana from Canada to treat 29 children suffering from the debilitating ailment, according to 9News.
'This treatment is going to change so many lives,' Mr Andrews wrote on Facebook.
The crop contains more than 150 plants and will be run by the Cann group.
The cannabis plants are grown and harvested in a secret location.
THC – the main constituent of cannabis - will be produced in oil, capsule and vapour form, 9News reported.
The crop will be run the by the Cann group and is held in a secret location
In the video forensic testers can be seen planting and tending to hundreds of cannabis plants
Health Minister Jill Hennessy said the government will now evaluate which adults could be eligible for treatment
It will also be made into a spray form so it's easy to use for children.
Health Minister Jill Hennessy said the government will now evaluate which adults could be eligible for treatment.
Additional medicinal crops have since been approved in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia.Ever visited places on your overseas travels and felt that you were ten or twenty years too late? I have, often, but not with China. I first went there in 1995 and it was bad enough; a decade or two earlier would have meant even dirtier toilets, even worse transportation, more spitting, more bureaucratic hassles, and with so many areas off-limits, fewer opportunities to explore. I’ve no regrets about missing Mao’s China, and I’m more than happy just reading about it.
Richard Kirkby’s Intruder in Mao’s Realm: An Englishman’s eyewitness account of 1970s China does a wonderful job of transporting us back to the tail-end of the Cultural Revolution. Kirky and his wife Jo taught English at Nanjing University from 1974 to 1977 and a little later at Shandong University. These years were simultaneously dreary yet dramatic, with 1976 notable for its “unceasing tumult.”
One by one, the most eminent leaders of the revolution went to their graves, mass opposition surfaced for the first time, the most destructive earthquake the modern world has ever seen struck Tangshan, and to cap it all, following Mao’s death in September, the Cultural Revolution leaders fell in a palace coup.
These events have been covered in James Palmer’s excellent The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China (2012). Palmer was born in 1978, so for a foreigner’s first-hand account, we need to look elsewhere. There’s Nineteen Seventy-Six by Ragnar Baldursson, a diplomat and scholar of Chinese philosophy from Iceland. It’s one of the Penguin “Specials,” however, which means it’s snack-sized, only 96 pages long. Another book that covers the period is Jan Wong’s Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, the story of how an idealistic Canadian socialist, arriving in 1972 to study at Peking University, was slapped sensible by reality.
What makes Intruder in Mao’s Realm a welcome addition to the bookshelf is that it covers new territory; the author was based in Nanjing and Shandong whereas most books covering the 1970s – including all three of the aforementioned – have a Beijing focus. Additionally, it is very comprehensive; both in length (474 pages long) and content. Kirkby matches his deep professional knowledge of China with meticulous detail drawing on the notebooks and diaries he kept throughout his stay.
Kirkby was a student leftie (with “Trotskyist leanings”) active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He was invited to China to teach English, having previously been on a month-long “friendship” trip there, and known by the Chinese to be sympathetic to the cause. As well as curiosity about China’s socialism and his family connection (his grandparents were missionaries in Sichuan), he was eager to go primarily because of his academic interest in the Chinese experience of urbanization.
In Nanjing the feisty young activist and his newlywed wife found a suffocating political straitjacket in which they were expected to keep their mouths shut. Even regular non-political conversations were difficult and their minders made sure that they were kept away from the masses. Travel was restricted.
… to venture outside the bounds of the city was a big deal, demanding sheaves of paperwork from our many unseen minders. Before every rare escape from Nanjing we would be summoned to the Yellow House for an audience with the Revolutionary Committee.
The Kirkbys’ mail was routinely opened and read. Having had enough of this, he wrote to the authorities to express disproval.
“To the Leading Comrades, Jiangsu Postal Bureau. You have the perfect right to read our mail – after all we might just be spies. But (a) could you read them more quickly, and (b) if you can’t, we know a couple of local English natives who could assist your efforts.”
Three months later, they were amazed to get a formal response from the Postal Bureau, “a sternly worded denial of any mail tampering:”
“It is against Articles x, y and z of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China to interfere with the privacy of citizens’ communications. Your accusation injures the undying friendship between the Chinese and British peoples.” While these remarks caused us a little wry mirth, there was also a hint of a threat. Unbeknown to me my file in the Security Section of the Foreign Experts Bureau was already swelling.
Much worse than having their mail read were the attempts at sabotage:
… half-a-dozen times our letters arrived with extras. Folded within our correspondence we would find a lurid mimeographed sheet defaming the Chinese Communist Party and purporting to be from this or that democratic cell.
Why the attempt to defame? Their presence was resented by political hardliners opposed to China’s opening up.
As time went on, with Mao on his deathbed, the faction fighting throughout China was reaching a crescendo and the murky plotting around us became more naked. The room telephone would ring and a voice would announce: ‘Your call to the Reuters News Agency in Beijing is now through – please speak.’ We knew enough to drop the receiver like a hot brick, for a single word was all that was needed to implicate us.
Kirkby is honest about often not knowing what was going on around him. (Actually, he writes with commendable candor and modesty throughout the book). However, there were times, such as after the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, when residence gave valuable insights denied to the China Watchers based overseas.
Yet now, with Zhou Enlai’s death, it was only those within the Bamboo Curtain who could truly sense the atmosphere of neurotic uncertainty. Nanjing felt suddenly tense and exciting, the familiar norms of public ritual no longer seeming to prevail. We were in a heady, anthropological mood, ready to witness the unfolding of unscripted events which no one outside China could share. At our teacher training classes, our colleagues were strained and monosyllabic. What was next for China, for them, the intelligentsia, the Stinking Ninth category of class enemy, and indeed for ‘foreign intellectuals’ too, if the normal rules were to be suspended and the Cultural Revolution extremists were again in the driving seat?
Public mourning for Zhou Enlai led to political protests and Kirkby was soon caught up in events. Unknowingly taking some photographs that were deemed “sensitive,” he was lucky to get off with a reprimand and the confiscation of his pictures.
Kirkby and Jo left China in early 1977. Originally intending to simply pass through Hong Kong, they ended up staying there until the end of 1978, when they returned to China, this time for a shorter second stint teaching at Shandong University in Jinan. The black mark over his sensitive photographs was seemingly no longer a problem as the political situation had changed. As it was explained to him:
‘The Nanjing Counter-Revolutionary Incident of Qingming two years ago has now become the Nanjing Revolutionary Incident. You two played an important part in the activities against the Gang of Four and you are now named as foreign revolutionary heroes.’
Still, some of the old guard were not amused, and the Nanjing police tipped off their counterparts in Shandong; Kirkby would be closely followed the whole time he was there.
Although Kirkby enjoyed the freer atmosphere of the late seventies in the gradually opening China – travel was less restricted and it was possible to have more contact with Chinese people – the location was less than ideal.
Shandong University was plonked down some miles outside the capital city of Jinan, in the loamy yellow fields and along the grimy lanes of an outlying county town. … Licheng, location of the University, was neither picturesque nor joyously and dirtily productive. It was merely filthy, heavily-polluted, and disarrayed. The civic pride of the commune era had evaporated and Licheng town had fallen into the desuetude common to thousands of North China settlements, which under the new dog-eat-dog profit economy were now places of crumbling facades, potholed roads, chaotic tractor and lorry traffic, piled up garbage, and squabbling peasants.
One of Kirkby’s colleagues at Shandong University was Jim Veneris, an American veteran and former Korean War POW. He was one of about two dozen American prisoners from the Korean conflict, who, given the choice at the end of hostilities of returning to the United States or staying on, decided to remain. Although Veneris was in many ways a dislikeable man, Kirkby says that he “warmed to Jim” after the American revealed during a late-night drinking session that in the Vietnam War years he had “broadcast insurrection to Uncle Sam’s troops.”
Kirkby later learnt that Jim had betrayed his confidence, passing on negative political comments the Englishman had made, a betrayal which was to hasten his departure from China. The author shrugs this off as what Veneris needed to do to survive, but it’s telling that the only American that Kirkby has something nice to say about is this traitorous rat. The author’s anti-Americanism is rather uncompromising. Indeed, in multiple passages he expresses his exasperation that the Chinese were not more anti-American.
Not that I was ever a Moscow sympathiser, but I was heartily sick of the unceasing anti-Soviet diatribes which contrasted so obviously with the gentle treatment reserved for the United States.
I’m virulently anti-communist, so reading the author’s leftist views often had my facial muscles twitching like a freshly landed fish. Leftists cheered on the enemy during the Cold War, and yet so few ever paid any price for this; quite the reverse, many of these anti-establishment types landing nice taxpayer funded jobs in academia. I don’t know the author’s views on Taiwan, but hard-core leftists – despite their disappointment with China’s embrace of capitalism – continue to side with the authoritarian PRC over democratic Taiwan, the latter dammed for its ties to the United States.
Even the author’s area of academic research raised my hackles. He praises the PRC’s lack of urban squalor, but makes only one passing reference to the all-important hukou, the household registration system that bound people to particular locations. The cities didn’t have shanty towns because of the draconian internal migration laws, not to mention the state’s stranglehold on housing, employment, and, well, absolutely everything.
Today, the country which is most similar to the China of the Mao years is North Korea. Imagine being sympathetic to their socialist experiment, visiting Pyongyang as a “foreign friend,” and then being invited to teach English there for a few years. It would certainly be an experience. How much of your criticisms would be directed at North Korea and how much at the villainous stationing of American troops in neighbouring South Korea? Would you find some area of academic interest to study such as Pyongyang’s praiseworthy lack of traffic congestion?
Damn, my facial muscles are twitching again. I better go calm myself down and watch a Ronald Reagan YouTube video; his 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech usually does the trick.
Political differences aside, I found Intruder in Mao’s Realm a fascinating book and devoured it in two days. It’s required reading for anyone wondering what it was like to be in China during the 1970s.
Intruder in Mao’s Realm: An Englishman’s eyewitness account of 1970s China is published by Earnshaw Books. It is also available from Amazon.You will need to initially download the OVF file from here – https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/details?downloadGroup=VRLI-332&productId=568&rPId=11456 (You will need to be logged in). When you have download the OVF file, login to your vCenter and select File –> Deploy OVF Template. Select the correct OVF file as below –
You will be presented with information about the OVF file –
Select Next to continue.
Accept and select Next on the licensing agreement.
Type a suitable virtual machine name.
Select the size of your deployment, I have selected small as I will only be using this in a lab environment consisting of two hosts.
Select the cluster required for the virtual machine.
Select the storage required for the virtual machine.
Specify the correct network for your virtual machine. Usually this will be your management network.
Configure the appliance with the required IP address details.
You will now see a summary of the deployment, select Finish to continue.
When the deployment has finished you will see the below –
Proceed to the website as per the appliance setup above. In my case it was http://172.16.0.204 – You will be presented with the below
Select Start New Deployment, If you have an existing deployment you can configure the appliance for that scenario.
Specify the administrator credentials required.
Input your license key –
Select the e-mail you would like to use for notifications.
Configure your NTP Servers, these are the defaults provided –
Configure a SMTP server for your alerting e-mails. You can skip this if you prefer to not setup SMTP.
Select Finish to continue.
You can now proceed to add your first vCenter. Type your administrator credentials and select Test Connection, if this is successful, select Save.
You will see that VMware vRealize Log Insight will automatically configure your VMware ESXI Hosts Syslog server location to this server.
We now need to configure the VMware vRealize Log Insight Agent’s, this isn’t required if you are not going to be adding any Windows/Linux VM’s to the console. If you simply want to monitor vCenter (Without Windows vCenter Logs) you can finish here. If however you want to configure Windows/Linux logs you can install the required agents. You will need to navigate to the agents screen and select ‘Download Log Insight Agent’. This will allow you to download the package for Windows and for Linux.
Copy this on to your vCenter server and install the agent.
You’ll notice this is pre-configured with the VMware vRealize Log Insight IP address.
Select Install to continue the installation.
You will need to copy the.DEB package (For Ubuntu) to your required host, this can be achieved using WinSCP when completed you can run the following command to install the agent –
sudo dpkg -i VMware [Press Tab]
This file will have appended the IP address of your server to the end so you will need to press TAB for it to auto-complete the file name. You can see below it has now installed the agent.
You can install content packs that will be able to monitor services, alternatively you can create your own but they are pre-configured for applications such as Microsoft Exchange. Select the Content Packs selection as below –
When you have selected the one you want to install, select Install then navigate back to ‘Agents’
You can now copy one of these profiles and select the servers you need to add to the group.
For example Windows monitoring you can copy the group by selecting ‘Copy Template’
You can now specify the filter, in my case I have specified Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard as the majority of my Windows servers are using this operating system.
You can now navigate back to Dashboards once you have gathered some data (I would leave this for a few hours) and you will be able to see the below information presented –
This completes the VMware vRealize Log Insight Installation!Nine people died in Waco, Texas, in May after a shootout between warring motorcycle gangs at restaurant car park - but is such violence an aberration or part and parcel of such groups?
"Look at it now, it's such a tranquil place. It was the same that Sunday afternoon, until all hell broke loose."
McLennan County Sheriff Parnell McNamara stands outside the Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco, the scene of a deadly shoot-out between biker gangs. He points to where the carnage happened.
"You could see bodies lying about - one was right there on the grass, five here on the parking lot, one over there behind that pick-up truck."
McNamara does not hide his contempt for the men involved.
"They couldn't have cared less about the families right across the parking lot in other restaurants or shops," he says. "All they were interested in was killing rival bike gangs."
All of those killed and injured were part of biker gangs who had arranged to meet at the restaurant.
More than 170 bikers were arrested. Most are still in prison, with members of the different gangs being detained separately from each other.
Image copyright AP Image caption The feud broke out between several gangs at a shopping district in Waco
After some persuasion, we managed to speak to a biker who was moments away from having been caught up in the bloodshed. He had been heading to Twin Peaks, but was stuck in traffic when he heard what had happened.
"We were just as shocked as anybody else," says Sean, who spoke to us on the condition we only use his first name.
A few hours south of Waco, Sean invites us to attend the funeral of a friend of his, Jesse "Mohawk" Rodriguez. one of the bikers who died in the car park,
Hundreds of men in leathers are there, their bikes parked beside the church.
They hug each other, support the grieving family and ultimately congregate in individual groups, denoted by the insignia on their jackets.
As the coffin is brought out of the hearse, a large proportion of the bikers salute.
Many of them, like "Mohawk", Sean and thousands of bikers around the country, used to serve in the American armed forces.
"It's about camaraderie, it's about brotherhood, getting together with like-minded individuals," Sean says, explaining why so many bikers are former military.
"When you're in the military, you're really, really close to the people you serve with and when you come back there is a hole."
But another former biker, James Quinn, a professor at the University of North Texas, says when mixed with disillusionment, such biker clubs can often go beyond just men hanging out together with their bikes.
Image caption James Quinn used to belong to a motorcycle club himself
"They are very loyal to their insignia, to their brothers - and very territorial," Quinn says, adding the groups are a "great place" to set up criminal networks - "drugs, weapons, extortion and prostitution are the mainstays".
Police investigators say the killings at Twin Peaks were about a challenge over territorial control.
The dominant gang in a state (currently the Bandidos in Texas) can demand affiliation from smaller clubs in return for protection and the use of the state name on their insignia, Quinn says, adding smaller clubs may not be directly involved in criminal activity.
All of the bikers we spoke to at Mohawk's funeral said they were disappointed in the negative portrayals of bikers, saying accusation of links with criminality were far-fetched.
But when a veteran member of the Bandidos, a group that classifies itself as an "outlaw motorcycle club" arrived to pay his respects, many of those same bikers showed deference.
Image copyright AP Image caption A police officer stands guard near bikers after the shootout
"If you lay down with dogs, you're going to get fleas," says Steve Cook, who worked as an undercover investigator in outlaw motorcycle gangs, and now trains law enforcement.
He goes further than many other experts, saying the vast majority of motorcycle clubs in the United States in some way support those bikers involved in criminal activities.
"As time goes by, they get a little bit more involved with the outlaw groups are doing and before you know it you have these guys getting involved in stuff like you saw in Waco," Cook says.
"The groups that don't placate these guys are few and far between."
The bikers we spoke to say the level of criminal activity Steve Cook alleges is not borne out by the number of arrests of bikers over the years.
Image copyright AP Image caption Bikers ride as a part of protest against what they say is the violation of rights of many bikers who were arrested just for being at the scene of the killings
But Cook believes that is due to romanticism that surrounds motor biking in the United States.
"Even within law enforcement here there is that romanticism about bikers," he says.
"Officers don't pay any attention to the crimes bikers commit at all, they don't take them seriously."
Sean feels the popular perception of bikers, especially in movies and television, go against them, focusing on violence and criminal activity.
"We're people who pay our taxes, have normal jobs, raise our kids," he says.
After the church service, uniformed Marines perform military rites beside the coffin.
As the hearse is pulled away by a Harley Davidson, the scores of bikers at the funeral mount their motorcycles and follow behind in a thunderous "last ride" for Mohawk.Satan turns his malevolent eye on a certain sporting event that only occurs every four years and somehow seems to be taking place quite soon in London.
The sitcom set in hell returns with a two part special. Six years ago London won the right to host the biggest sporting event in the world and with typical modesty the Brits have barely mentioned it ever since. Well now the news has reached Satan in Hell and he decides to have a little look into this sporting event.
In part one he finds out how it all began by going back to ancient Greece - a time when Greece had great philosophers, big ideas and a bit of cash.
In part two he transports historian Edith from the chaos of Hell up to London in two thousand and twelve so she can appreciate real chaos.
Written by and starring Andy Hamilton as Satan and also starring Annette Crosbie as Edith.By Barry Grey
The US Federal Reserve Board last week released its semiannual Monetary Policy Report to Congress, providing an assessment of the state of the American economy and outlining the central bank’s monetary policy going forward. The report, along with Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s testimony before both the House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as a speech by Yellen the previous week in Cleveland, present a grim picture of the reality behind the official talk of economic “recovery.”
In her prepared remarks to Congress last Wednesday and Thursday, Yellen said, “Looking forward, prospects are favorable for further improvement in the US labor market and the economy more broadly.”
She reiterated her assurances that while the Fed would likely begin to raise its benchmark federal funds interest rate later this year from the 0.0 to 0.25 percent level it has maintained since shortly after the 2008 financial crash, it would do so only slowly and gradually, keeping short-term rates well below historically normal levels for an indefinite period.
This was an expected, but nevertheless welcome, signal to the American financial elite, which has enjoyed a spectacular rise in corporate profits, stock values and personal wealth since 2009 thanks to the flood of virtually free money provided by the Fed.
But as Yellen’s remarks and the Fed report indicate, the explosion of asset values and wealth accumulation at the very top of the economic ladder has occurred alongside an intractable and continuing slump in the real economy.
In her prepared testimony to the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee, Yellen noted the following features of the performance of the US economy over the first six months of 2015:
* A sharp decline in the rate of economic growth as compared to 2014, including an actual contraction in the first quarter of the year.
* A substantial slackening (19 percent) in average monthly job-creation, from 260,000 last year to 210,000 thus far in 2015.
* Declines in domestic spending and industrial production.
In her July 10 speech to the City Club of Cleveland, Yellen cited an even longer list of negative indices, including:
* Growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) since the official beginning of the recovery in June, 2009 has averaged a mere 2.25 percent per year, a full one percentage point less than the average rate over the 25 years preceding what Yellen called the “Great Recession.”
* While manufacturing employment nationwide has increased by about 850,000 since the end of 2009, there are still almost 1.5 million fewer manufacturing jobs than just before the recession.
* Real GDP and industrial production both declined in the first quarter of this year. Industrial production continued to fall in April and May.
* Residential construction (despite extremely low mortgage rates by historical standards) has remained “quote soft.”
* Productivity growth has been “weak,” largely because “Business owners and managers… have not substantially increased their capital expenditures,” and “Businesses are holding large amounts of cash on their balance sheets.”
* Reflecting the general stagnation and even slump in the real economy, core inflation rose by only 1.2 percent over the past 12 months.
The Monetary Policy Report issued by the Fed includes facts that are, if anything, even more alarming, including:
* “Labor productivity in the business sector is reported to have declined in both the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.”
* “Exports fell markedly in the first quarter, held back by lackluster growth abroad.”
* “Overall construction activity remains well below its pre-recession levels.”
* “Since the recession began, the gains in… nominal compensation [workers’ wages and benefits] have fallen well short of their pre-recession averages, and growth of real compensation has fallen short of productivity growth over much of this period.”
* “Overall business investment has turned down as investment in the energy sector has plunged. Business investment fell at an annual rate of 2 percent in first quarter… Business outlays for structures outside of the energy sector also declined in the first quarter…”
The report incorporates the Fed’s projections for US economic growth, published following the June meeting of the central bank’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee. They include a downward revision of the projection for 2015 to 1.8 percent-2.0 percent from the March projection of 2.3 percent to 2.7 percent.
That the US economy continues to stagnate and even contract is indicated by two surveys released last week while Yellen was testifying before Congress. The Fed reported that factory production failed to increase in June for the second straight month and output in the auto sector fell 3.7 percent. The Commerce Department reported that retail sales unexpectedly fell in June, declining by 0.3 percent.
These statistics follow the employment report for June, which showed that the share of the US working-age population either employed or actively looking for work, known as the labor force participation rate, fell to 62.6 percent, its lowest level in 38 years. During the month, some 432,000 people in the US gave up looking for a job.
The disastrous figures on business investment are perhaps the most telling indicators of the underlying crisis of the capitalist system. The Fed report attributes the sharp decline so far this year primarily to the dramatic fall in oil prices and resulting contraction in investment and construction in the energy sector. But the plunge in oil prices is itself a symptom of a general slowdown in the world economy.
Moreover, a dramatic decline in productive investment is common to all of the major industrialized economies of Europe and North America. In its World Economic Outlook of last April, the International Monetary Fund for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis acknowledged that there was no prospect for an early return to pre-recession levels of economic growth, linking this bleak prognosis to a general and pronounced decline in productive investment.
The American phenomenon of record stock values fueling an ever greater concentration of wealth at the very top of society, while the economy is starved of productive investment, the social infrastructure crumbles, and working class living standards are driven down by entrenched unemployment, wage-cutting and government austerity policies, is part of a broader global process.
The economic crisis in the US and internationally is not simply a conjunctural downturn. It is a systemic crisis of global capitalism, centered in the US. A defining expression of this crisis is the dominance of financial speculation and parasitism, to the point where a narrow international financial aristocracy plunders society’s resources in order to further enrich itself.
While the economy is starved of productive investment, entirely parasitic and socially destructive activities such as stock buybacks, dividend hikes and mergers and acquisitions return to pre-crash levels and head for new heights. US corporations have spent more on stock buybacks so far this year than on factories and equipment.
The intractable nature of this crisis, within the framework of capitalism, is underscored by the IMF’s updated World Economic Outlook, released earlier this month, which projects that 2015 will be the worst year for economic growth since the height of the recession in 2009.
Via WSWS. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.Most helpful positive review
Beautiful and capable with an Andrioid phone
I got this for $98 which is my sweet spot for a smartwatch. I have two Pebbles that I love. This is better looking but HUGE. I have very large hands and I definitely need a bigger band, The setup takes awhile and be sure to follow the order of pairing in the manual. Update takes a long time. The touch screen is nice and the brightness level is also great. Fantastic watchfaces. Using mainly google apps like hangouts and keep and they seem to work fine. Not sure how well notifications are working since I have only had a few days but so far they seem fine. Voice search works well. Making calls just seems to make my phone dial. Despite having LG call installed sound and voice seems to be all on my phone which is not an LG. Running Android 6.0 on a slightly skinned LeEco S3 and it seems to be working OK. Battery life is about a day with wi-fi on. Not sure it is really necessaryOn April 4, we reported that in ten U.S. states, gun deaths now outpace auto deaths.
Make that 12.
A new analysis from the Violence Policy Center found that, in 2010, there were 31,672 firearm deaths and 35,498 motor vehicle deaths, compared with 1999, when there were 28,874 firearm deaths and 42,624 motor vehicle deaths. Which is startling, considering more than 90 percent of American households own a car while little more than a third of American households contain a gun.
By 2015, gun deaths will outnumber auto deaths on a national scale. Here is today’s report.
—Jennifer Mascia
A 2-year-old boy is dead after an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. Trenton Mathis shot himself in the face with a 9mm pistol in a house in Cherokee County, Tex., while at home with his great-grandmother. No determination has been made as to whether any criminal charges will be filed.
—KETK
A 2-year-old boy was grazed in the head during a firefight between an armed man and police officers in Philadelphia, Pa., Wednesday night. A 25-year-old woman was also hospitalized with a graze wound. It’s unknown whether they were struck by police or by the suspect, Trey Nelson, 19.
—NBC10 Philadelphia
A teenager who recently graduated from high school was killed in an accidental shooting in Maryville, Tenn., Tuesday night. Skyler Daniel Boring, 17, and some friends were at a residence on East Lamar Alexander Parkway at around 10 p.m. when one of the firearms they were passing around – a shotgun – went off, striking the teen in the chest. Boring had been wrestling co-captain at Heritage High School.
—The Daily Times
A 19-year-old man died and three others were injured from a shooting that stemmed from a dice game in Memphis, Tenn., Tuesday evening. Among those injured is a teenage girl, 17, and two men, 18 and 20. No charges have been filed at this point.
—WMCTV.com
A man in his mid-20s died after being shot three times in southwest Atlanta, Ga., Wednesday afternoon. The victim ran several blocks trying to get help until he collapsed. Investigators have not identified a suspect or a motive in the killing.
—WSBTV.com
A man killed his own father inside an auto parts shop in Henry County, Ga., Wednesday night. Police say John Wesley Morgan, Jr., who is in his 40s, got into a disagreement with John Wesley Morgan, 79, and shot him. The younger Morgan was sitting at a desk inside the garage area when officers arrived.
—WSBTV.com
A 59-year-old man shot and killed his twin brother Wednesday evening at their west Wichita, Kan., home. Although a motive wasn’t immediately clear, authorities said the shooter called 911 and told a dispatcher he shot his brother because his brother was going to shoot him. Two firearms were recovered from the home. Officers took the living twin into custody.
—The Wichita Eagle
A man was shot and killed Wednesday night during a family dispute at a home on the southwest side of Fort Wayne, Ind. Detectives are interviewing witnesses and processing the scene for evidence. Criminal charges are being weighed.
—INC NOW
A man is in stable condition after being wounded in Natchez, Miss., Wednesday night in an ongoing feud between two families. Joshua Beamer, 31, was shot in the buttocks after a verbal argument with the son of a woman Beamer’s mother had argued with earlier in the day. Beamer’s mother then went to the other family’s house and began shooting in retaliation, but no one there was wounded. No arrests have been made, |
1994: Brach's Candy purchases a controlling interest in Brock's Candy of Chattanooga
1995: Favorite Brands International created with purchase of Kraft Caramel, Marshmallow, Dinner Mints and Peanut Brittle businesses. Henry Heide, Inc is sold to Hershey Foods.
1996: Favorite Brands International acquires Farley Foods, Sathers Candy and Kidd Marshmallow businesses
1997: Favorite Brands International acquires Dae Julie and the Trolli Gummi businesses
2002: Catterton Partners form Farleys & Sathers Candy Company made up of assets from the former Farley Foods, Sathers Candy Company, and the Kraft Taffy business from Kraft; Chuckles and several other Henry Heide brands purchased from Hershey Foods.
2005: Farley & Sathers acquires the Trolli Gummi business, which had been part of the Favorite Brands group of products, from Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, which had acquired it as part of a larger group of businesses from Kraft. Bob's Candies is acquired.
2007: Farley & Sathers acquires Brach's Candy
2012: Catterton Partners purchases Ferrara Pan Candy Company and renames the company Ferrara Candy, a shorter name with better name recognition
2017: Ferrero Group acquires Ferrara Candy Company
Products [ edit ]
Atomic Fireball : A round, cinnamon-flavored hard candy invented by Nello Ferrara (1918–2012) in 1954. They are a form of jawbreaker. The outer layers of the candy are a bright red color while the interior layers are white. Atomic Fireballs have been adopted by Flight Controllers in NASA's Mission Control as the "Console Candy of Choice." [8]
: A round, cinnamon-flavored hard candy invented by Nello Ferrara (1918–2012) in 1954. They are a form of jawbreaker. The outer layers of the candy are a bright red color while the interior layers are white. Atomic Fireballs have been adopted by Flight Controllers in NASA's Mission Control as the "Console Candy of Choice." Black Forest : Fruit juice snacks and treats in various shapes; Gummy Bears, Gummy Worms and other varieties. [9]
: Fruit juice snacks and treats in various shapes; Gummy Bears, Gummy Worms and other varieties. Bobs Candies : Soft mints and sticks, candy canes and mint "lumps"
: Soft mints and sticks, candy canes and mint "lumps" Boston Baked Beans : A sugar-coated peanut candy.
: A sugar-coated peanut candy. Brach's : A candy and sweets brand that produces and has invented many iconic candies including candy corn, Conversation Hearts, Jelly Bird Eggs, Star Brite Mints, Royals, Bridge Mix, malted milk balls, Double Dipped Peanuts and others.
: A candy and sweets brand that produces and has invented many iconic candies including candy corn, Conversation Hearts, Jelly Bird Eggs, Star Brite Mints, Royals, Bridge Mix, malted milk balls, Double Dipped Peanuts and others. Chuckles : A soft jelly candy, covered in sugar in five original colors (red, orange, yellow, green and black). They are now made in a number of varieties and seasonal selections.
: A soft jelly candy, covered in sugar in five original colors (red, orange, yellow, green and black). They are now made in a number of varieties and seasonal selections. Fruit Stripe : A fruit flavored chewing gum created in the 1960s.
: A fruit flavored chewing gum created in the 1960s. Jawbuster : The original 1919 jawbreaker. As they dissolve, they change color and flavor with each of the five layers.
: The original 1919 jawbreaker. As they dissolve, they change color and flavor with each of the five layers. Jujyfruits : Small, chewy, fruit flavored candies that come in various fruit shapes and flavors including pineapple, raspberry, grape and banana. Also available are Jujubes which are a firmer candy dating back to 1920 in the traditional flavors of lemon, lime, violet, cherry and lilac.
: Small, chewy, fruit flavored candies that come in various fruit shapes and flavors including pineapple, raspberry, grape and banana. Also available are Jujubes which are a firmer candy dating back to 1920 in the traditional flavors of lemon, lime, violet, cherry and lilac. Lemonheads : Introduced in 1962, Lemonheads are a round, lemon-flavored candy consisting of a sweet coating, soft sour shell, and a hard candy core. Other varieties include Appleheads, Grapeheads and Chewy Lemonheads & Friends varieties.
: Introduced in 1962, Lemonheads are a round, lemon-flavored candy consisting of a sweet coating, soft sour shell, and a hard candy core. Other varieties include Appleheads, Grapeheads and Chewy Lemonheads & Friends varieties. Now and Later : Bite-sized squares of taffy in nineteen different fruit flavors. They come in Original, Chewy and Splits varieties and are packaged in both multi-pieced bars and assorted jars.
: Bite-sized squares of taffy in nineteen different fruit flavors. They come in Original, Chewy and Splits varieties and are packaged in both multi-pieced bars and assorted jars. Rain-Blo : The first gumballs made where the color on the outside matches the flavor on the inside.
: The first gumballs made where the color on the outside matches the flavor on the inside. Red Hots : A small cinnamon-flavored candy created and trademarked by the Ferrara Pan Candy Company in the 1930s.
: A small cinnamon-flavored candy created and trademarked by the Ferrara Pan Candy Company in the 1930s. Super Bubble : Individually-wrapped bubble gum first introduced in 1946 in original, grape, apple and watermelon flavors.
: Individually-wrapped bubble gum first introduced in 1946 in original, grape, apple and watermelon flavors. Trolli (USA): Gummy candies that are both sour and sweet in unusual shapes.March 28, 2017 Javier Eguiluz
In October 2015, we discontinued the translations of Symfony docs (French and Italian at that time) and we decided to only publish documentation in English. The main reason behind this decision was that translations were not in sync with the original contents, so we couldn't guarantee our readers that the non-English docs were correct.
Now it's time to do the same with the rest of translations of symfony.com. When the redesigned symfony.com website was launched in March 2011, we created the symfony-marketing repository to store all its translatable contents (from the main menu labels to the static content pages).
However, these translations never took off. Most of them are incomplete and we don't have the needed resources to review their quality. The only exception was the Slovenian translation, which was continuously updated by Peter Kokot. Because of this, we've finally decided to remove every translation from symfony.com and remove most contents from the symfony-marketing repository.
Hopefully this decision will encourage local Symfony communities to publish their own contents and websites, such as the Symfony in Japanese and Symfony in Spanish communities.Located in Northumberland, England, this modern architectural project is a study of sustainable living. Dubbed the Gyllehaugh Lake House, the home’s setting is a peaceful, pastoral one overlooking a lake, and the house is designed to preserve the very nature that surrounds it through ecologically responsible materials, building practices and a lifestyle to follow. Still in its approval stage, Gyllehaugh Lake House is an innovative, forward-thinking design by Reid Jubb Brown Architecture – a first in the region to adopt PPS7 (Planning Policy Statement 7), which is the UK-government directive outlining sustainable residential developments in rural areas. This modern model of eco-friendly design incorporates the latest and greatest in sustainable technologies. The structure consists of a timber shell constructed of green oak, formed using timber gridshell technology. The residence is composed of two volumes forming an L shape, connected via a footbridge. The wood walls provide insulation, finished with a thermal insulation coating. Also features in this amazing home are low-emission double-glazed windows, a greywater recycling system, and active and passive solar energy. Aesthetics did not go by the wayside, as this contemporary home dons a soft, natural guise that’s designed to harmonize with its lovely lakeside surroundings. The Gyllehaugh Lake House is the first of a handful of homes planned worldwide to feature this cutting-edge technology. Reid Jubb Brown Architecture
photo credit: Reid Jubb Brown ArchitectureSt. Louis County authorities finally agreed on Thursday to drop charges they filed against Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and me in connection with our unlawful arrests in Ferguson on Aug. 13, 2014. In exchange, we've agreed not to sue the Missouri county for the illegal conduct of its police officers.
The deal is a win for me and Wes, as well as our employers. But it doesn’t quite feel like one.
The ordinance violation charges that had been pending against us in St. Louis County Municipal Court since August 2015 -- one for “trespassing” in a McDonald’s where we were customers and the other for “interference” with the duties of the police officers who forcefully took us into custody -- should never have been brought.
Yet had I been the one paying the legal bills instead of The Huffington Post’s parent company (thanks, AOL!), I may have been forced to give up and cop a plea a long time ago. We had enormous advantages in this case. Not everyone arrested on a municipal ordinance violation has the U.S. president and attorney general speak out on their behalf. Still, dealing with this bogus case has been frustrating, infuriating and time-consuming.
It’s only because Wesley and I have the resources of large companies at our disposal that it hasn’t come with a huge personal monetary cost.
The facts were on our side. The manager of the McDonald’s never asked us to leave (let alone be arrested) and welcomed us back to the restaurant on many occasions. The evidence made clear what had happened: Stressed-out officers who didn't want their actions recorded had decided to lash out at a couple of reporters. No charges were warranted. But prosecutors endorsed the ridiculous theory -- which the police pushed -- that two journalists recording the actions of police officers in a fast food restaurant “directly contributed” to the civil unrest in Ferguson in August 2014.
The law was on our side. Attorneys in the St. Louis County Counselor’s Office (which mostly focuses on protecting officials from lawsuits but also prosecutes minor violations in unincorporated parts of the county) lacked jurisdiction to bring municipal ordinance violations in St. Louis County Municipal Court. One of the municipal codes we were charged with violating, which makes it unlawful for a person to “interfere in any manner with a police officer or other employee of the County in the performance of his official duties,” is a “contempt of cop” statute that is unconstitutionally overbroad. It should not have even been on the books. A Supreme Court decision struck down a similar ordinance when I was in diapers and before Wesley was born.
Sgt. McCann slammed my head on the door while I was in handcuffs and then lied about doing so
The two cops involved in my arrest, former Ferguson officer Justin Cosma and St. Louis County Sgt. Michael McCann, had plenty of time to get their stories straight. They weren't even interviewed for the investigative report until eight months after the incident. Yet in depositions, they couldn't even agree on who arrested me: Each claimed he was only assisting the other. Sgt. McCann slammed my head on the door while I was in handcuffs and then lied about doing so in the internal investigation of his conduct, which could have resulted in a federal civil rights charge.
In the nearly full year between our arrest and the time St. Louis County brought charges, I went through the official process, filing a complaint about McCann’s conduct with the St. Louis County Police Department and making public records requests in an effort to obtain McCann’s name, which he had repeatedly refused to provide. During that time, I decided not to get involved in a lawsuit that four other journalists ultimately filed against St. Louis County. We had been released relatively quickly, our case had received so much attention already and I felt that I’d ultimately have to donate any monetary settlement I received to charities in the St. Louis region, so it simply didn’t seem worth my time. As Wes and I had never even been officially booked, we thought the incident was over and had no idea that St. Louis County was considering charges.
By the time county officials decided to charge us, the journalists' lawsuit and several others had already been filed. The charges, it seemed, gave the county an opportunity to head off additional litigation. The county had used municipal court charges as leverage in settling a lawsuit filed by journalist Trey Yingst, even though those charges were based on a police report that was demonstrably false based on video from the scene.
St. Louis County Counselor’s Office played a problematic dual role of protecting County officials from lawsuits while simultaneously prosecuting minor ordinance violations. The lawyer who ultimately prosecuted me is the same one who had previously responded to my public records requests and been involved in clearing the language of the letter the police chief sent me about my internal affairs complaint. Even the City of Ferguson recently recognized that having the same person act in both roles can be a conflict of interest.
The deal we reached with St. Louis County -- often referred to as a release-dismissal agreement -- illustrates why this sort of arrangement can be a problem. Those deals have been the subject of much legal and ethical debate. These agreements “suppress complaints against police misconduct which should be thoroughly aired in a free society” and “tempt the prosecutor to trump up charges for use in bargaining for suppression of the complaint,” a federal appeals court ruled in 1984. But the Supreme Court ultimately decided in a 5-4 decision in 1987 that while release-dismissal agreements could tempt prosecutors to bring frivolous charges, it couldn’t be assumed that prosecutorial misconduct took place. Each agreement had to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
The longer St. Louis County could drag this out, the higher our costs would get, and the more likely we’d be to take a settlement.
I never had any doubt we’d ultimately win. But financially, fighting these charges made little sense. A deal probably would have resulted in few if any actual consequences for us, but it also would have legitimized bogus arrests and provided cover for officers who violated our rights and engaged in misconduct. So the process really served as the punishment. The longer St. Louis County could drag this out, the higher our costs would get, and the more likely we’d be to take a settlement.
And drag it they did. In the nine months since it brought the charges, St. Louis County has fought us at every turn, even successfully fighting our motion for a joint trial. Officials in St. Louis County Municipal Court even accidentally issued warrants for our arrest. Municipal Court Judge Craig Concannon -- appointed after donating more than $20,000 to the reelection campaign of St. Louis County Executive Steve Stenger -- consistently sided with County Counselor Peter Krane, another Stenger appointee.
I’m glad it’s finally over. But I’m still angry. I’m a new dad, and having a theoretical jail sentence hanging over my head -- no matter how unlikely it was -- during most of my wife’s pregnancy and in the first three months of my daughter’s life wasn’t fun.
It was, arguably, a valuable experience: If every journalist covering criminal justice in this country was forced to go through the process we did, our coverage would be much more critical.
I’ve thought a lot about the conversations I had with citizens and demonstrators in Ferguson back in August 2014. It seemed like everyone I spoke with had a horror story about the police and municipal courts. But even after my arrest and witnessing the way police treated protesters even during peaceful demonstrations in broad daylight, I was still skeptical that the entire system in the region, including the courts, could be as broken as they described. It couldn’t possibly be that bad, I thought.Reading Time: 3 minutes
Do you like upsets?
Foshan foreign coach Dean Murray was asked to be Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible at the beginning of the season when he took on the role of coaching a team without a point guard and two foreign players who have no experience playing overseas. It was a surprise to nobody when the team fell to the bottom of the CBA standings.
But on the night of January 22nd, 2015, with NBA scouts in attendance to watch young Chinese prospect Zhou Qi and his then first place Xinjiang Flying Tigers, the impossible happened. After it appeared he had lost the team, coach Murray rallied the troop and put some fight in them. Foshan looked like a different team, they would come in as David and finish the game as Goliath when Jabari Brown banked home a three with 0.1 seconds left in the game to upset Xinjiang 99-98.
At the time, Foshan’s record was three wins and 28 losses, Xinjiang’s was 25 wins and six losses making it one of the biggest upsets in CBA history. In a losing effort, Andrew Goudelock led all scorers with 40 points while on the winning side both Brown and Jerelle Benimon combined for 61 points.
After the game, Xinjiang’s coach blamed the loss on the cold weather in the South part of China. Coach Li, who coaches in Xinjiang, a province with an average winter temperature of about -20C, said the +2C weather in Guangdong made it difficult for his team to feel comfortable.
“It’s not the cold weather outside that’s bothering us, it’s the hotel we are staying at. It’s way too cold there. I believe the hotel we were staying was too cold and it didn’t allow us to play our best game,” Li Qiuping said.
“They poisoned our food!”
After receiving a beatdown at the hands of the 11-20 Fujian Stuergeons, the 16-15 Dongguan Leopards’ head coach didn’t blame the team’s lack of rebounding (out-rebounded 41 to 35), or the team going four for 22 from beyond the arc. Dongguan’s head coach blamed the food in Fujian saying, “the visiting arrangements at the hotel’s dining hall caused several players to get diarrhea, which directly impacted the game, some players couldn’t play, some players couldn’t run.”
The head coach went on to say that either five or six players were suffering from diarrhea. He wasn’t sure if it was five or six meaning it could have been the entire team, or it could have been non and the coach was just making it up after getting embarrassed by Fujian. The final score was Fujian 111, Dongguan 72.
Ref gets carried out of arena on interns back
One of the referees in the Foshan vs. Shanxi game called a foul, and his motion was so fierce that he ruptured his achilles tendon. Instead of two people grabbing a side of the referee and carefully helping him to the locker room, the ref climbed on the back of what appears to be an intern and received a piggyback out of the gym. The game continued with only two referees. Shanxi would end up winning the game.
I cat believe this
The Guangdong Southern Tigers released their secret weapon in a game against China’s military team, the Bayi Rockets. A wild stray cat came out of nowhere and stormed the court heading directly for Bayi’s bench.
I’m sure this is not the first time an animal has stormed a professional basketball court. If I recall correctly, a dog made its way to the hardwood a couple years ago in China, and we can never forget Manu Ginobili’s bat incident in the NBA. Nevertheless, Guangdong’s strategy worked, they went on to beat Bayi by a final score of 99-84.Light heavyweight champ Jon Jones escaped his UFC 165 fight with Alexander Gustafsson with the title belt still around his waist, but the physical injuries he suffered were apparent to those close to him. Jones was seen limping badly as he left the arena, and was taken to a local hospital following the fight. Besides the cut above his right eye and the generally busted up face, he may have fractured his foot.
Jones' striking coach Mike Winkeljohn tweeted the news early Sunday morning.
Jon Jones showed true grit tonight fighting through a badly injured foot, possibly shattered.. early on in the... http://t.co/BrICr1Q8ca — Mike Winkeljohn (@mmacoachwink) September 22, 2013
Winkeljohn further explained the possible injury in a post on his Facebook page.
"There is no attempt to make an excuse here. Actually a compliment to Gus's skill in checking Jon's kick- which is where the injury occurred. Jon's injury did impede his movement no doubt."
If Jones did fracture his foot, it will be the second foot injury he has suffered in his last two fights. Who can forget the grisly toe injury that he suffered in his UFC 159 fight with Chael Sonnen last April?
SBN coverage of UFC 165: Jones vs. Gustafsson
More from Bloody Elbow:Unamuno believed that it was not Quixote but Sancho who was delusional, firm in his belief that windmills are not worth charging, and, more broadly, that unwinnable battles are not worth fighting. The result of this type of thinking will usually be paralysis, since most enemies are windmill-size instead of human-size. Sancho believed that tilting at windmills was dangerous. Today, we might just call it a waste of time, and since common sense also tells us that time is money, we had better steer clear of anything unprofitable.
According to the political theorist Joshua Dienstag in his 2006 book, “Pessimism,” Quixote’s loss of common sense offered him a more meaningful metric for deciding which battles are worth fighting. Quixote didn’t charge the windmill because he thought he would defeat it, but because he concluded it was the right thing to do. Likewise, if we want to be legitimate actors in the world, Unamuno would say that we must be willing to lose the fight. If we abandon the common-sense belief that deems only winnable fights worth fighting, we can adopt Unamuno’s “moral courage” and become quixotic pessimists: pessimists because we recognize our odds of losing are quite high, and quixotic because we fight anyway. Quixotic pessimism is thus marked by a refusal to let the odds of my success determine the value of my fight.
On Unamuno’s Marxist interpretation of the windmill scene, Quixote recognized that, though they might look harmless, the “long-armed giants” kept the townspeople sated and distracted enough to forget their oppression at the hands of the modern bread factories. Unamuno complained that instead of asking whether they would ultimately benefit the towns they invade, the townspeople ended up “venerate[ing] and pay[ing] homage to steam and electricity.” Contemporary windmills might look like a small town getting a Walmart, or like kindergartners getting free iPads. Common sense fails us in two ways: first and most often, it uncritically believes that technology equals progress, and second, even in cases in which people recognize the potential harm to the community, they generally don’t believe that they can resist it. Common sense calls it a waste of time and energy. Quixote rejected this calculus, instead favoring a moral metric to decide who and what to fight. Thus freed, Quixote was left open to fight for lost causes — and lose.
Warning: quixotic pessimism will not go over well in public. If you choose this life, Unamuno says you will face disbelief, judgment and ridicule. He writes that moral courage “confronts, not bodily injury, or loss of fortune, or the discredit of one’s honor but rather ridicule: one’s being taken for a madman or a fool.” In a real-life context, quixotic pessimism will look like constantly face-planting in public, and we will need moral courage to accept it. People will laugh at us as they do at Quixote. People will mock our decision to fight big machines, but we must do it neither to win nor to impress. We will eventually grow accustomed to ignoring the criticism of our saner colleagues and friends who seem to follow the adage “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
Cultivating moral courage amounts to learning to shift our attention away from those who confuse criticism for action toward our own judgment of what is worthwhile, based on thinking a whole lot about what kind of world we would like to live in and the kinds of people we’d like to be. It is worth noting that Quixote went mad from reading books, and this is precisely the type of crazy that Unamuno supports. We may not be able to improve the world, but we can at least refuse to cooperate with a corrupt one.Graphic: Who would win if a Premier League XI took on a La Liga XI?
Ever since the Ballon d’Or gala on Monday night and the announcement that the team of 2012 only featured players from Spain, there has been much gnashing of teeth and wailing in England.
The Daily Mail, who often have a bee in their bonnet about something, urged their readers to come up with a Premier League XI to take on Messi, Ronaldo, Xavi, Iniesta, Casillas and co.
Which is where the graphic below originates from and has been reproduced on various websites and social networks in the last 24 hours.
Whether the Premier League XI is even the best on offer is certainly open to debate. The likes of Petr Cech, Ashley Cole, Wayne Rooney, Juan Mata and Nemanja Vidic can count themselves rather unlucky not to be involved.
For what its worth we believe even the star studded Premier League team below would struggle against what is effectively the Spain midfield and the two best footballers on the planet!
Graphic below, have your say in the comments.Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin's statement blaming the national football team squad for the slide in the country's international ranking earned a sharp rebuke from a star striker.
Penning his frustration on Facebook, Safee Sali also appeared to take a swipe at the RM100 million corruption scandal in the ministry.
"It's disappointing when the national team's ranking tumble, only the players are blamed.
"But when RM100 million goes missing, things remain as it is.
"Imagine the needs that can be met and facilities provided with that amount of money alone," he added.
Safee seemed to be referring to the high-profile scandal involving a senior officer from the ministry and his accomplices.
When news of the embezzlement broke, there were calls for the minister to resign.
However, Khairy said he had no knowledge of the embezzlement. Though accepting responsibility over the matter, he did not resign.
On March 31, the ministry's financial division secretary Otman Arsahd was slapped with 32 counts of misappropriating government funds totalling RM38 million and falsifying documents.
Safee, who also plays for Johor Darul Ta'zim (JDT), was upset over Khairy's statement that he was not surprised the national football team slid to the 174th place, its worst ever.
The minister said the national team players have reached their limit and were no longer capable of improving, stating that attention should be focussed on moulding younger players.Baltimore's Board of Elections formally certified Monday that state Sen. Catherine E. Pugh won the Democratic primary for mayor. The official tally came after last week's count of absentee and provisional ballots did not change the unofficial result in any race.
Pugh defeated former Mayor Sheila Dixon — who has questioned the integrity of the April 26 primary and is mulling legal options — 36.6 percent to 34.7 percent.
Dixon has three days to ask for a recount, which she would need to pay for with campaign funds. A court challenge would have to be filed within seven days.
Martha McKenna, a spokeswoman for Dixon, said the former mayor's team has yet to analyze precinct-level data to make an informed decision about a recount.
"While Sheila Dixon picked up votes from the provisional ballot count, we will analyze the precinct-level data before making decisions about the next steps," McKenna said.
Pugh and Dixon finished well ahead of the other 10 candidates in the crowded Democratic primary for mayor. Lawyer Elizabeth Embry finished third with 11.7 percent of the vote. City Councilman Nick J. Mosby appeared on the primary ballot, but dropped out of the race the week before the election.
The Democratic nominee faces Republican Alan Walden and Green Party nominee Joshua Harris in the November election. The heavily Democratic city has for decades chosen a Democrat for mayor.
As she did on election night, Pugh declared victory Monday and thanked voters.
"I am excited to focus on the general election and then begin the process of moving our city forward," Pugh said in a statement. "It is my intent to continue to use this campaign as an opportunity to listen to the people of our city and to share my vision for making Baltimore even greater."
Dixon congratulated Pugh on her apparent victory on Election Day but then joined in complaints about irregularities in the voting process that were raised by activists and City Council candidates. Among the issues: Eight data files went missing for about a day after the election, and some polling precincts opened late.
Thirty-four released felons — eligible to vote under a new law — also received a Board of Elections letter before the election erroneously telling them they might not be able to vote.
Hassan Giordano, an activist who has been examining election issues, said he and other members of the group Voters Organized for the Integrity of City Elections will meet with lawyers Tuesday to decide whether to challenge the results. He said the group has compiled a spreadsheet that documents a series of problems from the election, such as voters who said they were wrongly turned away from the polls when election judges could not find their registration information.
Giordano said he is concerned that voters were disenfranchised.
"Our goal never had anything to do with the results, but with the process," said Giordano, a Dixon campaign volunteer. "Based off of the numerous irregularities, the process itself was flawed. We really need to re-examine how the election was done. We can't have this happen in November."
The three City Council contenders in close races said Monday they would not seek a recount.
Kelly Cross, who lost the Democratic nomination in Central Baltimore's 12th District to Robert Stokes Sr., said he was moving on. Stokes garnered 33.6 percent of the vote to Cross' 29.4 percent.
"I'm beyond that," Cross said of seeking a recount. "I feel great. We had a very strong showing, despite entering the race late. If I had had two more weeks, we could have taken the race."
Charlie Metz, who came within about 135 votes of defeating incumbent Edward Reisinger for the City Council's 10th District in South Baltimore, said he feels "pretty satisfied" with the integrity of the election. He is considering a write-in campaign in November.
"The ballot system was pretty fair with paper ballots as a backup," said Metz, a business owner from Morrell Park. "I came up a couple of votes short."
In another tight race, Isaac "Yitzy" Schleifer edged out Betsy Gardner, 33.8 percent to 28.8 percent, in Northwest Baltimore's 5th District Democratic primary for City Council.
Gardner said she is "going to accept" the results and "move on and continue serving the citizens in the capacity I have been." Gardner lost to Schleifer by fewer than 550 votes.
"I am very disappointed in the process and what the city went through," said Gardner, who works as a liaison to the City Council president's office for residents in Northwest Baltimore. She also is the council president's citywide Jewish community liaison.
Gardner said some voters reported being given a ballot for the wrong district at a 5th District polling station. Others, she said, were turned away from a polling station because an election judge did not have accurate information on which district was voting at that precinct.
"It is very disheartening in this day and age to have this lack of training and lack of experience," she said.
A losing candidate is entitled to a recount at government expense only if the margin is 0.1 percent or less. Otherwise, the loser must bear the cost unless the recount is successful or reduces the winner's count by at least 2 percent of the total vote.
More than 133,000 Baltimoreans voted in the Democratic primary for mayor — a large increase from recent elections. The 2011 Democratic primary for mayor drew about 74,000 voters.
lbroadwater@baltsun.com
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twitter.com/yvonnewengerDanville teen's freeway speeding ends in death
(03-07) 12:48 PST DANVILLE -- A 17-year-old Danville boy who died when he lost control of his car while speeding on Highway 24 in Lafayette was identified Friday as Anthony Grosso.
Grosso was driving recklessly and weaving in and out of traffic when he lost control of a 2014 Subaru Impreza on eastbound Highway 24 east of the central Lafayette exit about 11 a.m. Thursday, said Sgt. Joseph Johnson of the California Highway Patrol.
The car hit a traffic sign and went down an embankment before coming to rest, Johnson said. Grosso, who was wearing a seat belt, died at the scene.
Witnesses said Grosso had been speeding before the crash. The CHP was investigating reports that Grosso may have been racing another vehicle, Johnson said.
Grosso was a student at San Ramon Valley High School in Danville before transferring two years ago to Fusion Academy in Walnut Creek.Interview With Kevin Jordan
In-between games of Kevin Jordan, HEX’s lead systems designer, playing the unforgiving dungeon master and smashing adventurer parties, we were able to sit down with him and talk to Kevin about his gaming roots, his professional background, and what he’s been working on with the PVE experience.
What made you want to design games? What inspires you?
KJ: I started iterating and creating roleplaying games when I was 5 or 6 years old. It’s something I’ve had a passion for most of my life. My brother came home one day telling me about this game called Dungeons & Dragons that he played with his buddies and that’s all it took. I already had a love for low-budget fantasy films and read The Black Cauldron series. All the possibilities were so amazing. I played chess at an early age; seeing different powers on different pieces opened up my mind. D&D was that perfect marriage of both. I didn’t have the books, so my brother would tell me about the scenarios and I’d just build everything on my own. Then, as a teenager, I started tinkering with the hero system to make my own Street Fighter module and it all went from there.
What’s your previous experience in video game design?
KJ: I started in the industry at Blizzard Entertainment and my first project was World of Warcraft. I was one of three original game designers and worked on that project through the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. In the beginning, we had our hands on every design system from City and Dungeon design to Classes and Crafting. As the team grew and the design demands increased for each system, I shifted most of my focus to character classes, talents, spells and abilities.
How does that work translate to HEX and the PVE experience?
KJ: Working on World of Warcraft gave me insight into so many social, competitive, UI and game systems and how they all interact and come together into one total experience. I also had the good fortune to work with so many of the most talented artists, programmers and designers in the industry. The amount I learned from over a decade on that project is truly mind-boggling.
Which parts of the game have you been working on the last few months for HEX?
KJ: The focus of my work on HEX in the last few months has been on the PvE side of things. In addition to offering the very best multi-player TCG experience we want to compliment that with a robust single player role-playing experience. As you may have already seen in the card previews, most cards have two pieces of equipment that modify each card in interesting ways. It’s like 2 additional sets of mini-cards built around each card we put out and players have that creative sandbox where they can essentially design their own cards. So, I’ve been refining the equipment for the PVE set, balancing rarity and card play. One example of this is the Chaos Key. Our first iteration was building on what the card did mechanically, making the card do those things better. Then we met and asked “What does the Chaos Key mean in the game?” Going in a new direction, we created an easter egg. If you can unlock the mystery of the key and use it in the right place, you’ll find that little treat.
What are you currently doing on the HEX project on a day-to-day basis?
KJ: We’ve been playtesting character class mechanics and talents against various dungeons to make sure the PvE experience is as robust and compelling as possible. We’ll basically do that until they pry it out of our cold, perfectionist hands. In addition, work continues on the equipment and loot tables to make sure the rewards are as satisfying as the journey. We’re also iterating on the new-player experience so we can make those first steps for players as smooth, informative and fun as possible.
What’s your favorite dungeon? What can you tell us about it?
KJ: I like the Wendigo Hunt dungeon a lot. It plays like a game of werewolf. You’re trying to figure out which of the townsfolk is the werewolf. You go through dialog options. Every time you make the “wrong” choice, you’ll have to battle. Once you’ve narrowed down who the wendigo is, then you battle the boss.
Can you give an example of progression on something you worked on recently? Like, how did it look in the beginning vs. how does it look right now?
KJ: I’d say the biggest evolution was the equipment system. Our early model had equipment giving you more general purpose improvements to your game experience (e.g. draw an extra card at the end of the turn or increase your maximum hand size by 2). After a few mockups we realized the design space wasn’t as large as we needed and many of the mechanics were difficult to balance or had very little granularity (i.e. they quickly went from not good |
) executive Patrick Hickey has been sent to Brazil's Bangu maximum security prison on Friday while police investigate his involvement in a plot to illegally resell Olympic tickets, civil police said.
The elderly Irishman was arrested in his dressing gown during a dawn raid at his luxury beachfront hotel on Wednesday, where Hickey had been staying with his wife and fellow IOC members.
Police said they had discovered evidence linking Hickey to an international scheme to illegally pass tickets to touts who were reselling them at well above their original price.
GEOFF BURKE/USA TODAY SPORTS Pat Hickey was rushed to hospital after being arrested.
The 71-year-old, frightened by the raid according to a police chief, was first taken to Samaritano hospital after complaining of chest pain.
He stayed overnight before being released into police custody on Thursday and taken in a wheelchair to a police station for questioning.
READ MORE: Hickey arrested in ticket-scalping probe
Hickey was denied bail by a Brazilian judge and transferred to Bangu, a penitentiary complex which houses some of Brazil's most dangerous inmates.
Hickey has temporarily stepped aside from his IOC duties, including his post on the ruling executive board and heading the influential umbrella group for Europe's Olympic bodies.
He is facing charges of conspiracy, ticket scalping and ambush marketing after Brazilian authorities alleged he was part of a plot to make US$3 million (NZ$4.1 million) by illegally selling Rio Games tickets above face value.
Police said Ireland's Olympic body helped transfer tickets to an unauthorised vendor who would set high fees and disguise the transaction as a hospitality package.
The Olympic Council of Ireland said it will "cooperate fully" with any state inquiry at home into the ticketing scandal.
"The OCI will now also commission its own independent inquiry into the ticketing arrangements for Rio 2016," the Dublin-based organisation said. "The previously announced internal inquiry by the OCI has been discontinued."
Kevin James Mallon, from the British hospitality provider THG, was arrested in Rio last week. Authorities have also issued warrants for four more executives at the company.
Some Irish tickets for the Olympics' opening ceremony with a face value of $1400 were sold for $8000, police said.But Burns paid £200,000 legal fees and a further £170,000
Both Burns and Warren declared victory after the High Court showdown
Former two-weight world champion Ricky Burns has been left with only £228 to his name after his legal battles with Frank Warren.
The 31-year-old, who fights in Texas on May 9 against Omar Figueroa, has declared himself bankrupt this week with debts of £419,888 after a courtroom showdown with his former promoter.
Warren had claimed unsuccessfully for £1.8million in lost profits at the High Court in London last year after Burns joined Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom stable on March 11, 2013. But the judge also ruled Burns was not entitled to end the promotional agreement with Warren’s company and owed him commission.
Ricky Burns, pictured in action against Raymundo Beltran in 2013, has been declared bankrupt
The former world boxing champion said his remaining assets are worth only £228
Boxing promoter Frank Warren (left) and Burns, pictured here in 2010, were embroiled in a courtroom battle
Burns paid his own £200,000 legal fees and a further £170,000 to cover Warren's damages
Burns teamed up with promoter Eddie Hearn in 2013 amid frustrations over two postponed fights
In December, Burns paid his own £200,000 legal fees and a further £170,000 to cover Warren’s damages and costs. The judge ruled Frank Warren Promotions owed Burns £102,000 in purses but said he was unlikely to receive anything from the liquidated company.
Frank Warren said: ‘I brought a claim against Ricky Burns because he wrongly terminated his management and promotional agreements. I offered to meet him to try to sort things out after he had terminated, but he did not take me up on this offer.’
A previous version of this story repeated a claim that suggested Eddie Hearn had encouraged Mr Burns to leave Mr Warren’s management. We have since learnt that the court considered and rejected a similar allegation and we have taken immediate action to amend the article. We apologise for repeating the allegation.
Burns and Warren are pictured at a press conference in 2012 before they went their separate ways
The Scottish fighter, in action against Jose Gonzalez in 2013, joined Eddie Hearn's Matchroom BoxingHow do people perceive Bible verses if they think they're coming from the Quran?
Dutch YouTube duo Dit Is Normaal decided to conducted a social experiment following the attacks in Paris to dispel misconceptions about Islam. They disguised a Bible as a Quran, and then went out onto the streets of the Netherlands to ask people about certain verses from it.
The pair chose specific Biblical passages that are far out of touch with modern Western culture, and they read them out loud to passerby, pretending they were reading from the Quran. People said the readings were "aggressive," while they described the Bible as "more peaceful" and "positive." The shock was palpable when they found out the verses they had just heard were actually part of the Christian holy text.
"Our experiment was a way to highlight our prejudice as a society about Islam, one that has been fed to us through mass media over the past couple of years," Alexander Spoor of Dit Is Normaal wrote to The Huffington Post in an email Monday. "The responses we got from the people on the streets were interesting, but not surprising. The outcome of this experiment pretty much proved our hypothesis to be correct. The responses we've been getting from people online are slightly surprising, though. We've received so many messages of thankfulness from Muslims from all over the world for making this video. It's been quite incredible."
Also on HuffPost:Pre-Volcker thinking about inflation.
Gerald Ford Presidential Museum
Matt O’Brien has a good post about how many people refuse to admit that the problems of the 2010s aren’t the same as those of the 1970s. That said, I also like Christina Romer’s point (PDF) that in a sense we really are replaying the central political problem of the 1970s—the people in charge are refusing to admit that they have the ability to solve the major macroeconomic problem of the time.
Today that problem is unemployment and stubbornly low levels of investment spending. In the 70s it was, obviously, inflation. But the remarkable thing about the inflation of the 1970s is how long a span we went with key Federal Reserve officials insisting that curbing inflation expectations was beyond their power. And they invoked arguments you’ll be familiar with today. They thought there were major credibility and time-consistency problems. They thought money was already tight as evidenced by high interest rates so there was nothing more to be done. They noted, accurately, that the structure of the American economy was changing and then insisted, wrongly, that this somehow made it impossible or irrelevant for them to do their own jobs properly. People looked to high-profile politicians to provide solutions, and so high-profile politicians cooked up solutions. Gerald Ford wanted us to Whip Inflation Now largely through a campaign of exhortation.
When Paul Volcker came around and accepted responsibility for the problem, the adjustment turned out to be quite painful. But it wasn’t logistically difficult to pull off, it didn’t take very long, and all things considered we would have been a lot better off deflating in 1973-75 than waiting all the way until 1980-82.
We’re talking about different problems that need to be solved with different policies. But in both cases, the first step to fixing policy is for the people with the ability to change direction to admit that they have the power to make change happen. In both the United States and Europe, central bankers need to move past claims about their own impotence and accept responsibility while public figures need to move beyond “now more than ever” thinking and address the outstanding problem of the day.AP Photo/Susan Walsh Real-estate mogul Donald Trump's Thursday speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition was criticized by some for allegedly engaging in offensive stereotypes.
The Times of Israel, an online newspaper, was particularly brutal in its assessment, which was titled: "Trump courts Republican Jews with offensive stereotypes."
"Trump on Thursday invoked a series of stereotypes about Jews that are often deemed offensive and even anti-Semitic," the paper reported.
Trump's controversial lines involved praising the wealth and savvy of his audience, which included a number of Republican donors, according to Jewish Insider. The Republican Jewish Coalition is reportedly heavily funded by billionaire GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson.
"Is there anybody that doesn't renegotiate deals in this room? This room negotiates deals... perhaps more than any room I've ever spoken to. Maybe more," Trump said to laughter and applause.
The billionaire businessman also repeatedly said that the donors in the room would not support him because he didn't want their campaign contributions.
"I don't want your money. Therefore, you're probably not going to support me. Because stupidly, you want to give money," he said.
"I know why you're not going to support me. You're not going to support me because I don't want your money. Isn't it crazy?" Trump added in yet another part of his speech, prompting laughter. "If I wanted your money, I think I'd have a damn good chance."
Others also criticized Trump for his speech.
BuzzFeed News similarly took Trump to task for invoking "Jewish stereotypes." The Forward, a Jewish-oriented news site, called Trump's comments "cringeworthy."
And Ari Fleischer, who served as President George W. Bush's press secretary and is a member of the coalition's board of directors, attacked Trump's comments about donors. President Bush is the brother of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of Trump's rivals in the presidential race.
"To suggest that donors want to control their politicians is offensive," Fleischer told Jewish Insider.
Other parts of Trump's address were much more well-received, including his attacks against the Iran nuclear deal, his criticism of US Secretary of State John Kerry, and his praise for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Thursday evening, CNN reported that the Anti-Defamation League defended Trump amid the controversy:A graduating student takes his seat for the 2012 diploma ceremony at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
This week in Philadelphia, the Democratic Party is expected to officially confirm Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate. But the surprisingly competitive primary race doesn’t come without considerable concessions to the more liberal wing of the party supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Earlier this month, Clinton updated her presidential platform to more boldly address affordability in higher education. Her updated proposal would grant tuition-free access to public universities for families with annual incomes less than $85,000, tacking on an additional $100 billion to her original plan. The tuition threshold would build up over time so that by 2021, families making less than $125,000 a year would also have access to tuition-free college.
Clinton’s new position is just the latest piece in the discussion to improve higher education, which has centered around lowering student debt and increasing the accessibility of the expensive four-year college model. But there’s a larger question to be asked: Is the current model the right one?
The 1944 GI bill, which offered free tuition for World War veterans, launched a wave of enrollment in “traditional” four-year institutions that has yet to abate. A vast array of films and books celebrating the “college experience” and numerous presidential administrations that have exhorted students to commit to higher education have pushed many to see a four-year university education as the best option after high school. It’s a model that delivers both prestige and income potential not found in community colleges or other trade schools.
Forty percent of college-age Americans are enrolled in degree-granting institutions, and a bachelor’s degree is closely tied to financial achievement later on. In 2013, median earnings for young adults with degrees were $48,500, compared with $30,000 for those with a high school diploma or its equivalent. Yet not all who enroll in school complete a degree, and enrollment is no guarantee of work: A Department of Education survey found that 84 percent of 27-year-olds had some college education, but only 34 percent achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher. Many were also left with debt and bouts of unemployment.
Higher education models are policy choices that include trade-offs with regard to cost to the public, government subsidization and enrollment. The U.S. system emphasizes high subsidization but relatively low enrollment when compared with other countries. Our more federalist system offers control of higher education systems to states and local governments, which decide tuition prices and the cost of education locally, leaving room for a large number of private colleges and universities.
Many higher-education institutions in the United States have a strong emphasis on research along with a uniquely American focus on the liberal arts — a high level of academic excellence, but one that is not necessarily tied directly to students’ economic participation or preparation for employment. European countries, in contrast, have “dual education systems” at the post-secondary level, in which higher education can also take the form of specifically vocational work.
Some prominent critics of the U.S. system argue that we need to offer new routes for job training that doesn’t rely on costly research institutions. Kevin Carey of New America, for example, has suggested that technology and the Internet would spell the “end of college” as we know it, allowing more people to gain skills without submitting to the typical four-year model. Others predict that most higher-ed institutions won’t survive this disruption.
Are the expensive, research-focused academic institutions in the United States the best outlets to offer the job training needed in our rapidly shifting economy? Should “job training” even be the main goal of higher education? And what about alternative systems that are less costly and easier to access — whether community college, vocational training or apprenticeships? Should we be taking lessons from other countries as we attempt to reform our higher-education system?
Over the next few days we’ll hear from:
Donald Heller, provost at the University of San Francisco
Joe Parilla and Martha Ross, fellows at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program
Wilfred M. McClay, historian at the University of Oklahoma
Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the Fordham InstituteThousands of widows have been making their way to one particular town in the north of India. Cast out by their families, or simply alone in the world, some travel hundreds of miles to get there, and nobody quite knows why.
India is jam-packed with holy sites and pilgrimage destinations. But few places are as closely associated with the deity Krishna as is Vrindavan, on the banks of the Yamuna, a few hours' drive south-east of Delhi.
Here, in this temple-crammed town, the name of Krishna is on everyone's lips along with the name of his childhood sweetheart, Radha.
Krishna, according to great epic the Mahabharata, was born in the nearby forest and it was around here that the young flute-playing trickster flirted with the cow herders - the gopis - and enjoyed that love affair known to every Hindu with the beautiful, divine Radha.
Radha and Krishna, the two names bound together forever and in the minds of every pilgrim who arrives in town to walk the ritual circuit of temples and bathing ghats (steps leading down towards the water).
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But Vrindavan has its darker, less-loving side - it is known as "the city of widows".
Spend a little while observing the pilgrims coming in and out of the temples and you see these widows - usually quite elderly women - dressed in simple white and often begging.
Widows in India no longer throw themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. But life for them can still be hard.
Considered inauspicious, many soon find they have lost their income and are ostracised in their home villages. Some are sent away by their husbands' families who want to prevent them inheriting money or property.
Nobody can quite explain why this particular town attracts widows from all around India - particularly, it seems, from Bengal.
There are as many as 6,000 of them in this place alone and more in the surrounding countryside.
Some come as genuine pilgrims to devote their remaining years to the service of Radha/Krishna, but many others come here to escape from brutal family homes or have been flung out by their sons and daughters-in-law as unwanted baggage.
This is one unusual aspect of Indian society that the government might prefer the outside world not to see, despite all their genuine efforts to solve the problem.
Delhi-based non-governmental organisation Maitri helps provide food and shelter for some of the widows.
In a small temple, some of them are sitting cross-legged on the courtyard floor while young volunteers slosh out piles of rice and dal.
Sitting inside, people in a smaller group tell their stories.
Most had travelled here from West Bengal, for some a journey of over 1,000 miles (1,600km) - often by themselves and many leaving behind friends and grandchildren.
Saif Ali Das is just 60 years old but she looks much older and her walk is lopsided. Her husband was a drunk, she says, who died 12 years ago after a fall.
She had a daughter who died in hospital and a son who was murdered over a land dispute. After his death she was left entirely alone and fled to this place that she had heard was safe.
Sondi is a tough 80-year-old whose husband died young, she had to bring up her four children by herself. It is her daughter-in-law who effectively threw her out, saying it was her own husband who kept the family going and "as you have not got a husband you will have to look after yourself".
For many of these Bengalis, surrounded by Hindi speakers, it is as if they are living in a foreign land. Some are feisty and resentful, others broken and afraid.
The authorities run four ashrams - a form of spiritual commune - where some of the women are housed, but many need to beg to pay for rented accommodation. Some claim that the locals treat them quite roughly and it is only the pilgrims who are happy to win spiritual merit by giving them money.
Gauri Dasi left the Bengal border with Bangladesh because of tensions in the area in 1971. She arrived in Vrindavan with her husband, with whom she had three daughters.
He then deserted them and all her daughters were married off when they reached the age of 10.
Dasi has been living alone in Vrindavan for the past 15 years and feels pushed into dedicating her life to the devotion of Radha.
She gets paid a few coins for singing devotional songs in the temples. She has become one of India's millions who have renounced the world to follow a spiritual path, but she is one of the reluctant ones.
Many of these servants of god appear to live tragic lives on the streets of this romance-drenched town.
The government and pilgrims can help keep these refugees from family life away from starvation, but they are less able to quell injustices and age-old superstitions in Bengal.
For some here, to even cast an eye on a widow is considered deeply unlucky.
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You can follow the Magazine on Twitter and on FacebookMy involvement in that tournament was part of a plan, launched in 1975, to infiltrate the criminal organizations that organized the fights. The original idea was to participate in the Kumite tournament and make a few contacts. We initially assumed I would lose, but eventually I became one of the best Kumite fighters to ever participate in the event.
-Frank Dux (Martial Arts Magazine)
Questioning the Story:
Is the underground Kumite Tournament in the movie Bloodsport real?
Frank Dux (right, circa 1975) shared a similar resemblance with his onscreen counterpart Jean-Claude Van Damme (left). Frank Dux (right, circa 1975) shared a similar resemblance with his onscreen counterpart Jean-Claude Van Damme (left).
Bloodsport t-shirts, including the bestselling Kumite t-shirt, have helped fans celebrate the movie and the legendary tournament.
From 1975 to 1980 Frank W. Dux fought 329 matches.
He retired undefeated as the World Heavy Weight
Full Contact Kumite Champion.
Mr. Dux still holds four world records:
Fastest Knockout - 3.2 seconds
Fastest Punch with a Knockout -.12 seconds
Fastest Kick with a Knockout - 72 mph
Most Consecutive Knockouts in a Single Tournament - 56
What does the word kumite mean?
According to the movie, the Kumite tournament is a no-holds-barred mixed martial arts competition held in secret every five years. In the 1988 film, we see Jean-Claude Van Damme, playing Frank Dux, triumphing over a ruthless fighter named Chong Li, portrayed by a then 50-year-old Bolo Yeung.As stated in the November 1980 Black Belt magazine interview, titled "Kumite: A Learning Experience," the real Frank Dux did in fact attend and win the 1975 Kumite, weighing in as a heavyweight. His experience became the inspiration for the onscreen events in the 1988 movieBloodsport. However, according to Frank's accounts, "The Kumite" was held in Nassau, Bahamas in 1975, not in Hong Kong like we see in the film. Controversy has arisen around Dux's own past and his stories of The Kumite. In our own correspondence with Frank, he named numerous organizations as acknowledging the existence of The Kumite, including the USA Martial Arts Hall of Fame Black Dragon Fighting Society, Shinjimatsu (Yokohama, Japan), Golden Globe International Martial Arts Hall of Fame, and Imperial, among others.Black Belt magazine's November 1980 issue states the following, "The truth is that a full-contact kumite event is indeed held at a private location once every five years. The event is sponsored by the International Fighting Arts Association (I.F.A.A.) which, although not a publicity seeking organization, is far from secret." (Black Belt Magazine, 1980, p. 28).Considering that the Kumite took place nearly two decades before the emergence of the internet, coupled with the I.F.A.A.'s desire to remain out of the public eye, it is not hard to understand why an online search for the I.F.A.A. organization yields little evidence of its existence, other than a brief mention on the websiteFasstDuxRyu.com. The website is run by one of Dux's former students, Sky Benson, who uses the website to help promote Dux's fighting system, FASST™/Dux Ryu.In communications with Frank, he stated that the I.F.A.A. has since disbanded and that the Black Dragon Fighting Society is a "derivative affiliate" of the former organization, which was still in existence when the 1980 Black Belt magazine article was written. This might also help to explain why an online search for the I.F.A.A. yields such a small number of results. The Black Dragon Fighting Society (BDFS) is a sponsor of the Kumite in the Bloodsport movie. It should be noted that the BDFS acknowledges Frank Dux's championship titles and world records, which are listed on their South African website.Frank's records also appear at the end of the Bloodsport movie, displayed as follows:Those who believe that the Kumite was a fantastic exaggeration need only to fast-forward thirty plus years to the Mixed Martial Art cage fight genre of today, as CNBC reporter Scott Wapner points out during the segment "From Bloodsport to Blue Chip." Wapner explains that the Kumite essentially gave birth to today's publicly recognized MMA.
Translation of he Japanese word kumite means "free fighting" or roughly "sparring." The westeren sense of the word incorporates a broader meaning that includes "sparring" in boxing and even some forms of karate, like Shotokan.
Kumite is one of the three main areas of traditional Japanese karate training, along with kata and kihon (form and fundamentals). In the movie Bloodsport, Kumite is the name given to the deadly, underground, full-contact fighting tournament to which the main character, Frank Dux (Jean-Claude Van Damme), is clandestinely invited. Other real life names used to refer to the tournament include Vale Tudo, San Soo, No Holds-Barred, etc.
How did Frank Dux get invited to the Kumite competition?
Dux found himself entered in the International Fighting Arts Association (I.F.A.A.) competition because his instructor, a Japanese man named Senzo Tanaka, had participated in past events. After performing well enough in smaller kumite matches held by the I.F.A.A., the organization granted him an invitation to the international event.
-Black Belt Magazine, November 1980
In the movie, is Frank's nemesis, Chong Li (Bolo Yeung), based on a real life individual?
Dux said that Bolo Yeung's character was based on a real person. Dux said that Bolo Yeung's character was based on a real person.
Did the real Chong Li blind Frank Dux during their fight?
Yes. According to the real Frank Dux, actor Bolo Yeung's character in the movie, Chong Li, was based on a real person. "I understand he passed away before the film was made," Dux said, "due to brain tumors from fighting (like what almost killed me, in 1993). Other people say it was a car accident. I have no way of knowing for sure."
Yes. Dux said that the real Chong Li openly admitted to blinding him during their fight. However, Chong Li assured Dux that the incident was purely accidental, regarding blurring his eyes with liniment. "In the movie, the incident is shown as him intentionally tossing powder, but it was beads of sweat and dit dao mixed in that temporarily burned my eyes, blinding me, which is not a single unique occurrence for fighters. Muhammad Ali for instance shares a similar experience," Frank said.
Does the 1980 Black Belt magazine article offer definitive proof of the Kumite and Frank Dux's achievements?
The now legendary Black Belt magazine article "Kumite: A Learning Experience" is prefaced with the following disclaimer. "Although there is no convenient way to verify each and every detail connected with the story, the editors have verified enough of the basic facts to feel confident in publishing it. But since we are not at liberty to share the corroborating evidence with the public, we acknowledge that each reader may have a different idea of what the facts permit him to believe." Regarding Dux, the magazine states, "Although the details of his story are impossible to check out completely, BLACK BELT has spoken with other I.F.A.A. members from the United States and abroad who have privately confirmed that the basic facts are indeed as Dux says they are."
In 2009, Frank Dux sent HistoryvsHollywood.com a copy of a cover letter from John Stewart, the editor of Black Belt magazine and author of its Kumite article. Stewart's letter, dated May 21, 1980, makes general statements about Frank Dux's unique martial arts expertise and knowledge, stating, "BLACK BELT magazine has conducted a lengthy series of interviews with Mr. Dux, and it is the opinion of the editor that:
Dux is highly skilled in a number of martial arts and has mastered some extremely unusual techniques, many of which may never be seen by the general public. Dux is a fully knowledgeable consultant on the details of such subjects as full-contact fighting, breaking objects, weapons technique, and anit-terrorism. He has had military experience of a unique nature."
What made Frank Dux decide to talk about the existence of the Kumite in Black Belt magazine?
In the letter's closing, John Stewart wrote, "While this magazine ordinarily does not act as an agency for the verification of skills or credentials, in this case we happen to know that the above statements are true."
In Martial Arts Illustrated, the real Frank Dux answered this question by saying, "The stated purpose in doing the article is the fact I issued an open challenge encouraging others to fight in the Kumite circuit I championed as a heavyweight, in 1980. It is the reasons why I was "green lighted" to act as a spokesperson for the I.F.A.A. then trying to commercialize the event, with a foothold in the United States."
Can Frank Dux prove that he fought in a tournament called the Kumite?
Frank Dux holding his 1975 Kumite tournament trophy. Dux said the photo was taken in 1976. Frank Dux holding his 1975 Kumite tournament trophy. Dux said the photo was taken in 1976.
The alleged trophy receipt is a Xerox document where Frank Dux's signature is cut and recopied from another document onto the receipt, in addition to giving the incorrect address for him. Anyone could create this on their home copier.
The trophy inscription name is incorrectly spelled D-U-K-E-S and not D-U-X (contrary to the correct spelling inscribed on Dux's trophy).
The alleged trophy receipt is dated 1979, which is three years after the trophy was first viewed in my possession, both on public display and in the photo that was taken of me holding the trophy (above) that appeared in Black Belt magazine, November 1980.
No resemblance exists between the John Johnson photocopy of a trophy receipt and Dux's trophy. The Johnson receipt is for a three tiered trophy with two gold cups on and four judo figures. The kumite trophy has a two foot pedestal base with a large engraved silver bowl as its crown, and it is not even remotely close in its size specifications and materials to the description on the alleged receipt."
Was Dux's instructor in the movie based on an actual person?
Dux is shown on the left holding his 1975 Kumite tournament trophy, as inset in Black Belt magazine, November 1980. Yet shortly after the movie's release in May of 1988, writer John Johnson published an an editorial in the Los Angeles Times' local San Fernando Valley Metro Section accusing Dux of making everything up. The editorial is written in a format one may easily mistake for an objective article. Johnson states that Dux's Kumite trophy didn't come from a 1975 tournament in the Bahamas, but rather it was merely ordered and picked up by Dux at a trophy shop just a few miles from his Southern California home.Johnson's claims contradict the facts regarding Dux's achievements that are displayed at the beginning of the Bloodsport movie credits. "There exists as public record eyewitness testimony and photographic evidence of my winning the Kumite made available through court proceedings," Dux says. This is in addition to the journalistic research undertaken by print and broadcast media outlets and the fact finding done by the legal firms of the movie studio and the publishing house behind Dux's book.When interviewed by Martial Arts Illustrated as part of their "Asking the Masters" series (December & January 2008), Dux tackled Johnson's allegation that he bought his trophy, and in speaking with HistoryvsHollywood.com, he supplied a copy of the alleged receipt and responded, "One cannot litigate or force a retraction of opinion. To demonstrate how untrustworthy John Johnson is, keep the following in mind. My trophy has been in my possession and on public display, since January 1976. John Johnson alleges, in 1988, he was able to obtain the receipt for my trophy made out to me and commissioned in my name - TWELVE YEARS AFTER MY TROPHY IS IN MY POSSESSION! The trophy shop owner, Mr. Moody, is quoted by John Johnson as saying that it was "partially" manufactured by Moody in his trophy shop, located near my home. After the editorial, I spoke with Mr. Moody, who denied ever supplying Johnson this mysterious receipt and acknowledged he informed Johnson he was misquoted, referring to partially repairing another trophy of mine, damaged after my studio was broken into by students of a business competitor. These perpetrators were arrested and convicted. This is a verifiable fact, a public record. This alleged trophy receipt was shown in a court of law to be an obvious fabrication, thus withdrawn from evidence due to these facts:In the interview with Martial Arts Illustrated, Dux also stated that the article's author, John Johnson, was an acquaintance of his ex-wife and that the article was written at the same time that he was embroiled in a bitter divorce.
Yes. The Bloodsport true story reveals that Frank Dux's instructor in the movie is a composite of two individuals, Jack Seki and Senzo Tanaka. "Jack Seki is an extended Tanaka family member and is related to my other instructor who I met through Seki, Senzo Tanaka," Frank said. When asked about instructor Senzo Tanaka, Frank said that they "did not part the best of friends."
Did Frank Dux really meet his karate instructor after breaking into his house?
As a boy, the real Dux never broke into his instructor's house. As a boy, the real Dux never broke into his instructor's house.
Did Frank Dux have to evade U.S. Military police to fight in the Kumite?
No. The movie shows the Dux character as a teenager breaking into Tanaka's house. Tanaka (Roy Chiao) catches him attempting to steal a sword. The real Frank Dux said, "My meeting my instructor by breaking into his house was the producer's idea, which I objected to, but now in hindsight I must admit he was right to do this, given screen time limitations. It was a clever device to help make people understand the importance of martial arts training and how its discipline played a role in putting and keeping young impressionable minds on the right path."
No. In the movie Bloodsport, Jean-Claude Van Damme's character is a valuable U.S. Military Operative who tries to evade two military police agents so that he can fight in the Kumite. Contrary to internet gossip and unsubstantiated allegations, no evidence exists of the real Frank Dux having directly claimed he worked for the CIA or military as an in-expendable agent, as depicted in the movie.
Initially, recognizing the intelligence gathering value, as a contract agent Dux entertained only participating in the Kumite in order to formulate a plan to get closer to the Asian criminal element that organized the fights. He says that he never expected to win. Regarding his character being on the run from military agents, "The AWOL bit was the producer's idea," Frank said.
Did spectators really place bets on Kumite fights?
Yes. According to Black Belt magazine, gambling did take place at the Kumite. Frank said that documentary video footage taken by eyewitnesses who attended the events also verifies the fact that gambling was an aspect of the Kumite. "We rarely knew each other by our names," Frank said of the fighters, "due to fear at any moment the doors to the room could be kicked in and we would end up jailed, with all the gambling going on." (Martial Arts Illustrated)
Is Dux's friend in the movie, Ray Jackson, based on an actual person?
Frank Dux and actor Don Gibb on the Bloodsport movie set in 1986. Frank Dux and actor Don Gibb on the Bloodsport movie set in 1986.
Is Jean-Claude Van Damme's love interest in the movie Bloodsport based on a real person?
Yes. The basis for Dux's friend and fellow fighter in the movie, Ray Jackson (Donald Gibb), can be traced back to two different individuals. "The majority of the Ray Jackson characteristics are chiefly based upon Richard Robinson," said the real Frank Dux. Robinson, a Jujitsu black belt, went from being a biker in Venice, California, to transforming himself today into a prominent stockbroker for Montgomery Scott. Robinson also founded The River of Life Martial Arts and Wellness Center, a million dollar facility that teaches numerous Japanese koryu martial arts in Pennsylvania. In an earlier interview with Martial Arts Magazine, Dux said that the Ray Jackson character is also partially based on Swedish Karate Champion Kurt Peterson.
No. In the movie, the main character becomes involved in a romantic and sexual relationship with an American journalist named Janice Kent (Leah Ayres). "As far as the love interest, she did not represent a single particular person," Frank said, "nor would I be intimate with a woman right before a fight."
Did Frank Dux sue Jean-Claude Van Damme over a script titled The Kumite?
Dux battled Jean-Claude Van Damme in court in 1998. Dux battled Jean-Claude Van Damme in court in 1998.
Did Frank Dux win his court case against Jean-Claude Van Damme?
No. Frank Dux lost his case against Van Damme. CourtTV.com states that Van Damme's attorney, Martin Singer, centered his closings on two witnesses who attacked the truthfulness behind Dux's claims.
Dux (center) and Van Damme on the Bloodsport set during happier times, with costar Paulo Tocha. Dux (center) and Van Damme on the Bloodsport set during happier times, with costar Paulo Tocha.
Did Frank Dux set a record for breaking bulletproof glass with his bare hands?
Dux testified before the court that Van Damme had written an outline and had made an audiotape of their supposed agreement. However, Dux said that both items were lost when an earthquake destroyed his apartment in 1994. Dux's former neighbor, Kim Owens, testified that the earthquake did not cause severe structural damage to the apartment building. She submitted photos to prove that the building's balconies had not crumbled as Dux had claimed. As a result, Frank Dux's credibility was damaged, suggesting that his written proof of the contract may not have existed at all. The testimony of the second witness is detailed in the following question.An independent observer to the trial, the Hollywood trade magazine Point Of View, offers up another observation and raises an eyebrow at how the trial was run. Point of View's Jennie and Terrie Frankel write, "The judge karate kicked Dux below the belt with a series of unprecedented rulings that precluded the testimony of any rebuttal witnesses, any impeachment witnesses, and all actual eyewitnesses to the deal. Kramer (Dux's attorney) argued these witnesses were critical to his case, but to no avail."Dux states, "Regarding Kim Owen's testimony, I wasn't able to put before |
them and their families and children,” they stress.
“We are on guard at the Bulgarian-Turkish border, the Southern frontier of all Europe, not against genuine refugees but against criminal gangs – radical Islamists, terrorists and ISIS and Al Qaeda fighters – illegally invading our countries with the purpose not of integrating themselves into the societies of the independent European nations, but rather to assault and radicalize forcefully the traditional Muslim communities which have existed and have been functioning with dignity and respect and consider themselves as part of our common life for the last fifty years or more.”
BNO Shipka’s leader, Bulgarian Veterans Military Union chief Vladimir Rusev, paints the migrant crisis as something of an establishment conspiracy, alleging that “ISIS was created not by real Muslim believers but by foreign security services, international financial syndicates and extremists serving vested financial and political interests.”
Rusev calls for officials and politicians “who aid and abet the illegal migration into Europe of nationals of countries outside the EU and so facilitate the occupation and enslavement of their own people” to be prosecuted for treason.
According to NBC, the group claims to have 50,000 members and displays strong Russian sympathies. The ‘Shipka’ in their name refers to the Battle of Shipka Pass in 1887, when a small Russo-Bulgarian force repelled an army of 40,000 Ottoman Turks.
Bulgaria was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for five centuries, a period still remembered as “the Turkish yoke”, and is one of four NATO members where the public say they would choose Russia rather the United States to defend them if attacked.
The other three are Greece, Slovenia and – curiously – Turkey.Aftershocks from Saturday's 5.6-magnitude earthquake in Oklahoma are likely to continue for weeks or even months, the U.S. Geological Survey says, but rattled residents can expect them to decrease in intensity.
The USGS says dozens of aftershocks from the temblor, and a 4.7-magnitude foreshock, have been recorded since the 5.6 quake hit at 10:53 CT Saturday night.
The Oklahoma Geological Survey says the quake was the largest ever to strike in the state, topping a 5.5-magnitude temblor that struck on April 9, 1952.
Saturday's quake was centered about four miles east of Sparks, in Lincoln County, Oklahoma. The USGS says on its website that it has not been able to determine what fault line the quake occurred on, but scientists are focusing on the Wilzetta fault, which they describe as one of a series of small faults that formed in the area about 300 million years ago. If the Wilzetta fault did rupture Saturday, it would be the first time a surface-rupturing quake has been recorded on it.
All previous surface-rupturing quakes in Oklahoma have occurred on the Meers fault, in the south-central portion of the state, the USGS says.
Damage from Saturday's quake was slight, with The Oklahoman newspaper reporting minor damage to 12 homes and a buckling of U.S. Highway 62 near the epicenter in Lincoln County.
But the quake was anything but minor to one couple whose home sits near the epicenter. The chimney of Joe and Mary Reneau's home came crashing through their roof in Prague, Oklahoma, CNN affiliate KJRH-TV reported.
"Wham! It wasn't just a sudden bang,” Joe Reneau told KJRH. “This house was rocking and rolling."
But it wasn't just people that the quake stirred up. Birds and bugs were so rattled that they took to flight in massive numbers, enough to show up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather radar, CNN affiliate KTUL-TV reported. Check out the radar images here.With their third-round pick in the 2015 NFL Draft, the New York Giants selected defensive end Owamagbe Odighizuwa (pronounced Oh-wah-MAH-bay Oh-DIGGY-zoo-wah) of UCLA.
SCOUTING REPORT: Odighizuwa is an extremely well-built (6’3”, 267 pounds) and athletic defensive end with long arms and huge hands. He plays with power and strength and is a good run defender. He is a versatile player who can play inside in pass rush situations. Odighizuwa flashes explosive pass rush ability (4.59 40-yard dash) but he needs more technique work in that area. Odighizuwa is a hard working, competitive team leader with a non-stop motor. He missed the 2013 season due to two hip labrum surgeries.
MEDIA Q&A WITH GENERAL MANAGER JERRY REESE: (Video)
Opening Statement: He’s a defensive end. Great athlete. Big and fast. Long arms. Big Hands. Really a clean player, captain. There are a lot of things to like about him. He plays hard. We think there’s a lot of upside. When you start picking guys in the third round, those are guys that have some things they have to get better at, some developmental qualities that they have to get better at, but this guy, all of his gymnastic stuff he did at the combine were really off the charts. You rarely see guys with this kind of athletic ability with respect with the gymnastic numbers show. There’s a lot of things to like about him. We just think we can get a guy in the third round who’s going to be a core special teams player while he’s learning how to adjust to the game up here. He’s a big, powerful guy. An amazing body. We’re hoping to hit on this guy as a pass-rusher. He can play inside. Our coaches like that he can go inside and play. We think he’ll be a matchup problem as an inside rusher as well.
Q: He will be a defensive end for you?
A: He’s a defensive end.
Q: Any concern with the hip surgery he had?
A: We talked about that, but our doctors think he’s fine and they cleared him, so we picked him. That definitely was a concern for us, but he has no restrictions at this point.
Q: Would you have considered him with the 40th pick in the second round if you did not trade up?
A: We had some more guys.
Q: You were or were not ready to talk about him at that pick?
A: We were not ready to talk about him at that point.
Q: You talked about his personality. He was a captain at UCLA.
A: He was a captain. He really blew us away in the interview process at the combine. He was really good. With the video stuff, he knew all the schemes and where people lined up and played. He was impressive that way. He has already graduated. He’s very smart. You guys will like him. He’ll be a media guy. You guys will like him.
Q: You’ve taken fliers on athletes in the draft.
A: I wouldn’t call him a flier because our defensive coaches say there’s a lot of things to like about him. They really like him. I wouldn’t call him a flier. Justin Tuck was a third round pick and he ended up being a pretty good player for us. We’re hoping that he can be in that same mold to come in and like Justin started out playing a lot on special teams and develop into a really good player. We think this guy can do the same thing.
Q: What kind of a pass-rusher is he?
A: He had six sacks. He’s a hard rusher. I think he can learn a lot of things with the pro coaching up here. I don’t think he’s an ultra pass-rusher at this point, but I think he has the tools to be a really good pass rusher.
Q: What do you see as his top skill?
A: I think he equally plays the run and plays the pass. I think he’s a good player both ways. With respect to what his top skill is, I’m not sure what his top skill is. His compete and his effort is what his top skill will be until he really learns how to hone his skills and play the type of technique that we like up here for the New York Giants.
MEDIA Q&A WITH VICE PRESIDENT OF PLAYER EVALUATION MARC ROSS: (Video)
Q: What about him did you personally see that you liked?
A: First thing you see when you see the guy on the field, he is built. He looks like an NFL football player. He is strapped up, put together. At this point, he is a big guy that plays hard. He plays physical. He is strong. Snap to whistle, he is going after it. He is a team captain. He loves ball. He loves playing. That is what we are looking for. Premier position. He has rushed from the inside and outside. That gives you some flexibility there. He has special teams temperament. He is a great young man.
Q: What kind of a pass rusher is he?
A: He is more of a power guy on the outside. They put him inside, so he uses his quickness a little more inside. He is actually more accomplished inside right now than outside. Outside, he is a power guy – let me try to run you over. He has some sneaky quickness inside, so they do both with him. That was definitely attractive to us and our defensive coaches.
Q: Did having [Coach Spagnuolo] here change anything that you were looking for in defensive players?
A: No, not really. It has been about the same. We look for productive guys that play hard and are good athletes. Spags has been here before, so when we first started meetings, nothing changed. Once we started meetings, we just jumped back in. The familiarity with him was great, but there was nothing that changed or he said, ‘Hey, I need this since I have been gone’ or ‘we need this, we need that.’ It has all pretty much been the same.
Q: You said before Coach Coughlin wanted a pass rusher… Did it just so happen that you ended up with a pass rusher?
A: It just happened to end up that way. We knew [Coughlin] liked him. I spent a lot of time with Tom after the season, once we do the Combine, pro days and all that. We spent a lot of time together. I have a good idea of the guys he really likes. Again, we are on the same page, Tom, Jerry [Reese] and I, and the scouts and coaches. We all talk it out and hash it out together and have a good synergy going on with everybody. There are really no surprises or guys jumping on the table pushing for people. We talk things out. We are prepared. We feel like we come to good decisions as a unit and as a team.
Q: Did you feel like you needed to come away from the draft with a pass rusher?
A: It is always good to get ends. If you can go into a draft and get a defensive end who everybody likes, then that is a good goal. We never set out and have a checklist of players that we say we have to get. We set the board up by the players we like. We hope they fill a position of need and value. We just attack in that kind of way.
Q: How would you describe how the draft has gone so far overall?
A: I think the biggest thing that jumped out is all three of these guys bring a physical toughness to our team. They are three different positions. A passion, a toughness, a physicalness at their position. I think that is the common thread with the three of them.
Q: Do you see anything there with him and Justin Tuck?
A: It never crossed my mind.
Q: Could you see him moving inside and being a successful pass rusher?
A: Yeah, he did that there. That is one of the things we like. We have been successful moving guys around and we think he brings us that versatility. [Robert] Ayers can do it, [Odighizuwa] can do it, so hopefully we have some versatility with a few of those guys.
Q: Did [Odighizuwa] rush from the inside at UCLA?
A: Yeah.
Q: What makes him good at it?
A: He has sneaky quickness inside. He has enough power and strength to power through the gaps. That is how he beat guys.
Q: Have you seen signs from studying him last year of medical conditions?
A: No, none at all. We have a great medical staff. Those guys go through the ringer with that. There were no limitations on the field, workout wise. The guy is a beast working out. It didn’t limit him at all.
Q: Is this the kind of guy profile-wise who pops out to you?
A: Yeah, at this point in the draft, when you are going through the checklist and talking about players. You say, ‘He is big. He is fast. He is a good athlete. He plays hard. He is smart. He is a captain. Okay, he is productive.’ You are going down all these things and saying, ‘Alright, in the third round, these are a lot of attractive attributes that he has.’ This is the kind of guy you need to try to work with. Throw him in the mix. He has the special teams temperament right away. Hopefully he will get on the field and contribute in some sort of packages versus the run and pass. At this point in the draft, a guy with all these positive traits is very attractive.
MEDIA Q&A WITH HEAD COACH TOM COUGHLIN: (Video)
Opening Statement: This guy is a great effort player. When I got on the phone he was crying. He was so happy, so excited. He brings a lot to the table. His testing, his gym numbers out at the Combine are out of sight. 11 [inch] hands. Strong, very, very strong. We think he can rush from the inside or the outside. We think he can play certainly a 9 and a 6-I on first and second down. I am not sure he will be a five-technique. He is a strong player. Gives great effort. He is fast and can play on special teams. He will be a contributor that way. He gives us that force that could be a left-end. I am not going to nail that down just yet. He certainly can play on that side. We are excited to have him.
Q: Do you see any Justin Tuck comparisons?
A: I certainly hope the results are that.
Q: What is it about [Odighizuwa’s] game that you like?
A: Effort. I like the effort. I like to see a guy that just goes and goes and goes. He seems to have that kind of a motor. I like that. He plays hard.
Q: How important is that physicality that you guys talk about?
A: Very important. What I always talk about – you have to win the line of scrimmage with the defensive line and the offensive line. I think this guy gives us a chance to get back into that business, run or pass.
Q: Can he do that right away?
A: He is going to have to learn. He is relatively new to the game. He is going to have to learn the nuances. I just don’t want to slow him down while we are teaching him. We will try to anticipate those types of things. He is smart. He has graduated. He has been a captain. He played in a sophisticated system.
MEDIA Q&A WITH ODIGHIZUWA:
Q: Tom Coughlin said you were emotional when he spoke to you today. Can you explain what that call meant to you?
A: I was definitely very emotional. Just finally getting my name called and knowing that I’m going to be living out my dream and working and playing professional football was a very emotional moment for me.
Q: Is this around where you thought you would go and was there any indication it would be to the Giants?
A: Honestly, I wasn’t sure which team it was, but a lot of people were saying different things and I was just waiting it out to see who was going to call my name. But anything goes on draft day, so I was just excited to get my name called.
Q: Do you think your hip issues in 2013 caused your stock to drop a little bit?
A: I’m sure that could have played a part in it. There could be a lot of different factors. You just never know what teams are thinking when it comes to draft day. Regardless of what it was, that’s behind me. I’m looking forward to just being a part of this organization and competing and getting ready to play football.
Q: Where do you think your best position is going to be on that defensive line?
A: Honestly, I think I can play anywhere that the coaches want me to play, whether it’s strongside or weakside defensive end or even rushing as a three technique on passing downs. I think my versatility in what I bring to the table is an upside for what the coach wants for the defense and for the team.
Q: Could you describe your own game and your strengths?
A: I’m a relentless player. I’m physical. My athletic ability allows me to do a lot of different things, like I was saying with my versatility. I think that’s what really helps me as a football player.
Q: How much do you know about Justin Tuck and what he did here?
A: I know he’s a great player who was drafted out of Notre Dame in the (third) round and I know that I was watching him my sophomore year in high school when they were playing New England in the Super Bowl and the Giants’ defensive line inspired me and made me want to be a better defensive line with Osi Umenyiora, with Justin Tuck, I believe number 94 (Mathias Kiwanuka, who did not play in Super Bowl 42). But I know Justin Tuck is a great player. He’s really, really physical and that’s a guy that I try to learn some things from, but I know a lot about the Giants’ defensive line. I could go all day with what I know about their defensive line play. With Michael Strahan, obviously he’s a Hall of Fame player. He won a Super Bowl. He went out on a bang, so to speak. The last year he played, they won a Super Bowl, but he had a great career with the Giants. He was drafted out of Texas (Southern). I believe it was in the (second) round, which makes me put things in perspective with me. For me as a competitor, I want to be drafted as high as possible, it doesn’t work out but my thing is a lot of great players come in different rounds and make an impact. I know Michael Strahan was one of them. I know Osi Umenyiora was one of them. I know Justin Tuck is another guy. I know the Giants have a great tradition with drafting great defensive linemen. Jason Pierre-Paul is one of them. I looked up to him coming out of (South Florida). Is it South Florida? I can’t remember. I’m very excited about this opportunity that I get to learn. I think it’s going to help me develop as a football player. My goal is to just be the best that I can be and take my game to the next level. You’ve got to start somewhere and learn from guys who’ve been there and done that. I’m excited about it. I think it’s a great opportunity for me.
Q: How did you get to know so much from the Giants out on the West Coast?
A: It may sound weird, but I just love football. It’s just something that I like to study to get better as a player. When I tell you that the Giants’ defensive line inspired me as a player, it’s no joke. The way they played is really what sparked my thirst for wanting to be better as a d-lineman. I remember in college watching the year Osi Umenyiora had six sacks against the Philadelphia Eagles. I watched his highlights over and over again. I watched his drills that he did with the d-line coach who coaches guys out of Atlanta. There was a video of him on YouTube and I was watching it over and over again. I was doing every drill that he did. The list goes on and on. I was watching Michael Strahan and how he plays. I studied everything about the Giants defensive line. I studied Jason Pierre-Paul the year he went off. They know their defensive line.
Q: You get to play under defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo. How excited are you for that opportunity?
A: I’m extremely excited. I’ve been waiting to be in this situation where I can just be a defensive end getting after the quarterback, playing physical against the run, just playing that traditional four down over, under defense. I’ve been looking forward to that for a very long time.1.
In The Fortress of Solitude, his great white whale of a novel, Jonathan Lethem chases after childhood, neighborhood, and the American leviathan of race relations. In Men and Cartoons, a grab bag of his stories, he paddles a kayak downstream over waters not exactly rapid. Old friends from elementary school reappear in order to deplore the compromises and corruptions of their former classmates. Bygone parents are revealed to have been capable of secret, sexual exultations. Young lovers in a burgled house go to bed with the ghosts of past relationships made visible by a magic spray. Artists, agents, editors, opticians, and a talking sheep named Sylvia Plath negotiate dystopias of gridlock. In “Access Fantasy,” one character lives in his car in a city-wide traffic jam on the wrong side of a One-Way Permeable Barrier.
But the joke’s on Hemingway. According to Lethem, men without women employ comic books to compensate for their absence. When his characters aren’t listening to Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads, or dreaming up scenarios for interactive video games, or hiring out as “advertising robots” at the local Undermall, or destroying the world with air bags made of cabbages, they are thinking about Stan Lee and R. Crumb, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Dr. Doom, and Captain America. If Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, Walt Whitman, and Carl Jung show up in “Super Goat Man,” the most ambitious of these stories, they are really only red herrings or highbrow beards in an epic tale of an Electric Comics superhero from the Sixties who is reduced in the Eighties to teaching a college seminar on “Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955–1975.”
Mostly, though, the comics mentioned in Men and Cartoons aren’t published by Electric. Or DC, Raw, or Fantagraphic. They bear the brand of Marvel Comics, “which anyone who read them understood weren’t comic at all but deadly, breathtakingly serious. Marvel constructed worlds of splendid complexity, full of chilling, ancient villains and tormented heroes, in richly unfinished story lines.” Lethem’s nerds entered into those complex worlds back in grammar school and junior high, between the ritual humiliations of pubescence. In years to come of pink slips, eviction notices, and deleted icons, of fax machines and vibrators, these Marvel worlds are the vistas in their mediated heads. They see in panels, talk in balloons, and feel in lurid colors. But how can a Columbia professor who plays party games (in “The Vision”), a museum director for acquisitions of drawings and prints (in “Vivian Relf”), or a cartoonist for a free music magazine published by a record store chain (in “Planet Big Zero”) ever be expected to compete with the likes of Vision, the android in the Avengers series who could vary the density of his body from bullet-stopping diamond-hard to blue-smoke phantom fuzzy? Or Black Bolt, the noblest member of a band of outcast mutants known as…BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Halima Dakhil lost her husband in the sectarian slaughter that engulfed Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and now spends her days tearful and scared, knowing her $250 monthly wage won’t pay the rent and feed five children.
Widows sell vegetables at a market in the central city of Kerbala, 80 km (50 miles) southwest of Baghdad, November 5, 2011. REUTERS/Mushtaq Muhammed
One of an estimated 2 million women who are primary breadwinners in Iraq, Dakhil is but one face of the humanitarian crisis left behind as U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq nearly nine years after toppling dictator Saddam Hussein.
Rent takes $210 of her monthly earning as a cleaner in a medical clinic. She depends mainly on the kindness of neighbors and other donors to feed her family.
“When my husband was killed in 2006, my youngest child, Ridha, was only a toddler,” said Dakhil, wiping away her tears with her abaya, as Ridha stood by her side.
“I took on the role of both mother and father. I support them and pay the rent. The rent is destroying me.”
Dakhil said militants beheaded her husband, along with his brother and nephew, as they traveled to sell a car and buy another in Diyala province, a center of ethnic and sectarian strife east of Baghdad.
In a cruel irony, Dakhil’s spouse, a Sunni, was killed by Sunni militants who thought he was a Shi’ite because his ID badge was issued in the Shi’ite slum of Sadr City, she said.
Dakhil, herself a Shi’ite, she was displaced shortly after her husband’s death from their Sunni area in northern Baghdad to
Sadr City, with no money, no furniture and no family support.
As Iraq emerges from nearly nine years of what many here think of as an occupation by U.S. forces, and the decades of Saddam’s reign before, it faces an uphill battle to help the poor, the wounded, the widowed and others scarred by war.
“I wish the war never happened and my husband was still alive. What is his fault? What is the fault of the innocent people?” said Dakhil, who is raising four boys and a girl.
Tens of thousands of men — soldiers, police, insurgent fighters and civilians — have died in bombings, tit-for-tat sectarian slaughter and other violence during a war that has killed more than 100,000 Iraqis, by some estimates.
LITTLE HELP FOR WIDOWS
Minister of Women’s Affairs Ibtihal Gasid al-Zaidi estimates there may be 2 million women breadwinners in Iraq, most of them widows of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and the sectarian conflict that followed, the first Gulf war or the 1980s Iran-Iraq war.
The humanitarian group Relief International estimates there may be 1.5 million widows, nearly 10 percent of the female population. The International Committee of the Red Cross said there are more than 1 million women leading households in Iraq.
“The ICRC sees women-headed households as among the most vulnerable in Iraq today,” the group said.
Zaidi said 23 percent of oil-rich Iraq’s estimated 30 million people, around 7 million, live under the poverty line and more than half are women.
Many widows struggle with the realities of their new lives; raising children alone, with little money or family support.
“The woman’s suffering is huge in these difficult circumstances because she is the father, the mother, the care-giver and the breadwinner,” Zaidi said. “She is taking huge responsibility, inside and outside the home. We are trying to help her as much as we can.”
During Saddam’s reign, widows were paid a monthly benefit and were given land and a car, which helped to placate many. He also rewarded members of the military who married widows.
Those benefits stopped when he was toppled.
In 2009, a new law was passed to help victims of war and their relatives, and a state-run compensation committee to help those hurt by militant attacks began its work in July.
Standard compensation includes 5 million Iraqi dinars ($4,275) for a government worker who is killed and 3.75 mln dinars ($3,200) for non-government worker, along with land and a monthly pension, in addition to social security benefits.
So far the committee has given out 55 billion dinars ($47 million). Land has been distributed in some provinces but not in Baghdad yet, said Hazem al-Haidari, the head of the committee.
A widow’s monthly social security is 100,000 Iraqi dinar($85). Each child receives 15,000 ID ($13).
“I agree it is little. But there is a real plan to increase these benefits,” Zaidi said.
Iraqi women say registering for government pensions is a bureaucratic nightmare due to corrupt workers who demand money to complete the paperwork.
One divorcee said she spent almost a year registering and when she was about to finish the process the pension office told her that her file had been lost. She gave up.
The government has allocated $1.2 billion a year to a plan to reduce the poverty level to 16 percent by 2014, said Hassan al-Zubaidi, a professor at Kufa University in Najaf and one of the plan’s authors.
The plan sets the poverty line at 77,000 ID ($66) a month; a line to which too many Iraqis are dangerously close.
“Most of (the people) are close to the 77,000 ID, which means with any security and economic crisis, many people will be under the poverty line,” Zubaidi said.
WINDOWS, BUT NO GLASS
The 75-square-meter home where Dakhil is raising her five children has no glass in the windows. A broken air cooler sits in the front yard.
“My children went to bed without dinner the other night,” she said. “I want compensation from the government. I want them to build us a house.”
In a camp near the Iraqi capital’s Sadr City slum, the plight of widows is slightly better than Dakhil’s. The Baghdad Provincial Council distributed 150 caravans to displaced families rent-free.
Ibn Sina, a non-governmental organization, helps widows find jobs. The group bought one a sewing machine and another a refrigerator and food supplies so they could earning a living.
A widow works on a sewing machine at her house in Baghdad's Sadr city October 23, 2011. REUTERS/Kareem Raheem
Kadhmiya Mohammed, 35, a mother of five, sells used household goods at the camp, but barely meets the needs of her family. Her husband disappeared in 2005 and despite searching hospitals and prisons she was unable to find any trace of him.
He was declared dead by a court two years ago.
“My husband went (missing) but I have children. Who should raise them?” she said. “Our conditions are tragic. For how long shall we stay like this?”As the 2016 presidential campaign takes shape for the fall, North Carolina is once again emerging as an important battleground state, but a close examination of the numbers suggests growing advantages there for presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Both Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump traveled to the Tar Heel State on Tuesday because they can do the math. In short, any plausible path to the White House for Trump involves winning all the states, like this one, that Republican Mitt Romney won in 2012.
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Much has been made of Trump’s hopes of pursuing a Rust Belt strategy that would involve capturing Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, along with a few other states Obama carried in 2012. But none of that will matter if Trump can’t hold onto North Carolina, which went Republican in 2012 but also voted for President Barack Obama in 2008.
In other words, in the last two elections North Carolina has actually been a “swing state” and the data suggest it’s swinging the wrong way for the GOP in 2016.
In 2000, George W. Bush won North Carolina by some 13 percentage points. He won it by 12 points in 2004. But since then the state has become very close in presidential elections.
NBC News
What happened? North Carolina is growing rapidly. It holds 25 percent more people than it did in 2000 – that’s a much faster rate of growth than the United States as a whole in that time – and in the process North Carolina has also grown more racially and ethnically diverse.
In 2000, North Carolina’s population was more than 70 percent white and non-Hispanic. That figure is now 63.8 percent. At the same time the Hispanic population has almost doubled from 4.7 percent to 9.1 percent.
But perhaps just as problematic for the GOP nominee is where and how the state has grown. Its urban centers have become much more populous.
Wake and Mecklenburg counties – the homes of the cities of Raleigh and Charlotte – have seen their populations grow by 63 percent and 49 percent respectively. They now each hold more than 1 million people, by far the most of any counties in the state. Together they hold more than 20 percent of the state’s population.
And since 2000 and since then both counties have gone from voting Republican to voting very Democratic.
George W. Bush captured 53 percent of the vote from Wake and 51 percent from Mecklenburg in 2000. In 2012 Obama won 55 percent of the vote from Wake and 61 percent from Mecklenburg.
Those are enormous swings.
And, maybe most troubling for the Trump campaign, both counties have been filling up with a group of voters that seem to be an especially hard sell for the Trump campaign: college-educated voters, as we noted last week.
In North Carolina, about 28 percent of people over 25 have at least a bachelor’s degree. In Mecklenburg the figure is 42 percent. In Wake, its 48 percent.
In many ways Wake (and the collegiate Research Triangle counties around it) along with Mecklenburg, look a bit like the Northern Virginia counties that sit in suburban Washington DC – educated, diverse, relatively wealthy. Those counties are the principal reason why Virginia has gone Democratic in recent presidential, gubernatorial and senate races.
None of this means that Trump can’t win North Carolina. It’s a true battleground/toss-up on most electoral maps right now. But the numbers here suggest he is going to have to fight hard to hold onto it in 2016.On March 29, ICE arrested five people when they showed up for scheduled appointments before the U.S. Citizenship and Iimmigration Services. These appointments are normally the first step (and it’s required) in legalizing one’s status. If it sounds crazy that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would arrest people who are trying to get right with the law, that’s because it is.
The takeaway here is twofold:
1. This is not new. It did happen before under George W. Bush, and yes, even under Barack Obama. But while it varied from office to office, it was the exception, not the rule. Now, however, it may no longer be the exception.
2. This means one has to be extremely careful in taking that first step. ICE is going to make an already difficult process even more difficult.
The people arrested all had final orders of removal. In order to have a shot at vacating (canceling) those orders, they have to have an immigrant petition approved, which is what they were trying to do. They’re not out of the woods yet: They still have to get their cases reopened and apply for the green card.
I wrote before about how there are serious problems with “rigorous enforcement” of the immigration law. This is a prime example: ICE could allow these people to attempt legalization of status before detaining them. The law allows them to. But because they are called on to enforce the law rigorously, they go after the low-hanging fruit. That includes people who serve themselves up by showing up for a required appointment. The fact that these folks had no criminal record (extensive family and business ties to the United States, including infant children) is of no import.
So while the practice itself is not new, the fact that this might be the new normal is new. And it’s obnoxious. It takes the wind out of the argument that people should do things legally. How can an agency establish a requirement but then detain you if you follow it? The only other option is to slink back into the shadows. It’s a classic Catch-22.
I believe the practice may be unlawful: an agency arguably should not be able to establish such blatantly conflicting rules. Moreover, U.S. citizens in these situations are denied consortium of their family members for simply doing the right thing.
Immigration lawyers now have to advise clients assuming detention at any stage. We already have heard verified reports of ICE picking up people at their report dates. ICE sometimes sends out “call-in letters” where the sole purpose is to have the person show up to get detained. It’s hard to say what’s next; we cannot even say this practice is limited to those with orders of removal.
Therefore, it is even more important now for the prior removal order—and entire immigration history—to be analyzed and attacked before a person shows up to any appointment with USCIS, ICE, or Customs and Border Protection. Detention does not necessarily have to mean deportation. A detention plan needs to be in place: Who will care for your children? What happens to your job? Who else in the family is at risk? Federal court litigation to order release must be considered and perhaps prepared in advance. It may be best to move to a different state where, if the person is detained, the laws and procedures provide better protection against deportation. Some people might have viable secondary forms of relief such as asylum.
As usual, every case is different. But what’s not different is the tone of this administration: We’ll get you wherever we can.
ICE must answer for this nonsensical practice. It cannot be dismissed by saying “Well, they had orders of removal.” That just shows ignorance of the law. Law that allows these people to legalize their status, even if the removal orders were lawful. If every law was this rigorously enforced, every speeding ticket would result in loss of license; every mistake on your tax return would mean jail time. And punishment would come before trial.
Due process is under attack by this administration. It has called for rigorous enforcement, vitiated any concept of prioritization of deportation, attempted to ban refugees and Muslims, expand detention of immigrant families. And this is a concern for us all.
Hassan Ahmad is an immigration lawyer practicing in Northern Virginia. |
an also said the show going forward would focus less on Piper. "As much as I love Piper and Taylor and her journey, I think people are interested in everybody's journey," Kohan said.
So what to do? How do Kohan, Netflix, and Lionsgate (the studio that produces OITNB) balance a presumed desire to keep the show popular with Prepon's lack of availability, not to mention the fact that Season 2 has been filming since July and has moved in a new direction?
Luckily for the Prepon faithful — and perhaps for Netflix and Lionsgate — scheduling around directing her first feature has ended up not being a conflict. With Prepon's schedule freer, Kohan (who did not respond to an interview request sent over Facebook) and the show's other writers have reconceptualized the original plan to have Alex exit quickly. Sources say her story will now be more open-ended.
In other words, let the drumbeat of speculation about Prepon and Orange Is the New Black's third season, which would air in 2015, commence.Obama’s not the One Fomenting Racial Hatred, Mr. Cruz
Eoin Higgins Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 2, 2015
Ted Cruz, the little prince of the religious/racist wing of the Republican Party, was inexplicably asked his opinion about the Baltimore protests recently. Cruz immediately laid the blame for the explosion of violence in Baltimore specifically, and racial tensions in the country more generally, at the feet of President Obama.
In the world of Ted Cruz and his ilk, President Obama has pursued policies and made statements that have served to inflame racial tensions in the country, instead of defuse them. The thinking goes something like this: President Obama came to office promising hope and change, then cynically manipulated and exacerbated divisions in the country to pursue his radical socialist agenda.
The right wing is correct that President Obama’s presidency has been racially divisive. But they’re at best willfully ignorant as to the causes of this racial division.
In American politics, the opposition, when it is Republican, always looks to jockey for power at the expense of the dominant party’s agenda. And for those on the fringes of the right wing, the craziness always ratchets up a little more when a Democrat is in office. Even in this context, the reaction of these epicenters of the American right wing to the past seven years of the Obama administration has been extreme.
Now, a lot of this has to do with extenuating factors. The rise of the Internet and its role in disseminating views and opinions and the disaster of the Bush administration and the subsequent need for the right wing to explain away those failures as aberrations of conservatism, for example, had already created the fertile ground for a right wing populist movement that would have existed with or without a black president.
But all things being equal, the racial divide in America has gotten a lot worse in recent years, and the blame for it is on the right wing’s reaction to the very existence of an Obama administration. From the infamous southern shriek of “you lie” by South Carolina’s Congressman Joe Wilson at the President in 2009 to the rise in hate groups over the past seven years, the right wing in America has lost its damn mind.
The legitimacy of the president has been challenged on grounds of his birth (a problem that the Canadian born Mr. Cruz doesn’t appear to have), his religion, his devotion to the current economic paradigm, and his love of America. No other president in American history has seen this vitriol and attempts to delegitimatize their right to hold office.
The right can’t accept that the American people elected a black man to the highest office in the country, so it fights to take away his legitimacy.
The racial divide and racial hate inspired by Obama the right wing engages in does not stop at the White House, of course. In fact, while the hatred stems from the administration, it’s acted out in the streets of our cities and in our communities.
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray: these are the names of but a few young black men murdered by whites over the past three years. Whether it’s the institution of the police or lone gunmen out to prove their manliness in their neighborhood watch, violence towards blacks by whites is increasing in brutality.
Obama has not reacted to these events and this treatment with anything more than tepid responses contextualizing black anger.
If one is fed a diet of right wing blather, one might think that the President foments racial violence and is a Black Panther. But the facts are simple. The racial divide in this country is exacerbated by the right wing’s hatred for the fact that and the inability to accept that the President is black.
There are many reasons to criticize President Obama and his administration. To criticize him for fomenting racial discontent, as the right wing does, is ludicrous.Zeev Suraski: The PHP 7 Story In the keynote, Zeev shares the evolution of PHP’s major versions, the behind-the-scenes story of how PHP 7 came to be and its key benefits and features.
Speeding up the Web with PHP 7 - Rasmus Lerdorf In this talk, Rasmus Lerdorf discusses the new features in PHP 7, show some pretty graphs, and walk through potential BC breaks that you might hit in migrating your code to PHP 7.
Pierre Joye - PHP 7, what's coming In the video, Pierre introduces PHP 7 and talks about its performance, as well as how does it compare to the various alternatives (hhvm, etc). PHP 7’s new features and changes in the core are also be covered.
Erika Heidi - Getting Ready for PHP 7 How PHP 7 will impact your current PHP codebase? What really changed? How safe is it to update? This talk will answer these questions and give you a taste of what is coming with PHP 7.
Anthony Ferrara - PHP7 and Beyond: The Future of PHP PHP is experiencing a renaissance; old methodologies are everywhere under assault from advances in tooling and design. From Composer to HackLang, "the PHP way" of solving problems is dramatically evolving.
Julien Pauli - En route to PHP7 Joulien Pauli talks about the changes and new features added in PHP 7 and the road to the release of this greatest version.
Scalar type hinting and return types in PHP7 The upcoming PHP7 brings some cool stuff to the game. Here is a quick look at two of the new features: return types declarations and the controversial scalar type hinting.
JumpStart Exceptions in the Engine/ Throwable Interface Of all the new features of PHP 7, Exceptions in the engine is one of the most important. Let's take a quick look at this change and what it means to PHP developers.Confiscated butane canisters and "spice mix" – a synthetic cannabis – paraphernalia.
Remember being 15, not being able to buy weed, and getting turned down at every bodega you tried to buy beer at because your "European driving permit" didn't stop you sounding like a choirboy on a rollercoaster? If you were opportunistic, you may have stolen your parents' booze. If you had access to it, you may have bought some poppers or laughing gas and called it a (kind of half-assed, shitty) day.
In Dubai, however, access to all those things is somewhat restricted, so instead, ex-pat teens with a passion for temporarily altering their brain chemistry have taken to inhaling butane gas from cans of lighter fluid, because why the hell not? This may come as a shock, but huffing the noxious fumes of a highly flammable liquid isn't particularly good for your health. It can freeze your lungs if you're not careful and at least six ex-pat teenagers have died from it in the last few years. With access to any fun-inducing chemicals severely restricted out there, I suppose you take what you can get, but inhaling butane still seems like the dumbest thing imaginable.
To try to understand why people don't just wait a couple of years to buy booze and not inhale deadly gas, I spoke to "Steph" (Dubai's authorities aren't that keen on drugs, so she didn't want to share her real name), who lived in Dubai for three years, before leaving her parents and two sisters there to come back to the UK. One of her sister's friends died a couple of years ago after inhaling butane gas.
Everything an ex-pat teenager in Dubai needs for a great night.
VICE: When did you first hear about this whole huffing butane thing?
"Steph": The first time I saw it was when I was at my friend's place in 2007. He went and sat in a store cupboard, did some butane and was just a mess after that. I guess the closest comparison you could make is to laughing gas, or something, but it lasts longer. You just stand there laughing and giggling and being confused. Your depth perception goes and you end up laughing at your hands a lot. Only, unlike laughing gas, it can kill you instantly, which isn't a lot of fun. And it's not subtle, either. Everyone on it looks so fucked—that horrible fucked where your eyes roll back into your head and you look like you're going to die.
Sounds like fun. Is it only big with ex-pat kids who go to private school?
As far as I know, yeah, because local kids can get hold of proper drugs and pretty much get away with whatever. If they get caught, they'll just ring an uncle who knows someone, then everything's fine. I think it's because all these ex-pat kids, who could readily buy drugs in the UK, arrive in Dubai and realize they literally can't get anything. So the easiest thing to get is a legal substance you can abuse. It's definitely a teenage thing, though. My sister's friend Anton—who died from huffing butane—was 16, and it definitely seems like something you stop doing when you're 18, because you can go out to clubs around that age if you have fake ID and blonde hair.
Anton Tahmasian, who died in 2010 after using butane to get high.
So it's like poppers or balloons, or any of those legal highs you can buy in the UK, basically?
Yeah, it's the equivalent of the stuff you do when you're about 14 to 16 in the UK. But it seems a lot stranger, obviously. I wasn't completely unaware of drugs the first time I saw my friend do it, but that just baffled me. It's like, this is fucking butane—you don't huff butane.
I remember you telling me about people getting high of Lynx as well?
Yeah, a load of people do that, too. You just spray a shit-load of Lynx into a shirt or a bag, or whatever, which somehow extracts the butane from the deodorant, then huff that.
How do the police treat it? Because if it's not illegal, I'm guessing they can't really do anything.
Well, Anton's family left pretty swiftly after he died because they didn't want any repercussions. But yeah, that's more because there was a party at their house where kids were drinking alcohol—which would have had them thrown in jail—rather than the butane thing.
So is there really nothing else you can get your hands on?
I mean, I lived in Dubai for two years and couldn't get a hold of any weed, alcohol, coke, or anything else that whole time. And, to be honest, you don't really want to, either, because they're so strict on that kind of stuff out there. Mind you, my friend got caught smoking a spliff on the beach and was sent to jail for two years, but ended up doing her time in the family jail, which sounded like luxury. She had a TV in her cell and it sounded like basically living at home without having to pay rent or buy food.
Dubai, because weirdly no pictures exist online of people actually inhaling butane gas.
Oh, that's alright then. Have shop-keepers caught on? Has anyone stopped selling butane canisters to kids?
No, you can still get it anywhere at any age. Most of the mosques have little shops next to them and you can buy anything in there. They don't ID you for cigarettes past the age of about 12, they don't ID you for glue, and they don't ID you for paint, so I doubt they'll be IDing anyone for lighter fluid. A lot of the places deliver, as well. So you can be sitting at home, call up the shop, and they'll deliver the butane to you on a bike.
I never would have thought you could get drug delivery service in Dubai. So is it always recreational at parties and stuff, or do people end up getting hooked and doing it before school and that kind of thing?
Yeah, people get addicted and do it all the time—before school, in break time, even at the back of class. You can do it anywhere because it just smells like—well, you know what lighter fluid smells like. No one's going to suspect anything and the smell disappears almost instantly.
How exactly do you do it? Surely huffing a rag in the back of a classroom is pretty obvious.
No, it's different with the stuff in the actual lighter fluid canisters. You know there's that nib on the top that you poke into lighters to refill them? You put that bit in between your two front teeth, tilt your head forward so your chin's nearly on your chest, then push the bottle up so the butane releases and hits the top of your mouth over your tongue. If you do it at the wrong angle, it'll go straight down your throat and freeze your lungs, which is how people die from it.
The canister nib you stick in between your teeth when you want to inhale deadly gas.
Sounds dark. Is it brought up much in the media over there?
Not really. I mean, it's a hard thing to cover. Like in the case where Anton died, all the kids at the party were so terrified of the police that no one ended up giving a proper statement. So there's not much in police records and nobody will talk directly to the media there about it, either.
Is there any other disturbing stuff kids are using in Dubai to get high?
Nothing quite as shocking as inhaling butane. There's a thing called "spice," which is basically synthetic weed. It mostly makes people kind of giggly and high, but I've see some people properly freak out on it. One of my friends smoked a load, then disappeared, and I eventually found him in a bathroom screaming about how everything in there was too white for him. Then we got in a taxi and he started shouting again that we were going too fast, when we were only going 20mph, and just generally having a huge break down.
Party time.
Well, the problem with the legal highs in Dubai is that they mix everything in them. They smoke this really harsh tobacco and mix it with stuff they call herbal cannabis and all sorts of other weird stuff. So I think it just depends on the mix you get. My friend obviously got a bad one.
Obviously. Fuck ever doing any legal drugs in Dubai. Thanks, Steph!
Follow Jamie on Twitter: @jamie_clifton
Prefer more conventional narcotics? Try these:
Which Is the Coolest Drug?
I Learned How to Make Blow in Colombia
Watch - Krokodil TearsMake Sure Council Takes YES For An Answer
Hamilton Light Rail is launching a renewed effort to engage Hamiltonians in local consultation and advocacy to ensure that the Provincial investment in Light Rail Transit (LRT) for Hamilton is successful.
A year ago, on May 26, 2015, the Ontario Government announced full capital funding for LRT in Hamilton. This was a hugely exciting milestone after years of planning and advocacy, but there is still a lot of work to do before the project is completed.
Recent developments, including the selective leaking of information to the press and the level of leadership demonstrated by City Council on LRT, are cause for concern. To that end, Hamilton Light Rail is announcing a renewed effort to engage in local debate as the project unfolds.
http://hamiltonlightrail.ca/statements/new
On October 25, 2016, City Councillors will vote on a motion to reaffirm Council's support for LRT. Amazingly, there is a chance that they will vote to reject this motion, even after eight years of planning LRT, asking the Province for full capital funding, receiving full capital funding and launching a partnership with Metrolinx to finish designing and building it.
Now, as many times before, it is up to Hamiltonians to show leadership, courage and vision and remind Council why they supported LRT in the first place. Please take a few moments to express your LRT support and request that Council does the same:
http://hamiltonlightrail.ca/statements/new
If Council loses its nerve and turns down a billion dollars in transformative rapid transit investment, the effects on Hamilton's future prospects for growth and revitalization will be absolutely devastating. We simply cannot afford to screw this up!
See also:
Answers to all your Light Rail Transit QuestionsThe IDF is preparing for a resumption of anarchist violence at Bilin, Naalin and other hotspots in Judea and Samaria as anarchists leave the "housing protest" tent cities and return to their "regularly scheduled" program of violence.
During a recent tour for Knesset members, an IDF officer told MK Prof. Aryeh Eldad (National Union) that there was a marked reduction in anarchist violence at Bilin and Naalin over the summer, because the anarchists were busy taking part in the tent protests in Tel Aviv.
The officer assessed that the IDF "will now be meeting [the anarchists] in the friction spots. They will go back to torching fields, hurting farmers and confronting IDF forces."
In an interview with Arutz Sheva, MK Eldad refused to name the officer. He said that the man mentioned the assessment in a matter-of-fact tone and did not even realize the implications for the organizers of the "social protest," which the Israeli press has been touting as a bona fide non-political movement.
MK Eldad mentioned the investigative report by Maariv's Kalman Libeskind that placed US Democratic strategist Stanley Greenberg behind the protest.
"The fact is that these same anarchists succeeded in bringing out to the streets tens of thousands of Israelis who thought they were protesting about their private pain – a real pain about the price of baby food and rent," he explained. "Now that the tents are being folded, the IDF commanders who confront (leftist provocateur) Ezra Nawi every week will have to shift gears because they are returning to their arena, and as September approaches they [the provocateurs] intend to set the place alight."A month after being drafted 15th overall in 2012, Tyler Naquin talked about how his approach to hitting is “very simple” and about how he’d “never had a hitting instructor.” A little more than 18 months later, the 22-year-old outfield prospect is a more-refined version of the same player. He is also the most promising young hitter in the Cleveland Indians system.
Naquin spent most of his first full professional season at High-A Carolina, where his left-handed stroke produced a.275/.345/.424 slash line. He subsequently scuffled in an 18-game stint at Double-A Akron, but rebounded to hit.339 in the Arizona Fall League. Along the way, he made subtle, yet meaningful, adjustments.
Naquin talked about his developmental strides, and his expectations of hitting for plus-power, late last week.
——
Naquin on his willingness to learn: “You have to be open-minded to things. I’m going to listen to whatever these guys want me to do. I’m going to make adjustments, and if we see they’re good for me, then obviously I’m going to keep on grinding it out.
“I have a great relationship with all of the Indians staff. We understand each other real well. It’s a matter of finding what works for you, because not everybody is the same.
“I’ve always been a good hitter and had a feel for hitting. But that doesn’t mean I have it all figured out. Just because I went out and hit almost.400 in college and won a couple of [Big 12] batting titles doesn’t mean I’m going to do that at the next level. You have to always keep learning. I like to think Derek Jeter doesn’t have it completely figured out. He’s a great player, but in the game of baseball, you have to try to keep getting one percent better every day.
“Little adjustments can help. I feel if you can take one little thing from every other session in the cage, you keep building them up. Before long, you have a strong foundation to hit from.”
On his adjustments: “I started out hitting real tall, with my hands up high. They wanted to widen me out. When I got to the Fall League, I kind of found a happy medium. That’s what we were shooting for. We were making adjustments.
“My strikeouts went up. My pitch location got a little haywire about midway through the season, but you have to go through those struggles to find the happy medium. That’s eventually what happened, and when I got to Arizona — against the best competition — it seemed to all start coming together for me.
“We made it just a little bit wider, maybe a shoulder width apart, just to be able to use the ground for more power. It gives me more of a foundation from the ground up. I also lowered my hands, but not a whole lot. My stance is pretty much the same, just a little bit wider and a little bit lower with the hands.”
On trusting the process: “It can be hard to not focus on the numbers, but I think I have a pretty good handle on that. I can probably go out on a limb and say there are a whole bunch of players who didn’t hit.300 every year in minor league baseball, and now they’re hitting.290 to.315 in the major leagues.
“You have to go through the process. As they like to say, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s just something you’re going to have to suck up and deal with. You’re going to have to make adjustments. My goal isn’t to look back in 20 years and tell my kids, ‘Hey, I hit.340 in Double-A.’ No. Nobody remembers what you did in Double-A. The legacy you build begins with your major league debut and extends to when you retire. And that’s if you have the luxury of retiring. You might get let go.
“You have to pay your time to get up there with the big league guys. It’s not like the Indians’ coordinators are out to get me. It’s not, `We picked Naquin in the first round, so let‘s see if he can make it up there on his own.’ That’s clearly not the case. They want to help. They have my best interests in mind and want me to get to the big leagues as fast as I can, and help win a World Series.”
On home runs and stolen bases: “A lot of people thought I wouldn’t hit but two or three home runs. And it’s not really about the swing; it’s mostly about experience on how to hit a baseball. I rolled out my first year and hit 10. I think that surprised a lot of people. I believe that once I get to the big leagues, I could be a 20- to 25-a-year guy.
“I think I am [creating more backspin]. Backspin is big. Being able to turn on an inside pitch, and lift it, is a big deal for me if I want to be able to drive that ball out.
“Stealing bases is another thing I’d like to do better. Leaving the stadium [at Indians Fan Fest], I was talking to Kenny Lofton. He said, ‘Man, they like you a lot. What is something you need to work on to get to the big leagues and stay there?’ I said, `Well, probably stealing bases.’ We ended up talking about that for about 10 minutes.”
On strikeouts and OBP: “You have more control over things like your walks and strikeouts than your RBIs. You have to be in a situation for an RBI. Other guys have to set that table up for you. Hitting in the middle of an order is a luxury, but if you have a good bottom of your lineup, hitting first or second can be a luxury too. Everybody has a chance for some RBIs. But you obviously need guys on base for that to happen. On-base percentage is important. Everything is about getting on base, because a team needs to score runs to win.
“With your walks-to-strikeouts ratio… say you’re a guy who doesn’t strike out a lot, but your coordinators want you to make a change. If you need to make a change and are worried because you don’t want people seeing you’re striking out more often, well, that’s the point where you can become uncoachable. You have to throw all that stuff out the window in order to get better.
“My strikeouts did go up. But when I got to the Fall League, they went way down, and my walks were probably even better than they should have been. I trusted the process, and it panned out for me at the end — those [27] games and 115 at bats in the Fall League.”
On his 2013 highlights and lowlights: “Going to the All-Star game was a highlight. But really, working with our coordinators and learning the process is probably even bigger. It’s fun to learn and get better. Even if you’re striking out more in the process, you know you’re on your way to the big leagues. You can either decide to go with the help they’re offering, or you can decide to go down. I decided to grasp it, and that’s honestly my biggest highlight.
“As for the lowlights, I suppose it was just the grind. Your body takes a beating. Maybe that’s not really a lowlight, but rather part of what you go through in pro ball. For my first full season, I didn’t really know what to expect. But I’ve put on 15 pounds — I’m 187 pounds now — and feel I’m ready to go out there and be an everyday center fielder.While the tire treads will have no bearing on whether the tire will make for a sturdy base, you will want to ensure that the tire is intact and has no large rips or holes.
Use your measuring tape to obtain the measurements of the tire opening to ascertain the plywood size. You will be cutting out a circular piece for the top.
Instead of designing the bottom to match the top exactly, take the measurements of the tire’s diameter and then subtract 2 inches (5.1 cm). You will be creating a circular piece for the bottom as well.
Using the plywood bottom, determine the spacing before you secure them in place. Position the legs in different areas of the tire bottom to see which placement has the best balance.
6
Paint and/or stain the plywood and legs. All wood pieces should have a few coats of stain or paint. Now is a good time to get a little creative and you can apply a variety of paint and stain techniques to the wood or just add a few smooth coats of stain to create a refined look.President Obama’s May 9 announcement of his support for same-sex marriage unsurprisingly prompted immediate opposition from his detractors on the right, but it has found support in an unlikely place. In a sermon posted on the web last Friday, Senior Pastor Frederick D. Haynes III of the Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas blasted his congregation and other pastors for their outrage over Obama’s announcement, and, over shouts of disapproval from parishioners, unflinchingly declared his support for the president and the gay community.
Haynes said of Obama:
“He swore to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution – not the Bible, but the Constitution of the United States. He is not the pastor of the United States, he is the President of the United States. And for the first time in the history of this nation we have a president who has dared to use his position to make the democratic promise available not just for a select few, but for everyone.”
Haynes went on to express disbelief at the overwhelmingly negative reaction of black churches to Obama’s new stance, demanding an explanation from his flock.
“You should have seen pastors scurrying and hurrying to call out the president on what he said was a personal opinion. But whenever you like to ostracize other people it’s because there’s a fear that you have yourself, and the fear that you have finds itself rooted in an ignorance of other people. Or in a projection of your issues. Either there’s ignorance or there is a projection of your issues… It really blows my mind how outraged you are. You are so outraged over what the president said. First of all, take a chill pill. Take a deep breath. Everything’s going to be all right. You will not lose your 501(c)(3) if you do not marry same-sex couples. But I’ve got a question for you. Why are you so upset? Why did it bother you so? Why were you so emotional that you had to clothe your anger with the Bible and justify your bigotry with scripture? Why did you have to do it?”
Haynes added:
“Have you ever read the Gospel and heard Jesus say anything about homosexuality? …Black folk can’t even deal with homosexuality because we got issues with sexuality. And because we got issues with sexuality we can’t have a healthy discussion about homosexuality. Why, why do you get so upset? Why are you so mad at the president?”
Amid shouted objections and booing, Haynes continued, “Why are you so angry? Jesus never said a word about it. … Maybe we need to talk about what issues you may have. Evidently you’ve got some major issues or an ignorance rooted in fear.” In response to the crowd’s obvious displeasure, a resolute Haynes told his congregation, “Y’all not feeling this, but I’m going to preach the gospel anyhow. We love to judge other folks’ sins because it keeps it off of us as opposed to looking at us.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2yIaNSFBBw
When President Obama unequivocally declared his support for gay marriage following years of “evolving” on his position, political experts across the country predicted swift backlash from the black community.
This has not been the case, says Cal Jillson,a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
While Jillson concedes that polling suggests that African Americans tend to be more resistant to gay marriage, “The mistake was in assuming that that fact would overwhelm the very broad and deep support that African Americans had for President Obama in 2008 and still have today.
“Obama won the black vote 19 to 1 over John McCain in 2008. McCain got about 3 percent of the black vote, and Obama got the rest. And that is up from the normal 10 to 1 advantage that blacks give to the Democratic Party.”
Despite the fact that Obama’s announcement caused “significant disappointment in some quarters of the black community,” Jillson predicts that black Americans will continue to vote Democrat “in overwhelming numbers” in 2012.
“All voters make their decisions based on a wide range of issues. Gay marriage is only one of those issues. I think the number of black voters who would say, ‘I liked Obama in 2008, but now because of this one judgment I’m not going to vote for him’ will be very small. That will be an uncommon reaction. So I don’t think the Obama announcement is going to have a significant effect on the polls,” Jillson said, adding, “He’s not going to win 19 to 1 this time around; I think he’ll lose a little bit of his support among blacks, not simply because of gay marriage, but because of a whole range of things that have disappointed many Americans, the economy being foremost among them. So rather than the normal 10-1, they may give Obama 15, 16, or 17 to one rather than 19 to 1.”
According to a May 23 Washington Post/ABC News poll, 53 percent of Americans overall say gay marriage should be legal. Most of those surveyed said Obama’s stance on gay marriage would not be a major factor in their vote for president, and those who said Obama’s new position would make them more likely to support him for a second term were about equal in number to those who said it would make them oppose his reelection.
The poll also found African American support for same-sex marriage at 59 percent, up from 41 percent in polls prior to Obama’s announcement.
Religion continues to be a powerful force in the formation of political ideology. “Americans fundamentally believe in fairness, but many, like the President, have struggled to reconcile that core belief and the question of marriage equality,” Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese said in a press release following the President’s announcement. “The President’s words will no doubt inspire thousands more conversations around kitchen tables and in church pews. We are confident that our nation will continue to move inexorably toward equality and we thank the President for so boldly leading us in that direction.”
Added Jillson, “I think many ministers steer clear of politics because they have congregations that might be divided in terms of partisanship or ideology. Many black ministers face an overwhelmingly democratic congregation, and some of those black ministers are used to talking about politics in their sermons and leading their congregations in terms of how to view various candidates and issues – and that’s certainly the case across much of the South, and Texas, and in Dallas… Ministers in the South are used to talking to their congregations about politics, but they’re used to having a congregation that shares their view pretty uniformly.”
The tense scene that took place at the Friendship-West Baptist Church last week may be a sign of the changing national discourse on marriage equality.by
excepts from te post by Barking up the wrong tree
1) Thank someone
First thing in the morning, send an email thanking or praising someone. Research shows this can brighten your day.
2) Spend money “” on someone else
Harvard professor Michael Norton, author of Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending, talks about this in this video
3) Give 5 hugs
In a one-of-a-kind study, students at Pennsylvania State University were assigned to two groups. The first group was instructed to give or recevie a minimum of five hugs per day over the course of four weeks and to record the details. The hugs had to be front-to-front (nonsexual) hugs, using both arms of both participants; these students couldn’t simply huge their boyfriends or girlfriends half a dozen times; they had to aim to hug as many different individuals as possible. The second, the controls, was instructed simply to record the number of hours they read each day over the same four weeks.
People assigned to give or receive hugs 5 times a day ended up happier than the control group. From Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book
4) Do stuff you’re good at
People who deliberately exercised their signature strengths on a daily basis “” those qualities they were uniquely best at, the talents that set them apart from others – became significantly happier for months.
5) Do 5 little nice things for others
Pick one day a week and make a point of committing five acts of kindness. But if you want to reap the psychological benefit, make sure you do these things deliberately and consciously””you can’t just look back over the last 24 hours and declare your acts post hoc.
6) Create something to look forward to
One study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent. Often, the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation. If you can’t take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with friends, put something on the calendar””even if it’s a month or a year down the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.
7) Spend time with friends
Having a better social life is the happiness equivalent of making an extra $131,232 a year:
There is substantial evidence in the psychology and sociology literature that social relationships promote happiness for the individual. Yet the size of their impacts remains largely unknown. This paper explores the use of shadow pricing method to estimate the monetary values of the satisfaction with life gained by an increase in the frequency of interaction with friends, relatives, and neighbours.
8) Before bed, write down three good things that happened today
Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well. You may use a journal or your computer to write about the events, but it is important that you have a physical record of what you wrote. The three things need not be earthshaking in importance (” My husband picked up my favorite ice cream for dessert on the way home from work today”), but they can be important (” My sister just gave birth to a healthy baby boy”).
Read the full blog post by >CLICKING HERELatest Content 162 Comments) 13 Feb 2019 | Editorial: Without Map, Compass, or Destination - MRY on RPG Writing 254 Comments) 21 Jan 2019 | GOTY 2018: Results & Cool Graphs 306 Comments) 13 Jan 2019 | s 2018 GOTY - VOTE NOW! 219 Comments) 9 Jan 2019 | Review: ATOM RPG 29 Comments) 16 Dec 2018 | Review: Das Geisterschiff 98 Comments) 21 Oct 2018 | Review: Grimoire - The Real Official Review RPG Codex Review: Hard West Visit our sponsors! (or click here and disable ads) RPG Codex Review: Hard West Review - posted by Crooked Bee on Sat 26 December 2015, 18:39:47 Tags: Hard West
[Review by Ludo Lense]
Note: Some images in this review have been overlayed with black boxes to hide spoilers.
“The Old West was a hard place. The only thing in abundance was poverty. And firearms.”
People around these parts tend to cautiously flock around any title that has hints of being an RPG that isn't medieval fantasy-inspired, with bonus points awarded if it's not sci-fi either.
In this case, we have an occult Western-themed tactical game with some RPG elements, that has received plenty of good will in the form of $100,000 of Kickstarter funding and endorsements from the likes of John Romero, Chris Avellone and Brian Fargo. But before Hard West, the Poland-based CreativeForge Games only had a subpar sci-fi strategy game to their name, |
somehow end up in these houses without having a choice. No labor laws are applied to these children in most of the houses," said Chowdhury, who heads Sporshok, an organization which aims to raise awareness of the most ignored and vulnerable people in society.
Chowdhury said that the high numbers of child laborers could be traced back to traditional beliefs about children's role in supporting older generations. "The cultural ideology that the more children you have, the more financially secure family is also is a major factor behind child labor issue in Bangladesh."
Happy is looking forward to a new life in the shelter where she's meeting new friends.
A new life
Back in the shelter, Happy says she had feared she'd be living in the house forever. She's not angry with her grandmother, who suggested she take the job.
"I realized that my family needed money, and that I didn't have a job to support them. So, I agreed to work by myself -- nobody had to push me to even think about it."
Asked what she wants to do when she grows up, she says with a smile, "I want to go to school, I want to go to college and then become an actress."After a few weeks of bouncing between the first and second spots, the Seahawks are now the unanimous top pick across the board, courtesy of a Broncos loss and the Seahawks' beat-down of the Giants.
A week ago, people were abuzz about the Chargers stunning the nation by beating the Denver Broncos. "How did they do it?" people asked. "This was unexpected and unheard of!"
Then the same thing happened around the league to the other top contenders. All of a sudden, what San Diego accomplished in Denver was less impressive; It was just part of a collective bump in the road for the other top teams. That's not to say the Chargers didn't climb a little in the rankings this week — they did — I'm just saying given the Chargers' body of work this season, they didn't shoot up the rankings by any means.
I'm not here to whine. What the Chargers did in Denver was indeed impressive, but it was just one game. Know what else was one game? The matchup against Washington. As was the Tennessee game and the Miami games. If anything, the win over the Broncos is just that much more frustrating considering what could have been by now.
Notable Quotes
A Denver hiccup Thursday was excused when everyone else did the same Sunday. The Broncos should have home-field advantage, especially finishing against the Raiders and Texans -- a combined 6-22. - ESPN
Could this be the team Denver least wants to see in the playoffs? The Chargers pushed the Broncos in an eight-point Week 10 loss and then took it to the AFC leaders last Thursday. - Sports Illustrated
The San Diego Chargers may not be in the drivers seat for the playoffs, but they have found their groove. Fantastic games these past two weeks, including the "upset of the year" against the Broncos on Thursday. If the Chargers manage to sneak into the post season they will be very dangerous. In other news, The Chargers petitioned the NFL for Archie Manning to come out of retirement, so they could pull off the Manning Face Trifecta. - Reddit
Division Averages
Division Week 16 Average Week 15 Average Difference NFC West 7.9125 9.1750 1.2625 AFC West 13.2375 13.4750 0.2375 NFC South 14.6375 14.5250 -0.1125 AFC North 16.9125 17.1750 0.2625 AFC East 17.1250 17.3625 0.2375 NFC North 17.3875 18.1250 0.7375 NFC East 21.5500 19.4875 -2.0625 AFC South 23.2375 22.6750 -0.5625
Stock Rising
Team Week 15 Average Week 16 Average Difference MIN 26.879 23.750 3.129 STL 20.162 17.800 2.362 SDG 15.818 13.600 2.218 BAL 16.146 14.200 1.946 PIT 20.313 18.500 1.813
Stock Falling
Team Week 15 Average Week 16 Average Difference PHI 9.167 12.600 -3.433 DET 13.131 16.000 -2.869 DAL 16.222 18.800 -2.578 NYG 22.424 24.850 -2.426 JAX 27.283 29.350 -2.067
Subjective Average
Subjective Seahawks 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1.000 0.455 Broncos 2 3 2 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 2.200 -0.564 49ers 3 2 4 4 2 6 6 3 5 3 3.800 1.473 Panthers 4 4 7 5 5 3 5 4 4 6 4.700 1.391 Saints 5 5 6 6 4 5 4 6 3 4 4.800 -1.527 Chiefs 6 6 5 3 7 7 3 7 6 7 5.700 1.482 Patriots 7 7 3 7 6 4 7 5 7 5 5.800 -1.800 Cardinals 8 9 9 8 12 10 9 8 9 9 9.100 1.264 Bengals 9 8 8 9 15 11 8 9 8 8 9.300 -2.027 Colts 10 10 10 10 14 13 11 10 10 14 11.200 0.800 Ravens 12 11 12 11 11 8 14 13 13 11 11.600 1.582 Bears 13 14 13 13 10 12 13 12 12 10 12.200 0.891 Dolphins 14 12 14 12 8 15 10 11 14 13 12.300 1.882 Eagles 11 16 11 14 16 9 12 16 11 12 12.800 -3.800 Chargers 15 13 15 17 9 16 16 15 15 16 14.700 1.936 Packers 16 17 17 16 13 14 15 18 17 17 16.000 2.091 Lions 17 15 16 15 20 20 17 14 16 15 16.500 -3.682 Cowboys 18 18 18 18 21 17 18 20 19 18 18.500 -2.500 Steelers 19 19 19 20 17 19 19 17 20 19 18.800 1.382 Rams 20 20 20 19 18 18 20 19 18 20 19.200 2.346 Titans 21 22 21 21 26 24 22 21 21 21 22.000 -0.273 Jets 22 23 22 23 22 21 21 26 22 25 22.700 -1.700 Vikings 23 21 24 26 19 26 24 23 26 24 23.600 3.491 Giants 26 25 23 24 29 25 23 24 23 22 24.400 -2.218 Buccaneers 24 26 25 27 25 27 25 25 25 23 25.200 -1.382 Bills 25 27 27 22 27 22 26 29 24 26 25.500 2.136 Falcons 28 24 26 25 23 29 29 27 30 28 26.900 2.282 Browns 27 30 29 28 28 28 28 22 27 27 27.400 -1.945 Jaguars 29 29 28 29 24 23 27 30 29 29 27.700 -2.245 Raiders 30 28 30 30 30 30 30 28 28 30 29.400 -1.218 Redskins 31 31 31 31 32 31 31 31 31 31 31.100 -0.009 Texans 32 32 32 32 31 32 32 32 32 32 31.900 0.009
Observations:
SI seems to be the one that's a little off-kilter this week judging by the colors that don't quite line up.
Without SI moving the Chargers up to the 9th spot, they only rose 1.3 spots this week. Several rankers didn't even move the Chargers at all.
Seahawks are unanimous at number 1 in the subjective list. Broncos near-unanimous at number 2.
Your bottom 3 are firmly cemented: Raiders, Redskins and Texans. All three teams beat the Chargers this year.
Subjective Standard Deviation
Subjective Seahawks 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0.000 -0.656 Texans 32 32 32 32 31 32 32 32 32 32 0.300 0.012 Redskins 31 31 31 31 32 31 31 31 31 31 0.300 0.012 Broncos 2 3 2 2 3 2 2 2 2 2 0.400 -0.081 Rams 20 20 20 19 18 18 20 19 18 20 0.872 -1.317 Raiders 30 28 30 30 30 30 30 28 28 30 0.917 -0.112 Steelers 19 19 19 20 17 19 19 17 20 19 0.980 -0.547 Saints 5 5 6 6 4 5 4 6 3 4 0.980 0.535 Panthers 4 4 7 5 5 3 5 4 4 6 1.100 0.307 Cowboys 18 18 18 18 21 17 18 20 19 18 1.118 -0.010 Cardinals 8 9 9 8 12 10 9 8 9 9 1.136 -0.090 Buccaneers 24 26 25 27 25 27 25 25 25 23 1.166 -0.026 Bears 13 14 13 13 10 12 13 12 12 10 1.249 -0.130 Patriots 7 7 3 7 6 4 7 5 7 5 1.400 0.547 49ers 3 2 4 4 2 6 6 3 5 3 1.400 0.187 Packers 16 17 17 16 13 14 15 18 17 17 1.483 -0.349 Chiefs 6 6 5 3 7 7 3 7 6 7 1.487 0.458 Jets 22 23 22 23 22 21 21 26 22 25 1.552 -0.448 Ravens 12 11 12 11 11 8 14 13 13 11 1.562 0.533 Titans 21 22 21 21 26 24 22 21 21 21 1.613 -0.765 Colts 10 10 10 10 14 13 11 10 10 14 1.661 0.455 Giants 26 25 23 24 29 25 23 24 23 22 1.908 0.159 Lions 17 15 16 15 20 20 17 14 16 15 1.962 -0.287 Browns 27 30 29 28 28 28 28 22 27 27 2.010 0.339 Dolphins 14 12 14 12 8 15 10 11 14 13 2.052 0.106 Bengals 9 8 8 9 15 11 8 9 8 8 2.100 0.964 Chargers 15 13 15 17 9 16 16 15 15 16 2.147 1.168 Vikings 23 21 24 26 19 26 24 23 26 24 2.154 0.273 Bills 25 27 27 22 27 22 26 29 24 26 2.156 0.436 Falcons 28 24 26 25 23 29 29 27 30 28 2.211 1.019 Jaguars 29 29 28 29 24 23 27 30 29 29 2.238 -0.537 Eagles 11 16 11 14 16 9 12 16 11 12 2.400 1.547
Observations:
NFC teams make up 11 of the top 16 teams in the "more consistently-ranked" teams. Not surprising.
Eagles are ranked about as consistently as they've played this year.
Most (not all) of the inconsistency can be blamed on SI.
Objective Average
Objective Seahawks 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1.000 0.222 Panthers 3 8 3 3 5 2 4 3 4 3 3.800 0.533 49ers 5 5 2 2 14 4 3 4 2 2 4.300 1.700 Broncos 2 3 6 4 10 3 2 7 3 5 4.500 -1.500 Saints 7 2 4 6 2 8 5 5 6 4 4.900 -0.567 Bengals 8 4 9 8 4 6 8 6 10 9 7.200 -0.978 Chiefs 4 19 12 5 11 5 6 2 5 6 7.500 0.167 Cardinals 10 7 5 7 13 11 7 10 7 8 8.500 -0.167 Patriots 6 11 8 9 9 10 9 8 9 7 8.600 -1.156 Colts 14 18 14 11 8 13 10 14 8 10 12.000 1.000 Dolphins 18 15 7 10 6 15 13 13 12 11 12.000 1.333 Eagles 11 6 15 15 12 9 17 9 14 16 12.400 -3.067 Bears 9 10 17 17 3 12 16 11 16 13 12.400 1.933 Chargers 12 16 11 12 7 14 12 15 11 15 12.500 2.500 Lions 16 9 22 19 20 7 14 12 19 17 15.500 -2.056 Rams 15 27 10 13 26 16 11 21 13 12 16.400 2.378 Ravens 20 26 13 14 15 17 18 16 15 14 16.800 2.311 Steelers 13 13 18 18 18 23 20 19 20 20 18.200 2.244 Packers 21 12 20 21 23 18 21 17 18 19 19.000 0.778 Cowboys 19 23 21 16 21 21 15 20 17 18 19.100 -2.656 Titans 22 21 27 20 16 20 19 18 21 21 20.500 -1.389 Buccaneers 17 30 16 23 19 22 22 22 23 22 21.600 -2.711 Bills 23 22 25 25 27 19 24 23 27 23 23.800 1.422 Vikings 24 20 19 22 28 28 25 24 24 25 23.900 2.767 Falcons 25 28 23 24 24 29 23 27 25 24 25.200 0.133 Giants 28 17 24 26 22 31 27 29 22 27 25.300 -2.633 Browns 27 14 29 29 25 27 26 25 30 28 26.000 0.111 Jets 26 29 26 27 17 25 30 31 26 26 26.300 0.367 Redskins 30 25 30 30 29 24 31 28 31 30 28.800 0.311 Raiders 31 31 31 28 30 26 29 30 29 29 29.400 -0.844 Texans 29 24 32 32 32 30 28 26 32 31 29.600 -0.600 Jaguars 32 32 28 31 31 32 32 32 28 32 31.000 -1.889
Observations:
After a week of looking in line with the other rankings, BeatGraphs got all broken after this last week of upsets.
Seahawks are unanimous on this list too. The Panthers are nearly 2 full spots behind them in 2nd place.
Sharp clustering of teams. Chargers included in the "Good, not great" teams, that includes Colts, Dolphins, Eagles and Bears.
Jaguars still holding down the fort at the bottom of the list.
Objective Standard Deviation
Objective Seahawks 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0.000 -0.629 Patriots 6 11 8 9 9 10 9 8 9 7 1.357 -0.909 Raiders 31 31 31 28 30 26 29 30 29 29 1.497 -0.453 Jaguars 32 32 28 31 31 32 32 32 28 32 1.549 -2.322 Panthers 3 8 3 3 5 2 4 3 4 3 1.600 -1.527 Saints 7 2 4 6 2 8 5 5 6 4 1.868 0.814 Bengals 8 4 9 8 4 6 8 6 10 9 1.990 -0.539 Falcons 25 28 23 24 24 29 23 27 25 24 1.990 -0.759 Bills 23 22 25 25 27 19 24 23 27 23 2.272 -1.217 Cardinals 10 7 5 7 13 11 7 10 7 8 2.291 0.527 Redskins 30 25 30 30 29 24 31 28 31 30 2.315 0.032 Broncos 2 3 6 4 10 3 2 7 3 5 2.419 1.172 Cowboys 19 23 21 16 21 21 15 20 17 18 2.427 -0.943 Chargers 12 16 11 12 7 14 12 15 11 15 2.500 0.867 Texans 29 24 32 32 32 30 28 26 32 31 2.691 -0.676 Titans 22 21 27 20 16 20 19 18 21 21 2.730 -0.155 Vikings 24 20 19 22 28 28 25 24 24 25 2.809 1.395 Packers 21 12 20 21 23 18 21 17 18 19 2.898 -0.896 Steelers 13 13 18 18 18 23 20 19 20 20 2.960 -0.026 Colts 14 18 14 11 8 13 10 14 8 10 3.000 -0.019 Eagles 11 6 15 15 12 9 17 9 14 16 3.412 0.873 49ers 5 5 2 2 14 4 3 4 2 2 3.437 0.855 Dolphins 18 15 7 10 6 15 13 13 12 11 3.493 0.785 Jets 26 29 26 27 17 25 30 31 26 26 3.635 1.141 Ravens 20 26 13 14 15 17 18 16 15 14 3.655 0.307 Buccaneers 17 30 16 23 19 22 22 22 23 22 3.666 -1.129 Giants 28 17 24 26 22 31 27 29 22 27 3.900 -0.814 Bears 9 10 17 17 3 12 16 11 16 13 4.200 0.768 Browns 27 14 29 29 25 27 26 25 30 28 4.313 -0.839 Lions 16 9 22 19 20 7 14 12 19 17 4.674 1.473 Chiefs 4 19 12 5 11 5 6 2 5 6 4.801 0.329 Rams 15 27 10 13 26 16 11 21 13 12 5.834 0.261
Overall Average
Subj vs Obj Seahawks 1.000 1.000 1.000 0.338 Broncos 2.200 4.500 3.350 -1.032 49ers 3.800 4.300 4.050 1.586 Panthers 4.700 3.800 4.250 0.962 Saints 4.800 4.900 4.850 -1.047 Chiefs 5.700 7.500 6.600 0.824 Patriots 5.800 8.600 7.200 -1.478 Bengals 9.300 7.200 8.250 -1.503 Cardinals 9.100 8.500 8.800 0.548 Colts 11.200 12.000 11.600 0.900 Dolphins 12.300 12.000 12.150 1.608 Bears 12.200 12.400 12.300 1.412 Eagles 12.800 12.400 12.600 -3.433 Chargers 14.700 12.500 13.600 2.218 Ravens 11.600 16.800 14.200 1.946 Lions 16.500 15.500 16.000 -2.869 Packers 16.000 19.000 17.500 1.434 Rams 19.200 16.400 17.800 2.362 Steelers 18.800 18.200 18.500 1.813 Cowboys 18.500 19.100 18.800 -2.578 Titans 22.000 20.500 21.250 -0.831 Buccaneers 25.200 21.600 23.400 -2.046 Vikings 23.600 23.900 23.750 3.129 Jets 22.700 26.300 24.500 -0.667 Bills 25.500 23.800 24.650 1.779 Giants 24.400 25.300 24.850 -2.426 Falcons 26.900 25.200 26.050 1.208 Browns 27.400 26.000 26.700 -0.917 Jaguars 27.700 31.000 29.350 -2.067 Raiders 29.400 29.400 29.400 -1.031 Redskins 31.100 28.800 29.950 0.151 Texans 31.900 29.600 30.750 -0.295
Observations:
That sharp delineation from above carries over to the overall listing. There's Seattle, then there's the rest of the league.
Baltimore now joins the other teams in the "good, not great" list.
Overall now, the Jaguars, Raiders, Redskins and Texans are solidly the bottom 4.
Overall Standard Deviation
Subj vs Obj Seahawks 1.000 1.000 0.000 -0.654 Raiders 29.400 29.400 1.241 -0.285 Panthers 4.700 3.800 1.445 -0.902 Saints 4.800 4.900 1.493 0.551 Cardinals 9.100 8.500 1.833 0.031 Cowboys 18.500 19.100 1.913 -0.508 Patriots 5.800 8.600 1.965 -0.411 Redskins 31.100 28.800 2.012 0.179 Broncos 2.200 4.500 2.080 0.945 Steelers 18.800 18.200 2.225 -0.079 Texans 31.900 29.600 2.233 -0.458 Falcons 26.900 25.200 2.269 -0.532 Bengals 9.300 7.200 2.300 0.335 Titans 22.000 20.500 2.364 -0.560 Bills 25.500 23.800 2.372 -0.552 Colts 11.200 12.000 2.458 0.189 Vikings 23.600 23.900 2.508 0.808 Jaguars 27.700 31.000 2.535 -1.245 Chargers 14.700 12.500 2.577 1.031 49ers 3.800 4.300 2.636 0.651 Packers 16.000 19.000 2.748 -0.257 Dolphins 12.300 12.000 2.868 0.510 Eagles 12.800 12.400 2.956 1.132 Bears 12.200 12.400 3.100 0.506 Giants 24.400 25.300 3.103 -0.323 Buccaneers 25.200 21.600 3.262 -0.878 Jets 22.700 26.300 3.324 -0.274 Browns 27.400 26.000 3.437 -0.249 Lions 16.500 15.500 3.619 0.882 Chiefs 5.700 7.500 3.666 0.561 Ravens 11.600 16.800 3.829 0.044 Rams 19.200 16.400 4.400 0.098
Difference in Averages
Subj vs Obj Ravens 11.600 16.800 5.200 -0.729 Jets 22.700 26.300 3.600 -2.067 Jaguars 27.700 31.000 3.300 -0.357 Packers 16.000 19.000 3.000 1.313 Patriots 5.800 8.600 2.800 -0.644 Broncos 2.200 4.500 2.300 0.936 Chiefs 5.700 7.500 1.800 1.315 Giants 24.400 25.300 0.900 0.415 Colts 11.200 12.000 0.800 -0.200 Cowboys 18.500 19.100 0.600 0.156 49ers 3.800 4.300 0.500 -0.227 Vikings 23.600 23.900 0.300 0.724 Bears 12.200 12.400 0.200 -1.042 Saints 4.800 4.900 0.100 -0.961 Raiders 29.400 29.400 0.000 -0.374 Seahawks 1.000 1.000 0.000 0.232 Dolphins 12.300 12.000 -0.300 0.549 Eagles 12.800 12.400 -0.400 -0.733 Cardinals 9.100 8.500 -0.600 1.430 Steelers 18.800 18.200 -0.600 -0.863 Panthers 4.700 3.800 -0.900 0.858 Lions 16.500 15.500 -1.000 -1.626 Browns 27.400 26.000 -1.400 -2.057 Titans 22.000 20.500 -1.500 1.116 Falcons 26.900 25.200 -1.700 2.149 Bills 25.500 23.800 -1.700 0.714 Bengals 9.300 7.200 -2.100 -1.049 Chargers 14.700 12.500 -2.200 -0.564 Redskins 31.100 28.800 -2.300 -0.320 Texans 31.900 29.600 -2.300 0.609 Rams 19.200 16.400 -2.800 -0.032 Buccaneers 25.200 21.600 -3.600 1.329
Observations:
6 of the 7 teams with an "over-ranking" greater than 1 are in the AFC.
6 of the 10 teams with an "under-ranking" more than 1 are in the AFC.
That means of the 17 teams with more than 1 spot of disparity, 12 are in the AFC. The conference is in shambles.
On the flip-side, Oakland is ranked exactly where they should be at 29.400. Neat.
SourcesLast Wednesday, the United Talent Agency, home to A-listers like Harrison Ford, Angelina Jolie, and Amy Schumer, announced it was cancelling its long-awaited Oscars party and instead donating $250,000 to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The action was meant as a symbol of resistance against President Donald J. Trump.
By now, everyone is aware of the special place the ACLU holds in the hearts of people on the left. According to The Washington Post, after President Donald Trump’s victory in November, the ACLU has received over $15 million. This groundswell of support continued following his first week in office, during which he signed several controversial executive orders, including new travel restrictions on individuals entering the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries, for which the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the administration. All told, this past weekend, the civil rights group received over $24 million, which, as The Post reports, is over six times its yearly average.
It makes sense too. Donald Trump has not exactly inspired confidence that he will not single out minority groups in his effort to rally voters, and the ACLU’s reputation for protecting disenfranchised peoples precedes it. It was just a few short years ago, in 2013, when the group took on the National Security Agency (NSA) over the latter’s “unconstitutional” domestic spying program involving the collection of Americans’ phone metadata. The left cheered, as it is doing once again.
But something now needs examination in light of the fact hundreds of thousands of people are looking for groups which will fight on the front lines and #resist Trump: the role the ACLU played in creating the conditions that led to the President’s election—namely an unresponsive government beholden to economic elites.
The ACLU has been a key and consistent player in the dismantling of the federal regulatory framework for campaign finance. It has been a party on the winning side in both the 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo and the 2010 case, Citizens United v. FEC which respectively established the controversial principles that spending money is a protected form of speech and that corporations and unions were entitled to the same speech rights as private citizens.
Since these decisions, the influence of money in our political system has grown significantly, with congressmen dedicating virtually half of their time fundraising. A nonpartisan study from 2014 of the past four decades since Buckley found that policy outcomes are driven by the demands of the economic elite rather than popular will. Critics have criticized the methodology of that study, only to find that their own research confirms the overall premise that the US has become an oligarchy. The demands of the elites outweigh the will of the people.
And in our oligarchy, money is not only incredibly influential, but also incredibly difficult to trace. Thanks to Citizens United, even foreign governments can get in on the action by using dummy corporations. An example of how this becomes a real problem for transparency is when said dummy corporation is a 501©(4) nonprofit, a type of nonprofit able to keep its donors hidden. These corporations can also hire federally registered lobbyists, which mandates disclosure. Of course, anyone really bent on circumventing that disclosure requirement can retain de facto lobbyists who take advantage of the Daschle Loophole, thus falling just shy of the legal definition of what a lobbyist is. All told, our campaign finance laws are now so porous there is no way of knowing how much money foreign governments spend in our elections thanks to that fateful 2010 Supreme Court decision.
And yet, when faced with criticism a few years ago, the ACLU stood by its position. There’s a disingenuous statement on their website arguing the solution to the rising oligarchy is more money for candidates, more enforcement of the few rules still in place—rules which are difficult to enforce with Buckley on the books—and more transparency:
In our view, the answer to that problem is to expand, not limit, the resources available for political advocacy. Thus, the ACLU supports a comprehensive and meaningful system of public financing that would help create a level playing field for every qualified candidate. We support carefully drawn disclosure rules. We support reasonable limits on campaign contributions and we support stricter enforcement of existing bans on coordination between candidates and super PACs.
Incredibly, in defense of its assessment, the ACLU makes the case that the “loopholes” discovered since Buckley prove regulation won’t work:
Some argue that campaign finance laws can be surgically drafted to protect legitimate political speech while restricting speech that leads to undue influence by wealthy special interests. Experience over the last 40 years has taught us that money always finds an outlet, and the endless search for loopholes simply creates the next target for new regulation. It also contributes to cynicism about our political process.
It later attempts to misdirect angry readers unaware of the group’s role in previous cases before pledging to oppose any significant effort to fix the system.
It is also useful to remember that the mixture of money and politics long predates Citizens United and would not disappear even if Citizens United were overruled. The 2008 presidential election, which took place before Citizens United,was the most expensive in U.S. history until that point. The super PACs that have emerged in the 2012 election cycle have been funded with a significant amount of money from individuals, not corporations, and individual spending was not even at issue in Citizens United.
Unfortunately, legitimate concern over the influence of “big money” in politics has led some to propose a constitutional amendment to reverse the decision. The ACLU will firmly oppose any constitutional amendment that would limit the free speech clause of the First Amendment.
This whole defense is perverse. The Bill of Rights was implemented to ensure our system of representative government continued. However, as we are seeing, when money is speech, there is no representation. Economic elites determine which laws get passed and which do not.
If the ACLU wants to be a leader in the #Resistance against the unconstitutional aspects of President Trump’s agenda, it should prove it by offering its donors an option to earmark their donation so that after these legal battles, the money is not used to undermine future efforts to regulate campaign finance. If it cannot do this, the left should reconsider funding such an organization.Sterling hits 11-day high as dollar drops on weak U.S. GDP data
By Jemima Kelly
LONDON, July 29 (Reuters) - Sterling gained more than 1 percent on Friday to trade above $1.33 for the first time in eleven days, as the greenback dropped sharply across the board after U.S. economic growth data came in much weaker than expected.
Since plunging 14 percent within hours after Britain's shock vote |
that you can rent; or a private cloud running on your own dedicated Mac hardware that lets you deploy virtual servers and services on demand. Once up and running you can use your Mac hardware for anything that runs on OS X including Xcode build servers, OS X Server for Mail, etc, Git hosting, backup, and loads more.
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A Mac app that gives you quick access to all the icons you could need. IconJar is a complete icon organiser that lets you browse and search for thousands of vector icons. You can preview any icon before dragging and dropping into any application or exporting using one of the built-in or custom presets. Icons can be imported in a number of different formats, but the best way to find new icons is to browse the more than 40,000 compatible icon sets at IconFinder.
A simple Mac app that lets you generate app icons in milliseconds for iOS, watchOS, iMessage Apps, macOS and more. You just drag your app icon image into App Icon Generator, choose the devices that you would like to export for, and click export. All of your icons are then exported into a folder, named by size and automatically converted to PNG ready for use.
A simple Mac app for creating good looking App Store screenshots. Screenshot Creator lets you drag in the screenshots taken on your simulator or device and it will resize and frame them in the most suitable iOS device. You can then add captions, rearrange the layout, adjust the backgrounds, change the fonts and more. When you’re ready to export, it will batch export all of them into the optimum sizes for display on the AppStore including the correct device for each resolution. Screenshot Creator supports all devices from iPhone 5 up to iPhone X, iPad and iPad Pro in all colours.
A set of nearly 2,500 premium icons across 22 different categories. Swifticons includes each icon in 6 different styles (including outlined, filled, and coloured) and is downloadable as a scalable image in a number of different formats including Sketch, Illustrator, and SVG. You can get access to the complete set for a one-off price that includes free life-time updates. You can also use Swifticons with the handy IconJar app for Mac to get quick access to whatever icon you need.
A pair of tools for creating App Store screenshots and device mockups. AppLaunchpad provides over 1000 free professional looking pre-made device mockup templates ready for you to drop in your screenshots. You can then customise with background colours, text styles and colours. Some templates also have placeholders for company logos or app icons. The Screenshot builder lets you select from dozens of predesigned templates and devices for iOS and Android to create trendy looking App Store and Google Play images.
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A gallery selecting the best in iOS app design from around the world. MobileMozaic aims to be a rich source of inspiration for iOS designers and developers. All submissions have been categorised based on UI patterns such as activity feeds, logins, popovers, timelines, and loads more. You can also browse by category such as travel, productivity or sports, or search by name, making it easy to find the inspiration you need.
A huge collection of animated UI design inspirations. UI Movement designs are submitted by the community and curated by the site's creator, Ramy. Each new design is tagged so that you can easily find the most popular design animations for whatever design element you're looking for. You can also sign up to the email newsletter to have the top UI designs delivered to your inbox each week.
A curated collection of inspiring UI interactions and concepts from iOS and Android apps. UI Interactions is updated daily with new delightful interactions including animations, gestures, loaders, transitions, on-boarding, and loads more. Each interaction is tagged and searchable with links back to the source and author, so it's easy to find the inspiration you're after.
A collection of example email copy from a number of well known online companies. Just Good Copy makes it easier to get the communication with your users right by giving you examples of how other online companies are doing it. The collection includes example emails for loads of different purposes including welcome, thank you, feature announcements, email confirmation, and more, from companies such as Slack, Pinterest, Evernote, Dropbox and GitHub.
A collection of free, high-quality Sketch resources ready to use in your next project, or just to give you bit of inspiration. Sketch Repo includes Sketch resources across a number of categories, including mockups, icons, mobile, UI kits, and more. They're also accepting submissions if you'd like to contribute some of your work. You can also subscribe to the Sketch Repo mailing list to get the best Sketch resources sent to your email.
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A curated list of remote and onsite iOS developer jobs from around the world. iOS Jobs features job postings from at everything from large well-known companies to small independent agencies and start-ups. You can search for jobs by location and each posting is tagged with the required skills. New postings are added every week so it's worth subscribing to the monthly email newsletter to stay up to date.
A platform that brings together people looking for others who want to start or collaborate on a side project. Nomad Projects combines ideas and skills so if you have an idea for a side project but are missing some of the skills needed, or you just want to use your skills to fill some free time, you can find the people to work with. You can search the platform by listing 'nomads' with project ideas, or those that are looking for others with an idea. You can also filter by the amount of time you have to devote to the side project, or search for a specific skill, then assemble a team and get started.
A site that aims to make creating apps or websites easier by connecting designers and developers with like-minded people. Build it With Me lets anyone with an idea for an app post a request for designers and developers with the skill they need. The site lets you search for available projects by skills required and type, or you can view those that were recently added or popular right now. If you have an idea for an app and need a backend developer or designer, or you're just looking for your next project to work on, Build it With Me might be a great way of finding it.
A developer freelancing site where you can hire and get hired. Toptal aims to provide access to the best freelance developers by screening every applicant and typically only 3% are accepted. This means that you can find a top developer from one of several disciplines (including iOS, Android, front-end, Node.js, Ruby and more) in less than 3 weeks. If you're looking to get hired, then getting accepted by Toptal means you're an A-player which gives you access to an abundance of opportunities allowing you to pick your favorite projects and teams.
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A fantastic free collection of learning resources for Swift and iOS developers. Skilled includes over 75 videos, presentations and articles from well-known developers from the iOS and Swift community. Most of the posts feature conference talks including videos, full searchable transcripts, code samples and links to GitHub projects and other useful resources. Definitely subscribe to the email newsletter so you don't miss out on any of the new content added to the collection.
A new video series exploring functional programming in Swift. Point-Free is hosted by two ex-Kickstarter engineers who have a real interest in functional programming. Each episode aims to take a topic that may seem complex and academic and dissects it making it simple to understand. Episodes are transcribed for easy searching and reference, and come with fully-functioning Swift playgrounds so that you can experiment with the concepts discussed. The first episode is free to watch with future episodes available with a subscription.
A catalogue of the best online programming courses and tutorials. Hackr.io lets you search over 100 different programming languages and platforms — including iOS, Swift and Objective-C — for user submitted tutorials each voted on by the programming community. Each course is tagged up by cost, type, platform/language version, and difficulty level making it easier to find the best course for you. If you know a course or tutorial that is missing from the list, you can submit it and earn reputation and badges.
An online service that helps you connect with an expert mentor to help you in real time. Codementor has a directory of over 5000 domain experts across more than 100 categories who can provide you with live debugging help, code review and pair programming via screen sharing, video, and text chat. You start by posting your request for either live 1:1 help or a long-term mentor, and Codementor will connect you with an expert. If you consider yourself a bit of an expert, you can apply to become a mentor and get paid to help others with their programming problems.
A new book that teaches you Swift for the server and web development through real-world projects. Server-Side Swift takes you from beginner to intermediate with IBM's Kitura framework for server-side Swift using 12 practical projects. The course covers everything from sessions, databases, and logging, to templating, user authentication, and more, all in the latest version of Swift. You'll end up with a huge library of finished projects you can develop further or use as the base for something entirely new.
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A Mac app and platform that offers continuous localization for your Xcode projects. LocalizeWiz completely automates the localization workflow by monitoring strings files in your Xcode projects for changes, so any new content is automatically localized to all your supported locales, and changes synced back to your Xcode project. You get to localize up to 300 strings or 3 projects for free, with additional paid plans to remove restrictions and translate your app to over 50 different languages.
A multi-platform localisation service. Localise lets you upload your source files in pretty much any recognised language file format, and collaborate with your team to translate your app into multiple languages. Once translated you can download your updated files, or use the iOS framework that provides over-the-air localisation so you can update your translations without having to submit your app for review. Localise has built in Google and Yandex machine translations, or you can buy translations for a price per word fee.
A localization SDK and platform for iOS and Android. The Qordoba SDKs work with the asset and localization files in your app to parse and ingest them into the Qordoba platform, a visual web-based solution for editing and managing mobile app UI and the metadata for your app. New languages or updated content can be delivered to your users via Qordoba's SDK so you can add languages on the fly or remove and edit content in existing languages without needing to resubmit your application to the App Store.
An online translation and localization management tool. POEditor offers a simple interface for translators, devs and project managers to collaboratively localize apps, websites, games and more. You can customise and automate the localization workflow with the POEditor API and shorten the file management process with the GitHub and Bitbucket integration. POEditor allows you to make your project public, if you want to crowdsource translations, and is free for Open Source projects.
A localisation code generator written in Swift. Laurine is a Swift script that scans your localisation file and generates actual structured code in Objective-C or Swift, making the usage of localised strings much easier. It allows you to remove magical strings from your code so the compiler can actually tell you when you forget to make changes if your localisation file changes. It also introduces type checking for strings that contain runtime format specifiers such as "%@" or "%d". The generated structures can also be nested so your localisations can be descriptive and easy to traverse.
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A huge collection of ready to use machine learning models in the Core ML format to include in your iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS apps. Awesome Core ML Models includes pre-trained Core ML models across a number of different categories including image recognition and processing, image style transfer, text processing, and more. Each model listed includes a reference link, demo, installation instructions, and a direct download link. The list currently features of 30 models, but you can also contribute your own.
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It's now been over a year since Apple Maps launched with iOS 6 and it's still lagging a long way behind its competitors. If you want to include maps in your app but don't trust Map Kit, Mapbox is a great alternative. They provide a drop-in SDK that is a bottom-up, open source rewrite providing the same features as Map Kit as well as offline map caching, extensive map customisation and loads more. Mapbox is used by some pretty big names, including Foursquare and Pintrest, and the map data is powered by the OpenStreetMap project so is very accurate and up to date. The free plan gets you 3,000 map views per month but there are a decent selection of paid plans if that's not enough.
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An API for human labour. Scale aims to solve the problem of software struggling with complex tasks by using actual human beings. They provide an API that lets you create tasks that will be completed accurately by one of their 'Scalers'. Current tasks include content moderation, phone surveys, transcription, e-commerce tagging, de-duplication and image annotation. Responses are typically returned within 5 minutes with a JSON payload to a callback URL you specify, and prices start at around $0.10 per request.
An advanced web debugging proxy app for Mac. Surge is capable of intercepting and logging the summary of all HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5, SOCK5 over TLS traffic. You can monitor all recent network requests, adjust proxy rules, and manipulate Local DNS Mapping. You can also decrypt HTTPS traffic using an MitM certificate. There's also a clever iOS version that can capture all HTTP/HTTPS/TCP traffic from any app on your device, and redirect to an HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5/SOCKS5 TLS proxy server following highly configurable rules.
A Mac app that lets you easily serve up mock JSON, XML, or text responses to make development easier. ServeUp removes the reliance on third party services when developing and testing networking code by allowing you to quickly create custom mock REST API responses and serve content over HTTP or HTTPS. You can set up sophisticated pattern matching using any part of the URL, headers, cookies, form variables, and more, and provide custom responses for each match. You can also provide global overrides for delays and status code responses.
An online service that transforms your REST endpoints into streaming APIs without having to write any code. Heartbeat runs a worker process that will poll your REST API at the polling frequency you specify in the dashboard and show the changes via an elegant realtime endpoint, and can store updates for up to six hours. It's free to use while in beta with up to five REST endpoints per user and a minimum polling frequency of 1 minute.
An open source tool for sending push notifications to Android and iOS. Pushkin has two modes of operation: Push Notification mode can issue a direct notification for the supplied user and message. Pushkin will find the device ID for the user and send the message. Event mode can send notifications based on an event - something happening to a certain user. Pushkin will decide whether it should send a notification based on the event, construct a localised message, find the device ID for the user and send the notification. It is also easily scalable, because you can run as many instances as you need with each instance capable of pushing 500 messages per second.
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A Hacker News style website to share links to interesting Swift resources like tutorials, blog posts, GitHub projects, iOS API news, related open source Swift developments, Swift Linux news and more. Once you've connected your GitHub or Twitter account, SwiftWatch lets you post links, up-vote and comment. Like Hacker News, posted links can be viewed by popularity based on up-votes or chronologically, or you can subscribe to the site's RSS feed.
An iOS app that lets you keep up with the Swift programming language mailing lists on the go on iPhone and iPad. Charter gives you access to the Swift Evolution (swift-evolution), Swift Users (swift-users), and Swift Dev (swift-dev) mailing lists, with messages threaded together to make discussion easy to follow. You can download the list contents to read online and offline and view emails by message thread to follow the conversation. Excessively long quotes in emails are truncated to remove noise, making it easier to follow along.
A new OS X app that lets you browse and follow the discussions in the Swift mailing lists such as Swift-Evolution or Swift-Dev. Hirundo makes accessing the information you need much more convenient than the web archive by including full search of everything posted to the lists, bookmarking of any message or thread, and ranking that highlights the most discussed threads. If the lists get a bit much, you can also mute specific threads so they don't appear in the lists, or favourite certain authors to jump straight to their posts.
A free weekly email of hand picked iOS development links with sections on News, Tools, Code, Design and Business. Published every Friday by Dave Verwer.
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A weekly podcast about iOS development and related technology by development veterans. The iPhreaks Show started back in April 2013 and is now approaching 200 episodes. It uses a group discussion format with a handful of regular hosts and a special guest each week to discuss a relevant topic related to iOS, Apple, tools, practices, and code. Episodes are typically around 45 minutes long and have recently covered topics such as React Native, Swift 3 migrations, Xamarin, protocol oriented programming, and more.
A biweekly podcasts hosted by Soroush Khanlou and Chris Dzombak. Fatal Error covers topics on the cutting edge of iOS development including software architecture, Swift, and best practices. The podcast is currently in its initial ten-episode season, with episodes between 30 and 50 minutes, and has covered topics such as coordinators, view models, reactive programming, why not to use singletons, and more.
A weekly podcast from Sam Soffes and Caleb Davenport where they talk about Swift, iOS, and other things they like. Runtime episodes are typically less than 30 minutes and have covered Swift evolution, package managers, Interface Builder, and lots of other relevant and interesting iOS topics. There is also a Slack community for the show that is free to join, where you can chat with other listeners and the hosts and suggest topics for future episodes.
A weekly podcast released each Thursday covering all of your iOS development news. Unlike most podcasts, iOS Bytes is only 5 minutes long so will fit into anyone's schedule. It's great for iOS developers of all experience levels, covering a range of topics including tools, open source, conferences, design patterns and more. If any of the topics mentioned in the short podcast are of interest to you, all the links are available in the show notes or on the website.
A network of podcasts for designers and developers. Spec currently features two podcasts, Design Details and Developer Tea, but they are working to add new shows soon. As the names suggest, Design Details is aimed at designers whereas Developer Tea is for web and software developers. Developer Tea episodes are typically between 10 and 30 minutes long and cover a wide variety of topics from development techniques to the less technical such as staying productive and improving yourself.
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A productivity tool that lets you collect together all the things you need to work on your project(s) in one place. Freeter provides you with a dashboard for each project where you can add a number of useful widgets. This includes a Commander widget, that lets you execute a command line script or command with a single click; a File Explorer widget to view a file and folder tree; an Opener widget to get one click access to specific files and folders; a Webpage widget to load any site such as a task manager or dev site; and several more.
A private time tracking app for Mac. Qbserve detects activities automatically with an ever-expanding database of over 6,800 sites, apps and games, and categorises them as productive, neutral or distracting to help you understand your habits. You can also assign windows of a single app to different categories, which you could use to differentiate between productive and distracting chats in Slack. All the tracked information is only stored locally on your machine and you can pause tracking whenever you want or choose to ignore certain activities. And now it can track projects automatically, so there's no need to manually start and stop tasks, and generates invoices for projects.
A productivity app to automate your meetings. Solid sends automated reminders to all participants before the meeting, making sure they’ll contribute to the agenda in advance and come prepared. During the meeting, Solid’s text editor lets participants quickly take notes, mark decisions made, open issues, and assign tasks to other attendees. After the meeting, Solid automatically sends the meeting summary to every participant. They have also just added a Slack integration which lets you keep track of and manage your meetings right from your Slack chat.
A plugin for Slack that automatically saves the links you share in your chats and fully indexes these web pages for deep search in Slack or the Kifi web app. Kifi adds Slack attribution to indicate the channel the link is coming from, preserving the context of the team discussion you had in Slack. When you search on Slack, Google and Kifi, you can click the timestamp to be brought back to the exact message that link was shared in. They also provide iOS and Android apps for organising and browsing your libraries of shared links.
An OS X app that helps you keep track of the time you spend on your Mac. Timing automatically tracks which documents you are editing, which applications you use, and which websites you visit. After tracking, you can drag and drop activities into projects. Some general categories like "Web Browsing", "Office" and "Games" are created automatically, but you can customise them any way you like. Unlike similar services, Timing does not send your data to any servers and there is no subscription required.
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A content collaboration platform for agencies, freelancers, and consultants. Amium brings together full-featured file sync and share capabilities with team messaging and chatrooms so your files and the discussion about those files are all in one place. You can preview documents in the app, and get full file version history along with the discussions around them. It also includes dozens of built-in integrations with your favourite tools including Bitbucket, Crashlytics, GitHub, JIRA, and more.
A online tool to help distributed teams work better together. Sococo gives you an online virtual office space where you team can get together to communicate. You can view where each of your colleagues are on the virtual map and call them into one of the meeting spaces of a private call. It reduces wasted time by minimising the need for scheduled meetings by encouraging the spontaneous interaction you would get in a real physical office. Sococo is available online, or by using one of the desktop clients for Mac, Windows and Linux, or on mobile using the iOS or Android app.
A self-hosted invoicing and project management app with an integrated client portal. Duet is hosted on your own server, which means your data is always private. You can also customise and brand Duet to match your business and its processes. It offers many of the project management features you'd expect including; Kanban boards and task lists; time tracking; discussions and team collaboration; email notifications; and loads more. Unlike many alternatives, Duet has just one up front fee so you can save a lot of money the longer you use it.
A beautiful Trello client for Mac. Paws for Trello brings the power of native Mac features to Trello including notifications whenever there’s new activity on your Trello boards, and global shortcuts to give you quick access to all your starred boards. The interface is just like the Trello you're used to and includes all your favourite Trello options and features, so you'll be productive from the start. Paws for Trello is available on the Mac App Store now, and a Windows 10 version is coming soon.
Public and private chat for GitHub. Gitter is built on top of GitHub, bringing unlimited public rooms and one-to-one chats to your repositories, with tight integration with your organisations, issues and activity. Unlike other chat services, Gitter is aimed specifically at developers, so includes features such as Markdown support with syntax highlighting, integrations with Trello, Jenkins, Travis CI, Heroku, BitBucket and loads more, and a flexible API and webhooks for custom integrations. They even offer a very generous free plan with unlimited public and private rooms.
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A full featured git client and code editor for iPhone and iPad. Source combines a powerful code editor with syntax highlighting for over 100 languages with a git client so you can commit, pull, push, branch, and more, with specific integrations for GitHub, Bitbucket and Gitlab. It also includes a built in coding keyboard inspired by Swift Playgrounds with common programming characters that can be used across iOS as a 3rd party keyboard.
A tool that runs during your CI process and gives teams the chance to automate common code review chores. Danger can help lint your tasks in daily code review by leaving messages in your pull requests based on rules that you create with the Ruby. As rules are adhered to, the message is amended to reflect the current state of the code review. It runs a Dangerfile that you set up per-project with a collection of project specific rules. Danger currently supports Circle, Travis, Jenkins, Buildkite, Semaphore, TeamCity, Xcode Bots, Drone, and Surf and can easily be integrated with fastlane.
A Git client generating pretty diffs built right into Sketch. Git Sketch Plugin lets you follow a typical Git flow - after working normally on your designs, you can create a branch, commit the changes, push your changes to a remote and create a pull request to merge into master, all from a convenient menu right in Sketch. The plugin creates PNGs of each artboard in your Sketch file so you can easily view visual pretty diffs in your Git client of choice or GitHub, as you make changes.
An iOS app for managing issues for your GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket projects on iPhone and iPad. Branches offers a convenient way for you to navigate open or closed issues, create your own issue list filters, see all commits on all branches and view detailed pull requests including comments, commits and file diffs for free. You can also upgrade the app with in app purchase to unlock creating and editing issues and comments, assigning issues to collaborators, closing and reopening issues and more.
A new cross-platform Git client built on Electron, meaning it runs natively on Mac, Windows, and Linux. GitKraken is 100% standalone, so once it's installed, it will work directly with your repositories with no dependencies. You don’t even need to have Git installed on your system. It has full integration with GitHub and Bitbucket allowing you to search for and interact with all your public and private repos, and it supports the Git Flow methodology, allowing you to initialise a workflow per repository and get to work on Feature, Release, and Hotfix branches. GitKraken has just entered public beta and is free to download.
See more Source Control ›
A drop-in SDK and backend service to provide user onboarding and self help for iOS and Android apps. Appunfold gives you intelligent visual walkthroughs to handhold your users through workflows and new features while giving you better analytics on the usage of your app. You can choose from 7 different UX elements to create custom onboarding workflows which can then be triggered contextually to make sure it's only shown to the right users. It can also help to reduce support requests with by letting you compose a self help section with text, images and videos.
A multi-platform CI solution from Microsoft. Visual Studio App Center lets you continuously build, test, release, and monitor apps for several platforms including native Swift/Objective-C iOS apps, React Native, Xamarin, macOS, and tvOS. It integrates with GitHub, Bitbucket, and VSTS and will automatically build and test your app on real hosted iOS and Android devices on every commit. You can also beta test your app with support for private distribution and TestFlight, and once your app is ready to release, you can submit it to the App Store or Google Play.
A tool created by the developers at LinkedIn that lets you run iOS tests in parallel using multiple simulators. In its simplest form, Bluepilll will run your tests on 4 simulators in parallel, producing a JUnit report when the test run completes. It will automatically pack tests into groups with similar running time, and can run in headless mode to reduce memory consumption. You can also supply a config JSON file to customise how your tests are run, including options to specify how many simulators to run, which device to use, how to handle failures, output formatting, and more.
A Mac OS X library for managing, booting and interacting with multiple iOS Simulators simultaneously. FBSimulatorControl is built by the engineers at Facebook and can simultaneously launch iPhone, iPad, watchOS and tvOS simulators, making if perfect for running end-to-end tests. It can boot Simulators via Xcode's Simulator.app or by launching directly with CoreSimulator. Direct launch supports video recording and fetching screenshots and crashlogs.
An add-on tool for FBSnapshotTestCase that makes the output of failed UI tests much more readable without the need for expensive image diffing software. snapdiff will parse xcodebuild output, detect any failed snapshot tests, and generate human-consumable HTML output. This output can be stored locally so can be handled by your CI scripts. The HTML output includes each test name along with side-by-side comparison of the reference and result images, and optional debug information if the tool has found a problem.
See more Testing and Support ›
A simple Mac app that makes creating complicated attributed strings really easy. Attributed String Creator gives you a rich text editor where you can write or paste your text and style it up with fonts, sizes, styles, colours, alignment and more. It will then generate all the iOS or OS X compatible Objective-C ready to paste into your Xcode project.
A small utility that makes the custom fonts in your iOS projects available in Interface Builder. Since iOS 3.2, you can use custom fonts in your iOS apps by adding the UIAppFonts Info.plist key. Unfortunately though, these custom fonts are not available when editing your xib files in Interface Builder. MoarFonts fixes this.
A complete list of all the system fonts available on various versions of iOS (from iOS 4 to current). Includes search, preview and iPhone/iPad availability.
See more Typography ›
An Xcode source editor extension that helps you easily navigate to a number of places related to your project. XcodeWay gives you an extra menu in Xcode with options to jump to a number of different locations. This includes opening Finder to the Project folder, the relative or global DerivedData, Provisioning Profiles, Themes, Archives, DeviceSupport, or CodeSnippets. You can also quickly open the GitHub page for the project repo in your default browser, or open the project folder in iTerm. XcodeWay is extensible so if anything is missing you can add your own destinations and submit a pull request.
A simple Mac app that quickly reformats JSON to be pretty printed making it more humanly readable. Formatter provides a convenient window to drop your JSON files and instantly reformat them. You can also drop your files on the Dock icon as well.It also includes an Xcode extension which you can enable in System Preferences. This gives a menu item in Xcode you can use to format JSON files you are looking at from inside your project. Finally, it also includes a Quick Look plugin that makes JSON files easier to read from the Finder.
An Xcode plugin turned standalone app that allows you to inject changes to class method implementations into a running application in the simulator or a macOS app. Injection has been recreated as a standalone app after plugin support was removed from Xcode 8. It works by "swizzling" the new method implementations onto the original class so they take effect immediately without having to relaunch the app. It also includes the Xprobe viewer for browsing an app's memory or creating a memory snapshot that can be exported as a standalone web page for later analysis.
A menubar app to quickly create new iOS or macOS Swift playgrounds. With PlayAlways once you've set the path of where you want to save them, you can create iOS, macOS or tvOS playgrounds with a single click or keyboard shortcut. It also includes an Xcode extension that will create a playground from your currently selected Swift code, making it even easier to quickly test an idea in Swift before using it in your apps.
The app version of the Refactorator Xcode plugin for refactoring Swift. Now that Xcode 8 has removed plugin support, Refactorator App supplies the same renaming functionality in a standalone app. In addition to being able to rename public or internal vars, functions, enums etc it can now also generate a complete standalone static website of navigable code from your Xcode project with linked entities between files.
See more Xcode Extensions ›The union estimates that AT&T has cut 12,000 call-center jobs in the United States since 2011 while creating many such jobs overseas, but Mr. Master said the company had rebuffed a request for data that would clarify the extent of the practice and other changes to its work force.
Workers are also frustrated that they are being asked to pay more of their health-insurance costs, he added, and that changes in retail workers’ commissions have limited or reduced their take-home pay. As part of its next contract, the union wants to bar AT&T from changing its commission structure unilaterally.
Marty Richter, an AT&T spokesman, said the company was offering the wireless workers wage and pension increases and called the willingness to strike “baffling.” He said AT&T sales workers were well paid by industry standards, citing an average of over $68,000 in annual pay and benefits, roughly twice the figure for retail workers as a whole, according to PayScale, a company that tracks salary data.
Mr. Richter said that AT&T had successfully negotiated contracts covering nearly 130,000 workers since 2015, and that fewer than five of the company’s more than 25,000 retail workers lost jobs last year because of store closings. The union said that some company stores had been converted to noncompany stores and that much of the recent growth in the retail work force had occurred at noncompany stores.
With over 200,000 employees in the United States, AT&T is the country’s largest telecom company.
In addition to the call center and retail workers, the strikers include more than 15,000 employees on the company’s wireline side — which includes landlines and internet service — as well as about 2,000 employees of DirecTV, which the company acquired in 2015. The wireline and DirecTV workers have been without a new contract for over a year and held a one-day strike in March. The two groups’ contract negotiations are separate from those of the wireless workers.The Cambodian government is planning to introduce a new school course to teach students about LGBTI issues, sexuality and gender.
Called ‘Life Skills’ the course will be taught from grades 1 to 12, and coursework will be introduced from grade 5.
The Ministry of Education worked closely with Cambodian LGBTI advocates. Srun Srorn was one of those advocates who said the course would help to reduce discrimination against the country’s LGBTI community. It would also serve a range of purposes.
‘First, to teach children about the biology of male and female bodies. Second, to explain gender identity and how this could differ from the biological sex. Third, to focus on gender-based violence, forced marriage and discrimination based on sexual orientation,’ he told the Phnom Penh Post.
Grade 7 students will learn to ‘elaborate on the role and difference of gender and sex’ and grade 11 students will learn to ‘describe the access to safe, suitable and effective contraceptives describe unwanted pregnancy, describe the abortion law in Cambodia and the products for safe abortion’.
The director of the Ministry’s School Health Department, Dr Chhay Kim Sitheavy, said the content on preventing gender-based violence and STI infections had never been taught at Cambodian schools.
Sitheavy said the Life Skills would teach children that homosexuality is not taboo and LGBTI people should be treated equally.
‘Values have changed over the past years and courses need to be adapted,’ she told the Phnom Penh Post.
The Ministry will create the content and start drafting a textbook for the next year’s school year.
The LGBT rights group CamASEAN will work with the Cambodian Health Ministry to implement the Life Skills program.
‘We train the teachers to understand that there are not only [heterosexual] men and women, but also LGBTIQ,’ said CamASEAN’s Chhoeurng Rachana.A $15-million lawsuit against the chair of the Canadian Mint, which turned up evidence that millions of dollars were moved through offshore havens in a "tax avoidance scheme" and much of it was never reported to tax authorities, ended with a pact not to alert the Canada Revenue Agency about the case, CBC News has learned.
As reported last month by CBC, descendants of former prime minister Arthur Meighen sued Toronto lawyer and mint chairman Jim Love, his trust company, his law firm and others in 2008, alleging wrongdoing in how they managed the Meighen family fortune and helped transfer $8 million through tax havens.
The lawsuit contained allegations by Meighen heirs that they could face "liability for taxes, interest and penalties" on the offshore transaction, while court documents show Love hesitated to send information about it because he felt there was "some sensitivity from a taxation perspective."
The litigation was quietly settled in 2011, but CBC News has now discovered that the deal to end it contained a pledge not to alert the Canada Revenue Agency to the case.
"None of the parties … shall initiate contact with the CRA, or any provincial or foreign taxing authority, in connection with any of the issues related to [the lawsuit], except as required by law," reads the settlement, found amid the more than 4,000 pages of documents filed in court.
Former Conservative senator Michael Meighen, who was peripherally involved in the lawsuit, says he didn't know there was a do-not-alert-the-taxman clause in the settlement he signed. 'I would be stunned if it was valid.' (CBC)
What's more, an Ontario Superior Court judge signed off on the deal, including the do-not-contact clause. As requested by the plaintiffs and defendants, Judge David M. Brown issued a court order barring any of the parties, plus six of their minor-age children as young as four, from reaching out to any tax agency, except "as required by law."
CBC News consulted more than a dozen legal experts about the clause. The vast majority said the terms are highly unusual.
"That's not something that I've ever seen happen," said Donald Bowman, former chief justice of the Tax Court of Canada and a one-time head of tax litigation for the federal government.
Though the provision says parties can approach the Canada Revenue Agency if the law requires, there is no legal requirement in Canada for someone to report suspected tax evasion or aggressive tax avoidance by another person.
'Parties to a contract cannot stipulate clauses that run |
configuring models, setting and handling animations, managing joints/bones and even vertex level manipulations.
There is also an animation panel.
This enables you to blend animations together, set and remove animation keys and of course, preview animations.
Material Window
A detailed material system allowing multiple layers. You can control diffuse and normal maps, UV tilting, lighting properties and more. You also have control over detailed material attributes like alpha blending, animations, scattering, light emission and more.
Special FX
Fine tuned control over multiple special FX of types weather, post processing and environmental. Fine tune control over all aspects, including water fx, sky, weather, lens effects, etc. You also have fine tune control over day/night cycles using a keyframe system:
Cutscene Tool
S2Engine has a complete system in place for authoring cut scenes. Includes a curve editor:
As well as a detailed timeline:
Hierarchy
This is essentially your scene graph.
Font Tool
Enables you to create png textures for fonts of varying dimensions with font preview. Fonts are imported in fnt format created using the BMFont tool.
GUI Editor
Currently in Beta, there is a UI editor available. You can create a hierarchy of UI widgets and configure them using the Params class panel.
Currently supported widgets include button, slider, frame, input box, combobox, label, checkbutton, colorbox, image, listbox, groupbox, tabbox and rangeinputbox.
Publishing
When you are complete publishing is a pretty straight forward process. This is one of the advantages of only supporting a single platform publishing is as simple as choosing a file name, starting scene, main script (entry point) and a few other settings and clicking the Publish button.
Coding
There are two ways to code in S2Engine. You can use their own scripting language or the visual FSM (Finite State Machine) visual programming language. The scripting language has the sc2 extension and has a C like syntax. You can read the language reference here while the API documentation is available here. Scripts are simply connected to (and thus control) game objects. Here is an example script that controls a jeep found in the demo game.
# message TakeControl # message LeftControl # message LockWaypoints # message UnlockWaypoints # use "engine.wav" var float acc ; var float steer ; var bool brake ; var bool control ; var float steerAng ; var string steerNode ; var string handsNode ; var float oldsteerAng ; var bool _on ; function void Init () { _on = false ; control = false ; steerAng = 0.0 ; steerNode = "steer" ; handsNode = "hands" ; AICreateObject ( false, false, 205.0, 200.0 ); resetNodeFlags ( "camera", "visible" ); resetNodeFlags ( "hands", "visible" ); SetSource ( 10.0, 15000.0 ); } function void PostInit () { SetPerObjectMaterialData ( 3, 0.0 ); resetNodeFlags ( "light01", "visible" ); resetNodeFlags ( "light02", "visible" ); _on = false ; } function void update () { if ( control == true ) { acc = 0.0 ; steer = 0.0 ; brake = false ; RotateNode ( steerNode, "rgt",- steerAng ); RotateNode ( handsNode, "rgt",- steerAng ); SetSourcePitch (( PhysicsGetVehicleRPM ()* 0.0025 )+ 1.0 ); /*LOG( string(PhysicsGetVehicleRPM()) );*/ if ( IsKeyPressed ( "w" )) { acc = 1.0 ; } if ( IsKeyPressed ( "s" )) { acc =- 0.5 ; } oldsteerAng = steerAng ; if ( IsKeyPressed ( "d" )) { steerAng = steerAng +( frametime ); steer =- 1.0 ; } else { if ( IsKeyPressed ( "a" )) { steerAng = steerAng -( frametime ); steer = 1.0 ; } else { steerAng = 0.0 ; } } if ( IsKeyPressed ( " " )) { brake = true ; } if ( steerAng >= 35.0 ) { steerAng = 35.0 ; } if ( steerAng <=(- 35.0 ) ) { steerAng =- 35.0 ; } steerAng = ScalarInterpolate ( oldsteerAng, steerAng,( frametime / 200.0 )); RotateNode ( steerNode, "rgt", steerAng ); RotateNode ( handsNode, "rgt", steerAng ); PhysicsVehicleControl ( steer, acc, brake ); if ( acc!= 0.0 ) { var vec3 fwdaxis ; fwdaxis = GetWorldAxis ( "fwd" ); SendMessageMulti ( "pushOut", string ( fwdaxis ), 400.0, "null" ); } } else { PhysicsVehicleControl ( 0.0, 0.0, true ); if ( ObjectIsInRange ( "player01", 300.0 )) { SendMessageSingle ( "player01", "DriveVehicle", "" ); } } } function void message () { if ( ReceivedMessage ( "TakeControl" ) ) { /* lights control */ var float tod ; tod = float ( GetLevelParam ( "TimeOfDay" )); LOG ( "tod" + string ( tod )); if ( ( tod >= 18.0 ) && ( tod <= 24.0 ) ) { SetPerObjectMaterialData ( 3, 1.0 ); if (! _on ) { SetNodeFlags ( "light01", "visible" ); SetNodeFlags ( "light02", "visible" ); _on = true ; } } if ( ( tod > 0.0 ) && ( tod < 6.0 ) ) { SetPerObjectMaterialData ( 3, 1.0 ); if (! _on ) { SetNodeFlags ( "light01", "visible" ); SetNodeFlags ( "light02", "visible" ); _on = true ; } } if ( ( tod > 6.0 ) && ( tod < 18.0 ) ) { SetPerObjectMaterialData ( 3, 0.0 ); ResetNodeFlags ( "light01", "visible" ); ResetNodeFlags ( "light02", "visible" ); _on = false ; } /*=======================================0*/ control = true ; SetNodeFlags ( "hands", "visible" ); PlaySound ( "engine.wav", true ); } if ( ReceivedMessage ( "LeftControl" ) ) { control = false ; ResetNodeFlags ( "hands", "visible" ); StopSound (); SetPerObjectMaterialData ( 3, 0.0 ); ResetNodeFlags ( "light01", "visible" ); ResetNodeFlags ( "light02", "visible" ); _on = false ; } }
It’s a straight forward enough language, but I generally prefer that engines use an off the shelf scripting engine instead of rolling their own. This gives the community access to a much larger source of expertise, sample code and generally is much more time tested and stable. As you can see from the script above, much of the logic and communication is implemented via message passing.
The majority of in game programming however is done using FSM (Finite State Machines ) via the FSM graph.
If you’ve ever worked in Blueprints in Unreal Engine or Flowgraph in CryEngine you should have a pretty good idea how FSM programming works. You’re code responds to various events and creates program flows using a series of connecting cables to other states. Each node can have multiple actions, configured like so:
There are dozens of states available, and new ones can easily be created.
Variables are easily created as well.
In addition to local variables, parameters and globals can also be defined.
The Documentation, Community and Content
The S2Engine has a decent amount of documentation, reference materials, getting started videos and beginner projects. There are however a few issues, the first of which is English. The developers primary language is not English and it shows on occasion in the documentation. The actual UI is very well translated but some of the documentation is certainly a tad “Engrish”. Worse, some of the linked starting videos aren’t in English at all. I have no issue with non-English videos, but I would recommend not linking them directly from an English localized application.
In terms of actual available documentation, there is a Wiki available here, a very solid reference manual available here, and a series of video tutorials available here. S2Engine also comes with the beginner scene you’ve seen throughout this review.
The community for S2Engine isn’t huge but there is an active forum. There is also a Trello bug tracking board available on Trello as well as a few other community options. One impressive thing about the engine is the engine developer is very responsive to user requests and feedback.
One interesting aspect of the S2Engine is the existence of Content DLC. These are themed content packs you can download and use in your game. Currently the only content pack is the Medieval content pack shown in the video below. There is another content DLC pack in the works.
Conclusion
I pointed out the two biggest negatives to this game engine in the very first paragraph. It’s Windows only, both for tooling and target platforms. It’s closed source and commercial. For many those are going to be big enough deal breakers that nothing else really matters. For the rest though, is this a worthwhile engine? For a small team effort, there is a massive amount of functionality included in this engine, it’s capable of some staggeringly pretty results and the workflow, once understood, is pretty accessible to people with limited programming experience.
My biggest recommendation to the developer behind this engine is to make a proper demo available. What will get people to use this engine over the other options is that they prefer the workflow, the tools, the built in assets, etc. The lack of a current demo is going to vastly limit the potential audience. Even with a low price tag, few people will spend money to evaluate an engine and having a previous weaker version of your engine available as the trial is certainly a mistake. When you go to the download section of the website, you are greeted by this text:
NOTE: The version to be downloaded here (1.4.5) is a previous, very old, FREE BETA version. It is useful just for letting you to view How S2ENGINE HD is organized and How it works. It doesn’t represent the final quality of the 1.4.6 Steam version.
This is quite simply a mistake. A demo is about selling people on your engine, so having them experience a “very old” version is a bad idea. Always put your best foot forward when showing an engine. I would recommend creating a version of the current engine that is full featured but either time locked, save limited or publish limited. You will have a great many more developers willing to give your engine a try.
I have found the performance to be a bit inconsistent. I was running consistently at 70+ FPS, then struggled to hit 15FPS for a while with a ton of UI glitches. Upgrading to the newest nVidia drivers didn’t help. Then oddly, switching Optimus to use the integrated GPU, then back to dedicated seemed to fix the problems. Hopefully these problems are localized to me and not widespread. I wish the developers used a standard UI toolkit like Qt, as their custom implementation can be a bit buggy or not perform as you’d expect. I also unfortunately experienced a half a dozen crashes while evaluating the engine, including one while making the video version of this review.
The Video
ProgrammingPeople watch as Andrew MacKay, chairman at Nevada Transportation Authority, right, speaks via video conference during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM:
Andrew MacKay, chairman at Nevada Transportation Authority speaks via video conference during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM:
Assemblywoman Irene Bustamante Adams speaks during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation as Assemblyman Lynn Stewart, left, looks on at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM:
Nevada Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson speaks via video conference during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM:
People attend a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM:
Senator Kelvin Atkinson speaks during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM:
The logo of car-sharing service app Uber is seen on a smartphone at the ÒWelcome to Fabulous Las VegasÓ sign Wednesday, May 6, 2015. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal) Follow Bizu Tesfaye on Twitter @bizutesfaye
People attend a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM: @BIZUTESFAYE
Nevada Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson speaks via video conference during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM: @BIZUTESFAYE
Senator Kelvin Atkinson speaks during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM: @BIZUTESFAYE
People watch as Andrew MacKay, chairman at Nevada Transportation Authority, right, speaks via video conference during a legislative hearing on Uber-related legislation at Grant Sawyer Building Monday, Aug. 10, 2015. BIZUAYEHU TESFAYE/LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL / FOLLOW HIM: @BIZUTESFAYE
Uber and Lyft could begin operating within 30 days following action Monday by the Legislative Commission.
Commissioners unanimously pre-approved a series of regulations for transportation network companies submitted late last month by the Nevada Transportation Authority.
Representatives of the commission, comprised of senators and Assembly members who approved legislation legalizing ride-hailing companies, questioned Transportation Authority Chairman Andrew MacKay and Bruce Breslow, director of the Department of Business and Industry, for more than an hour Monday morning before the vote. The meeting was held in Carson City but teleconferenced to Las Vegas.
MacKay said despite efforts to get ride-hailing companies on the road as quickly as possible, Uber and Lyft have yet to apply to operate in the state.
Now that the legislative group has pre-approved the regulations, it’s expected that Uber and Lyft would apply for permits, possibly as early as this week.
Representatives of Lyft did not respond to phone and email inquiries as to their plans by press time, and an Uber official gave no clear indication when the company would apply.
“We are encouraged by this progress,” Uber spokeswoman Eva Behrend said in an email. “We look forward to applying for a permit in the near future and to bringing Uber back to the Silver State to offer more options for people to move around their city.”
Regulations still have to be adopted by the three-member Transportation Authority, which has scheduled a public hearing on regulations for Sept. 11. But not having the regulations in place won’t prevent Uber and Lyft from beginning operations, as long as they comply with Assembly Bills 175 and 176, which established the ground rules for operations.
Legislators pose questions
The commission approved the rules despite a number of questions from legislators.
Assemblywoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, said there were several matters discussed when the legislation was debated that aren’t referenced in the proposed regulations.
She noted that the rules mention nothing about driver drug-testing, either prior to a driver contracting with a company or after an accident. She said the rules also are silent on where and how companies can drop off or pick up passengers at resort properties and whether drivers would be required to have a business license as independent contractors.
Commissioners determined that while drug testing was discussed in several versions of the legislation that finally was approved, the final version required no testing.
MacKay said the issue of where to pick up and drop off at resorts is a matter between the companies and the resorts and he said each municipality and county would have to determine whether a contractor would be required to have a business license. The rules do state the companies, but not the drivers, must register with the secretary of state to conduct business in Nevada.
Much of the operational oversight will be the responsibility of the companies. They’ll be required to vet drivers, inspect vehicles and make sure drivers comply with rules restricting them to 12 cumulative hours of driving per 24-hour period and being on call for 16 hours during a 24-hour period.
The Transportation Authority would be able to conduct random checks to make sure the companies are keeping drivers in compliance and could suspend or revoke a license for failure to do so.
Licensing costs
Commissioners also discussed the cost of applying for a license, but took no action demanding a change. Companies would be required to pay $300,000 for an unlimited number of cars, down from the $500,000 the authority initially considered.
MacKay said the fee would be used to hire additional staff to monitor transportation network companies and secure additional office space and technology. The state’s Interim Finance Committee would have to approve those positions before any hiring could occur.
MacKay said he doesn’t see the fee — the highest Uber and Lyft would pay as a price of entry of any place in the world — as a deterrent to the companies operating in the state.
“We’re not trying to create a revenue stream here,” MacKay said. “We do not intend to create a goliath of an agency. Las Vegas will be one of their biggest markets, probably in the world. They’re going to get a pretty good deal out of this and so is the state of Nevada.”
MacKay acknowledged that if it turns out oversight of the companies costs less than anticipated, the overpayment could be used as a credit toward license renewals.
Contact reporter Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Find @RickVelotta on Twitter.I can’t wait to get my hands on Guild Wars 2, it looks truly stunning and the races/classes all look brilliant! To be honest I am not sure how long Aion (Rift or Warcraft) will keep me busy until this hits beta.
Featuring extrememly talented artists and probably some of the best in the MMO industry such as Daniel Dociu, Jaime Jones, kekai Kotaki, Richard Anderson, Matthew Barrett and Horia Dociu.
As always we would love to know which your favorite is in the comments below and if you have enjoyed this resource we would very much appreciate if you can share it with your Facebook and Twitter followers.
We are opening our doors to contributors! So if you love fantasy art, love MMORPG’s or want to recommend an extremely talented artist that we should feature, please� contact us!
All art work is © ArenaNet – All rights reserved.
TagsToday, we’re excited to announce the acquisition of Limes Audio. The Limes Audio team builds technology that makes voice communication systems sound better, so that you can hear the person you're talking to, and they can hear you.
As more and more businesses adopt our video conferencing solutions, powered by Chromebox for Meetings and Google Hangouts, it’s critical that we provide a great audio experience. With G Suite customers now relying on video communications for their day-to-day meetings, it's more important than ever to ensure low-cost, high-quality audio.
One of the biggest challenges to a great video meeting is the audio quality. Conference rooms today come in all shapes and sizes and that can provide a challenge for acoustics. Additionally, a poor internet connection can hamper voice quality in video conference calls. Limes Audio has been building solutions that remove the distracting noise, distortion and echoes that can affect online video and telephony meetings, improving the overall online conference experience.
We’re excited to work closely with the Limes Audio team to introduce new solutions that offer our customers the best online voice quality on the market.
Welcome Limes Audio!Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Tampa Bay Rays farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen
The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell
Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)
60 FV Prospects
Signed: July 2nd Period, 2012 from Dominican Republic Age 21 Height 6’1 Weight 180 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 40/55 55/60 40/55 45/40 40/45 60/60
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed.270/.370/.430 as a 20-year-old at Double-A.
Scouting Report
The barrel-chested Adames might ordinarily project to move off shortstop given his build, but it seems to me that Tampa has a rather liberal organizational philosophy about what constitutes a viable defensive shortstop and Adames isn’t going to be any more offensive there than aging Asdrubal Cabrera and Yunel Escobar have been in recent years.
If Adames does have to move off of shortstop (I have a future 50 on him there and he has plenty of arm), then he’s probably grown into enough power to profile anywhere he moves. He has good feel for contact and a bat path that should produce both it and power. If his body matures in the Goldilocks Zone and, when he’s 25 or so, he’s added power but simultaneously retained the physical agility to stay at shortstop, he’ll be among the growing collection of young Uber Shortstops we all get to watch for the next decade. The result, in that case: a high-end makeup, franchise-cornerstone type of player. Adames was acquired from Detroit in the David Price trade.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 10.4 WAR
55 FV Prospects
Drafted: 2nd Round, 2014 from Walters St CC Age 22 Height 6’2 Weight 180 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Curveball Changeup Splitter Cutter Command 60/60 40/40 55/60 60/60 40/45 45/55
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Recorded strikeout and walk rates of 23% and 6%, respectively, at Double-A.
Scouting Report
Honeywell’s deep, unique collection of pitches is bolstered by artistic sequencing, and he essentially never has to pitch off of his fastball (though he could if he wanted to, I’ve seen it up to 98) because he always has new looks to show hitters. The best of these is a cutter and changeup. The screwball (in the 79-82 mph range while the changeup is usually a little harder than that) is more than a gimmick and can miss bats. Like chocolate cake, however, it’s best in moderation — not only because it arguably adds to the violence already inherent in Honeywell’s delivery, but because (it seemed to me, during Fall League looks) that good hitters are able to recognize it after seeing it multiple times in the same at-bat. He also has a loopy, below-average curveball. The effort in the delivery and Honeywell’s six-week DL stint last summer have some concerned about injuries, but there’s a chance for three plus pitches and above-average command here.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 5.7 WAR
Drafted: 24th Round, 2013 from Southern Age 24 Height 6’2 Weight 190 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Slider Changeup Command 55/55 50/50 55/60 50/60
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Posted 0.94 WHIP in hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League.
Scouting Report
Undrafted out of Puerto Rico as a high schooler, De Leon matriculated to Southern and began missing bats immediately. He led the SWAC in strikeouts as a sophomore, but his body, delivery and stuff backed up as a junior. He signed for just $35,000 as a 24th rounder and had a promising, if rocky, pro debut in 2013. The next year, things clicked: De Leon improved his conditioning and strike-throwing and began to experience rousing success. He’s advanced through two minor-league levels in each of the last three years, culminating in a three-start run at Triple-A this past season, during which DeLeon struck out 33 hitters in 21 innings and didn’t walk a single batter. He made his big-league debut after that stretch.
De Leon has mid-rotation starter’s stuff. The fastball sits 90-93 and will touch 95 with life. De Leon’s drop-and-drive delivery sucks plane out of the fastball, and he’s fly-ball prone when he’s working up in the zone. He has above-average fastball command that projects to plus and mitigates concerns about the fastball’s context-free effectiveness. His best secondary pitch is a changeup that, too, projects to plus if it isn’t already there. His low-80s slider is an average offering and only consistently effective when he’s locating it just off the plate to his glove side. De Leon didn’t do this in his brief major-league stint, but it was a significant aspect of his success at Triple-A and I expect to see improved slider location in 2017. I think De Leon will be an above-average big-league starter.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 8.0 WAR
50 FV Prospects
Signed: July 2nd Period, 2014 from Dominican Republic Age 19 Height 6’2 Weight 185 Bat/Throw L/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 20/50 50/60 30/55 50/45 40/50 60/60
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed.330/.350/.550 in 2016.
Scouting Report
While impatient at the plate, Sanchez has star-level offensive tools and a chance to remain at a premium defensive position. He’s good-bodied and projectable and already has enough raw power that he accidentally threatens opposite-field fences with well-hit balls. He has plus bat speed, generates big extension through contact, and projects to have plus raw power at maturity. Despite some effort to the swing and a very aggressive approach, Sanchez has shown good bat control and has the physical tools to hit and hit for power, though he’d do well to tone down his tendency to take early-count hacks.
Sanchez is an average runner (above underway) and there’s not a consensus among scouts about his long-term ability to stay in center field. Some think his feel for the position will improve to the point where he’s a viable defender there despite lacking top end speed; others think the body grows into right field.
The risk profile here is sizable because of the somewhat unstable defensive profile and because Sanchez doesn’t exactly have a plan at the plate right now. But there’s a chance for five average or better tools if things pan out just right, and there just aren’t many other prospects like that in the minors. He’s already a Boras client.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 0.6 WAR
45 FV Prospects
Drafted: 7th Round, 2013 from Marina HS (CA) Age 21 Height 6’1 Weight 195 Bat/Throw L/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 45/60 55/55 40/45 45/40 45/55 50/50
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Recorded 13% walk rate, 15% strikeout rate, and.146 ISO at Double-A.
Scouting Report
Bauers was an advanced Southern California high-school hitting prospect but had no clear position and lacked the physical projection that is typical for high-end corner-outfield or first-base prospects. That’s largely why he lasted until the seventh round of the 2013 draft, where he was picked by San Diego. His first full pro season began with an aggressive assignment in the Midwest League and he excelled, hitting.296/.376/.414 there at age 18. He was traded to Tampa that offseason as part of the Wil Myers deal. Bauers has continued to hit and reach base consistently, always young for his level, though producing only modest power.
Scouts unanimously think Bauers is going to hit in the big leagues. He’s very smooth and relaxed in the box, has a mature approach, makes adjustments to breaking balls and tracks pitches well. His bat speed and bat control are solid, too, and he projects as a plus hitter overall. The power remains a question mark. Bauers has above-average raw power and makes opposing pitchers pay for making mistakes up and in, but he doesn’t have the monster, all-fields raw power typically associated with first-base and corner-outfield prospects. (Bauers hit four oppo homers in 2016, but Montgomery’s left-field fence is only about 310 feet from home plate, closer than the Crawford Boxes in Houston.)
At a thick 6-foot-1, there’s probably not any more power coming. There are those who feel the combination of OBP and copious doubles will be enough for Bauers to profile as a good everyday player, no matter where his ultimate defensive home lies. (I prefer him at first, where he could be a 55 glove at peak.) Others think it’s more of a fringe profile. And then there are scouts who have seen him struggle against lefties and think he’s more of a platoon bat. The track record of offensive success here is very strong, and I believe Bauers is going to be a steady big leaguer of some kind, with a chance to be an average everyday player. That said, his upside is capped by the lack of power output. If he ends up as more than that it will be because of his secondary skills.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 9.9 WAR
Drafted: 1st Round, 2016 from Pope HS (GA) Age 19 Height 6’4 Weight 190 Bat/Throw L/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 20/45 50/60 20/55 60/60 40/50 60/60
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Basically none. Played less than 30 games at each of two stops.
Scouting Report
An athletic, two-way prospect, Lowe had some of the 2016 draft’s more ethereal upside with plus straight-line speed, plus raw power projection, and a plus arm. Physically, he looks as though someone cloned Brad Zimmer and he takes similarly efficient, earth-eating strides in center field, which is where I have him projected after he flopped at third base over the summer.
As is typical for most two-way prep prospects, Lowe is a bit raw in various facets of baseball. He’s new to center field but has the speed to stay there once his routes get polished up with reps. When I saw him in the fall, Lowe had a tendency to open up his hips early, get pull-happy, and struggle to cover the outer half of the plate (something that’s probably correctable). He also has natural swing and miss due to lever length (something that isn’t). Nevertheless, his power on contact is strong and, even if he always whiffs a lot, the power/speed/defensive foundation of his profile is still very favorable. And if he does learn to hit, he’s a potential star.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 2.8 WAR
Signed: July 2nd Period, 2011 from Taiwan Age 23 Height 6’1 Weight 209 Bat/Throw R/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Fastball Curveball Changeup Splitter Cutter Command 50/50 45/45 60/60 45/45 50/55 45/50
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Career 2.74 minor-league ERA.
Scouting Report
Hu was 94-97 with bat-missing movement in his abbreviated Futures Game appearance but sits more 89-94 as a starter. His plus changeup, which positively evaporates as it reaches the plate, was arguably the dirtiest pitch at that event, with identical fastball arm speed but less velo separation than is usual. He also has a hard, upper-80s cutter, usually 86-89, which has been a point of developmental emphasis for Hu this spring. Rounding out the repertoire are a palmball and fringe curve, both of which operate as changes of pace off of the other offspeed and breaking ball, respectively.
Though he clearly has a starter’s toolkit of pitches with which to work, there are those who think Hu’s ultimate role will be in the bullpen, as his delivery has some effort and lacks consistent, efficient use of his lower half. Others see a stocky, strong build capable of handling a heavy workload. I lean toward the latter group and think Hu has a good chance to be a league-average starter at peak, though acknowledge there’s a chance he ends up in a relief role, where he could be dominant based on what we’ve seen from him in short stints in the past.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 1.5 WAR
Signed: July 2nd Period, 2015 from Bahamas Age 19 Height 6’1 Weight 175 Bat/Throw S/R Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 20/55 30/40 20/40 70/70 40/55 55/55
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Produced just.582 OPS at Low-A.
Scouting Report
Fox was born in the Bahamas and then came to the U.S. to play high-school baseball at American Heritage in Florida. He reclassified as an international amateur ahead of the deadline. (International free agency was, at the time, more lucrative than the wage-suppressing draft. Now, both are disasters created by a selfish and short-sighted player’s union and greedy sect of owners, but I digress.) He got $6 million from San Francisco instead of the 1.4-1.7 million he likely would have gotten in the draft.
The Giants, very aggressively, sent him directly to full-season ball in Augusta and Fox flopped. He fouled a ball off of his foot and suffered a bone bruise, through which he attempted to play, a week or so before he was traded to Tampa in the Matt Moore deal. Tampa wasn’t aware of the issue and there was talk of them receiving additional compensation in that deal but nothing materialized. Fox sat out the rest of the season.
The talent — which led to Fox ranking third on the FanGraphs IFA board and second on my own pref list for ESPN at the time — is all still here. Fox is an exceptional quick-twitch athlete and plus runner, has flashy but inconsistent actions at short, good bat speed, some barrel control, and a frame that should strengthen with age. Fox has the physical capability to one day play a good defensive shortstop and also do some damage with the bat near the top of a lineup. He’s a potential star who had quickly fallen out of favor with his previous org. This is exactly the kind of player Tampa should be trying to acquire via trade, because they have no way to acquire it via free agency.
KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 1.0 WAR
Drafted: 1st Round, 2014 from Wichita St Age 24 Height 6’4 Weight 238 Bat/Throw S/L Tool Grades (Present/Future) Hit Raw Power Game Power Run Fielding Throw 40/45 60/60 45/50 20/20 40/45 40/40
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed.284/.388/.480 in 2016 between Double- and Triple-A.
Scouting Report
Those who are influenced by aesthetics {author sheepishly raises hand} may have a more difficult time evaluating Gillaspie, who had an effective season in 2016 at the upper levels (mostly as a 23-year old at Double-A) but has some mechanical idiosyncrasies. Gillaspie lacks bat speed and has shortened his load, especially as a right-handed hitter, since college, presumably as a way to artificially shorten his swing. While most hitters draw their hands back like the string of a bow before they fire back toward the ball, Gillaspie’s hands just kind of hang out in one spot before |
scratching my head because Forchion can still effectuate a common law name change, which will give him 90% of the website publicity traffic he seeks. So it’s not clear how the court actually advances its policy concerns by denying the official name change.
More generally, despite Laura’s scholarly work, state policies governing name spaces remain undertheorized and under-scrutinized. For example, as I blogged on my personal blog, California went decades with a facially illegal distinction in its marriage license, letting the woman take the man’s name but not letting the man take the woman’s name. California finally fixed this problem with a statute in 2007. For more discussion on government policies towards personal names, see these articles on marriage names and baby names). Another government-operated namespace that doesn’t get much attention are vanity automobile license plates; we’ve seen a variety of questionable government policies emerge there without much pushback.
FWIW, because I changed my name to Eric Goldman from Eric Schlachter, the name Eric Schlachter is freely available for other takers (although, I should point out, there are a few other Eric Schlachters currently using the name). As I mentioned in this blog post, anyone else is free to adopt “Eric Goldman” too, but I plan to defend my favorable search engine placement vigorously!Mind That Age! This blog post is 5 years old! Most likely, its content is outdated. Especially if it's technical.
tl;dr; It's not a competition! I'm just comparing Go and Python. So I can learn Go.
So recently I've been trying to learn Go. It's a modern programming language that started at Google but has very little to do with Google except that some of its core contributors are staff at Google.
The true strength of Go is that it's succinct and minimalistic and fast. It's not a scripting language like Python or Ruby but lots of people write scripts with it. It's growing in popularity with systems people but web developers like me have started to pay attention too.
The best way to learn a language is to do something with it. Build something. However, I don't disagree with that but I just felt I needed to cover the basics first and instead of taking notes I decided to learn by comparing it to something I know well, Python. I did this a zillion years ago when I tried to learn ZPT by comparing it DTML which I already knew well.
My free time is very limited so I'm taking things by small careful baby steps. I read through An Introduction to Programming in Go by Caleb Doxey in a couple of afternoons and then I decided to spend a couple of minutes every day with each chapter and implement something from that book and compare it to how you'd do it in Python.
I also added some slightly more full examples, Markdownserver which was fun because it showed that a simple Go HTTP server that does something can be 10 times faster than the Python equivalent.
What I've learned
Go is very unforgiving but I kinda like it. It's like Python but with pyflakes switched on all the time.
Go is much more verbose than Python. It just takes so much more lines to say the same thing.
Goroutines are awesome. They're a million times easier to grok than Python's myriad of similar solutions.
In Python, the ability to write to a list and it automatically expanding at will is awesome.
Go doesn't have the concept of "truthy" which I already miss. I.e. in Python you can convert a list type to boolean and the language does this automatically by checking if the length of the list is 0.
Go gives you very few choices (e.g. there's only one type of loop and it's the for loop) but you often have a choice to pass a copy of an object or to pass a pointer. Those are different things but sometimes I feel like the computer could/should figure it out for me.
I love the little defer thing which means I can put "things to do when you're done" right underneath the thing I'm doing. In Python you get these try:...20 lines... finally:...now it's over... things.
The coding style rules are very different but in Go it's a no brainer because you basically don't have any choices. I like that. You just have to remember to use gofmt.
Everything about Go and Go tools follow the strict UNIX pattern to not output anything unless things go bad. I like that.
godoc.org is awesome. If you ever wonder how a built in package works you can just type it in after godoc.org like this godoc.org/math for example.
You don't have to compile your Go code to run it. You can simply type go run mycode.go it automatically compiles it and then runs it. And it's super fast.
go get can take a url like github.com/russross/blackfriday and just install it. No PyPI equivalent. But it scares me to depend on peoples master branches in GitHub. What if master is very different when I go get something locally compared to when I run go get weeks/months later on the server?
UPDATE
Here's a similar project comparing Python vs. JavaScript by Ilya V. Schurov
Comments
Related postsGood Lord this girl is lucky to be alive. Samantha Goudie goes by @vodka_samm on Twitter. That name seems to make sense when you hear about what she pulled during the first college football Saturday of the season. Yesterday she was arrested at Iowa’s game against Northern Illinois while trying to jump on the field. She was arrested at the time and proceeded to blow a (!!!).341.
Here’s the University of Iowa’s police report:
Goudie, Samantha Lynne, 22 of Iowa City, IA for Public Intox at Kinnick Stadium at 1321 hours. Goudie was stopped for trying to enter the field. Goudie was unsteady on her feet. Goudie blew.341 PBT.
She then proceeded to Tweet about the incident. Via Deadspin
Heyyy! FOLLOW BroBible on Twitter here.
Just went to jail #yolo — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) August 31, 2013
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My mom had to get me out of jail and had to take a breathalizer #lmao — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) August 31, 2013
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Blew a.341 in jail — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) August 31, 2013
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My mom hates me too — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) August 31, 2013
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I’m going to get.341 tattooed on me because its so epic — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) August 31, 2013
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Girl waiting for court with me goes “I wish I knew the girl who blew a.341” I said hi — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) September 1, 2013
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Ive gotten so many hate tweets because I was drunk…uh I get good grades sorry for being like every other college student — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) September 1, 2013
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Go Hawks motherfuckers — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) September 1, 2013
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@ThoseIowaBoys I was not trying to enter the game — Samantha Goudie (@Vodka_samm) September 1, 2013
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And finally, a noteworthy pic and Vine from Vodka Sam:
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//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js“The world has an unhealthy obsession with politics. If people spent half the time learning about science as they do watching CNN or Fox or Al Jazeera or CCTV the world would be a better place.
Science brings reason, understanding and enlightenment. Politics brings division.
Science makes progress with new facts about the world seemingly discovered daily. Politics drives itself around in circles, offering little along the way that could inspire or excite anyone.
Science is the study of eternal truths, it tells you what is true and what will always be true. Politics is just what is happening right now.
This is not to say that politics is not important, we cannot function as a society without it, and it has a role to play in driving science forward, but a disproportionate amount of time is spent on it. If people took some of that time trying to understand what is happening in science these days they would realize that the world is not all the doom and gloom that politics tells you it is. There are amazing things happening all the time, wake up to it and you might just realize we are living in the greatest era in human history.
Many seem to think that science is beyond them and don’t spend time trying to understand it except maybe to watch a documentary once or twice a week. It really isn’t as hard to grasp as you might think. If you just spend a little more time with it, it starts to reveal itself.
Just take a look at this.
These are drawings of neurons made in the late 19th century by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of neuroscience. He spent his whole life peering through microscopes and drawing what he saw. Every time you move your hand, or smell a flower, or have a thought, or beat your heart, it is because one of these microscopic neurons is sending an electrical or chemical signal through your brain. What is remarkable about his work is that, even though the microscopes he used were crude compared to the microscopes of today, because of his dedication to his craft, the countless hours he must have spent tinkering with the resolution and the lenses, these drawings are very close to what neurons actually look like. Everything you see, feel, think and do is because of the structure, wiring and signaling from one of these little things to another. There are a 100 billion of them in your head and 100 trillion connections between them. They make up the most complicated structure in the universe, the brain, which allows the universe to understand itself.
Or look at this.
This is mitochondria. Inside every cell in your body there are thousands of these little things. Billions of years ago on Earth, when single celled organisms ruled the planet, these things floated around independently. They are living things that have their own DNA. The ancestor of every cell in your body was also floating around at that time. Somehow that cell absorbed a mitochondria into its structure. Our cells benefited from mitochondria’s ability to produce a form of energy called ATP, it was a more efficient form of energy than anything our cells had previously come up with. The mitochondria benefited from the protection it received being encased in our cell’s membrane. A symbiotic marriage was formed that has lasted till this day and allowed life on earth to thrive. You would not be here if this chance meeting did not happen.
Or newly discovered gravitational waves which this guy describes far better than I ever could…
Science is littered with interesting stories like neurons and mitochondria and super massive black holes slamming into each other. They are also stories that inform your life because they tell you who you are and how you came to be.
If people took the time to learn this kind of stuff instead of spending their energy bickering over everything Trump does or says they would have a new perspective on the news. Though they matter, they are not the most important things happening in the world. They’ll also realize that everything that he says and does, though it does effect millions of lives, pales in comparison to the discoveries made in science because those effect every single person alive and helps us understand every human, animal, plant, microbe, planet, rock, and grain of sand that has ever been and will ever be. Trump and everything he does will start to look microscopic by comparison, especially his tiny little hands.One way to stop the ever-growing pile of plastic water bottles in landfills? Make a bottle people can eat.
Inspired by techniques from molecular gastronomy, three London-based industrial design students created Ooho, a blob-like water container that they say is easy and cheap to make, strong, hygienic, biodegradable, and edible.
The container holds water in a double membrane using “spherification,” the technique of shaping liquids into spheres first pioneered in labs in 1946 and more recently popularized by chefs at elBulli in Spain. It works a little like an egg yolk, which also holds its shape using a thin membrane.
“We’re applying an evolved version of spherification to one of the most basic and essential elements of life–water,” says Rodrigo García González, who designed the Ooho with fellow design students Pierre Paslier and Guillaume Couche.
A compound made from brown algae and calcium chloride creates a gel around the water. “The double membrane protects the inside hygienically, and makes it possible to put labels between the two layers without any adhesive,” García explains.
While the package is being formed, the water is frozen as ice, making it possible to create a bigger sphere and keeping the ingredients in the membrane and out of the water.
Why not just drink from the tap? The designers wanted to address the fact that most people are drinking water in disposable bottles. “The reality is that more and more, when we drink water we throw away a plastic bottle,” García says. “Eighty percent of them are not recycled. This consumerism reflects the society in which we live.”Photo
Bill Gates added clean energy and climate change to his agenda in 2010 with a TED talk on the need for “energy miracles,” during which he uncapped a jarful of blinking fireflies in place of the mosquitoes he liberated in a malaria talk the year before.
He’s been ramping up his own commitments since then, and pledged last year to double his investments (to $2 billion) on a host of energy frontiers in the next five years – from new battery and solar technologies to a safer nuclear plant design to tethered, high-flying wind turbines that might harness the power of the jet stream.
And just in case the energy revolution doesn’t happen quickly enough, he’s also investing in systems that might someday be able to remove the long-lasting planet-warming emission from fuel burning, carbon dioxide, from the air at large scale.
Late last year, the man who calls himself an “impatient optimist” broadened his energy quest. Ahead of the Paris climate treaty talks, he helped line up parallel multi-billion-dollar pledges by government leaders and some of the world’s wealthiest investors to accelerate clean-energy science and innovation.
I recently had a 45-minute conversation with Gates in the Seattle headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to explore what drove him to focus so much time and money in pursuit of energy breakthroughs.
Gates is making a particular effort this year to reach young people. This year’s Gates Letter – the annual mission statement of Bill and Melinda Gates — is shaped as a call to high school students to center their studies and careers on energy innovation and other ways to boost prospects for more than a billion people whose energy poverty locks them into an unhealthy and time-sapping scrabble for existence.
In this campaign and investment effort, Gates is valuably building on the years-long push for an energy revolution by Richard E. Smalley, who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and, even while fighting a losing battle with leukemia, crisscrossed the nation pressing for a space-shot-scale boost in research and development on technologies that can power planetary prosperity without overheating the climate. (Please take the time to watch the 2003 lecture Smalley gave at Columbia University; this talk shaped my own reporting, helping result in my first long piece, in 2006, on the glaring clean-energy research gap.)
In our conversation, Gates described the next steps for the Breakthrough Energy Coalition that was launched in Paris and surveyed the technologies he sees as most needed.
He also addressed concerns expressed by some energy investors who say energy miracles are already occurring with deployment of today’s solar, wind and other non-polluting energy technologies. (Interestingly, Gates’s gambit in Paris seems to be prompting a friendly competition with other wealthy investors. See the end of the post for some details.)
Here’s the full conversation we had, both the video and a transcript with some light editing for syntax and clarity, some contextual links added by me, some related artwork and culminating reflections:
Video
[If time is tight, watch a six-minute edit here.]
Q.
Do you have a vision for the energy and climate norms that the world could have in 2100, given what you know about the climate system and the energy system?
A.
Well, I have a strong goal that the price of energy should be lower because of the work of the foundation and looking at the lives of the poorest. And so it’s a very big deal that we not push energy prices up too much, so that things like fertilizer, lighting, refrigeration, air conditioning eventually — the kinds of things we take for granted — by 2100 should be available to everyone on the planet. So we need affordable energy.
We certainly want to cut down on local pollution because the understanding of the ill effects of particulates continues to rise. And then at a global level, you don’t want the [climate] perturbation, because it gets you off into a level of uncertainty both about weather and the knock-on effects for ecosystems and species. And you want a limit on the [ocean] acidification because the speed that you’re acidifying is quite rapid versus how quickly evolution can adapt to it. And so, you know, maybe if you wait millions of years, some evolutionary path can build coral reefs in that ocean that you’ve got. But in human time frames that’s a long time to be missing huge parts of the ecosystem.
Q.
What aspect of the climate challenge drives you the most? Many people say sea-level rise is the biggest factor.
Photo
A.
The impacts will be greatest on the poor. Even sea-level rise. Yes, rich cities might have to raise their taxes a little bit, and you might have to move inland a little bit. But if you look at Bangladesh, there are a lot of poor people living in a river delta. That’s not that easy for them to adapt. You certainly have low-lying islands.
To me it’s 70 percent of the world’s poor people are farmers, and they’re barely getting by. And a bad year means that their kid doesn’t have enough nutrition. And so unless we can get their productivity and their resilience up quite dramatically, the increased variance in the weather, including lots of precipitation all at once, they just don’t have the ability to deal with it. When you have resilience, which you have in rich countries, you’re likely to be able to make adjustments.
Q.
Back to Paris, which is where you made a substantial announcement. So could you say now, where we go from here, sort of lay out from that initial grand announcement, what happens next?
Photo
A.
Well for me, it’s pretty easy to think of research and innovation as the thing that’s going change the framework. And my interest in getting that on the agenda goes back quite a ways. I had talked to the United States and France about saying, hey, shouldn’t this be on the agenda? And in fact, in terms of having Paris be novel for driving solutions, you’d do the world a service by getting this onto the agenda. After all, raising R&D is a global public good, to invent something that can solve this problem.
We need to encourage each other. And we even need to think, okay, are there some countries who are specializing, you know, say you want to do [carbon] sequestration. Well, you need a government with the right regulations and incentives, who let’s all the pilot plants and things go on there the right way.
So it really belongs on this agenda, particularly because the big emitters are pretty much one and the same as the countries with research capacity. They can respond by tilting their R&D budget in the right direction. And energy is so unique in terms of how little is spent on R&D, because if you invent something, it’s not going to be deployed in big amounts within a 20-year period.
So yes, it’s wonderful that the countries made that commitment. And at first we thought, you know, if we get five or six countries, including the U.S. and a few big countries, that would be phenomenal. As it was, we ended up with 20 countries, and this is in a time of extremely tight budgets — every European country, Japan, the U.S.
It is very tough. There are very few things that are getting more money. Most of the dialogue is about which things will get less money. So it takes a pretty compelling cause. You know, like when the Ebola epidemic came along. Okay, things related to that got more money.
But only things that really get people’s attention in a big way are allowed to fit that special category. So it was a great announcement. And it was interesting, the idea that the private sector, in terms of high-risk venture investing, would come in and be there so that all we were asking for in this case was the basic research piece. Now, some countries may help with non-research pieces. I think that’s fantastic. But this ask was about the piece that really can only be done at the government level. And we said the group of private investors — we’ll add a lot of institutional investors as well — would bring several billion in so that we can nurture these companies up to a pretty large stage, so that more non-venture type financing would then grab onto them and help with the scale-up.
Q.
Is it anticipated that it’s really going to operate like an endowment?
A.
What we’re planning now is the first five years. And the spending will somewhat grow over the years, because we’ll have more companies that are at a later stage. We are going to look at all the companies that are out there, because there are a few that have promising technologies, but they’re in a place where getting financing is a little bit difficult. So we’re not just going to do start-up companies. We may find a few that are at the stage where getting $50 million or even $100 million would be valuable. And then over the five years, we’ll fully invest money, and then, like most venture funds, we would turn around and say to the investors, hey, if you’re happy with this, yes, we’ll do another fund.
And they’ll look at how well the different things are. We wouldn’t expect all of them to be totally liquid. The turnaround time is not like I.T. where within two years something’s completely gone or it’s a unicorn [an investors’ term for start-ups that reach a billion-dollar valuation] or public.
Q.
Energy is so peculiar that way. I’m sure you’ve talked to Nate Lewis before. He’s got this great line, but it’s a very sobering one, that I put in a story years ago. It’s not like we’re trying to go to the moon. A moon shot is more clear-cut. We’re trying to go to the moon when Southwest Airlines is already flying there, handing out peanuts. In other words, the energy system is there, I can plug my laptop into the wall. So it’s like a substitution for something that’s already there, with these secondary long-term risks. I think that’s what’s impeded the R&D — the government sense that we need to even look at it.
And you’ve seen the graphs of not just the U.S., but the O.E.C.D., when you compare different sectors, it’s unbelievable how little goes into energy research if it’s as important as world leaders say it is.
Are you saying, we wealthy individuals with an investment plan here, we need a hand-off. We need you to work on this, too. It’s kind of like a quid pro quo thing?
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A.
Well there’s always been a tradition that certain advances got funded by individuals. I mean, somebody endowed a Lucasian Professorship for Newton to take. And a lot of good science happened by private donors caring about it. Here, we have this imperative where the impact—if you talk in monetary terms, although there are other ways of measuring it that are probably more valuable — you’re talking about trillions of dollars.
It won’t be as fast. But we do expect to make money out of this thing. If you can drive a new approach, then the energy economy is absolutely gigantic. Now, getting it scaled up fast enough, so that you benefit from your invention or your trade secrets, that is tricky. But it’s great that we have that incentive. The financial incentive is to get it out and scaled quickly, and the climate benefit requires that same mentality.
Q.
John Holdren, the science advisor to President Obama, way before he was in that office, articulated how little we spend in a way that was effective. He said a two-cent rise in the gasoline tax triples our R&D money in this country. Recently I asked him by email to update the numbers, and he said the appropriation for energy R&D the last several years has been $3.6 billion, roughly. And he said that it’s more like a doubling of research, if you have a two-cent rise in the gas tax.
Is there a way to make that case to the American people that hasn’t been made? You talk to people of all political stripes, I assume. Have you found a way to get traction with the logic of that?
A.
Well, research hasn’t been discussed much, but I do think it has a lot of appeal. Everyone wants great companies that are leading the way. We do have amazing universities where the basic technology, the material science, the simulation. You know, the I.Q. around the world large is very strong on this — to make the case to the U.S. that it should be a leader in doubling its budget. That was pretty important. I don’t think if the U.S. wasn’t participating, it would be easy to get critical mass. Because even though we underspend, we are about 50 percent of all of the energy R&D spending that gets done.
I think everybody can get excited when they hear there are really ideas out there. And when you talk about basic research, you get away from the somewhat partisan divide about what’s the role of government. Nobody would say it was zero, but you’d get quite a range of views of how much the government ought to try and help out at that later stage.
And so I think this one, now that it’s been highlighted as being so important, it you know, creates jobs in the company that allocates the R&D, it creates business opportunity in the country. And as you say, it’s not relative to the size of the energy market or what’s at risk here. It’s actually very, very small. You know, capitalism in general underinvests in research because the benefits to society are way more than whoever takes the risk and does the invention gets. And energy is just particularly dramatic in that. In fact, I.T. and health, people are spoiled by those, because those have pretty strong research models, both at the government level and at the private level.
Q.
Circling back to Paris, could you lay out the general sectors you personally are interested in, and inevitably these investments will be in? Can you remind people what some of the basic concepts are that are out there?
A.
The range of possibilities for getting an energy breakthrough that is something that will be cheap and clean, there’s quite a few ways to do that. Ah, in the nuclear space there’s fusion; there’s fission.
Within wind, you’ve got high [altitude] wind that only a little bit’s been done in. You have offshore wind, you have whatever improvements you can do to onshore wind, which you know, will likely be a workhorse of the overall system. Then in solar, you have solar electric, which has gone the furthest. You can do a lot more there. You have solar thermal, which has some nice characteristics, because storing heat is easier than storing electrons.
And then you have solar chemical, which is where — without using a photosynthetic process; you’re using a de novo process — photon energy equals some type of hydrocarbon. Think of oil dripping off of a solar panel type thing.
That’s a paradigmatic example because it is not ready for a start-up, but there are some particular problems in terms of material structures and simulation that, if the right research was done, even over the next two or three years, then you could have a set of start-ups that would go into that area.
High wind is another one where the challenges are, to some degree, control and materials challenges. This is the golden age of actually rationally designing materials, whether it’s for tensile strength or for catalytic capabilities. And if you can look at that area and say, okay scientists, here’s what we need, then you can stimulate a lot of good work. And for us it’s a little bit like what we do at the foundation where we take a disease problem and then we try and make sure the scientists who might — even if they don’t know the disease — have some tool that would help stimulate them to get involved.
Biofuels is a category where you’re either taking natural photosynthesis or modifying natural photosynthesis to get much higher efficiencies, and there’s quite a few, you know: trees, grasses, algae. If you’re taking current photosynthesis, then there’s many ways to do cellulosic processing, none of which should have gotten into the large-scale mainstream, but there’s a lot of promise that that might happen.
And when we think about climate, we have to think about more than electricity. We have to make materials. There’s steel, aluminum, cement, plastic, paper — all of which are big processes we’re dependent on, some of which directly generate CO2, like cement production, and a lot of which are big industrial users of electricity or energy. We also have the entire land use, agricultural, livestock area, which is a very significant CO2 emitter.
A little bit of the trap people get into is they think, okay if we’re meeting some 2030 goal, we must be on the way, because we just do more of what we did. Well, a lot of things you do, like, take [away] coal and build natural gas, for your 2050 goal, that’s actually a step backwards because that gas plant is at a higher CO2-per-kilowatt-hour than you’re going to want to have in 2050. So you thought, oh what a great thing we just did. But in fact it doesn’t scale to the sort of near-zero [emissions technology] that we need to achieve.
So when you think of the industrial economy, getting 20 or 30 percent out of that by pushing up recycling, labeling things, that’s easy. But you have to plan today for meeting the large target. You don’t just get to get partway there and say, oh well someone else will figure out how to make steel or, you know, let’s pretend we don’t need to make a lot of steel.
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Q.
One of the things that frustrated me about Paris was that the whole discussion was about that 2020 to 2030 period. But all of those trajectories for that short period rely on this unbelievably steep dip that has to happen later. There was a lack of full disclosure that we don’t know how to do that yet. And that’s where the R&D has to come in.
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A.
Yeah, and people like David McKay have tried to get people to say, hey, we only have so many ways to make energy. And have models — he did it for the U.K. with “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.” But there are not a lot of ways to get that scale of energy. And there are geographies like Japan. You know, where is their energy going to come from? People tend to want sovereign control of their energy supply. And so you run into geographic realities. What technologies are going to fit there?
Q.
I know you have an interest in CO2 removal – taking it out of the atmosphere and stashing it long term. Vaclav Smil, who we both read and talk to, talks about the scale issue. He has said you would need the same infrastructure we have all around the Earth taking oil out of the ground to put a waste gas in the ground.
CO2 removal is actually implicit in the models that the I.P.C.C. provided for the treaty process, to get that deep dive. But is it realistic to get that gigaton kind of outcome?
A.
Well there’s a couple ways that it could come in. Poor countries, even if we figure out how to take livestock and land use in rich countries and get that down to zero, there’s going be a lot of emissions out of poor countries. And we shouldn’t force them not to use hydrocarbons. People actually get confused in climate and think this is bad for poor countries so let’s get them to do expensive intermittent energy systems and then it’s okay.
No, developing and truly poor countries – not China or India – they are a rounding error. So anything you do with their energy systems is a hobby, unrelated to climate change. I mean, maybe you could bring some power there, but they should grab onto the cheapest solution.
And so the rest of the world has to be at true zero or even, under some models, it’s a negative number, which is where you get to capture. A lot of the systems design that people are looking at – like Christopher Clack — even if you can get the renewables up to 80 percent, then you have a piece there probably natural gas “peakers” [power plants that run in periods of high electricity demand], at least based on current technology, are way cheaper than any [energy] storage.
So doing carbon sequestration out of a natural gas [power plant] flue is a lot easier than out of a coal flue, because there isn’t the sulfuric acid. And there’s very little going on with that, but we may need that as part of a solution for that backup peaker 20 percent. Or if you have emissions taking place far away, in the poor countries, the idea that you could do free air capture, like Carbon Engineering is trying to do and a few other people are trying to do — that would have to be part of the mix.
So actually, building prototypes now and saying, okay, how hard is it to do that carbon capture at scale, it’s great that that work is going on. The initial plants will be at very high prices — on the order of $100 per ton, which is way above even the highest CO2 tax in the world.
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Q.
There are some pretty cool ideas out there. I was just at Arizona State, for the first time seeing Klaus Lackner’s work there. He has this spongy looking material that captures CO2 in dry air. You put it into a greenhouse in a moist environment and it liberates the CO2. So he’s developing a prototype like that. And it’s exciting to see minds working on these problems.
I’d like them to be more visible, more integrated perhaps into how kids are learning.
You and I grew up in the space race, you know, it was a no-brainer. Science was all around us. But do you see a way to make this story more pervasive?
A.
Well, I definitely think we need to take the dreams, like for air capture of CO2, and get those out there and make it concrete. You know, or high wind. I mean super-high altitude, the jet stream, which is a very constant source, and a large source. But it’s just very difficult to design that system. Get people thinking about those things and realize, hey, we need some inventions, and draw young people in.
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Q.
I’ve seen other experiments in the education arena. There was a woman [Ozgem Ornektekin] who was the sustainability chief for the New York City school system for a while. And she had gotten some federal funding to put new energy management systems in the school buildings. They started realizing they didn’t have enough people in New York trained to run these systems. So they created this High School of Energy and Technology. And it’s kind of geared to getting young people into the heating-cooling arena. One of the things I was incredibly excited to see there is that they go on a boiler room tour as part of their education. And the custodian is their teacher for the day. He shows them this boiler room, where just 20 years ago, coal was hand shoveled into the furnace. And now it’s oil.
And I would like a boiler room tour in every school in America. You don’t have to charter buses. There are no permission slips, and you start to understand an energy system within a school. It’d be great to see innovation on that front. Maybe not as much as the innovation in laboratories for photovoltaics. I’m a communicator and an educator, so I’m biased — but I think there’s a lot of potential in that arena for innovation, as well. You should go on that boiler room tour. It’s a great template.
Every day I wake up with this issue, like we all do, with a sense of optimism when I see an exciting innovator, and pessimism when I feel the weight of inertia. In 2013, the Bloomberg administration had this statistic where they realized, 75 percent of New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions are from energy in buildings. And 80 percent of the buildings that exist in 2050 in New York City already exist. And so that says you can have your shining visions of the future and transformative, energy pathways. But you still have to deal with window by window, door by door retrofitting.
A.
Not really. Not if your electricity coming in is zero CO2. If the electricity system isn’t about zero CO2, there’s no way to get there. I mean, just ignore the U.S. Assume we could cut some dramatic amount. Just look at India. They will be using over 10 times as much energy. And, yes, some of those light bulbs will be more efficient. Some of those refrigerators will be more efficient. But they will be using more kilowatt-hours. There’s not any doubt. A lot more. The more the better. And so the generation system really has to do the magical work here.
And there are generation systems. I mean, nuclear has got lots of lots of problems, but it does not emit CO2. Hydro, if you manage it properly and you’re working with a reservoir and everything, it doesn’t have to emit CO2.
But I certainly agree with you that this is a problem that you can go from thinking it will be solved to thinking that it won’t |
explained. “Each artist is giving you their insight into what they feel, and it doesn’t matter what kind of music it is. You have to allow yourself to get on that wavelength and get a sense of what you could do so that it connects more directly for the listener. You’re trying to contribute to the artist’s dream.”UPDATE: On Tuesday the City Council unanimously passed new rules to ease restrictions on local taxi companies.
Despite a two-day taxi strike protesting deregulation last week, San Jose lifted fingerprint and background check requirements for ridesharing services Uber and Lyft. Come Tuesday, the City Council will vote on whether to extend similar treatment to traditional taxi companies.
Betrayed! How San Jose's taxi drivers feel after city passes ordinance loosening rules for @Uber and @lyft drivers pic.twitter.com/qLJarEbli6 — Matt Bigler (@mattbigler740) November 11, 2015
The city rolled out a pilot program this past summer that required mobile app-based shuttle drivers (namely Uber and Lyft) to undergo criminal background checks, submit fingerprints and obtain a business license as well as permits to pick up passengers at Mineta San Jose International Airport.
But no Uber or Lyft drivers even applied to work at the airport under those rules, which also required them to disclose vehicle conditions and banned cars more than a decade old.
San Jose has borrowed a regulatory scheme from San Diego, which requires a monthly audit on 1 percent of drivers. Uber and Lyft drivers will still have to undergo background checks, which are required by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
Cabbies have argued that they face stricter regulations and higher trip fees, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage. In protest of this inequity, last week cab drivers refused to provide rides at the airport, instead driving by people and honking their horns. It was a dubious strategy to win the hearts of people in need of a ride.
To level the playing field between conventional taxis and ridesharing services, the city may simplify car inspections and allow lower fares for rides booked online.
“Ground transportation options and related regulatory frameworks are rapidly evolving,” according to a memo signed by Mayor Sam Liccardo and council members Don Rocha, Raule Peralez, Johnny Khamis and Rose Herrera. “To address that reality the city council gave staff direction to review taxi regulations in Title 6 and 25 in an effort to ‘level the playing field.’ Staff recommendations include removal of vehicle inspections by the police department, issuance of temporary permits, establishment of alternate methods of background checks, reduction in annual company license fees for the taxi industry, and the deregulation of fares booked via mobile app. We support these recommendations, which will create a more cost competitive and less burdensome regulatory framework.”
The proposal is a clear reversal from Mayor Liccardo, who proposed the ridesharing pilot program from last summer. This new proposal, in a sense, levels the playing field by going the opposite direction of what was attempted earlier this year.
Union officials cautioned the city against relaxing too many regulations for airport transportation.
“There is concern by airport officials that this open entry approach will result in a ‘race to the bottom’ for fares and service as more [Uber and Lyft drivers] jump into this young, and as yet not clearly defined, transportation service model,” wrote Ray Mundy, director of the Airport Ground Transportation Association. “After all, it was the lack of quality in taxi and van services that led many airports to develop their own requirements and contracts/conditions for the services that exist today.”
While using private cars driven by their owners may lower fares and expand options for consumers, it’s a questionable model for airports, he said.
“Random driver checks at the airport … is no substitute for having every driver to be thoroughly vetted, exactly like taxi drivers, prior to ever getting behind the wheel of a commercially available passenger vehicle at the airport.”
Uber and Lyft drivers face varied local laws throughout California, as cities and counties grapple with how to regulate the nascent industry.
Pending litigation also threatens to undermine the on-demand industry. A class action lawsuit in California asserts that Uber—a $50 billion company—has misclassified its drivers as independent contractors.
Meanwhile, a federal lawsuit filed by a SoCal taxi company against Uber and the state last week accuses the ride-hailing service of flouting unfair competition laws.
This article has been updated.
More from the San Jose City Council agenda for November 17, 2015:
Adjusting for inflation, the city will bump up its campaign contribution limits to $600 for council candidates while keeping the limit for mayoral candidates flat at $1,100.
Taking the lead from Santa Clara County, the city will create a tax break incentive for property owners who lease their land to urban farmers.
After decades of planning, the city is moving forward with plans to develop an empty parking lot in the heart of Japantown into a hub of housing, shops and a performing arts center.
WHAT: City Council meets
WHEN: 1:30pm Tuesday
WHERE: City Hall, 200 E. Santa Clara St., San Jose
INFO: City Clerk, 408535.1260
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Jennifer Wadsworth is the news editor for San Jose Inside and Metro Newspaper. Email tips to [email protected] or follow her on Twitter at @jennwadsworth.Head Cement - A Bit of Casual Research
Head Cement and its History
Introduction
I have had a curious interest in head cements ever since my first days of fly tying many years ago. Head cement selection can be a casual thing, a rigid protocol or a selection of habit it seems. The old masters did not have the selection we have today. Their options were limited basically to what was available at the local hardware store; in their case, varnish or lacquer.
My favorite tyer is Rueben Cross. His book "Tying American Trout Lures" was the book that I checked out from the library when I was just a youngster. I learned by myself with that book. He used Pratt & Lambert's "61" spar varnish.
During this casual research I have uncovered so many different head cements that, well, one could create a hobby of collecting them. Here are the ones I have uncovered so far; and the list continues to grow. If you know of a head cement that is not on this page, let me know and I will add it.
History of Finishes for Flies
It is not necessarily documented but is an accepted fact for most people that the tyers prior to the 20th Century did not use head cement, glues or finishes on their flies. Those tyers would include Frederick Halford from England and our own Theodore Gordon who spent many of his years fishing the Catskills and most notably the Neversink River. I will present an entirely different view based on this casual research. J.H. Keene in his 1881 book, "The Natural History, the Legendary Lore, the Capture of British Freshwater Fish, and Tackle and Tackle Making" provides recipes for many substances for fly making, wax, dubbing wax, dyes, etc and, "Varnish".
In Chapter IX he describes many of these recipes in great detail. He stated that, "Copal Varnish, with small quantity of Gold size and turpentine, takes some time to dry, but it makes a good whipping wax." He also provides recipes for Green Spirit Varnish, Colourless Spirit Varnish, Brown Varnish and Indiarubber Varnish. He did not call these "Head Cement" or "Head Varnish" but there is no doubt that he recommended a fly maker use these varnishes on the silk thread when making a fly. Copal varnish, being a natural resin and used as a "whipping wax" would provide the same results as our modern head cements back in his day; meaning, that it would help hold the silk thread together on the fly.
I have not yet found any conclusive evidence that Halford, Gordon, Cotton, etc. used head cement or varnish. However, it can be deduced that the concept of head cement and the products were available to fly makers at the latest by 1881 when Keene published his book; and quite probably long before that because he did not invent all of the recipes and concepts in that book. So the question then becomes, since varnishes, shellacs, etc were available back then, and considering the bamboo rod makers used them for their silk guide wraps, why then would it not be plausible that fly makers used varnish and/or shellac for the silk on their flies? In 1881 there is evidence that J.H. Keene did. I think now the argument should be, why wouldn't they have used these substances on the head of a fly? I present that the early fly makers did use an early form of head cement. Whether other fly makers chose to use it, or thought about using it was their own choice.
Between Theodore Gordon and the current Catskill masters we know today (Dave Brandt, the late Poul Jorgensen, Mary Dette, Ralph Graves, Frank Kuttner and many others) lived Reuben Cross, Harry and Elsie Darbee and Walt and Winnie Dette. Reuben Cross can trace his roots back to Theodore Gordon and claimed that he learned directly from Gordon the techniques that evolved into the Catskill-style dry fly. Walt Dette learned from Reuben Cross and in the book about the Dette family ("The Dette's" by Leiser) Walt stated that he basically had to trick Cross in to teaching him the correct technique by intentionally doing it wrong and proclaiming it was a great fly! Cross would then, according to Walt, say, no, no, no, you do it this way...and proceed to show Walt the correct technique. I wish I could have been there to see that!
Spar Varnishes for Head Cement
In Cross's book, "Tying American Trout Lures", Cross's only reference to the type of head cement he used is on page four and states:
"Happily, they (refering to tools for fly tying) are few and inexpensive - a tying vise, hackle pliers, manicuring scissors, patent-spring clothespin, large darning needle, razor blade, piece of beeswax, tying silk and, last but not least, a small can of good waterproof varnish."
In Cross's case he used Pratt & Lambert "61" spar varnish as seen in a photograph of his book on the following page (and further below on this web page). Considering that the 1st edition of "Tying American Trout Lures" was published in 1936 this may be one of the first American tyers to document its use. Ray Bergman's book, "Trout" was first published in 1938 but does not seem to mention the use of head cement; although three pages with illustrations were devoted to waxing silk thread!
Harry and Elsie Darbee also reportedly used spar varnish; as did the Dette family (Walt, Winnie and their daughter Mary). Mary still uses spar varnish to this day and applies it to the head of a fly with an antique glass syringe. She calls it her "Varnish Needle" and is passing that tradition down to her grandson as he also uses spar varnish and applies it with a syringe as well.
Although I have scored a couple of pristine BD Yale 10cc syringes on eBay, I have not yet been able to effectively apply the varnish with a syringe. Getting the pressure on the plunger right may be key. Suffice to say the next time I am in Roscoe, NY I'll be stopping by the Dette shop to ask Mary how she does it.
If you have the time to let it dry, spar varnish makes a great head cement.
Lacquer-based Head Cements
Many other modern Catskill masters also use spar varnish as well as lacquers in their various forms. I imagine they use lacquers since they dry much more quickly on the fly. In the years I have known one notable Catskill and highly skilled tyer, I have seen him use primarily lacquer-based head cements. Most recently this tyer was using Serge Boulard's Pro Lak cement; which appears to be, at least by sniff test, to be a lacquer although it is gin-clear and not a pale yellow color.
The well known Western fly tyer A.K. Best, in his book, "Production Fly Tying", advocates the use of common hardware store lacquer for its economy and fast drying qualities.
I often use Nitrocellulose Lacquer that I purchased from a woodworking store. I tried the "brushing lacquer" but found it a bit too thick. I then tried the "spray lacquer" and found it too thin...runs all over the place if you are not careful. I was building the fly tying desk displayed elsewhere on my site and was looking for a nice lacquer for it. I stumbled upon Valspar's Luster Lac 90. I used it to finish the fly tying desk and tried it on some flies. Many of the "lacquer" head cements you purchase appear to be a very small bottle of nitrocellulose lacquer that you can get at the hardware store for a whole lot less money...(like A.K. Best says). If the head cement is a pale yellow color (or clear) and smells like lacquer thinner, it is a good bet it is lacquer.
Flexible Head Cements
Many tyers also like the "soft" and flexible properties of another form of head cements that I call "Flexible Cements". Softex, Flexament are two of the more common ones found in stores. These cements reportedly offer a more flexible and resilient head finish that is more durable than "harder" finishes such as lacquers and varnishes (although I cannot call true spar varnish a "hard" finish since it can take months to totally cure). Whether or not flexible cements are actually more durable than hard finishes is probably another hotly debated topic.
UV-Cured Glues and Cements
They aren't new on the scene but UV glues and cements have come a long way in the last couple of years. Once upon a time ago even the "hard" finish products had a sticky texture once cured. No more. Products like SilverCreek's Crystal UV Coat and FlexThin Coat and the Solarez products are wonderful! The main difference these days is how long it takes the product to cure. They now cure in seconds! I don't use these products for head cement but for Buzzer bodies and quill-bodied flies they work great!
Home-made Head Cements
Many fine head cements can be made at home with a little research and experimentation. Thin ShooGoo with toulol/toluene to get a home-made version of the commercially available flexible cements. I have tried this and you do get a nice thin flexible cement for a lot less than you spend for the commercial bottle but the initial outlay does cost more. If you like this kind of cement, it might be worth trying it out as you can also control the viscosity.
An old head cement mentioned in the May 1941 issue of "American Fly Tyer" magazine calls for Ambroid cement diluted with toluene to get a thinner solution. Ambroid cement has been around for a very long time but it is becoming increasingly harder to find. A good hobby store should have it. I have used this little recipe but it does not give a particularly glossy head and it smells up the house pretty good. However, since it is quite literally a cement it does a fine job at holding things together. Although I have not used it as such, it would probably make a good cement to hold feathers together (such as Jungle Cock, etc) without giving them an un-natural shine or sheen and it would also maintain their flexibility since it is designed be to a flexible cement. Frankly speaking, this little concoction replicates the "properties" of Pharmacist Formula head cement very closely (soaks in well, doesn't dry too fast in the bottle, etc) although it doesn't have the same glossy effect.
Advantages of Head Cement
One reason I believe that head cements became popular is durability of the fly. Back in the 1930's when Reuben Cross was in his heyday, flies were probably considered an expensive luxury. One did not want to pay top dollar for a hand-tied fly only to watch it unravel after a couple fish. I have not yet been able to determine who is "reportedly" the first tyer to use head cement. I wouldn't be surprised if it was Reuben Cross since he was a very serious and steadfast tyer who was constantly looking for ways to improve his flies.
It is generally accepted that a well tied fly with head cement will last longer than one without head cement....although that point is also hotly debated amongst modern fly tyers.
Disadvantages of Head Cement (Have to be fair here)
Generally speaking I think the advantages of using head cement out-weigh the disadvantages but here are some disadvantages I and others have observed:
- Head cement gives off an odor that the fish can smell - Yes it probably does if the fly is used soon after ANY head cement is applied. After the volitiles have evaporated, I am not so sure they pick up on any discernable odor but I also have no scientific data to back that up. Besides, fishermen have been catching a lot of fish over the decades on flies with head cement!
- Head cement adds more weight to a delicate dry fly and can alter the fly's balance or floatability. It can also prevent water from penetrating a nymph and therefore prevents the nymph from sinking as quickly as it should. Perhaps, but I think that is stretching it a bit. I have heard fisherman say these things though.
- It is one more step in tying a fly that takes time and slows down the process....True; however, tying on a new fly after a couple of fish unravel one takes time to.
- Head cement glues-over the hook eye and makes tying on a tippet difficult. Yes it does if it is not taken care of at the vise!
- If head cement is applied haphazardly, it can create a sharp edge in the eye and facilitate a "long release" of a fish when the tippet abrades and snaps. True if using a "hard" finish-type head cement such as lacquer-based head cements and the cement is applied sloppily and the hook eye is not cleaned at the vise. However, if flexible cements are used, I really do not see this as much of a problem.
Other Head Cement Research on the Web
Head Cement - Al Campbell's Article - Al Campbell has put together a good one-pager article on the various head cements. He mixes a few of his own and offers some of his recipes.
Wayward Article - The Sticky Myth of Head Cement - The author explores the use of head cement...rather, why we shouldn't use it. Interesting point of view and it has merit.
Available Head Cements - (Not a Comprehensive List)
This is a quick run-down of the head cements I have seen or heard of fly tyers using these days. They are in no particular order and this is not a head-to-head comparison.
Update as of February, 2016: Many of the mainstay solvent-based head cements we have been using for years are no longer on the market or available to us in the USA. They include: Pro-Lak, Superlak (both from Canada), Dan Bailey's head cement and Griff's. If you find a bottle of any of these I'd suggest you buy it for posterity's-sake. Actually the maker sof Pro-Lak are now selling a product called Superfly Lacquer now. Whitetail Fly Tying has it.
Any of the other solvent-based head cements are also probably not long-lived considering the VOC laws that have been passed in the last few years. That applies to lacquers, spar varnishes, cleaning fluids, etc that we used to take for granted that we could get at the local hardware store. No longer folks.
- Veniard is one of the oldest and most respected names in fly tying materials. Cellire varnish does not appear to be very popular in the US but it does hold a lot of counter-space in shops in Europe. It has a very loyal following. They also produce Floo Gloo and it appears to be a flexible-style cement.
Lagartun Lacquer - Lagartun comes to us from France. It is a lacquer-based product that comes in a number of translucent colors as well as a glow-in-the-dark and shimmer version.
Lagartun's Glow-in-the-Dark version. This lacquer is very cool! It can also be used on other items to make them more easy to locate in the dark. Don't let your kids know about this stuff or they'll paint everything in site!
Lagartun's shimmer head cement:
Dan Bailey's Head Cement - The venerable Dan Dailey has his own head cement that he uses on all of the flies that he sell's from his shop. A sniff test indicates it's a lacquer. The bottle's label says it is made by Midwest Lacquer, Chicago, IL. A bit of further research found that Midwest Lacquer got bought by another company recently. That company makes industrial coatings for containers. They evidently consolidated their manufacturing plants. This cement provides a nice glossy head.
Dave's Flexament - Flexament has been around for a long time and has a loyal following of tyers. It offers a more flexible finish than lacquers or varnishes. Be sure to have a bottle of Dave's thinner on hand though.
Exo-Flex Head cement - I do not know too much about this product other than it is a flexible product and readily available in many fly shops.
Fly-Rite's Fly-Tite Head cement - This is a product that Fly-Rite brings to the table. If you watch the Oliver Edwards "Essential Skills" DVD's, this is the head cement he reaches for quite often. The cement goes on the fly very nicely and forms a slightly rubbery flexible finish although not very glossy. It provides a semi-gloss finish. The "Dilly Wax" he refers to for fly floatant is also by Fly-Rite.
Griffin Head cement - Griffin makes two versions, thick and thin. This is a very common product found in the US. A lot of my friends use this stuff because it is so readily available in our area.
Rumpf Head Cement - "The last name in fly fishing" Made by Raymond Rumpf & Son since 1968. A quick sniff test indicates it is a lacquer-based head cement.
Backcountry Laboratories Hard as Hull - Funny name but this product also seems to be a very popular head cement. This is the stuff that Lefty Kref includes in his "Eventuality Kit".
Loon Outdoors Head cement - Loon makes a few eco-friendly products. Hard Head is one of them:
Loon's water-based head cement:
Loon's Soft Head product:
LureFlash - This product does not appear to be readily available in the US although it seems to be popular in Europe. This is their Glass Build product. Glasgow Angling in Scotland carries it.
LureFlash Feather Weld formula is used for coating feathers to increase their durability:
Harry Murray's Head cement - The famous Virginia guide Harry Murray has a fly Shop and produces his own head cement (VERY thin stuff indeed!) and Wing Kote. The Wing Kote is interesting stuff. I was in Harry's shop the summer of 2010 and talked to him and bought some. He wouldn't divulge the ingredients (no surprise there) but I did find that it did its intended job well but needed constant shaking to keep the stuff in solution. A sniff test indicates it's a lacquer-based product.
Wapsi Head cement - Wapsi produces their own head cement as well and it comes in a handy applicator bottle:
Black Duck - This company re-produced their own version of Pharmacist's Formula but unfortunately went out of business not too long ago. It took a bit of digging but I did score two new bottles from remaining inventory at a western fly shop recently. A quick smell test tells me that it contains some of the same chemicals the original Pharmacist Formula contained; however, the color is much lighter and it is much more viscous than Pharmacist Formula. It does not evaporate much out of the bottle...one claim that Pharmacist Formula had.
Serge Boulard Head cement - Serge Boulard is a Canadian company that wholesales to the fly tying shops. The cement comes in different colors. A Catskill fly-tying friend of mine showed me this cement at a recent fly show and he likes it quite a bit. It's difficult to source here in the USA. It is a very fine quality head cement and is easy to work with. Evidently this head cement is very popular in the Salmon Fly tying community as well...especially the black color. I can see why. This cement goes on very smooth and evenly...very easy to control and makes a nice glossy head. This cement has become my go-to head cement. These guys have it and they will ship to the US.
Pratt & Lambert "61" varnish - My fly tying hero Rueben Cross used this varnish as did famous bamboo rod maker Everett Garrison on his rods (see the can near the center of the photograph of Cross's tying desk). This varnish is still available but is not the same formula that was sold back when Rube was using it. Pratt & Lambert does make a great outdoor varnish called Vitralite though. It is a very tough spar varnish with UV inhibitors. I have used it as head cement and it does work nicely as long as you are using a dark thread as it is a very dark amber/brown color.
Pharmacist Formula Head cement - This product has not been available for many years. Some tyers say it could be one of the best head cements ever made. I found it to be an excellent head cement with properties few others have. It penetrated the threads entirely, didn't dry in the bottle, dried fast on the fly and made a nice hard glossy finish. Suffice to say that it has a loyal following. I just acquired this bottle of Pharmacist Formula. A quick smell test indicates, that, well, it has a funky chemical Bourbon-like smell. That's right, it smells like whisky...looks like it to. As a matter of fact, I suspected that the person who owned the fly tying kit that this came from may have poured out the real cement and poured his dad's Jack Daniels in its place. I tested it to be sure and also asked another owner of Pharmacist to validate that the color is right. It checked out. This is the real deal.
The ingredients indicate that it contains hydrocarbons ( a generic term that could indicate just about anything - mostly flammable things) alcohol, ketones and esters. No wonder they called it Pharmacist Formula. There's no telling what is actually in this head cement but it does provide a nice glossy head finish and soaks in better than any other head cement I have used. Notice also the warning label, "...do not induce vomiting, call a physician. If patient is unconscious, give him air". Nice!! I think I will reserve this stuff for special flies until I can get another bottle.
Sally Hansen's Hard as Nails polish - This is a very popular head cement, er polish, among the Catskill dry fly crowd. Many notable tyers use it, Dick Talleur being one of them. Oh, and it comes in cool colors to...imagine that! Funny how they market one bottle in a very lady-like feminine manner and right next to that display are these bottles that have a more masculine appeal...read "Hard...Nails". Somebody at Sally Hansen did their research to broaden their market it would appear. Smart, very smart!
Softex - A flexible head cement that is popular amongst the salt water fly tying crowd
Zap-A-Gap - A cyanoacrylate-type head cement/glue that is popular
Fishin' Glue - Another head cement
Angler's Corner Fly Tying Water-based Head Cement - Angler's Corner product - I have not seen this head cement on the East coast. I ordered a bottle and tried it out. It is a good cement but tends to separate in the bottle and has to be shaken often.
Hard Headed - By Angling Evolutions - A non-toxic head cement:
Giorgio Benecchi's Head Cement - Giorgio Benecchi - Sniff test suggests it is nitrocellulose lacquer. I just got this in from Henrik at www.flyco.dk. The bottle is on the small size but it does come with a pin attached to the inside of the cap. The pin is actually quite thin and precise (read: it really works!). The lacquer dries a satin sheen not glossy. This is nice product indeed!
Fritz von Schlegell - Head Cement - Very thin head cement. Smell test indicates it's probably a lacquer-based head cement but I can't be sure. This cement really soaks into threads well. It has a very unique and patented built-in retractable brush/applicator. As I recall, the late Poul Jorgensen recommended this head cement in one of his books.
SuperFly Superlaq - Available from www.superfly.ca appears to be a laqcuer-based product by quick sniff test. This product penetrates well and gives a nice glossy head. Like Pro Lak this product comes from Canada and is difficult to source here in the USA. I ordered this bottle from a fly shop in Canada.
Trout Hunter Head Cement - From famous Western guide and fly tyer Rene Harrop comes his water-based head cement. A very nice glossy head cement for those folks who have young tyers in the home or experienced tyers who don't want that chemical smell in the house.
DrLogik's "Nitro-Formula" Head Cement - DrLogik - Uh oh! What's this? DrLogik's own head cement?? Yep, something I have been working on in the background. This is the first attempt at making a better head cement. This is a genuine nitro-cellulose lacquer.
DrLogik's own Traditional Amber Thread Varnish
Traditional Amber Thread Varnish - Here is an old thread varnish formula I put together. This varnish takes about a day to dry but provides a translucent, very durable and very glossy and waterproof head. It is virtually impervious to water. It penetrates silk thread and turns it a beautiful translucent color of the thread used. Made from walnut oil, spar varnish, alkyds, heat and a lot of love. A similar formula is used by bamboo rod makers for their guide wraps. Flies are in the water though and I adjusted for that.
DrLogik's Classic 19th Century Salmon Fly Varnish - Here is another formula I am working on. It is based on a 19th century Kelson formula that contains asphaltum, spirits, heat and care. The first batch came out a little too viscous. This is from the second batch and it seems to be just the right consistency. It has an obsidian-like black finish and dries fairly quickly. Considering the raw materials and how they are formulated, it should provide a waterproof and permanent glossy black finish on the finest salmon fly. This is some interesting varnish! Kelson did his homework on this.With next week's launch of "Invisibilia," the network plans to be more agnostic about platform.
During the 18-month incubation period for Invisibilia, a soon-to-launch show about human behavior, NPR asked the categorical questions media organizations have always used to give direction to their efforts: Would it be its own radio show? A podcast? A segment on other shows?
Instead of trying to fit Invisibilia into preexisting categories, “we decided to just answer yes,” says Eric Nuzum, NPR’s vice president for programming.
Invisibilia will debut January 9, and it “is really meant to be a big thing on a lot of different platforms at once,” Nuzum says. Pieces from the show will populate Radiolab, All Things Considered, and WBEZ’s This American Life. And, of course, Invisibilia will be available as a podcast.
“We’ve become a huge, massive force in podcasting, and, I think it’s fair to say, without even realizing it,” Nuzum says. The network published its first podcasts—none of which were full-show podcasts, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara says—in August 2005, and now serves 69 million downloads per month. But the massive success of Serial (like This American Life, produced by WBEZ), abetted heavily by smartphone adoption, has helped bring a large new audience to the once-nerdy form of media consumption.
“You can make the argument that 2015 is the year of the podcast,” Nuzum says, and NPR believes that “for a lot of people they do serve as the gateway to public radio.” The architectural plans for that gateway, though, are a little unclear. Last month, for example, WBUR General Manager Charles Kravetz told New York Times reporter David Carr public radio’s audience growth is “off slightly, probably in part because people are listening to on-demand programming on podcasts.” In other words, there’s no guarantee a listener will switch on their local NPR affiliate station after an episode of Serial or the TED Radio Hour finishes on their iPhone.
But listener habits aren’t the only thing changing. The economics of public radio shows are changing as well.
“I think what we’re learning in public radio is there’s mutual interdependence,” he says. The TED Radio Hour has a larger digital audience than it does on terrestrial radio, and wouldn’t be sustainable if it were “just supporting itself off its radio underwriting revenue.” Listeners attracted to the deeper storytelling they encounter on flagship podcasts like TED may lead them to the network’s news products, Nuzum says.
NPR’s research has shown that many people who’ve downloaded podcasts “believe when they make a contribution to their local station it’s paying for that podcast,” Nuzum says. “I don’t mind that assumption being made.”
Some of the network’s existing podcasts have made great gains in listeners in the past year—the Pop Culture Happy Hour has quadrupled its audience, and recent live versions of the show (including one held earlier this month at Sixth & I Synagogue) have sold out in minutes. The network has other new podcasts/shows/whatever-you-call-thems in the turnstiles behind Invisibilia, but it has no definite plans about when they’ll be released, Nuzum says.
“I will say we’re working on a number of different ideas,” he says. “Our hope is to really embrace the opportunity we see in front of us in podcasting. This is a great, golden moment. The popularity of Serial has shown this is not just a niche platform: This is a mainstream platform, and we should be treating it like that.”Earlier this week, rumors that Ray Fisher's Cyborg would appear in Warner Bros.' "The Flash" film surfaced online -- only to be called into question by director Rick Famuyiwa the very next day. Little else is known about the film, which will hit theaters after "Justice League" arrives next year; "The Flash's" solo film won't be in theaters until spring 2018. While we do know that Ezra Miller will play Barry Allen and "Dope" star Kiersey Clemons was recently cast as Iris West, that's about all the information we have on the film so far.
Since Warner Bros. plans to connect its DC films the same way Marvel Studios does with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's unlimited potential for another big name hero -- or villain -- to join Miller's Flash on the big screen. CBR rounded up a few of the top super-people we'd love to see in "The Flash" solo film.
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10 Wally West
Let's get the obvious one out of the way first. Wally West has long been a staple of "Flash" comics, having taken over the mantle himself for a good couple decades. Whether the film introduces him as a younger Kid Flash (which is how he debuted in "The Flash" #110) or as an equal on Barry's level (similar to The CW's version of the character), it's hard to imagine a "Flash" film without everyone's favorite wisecracking speedster. Considering that Wally's relative -- Clemons' Iris West -- is already slated to be in the film, it's not a stretch to hope for some kind of role for the younger West.
What's more, Wally's inclusion could set up an interesting dynamic for Barry, the more experienced speedster; since Barry made his (brief) debut in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" and he'll be a major player in "Justice League," he'll have plenty of screen time to develop into the superhero he's known to be -- which would lead organically into his taking on a mentor role with Wally. Wally could present a new challenge that Barry can't just speed away from, and a deeply personal one at that, as Wally is related to Barry's good friend and often love interest Iris. Plus, two speedsters would provide plenty more humor and fun, especially where Wally's more recent incarnation tends to be a bit more rebellious and stubborn.
9 Nightwing
This one may seem a little out of left field, but hear us out. By the time of "Batman v Superman," Batman has been long established as a vigilante in the DC Films universe. We know for a fact that he's had a Robin who died by Joker's hand, who director Zack Snyder confirmed as Jason Todd -- and there's the hang up. While it certainly isn't beyond a film adaptation to change up minor details, Jason Todd was not Batman's first Robin in the comics; Dick Grayson was. Of course, Dick would go on to leave Batman's side and take up a mantle of his own: Nightwing. It's easy to imagine that -- following Jason's death and Batman's descent into murder and violence -- Nightwing disassociated himself with his former mentor.
Considering that, he may take interest when the Justice League -- Batman's group of metahumans -- steps into the limelight. Perhaps, in moving away from Gotham, Dick landed himself a little closer to the Scarlet Speedster. Additionally, Dick is probably closer in age to the Flash than the rest of the Justice League (with the exception of Cyborg, of course). In 2018, when "The Flash" hits theaters, Miller will turn 26; it's hard to imagine Barry will be much older than that. As two young heroes with a connection to Batman, the Flash and Nightwing could have an instant rapport. Though Barry and Dick don't have much |
birds have suffered a further decline in their numbers over the past year, new figures show.
The results from the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch (BGBW), based on half a million people counting birds in their gardens over a weekend in January, also showed an increase in the species that are not commonly seen in back gardens, such as fieldfares and jays, after a freezing start to the year drove them out of the countryside in search of food.
Numbers of starlings, a "red-listed" species of conservation concern which dropped to a record low in last year's birdwatch, declined by a further 16% this year.
House sparrows – also endangered – fell by 17% on 2012 figures, while bullfinches and dunnock numbers also fell, by 20% and 13% respectively. While green finches have declined by nearly 21% since last year.
Martin Harper, the RSPB's conservation director, said: "We know from the many people who take part in Big Garden Birdwatch every year that garden birds are incredibly precious to us and connect us to nature every day … but several of our familiar and best-loved species have been declining at alarming rates over the 34 years that the RSPB has been running the birdwatch and this year's results show a continuing decline."
The starling, famous for its winter "murmurations" involving up to hundreds of thousands of birds, has seen a steady decline in numbers since the BGBW survey began in 1979. Losses have been linked to the loss of traditional, established farming pastures, where experts believe that intensively farmed land makes it more difficult for birds to find their favourite food – the cranefly larvae that live in undisturbed soil.
House sparrows have experienced a rapid recent decline, particularly in urban and suburban environments: greater London lost seven out of 10 sparrows between 1994 and 2001. The causes remain largely unknown, with everything from cats to air pollution being blamed.
"The decline of these two species is part of a long-term trend and nothing to do with the cold weather," said RSPB spokeswoman Wendy Johnson. "Starlings have gone down 82% since we started the survey and house sparrows by 63%. Bullfinches and dunnocks haven't declined overall in the same way as sparrows, starlings and songthrushes, however they are amber-listed species and we are concerned because they have suffered declines this year and over the last few years."
However the freezing temperatures in January meant that some species of birds increased in gardens, with sightings of siskins, fieldfares and jays up by as much as 85%. The RSPB said cold, harsh conditions in the wider countryside was likely to have driven more of these birds into gardens in search for food. For example, more jays were seen in gardens searching for alternative food sources after a particularly bad crop of acorns last year.
Big Garden Birdwatch 2013
The RSPB said the results showed that gardens – as well as wider UK habitat protection – were vital in supporting threatened wildlife.
Harper said: "Gardens make up around 4% of land area in the UK and their role as habitats for our wildlife is clear. They are the places that birds come to for food and shelter when conditions in the countryside are especially tough and together we can all play a part in making them more welcoming and supportive for wildlife."
The cold spring weather the UK is experiencing now is affecting garden birds' breeding patterns, Johnson added. "It's getting into the breeding season now and we would expect birds to be prospecting sites and furnishing their nests right now, but that's having to be put aside because they have to find food and shelter. Hopefully the weather will improve and they will start breeding soon, it's still early on but it's impossible to say right now whether this will affect next year's figures."
The current cold snap – which could turn out to be the coldest March in the UK in 50 years – has led to confused behaviour for migrating birds. The WWT's nine wetland centres have reported sand martins, swallows and spoonbills arriving from Africa for the summer, while bitterns and swans are yet to make their return journey to the Arctic.
On Tuesday the RSPB said it feared the ongoing bad weather may be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of puffins, razorbills and guillemots that have washed up on beaches along the north-east coast of England and Scotland. Severe weather may have led to birds struggling to find food or succumbing to exhaustion, but the exact causes are unknown.
Big Garden Birdwatch 2013 sightings
Cold weather in recent years has produced some unusual variety in the BGBW results: in 2011 rare birds flocked to Britain from Scandinavia, while in 2010 the coldest winter for 30 years was disastrous for small birds.
Every year the RSPB asks members of the public to spend one hour during the last weekend of January counting garden birds as part of the world's biggest wildlife survey. This year almost 590,000 people took part.
Tips to help birds survive cold weather
• Put out a variety of feed – seeds, fatballs and peanuts.
• Break ice, and leave out fresh water daily. Never add anything, especially salt, as it can kill birds.
• Clear snow from lawns to help ground-feeding species such as blackbirds.
• Create homes for birds with nestboxes, and preserve old trees that have holes.If you have completed your undergraduate degree outside of Canada, and can demonstrate eligibility for membership in a Canadian Professional Engineers’ Association, you may apply to undertake the Obligation. Contact a camp near you.
The Calling of an Engineer
The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer has a history dating back to 1922, when seven past-presidents of the Engineering Institute of Canada attended a meeting in Montreal with other engineers. One of the speakers was civil engineer Professor Haultain of the University of Toronto. He felt that an organization was needed to bind all members of the engineering profession in Canada more closely together. He also felt that an obligation or statement of ethics to which a young graduate in engineering could subscribe should be developed. The seven past-presidents of the Engineering Institute of Canada were very receptive to this idea.
Haultain wrote to Rudyard Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in some of his poems and writings. He asked Kipling for his assistance in developing a suitably dignified obligation and ceremony for its undertaking. Kipling was very enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both an obligation and a ceremony formally entitled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer."
The object of the Ritual can be stated as follows: The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer has been instituted with the simple end of directing the newly qualified engineer toward a consciousness of the profession and its social significance and indicating to the more experienced engineer their responsibilities in welcoming and supporting the newer engineers when they are ready to enter the profession.
The Ritual is administered by a body called The Corporation of the Seven Wardens Inc./Société des Sept Gardiens inc. The seven past-presidents of the Engineering Institute of Canada in 1922 were the original seven Wardens. The Corporation is responsible for administering and maintaining the Ritual and in order to do so creates Camps in various locations in Canada. The Ritual is not connected with any university or any engineering organization; the Corporation is an entirely independent body. The Ritual has been copyrighted in Canada and in the United States.
The Iron Ring has been registered and may be worn on the little finger of the working hand by any engineer who has been obligated at an authorized ceremony of the Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer. The ring symbolizes the pride which engineers have in their profession, while simultaneously reminding them of their humility. The ring serves as a reminder to the engineer and others of the engineer's obligation to live by a high standard of professional conduct. It is not a symbol of qualification as an engineer - this is determined by the provincial and territorial licensing bodies.
(Original text by Camp No. 1, Toronto) 91.07Due to an overwhelming workload, I am suspending production of the RM II while I search for a machine shop to take up manufacturing some of the parts for me.
The key to a well sharpened handsaw is accurate and consistent tooth geometry. Two of the most important elements of saw tooth geometry are the rake and fleam angles. By bringing an unprecedented level of precision and repeatability to saw filing, it is possible to file your saws more accurately and consistently, leading to more predictable sawing characteristics.
Inspired by, and loosely based on a saw filing guide patented by Henry Briggs in 1919, the RakeMaker II is the most versatile saw filing guide made today. With built-in rake and fleam scales, accurate and repeatable saw filing is within everyone's reach.
The RakeMaker II takes advantage of our innate ability to discern parallel and horizontal lines. By magnifying the angle of the file, even small deviations from the target rake and fleam angles are readily apparent. In use, the comfortable hardwood handle (which is held in a fixed horizontal orientation) provides a tactile frame of reference that further aids in maintaining your rake angle.
Filing from both sides of the saw is easier than ever, as the rake and fleam angles can be quickly and accurately reversed. And because it is so easily adjustable, filing progressive rake is now nearly a trivial matter.
For further precision and ease of use, the optional level vial can be mounted on the fleam guide. While it seems excessive at first glance, many find that using the vial to level the guide is actually faster than aligning the guide with the toothline.
Rake angles of 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 degrees are readily set using the modified vernier scale on the body of the guide. Angles between these markings are easily intrerpolated.
Fleam angles from 0 to 45 degrees (in 5 degree increments) are marked on the fleam guide.
Approximately 2 7/8" long and 3 3/8" wide.
Holds tapered saw files ranging from 6 inch needle files (for teeth as fine as 18 or 19 ppi) to 7 inch slim files (for teeth as coarse as 4 or 5 ppi).
Because the file holder compensates for the taper on the end of most files, the axis of the filing guide is parallel to that of the file.
Made in the USA of stainless steel, bronze/brass, and premium hardwoods. Fully warranted for one year.Image copyright EPA Image caption A massive search operation was launched after the plane vanished
Australia's transport minister has said the search for flight MH370 could resume in the future, but only if "credible new evidence" emerges.
Australia, Malaysia and China ended the Indian Ocean hunt on Tuesday, almost three years after the jet went missing.
Darren Chester on Wednesday said Australia did not rule out another search, but he stressed he did not want to provide false hope.
He also defended the suspension following criticism from relatives.
The plane carrying 239 people vanished on 8 March 2014 while travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
More than 120,000 sq km (46,300 sq miles) of the Indian Ocean has been searched. Pieces of debris have been found as far away as Madagascar.
But only a handful of the fragments have been identified as definitely or highly likely to be from the Boeing 777.
MH370: What we know
Is it likely MH370 will ever be found?
The passengers on board MH370
Relatives' anger at 'ignored' debris
MH370: The key pieces of debris
There were 14 nationalities among the 227 passengers and 12 crew on board the plane. The majority - 153 people - were Chinese.
A report in November 2016 said the plane had probably made a "high and increasing rate of descent" into the Indian Ocean.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Flight MH370: Audio recording reveals final cockpit communications
"I don't rule out a future underwater search by any stretch," Mr Chester told reporters in Melbourne, stressing that the hunt was "not a closed book".
But he said he did not want to provide false hope to the victims' families.
"We need to have credible new evidence leading to a specific location before we would be reasonably considering future search efforts," he said.
Australia, Malaysia and China flagged in July that the search would be suspended this month if no credible new evidence was found. In the nations' joint statement on Tuesday, they hoped "new information will come to light".
Mr Chester said analysis of satellite imagery and the drifting of plane debris in the ocean would continue into February while Australia remained open to help Malaysia on future requests including the examination of other aircraft fragments that may be found.
He defended the choice of the search zone, which was called into question after new analysis in December concluded MH370 was not in the area.
The report, released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), said it was more likely to be in a 25,000 sq km north of the current one.
"We need to understand the very limited amount of actual data our experts were dealing with... it has been the edge of science and technological endeavour in terms of pursuing this search effort," Mr Chester said.
"In future, whether through better analysis of data, if new technology becomes available or through improved equipment or something of that nature, we may have a breakthrough."
Families angered
Relatives of the victims on Tuesday criticised the decision to halt the search as "irresponsible".
Voice370, a family support group, said finding the Malaysian airliner was "an inescapable duty owed to the flying public" and the search must continue in the newly-identified area.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Grace Subathirai Nathan: "I want to know what happened to my mother"
"Stopping at this stage is nothing short of irresponsible, and betrays a shocking lack of faith in the data, tools and recommendations of an array of official experts assembled by the authorities themselves," the group said in a statement.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he empathised with the families, but that search officials had done the best they could under extraordinary circumstances.
"We share their deep disappointment that the plane has not been found," he said.
"It is an unprecedented search. It's been conducted with the best advice over the areas that were identified as the most likely to find the location of the airplane... and we deeply regret that the plane has not been found."Since roughly the middle of the last century, there has been a thriving philosophical debate about the nature of action. What is it that makes us agents rather than patients? What makes us responsible for the things that we do rather than the things that happen to us? And what kinds of capacities do such agents have to have to bear different kinds of responsibility – is it enough just to have desires of which one is aware, or does one have to be able to choose between them, or does one further have to be able to judge those desires by principles anyone could share? The thread that generally holds this discussion together is the idea that whatever the correct answers are to these questions, they are the correct answers for all agents; there is fundamentally only one form of agency. But what if this assumption were wrong, though wrong in an instructive and tractable way? What if there were multiple forms of agency in human life, but not so many that they couldn’t be identified and related to each other in visible and significant ways? Surprisingly (given his reputation as the purveyor of identities that swallow up all differences), it turns out that Hegel has such a pluralistic philosophy of action.
Specifically (and this is not so surprising, of course), Hegel thinks that there are three: one that is oriented by specific desires deeply embedded in the local contexts of life; one that is more goal-directed, seeking out new and wider contexts when necessary to provide better resources for achieving those goals; and one that commits itself to achieving the goal of all goals – the “Good” – through putting its shoulder to the wheel of the larger institutions that attempt to promote and balance the satisfaction of different desires and achievement of different goals.
And, Hegel thinks, with each of these different ways of practically orienting oneself to the world comes a different fundamental value. The desire-based form of agency fundamentally values security, a kind of right to be left alone in those local contexts in which those desires have their fullest strength and validity. The goal-based form of agency fundamentally values welfare, understood in a formal sense as the achievement of goals. And we have already seen the relevant value for the third form – the Good itself, understood as a state in which rights claims to security and welfare claims to support are made consistent with each other in a global normative distribution.
Hegel calls these three different ways of being an agent different forms of accountability (Zurechnungsfähigkeit). This means at least two related things. First, it means that they are different ways we have of holding ourselves and each other responsible. Hegel thinks that participants in the desire-based form hold themselves and each other responsible only for consequences that actually cambe about and that they actually foresaw; participants in the goal-based form hold themselves and each other responsible for the kinds of consequences that usually attach to the essential type of the action in question; but participants aiming at the Good hold themselves and each other for the whole network of consequences and all effects on rights and welfare.
Second, this means that the three forms of agency are different ways to be somebody recognizable, visible, and worthy of respect in both public and private life. For Hegel, this meaning was tied to social types: farmers and soldiers, artisans and workers, civil servants and merchants. It would be too hard to “be somebody” just by, e.g., following one’s desires. One needs images, narratives, exemplars and other forms organized by social types to mediate the requisite recognition.
The question for contemporary philosophers of action is: are there still a tractable number of ways of acting, and is there sufficient connection with social types sufficient to make any of this visible? For one great benefit of such pluralism would be that it would allow us to tell when we were talking past each other or being unreasonable in our expectations of each other as a result of performing or participating in different forms of agency, and a second great benefit would be our ability to recognize ourselves and each other as (at least occasionally) succeeding at being somebody who counts in these relevantly different ways. But without visibility and a tractable number, these benefits are lost.
Featured image credit: “Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) mit Studenten. Lithographie”, from Das Wissen des 20.Jahrhunderts. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.The European Commission filed a lawsuit Thursday against Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic over their reluctance to accept migrants.
The three nations could face hefty fines if the European Court of Justice (ECJ) sides with the European Union. The lawsuit stems from a 2015 scheme to relocate 160,000 migrants proportionally across member states.
Hungary and Poland have refused to take a single migrant while the Czech Republic has accepted 12. The European Union demands that the countries accept a combined 8,000 as part of the scheme.
“The European Commission has today decided to refer the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to the Court of Justice of the EU for non-compliance with their legal obligations on relocation,” the Commission said in a statement. “This is why the Commission has decided to move to the next stage of the infringement procedure and refer the three member states to the Court of Justice of the EU.”
The three countries argue that the scheme interferes with their national sovereignty. Poland’s Interior Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said the European Union’s migration policies directly increases the terror threat across the continent.
“Experience shows that the [migrant] relocation system has not worked,” Błaszczak said in response to the lawsuit, according to Radio Poland. “It is a system that poses a threat. It degrades states, entire cities, city districts because the communities that are flowing in to Europe not only do not integrate with Europeans, but … form a hinterland for Islamic terrorists.”
The relocation scheme has been largely unsuccessful so far. Just 32,000 out of 160,000 migrants have been resettled so far.
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Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.China has become the world leader in wind power production after constructing nearly half of all the new turbines built around the globe in 2015.
According to statistics released by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) on Wednesday, China installed 30,500 megawatts of new wind power last year, compared to the world total of 63,000 MW. China now has 145,100 MW of wind power, out of the global total of 432,400 MW.
Over all, there is now enough wind power installed around the world to generate electricity for about 100 million homes.
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China is by far the largest producer of wind power, and now has more wind capacity installed than the European Union, the traditional leader in the sector.
China's dramatic increase is partly due to its drive to cut smog and deal with climate change, the GWEC said.
McKinsey & Co. analyst Scott Nyquist said in a report last year that wind, in most markets, is now the cheapest renewable power supply, except for hydroelectric power. Since 2009, its cost has fallen 58 per cent because of less expensive materials and greater efficiency, he said. Because of that, wind is competitive with other forms of power production without the need for subsidies in a number of markets.
The GWEC figures show that Canada also added substantially to its capacity in 2015, and now has the seventh-largest wind power capacity of any country in the world, with 11,200 MW installed. About 1,500 MW was added to the Canadian grid in 2015. In the United States, there is now almost 75,000 MW of capacity, after an addition of almost 8,600 MW in 2015.
According to the Canadian Wind Energy Association, 36 wind projects were completed in Canada in 2015, in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. Ontario has the most installed capacity, at about 4,360 MW. Quebec is in second place at 3,260 MW.WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump and congressional leaders plan to meet next week to discuss how to avert a potential government shutdown at the end of the year.
White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters says the group will meet next week “to discuss end-of-the-year legislative issues.”
Two congressional aides confirmed that Republicans Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would meet with Trump on Tuesday afternoon to hammer out the end-of-year agenda.
That includes figuring out how to keep the government funded, as well as other thorny issues, such as extending protections for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
The aides spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The meeting was first reported by Politico.That Pesky Esky
The Royals just won their first road trip of the year, and pitching was definitely the major reason for this, but not today (at least as far as the starter Jeremy Guthrie was concerned). The Royals offense unloaded for 9 runs today (7 of which cam from the long ball!!!!!) in a come from behind victory of the Mariners. The Royals won what could be considered the rubber game of the road trip to improve to 4-3 on their tour of the West.
A lot of the success can be thanks to Eric Hosmer and his unbelievable week that could gain him A.L. Offensive Player of the Week, but the unsung hero of this offense has to be the play of Alcides Escobar! Escobar put an exclamation point on this today with his first ever Grand Slam.
Escobar is typically not the Royals main power threat, but early in the season he seems to do most of his damage with the long ball. This year is no different as he now has two homers on the fledgling season.
Where Escobar is really showing gains this season is his ability to get on base. As we all remember last year was a rough year for him with a triple slash at.234/.259/.300. This year Esky seems to be back on his path from 2012, with a current triple slash at.276/.331/.394. The most important of those numbers for the Royals is the middle one, On Base Percentage (OBP). Escobar’s career OBP is only.296. Where his increased batting average is helping this number, where he is seeing the biggest increase is his ability to take a walk.
Alcides has already drawn 10 walks this year. Last year he amassed 19 walk for the entire season…He has already halved that number, and we are only a 6th of the way through the season. His best season for the free pass was in 2010 when he was with the Milwaukee Brewers. But the thing to remember with this, was he was in the National League and hit 8th a lot. That left the pitcher behind him, so many pitchers would pitch around him to get to the pitcher. So these numbers are a bit inflated.
His best non-pitcher aided walk year was 2012 with the Royals with 27. It stands to reason, that this is also helping his batting average as he is now seeing more pitches, and thus capitalizing on mistakes.
If Esky has found his swing and success from 2012, once Billy Butler and Alex Gordon right the ship, this could be a much higher octane offense than we have been seeing. And if he can keep this up at least through the month we will see a much better May than we have been fearing this whole off season!
I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t point out another high point of the Royals so far, and that is the pitching of Wade Davis. Davis struck out his 29th and 30th batters of the season today to in route to a scoreless 8th. More to come on this late in the week, but I wanted to throw him an “Attaboy!” As I must admit, I was not a fan of his from the time we got him, but I must admit I am coming around.
And while I am eating crow I would like to also point out Johnny Giavotella drove in runs for the second straight game. This time in the form of a game winning three run homer. I have continually said Gio is a AAAA player, but as for now, he is really showing his worth as a legit back-up while Omar Infante sits out with back spasms. He also has been playing a lot of third base in Omaha, so makes you wonder what in store for him as the season continues.
Of note: Today marked the first three run home run of the season….As well as the first Grand Slam!
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Previous Post Royals are '69 Expansion CHAMPS Photo Credit: Chris Walker's TV While watching a replay of Wednesday's game against the Pads, the Padres local telecast showed a quick stat about the record of the expansion teams from 1969. The stat caught me off guard, and I... Read more Tweet Next Post Goose's Tuesday Take -- Moose Crossing Edition ***Update, the Royals place Omar Infante on 15 day DL and call up Pedro Ciriaco In what was the most anticipated news following a Royals off day, many fans had hoped the whispers that Mike Moustakas might be demoted to AAA... Read more
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commentsA Catholic Church official has apologised after a priest told parishioners that had murdered Melbourne woman Jill Meagher's faith been stronger, she would have been "home in bed" and not walking down a street on the night she was brutally raped and killed.
The controversial homily was reportedly delivered during an end-of-term service at St Christopher's Primary School in Airport West on Friday when the priest held up a newspaper article with an image of Ms Meagher's killer, Adrian Bayley.
Jill Meagher.
Radio station 3AW reported that the priest made the comments to an audience of about 100 people, saying that if Ms Meagher had been "more faith-filled", she "would have been home in bed" and "not walking down Sydney Road at 3am".
Bayley raped and killed Ms Meagher in a Brunswick laneway in September 2012. He was sentenced to life in prison, with a minimum term of 35 years.Bitcoin is knocking on Washington's doors.
Bitcoin companies are hiring lobbyists, visiting lawmakers on Capitol Hill and writing to agencies about how they should write rules that will determine the future of the fast-growing virtual currency.
It's all part of a push to shape how Washington ultimately regulates the independent, digital money that is growing in popularity.
"The most important thing we're doing is explaining how Bitcoin works," said Jim Harper, a lobbyist who was hired recently as counsel for the Bitcoin Foundation, an organization that represents Bitcoin companies and investors. Harper, who has lobbied for PayPal and VeriSign, is paid in bitcoin.
The timing is ripe.
Just two weeks ago, the Internal Revenue Service issued a rule to tax bitcoin as property. The Federal Election Commission is also expected in the next several weeks to decide whether people can contribute to political campaigns using bitcoin. Another federal agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is expected to rule whether Bitcoin is a traded commodity, like gold or interest rates.
All of this comes as Bitcoin is under increased scrutiny. On Tuesday, Attorney General Eric Holder told lawmakers during a Congressional testimony that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies pose a challenge for law enforcement agencies, because they can be used to conceal illegal activity.
"A lot of different government officials and federal agencies are trying to wrap their mind around Bitcoin," said Harper, the lobbyist.
Those in the Bitcoin world certainly don't want to be caught by surprise with any new federal rules.
Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Boston-based Circle Internet Financial, a Bitcoin exchange startup, has been making frequent trips to Washington meeting with regulators at the U.S. Treasury and lawmakers on Capitol Hill to talk about the virtual money.
He said he "welcomed the decision" by the IRS to tax bitcoin as property as opposed to a currency, because it added a new layer of certainty for companies like his.
The move to beef up the industry's voice in Washington began late last fall, when Sen. Thomas Carper held a hearing on Bitcoin and asked agencies to give Bitcoin companies a clear regulatory road map.
Any new technology, or industry would be smart to educate Washington, said Michael Beckerman, CEO of The Internet Association, a trade group for digital companies like Facebook and Google.
"The consequences if you don't (engage in the process) can be dire. Decisions made on the Hill and by regulators can make or break any industry," Beckerman said.
Related: Where is Bitcon legal?
Companies dealing in bitcoin have been in informal talks with officials at the federal commodities regulatory agency, says CFTC spokesman Steven Adamske. And the BitCoin Foundation and Atlanta-based BitPay, a digital payments processor, have written letters to the election commission urging the regulator to allow bitcoin for payments in political campaigns.
Bitcoin proponents have reason to be concerned about Washington getting too involved. It could threaten users' anonymity, a key characteristic of the currency.
Bitcoin is used to buy merchandise anonymously. Bitcoin is becoming increasingly popular with small businesses because there are no credit card fees.
However, the virtual currency has run into a litany of problems in the last six months.
In October, the FBI shut down Silk Road, the biggest online black market used to market illegal drugs and other items, which used bitcoin for transactions.
Authorities also arrested Charles Shrem, a co-founder and chief executive of a popular bitcoin exchange BitInstant. Shrem was on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation.
And in February, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges, Mt.Gox, filed for bankruptcy.
Related: IRS says Bitcoin is taxable
Though Bitcoin companies are meeting with Washington players, none of them have registered with the Senate to officially lobby.
Harper said his group hasn't registered because so far the group's activities have been "informational and educational."
"We haven't done so much of it that we need to worry about it," Harper said. "My hope is that we'll be a resource for those who are lobbying, ideally we'll work for them."Brazilian Grand Prix
Venue: Autodromo Jose Carlos Pace Dates: 13-15 November Coverage: Live TV, radio and text coverage of the race.
Full coverage details
It has not been the most conventional of build-ups to a grand prix weekend for me, as you may have read by now.
It has been an eventful time since the Mexican race two weeks ago, and I ended up getting quite run down.
Following the race weekend in Mexico City, I stayed over there working for another four days. Then, when I got back to the UK at the end of last week, I was stressed trying to organise my mum's 60th birthday last Saturday.
The party turned out great, and we had so much fun, but by the end of it I was exhausted. I had been busy for two solid weeks and I basically collapsed.
I ended up back in Monaco on Monday with a fever and we decided to delay my arrival in Brazil by a day to give me more time to sort myself out.
I've slept a lot the last couple of days and I feel much fresher now. I've had some good medication and I feel I am now on the upward slope and I will be fine for this weekend's race at Interlagos.
Saying thanks to my mum
I really wanted to put a lot of effort into my mum's birthday. Turning 60 is a major landmark in life and I can never thank her enough for what she has done for me. This was one small way of doing that.
She was a single mother bringing up three kids and she gave up everything for me - as did my dad, of course.
She is such a selfless person, and had never really had anything done for her. So I wanted to give her the most amazing birthday, just to show her how special she is.
Lewis Hamilton threw his mother a surprise 60th birthday party
I flew in people that we hadn't seen for 20 years. There was something like 120 people at a place we hired in London. I had a friend organise the venue. I've never done anything like that before.
I had loads of my friends there. I had a load of really cool people sending video messages, which we played before the party, and then Jessie J got on stage to sing, among other people.
It was stressful for everyone involved getting ready but it was so well worth it - Mum looked like she had a whale of a time.
No problems at Mercedes
If you were watching the Mexico race, you'll know that during it I had questioned my Mercedes team's decision to make a second pit stop for tyres.
We discussed it afterwards. Not because there was anything particularly to be resolved but just to go through what we were all thinking at the time.
Obviously, I'm a racing driver and I have the right to question decisions that are taken during the race.
The thinking behind the stop was that we were far enough ahead to have basically a 'free' pit stop for both cars. And making that stop took away any risks with the tyres potentially not making the distance, and meant we were safe if there was a safety car - as indeed there was, as it turned out.
Hamilton visited Mexico's Black Jaguar White Tiger Foundation
It was absolutely the right thing for the team to do, to take away as many risks as possible of us not finishing one-two.
Once they had stopped my team-mate Nico Rosberg, they had to stop me because otherwise it would have disadvantaged him.
The team told me we were stopping for safety reasons - by which they meant they did not know at that time if the tyres would make it to the end of the race, based on what they had seen in the first stint.
Of course I understood that. But I knew that my tyres would make it to the end. That's where I was coming from; that I didn't need to stop. And it turns out that the tyres were absolutely fine and could have made it easily.
Media playback is not supported on this device Hamilton joins greats with third title
There was no argument at all. I sat with Paddy Lowe, our technical boss, and he asked me what my thinking had been.
I told him I was a racer, that he knows me well - we have basically worked together all my career as he was at McLaren with me and we both joined Mercedes at the same time in 2013.
We've had an amazing year. There have hardly been any instances of me questioning the pit calls, and I was like: "Let's just move on."
I know the team make decisions for the right reasons, and that's the way it will continue to be.
Not worried about Rosberg's run
Nico did a really good job to win that race, and he did it after scoring his fourth consecutive pole position.
I'm not worried about that run. I don't see it as a pattern; it's just the way things have worked out at the individual races.
I've had a great run in qualifying this year and you can't get it right all the time. It's no big deal.
Having said that, of course qualifying is important and naturally I want to get pole this weekend at Interlagos.
I've only been on pole once here - in 2012 - and it has not been a great circuit for me so far.
I like it, it's just that I've very rarely had the car to win here.
In my first two years with McLaren, the Ferrari was always better here. Then from 2009-13, Red Bull had an amazing run at this race.
Nico Rosberg (right) has beaten Hamilton to pole at four successive races
I was finally in the lead here in the wet in 2012, and I should have won, but I got taken out by Nico Hulkenberg's Force India while I was in the lead.
And then last year I was quicker than Nico Rosberg in the race, and it would have been close between us had I not spun on the lap before one of my stops while I was trying to make up the time to pass him.
It's annoying that it has worked out like that here because it is a track I have always wanted to win at.
When I was a kid, I used to play a game called Grand Prix Two. Interlagos was always the first race of the season on that and I never really got much past the second race.
I would always restart the season, so I always seemed to be doing Interlagos - it was a real pain!
It |
less mommy-knows-best to the other,” a libertarian quickly replied, “What, pray tell, would this injection of ‘intuition and emotional wisdom’ offer the libertarian?” Hoo boy.
Seems to me like there is little tolerance for emotion or the Feeler preference within groups of libertarians. There is an assumption that Feelers cannot come to the rational conclusions of their Thinker counterparts and become decided libertarians.
First of all, there have been a variety of psychology experiments to correlate intelligence and MBTI. In a well-cited UAB article, while there was a correlation between iNtuitivism and intelligence (via the KAIT test), there was no data to support that Thinkers were smarter than Feelers. It is simply untrue to suggest that libertarians are more intelligent than the rest of the populace because they have Thinking tendencies.
There is also a fundamental misunderstanding that Thinkers only think through problems and Feelers only feel. This could not be further than the truth. Thinkers gain insight to a problem by distancing themselves from it, whereas Feelers try to immerse themselves to have a holistic understanding. Both Thinkers and Feelers come to rational conclusions to problems; their process is really all that’s different. And there are benefits and drawbacks to both methods—one is not inherently better than the other.
While libertarians tend to be “cold and calculating” Rationals, they should explore, and affirm the value of Feeler arguments. This will bring more Feelers into the movement. Remember, utilitarianism has its weaknesses, and so too its arguments. Intuitive, emotional arguments may offer better ways to connect with the public and generate ideas we haven’t thought of yet.
In the past few years, there have been great strides taken to attract Feelers. LearnLiberty‘s “Liberty is Personal” video series is one of them (albeit, the music was a little much). The reason why this campaign appeals to Feelers is because it allows them to holistically involve themselves in a problem; they become passionate when there’s a face to the consequences of a law or situation.
Let’s not isolate our Feeler friends. They have a great deal to offer, including, and perhaps especially, their ideas.Programming tasks are problems that may be solved through programming. When such a task is defined, Rosetta Code users are encouraged to solve them using as many different languages as they know. The end goal is to demonstrate how the same task is accomplished in different languages.
These are the Programming Tasks that have been defined and solved. Feel free to add solutions in languages not already included.
The Category:Simple is a small subset with only "really simple" tasks, like "Hello World", and demonstrations of basic language-features.
The Category:Draft Programming Tasks is a list of tasks, some of which are just awaiting more implementations before they can be promoted to tasks. Others may well have problems, (check their discussion and history pages).
Read the guidelines on creating new tasks. If you need help, check the discussion for this page.**No afternoon Weather Xtreme video today; having to spend most of my time dealing with TV!**
WINTER STORM WARNING: NWS offices in Birmingham and Huntsville have issued winter storm warnings for much of North and down into Central Alabama. Winter storm warnings are up for Birmingham, Anniston, Gadsden, and Tuscaloosa.
We should note a winter weather advisory has been issued down into the Greensboro/Demopolis area of West Alabama, where some light snow is possible.
This is our public forecast…
TIMING: It begins in West Alabama as early as 8:30… then the precipitation moves east. It should reach Birmingham around 10:30, and Anniston/Gadsden around 11:30. Understand these are approximate times. The heaviest snow comes from 12:00 noon until 6:00 p.m., and then it winds down tomorrow night.
ACCUMULATION POTENTIAL/PLACEMENT: Within the heaviest snow band, which should be somewhere between Birmingham and Huntsville, amounts of 3-6 inches are likely, with isolated amounts to 8 inches. We might even hear of some reports of thundersnow in that zone. We project 2-3″ for Birmingham, and 1-2″ for Tuscaloosa. Please understand the snow will not follow the clean lines we are showing on the map above… they are just a broad guideline. Anniston and Gadsden are on those lines as you can see; amounts could go either way there.
IMPACT: Travel conditions will deteriorate quickly tomorrow afternoon as the heavy snow falls. Hazardous travel is likely through tomorrow night and Thursday morning; temperatures will ease above freezing by mid-morning Thursday, and after that roads will improve.
BIGGEST CHALLENGE: The exact placement of the rain-snow line. For now we project it along a line from Eutaw to Brent to Calera to Ashland to Wedowee. This might have to be adjusted north or south a bit later tonight and tomorrow morning as the event unfolds. South Alabama will simply have a cold rain.
REMEMBER: For the snow lovers, some of you will be delighted with the amount of snow you see tomorrow, others severely disappointed. See the 10 things you need to know about winter weather forecasting. And, of course, the forecast can and will change.
THURSDAY/FRIDAY: These two days will be dry with highs between 40 and 45; the sky will feature a mix of sun and clouds.
OUR WEEKEND: We expect a high in the low to mid 50s Saturday and Sunday; a touch of light rain is possible Sunday, but much of the weekend will be dry.
Showers and storms return early next week; too early to be specific.
ALABAMA POWER IS READY, ARE YOU? Our friends at Alabama Power are monitoring the forecast closely, ready to deploy people and assets to quickly address any outages that might occur. Read a special message from Ike Pigott about their commitment to their customers.
WEATHER BRAINS: Don’t forget you can listen to our weekly 90 minute netcast anytime on the web, or on iTunes. This is the show all about weather featuring many familiar voices, including our meteorologists here at ABC 33/40.
CONNECT: You can find me on all of the major social networks…
Facebook
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Stay tuned for updates through the night…
Category: Alabama's WeatherIf you are one of those Filipinos who thinks that the “Filipino First Policy” of actively discouraging Foreign Direct Investors and multinational companies from coming into the Philippines by requiring them to partner with local Filipino investors who will own at least 60% of the company set up in the Philippines is a step in the right direction, think again. Local Filipino investors are not numerous enough to create as many businesses that would create the huge number of jobs necessary to absorb our country’s unemployed. In fact, the amount of money that most local investors have with them – let alone the money that they are usually willing to invest – is often very low when compared to international levels of investment.
What’s very frustrating is that the rest of the ASEAN region, starting with Singapore, relied heavily on attracting massive foreign direct investments as a means of creating a lot of jobs for their people. When Singapore did this, even huge countries like China followed suit. Malaysia too, under Mahathir bin Mohamad, also pursued an aggressive policy of attracting a lot of foreign direct investments as a means of creating massive employment. Everyone else in the region, including Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and even recently, Myanmar have joined in the aggressive foreign investment attracting game.
Only the Philippines remains the lone country in which Foreign Direct Investment is seen as being harmful and “infringing upon our sovereignty.” Wow. What idiocy!
So instead of allowing foreign direct investors and multinational companies to come to the Philippines and create jobs for Filipinos in the Philippines, Filipinos would prefer to send jobless Filipinos abroad to work in foreign countries, working for foreigners. The main difference is that had these Filipinos been working in the Philippines, they would at least be together with their families and loved ones, unlike when they work abroad as OFW’s and are away from their families and loved ones for years, oftentimes ending up with broken families. Well, done, Pinoys!
This Filipino First Policy has done nothing but cause the Philippines to fail!
What to see another one?
So the Philippines is dead last within ASEAN.
Now let’s try to learn more about the difference between Hong Kong – which is very open to Foreign Direct Investments (like Singapore and most of ASEAN) – versus the Philippines – which is very closed to FDI.
Here is a story about two “countries.” Hong Kong, for all intents and purposes is a “country.” It has its own economy and it has its own laws different from that of China to which it is supposed to belong after the 1997 hand-over. Read the whole story in its entirety and learn just how bad things have turned out in the Philippines thanks to the 60/40 restrictions and the misguided Filipino First Policy.
A Tale of Two Countries
(Borrowed from the Far Eastern Economic Review)
by William McGurn (June 1994)
Editor’s note: While it is true that this is an old article from June 1994, the author William McGurn’s analysis is so spot-on and remains extremely relevant today such that this article seems as if it was written just yesterday. If anything, it is worth noting that the Philippine situation is even far worse now (some 20 years after this article was written) so that whatever the author wrote in 1994 has become even worse in terms of degree. That this article was written in 1994 does not diminish the Truth that this article speaks.
The human costs of protectionism
Teresa Concepcion had high hopes for her future.
Although her father was only a farmer with a grade-school education, things were looking bright for the new generation of Filipinos. By the time Teresa (not her real name) was born, the country had risen from the ashes of World War II to achieve not only independence and a working democracy but the second-highest standard of living in the Far East after Japan’s. In 1970 she entered a local university. Four years later, degree in hand, she took a job as a social worker supervising day-care centers. That’s when her dreams began to dissolve.
Teresa had expected only a modest salary. Upon entering the working world, however, she was stunned to find out exactly how low wages were, not only in her profession but throughout the Philippines. Her paycheck brought in barely $40 a month. By now she was married and had given birth to the first of three sons. Her husband, a surveyor’s assistant with the Bureau of Land and Natural Resources, made no more than she did. Even such basics as clothing and baby food became more than they could afford. And so, after eight years of incessant financial struggling, Teresa and her husband made a critical decision.
In the summer of 1983, she hugged her husband and three boys–ages 7, 5, and 3–and, with money borrowed from her in-laws, boarded a plane bound for Hong Kong at Manila Airport. At age 33, she was leaving her family behind to begin a completely new career: as a maid.
Teresa was not alone. Some 105,000 Filipinas labor in Hong Kong as amahs, or maids. Almost a decade after the People’s Power revolution that toppled Ferdinand Marcos, the plight of these women remains a standing indictment of the Philippine government’s staunchly protectionist economic policies. Like Teresa, the amahs are for the most part smart, relatively well-educated women who found the door of opportunity slammed shut at home. They have college degrees in disciplines ranging from accounting to education, yet they find themselves cooking meals and scrubbing floors for Hong Kong shop clerks and secretaries. Like Teresa, many of them are mothers who are now raising other people’s children while their own grow up without them. Underscoring their predicament is a cruel irony: A generation ago, Filipino families imported Chinese maids.
Today the situation has reached crisis proportions. Within East Asia, disparities in prosperity have led to huge labor outflows, mostly from poorer countries such as the Philippines to richer ones such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Korea. The maids are only the legal tip of a Filipino iceberg that includes such diverse occupations as nightclub dancers, construction workers, shop clerks, and mechanics. Their growing numbers and negative image have become sensitive issues both at home and abroad. When Teresa first arrived in Hong Kong 10 years ago, there were only 24,800 Filipina amahs at work; now there are more than four times that many, and locals complain that the women occupy the city center on Sundays, their one day off.
In the Philippines, the debased condition of these women has led to legislation calling for an end to the Overseas Worker Program. In 1993, Philippine public opinion was outraged by the death of a Filipina nightclub hostess in Japan whom Japanese authorities said died from hepatitis but whose family claimed she had been beaten. Filipinos are also upset by the virtual identification of domestic with Filipina throughout the region.
The current president, Fidel Ramos, has vowed to reverse some of the longstanding policies that have sent so many Filipinos abroad–a promise that the Philippine people have heard many times before. Ramos’s biggest obstacle is a reluctance among the Philippine establishment to admit that its self-perpetuating economic policies are largely responsible for the country’s descent into poverty.
Over the years, Philippine leaders have ascribed their abysmal economic failure to any number of root causes, including their colonial heritage, Marcos-era greed, and a series of natural disasters. The truth, however, is that the country’s poverty is no accident and the quandary in which Filipina maids find themselves owes itself almost directly to the most pernicious of economic sins: protectionism. For the past 40 years, under the guise of ensuring the country’s economic sovereignty, successive Philippine governments have enacted laws that have discouraged foreign investment, concentrated wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and diminished the standard of living for the average Filipino to the point where less than 50 percent of the country earns a subsistence wage.
Nowhere is this clearer than in a comparison between the Philippines and Hong Kong, just a two-hour flight from Manila and the destination of so many Filipino laborers desperate for work. Just as the Philippines owes its current status as “the sick man of Asia” to longstanding protectionist policies, Hong Kong owes its stupendous wealth today to an ongoing commitment to open markets and a hands-off approach to business. For the past decade, Hong Kong has boasted an unemployment rate of under 2 percent, and its residents purchase more each year than the Japanese, other Asians, or Europeans. In 1993, Hong Kong’s per-capita income even surpassed that of its colonial protector, Great Britain.
But Hong Kong was no more destined to be wealthy than the Philippines was destined to be poor. If anything, it was a prime candidate for the sort of economic anemia that afflicts the Philippines. Lord Palmerston’s remark about Hong Kong upon its 1842 acquisition by the British–he called it “a barren island with hardly a house upon it”–was a fair description of its seeming promise, and even today its crowded population is spread over an inhospitable terrain that makes it utterly dependent on its neighbors even for basic resources such as water.
If Hong Kong’s natural obstacles to wealth were considerable, the man-made ones were downright staggering. No sooner had the colony begun to recover from the Japanese occupation of World War II than the Communist takeover of the mainland sent hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees to its shores. A few years later, a United Nations-imposed boycott of China saw Hong Kong lose its largest market overnight. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, the experts were not talking about the “Hong Kong miracle.” Back then, they were wondering if Hong Kong would survive.
Hong Kong withstood these pressures primarily by remaining open to foreign investment. While the Philippines and other East Asian nations chose to coddle their industries and put their faith in central planning, Hong Kong forced all its industries to compete with the rest of the world on their own merits and on a completely equal basis. And now, when countries such as South Korea are busy trying to pare down huge bureaucracies spawned by protectionism, Hong Kong is free to do productive business. There are no foreign exchange controls, and foreign companies are free to take their profits out if they choose. Taxes are stable and minimal, with none on capital gains and a flat tax on corporate profits. As Milton Friedman once quipped, “To see how the free market really works, Hong Kong is the place to go.”
This prosperity and freedom are largely the legacy of Hong Kong’s legendary financial secretary, John James Cowperthwaite. During the 1960s, Hong Kong was said to be governed “by the gospel of Adam Smith as expounded by his disciple John James Cowperthwaite.” Arriving in the colony as acadet officer in the civil service just three months after the Japanese surrender and charged with getting the economy back on its feet, Cowperthwaite immediately noted the degree to which Hong Kong’s resilient economy had already recovered without any government help. Cowperthwaite’s strength was that, more than most, he understood that even the most brilliant planner was no match for the collective genius of the market.
Whether it was water–which in those days was always in short supply–or food or energy, Cowperthwaite insisted that the best way around the problem was to allow free pricing among suppliers and to keep the doors open to anyone who wanted to enter. He did his part by keeping taxes low and refusing to spend more than he took in. “I see no reason,” he once said to a request for government to finance lower water rates, “why someone who is content with a cold shower should subsidize someone who is able to luxuriate in a deep hot bath.” Cowperthwaite, in fact, was so distrustful of intervention in the economy that he refused to allow the government to keep statistics on gross national product–on the grounds that if the government kept the statistics they would only misuse them.
This strategy was not simply do-nothingism. At the same time the government was keeping taxes low and spending under control, it embarked on a public housing scheme that would eventually shelter more than half the population. The difference was that Cowperthwaite could afford to do this since he maintained fiscal restraint and resisted calls to subsidize Hong Kong industry or give them any protection.
“Had Cowperthwaite taken the advice or yielded to all those who wanted more government intervention,” says Richard Wong of the Hong Kong Center for Economic Research, “Hong Kong would not have prospered. By keeping Hong Kong open he ensured that it would remain competitive.”
Certainly history has vindicated Cowperthwaite’s judgment. During the 10 years between 1961 and 1971 that Cowperthwaite was Hong Kong’s financial secretary, income grew faster there than anywhere else in Asia. The policy of keeping the door open to imports also fueled an export boom–at a phenomenal average annual rate of 13.8 percent over these years. Real wages increased by more than 50 percent over this period and remain roughly twice those of both Korea and Taiwan.
Hong Kong’s disavowal of protectionism extends to the lack of anti-dumping laws that are used even in the United States to keep competitors out. “Any economist will tell you that when you keep foreign business out you simply hurt your own people,” says Hong Kong treasury secretary and former trade negotiator, Donald Tsang. “All you are doing is cutting your nose off to spite your face. We keep our economy open because it is in our self-interest.”
(Note: Sir Donald “Bow-tie” Tsang went on to be Hong Kong Chief Executive at the time when Noynoy Aquino committed terrible embarrassing diplomatic blunders during the HK Tourist Bus Hostage Crisis.)
If Hong Kong owes its impressive wealth to a conscious political decision not to micro-manage the economy, the Philippines’ pervasive poverty represents the negative version of the same argument. There, a series of conscious economic choices made over the past four decades–especially a hostile attitude toward foreign investors–has allowed local monopolies to flourish at the expense of both workers and consumers.
Some have called it “crony capitalism.” But the preferences enjoyed under this arrangement have little in common with capitalism, and the cronies would lose their protected empires tomorrow if the state weren’t propping them up. The ruling elite in the Philippines has taken a country with a well-educated English-speaking work force and an enviable location smack dab in the midst of the world’s fastest growing market and turned it into an economic basket case.
This took some doing. Providence had bequeathed the Philippines many advantages, including an almost inexhaustible supply of natural resources: gold, iron ore, copper, cement, salt, granite, marble. Its soil was rich and its produce bountiful, including rice, sugar, coconuts, tobacco, bananas, and avocados. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, it was second in Asia only to Japan, and everyone assumed that its future would be as bountiful as its present.
As the World Bank put it in an upbeat report, “By comparison with most underdeveloped countries, the basic economic position of the Philippines is favorable…. |Apart from its~ generous endowment of material resources and high level of literacy, other favorable factors are the growth of the labor force, the availability of managerial and technical skills, the high level of savings and investment, rather good prospects for most of the Philippines exports, and considerable possibilities for import substitution.” The Philippines was considered so successful, in fact, that in the ’60s Manila was sending specialists to Korea to advise them on their development.
But the Philippines never realized its potential. Instead opening the door to foreign investors with the money and the wherewithal to make something of its resources, the Philippines wrapped itself in the cloak of protectionism. Under the guise of nationalism–the country had achieved independence in 1946–the Philippines passed a series of laws limiting what they called “alien” (foreign) involvement in the economy. It started with a limit imposed on alien-owned market stalls in Manila and soon covered everything from access to credit to quotas on imports. By the end of the ’50s, this had evolved into a full-fledged ideology called “Filipino First” that would figure prominently in the presidential elections for years to come.
In 1960, Philippine President Garcia summed up the Filipino First policy as merely “an honest-to-goodness effort of the Filipino people to be master of their own economic household.” His secretary for commerce and industry, Manuel Lim, likewise described the policy as simply an effort to ensure that Filipinos get some share of the benefits flowing to foreign investors. Of course, it was slightly more than this. Although both Garcia and Lim went out of their way to say the Filipino First policy would be fair to outsiders, they both saw foreign involvement in the economy as a “threat” and a cause for alarm. Although the policy was later relaxed somewhat, the emphasis remained on ensuring Philippine “supremacy.”
“It’s the classic mistake for developing countries,” says Richard Wong. “Despite all the populist rhetoric, whenever you make it more difficult for foreigners, all you are doing is taking money from the public and putting it into the hands of the vested interests.”
In the Philippines, protectionism was intertwined with racism. Many of the local entrepreneurs belonged to the country’s sizable Chinese minority, and many of the government regulations attempted to force them from their economic niches. Two of the most infamous regulated participation in retail selling and the corn and rice industries. In June 1954, President Ramon Magsaysay signed “An Act to Regulate the Retal Business,” which was followed by a 1964 measure that tightened the screws even more. The gist of the regulations was that no industry or store could sell directly to the public unless it was Filipino owned; otherwise the business had to sell to a Filipino first. The object was to make sure that Filipinos got a piece of the action on every sale. But in practice, the regulations simply created a middleman who raised the final cost to the consumer. The almost-immediate effects included a precipitous drop in the number of newly registered retail businesses and a sharp rise in general prices.
Much the same thing happened in 1961, when the Philippines passed another protectionist act, this one “Limiting the Right to Engage in the Rice and Corn Industry to Citizens of the Philippines.” Like the retail business law, this one took aim at the Chinese merchant population by decreeing that only Filipinos would be allowed to participate in rice and corn production. This was a big decision, because at the time rice was both the chief staple of Filipinos’ diet and a significant commercial export. In 1960 there had been 6,100 foreigners registered in the rice and corn business, but by the summer of 1962 the executive director of the Rice and Corn Board, E. V. Mendoza, reported that the program had “worked” in running foreigners out.
“Success,” however, was curiously defined. Apart from encouraging fraud–some foreigners simply put their companies in the names of their Philippine wives or friends–it had a disastrous effect on production and prices. Mendoza was correct in noting that by year’s end most of the rice and corn business was forced out of foreign hands. But the price paid by the population for that change was a severe rice shortage. The Philippines went from a country that exported rice to one that imported it, a situation that did not change until much later in the decade when scientific advances introduced a new, “miracle” rice capable of tremendous new yields.
The government’s continuing support of protectionist policies in the face of such abject failures is the reason why Max Soliven, editor of The Philippine Star and the country’s most popular columnist, blasts the Filipino First philosophy as “the pirate flag of convenience for vested interests.”
“Every big foreign investment project,” says Soliven, “is slandered as ‘a scam’ or labeled ‘imperialist exploitation,’ and thus those two cabals of conspiracy, the Old Rich and the nouveau riche, manage to fight off and repel ‘the enemy.'” Filipino First, says Soliven, should really be called “Filipino Last and Always.”
As far back as the early 1960s there were voices raised in warning. In 1962 the president of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce, Alfonso Catalang, went on television to say that Filipino First was shooting the country in the foot. My magazine, the Far Eastern Economic Review, warned that “Filipino politicians seem to favor securing foreign loans instead of inviting foreign capital to come in.” The direct result of such choices were the bloated Philippine monopolies that still stand before us today, protected from foreign competition and unresponsive to the needs of the country.
Although myriad regulations restrict foreigners doing business in the Philippines–foreign banks, for example, have not been permitted to open new branches since 1948–the most effective way of keeping them out has been a law limiting the amount any foreigner can own in a business to 40 percent. At the start of his reign, President Marcos made some moves to open up the economy, but instead of busting the monopolies he merely put his own buddies in charge of them. Nor did things improve with the People Power revolution of Cory Aquino. By 1991 foreign investment in the Philippines totaled only $783 million–compared to about $5 billion for Thailand and almost $9 billion for Indonesia, which is just about as poor as the Philippines.
In many ways, in fact, Aquino only made the situation worse. The constitution drafted by her associates specifically blocks or severely limits access to vast segments of the economy by outside developers, especially in the area of natural resources. Section 12, for example, requires that the “State shall promote the preferential use of Filipino labor, domestic materials and locally produced goods.” In effect, the revised constitution applies the 40-percent limit to all but a few areas. Filipino First is back with a vengeance.
The reason the 40-percent limit is so debilitating is that as long as votes in a company are pegged to the owner’s share, no foreign investor will have control over his money. This is particularly distressing in a developing country such as the Philippines, where the economic climate is uncertain and the risks are already high. Foreigners are unlikely to invest millions of dollars if they don’t have a say over how the money will be spent.
“If I had to name one thing that has hurt the Philippines more than anything else, it’s this 40-percent limit,” says Peter Wallace, an international business consultant and economist who has lived in Manila for many years. “We had a similar problem in Australia years ago–we were resource rich but cash poor. Much of Australia’s development came about because it opened the door to those who had the money to develop, especially in the mining industry.” In testimony before the Philippine Congress, Wallace pointed out that if the Philippines followed Australia’s lead, the country’s abundant resources would finally start paying some dividends.
The development of natural resources is hardly the only area of the Philippines’ economy affected by the lack of foreign capital. The nation’s infrastructure, for example, remains one of the worst in Asia. President Ramos has recently eased the ongoing power shortage that just last summer was responsible for blackouts of 10 to 12 hours a day. But the shortage never would have occurred had the country opened energy development to foreigners. “Making yourself open to foreign investment does much more than bring in money,” says Wallace. “It brings in badly needed technology. It grows your exports. It creates jobs, and it generally also develops a host of industries that pop up to serve the new investors.”
The Philippines’ nationalism has, in fact, managed to strangle every aspect of economic development. Foreign goods remain a luxury that only the protected rich can hope to afford. Recently Philippine Sen. Blas Ople pointed to a study by the government’s own assistant secretary for trade documenting that no less than 167 signatures were necessary to release an imported car from the Bureau of Customs. Ople had a field day when the customs commissioner proudly announced he had greatly reduced the number of necessary signatures: to 50.
The regulatory choke hold is also responsible for a phone system so abysmal that it is an international embarrassment. In a November 1992 visit to Manila, Singapore’s senior minister, Lee Kuan Yew, publicly spoke out against the Philippine telephone company as “an example of a powerful vested interest … which has had a monopoly for 64 years.” He also cited a standing joke that “98 percent of Filipinos are waiting for a phone and the other 2 percent are waiting for a dial tone.” In fact, fewer than 2 out of 100 Filipinos have phones in this nation of 61 million people, and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company controls more than 90 percent of the existing 600,000 lines. Their monopoly has been helped along by Supreme Court decisions that shut Eastern Telecommunications out of the market and awarded a contract to PLDT even though its foreign-backed competitor had outbid it by a factor of six.
Comparing the Philippines’ phone system to Hong Kong’s actually provides a thumbnail sketch of how two economic systems produce hugely different results. While the Philippines stagnates with one of the worst phone systems in the world, Hong Kong boasts one of the best: fully digitalized with about 63 phones per 100 population, about double the number of another East Asian powerhouse, South Korea. It is so easy to get a phone in Hong Kong that almost all the colony’s shops have a phone sitting out front that customers can use free. And with new developments in related technology (such as cellular phones) now becoming popular, the government reviewed its telecommunications policy and decided to open up additional networks to increase competition.
Beyond all the theoretical and statistical explanations, however, the painful human costs of the different economic strategies pursued by Hong Kong and the Philippines are dramatically illustrated by the booming growth of domestic helpers in Hong Kong. A generation ago, middle and upper-class Filipinos were likely to have poor Chinese as amahs. Today the situation has flip-flopped. Thousands of desperate Philippine women just like Teresa Concepcion–college educated and with children of their own–are forced by circumstances beyond their control to go abroad and work as domestics. The ones who are lucky go to Hong Kong. Many go to the Middle East or other parts of Asia, where the work is even more demanding and the environment even more difficult.
Despite their relative good fortune, their life in Hong Kong is not an easy one. According to a survey by Asian Labor Update Research, some 40 percent of these maids work 14 to 15 hours a day and 30 percent work 16 to 17 hours a day for a standard monthly wage of $415, much of which is sent back home. If they are “lucky,” as is Teresa, they have an “amah’s room” off the kitchen–a non-air-conditioned eight-foot-by-six-foot cell barely big enough for a twin bed. Less fortunate amahs sleep on a couch or share a room with the younger children of their employers.
Life on the bottom rung of society has its other problems as well. Filipinas often report that the Chinese look down on them and treat them harshly. Indeed, one of the colony’s biggest companies, Hong Kong Land, recently tried to bar them from sitting on its grounds on weekends when they congregate with their friends in the center of town.
Occasionally, their work may even prove fatal. One Filipina, Pascuela Destas, gave her life for her 5-year-old charge by pushing him out of the way of an out-of-control bus. But saving the life of her employers’ son meant that Destas left her own three boys back in the Philippines without abreadwinner.
Although life in Hong Kong may be difficult, the maids agree on one thing: It is better than being in the Philippines. Thirty-eight-year-old Eppie Cruz is typical. Ten years ago she received her B.S. in accounting from the Philippines’ University of the East. After her graduation, she came to Hong Kong to work as a domestic to support her sisters back home. “Of course we would like to stay in the Philippines if the opportunity was there,” says Eppie. “But the jobs are here.”
Eppie is wearing a Giordano blouse, a popular brand in Hong Kong roughly equivalent to the Gap in America. In the Philippines, she says, it would cost three times as much as it does in Hong Kong. The same goes for her Sony Walkman. Back in her tiny room, she has a telephone, an air conditioner, a JVC television, and a host of minor appliances that are standard in Hong Kong but would be regarded as luxuries in the Philippines.
Or consider 49-year-old Cora Alanunay. Cora is the mother of six children–two of whom are with her in Hong Kong, also working as domestics. One son, Ramon, is working in a hospital in Saudi Arabia. She came to Hong Kong shortly after she was widowed and needed work, and like her friends she is impressed by Hong Kong’s commercial openness and the opportunity it breeds. Although Cora makes only a minimal wage in Hong Kong, it’s far more than what another son makes back in the Philippines as a bank executive.
The incentives are as clear as they are heartbreaking. Today Teresa Concepcion’s children are 16, 14, and 12. Since leaving the Philippines nine years ago, she has seen her boys and her husband just once each year for a few weeks’ holiday. Yet she has little choice. Her salary of $520 per month is 13 times what she could hope to make in the Philippines, and each month she mails half of it back home. Like other Filipina exiles in Hong Kong, Teresa stoically accepts the trade-offs: “I constantly remind myself how important it is to send back the money to them. Otherwise I would get depressed thinking about the kind of work I’m forced to do.”
These amahs are not alone. Ever since the Philippines started its Overseas Employment Program in the mid-1970s, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who would otherwise have stayed at home have gone into exile to provide for their families. They have also provided for their country. Last year, the 4.5 million Filipinos working abroad helped bail out their country’s cash shortages by sending home an estimated $2.5 billion in foreign exchange-more than the revenue from a number of important Philippine industries, including tourism.
Having inherited an economy that so demeans productive workers, President Ramos has moved to open up the banking system and, most recently, has vowed to fulfill promises to sell off state enterprises. But the problems remain formidable–particularly the protectionist constitution that walls off investment in any number of areas and a Filipino First legacy that endures. Perversely enough, at a time when the Philippines ought to be out begging for multinational investment, a major argument in the national legislature against the privatization of firms such as Petron Oil is that they may be bought by foreigners.
Ramos, too, for all his stated intentions to the contrary, is not above playing the old games. Back in 1975, Imelda Marcos erected pretty white fences so that the delegates to the annual IMF/World Bank meeting would not have to be offended by the sight of the very poor they were supposed to serve. Last year on May Day, President Ramos announced plans to close the Smoky Mountain garbage dump–long a favorite of foreign reporters looking for a symbol of the Philippines’ crushing poverty. The thousands of scavengers who eke out an average $3.00 per day picking through Smoky Mountain’s waste for anything they can sell, use, or eat are upset that the government is once again taking away what little livelihood they have. The Philippine poor will be forced to move out of sight, if not out of poverty.
And in Hong Kong, Filipina mothers and daughters continue to pay a devastating social and economic price for the protectionist schemes of their government. Most of these women started out with big dreams; Teresa Concepcion thought that with her college degree she’d have a fulfilling career in the Philippines, not a job scrubbing floors in Hong Kong. Today she just wants to go home. “I’d like to return to the Philippines in two or three years,” she says, “maybe to farm with my husband.” Even if she is lucky enough to do so, it will mean her children will have grown up without her. What kind of protection is that?
William McGurn is a senior editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review.Minister Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom says Putrajaya is waiting for the rulers’ consent to set up two more Shariah courts to give them the same powers as the civil Federal Court. ― File pic
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 13 ― The government is waiting for the rulers’ consent to set up two more Shariah courts to give them the same powers as the civil Federal Court, Malaysia’s highest court, minister Dat |
the regime of Alvaro Uribe, the major Latin American recipient of US aid.
Biased reports
On the other hand, the group’s December 2008 report on Venezuela (A Decade Under Chavez) had an open political motivation. According to Vivanco, it was written “because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone”. That report was roundly criticised by more than a hundred academics for not meeting "even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy of credibility". Rather than a careful report on human rights, it was an attempt to discredit a government, mainly on the basis on allegations of "political discrimination" in employment and the judiciary. The evidence was poor and the approach anything but systematic. HRW disregarded this criticism.
The recent report on Cuba (Different Castro, Same Cuba) is a similar attempt to pillory an entire social system on the basis of some anecdotes. As has been the case for some years, the major US focus on "human rights" in Cuba is on the few dozen people arrested and jailed for what HRW says was simply pursuing their basic rights. The Cuban government says most of these people were taking money from US programs designed to overthrow the Cuban social system. HRW ignores Cuba’s right to protect itself from Washington’s interventionist programs.
In respect of the 40 former prisoners said to have been interviewed in Cuba, HRW draws attention to what it calls a law:
“that allows the state to imprison individuals before they have committed a crime, on the suspicion that they might commit an offence in the future … This ‘dangerousness’ provision [refers to] any behaviour that contradicts socialist norms. The most Orwellian of Cuba’s laws, it captures the essence of the Cuban government’s repressive mindset.”
Other laws have been used, it says, which:
“criminalize the exercise of fundamental freedoms, including laws penalizing contempt, insubordination, and acts against the independence of the state. Indeed, article 62 of the Cuban constitution prohibits the exercise of any basic right that runs contrary to ‘the ends of the socialist state’.”
HRW also claims that in January 2009 a number of young people in eastern Cuba were charged with "dangerousness" simply for being unemployed. One was said to have been jailed for two years just “for being unemployed”. HRW notes that Cuba links some arrests to “a US policy aimed at toppling the Castro government … However, in the scores of cases Human Rights Watch examined for this report, this argument falls flat.”
Let’s examine some of the legal and practical aspects of these claims.
Firstly, article 62 of the Cuban constitution actually says that citizens liberties "cannot be used against that established by constitution and the law, nor against the existence and objects of the socialist state, nor against the decision of the Cuban people to build socialism". That is not the same thing as "prohibiting the exercise of any basic right that runs contrary to ‘the ends of the socialist state'". Dissent is not the same thing as attacking the constitutional order.
Legally, there is indeed a principle of "social dangerousness" in Cuban law, but is a concept that qualifies criminal and other offences. For example, "social dangerousness" can aggravate an "act" which is an offence under labour law (Law 176). Conversely, under the Penal Code (art. 14) the absence of "social dangerousness" can mitigate the penalty for an offence. The "dangerous state" defined by the Penal Code (art. 72) is also a qualifier to a range of anti-social conduct, including drunkenness.
In other words, the HRW focus on "dangerousness" is an artefact. There is no substantive offence of "dangerousness". It is a qualifier to actual conduct. Similarly,the fact of being unemployed in Cuba is not any sort of offence. That is just absurd.
`Dissidents'
However in the case of the celebrated "dissidents" – which include many of the "independent journalists" and "human rights defenders" funded by the US State Department and USAID programs to promote a "transition" in Cuba – the possession of large amounts of money while unemployed can constitute evidence of an offence.
For example, "dissident" Oscar Espinosa Chepe had been unemployed for 10 years at the time of his March 2003 arrest, yet he had more than $7000 hidden in the lining of his suit. That money could have been in the bank with his other savings, but it had recently come from a US-linked group. Similarly, Raúl Rivero, Héctor Palacios, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés and others were charged because there was evidence (including receipts) that they had received money from US programs aimed to overthrow the Cuban constitution. The HRW report ignores this evidence.
The same Miami groups that sent money to these Cubans (but note, most of the US government money stays in Miami, provoking conflicts within these groups) had organised bombings of tourist hotels in Cuba in the late 1990s. Cuban authorities are unsurprisingly intolerant of this terrorism. The March 2003 arrests were provoked by Cuban fears that the Bush regime would mount an Iraq-style invasion, making use of these paid agents.
After the New Castro report, Human Rights Watch maintained its campaign on behalf of the US-funded "dissidents". It demanded in January 2010 that the Cuban government "immediately cease its harassment of the blind human rights defender Juan Carlos González Leiva, a leader of the Council of Human Rights Rapporteurs". González Leiva heads the Camagüey chapter of the Cuban Foundation for Human Rights, a body which has been funded by Washington via Miami for at least a decade.
Some US "aid" for Cuban agents bypasses Miami. The US government directly supports the "independent journalists" over whom both Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and HRW express so much righteous anger. The US Interests Section in Havana (the de facto embassy) directly prints the Revista de Cuba magazine of the "Márquez Sterling Journalists Society", while El Disidente magazine is printed in Puerto Rico but distributed through the Interests Section.
This information is published in some detail in Cuba but is barely mentioned by HRW, or in any other US reports. Since the US "consensus" has effectively disqualified the entire Cuban system, no regard need be paid to such detail. Yet there can be no doubt that independent countries have the right to self-defence from US subversion and terrorism.
HRW does not condemn US blockade
HRW says the 50-year economic blockade by the US of Cuba has failed, but (unlike the 187 countries that voted against the blockade at the United Nations in 2009) the New York-based group does not condemn this blockade as a violation of human rights.
Rather, HRW argues that Cuba uses the blockade as a pretext for repression. It proposes a new program against Cuba where Europe and Latin America join with Washington in demanding "the unconditional release of all political prisoners", including "the 53 dissidents still in prison from the 2003 crackdown". If these demands do not achieve their end, then countries, including the US, "should be able to choose individually whether or not to impose their own restrictions on Cuba". In fact, the US is the only country with such sanctions against Cuba.
This sort of "human rights intervention" is consistent with US foreign policy in Latin America. Dispensing with troublesome, independent regimes was practised ad nauseum throughout the "American Century", and was always backed by the US corporate elite. Delegitimisation campaigns have always preceded "regime change", for example in Guatemala and Chile. Human Rights Watch apparently sees no abuse of human rights in such interventions.
Sitting down with CIA agents
José Miguel Vivanco has sat on panels with Caleb McCarry, the Bush-appointed and Washington-based "Transition Administrator" for a "Free Cuba", without a word about the appalling human rights abuse implicit in one country pretending to organise the political "transition" of another country. On this count, HRW needs a little homework on article 1 of the International Bill of Rights, which sets out the "right of a people to self-determination".
Vivanco has similarly spoken on panels with former CIA agents Frank Calzon and Carlos Montaner, people who have personally organised terrorist attacks on Cuba. He did not sit down to condemn them for these attacks, but rather to concur with them over support for the US-backed "dissidents". Such is the flexibility of his advocacy.
As a reward for his services, in June 2009 Vivanco received a National Endowment for Democracy award for his work for "Democracy in Cuba". This made the US government link quite clear.
US propaganda campaigns against Cuba have not flagged in half a century, and HRW is just one of the more recent contributors. Responding to cries from the US for "human rights and freedom", one Cuban diplomat wearily replied, "of course, and the US has a very long history in this, from Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Duvalier, Pinochet, Videla", referring to the US-backed dictators of Cuba, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Chile and Argentina.
All the prisoners HRW spoke with had been released. One wonders what the HRW report might have said had it discovered a hidden prison in Cuba where hundreds were held without charge, tortured and argued to be beyond the reach of any legal system?
In the case of those prisoners – held by the US military in occupied Cuba, at Guantanamo Bay – HRW wrote (in January 2010) that US President Barrack Obama should “renew his pledge” to close the prison. No condemnation of the "abusive" Washington regime for its "repressive machinery". But why should we expect such candour and self-criticism from the US elite?
The lesson from the Human Rights Watch reports on Cuba is that we have nothing to learn about the little Caribbean island – whether on its weaknesses or strengths – from a self-appointed organisation which represents the US corporate and foreign policy elite.
[Tim Anderson is a senior lecturer in political economy at Sydney University.]
A note on sources: Some detail of the charges against the "dissidents" arrested in March 2003 was published at that time by Cuba’s foreign ministry (MINREX), and remains online. More detail emerged in the 2003 book The Dissidents by Cuban journalists Luis Báez and Rosa Miriam Elizalde. Many articles on the US-funded organisations (mostly Miami-based, but also the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders) that work with the US government against Cuba have been written by the French-Canadian journalist Jean-Guy Allard, French academic Salim Lamrani and US journalist Diana Barahona. Human Rights Watch funders appear in its annual reports and linked funding is often acknowledged in its country reports.]
¿Es creíble Human Rights Watch cuando habla de Cuba?
Por Tim Anderson
Traducido para Rebelión por S. Seguí
A finales de 2009, la organización Human Rights Watch (HRW), con razón social en Nueva York, publicó un informe titulado. Basándose en el testimonio de ex presos, el informe condenaba de manera sistemática al gobierno cubano, calificándolo de tiránico y acusándolo de utilizar “su maquinaria represiva, leyes draconianas y juicios arbitrarios para encarcelar a decenas de personas que osaron ejercer sus libertades fundamentales”.
El grupo afirma que entrevistó a 40 prisioneros políticos y que analizó las leyes extraordinarias que permiten que los cubanos puedan ser encarcelados simplemente por expresar opiniones críticas de su sistema socialista.
A primera vista, se nos podría perdonar por pensar que Cuba es uno de los peores violadores de los derechos humanos en las Américas. Sin embargo, la más somera reflexión podría llevar a cuestionar tales declaraciones procedentes de los EE.UU., un país con miles de prisioneros mantenidos en una red internacional de cárceles secretas, muchos de ellos sometidos a regímenes de tortura.
¿Es creíble este informe crítico sobre Cuba? ¿A quién representa Human Rights Watch?
La respuesta a la última pregunta es un poco más difícil que en el caso de otras organizaciones como la National Endowment for Democracy (NED), establecida por el gobierno de los EE.UU., o incluso Reporteros sin Fronteras (RSF), con sede en Francia y financiada directamente por el Departamento de Estado usamericano en algunas de sus campañas contra Cuba. A la manera de los “periodistas empotrados” que viajan con las tropas de EE.UU. en todo el mundo, la NED y RSF pueden ser considerados “vigilantes empotrados” que contribuyen a legitimar o deslegitimar determinados gobiernos en función de la política de EE.UU.
Human Rights Watch, sin embargo, no está financiada por el gobierno de los EE.UU., si bien obtiene la mayor parte de sus fondos de una serie de fundaciones usamericanas a su vez financiadas por muchas de las mayores corporaciones de este país. Estas fundaciones, privadas y adineradas, suelen vincular sus contribuciones a proyectos específicos. Así, por ejemplo, los informes de HRW sobre Oriente Próximo a menudo se basan en informes de fundaciones pro israelíes y reciben financiación de las mismas. Otros grupos piden un enfoque sobre los derechos de la mujer o el VIH/SIDA. Más del 90% de los 100 millones de dólares del presupuesto de HRW para 2009 estuvo “limitado” de esta manera. En otras palabras, HRW ofrece una selección de asuntos privatizada y realizada en EE.UU. que sirve a los intereses de los ricos.
La coordinación de todos estos intereses se ilustra con toda claridad por medio del nuevo presidente de HRW, James F. Hoge, Jr., editor y periodista, redactor jefe de la publicación Foreign Affairs, de 1992 a 2009, y miembro prominente del patrocinador de la misma, el Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), ubicado en Nueva York. El CFR, considerado como el más influyente think tank de la política exterior de los EE.UU., incluye gran parte de la elite empresarial usamericana (entre otros los bancos y los medios de comunicación), así como líderes pasados y presentes de los dos grandes partidos. Ex secretarios de Estado como Henry Kissinger y Condoleezza Rice, y el actual secretario de Defensa Robert Gates, son miembros del CFR. Su lista de miembros es realmente un Quién es quién de las elites usamericanas.
El consejo directivo de HRW está igualmente dominado por la elite corporativa de EE.UU., como la banca y los grandes medios de comunicación, y algunos académicos, aunque no por funcionarios del gobierno. El consejo directivo incluye al ex ministro de Asuntos Exteriores mexicano Jorge Castañeda (académico que una vez fue marxista reconvertido en político de derecha), mientras que el abogado de origen chileno José Miguel Vivanco es director de la División de las Américas de HRW.
Vivanco ha sido objeto de una gran controversia en América Latina a causa de sus ataques contra Venezuela y Cuba. Si HRW a veces parecía actuar con cierta independencia de la política exterior de EE.UU., por ejemplo cuando apoyó la “guerra contra el terrorismo” pero criticó las operaciones de este país en Iraq, éste no ha sido el caso en América Latina, donde el grupo ha seguido al pie de la letra la línea de Washington.
De todos los informes de Human Rights Watch sobre América Latina de los últimos años, los únicos gobiernos a los que se les ha hecho estas críticas sistemáticas son los de Venezuela y Cuba. Otros informes, sobre Brasil, Honduras y México, han tratado de cuestiones mucho más concretas, como la violencia de la policía, los derechos de los transexuales o la justicia militar. Cuando se trata de Colombia, HRW ha publicado informes sobre el uso de minas terrestres y sobre las “mafias paramilitares”. Este último informe de hecho recoge que Colombia tiene un más alto nivel de violencia “que casi ningún otro país en el hemisferio occidental.” En realidad, Colombia está por delante de cualquier otro país latinoamericano en número de asesinatos de sindicalistas, periodistas, abogados y personas corrientes. Los militares colombianos y sus aliados de las milicias de extrema derecha han sido responsables de la mayor parte de estas masacres y sin embargo HRW culpa a la guerrilla de izquierda y a las milicias de derecha por igual, sin implicar al régimen de Álvaro Uribe, el mayor receptor ayuda usamericana en América Latina.
Parcialidad en los informes
Por otra parte, el informe del grupo de diciembre de 2008 sobre Venezuela, titulado Una década de Chávez, tuvo una motivación política clara. Según Vivanco, fue escrito “porque queríamos demostrar al mundo que Venezuela no es un modelo para nadie”. Dicho informe fue duramente criticado por más de un centenar de académicos por no cumplir “ni siquiera los estándares mínimos en materia de calidad académica, imparcialidad, exactitud o credibilidad.” Más que un informe detallado sobre los derechos humanos era un intento de desacreditar a un gobierno, principalmente sobre la base de las acusaciones de “discriminación política” en el empleo y el poder judicial. La evidencia era escasa y el enfoque en absoluto sistemático. HRW rechazó estas críticas.
El reciente informe sobre Cuba (Un nuevo Castro, la misma Cuba) es un intento de poner en la picota todo un sistema social basándose en algunas anécdotas. Al igual que desde hace algunos años, EE.UU. ha centrado su enfoque sobre derechos humanos en Cuba las pocas docenas de personas detenidas y encarceladas por lo que HRW considera que es simplemente la defensa de sus derechos básicos. El gobierno cubano dice que la mayoría de estas personas aceptaban dinero proveniente de los programas de EE.UU. para derrocar el sistema social cubano. HRW ignora el derecho de Cuba a protegerse de los programas intervencionistas de Washington.
Con respecto a los 40 ex presos que afirma haber entrevistado en Cuba, HRW llama la atención sobre lo que denomina una ley:
“… que permite al Estado encarcelar a personas antes de que hayan cometido un delito, bajo la sospecha de que pudieran cometer un delito en el futuro… Esta disposición de “peligrosidad” [se refiere] a cualquier conducta que contradiga las normas socialistas. Es la más orwelliana de las leyes de Cuba y refleja la esencia de la mentalidad represiva del gobierno cubano.”
Otras leyes se han utilizado, afirma, para:
“… tipificar como delito el ejercicio de libertades fundamentales, en particular leyes que penalizan el desacato, la insubordinación, y las acciones contra la independencia del Estado. En efecto, el artículo 62 de la Constitución cubana prohibe el ejercicio de cualquier derecho básico que sea contrario a “los fines del Estado socialista”.
HRW también afirma que en enero de 2009 algunos jóvenes de la zona oriental de Cuba fueron acusados de “peligrosidad” simplemente por estar desempleados. Se decía que uno de ellos había sido encarcelado durante dos años, sólo por estar desempleado. HRW señala que Cuba vincula algunas detenciones a “una política usamericana destinada a derrocar al gobierno de Castro... Sin embargo, en las decenas de casos que Human Rights Watch examinó para la elaboración de este informe, esta afirmación no se sostiene.
Examen de algunos de los aspectos jurídicos y prácticos de estas afirmaciones.
En primer lugar, el artículo 62 de la Constitución cubana dice textualmente que “Ninguna de las libertades reconocidas a los ciudadanos puede ser ejercida contra lo establecido en la Constitución y las leyes, ni contra la existencia y fines del Estado socialista, ni contra la decisión del pueblo cubano de construir el socialismo y el comunismo. La infracción de este principio es punible.” (1) Eso no es lo mismo que “prohibir el ejercicio de cualquier derecho básico que vaya en contra de 'los fines del Estado socialista’. La disidencia no es lo mismo que atacar el orden constitucional.
Legalmente, hay ciertamente el principio de “peligrosidad social” en la legislación cubana, pero se trata de un concepto que tipifica las infracciones penales y de otro tipo. Por ejemplo, la peligrosidad social puede agravar un “acto” que sea un delito en virtud de la legislación laboral (Ley 176). Por el contrario, en el Código Penal (art. 14) la ausencia de “peligrosidad social” puede mitigar la pena por un delito. El “estado peligroso”, definido por el Código Penal (art. 72) tipifica también una serie de conductas antisociales, como la embriaguez.
En otras palabras, el enfoque de Human Rights Watch sobre “peligrosidad” es un montaje. No hay delito sustantivo de “peligrosidad”. Es un calificativo a la conducta real. Asimismo, el hecho de estar desempleado en Cuba no constituye ningún tipo de delito; es sencillamente absurdo.
Los “disidentes”
Sin embargo, en el caso de los famosos “disidentes” –entre los que se incluyen muchos de los calificados de periodistas independientes y defensores de derechos humanos, financiados por el Departamento de Estado de EE.UU. y los programas de USAID para promover una “transición” en Cuba— la posesión de grandes cantidades de dinero, en una situación de desempleo, puede constituir una prueba de delito.
Por ejemplo, el “disidente” Oscar Espinosa Chepe estaba en paro desde hacía diez años en el momento de su detención en marzo de 2003; sin embargo, tenía más de 7.000 dólares escondidos en el forro de su traje. Ese dinero podía haber estado en el banco junto con sus otros ahorros, pero lo había conseguido recientemente de un grupo vinculado a Estados Unidos. Del mismo modo, Raúl Rivero, Héctor Palacios, Osvaldo Alfonso Valdés y otros fueron acusados porque había pruebas (entre otras, recibos) de que habían recibido dinero de los programas de EE.UU. destinados a derrocar la Constitución cubana. El informe de HRW hace caso omiso de esta evidencia.
Los mismos grupos de Miami que enviaron el dinero a estos cubanos (aunque la mayor parte del dinero del gobierno usamericano se queda en Miami, lo que provoca conflictos dentro de estos grupos) eran los que habían organizado los atentados de los hoteles turísticos en Cuba en la década de 1990. No es sorprendente que las autoridades cubanas sean intolerantes ante este terrorismo. Las detenciones de marzo de 2003 fueron provocadas por los temores de Cuba de que el régimen de Bush pudiera organizar una invasión al estilo de Iraq haciendo uso de estos agentes pagados.
Tras el informe sobre el Nuevo Castro, HRW mantuvo su campaña en favor de los “disidentes” financiados por Estados Unidos. En enero de 2010 ha exigido que el gobierno cubano “ponga fin de inmediato al hostigamiento del invidente y defensor de los derechos humanos Juan Carlos González Leiva, líder del Consejo de Relatores de Derechos Humanos”. González Leiva encabeza el capítulo de Camagüey de la Fundación Cubana de Derechos Humanos, un organismo que ha sido financiado por Washington a través de Miami por lo menos durante diez años.
Una parte de la ayuda usamericana a los agentes cubanos pasa por alto a los cubanos de Miami. El gobierno de EE.UU. apoya directamente a los “periodistas independientes”, sobre los que tanto Reporteros Sin Fronteras (RSF) como Human Rights Watch manifiestan su santa indignación. La Sección de Intereses de EE.UU. en La Habana (la embajada usamericana de facto) imprime directamente la Revista de Cuba de la Marquez Sterling Journalist Society, mientras que la revista El Disidente se edita en Puerto Rico pero se distribuye a través de la citada Sección de Intereses.
Esta información se publica con cierto detalle en Cuba, pero es apenas mencionada por HRW, o en cualquier otro informe EE.UU. Dado que el “consenso usamericano” ha descalificado de manera efectiva el sistema cubano en su totalidad, no es preciso tener en cuenta este pequeño detalle. Sin embargo, no puede haber ninguna duda de que los países independientes tienen derecho a la autodefensa ante la subversión y el terrorismo usamericanos.
HRW no condena el bloqueo de EE.UU.
HRW afirma que los 50 años de bloqueo económico de los EE.UU. sobre Cuba han sido un fracaso, sin embargo, a diferencia de los 187 países que votaron en la ONU en contra del bloqueo en 2009, este grupo con sede en Nueva York no lo condena como una violación de los Derechos Humanos.
Por el contrario, HRW afirma que Cuba utiliza el bloqueo como un pretexto para la represión. Propone un nuevo programa contra Cuba en el que Europa y América Latina se unan a Washington para exigir “la liberación incondicional de todos los presos políticos”, incluyendo “los 53 disidentes aún en prisión desde la oleada represiva de 2003.” Si estas demandas no logran su fin, entonces estos países, incluido EE.UU., “deben ser capaces de elegir individualmente si procede o no imponer sus propias restricciones sobre Cuba.” De hecho, EE.UU. es el único país que impone tales sanciones contra Cuba.
Este tipo de intervención con el pretexto de los derechos humanos es coherente con la política exterior de EE.UU. en América Latina. La eliminación de regímenes independientes molestos ha sido una práctica ad nauseam durante todo el siglo americano y fue siempre apoyada por la elite corporativa de EE.UU. Las campañas de deslegitimación siempre han precedido el “cambio de régimen”, por ejemplo, en Guatemala y Chile. Human Rights Watch, al parecer, no ve un abuso de los derechos humanos en dichas intervenciones.
Compartiendo mesa con agentes de la CIA
José Miguel Vivanco ha formado parte de paneles con Caleb McCarry, designado por el gobierno de Bush como “administrador de la transición hacia una Cuba libre”, sin decir una sola palabra acerca del terrible abuso de los derechos humanos implícito en el hecho de que un país pretenda organizar la “transición política” de otro. En este aspecto, HRW tiene que hacer sus deberes en lo relativo al artículo 1 del Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos (2), que establece: “Todos los pueblos tienen el derecho de libre determinación.”
Vivanco también ha hablado en paneles en los que formaban parte ex agentes de la CIA como Frank Calzón y Carlos Montaner, personas que han organizado personalmente ataques terroristas contra Cuba. En ningún momento se sentó para condenarlos por estos ataques, sino más bien estuvo de acuerdo con ellos sobre el apoyo a los disidentes respaldados por Estados Unidos. Así de flexibles son sus posiciones.
Como recompensa por sus servicios, en junio de 2009 Vivanco recibió un premio del National Endowment for Democracy por su trabajo titulado “La democracia en Cuba”, con lo que quedó claro su vínculo con el gobierno de EE.UU.
Las campañas de propaganda de EE.UU. contra Cuba no han disminuido en medio siglo, y HRW es sólo uno de los colaboradores más recientes. Respondiendo a las quejas de EE.UU. sobre los “derechos humanos y la libertad”, un hastiado diplomático cubano respondió “Por supuesto, EE.UU. tiene una larga historia en esta materia, con los Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Duvalier, Pinochet, Videla”, en referencia al respaldo de Estados Unidos a los dictadores de Cuba, Nicaragua, República Dominicana, Haití, Chile y Argentina.
Todos los presos con quienes habló Human Rights Watch habían sido liberados. Uno se pregunta qué hubiera dicho en su informe HRW de haber descubierto una prisión secreta cubana donde cientos de personas estuvieran detenidas sin cargos, fueran torturadas y ubicadas fuera del alcance de cualquier sistema jurídico.
En el caso de estos prisioneros –retenidos por los militares de EE.UU. en la Cuba ocupada, en Guantánamo— HRW escribió (en enero de 2010) que el presidente Barack Obama debe “renovar su compromiso” para cerrar la prisión. No hay condena del “abusivo” régimen de Washington por esta maquinaria represiva. Pero, ¿por qué deberíamos esperar tal sinceridad y la autocrítica de la elite de EE.UU.?
La lección que nos enseña el informe de derechos humanos de Human Rights Watch sobre Cuba es que nada nos tiene que enseñar sobre la pequeña isla del Caribe –ya sea en sus debilidades o fortaleza– una sedicente organización de derechos humanos que representa a la elite corporativa y de política exterior usamericana.
N.B. Algunos detalles de los cargos contra los “disidentes” arrestados en marzo de 2003 se publicaron en su momento por el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Cuba (MINREX) y permanecen en línea. Para más detalles véase el libro, publicado en 2003, Los disidentes, de los periodistas cubanos Luis Báez y Rosa Miriam Elizalde. El periodista franco-canadiense Jean-Guy Allard, el académico francés Salim Lamrani y la periodista usamericana Diana Barahona han escrito numerosos artículos sobre la financiación por Estados Unidos de estas organizaciones (en su mayoría con sede en Miami, pero también con sede en París: Reporteros sin Fronteras) que colaboran con el gobierno de EE.UU. contra Cuba. Los financiadores de HRW aparecen en los informes anuales de esta organización, y la financiación vinculada figura a menudo en sus informes del país.
(1) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/cuba.htm
(2) http://www.cinu.org.mx/onu/documentos/pidcp.htm
[Tim Anderson es profesor de economía política en la Universidad de Sydney (Australia). S. Seguí es miembro de Rebelión y Tlaxcala, la red de traductores por la diversidad lingüística.]I’ve finally finished version 0.2 of Ubuntu Tasks, bringing in a huge amount of changes, though most of them can’t be seen.
After my first attempt at a Trello plugin, I learned that my current backend won’t easily support read/write Trello synchronization. So, I took began rewriting the backend and UI mostly from scratch, and for the past week, my app has been lying in pieces across my desktop (well, maybe not my desktop, just in Qt Creator). I’m happy to say it is mostly put back to gather and merged into the master branch!
On the backend side, my new code is designed in such a way that Trello boards/lists/cards can be locally stored for faster startup, and changes can be made to it, even while the backend is still loading a fresh version.
I’m now beginning to work on making the Trello plugin editable. Currently, you can now create Trello boards from within Ubuntu Tasks! That’s all that can be done so far, however. The rest is still read-only.
I’ve also added sorting, so now higher importance tasks are shown at the top.
Here’s a pick of the UI showing the list-switcher at the top:
I’ve been trying to upload my app into the Click app store, but unfortunately have been unsuccessful due to the click file not uploading. I’ll try to get that working tomorrow so hopefully people can start testing it and reporting all the bugs (because I’m sure there’s at least a few).
AdvertisementsBut let’s not let facts slow us down. Santorum, predictably, deflected back to sex:
“Woodstock is the great American orgy. This is who the Democratic Party has become. They have become the party of Woodstock. They prey upon our most basic primal lusts, and that’s sex. And the whole abortion culture, it’s not about life. It’s about sexual freedom. That’s what it’s about. Homosexuality. It’s about sexual freedom. All of the things are about sexual freedom, and they hate to be called on them. They try to somehow or other tie this to the founding fathers’ vision of liberty, which is bizarre. It’s ridiculous. That’s at the core of why you are attacked.”
The next question was: “Do you see any possibility for a party of Christian reform, or an influx of Christian ideas into this [Democratic] party?”
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Santorum’s answer included what? That’s right: Sex!
While explaining what he saw as a shift in the Democratic Party away from “blue-collar working-class folks with traditional values” Santorum said:
“What changed was the ’60s. What changed was sex. What changed was the social and cultural issues that have huge amounts of money because if you look — I haven’t seen numbers on this, but I’m sure it’s true — if you go socioeconomic scale, the higher the income, the more socially liberal you are. The more you know you can buy your way out of the problems that sexual libertinism causes you. You have an abortion, well, I have the money to take care of it. If I want to live an extravagant life and get diseases, I can.... You can always take care of everything. If you have money, you can get away with things that if you’re poor you can’t.”
The questions finally got around to asking about sex directly, much to Santorum’s delight, I’m sure. To one of those questions Santorum answered in part:
“Sex is a means. Evolution is a means. And the aim is a secular world. It’s a, in my opinion, a hedonistic, self-focused world that is, in my opinion, anti-American.”
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Santorum may now cloak his current views in Catholic fundamentalism and Constitutional literalism, but, at their root, they are his reaction to, and revulsion for, the social-sexual liberation that began in the 1960s.
In fact, Santorum’s distaste for the sexual revolution of the 1960s leaks over into a deep dislike of everything that the 1960s represents. Santorum continued in the question-and-answer session:
“You’re a liberal or a conservative in America if you think the ’60s were a good thing or not. If the ’60s was a good thing, you’re left. If you think it was a bad thing, you’re right. And the confusing thing for a lot of people that gets a lot of Americans is, when they think of the ’60s, they don’t think of just the sexual revolution. But somehow or other — and they’ve been very, very, clever at doing this — they’ve been able to link, I think absolutely incorrectly, the sexual revolution with civil rights.”
Maybe that’s why he has such a dyspeptic reaction to the 1960 speech by John F. Kennedy, in which he said that “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
Santorum said that the speech made him want to throw up because it was an “an absolutist doctrine that was abhorrent at the time of 1960.”
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's content. As you can see, it's possible to beat the game almost immediately, but as you'll see in the 100% run, a lot of the best content of the game is a bit out-of-the-way and is easily missed. Adding this ending to the game may have been a mistake; I bet plenty of people saw this ending, and returned the game for being "too short." This is a very solid run. The best points of it would be the entirety of Level 1, and the final battle with Phalanx. Honestly, if you're interested in checking out the game to see what it's like, you should go for the 100% run, as most of the game's best content can be seen there. Still, those interested in seeing just how quickly this game can be beaten should find this run to be quite interesting.
Single-segment 100% 0:50:59 by Adam Sweeney.
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Third of four speedruns done on April 8th, 2007. My copy of this run is just over an hour long, with a sixth of that being the ending sequence. Unlikely as it may seem, this game has had something of an influence on me. My friends and I love Demon's Crest; for years, we had a complex RPG going that was based on this game. And, I never get tired of the music in Demon's Crest; I would say it has one of the top three SNES soundtracks. A 100% run on Demon's Crest means starting from a new game, and beating it after collecting every item in the game: the five Crests (including the five pieces of the Crest of Fire), five Vellums, five Urns, five Talismans, and every life extension. This involves a lot of backtracking and unearthing secret locations. There is a blank spot in the game's submenu at the end; this space is for the "Ultimate Gargoyle" form, which can only be attained by using a certain password, which the game grants you after getting this ending. I'm very happy with the way the run turned out. Almost all of it is solid, or at least entertaining to watch. I used a few renegade tactics well, such as switching to the Crest of Time against Holothurion. The second and third battles with Arma were hard-fought and among the most exciting parts of the run. With the exception of the headbutting mini-game, I think I may have a flawless level order here... I could have used some Sulfur potions to speed up the backtracking, but I can only think of one, maybe two spots where it would have saved even a little time. I was low on money, anyway. The only ugly part of the run, unfortunately enough, would be the final battle. The first two phases went well, but the third was rather pedestrian. I even had to use my second Ginseng potion. Final battle aside, this is the best Demon's Crest run I've ever done. Have fun.
Return to the Game List, the FAQ, or the Home Page.On March 23 over at Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Ilya Somin wrote about a lawsuit against Henderson, Nevada police officers who allegedly forced a family to let them into their home for hours while scoping out a neighbor’s domestic disturbance standoff back in 2011. Linda, Michael, and Anthony Mitchell sued police for various constitutional violations based on their treatment (which included being pepper sprayed) such as the familiar Fourth and 14th Amendment violations which often appear in lawsuits against police. Most interestingly, the Mitchells also sued over violations of their Third Amendment rights.
In case you need a refresher, the Third Amendment is the comically archaic one to many people. The one that says police cannot be quartered in a private home during peacetime. However, the Amendment is not necessarily a quaint throwback. Though the judge in the Mitchell’s case dismissed the Third Amendment aspect to the lawsuit – and let the rest continue – and that may be technically correct (Somin thinks so) there is still a lot more to consider there. No, police and soldiers are not technically the same. "Quartering" may not have intended to mean only a few hours. Generally, whether that’s accurate or not, you picture quartering to mean Redcoats helping themselves to food, and then bedding down for the night in some Colonial home.
That doesn’t happen today, so what’s the relevance? Well, just because soldiers and police are legally different, doesn’t mean that this lawsuit doesn’t raise important points. Somin explores this in much more detail in his piece, and it’s well worth reading. The jist of it is that we didn’t have police back when the Founders were hammering out the Bill of Rights. We certainly didn’t have the type of militarized police we see today, with their broad powers to come into private homes if it’s deemed necessary. (And yes, it’s often necessary so that cops may stop drug crimes.)
I interviewed journalist Radley Balko for Antiwar.com back in 2013, right after his fantastic Rise of The Warrior Cop was released. My first question to him dealt with the Third Amendment, because Warrior Cop begins with the bold question of whether cops are even constitutional – based partially on the anti-quartering law. In the interview, Balko elaborated on his concept of "the symbolic Third Amendment":
"The Third Amendment was more a kind of a placeholder for this broader idea of being on guard against an overly militaristic society…. The Third Amendment, along with the Second and the Fourth – you take them all together and I think it presents a reaction to what the Founders knew about history; what they witnessed in Boston when the British troops were stationed."
Plenty of would-be experts might disagree with this interpretation. And again, law is all about precedent and definitions. Since the Third Amendment has been ignored by the courts, there is little to no case law for judges to consult. It’s not surprising then that the judge in the Mitchells’ case wrote, "I hold that a municipal police officer is not a soldier for purposes of the Third Amendment…this was not a military intrusion into a private home, and thus the intrusion is more effectively protected by the Fourth Amendment." Fine. That makes sense. And it’s not as if the entire lawsuit has been tossed out.
But it’s awfully convenient to those in power, this idea that since police are police, and soldiers are soldiers, rules applying to the latter cannot restrict the actions of the former. It’s also ridiculous. And not just because police are now so often “militarized."
The military also helps out with law enforcement activities more often than is appropriate. Reconstruction certainly qualified as a military occupation of the South, which was supposed to be restricted from ever happening again thanks to the Posse Comitatus Act. Years later, the Military Cooperation with Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act passed under Ronald Reagan lessened Posse Comitatus’ restrictions on soldiers acting as domestic law enforcement. Conveniently for the burgeoning prison state, this usually meant that law enforcement could assist with operations when there was some drug war connection. This resulted in memorable moments such as the Branch Davidians being besieged by National Guard helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, even despite there being no meth lab in their building, as was claimed. More frequently, there were real drug war actions such as the horrifyingly paramilitary CAMP raids in Northern California in the 1980s. Both incidents – if not a violation of the anti-quartering law – sure seem as if they are in opposition to Balko’s "symbolic Third Amendment."
And hell, the Third Amendment has already been violated in the most obvious fashion possible. Unsurprisingly, this occurred during World War II, when the "good guys" were the ones nuking whole cities. The natives of the Alaskan Aleutian Islands were removed, and their homes occupied for a year so that American soldiers could battle the invading Japanese. As with Japanese(-American) internment, property was taken or destroyed and the people were not compensated.
Perhaps that Third Amendment lawsuit would have gone forward. Or perhaps “national emergency” would have magically justified it. The Nevada family’s constitutionally-intriguing one will not make Third Amendment precedent. But Ilya Somin is right to wonder when cops and soldiers become legally indistinguishable. Out of the realm of law and its specifics, even a handful of recent events – the murder of man in his own home during a narcotics raid, the killing of another because he had a screwdriver, and an Arizona law that would shield killer cops’ names from the media – show that perhaps they already have.
Lucy Steigerwald is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and a columnist for VICE.com. She previously worked as an Associate Editor for Reason magazine. She is most angry about police, prisons, and wars. Steigerwald blogs at www.thestagblog.com.
Read more by Lucy Steigerwald(Chad Batka)
We can't count the number of times we've wanted to enact vengeance on some inconsiderate audience member whose cell phone goes off during a performance. But, like most people, we just bottle that fury up deep down inside and take it out on the break room vending machine later. Not Kevin Williamson. Last night the National Review writer was in attendance at the marvelous new musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 when one theatergoer's incessant cell phone use finally drove him over the edge... into vigilantism.
The stellar production—a swinging cabaret-type musical adaptation loosely adapted from Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace—takes place inside a luxuriant carnival tent nestled next to the Standard High Line. The audience is closely clustered at small tables throughout the room, and while there is food and beverage service before the show and during intermission, the performance itself takes place with zero table service interruptions, and the atmosphere is as quiet and attentive as any other conventional stage play. At least it's supposed to be.
Although each table is explicitly told that photography and cell phone use is strictly prohibited during the performance, the people seated around Williamson were, he says, unbearable. "They were carrying on a steady conversation throughout entire show," Williamson, who also writes a theater column for New Criterion, tells us. "They had been quite loud and obnoxious the entire time. There were two groups, one to the left and one to the right who were being loud and disruptive."
During intermission, Williamson's date complained to the theater's management, but he says he didn't personally witness the theater managers admonish the disruptive audience members. And once the performance resumed, the woman sitting to Williamson's right on his bench would not, he says, stop using her cell phone. "It looked like she was Googling or something," Williamson tells us. "So I leaned over and told her it was distracting and told her to put it away. She responded, 'So don't look.' "
Blood boiling, Williamson says he then asked her, sarcastically, "whether there had been a special exemption for her about not using her phone during the play. She told me to mind my own business, and so I took the phone out of her hands. I meant to throw it out the side door, but it hit some curtains instead. I guess my aim's not as good as it should be." Asked if the phone was damaged, Williamson says, "It had to be; I threw it a pretty good distance."
According to Williamson, the woman then slapped him in the face and, after failing to find her phone, stormed out. Soon the show's security director asked to "have a word" with Williamson, and they stepped out into the lobby. "I told him I would be happy to leave," Williamson recalls. "They tried to keep me there. He said the lady was talking about filing charges. So I waited around for a bit, but it seemed to be taking a while. He did try to physically keep me in, and was standing in the door blocking me, telling me I couldn't leave. I inquired as to whether he was a police officer and I was under arrest, and since I wasn't, I left."
A publicist for the production did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But if the cell phone user decides to press charges, Williamson says he's willing to face her in court. "I doubt that will happen, but if it does, that'll be fun. If I have to spend a night in jail, I'll spend a night in jail. I don't want to suggest I'm Henry David Thoreau protesting the Mexican-American War, but I'll do a day in jail if I have to."
Kevin Williamson, you are indeed our Thoreau. And if you need help raising bail money, we'll totally start a Kickstarter for you, just like Emerson did.
(Via @TonyBeard)
Update: One of the show's producers, Howard Kagan, tells us that while cellphone use during a theatrical production is a problem, "I don't think it ever makes sense for an usher to go over to someone and eject them because they're using a cell phone." As for Williamson, even though some wonder if he went too far, if he had to do this all over again, "I'd do the same thing. I'm okay with it. It was the right thing to have done."CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Jim Brown is not a fan of the NCAA, a truth he made more than evident Saturday at the Pro Football Hall of Fame Fan Fest.
Jim Brown ripped the NCAA Saturday at the Pro Football Hall of Fame Fan Fest. Nick Cammett/Diamond Images/Getty Images
"The NCAA is probably the most reprehensible organization God ever created," the Hall of Fame running back said at a roundtable discussion on the NFL with Barry Sanders and Harry Carson on his right and host Larry King on his left. "Total exploitation. The kind of money they make, the kind of life they live, it's embarrassing."
The comment came in response to a question from a fan about why a player with a career-ending injury in college could not receive a payment to compensate for lost future income.
Brown said the NCAA is pretentious when it says it is "doing things for the young people."
"I'm totally for change and total change," Brown said. "And I think that body needs to be torn apart and put back together with everybody's best interests in mind."
Brown said what he said with a definite purpose.
"I wanted to say it as harsh as I could, because I want them to come at me in any way they want to," Brown said. "Because it's a shame the way that it happens.""Scottish pork taboo" was Donald Alexander Mackenzie's phrase for discussing an aversion to pork amongst Scots, particularly Highlanders, which he believed to stem from an ancient taboo. Several writers who confirm that there was a prejudice against pork, or a superstitious attitude to pigs, do not see it in terms of a taboo related to an ancient cult. Any prejudice is generally agreed to have been fading by 1800. Some writers attribute a scarcity or dislike of pork in certain periods to a shortage of pig fodder.
Mackenzie's ideas [ edit ]
Donald Mackenzie gave a lecture on the Scottish pork taboo in 1920[1] when he explained his idea that prejudices against pork-eating could be traced back to a centuries-old religious cult. When he published these theories in the 1930s, he suggested the taboo was imported to Scotland in pre-Roman times by Celtic mercenaries, influenced by the cult of Attis in Anatolia. (The cult of Attis did not abstain permanently from pork; it was a purification for their ceremonies.[2])
He dismissed any possibility that the pork taboo originated from a literal reading of the Bible, and disputed this with various arguments, noting that early Christian missionaries did not snub pork. He conceded that there was archaeological evidence of pigs being eaten in prehistoric Scotland, but suggested this might have come from pork-eating peoples living near others who did observe the taboo, or be related to ceremonial use of pigs. Later pork production was for export, not for local use, just as eels were caught to send to the English market, while they were unacceptable as food in Scotland. The taboo died out in the Lowlands earlier than in the Highlands, and by the 1800s most crofts in the Highlands and Islands would have kept a grice.
Other folklorists, such as Isabel Grant, have accepted this theory of a taboo.[3]
Writers cited by Mackenzie [ edit ]
In addition to proposing ideas developed from studying the mythology and folk-lore of Scotland and other cultures, Mackenzie quoted writers of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Walter Scott referred to Scottish Highlanders' dislike of pork in more than one book,[4] and around 1814 explained that
Pork or swine’s flesh, in any shape, was, till of late years, much abominated by the Scotch, nor is it yet a favourite food amongst them. King Jamie carried this prejudice to England, and is known to have abhorred pork almost as much as he did tobacco.[5]
Scott's remark that Ben Jonson "recorded" the king's aversion to pork in his masque The Gipsies Metamorphosed, when the king has his hand read, is based on these words:
You should, by this line,
Love a horse and a hound, but no part of a swine.
Samuel Johnson found an "abhorrence" of pork and bacon on Skye in the 1770s.
It is not very easy to fix the principles upon which mankind have agreed to eat some animals, and reject others; and as the principle is not evident, it is not uniform. […] The vulgar inhabitants of Sky, I know not whether of the other islands, have not only eels, but pork and bacon in abhorrence, and accordingly I never saw a hog in the Hebrides, except one at Dunvegan.[6]
Mackenzie suggested that a verse in the English satirical song The Brewer from A Collection of Loyal Songs referred to the taboo:
The Jewish Scots that scorn to eat
The flesh of swine and Brewer's beat
'Twas the sight of this hogshead made 'em retreat
Which nobody can deny!
He believed that this, and other comments associating Scots with Jews, confirm the existence of the taboo, but have nothing to do with its origin. However, Celtic Christians had long faced accusations of 'judaizing'.
He described a superstition about touching or saying "cauld airn" (cold iron) when pigs are mentioned. This was discussed by Dean Ramsay, and is also included in Walter McGregor's Notes on the folk-lore of the north-east of Scotland (Folklore Society 1881).[7]
Among the many superstitious notions and customs prevalent among the lower orders of the fishing towns on the east coast of Fife, till very recently, that class entertained a great horror of swine....[8]
Mackenzie disagreed with Edward Burt, whose Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland (1754)[9] discusses an “aversion” to pork in the Highlands, but says it is not “superstitious”.
Other writers referring to a prejudice against pork [ edit ]
Bishop John Lesley's History of Scotland talks of "our cuntrie peple" having "lytle plesure" in pork in the 1570s.[10]
At least four ministers writing about their parishes for the Statistical Accounts of Scotland in the 1790s speak of a prejudice which is starting to fade: for instance, "The deep rooted prejudice against swine's flesh is now removed: most of the farmers rear some of that species, which not 30 years ago, they held in the utmost detestation." (Ardchattan, County of Argyle) Account of 1791-99, volume 6, page 177)[11]
20th-century historian Christopher Smout speaks of "a universal superstitious prejudice".[12]
An archaeological survey of pork consumption in Scotland by the Society of Antiquities in Scotland in 2000 states: "Whether there is any archaeological evidence of this prejudice against pigs, for whatever reason, is open to question." and that "During the medieval period, it has been noted that rural sites contained more pig bones than urban sites, and that the lowest relative frequencies come from the most southerly of the burghs considered, Peebles and Perth. This contradicts the notion that it was the ‘Highlanders’ who abhorred pork, unless it is assumed that, despite this dislike, they continued to produce it for sale to others."[13]
Writers disputing Donald Mackenzie's theories [ edit ]
The historian William Mackay Mackenzie published his thoughts in the Scotsman letters pages (8 October 1921) as part of a long-running debate arising from D. A. Mackenzie's lecture in 1920. While agreeing there had been a "sporadic prejudice" against pork in parts of Scotland, and offering illustrations of this, he was against the idea of a link to a "religious cult". He saw economic factors at work between 1500 and 1800 which would discourage pig-keeping. He cited several examples of pork consumption in the Middle Ages, and described a "temporary lapse" when "the great forests disappeared from Scotland".
In 1983 the American anthropologist Eric B. Ross put forward arguments based on a detailed study of Scottish agricultural history, and asserted the value of cultural materialism rooted in evolutionary anthropology for studying dietary customs, thus avoiding explanations based on "relatively esoteric" beliefs. Because of deforestation there was a loss of beech mast and acorns for feeding pigs, and it was not until the late 18th century that potatoes were produced in sufficient quantity to offer a useful alternative. Throughout this gap in pork consumption by the general population, many of the Scottish upper classes continued to eat the meat. He summed up:
In the years of the eighteenth century and probably earlier, swine were rarely raised in Scotland, particularly in the Scottish Highlands, and subsequent writers have gone so far as to postulate the operation of a taboo on the eating of pork. Unfortunately there is almost nothing known today about local sentiments of that era, and we have only the intellectual rationalizations of educated writers who all too easily found an explanation for the scarcity of pigs in the assumption that a 'foolish prejudice' was at work.[14]
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]What is worrisome about the Bengal situation today is the near-collapse of Centre-state relations—visible via the acrimonious exchanges between the chief minister and the governor—while the state is literally on the boil on two fronts.
On one front is the Siliguri corridor, which is just 50 km as the crow flies from the new flashpoint, the Indo-China-Bhutan tri-junction. Close by, the Gorkha population in Darjeeling has revived its dissent against perceived Bengali dominance, demanding a separate state. If the protesters have taken recourse to arson, the state government too has used force, killing three in firing in the last week.
CM Mamata Banerjee’s rather belated offer of talks has been rejected, with both Gorkha factions asserting they would rather talk to the Centre. Banerjee’s relations with the Centre may be marked with confrontation and recriminations, but the whole thing does not behove well for West Bengal or the nation. When India is caught in a battle of nerves with China, it’s hardly desirable to have the hills on fire. This is not the only challenge before Banerjee’s administrative leadership, though.
The southern tip of Bengal, 24 Parganas, is still recovering from the shock of a sudden eruption of Hindu-Muslim tension, after seven decades, this time triggered by a Facebook post. The CM has blamed the BJP for fanning communal fires. However, law and order being a state subject, a leader such as Banerjee should step back and take a panoramic view of her own actions too.
The balkanisation of Bengal is not a pretty thought. It would be saner for her not to play with fire in the hills to garner anti-Gorkha votes in the northern plains, or to stir parochial sentiments elsewhere. Nor to seek political dividends in a divided Bengal. Bengal is crying for constructive development, not divisive politics. As for the Centre, it has to play the statesman and ensure the parts are held together, without the population getting bruised in the brinkmanship of the local political classes.during day one of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on September 4, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The DNC that will run through September 7, will nominate U.S. President Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate. Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee speaks during day one of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on Sept. 4, 2012 in Charlotte, N.C. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Gov. Lincoln Chafee has signed a proclamation declaring a “Day of Reason” in Rhode Island.
The proclamation declares May 1 the Day of Reason. The Humanists of Rhode Island and the Secular Coalition for Rhode Island say they requested it.
The proclamation says the application of reason has “proven to offer hope for human survival upon Earth by cultivating intelligent, moral and ethical interaction among people.”
The groups say they’re planning events to coincide with the National Day of Reason. The events are also being held in parallel with the National Day of Prayer, on the same day. They say the Day of Reason aims to raise awareness about the “persistent threat” to the separation of church and state.
A Chafee spokeswoman says he signed a similar proclamation last year.
(© Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)I'm thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.
Oh, and I'm not thinking of George W. Bush, but another "W" – actually "WW": Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.
President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of "self determination" and the author of the idealistic but doomed "Fourteen Points" – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.
That's a shame, because Wilson's two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson's racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since "progressivism" is suddenly in vogue – today's leading Democrats proudly wear the label – it's worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.
The record should give sober pause to anyone who's mesmerized by the progressive promise.
Wilson, like the bulk of progressive intellectuals in fin-de-siècle America, was deeply influenced by three strands of thought: philosophical Pragmatism, Hegelianism, and Darwinism. This heady intellectual cocktail produced a drunken arrogance and the conviction that the old rules no longer applied.
The classical liberalism of the Founders – free markets, individualism, property rights, etc. – had been eclipsed by a new "experimental" age. Horace Kallen, a protégé of Pragmatism exponent William James, denounced fixed philosophical dogmas as mere rationalizations of the status quo. Sounding much like today's critical theorists, Mr. Kallen lamented that "Men have invented philosophy precisely because they find change, chance, and process too much for them, and desire infallible security and certainty."
The old conception of absolute truths and immutable laws had been replaced by a "Darwinian" vision of organic change.
Hence Wilson argued that the old "Newtonian" vision – fixed rules enshrined in the Constitution and laws – had to give way to the "Darwinian" view of "living constitutions" and the like.
"Government," Wilson wrote approvingly in his magnum opus, "The State," "does now whatever experience permits or the times demand." "No doubt," he wrote elsewhere, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, "a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle."
In his 1890 essay, "Leaders of Men," Wilson explained that a "true leader" uses the masses like "tools." He must inflame their passions with little heed for the facts. "Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader."
Wilson once told a black delegation, that "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." But his racism wasn't just a product of his Southern roots; it was often of a piece with the reigning progressive obsession with eugenics, the pseudoscience that strove to perfect society through better breeding.
Again, Wilson was merely one voice in the progressive chorus of the age. "[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many," declared the progressive social activist Jane Addams.
"New forms of association must be created," explained Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading progressive theologian of the Social Gospel movement, in 1896. "Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life." Elsewhere, Rauschenbusch put it more simply: "Individualism means tyranny."
Not surprisingly, such intellectual kindling was easy to ignite when World War I broke out. The philosopher John Dewey, New Republic founder Herbert Croly, and countless other progressive intellectuals welcomed what Mr. Dewey dubbed "the social possibilities of war." The war provided an opportunity to force Americans to, as journalist Frederick Lewis Allen put it, "lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step." Or as another progressive put it, "Laissez faire is dead. Long live social control."
With the intellectuals on their side, Wilson recruited journalist George Creel to become a propaganda minister as head of the newly formed Committee on Public Information (CPI).
Mr. Creel declared that it was his mission to inflame the American public into "one white-hot mass" under the banner of "100 percent Americanism." Fear was a vital tool, he argued, "an important element to be bred in the civilian population."
The CPI printed millions of posters, buttons, pamphlets, that did just that. A typical poster for Liberty Bonds cautioned, "I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!... [I]f you have the money to buy and do not buy, I will make this No Man's Land for you!" One of Creel's greatest ideas – an instance of "viral marketing" before its time – was the creation of an army of about 75,000 "Four Minute Men." Each was equipped and trained by the CPI to deliver a four-minute speech at town meetings, in restaurants, in theaters – anyplace they could get an audience – to spread the word that the "very future of democracy" was at stake. In 1917-18 alone, some 7,555,190 speeches were delivered in 5,200 communities. These speeches celebrated Wilson as a larger-than-life leader and the Germans as less-than-human Huns.
Meanwhile, the CPI released a string of propaganda films with such titles as "The Kaiser," "The Beast of Berlin," and "The Prussian Cur." Remember when French fries became "freedom fries" in the run-up to the Iraq war? Thanks in part to the CPI, sauerkraut become "victory cabbage."
Under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, Wilson's administration shut down newspapers and magazines at an astounding pace. Indeed, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn't want to buy Liberty Bonds.
The Wilson administration sanctioned what could be called an American fascisti, the American Protective League. The APL – a quarter million strong at its height, with offices in 600 cities – carried government-issued badges while beating up dissidents and protesters and conducting warrantless searches and interrogations. Even after the war, Wilson refused to release the last of America's political prisoners, leaving it to subsequent Republican administrations to free the anti-war Socialist Eugene V. Debs and others.
Now, obviously, none of the current crop of self-described progressives are eager to replay this dark chapter. But we make a mistake when we assume that we can cherry pick only the good parts of our past to re-create.
Today's progressives still share many of the core assumptions of the progressives of yore. It may be gauche to talk about patriotism too much in liberal circles, but what is Barack Obama's obsession with unity other than patriotism by another name? Indeed, he champions unity for its own sake, as a good in and of itself. But unity can be quite amoral. Mobs and gangs are dangerous because of their unblinking unity.
Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, often insists that we must move "beyond" ideology, labels, partisanship, etc. The sentiment is a direct echo of the Pragmatists who felt that dogma needed to be jettisoned to give social planners a free hand. Of course, then as now, the "beyond ideology" refrain is itself an ideological position favoring whatever state intervention social planners prefer.
In Senator Clinton's case, the most vital intervention is intruding on the family. Mrs. Clinton proudly follows the "child saver" tradition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jane Addams. In 1996, she proclaimed "as adults we have to start thinking and believing that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child." In her book, "It Takes A Village," she insists that children are born in crisis, requiring progressive government intervention from infancy on. She seems to subscribe to Wilson's view, when president of Princeton, that the chief job of an educator is to make children as unlike their parents as possible.
In a Democratic debate, Clinton famously rejected the word "liberal" in favor of "progressive." Shouldn't we at least ask what that means? If Mike Huckabee proclaimed that he prefers the label "confederate" over "conservative," pundits would rightly denounce his association with such a tainted legacy. But when it comes to progressivism, there's no such obligation to account for your ideological heritage. It seems progressivism is never wrong.
• Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online's editor-at-large, is the author of "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning."I know that there was a lot of fuss over the failure of the Republicans to have any female witnesses on the issue of contraception for women. But I would have had no problem with the panel, if only they had been asked the right questions. The leader of the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, who also wants to elect the leader of the free world, has crystallized the party's position: Putting aside (or rather ignoring) the other benefits of contraception, a woman who uses a contraceptive to prevent having a baby is a "slut." If the contraceptive is paid for by someone else, the woman is a "prostitute," and all such sex acts should be videotaped and broadcast on the Internet. And Rick Santorum chimes in, if a woman wants to avoid being either a slut or a prostitute, and follows the admonition not to use contraception, and thus has an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy and an abortion, that woman is a "murderer." What an upbeat bunch of guys! The next Blunt Amendment will be to rescind a women's right to vote or bare her ankles in public.
What should have been asked of the male witnesses were questions such as: If a woman who has sexual relations before marriage uses a contraceptive to avoid having a baby is a "slut," what do you call the man who has relations with her? Have you ever had sexual relations with anyone before marriage for purposes other than having a baby? If so, did you or your partner take precautions not to have a baby? Have you ever had sexual relations during marriage for purposes other than having a baby? If so, what did you do to accomplish that purpose? Have you ever had extra-marital relations (like Newt) for purposes other than having a baby? Do you use Viagra? If so, has it been paid for in whole or in part by anyone else, such as your employer or insurance carrier? If so, does that make you a prostitute? Have you ever used a condom? If so, for what purpose?
Finally, have you ever had sex just for the joy of having sex without any intention of having a baby, and if so, should there be a law against it?CHICAGO -- Brandon Rozzell led four players in double figures and VCU made 12 3-pointers to stun Georgetown with a 74-56 win that showed any remaining doubters the Rams do, indeed, belong in the NCAA tournament.
Rozzell tied his career high with six 3-pointers and finished with 26 points, while Joey Rodriguez had 17 points and seven assists. Bradford Burgess and Jamie Skeen added 12 each.
It is the first time the 11th-seeded Rams (25-11) have won more than one game in the NCAA tournament, and they'll now play third-seeded Purdue on Sunday in the Southwest regional.
"Anytime people disrespect you, especially on national TV, it kind of hurts you," Rodriguez said. "We had an opportunity to come out here and prove people wrong and hopefully we can keep it going."
Not even the return of point guard Chris Wright could help the sixth-seeded Hoyas, who were handed their worst loss in the NCAA tournament since a 24-point drubbing by top-seeded UMass in the 1996 East regional final. Wright, who broke his left hand Feb. 23 in the second half against Cincinnati, had six points on 3-of-13 shooting and just three assists.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Wright got knocked in the head with less than 6 minutes to play and briefly had to take a seat on the bench while he popped his contact lens back in.
"They've been doing that all year, making shots," Wright said. "We're not taking nothing away from them, they played |
last line. Gene drift from plant to plant, field to field, food product to food product? Apparently, Epicyte never heard of it. Every food scientist in the world knows about it, but not Epicyte.
So what happened to the company?
In 2004, it was bought out by Biolex, a North Carolina biotech firm. Then, in 2012, Biolex filed for bankruptcy. Before it did, it sold some of its technology to Synthon, a Dutch drug company that makes Paxil, known for causing birth defects.
The depopulation corn technology? It could be floating around in a number of places by now.
In April of this year, Russia announced it would ban imports of GMO food products. By the end of July, China had stopped importing corn from the US.
Of course, no mention was made of Depopulation Corn. Russia and China are fully aware of, what shall we call them, the conventional dangers of GMO food.
However, China and Russia might check on the “other thing” while they’re at it—the spermicidal genes—to see whether they’ve been importing that type of corn.
You might think China would welcome Depop Corn. I beg to differ. If they’re going to do Depop, they want to engineer it themselves. And then there is the fact that corn is omnipresent in hundreds of thousands, even millions of processed food products. Chinese leaders themselves would thus become subject to Depop without even knowing it.
And what about the USA? Why haven’t I mentioned it?
Because in America, the high-minded campaign is all about labeling GMOs, not banning them. It’s embarrassing.
And with gene drift, in which all sorts of biotech genes float on the wind across the land, and settle into plants of every kind, to say nothing of factories, where processed food is manufactured, what are the chances that labels are going to save the day?
Several counties in the US have enacted bans on growing GMO crops, and as I’ve been detailing, the voters of Maui recently struck a major blow and decided to stop Monsanto and Dow from launching new GMO experiments.
But Monsanto and Dow immediately sued, and the county government of Maui is on their side—and against their own voters.
Press coverage of this ongoing battle is weak, soft and small.
The majority of anti-GMO activists in the US have been brought into the labeling movement, because they think and hope that Shopping Moms will stage a revolution and bring Monsanto and Dow to their knees.
The Moms, that is, who aren’t too busy with their husbands trying to get pregnant through exotic high-tech strategies, because, for some odd reason, the normal time-tested methods aren’t working.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.comNarain Karthikeyan has reacted angrily to Felipe Massa's claim that he was responsible for the Ferrari driver missing out on a podium at the Canadian Grand Prix.
"The blame game starts when your seat is under threat," Karthikeyan told ESPNF1, making a reference to persistent rumours that Massa could be replaced.
Following the eventful Canadian Grand Prix on Sunday, Massa, who finished sixth, blamed Karthikeyan for causing an accident that dropped him from third to 12th.
"My chances of finishing on the podium and also of fighting for the win just evaporated when I was passing Karthikeyan," he said. "He was going very slowly on the dry line but then, as I was passing him on the wet, he accelerated and I lost control of the car ending up in the wall. I am angry, there is no point denying it."
But Karthikeyan does not agree with Massa's version of events: "I didn't slow down at all. He came really fast behind me. He then changed his racing line, went on the wet part and spun."
Although Karthikeyan enjoyed his best race since his comeback, a post-race penalty for skipping the final chicane saw him demoted from 14th to 17th and admitted, "I was disappointed with the stewards' decision."
The Indian added that he had been taken by surprise when his team fitted slick tyres at the final pit stop rather than intermediates.
"I didn't expect to be called in after having passed Tonio [Liuzzi] with the intermediates," he said. "I wanted to stay out on the same set for a bit longer. However, for whatever reason, the team called me in, put on slicks [without informing me about the change from intermediates to slicks] and from there, I dropped quite a few places.
"I did everything right in the race and managed to overtake Virgin cars as well as Tonio."
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It is known as the fashion capital of the world, but away from the celebrated boutiques of Armani, Versace and Prada the mood has turned ugly in Milan as it becomes the latest flashpoint in Europe's migrant crisis.
Residents and politicians are in a state of near-panic after roughly 400 turned up at the city's famous central railway station, swelling overall numbers in the city to a record 3,300.
With Switzerland, Austria and France clamping down on migrants, Milan is being seen as the new 'bottleneck' where people desperate to move into central Europe are 'trapped' for weeks.
MailOnline found young men still determined to get to Britain, but held in a series of makeshift shelters, while residents are increasingly losing patience with politicians' ability to control numbers.
Scroll down for video
Bottleneck: Groups of young men hang around outside Milan's Central Station as the city becomes the new flashpoint for Europe's migrant crisis with hundreds converging on the railway square
Trapped: The numbers of migrants arriving in Milan in recent weeks has risen as Switzerland, France and Austria clamp down on immigration, meaning those who get off a boat in Italy cannot travel through into central Europe
Anger: As migrant numbers rise, residents in Milan have expressed worry that politicians do not have control of the issue, but police are visibly patrolling the square at the Milano Centrale station
Concern: Many young men from north Africa have arrived in central Milan in recent weeks, determined to get through Italy and into Britain or Germany, but have discovered they are effectively trapped
Bottleneck: With Switzerland, Austria and France clamping down on migrants, Milan is being seen as the new 'bottleneck' where people desperate to move into central Europe are 'trapped' for weeks
Resident Andrea Toniuto, 38, said he was worried that with so many on the streets there could be trouble.
'When they are desperate they will do desperate things. I do not know what the answer is other than to try and stop them from coming to Italy,' he said.
The sense of panic was heightened when the city's mayor Giuseppe Sala seemed to suggest he would open a tent city to cope house the new arrivals. From January 1 to July 1, 2016 around 70,930 migrants arrived in Italy, according to the Ministry of Interior
He admitted the city needed an 'intervention' as it struggled to handle the influx and was later assured by the country's defence minister that a disused barracks could be used for temporary accommodation. The Italian press talked grimly of an 'invasion' with dire warnings of thousands of more migrants to come, mostly from Africa and Egypt.
Makeshift: Migrants staying at the Oratorio San Luigi, in Bruzzano, are hanging their washing on the goalposts as the centre is forced to accommodate many more migrants than usual
Delayed: The church youth centre of Oratorio San Luigi, in Bruzzano, has been turned into a makeshift dormitory where more than 90 people, mostly from Eritrea, are based as Italy's migrant crisis escalates
Full: The Oratorio San Luigi youth centre, in Bruzzano is now packed with migrants and extra beds have been brought in to accommodate extra people
Packed: The Oratorio San Luigi, in Bruzzano, was a church youth club but has been turned into a migrant centre as routes out of Italy are effectively closed due to tightened border controls from neighbouring countries
The prediction has yet to come true, but with all routes out of Italy effectively closed due to tightened border controls from neighbouring countries, it seems likely that more migrants will end up in major cities such as Milan.
Resident Gianluigi Bonsaglio, 27, said: 'It does concern me that so many are here. When I drive around Milan and in the centre you see lots of [migrants] sitting around. It does not present a very good image of city.
'They are not doing anything wrong, but they cannot sit on the streets all day.'
Other residents, who declined to named and photographed, said they feared that groups of migrants projected the wrong image for the city.
'We know this problem of the migrants is not going to go away and so we have to face it and do something about it,' said one woman in her 40s.
Police patrol: Authorities patrol the square outside Milano Centrale amid increasing concern at the number of migrants caught in a 'bottleneck' in Italy, as neighbouring countries clamp down on immigration
Landmark: Milan's stunning central station has become the focal point for migrants arriving in Italy, who discover that they are effectively trapped as border controls in neighbouring countries are tightened
Volunteers: As Italy's migrant crisis intensifies, ordinary people have helped to care for those who arrive in Milan. People from the Church Beata Vergine Assunta at the Bruzzano area are working in a nearby church youth centre that has been turned into a migrant centre
'They cannot stay sat outside the station all the time. It looks bad and who knows what could happen.'
Some of the 3,500 migrants in the Milan have returned from lakeside town of Como, home to George Clooney and other wealthy residents.
More than 500 were previously camped at the town's train station having failed in their attempts to cross the border into Switzerland.
Others have made their way to Milan after landing on Lampedusa, a small island off the coast of Sicily having made the boat trip from Libya with the aid of people smugglers.
Most made their way to the city in the hope its excellent rail links would speed their journey to other parts of Europe.
Desparate: The streets in the outskirts of Milan have also become accustomed to accommodating migrants with volunteers from the Church Beata Vergine Assunta at the Bruzzano area, pictured, working to turn their youth centre into a migrant camp
Complaint: Police park up outside the Milano Centrale station amid concerns from residents that the historic building is becoming the focal point for migrants
But their progress has come to a shuddering halt as Switzerland, Austria and France slam the door shut on migrants.
More than 200 hundred people who recently attempted to swim to France from Italy were sent back.
It means many have little choice but to make Milan their home.
Camped in front of the 85-year-old railway station are dozens of African migrants, chatting and doing their best to keep in the shade from the blistering summer heat.
They only move when teams of cleaners in mechanized vehicles swoop on the area in front of the station to hose it town and clear up rubbish.
Two police officers stand guard as the groups of migrants reluctantly move from their position to allow the cleaning take place.
While many sleep rough outside the station others finds local parks and doorways.
Among them is 21-year-old Lamin Saho who left his home in Gambia in the hope of reaching England and a new life.
He worries that with the cooler autumn months approaching he will not survive on the streets.
'I want to go to England but they have made it so hard to get there,' he told Mail Online.
Crowded: Residents say that dozens of migrants camp out in front of the Milano Centrale station, chatting and doing their best to keep in the shade from the blistering summer heat
Fears: While many migrants sleep rough outside the Milano Centrale station, others finds local parks and doorways. Among them is 21-year-old Lamin Saho who left his home in Gambia in the hope of reaching England and a new life
'That is where I want to go, or to Germany. There is nothing for us here in Italy. They do not give us documents so that we can leave.
'This is not the place where we want to stay.'
Like all the migrants arriving in Italy he was fingerprinted and had his photograph taken but sees Milan as a stopping off point only.
He has no desire to stay or learn Italian.
Others in the city like 20-year-old Ethiopian Elias are new arrivals.
His family paid $2,500 to people smugglers to get him from Libya to Italy.
Elias claims he is fleeing war in his country but admits he wanted to leave to find a job or even study medicine abroad.
Resident Andrea Toniuto, 38, pictured left, said he was worried that with so many on the streets there could be trouble. 'When they are desperate they will do desperate things. I do not know what the answer is other than to try and stop them from coming to Italy,' he said. Resident Gianluigi Bonsaglio, 27, said: 'It does concern me that so many are here. When I drive around Milan and in the centre you see lots of [migrants] sitting around. It does not present a very good image of city. 'They are not doing anything wrong, but they cannot sit on the streets all day.'
'If I can I want to get to Holland as they give good benefits for people who want to study,' he told Mail Online.
'England was my first choice, but everyone says it is impossible to get into the country now. '
Speaking in near perfect English he added: 'Why do you make it so hard for people like me,' he asked.
Around him sat dozens of other migrants, mostly all young men aged from 18-30.
They were sat in the shade outside Milan's main reception centre for new arrivals called The Hub and based in arches under the railway tracks.
Usually it can sleep up to 150 people but it was forced to accommodate several hundred more when a large group arrived.
Run by a charity called the Arca Project it provides food, shelter, clothing and Internet access for the migrants.
Nowhere to go: Groups of migrants stay outside the Central Station as fears intensify that Milan is becoming the bottleneck of Europe's migrant crisis
'It is not an emergency situation but we do have a problem now here in Milan' said Alice Stefanizzi, the charity's fund raising manger.
'More accommodation is needed and we hope the city will provide it. The people who come here stay for a few days, but with nowhere to go many are staying longer.
'Charities like ours can only provide so much and it will be down to the city and the Government to step in.'
In an effort to keep migrants off the streets, and provide secure accommodation, many have been taken to the suburbs.
One such centre is in the town of Brazzano where a church youth centre has been turned into a makeshift dormitory.
More than 90 people, mostly from Eritrea, are based there and looked after by volunteers from the nearby church and the House of Charity, a local organization that usually helps the homeless.
Other similar centres have been set up around the city, including one in Quarto Oggiaro.
We have a solution that allows the refugees not to go around the streets of the city, but that will be placed in a safe place'
Milan's Mayor Giuseppe Sala has admitted the city has a problem telling the La Stampa newspaper that he has not ruled out calling a state of emergency.
He also said it was the duty of the Government to come to the aid of the city.
'I leave it to the government decision' he said of the state of emergency.
'The Milanese have the right to live in peace. they need the help of the government. '
He said opening up the former Montello army barracks would help solve the problem.
'We have a solution that allows the refugees not to go around the streets of the city, but that will be placed in a safe place. '
But while the Mayor finds himself at odds with other politicians in the region who are opposed to helping migrants.
Lombardy regional president Roberto Maroni has been outspoken in his opposition to sheltering migrants.
He has said previously said refugees are 'illegal immigrants who should be sent home.'
And Riccardo De Corato, regional advisor for the Fratelli d'Italia party, said with the latest influx of immigrants, 'Milan is already a tent city.'
More than 94,000 migrants have arrived at southern Italian ports this, according to figures from the International Organisation for Migrant.
A similar number made the trip from Libya last year but in 2016 access to other European countries from Italy has been shut down.Staunch atheist wins over audience in debate with Catholic convert over whether religion is a force for good in the world
In theory it was not an event that should have created a stir: a philosophical debate on the moral merits of religion. In an age of reality TV drama and Hollywood blockbusters loaded with special effects it would seem hard to get the masses to flock to witness such an old-fashioned, high-brow spectacle.
But when the two debaters are the world's most famous recent Roman Catholic convert in the shape of Tony Blair and the charismatic yet cancer-stricken sceptic Christopher Hitchens suddenly it becomes easier to sell tickets.
Two thousand seven hundred tickets to be precise. For that was the size of the crowd that packed the space age-looking Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto late last night to watch the two ideological foes – when it comes to religion – spar and trade verbal blows.
The occasion was part of the Munk Debate series, organised by the Aurea Foundation group, and the motion was simply: "Be it resolved, religion is a force for good in the world".
Both men were unabashedly stalwart in their positions. Hitchens, one of the leading "new atheists" and author of the hit book God Is Not Great, slammed religion as nothing more than supernatural gobbledegook that caused untold misery throughout human history. "Once you assume a creator and a plan it make us subjects in a cruel experiment," Hitchens said before causing widespread laughter by comparing God to "a kind of divine North Korea".
Blair, perhaps not surprisingly, was a little less forthright. On the backfoot for much of the debate he kept returning to his theme that many religious people all over the world were engaged in great and good works. They did that because of their faith, he argued, and to slam all religious people as ignorant or evil was plain wrong. "The proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable," he said. Blair called religion at its best "a benign progressive framework by which to live our lives".
Throughout the 90-minute debate Hitchens seemed to have the crowd's sympathy. That might have been to do with his ill appearance due to cancer, but was far more likely to be down to the sharpness of his verbal barbs and the fact that 57% of the audience already agreed with his sceptical position according to a pre-debate poll, while just 22% agreed with Blair's side. The rest were undecided.
But the true winners of the debate were the organisers. The high-profile debaters and controversial subject matter ensured not only a packed hall but an overflow location where people who could not get tickets were able to watch it on TV monitors. Tickets sold out weeks ago and were selling on eBay for several times their cover price. The debate was also trailed on the front pages of some Canadian newspapers and covered by local television.
It even attracted a small but vocal knot of anti-Iraq war protestors accusing Blair of war crimes. Demonstrators unveiled placards that read "Arrest Blair" and "War criminals not welcome here", proving that, as with the merits of religion, some arguments are unlikely to ever be settled with a single night's debate.Triumph 2.5 P.I MK. 2
In October 1969, the Mk 2 range was launched, again styled by Michelotti, updating the car for the 1970s. The front of the car now followed the lines of the then-upcoming Triumph Stag grand tourer. There were entry-level 2000 models, which were the most plentiful, but the remainder of the range consisted of 2500, 2500 TC and 2500 PI models. Apart from the PI (petrol injection) models, all Triumph 2000 and 2500s had twin Stromberg or SU carburettors, the "TC" prefix on some models can seem misleading in this respect as it stood for a higher equipment level. In June 1975 the 2500S model, with 14 inch (356 mm) wheels and anti-roll bar, was added: it replaced the 2.5PI which had quietly disappeared from the show rooms two months earlier. This Marked the end of fuel injected engines for the car, but improved acceleration was claimed for the twin carburettor 2500S and its slightly less expensive 2500TC sibling. These new versions featured an extensive list of other, mostly minor, improvements, of which the most significant were probably those affecting the ride and handling: these resulted from suspension changes including an anti-roll bar. The Estate in the Mk 2 version was 5 inches (125 mm) shorter than the Mk 2 Saloon, because the rear bodywork of the car was carried over unchanged from the Mk 1 version. The Mk 2, the last big Triumph car, ceased production in 1977, supplanted by British Leyland's corporate executive car, the Rover SD1: Six-cylinder 2300 and 2600 versions of the new Rover would nonetheless be powered by engines derived from the Triumph 2000. The last production car, a 2500S estate (BOL87V) is kept at the Heritage Motor Centre.. More info can be found at Wikipedia
The Power Elite: Also you belong to it with the Triumph 2.5 P.I MK. 2
Fuel injection: for higher motor power
The Corporate Jet: in the Triumph-form
Comfort: true long tradition
The Corporate Jet: Commercial veicle version
Technical specificationsDuring his signature "Keeping Them Honest" segment, CNN host Anderson Cooper questioned Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's tax plan.
Cooper replayed clips of Romney and his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan promising to cut taxes for middle-income families. "Under no circumstances will I raise taxes on the middle class of America," Romney has said on the campaign trail.
Ryan echoed this sentiment during last week's vice presidential debate. "You can cut tax rates by 20 percent, and still preserve these important preferences for middle class tax payers," Ryan said.
The problem though, Cooper said, is that Romney and Ryan fail to "specify which tax cuts they'll cap, or which loopholes they'll close."
Both Romney and Ryan avoid specifics and simply cite six studies from institutions like Harvard, Princeton and the Wall Street Journal, concluding that their tax plan will deliver on its promises.
"Keeping them honest, though, a bipartisan study found the math doesn't work. And the other studies, which the Romney campaign counters with, well they're coming under fire as well," Cooper said. "The suggestion is that these are full-blow academic studies. Actually, three are blog-posts, one is a Wall Street Journal op-ed."
He added, "every one of these authors in each these so-called studies is making assumptions...because neither Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan nor any of their surrogates have yet come forward with specifics."CHRONIQUE
La « culture du viol », vraiment?
Lysiane Gagnon La Presse
Ainsi donc, nous baignerions dans « la culture du viol »? Autrement dit, dans une société qui cultive et encourage la violence sexuelle?
Attention aux mots, ils peuvent pervertir les meilleures intentions du monde. Ce n’est pas parce que l’on doit combattre la violence sexuelle que l’on peut dire n’importe quoi.
La soi-disant « culture du viol » qui imprégnerait nos villes et nos campagnes est une construction idéologique, née dans les départements de « women studies » nord-américains qui s’inscrivent dans le courant le plus radical du féminisme. Les médias ont ensuite repris l’expression comme si elle allait de soi.
Retombons sur terre. Jamais, à aucun moment de l’histoire de l’humanité, les femmes – du moins celles qui ont le privilège de vivre dans des pays démocratiques – n’ont été plus protégées, plus respectées et plus encouragées à s’affirmer qu’à notre époque.
Jamais la violence sexuelle n’a été plus jugulée et réprouvée qu’aujourd’hui.
Oui, il y a encore des femmes battues ou violées. Mais justement, ces cas font la manchette parce qu’ils sont rares, beaucoup plus rares qu’à l’époque d’avant la révolution féministe.
Si n’importe quelle allégation d’« agression sexuelle », même la moins documentée, cause autant de remous, c’est justement parce que la violence sexuelle est devenue le tabou ultime des démocraties modernes.
Des preuves? En voici quelques-unes…
Ce sont ses propos sexistes qui ont causé la perte (peut-être définitive) de Donald Trump, plus encore que ses attaques contre les Mexicains et les immigrants, qui étaient objectivement beaucoup plus graves que ses vantardises ridicules de vieux macho.
Les femmes peuvent se permettre de mépriser ouvertement les hommes, mais l’inverse est impossible. Si un homme public avait dit à propos des femmes la moitié de ce qu’a dit à Tout le monde en parle la fameuse Anne-France Goldwater, il aurait été lynché sur-le-champ.
Imaginez qu’il ait démontré, claquement de langue et clin d’œil à l’appui, que « les belles filles » sont des « p’tits morceaux » qu’on appelle comme un animal. Imaginez qu’il ait dit : « Les femmes sont utiles, mais pas pour grand-chose ». Mais c’étaient les hommes qui étaient ici dénigrés, alors tout le monde a trouvé ça très drôle.
En fait, l’influence du féminisme a été telle que nos sociétés adoptent de plus en plus des valeurs et même des comportements traditionnellement féminins, comme la notion de « care » (prendre soin d’autrui). Quand on voit le monde scolaire stigmatiser les comportements spontanés des petits garçons, ou le chef de la GRC fondre en larmes en demandant pardon pour la discrimination passée, c’est tout de même le signe que quelque chose a changé!
En fait, les Québécoises vivent dans un tel cocon, à comparer avec ce qui se passe dans le reste du monde, qu’elles risquent de se mettre en danger quand elles vont à l’étranger.
« Elles croient qu’elles auront droit à la même sécurité qu’au Québec et que rien de fâcheux ne leur arrivera », raconte un diplomate qui a œuvré dans des plusieurs pays « difficiles ».
Oui, mais les statistiques? Une femme sur trois, au Québec, aurait été « agressée sexuellement » après l’âge de 16 ans.
C’est beaucoup, mais tout dépend de ce qu’on entend par cette expression. La langue populaire, suivant en cela l’évolution du Code criminel, a effacé la distinction cruciale entre le viol véritable – la pénétration effectuée sous la contrainte – et toutes sortes de comportements (attouchements, embrassades, commentaires sexistes, etc) qui, aussi désagréables soient-ils quand ils ne sont pas désirés, ne sont pas de nature à traumatiser une femme le moindrement raisonnable et équilibrée.
Mais tout cela entre pêle-mêle dans le grand sac de l’« agression sexuelle », ce qui fausse complètement le tableau – à moins que l’on considère comme de la violence un commentaire déplacé ou un effleurement sur la main!
Preuve ultime de l’intériorisation d’un certain discours féministe par l’ensemble de la société, n’importe quelle allégation de violence sexuelle suffit aujourd’hui à jeter par-dessus bord le principe de la présomption d’innocence.
C’est le seul domaine où l’opinion publique semble prête à croire sur parole une présumée victime. « On vous croit! » est d’ailleurs le nouveau slogan des manifs contre la violence sexuelle. Depuis deux ans, trois députés ont été crucifiés sans preuve et sans procès pour « agression sexuelle », et l’on n’a pas entendu beaucoup de protestations contre ces dénis de justice.Sony’s share prices dropped more than 10 percent in Tokyo on Thursday, which is their biggest drop in more than 10 months. Earlier, the prices also slid nearly 7 percent in New York.
The Japanese consumer electronics maker had warned a day earlier it would post a net loss of 230 billion yen ($2.1 billion, 1.63 billion Euros) this fiscal year, more than four times its earlier forecast, contributing to Thursday's plunge in share prices.
Sony chief executive Kazuo Hirai attributed his company’s possible loss on other firms’ new offerings with innovative technologies.
"The environment is changing and becoming more severe," he told reporters in Tokyo on Wednesday.
Samsung and Apple have put significant pressure on Sony in the smartphone business. On Friday, Japanese customers will become first time users of the newly launched iPhone by Apple, which is sending its trademark products to seven other countries on the same day.
Later on Wednesday Sony also made announcements of its plan to cut about 1,000 jobs and scrap its dividend for the first time since the company was listed on the Tokyo stock market in 1958.
Future plan
After taking office in 2012, Sony chief executive Hirai launched a restructuring process, which included layoffs and exiting the personal computer business. Since then the company issued a string of downward earnings revisions.
Despite huge loses in the TV business, Hirai said they will not abandon their television unit and emphasized that the medium remains central to Sony's core business.
Rather Sony would continue to focus on more profitable areas ranging from portable music to movies and insurance, added the Sony boss.
zh/dr (AFP, Reuters)Accusations that a young man was abusive to his former girlfriend led to a swarming attack and fatal stabbing of a Burnaby teen in Whistler, a prosecutor said Monday.
The background to the tragedy that claimed the life of 19-year-old Luka Gordic of Burnaby was outlined by the prosecution during their opening statement at the trial of three young men charged in the May 2015 slaying.
Crown counsel Julie Robinson told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Terence Schultes that it was seen as a tradition for high school graduates and their friends from the Burnaby area to visit the ski resort on the May long weekend.
Gordic had gone to Whistler earlier in the day, and with some friends had run into another group of young men who he believed knew one of the males now accused in the attack, said Robinson. The victim told one of the group that it was known the accused in question, who cannot be identified due to a publication ban, was abusive to his ex-girlfriend, she said. Gordic said the accused should stop treating her in that fashion, prompting a phone call later from the accused, who was angry and was of the view that Gordic wanted to confront him, said Robinson.
The prosecutor said Gordic denied he had any intention to have a fight, but the accused was not mollified and it was ultimately agreed that the two men would meet at the Olympic Rings monument: “There would seem to have been at the very least a prospect of a fight between (the two).”
Gordic rounded up a number of friends and acquaintances, and went to the Olympic Rings, but the accused did not show up; but others from his group did, said Robinson. The victim then went to a residence, where there were more angry phone calls from the accused who wanted to meet Gordic, who said he didn’t want to see him and was having a good time at Whistler, and wanted nothing further to do with the matter, she said.
Gordic continued to enjoy his weekend and interacted with various people through the evening, including going to a 7-Eleven just before the attack. After leaving the store, he was “set upon” by a group estimated in size from eight to 15 young males, said the Crown. “But it was more than sufficient in number to make it impossible for him to defend himself,” said Robinson. “Shortly after the attack, Luka Gordic fell to the ground bleeding profusely.”
The attack was brief, lasting possibly no more than 30 seconds, said Robinson.
One eyewitness in a nearby hotel overheard an accused say, ‘There you are, you little bitch, you thought we wouldn’t find you,” just before the attack, she said.
Shortly after the attack, descriptions of the attackers were broadcast by police, who saw the three accused on a trail near the scene of the crime headed in the direction of Highway 99, said Robinson. Clothing seized from all three accused had apparent bloodstains, said the prosecutor. DNA from Gordic was found on those items of clothing, she said. A knife with Gordic’s DNA was seized from the pocket of one of the accused, added the prosecutor. DNA from one of the accused was detected on a second knife found at the scene of the attack, she said.
Gordic, who suffered three stab wounds, one of them penetrating his heart, died soon after the attack.
One of the accused on trial pleaded not guilty Monday to second-degree murder. The other two pleaded not guilty to manslaughter. Under young-offender laws they cannot be named because they were younger than 18 at the time of the attack.
Dozens of supporters of Gordic, including his father and other family members, packed into the courtroom. Many were wearing black T-shirts and buttons that said, “Justice For Luka.”
At the end of the day’s testimony, the judge ordered that the supporters of the victim not wear the T-shirts commemorating the victim in the courtroom.
“It’s not appropriate to be worn in the courtroom.”
Outside court, Mike Gordic, an uncle of Luka Gordic, said it “meant a lot” to have the huge turnout in support of his nephew.
He said the T-shirts were created at the beginning, when Luka was killed, and in support of an online petition but added he respected the judge’s order to have them not be worn in the courtroom.
kfraser@postmedia.com
twitter.com/keithrfraserInvoking the Monad a guest Jan 18th, 2015 965 Never a guest965Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 3.09 KB Invoking the Monad This is a white magic ritual developed to Cleanse, purify, and heal both the space and your temple(body). It takes a relatively short time to complete and can be done in silence, as your intent upon starting shall be more than enough direction for these energies if your intent is pure. Before you attempt this, it is imperative that you do so with but love(agape type) as it is the fundamental principle of this ritual. This ritual uses a form of the holy trinity (Father, mother, and son), from whichever mythology or religion does not necessarily matter. It can be used rather effectively to heal any sort of pain within the body, or most negative emotions (depression, fear, etc). I have created some visualizations for each step, but this ritual is fairly loose in form and you may adjust the visualizations to whatever you are comfortable with. 1. Face East, Begin Meditating, Standing or sitting in the lotus position, Relax your body and clear your mind. 2. When you have reached a sufficient level of quiet begin visualizing a double helix traveling through the center of your being. One helix will be travelling downward the other upwards. The downward helix should be visuallized to have a pulling force, It represents the pull of the Infinite power of the heavens which wishes to pull all things into perfection. The upward helix represents the life force of the planet, striving upwards to the light of the heavens. Another way to see it is as the Divine Father, from above, and the Holy mother, or Mother Earth (See: http://imgur.com/nyhvzfb) 3. Allow the 2 forces to converge and unite in the heart chakra, This uniting will give birth to the monad, the divine essence of the soul. Visualize this as if there were a Sun in your Heart chakra shining with brilliant light that will cleanse everything with its purity. Dont just imagine creating a new Sun, Imagine that you are indeed the sun itself feel its energy flow through you. At the same time visualize 2 wings growing from the same light out of your shoulder blades and send them horizontally outwards (See: http://imgur.com/3lbxw7K).This image is the monad and the winged solar disc, they are the same thing. The horizontal line through the center of the wings should be centered through the Heart chakra as well. 4. After the monad has manifested within you, you must bring form to the rest of your chakras. This method uses the symbol of Atlantis (see: http://imgur.com/NMN7DdH). Originating from the center, vis |
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Senate.
Next year’s elections take on a special meaning because of the upcoming redistricting process.
Democrats felt the sting of steep legislative losses in the 2010 midterm elections, when Republicans picked up 708 Democrat-held seats — almost 10 percent of the 7,383 state legislative seats across the country.
Because legislatures in many states are responsible for crafting new maps, newly Republican-dominated legislatures were able to craft districts that helped the party solidify its control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the remainder of the decade.
“This is the first serious table-setting election for 2021 redistricting,” said Tim Storey, a legislative elections expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “No doubt that [Democrats] will gain seats, and maybe a few chambers.”
Democrats start in a deep hole. The party controls just 31 of the nation’s 98 partisan legislative chambers. Republicans control both chambers in 33 states, while Democrats own both chambers in just 15 states. That means Democrats will have to spend resources to win back seats that should, by most measures, already be in their column.
A handful of those majorities, on both sides, teeter on a knife’s edge. Republicans own slim majorities of just one seat in the Colorado, Maine and Minnesota state senates; two seats in the Virginia state Senate; and four seats in the Arizona and New Hampshire state senates. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said it will target state House chambers in Minnesota, Michigan and Iowa, as well as the Florida state Senate.
Republicans are likely to invest heavily in Washington, Nevada and New Mexico, all states where Democrats narrowly control both chambers, and in Alaska, where a cross-party coalition controls the state House. And both parties will contest Colorado, where Republicans hold the state Senate and Democrats run the House.
“A panic about a wave is not in line with the facts of data,” Walter said. “There are enough signs out there to indicate that, if you have the right candidate and they have sufficient resources to push back, you have a good chance in the overwhelming majority of places of maintaining, and you also have the opportunity to grow.”
Despite Trump’s low approval ratings, Republicans hope they get credit for an improving economy and tax reform they say will put more money in middle-class pockets.
“I think nationwide Republicans will probably have losses,” Wisconsin’s Vos said. “My hope is the economy and the increasing growth that families are seeing in their own pocketbooks will mitigate those numbers.”California advocacy groups and politicians, most of of them Democrats, reacted swiftly to President Donald Trump’s actions Wednesday to begin construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and end federal funding for sanctuary cities, which do not enforce immigration laws.
Following is a look at their statements:
Cutting off funds for cities that refuse destructive deportation programs is unconstitutional. See you in court. https://t.co/NjGfZfvMrd — Kevin de Leόn (@kdeleon) January 25, 2017
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra:
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“It is important to put these White House executive actions in context.
Executive orders do not change existing law. Executive orders cannot contradict existing law. And Executive orders can be challenged for violating constitutional and legal standards in their enforcement.
The California Department of Justice (DOJ) is prepared to protect the public safety and general welfare of all Californians as well as their privacy and property rights. These are rights and protections which have survived numerous legal challenges over time. And they are grounded on our federal and state constitutions not on an executive pronouncement.
The California DOJ will protect the rights of all of its people from unwarranted intrusion from any source, including the federal government. In California, we want to foster trust between law enforcement authorities and the communities they are obliged to protect. That's why California enacted the TRUST and TRUTH acts to guide our men and women in uniform on the proper execution of their public safety duties.
California is prepared to work with our federal government to enhance the safety and well-being of all our people. We will work with our sister states to achieve mutual goals of respect and cooperation with the federal government. And we will remain ready to advance and defend California's policies wherever and whenever necessary.”
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein:
“The two executive orders signed today by President Trump won’t help fix our immigration system.
“The orders did not address the future of the DACA program, the number one issue at hand. California is home to nearly half of all DACA youth. It’s a successful program that I think the president should leave alone. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said DACA youth wouldn’t be a priority and I hope he follows through on that.
“The order concerning the president’s border wall was unclear and there’s little chance Congress will divert billions of dollars to it when there are far more important priorities.
“The solution to immigration won’t be a series of disjointed policy provisions. What we need is comprehensive immigration reform. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill in 2013 and we need to do so again.”
Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles:
“It should go without saying that America is and always has been a nation of immigrants. It’s part of our national heritage and vital to our prosperity. Clearly, there are and should be limits on immigration and it is the responsibility of the federal government to set those limits. We can all agree that we need comprehensive immigration reform – clear, predictable and fair guidelines, with secure borders and a path to citizenship for those who are undocumented. But the executive actions announced today are counterproductive, divisive and unnecessary. They won’t make us safer. They won’t bring back jobs or solve our economic challenges. In fact, these measures do just the opposite.
These are spiteful and mean-spirited directives that only instill fear in the hearts of millions of people who pay taxes, contribute to our economy and our way of life. Tearing apart honest, hardworking families is not the answer. Separating mothers from their children is no solution. These measures are inconsistent with our values and we will have no part in their implementation. If the new President wants to wage a campaign of fear against innocent families, he can count us out.
We will not spend a single cent, nor lift a finger to aid his efforts. In fact, the Senate will expedite the process to pass my bill, SB 54, to prevent state and local tax dollars and law enforcement resources from being used to help ICE destroy families and damage our economy. The bill will be heard in both the judiciary and public safety committees on Tuesday.
We will also fast-track SB 6 by Senator Ben Hueso – the Due Process for All Act – to make sure those facing deportation have due process and adequate legal representation. Thanks to the supermajority we won in November, we have the ability to use urgency clauses to implement new laws immediately, and the actions of the new administration demand an immediate response.
We will also explore all of our legal options, in collaboration with Attorney General Becerra and the legislature’s outside legal counsel. Singling out states and cities with punitive threats and withholding federal resources as today’s order on sanctuary cities does, is unconstitutional. It’s not the job of our local and county and state law enforcement to turn the cogs of President Trump’s deportation machine. He cannot force us and we will not hesitate to fight him in Congress and settle the matter in court.”
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom:
“President Trump claims to bring his business acumen to the White House but today’s announcement is not just inhumane and immoral – it is a declaration of national economic devastation.
“Inflicting financial sanctions or mass deportation on the nation’s most economically-dynamic regions would decimate the workforce, strip businesses of their consumer base, and eviscerate the entrepreneurialism that drives our economy.
“It’s also irresponsible and irrational to force cities to participate in deportation crackdowns by threatening to take away their public safety and homeland security dollars – since the inevitable result will be making our cities and our homeland far less safe and secure. Immigrants and local communities should not be compelled to spend precious taxpayer dollars doing the job of the federal government on immigration enforcement.
“Reasonable people share support for local, state and federal cooperation in pursuing dangerous violent criminals, regardless of their immigration status. This was San Francisco’s policy and one I fought to uphold as mayor.
“During that time, however, I also witnessed the federal government’s abuse of those powers, where they swept up law abiding individuals, separated parents from children, and sowed seeds of distrust between communities and local law enforcement. That is why citywide refuge policies are widely supported by law enforcement and the public at large.
“If President Trump and Republicans in Washington are serious about the economy, and law and order, they would be wise to abandon this cynical nativism.”
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount:
“Here in California we are concerned that these policies are based more on campaign buzzwords than on legal and economic realities.
“The language is so broad that mass deportations are likely without real due process. Sanctuary cities were established to make communities safer and free up law enforcement for real crimes. Our cities can’t afford to shift law enforcement resources to help track down law-abiding individuals. Our agricultural industry and other economic sectors, businesses large and small, depend on an immigrant workforce. If those businesses suffer, the national economy will suffer, too, and that’s all on Trump.
“It’s sad Donald Trump thinks these executive orders make America safer, and it’s sad he thinks they make America better.
“These orders are exactly why the Legislature is taking steps to help immigrants with access to legal counsel to ensure due process. We’re also examining ways the state can aid sanctuary cities, and that’s an area we believe former Attorney General Holder and the Covington law firm can also be helpful.”
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield:
“Few things are more fundamental to a nation than a defined and protected border. The lack of security on our southern border is a threat to the safety of our homeland and the Obama Administration’s catch-and-release policy was an affront to the rule of law. President Trump’s actions are the right start to enforcing our laws and protecting our citizens.”
United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez:
“U.S. Department of Labor surveys show the majority of U.S. farm workers are undocumented. The United Farm Workers’ anecdotal experience in California and other states where we are active shows the percentage of undocumented workers is even higher.
So if today’s executive orders from Donald Trump signal the beginning of fulfilling his oft-repeated campaign pledge to deport the undocumented, then who is going to feed America? Who is going to feed the guests at Trump hotels and golf courses? Who is going to feed Donald Trump?”
California State Sen. and California Latino Legislative Caucus Chair Ben Hueso, D-San Diego:
“President Trump’s executive order to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border is a dim-witted publicity stunt that is more aimed at disparaging an important international ally than curbing illegal crossings. Building walls is a failed political policy that should remain in medieval history. In addition, building a multi-billion dollar wall is a reckless waste of taxpayer dollars that will not prevent crossings. If he was interested in truly creating jobs and protecting America’s economy and national defense, he should make wise investments in reducing border wait times, opening foreign markets by treating our allies and closest neighbors with respect, and dignity. In addition, the President needs to invest our precious tax dollars in policies directed at developing housing, education and improving health. Our allies will retaliate every executive order that seeks to hurt them. He is needlessly attacking them in a manner that will most definitely result in conflict not the harmonious relationships we need to cultivate to promote a shared prosperity.”
San Francisco-based National Center for Lesbian Rights, Executive Director Kate Kendell:
“Today’s executive orders on immigration confirm our worst fears that the Trump Administration will pursue inhumane, costly, and ineffective policies that will do nothing to make our nation more safe. Members of the LGBTQ community are in every community and are targets of violence and harassment throughout the world. The orders issued today will only make these individuals more likely to suffer and be tortured or murdered. These fear-based policies will not make any American more safe, nor will they improve the lives of any citizen. Rather, these proposals will cost millions of dollars in taxpayer funds and terrorize already vulnerable communities. We must all fight back, resist, and engage to stop these reckless measures. We are a better nation than one that exacts intentional harm on those seeking to improve their lives.”
David Huerta, President of SEIU United Service Workers West:
“In appealing to fear, cynicism, and hatred, the orders signed today are as unpatriotic as they are counterproductive. The working people of SEIU California reject these divisive actions and stand united in our resolve to defend the dreams and contributions of immigrants and the promise of justice for the oppressed.
“Just as attacks on women in this election cycle ignited a historic national action to defend civil rights, and attacks on immigrants in California unleashed a new majority of voters and activists two decades ago, these orders will serve only to awaken the conscience of millions of voters.
“In California, a state where more than one in four residents are immigrants, the fear-mongering and racism behind these orders take on particular meaning. They represent attacks on our communities, our families, our colleagues, our neighbors and union brothers and sisters. They won’t stand. SEIU members applaud and support the efforts of the California leaders who have committed to defend all the people who are the strength of our diverse Golden State.”
Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco:
“Today is a shameful day for our country, but it only strengthens my resolve to stand up against the alarming bigotry and hatred emanating from the White House. If President Trump believes signing a piece of paper will for one second change how San Francisco and California value and protect our immigrant neighbors, he is underestimating our strength and spirit. Our immigrant communities need us more than ever and we will be there for them every step of the way. Trump can try to build his wall and he can try to cut off funding for sanctuary cities, but he’s in for one hell of a fight.”
MALDEF President and General Counsel Thomas A. Saenz:
“These are alt-right, dog-whistle executive directives, with great long-term cost to the soul and safety of our nation. However, our communities will not be cowed by irresponsible rhetoric couched in terms of executive authority.
Donald Trump’s border Wall Mahal threatens to bankrupt the nation’s treasury just as Trump bankrupted his own businesses in the past through overblown construction projects. Because today’s order only commences planning, Congress has the opportunity to prevent the profligate use of federal resources to construct this monument to waste and excess.
Aggressive interior enforcement is an abject failure, delivering tremendous upheaval and harm to families, schools, and workplaces. The economic disruption to critical industries, such as agriculture, from such efforts render these executive orders a direct and undiluted threat to United States national security. There are serious constitutional questions about the enforcement proposals, and untoward activity will elicit court challenge. Reviving the thoroughly discredited and misnamed ‘Secure Communities’ program, which actually undermined both security and community, will not make America great again. And no amount of lipstick – through alternative facts or otherwise – will transform the pig of a program that the administration seeks to embrace.
Finally, threatening cities and communities that value the contributions of immigrants and that recognize the injustice in current immigration laws and practices does nothing but undermine public safety and foster division in our nation. Any order that promises to take monies from immigrant-protective cities is an impotent effort to overreach executive authority. Once again, the Congress can and should block this attempt to impinge on federalism and to undermine successful communities.”
Rusty Hicks, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO:
“President Trump’s dark deportation scheme has moved from cynical campaign tactic to an un-American reality.
“Angelenos come from more than 140 countries and speak 224 languages. Our strength lies in our diversity. The LA Fed will remain united with the 1,000,000 undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles County.
“We have already strengthened protections for immigrant workers in collective bargaining agreements. Now, with our State Legislators and County Board of Supervisors, we will grow the 100 attorneys we have already organized into a much larger force to make sure every immigrant has a lawyer to defend their rights to a fair process.
“For decades, Los Angeles and California have been stronger, more progressive, and more prosperous than the rest of the nation. Unfortunately, President Trump has chosen to take our nation down the dark path of division and exclusion.”
Assemblywoman and California Latino Legislative Caucus Vice Chairwoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, D-San Diego:
“My district is one the most diverse set of neighborhoods in the entire country. I represent immigrant communities that include the border with Mexico as well as one of our nation’s largest refugee communities in City Heights. Donald Trump’s actions today run contrary to our most basic American values of compassion and inclusion. He will jeopardize the lives of thousands of innocent men, women and children who are in harm’s way. Forcing police to freelance as border agents doesn’t make our communities safer, nor neither does wasting billions of American tax dollars to further divide our binational community with a border wall. This is embarrassingly un-American.”In the past, we have showcased examples of landscape photography, which includes photos of mountains, valleys, plains, lakes, coastlines, and a variety of other types of landscapes. Deserts may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of subjects for landscape photography, but even a barren desert provides opportunities for beautiful photographers.
In this post, we’ll showcase 20 outstanding examples of desert photography from a variety of different photographers. Hopefully, these snapshots will serve as inspiration for your own work.
Photo credit: Barabeke
Photo credit: Navid Baraty
Photo credit: Raffaele Petralla
Photo credit: Wolfgang Staudt
Photo credit: viewerblur
Photo credit: Nick Leonard
Photo credit: Antonio Perez Rio
Photo credit: Malavoda
Photo credit: Garry Wilmore
Photo credit: Vyacheslav Argenberg
Photo credit: Christoph Rupprecht
Photo credit: Sek Keung Lo
Photo credit: Tela Chhe
Photo credit: Johnathan Kos-Read
Photo credit: Jason Corneveaux
Photo credit: Nagaraju Hanchanahal
Photo credit: Edgar Barany C
Photo credit: Bartek Kuzia
Photo credit: Pedro Szekely
Photo credit: Hamed Saber
For more inspiration from photography please see:When Orlando Phantoms coach Michael Torres was scanning the list of players who had registered to try out for his Central Florida-based semi-pro football team last summer, there was one name that made him do a double-take.
Listed among the 116 prospective players was a guy named Kyle Farnsworth. Like, that Kyle Farnsworth. And apparently he was serious about playing defensive end for the Phantoms as he was about kissing 100 miles per hour on the radar gun during his 16-year major league career.
"I called him, just like I called everybody that registered to find out if they’ve played football before, that kind of thing," Torres told FOX Sports on Wednesday. "He acted like he was just some random guy out of the blue. So I told him about the tryout, and we went from there, and he definitely earned his spot."
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Less than six months after the initial audition, Farnsworth was on the turf at Lake Brantley High School in nearby Altamonte Springs in January — wearing a new number, 90, with his trademark glasses swapped out for a mean-looking facemask and visor — ready to make his long-awaited return to the gridiron against the Brooksville Ballers.
Farnsworth had previously played football as a Georgia high schooler, but a budding career on the diamond forced him to prioritize. For most of the last two decades, Farnsworth was busy tossing nearly 1,000 big-league innings, so there was simply no time left to rekindle his love for the game until he was almost 39, with his major league career in the rear-view mirror.
"Baseball was just what he was better at," Torres said. "But he said he’s always loved football, so I guess he felt like he had to give it a shot."
In the Phantoms’ 11 games this season, Farnsworth has proved he belongs on the field. The 6-foot-4, 230-pounder has 11 sacks and 41 tackles for Orlando. Of course, Farnsworth left little doubt about his ability to make a tackle during his time in baseball, as former Major League pitchers Paul Wilson and Jeremy Affeldt can attest.
And though the Florida Football Alliance isn’t exactly the NFL, it’s definitely real football.
Phantoms players aren’t paid, and they can’t practice as often as they’d like because many of them work or are in school during the day. As a result, the playbook can sometimes be lacking in complexity. But many of them still have a goal of playing professionally elsewhere — in the Arena League, the CFL or overseas — and they don’t go easy on anyone.
"Florida semi-pro football is dang near college football, to be honest," Torres said. "There’s a lot of talent. I’ve got a guy, Dave Roberts, who played at Georgia Southern. I’ve got another guy, Jonathan Akanbi, who played at Florida State and won a national title with Jameis Winston a couple years ago. I’ve got Mike Davis, who played at Virginia.
Kyle Farnsworth’s Orlando Phantoms teammates didn’t know about his big-league career until recently.
"We have talented guys who know football, so for him to be able to come here and play teams from Miami and all over the state and to be blowing by tackles who played college ball, it’s pretty impressive. The shape he’s in, he looks like a 29-year-old out there."
Most impressive, though, is that Farnsworth nearly made it through an entire season without his teammates knowing who he was.
For most of the year, the other guys on the field knew him by his nicknames — NASCAR, Crossfit or Big Grizzly — with almost none of them recognizing him as the pro ballplayer who made nearly $40 million playing for nine teams during his career. It was only when the team posted an announcement on Facebook last week that Farnsworth’s true identity was revealed.
"Our quarterback, Josh Rose, he used to play baseball, so he kind of knew the name, but he told me that he heard it and figured there was no way it was the same guy," Torres said. "It was really only one of my coaches, Chris Barlow, myself, (offensive lineman) Steve (Cospito), one of my linebackers, Michael Boudreau, and that’s it."
In fact, Farnsworth is so set on keeping a low profile that he’s been reluctant to speak publicly about his second career. He has tweeted about the team throughout the season and confirmed that he’s a member of the Phantoms in a post on Wednesday but did not respond to a request for an interview with FOX Sports.
Kyle Farnsworth looks like a natural in his football gear.
"We’ve got a playoff game (on Saturday),and he just wants to focus on that," Torres said. "He told me, ‘I don’t want the team getting distracted by this.’ He really doesn’t want to take anything from the team, and I respect that. His only focus is on getting the job done."
And if anything, that modest disposition and insistence on just being "one of the guys" has made Farnsworth both a solid player and an ideal teammate, which is what he promised he would be from the outset.
"The dude is a great defensive end, and that’s the funny part," Torres said. "He’s very rangy, he’s got some motor and he’s got the attitude. He comes to practice, he does his stuff, he’s very professional — and I expected that.
"Even though he is who he is, there have been times during the game, if he doesn’t keep his containment or doesn’t do his assignment, I’ll jump on him. And he’ll say, ‘Yes, Coach. Not a problem, Coach. I understand, Coach,’ and he’s no different from anyone else. He shows up to practice and whatever we ask him to do, he does it. He asks questions, and he’s really into football. He’s really excited about doing what he’s doing."
You can follow Sam Gardner on Twitter or email him at samgardnerfox@gmail.com.On June 8th in the year of our Lord 2017, Senator Bernie Sanders cross-examined a candidate for Deputy White House Budget Director, Russell Vought, in the course of which Sanders not only claimed Vought’s Christianity to preclude him from public office, but also that the Christian faith is contrary “to what this country is supposed to be about.” Yes, he really said that.
The evangelical community has responded with shock and dismay. It rocks them back on their heels, because they expect non-Christians to hold their same assumptions about religious pluralism. Modern evangelicals are, after all, quite liberal and insist America to have been founded for every breed and creed under heaven. And they expect all those groups to function on essentially the same understanding of tolerance, reciprocally inclusive of Christianity as much as any other faith. Even Sabbatean saboteurs like Sanders.
But it just doesn’t work that way.
Which reminds me of something a farmer friend shared recently — a bit of correspondence between himself and some of his fellow sodbusters. The topic under consideration was foreign labor, in regard to dairy hands specifically, which without saying so, means Mexicans. And minus one (my friend), this little grange enjoyed a consensus on the topic, giving hearty approval to mass non-White colonization of our fathers’ land. Their argument boiled down to, “Agricultural work makes you an American. So Mexican ag workers are far more American than the majority of White Americans.” Funny, our founders would never have guessed that all those Indian savages they fought for generations were all just good ol’ American boys the whole time.
You’d think these fellas living closer to the land would have a more durable sense of heritage, but it appears the industrialization of their trade, not to mention ubiquitous propaganda, has been sufficient to uncouple them, no less than the cubicle-dweller, from both natural and special revelation.
But my yeoman friend called his fellows to account, arguing that Mexicans are “incapable of participating in a system of government built on the Magna Carta.”
Which evinced palpable astonishment amongst his opponents, one asking incredulously, “Do you somehow think Hispanic people are incapable of following English common law?”
Haha! I can’t even repeat it without laughing.
To which my friend offered a most apt rejoinder — “How well do they follow our immigration law?” And thus concluded the conversation. My friend had refuted them, and with style; but they no doubt regarded such a rejoinder as too frank to be accepted. To the creed of the multicult, candor just ain’t cricket.
Okay, in abstract, we understand that the liberals are slave to PC propaganda, but I mean, really, how does one muster the temerity, the sheer audacity, to suggest that Azteca denizens of Tijuana are inclined to Anglo-Saxon ideals?
The Magna Carta was a charter drafted on behalf of a European folk asserting their national independence under God against internationalism, represented at the time by Rome. Therein the English people solemnized their own existence and self-defense for their own preservation from the aggressions of the empire, as well as certain minority ethne such as the Jews, whose avarice and control are expressly checked against in that very document.
So the notion that Mexicans and like equatorials aggressing upon our borders and national independence are assimilable to the Anglo-Saxon conception of rights is absurd on its face. Magna Carta condemned such ideas outright. For their very presence here occurs only under the presumption that it is their right to invade and occupy our land. In fact, they believe our land is actually not ours at all, but theirs, and popularly express intent to drive Europeans from the continent. So, by definition, they cannot uphold even the most basic sentiment of Magna Carta, because their very presence is a denial of it. Fact is, their entire worldview of Reconquista liberationism is nothing less than a repudiation of Anglo-Saxon Christian law in its every expression. Which is why so many noted Anglo thinkers like Jack London concluded that Mestizos were not only incompatible with Western civilization, but had little to no aptitude for self-government or civilization of any sort.
Even the libertarian notion of some right for foreigners to freely participate in our economy is founded not in Christian common law, but in Marxism. Yes, what is today ironically termed by capitalists the “free flow of labor” is a concept pioneered under that infamous slogan, “Workers of the world, unite!” Far from an American, Anglo-Saxon, or Christian concept, the notion of men being interchangeable cogs in some supranational economic machine descends from purely secular-humanist presuppositions, Marxism in specific. The proximate antithesis of Christian law.
Though some may still pretend otherwise, the inassimilability of non-Whites to Western, and more particularly, American civilization is plain for all to see. California, which had been the reddest of all red states in the 80s, has transformed into an ironclad Democrat stronghold by way of one central dynamic — Mexican immigration.
It isn’t even a controversial statement. In fact, it is the standard refrain of the Left now, that conservative patriots need to just accept that traditional American values are going to be put down forever because Whites are no longer the majority. Sure, they used to be scandalized whenever Whites suggested that demographics are destiny, but that was only until their numbers began to eclipse ours; since then they proclaim triumphally that demographics are indeed destiny and non-Whites are openly committed to overturning all the social, legal, and ethical foundations of our society. This, they insist, is the new definition of true American patriotism that White people could never understand: the abolishment of the faith and folk that founded America — White Christianity.
So let’s be frank — when we speak of modern Democrats, we aren’t talking about well-intentioned patriots of alternate perspective, but rather, at best, a menagerie of aliens, witches, traitors, the criminally insane, and Janissaries of various worldviews antithetical to Western civilization. The Democrats aren’t a political party, but a coalition of enemy insurgents united only in their hatred of our folk and faith and their lust for all that is ours.
Which is not to say that the GOP represents the real American ethos either, just that they aren’t monolithically bent on our destruction.
The history of minority relations in this country makes evident that the perspectives of those various peoples grasping for control are not only intrinsically anchored to their ethnic identities, but also, defined in contradistinction to traditional American identity and values. As regards Mexicans, for instance, historical opposition to the gabachos and gringos del Norte is integral to their national identity. From the time of Cortez to present, the Mexican identity has been formed and framed in juxtaposition to Europeans. That isn’t erased by the magic of American welfare, Big Macs, or the re-creation of Chiapas in America.
While the “propositional nation” advocates insist breed is irrelevant to creed, their entwinement is obvious and inextricable. Though denouncing the fact whenever we broach it, our enemies even admit as much when they say, “Of course you believe that, you’re a White man!,” “You can’t understand because you’re White!,” or “All y’all White people racist, yo.” So too do they concede the point when they speak of America as a “white supremacist country.”
Ours, a European-stock nation founded, in the words of our Constitution, “for us and our posterity,” was predicated upon “self-evident” and “God-given rights” that they alternately called “the Rights of Englishmen.” To a man, they understood those rights to appertain to our folk within our own limited jurisdictions and within the context of our own history and civilization. But they did not even entertain the idea of those rights applying to other races in the same ways and in the same place. This is why Indians and Africans were precluded from citizenship as a matter of course in all our colonial and founding documents; they were different orders of men entirely, who had their own rights peculiar to them within their own jurisdictions as well. For the members of a family enjoy rights exclusive to themselves in the context of their own house and clan; blood heirs have a birthright not shared with neighbor children in the same house. Though the neighbor children, depending upon their circumstance, may have like claims in their own families that likewise preclude us.
Surveying the history of repudiating this reality (the 1860s onward), attempting to superimpose American liberties upon non-Whites, the denial of their exclusivity only proves it the more. What I mean is, the perspectives endemic to different races and religions preclude any harmonious and unitary understanding of our rights, and especially banish all traditional Christian conception thereof.
Let us count the ways:
Freedom of Religion
This term and its equivalents like religious liberty, and liberty of conscience, mean something insurmountably different to White Protestants than to literally everyone else. Ray Allen Billington’s exhaustive study, The Protestant Crusade, proves this beyond all shadow of a doubt. And I cite him on the fact precisely because he is so hostile to the colonial and founding Protestant worldview. He is a hostile, albeit expert, witness, and as such doubly useful.
As Billington relays it, the American colonists “administer[ed] oaths of allegiance which specifically denounced the pope and fast days where prayers were offered ‘that the Protestant interest might be advanced in our English nation.'” Moreover they accepted King James II’s proclamation of religious liberty only upon the inclusion of an antipapal section of the charter of 1691 which granted “Liberty of Conscience in the worship of God to all Christians [except papists].” No other worldviews were even on the table. Except perhaps Wiccan and Indian magics, which were prosecuted as capital offenses.
As one popular colonial pamphlet summarized the American understanding of religious liberty:
If Gallic Papists have a right
To worship their own way
Then farewell to the Liberties,
Of poor America.
This is the whole thesis of Billington’s book — proving that the American conception of freedom of religion meant freedom for White Protestants exclusively to practice our faith unencumbered by the popes and their puppet kings, and secure against the aggressions of all other worldviews. And it is not his thesis alone, but the same assumed by everyone — especially White Christians — up until very recent years. This is the backdrop by which we understand the First Amendment’s assurance of freedom of religion.
Even the Supreme Court has confirmed this understanding of the First Amendment:
The real object of the [First] amendment was not to countenance, much less to advance, Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity, but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects, and to prevent any national ecclesiastical establishment which should give to a hierarchy the exclusive patronage of the national government.
~Joseph Story, Justice, Supreme Court of the United States from 1811 to 1845
This understanding, which was universal in the colonial and founding eras, informing the language of the framers of the Constitution themselves, is the one view precisely rejected now under the modern assumption of pluralism. Thus outlawing the Christian understanding of religious liberty in a country founded expressly upon that very principle.
Free Speech
From the beginning in this country, free speech was understood as predicated on the Reformation doctrine of toleration, which, in order to be consistent with itself, precludes all speech that contradicts or undermines the orthodox Protestant faith. For our fathers knew any and all worldviews apart from orthodox Protestantism will necessarily undermine and seek to abolish our freedom of religion.
It was the fruit of the Reformation.... Thus the philosophical base of the First Amendment was that of denominational pluralism — a healthy coexistence between the various Christian denominations. Such practical denominational pluralism is not to be confused with the modern concept of pluralism, which commands complete acceptance of all views, even secular humanism.
Our fathers took Christ’s words to heart: “He who is not with Me is against Me” (Matt. 12:30). Inside the umbrella of orthodoxy, all Christian creeds should have toleration, but non-Christians simply cannot tolerate genuine Christianity, and thus, the term ‘religious liberty’ was not conceived as extending to them. In fact, understood from the vantage of Christianity, religious liberty was the domain of those “free in Christ,” none other. Because all others were in bondage to sin. This is core Christian doctrine, and likewise the core belief of colonial America. This is why and how the same men who gave us the Bill of Rights also ratified anti-blasphemy laws in the various states as consistent with the First Amendment, and on occasion, even prosecuted blasphemers under the same; blasphemers being any who spoke contrary to orthodox Christianity. No one at that time, not even the signatories to the Constitution, believed blasphemy to be protected speech, as such a view would necessarily negate the foundational faith of the nation. In early America, federal judges treated any attack on the name of Christ as an attack on the central basis and character of our whole legal system and nation. Blasphemy was regarded rightly, therefore, as a type of treason.
This makes the modern concept of pluralism, i.e., multiculturalism, not only irreconcilable with the First Amendment, but a direct repudiation of it. Multiculturalism violates the First Amendment directly by demanding it to mean the opposite of what it actually meant.
This is all the more apparent for the fact that as multiculturalism has risen, those anti-blasphemy codes enacted and upheld by the framers are suddenly deemed “unconstitutional” by Jewish and other humanist judges who endemically resent the founding faith under which the Constitution was written.
Of course, this begs the question of how pagans ever attained the gavel in the first place. Unfortunately, the scope of this piece does not permit the treatment which that question deserves. So we reserve it for another time.
But make no mistake; they have not discontinued the concept of anti-blasphemy codes. They have merely created new ones to replace the old, these, after the new humanist order — codes against “hate speech” wherein they ostensibly outlaw telling obvious truths with respect to gender, race, nation, and many other categories |
northern fisheries proves that sustainable fisheries management is possible. Together with the fishermen we now need to consolidate the positive results and achieve the goals of the new Common Fisheries Policy. Our efforts in the Mediterranean need to be stepped up.. We need to develop Union management plans and more effective regional plans. But only when we address the situation in our Member States, will we gain the necessary credibility to start discussing with our partners in the Mediterranean.”
The document is now open to the views of stakeholders via an online public consultation. The Commission will make its proposals for the 2016 fishing opportunities during the autumn.
In its annual reporting on the state of the resources, the Commission highlights two different situations:
There is good news in the Northeast Atlantic area, the North Sea and the Baltic Seas where more than 50 % of fisheries (32 out of 62 MSY-assessed stocks) were at sustainable levels in 2014, compared to only 14 % in 2009. They include many of the commercially important stocks.
The fish stocks in the Mediterranean show a dismal picture: 93% of the assessed stocks are not sustainably fished. The situation is similar for stocks fished by fishermen from the EU only, and stocks shared with fishermen of third countries. The Black Sea is in a comparable situation, with 86 % of the assessed stocks being overfished.
The Commission confirms its commitment to bring all fisheries as soon as possible to levels that correspond to maximum sustainable yields (MSY). This core objective of the new Common Fisheries Policy will contribute to reaching good environmental status in our seas by 2020 at the latest.
Background
In its annual consultation paper, the European Commission sets out its views and intentions for setting the annual fish quotas – the levels of Total Allowable Catches (TACs), quotas and fishing effort - for 2016 and asks for the views of Member States, the fishing industry and non-governmental organisations in regional Advisory Councils, as well as interested citizens and organisations via an online public consultation.
In the autumn, the Commission will then table its proposals for fishing opportunities for 2016 in the Union waters of the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea.
On the basis of the latest scientific advice, the Commission intends to table proposals for fish quotas in the Northeast Atlantic and the North and Baltic Seas in line with the MSY objective. The Commission's proposals will include the upward adjustments to the fishing opportunities resulting from the introduction of the obligation to land all catches in demersal fisheries in the Atlantic and North Sea from 2016.
The Commission's ultimate objective is to achieve sustainable fishing in line with the objectives of the new Common Fisheries Policy.
The Commission bases its proposals on the best available biological advice provided by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the Scientific, Technical and Economic Committee for Fisheries (STECF) and other independent bodies.
For further information
Questions and Answers about Fishing Opportunities in the EU for 2016: MEMO/15/5083
The Communication can be read at: http://ec.europa.eu/fisheries/cfp/fishing_rules/tacs/index_en.htmINSIDE : Learn how to make a Valentine’s Day DIY Cupid’s Bow and Arrow craft with your kids! Also these would be such fun decor for a Galentine’s Day party.
I hosted a small Valentine’s Day party with some friends and their kids. We had four kiddos under five, wow. I knew right away with that crowd I wanted minimal candy and maximum crafty. Everyone made a Cupid’s Bow and Arrow craft and I think they were a big hit! Today I am sharing how to make a Valentine’s Day DIY Cupid’s Bow and Arrow craft with your kids! This post may contain affiliate links. See full disclosure here.
Leftover wrapping paper roll | String or Yarn | Hot Glue
Before the guests arrived, I pre-cut all the arrow heads and bottoms from the felt. Make sure to fold the felt in half so you end up with perfectly matching double pieces.
We let the kids pick which colors they wanted and then it was a parent job to hot.glue the felt onto the straws. We basically sandwiched the straw in-between the two felt pieces and glued away.
Next up the kiddos got to decorate the bow + arrow quiver. I had precut two wrapping paper rolls into approximately 8″ lengths. Each kiddo used colored pencils, crayons and washi tape to decorate to their little heart’s desire. Some went minimalist (the boys) and some went all out (the girls).
A circular piece of felt was glued to the bottom of the quiver to keep all the arrows secured.
Here is my Kiddo #1’s handiwork in action!
Be sure to check in next week to see the setup and decorations for this adorable party!
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SaveSaveTORONTO � It�s the comparison everyone has been thinking about: Bogaerts and Garciaparra.
TORONTO � It�s the comparison everyone has been thinking about.
Seventeen years ago, the Red Sox handed over the shortstop position to a highly regarded prospect named Nomar Garciaparra, who promptly won the Rookie of the Year and, eventually, two batting titles. This season, Boston�s given the reins at short to Xander Bogaerts, arguably the organization�s most hyped prospect since Garciaparra, if not longer.
Garciaparra�s rookie season, though, sets a nearly impossible standard for anyone to live up to � rookie or no. Then 23, Garciaparra hit.306 with a.342 on-base percentage, 30 home runs and 98 RBIs. His 85 extra-base hits were second in the AL to only Ken Griffey, Jr.
Aside from the obvious talent he possessed, Garciaparra also carried himself with an impressive assurance throughout that rookie campaign. How exactly does a rookie shortstop have a season like that in Boston?
�You have to feel like you belong,� Garciaparra said recently over the phone. �If you don�t feel like you belong, they�re going to eat you alive out there�. It was just a matter of, what do I have to do to stay here and belong here for a long period of time?�
Garciaparra similarly tried his hardest to ignore the whirlwind around him.
�I didn�t really think about, �Oh, the expectations,�� he said. �It�s really about, what do I have to do to help our team win? I�ve got to learn so I can stay and continue to be there to help them win.�
Bogaerts said he�s gotten used to the media attention that comes with playing in Boston. As much as any other player, he was the focus of national storylines both last autumn and this spring. He gets it.
�It�s a bigger market,� he said. �It�s not the same if you make five errors somewhere else compared to making five errors in Boston. That comes with playing in Boston � high expectations for winning. It�s fun.�
Garciaparra credited his ridiculous rookie season in part to the context of his surroundings. He gained priceless experience at the end of the 1996 season when he played 24 games as a September call-up. That led him into the offseason with more answers than questions about where he needed to improve.
�It helped out so much just to get an idea,� he said. �You just can�t simulate the speed�. To experience it that way and then to be able to go into an offseason and know how I have to work � I�ve got a taste of it, I realize what it is and how I need to go out there and prepare myself.�
Bogaerts� introduction to the majors was obviously on a grander scale, as he didn�t start receiving regular playing time until the American League Championship Series. That makes his experience in that pre-rookie exposure even more valuable.
�You go through that pressure of every game being so important to win,� he said Sunday. �Being in a World Series, facing the best of the best and having some success, it�s something that if I�m going through a bit of a struggle, I can always reflect on that and get my confidence back high.�
Garciaparra also entered a veteran-laden clubhouse with high expectations. Mo Vaughn was the established star, a year removed from his MVP award. John Valentin and Tim Naehring, both of whom could see their playing time and roles change with Garciaparra�s emergence, were accepting of the young prospect.
�It was just invaluable how I had veteran guys who were willing to be there � the sounding board, to teach me, to talk to me,� Garciaparra said. �The guy whose position I took, John Valentin was huge. Just how much he taught me and how he treated me, especially with the way he probably didn�t even have to or what he was dealing with and how he felt � he was incredible.
�I just had all these veteran guys that had been through it. There were times, I just had to listen. It wasn�t always them talking directly at me. Just being able to be around them when they�re talking among themselves and hearing them talk about the game, I�m just gaining this knowledge. What a great place to be a fly on the wall and to be able to, as a sponge, soak it all in and help my development.�
Already, Bogaerts is enjoying a similar dynamic in the Red Sox clubhouse.
�Same thing, I would say,� he said. �I have a Gold Glove second baseman in [Dustin Pedroia] helping me a lot. There are good coaches around me, guys who have been around the game a lot � [Mike] Napoli, [Jonny] Gomes, [Daniel] Nava, Papi [Ortiz]. You know if you�re going through struggles, they�re right there to tell you everything is going to be OK. They�ve been through it, so they know what they�re talking about.�
Bogaerts� first month as Boston�s everyday shortstop has been a reminder of the proverbial growing pains that come with handing over a position to a 21-year-old. He has hinted at his game-changing offensive potential, with another long home run and a.392 on-base percentage through 24 games. He�s also shown flaws defensively that illustrate why some didn�t think he could stick at short. The Red Sox still do.
�The talent is there, the work ethic is there,� manager John Farrell said earlier this month. �We�ve got to ride the ebb and flow a little bit because of the inexperience, which is fully accepted on our part. �
�There�s a reason everybody is talking the way they are about him,� said Garciaparra. �It�s well-deserved. He has all the tools and all the makings to become a great player.�If you are a proud owner of the fine art collection, you sure need experts to move it safely.... More >>
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Mildred and Richard Loving are best known for having gone against the anti-miscegenation laws in... More >>An official iOS 7.1 jailbreak has been available for the iPhone 4 for quite a while now, but a new iOS 7.1 jailbreak is supposedly available that works for all iPhones and iPads, and it’s untethered. The only problem with it, is that it’s fake.
iOS jailbreak developer i0n1c has teased in the past that he successfully jailbroke his iPhone 5c running iOS 7.1.1 and even posted a video on YouTube demonstrating it all. He calls the jailbreak Cyberelevat0r and there’s now a website where you can download the jailbreak and apply it to your own iOS device, but hold your horses.
While the jailbreak itself might be for real, the public release is fake, according to Evasi0n team member MuscleNerd, who says that the Cyberelevat0r website is “the best-looking fake jailbreak so far,” and notes that users are greeted with a survey scam when they go to download the jailbreak.
It’s a little odd to see a reputable jailbreak developer launch a fake jailbreak website, but i0n1c hasn’t been too happy with the jailbreak community as of recently, creating unnecessary drama on Twitter and retweeting tweets that talk about how pathetic jailbreakers apparently are. By that token, we’re not too surprised that he’s been trolling all of us recently.
Furthermore, iOS hacker DarthNull reiterates that a jailbreak release a week before iOS 8 will be announced is probably one of the most insane things that someone could believe, and notes that users shouldn’t expect a public jailbreak release until at least after iOS 8 has been announced.
We’ve said for a while now that jailbreak developers will likely not release an iOS 7.1 or iOS 7.1.1 jailbreak, simply because they don’t want to give away their secrets right before iOS 8 is about to be unveiled. Doing so would give Apple the chance to patch up iOS 8 and fix the exploits used for the jailbreak in iOS 7.1 and iOS 7.1.1.
So when can we expect the next jailbreak to arrive? Well, Apple will most likely unveil iOS 8 next month, but probably won’t release it to the public until later this year, similar to iOS 7′s timeline last year. After that, we should expect an iOS 8 jailbreak soon after, possibly in the late fall/early winter, or early next year at the latest. It seems far off, and it certainly is, but we’d say it’s in the best interest for the jailbreak community.
It’s possible that jailbreak devs could release an iOS 7.1.x jailbreak at some point during the summer when iOS 8 betas are out and about, but that’s also up in the air. Apple would still have the chance to patch up any exploits during the beta process, so releasing a jailbreak to the public during iOS 8’s beta phase probably won’t happen either.
Of course, if you’re still on iOS 7.0.6 or older, you can jailbreak your iOS device with ease, just be sure to stay away from iOS 7.1 like the plague, as it will delete your jailbreak and Apple seems pretty adamant on trying to get its users to update to the latest version. Because of this, you’ll have to be more careful than how you might have been in the past.
Also, if you ever see other claims that you can jailbreak your iPhone right now, they’re probably fake. An official jailbreak will cost nothing and won’t come with any survey scams. Plus, we’ll be one of the first to report on its availability, so keep coming back for updates on when an official jailbreak might be released.The 28-year-old suspect in a Grandfalls double homicide that rocked the small community was found dead in his jail cell Thursday morning, but no one is saying how he died.
Rodney Wayne Crawford was found dead in his jail cell around 6 a.m. Thursday, Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Tom Vinger said. The Texas Rangers were asked by the Ward County Sheriff’s Office to investigate and the Rangers are calling it a “questionable death.”
“All the Rangers can say is we were asked to investigate after they found the individual,” Vinger said.
Ward County Sheriff’s deputies originally received a “shots fired” call around 1:37 a.m. Sept. 5 at an RV park at 211 Ave. B, Grandfalls. Officials entered a camping-type trailer and found Christina Stafford, 31, of Grandfalls, and Travis M. Dewitt, 30, of Royalty, with gunshot wounds, Ward County Sheriff Mikel Strickland previously said. Stafford was a reported ex-girlfriend of Crawford’s and Dewitt worked with Crawford at Crockett County Mining.
Stafford’s 8-year-old daughter also was reportedly transported to Ward County Memorial Hospital and released later that day.
Crawford also was reportedly charged with public intoxication over the Labor Day weekend, and Strickland said Stafford declined to press assault charges at the time.
Crawford was later found at his parents home and was taken to Medical Center Hospital where he received treatment for blunt force trauma to the head and a gunshot wound to the hand. Strickland said the weapon supposedly used belonged to Crawford’s father, Ward County deputy Steve Crawford.
In a previous interview with the Odessa American, Strickland said Rodney Crawford would be placed in a four-man cell so his cellmates, who are nonviolent offenders, could watch over him in the event his condition worsened.
Calls made to the Ward County Sheriff’s office were directed to the Texas Rangers.So the New York Jets, yes those Jets, decided to do a little housekeeping before they had to pay a bunch of roster bonuses. Among those they released was cornerback Darrelle Revis. Just as a quick reminder of things, Revis was considered the best corner in the league for a lengthy period of time and is arguably the best pure shutdown corner of our generation. The Jags can use him, badly.
legal issues for the sake of this argument. A bigger concern is the perception of his declining skills. We all loved the jokes about Revis Island becoming a vacation spot instead of the barren stranded island that it was once known as. But all jokes aside Revis is still a valuable asset to the right team, and that team is the Jags.
The Jags current secondary members are Jalen Ramsey (Steve Smith’s best friend) Davon House (who is on the trade block), Prince Amukamara (a free agent to be), Aaron Colvin (a quality, serviceable nickel corner) and the safety combo of Tashaun Gipson and Johnathan Cyprien. We all know that Ramsey is currently trending towards being on of the best corners in the league (just ask the Texans). Prince is an above-average-to-great second corner when healthy, which has been a problem lately. Gipson and Cyprien aren’t the best but aren’t the worst combo of safeties in the league. Considering that, why not take a flier on Revis?
The Jets are going to be paying Revis $6 million regardless. So why not try to land Revis for a two or three-year deal. He was scheduled to make $15 million this year before being cut. It should be easy to land him for around $10 million at most. Let’s put that in perspective by comparing it to some current Jags: the franchise is paying $6.5 million this year to Jeremy Parnell, and also will be paying Branden Albert $8.9 million this year. That’s almost $16 million for the cornerstones of a very questionable offensive line.
Revis coming in would not only bolster a secondary that needs it, he would also be a great mentor to Ramsey, who looks to be the next Revis at times. Revis has always been heralded as one of the best at preparation in the game today.
Even if Revis is no longer able to be a productive second or third corner he could easily be converted to play safety. Moving Revis to safety would not only bolster the back end of the secondary, but it would extend Revis’ career. Revis has 29 career interceptions, and considering how many teams would rarely throw to his side of the field should prove that Revis is one of the best at playing the ball and the receiver. Putting him at safety would only open up things and allow him to become more of a true ball hawk, which in return would allow the corners to be more physical knowing the safety net they have.
The only things that would and should make the Jags worry are his legal issues — and whether he’s still committed to the game. Even if Revis signs with the Jags and ends up suspended for part of the season due to his off the field issues, it’s still a win for the Jags if they can get him for the right price. The bigger issue is making sure his head is in the game. One would think that having a young stud like Ramsey would motivate Revis to at least pass on his work ethic and preparation habits. Even if they sign Revis and it blows up in their face in some form or another, it’s not like it’s the first bad free agent the Jags have signed, right?The mystery surrounding the whereabouts of Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm deepened today. After failing to turn up for 2010's hearing to appeal his 2009 conviction for criminal copyright infringement, the court decided he would be dealt with at a later date. Today, however, Svartholm failed to appear at the Court of Appeal.
At the end of September 2010 the appeal of The Pirate Bay Four began, but one of the most important cases of its type began with just three defendants present.
Due to him being hospitalized in Cambodia, Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm was unable to travel to Sweden.
Such was her concern, Gottfrid’s mother said she would travel to Asia to support him. The Court decided that the hearing would continue without him.
In late November the Appeal Court found founders Fredrik Neij and Peter Sunde, and businessman Carl Lundström guilty, although it did decrease the lengths of their prison sentences. The damages they have to pay to the entertainment companies were increased.
Although the trio announced they would appeal to the Supreme Court, one of their team had been left behind. Gottfrid Svartholm’s appeal would have to be dealt with separately at a later date, throwing their processes out of sync.
However, setting a date for the hearing was proving difficult since Svartholm’s location could not be determined, not even by his lawyer Ola Salmonsson.
Nevertheless, a hearing was eventually scheduled for today at the Svea Court of Appeal. In common with the previous hearing, Svartholm failed to appear.
He now has just 3 weeks to apply for his appeal to be reopened or it seems that the District Court’s ruling of 2009 – a year in jail and his share of 30 million kronor ($4.48m) in damages – will stand.Minnesota’s minimum wage will increase next year by 15 cents to keep up with inflation, rising to $9.65 per hour for workers at many businesses across the state.
The increase, announced Thursday by the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry, is effective Jan. 1, 2018. It’s the result of a 2014 law that boosted the minimum wage to $9.50 and required the state to begin calculating automatic inflationary increases for each year, starting with 2018.
About 250,000 Minnesota workers earn less than $9.65 per hour. Gov. Mark Dayton and Lt. Gov. Tina Smith said in a statement that the wage bump is aimed at helping those residents build economic stability.
“Our state and nation was founded on the belief that hard work and opportunity should go hand in hand,” Smith said. “Raising the minimum wage will help make this value a reality for thousands of Minnesotans, many of them people of color and women with children.”
The new rate applies to workers at businesses with annual gross revenue of $500,000 or more. Employees at businesses with lower revenue, who now make $7.75 per hour, will see their minimum wage rise by 12 cents, to $7.87 per hour. That will also be the new training rate for workers younger than 20 for the first 90 days of employment, and for youth workers under age 18.
Minnesota’s minimum wage has increased by a much larger margin in recent years. In 2014, when the state Legislature approved the new law, the minimum wage was $6.15 per hour, one of the lowest in the country. Wages jumped to $8 per hour later that year, and increased by steps to $9.50 in 2016.
Meanwhile, some cities have been exploring raising wages beyond the state minimum. The Minneapolis City Council voted this summer to adopt a $15 minimum wage, which will be phased in by July 2024.
Advocates say higher pay is needed to help erase economic and racial disparities, but some business owners and business groups worry that increased labor costs could end up hurting both businesses and workers.
Mike Hickey, Minnesota state director for the National Federation of Independent Business, said the increases add up to a “big negative.” His group opposed the initial bump to $9.50 and said businesses will struggle to keep up with annual wage jumps — and may end up hiring fewer people.
“I think it’s going to be harder and harder for young people to find jobs,” Hickey said. “They’re going to consider hiring older people, automate when they can, and it’s going to have a lot of negative effects on the economy.”Today, I started looking for a portable unit test framework I could use for Scheme development. I haven’t found one yet, but I realized I didn’t know how to use the module system for R6RS to import a unit test framework library, so I decided I should learn that first. After a lot of searching, I managed to cobble together how to make and use libraries in R6RS (the only Scheme revision that has anything like a standardized, cross-implementation module system) by reading code that used libraries and code inside libraries, and reading about modules in places that didn’t really explain them very well.
I decided to write a simplified tutorial, both so my readers may be able to avoid the same difficulty I had and so I can refer back to it later if I manage to forget what I’m doing. Note that I’ve only tested the following with the Ypsilon implementation of R6RS on FreeBSD using its default user shell, tcsh (except that I’ve confirmed (import foo) works on MS Windows). The scheme parts should work the same with other R6RS implementations, and in general it should all work the same on any Unix-like system at least. Any variations are the reader’s responsibility to figure out, though. If you get it working with a different setup than mine, please tell me in comments what (if anything) you had to do differently.
Without further ado, I’ll start by explaining how to create a library module for R6RS.
Creating a Module
I’ll start by creating a module that implements a variation on the perennial “Hello, world!” function in a library. As I do this, a step at a time, you’ll notice that the construction of the module is in some respects from the bottom up.
First, there’s the function:
(lambda () (display "Goodbye, crule world!") (newline))
Next, of course, I’ll assign a symbol to it so we can use it when importing the library:
(define emo (lambda () (display "Goodbye, crule world!") (newline)))
The third step is to import either core or rnrs, the major parts of the standard library. This is necessary because, as with C, you need to import parts of the standard library just to do simple stuff like display (print to standard output):
(import (rnrs)) (define emo (lambda () (display "Goodbye, crule world!") (newline)))
Fourth, we need to export all the functions in our library we’ll want to use in a script later so that when we import the library we’ll have them available to us:
(export emo) (import (rnrs)) (define emo (lambda () (display "Goodbye, crule world!") (newline)))
Finally, we need to name our module:
(library (hello) (export emo) (import (rnrs)) (define emo (lambda () (display "Goodbye, crule world!") (newline))))
This gives us a library that can be imported using the standard module system of R6RS Scheme. Let’s make it more featureful, adding a function for people who prefer a more traditional “Hello, world!” function:
(library (hello) (export emo traditional) (import (rnrs)) (define emo (lambda () (display "Goodbye, crule world!") (newline))) (define traditional (lambda () (display "Hello, world!") (newline))))
Using a Module
Using it is even easier than creating it. To import it to your script, you use the aptly named import :
(import (hello))
After that, you can use the functions exported by the hello module:
(import (hello)) (traditional) (emo)
That should give you the following output:
Hello, world! Goodbye, crule world!
It Can’t Find The Library!
First of all, the library file should be called hello.sls or hello.scm, because hello.foobar won’t work. Next, you need to put it in a directory where your Scheme interpreter will look for it. This should be controlled by an environment variable. The name of that variable can change from one implementation to the next, however, so you’ll have to check what it’s called. In Ypsilon (the implementation I’ve been using most), for instance, the relevant environment variable is called $YPSILON_SITELIB.
This environment variable may not exist before you create it. This is an example of how I found that out (using FreeBSD’s standard user shell, tcsh), set the environment variable, and confirmed that I set it properly:
> echo $YPSILON_SITELIB YPSILON_SITELIB: Undefined variable. > setenv YPSILON_SITELIB ~/schemelib/ > echo $YPSILON_SITELIB /home/ren/
Directory paths listed in the Scheme library search path are separated by colons in tcsh, if the environment variable contains more than one directory path. You’ll have to confirm both the name of the environment variable for your specific Scheme implementation and the syntax for setting the environment variable for your specific shell (or just use Ypsilon and tcsh like I do, I suppose).
With that set, I can put any modules I write myself or download from the Internet into schemelib/ inside the home directory for my user account, and (import (foo)) will work fine — assuming a library file named foo.sls, for instance.
Initial Impression
The R6RS module system is impressively simple. It’s also impressively difficult to figure out how one must use it and why one must do things that way, though — largely because it’s not very easy to find out about it with the Google search strings I’ve been using. It seems slightly limited in some ways, and I would think that should be kind of disappointing given the fact that many module systems have been developed for different implementations of Scheme, but I don’t really know anything about those module systems so for all I know they might all suck.Red Hat recognizes the changing face of enterprise computing involves containerization technology and to that end, they announced a Beta release of their Linux container platform called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.
Containerization is a new trend that offers a more efficient and faster way to deliver applications than virtual machine technology. In a sense, it’s another step in virtualization that takes the concept and strips it down even further to produce greater resource efficiencies and faster deployment.
Today’s Beta release is a step toward providing a full enterprise-ready containerization stack, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host is the platform on which you can build your container technology. By releasing it to Beta now, Mark Coggin, senior director, product marketing, platform at Red Hat, says it will allow ISVs and others to build certified containers to run on the host platform. Obviously, this is to give customers confidence that the containers they are using have been built to work with and take advantage of the Red Hat platform. And of course some companies will build their own containers as well.
Coggin says the idea here is to build a container that contains the application, some run-time libraries and a stripped down version of Linux, to deliver the core services required to run the application. Coggin says by stripping down Linux and delivering it in this fashion, it makes it more portable, easier to deploy and simpler to maintain and manage.
He says this is not designed to compete with the popular Docker container technology. In fact, they are working with Docker and are using Docker within the platform. The release also includes Google Kubernetes support, which gives users access to an important orchestration layer to manage the container through its lifecycle. Coggin pointed out that they have been working with Google for several months on Kubernetes, so it’s very early days, but it adds an important management piece to the stack.
What’s more, instead of hours to stand up a physical server or minutes to set up a virtual machine, you can set up and launch a container in about 10 seconds, Coggins said. For companies looking for greater agility and speed, this gives IT the ability to react to the needs of lines of business almost instantly and that’s a tremendous advantage in today’s increasingly competitive environment.
And it’s not just speed, because these containers are so efficient in design and so stripped down, instead of an average of 10 VMs per server, you could get 100 containers, and that’s a huge difference in terms of cost to run your data center.
Coggin notes that today’s Beta release does not allow for multi-host orchestration. For today, it only supports a single host implementation, which takes away from some of the efficiency you can achieve by deploying across multiple servers. But he says, this is still a very early release and Red Hat plans to offer multi-host support in a future release. He didn’t say when that would be, but he said it would be coming eventually.For the natural history of the Antarctic continent, see Antarctica.
Jane and the cutter Beaufroy. Painting of James Weddell's second expedition, depicting the brigand the cutter
The history of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe. The term Antarctic, referring to the opposite of the Arctic Circle, was coined by Marinus of Tyre in the 2nd century AD.
The rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn in the 15th and 16th centuries proved that Terra Australis Incognita ("Unknown Southern Land"), if it existed, was a continent in its own right. In 1773 James Cook and his crew crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time but although they discovered nearby islands, they did not catch sight of Antarctica itself. It is believed he was as close as 240 km (150 mi) from the mainland.
In 1819, a few of the 644 crew of the wrecked Spanish ship of the line San Telmo with 74 cannons might have been the first men to set foot on Antarctica before probably dying of hypothermia - but there is no proof that they did. A year later on the 27th of January, 1820 a Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev discovered an ice shelf at Princess Martha Coast that later became known as the Fimbul Ice Shelf. Bellingshausen and Lazarev became the first explorers to see and officially discover the land of Antarctica continent. Three days later, on 30 January 1820, a British expedition captained by Edward Bransfield sighted Trinity Peninsula, and ten months later an American sealer Nathaniel Palmer sighted Antarctica on 17 November 1820. The first landing was probably just over a year later when American Captain John Davis, a sealer, set foot on the ice.
Several expeditions attempted to reach the South Pole in the early 20th century, during the 'Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration'. Many resulted in injury and death. Norwegian Roald Amundsen finally reached the Pole on 13 December 1911, following a dramatic race with the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott.
Early exploration [ edit ]
The search for Terra Australis Incognita [ edit ]
In 1570 a map by Ortelius showed the imagined link between the proposed continent of Antarctica and South America. Note also the proposed landmasses surrounding the North Pole
Aristotle speculated, "Now since there must be a region bearing the same relation to the southern pole as the place we live in bears to our pole...".[1]
It was not until Prince Henry the Navigator began in 1418 to encourage the penetration of the torrid zone in the effort to reach India by circumnavigating Africa that European exploration of the southern hemisphere began.[2] In 1473 Portuguese navigator Lopes Gonçalves proved that the equator could be crossed, and cartographers and sailors began to assume the existence of another, temperate continent to the south of the known world.
The doubling of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 by Bartolomeu Dias first brought explorers within touch of the Antarctic cold, and proved that there was an ocean separating Africa from any Antarctic land that might exist.[2]
Ferdinand Magellan, who passed through the Straits of Magellan in 1520, assumed that the islands of Tierra del Fuego to the south were an extension of this unknown southern land, and it appeared as such on a map by Ortelius: Terra australis recenter inventa sed nondum plene cognita ("Southern land recently discovered but not yet fully known").[3]
Map from 1771, showing "Terres Australes" label without any charted landmass.
European geographers connected the coast of Tierra del Fuego with the coast of New Guinea on their globes, and allowing their imaginations to run riot in the vast unknown spaces of the south Atlantic, south Indian and Pacific oceans they sketched the outlines of the Terra Australis Incognita ("Unknown Southern Land"), a vast continent stretching in parts into the tropics. The search for this great south land or Third World was a leading motive of explorers in the 16th |
reasonably enough, that there is an easy workaround to the fact that Democrats like to live cheek-by-jowl: simply carve up the cities in which they live and parcel them out across different congressional districts that also include less densely populated Republican territory. But this approach seems like just another way to institutionalize unfairness. If we wind up with pizza-slice districts that distribute Democrats into a larger number of heterogeneous districts, Republicans will complain that their voices have been squelched.
If our goal is to create legislative districts that truly reflect their electorates, our best bet would be to give up on single-member districts altogether and replace them with multi-member ones. Take the case of my tribe, the forlorn conservatives of New York City. Even if the New York state Legislature decided that it wanted to carve out a new district to represent conservatives scattered across the five boroughs, and not just those in Michael Grimm’s swing district, they’d have an almost impossible time doing so. For one thing, we don’t all live in a heavily Republican enclave called “Giulianiville.” A similar problem arises for minority groups that aren’t isolated in particular neighborhoods. The only reason it is possible to draw majority-minority districts for blacks in the Deep South and some Northern and Western cities is that black segregation is still with us. Drawing majority-minority districts for less-segregated minorities, like Asians, is a different story. (The only Asian-majority congressional district in the United States is in Hawaii, though there is one district in California’s Silicon Valley that comes close.)
When you combine single-member districts into bigger multi-member districts, the picture starts to look quite different. The beauty of multi-member districts is that they allow us to use what FairVote calls “fair representation voting.” (FairVote is stacking the deck a bit with that terminology, admittedly.) There are several different forms of fair representation voting, but FairVote is a fan of “ranked choice voting,” a method that has been used in Ireland and, closer to home, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for decades. Under that system, voters rank-order several different candidates rather than choosing their single favorite. Here’s an excellent video from Minnesota Public Radio explaining how it works:
As FairVote explains, the goal of this approach is to ensure that all candidates who receive a certain share of the vote will be elected. Some countries have huge multi-member districts that elect dozens of legislators. Israel elects all 120 members of the Knesset in a single multi-member district that encompasses the entire country. This guarantees that even very small groups can elect a representative who reflects their interests, yet it also severs the connection between a legislator and a given region. In the United States, FairVote envisions multi-member districts that would send no more than five representatives to Congress—big enough to represent relatively small minorities, but not so big that they don’t have a connection to concrete communities.
In a district with three representatives, you’d need to win 25 percent of the vote plus 1 to get elected. In a district with five reps, you’d need to win 16.7 percent plus 1. Getting there is a bit complicated—it involves fractions. But the basic idea is that if there were a three-seat multi-member district in Texas in which 68 percent of the vote went to Republican candidates and 32 percent went to Democratic candidates, one of the scenarios FairVote offers in “Monopoly Politics 2014 and the Fair Voting Solution,” it would send two Republicans and one Democrat to Congress. Of course, fair representation voting won’t do much good in states that send only one member to Congress. The good it would do everywhere else, however, is reason enough to justify the idea.
It should be obvious why multi-member districts would appeal to Democrats, who really are disadvantaged by the status quo. But it should appeal to Republicans, too. Yes, it would deny the GOP an edge over Democrats in the short term. But at the same time, it would help stranded conservatives like myself, and it would guarantee that some political reversal of fortune wouldn’t one day result in Republican underrepresentation.
There is an even better reason to favor fair representation voting: It might fuel the rise of new political parties. Getting to 50 percent can be challenging for Greens or Libertarians or other minor-party candidates who are asking voters to make a leap of faith. Getting to 17 percent in a multi-member district is far more realistic.
Imagine if Netroots Democrats or Tea Party Republicans made an impact not by launching primary challenges but by setting up shop as separate political entities. Instead of dragging the major parties to the left or to the right, they’d be able to compete with them on a level playing field. It’d be a bit like the startup world, where venture-backed entrepreneurs routinely take on entrenched incumbents. Don’t think your local Democrats are liberal enough? Vote Netroots! Tired of GOP squishes? Back the Tea Party!
Not everyone likes the idea of a multi-party system, I realize. There is a neat symmetry to two-party politics, and it is true that our big, lumbering parties are capable of change, albeit at a slow pace. Yet it’s hard to deny that a two-party system is best understood as a zero-sum game, in which a victory for one party is seen as a defeat for the other. This makes meaningful cross-party cooperation vanishingly rare. A multi-party system, in contrast, is one in which your enemy on one issue might become your ally on another. Netrooters might fight Tea Partiers tooth and nail on the top marginal tax rate one day while working alongside them to curb crony capitalism the next. They might join with Democrats on one issue and Libertarians on the next. This ever-present need for coalition-building creates a powerful incentive to treat your political rivals with respect, even when you disagree with them. That would make for a much healthier political culture—and certainly a more interesting one.Tom Hayes was allowed to keep bonus by Citigroup after it found he had ‘attempted to manipulate’ interest rates, Southwark crown court hears
Trader in Libor trial was allowed to keep £2.2m bonus after he was sacked
Tom Hayes, the trader accused of trying to rig a key interest rate behind trillions of dollars in financial deals, was allowed to keep a £2.2m bonus despite being sacked by his bank for “attempting to manipulate” financial markets.
Southwark crown court heard on Tuesday that in 2010 a disciplinary committee investigating alleged rigging of the Libor interest rate at his then employer Citigroup was asked by Hayes: “How much are you going to pay me to go quietly?”
The committee then sacked Hayes without a payoff, but did not exercise an option to claw back his multimillion pound bonus.
In its letter dismissing the 35-year-old former trader, the bank wrote: “Citigroup has uncovered that you attempted to manipulate the Yen Libor and [the Tokyo equivalent] Tibor rates in order to benefit your trading position,” which it said was a clear breach of its code of conduct, “resulting in the possibility of serious regulatory actions”.
However, it added that it was not “exercising its right to demand repayment of Y292m [worth £2.2m at the time]” that it had paid Hayes when he joined the bank from rival UBS in late 2009.
The evidence emerged on day five of Hayes’s trial, Britain’s first for Libor manipulation, where the trader denies eight counts of conspiracy to defraud between 2006 and 2010. He has been diagnosed with mild Asperger’s syndrome and has been sitting in the well of the court during his trial rather than in the dock.
The court also heard how Hayes told investigators how he thought the decision to sack him by the Citigroup committee – which included Brian Mccappin, who was then running Citigroup’s Japanese investment bank – was ironic, with him telling Mccappin “you were involved in it up to your eyeballs as well”.
Hayes says that the bank’s legal counsel replied that Mccappin “didn’t have trading positions”, only for the trader to respond: “That’s not really true is it? As a CEO you have responsibility for every trading position the bank’s got.”
Prosecutors say that the trader, who earned more than £1m during his three years at UBS and then £3.5m in nine months at Citigroup, gave the Serious Fraud Office a “complete confession” that he manipulated Libor in exchange for the prospect of a lighter sentence, only to then change his mind and plead not guilty.
Hayes was arrested at 7.10am on 11 December 2012 and taken for interview at Bishopsgate police station in the City of London. He declined to answer questions, during a series of interviews spanning around three hours, but his lawyers then wrote to the SFO in January 2013 saying that Hayes would co-operate.
Portions of a transcript of Hayes’ subsequent “scoping interviews” with SFO officers were then read to the court, in which he answered “yes” to the question: “Do you admit that you acted dishonestly in the manipulation and attempted manipulation of submissions bring made for Libor?”
He also acknowledged: “There was one occasion when a very deliberate attempt was made by me and a guy at Deutsche Bank called Guillaume Adolph, to align our positions and make an agreement to keep our Libors, you know, high and then low. You know that was probably for me the most dishonest. I blatantly knew I shouldn’t have done that.”
He also argued that Libor was being rigged in other currencies, but that the guilty parties were harder to catch as agreements had been reached during face-to-face talks. He added: “There is no way that I’m the only Libor manipulator in the world. It’s just not possible. I might be the most open about it and I’ve left reams of evidence.”
The prosecution alleges Hayes was motivated by greed and acted as the “ringmaster” in an enormous fraud to rig the benchmark Libor interest rate, allowing him to make increased profits from his trading.
The case continues.BY: Follow @LizWFB
Desperate students are still taking to Twitter to reveal the horrors of school lunch under First Lady Michelle Obama’s rules, including empty chicken nuggets and complaints that meals taste like "prison food."
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) raves about "locally sourced chicken sandwiches" that meet nutrition standards served in a school district in South Carolina, students across the country complain about what they are eating under the new rules.
"My poor little sister has to eat prison food #ThanksMichelleObama," one student tweeted on Friday.
Students are unhappy about their "chickpea sliders" and whole grain pizza, mandated by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Mrs. Obama. The USDA has a 33-page guide—complete with flow charts—telling schools how they can meet the whole grain requirements.
Many students complain about meager portions. One student was served only a plate of nachos with a side of coffee-flavored fat-free milk.
"This is not anywhere near enough…." tweeted another, with a picture of an unidentified piece of mystery meat.
"WHAT IS THIS!??!,?!!?" a student tweeted about their meat serving. Examples of questionable meat servings are numerous.
"#ThanksMichelleObama for my empty chicken nugget," another said.
Unappetizing selections also include "soggy rice" and rotten fruit. Students tweet pictures of rotting pears, "Chris Brown-ified" bananas, and nasty oranges.
Meager portions are a common complaint about the standards. A school in Texas served tacos with barely any meat in them. Parents said the meat filled the size of a "thimble."
"I first thought it had to be a mistake or the kids were messing around. And then when he told me that’s all we got, it’s just a little shocking," said one parent of a high school student in Burleson, Texas.
"Any reasonable person can see there’s not enough meat on that taco," an administrator said.
School districts in New York are also facing problems with food waste. Nearly every state in the country saw an uptick in food waste after the standards took effect.
"If we cut up 20 pounds of cucumbers, we guess that 17 pounds get thrown away," a food service director in Canton, N.Y., said. "I’ve watched kids take their cup of vegetables or fruit they’re required to take and just throw it away."There is something happening on the Indian rap scene. In the last year or so, four strong new voices have emerged from different parts of the country-Kashmir, Delhi, Calcutta and Punjab. And they rap in different languages (not surprising, given India's multilingualism): English (MC Kash), Hindi (DJ Faadu), Bangla (G**** Circus) and Punjabi (Yo Yo Honey Singh).
None of these rappers know each other, nor are there rap festivals (like with Indian rock and electronica) where they can meet each other and share notes. What unites them is the fact that they are using rap as a weapon to deal with local realities.
Rap isn't a homogenous entity. It's not surprising that each of them draws inspiration from different traditions of rap. MC Kash is in the activist mould, much like The Last Poets (in content, not in style). In 1970s America, The Last Poets railed against the oppression of blacks; Kash talks about the plight of Kashmiris in contemporary times. DJ Faadu draws from a personal-confessional tradition, much like Eminem. Calcutta's G**** Circus has a wider lyrical arc, but the words are essentially about resisting the mainstream. Honey Singh is strongly influenced by present-day gangsta rap.
Range
Rap is perhaps the most direct musical genre, and these rappers are masters at saying it like it is. They don't hold back. They don't dance around issues. And like all rappers, they are not afraid to use cuss words to make their point.
The most striking feature of these rappers is that they are self-taught. They have grown up in India (except Honey who has a Canadian connection), and learnt the craft by listening to their heroes. Unlike Eminem who learnt to rap on the porches of Detroit houses and trailer parks, and honed his skills in freestyle competitions, these guys evolved in a vacuum, but have emerged surprisingly fully formed.
Some days back I saw G**** Circus live at Out of the Box in Hauz Khas Village. The energy was unmistakeable; even though the lyrics were in Bangla, a sense of urgency got through. There was palpable anger in the air, though suffused with laughter and cheerfulness. G**** Circus are the kings of paradox.
Later, I asked Neel (guitars) about what they sang about. He told me that the songs emerged from the cult film 'G****', about a loser. Q, who directed the film, is also the front man of the band, which has played gigs in London, Cologne, Berlin and Brussels, as well as cities in Poland and Romania. In Calcutta, their hometown, they've done just two live shows. In bhodro Calcutta, says Neel, the audience is intimidated by the lyrics. It's simply too close for comfort.
G**** Circus rap about the little man who has been ignored by the system. This little man could be anyone: a rickshaw puller, a small businessman, a singer. The recurrent theme is about the hostility of the mainstream to the underground, a hostility which stems from insecurity. G**** Circus strikes back on behalf of all losers: "Like a ghost/ I'll climb on your shoulders and dance/ If you're the big fat balloon/ I'm the safety pin who'll burst your bubble."
The Delhi-based DJ Faadu sings about college life. But this is not the college life of Bollywood where happy boys and girls go on picnics and play antakshari in the bus. This is a real engineering college. There are few girls. Sexual frustration is rife in this community of nerd men: "In actual class mein ladkiyon kin kam ratio se main sick hoon/Ladke hi ladke bonus me hain sare ladke teacher/ Female teacher bhi hai ****/ B tech me char saal tak bhramchari banke padhte hain/ Isiliye to jyada engineer gay banke sadte hain."
Porn offers a solution but till a point: "Life me newspaper nahi padha but matrimonial padhta hoo/Maxim, Playboy, even Kamasutra bhi subscribe ki hai/ It's humiliating par Sarita, Grahshobha bhi try ki hai." This rings so true. It's well-known that in engineering colleges boys brag not about how many women they've been with, but how many gigabytes of porn they have on their hard drives. The IITs have been trying to ban porn for many years but with little success. Faadu's tracks reveal the dark flipside of our engineering success story: the perversions, and lonely and bleak inner lives: "Internet pe girlfriend ban gayi she asked me to come home/ As I started upon she had p--- of her own/ Socha fir jab aa gaya to kuch to karke jaoon, yeah... I lost my virginity but other way round."
Kashmir
If G**** Circus raps about the battle between the little man and the mainstream in abstract terms, MC Kash is very specific and concrete. His lyrics deal with the tensions between the hapless Kashmiri and the Indian state. He makes it clear that he has little to do with contemporary American rappers: "Everyday hustle, hell I ain't no Jay Z." He draws from an older tradition of American rap, which was about blacks resisting white oppression: "They can't stop an idea/ When our minds are free." His heart bleeds for Kashmir, a state he's never travelled out of: "They gave us blood and hate/ Then wondered why every man is a rebel." In an interview to the BBC he spoke about a comic but scary moment when Indian authorities raided his studio. They thought separatists were funding him. He is just an angry young man in his early twenties, rapping in English about the atrocity he sees around him: "We're taking back the throne/ With my fist held high/ And holding a stone."
Yo Yo Honey Singh, the final rapper in this little survey, is mainstream. He now charges 70 lakhs for doing a Bollywood song. But like the others he has an underground side. People like Kash and Faadu are invisible and don't do shows. Honey plays live from Toronto to Dehradun.
Underground
He doesn't perform his underground stuff but it's a huge success on the net. He borrows heavily from gangsta rap - the fast cars, the sharp suits, the branded sports gear, the sexual aggro/machismo. The content though is hardcore desi Punjabi: the 'pind' replacing the 'hood', 'purja' replacing 'hoe', and so on. His songs are brutally explicit about sex.
Of course, none of this stuff will ever make it to the television or the radio. Even though this is a revolution that will never be televised, the thousands of hits that these underground rappers garner on YouTube, and on their Reverbnation pages, shows that they have a massive audience.
For years, the Indian underground was dominated by rock bands. They are technically very sound, and often use foreign professionals during production, which gives their albums a slick feel. But one was always left with the feeling that most had little to say. The new rappers, with their rough-and-ready recordings, have changed this. Not only do they have a lot to say, and about a range of subjects, they have also successfully put rebellion back into Indian music.
As for those who find some of the lyrics misogynistic, well, it's really part of the genre. In fact, it's not so much misogyny as playful sexual aggression. I don't think the day is far when Indian girls will enter the rap game. This has been happening in America for quite some time. In an Ice Cube song, when the man brags that hip hop "is a man's world", the female rapper retorts: "What you're saying I don't consider it as rapping/ Cause you're on rewind and I'm the new what's-happening."NEW YORK (Reuters) - Court records released on Tuesday show the U.S. Justice Department has in the last four months sought court orders to force Apple Inc (AAPL.O) to help investigators extract data from 15 devices in cases across the country.
A man walks past a backlit Apple logo during an Apple media event in San Francisco, California, in this September 9, 2015 file photo. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach/Files
The disclosure comes amid a heated dispute between Apple and federal investigators over access to a locked iPhone belonging to one of the killers in December’s mass-shooting in San Bernardino, California.
In a letter unsealed on Tuesday addressed to a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, overseeing one such case, Apple said it had received requests since October to assist law enforcement in accessing 13 other devices.
Prosecutors said they were aware of a 15th case filed in Massachusetts, in their own letter filed late on Monday ahead of the unsealing of Apple’s Feb. 17 list of cases.
Those cases include one announced last week in which a federal magistrate judge ordered Apple to unlock the iPhone belonging to one of the killers in the San Bernardino shooting, which has escalated into a high-publicity showdown between Apple and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
According to Apple’s letter, the technology company has objected to providing law enforcement assistance with regards to at least 12 of the 15 devices so far.
The letter was addressed to U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who since October has been weighing whether to order Apple to provide authorities access to data on a locked iPhone in a narcotics-related case.
Prosecutors earlier said that before the Brooklyn dispute emerged, Apple had since 2008 received 70 court orders requiring it provide similar assistance to which it complied without objection.
In contrast to the San Bernardino case, many of the cases listed by Apple and the Justice Department appear to involve iPhones using an older Apple operating system, which has fewer security barriers to surmount.
The Justice Department on Friday filed a motion seeking to compel Apple to comply with a judge’s order to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, portraying the tech giant’s refusal as a “marketing strategy.”
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has refused to do so, and sent a letter to employees Monday morning making clear the company’s hardline stance refusing to make software to unlock the phone addresses broader issues, not just a single device linked to a grisly attack.(This story corrects headline in paragraphs one, three and six to devices, from iPhones)EXCLUSIVE: In a deal near seven figures, Sony Pictures Animation won a three-studio auction for an animated movie pitch centering on the Emoji, those lovable round headed figures that are as much a staple of social media correspondence as adverbs and adjectives. The project will be co-written by Eric Siegel and Anthony Leondis, with the latter directing the feature. Leondis pitched the project around to studios, with storyboards for how the movie would play out. Three studios bid–I’ve heard Warner Bros and Paramount were the others–but none more aggressively than Sony. It’s a big project for SPA president Kristine Belson, who got a quick decision from studio chief Tom Rothman to move aggressively. Michelle Raimo Kouyate is producing. This appears to be a zeitgeist moment for these ideograms that hatched in Japan and have spread worldwide. Unlike like, say Lego, there are also no underlying rights here to purchase, which makes this as much a catnip idea to Hollywood as public domain fairy tales that fuel so many blockbusters. I’ve heard that another pitch is going to be shopped shortly, so there might be reason for Sony Animation to move quickly.
Leondis is director of Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Masters, and he most recently completed the DreamWorks Animation feature B.O.O.: Bureau Of Otherworldly Operations. That film, which features a voice cast including Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy, Matt Bomer and Seth Rogen, has been awaiting a release date, pulled from the schedule as DWA went through a restructuring. Now, Leondis has another project to throw himself into. WME reps Leondis. Siegel is a writer and actor who has sold several shows to Fox and NBC and was most recently as producer on the TBS series Men At Work. He’s also consulting producer on Family Tools at ABC. This is his first movie sale and he’s repped by APA, New Wave and Lichter Grossman.
This comes as Sony this Friday rolls out Pixels, the Chris Columbus-directed animated/live action mix that stars Adam Sandler and some of the most popular videogame characters come to life, including Pac Man.But the real attraction of the building, for us, was that it's the home of Detroit Venture Partners, the startup hub of the area. DVP is run by Josh Linkner, a Detroit native who founded and eventually sold ePrize, an online promotions platform. It's on the same floor as the formerly futuristic Detroit People Mover, a monorail which loops endlessly around the still mostly deserted downtown.
Linkner's office space contains his own portfolio companies as well as those of Bizdom, an accelerator that's also funded by Dan Gilbert. There's no doubt about it, as Linkner put it, "We're the dominant early stage tech VC in this region."
DVP is a traditional venture firm in the sense that they invest in digital-only companies that are trying to make something big out of what a few kids in a room can build. An old friend of mine from college, Jay Gierak, is one of them. HIs company Stik is like an Angie's List for lawyers, realtors, and other professional services. He and his cofounder Nathan Labenz recently moved their company from the Bay to Detroit, where Gierak grew up, and received $2.5 million from DVP. In press coverage of the funding, the company's move to Motown got more attention than the money did.
People want to be excited for Detroit. They want Clint Eastwood and Eminem to be right. They want grit to count for something in today's economy. Linkner, for his part, is sure that it does. "I'll put a Detroit entrepreneur up against anyone from the coasts and I think we'd kick their ass," he tell us. He quotes the Chrysler commercial, "The hottest fire makes the strongest steel."
It's easy, conceptually, to get excited about all of this. You almost get giddy looking out at all the old buildings of downtown Detroit and imagining that you could buy one for the same amount as a nice house goes for in Noe Valley, let alone Atherton.
But, at least for me, that vision requires thousands of other people committed to building the same kind of city. People like Linker and Gilbert or Gierak and Labenz are here, but what about the other few thousand that are needed to make the city feel vibrant? Not to detour into a ruin-porny segment about the state of the city, but the number of abandoned buildings in Detroit -- and the feeling they toss into the air -- is truly unfathomable to someone raised on the west coast.
Linkner, who is a self-proclaimed booster for his city, admits that the lack of density is a--if not the--problem.
"Things tend to be spread out," he said. "Something on one block and something else four blocks later. We don't have a place you can stroll around for 8 square blocks."
But he also argued Detroit needs to tell its own story in "a better and more cohesive" way. And that I'm not so sure about. For me, the narrative of Detroit has outstripped at least what I could see of Detroit. Good things are clearly happening, but the lack of connective tissue is a bigger problem than you might imagine. Between downtown and an area like Corktown, which has an excellent coffee shop, the oft-applauded Slow's BBQ, Honor + Folly*, and a couple other bars, there's just nothing. When we left Slow's on a Thursday night at 9pm to drive the couple miles to our hotel, we got about halfway when I looked in my rearview mirror and realized that there wasn't a single other car behind us, nor approaching. There were no bikes or pedestrians, either.Illustration by Luke Pearson
Reader, if you and I can agree on anything, it’s that the Internet is made of cats. But we may differ on the follow-up: What else could it be made of? When cats took over on our screens and in our minds, whose regime, exactly, did they replace?
For too long we’ve talked as if the online feline emerged from nowhere, to fill a niche that hadn’t yet existed. We’ve made out cats to be the brand-new products of a brand-new age and ignored the fact that before we had the Internet, and before the Internet had its furry totem, media consumers held a different set of animal predilections. We’ve forgotten that the readers from that ancient age of dusty books preferred the dog, and so they do today. Before the Web page there was the written word. Before kittens ruled the Internet, puppies reigned in print.
The real mystery, then, is not how cats took precedence online, but rather how they managed to dethrone the dog. Our media have been split in two, and each opposing camp—the old against the new—has a spirit animal suited to its ethos. We’re reading dogs and clicking cats. Knopf is a borzoi. BuzzFeed is a Scottish Fold.
When did our entertainments break along these species lines? And what will happen to the dog, once so proud in literature, as the industry that championed it limps into the future?
* * *
Surely you’ll be inclined to grant the premise: Think of Maru the Cat; think of Marley & Me. But let me try to make the case using more objective means. Precisely how do dogs and cats compare online, and then again in print?
The other day I went to visit Yahoo and plugged in the words “cat” and “cats.” (I tried them 10 times each.) My searches pulled an average of 1.8 billion hits, nearly two giga-cats of data on the Internet. Then I did the same with “dog” and “dogs,” and received one-third as many results. For every Web-enabled pooch, three kittens danced on YouTube.
A proto-YouTube collection of cats from a 1914 magazine spread.
Bing produced a similar comparison: 1.7 billion cats against 775 million dogs, for a ratio north of 2-to-1. Google was more even-pawed, but still the Web evinced a preference for felines: Its worm crawled 2.5 billion sites on cats and just 1.7 billion sites on dogs.
These searches tell us what we knew already: That stats on cats are unsurpassed online. But what’s the mix for books?
On Amazon, canines held the lion’s share of search results, by a healthy 2-to-1. A look at Google Books returned the same disparity: The corpus holds 87 million cats and almost twice as many pups. What’s more, this trend in published work appears to date back centuries.
What about the future? To get a more specific sense, I consulted an online database of book deals and sifted through the last few years for references to animals. Since 2008, editors have signed up at least 44 dog-related works of fiction, compared with 20 books on cats. Among nonfiction deals—including memoirs, how-to guides, photography, and pet-related humor—the spread was even more severe: Over the last two years, the database lists 57 such arrangements for canine printed matter against 18 for kitty-lit.
So there we have it: Dogs really are the champs in print, while kittens win online. Which brings us back to where we started.
* * *
There’s an old joke, often (and erroneously) attributed to the founder of Random House, Bennet Cerf, that since people love to read books about Abraham Lincoln, and people love to read books about doctors, and people love to read books about dogs, then the best-selling book of all time ought to be a book called Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.
That wisdom first appeared in print in 1938, in an essay for the Saturday Review by editor George Stevens. His piece, called “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog and Other Famous Best-Sellers,” looked at how book publishers try—and often fail—to manufacture hits. The principles of viral marketing that he laid out 75 years ago (“advertising sells a book that is already selling,” for one, and “it is up to the publisher to know when the iron is hot”) have since become gospel in media both old and new. Whether it’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, or just the Keyboard Cat, the lesson is the same: Success must be nurtured, not designed.
That’s the point of the joke, of course: You can’t squish together trends and expect to sell a million copies. But it’s just as telling that the line itself still circulates in old-school publishing, and in old-school publishing alone. (I first heard of Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog from a literary scout, who got it from an editor at Houghton Mifflin.) This long-running fad for dogs in books suggests a deep and strange connection. Consider that in ‘38 the dog itself was somewhat scarce: Around that time, the country had just 1 of them for every 9 of us. The doggy boom (IRL, I mean) did not occur until the 1960s, when the ratio of dog-to-man would rise to 1-to-5. (These days it’s 1-to-4.) In other words, dogs were selling books before they sold themselves.
Needless to say, no one in the business ever wondered if Lincoln’s doctor had a cat. The parade of canine hits started with the corny classics—Old Yeller and White Fang—and now includes some very modern books of science, the kind that tell us what it’s like to be a dog. Along the way, it swept up a few of the most famous writers ever to have written: Steinbeck did a doggy book, and so did Virginia Woolf. This highfalutin pedigree lingers even to this day. In the last few years, several of our leading journalists—old-media types, of course—have joined the long procession: The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean and the Times’ Jill Abramson have lately gone into the doghouse, and so has New York Magazine’s executive editor John Homans.
Brainy writers have been so inclined to scrutinize the pooch, in fact, they’ve often tried to get inside its head. Jack London did an early version of the dog-narrator, but so have many others: Paul Auster and Dave Eggers, William Maxwell and Peter Mayle. Kitties, for their part, have mostly failed to earn the same regard. I’ve seen omniscient cats, but only on the Web. And here’s another, final way to show that canines get respect in print: Dogs in stories die; cats almost never do. (That’s just as true in movies, and really any form of narrative. According to one database, the ratio of lifeless dogs to lifeless cats on-screen is 4-to-1.)
* * *
Cats have their place in art, of course. They’ve had it since the dawn of culture. In the Chauvet cave in France, where early humans sketched out animals in 30,000 BCE, the evidence suggests a preference for pussies: Among the horses and the bison, cavemen drew a pride of lions and a panther.
I’m guessing that since ancient times, the cat has been more an image than a text. One scholar of feline memology notes that in the 1870s, photographs of cats were put on cutesy cartes de visite. Nice to look at; nothing much to say. In later years the cat became a star of comic strips, starting with the black-and-white called Felix, and then on and up through Garfield, Hobbes, and Heathcliff.
Hart Crane invoked a kitten in his poem “Chaplinesque,” and while tabbies may be good for comedy, they’re better yet in verse. T.S. Eliot once wrote a book of cat-related poems, and he’s not the only one: Searching through a site called PoemHunter for references to pets, I found an equal canine/feline split. It seems the tendency for putting dogs in print is limited to prose. Poets know the cat’s a short-form thing, quick and nimble, cloaked with hidden meanings. “The thing about cats is that they’re veiled,” says Robert Trachtenberg, author of the recent meowmoir Another Insane Devotion.
“It’s a question of companionship versus observation,” adds Eamon Dolan, a man who’s owned both dogs and cats, and edited a litter of best-sellers. “You develop a relationship with a dog, whereas you observe a cat. Dogs are companions; cats are beautiful, animate objects.” I think he means to say: We dialogue with dogs and contemplate our cats.
If cats tend to sit for quiet portraits, it’s in part because they tend to sit. When they do go outside, it’s to pad around alone, which makes it hard for cats to gin up exploits fit for publication. That’s why an animal like Garfield can only live in comic strips: He’s too lethargic for a novel.
The feline tendency to laze about or wander off may explain a few unexpected cat-related hits. Literary cats may be missing pets, like in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, setting up the plot through mystery and absence. Or else they may be given some improbable contrivance, like the tiger on a raft from Life of Pi, forced into a place where sitting on one’s haunches takes the form of high adventure. Either way, an animal that’s prone to lonesome stalking must be stuffed into a novel, like a kitten in a sack.
Or maybe it’s a gender thing: Dogs are boys and cats are girls. Dogs are voiced narrators, marching forth into the world. Cats are pigeonholed in quiet domesticity. If we end up seeing dog-boy books in print, it’s because the cat-girl ones are pushed off to the side. But when I looked up recent deals for literature on dogs and cats, both categories were mostly female-written.
Perhaps it’s not the feline’s body but its soul, so ephemeral |
’s not still worth fighting for. Now go back and replace “Feminism” with “The human race”. It works, right?. That’s because feminists are made of human. Men and women. In fact, one of my favorite feminists is Sir Patrick Stewart.
I’m not saying you can’t choose to not be a feminist but know what you’re choosing. Don’t make a decision about a group based on the most radical beliefs of a group. Don’t get defensive if you get deeper and are exposed to difficult ideas about intersectionality and race and gender and colonialism and patriarchy and male liberation. Just listen. Some of it will make sense. Some of it won’t. Some of it will later when you’re a different person. Some of it you’ll change your mind about throughout your life and the world will change too. Some of it is bullshit. Some of it is truth. All of it is worth listening to.
And now you get to decide. Are you a feminist? Yes? No? Well, don’t worry because tomorrow you get to choose again. And that keeps happening every day for the rest of your life.
As for me, I am a feminist (among so, so many other things). I believe in equality and I think we still have work to do. I’m thankful to the men and women who worked to give me the freedom and rights I have today and I am proud to be a part of a movement that I hope will make the world better and safer for my daughter (and for the men and women she’ll share that world with). I’m happy we’ve come so far and I’m glad that we’re becoming more aware of feminist issues that don’t just focus on straight, white women, even though confronting those issues is sometimes painful. And I’m happy that the womenagainstfeminism tumblr exists. Because even though I disagree with most of them I’m glad that those women have a platform on which to speak, and also because if we know what the arguments or misperceptions are against feminism then we can better address them. Or agree with them. Or ignore them. Or discuss them with our sons and daughters so they can make informed decisions for themselves. It’s up to you.
We’re all equally deserving to express our opinion. After all, that’s what feminism is all about.*
*Or maybe not. I got kinda confused after the shark analogy went sideways.Bothwell Cheese Inc. has shut down its production lines and honed in on a piece of equipment believed to be at the source of a possible Listeria contamination announced Sunday.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) put out a notice asking consumers to throw out products that are part of the recall or return them to where they were purchased.
A total of 262 cases containing five shredded cheese products made in Manitoba have been flagged in the recall. That amounts to more than 3,000 individual packages of cheese that could be impacted, said Mike Raftis, director of sales and marketing at Bothwell Cheese.
"It is an unfortunate circumstance, it is embarrassing," Raftis said. "We're very sorry that this issue has surfaced."
The recall affects shredded cheese products made on or before Dec. 19, 2015. It was for sale in Manitoba, Quebec and Saskatchewan, with the majority of the product being sold within Manitoba, Raftis said.
Raftis said the contamination results were produced during one of the company's in-house routine tests. They brought the information to the CFIA, which is now conducting its own review.
The company has identified a piece of equipment in its production line that may be responsible for the scare.
"This could be stemming from a piece of equipment that was newly commissioned and installed," he said. "If that equipment was the source of the contamination, that would transfer onto the product as well."
The equipment has been decommissioned and removed from the factory, Raftis said.
"This [shredded cheese] is the only product that ran on this particular line, so we're confident that it is isolated to this particular product," he said. "We are proactively taking some steps under our own direction to thoroughly clean and sanitize the plant. So our entire facility, for the next day or two, is being completely washed and sanitized from the top down."
Raftis expects the factory will resume production some time near the middle of the week. The company doesn't think the stoppage will impact the availability of its product in stores.
"We're very focused on producing quality products and we want to do everything possible to gain the trust back with our customers," he said.
This is the first time the New Bothwell, Man., based company has had a contamination scare, Raftis added.
List of items impacted by recall:The Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that Hello Games did not mislead consumers through the No Man's Sky Steam page and did not misrepresent the game and its features. In a statement published on the ASA website the regulatory body concluded "the ad did not breach" advertising codes.
"We understood that the screenshots and videos in the ad had been created using game footage, and acknowledged that in doing this the advertisers would aim to show the product in the best light," reads the statement.
"Taking into account the above points, we considered that the overall impression of the ad was consistent with gameplay and the footage provided, both in terms of that captured by Hello Games and by third parties, and that it did not exaggerate the expected player experience of the game. We therefore concluded that the ad did not breach the Code."
According to the ASA, 23 complainants said they believed No Man's Sky "was not as depicted or described" through marketing material such as trailers and screenshots on the Steam page. In its defense, as recounted by the ASA, Hello Games noted that No Man's Sky's content is procedurally generated instead of created by hand.
"This meant that the game content was generated by way of a computer process as that content was encountered by the player. This computer process embodied algorithms that determined, for example, the probability of a player encountering a creature with a particular physiology, exhibiting a particular behaviour or existing in a particular habitat."
The algorithm-powered generation of content meant that "each user’s experience would be very different" and "it would be difficult to recreate the exact scenes from the ad." Nevertheless, the studio maintained that it was "fairly straightforward to locate content of the type shown in the ad and to demonstrate that such content was commonly experienced by all users who played NMS for an average period of time."
The report continued, saying Hello Games asserted "there was a low probability that anyone playing the game as intended would fail to encounter all these features in some form within an average play-through."
In its own assessment, the ASA concluded that, since the marketing emphasised game content was procedurally generated, it was clear that the consumers would be able to understand that images and videos are representative of experiences they could have, though not necessarily in an identical fashion.
On the claims that user interface and aiming was not as advertised, Hello Games said "the appearance of these functions (but not the way they operated) had been amended since the videos were created," but said they didn't think "the appearance of these game elements was material." The ASA agreed, saying "these elements would [not] affect a consumer’s decision to purchase the game."
[Hello Games] did not exaggerate the expected player experience of the game... We therefore concluded that the ad did not breach the Code."
Addressing the supposed visual discrepancies between the videos and full game, Hello Games argued trailers used gameplay captured using an average spec PC and said the quality of the graphics in those videos was actually inferior to what the game is capable of. The studio also noted that post-release updates have improved the visuals further.
The ASA supported this line of reasoning, saying "the graphical output of the game would be affected by the specifications of each player's computer, and considered that consumers would generally be aware of this limitation." It found two instances of higher visual fidelity in screenshots than in game, but said it "did not consider that the difference was so significant as to mislead in this context."
Other issues investigated by the ASA include the speed of warping around the galaxy shown in the video, which Hello Games said was normal and indicative of the experience in-game. It also clarified that footage was not edited to present warping to be quicker than it is. The ASA supported Hello Games in its conclusion, saying "warping would depend on the complexity of the destination system and the characteristics of a player's computer."
On the subject of flying from deep space to planetary surfaces with no loading screens, Hello Games said players could still interact with the game as "environments and characteristics were generated in real time." The ASA interpreted this to mean a "lack of interruptive or non-immersive interstitial screens" during travel, which was consistent with the in-game experience.
Another point of contention was the suggestion that players will be able participate in territorial disputes between faction. But Hello Games said this element was part of the narrative of the game and "manifested itself through the player's journey and interactions with three factions during gameplay." Again, the ASA sided with Hello Games, saying it "we did not consider that this description differed materially from the relevant gameplay features."
Concluding, the ASA noted "no further action required," regarding the dispute. You can read its full report here.
On November 27 Hello Games launched a major new update for No Man's Sky called the "Foundation Update." It introduces the first parts of the game's base-building and also serves as a "foundation for things to come." According to the developer, the Foundation Update is the first of "many" free patches for No Man's Sky.An apartment complex built entirely of recycled shipping containers in California is providing shelter for homeless veterans.
Potter's Lane, located in Midway City, Calif., was built by the American Family Housing, a nonprofit organization that provides shelter and assistance to those in need, according to its website.
Potter's Lane is the first multi-family structure to be built entirely from recovered shipping containers – but it will not be the last. In November, Los Angeles residents voted and approved a $1.2 billion bond to construct shelters for the homeless, according to the Los Angeles Times. There are plans to build more sustainable complexes.
PROBE ONGOING AFTER HEDGEHOGS DUMPED IN CALIFORNIA TRASH CAN
The $1,200 per month rent is largely subsidized, Steven Forry, American Family Housing’s chief development officer, told CBS News.
Sixteen studio apartments were built from 48 recycled shipping containers. The complex, which took six months to complete, was purposely made small so the residents can connect with one another.
“When you’re dealing with people who have been homeless and you warehouse them in 300 units, you are not creating a safety net for people, you are not creating a human connection with people,” Forry said. “The concept here is called housing first. Find a home for them like we found here and then you surround them with social services.”
WAZE EXPANDING CARPOOL SERVICE TO ALL OF CALIFORNIA
Marine veteran Dale Dollar has been living on the street for 14 years. He now lives at Potter's Lane along with 15 others, most of whom served their country, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“It’s quite a place. You know you come in when you’ve been sleeping in a tent on the dirt and rocks for years and have to fight to keep your stuff and you end up in a place as beautiful as this?” Dollar said. “Oh, I’ve been blessed more than I should have been. It’s wonderful.”Losing a black box has all sorts of connotations, many of which are unpleasant. News reporters telling us of how the search of a black box is ongoing is usually a morbid tale of air accidents and loss of life. When you lose a black box in the context of player analytics in the game of football then you realise that maybe things are not so bad after all.
Paul Mitchell, who apparently carted his very own black box all the way from the South Coast to Hotspur Way, is to part company with Tottenham Hotspur. Of course as soon as this was announced, fans were trying to ridicule the man and whether use of this black box actually unearthed the playing talents we had hoped for. It’s an ugly fan trait. Similar to reports of “Eriksen demanding £150,000 per week” suddenly unearthing those in our fan base of the “let him leave” variety. “Not good enough anyway. We want players to play for the shirt” Oh how we turn on ourselves so quickly.
But what does Mitchell’s impending departure actually mean? And what is the “black box”? As far as I am aware the black box seems to be the porta cabin that Mitchell and his team sit in to do their work and it happens to be black. Or so it used to be at Southampton. But I could be wrong.
Why this was even a shock for Spurs fans is because that for just a little while we got comfortable
It’s all about assessing player analytics and to be honest it’s something that nearly all teams do now in a world where statistics are king. It is likely that everyone has a different name for it and Mitchell had carved out a reputation of being good at it. Players are watched, analysed and assessed. It’s “Moneyball” tailored to soccer. Those of you that saw the film of the same name will know what I mean.
Mitchell is leaving because………well we don’t actually know why although rumours will spread. He could have just been offered a better job elsewhere. He could have been getting frustrated with Levy. Or he could just have been gasping for air after being cooped up in a box for the last year or so! It doesn’t really matter. He will have his reasons and people will always come and go in football.
Why this was even a shock for Spurs fans is because that for just a little while we got comfortable. We were content with structures, stability, performances on the pitch, continuity in playing personnel and a feeling of temporary smugness. It should be noted that smugness for Spurs fans is always temporary. We wouldn’t have invented “spursy” otherwise. Mitchell’s out of the blue resignation rocked our comfort zone just as we started to kick out the recliner feet of our chairs.
It can safely be assumed that Pochettino now has a greater say on many things including which players we should be recruiting
Should we be concerned? Probably not. Yes Pochettino had a close working relationship with this chap that went back to their Southampton days, but if Poch can respect the guy’s decision then so can we. Pochettino’s job title changed recently from Head Coach to Manager. It can safely be assumed that Pochettino now has a greater say on many things including which players we should be recruiting perhaps. Levy has always preferred someone on his board to identify players that the club should target. Think Arnesen, Comolli, Pleat and now Mitchell. But now there is another level in the chain of command with Pochettino’s new role.
Pochettino has always placed major emphasis on a player’s character. It is not only about playing ability, which is a given. But a player must have the profile to suit the manager’s playing philosophy and team ethos. He knows the kind of player he wants.
A player must have the profile to suit the manager’s playing philosophy and team ethos. He knows the kind of player he wants
Mitchell hasn’t been at Spurs long enough to be really judged. In respect of recent signings it is accepted that Dele Alli was spotted by David Pleat (who seems to be still respected by Levy); Dier was signed before Mitchell arrived; Alderweireld and Janssen were established players that likely didn’t need analytical scouting. Which leaves Son, N’Jie and Wimmer. The latter has had some success and the jury is still out on the others, mainly due to untimely injuries. They may still come good however if allowed the time needed.
If indeed Mitchell was upset that the club didn’t move for Mitchy Batschuayi then he probably misunderstood his role specification. Spurs are not in the market for £30m+ players to sit on our benches, and we are never going to get into an auction for a player with the likes of Chelsea. Dispute over Jay Rodrigues has also been cited. If true then it is best remembered that this is a player that has suffered horrific long term injuries and is only just getting back into the swing of things.
So once this transfer window is over, and many of our fans will once again likely be bemoaning the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” signings that passed us by, Mitchell will be gone. I suppose either the black box and its controllers will be packed away, or perhaps it will remain and a new inhabitant will be recruited. Either way the club will continue under Pochettino’s charge and we carry on. It’s just a blip in the comfort zone for now.In an interview on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' on Wednesday, House Speaker Paul Ryan reiterated for some that it is essentially the only job of an incoming national security adviser to talk to ambassadors and officials from other countries. There is a chorus of pundits, comedians, and hosts acting like it was illegal for Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn to speak to an ambassador from Russia before President Trump's inauguration.
"With respect to Michael Flynn talking to other governments during the transition: That's his job. That's what he is supposed to be doing. It is entirely appropriate, it is actually the job description, to talk to other nations, to ambassadors, to start beginning relationships. That is very much appropriate," Ryan said.
He added: "But I think the story here is that he lost the trust of the president, and as I understand it, he was not candid or honest with his superior [VP Mike Pence]. That is ground for dismissal as far as I am concerned."Several days ago, while testing SMPlayer and its Youtube-specific add-on, SMTube, I started thinking about some other cool, useful software that can stream second-person-metro content. Minitube has been on my list on and off, and it’s featured in various distros across the years. I have never given it a proper standalone review. Till now.
Getting started
If you feel enthused, you might power on your distro’s software manager and try to install Minitube. Don’t. The chances are, most distros won’t have the latest version, and you might end up with an older edition that does not have all the good stuff, and worse, might come with a broken API. This is what happened to me in Linux Mint. All of the Ubuntu-based distributions ship with an outdated version.
I fully understand why this is the case, but then, anyone trying Minitube and not keen on using unofficial channels or direct downloads will be utterly disappointed. The distro’s default package simply does not work. It comes with an old, buggy, crash-prone interface, missing features, and it cannot stream anything, because it’s using ancient code that cannot sync with Google’s servers anymore, throwing errors like:
410 "Error downloading http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos/?v=2&max-results=10&start-index=1&q=crockett's%20theme - server replied: Gone" 299
Instead, you ought to go for whatever’s on the official site. Ignore the package manager warnings.
Getting underway
If you follow my advice, you will get the new, revamped, fresh version with a smarter interface, better logic, and more features, including three, rather than two, categories. Namely, you have search, category browse and subscriptions. The search is exactly what you have in mind, the subscriptions are self-explanatory, too. The browse function is quite cool, as it displays the search categories as tiles, somewhat like TV channels or whatnot. Really neat.
Tubing around
Minitube is very simple and straightforward to use. Search for what you like, hit Play. The end.
If you have auto-play enabled, you won’t even have to do that. You also get recommendations for the currently playing videos, you can tweak the video resolution, take snapshots, create playlists, and other fancy things. It runs and behaves like a standard media app.
Other perks of using Minitube is you don’t get ads – at least I didn’t see any, and you can still do all the Youtubey stuff you normally would. You can fine tune your search, share videos, and such. All this from the comfort of your desktop. Not that using any one program is different than using a browser, but you get the idea.
Another perk of continued use is that you don’t have to be signed in to have a sort of personalized history. The main interface will list your keywords, so you will know what you’ve seen. Combine that with playlists, and you’re good to go.
The one bug that I encountered is that the window auto-scaling works in a weird way. It will not only scale the interface but also the clip, so you might think resizing Minitube might help you get more clip information in the sidebar on the left, but it will also change your view port, which can be annoying. Usually, you will have to extend the player horizontally, quite a bit, and then sort of find the right aspect ratio with the best video real estate.
Conclusion
Minitube is a really neat little application. Normally, I am opposed to software that merely gives you the same information like the origin only with a different presentation layer, however, this program pulls it off without being an abnoxious, in-your-face, over-the-top, yet-another-modern-wonder software purely designed to show everyone how amazing the developer is. It is really useful and practical for those keen on watching lots of Youtube, not seeing ads, and not having to sign in to Google to retain some level of history and personalization.
Once I got past the old-new package problem, Minitube behaved well. It was stable, it did not crash or stall or hiccup, the performance was reasonable, the usability model is quite good, and the interface is simple and inviting. You don’t get too much, just the right dose of necessary buttons and options to give you what you need without overwhelming you. I have to say I like it. Sure, it’s not on my top 10 list, it won’t cure cancer, but for what it does, it’s pretty good. Also cross-platform. Worth checking out.
Enjoy.
Cover Image: Living Room by Michael Schwarzenberger for FreeImages.com.Washington doesn’t negotiate. It demands. John Kerry saying he’s willing to engage with Russia and Assad on Syria is smoke screen deception. Claiming the need for a political solution belies America’s rage for war.
Washington undermined Geneva I and II talks despite Russia’s best efforts. Longstanding US plans call for regime change.
Days after 9/11, retired General Wesley Clark visited then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon “No one will tell us where or when to bomb”, he was told. Military commanders said Iraq would be attacked.
On a second visit, Clark was told plans were to “destroy the governments in seven countries,” he explained. Besides ongoing war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran would be targeted.
As a brigadier general in 1991, Clark met with then Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz after Operation Desert Storm. He was told America planned multiple premeditated wars – intending to destabilize and redraw the Middle East, changing its configuration under US-controlled puppet regimes.
“We can use our military anywhere in the Middle East and the Soviets won’t stop us,” Wolfowitz explained. “And we’ve got about five or 10 years to clean out those old Soviet client regimes.” He named Syria, Iran, Iraq and other countries – calling multiple wars essential “before the next great superpower comes along to challenge us.”
In his book, “Winning Modern Wars,” Clark discussed what’s explained above. Did Congress debate it, he asked? Did presidents explain it? Did America’s media report it? “Was there a full-fledged (public discussion)? Absolutely not, and there still isn’t.”
In his new book, titled “The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire,” Julian Assange explained US plans to topple Assad way preceded the so-called 2011 Arab Spring.
A 2006 cable from former Washington consular section chief in Damascus William Roebuck discussed plans to oust Assad, saying:
…That plan was to use a number of different factors to create paranoia within the Syrian government; to push it to overreact, to make it fear there’s a coup…so in theory it says “(w)e have a problem with Islamic extremists crossing over the border with Iraq, and we’re taking actions against them to take this information and make the Syrian government look weak, the fact that it is dealing with Islamic extremists at all.’
Key was
“foster(ing) tensions between Shiites and Sunnis. In particular, to take rumors that are known to be false…or exaggerations and promote them – that Iran is trying to convert poor Sunnis, and to work with Saudi and Egypt to foster that perception in order to make it harder for Iran to have influence, and also harder for the government to have influence in the population.”
Nothing American officials say is credible. Longstanding US plans call for toppling all independent governments. Assad must go remains unchanged US policy.
Washington shuns political solutions. They require comprises.
The Obama administration’s alleged willingness to negotiate with Russia and Assad on resolving Syria’s conflict conceals its real objective – regime change by any means possible.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at[email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”
http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.
It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.JUNE 30th
On this day in history in 1933, was born Derek Bentley.
Bentley was a petty criminal who was convicted and hanged for a murder committed by his associate. His case became a cause célèbre, and he was eventually pardoned posthumously.
Derek William Bentley was born on 30th June 1933 at London. He had a difficult childhood, being injured in the London Blitz and developing epilepsy, possibly as a consequence of his injury. He had limited intelligence, prison psychologists later said that he had a mental age of 11, and he never learnt to read. When he left school, he was unable to find employment and turned to petty crime.
On 2nd November 1952, accompanied by Christopher Craig, aged 16, he attempted to break into a warehouse in Croydon. He and Craig were seen entering the premises and the police were alerted. When the police arrived, they searched the building and found the two youths on the roof. A constable grabbed Bentley and placed him under arrest, at which point, Craig produced a revolver. As the constable tried to persuade Craig to hand over the weapon, Bentley shouted out "Let him have it, Chris". Craig opened fire, grazing the constable on the shoulder. When a further group of police arrived on the roof, Craig fired again, killing one of the constables and, having exhausted his ammunition, attempted to escape but fell 30 feet from the roof, fracturing his spine.
Bentley and Craig were brought to trial at the Old Bailey, on charges of murder. Even if convicted of murder, Craig could not face execution as he was below the statutory age of 18. Bentley, on the other hand, could be hanged if convicted, even though he had not fired the shot. The prosecution made much of the fact that Bentley had exclaimed "Let him have it”, a slang expression of the time, popular in gangster movies, meaning ‘shoot him’. The defence protested that Bentley had meant ‘hand over the weapon’. Prosecution witnesses testified that Bentley, although retarded, was of sound mind and, at that time, the concept of diminished responsibility was not recognised under English law. The jury took an hour and a quarter to find both defendants guilty. Craig was ordered to be detained at Her Majesty's Pleasure, he was released after 10 years, and Bentley was sentenced to death.
Bentley's lawyers filed appeals against conviction but these were dismissed. They appealed to the Home Secretary for a mitigation of sentence to life imprisonment but were rebuffed. On 28th January 1953, Bentley was hanged at Wandsworth Prison.
There followed a long campaign to obtain a posthumous pardon. The campaigners argued that as Bentley had not fired the shot, he was not a murderer, and as it had not been proved that he had encouraged Craig to fire, he was not complicit in murder. Furthermore, Bentley had not known that Craig was armed and therefore he was not even party to armed robbery and could not even be convicted of manslaughter. On 29th July 1993, after much deliberation by the Home Office, Bentley was granted a royal pardon in respect of the death sentence, but not exonerated of murder. In 1998, the Court of Appeal set aside the conviction for murder, as the court ruled that for a conviction to stand it must be proved that Bentley had known that his accomplice was armed, because if he was not aware of the fact, he could not have willingly participated in an adventure likely to result in murder.
Previous day Next dayA rare first edition of the 300-year-old book in which the entomologist, artist and explorer Maria Sibylla Merian details the insects of Suriname is expected to fetch up to £120,000 when it is auctioned at Sotheby’s on Tuesday.
Showing exquisitely detailed images of the plants, insects, spiders, butterflies and amphibians of Suriname at the turn of the 18th century, Merian’s Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium caused a sensation when it was published in 1705, with George III acquiring her work for the royal collection. Sotheby’s said it was “one of the most important natural history books of the period”, with very few studies of insects having been done previously, and Merian one of the first naturalists to observe them directly, as well as one of the first female scientific explorers.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from one of Maria Sibylla Merian’s illustrations in Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium
Merian, who was born in 1647 in Germany and whose image adorned the 500-deutschmark note until the introduction of the euro, was “very much ahead of her time”, said Cecilie Gasseholm at Sotheby’s. As a child, she collected insects for the artwork of her stepfather, the still-life painter Jacob Marrel, and became fascinated by entomology, going on to start her own caterpillar collection. Marrel taught her to paint, and as an 18-year-old she married one of his pupils. She published her first book, about the insects of Europe, in 1679.
She later divorced her husband and, inspired by a collection of insects from Suriname, set out with her daughter Dorothea for South America in September 1699. She would stay for almost two years, recording the insects and plants of the region for what would eventually become the work up for auction this week. Malaria then forced her to return to Amsterdam, and she died a pauper.
“Merian and her daughter stayed for nearly two years studying and recording the plants and insects, the results of their labours being the magnificent Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium,” said Gasseholm. “She took a great interest in the metamorphosis and life cycles of insects, something that was largely unknown at that time. She also understood that there was a correlation between species and the particular plants for feeding – a connection she showed in her artwork.”
Sotheby’s said that Merian’s journey to Suriname “was possibly the first time ever that anyone had set out on a journey solely for the purposes of science … The pictures are brilliantly fun and full of personality. At times they verge on gruesome: one shows a frog being devoured by water bugs,” it added.
The book, a first edition of the Dutch text, has been in a private collection until now. The auction house, which will offer the volume with a guide price of £80,000 to £120,000, said that only five copies of the Dutch text edition have been auctioned since 1983.Pursuit OCR is an indoor obstacle course boasting features like a massive ball pit, epic Tron-like lighting, and a one-of-a-kind track for tricycle racing.
Since moving from its original location on Dufferin the course has expanded to three times the size, going from 9,300 square-feet to a whopping 33,000 space.
It's officially the largest obstacle course in Canada, but you'd never know it from the unassuming facade of its building off Albion Road.
You'll have to sign up at the front desk and sign an extensive waiver on an iPad before heading into the main area. There are no reservations here; it's all drop-in, and it costs $20 per person for all-day play.
Once you've done all that, you'll be permitted to enter—past the free arcade section with games like Skee-Ball—to the sprawling course decked out with a plethora of glowing neon light structures and over 22 obstacles to explore.
Aside from the fact that all the obstacles here look incredible, the great thing about OCR is that it's completely accessible and can be fun for people of all physical skill levels.
Owner Wil McLean has dreamt up a crazy playground that, despite being an 18+ space, is perfect for large numbers of friends, families, and corporate groups who would rather eschew the usual activities like drinking for healthier ways of having fun.
Collaborating with a team of builders and lighting engineers, the entire course was completed in just six months.
The esthetic is more futuristic than the original rendition, and visitors can spend as much time hanging out in the photogenic place as they do scaling the course.
You'll find the usual American Ninja Warrior-style courses like ramps and hanging rings suspending over pits of foam blocks to soften any fall, giving your forearms the most intense workout you'll get of your life.
There's no necessary sequence to complete the obstacles in, though there is a natural order you can follow to get through the whole thing.
It can take over two hours to complete the course at a leisurely pace, unless you're trying to finish the whole thing in record time, which currently stands at just two minutes and 39 seconds.
You'll feel like a big kid running climbing through the Die Hard-inspired Nakatomi Plaza tube or falling down the 20-foot giant slide covered in fluorescent paint.
And you'll have to channel your best Catherine Zeta Jones a la Entrapment to manoeuvre through the laser maze (a room strung with neon ropes) or bring out your competitive side while racing through the 1,500-pound forest of punching bags.
OCR Pursuit is home to one of the biggest ball pits to date: at four and a half feet deep, it's a real workout to make it out of the depths of over 100,000 balls.
It's safe to swan dive into, just make sure not to lose your shoes.
But the best part about the entire place is the drift tricycle race track, a Mario Kart-esque track that stretched three football fields from end to end and runs underneath the obstacle course.
You can race your friends on these little pedal-powered tricycles, which you won't be able to find anywhere else in the world, according to McLean.
Easily one of the most entertaining places in the city, Pursuit OCR is a must-visit for those who want to feel like a kid again.PA500
© 1981, 1997 by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., Covenant Media Foundation, 800/553-3938
Let God Be True: A Brief Defense of the Christian Faith
by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr.
"Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar.
As it is written:
That You may be justified in Your words,
And may overcome when You are judged."
(Romans 3:4)
God calls upon Christians to "sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear" (1 Pet. 3:!5). As we obey him we must defend the faith in such a way that it "sanctifies the Lord" in our hearts. We must defend the faith from a position of faith. Too many defenses of the faith cede the method of approach to the unbeliever and end up "proving" at best the possibility that a god exists — not the certainty that the God of Scripture exists.
Let us see how we may do this.
The Role of Presuppositions in Thought
The Uniformity of Nature and Thought
We exist in what is known as a "universe." The word "universe" is composed of two parts: the first part, "uni," means "unit, one." The second part, verse," indicates "diversity, varying parts." By this it is meant that we live in a single unified and orderly system which is composed of many diversified parts. These parts function coordinately together as a whole, rational system. We do not live in a "multiverse". A multiverse state-of-affairs would be a dis-unified, totally fragmented, and random assortment of disconnected and unconnectable facts. These unconnectable facts would be meaninglessly scattered about in chaotic disarray and ultimate disorder.
This concept is vitally important to science. For the very possibility of scientific investigation is totally dependent upon the fact of a "uni-verse" — an orderly, rational and coherent system. If it were the case that reality were haphazard and disorderly there could be no basic scientific laws that governed and controlled various phenomena. And if this were the case there could not be any unity at all in either reality itself, or in experience, or in thought.
In such a multiverse each and every single fact would necessarily stand alone, utterly disconnected from other facts, not forming a system as a whole. Consequently, nothing could be organized and related in a mind because no fact would be related to any other fact. Thus, science, logic, and experience are absolutely dependent upon uniformity as a principle of the natural world.
Uniformity and Faith
But now the question must be raised: How do we know assuredly that the universe is in fact uniform? Has man investigated every single aspect of the universe from each one of its smallest atomic particles to the farthest |
permit the following: slashing the throats of stunned yet conscious animals and letting them bleed to death; driving an electrocution rod up the animal’s rectum in order to cause a grand mal seizure; and poison gas and suffocation, which can send the animal into violent seizures for the last several minutes of his life. If any of these practices were inflicted on human beings, we would consider them — not just cruelty and abuse — but torture and even genocide, if performed on the massive scale of animal agriculture. If any of these practices were inflicted on our companion dogs or cats, the perpetrators could be criminally prosecuted on felony cruelty charges. If it is wrong to abuse humans and companion animals in these ways, then it is equally wrong to inflict these abuses on farmed animals.
It’s okay to eat animal as long as we honor them for their sacrifice.
The concept of sacrifice has its roots in the earliest recorded civilizations. And even though we no longer practice the ancient rituals of animal sacrifice (with the exception of traditional societies), many modern day meat-eaters insist on framing the slaughter of farmed animals as a case of animals “sacrificing” their lives for us. The self-congratulatory (and self-exonerating) rhetoric of “honoring” the animals we needlessly brutalize for food continues to paint animals as “giving” us their flesh, milk and eggs, as if bestowing upon us a gift, or as if to suggest milk and eggs just fall from trees like fruit.
Yet animals do not consent to being commodified, or to being engineered to produce milk and eggs at a far higher capacity than their bodies were designed for, or to being forced into captivity and confinement, or to being sexually violated to produce offspring, or to having their offspring taken from them, or to being killed against their will while in their youth. The psychology of sacrifice is based on our need to absolve ourselves from the guilt we feel for harming animals by assigning them a human-like ability to selflessly “gift” us their bodies and their lives. It is a disingenuous gesture.
Justifications Based on Personal Choice or Belief
What I eat is a personal choice! Don’t judge me and I won’t judge you!
There is actually a hidden judgment in the statement “Don’t judge.” If you claim that people should not be judged for eating animal products then you are simultaneously making the judgment that an animal’s entire lifetime of experiences is worth even less than satisfying some trivial, momentary taste sensation. This judgment is based on an entrenched prejudice against a handful of species that we just so happen to want to exploit and kill for food. There is no personal, neutral or morally relative position on eating animal products. If animals matter, then we don’t violate their right to life and liberty when we can so easily avoid it, such as in the case of replacing animal products with alternatives. And since 99.7% of the animals exploited by humans are those raised for food products we have no biological need to eat, this matters a great deal. For a more in-depth exploration of the subject, see our article, Why Eating Animals Cannot Be Considered a Personal Choice.
Vegans push their beliefs on others and turn others off.
If you care about animals and feel compelled to defend them, chances are you’ve come across knee-jerk accusations claiming you are “pushing your agenda,” forcing your ideas down their throat,” or “spreading propaganda.” So, why don’t other social justice advocates face the same accusations? It is very telling that human rights activists who campaign against violent and exploitative practices, such as sweatshop labor or sex trafficking, are rarely, if ever, criticized for pushing their beliefs on others. On the contrary, these activists are often lauded for their passion and commitment to justice and for exposing injustices. Read article…
The Bible says we have dominion over animals.
The Bible and religion in general have historically been used to justify rape, incest, infanticide, murder, war, racism, sexism, homophobia, slavery, and many other acts of violence, oppression and persecution. Does a Biblical or religious precedent make any of these actions less immoral? Of course not.
Instead of citing, for example, what Jesus was said to have possibly eaten in Biblical times, it would be far more relevant to ask, What would Jesus do today, if he lived in the age of industrialized agriculture where billions of animals are bred through artificial insemination, treated like mere commodities and processed like worthless pieces of meat — used and killed not from necessity, but just to satisfy our taste buds and to line the pockets of wealthy industrialists? Would he praise humankind for respecting his creations? Or would he instead invoke The Golden Rule? Would he not insist that, when given a choice between mercy and cruelty, a Christian is compelled to choose compassion over violence?
The scriptures of most world religions describe a golden age in which humans lived peaceably on earth without bloodshed. Many Biblical scholars have noted that in the creation story, the Bible quite plainly depicts a vegan world as the world God intended: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” (Gen. 1:29–31)
In Eden, all creatures lived peacefully, and God told both humans and animals to consume only plant foods. It was only when human sinfulness caused God to curse all creation that He said people would begin eating animals, and this killing was included in a catalog of suffering and tribulations that would henceforth mark the conditions of a downfallen existence. Christian vegans thus believe that human beings should strive toward the compassionate world God first envisioned, and live in accordance with the values of mercy and kindness at the heart of their faith.
Further reading:
Father Mann’s Journey to a Vegan Vision of Christianity
Would Jesus Eat Meat Today?
Christianity and a Vegan Diet: How I Reconcile Veganism with the Judeo-Christian Belief System
An Advent Reflection on God and Animal Cruelty
Compassionate Eating as Care for Creation
Miscellaneous Justifications
But you feed your cats and dogs meat; that’s not vegan!
Dogs are not obligate carnivores, and in fact much of the scientific literature classifies them as omnivores. Regardless, dogs can and do easily thrive on a properly formulated vegan diet, and this can be accomplished by feeding them a ready-made vegan dog food, of which several brands exist, or preparing a whole foods vegetable diet for them that includes things like rice, sweet potatoes or carrots, lentils, and other veggies many dogs love, along with any needed supplements. Read more…
Everyone eats animal products. It’s just the way things are. You’re never going to change that.
Whenever we base an argument on an appeal to the mob mentality, we commit a logical fallacy that concludes something is true simply because a critical mass of people believe it to be true. But what happens when we think critically for ourselves and see through what we’re told is normal? Social psychologist Melanie Joy perhaps says it best:
“It’s just the way things are. Take a moment to consider this statement. Really think about it. We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no other reason than because it’s the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors towards animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. It is absurd that we eat pigs and love dogs and don’t even know why. Many of us spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of don’t spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion animals per year in the United States alone. If we choose to support this industry and the best reason we can come up with is because it’s the way things are, clearly something is amiss.”
To explore Joy’s work more in depth, check out her excellent presentation on carnism. Finally, keep in mind that every social justice movement has been met with the same resistance, particularly in the beginning phases, with naysayers claiming “people will never change.” For example, the abolitionists were often ridiculed and even threatened with violence and death by their critics, who claimed they would never succeed at abolishing slavery. But indeed they did.
Vegans kill more animals than meat eaters.
Absolutely inaccurate. In the last several years, a number of scholarly and non scholarly arguments have gained traction by claiming that if vegans factor in the amount of animals killed in the harvesting of plant crops, they would find that vegan and vegetarian diets result in a greater number of animals killed than diets based on pasture-raised animals. We have two excellent articles to refute this claim, Comparing Animal Deaths in Production of Plant and Animal Foods and Why Plant Crops Don’t Kill More Wildlife than Pasture Raised Animals.
Animals don’t know what’s happening to them when they are raised and slaughtered.
If you were unaware of your murderer’s premeditated intention to kill you before he shot you point blank in the head, and you felt little or no pain or suffering before the life was snuffed out of you, would this make the murderer’s act any less immoral? Farmed animals are highly aware and sentient. They clearly demonstrate their interests, likes, dislikes, needs and desires. Indeed, animals will fight for their lives — and for the lives of their offspring — and even for the lives of members of their extended social group, as vociferously as we would fight for our own lives. Our cats and dogs yearn for our attention and affection and bond with us. Farmed animals who have learned to trust us will often similarly bond with us. Also like cats and dogs, cows, pigs, turkeys and chickens clearly display depression, frustration, anger, hostility, fear and despair when we deny them the conditions that allow them to freely express themselves, as is the case on farms. Even under the highest welfare standards, most or all of farmed animals’ fundamental interests are denied. And a violent and undignified end to their abbreviated life is the inevitable outcome. For a visceral example of how dearly animals wish to live, check out this video of a cow in line at a slaughterhouse who tries to escape the kill chute.
Humans are more important than animals.
Whether humans are more subjectively important to us than other animals is not relevant to our unnecessary exploitation of billions of animals for food. The fact is, we force animals to suffer unnecessarily for no other reason than our palate pleasure. At the same time, we say that we believe, as a general principle, that it is wrong to cause unnecessary harm and suffering to animals. We oppose such things as dog fighting and whale hunting. We are outraged by the story of a teenager who tortured and killed his cat for kicks. But opposing one case of needless animal suffering means opposing all cases of needless animal suffering. Opposing violence and exploitation of human victims means opposing the same, unequivocally, for non-human victims who share the same fundamental capacity for suffering. To act consistently on this belief means to adopt a vegan lifestyle. Read more on why the claim of human superiority doesn’t justify doing whatever we want to animals.
Why care about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world?
A common reaction to animal advocates is that we only care about animals or care more about animals than humans. So this post is about evaluating this kind of reaction and suggesting constructive ways of responding to it. The underlying belief that drives this fabricated conflict between humans and other animals is the denial that humans are in fact animals themselves. Read on
A vegan diet is elitist, a luxury that only some can afford.
Check out the book, Eat Vegan on $4 a Day, to learn how easy it is to eat vegan on a restricted budget. Grains and legumes have served as the staple crops of civilizations around the world since the domestication of agriculture around 10,000 B.C. Up until very recently, animal products such as meat, cheese, milk and eggs were cost prohibitive, a “luxury” only the more affluent could afford. With the industrial revolution, the production of animal products began to escalate as a result of new mass feeding, transport and slaughter technologies. Increased efficiency combined with heavy government subsidies to animal agriculture pushed the price of animal products down to unprecedented lows that almost anyone could afford. Today, American taxpayers currently pay $38 billion annually to fund the government’s corporate welfare programs (subsidies) to the highly-profitable meat and dairy industries, according to the book Meatonomics. Author Dave Simon points out that “animal food producers impose almost $2 in hidden costs on Americans for every $1 of product they sell at retail.” In his analysis, “A $5 Big Mac would cost $13 if the retail price included hidden expenses that meat producers offload onto society.” (See pie chart above for further details.)
But some animals are harmed and killed in the production of plant foods.
Yes, but the detrimental impact to animals from a vegan diet is astronomically less compared to raising and killing animals for food. Veganic agriculture employs no till harvesting that reduces harm to rodents and other small animals. And while millions of animals are legally killed every year to protect conventional agriculture via traps, poisons, pesticides, and other licensed forms of extermination, veganic farming practices can help to restore biodiversity of plants and animals by creating wildlife habitats. Encouraging diverse plant, animal and insect species makes it less likely that any single species will dominate an area and cause serious crop damage. Techniques such as companion planting, beetle banks and hedge cultivation can be used to maintain the balance of potentially competing animals.
It’s impossible to be 100% vegan so why even try?
Even non-vegans already believe that the world would be a better place with less suffering. It is not hypocritical to hold a belief in veganism and yet be unable to avoid all products and by-products of animal exploitation because of circumstances well outside of our control, just as it is impossible for someone who opposes slavery to avoid all of the products and outcomes derived from the institution of slavery, like the roads we still drive on or the battles that were fought with slave soldiers.
The perfect is the enemy of the good, as has been often noted. Perfection is not the goal of veganism. Vegans seek to abolish the enslavement and exploitation of nonhuman animals. Human exploitation of animals is the most widespread, gratuitous and needless form of animal suffering and death on the planet, and we can end it simply by making a few adjustments to our diet and lifestyle. Vegans simply stop buying meat, dairy and eggs, foods containing animal-derived ingredients, and animal-based fabrics and accessories. Everything else — all the secondary by-products and ingredients that can be found in such things as adhesives and cosmetics — exists only because of the slaughterhouse industry, which exists only because of consumer demand for meat, dairy and eggs.
The notion that it’s impossible to be 100% vegan, so why try? implies that if we cannot raise food without harming anyone, then we might as well raise and kill whatever we want. So if perfection is not obtainable, then let’s throw out ethics (including intention) all together. This just becomes a reductive, “all or nothing” justification for doing whatever we want, and it negates what we say we already believe, that less suffering is better even if we can’t eliminate it completely. By going vegan, you will not become perfect or even cruelty-free. But you’ll have reduced an enormous amount of suffering to innocent beings who have done nothing to you, just by making some simple dietary and lifestyle changes. To go more in depth on this topic, check out Charles Horn’s article, You Can’t Be 100% Vegan.It costs the Drug Enforcement Administration 60 bucks to get rid of one of these plants in Oregon. (Jim Mone/AP)
The Drug Enforcement Administration spent $960,000 to destroy marijuana plants in that state in 2014 as part of its "Cannabis Eradication Program," according to a recent report by NBC affiliate KGW in Portland, Ore.
That year, the DEA succeeded in removing 16,067 pot plants from Oregon, which at first blush sounds like a lot of weed. But when you do the math, that works out to a cost to taxpayers of $60 per uprooted plant. That is a lot when you consider that nationally, it costs the DEA *ahem* $4.20 to eliminate a single marijuana plant under this program.
The DEA has budgeted $760,000 in marijuana eradication funds for Oregon this year, according to KGW. Considering that marijuana is now legal in that state, many Oregonians — including some members of Congress — are questioning whether that's a sensible endeavor. They are trying to defund the federal anti-pot program that costs about $18 million a year overall.
The DEA defends the cannabis eradication program on the grounds that much of the marijuana grows it targets in Oregon and elsewhere are the products of Mexican drug cartel activity. "This program has proven effective in dismantling and disrupting drug trafficking organizations," DEA spokesperson Joseph Moses told KGW.
But some are skeptical, saying that federal authorities may be overstating the connection between Mexican cartels and marijuana operations in the United States. In 2012, the Office of National Drug Control Policy acknowledged that there wasn't much hard evidence connecting the cartels to marijuana grown in California. "Based on our intelligence, which includes thousands of cellphone numbers and wiretaps, we haven't been able to connect anyone to a major cartel," an ONDCP representative told the Los Angeles Times.
Some law enforcement officials in Oregon are dismantling their marijuana eradication programs, according to KGW's report. "I want to focus on person crimes," one sheriff told KGW. “Child abuse, sex assault, crimes against people."
Marijuana, of course, remains illegal under federal law.To study: 0 tomorrow | 0 this week | 0 next week
Click flashcard terms on the left to see their definitions.
All terms in this list:
diploid: Of a cell, having a pair of each type of chromosome, one of the pair being derived from the ovum and the other from the spermatozoon.
zygote: A fertilized egg cell.
lipid: Any of a group of organic compounds including the fats, oils, waxes, sterols, and triglycerides. They are, however, soluble in nonpolar organic solvents.
anabolic steroid: A class of steroid hormones that promote growth of tissue.
typhoid: An infectious bacterial fever with an eruption of red spots on the chest and abdomen and severe intestinal irritation
android: A robot that is designed to look and act like a human (usually male).
embroidery: The ornamentation of fabric using needlework.
lederhosen: knee-breeches made of leather
dickey: A detachable shirt front, collar or bib.
hip-huggers: Tight-fitting pants (trousers) with a waistline that rests on the hips
angler: A person who fishes with a hook and line.
bobber: A buoyant device (frequently made of cork) attached to a line so as to suspend the end of the line with the hook (and bait or lure) above the bottom.
entomologist: A scientist who studies insects
auger: A carpenter's tool for boring holes larger than those bored by a gimlet.
omega: The twenty-fourth, and last, letter of the Greek alphabet (Ω, ω), transliterated as ‘o’ or ‘ō.’
alpha: The name of the first letter of the Greek alphabet (Α, α), followed by beta. In the Latin alphabet it is the predecessor to A.
liver: A large organ in the body that stores and metabolizes nutrients, destroys toxins and produces bile. Responsible for thousands of biochemical reactions.
Dixie: The southern United States; the South.
ditty bag: A small bag used to carry one's personal effects or toiletries while traveling.
attaché: A diplomatic officer, usually one who plays a specific role.
footlocker: A long, rectangular trunk or similar container that lays flat on the floor and is usually kept at the foot of a bed, commonly used in barracks and dormitories.
saddlebag: one of a pair of covered pouches laid across the back of a horse behind the saddle or hanging over the rear wheel of a bicycle or motorcycle
hatbox: A piece of luggage for a hat; a case or box for a hat.
coriander: An aromatic Mediterranean plant of the parsley family, the leaves and seeds of which are used as culinary herbs
checkerberry: A creeping evergreen North American shrub of the heath family, with spiny scented leaves and waxy white flowers
celluloid: Any of a variety of thermoplastics created from nitrocellulose and camphor, once used as photographic film.
iodine: A chemical element (symbolI) with an atomic number of 53; one of the halogens.
goitre: An enlargement of the front and sides of the neck caused by inflammation of the thyroid gland.
lozenge: A small medicinal tablet, originally of this shape, taken for sore throats and dissolved in the mouth
bozo: A stupid or foolish person.
Gandalf: A male given name known in history, and in the books of Tolkien, but not usually bestowed on children.
yellowhammer: A native or resident of the American state of Alabama.
settee: A long seat with a back, -- made to accommodate several persons at once.
gooseberries: A round edible yellowish-green or reddish berry with a thin translucent hairy skin
sonneteer: A writer of sonnets.
barrette: A clasp or clip for gathering and holding the hair.
wombat: A burrowing plant-eating Australian marsupial that resembles a small bear with short legs
opossum: An American marsupial that has a ratlike prehensile tail and hind feet with an opposable thumb
foley: Relating to or concerned with the addition of recorded sound effects after the shooting of a film
dolly: A small platform on wheels used for holding heavy objects, typically film or television cameras
ablution: The act of washing oneself (often used for humorously formal effect)
minaret: A tall slender tower, typically part of a mosque, with a balcony from which a muezzin calls Muslims to prayer
Muhammad: The prophet who founded Islam.
Mecca: A city in Saudi Arabia, the holiest place in Islam, location of the sacred Ka'ba, and to which Muslims are required to make a hajj at least once in their lifetime.
kudos: Praise; accolades.
Khrushchev: Soviet statesman and premier who denounced Stalin (1894-1971)
shotgun shack: A house with no internal barrier between the front and back doors.
stucco: A plaster that is used to coat interior or exterior walls, or used for mouldings.
Pamplona: A city in Navarre of northern Spain famous for the running of the bulls.
Alamo: An infamous fort in San Antonio, Texas, USA.
cotillion: A bold dance performed in groups of eight where ladies lift their skirts to display their ankles!
jitterbug: A fast dance popular in the 1940s, performed chiefly to swing music
on the mend: Healing or recovering, as from an injury or illness.
on the lam: Running away, usually from the police; on the run.
on the fence: undecided; wavering in one's opinion
on the wagon: Abstaining from drinking any alcoholic drink, usually in the sense of having given it up (as opposed to never having partaken).In the spring of 2010, a small group of entrepreneurs set out to change urban transportation across the United States. They began with a single modest system in Denver, and the concept has since expanded to more than 60 U.S. cities, including nine of the ten largest. In New York City, its biggest market, the system gets well over a million customer visits a month during peak season.
If this were a startup, it would be a private equity darling. The CEO would be on the cover of Fast Company, praised as a bold, visionary captain of industry. It would be celebrated and debated for how it’s changing the fabric of urban American life.
But this is not Uber. In fact, it’s not even a company. We’re talking about bike-share programs: fleets of public rental bikes in a network of stations across a city or community that anyone can pay to use. But while Uber is hailed as a success (if a controversial one), conversations about bike shares happen at the local, rather than national, level.
In part, that’s because Uber is a single, for-profit company with a clearly defined goal: increasing profit. Bike-share programs, however, are typically run by nonprofits and have varied missions, ranging from reducing traffic congestion and pollution to improving public health to attracting tourists. Just because the programs have enormous collective reach doesn’t mean they’re successful. A program that works in one city doesn’t mean it will in another. The question: What metrics should we use to determine whether the concept itself is a success?
A good place to start is to look at the three major factors that Zoe Kircos, director of grants and partnerships for advocacy group People for Bikes, says are the primary goals of bike sharing: reducing traffic congestion, boosting public health, and increasing mobility.
A 2015 study in Transport Reviews looked at systems in five cities, including Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, and found that users substituted rides via bike shares for car trips 8 percent of the time in D.C. and almost 20 percent of the time in Minneapolis. A separate study on D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare found that it contributed a modest but noticeable 2 to 3 percent reduction in traffic congestion. And a 2014 report from the NYC Department of Transportation found that even though some traffic lanes were converted to protected bike lanes on various streets, travel times for car traffic remained steady or improved: on Eighth Avenue, they were 14 percent faster, for example.
More people on bikes translates to not only less traffic congestion but also more physical activity: in excess of 23,000 hours in Minneapolis just in 2012, according to the 2015 study. Additionally, a report on London’s massive bike-share system found injury rates for bike-share users were lower than those for regular cyclists. In the U.S., there has been one bike-share rider death in the system’s seven-year history. By contrast, roughly 700 cyclists die each year on America’s roads. (There is no known cause for that disparity.) According to the same London study, even when injury rates and pollution exposure were balanced against physical activity, bike shares have a modest but net positive effect on overall public health by virtue of the physical activity. And a recent study of New York’s Citi Bike program in BMJ’s journal Injury Prevention found that the city’s addition of bike lanes, crucial to Citi Bike’s success, increased lifespan even among nonusers because of the reduction in pollution.
However, bike shares still come under attack. Much of that criticism has focused on the use of public funding, or the idea that tax dollars are used for bike-share programs instead of roads or other services that more residents use on a daily basis. But that argument relies on two faulty assumptions: that bike shares aren’t a public good and that taxpayer money is a significant source of their funding.
There are three general structural models for funding bike shares—publicly owned (like London’s Santander Cycles), public-private partnership (like B-Cycle systems), and fully private (like NYC’s Citi Bike). Those that use public funding often use just a small slice of taxpayer-derived money in their total operating budgets and rely primarily on other sources of income, like corporate sponsorship and rider fees.
An analysis by People for Bikes, a leading organization that advocates for new and safe bike infrastructure, found that public investment in Salt Lake City’s Greenbike and the B-Cycle Denver program, on a per-trip basis, was far less than traditional public transit like bus or rail in those same cities. Both Greenbike and B-Cycle Denver’s public funding subsidies amount to 10 percent or less of total trip cost. By contrast, Salt Lake’s bus and rail system, called UTA, relies on 80 percent public funding per trip. Denver’s equivalent RTD network is tax-funded at more than 70 percent per trip. Not only are bike shares achieving statistically measurable improvements in traffic congestion and public health, they’re doing so at negligible cost to taxpayers.
But there are issues yet to be resolved, particularly when it comes to reaching minorities and low-income communities. Initially, “marketing was targeted toward people who use bike shares a lot: typically a white, upper-class, male user,” says Kircos. Despite a few encouraging trends (female ridership has increased in San Francisco, and a substantial number of low-income Philadelphians who use the system do so for recreation), the majority of riders in many cities still fit that mold. Which points to a sad truth about programs: they don’t always reflect the cities where they operate.
Critics have dinged programs for not reaching more low-income communities. Kate Fillin-Yeh, who helped launch Citi Bike and now directs the bike-share program at the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), said she attended some 400 community meetings to try to understand how to integrate Citi Bike into the city’s transportation structure and reach a diverse array of neighborhoods. “We talked with community boards, block associations, churches, everyone,” she says.
Despite an effort to make sure that stations were located within a quarter-mile or shorter walk from most NYC Housing Authority campuses, a 2015 study from NACTO bluntly stated that New York City’s Citi Bike program has “underperformed” with its discounted membership program, which was aimed at increasing ridership among low-income residents. Some 80 percent of study respondents reported they did not know about the discount, and although officials envisioned the program partly as a transportation solution, more than 50 percent of the study respondents who had used Citi Bike used it for recreation instead of as a replacement for another form of transit.
Several high-profile failures have also skewed the conversation: Washington, D.C.’s first bike-share system, BikeShare DC, suffered low use rates (in part due to limited stations) and was shuttered in 2011. Bixi Montreal, an early bike share operator that grew into a provider of hardware and technology services to other systems, also went bankrupt in 2014 (although the hardware and service side was subsequently sold off and now operates as PBSC). These failures have allowed developers to realize that bike-share programs work best at “scale and density,” according to NACTO’s Fillin-Yeh. In other words, they’ll be successful when they’re crafted specifically to the communities they serve. What works for New York City doesn’t translate to a midsize Midwestern town. A key component is station density: there have to be enough stations close together so riders can use bikes for, say, short errands in addition to major commutes. “The idea that you can put down a couple of stations across a city and see how it goes, as a pilot, is ludicrous,” says Fillin-Yeh.
Greenbike is a good example of a system that focused on density over scale. While Salt Lake City is far smaller than New York City, the initial station map was clustered in the downtown core. “We didn’t have enough funds to start with 30 stations, so we did ten and focused on the central business district,” says Greenbike founder Ben Bolte. After three years of strategic expansions, it’s the second-densest system in the country, behind Citi Bike.
Bike-share operators are trying to encourage broader use by adapting payment models that are more open and flexible. Originally, bike shares were built on memberships, with annual fees or pricey day-use passes that discouraged use by groups like low-income users and tourists, for example. Today, bike-share operators are moving to simpler and less-costly pay-per-ride options and, in cities like Los Angeles, even integrating payment and membership with existing public transit cards.
“The hardware is fully integrated, and it’s seamless,” says Brian Conger, national director of operations for B-Cycle. “That’s really where the market is going. If we can provide users with that option, maybe bike shares are the perfect way for them to get downtown after taking the light rail in from where they live. Transit is an ecosystem, and bike shares are part of that.”
So, is the concept of bike share as a whole a success? It’s hard to tell. Bike shares operate on a city-to-city basis, with innumerable unique factors affecting each system. Despite some imperfections, there are very few arguments from users, researchers, or advocates that a bike-share system is bad for a city. But to better quantify the role it plays in the United States, we simply need more frequent and rigorous data and analysis, like the London study. Interest as a research subject has grown along with the systems themselves, a path that will likely continue.
Bike shares benefit their cities in small, varying, and sometimes imperfect ways. Such cautious and incremental gains aren’t the stuff of bold headlines. But they’re small because the idea doesn’t need a complete rethink. Perhaps that’s because the original idea itself was pretty radical. In fact, maybe it’s not really about bikes at all. We get excited about emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles (which Uber is pursuing) or Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, but bike shares are at once a low-tech, low-cost solution that’s available right now. And they have fundamentally altered how people get around a city. In that sense, it’s no less revolutionary than any new technology.
Think about it, says Kircos, “How often does a city get to launch an entirely new transportation option?”On March 29 The Guardian pointed out that although Hillary Clinton is running on a gun control platform in 2016, she ran against excessive gun control in 2008.
In 2008 Clinton’s opponent was Barack Obama, and she was critical of his hard line gun control positions.
According to The Guardian, Clinton’s 2008 campaign focused on “[running] to the right of Obama on guns, criticizing him for being out of touch with the tens of thousands of Americans who own firearms and use them responsibly.” But this time around, Clinton’s campaign is anchored on a gun control push that seeks to outdo Democrat rival Bernie Sanders in every facet.
For example, Clinton is campaigning on allowing crime victims to sue gun makers and gun sellers for gun crimes. She is pushing universal background checks–which already exist in California, Colorado, Washington state, and Paris–and which have proven impotent to stop determined attackers. She is pushing to extend the instant criminal background check for gun purchases so that it is an indefinite background check, and she wants more rules and regulations on gun shows.
On October 16 Clinton even said that the Australian gun confiscation scheme was “worth looking at” for the U.S.
During the November 14 Democrat debate, Martin O’Malley looked at Clinton and said, “When you ran in 2000 you said that we needed federal robust [gun control] regulations. Then, in 2008, you were portraying yourself as Annie Oakley and saying that we don’t need those regulations on the federal level. And now you come back around here [to gun control].”
O’Malley said Clinton’s changing gun control stance demonstrates her habit of “leading by polls” rather than “leading by principle.”
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.The European Space Agency (ESA) says its comet-circling Rosettta probe will try to make contact with the Philae lander starting Thursday.
In case you've come in late, this story starts in 2004 when the ESA sent a craft called Rosetta in the direction of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta's payload included Philae, a lander intended to set leg upon, and study, the comet.
Rosetta arrived last year, entered orbit and then dropped Philae. But Philae's harpoons failed to operate as expected, the lander bounced and came to rest in a spot where its solar panels could not see the sun. While the lander was able to run its basic tests and beam back data, without solar top-ups it soon ran out of power. ESA boffins therefore put it into sleep mode.
The ESA's hoped that Comet 67P would eventually rotate enough that sunlight would beam down upon Philae and that the lander would reactivate.
As explained in a new post “As soon as Philae ‘realises’ that it is receiving more than 5.5 watts of power and its internal temperature is above –45°C, it will turn on, heat up further and attempt to charge its battery.
The agency now says it thinks the time is right to ask Philae how it's doing, because it thinks the “Philae currently receives about twice as much solar energy as it did in November last year,” according to lander project manager Stephan Ulamec from the German Aerospace Center.
Starting March 12th, Rosetta will therefore start sending “wake up” commands to Philae at times it's thought the lander should be in sunlight. Mission control doesn't know exactly where Philae came to rest, but hopes that telling it to wake up will see its other programming kick in so that it sends out an automated health report.
Rosetta will try to contact Philae for eight days, especially during 11 orbits that take it close to the place the lander is thought to lie. ESA boffins don't sound optimistic that their efforts will succeed: the post about these new attempts mentions second tries. ®A recent UK high court ruling from a case brought by the British Phonographic Industry (the UK version of RIAA) means that The Pirate Bay is now inaccessible from many ISPs, with BT and remaining ISPs set to follow suit in the weeks to come. It’s a similar case in other European countries.
Unfortunately for the BPI, news of the forthcoming ban was reported on the BBC, resulting in a traffic spike of 12 million in one day – one can only assume that some people had no idea about the existence of Pirate Bay before the BPI decided to make such a big deal out of it. The long term effects of such a ban are simply to shift the usage of the site further underground, as would-be file-sharers seek out more secure ways to access the site and bypass that block.
On my Virgin Media connection, I see this.
I’m here to help though, so without further ado, here are 5 ways of bypassing those pesky ISP-level site filters.
The So-easy-it-hurts Method: Use The Pirateparty’s Mirror
After the success of the official political entity – the Pirate Party in Sweden – other European countries were quick to follow |
so happy being in a place where I feel different and free to make my own choices, to make friends without them judging me like everyone else does, and as an escape from my everyday troubles. My mum on the other hand tries to remove the games. This is basically taking away my little escape. My mum watches TV all day while I’m on the computer. I tell her that she is addicted to the TV and she says it’s her escape and I try to make a comparison but she doesn’t have any of it. She also mocks me and struggles to find how I find it fun to play games all day, but I struggle how she finds it entertaining to watch TV all day.” Get out of the house for serious conversations. Try going for a walk or a drive. This will create a safer environment where your loved one can focus. When at home all he or she will be thinking about is how quickly they can get out of the conversation to go back to their games. Put a little thought into an environment that will be conducive to having an honest conversation about your concern about their gaming. During this talk you can share what your experience of this situation is but I’d advise against any accusations (“you’re a gaming addict!”) or shaming (“you’re better than all of this.”) Don’t panic. Anxiety won’t help, so do your best to try to let go of it. When we’re anxious we tend to make impulsive decisions out of emotion, like cutting the Internet off or removing the computer from the house; this situation is too fragile for these sorts of actions. On top of that, if you feel anxious you will transfer that feeling to the gamer, and gaming is precisely how they escape from these kind of emotions. Be present. A common reason gaming becomes a problem is that somewhere along the way the gamer’s relationship changed from one of interaction to one of entertainment. The best thing you can do to help someone overcome a gaming addiction is to be present with them, without judgment, and spend time together having authentic interactions. Think of gaming like sugar. There’s a difference between your loved one wanting to game and their brain wanting to game, and modern games are designed to hook a gamer. This is an important distinction to make because understanding it will help your ability to empathize. Modern games are designed in a way where overexposure to them can cause structural changes to the brain. Think about gaming like you think of foods filled with sugar: If you have a lot of sugar, you will experience cravings and saying no to cravings is often very hard. Be patient: Recovery takes time. As I shared in #12, depending on the extent of their overexposure the gamer you love may experience structural changes to their brain. Research suggests it may take up to 90 days (or longer) of detox (meaning giving up games completely) for them to recover. Not only that, but as you can see, there are other factors at play (no pun intended), including social relationships, a sense of belonging and community, confidence and self-esteem. Be patient, as replacing these with new, healthier habits will take some time.
Bringing this advice together, you can approach your child or loved one with more clarity. It’s not easy but it is worth it. They will need supportive, encouraging people by their side to overcome an addiction to video gaming. You can be one of these crucial people for them. They may not thank you in the moment, but they will, eventually. I hope that this helps and if it does I’d love to hear from you.Apple is currently developing an original scripted drama set to star musician, mogul and actor Dr. Dre, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The project, called Vital Signs, stands as the tech company's first foray into TV programming.
The six-episode series will be semi-autobiographical, according to The Hollywood Reporter's sources, and will recount Dr. Dre's life amid a heavy dose of sex and violence. Sam Rockwell and Mo McCrae are also attached to the half-hour drama.
Whether the series will be exclusive to Apple's streaming device, Apple's streaming set-top box, is not yet known, but Apple will likely release Vital Signs through its Apple Music platform. The company will also make the entire season available at the same time, similar to Netflix's release methods.
Apple bought Beats, the music hardware company that Dr. Dre founded and lent his name to, in 2014; Dr. Dre now works at the company. In November, Apple shut down Beats Music in favor of its own music streaming service.
Apple's shown an interest in television in the past, even if it has yet to delve into the programming sphere. The Apple TV hardware currently offers a plethora of streaming services, including Apple Music. We looked into the latest iteration of the Apple TV's various streaming options when it launched last fall.Earlier this evening French magazine Tsugi admitted they made up the Daft Punk song Renoma Street. This ends vast speculation since they initially published the name as part of a compilation CD, supposedly being released with the next issue of the magazine.
The official release stated that the hoax was printed as a joke… “A pure creation, making fun of all the madness surrounding every (mainly false) news concerning the two robots.”
It’s a shame that reputable publications feel the need to cash in on the hype and make up stories to gain coverage.
Reaction has been fierce, but one thing is for sure – all these hoaxes are just bringing us one step closer to an actual release – we hope!
If you want to comment on the hoax please tell us what you think on our forum.In the new edition of its full-color, glossy magazine, ISIS mocks those who claim Islam is a peaceful religion, and even wades into the controversy surrounding Donald Trump and the parents of a dead Muslim U.S. soldier.
The 15th issue of Dabiq, published on July 31, is titled “Break The Cross” and appears to be primarily directed at those that ISIS considers its enemies, particularly Christians. One section is devoted to the words and actions of Pope Francis and is headlined “In The Words Of Our Enemies.” An editorial titled “Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You” takes aim at Westerners and “apostate ‘Imams’ in the West” who refuse to define ISIS’ motivation as being Islamic. ISIS calls this rhetoric purely political.
“Many Westerners, however, are already aware that claiming the attacks of the mujahidin to be senseless and questioning incessantly as to why we hate the West and why we fight them is nothing more than a political act and a propaganda tool,” the article says. “The politicians will say it regardless of how much it stands in opposition to facts and common sense just to garner as many votes as they can for the next election cycle.”
The argument echoes a current debate in the U.S. between some on the right who have been vocal about challenging high-ranking left-leaning politicians to specifically label the ISIS threat as “radical Islamic terror.” President Obama has said on multiple occasions that he has refused to use the term in an effort to avoid lending religious legitimacy to the terror group.
The ISIS author of the “Why We Hate You” piece aims to settle the argument, and “clarify” in “unequivocal terms” that ISIS is Islamic. The author says that those on the “social fringe” who identify Islam with ISIS are correct.
“There are exceptions among the disbelievers, no doubt, people who will unabashedly declare that jihad and the laws of the Shari’ah – as well as everything else deemed taboo by the Islam-is-a-peaceful-religion crowd – are in fact completely Islamic, but they tend to be people with far less credibility who are painted as a social fringe, so their voices are dismissed and a large segment of the ignorant masses continues believing the false narrative,” the article says.
Showing just how quickly the magazine was produced – and how intently members of ISIS watch U.S. politics – an image in the publication shows the grave of Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004. Khan’s parents rebuked Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during a speech at the Democratic National Convention last week, prompting Trump, in turn, to criticize their “right” to censure him in front of a national audience. Adding its own voice to the debate, ISIS declares in a caption below Khan’s grave that the soldier is an “apostate” of the Muslim religion and urges other Muslims to “beware” a similar fate.The Supreme Court has ruled that the obvious truth is the obvious truth: States that ban racial discrimination do not violate the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on racial discrimination.
This overturns the 6th Circuit that ruled that prohibiting racial discrimination was a violation of the 14th Amendment’s prohibition of racial discrimination. That the advocates for mandating racial discrimination in the name of “anti-discrimination” openly declared that the equal treatment clause was intended to be used unequally, clearly helped the majority of justices to toss aside such nonsense.
The dissent, however, still leaves plenty of room for concern. Wise Latina Freedom-Hater Justice Sotomayor, along with Justice Ginsberg, twisted themselves in knots to try to protect racial discrimination, even in the face of popular support for equality:
“In a perfectly Orwellian dissenting opinion, which she read dramatically from the bench, Justice Sotomayor argued that the decision of the people of Michigan to end racial discrimination is itself an instance of racial discrimination and that the only way to mitigate such racial discrimination is through the mandatory maintenance of racial discrimination. In this opinion she was joined by Justice Ginsburg, with Justice Kagan recusing herself from the case. Justice Sotomayor argued that Michigan’s Proposal 2, which mandates race-neutral state policies, is the sort of legislation used to “oppress minority groups.” By outlawing racial discrimination, she argued, ‘a majority of the Michigan electorate changed the basic rules of the political process in that State in a manner that uniquely disadvantaged racial minorities.'”
In effect, because certain racial groups benefited from the now-illegal preferences, taking those preferences away and treating people equally is discrimination against those who lost their preferential treatment. Oh, how history would have been different if Bull Conner had advocated such eloquent reasoning…
Also of concern, is that there was no single majority opinion, which weakens the case a precedent. Justice Kennedy, along with Alito and Roberts, treated the question as a purely procedural one, and Justice Breyer’s concurrence was of an even narrower procedural vein (Justice Kagan refused herself). Only Justices Scalia and Thomas hit the nail on the head:
“It has come to this. Called upon to explore the jurisprudential twilight zone between two errant lines of precedent, we confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself. ‘The Constitution proscribes government discrimination on the basis of race, and state-provided education is no exception.’… It is precisely this understanding—the correct understanding—of the federal Equal Protection Clause that the people of the State of Michigan have adopted for their own fundamental law.”
But that simple truth that Chief Justice Roberts had previously stated, that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” was smarmily retorted with the statement that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.”
In other words, discrimination is bad, therefore we must discriminate with roles reversed to achieve some type of equality of outcome.
Despite such dissenting opinion, and lack of a strong resolve for equal treatment under the law, it has not been established that the 14th Amendment does not prohibit what it requires by its plain text.
TweetThe Environmental Protection Agency’s revised rule on arsenic contamination in drinking water has resulted in fewer lung, bladder and skin cancers.
In 2006, the E.P.A. reduced the arsenic maximum in public water systems to 10 micrograms per liter, from the previous level of 50 micrograms. The rule does not apply to private wells.
Using data from a continuing nationwide health survey, researchers compared urinary arsenic levels in 2003, before the new rule went into effect, with those in 2014, after it had been fully implemented. There were 14,127 participants in the study, and the scientists adjusted for arsenic contributions from tobacco and dietary sources. The report is in Lancet Public Health.
They found a 17 percent reduction in arsenic levels among those using public water systems. The researchers estimate that the new rule resulted in 200 to 900 fewer lung and bladder cancers and 50 fewer skin cancers annually.One of Gustav Klimt's most famous paintings will not be returned to the heirs of its Jewish former owner, in a case that has tested Austria's laws on restitution of looted art.
The law, which is often applied in cases linked to the country's Nazi past, was updated in 2009 to include works which were sold rather than stolen, but whose owners had been put under pressure to part with their property.
The 34-meter-long "Beethoven Frieze," completed in 1902 as an homage to the German composer's Ninth Symphony, used to belong to members of the Lederer family but was seized when they fled to Switzerland after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938.
Erich Lederer got the masterpiece back after World War II, but he was not allowed to export his many other artworks unless he sold the painting to Austrian government at a discount, the family's lawyers say.
He eventually sold it for $750,000 in the 1970s, and it now hangs on public display in Vienna's Secession Building.
Austria, which returned several works by Klimt's near contemporary Egon Schiele to Lederer's heirs in 1999, said it would follow an expert panel's decision on Friday that the painting was lawfully sold to the state.
One of the lawyers representing some of Lederer's heirs said he rejected the decision and planned to take the case to the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg or a court in the United States.
Swiss-based lawyer Marc Weber said the decision-making process regarding Austria's restitution law was not transparent for the heirs of former owners.
Alfred Noll, another lawyer representing a group of Lederer's heirs, echoed Weber's criticism but said he would not take further action, according to the APA news agency.
Culture Minister Josef Ostermayer said he was glad the frieze would remain on show for people in Austria to visit.
ReutersYou know what’s amazing?
Just four years ago, before the Nest Learning Thermostat came along, nobody even thought about that beige box on the wall. Other than it was annoying, complicated, and kind of ugly.
Now people actually love their thermostats. And the Nest Learning Thermostat is on millions of walls in millions of homes around the world.
We hoped from the beginning our thermostat would change things. Big things. Like the way people use energy. Because the more you know about how much you use, the more you see how to use less. The Nest Thermostat actually helps people save energy, and there’s proof. As of 2011, it’s saved over 4 billion kWh of energy in millions of homes worldwide. And independent studies showed that it saved people an average of 10-12% on heating bills and 15% on cooling bills. That means in two years or less, it can pay for itself. That’s what we love most.
It all keeps getting better with the new 3rd generation Nest Thermostat.
The brighter way to save energy.
It’s thinner, sleeker, and more beautiful than ever. The display is even bigger and sharper. And now the Nest Thermostat does something new. We call it Farsight. When you walk into the room, Farsight lights up and shows you the temperature you set or the time. You can even choose a digital or analog clock face. It’s big and bright - you can see it from across the room.
With more temperature sensors, the Nest Thermostat is more accurate. So it’s even better at learning about your home. It gets to know how it heats and cools, or how drafty it is, and adjusts accordingly. And if your furnace is acting up, the Nest Thermostat will let you know. Most heating and forced air furnaces have an automatic shutoff to avoid overheating. The Nest Thermostat is always looking out for shutoff patterns that indicate a persistent problem with your furnace. If anything’s out of the ordinary, every heating season you’ll get a Furnace Heads-Up message on your phone or tablet and the thermostat screen. And you’ll also get a notice in your monthly Home Report. (Furnace Heads-Up will be available for 1st and 2nd generation customers later this year.)
The Nest Thermostat is even better at learning what you like, too. So when you wake up in the morning, you’ll be cozy. When you leave for work, it’ll turn itself down. When you come home, you’ll be cozy again. And you can control it from anywhere. The Nest Thermostat does everything it’s always done – it keeps you comfortable. While it saves energy.
And of course, the Nest Thermostat works with other Nest products. If Nest Protect senses smoke or carbon monoxide, the Nest Thermostat will shut off your heating system. That’s because the furnace can spread smoke throughout your home in a fire and it’s also a common source of CO leaks. If Nest Protect sounds an emergency alarm or a Heads-up alert, you’ll see a message on the Nest Thermostat to let you know what’s going on. And when you set your Nest Thermostat to Away, your Nest Cam can start recording automatically.
Like all our Nest products, the Nest Thermostat will keep getting better through software updates. We’ll keep coming up with ways to make things even more thoughtful. So your home is even more thoughtful, too.
You can buy the Nest Learning Thermostat on nest.com for $249.SWPL = white educated liberal bohemianSo what the heck is a bohemian? Wikipedia aptly defines “bohemian” as a word of French origin, “first used in the English language in the nineteenth century to describe the untraditional lifestyles of marginalized and impoverished artists, writers, musicians, and actors in major European cities. Bohemians were associated with unorthodox or antiestablishment political or social viewpoints, which were often expressed through free love, frugality, and/or voluntary poverty.”But modern bohemians aren’t necessarily impoverished. In fact, being college educated, they are usually wealthier than regular middle class white people, and many SWPLs are downright rich. BIGLAW is full of SWPLs such as Heather Eisenlord. Consequently, there is a great deal of overlap between SWPL values and upper middle class values.SWPL is actually an acronym for “ stuff white people like ” which was coined by Christian Lander who founded the blog of the same name, Stuff White People Like. In his blog, Christian wrote post about stuff that “white people” like, which includes things such as farmer’s markets, sushi, knowing what’s best for poor people, and the Ivy League. The blog was so well done that people initially thought that the author was Asian, but it turned out that the author was a member of the very class he was mocking.SWPL can be used interchangeably as a noun or a verb.SWPL should be pronounced “ swipple ” but never written that way.Weighing in at only two pounds and measuring less than a foot long is one of the most unique new shark species to be recently identified by scientists.
While the shark can be easily recognised by its huge nose leading into its small body, the most defining characteristic of this species may be that it glows in the dark.
Deemed Etmopterus lailae by scientists, the shark belongs to the lanternshark family and was found nearly 1,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii's northwestern islands.
Stephen M. Kajiura, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, was one of the researchers who worked to identify the shark when it was discovered almost 17 years ago.
“There are only about 450 known species of sharks worldwide and you don’t come across a new species all that often. A large part of biodiversity is still unknown, so for us to stumble upon a tiny, new species of shark in a gigantic ocean is really thrilling," Kajiura said in a university press release.
Watch: Glow-in-the-dark sharks
Identifying a new species can be so difficult that researchers did not initially realise they had found a new type of shark until they submitted their findings for journal review and received responses noting it did not easily fit into existing lanternshark classifications. To discern whether it was in fact a unique species, Kajiura and researchers from Florida International University and the University of Rhode Island took extensive measurements of the shark's teeth, vertebrae, and intestines noting consistent markings on its tale that distinguished it from other species.
They then confirmed the differences by comparing their findings with specimens in research institutions across the globe. Initial findings were published in the journal Zootaxa last February before the news was widely circulated by the corresponding researchers' institutions this month.
“The unique features and characteristics of this new species really sets it apart from the other lanternsharks,” Kajiura added in the press release.
The shark's physical characteristics evolved from its deep-sea environment. Because little light is able to penetrate the deep sea, the shark relies less on sight to find food and more on the large olfactory system housed in its unusually large snout.
Researchers have several theories for why the shark's belly is bioluminescent, ranging from ensuring the shark is mating with the right species to attracting the small fish and shrimp on which it feeds. One deep sea survey published in March suggested that as many as 75 percent of deep sea creatures may be bioluminescent.
Despite covering more than 70 percent of Earth, much of the ocean remains yet to be explored. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that 95 percent of the world's oceans have not been seen by human eyes.
In June, an Australian research vessel set out on a month-long voyage to explore and take specimens from the deep seas surrounding the continent. Among their findings were a nightmarish, toothy lizard, and a 'faceless' fish.
Header Image: Etmopterus lailae is a member of the Lanternshark family, which was serendipitously found 1,000 feet below the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN KAJIURA, FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITYAfter losing yet another defender for the year due to injury, Sporting Kansas City needed some good news along their back line. They may have just gotten it.
Center back Aurelien Collin took an active, energetic role in training on Monday, raising hopes that he will could play in Tuesday night's home match against New York after missing two matches with a recurring hamstring strain.
“He looked good. He looks like he's ready to go, I think,” manager Peter Vermes told reporters after Monday's training session. “Obviously, I'll have to wait until tomorrow because of the length of time that he's been out. Today's the most that he's done, so I'll have to make that (decision) tomorrow.”
That news came a day after Sporting announced that right back Chance Myers would miss the rest of the season after tearing his left Achilles tendon in the first half Friday's 2-2 home draw with Toronto FC.
“I knew something wasn't right when I initially went down,” Myers told MLSsoccer.com on Monday. “I have a pretty high pain tolerance and I can usually walk things off and tough it out, but in this case I couldn't even feel my left foot. The pain literally knocked me off my feet.
Myers, who is in his seventh season with Sporting, is scheduled to undergo surgery on Wednesday. Vermes doesn't expect him to be ready for the start of the 2015 season.
“I think it'll take, at minimum, a year from now,” Vermes said on Monday. “A solid year. I would say that by that time, you would hope that you can get him back into playing.”
Myers would like to get back sooner, though.
“Best-case scenario, I want to be with the team next preseason,” he said. “But I'm going to take it day by day and rehab as best I can and listen to my body.”
Collin has not played since taking himself out just after the hour mark of Sporting's 2-1 home loss to Philadelphia on May 14 – the second time this year he has been sidelined by the same hamstring. Kansas City is on a three-match winless streak going into Tuesday's match, and played against TFC without a natural center back anywhere on the roster.
“It's always hard to watch when you're not playing,” Collin said. “But whoever's been playing out there, honestly, I've been very proud of the way they played in the defense. They did their best, and the last couple of games it was more of a team problem than a defense problem.”
The two-time MLS All-Star and 2013 MLS Cup MVP also said he doesn't expect to see a recurrence of the strain.
“Obviously, I took my time, so I hope it's going to be good,” he said on Monday. “It's a small injury, so I cannot complain. You just have to be careful to go crescendo, because if you go too fast like I did last time, I hurt my hamstring again. I took it step by step and now I'm ready to go.”
Steve Brisendine covers Sporting Kansas City for MLSsoccer.com.The Democrat Party’s Path to Enacting Policy
Parker O'Brien Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 28, 2017
If there is one thing Republicans should thank Democrats for, it is their treatment of Donald Trump. Trump was a lifetime Democrat who holds fairly socially liberal views, arguably more socially liberal in some areas than any prior major candidate. It’s not as though he doesn’t hold Republican views, but at his a core he is a rather heterodox politician. However, it’s been noted that over time Trump has more closely adopted Republican priorities and policies and many point to the hostility he’s faced from the Democrat party as the reason. To whatever extent this is true, you can be sure it is not false.
There is a clear path for the Democrats to divide Republicans and drive their policy agenda with very little formal power, co-op Trump. How do they co-op him? Very simple, flatter him. The president reads his own press to an almost obsessive degree and it gets to him. He criticizes those who criticize him and praises those who praise him. He even admitted to it in his recent speech! If they praised him where they agreed with him, expect him to return the favor.
So the question is, where do their ideas align? On this point, there is definitely a vast level of subjectivity. As an example, this poll on free trade perceptions should illustrate the power of partisan politics. Following the election of Trump, support for NAFTA jumped for Democrats and fell for Republicans. It also undermined my view that the Republican party has been a consistent voice in favor of free trade. Though the poll hasn’t been conducted regularly, this is the first time the two parties showed a major divergence in support, a sign of our polarized times. Political priorities are constantly shifting and to a certain extent the election of Trump reflected a changing electorate, so it may be that historical positions don’t reflect the modern Democrat party. That said, this isn’t a demand that they pursue specific policies, but an idea on how they can. It’s possible the Democrat party sees partisan politics as more electorally successful than a few policy victories, and the Gallup poll definitely supports this theory. However, if the Democrat party wants to drive their agenda and split Republicans over policy, try find somewhere that they’re party is willing to agree with Trump on. From there flatter his intelligence and refrain from putting forward legislation that includes a poison pill for Republicans.
Is it too late to change tact? Most likely, which makes this thought experiment essentially a waste of time. On the other hand, an embattled president might be open to a far more conservative push if the Never Trump faction takes this advice.Community and collectivism are opposites. Community is valuable and powerful; it is individuals freely choosing to cooperate and identify with each other to achieve more than they can individually, as we do in the open-source community.
Collectivism is a fraud. It pretends to be about community, but it is actually about the use of force. Collectivists want us not only to bow to their desire for power over others, but to thank them for coercing us and praise them as our moral superiors.
Compassion is a duty of every individual. Groups of people organizing voluntarily to achieve compassionate ends are deserve admiration and support. Collectivists pervert compassion, speaking the language of caring but committing the actions of criminals.
It is a crime to rob your neighbor. It is a crime to use your neighbor for your own ends without allowing him or her a choice in the matter. It is a crime to deprive your neighbor of his liberty when he or she has committed no aggression against you.
These crimes are no less crimes when a sociopath (or a politician – but, I repeat myself) justifies them by chanting “for the poor” or “for the children” or “for the environment”. They do not cease to be crimes just because a majority has been conned into voting for them. The violence is just as violent, the victims just as injured, the harm done just as grave.
Valid ethical propositions do not contain proper names. What is criminal for an individual to do is criminal for a community to do. Collectivists are not the builders of community, as they pretend, but its deadliest enemies – its corrupters and betrayers. When we fail to understand these simple truths, we board a train to genocide and the gulags.
(This was originally a comment I left on Google+)Rethinking the Unthinkable
The following article was originally published in the OCD Newsletter in 1991. Back then, behaviorists were still telling people with the Pure-O form of OCD (where the sufferer experiences obsessions only), that they hoped medication would be of some benefit. To their knowledge, there were no known methods of treatment that reliably produced positive outcomes with this form of OCD. In 1987, I had developed a highly structured and formalized behavioral method of treating this form of OCD. These treatment guidelines were derived from current strategies, proposed by Dr. Edna Foa, for the treatment of the more traditional forms of OCD (e.g. contamination and checking). Specifically, the strategy called Exposure and Response Prevention (E&RP), entails the practice of having the patient voluntarily come in contact with the feared items or situations, and then manage the pursuant anxiety while not performing the undoing response. The adaptation of E&RP for the Pure-O required a few modifications, but essentially retained the same empirically-based treatment model. Initially, the duration of treatment for the Pure-O was significantly longer (two years), than the duration of the traditional treatment of OCD (six months to one year). Using the adaptation model of treating the Pure-O form, the success rate was achieved well into the 70% to 90% range. This was comparable to Dr. Foa’s findings. In the mid-1990’s, Mark Frearston, Ph.D. published one of the first controlled studies for the treatment of the Pure-O, using very similar methods to those proposed by my 1991 article. His methodology relied on a much stronger cognitive component than my approach, which, as discussed below, have retained a much stronger behavioral component. Cognitive treatment for anxiety disorders relies on helping people identify the irrational nature of their fears and find the evidence of their irrationality. My work with thousands of patients has lent strong support to the idea that the cognitive element is not nearly as important as the more strict behavioral element, which focuses on providing effective strategies for managing the threatening ideas, rather than debunking the specific irrationality of the idea. At this point (2004), I am finding that, with some slight innovations that I have laid out below, there are no differences in the treatment duration (approximately six to twelve months) for people with Pure-O and those with the compulsions of the more traditional form of OCD.
In my conceptualization of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, the tree of the overall syndrome has three main branches: the "obsessive-compulsive," the "responsibility O-C," and the purely obsessional thinker ("Pure-O"). In “Pure-O”, the anxiety emerges in response to an unwanted, intrusive thought or question; what I call a "spike." The ritual or compulsion with this form of OCD involves the non-observable, mental ‘pushing away’ of the thought, avoiding the recurrence of the thought, or attempting to solve the question or undo the threat that the thought presents. It should be remembered that most people who come into therapy tend to have a combination of these three distinct forms of OCD. Successfully treating one form typically has minimal effect on the others. When persons present with more than one form of OCD, treatment will tend to initially focus on the observable rituals, since they are generally easier to treat and provide a positive momentum for further therapeutic work.
The "Pure-O" has two parts: the originating unwanted thought (spike), and the mental activity in which the sufferer attempts to escape, solve, or undo the spike. This is called “rumination.” With “Pure-O”, it is the threatening, nagging, or haunting nature of the idea, which compels the patient to engage in an extensive effort to escape from the thought. Most likely, it is not the intrusive idea, per se, that drives the response, but the associated emotional terror. The following are some illustrations of these types of “Pure-O” situations.
1. A man is involved in sexual relations with his female lover. Just prior to orgasm, the thought of his friend Bob pops into his head. This is the fourth time in a month that this has happened. In response to this, he becomes very upset and wonders whether or not he is gay. His sexual activity is terminated in order to avoid having to deal with this concern.
2. A mother is changing the diaper of her infant. As she lovingly looks down at this helpless child, the thought occurs to her to "take a pillow and smother him." In response to this thought, the mother panics and runs to another room to diminish the possibility of acting on this thought, because she feels that having the thought is tantamount to acting on it.
3. A student finishes a conversation with his favorite professor. For the next three hours the student reviews the conversation mentally to ascertain if he said anything that might have been offensive.
4. An altar boy in church notices a statue of the Virgin Mary. He has a fleeting thought passes about performing a sexual act on her. He is tormented endlessly, even though he has repeatedly confessed the thought to a priest and to his parents.
5. A young man notices that the word “suicide” possesses a significant repugnance. It is not that he is depressed; he feels that the word suicide “shouldn’t” stand out. He finds that, not only does encountering the word in print produce a tremendous amount of emotional tumult, but hearing it in his own thoughts becomes equally upsetting. Certain sounds also start to stand out as being unique and unsettling. He begins to spend a great deal of time wrapped up in his own thoughts attempting to arrange the word in a certain manner so that it possesses less significance. He becomes tormented by the possibility that the unique sounds surrounding him may linger on for eternity and determines that he must find some method to stop being reminded of their occurrence.
6. A woman survives emotional abuse from an overly controlling father. At 20, she leaves his house, and she’s elated. However, she develops an obsession. She decides that all objects, which remind her of him, are infused with his essence and, therefore, must be discarded. Although irrational, she feels that discarding anything related to him will keep her identity free from his influence. She feels that to completely free herself from him, she has to discard all objects that remind her of her father, even those that might have been “contaminated” by contact with his possessions. This effort to free herself from her father’s influence, becomes so encompassing that she has to avoid even mail from her siblings because her father might have come in contact with something that had come in contact with the mail.
continued...
1 2 3BRAY WANDERERS CHAIRMAN Denis O’Connor has questioned the viability of running a Premier Division club based on the average attendances at the Carlisle Grounds this season.
In an ominous statement that was sent to the media during half-time of their home clash with Dundalk this evening, O’Connor blasted the lack of people coming through the turnstiles, despite Bray’s solid campaign.
“With the appointment of Harry Kenny as Head Coach in the middle of last season this Club took a very upward step in Irish football. He has brought us to new level.So at the start of this season The Club decided to back Harry with more resources in the expectation that he would continue the good run and that the investment would push us further up the table leading to greater support both on the terraces and reflected in gate receipts. Well, Harry has more than delivered but the support has just not materialised.”
Bray are currently third in the table but O’Connor says the lack of supporters in the stands is affecting the coaching staff and the players.
In a recent 3-2 victory over Derry City – a clash between the then-third and fourth best teams in the country, just 365 people were present at the Carlisle Grounds.
O’Connor crunches more numbers in the press release with one game against Galway attracting 255 people through the turnstiles.
Apart from our season ticket holders we estimate that our average home support base is somewhere along the lines of Adult 125/165 and Concession 90/120.This tells us that the support base is just not there!”
O’Connor continues by pointing to how Bray can only use their venue for soccer and rugby league purposes while they can’t draw majorly from local advertising and sponsorship.
Source: Tommy Dickson/INPHO
Ultimately, his conclusion hints at a bleak future for the seaside club.
It is just not viable to continue to run a club at the level expected by fans without the proper support.A huge effort has been put into the club by many volunteers in the past few years / Harry has done a great job with the senior squad and substantial funds have been put in to support this effort for which we are grateful. But what is the point if we cannot get the minimum financial |
the local Safeway. GOP and Democratic apparatchiks and their big-money enablers wouldn’t have to struggle with the grim and unavoidable fact that fewer and fewer of us are willing to identify with either party—even to strangers on the phone.
But for the large and growing plurality of us who are independents, there’s simply no advantage in putting up with this politics of exhaustion, of the elite’s fixation on characters and policies from the past. We need a reboot that’s not simply the same-old, same-old.Last month, a billboard went up in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Carrying the endorsement of New Mexico Right To Life, it announced that a woman had decided to "kill our child." Now the woman, Nani Lawrence, who apparently had a miscarriage, has successfully sued to have the billboard taken down and be granted an order of protection.
Lawrence's lawyer argued, successfully, that her privacy had been violated, and the billboard is expected to be removed within a week or so. A lawyer for Greg Fultz, who paid for the billboard but eventually lost the Right To Life endorsement, says this violates his free speech rights.
He also said, "My argument is what Fultz said is the truth. That fetus' life was taken away somehow. The distinction to me on First Amendment stuff is a person can't accuse someone of a felony, which (Fultz) didn't. He didn't allege it at all. What's the difference between someone holding a picket sign in front of an abortion clinic stating that so and so kills babies? It happens across the nation everyday."
Well, not exactly — saying a "child" was "killed" is in fact an accusation of murder, without further details divulged. Abortion is still legal in this country; so is involuntary miscarriage, which is what various Internet postings indicate Lawrence had, though the status of her uterus is still her business.
What's interesting here is the alignment of "pro-life" interests with the interpersonal harassment of Greg Fultz's much-younger ex-girlfriend. (He is 35, fifteen years older than Lawrence.) "We thought it was going to be a pro-life billboard," a Right To Life official told the Alamogordo News. Fultz said he'd given them "full disclosure of the billboard and the back story of it," he said. "I left out no details or gave any false facts about the billboard." He accused them, plausibly, of shying away from controversy.
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Fultz's anger at his ex-girlfriend hasn't just taken the form of anti-choice demagoguery; it's also latched onto "men's rights" rhetoric. He told The News,
It's my belief that fathers should have a say regarding pregnancy. Women have all the power when it comes to pregnancy. The men get no say when a woman wants to go and have an abortion without the say of the father. I believe that is wrong because men are 50 percent of the result of the pregnancy. They should have an equal right to their unborn child and decisions regarding it."
The same sentiment was expressed in a letter Fultz says he wrote to the New Mexico legislature, which said in part,
I'm 35 years old and have always wanted to have a family i.e. a child and for whatever reason I've never been able to achieve that dream up until last year when my then girlfriend got pregnant. I had finally conceived a child and i was more thrilled then the girlfriend. it was fine for a short time but then things went wrong we had separated and the dream was short lived the pregnancy was terminated I'm not sure how it was terminated weather it be a natural miscarriage or intentional termination. that remains unclear as she refuses to speak on the matter and from her actions and behavior leading up to the point i believe that she intentionally terminated the pregnancy either by abortion or other means. Which brings me to my request; I'd like to get a bill created in honor of my baby (Baby Fultz) for all fathers. My idea is to get a bill introduced that gives biological fathers equal rights as to the welfare and decisions being made of the unborn child with exceptions to those of rape and incest and other means of illegal fatherhood.
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There's also indication that Fultz engaged in reproductive coercion in the first place. A poster in Lawrence's name wrote in a BabyCenter post about a year ago,
Me and my bf are expecting, and we're excied but it took me coaxing. At first, I was concerned about how I would be able to take care of my child. Let me explain....when I was 7, I went into a coma, and it left me with many 'issues'. I lose my balance easily, I am paralyzed on the left side of the face, and it is hard to understanernd me sometimes. But the most concerning thing of all, I have severe tremors. I will have surgery to try to correct this when I'm 21, but by the time I give birth I'll only be 20. Not to mention the fact that I have been hurt so many times due to my weight that the idea of extra is unbearable. My bf is 15 years older than me and has been told he could never have children. So, of course he always wanted to keep it. It was so unplanned and I'm so unprepared(and I'm against abortion unless you've been raped) that the first thing I thought was 'I'll give it up for adoption.' But his want for a kid compelled him to talk me into it. But after talking to my parents, I've gone back to my initial concerns. If you knew me, you'd know it kills me to do anything that might PO or hurt someone's feelings. How do I bring it up?
It's only fitting that a man who wanted to control one woman's reproductive choices and bodily integrity would align with an entire movement — two, even — devoted to taking them away from all women. He may be an erratic example, but he's not a philosophically inconsistent one.
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Update: To wit, here's a Family Research Council rep on the story: "[A] man from New Mexico was recently silenced when he wanted to preserve and protect the life of his developing baby. His girlfriend had the abortion despite his convictions. He was so distressed and angered by his lack of choice in the matter that he commissioned a billboard on a major highway to communicate his experience."
Billboard Goes To Court [Alamogordo News]
Related: Sign Causes Stir [Alamogordo News]On the day of her arrest at Bahrain International Airport, human rights activist Maryam al-Khawaja tweeted: "Overheard guards saying they are going to deport me. They keep saying I am not a citizen." Khawaja had travelled to Bahrain from Denmark on August 30 to support her imprisoned father, who'd just started a second round of hunger strike five days earlier.
Her case highlights the threat now confronting some Bahraini opposition activists: The removal of their citizenship and subsequent deportation.
Like her father, who is serving a life sentence on charges of trying to overthrow the government during pro-reform protests three years ago, Khawaja is also a staunch critic of the Bahraini ruling Al Khalifa monarchy.
For years the main opposition in Bahrain has campaigned for a greater role in government. There have also been complaints of discrimination from the country's Shia Muslim population, a charge the government denies. Inspired by other uprisings in the region, tens of thousands marched on the streets in February 2011, demanding change.
But with the help of neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain crushed the revolt. Dozens of people were killed, hundreds wounded and more than a thousand were arrested. The government alleges that the protesters attacked police and that soldiers were deployed to "protect the safety of the citizens".
Since then, there have been almost daily protests and anti-government activists continue to be arrested arbitrarily, tortured and imprisoned, often without a fair trial. However, security forces have been attacked by home-made bombs in recent months. In March, three policemen were killed in a blast, including a policeman from the UAE.
Khawaja's lawyer is confident that her citizenship has not been officially revoked. Mohammed al-Jishi told Al Jazeera that the incident at the airport was simply a scare tactic: "It's a lengthy procedure to remove the citizenship of anyone. The king himself has to agree to revoke the citizenship of any national. This must be published in the newspapers. But this doesn't apply to Maryam."
RELATED: Q&A - Bahrain rights defender Maryam Khawaja
But what might prove to be an empty threat to Khawaja, is a reality for other anti-government protesters and activists that have campaigned for political reform in Bahrain. On August 6, a court sentenced nine people to prison and ordered that all the defendants be stripped of their citizenship. The men are facing prison terms between 5 and 15 years on charges of spying for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, forming a terrorist organisation, and smuggling weapons into the country.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, the mother of one of the convicted men said that the charges against her son were false. "He was involved in protests, but that's it. He never attacked the police or anyone," said Khatoon Al Asfoor. "It's not fair that they removed his nationality. We're Bahraini, we're Bahraini."
Many of the Bahrainis that have had their citizenship annulled say they were not even informed by the government. "It was just by chance that I found out that my nationality was revoked. I was in London at the time and my wife called me and told me the announcement was made on Bahraini TV," said Jalal Fairooz, a former Bahraini politician, who was a member of the opposition al-Wefaq party.
Fairooz is among a group of 31 people that were deprived of their Bahraini citizenship in November 2012. He now lives as a political refugee in London.
Fairooz told Al Jazeera why he was targeted: "My job as an opposition figure was to defend the oppressed and to speak about the major violations of human rights. Of course at the time, there was a lot of killing and bloodshed against the innocent protesters in Bahrain. I was threatened by the Bahraini authorities over and over. I kept receiving calls on my mobile, calling me names and telling me to stop talking to the international media."
At the time, the Bahraini government issued a statement with the names of the 31 people whose citizenships were revoked saying that they had "caused damage to state security".
Fairooz said the decision to make him stateless was a violation of Bahraini law. "When someone's citizenship is removed, you have to go to the courts and also the king must issue the order. But in this case, the order was issued by the Ministry of Interior. This is against Bahraini law".
In the past, Bahraini citizens could only have their nationality removed if they were convicted of treason, or if they were granted citizenship by another country, without government consent. And as Fairooz said, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa himself must approve the sentence. But provisions in the Citizenship Act were amended in July, making it easier for the interior ministry, with cabinet approval, to revoke the citizenship of an individual. Bahrainis can now be made stateless if a person "causes harm to the interests of the kingdom".
Mansoor al-Jamri, the editor-in-chief of Bahrain's al-Wasat newspaper, told Al Jazeera that the wording of the new provisions are too vague. "There has been another concept that has been included recently and they called it 'duty of loyalty' to the country. Who is to define someone has somehow satisfied the duty of loyalty?"
Repeated calls from Al Jazeera to the Minister of Information Affairs Sameera Rajab's office were not returned in time for publication.
RELATED: Bahrain activist Maryam al-Khawaja released
But revoking the citizenship of people considered to be outspoken government critics is not unique to Bahrain. In Kuwait, at least 15 people have been made stateless this year. A media owner and also an opposition politician, along with three of his family members, were stripped of their citizenship in June. The government said it revoked Ahmed Jabr al-Shemmeri's citizenship because he was a threat to the country.
Jamri also argued that revoking the citizenship of certain people is an order being used, not to protect the country, but to eliminate dissidents. "It's another punitive measure that has been added to somehow curb the number of opponents. And I believe it contravenes the international covenants on civil and political rights, which is obligatory for Bahrain because Bahrain ratified those covenants in 2006."
On September 7, Bahraini state media reported how the king received a report from the country's National Institution of Human Rights. The NIHR has been criticised for suppressing the abuses committed by the government. In the article, King Khalifa highlights Bahrain's "resolve to promote and protect human rights in line with international laws and conventions". But there was no mention by the king of rendering people stateless in the past few years.
On September 18, Khawaja was released from jail, but the charges of assaulting two police officers remain, and she's currently banned from leaving Bahrain. Khawaja's latest session on trial was held on October 1. A judge ruled to postpone it til November 1, while a decision on her travel ban is expected laterElysium: The movie does a good job stirring up debate about rich vs poor, but does it do a good job pinpointing the cause of the wealth gap?
If you haven't heard about it already, Elysium is a sci-fi film set in a dystopian world, where the poorest people live in slums on earth, while the richest people live in a giant space station. You can check out the trailer below.
I found the movie entertaining, but that's not what I'm here to discuss today. Instead, I want to comment on the economic realities both stated and implied by the world created by director Neill Blomkamp.
Before we begin, I want to warn you of small spoiler alerts. I won't give the plot away, but I will reveal certain details about the fictitious world.
Today's Growing Disparity Between Rich And Poor
On the one hand, I think Elysium did a great job of allegorically describing the lives of the rich and poor. No matter what your political stripe, everyone agrees that the gap between the rich and poor has increased over time. While the middle class certainly benefited from economic growth over the past few decades, the top 1% made out like bandits, prompting Warren Buffett to say that a rising tide lifts all yachts.
The film focuses the contrasting lives of the rich and poor, in a single point of contention - healthcare. In the movie, the richest people have these machines, where once you put yourself in it, it will heal any sickness or diseases you have. In contrast, the rest of the population on earth have to go to hospitals run more or less the way they are run today - with doctors, nurses and so on.
This is where I start to have issues with the movie, from an economic standpoint.
The Problem Introduced By Healing Machines
From what I can gather, the machines the rich people have are far more efficient at healing people, than nurses and doctors. Also, whether because the machines don't use very much energy, or because energy is plentiful, running the machine doesn't appear to be expensive. The machines are also very, very quick - healing people within minutes.
Therefore, the question arises - why don't they just replace all those doctors and nurses on earth with the machines?
This question strikes at the heart of the wealth gap problem today.
Inventions Destroy Jobs, But Creates New Ones
Since the dawn of civilization, new inventions have displaced workers. The invention of farming meant that the world needed less hunters. As a result, subsequent generations of people who might have become hunters, became farmers instead. The invention of electricity meant that the world needed less factory workers, so people who might have become factory workers became accountants, salesmen, etc instead.
Up until now, when each invention made certain jobs obsolete, society created other jobs to employ new workers. However, everytime it did so, it seemed that the new jobs required more knowledge and training to perform. For instance, accounting takes a lot more training than factory work. Even though each job became more difficult, most human beings could find jobs suitable for them.
The More Value You Provide, The More You Earn
In general, a person's income is proportional to the value of the contribution that person makes to society. For example, if you work at McDonald's and earn minimum wage, you're earning only minimum wage because you're performing a task that anybody can do. If you're a highly skilled doctor however, you're paid a lot because not many other people can do what you do, and what you do is very valuable.
When a society has many necessary jobs which most of its citizens could fill, that society will have an even income distribution. In other words, the gap between and rich and poor is small. I think this describes the U.S. in the 50s and 60s.
What Makes Today Different
However, I believe we're currently going through another technological revolution unlike others in the past.
Previous revolutions made manual labour more and more obsolete. This meant that manual labour workers could train their minds and become knowledge workers. However, the technological revolution happening today is designed to make knowledge work obsolete.
Consider for instance, 'TurboTax'. The software enables you to file your taxes on your own. In years gone by, you either had to fill in all the tax details yourself, often making mistakes, or you could go to an accountant. By doing the accountants' job, the popularity of TurboTax means less jobs for accountants.
Even this site, MoneyGeek, aims to enable you to invest your savings yourself. If you use our site as a guide as opposed to a financial advisor, that means the world needs less financial advisors. Now, I don't really feel much sympathy for the salesmen type financial advisors, but the point stands - companies like this means some Financial Advisors may have to find work in other professions.
Can People Adapt And Find New Jobs?
But what are those other professions? If society creates new types of jobs after it destroys others, what kinds of jobs does the current technological revolution create?
Right now, it looks like it's creating a lot of programming and engineering jobs. Society is looking for the kind of people who can drive the technological revolution even further.
But here's the question: Can people adapt to this new world and fill these jobs?
The average IQ in the U.S. is 100. I don't mean to be rude, but I think people will less than a 100 IQ will have trouble learning how to program. In fact, when technology is on course to destroy every relatively simple job out there, I don't know what kinds of jobs would want these people.
Perhaps we're beginning to see the early effects of such a transformation in the job market. Unemployment has remained historically high, yet companies in Silicon Valley are tripping over themselves trying to recruit the brightest programmers. While a large number of the new jobs created this year have been low-paying part time jobs, salaries in Silicon Valley are skyrocketing. If people could just retrain themselves and become programmers, they would have done so a long time ago - but they can't, and that's the rub.
Is it any wonder, then, that the rich is getting richer, while the poor is getting poorer?
Conclusions
Which brings us back to Elysium. In this world, the poor won't be poor because they're just paid poorly. Rather, think about a world in which the healing machines have replaced every doctor and nurse on earth. Also, think about a world where none but a couple of highly trained engineers are needed to run an entire factory. Will the poor stay poor? What do you think?Hong Kong media outlets are reporting the death of filmmaker and actor Lau Kar-leung (also known as Liu Chia-liang) at the age of 75. More details should emerge in the following days but this is truly a tragic loss. Lau Kar-leung has left behind a considerable body of work, including some of the finest martial arts movies of all time.
He is perhaps most famous for directing and starring opposite Jackie Chan in the 1994 classic Drunken Master 2, but Kar-leung was also a veteran of the Shaw Brothers system.
During his impressive tenure with the Shaw Brothers studio, he helmed a string a bonafide martial arts classics – including The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Legendary Weapons of China, My Young Auntie, and what is perhaps his masterpiece, Eight Diagram Pole Fighter.
Most of these films are available on DVD in North America, so this week may be a good time to rewatch one or several of his movies and remember the iconic filmmaker. Our condolences go out to Lau Kar-leung’s family and friends.Photograph of San Francisco in ruins from Lawrence Captive Airship, 2000 feet above San Francisco Bay
This map isn't part of any series, but we have other maps of San Francisco that you might want to check out.
To commemorate the 106th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, here's a famous aerial photograph of the destruction it visited on the city.
This isn't a map, of course, but it shares its perspective with many of the birdseye maps on this site, and it illustrates an important jump in available technology that answers a common question that readers ask about them.
One reason that this photograph by George Lawrence has been remembered for so long, is because it was demoing a pretty cutting-edge photographic technique.
The image was taken from a kite flying 2000 feet (600 m) over the San Francisco Bay. If you're not impressed by that, I encourage you to try to fly a 49 lb (22 kg) early-20th Century camera 2000 feet and then keep it steady enough to take a picture.
So... by way of answering the questions about wether or not the earlier Victorian-era birdseye artists worked from photographs; I'm going to say "no". There are a few instances in the Mountain West where I'm quite sure they did part of their work from the side of a nearby mountain (in some cases, you can even deduce the specific mountain), but for the most part these guys were applying street-level physical and photographic survey to a projected and skewed town plan. I'm almost sure of it.
For more map resources and imagery from this period in San Francisco's history, check out the California Historical Society's website.If Tinder Is For Hookups, Hinge Is For Relationships And It Just Raised $4M
Hinge wants to be Match.com for mobile. You can find horny strangers nearby on Tinder, but Hinge uses its “romance graph” to pair you with friends of friends that fit your style. And now Hinge has a raised a $4 million Series A from Great Oaks, Social + Capital, and more to bring its relationships app beyond DC, New York, and Boston. You’re still swiping yes or no, but to find your soulmate.
Tinder’s success has brought a swell of clones to the seas of mobile dating. But Hinge founder Justin McLeod believes romance comes in many forms, and there’s plenty of room for his iOS and Android apps. In fact, he sees people using both Tinder and Hinge, but with distinct intentions.
At first glance, they look quite similar. Both give you one potential mate at a time that you can swipe right to approve or swipe left to dismiss. If two people approve each other, they’re allowed to chat within Hinge.
But McLeod explains “When we ask our users, they say they use them differently. ‘I use Tinder when I’m out and about or bored or want to mess around, and Hinge is where I meet the people I want to date.'” Hinge only shows you matches that are friends of friends, so you have a trusted connection that implies your date isn’t a psychopath, and you get to see info about their work and education upfront.
The Romance Graph
“We’re the next generation of dating site” McLeod says, likening Hinge to Match.com, eHarmony, and OkCupid but mobile-first. Just like those desktop giants, Hinge uses a matching algorithm to intelligently show people mates they’re likely to be compatible with.
For example, Hinge pulls your Facebook information to present you with people who went to the same kind of college (ivy league, state school), or similar type of job (tech, finance, politics). But it also goes deeper and connects people across these boundaries if it notices female lawyers dig male bankers, or that Harvard guys seem to hit it off with Boston University girls.
While Facebook maps the social graph of friendships, and Twitter lays out of the interest graph of what people care about, Hinge wants identify the hidden threads the pull us towards people we want to date. This “Romance Graph” as I call it, gives Hinge a better success rate and a stunning retention rate.
Since expanding beyond its home city of DC in August to New York and Boston, Hinge has doubled its user count to 60,000 yet maintained its stickiness. McLeod says it still see about 85% of people who download Hinge as active a week later, and 75% a month later.
Those metrics helped it score this new $4 million Series A led by Great Oaks and joined The Social+Capital Partnership, Red Swan, 500 Startups, StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr, former Facebook Director of Business Development David Fisch, Graph Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Fortify VC, Middleland Capital, Militello Capital, former Facebook engineering lead Prashant Malik, founder of DC coworking space 1776 Evan Burfield, and one of the founders of LivingSocial.
Hinge still has a long uphill battle. First of all, Tinder may not be as easy to write off as a hookup app as McLeod says. While Tinder doesn’t reveal user counts, its founder Sean Rad said on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin that his app sees 350 million swipes and makes 3.5 million matches per day. Communicating that a similar looking app is for something different could be tough, and people may look for true love on Tinder even if that’s not what it’s best at.
Hinge will need traction to make good on its new investment. That means fighting for users in a crowded dating app market that includes newly revamped and rebranded Down (formerly Bang With Friends), as well as mobile efforts from stalwarts like OkCupid.
Finally, mobile is built for instant gratification. Tinder delivers that by optimizing to show you people who were recently online and might be ready to meet soon. Hinge wants to make the most accurate matches possible, but that means it might take a while for your crush to sign back on and rate you back.
As avid (and single) female dating app user Naynerz tells me after she said Hinge has some problems:
@JoshConstine Hinge doesn't provide users with instant gratification as much as Tinder does, with real-time or instant matches. — Ranee Soundara (@naynerz) November 4, 2013
However, she also notes that Tinder “is full of fucking weirdos”.
With $4 million, Hinge has some ammunition to fight off competitors and pay for growth. The money will help the startup break into new cities, and revamp its apps. McLeod concludes “Dating sites used to take the old newspaper classified models and put it online. We’re taking the really old model of meeting through friends and modernizing it for mobile.”
Hinge is available for iOS and Android, but has only officially launched in Washington D.C., New York, and Boston so you won’t get matches if you’re outside those cities.Milos Ninkovic has made himself an instant Sydney FC hero, scoring an 88th-minute winner as the Sky Blues prevailed 1-0 over Western Sydney Wanderers in a feisty derby on Saturday night.
A sensational crowd of 40,539 crammed into Allianz Stadium – the second biggest ever Sydney derby attendance – and they were treated to a pulsating clash with a thrilling finish.
Just as it looked like it would end goalless, Ninkovic pounced to score his first Sky Blues goal to give Sydney FC Harbour City bragging rights for the fourth time in their last five meeting.
The win takes Graham Arnold’s side top of the Hyundai A-League, while the Wanderers are still searching for their first win of the new season.
GOALS
1-0 Ninkovic (88’) – The Wanderers looked to have cleared a Sydney FC attack only for Brandon O’Neill to play a clever chip over the top to Ninkovic. The Serbian’s first touch was sublime, taking it down and past Nikolai Topor-Stanley before burying his shot across Andrew Redmayne and into the far, bottom corner.
KEY MOMENT
A cagey opening 45 minutes looked to be finishing with the visitors on top and they thought they had a goal in first-half stoppage time.
The impressive Mitch Nichols played a cross in from the left and found the head of Jaushua Sotirio, who flicked his header brilliantly into the far corner.
But before he could wheel away to celebrate their joy was cut-short by an offside flag. Replays suggested it was line-ball and could have gone either way.
It was a blow for the visitors, who were then sunk at the death by Ninkovic’s winner.
OPTA DATA KEY STATS
Sydney FC has now extended their unbeaten derby run to five matches, winning four of those.
It’s also the first time they have kept the Wanderers scoreless in nine meetings, going back to the very first derby three years ago.
The Wanderers have now failed to keep a clean-sheet in 16 straight Hyundai A-League matches, the clubs worst-ever run.
HIGHLIGHTS REEL
What a sight it was inside Allianz Stadium as more than 40,000 fans flocked in to see these two sides of Sydney go to battle.
While the action on the pitch failed to reach any great heights, the atmosphere and colour provided by both sets of supporters was first-class.
Neither let up for the whole 90 minutes, providing a cacophony of noise and another great advertisement for this derby and the Hyundai A-League.
TREATMENT TABLE
The Wanderers were forced into an early change as dangerous winger Romeo Castelen lasted less than eight minutes before he was forced off with a hamstring injury. The visitors also lost defender Scott Neville just after the break also with a leg problem.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
Wanderers marquee man Federico Piovaccari came to the club with a lot of wraps but for the third game in a row he failed to deliver.
Whether it’s the quality of the service or his own performance, something just isn’t clicking for the big Italian. Sydney’s central defender Matt Jurman and Jacques Faty both got the better of Piovaccari over the 90 minutes.
How long does Popovic persist before maybe looking at another option in attack?
THE FINAL WORD
They left it late but Sydney FC finally managed to put their inconsistent home form behind them with the late winner. The Sky Blues are on the road next weekend and involved in a third NSW derby in as many weeks as they head up the F3 to take on Central Coast Mariners on Saturday afternoon.
Western Sydney’s wait for a first win goes on but they will feel they are still in pretty good nick despite having just one point from three matches. The Wanderers return to Pirtek Stadium to take on Westfield FFA Cup finalists Perth Glory on Sunday.
TEAMS
Sydney FC: Janjetovic, Ryall, Faty, Jurman, Grant, O’Neill, Dimitrevic (Tavares 61’), Ninkovic, Holosko (Hoole 61’), Brosque, Smeltz (Simon 73’)
Western Sydney Wanderers: Redmayne, Neville (Hamill 53’), Alberto, Topor-Stanley, Jamieson, Andreu, Dimas, Castelen (Vidosic 12’), Nichols (Bridge 82’), Sotirio, Piovaccari
Scorers: Ninkovic 88’
Red cards: Nil
Yellow cards: Dimitrijevic 36’, Neville 38’, Faty 65’, Ninkovic 89’
Conditions: 21C, Fine
Attendance: 40,539 @ Allianz StadiumYears ago, most of anime I saw were long-runners like Naruto or Bleach. When looking up episode lists on Wikipedia, I always get confused about what they refer to as "seasons". Sometimes it corresponds to the story arc, but other times, in the case of Dragon Ball Z or One Piece (or the newer episodes of Fairy Tail ), it just seems to cut off at random. How long is a typical "season", and how do you tell when the season is over and when a new one begins?
With late-night anime, which run in pretty predictable chunks of 11-13 episodes (with a separation of over a year if it returns), it's pretty easy to figure out where the "seasons" of an anime begin and end. However, for the non-late-night shows, the ones that air for years without interruption, it's pretty hard to tell, and there's a lot of conflicting information out there. That's because, for these types of anime, they don't actually HAVE seasons, as Americans would think of them.
The idea of "seasons" for broadcast TV shows is mostly an American concept. It dates back to the American radio dramas of the 1930s when it became clear that people weren't tuning in during the summer months: it was too hot inside to huddle around a giant radio like they usually did. Families were outside, kids were playing, agrarian America took to the fields and urban America took vacations. Producers of weekly dramas began taking the months of July and August off, filling in those weeks with reruns—the earliest example I can find of this is the 1938 season of the domestic sitcom Fibber McGee and Molly. As time went on, that became a more structured practice, with new programming being introduced in the fall and running until the summer hiatus.
I couldn't find much information on pre-war Japanese radio, but Japanese TV broadcasting didn't start until the 1950s, and early broadcasts were dubbed versions of American sitcoms like I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best. Local Japanese productions, inspired by those shows, didn't really take off in earnest until Japan's huge economic boom of the 1960s (which, of course, was also was the beginning of TV anime). The American practice of new fall seasons was never really observed, however. Japanese broadcasts were far more whimsical in their scheduling. Drama producers would break up their shows into separate series, much like British television, and those series would be produced and introduced to audiences according to no particular schedule. For example, the much-loved domestic drama Arigatou aired from April till October 1970, but the second series didn't come along until the end of January 1972. Then series 3 aired only three months after the second finished up. This isn't too far off from how most late-night anime works today; if the first series of 12 or 13 episodes is a hit, another series will follow when it's good and ready.
But for long-running kids and family programming, which runs for years without interruption, there really isn't any such thing as a "season". There is no break in the show. A producer might opt to chop a series up into multiple sub-series (such as the myriad Bakugan and Precure series), to make them easier to collect on video and sell overseas. They might also use the occasion to do some fresh promotion for the show, shuffle around staff, and plan story arcs around those breaks. But then again, they might not. For a long-running show like Naruto Shippūden, there really weren't any defined "seasons"—I'm not sure where those came from in the English Wikipedia entry. Indeed, the Japanese Wikipedia episode list breaks down the show by story arcs. The official DVDs and episode listings from Viz make no mention of seasons. Hulu's listing does have seasons (which was possibly done just to force the show into Hulu's rigid framework), but they don't match what's on Wikipedia.
I honestly have no idea where those "seasons" are coming from. I have a feeling it's an invention by whatever otaku put that into Wikipedia.
Do YOU have a question for the Answerman?
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HOWEVER... CHECK THE ARCHIVES FIRST. I've answered a lot of questions already! Here are some common ones...This collection of reviews from a lifelong involvement in the intellectual life shows the late philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003) at his engaging best: lucid, cultivated and entirely serious in his determination to extract the essence from the matter he is discussing. Williams’s style of relentless interrogation, which permits neither vagueness nor evasion, invariably deepens the reader’s understanding not only of the question at issue but also of the intellectual networks in which it is embedded. Despite his busy life as a professor at respected universities on both sides of the Atlantic, as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and as a vociferous member of the old Labour establishment; and despite his own immensely important contribution to the subject in books that are on the shelves of all professional philosophers, Williams found time to study and review the works of his contemporaries, leaving all of them, it seems to me, with serious criticisms to answer, and at least one of them (Richard Rorty) with no hope of doing so.
Reading these essays was a wonderful journey back across the years of my own intellectual formation, revisiting the philosophical monuments of our time in the company of their acutest critic. Many of the significant post-war figures are called into the witness box: J L Austin, A J Ayer, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, Richard Rorty, Noam Chomsky, Derek Parfit, B F Skinner and many more, there to be cross-examined with consummate skill. Williams’s aim is not to score points, but to discover what these people are saying, why they are saying it and whether we should be saying it too. For readers without a philosophical training some of the essays will be uphill work. But they are never more difficult than the subject requires, and are written with a lightness of touch and a lack of solemnity that are a joy in themselves.
Williams’s great and in my view unmatched talent as a philosopher was to perceive and expose the hidden assumptions in every argument he came across, while understanding the goal that the argument was seeking to achieve. He brilliantly unsett |
mouse, keyboard and other hardware of all players of the 16 teams of the last Major for you. The table is even sortable by player name, team or sensitivity. This can be an incredibly valuable resource if you want to get your CS:GO game to the next level.
We have provided sources for you as well, just in case you want to check yourself. This table is updated every major Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament. Please feel free to comment if we got something wrong.
You can quickly reach this post under our subdomain at http://csgosetup.on-winning.com Any information on the settings, sensitivity, resolution, mice, keyboards, chairs or other gear of teams and players is very much appreciated. We will reply to you as soon as possible.
In general, checking out what the pros are using is a good start to find the perfect CS GO config, settings and hardware for you. You should always try to find the CS GO config, settings and hardware you personally are most comfortable with. Every player is different in his play style, which means that AWPers often play with a really low sensitivity, lurkers tend to have a comparatively high sens.
Interestingly, not every pro is using a flawless mouse sensor. Please refer to our Flawless Mouse Sensor List to check.
You should also try to find a mouse that fits your hand, there are many different grips that you have to try out for yourself. Until then you won’t know what mouse fits you. A 144hz monitor is a noticeable advantage over other players in CS GO, but if you are a new player 60 HZ are just fine. Also look at the mousepads the pros are using in CS GO. Most Pros use suprisingly big mousepads in CS:GO. If you are completely lost, start at 2 sensitivity and 400 dpi. Then just fine-tune it until it’s perfect.
You might also want to have a look at ProSettings.net. You can find some interesting analysis on the best monitors and mice in their CS:GO Best Monitor and Gear Guide and Best Mouse for CS:GO Guide.Kleefisch called Walker 'a true hero of the conservative movement.' Lt. Gov: Unions 'weaponized' recall
Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch is charging that unions have “weaponized” the recall election in Wisconsin, but she says she’s determined to win her battle and protect Gov. Scott Walker from dealing with an organized labor “boss” who will undermine him at every turn over the next two years.
Kleefisch, 36, hasn’t been in politics for long — her first attempt was her successful campaign just two years ago — but she’s already making history as the first lieutenant governor to ever face a recall. And if she loses in the separate June 5 lieutenant governor’s recall election to her expected challenger Mahlon Mitchell, the president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, Kleefisch warned that “big union bosses” will use the post as a “bully pulpit” to dominate the state’s government.
Story Continued Below
“I understand that the biggest priority here is to save Scott Walker, but it is essential that Scott Walker have his best partner in the lieutenant governor’s office,” Kleefisch told POLITICO in an interview. “If he instead has a union boss in the lieutenant governor’s office – our governor who wants nothing more than to see our state prosper and have the future of our children looked after – our governor will face non-stop harassment and our media will elevate this to a two-year gubernatorial debate on the nightly news.”
And the result of her election will do much more than simply define whether it will be “big union bosses” or “we, the people” who run Wisconsin, the tea party favorite said. The historic race, along with the governor’s recall, offers a “game changer, a momentum determiner” for the 2012 presidential election, Kleefisch said.
“Wisconsin is a purple state — this is going to be a focus of the presidential candidates so we need to make sure that momentum is on the side of our Republican nominee,” she said. “The best, most effective way to build momentum is to win this recall on June 5.”
But in Kleefisch’s race to hold onto her seat, there’s a critical quirk in Wisconsin’s constitution: since 1967 governors and lieutenant governors have been elected together as a slate, but there’s no dual ticket for a recall. And that means although Kleefisch was elected with Walker in 2010, she’s facing a separate recall this year.
“No one at that point in American history had weaponized the recall function,” she said. “And that’s what we’re looking at in Wisconsin now — non-stop recalls.”
While Kleefisch and Walker will campaign together, she’s very much a separate question on people’s ballots — and on their donation checks. And with many people still under the assumption that a vote or a dollar for Walker is the same as one for her, it’s a major concern for Kleefisch’s self-described “little campaign.”
This article tagged under: Unions
Wisconsin
Scott WalkerYesterday, following the close of the Vatican's sustainability summit, Pope Francis shared with a crowd in Rome an argument grounded in Catholic teaching for a heightened need for environmental protection, in the face of rampant degradation and climate change.
[T]he gift of knowledge helps us to avoid falling prey to excessive or incorrect attitudes. The first lies in the risk of considering ourselves masters of Creation. Creation is not a property, which we can rule over at will; or, even less, is the property of only a few: Creation is a gift, it is a wonderful gift that God has given us, so that we care for it and we use it for the benefit of all, always with great respect and gratitude....We are Custodians of Creation. But when we exploit Creation we destroy the sign of God’s love for us, in destroying Creation we are saying to God: “I don’t like it!. This is not good!” “So what do you like?” “I like myself!” – Here, this is sin! Do you see? Custody of Creation is custody of God’s gift to us and it is also a way of saying thank you to God. I am the master of Creation but to carry it forward I will never destroy your gift. And this should be our attitude towards Creation. Safeguard Creation. Because if we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us! Never forget this!
The full transcript of the Pope's speech can be seen here. The Pope's words can be interpreted to be a comment on climate change specifically—on how human actions are threatening to radically reshape the global ecosystem. But Pope Francis' words also apply to environmentalism more broadly.
Though in his term so far Pope Francis has developed a reputation for breaking with tradition, his respect for nature is not an example of that, says Think Progress:
The pontiff’s catechesis and the Vatican’s summit appear to be part of a renewed effort by the Catholic church to draw attention to environmental issues. Keeping with a long history of Catholic environmentalism (including several pro-environmentalist sermons delivered by Pope Benedict XVI, Francis’ predecessor), Francis addressed climate change in his inaugural mass as pope, and is rumored to be working on a formal encyclical on the environment.
This also isn't the first time the Vatican has made note of global climate change. In 2011, says the New York Times, “the Vatican released a report... calling man-made climate change "serious and potentially irreversible" and advocating aggressive action to curb emissions.”It’s little wonder that attempts to make Australia’s taxation system more unfair have emerged as one of Malcolm Turnbull’s early prime ministerial priorities. In his victorious spill night speech, Turnbull’s pledge to govern “for freedom, the individual and the market” made it explicit that mechanisms to advance the unmentioned “public good”, “community” or, God help us, “the people” were of zero immediate interest.
Raising GST to 15% 'will cost poorest families 7% of disposable income' Read more
So it’s barely November and the Coalition have a new leader but no new tactics, let alone ideas. With dreary inevitability, they’re talking tax reform.
A suitable stalking horse – David Gillespie MP (um, who?) – has been trotted out to suggest a NZ-style overhaul of the tax system that would apply an increased GST to food, health, education and probably the air we breathe, should the government finally manage to privatise it.
The “tax reform” strategy is, as usual, to propose something so preposterous amongst a clutch of other dreadful options that what the government really wants – the increase of the GST to 15% with a packet of tax cuts to rich people – can, with a gentle pucker of the treasurer’s mouth, be presented as a palatable compromise.
Indeed, Scott Morrison has already “stressed [Gillespie’s] idea is not official policy” although all ideas are “on the table”.
Nobody should get comfortable. The Coalition’s radical economic agenda – that came to be in Abbott government documents like the post-election Commission of Audit and disastrous 2014 Budget – didn’t start as “official” policy, either.
This is because Australians will not vote for economic policies they know to be unfair, so the Coalition can’t be too explicit about it – like Abbott and Hockey were – or they’re toast.
Turnbull appears to believe he can deliver the radical economic outcomes Abbott couldn’t if his team – that same Coalition team – just delivers a better sales pitch. He said as much himself in that mightily revealing spill night speech.
The Coalition’s hucksters are at least explicit about this part of their strategy. For Turnbull’s tilt at a GST increase, Arthur Sinodinos, newly-resurrected, claimed urgency was needed to “sell a story to the Australian people”. The AFR reports that communications minister Mitch Fifield “said selling the changes to Australia would nearly be as important as the changes themselves”.
But Australians are right to question just why this particular “reform” is the one preferred by Turnbull. He could instead address revenue gouging created by multinational tax avoidance, domestic tax evasion, superannuation tax concessions, diesel fuel rebates and negative gearing. He could establish a common-sense Buffett Rule, or, you know, simply increase the Medicare Levy.
He’s not going to. For all their colourful antics the Coalition remains an assortment of pro-business and propertied neoliberals, neoconservatives, neocon-libs, neo-lib-cons and petrified single-minded recalcitrants.
Protecting the wealthy is, as always, the real agenda of the Coalition’s taxation “reform”, because – and this may surprise those Australians who have already had their pensions cut, or their services cancelled, or are living in terror of higher medical or education fees - apparently, it’s not about raising revenue.
Hockey insisted there was a “budget crisis” to justify spending cuts – but now assistant treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer’s assures that an increased GST is about “improving the overall tax intake and not increasing it”. The sales claim from the Coalition is for “improving economic efficiency” because to claim that increasing the notoriously regressive GST is fair is not true.
As modelling this week from the Australian Council of Social Services showed, increasing the GST to 15% would cost the poorest Australian families an extra 7% of their disposable income. It would cost the richest families only an additional 3.6%.
In an Australia where wages are not keeping pace with productivity, unemployment is rising, labour casualisation is increasing and two years of Coalition government have coincided with a surge in wealth inequality, proposing to raise the GST is nothing short of shameful.Australia has moved into second position, behind the United Kingdom and ahead of the United States, in the World Economic Forum's ranking of global financial centres.
The forum released its second annual Financial Development Report on Friday, ranking 55 of the world's leading financial systems and capital markets.
The forum said global financial centres still led the rankings, but the effects of the global financial crisis had pulled down most countries' scores compared to last year.
''The United Kingdom, buoyed by the relative strength of its banking and non-banking financial activities, claimed the index's top spot from the United States, which slipped to third position behind Australia largely due to poorer financial stability scores and a weakened banking sector,'' the forum said.
Australia rose to second place in 2009, from 11th in 2008 and was the only country in the top five to record a rise in its score.The Arizona Cardinals are a step closer to suing cash-strapped Glendale over the loss of about 3,200 parking spots near the NFL stadium that workers demolished to build an outlet mall.
The Cardinals and the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, which operates University of Phoenix Stadium, on Wednesday delivered a notice of claim to the city seeking up to $66.7 million to replace the lost parking with garages, unless an acceptable solution is found.
The claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, follows two April letters to the city that laid out the team's and sports authority's concerns that parking demolished in February to build the 38-acre Tanger Factory Outlets complex could not be replaced. They gave Glendale a Tuesday deadline to provide assurances that parking spaces at Westgate City Center would be replaced.
The city never responded, according to the claim.
The Cardinals began playing at the Glendale stadium in 2006. An agreement signed four years earlier required Glendale to provide 6,000 spots for football games and other stadium events at Westgate, the restaurant and entertainment complex near the stadium.
A possible short-term solution the city presented in March did not comply with the parking agreement because the spots were outside Westgate, according to the team's and sports authority's April 9 letter to the city.
City Attorney Craig Tindall, whose city faces a $35 million deficit in next year's budget, said the franchise "jumped the gun" with its notice of claim.
Tindall said the parking agreement requires the 6,000 spots be available only about two months before the first football game. The first Cardinals game is set for Aug. 17, and the city is working to have an answer for the Cardinals within weeks, the city attorney said.
City Manager Ed Beasley said Glendale transportation staffers are working to find spots and are likely to provide responses to the Cardinals soon.
The city manager acknowledged March meetings with the Cardinals and the sports authority, but he could not say whether there had been discussions since or provide details on possible plans.
Cardinals spokesman Mark Dalton said Glendale never responded to April letters, which were also signed by representatives from the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee, the Fiesta Bowl and the NFL.
"Today, the city doesn't own or control enough land at Westgate to perform the contract, and under these unique circumstances, we have a legal right to assurances they have the ability to perform that obligation," Dalton said.
The parking woes are further complicated by Westgate's troubles. The 6-year-old complex fell into foreclosure last year.
This year's announcement that Tanger would open an outlet mall there, along Loop 101 just south of Glendale Avenue, was a sliver of good news for the complex that is now partly owned by two separate lenders.
The city attorney said any new development at Westgate would impact stadium parking plans, but he said there has long been an understanding that parking could be shuffled.
"We haven't violated any agreements," Tindall said. "We don't intend to violate any agreements. We are working on a solution."
If one exists, sports-authority President Tom Sadler said he would like to see it soon.
"I think we're prepared to sit down and fully vet any solutions (Glendale) may have, but meanwhile, the clock is ticking toward game day," he said.Image copyright Getty Images
About three million EU citizens living in the UK would be allowed to stay after Brexit, Theresa May has proposed.
A new "UK settled status" would grant EU migrants who had lived in the UK for five years rights to stay and access health, education and other benefits.
Proposals were unveiled at a Brussels summit but are dependent on EU states guaranteeing Britons the same rights.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the plan a "good start", but Labour said it was "too little, too late".
Many EU citizens in the UK, and Britons living abroad, are worried about their status once Brexit happens. The UK's exit deadline is 30 March 2019.
Addressing other EU leaders at her first summit since the general election, the prime minister said she did not want anyone to have to leave or families to split up.
"No one will face a cliff edge," she said.
"The UK's position represents a fair and serious offer, one aimed at giving as much certainty as possible to citizens who have settled in the UK, building careers and lives and contributing so much to our society.''
Mrs May said the UK wanted to protect the rights of EU citizens in the UK - and the rights of UK expats in other European countries.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Angela Merkel said she wanted the "widest possible guarantee" for EU citizens
But Downing Street has not yet specified what the cut-off date will be for new residents, after which the guarantee would no longer apply. It will be no earlier than March 2017, when the UK formally began leaving the EU by issuing the Article 50 notification, and no later than March 2019 when it will actually leave.
Those arriving up until the point of departure would have a "grace period" - expected to be two years - to build up the same "UK settled status", she told EU leaders.
Mrs May also said the system would be streamlined, doing away with an 85-page permanent residency application form which has attracted complaints.
BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said the PM was already on a collision course with her European counterparts over her plan for the rules of the new system to be applied by a British court - Brussels has insisted it must be the European Court of Justice that oversees it.
But she added that the offer was intended to be a symbol that the UK was getting on with Brexit at a time of turmoil at home, in the wake of the general election result which led to Mrs May losing her Commons majority.
Our correspondent said the full details would not be unveiled until next Monday, and it was not yet clear if the offer was as generous as that put forward by the EU a month ago. Details on issues such as the rights of EU citizens' relatives abroad and their descendants, were not yet known.
'Uncertainty for a year'
Labour's Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, said: "Labour has been clear that people should not be bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiations.
"The prime minister's offer is too little too late and falls far short of the full and unilateral guarantee Labour would make."
Giving a "clear commitment" that there would be no change in the status of EU nationals in the UK would help deliver the same deal for UK nationals living in the EU, he added.
Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said the plans left too many unanswered questions.
"Theresa May could have given a guarantee from day one, instead she has allowed our friends, colleagues and neighbours to live in uncertainty for a year," he said.
"Even now, Theresa May continues to insist on using EU nationals in Britain as bargaining chips and has failed to provide a full and clear right to stay for all."
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters she wanted "the widest possible security guarantees for EU citizens" from the Brexit deal and called the offer "a good start".
She added: "But there are still many many other questions linked to the exit, including on finances and the relationship with Ireland. So we have a lot to do until [the next EU summit in] October."
Both the UK and the rest of the EU say they want to come to an arrangement to secure the status of the 3.2 million EU citizens in the UK and the estimated 1.2 million Britons living in EU countries.
The European Union has said they should continue enjoying the same rights, enforceable by the European Court of Justice.
UK opposition parties had urged the government to make a unilateral guarantee to the EU migrants - but ministers have insisted a reciprocal deal is needed to ensure British expats are protected.
The gathering of 28 EU member states' leaders came the day after measures to enable Brexit dominated the Queen's Speech. Mrs May's Conservatives are still trying to secure the Commons support needed to pass their programme.
Mrs May was not present when the leaders of the remaining 27 EU states held a brief discussion about Brexit after her presentation.This project was intended to teach myself how to cut a sprite sheet with Python. I then decided I wanted to be able to create a spectrum of the Pokémon’s colors. The following is the tutorial on how to do it using the Emerald sprites of all the 151 Pokémon of the first generation.
First of all, you need to have all the Pokémon sprites separated in separate files. Since I didn’t have that. I used the sprite sheet on spriters-resource. Download that, remove the blue backgrounds around the sprites in a single click using GIMP’s Select By Color tool and put it in a new folder where you will later place your Python application.
To manipulate an image with Python 3, you need to install Pillow. To do so, simply enter the following in a command prompt:
pip install Pillow
We can now split our sprite sheet.
Start by creating a Python file. I’ve name mine “cut_sheet.py” but yours can be different. Then, enter the following:
from PIL import Image #This is the width of the white border that remains after removing the blue backgrounds MARGIN = 5 #Our sprites have a 64x64 resolution SPRITE_RESOLUTION = 64 #The path to our sprite sheet SHEET_FILENAME = "sheet.png" #We open the sprite sheet sheet = Image.open(SHEET_FILENAME) #Set the Pokémon number to 0 pokemon_number = 0 #Iterate through the rows for i in range(0, sheet.size[1] // (SPRITE_RESOLUTION + MARGIN)): #Iterate through the columns for j in range(0, sheet.size[0] // (SPRITE_RESOLUTION + MARGIN)): #Since the sheet has two sprite of each Pokémon and we want only the first one, we skip every second ones (odd numbers) if (j % 2 == 0): #Increase the Pokemon number by one pokemon_number = pokemon_number + 1 #Set the coordinate of the sprite x = j * (SPRITE_RESOLUTION + MARGIN) + MARGIN y = i * (SPRITE_RESOLUTION + MARGIN) + MARGIN #Select the section we want (the sprite) section = (x, y, x + 64, y + 64) #Crop it sprite = sheet.crop(section) #Save it with the Pokémon number in the filename sprite.save("pokemon_" + str(pokemon_number) + ".png")
If everything went well, your folder should now be flooded by sprite files. It’s time to create the spectrum. Create another Python application (I’ve named mine “avg_color.py”) and enter the following:
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw def countVisiblePixels(image): #Load the image pixels = image.load() #Set the counter to 0 visible_pixels = 0 #Iterate through every pixels for i in range(0, image.width): for j in range(0, image.height): #If not transparent if pixels[i, j][3]!= 0: #Increment counter visible_pixels = visible_pixels + 1 return visible_pixels def createImageContainingVisiblePixels(image): #Load the image pixels = image.load() #Create the image background = (0, 0, 0, 255) visible_colors = Image.new('RGB', (1, countVisiblePixels(image)), background) draw = ImageDraw.Draw(visible_colors) #Set counter to 0 pixel_counter = 0 #Iterate through every pixels for j in range(0, image.width): for k in range(0, image.height): #If not transparent if pixels[j, k][3]!= 0: #Increment counter pixel_counter = pixel_counter + 1 #Draw pixel draw.point((0, pixel_counter, 0, 0), fill=pixels[j, k]) return visible_colors def createSpectrum(width_of_stripe, height_of_stripe, number_of_stripe, avg_colors): #Background of our spectrum, it is not going to be visible anyway background = (0, 0, 0, 255) #Creating a new image for the spectrum result_image = Image.new('RGB', (number_of_stripe * width_of_stripe, height_of_stripe), background) #creating an ImageDraw so that we can draw on the spectrum draw = ImageDraw.Draw(result_image) #Iterating over the color list for i in range(0, len(avg_colors)): #Drawing a line of the average color of the Pokémon draw.rectangle((i * width_of_stripe, 0, (i + 1) * width_of_stripe, height_of_stripe), fill=avg_colors[i]) return result_image def main(): #The number of Pokémon your spectrum will contain, here we do only the first generation so that makes it a total of 151 Pokémon NUMBER_OF_POKEMON = 151 #The height of the resulting spectrum HEIGHT_OF_SPECTRUM = 500 #The width of the stripes WIDTH_OF_STRIPES = 10 #Lists where we will stock our colors later avg_colors = [] #Iterating over every Pokémon for i in range(0, NUMBER_OF_POKEMON): #Opening the file pokemon = Image.open("pokemon_" + str(i + 1) + ".png") #Creating an image containing only the visible pixels, removing the transparency from the average visible_colors = createImageContainingVisiblePixels(pokemon) #Getting data h = visible_colors.histogram() #Getting RGB values r = h[0:256] g = h[256:256*2] b = h[256*2:256*3] #Appending the average RGB value to the list avg_colors.append((int(sum( i*w for i, w in enumerate(r) ) / sum(r)), int(sum( i*w for i, w in enumerate(g) ) / sum(g)), int(sum( i*w for i, w in enumerate(b) ) / sum(b)))) #Create and save the spectrum result_image = createSpectrum(WIDTH_OF_STRIPES, HEIGHT_OF_SPECTRUM, NUMBER_OF_POKEMON, avg_colors) result_image.save("result.png") main()
You should now see in your folder a file named “result.png” which is the color spectrum. It should look like this:
AdvertisementsIf Major League Baseball had acted on a request by its players, the broken bat that seriously injured a woman at Fenway Park on Friday night never would have reached the seats.
The players, in each of the last two rounds of collective bargaining, proposed that protective netting extend down the foul lines and even to the foul poles, according to major-league sources.
The owners, however, rejected the proposals for the 2007 and 2012 labor agreements, citing concerns that additional netting would detract from the experience of ticket buyers in certain premium seats, sources said.
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"Some owners are afraid to upset the fans that pay some of the highest ticket prices, when in reality, it’s an effort to protect those very fans," said Diamondbacks reliever Brad Ziegler, a member of the negotiating committee for the players’ union.
"(The owners) seem afraid that fans will lose access to the players – autographs, getting baseballs, etc. — and that will cause those ticket holders to be unhappy. Or, that they’d have to watch the game through a net. (But) fans behind home plate pay the highest prices, have the same issues, and yet those seats are always full."
Baseball requires protective netting behind home plate, and some teams also use protective screens down the foul lines during batting practice. The woman at Fenway struck in the face by a broken bat — Tonya Carpenter, 44, of Paxton, Massachusetts — was sitting beyond the netting, in the second row between home plate and the third-base dugout.
Carpenter, who could be heard screaming as she was taken off the field in a stretcher, was rushed to Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston. Her family said in a statement that her condition was serious. Baseball issued a statement saying fan safety was a priority.
"We have the utmost concern for the victim of this terribly unfortunate incident," the statement said. "We will continue to keep her and her family in our thoughts and prayers. We appreciate the efforts of the Red Sox, the first responders, the Boston Police and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
"Fan safety is our foremost goal for all those who choose to support our game by visiting our ballparks and we will always strive for that experience to be safe and fan-friendly."
In 2008, baseball identified the emergence of maple bats as the reason for a sharp increase in the number of broken bats, and imposed design standards that cut the number of shattered bats in half, MLB spokesman Mike Teevan told the Los Angeles Times.
At the time, former commissioner Bud Selig said he was not considering more extensive protective netting around the field of play, similar to what is used in Japan.
"While we’re always very, very concerned with the health and the welfare of the fans, you also don’t want to do anything to obstruct the views of the fans, which creates really a major problem. You sort of have to weigh one against the other."
A spokesman for baseball said Saturday that the sport is constantly evaluating safety issues and that commissioner Rob Manfred likely will revisit the question of whether teams should install additional netting.
Players, however, say that the owners have seemed to place a greater priority on fan ambience than fan safety.
"The blowback we got is that people pay lots of money for those seats and don’t want a net in front of them," said left-hander C.J. Wilson, the Angels’ player representative to the union. "The difficulty for owners is balancing the premium seats and the safety of the people in the premium seats.
"Obviously, there is a lot of velocity involved with anything that goes into the stands, whether it’s errant throws, broken bats, foul balls — especially foul balls. It’s terrible whenever something happens and somebody gets hurt. That’s why we encourage people to literally bring a glove to the game. It’s completely random when it happens. It’s not predictable."
According to a 2009 study by Sports Illustrated, foul balls had killed 52 spectators since 1887. The only fatality at a major-league park occurred in 1970, when a 14-year-old boy was killed by a foul ball at Dodger Stadium, SI said.
Most parks include signage that warns fans who sit close to the field to pay close attention — "Be Alert Foul Balls and Bats Hurt," the signs at Fenway say. Tickets include disclaimers shifting all responsibility for injury to the fan.
In 2002, the NHL responded to the death of one of its fans — Brittanie Cecil, 13 — by mandating protective netting behind each goal. Cecil was hit by a puck while attending a Columbus Blue Jackets home game, and died two days later.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, addressing critics of the netting, said at the time, "After three minutes people won’t know it’s there."
Left-hander Chris Capuano, the Yankees’ player representative, said that baseball needs to act before a tragedy occurs in a major-league park.
"Hopefully something bad doesn’t have to happen for something to change," Capuano said. "We talked about it the last time (in collective bargaining). I’m sure it will be on the table this time."
Baseball’s collective-bargaining agreement expires on Dec. 1, 2016.The Delhi High Court today directed the Income Tax department not to take any coercive step against NDTV in connection with a Rs 428- crore demand raised by the authority.
A bench of justices S. Muralidhar and Pratibha M. Singh said it was "satisfied" that there was a prima facie case in favour of New Delhi Television (NDTV).
The court also issued notice to the IT department and sought its reply on the television channel's plea challenging the demand order of July 26 and a show cause notice of the same day. The notice was issued for failure to pay the amount in time.
Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for NDTV, contended that the July 26 order was "without jurisdiction" and based on "piecemeal assessment".
Pulling up the tax authority for issuing the demand order and the notice, the bench noted that the time given for deposit of the amount was 'immediately now' which appeared to be an "over enthusiastic step" and "on the face of it illegal".
"How can you pass penalty order when no time has been given for payment of the amount which was determined on July 26," the court asked the I-T department.
In its defence, the department contended that only a show cause notice was issued and it was in respect of two unpaid demands for 2007-08 and the one under challenge of 2009-10.
Senior advocate Sanjay Jain, representing the department, also argued that the plea was not maintainable and the media house could go in appeal against the order to the commissioner concerned of the Income Tax department.
He, however, said that the penalty notice with regard to the demand for assessment year 2009-10 would not be given effect to.
He also urged the bench to direct partial deposit of the amount demanded.
The court, while noting the statement made on behalf of the department, did not order partial deposit of the amount.
The bench, instead, allowed the department to raise the issue on the next date of hearing on August 21.
According to NDTV's plea, the July 26 demand order was issued after the July 14 decision of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) by which it had upheld the assessing officer's decision to add around Rs 642 crore, as unexplained money, to the channel's income for the assessment year (AY) 2009-10.
But, the ITAT had remanded back three other issues pertaining to the same AY, NDTV has said, contending that there could not be a demand order for each "truncated" issue.
The media house has also said that the "unexplained money" of around Rs 642 crore was in fact an investment made by NBC Universal Inc through its subsidiary Universal Studio International BV.
The petition, subsequent to the ITAT order of July 14, said the IT department had arrived at a figure of Rs 577 crore as the income of the media house for the AY 2009-10 by taking into account losses of Rs 64 crore claimed by the channel as well as the unexplained money.
Based on the figure of Rs 577 crore income, the department had calculated that a tax of Rs 428 crore was payable, the plea has said.
PTIHashimoto Nanami announced her graduation during the Nogizaka46’s All Night Nippon radio show, which aired on October 19th, 2016. Here is an English translation of her graduation announcement and commentary.
Yes, this is Hashimoto Nanami. Umm, let’ see. Going on like this, when it’s just me who’s talking, I think that some people will be thinking, “Huh? Was there a title like this?”
橋本奈々未「はい、橋本奈々未です。えー、どうだろう。こうやってね、私1人の時間が今流れて、なんとなーく皆さん「あれっ？ タイトルもあれっ？」って思った人いるかとは思うのですが。
I’m Nogizaka46’s Hashimoto Nanami. I’m taking part in the current, 16th single, “Sayonara No Imi”. My birthday is also on February 20th – so with that in mind, on my birthday next year, I’ve decided to graduate from Nogizaka46.
乃木坂46の橋本奈々未ですが、今回のシングル、16枚目のシングル「サヨナラの意味」の活動をして、私自身の誕生日は2月20日なんですが、来年の自分の誕生日、2月20日を目安にして、この乃木坂46を卒業することを決めました。
When I’ve just made my announcement, it’s hard to think about what to talking about next…. but yes, I’m graduating.
いざ発表するとなるとどこから何を話せばいいのかなかなか難しいんですが・・・そうなんです、卒業するんです
Although I’ve made my announcement today, it isn’t until February, not until February 20th. Today is the early morning of October 20th, so there’s still about 4 months. There are still things to be sorted out. I’ve been able to decide on a specific date, so you can relax about that. There are about four months left. I hope that you’ll continue to support me these remaining four months. So there’s that, and on November 9th, the new single, for which I’m the center, “Sayonara no Imi” will go on sale. I’ll hope you’ll continue to support me at that time as well.
でも今日発表して、また2月まで、2月20日まで。ちょうど今日が明けて10月20日なんです。だから4ヶ月ほどあるので。でもまだ今調整中なのでね、まだハッキリ何日にっていうのは出てないんですけど、目安がそこ。およそ4ヶ月間まだあるので、是非皆さん、残りの4ヶ月間よろしくお願いします、ということと、11月9日、私のセンターの新曲「サヨナラの意味」発売されるので、その間の活動、これからもまたよろしくお願いします」
A little later on in the program…
Oh, I almost forget to say. When I graduate from Nogizaka46, I will also be quitting the show business as well. I’ll be a normal person. I’m 23 right now, but as soon as I turn 24 years old, I’ll just be living life as a normal girl. Therefore, I entered show business as Nogizaka46’s Hashimoto Nanami; it started this way, and I want it to end like that.
橋本奈々未「あっ、言い忘れてたわ。乃木坂46を卒業して、私は芸能界も引退します。普通の一般社会で、今23歳ですけど、誕生日を迎えて24歳になってからは普通の女性として生きていこうと思っています。なのでね、ほんとに乃木坂46の橋本奈々未として芸能界に入って、活動をはじめて、そのまま終わろうと思っています」
Author: jerry |
charges, fiddling with data, and putting in restrictions on new technologies. Critics say the tariffs are anything but cost reflective, and in some cases simply a means to collect revenue and to slow down the uptake of disruptive technologies.
All this is happening while the primary cause of the expanded grid – the rush to air conditioning – remains largely undressed, along with other massive cross-subsidies between city and regional consumers.
It is the combination of all this that is inspiring many consumers to consider leaving the grid altogether. And as battery costs fall – and all analysts, most recently Lazard, predict at least a 50 per cent fall in coming years – then many others may follow.
A major study conducted by the CSIRO and the networks in 2012 highlighted the risks involved for the network. The Future Grid report pointed to a scenario where half of all demand would come from “local generation”, and hailed the rise of the “pro-sumer” – consumers who also produce their own electricity.
But it also warned that if networks failed to adapt, then up to one-third of their customer base could choose to leave the grid.
The networks, while seeking to change tariff structures, have rejected calls for them to write down the inflated value of their assets. They have even flagged potential “penalties” for people who do choose to leave the grid, and have sought changes in depreciation allowances that would allow them to recoup the cost of their investment more quickly.
An updated study is due to be released by the CSIRO and ENA in early December. The results will be fascinating to see.
One of the biggest arguments against grid defection is on cost; the incumbent utilities argue that the “return on investment” will not be compelling for many years. But others wonder if consumers care. When they choose a fridge, a TV, or even a car, they rarely consider ROIs. Who’s to say they would not do the same for battery storage and solar?
Hence the need for Hello Grid. The ENA says it is designed to provide information about the initiatives being taken on the networks, the introduction of new technologies, and the transition to a “smart grid”.
As part of the campaign, ENA has sponsored a series of articles on Gizmodo promoting new technologies, as well as posts from other bloggers.
It has a range of resources, including a quiz, which it uses to underpin its principal points – that the grid is essential and reliable, and that rooftop solar, for all the installations, plays a minor role in total production.
“While incredible numbers of Australians are installing rooftop solar, it produced about 3 per cent of our electricity consumption in 2014/15, or 5052 gigawatt-hours,” the website says.
Grid operators, however, suggest that at current rates of uptake, rooftop solar could be meeting all daytime demand in states such as Western Australia and South Australia within a decade.
And how reliable is the grid? Very reliable: “The entire Australian grid provides reliable supply without outages for 99.95 per cent of the year (on average),” the quiz answer notes, adding that blackouts are usually caused by “natural disasters” and the grid “provides the backbone of our economy and our connection to a cleaner energy future.”
It adds: “Did you know that the Australian electricity networks could go around the world 22 times, or to the moon and back?”
Some would say that is too long, and there might be smarter ways of doing this – local generation, micro-grids etc, and by encouraging networks to invest in alternative technologies, such as battery storage, rather than building more poles and wires.
But the rule setter – the Australian Energy Markets Commission – has punted any such changes until the next regulatory period, beginning in 2019/20. Meanwhile, the networks are likely to be allowed to spend another $50 billion in the coming five years, despite claims that this is too much.
The government-owned NSW networks, however, want to spend more, and have taken their complaints to court, reportedly spending 10s of millions in legal fees taking on the Australian Energy Regulator and consumer groups.Paramount Pictures has just released international trailer for the upcoming “G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra.”
Synopsis: G.I. Joe will be a modern telling of the “G.I. Joe vs. Cobra” storyline and its compelling characters that Hasbro created 25 years ago. The premise of this fantasy is the story of the G.I. Joe team, led by Duke, and their “fight for freedom wherever there is trouble” against the evil Cobra Commander and his Cobra force.
This storyline was an instant hit with kids in the early 1980s, spawning a highly popular 3-3/4-inch action figure line, comic book collection and animated series. The G.I. Joe team will not be based in Brussels. Instead, they will be based out of the “Pit” as they were throughout the 1980s comic book series. And, in keeping with the G.I. Joe vs. Cobra fantasy, the movie will feature characters and locations from around the world.
Duke, the lead character and head of the G.I. Joe team, will embody the values of bravery and heroism that the first generation of G.I. Joe figures established.
“G.I. Joe” stars Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller, Channing Tatum, Ray Park and Christopher Eccleston.
Paramount will premiere G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra in theaters on August 7th 2009.25th February 2016
Pancreatic cancer breakthrough: four subtypes identified
Pancreatic cancer has been found to have four separate subtypes, each with a different cause and requiring a different treatment.
An international team led by Australian researchers has studied the genetics of pancreatic cancer, revealing it is actually four separate diseases each with different genetic triggers and survival rates, paving the way for more accurate diagnoses and treatments.
These major findings also include 10 genetic pathways at the core of transforming normal pancreatic tissue into cancerous tumours. Some of these processes are related to bladder and lung cancers – opening up the possibility of using treatments for these cancers to also treat pancreatic cancer.
The study, led by Prof Sean Grimmond at the University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research, was published yesterday in Nature. Over seven years, his team analysed the genomes of 456 pancreatic tumours to find the core processes that are damaged when normal pancreatic tissues change into aggressive cancers.
Professor Grimmond said there was an urgent need for more knowledge about the genetic causes of pancreatic cancer, given its very low survival rate with most patients only living a few months after diagnosis – and the condition is predicted to become the second most common cancer in Western countries by 2025.
"We identified 32 genes, from 10 genetic pathways that are consistently mutated in pancreatic tumours, but further analysis of gene activity revealed four distinct subtypes of tumours," said Prof. Grimmond. "This study demonstrates that pancreatic cancer is better considered as four separate diseases, with different survival rates, treatments and underlying genetics. Knowing which subtype a patient has would allow a doctor to provide a more accurate prognosis and treatment recommendations."
Importantly, Prof. Grimmond said there are already cancer drugs, and drugs in development, that can potentially target parts of the 'damaged machinery' driving pancreatic cancers to start. For example, some strains of pancreatic cancer are unexpectedly associated with mutations normally associated with colon cancer or leukaemia and for which experimental drugs are available or in development. Other pancreatic cancers bear strong similarities to some bladder and lung cancers and researchers can now start to draw on that knowledge to improve treatments.
In a world first, his team performed an integrated genomic analysis – meaning they combined results of several techniques to examine not only the genetic code, but also variations in structure and gene activity, revealing more information than ever before about the genetic damage that leads to pancreatic cancer.
Comments »For other people with the same name, see David Blair
David Blair (or Davy) (11 November 1874 – 10 January 1955) was a British merchant seaman with the White Star Line, which had reassigned him from the RMS Titanic just before its maiden voyage. Due to his hasty departure, he accidentally kept a key to a storage locker believed to contain binoculars intended for use by the crow's nest lookout.
Titanic posting and reshuffle [ edit ]
Blair, from Broughty Ferry, was originally appointed the Second Officer of the Titanic.[1] He had been with the ship during its trial voyages to test the ship's seaworthiness and the final journey from its place of construction in Belfast.
The White Star Line, however, decided that with the Titanic's sister ship, the RMS Olympic, currently undergoing layovers, to have the Olympic's Chief Officer, Henry Wilde take the position, citing his experience with ships of the Titanic's class as a reason.[2] Chief Officer William Murdoch and First Officer Charles Lightoller were thus demoted one-step in rank, removing Blair from the command roster. Blair wrote about the disappointment of losing his position on the Titanic in a postcard to his sister-in-law days before the Titanic left for Southampton,[3] remarking, "This is a magnificent ship, I feel very disappointed I am not to make her first voyage."
Key to the binoculars [ edit ]
When Blair left the Titanic on 9 April 1912 he took with him the key to the Crow's nest locker, presumably by accident. This is believed to be a reason why there were no binoculars available with the crew during the voyage. According to other versions, the binoculars were not in the locker, but were left behind in his cabin,[1] or he took them along with him when he left the ship, as they were his personal set of binoculars. The absence of binoculars being a factor in the sinking of the Titanic, became a point of investigation in the subsequent inquiries into the sinking.
The lookouts at the time of the collision, Frederick Fleet and Reginald Lee, maintained during the inquiries that they were informed they were to have no binoculars during the voyage. Fleet, when asked by a commission of inquiry composed of members of the United States Congress whether or not they would have seen the iceberg from farther away, replied that he would have seen it "a bit sooner". When asked "How much sooner?", he responded: "Well, enough to get out of the way."[4] According to legal expert Gary Slapper, though, Blair's "forgetfulness wasn't a material reason for the disaster" as there were other intervening causes.[5]
The key itself survived and was donated by Blair's daughter to the International Sailors Society.[6] On 22 September 2007, it was sold in a group of items including a postcard Blair wrote on board the Titanic via an auction held by Henry Aldridge, including a ticket from Belfast that fetched £32,000 and a postcard sent by a passenger which sold for £17,000.[7] The key was purchased by Shen Dongjun, the CEO of jewellery retailer TESIRO's Chinese division for £90,000, and is currently on display in Nanjing.[8]
The auctioneers said about the importance of the key that, it was a conjecture that the key could have saved the Titanic had it not left the ship. They also said that the money from the auction of the key will be used to set up bursaries and scholarships in Blair's name.[6]
Later events [ edit ]
He was First Officer on the SS Majestic in 1913 when a coaler jumped overboard; the night before a fellow crewmember had succeeded in drowning himself. While a lifeboat was organised, Blair jumped into the ocean waters and swam toward the man, who was now swimming for the ship. Though the boat reached the man first, Blair was commended for his action in The New York Times and received money from the passengers[9] and a medal from the Royal Humane Society.[10]
Blair (and Charles Lightoller, who survived the Titanic disaster) served aboard the RMS Oceanic when it ran aground in 1914. As the navigator, Blair received the blame for the grounding at the resulting enquiry.
Blair died on 10 January 1955 in Hendon, Middlesex.
References [ edit ]Just now, I sliced a purple onion to put in my garbanzo bean salad – have you looked at one of those lately?
– How utterly beautiful they are –
But the slicing brought a deluge of tears so strong, that I shut my eyes and continued to cut by feel only, slice, slice slice, above the whoosh of the dishwasher. The tears stung and cleaned me out – even if onion induced – nothing feels better than a good cry.
Now I have those onions carmelizing in the pan; will that be good in a salad? I don’t know, but I will try.
I am moving forward without so much definition of just what exactly that means.
Moving is such an opportunity for release and reinvention. We are only going 8 miles or so. Boxing up, throwing out, I am seeing what it is that constitutes our lives; all of this activity gives perspective. We are a collection of stuff. We are a collection of shared experiences. We, my daughters and I, while away a bit of time together – and then things change – some so gradually you hardly notice, and other things disappear overnight. AH!
I found some old journals full of anguished thoughts. I visited my dear younger self in her sorrow. These sorrows in that time, as well as joys, did pass. The self I visited then is no longer the me of now, and the future me will look back at the me of now with loving tenderness.
The journey is important, but not in the way the mind wants to make it so.
Getting the sticky parts out can be a bit uncomfortable and embarrassing to the self that can be embarrassed. The real self recognizes there is no shame in the journey.
I forget. I expose my shadows in the mirror of my experiences. I fall down mind spirals that I no longer think are possible. When I return, what is left?
Nothing left to lose. It is insane to believe in loss.
The world of self-esteem, Own it, girl, strut your stuff, I’m all that 🙂 has a hard time with some of these ideas. The loss of identity in some ears sounds like the opposite of a healthy outlook. Funny!
Stripping down to the real thing is the opposite of adding on or building up –
what is here is all thatGorillas are being dangerously stressed by tourists whose attentions are disrupting the animals' feeding routines and making them aggressive. The discovery – made by researchers who have just completed a year-long study of the great apes at Bai Hokou in the Central African Republic – has important implications for the tourism industry.
Eco-tourism has become extremely popular, providing travellers with opportunities to get close to rare species, including tigers, polar bears and gorillas. Money raised in this way has helped to preserve endangered animals and bring employment to developing countries.
Gorilla tourism in particular has boomed, providing jobs and business opportunities in several African countries. In Uganda, gorilla tourism brings in an estimated £345,000 a month from the sale of permit fees alone.
But now scientists warn that greater care will be needed. Not only do tourists disturb the animals, but so do research teams studying the animals' behaviour and their interaction with tourists. It is recommended that the minimum distance between humans and gorillas be increased from seven to 18 metres.
"We got a lot of warning barks from the male silverback in a band of gorillas if we went too close," said Michelle Klailova of Stirling University. "And you ignore a male gorilla's barking at your peril, for there is a real danger that it will turn into something much worse, like a full-blown charge. They can kill very easily. They know exactly where to bite a person."
Great apes are known to be vulnerable to human diseases. A common cold has the potential to kill an entire family group. Research at the Tai chimpanzee project in Ivory Coast found that 15 young chimpanzees who died in three disease outbreaks there had been infected with viral strains that were very similar to those found in humans.
Authorities have so far insisted that humans remain at least seven metres away. "Even if we sneeze, then particles from our breath will not reach the gorillas," said Klailova, whose study – written with Chloe Hodgkinson and Phyllis Lee – is published in the American Journal of Primatology. "This barrier has been created for physiological reasons. However, our work suggests that there are good reasons to establish a far bigger gap between humans and animals – for psychological reasons."
Klailova and her research group concentrated on one silverback named Makumba and recorded his vocalisations, daily activities and interactions with his 12 family members. They then studied how these types of behaviour changed when different groups of humans – which included local trackers, scientists and often tourists – came close.
As numbers in a group increased, the gorillas spent less time feeding and instead behaved in a disturbed, unfocused manner. Klailova found that Makumba was more likely to stop feeding and start watching humans as observers moved closer.
Making a male gorilla angrier could lead to him attacking humans or female gorillas in his own band. Either way, the reaction reveals that animals that are now hovering at the edge of extinction are being further stressed.
Klailova admitted that a recommended gap of 18 metres "is not a realistic goal in dense forests, particularly for tourists who have spent valuable time and effort to see the gorillas". But in clearings and in open land, where there are good sight lines, it should definitely be adhered to.
The suggestion will find support from other scientists who have called for increased protection for great apes. Other proposals have included suggestions that all tourists be required to wear face masks to block any transmission of human diseases.
However, the prospect of wearing masks all the time while only being allowed distant glimpses of animals could have a detrimental impact on gorilla-watching holidays.
Eco-tourism has become an important source of income for remote African communities. Foreign visitors who come to enjoy the sights and sounds of natural parks have become a strong motivation for governments to invest in conservation, while the presence of researchers, tourists and tourism infrastructure can work as a strong deterrent to poachers.
As Klailova has said: "It is a very delicate issue."Prolife women aren't real women? Even if they identify as women? https://t.co/wfbPu2vsaO — Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) January 16, 2017
You might want to take a few deep breaths before reading any further, because what we are about to tell you is nothing short of repugnant.
It really is.
As Twitchy told you earlier, pro-abort shill and supposed feminist Jessica Valenti flipped her lid over the news that the Women’s March would be welcoming pro-life women to participate. Because pro-life women aren’t real women or something. Well, now, thanks to the uproar that Valenti helped to generate, the Women’s March has decided that some women just don’t deserve to be a part of it all.
Has @womensmarch changed its name to @somewomensmarch — Amy (@AmyOtto8) January 16, 2017
They may as well:
The Women's March confirmed that they removed a pro-life group from their list of partners in response to my articlehttps://t.co/GNFfSjYbZq — Emma Green (@emmaogreen) January 16, 2017
Congratulations?
This is nothing to be proud of.
"“The Women’s March’s platform is pro-choice and that has been our stance from day one," they said in a statement. — Emma Green (@emmaogreen) January 16, 2017
"The anti-choice organization in question is not a partner of the Women's March on Washington. We apologize for this error,” they continued. — Emma Green (@emmaogreen) January 16, 2017
A woman's right to make choices about what's best for her and her body is central to our platform. Read more: https://t.co/X9Z0pV2cif — Women's March (@womensmarch) January 16, 2017
Our statement regarding press today: pic.twitter.com/z1y9cfFFvY — Women's March (@womensmarch) January 16, 2017
Thanks for clearing that up, Women’s March.
@womensmarch this is a pathetic move. — Lyndsey Fifield (@lyndseyfifield) January 16, 2017
Women "stronger together" where more agree like treatment of women, work equality. Women's March stance is unfortunate & counter-productive. https://t.co/sF6GLO24dt — Mindy Finn (@mindyfinn) January 16, 2017
That’s a polite way of putting it.
So, if I'm reading my timeline correctly, #WomensMarch isn't a thing to support women, it's a pro-abortion march, then? — Michelle Ray (@GaltsGirl) January 16, 2017
@womensmarch So it's a march for abortion rather than for women? — Etienne de Montfort (@2cruel4skool) January 16, 2017
So the #WomensMarch is now a Pro-Abortion march. Good to know. — Stacey Lennox (@ScotsFyre) January 16, 2017
Abortion is all that matters. https://t.co/88RFQnNARV — Mo Mo (@molratty) January 16, 2017
@emmaogreen @TheAtlantic YAY! Good work and great example of inclusion! The platform then is abortion, not women. #AbortionMarch! — Brian Lerias (@lerias1968) January 16, 2017
How is that pro-woman, exactly?
But If a woman chooses to be pro-life you sling them to the curb because that disrupts your platform?
I sense a contradiction@SouthernKeeks https://t.co/9nZW1zS7HM — Brad Slager (@MartiniShark) January 16, 2017
@emmaogreen @RosieGray @TheAtlantic it seems counter productive to hold this women's march and exclude women's groups. — Emily Proffitt (@iluv2pekes) January 16, 2017
One might say they were given no choice? https://t.co/MsGpl5QKPK — NotMyPlayoffs Musket (@Patriot_Musket) January 16, 2017
@womensmarch I had hoped your claim that ALL women are welcome was true. Very sad to see it isn't. #prolife #WomensMarch — Citizen1 (@Citizen1) January 16, 2017
@womensmarch I had intended to participate. Our president-elect scares me to death. Am I to understand that I’m not welcome? — J-P Teti (@jpteti) January 16, 2017
@womensmarch Seriously? Women who defend unborn life aren't welcome. Thanks for being honest. — Jeremiah James Jill (@FloralColony) January 16, 2017
@emmaogreen congratulations on silencing an entire group of women in the name of "women's rights." — Jordan. (@_jordanlee93) January 16, 2017
To the left, women only count when they are rabidly in favor of aborting little women in the womb https://t.co/CrtZ7gA1x9 — Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) January 16, 2017
You apologize for the "error" of allowing speech? What kind of insular movement is this?What exactly are you women afraid of hearing/seeing? https://t.co/ITHjlDEUeq — lauren (@LilMissRightie) January 16, 2017
A disgusting, intolerant movement. They should remove “women” from the name. https://t.co/qSZuKWsLvU — Michelle (@michnic70) January 16, 2017
If the Women’s March wants to embrace a culture of death, they can have it. They’ll ultimately have to answer for it.
Does the @womensmarch not realize they can't just erase pro-life women from the country? Disinvite us from events but we're still here. — lauren (@LilMissRightie) January 16, 2017
In attempting to purge feminism of pro-life women, the Women’s March is only hurting the cause of women’s rights.
This is absolutely nuts and, dear god, my friends on the left, you need to fight against this! https://t.co/7R8f3lSPCa — PoliMath (@politicalmath) January 16, 2017
There are a LOT of women who identify as feminist and also pro-life. This isn't some fringe religious thing. These women are passionate (1 — PoliMath (@politicalmath) January 16, 2017
I've met several pro-life pro-feminism women who are very active in politics on the key local/state levels. These women are your allies! (2 — PoliMath (@politicalmath) January 16, 2017
You can't build a movement by kicking everyone out. We need VERY loud voices from the religious left objecting to this exclusion (3 — PoliMath (@politicalmath) January 16, 2017
I think of prominent left-religious voices like @rachelheldevans who could lead the charge in getting the left to accept pro-lifers (4 — PoliMath (@politicalmath) January 16, 2017
Let me be as plain as day: pro-life is too big a group to spit in their faces. If they want to join you, find a way to welcome them! (5 — PoliMath (@politicalmath) January 16, 2017
***
Related:
Pro-abort Jessica Valenti ‘horrified’ that pro-life women want to join Women’s March
Perfect: Patricia Heaton turns the tables on ‘pro-choice’ Jessica ValentiA doctor who appeared to vouch for and defend Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-profile lifestyle and e-commerce site, Goop, now says that she does not see herself as a Goop doctor and would not endorse the site, according to an interview with Stat.
Two weeks ago, Dr. Aviva Romm provided a signed letter included in a Goop post titled “ Uncensored: A Word from Our Doctors.” The post, written in part by the Goop team, including Romm and another doctor (Steven Gundry), collectively defended Goop’s questionable health products and penchant for unproven and often nonsensical medical theories. Those theories include Moon-powered vaginal eggs and energy-healing space-suit stickers.
The post was written in response to a wave of online criticism from journalists, medical professionals, and patient advocates, particularly blogger Dr. Jen Gunter, an Ob/Gyn who has written often about Goop.
Under a heading that included “our doctors,” Romm appeared firmly connected to Goop and its mission. But, in an interview published online Thursday on Stat, Romm said she doesn’t see herself as one of “Goop’s doctors” and doesn’t pay enough attention to know what’s on the site. She refused to endorse Goop and, in fact, expressed criticism of it. Romm suggested that the site is a “caricature of everything alternative health for women.” She advised the Goop team to re-evaluate all of the site’s products and recommendations with the help of doctors.
“I can’t endorse Goop, in that... just because [products are] natural or organic, doesn’t mean that they’re beneficial for women,” she told Stat. “Just because it hasn’t been proven harmful and it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s safe. We can’t just say that that’s sort of the default position.” “You can’t just say it’s better than conventional medicine. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”
Romm explained that she was sympathetic to women who are dissatisfied with conventional medicine. And she stressed that she wasn’t disavowing Goop and said that there was no justification to dismiss alternative medicine in general. But she noted that just because women seek alternatives doesn’t mean alternatives are good.
That said, Romm, a Yale-educated doctor, sells her own line of proprietary herbal supplements, including “Adrena soothe” and “Adrena nourish.” She also espouses detoxing, which is not supported by science.
In the Stat interview, Dr. Romm said she wasn’t concerned that her medical credentials might appear to lend support to unproven and unscientific theories and products, such as her own or those on Goop. She replied that she essentially saw herself as an independent contributor to the site and was open to patients trying harmless products that aren’t too expensive if they want.
She also seemed comfortable with the for-profit aspect of the health advice she and Goop offer. “Goop is certainly commercial,” Romm said, adding “I have to make a living, too.”
Dr. Romm elaborated:
I think Gwyneth Paltrow was a fabulous actress in her day of acting, and I’m not a sort of advocate or antagonist of her work. I understand that she is probably a very decent person, trying to do good work, and [she] does things that feel meaningful to her. And, yes, there’s a commercial aspect to it, [but] there’s nothing that doesn’t have a commercial aspect to it, unless you’re a saint doing medical work.
The interview ended with Romm noting that drug companies also make lots of money.We help put the right hands on deck.
As much of our industry is built around metal and machines, the shipping business has always relied on people to keep the supply chain moving. And it’s this human side of the shipping business that we do best.
We represent approximately 55 waterfront employers and, by extension, the more than 6,000 men and women who work for them. Our customer- members are ship owners and agents, stevedores, container and cruise ship terminal operators. We help optimize our members’ operations by adding our expertise in labour relations, safety & training, and recruiting.
BCMEA member companies are a vital part of the BC economy and a mainstay of the coastal community. Operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, our partners move 60 million tonnes of goods worth $53 billion around the globe every year. If you’ve got it, we helped you get it.Yellow Gold rings are still used a lot for engagement rings.
Granted, they are not quite as popular as white gold but yellow gold rings have one decisive advantage: You can go far lower in diamond color than you would ever have thought!
You can even go as low as a K color and this is even what we recommend for round cut diamonds. To many people this sounds kind of crazy but we are absolutely serious.
The perfect color for any diamond that will be set onto a yellow gold ring setting also depends on the diamond shape of course. It is for this reason that we want to give you a thorough overview of what particular diamond colors look like on a yellow gold ring setting.
Which diamond color to choose for round cut diamonds on yellow gold rings?
Yellow Gold Rings are actually quite notable in one aspect: The good thing about them is that diamonds absorb a lot of the color of the gold ring! Now, this might sound like a bad thing but actually that is a good thing for you: It means you can go considerably lower in diamond color! This way you can actually save a lot of money.
To demonstrate that we will show you a picture of a K colored diamond that is set on a yellow gold engagement ring:
We have found that many people are surprised to hear that a K colored diamond would still work out. It is true that when you choose another ring metal a K colored diamond might not be the very best choice for you! But a K colored ring will be perfect for a yellow gold setting.
Our recommended range however is the J – K color range!
This means that you could also go for J colored diamonds.
To give you some further examples of J colored diamonds let us have a look at the pictures below. You will see several examples of J colored diamonds:
This J colored diamond is an example that has been taken from an online jewelry store callled James Allen. The thing about this J colored diamond is that you might realize that it has a hint of yellow color in its body. But this would be the case with a D colored diamond as well! As mentioned before: The reason for this is simply the fact that any diamond on a yellow gold setting will soak up the color of the metal! It is going to look a little bit yellowish anyway! There is litterally no need to go for an extremely high diamond color with this kind of ring setting.
All in all diamonds can be pretty complicated. This is why you should definitely try to get a proper understanding of what diamonds are all about before diving deep into it. Click here for more specific information on the diamond 4Cs and especially the diamond color.
Please bear in mind that all of the previously said only applies for round cut diamonds. Of course, when discussing issues like that we are looking to get the most value for our diamond rings. We don’t want to spend a whole lot of money on features that can’t be appreciated anyway. This is something that we might admire in celebrity diamond rings but we do not recommend you do for your own engagement ring.
For all other diamond shapes you should go up at least one more color grade. Thus, for princess cut diamonds for instance we do not recommend a K colored diamond anymore. While a J colored diamond might be okay in such a case an I-colored diamond will still be better!
Just use your common sense but do not go against the basic guidlines and you should be fine with your diamond choice!A game between United and Chelsea is always monumental. This particular fixture, the first big game of the season, was further intensifying, as it marked David Moyes debut as United boss at the Old Trafford. Mourinho returned to the scene of some of his greatest successes, and with all the speculation surrounding Wayne Rooney (involving the two clubs), the game was further spiced up. The final score of Manchester United 0-0 Chelsea seemed a fair result, a scoreline that both sides played for and will be content with. Neither would particularly like to drop too many points this early in the Premier League season.
Schurrle Striking
Chelsea didn’t start the game with any of their nominated strikers, and it was the German Schurrle who was deployed furthest forward. While a lot of the pre-match talk was centered on Chelsea playing a False 9, Schurrle wasn’t a False 9 in the true sense. He very often stayed close to United’s midfielders, as opposed to their centre backs. This was a ploy to avoid overloads in midfield, and to stop Carrick from imposing himself on the game.
In an attacking sense, Schurrle was placed there because of his natural pace, but the aerial balls that Chelsea were attempting in order to get him behind Ferdinand and Vidic didn’t really work out, and he didn’t really get chances to run behind them. In fact, he barely got into the danger zone at all.
Crowding the midfield
As mentioned above, one of Mourinho’s objectives in this game was to stifle the creative play of the home side by crowding the midfield. Apart from Schurrle playing as a ‘deep striker’, Chelsea didn’t really press the ball much at all. The pressure line maintained was quite deep, and much closer to the midfield. Even in the middle of the park, Oscar, Hazard and De Bruyne got narrow, and looked to plug the gaps that passes may be played into. All in all, the Chelsea approach could be defined as a close low block. These tactics meant that a lot of the play was concentrated in the middle of the park.
United Set-up
Manchester United started the game with a variant of a 4-2-3-1 formation. Carrick sat slightly deeper than Cleverley, who was given the license to bomb move forward. Welbeck started on the left hand side, and naturally drifted towards the centre to combine with Rooney and Van Persie. Giving the width on the left was the ever willing Patrice Evra. On the right hand side, Antonio Valencia was tasked with providing width. He also had additional defensive duties as he was playing on the same side as the dangerous Eden Hazard. He carried these duties out well, and finished the game with 6 tackles.
MORE: Top 10 Premier League Talents to Watch-Out for
The attacking plan was to play down the right hand side, and use the width that Valencia offered in order to by-pass Chelsea’s midfield. Since the narrow play of Hazard meant that there was space down this side, it was likely that Valencia would get a fair few opportunities to put balls into the box. Unfortunately for United, not one of his 5 crosses found their target, as a combination of profligacy and good defending thwarted United.
Man-Marking van Persie
Over the last few years, Van Persie has proven to be a match winner and a goal machine. The key for Chelsea was to stop him. They did so by marking him very closely. Either Terry or Cahill was always sticking to him like a magnet. This meant that his biggest strength, his movement was taken out of the game a bit. He hardly got to see the ball, and had to drop deeper, go wide, and try a lot of different things to get the ball. This movement on his part had a pleasant kick on effect for United, and Wayne Rooney in general. Van Persie ran all over the park, and took the Chelsea defence with him. As they dropped deep along with the Dutchman, it created space for Rooney to operate in. This led to him being a very influential figure in the game, as he got 3 shots on target for the Red Devils, and all of these were from outside the box, in the zone that was vacated as van Persie made his runs.
Defending the penalty box
Chelsea did not pay any attention at all to the wide areas, and only defended the width of their own penalty area. This meant that it was very difficult for United to get shots off that would test the keeper. They were restricted to shooting from distance. Even when they did get into the box, their attempts were blocked by the wall of blue shirts there. To execute this plan effectively, Chelsea had to bring their pivot deeper, and Ramires and Lampard ended up playing most of the game behind the half way line. As the pivot went deeper, it got harder for the Chelsea players to get the ball out to their attacking players. This defensive approach hindered Chelsea’s play |
of rising temperatures," lead author Valerie Trouet, a professor at the University of Arizona, said in a statement.
"Anthropogenic" –- or manmade –- global warming "is making the drought more severe," she added.
The "snowpack" of Sierra Nevada, central California's 650-kilometre (400-mile) spine, provides more than 60 percent of the state's distributed water supply, including all or part of the drinking water for 23 million people.
Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are among the zones affected.
On April 1 -– when the snowpack is generally at its maximum -– California Governor Jerry Brown declared the state's first-ever mandatory water restrictions. He made the announcement while standing on dry ground that a few years ago would have been covered by a man-high snow blanket.
Extremely low winter rainfall combined with record high temperatures during the first three months of 2015 are to blame, said the study.
Scientists had already established that this year's snowpack was the smallest since annual measurements began in the 1930s, but the new research goes even further back in time.
- Tree rings -
The team measured the rings of some 1,500 ancient blue oaks in the Central Valley -- which runs parallel with the Sierra Nevada –- for a record of annual rainfall in winter, when California receives 80 percent of its precipitation.
Given that the same storms which water the oaks also dump snow on the mountains, tree-ring width is a good proxy for what the snowpack would have been in any given year.
The team then compared their tree-ring data with a reconstruction of winter temperatures for the period 1500-1980, to create a year-by-year snowpack profile.
"This is not just unprecedented over 80 years –- it's unprecedented over 500 years," Trouet said of the findings.
California is in the grips of a four-year drought, and ravaged by wildfires that have destroyed more than 100,000 acres (40,470 hectares), hundreds of homes and businesses, authorities say.
According to the US Geological Survey, more than 120 of the state's reservoirs are less than a fifth full, and 190 under half.
This also threatens California's hydroelectric power sector -- a key source of renewable energy.
Scientists warn that climate change will likely boost the frequency and intensity of droughts.In this section we discuss a variety of additional features:
auto, implicit, and default arguments;
literate programming;
interfacing with external libraries through the foreign function
interface;
type providers;
code generation; and
the universe hierarchy.
Auto implicit arguments¶ We have already seen implicit arguments, which allows arguments to be omitted when they can be inferred by the type checker, e.g. index : { a : Type } -> { n : Nat } -> Fin n -> Vect n a -> a In other situations, it may be possible to infer arguments not by type checking but by searching the context for an appropriate value, or constructing a proof. For example, the following definition of head which requires a proof that the list is non-empty: isCons : List a -> Bool isCons [] = False isCons ( x :: xs ) = True head : ( xs : List a ) -> ( isCons xs = True ) -> a head ( x :: xs ) _ = x If the list is statically known to be non-empty, either because its value is known or because a proof already exists in the context, the proof can be constructed automatically. Auto implicit arguments allow this to happen silently. We define head as follows: head : ( xs : List a ) -> { auto p : isCons xs = True } -> a head ( x :: xs ) = x The auto annotation on the implicit argument means that Idris will attempt to fill in the implicit argument by searching for a value of the appropriate type. It will try the following, in order: Local variables, i.e. names bound in pattern matches or let bindings, with exactly the right type.
bindings, with exactly the right type. The constructors of the required type. If they have arguments, it will search recursively up to a maximum depth of 100.
Local variables with function types, searching recursively for the arguments.
Any function with the appropriate return type which is marked with the %hint annotation. In the case that a proof is not found, it can be provided explicitly as normal: head xs { p =? headProof } More generally, we can fill in implicit arguments with a default value by annotating them with default. The definition above is equivalent to: head : ( xs : List a ) -> { default proof { trivial ; } p : isCons xs = True } -> a head ( x :: xs ) = x
Implicit conversions¶ Idris supports the creation of implicit conversions, which allow automatic conversion of values from one type to another when required to make a term type correct. This is intended to increase convenience and reduce verbosity. A contrived but simple example is the following: implicit intString : Int -> String intString = show test : Int -> String test x = "Number " ++ x In general, we cannot append an Int to a String, but the implicit conversion function intString can convert x to a String, so the definition of test is type correct. An implicit conversion is implemented just like any other function, but given the implicit modifier, and restricted to one explicit argument. Only one implicit conversion will be applied at a time. That is, implicit conversions cannot be chained. Implicit conversions of simple types, as above, are however discouraged! More commonly, an implicit conversion would be used to reduce verbosity in an embedded domain specific language, or to hide details of a proof. Such examples are beyond the scope of this tutorial.
Literate programming¶ Like Haskell, Idris supports literate programming. If a file has an extension of.lidr then it is assumed to be a literate file. In literate programs, everything is assumed to be a comment unless the line begins with a greater than sign >, for example: > module literate This is a comment. The main program is below > main : IO () > main = putStrLn "Hello literate world!
" An additional restriction is that there must be a blank line between a program line (beginning with > ) and a comment line (beginning with any other character).
Foreign function calls¶ For practical programming, it is often necessary to be able to use external libraries, particularly for interfacing with the operating system, file system, networking, et cetera. Idris provides a lightweight foreign function interface for achieving this, as part of the prelude. For this, we assume a certain amount of knowledge of C and the gcc compiler. First, we define a datatype which describes the external types we can handle: data FTy = FInt | FFloat | FChar | FString | FPtr | FUnit Each of these corresponds directly to a C type. Respectively: int, double, char, char*, void* and void. There is also a translation to a concrete Idris type, described by the following function: interpFTy : FTy -> Type interpFTy FInt = Int interpFTy FFloat = Float interpFTy FChar = Char interpFTy FString = String interpFTy FPtr = Ptr interpFTy FUnit = () A foreign function is described by a list of input types and a return type, which can then be converted to an Idris type: ForeignTy : ( xs : List FTy ) -> ( t : FTy ) -> Type A foreign function is assumed to be impure, so ForeignTy builds an IO type, for example: Idris > ForeignTy [ FInt, FString ] FString Int -> String -> IO String : Type Idris > ForeignTy [ FInt, FString ] FUnit Int -> String -> IO () : Type We build a call to a foreign function by giving the name of the function, a list of argument types and the return type. The built in construct mkForeign converts this description to a function callable by Idris: data Foreign : Type -> Type where FFun : String -> ( xs : List FTy ) -> ( t : FTy ) -> Foreign ( ForeignTy xs t ) mkForeign : Foreign x -> x Note that the compiler expects mkForeign to be fully applied to build a complete foreign function call. For example, the putStr function is implemented as follows, as a call to an external function putStr defined in the run-time system: putStr : String -> IO () putStr x = mkForeign ( FFun "putStr" [ FString ] FUnit ) x Include and linker directives¶ Foreign function calls are translated directly to calls to C functions, with appropriate conversion between the Idris representation of a value and the C representation. Often this will require extra libraries to be linked in, or extra header and object files. This is made possible through the following directives: %lib target x — include the libx library. If the target is C this is equivalent to passing the -lx option to gcc. If the target is Java the library will be interpreted as a groupId:artifactId:packaging:version dependency coordinate for maven.
— include the library. If the target is this is equivalent to passing the option to. If the target is Java the library will be interpreted as a dependency coordinate for maven. %include target x — use the header file or import x for the given back end target.
— use the header file or import for the given back end target. %link target x.o — link with the object file x.o when using the given back end target.
— link with the object file when using the given back end target. %dynamic x.so — dynamically link the interpreter with the shared object x.so. Testing foreign function calls¶ Normally, the Idris interpreter (used for typechecking and at the REPL) will not perform IO actions. Additionally, as it neither generates C code nor compiles to machine code, the %lib, %include and %link directives have no effect. IO actions and FFI calls can be tested using the special REPL command :x EXPR, and C libraries can be dynamically loaded in the interpreter by using the :dynamic command or the %dynamic directive. For example: Idris> : dynamic libm. so Idris> : x unsafePerformIO (( mkForeign ( FFun "sin" [ FFloat ] FFloat )) 1.6 ) 0.9995736030415051 : Float
Type Providers¶ Idris type providers, inspired by F#’s type providers, are a means of making our types be “about” something in the world outside of Idris. For example, given a type that represents a database schema and a query that is checked against it, a type provider could read the schema of a real database during type checking. Idris type providers use the ordinary execution semantics of Idris to run an IO action and extract the result. This result is then saved as a constant in the compiled code. It can be a type, in which case it is used like any other type, or it can be a value, in which case it can be used as any other value, including as an index in types. Type providers are still an experimental extension. To enable the extension, use the %language directive: % language TypeProviders A provider p for some type t is simply an expression of type IO (Provider t). The %provide directive causes the type checker to execute the action and bind the result to a name. This is perhaps best illustrated with a simple example. The type provider fromFile reads a text file. If the file consists of the string Int, then the type Int will be provided. Otherwise, it will provide the type Nat. strToType : String -> Type strToType "Int" = Int strToType _ = Nat fromFile : String -> IO ( Provider Type ) fromFile fname = do str <- readFile fname return ( Provide ( strToType ( trim str ))) We then use the %provide directive: % provide ( T1 : Type ) with fromFile "theType" foo : T1 foo = 2 If the file named theType consists of the word Int, then foo will be an Int. Otherwise, it will be a Nat. When Idris encounters the directive, it first checks that the provider expression fromFile theType has type IO (Provider Type). Next, it executes the provider. If the result is Provide t, then T1 is defined as t. Otherwise, the result is an error. Our datatype Provider t has the following definition: data Provider a = Error String | Provide a We have already seen the Provide constructor. The Error constructor allows type providers to return useful error messages. The example in this section was purposefully simple. More complex type provider implementations, including a statically-checked SQLite binding, are available in an external collection.
C Target¶ The default target of Idris is C. Compiling via : $ idris hello.idr -o hello is equivalent to : $ idris --codegen C hello.idr -o hello When the command above is used, a temporary C source is generated, which is then compiled into an executable named hello. In order to view the generated C code, compile via : $ idris hello.idr -S -o hello.c To turn optimisations on, use the %flag C pragma within the code, as is shown below : module Main % flag C "-O3" factorial : Int -> Int factorial 0 = 1 factorial n = n * ( factorial ( n - 1 )) main : IO () main = do putStrLn $ show $ factorial 3
JavaScript Target¶ Idris is capable of producing JavaScript code that can be run in a browser as well as in the NodeJS environment or alike. One can use the FFI to communicate with the JavaScript ecosystem. Code Generation¶ Code generation is split into two separate targets. To generate code that is tailored for running in the browser issue the following command: $ idris --codegen javascript hello.idr -o hello.js The resulting file can be embedded into your HTML just like any other JavaScript code. Generating code for NodeJS is slightly different. Idris outputs a JavaScript file that can be directly executed via node. $ idris --codegen node hello.idr -o hello $./hello Hello world Take into consideration that the JavaScript code generator is using console.log to write text to stdout, this means that it will automatically add a newline to the end of each string. This behaviour does not show up in the NodeJS code generator. Using the FFI¶ To write a useful application we need to communicate with the outside world. Maybe we want to manipulate the DOM or send an Ajax request. For this task we can use the FFI. Since most JavaScript APIs demand callbacks we need to extend the FFI so we can pass functions as arguments. The JavaScript FFI works a little bit differently than the regular FFI. It uses positional arguments to directly insert our arguments into a piece of JavaScript code. One could use the primitive addition of JavaScript like so: module Main primPlus : Int -> Int -> IO Int primPlus a b = mkForeign ( FFun "%0 + %1" [ FInt, FInt ] FInt ) a b main : IO () main = do a <- primPlus 1 1 b <- primPlus 1 2 print ( a, b ) Notice that the %n notation qualifies the position of the n -th argument given to our foreign function starting from 0. When you need a percent sign rather than a position simply use %% instead. Passing functions to a foreign function is very similar. Let’s assume that we want to call the following function from the JavaScript world: function twice ( f, x ) { return f ( f ( x )) ; } We obviously need to pass a function f here (we can infer it from the way we use f in twice, it would be more obvious if JavaScript had types). The JavaScript FFI is able to understand functions as arguments when you give it something of type FFunction. The following example code calls twice in JavaScript and returns the result to our Idris program: module Main twice : ( Int -> Int ) -> Int -> IO Int twice f x = mkForeign ( FFun "twice(%0,%1)" [ FFunction FInt FInt, FInt ] FInt ) f x main : IO () main = do a <- twice (+ 1 ) 1 print a The program outputs 3, just like we expected. Including external JavaScript files¶ Whenever one is working with JavaScript one might want to include external libraries or just some functions that she or he wants to call via FFI which are stored in external files. The JavaScript and NodeJS code generators understand the %include directive. Keep in mind that JavaScript and NodeJS are handled as different code generators, therefore you will have to state which one you want to target. This means that you can include different files for JavaScript and NodeJS in the same Idris source file. So whenever you want to add an external JavaScript file you can do this like so: For NodeJS: % include Node "path/to/external.js" And for use in the browser: % include JavaScript "path/to/external.js" The given files will be added to the top of the generated code. Including NodeJS modules¶ The NodeJS code generator can also include modules with the %lib directive. %lib Node "fs" This directive compiles into the following JavaScript var fs = require ( "fs" ); Shrinking down generated JavaScript¶ Idris can produce very big chunks of JavaScript code. However, the generated code can be minified using the closure-compiler from Google. Any other minifier is also suitable but closure-compiler offers advanced compilation that does some aggressive inlining and code elimination. Idris can take full advantage of this compilation mode and it’s highly recommended to use it when shipping a JavaScript application written in Idris.This new Germany guards its national interests more jealously and vocally than before, when it saw its identity in an integrated Europe and was willing to bankroll continental unity.
Although Mrs. Merkel has insisted that the euro, the common currency of 17 European countries, is a pillar of the united Europe she embraces, she has mixed such support with a healthy dose of populism.
Exactly where Berlin now stands — as Europeans return from summer vacations with their debt crisis, and thus the exact future of the euro, still unresolved — should become clearer on Friday, when Mrs. Merkel has scheduled a foreign policy speech in Berlin.
Those Germans skeptical about agreeing to rescue Greece loved Mrs. Merkel’s verbal assault on other E.U. countries in May. But in Greece, Spain and Portugal, people were furious and disappointed, especially because their governments had already started implementing painful economic and social changes at Germany’s behest.
This disappointment with Germany, and particularly the perception that Mrs. Merkel’s government is vocal in defending national interests, could cost dearly in the long term. “Germany is pursuing a short-sighted strategy that is not sustainable,” said Paulo Gorjão, director of the Portuguese Institute of International Relations and Security in Lisbon. “It needs allies for its foreign policy agenda, for example if it wants a permanent seat on the U.N Security Council or seeks higher representation in other multilateral organizations.”
Germany will be able to rein in the European Union’s spending only if it gets allies in coming negotiations for the 2014-21 budget.
“Germany has lost a lot of political capital in some of the member states, not just because of the way Mrs. Merkel has tied strict conditions to the rescue packages,” said Jens Bastian, a German economist who is now at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, a research institute in Athens.
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“Germans have changed in their attitude toward Europe,” he added. “They think they are being cheated by other countries or taken for a ride in terms of how their money is spent. They want this to stop.” Germany spends more for the budget of the 27-nation European Union than it receives.
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Nikos Frangakis, president of the Greek Center of European Studies and Research in Athens, said Mrs. Merkel’s oratory had hit a raw nerve among many Greeks, who then dredged up World War II in order to try and counter German criticism and to portray themselves as victims. “Mrs. Merkel, in insisting that Greece introduces reforms, could have been much softer and more persuasive in her tone.” he said.
“Older Greeks have vivid memories of the occupation when the Nazis occupied Greece, especially the fact that there are legal cases over reparations for the atrocities committed by the Nazis,” Mr. Frangakis said. “The attitude by Germany over the financial crisis has reopened old wounds. Germany should be careful.”
For decades, Germany was seen and even admired by other European countries as the driving force for the E.U.’s long term goals, from monetary union and enlargement to a more coherent foreign and defense policy.
Successive German governments played a major role in helping the new democracies of Greece, Portugal and Spain as they emerged during the 1970s from rightist dictatorships.
“Spaniards have not forgotten the huge role Germany played in the country’s transition to democracy after the death of Franco,” said Richard Youngs, director of Fride, a research institute in Madrid. “But now, there is a rudderless feel to German foreign policy. The feeling here is that Merkel is sacrificing Europe to the altar of domestic politics.”
Mrs. Merkel had done little to dispel that view, either in Southern Europe or Ireland, the other country on the periphery of the euro zone to have required substantial help, in this case with loan guarantees to protect its banks.
Since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, Mrs. Merkel has not once visited Ireland, Greece or Portugal, with the exception of a NATO summit in Lisbon.
“She has failed to communicate her policies to audiences in these countries,” Mr. Youngs said. “Perhaps it shows the lack of German leadership in Europe — or the lack of European-ness in German leadership.”
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The populist tone in her oratory may have increased euro skepticism in Germany, which has Europe’s largest economy. The Allensbach Institute, an opinion polling research center, privately told the leadership of the Christian Democrats last week that large majorities of Germans had little or no trust in the euro, or, for that matter, in the European Union itself.
Just beyond Southern Europe lie other urgent priorities: Libya and the unsettled Middle East. Germany’s unexpected decision in March to abstain from a U.N resolution authorizing a no-flight zone over Libya, and its refusal to participate in military action there, further enhanced the sense that it was withdrawing from the international scene.
Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who was responsible for promoting Mrs. Merkel, then an East German political novice, on the national scene after reunification in 1990, has become a vocal critic. In an interview last month in the journal Internationale Politik, he accused the Merkel government of lacking a “political compass.” He asked where Germany stood and where it was heading.
Even leading Christian Democrats acknowledge the rift in relations between Berlin and the peripheral euro zone countries. “Mistakes were made by both sides in terms of explaining the euro crisis and how to deal with it,” said Elmar Brok, a leading Christian Democrat who is a member of the European Parliament. “Relations will take time to mend, just as it will take for the reforms in these countries to bear fruit.”The Shakespeare answer reminded me of Inform 7, which is a serious programming language for writing interactive fiction. It's probably the language most closest to English that exists and has a well-defined semantics.
Here is a sample from Wikipedia:
"Hello Deductible" by "I.F. Author" The story headline is "An Interactive Example". The Living Room is a room. "A comfortably furnished living room." The Kitchen is north of the Living Room. The Front Door is south of the Living Room. The Front Door is a door. The Front Door is closed and locked. The insurance salesman is a man in the Living Room. "An insurance salesman in a tacky polyester suit. He seems eager to speak to you." Understand "man" as the insurance salesman. A briefcase is carried by the insurance salesman. The description is "A slightly worn, black briefcase." Understand "case" as the briefcase. The insurance paperwork is in the briefcase. The description is "Page after page of small legalese." Understand "papers" or "documents" or "forms" as the paperwork. Instead of listening to the insurance salesman for the first time: say "The salesman bores you with a discussion of life insurance policies. From his briefcase he pulls some paperwork which he hands to you."; move the insurance paperwork to the player.
The sample uses an extensive library of objects which is available for user. But the language itself is in fact Turing complete, and you can define objects with any behaviour in it.APR High Output 2.0 TSI/TFSI Gen3 ECU Upgrade for the MQB Platform
+66-104 Horsepower +68-125 FT-LBS of Torque Faster and More Exciting Money Back Guarantee 500+ APR Dealers World-Wide
APR is pleased to present the ultimate engine control unit (ECU) upgrade for the 2.0T EA888 Gen 3 engine!
APR’s ECU Upgrades are the best dollar-per-horsepower modification one can make to the 2.0T engine. The upgrades dramatically increase horsepower and torque, making for an exceptionally quicker and more exciting vehicle. This is made possible through APR’s optimization of the factory engine management system to take full advantage of the engine’s capabilities, without needing any end user adjustment. The software loads to the factory ECU through the OBD-II port, resulting in a clean and headache-free install. Furthermore, for those looking for tuning with a limited powertrain warranty, APR Plus has you covered!
APR ECU Upgrade Stages
APR’s ECU Upgrades are available in multiple stages and torque levels, supporting various octanes both with or without any hardware or transmission modifications. APR Plus software is available featuring a factory matching limited powertrain warranty. Specific software is available for use with a high flow Race DP exhaust system, while all stages are fully compatible with an upgraded intake, intercooler, catback exhaust, or other minor bolt on modifications. Finally, each stage is offered with special “Low Torque” software, designed to limit peak torque for use with an unmodified factory manual clutch, or DSG transmission.
APR Plus ECU Upgrade with a Limited Powertrain Warranty The APR Plus ECU Upgrade is the first step towards making more power, and it includes our limited powertrain warranty. This simple upgrade requires no engine hardware modifications, and produces 357 HP with 349 FT-LBS of torque. Gains as high as 66 HP and 68 FT-LBS of torque are available throughout the power band, making the vehicle exceptionally quicker in all scenarios. The APR Plus ECU Upgrade matches the performance of our Stage 1 ECU Upgrade (91 octane low torque version). To get even more power, you can add any of our other Stage 1 compatible products and still be covered under the APR Plus warranty! This only excludes our Race DP and turbo/fueling upgrades. To learn more about APR Plus, please visit the APR Plus website. If you're not interested in the APR Plus limited powertrain warranty, and want even more power, check out our other Stages. APR Stage I ECU Upgrade The APR Stage I ECU Upgrade is the first step towards making more power! This simple upgrade requires no engine hardware modifications, and produces 357-381 HP with 349-392 FT-LBS of torque. Gains as high as 66-93 HP and 68-109 FT-LBS of torque are available throughout the power band, making the vehicle exceptionally quicker in all scenarios. The upgrade is offered in both high and low torque versions, and is available for various fuel grades. The high torque upgrade may require an upgraded clutch on manual transmission vehicles, or APR's TCU Upgrade on 6 Speed DQ250 DSG/S tronic vehicles to avoid clutch slip, so low torque software is available, offering an impressive 349-366 FT-LBS of torque. To get more power, the vehicle can be outfitted with an upgraded intake, intercooler, catback exhaust and other small modifications without requiring any new modification to the ECU. For those looking for even more power, check out our Stage 1 ECU upgrade. APR recommends using colder heat-range spark plugs (Ex: NGK-R7437-9), properly gapped to a tighter gap (Ex: 0.024" ±0.002" or 0.6mm ±0.05mm), properly installed and torqued (Ex: Per the manufacturers specifications), and maintained with a shorter changer interval (Ex: 10,000-15,000 mi or 16,000-24,000 km). APR Stage II ECU Upgrade The APR Stage II ECU Upgrade is the next step towards making more power! This upgrade requires a high flow Race DP exhaust system, and produces 372-387 HP with 367-409 FT-LBS of torque. Gains as high as 86-104 HP and 82-125 FT-LBS of torque are available throughout the power band. The upgrade is offered in high, medium and low torque versions, and is available for various fuel grades. The high torque upgrade requires, and the medium torque upgrade may require an upgraded clutch on manual transmission vehicles, or APR's TCU Upgrade on 6 Speed DQ250 DSG/S tronic vehicles to avoid clutch slip, so low torque software is available, offering an impressive 367 FT-LBs of torque. An upgraded intake is required to meet the advertised low and medium output power figures, and an upgraded intercooler is required to meet the high output power figures. No ECU modification is necessary to run an upgraded catback exhaust system, or other small engine modifications. APR recommends using colder heat-range spark plugs (Ex: NGK-R7437-9), properly gapped to a tighter gap (Ex: 0.024" ±0.002" or 0.6mm ±0.05mm), properly installed and torqued (Ex: Per the manufacturers specifications), and maintained with a shorter changer interval (Ex: 10,000-15,000 mi or 16,000-24,000 km). NOTICE: THIS MOTORSPORT/RACING PRODUCT IS NOT DESIGNED TO MEET ANY FEDERAL EMISSIONS STANDARDS IN THE USA AND IS NOT FOR STREET OR HIGHWAY USE. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT C.A.R.B. COMPLIANT AND IS NOT FOR SALE OR USE IN CALIFORNIA, USA. APR MAKES NO CLAIMS THIS PRODUCT COMPLIES WITH ANY EMISSION LAWS IN ANY JURISDICTION. IT IS ENTIRELY THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PURCHASER TO INFORM THEMSELVES OF ANY LAWS OR REGULATIONS WHICH MAY PROHIBIT USE OF THIS PRODUCT.
Dyno Testing Select A Graph Select Graph Type APR Plus ECU Upgrade ---- APR Stage 1 (Low Torque) - 91 (R+M)/2 APR Stage 1 (Low Torque) - 93 (R+M)/2 APR Stage 1 (Low Torque) - 100 (R+M)/2 ---- APR Stage 1 (High Torque) - 91 (R+M)/2 APR Stage 1 (High Torque) - 93 (R+M)/2 APR Stage 1 (High Torque) - 100 (R+M)/2 ---- APR Stage 2 (Low Torque) w/ Intake & Race DP - 91 (R+M)/2 APR Stage 2 (Low Torque) w/ Intake & Race DP - 93 (R+M)/2 ---- APR Stage 2 (Medium Torque) w/ Intake & Race DP - 91 (R+M)/2 APR Stage 2 (Medium Torque) w/ Intake & Race DP - 93 (R+M)/2 ---- APR Stage 2 (High Torque) w/ Intake, Race DP & Intercooler - 91 (R+M)/2 APR Stage 2 (High Torque) w/ Intake, Race DP & Intercooler - 93 (R+M)/2 Power & Torque at the Crank Power & Torque at the Wheels Power & Torque Gain Over Stock
APR Calibration Report Stage NAR Fuel ROW Fuel Max HP Max TQ Max HP Gain Over Stock Max TQ Gain Over Stock - APR recommends and tuned with Sunoco GT 260 for 100 AKI mode and Sunoco GT 260 Plus for 104 AKI mode. Never use lower octane than specified by the mode. - Max increases are based on APR's actual measured stock values and not those reported by VAG. | RON = ROW Fuel Grades | AKI = North American (RON+MON)/2 Fuel Grades. - Reported wheel figures measured on APR's in house Dynapack Dynamometer with a US Spec 2016 MK7 Golf R DSG, using SAEJ1349 correction and an average of multiple runs. Crank figures are estimated based on the measured wheel figures. Results may vary depending upon environmental conditions, vehicle, transmission, vehicle health, operating conditions, temperatures, fuel grade, dyno type, dyno setup, other variables and other modifications. Stock As Reported by VW 91 AKI 95 RON 265-310 HP 280 FT-LBS Stock As Measured by APR 93 AKI 98 RON 294 HP 296 FT-LBS APR Plus ECU Upgrade 91 AKI 95 RON 357 HP 349 FT-LBS +66 HP @ 5,600 RPM +68 FT-LBS @ 3,850 RPM APR Stage I - (Low Torque) 91 AKI 95 RON 357 HP 349 FT-LBS +66 HP @ 5,600 RPM +68 FT-LBS @ 3,850 RPM APR Stage I - (Low Torque) 93 AKI 98 RON 360 HP 363 FT-LBS +80 HP @ 5,600 RPM +83 FT-LBS @ 3,750 RPM APR Stage I - (Low Torque) 100 AKI 104 RON 381 HP 366 FT-LBS +90 HP @ 5,650 RPM +84 FT-LBS @ 5,500 RPM APR Stage I - (High Torque) 91 AKI 95 RON 357 HP 366 FT-LBS +67 HP @ 5,450 RPM +87 FT-LBS @ 3,700 RPM APR Stage I - (High Torque) 93 AKI 98 RON 370 HP 383 FT-LBS +82 HP @ 5,350 RPM +97 FT-LBS @ 3,750 RPM APR Stage I - (High Torque) 100 AKI 104 RON 381 HP 392 FT-LBS +92 HP @ 5,300 RPM +109 FT-LBS @ 3,850 RPM APR Stage II - (Low Torque) 91 AKI 95 RON 372 HP 367 FT-LBS +86 HP @ 6,600 RPM +82 FT-LBS @ 3,850 RPM APR Stage II - (Low Torque) 93 AKI 98 RON 378 HP 367 FT-LBS +92 HP @ 6,600 RPM +84 FT-LBS @ 3,750 RPM APR Stage II - (Medium Torque) 91 AKI 95 RON 372 HP 385 FT-LBS +86 HP @ 6,600 RPM +102 FT-LBS @ 3,900 RPM APR Stage II - (Medium Torque) 93 AKI 98 RON 379 HP 387 FT-LBS +92 HP @ 6,600 RPM +105 FT-LBS @ 3,850 RPM APR Stage II - (High Torque) 91 AKI 95 RON 377 HP 403 FT-LBS +96 HP @ 5,050 RPM +122 FT-LBS @ 3,750 RPM APR Stage II - (High Torque) 93 AKI 98 RON 387 HP 409 FT-LBS +104 HP @ 6,600 RPM +125 FT-LBS @ 3,800 RPM
Race Fuel Information: Higher octane fuel typically allows APR’s engineers to create more power and torque by achieving greater ignition advance. However, on this application, APR’s engineers were able to achieve MBT, or minimum spark timing for best torque, on 93 AKI fuel at Stage II power levels. MBT is essentially the point where greater ignition advance no longer results in more power and torque.
Acceleration Testing
Acceleration Videos APR Stage 1 vs Stock Drag Strip Video At a local NHRA certified drag strip, APR's Golf R was able to achieve a 12.8@105.7 MPH 1/4 mile pass using the factory software. Upgrading to APR’s Stage I 93 AKI ECU Upgrade improved the results substantially, coming in at 12.0@111.7 MPH. Furthermore with APR’s Stage II 93 AKI ECU Upgrade, APR Intake and APR Cast Dowpipe, the Golf R broke into the 11’s with an 11.7@114.4 MPH. At 1 second and nearly 10 MPH faster in the quarter mile, the Golf R is transformed to a true powerhouse with only simple bolt on modifications! Acceleration Testing Dyno testing is a great way to gauge power increases over the entire rev range but may not translate to real world performance. Through GPS based acceleration testing, APR’s Engineers were able to verify increases made on the dyno translated to a faster and quicker vehicle on the street. The results were astounding. By simply adding the APR Stage I ECU upgrade (v1.0), the US spec 2015 Golf R DSG test vehicle completed every test quicker than the stock vehicle by a large margin. 0-60 MPH times were reduced to 3.8 seconds while the 30-130 MPH test was completed 5.9 seconds faster! Acceleration tests were conducted all the way to 140 MPH, which was reached 9.1 seconds faster with APR Stage I Software. Acceleration Data Setup 0-60 MPH (1-FT) 0-100 KPH (1-FT) 0-60 MPH 0-100 KPH 0-100 MPH (1-FT) 0-100 MPH 100-200 KPH 60-130 MPH 30-130 MPH 0-140 MPH (1 |
profile the presenter wants.
You get this profile - thin blade, relatively blunt honed bevel - not by trying for a convex edge. You get the correct profile not by using a soft abrasive surface and deliberately rounding the bevel (making it convex). You get this profile by using jigs and hard flat abrasives to produce the correct primary and honed angles.
In the video, he has one knife that cuts paper much better than all the rest. I suspect this is a newer knife that he has not freehand honed very often. The honed bevel therefore has a finer included angle at the edge (has not been dulled by repeated freehand honing).
[In adding a fourth principle, I am aware of this second occurrence of the number 4 - in the Doyle title and in the number of principles. Is it just a coincidence? Is there a deeper significance?]
8.5. Summary
In answer to the reader's question - Did the video change my mind about stropping? The answer is no. The video is magic thinking. Magic thinking will not produce consistently good edges.
In answer to my question - or perhaps, to Sherlock's challenge - You know my methods. Apply them, and it will be instructive to compare results. - Did you come to the same conclusion as I did?
9. When to Strop
There are two very different user experiences with stropping.
First, my testing shows that
if you sharpen using the abrasives and jigs I use, to an edge with the desired geometry and condition then stropping with standard stropping compounds will have a negative effect on edge condition and may also have a negative effect on edge geometry. It cannot improve either.
Second, many people find that stropping with these compounds improves the usefulness of their blades. There are many anecdotal reports of much better tool experience after stropping. Many of these reports are related to carving chisels, but some apply to bench chisels and plane blades. Proponents of stropping are absolutely convinced of the benefits of stropping.
How then to reconcile my results with the popular experience with stropping? There are two slightly different cases:
- restoring a slightly dull tool, and - as the last step in sharpening.
9.1. Restoring a dull tool
In the usual side profile drawing of a worn blade at the right - drawn to scale from measurements taken during a test - the black outer line is the original sharp profile, red the worn profile. Recall that his diagram represents the tool profile within 0.003" from the original edge.
The blue line represents the ideal resharpened result - a new lower bevel parallel to the original. This result is not achievable with a strop that uses a very fine abrasive - fine abrasives remove metal too slowly. If you were to use a coarse stropping compound (the Lee Valley compound) you would be compromising the condition of the steel - resulting in faster subsequent wear. If you strop freehand or use a soft stropping material like leather, you cannot achieve this result.
The two pinkish lines represent other possible (more likely) new profiles. In the first, slightly flatter case, you have raised the back of the blade slightly (are stropping at a slightly larger angle) so may slightly reduce the size of the bulge in the wear bevel while only slightly increasing the included angle (from the original). You could increase the stropping angle even more and create a flat facet that reaches the edge, but you have increased the included angle and reduced the clearance angle. Even though the bulge in the lower wear bevel is gone, this blade may now not have enough clearance to cut into the wood.
With a worn edge, you have two options. Repeated stropping which produces a slightly different worn edge, or the three step honing which produces a sharp edge.
People who argue that they just spend a few seconds bring the edge back are dodging reality. One strop proponent reported giving his bench chisel a quick touch up before each tenon. A well sharpened tool should do dozens of tenons without any attention. This person is spending a lot more time sharpening and worse. is always using a dull tool.
9.2. Last step in sharpening
But, say you do notice improved sharpness and edge durability! The only possibility is that you did not start with the ideal edge.
Perhaps grinding has produced a thick edge - your final abrasive was coarse. The thickness of the metal at the edge is a function of the depth of the scratches you are producing. Put another way, the thickness of the edge is a function of the heights of the scratch walls. Stropping, even with a coarse stropping compound like the Lee Valley green crayon may reduce the heights of those valley walls, making the edge thinner.
A second possibility is related to freehand honing. People who freehand do not get flat bevels, they get faceted bevels. A couple of careful pulling passes on as strop could remove some of those facets, making the surface of the tool near the edge more regular and hence more usable.
9.3. Wire Edge
If you use coarse abrasives at the edge, you may have produced a burr or wire edge. Your subsequent honing steps may not have removed that wire edge. In this case, your stropping step may remove that wire edge.
The wire edge has a thickness - if you were really careful you could measure it. The wire edge meets the tool at a surface of that thickness. Rather than the edge being the line of zero thickness at the intersection of two planes, the edge is a surface with width equal to the thickness of the wire edge.
Stropping can remove a wire edge by flexing the wire edge until it breaks off. The resulting edge has a face the thickness of the wire edge, which is not ideal, but at least the wire edge is gone.
Stropping might also actually abrade the wire edge away by rounding the edge until there is no metal to hold the wire edge.
While stropping has improved this edge, the edge was far from ideal before the stropping and far from ideal after the stropping.
9.4. Conclusion
The conclusion?
If stropping improves sharpness, then your grinding/honing steps have failed to produce a good edge.
10. Summary
First, a compressible surface if used at the edge will round the edge.
Second, the grit particles in the stropping compound may be of a wide variety of sizes, or even of unknown size.
Third, during use metal shavings contaminate the strop, that contamination having a negative effect on the fine structure of the metal.
Compressible surface
If the strop does not make contact with the edge, why are you stropping? You are only smoothing the bevels back of the edge.
If the stop does make contact with the edge, a compressible strop surface will dub the tool.
Grit Size
It is clear from the micrographs on this page, and on pages linked form this page, that stropping compounds produce larger scratches than a 0.5 micron or even 5 micron sheet abrasives. Metallography has shown that scratch size and sub-surface damage are directly linked. Sub-surface damage at the edge means a softening of the metal at the edge and reduced edge life.
Slurry Effect
When you use a strop you will quickly see swarf collecting on the lap. This swarf is made up of metal filings and broken abrasive grits. Metallography has shown that this swarf is responsible for increased sub-surface damage. That is, swarf degrades the quality of the steel. You get a softer tool that wears more quickly.
11. Conclusions
If you are using 3M microfinishing abrasives you should not strop using any of these compounds on a maple board. If you are using some other abrasive or blade holding method, and if stropping is improving the sharpness of your blades, then your previous grinding/honing steps are producing a bad profile. You should investigate other honing techniques - in particular, the techniques discussed in these pages.
11 Further testing
Some possibly better (than the test) combinations include:
It may be that some other manufacturer's Chromium Oxide compound does not contain the range of grits found in the bar I bought. Lee Valley's current green crayons may not even be the same. In fact, you can buy a Chrome Oxide paste that is 99.9% chrome oxide. It is possible that the same compounds on some other surface will produce different results. I have argued above that leather and MDF are not suitable. Metallographers use diamonds on linen. I have never heard of anyone hand stropping on linen, but it could work. Diamonds on steel or cast iron might also work. It is possible that the same compounds on powered strops (either discs, felt wheels, or leather belts) might work better. I have read, but not verified, that high speed grinding makes the grit appear smaller -- for example, the scratches from a 60 grit wheel might look like those from a 180 grit bench stone. I plan to test this option. If you use other sheet abrasives, even 3M wet-and-dry abrasives sold in lots of stores, often auto stores, your bevels may be so bad (the front and back bevels near the edge have deeper scratches than those produced by the honing compounds) that these compounds can help. If you don't use back bevels and you are getting a fine wire edge that is not being removed during honing, stropping on a bare leather surface may help. If you don't use back bevels, then stropping on the front and back of the blade may improve the quality of the back face - smooth the back wear bevel a bit. This would only apply if you stropped using a jig on a hard surface. Verhoeven's testing was limited to a electron microscope examination of the surface of the tool. He did not actually compare the resulting edge in use. We know from Metallography that the crystal structure of metal can be damaged below the surface even if the surface looks smooth. Verhoeven is a metallographer. I am not sure why he was satisfied with looking at superficial edge smoothness when he must be aware of the issues with sharpening methods using large grits at the edge.
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Lost?On his fortieth birthday in 1993, Alan Moore openly declared himself to be a magician, something he discussed in an interview with The Guardian in 2002:
“One word balloon in From Hell completely hijacked my life… A character says something like, ‘The one place gods inarguably exist is in the human mind’. After I wrote that, I realized I’d accidentally made a true statement, and now I’d have to rearrange my entire life around it. The only thing that seemed to really be appropriate was to become a magician.”
For Moore, his writing is his magic and his magic is his artform. In The Mindscape of Alan Moore documentary, he states rather unequivocally:
“I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.”
Consider the truth of that statement in terms of Moore’s very own work and say… the Occupy movement or Anonymous.
God, I love Alan Moore. May he have the best birthday ever this year (and every year).
Click here to read about “Who Strips the Strippers?” Excelsior Burlesque’s tribute to Alan Moore.
Below, a video of Alan Moore’s complete lecture at Northampton College on September 26, 2013. The mage of comics reads an extract from his book, The Mirror of Love and offers insights on being a writer.Illustrations // Kieron Black
I have told this story many times. It has reached such a status among friends that I am often requested to recount it, particularly if there is a newcomer around. I now fear that it circulates behind my back, like Chinese whispers, gathering falsehoods and damaging my already questionable reputation, so I’m taking this opportunity to lay bare the truth and formally set any legends to rest. Beware; it is not for the faint-hearted. My mother consoled me in the aftermath, telling me I had just endured the worst part of childbirth, and the nickname “Stitches” still sticks among friends. It contains graphic imagery from the start, although (you will thank me later), no flash photography.
“What happened was very simple. I fell while getting off a chairlift.”
It begins on a family ski trip. It also happens to be first and last ski trip my family was ever to take – I’m fairly sure this wasn’t my fault, but who can tell. My family are far from natural skiers, so there was a real jumble of abilities, but I found a decent riding partner in my cousin who was a reasonably experienced snowboarder. As it turned out, my choice of riding comrade was not so sympathetic in times of need.Image copyright AP Image caption Gay rights activists have strongly condemned the bill
President Yoweri Museveni is asking the US to advise Uganda's scientists about homosexuality, as he considers whether to sign a law increasing punishments.
Mr Museveni's spokesman said the president would not sign the law until he had received the scientific advice.
Last week he said he had decided to sign the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which parliament has passed.
The US - one of Uganda's largest aid donors - has warned that enacting the bill would complicate relations.
President Barack Obama described it as an affront, and a danger to, Uganda's gay community.
BBC regional analyst Richard Hamilton says President Museveni is trying to please a conservative local constituency while avoiding alienating Western aid donors.
Image copyright AFP Image caption President Yoweri Museveni says he wants to know whether homosexuality is a choice or genetic
Homosexual acts are already illegal in Uganda. Under the proposed legislation, those convicted could face life imprisonment.
The law would also make it a crime not to report gay people.
'Abnormal'
In a statement, Mr Museveni said: "I... encourage the US government to help us by working with our scientists to study whether, indeed, there are people who are born homosexual.
"When that is proved, we can review this legislation."
Presidential spokesman Tamale Mirundi told Reuters news agency the bill would be on hold for now "until more conclusive research is done, and that's what the president is saying".
Mr Museveni originally refused to sign the bill, saying that it was wrong to punish people who were born "abnormal".
But then government officials said Ugandan scientists had advised him that homosexuality was a behavioural choice.
The scientists' report said there was no definitive gene for homosexuality but it was not an "abnormality" and it could be influenced by environmental factors.
"The practise needs regulation like any other human behaviour, especially to protect the vulnerable," it said.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption In December a gay rights campaigner spoke of her fears about the legislation
The private member's bill originally proposed the death penalty for some offences, such as if a minor was involved or the perpetrator was HIV-positive, but that clause has been dropped.
Uganda already has legislation banning gay sex between men, but the proposed law sharply tightens restrictions - and covers lesbians for the first time.
Promotion of homosexuality - even talking about it without condemning it - would also be punishable by a prison sentence.An old law has come to the forefront, and it's being applied in a way that could affect what you do on your PC. In a case close to the Boston Marathon bombings, a federal court will decide if the deletion of browser history was an obstruction of justice.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was signed into law by President Bush in 2002, largely in response to the 2001 Enron scandal. Though it deals mostly with corporate financial reporting, it is now being used for an entirely different purpose.
Khairullozhon Matanov, a former taxi driver and acquaintance of the Boston Marathon bombers, is due in court next week. But it's not because he knew about the bombings beforehand, or because he participated in the attacks.
Instead, his crime was deleting his browser history in the days following the bombings. He's been charged with obstruction of justice for the deed, and could spend the next 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors are clutching to one section of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which details severe penalties for "destroying, mutilating, concealing, falsifying records, documents, or tangible objects" with intent to impede or stall a federal investigation.
A Grand Jury indictment from May 29, 2014 states that Matanov “deleted a large amount of information from his Google Chrome Internet cache" following the bombing, including "references to the video of the suspected bombers [later identified as the Tsarnaevs]...two of the photographs of the bombers released at approximately the same time...[and] a photograph of Officer Sean Collier, who had been allegedly killed by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.”
Matanov also faces three other counts stemming from allegations that he lied to investigators about his activities and relationship with the Tsarnaev brothers. Those carry a sentence of up to eight years each.
Although he maintains his innocence, Matanov pleaded guilty to all charges earlier this year, hoping that the US district judge will accept his plea agreement for a 30-month sentence.
Online outrage
Many online have responded to news of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act being used against internet users, expressing anger that a seemingly innocent task could land a person in jail for two decades.
Uhm, WTF, Sarbanes-Oxley can be applied to people, in private, outside work. For deleting browser history?! http://t.co/wE451UDo73 — Wille (@wfaler) 5 июня 2015
The senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Hanni Fakhoury, says that Washington wants – and believes it is entitled to – all online data for policing purposes.
"Don't even think about deleting anything that may be harmful to you, because we (the government) may come after you at some point in the future for some unforeseen reason and we want to be able to have access to that data. And if we don't have access to that data, we're going to slap an obstruction charge that has as 20-year maximum on you,” Fakhoury told The Nation.
Others were quick to point out that the law only applies to those who knowingly delete data with intent to impede or stall a federal investigation.
But according to The Nation's Juliana DeVries, the law can be applied broadly because prosecutors “do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway.”
She cited the case of David Kernell, a University of Tennessee student who entered Sarah Palin's email account in 2010 and changed her password to “popcorn.”
Although entering Palin's email was considered a misdemeanor, Kernell was convicted of a felony for deleting his internet history afterwards because his alleged awareness of a potential investigation into his conduct was enough to uphold the charge.
For the moment, it remains unclear just how broadly the Sarbanes-Oxley Act can be used by prosecutors in the digital age, or how much data citizens should preserve in case they find themselves part of an investigation.Jeffry Faranial‘s Henerik Bus ART HOUSE renderings awarded him Best Visualization of the Week NO. 24 with lots of requests for more information about his work. It wasn’t easy in the making for him as he says, but he took it upon himself to share with us all more information about the process of making his own art based on henrik’s art. Enjoy!
Author: Jeffrey Faranial Jeffrey Faranial is the Visualization Manager at DWP. He is working in the 3d Visualization field for five years now after having been in the architecture and interior design field for three years. He worked as an Interior Designer in the beginning of his career in dwp and eventually assigned to do the visualization for the company in early 2008, and had been promoted as a Senior Visualizer after a year and had been put forward to Visualization Manager in the same department the following year.
Hi everyone!
First of all, thanks for your time reading this article and a big thanks to Ronen for inviting me to write it.
The Inspiration
I’ve always envisioned myself having a library with a good selection of books and magazines, something tangible I can always flick through on my spare time. Whilst Im in the process of making this happen I do try to find time to visit any book stand habitually.
When I sew the front cover of the Livingetc Magazine, July 2013 issue, I was struck by the image. It really got to me… From the minimalist style to the black-and-white color palette which is always appealing for my liking. At that instance the image has become a challenge, as I do see a great opportunity in the elements presented to turn it into making my 3D rendition of it. The possible tasks and situations in making such an image are the driving force that made me start doing it. From the raw-looking wood, good lighting, simple composition, down to details like the texture and fur. Overall, the challenge idea has started to grow in my head and now I just needed to make it happen.
The Beginning
The reference interior has 4 sets of images so I decided to add more and amend some to re-create the space in some way with my added personal touch but still with a great respect to the original reference.
The Reference
The finished project has 7 different camera angles, but I chose to walk you through just a couple of views to make it simple. Setups are pretty much the same anyway and it only varies with cameras focal length and f-stops.
The final images…
Software Used
Autodesk 3ds Max 2013
Chaos Group V-Ray Adv 2.30
Adobe Photoshop CS
Basic Scene Setup
Display and System Units setup set to millimeters. Gamma and LUT set to 1.0. Yes! No LWF… There is such a thing still.
Basic Modeling
Every time I do an interior project, I always start with the basic volume defining components – floor, walls, openings and ceiling. This is also the part where I test the main materials, V-Ray Physical Camera, ambient V-Ray lights, and V-Ray sun settings.
All this while in low subdivision settings just to get the basic look and feel as I like.
The Plan…
I’ve added a V-Ray Sun and Lights, set to 3-8 subdivisions for test renders then increasing the value to 16-24 for final rendering. Environment set to the default V-Ray Sky.
V-Ray Sun Position :
I’m using 3ds max native foliage to simulate shadows from the windows. Seems no one uses these, but for this task they are spot on.
The V-Ray Physical Camera placement and settings :
Draft camera view which is always flexible to modify a bit once furniture is in place to make sure that I am happy with the composition.
Basic Materials
Here are some of the main materials used in this scene with textures. Again, these materials were set to default subdivision of 8 and eventually I increased their value to 16-24 for the final rendering.
Concrete Painted Wall with bump map from Arroway Textures :
Wood Floor with Diffuse, Reflect & Bump maps from Arroway Textures. Composite map for Evermotion :
Painted Wood / Cornices, baseboards and moldings.
Rendering
And here is the first test render and the settings used for it :
The Test Render :
The test render shows a lot of noise and splotches due to low render settings but its enough for me to continue to the next step which is modeling the basic furniture and start putting in more details according to the plan.
Furniture Modeling
I’ve used the poly modeling method (box modeling) with the furniture and spline modeling with most of the accessories.
Some of the models I used are from Evermotion and a Sofa from Designconnected – Both excellent products.
And stock models obtained on-line.
Hair & Fur Modeling
Once everything was set, I started working on the details that make it more realistic and pleasing. I have started with the throw on the sofa. Starting from a Plane object with enough segments then simulated using MassFX (mcloth) and sofa as the rigid body.
After a couple of try-out simulations, once Im satisfied with the output, the plane was converted to editable poly and slightly adjusted before being applied with the mesh smooth and hair& fur modifiers.
I will not discuss the styling phase, as it is a long process outside the scope of this article, but I do recommend you to watch the Bambi Chair Videos on Viscorbel website for more on that topic.
And these are the fur throw setups after styling…
And few more models, like the rug in the living and Henriks alternative Christmas Tree in the study room were done using iToo Software’s Forest Pack Plugin.
And here are some of the materials and textures used in final rendering.
Chrome :
Wood :
Glass :
Fabric :
Porcelain :
Now that the modeling and texturing is finally done then is time to do the…
Final Rendering Setup
Here are the final wires :
Final render settings :
Raw renders saved in TIFF 16 bit file :
Render Elements :
Post Production
This is definitely the last but not the least part of my workflow. Photoshop always plays a vital role in making sure I am happy with the final output. The following screenshots shown are the major and important steps I usually do and I wanted to share with you to give a good understanding how I approach and manipulate my rendering to the final image.
Brightness and Contrast :
The use of render elements – Wire color and Raw reflection :
Applied to floor and fireplace :
Giving it a bit of a glow and adjust the brightness. Then duplicate the last layer and change the blending mode to screen. Applied Gaussian Blur set to about 75 Pixels.
Set opacity of that layer to 25% and delete the part where I dont like the effect :
Then a few more steps to move forward into a more detailed editing.
The Fireplace
Add a dirt texture on top of the fireplace from (obtained from CGtexture).
Set blending mode to Overlay with 75% opacity :
Sculpture
The sculpture on the coffee table takes a lot of attention so I toned it down by selecting it via V-Ray Wire Color and applied brightness and contrast.
Throw (hair&fur)
During test renders, I tend to save some of the images I think I could use and merging it on the final image. This is what I did for the throw and living room rug and gives a better result.
Original Render :
Test Render :
Result With the original and test render combined :
A hint of color correction plus brightness and contrast manipulation :
Almost there, but wasn’t that happy with the result of the fur. I think it needs to be softer so I decided to select again the fur part, set blending mode to screen and applied Gaussian Blur at 8.4px radius.
And set opacity to 80%.
Then tone down the throw on the foreground.
Done editing the details!
The Finishing Touches
Now its time to add a couple more final touches. The next few steps is what make the images more photo-real (in my eyes anyway). I’m using NIK Software for this stage – NIK Color Efex Pro 4.
Pro Contrast :
Film Efex : Modern …
I wanted the grain to be subtle so I set the opacity to 35 :
After working in NIK Color Efex, last step would be adding a Lens Correction filter to add Vignette and Chromatic aberration :
Following the same process, here are the raw render images juxtapose to the final images.
Then its time to post and share the final image.
As a final note, I have to admit, this was the first time for me to do a broad step-by-step tutorial and its really a daunting task, please do bear with me if I have missed some steps. This gives me a great experience of sharing as well as a respect to other CG artist who do find time for putting their process into words. I just hope that I’ve tackled and shared helpful and beneficial points.
Once again, thanks to Ronen and thanks to everyone who keep on reading up to this LAST word. I hope that you had a good time reading this. Any comments and more questions about the tutorial are more than welcome – Just drop a line in the comment section below.
Cheers to you all,
Jeff.A year-long standoff between a Pennsylvania high school administration and its student body newspaper has resulted in suspensions, a $1200 fine, and an IndieGoGo campaign in protest—all because the student editorial staff of the paper is refusing to print the word “Redskins.”
Journalism teacher and newspaper advisor Tara Hubler, who won the Teacher of the Year award from Pennsylvania’s School Press association, received a two-day suspension without pay because of her support of her students. The paper’s editor-in-chief, student Gillian McGoldrick, was also suspended over her staff’s refusal to print the word, which they argue is racist and offensive.
The Redskins are the official mascot of Neshaminy High School in Langhorne, Penn. Following the example of numerous national media outlets, including the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, the student editorial staff of Neshaminy’s Playwickian newspaper stopped using the term last October, citing its offensive status as a racial epithet against Native Americans.
“The ‘R-Word’ is at least awkward, at most a racist slur,” they wrote in an unsigned editorial, which has since been taken offline. “The Playwickian cannot publish it for these reasons. The change is not being encouraged for the sake of political correctness itself, but for the sake of being respectful and fair to an entire race.”
But principal Rob McGee overturned the newspaper’s ban on the word a few weeks later, issuing a directive to the students that they not only had to continue using it, but that they also had to accept advertising that used the word.
School board president Ritchie Webb defended McGee’s decision to the Student Press Law Center at the time: “Whenever we use the term ‘Redskin,’ it is only in a positive light,” he said, claiming the students’ decision to ban the word violated the rights of other students—and advertisers—who wanted to use the word freely.
That was a year ago. Since then, the student newspaper has fought back, declaring through official legal statements and through house ads in the paper that it has the constitutional right to exert editorial control over the newspaper without interference. In response, McGee has reportedly slapped the newspaper with a series of escalating penalties, including:
Threatening to discipline the paper and any individual students who refused to print the word
Pulling both the editorial about the decision and a rebuttal editorial from the Playwickian website
Confiscating copies of the paper during a June meeting with McGoldrick
Fining the newspaper $1200 out of its annual budget
Freezing the newspaper’s social media accounts
This week’s suspensions of Hubler and McGoldrick
This evening our twitter will be deactivated due to an administration directive. We’d like to wish our followers a nice summer while we can — The Playwickian (@ThePlaywickian) June 19, 2014
The newspaper, which has garnered national attention over the year it has been fighting McGee’s order, said in a statement issued to the principal last December that any disciplinary action the principal took could be grounds for a lawsuit. The defense didn’t seem to stop the principal from issuing the suspensions this week.
This isn’t the first time that the school’s newspaper has tried to ban the use of the word. The last time was in 2001. While the controversy hasn’t eased in the interim 13 years, social media has become a gamechanger: Numerous legal and student advocacy associations have shown their support for the Neshaminy students by buying up advertising space in the Playwickian. Student presses around the country have joined in to cheer them on. “When one publication is threatened, we are all threatened,” wrote the Foothill Dragon Press in Ventura, Calif. Another in Texas wore armbands in solidarity with the newspaper staff during McGoldrick’s two-day suspension.
@ThePlaywickian We stand with you from Texas!! pic.twitter.com/gj9PqU4iVb — Lone Star Dispatch (@JBHS_dispatch) September 17, 2014
Wednesday, the Foothill Dragon Press launched an IndieGoGo campaign, as well as a hashtag campaign, to “Free the Playwickian.” The crowdfunding effort, which has already surpassed its $2600 goal, sought $1,200 to cover the money the administration docked from Playwickian‘s budget, and an additional $1,200 to cover Huber’s wages for the two days she was suspended.
“By donating,” they wrote, “you simply are affirming the rights of high school student journalists to decide what is offensive, racist or unwanted in their own publications.”
Photo via VimeoHi, this is Geoff.
Just a quick reminder: Many thanks to all of you who have been writing in and sharing your perspectives after each of the Friday Five. So that our entire community can benefit, if there is something that you’d like to add / share / offer a different perspective on, please go to the comments section of this Friday Five below, and leave your comments there.
With no further ado…
“Grow it yourself.” A humorous and instructive profile of Rosie Harding and Peter Fernandes, a couple in Goa who have cultivated a gorgeous food forest – but refuse to sell the produce. There’s a twist… “Fernandes even tells us that he goes to farmers’ markets at times and just shows off his produce, refusing to sell it. ‘It’s lovely, it’s delicious, it’s scrumptious and you can’t have it—so grow it!’ But the difference is, Harding and Fernandes are also willing to teach you how to walk the walk and grown your own veggies, if you are truly interested in learning.”
The Pesticide Myth: At last it is becoming obvious: “The idea that pesticides are essential to feed a fast-growing global population is a myth, according to UN food and pollution experts. A new report, being presented to the UN human rights council on Wednesday, is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions.” Full report here.
Still Contributing: As many of you already know, my dear friend and permaculture pioneer Toby Hemenway, passed away late December after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. It was a big loss for the permaculture community, his friends, his family, and the many people whose lives he touched. So I was pleasantly surprised to see a recent review of his groundbreaking book on urban permaculture, The Permaculture City, that was published almost two years ago. The review article is decent, and the book is priceless.
From Lawyer to Farmer: “In agriculture, striving to be bigger, faster and more profitable makes sense; in permaculture, not so much. ‘You can live off the land, can experience successes and failures, and see it’s not impossible,’ said Brock Albin, owner of Black Robin Farm and Orchard. ‘You can have a simpler life.’” Another profile of someone who’s caught the “permaculture bug,” this time a Bozeman, Montana resident who is literally half-a-world away from Rosie and Peter. Whether in India, Montana, or anywhere in between, with a bit of know-how and commitment, anything’s possible…
In case you missed it: A few interesting pieces this week from our sister site, the non-profit Permaculture Research Institute:
If you enjoy these posts, be sure to bookmark the site as several new articles go up weekly, or check out thousands of other past articles, here.
That’s it for the Friday Five.
Again, I can’t always get to my email, so please remember to share your comments and thoughts on the blog-version of this Friday Five (and all past + future Friday Fives), all housed here. This way, our entire community can benefit from your insights, and join the discussion.
Cheers, and have a great weekend
Your friend,
GeoffI have played this game for a while now. The campaign takes a couple days to finish and the story really hooks you in the gameplay. It's sometime stressful but you can finish it. Onto the multiplayer, it's real fun until you die. There are choices to choose from different classes this time.
Classes:
Outrider: bow and explosive arrows, has ability to see enemy's through walls.
Reaper: arms tranform into a cyborg like minigun that will tear up anything that crosses paths. Special ability is a glitch type teleport, once charged you basically teleport back to an area you were in a couple seconds ago - good for getting out of tricky situations.
Seraph: armed with a one hit kill pistol, special ability is the combat focus that increases your score streak for a limited time.
Ruin: you are armed with gravity spikes which makes a good explosive melter attack. Takes a little bit to long but if you time it right, it can be rewarding. Special ability is overdrive, you speed up your actions for a short burst of time.
Fun multiplayer, with different types of classes to pick from but no character customizations other than guns.
Zombies:
Fun but with only one big map like advanced warfare. You advance your way through by buying doors or finding the right tools to get your way into areas. Wish there were more than just one big map, I liked black ops 2 zombie maps better. But new added weapon kits and gobble gums is something real good. You can turn into a monster this time by going to one of the goblets but there can only be one of those monsters in the team and it will only last a little. The perks and random gun box is still in here lol forgot what it was called.
Overall: black ops 3 takes steps forward and backwards. Good looking game, specialist classes and class creating but online is fun until you die. Good game to play with friends and yourself. New games also come with a free futuristic nuketown map.
Cons:
Spawn trapping
Custom camo doesn't cover most of the gun
Ranks seem too long
Matchmaking needs help
Pros:
Hit detection
Feels like black ops
Classes give a Gucci touch to the game.
Good graphics
Nice paint shop
New game mode safeguard
10 point create a |
the exception of Islam’s holiest places if the kingdom does anything “ignorant”, Tehran’s defense minister was quoted as saying on Sunday after a Saudi prince threatened to move the “battle” to Iran.
“If the Saudis do anything ignorant, we will leave no area untouched except Mecca and Medina,” Iranian Defence Minister Hossein Dehghan was quoted by the semi-official Tasnim news agency as saying.
“They think they can do something because they have an air force,” he added in an apparent reference to Yemen, where Saudi warplanes regularly attack Iran-aligned Houthi forces in control of the capital Sanaa.
Dehghan, speaking to Arabic-language Al-Manar TV, was commenting on remarks by Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who said on Tuesday any contest for influence between the Sunni Muslim kingdom and the revolutionary Shi’ite theocracy ought to take place “inside Iran, not in Saudi Arabia”.
Saudi Arabia and Iran compete for influence in the Middle East and support rival groups in Syria’s civil war. Iran denies Saudi accusations that it sends financial and sometimes armed support to groups hostile to Riyadh around the Arab world.
In unusually blunt comments in a nationally-televised interview on Tuesday, Prince Mohammed ruled out any dialogue with Iran and pledged to protect his conservative kingdom from what he called Tehran’s efforts to dominate the Muslim world.
“We know that we are a main goal for the Iranian regime,” he said. “We will not wait until the battle becomes in Saudi Arabia but we will work to have the battle in Iran rather than in Saudi Arabia.”On December 31, 2012, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced its approval of a new drug to treat multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). The agency granted bedaquiline (Sirturo) “fast-track” approval, assessing its efficacy by a surrogate measure rather than an actual clinical outcome. The criterion was the capacity of the drug, compared with placebo, to convert a patient's sputum culture from positive to negative for Mycobacterium tuberculosis when added to a standard MDR-TB regimen.
Ideally, drug approvals are based on large trials that randomize thousands of patients and measure actual clinical outcomes. By contrast, the pivotal studies for bedaquiline were relatively small; the initial finding on sputum culture conversion came from an 8-week trial of 47 patients. A follow-up study enrolled another 161 patients. By 24 weeks, 79% of patients taking bedaquiline in the second study had undergone sputum culture conversion, compared with 58% in the placebo group. The difference in each substudy was not significant at later points.1,2
However, 5 times as many patients given the experimental drug died—10 of 79, vs 2 of 81 in the control group.1,2 Five of the 10 deaths in patients given the new drug were caused by tuberculosis, indicating treatment failure, as were the 2 deaths in the control group. No single cause explained the remaining excess deaths in the bedaquiline group, but several could have been related to hepatotoxicity. Bedaquiline was also found to cause QT prolongation, which can result in fatal ventricular fibrillation; now that the drug is approved, that fact and the excess mortality will be noted in a black box warning on its label.
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is an important clinical and public health problem, particularly outside the United States, with limited treatment options. Few innovative anti-infective products have been brought to market in recent years, and the FDA faces considerable pressure to accept less stringent standards for approving such products. Bedaquiline also had an appealingly novel mechanism of action: inhibition of mycobacterial ATP synthetase. But did these factors justify the decision to allow its use based only on a measure of sputum changes in the face of contradictory evidence from clinical end points such as treatment failure and death?
Although in recent years the FDA has been prompt in its review timelines, it is still under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry and others to approve drugs more quickly and more often. Since 1992, the salaries of FDA scientists who review new drugs have been subsidized by “user fees” paid by the industry, to make up for recurring congressional budget shortfalls. Decision making under such time pressure may subsequently lead to unanticipated safety problems.3 As 2012 ended, FDA reviewers faced both the deadline imposed by the user-fee program as well as demands from the industry that it increase its annual number of drug approvals (which it did, by a large margin over its past performance).4
Recent years have revealed several problems with drugs evaluated on the basis of surrogate measures alone. Rosiglitazone (Avandia) was approved based on its ability to reduce hemoglobin A 1c levels in patients with diabetes. However, 8 years later the drug was found to significantly increase the risk of myocardial infarction; it is now hardly ever used. Ezetimibe (Vytorin, Zetia) was approved because it lowered low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels through a novel mechanism; however, 10 years after approval the drug has not yet been convincingly shown to reduce the risk of cardiac events. On the other hand, surrogate measures have sometimes helped to speed approval of effective drugs; for example, viral load is a reliable predictor of the efficacy of medications for human immunodeficiency virus/AIDS, lowering low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels using a statin correlates with a reduction in cardiac risk, and reducing blood pressure has been shown to help prevent stroke and other cardiovascular events.
By law, if the FDA grants a drug accelerated approval based on a surrogate measure, its manufacturer must conduct an additional trial to confirm the appropriateness of the initial decision. However, for bedaquiline, the agency agreed that enrollment in that confirmatory trial would not have to start until late 2013 or 2014, with study results not required until 2022.5 Given the contradictory evidence at hand, it is not clear why the agency did not defer its decision about approval until further outcome evidence was available and demand it sooner than 2022. (A different view was taken by the consumer group Public Citizen. In a letter to the FDA dated December 21, 2012, the group not only urged the agency to withhold approval for the drug but also questioned whether it was ethically acceptable to continue any trials of a product that conferred no outcome benefit but increased the risk of death 5-fold.6) Further research might reveal that the novel mechanism of action of bedaquiline could prove helpful to patients with MDR-TB. But adequate clinical outcome data are not available to demonstrate that this is the case, and there is worrisome evidence in the opposite direction.
The economics of this decision are also provocative. Because of the rarity of MDR-TB in the United States (<100 cases in 2011), bedaquiline qualifies for “orphan drug” status, which provides the company with substantial federal research and development credits and other financial benefits. In addition, an FDA program provides that a company that wins approval for a drug to treat a neglected disease can receive a “voucher” from the agency, granting it expedited review of any other new product of its choice; bedaquiline has won such a voucher. The value of these vouchers has been estimated at several hundred million dollars,7 both because of the extended sales time it can transfer to another product with much larger market potential and because the law permits such vouchers to be sold to other companies to use on their own products.8 Thus, the potential financial benefit-risk profile of bedaquiline for its manufacturer appears to be clearer than its potential clinical benefit-risk profile for patients.
The FDA's approach to surrogate measures will be an important test of its scientific and political mettle in the coming years. Although the agency will face increasing pressure to accept easily reached laboratory or imaging measures of efficacy, it should embrace these criteria only when they are well linked to efficacy, and it must require prompt confirmation of such presumed associations if a drug must be approved on the basis of such surrogate measures. When, as with bedaquiline, favorable findings on a surrogate measure run counter to data on clearly important clinical outcomes such as disease progression and death, the agency should withhold its decision until more evidence is available to resolve the conflicting signals, rather than being obliged to make an approval decision prematurely based on what may turn out to be inadequate information.
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Corresponding Author: Jerry Avorn, MD, Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02120 (javorn@medsoc.harvard.edu).
Published Online: February 21, 2013. 10.1001/jama.2013.623. Corrected on March 8, 2013.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: The author has completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest and none were reported.Sounds likeis following the originalstory arc pretty closely. Check out what comic book writer andCreative Consultanthas to say about the film in an interview with SFX Magazine.Millar: "It has actually been very well put together – Simon Kinberg and Matthew Vaughn worked on it together and they are both great at what they do. Then Bryan Singer came in, and, of course, he is Mr X-Men and he knows exactly how everything works. Just look at these first two X-Men movies: despite the huge cast of characters it all came together really well. These two movies never felt like overload and the balance was really, really good. On the other hand I though the third film felt crowded, but then Singer is excellent at working with ensemble casts. So with this one I feel it is all fine. I have read the screenplay and it doesn’t feel rushed and it doesn’t feel like it is too many characters.”Millar: “I hadn’t actually thought about that [laughs]. Yeah, that is true isn’t it? You will have a couple of big movies with giant robots in them. I don’t really want to give too much away but the Sentinels are a big feature of this story. They will be cool and this will deliver on all of the teasers. We’ve all been waiting for this ever since X-Men: The Last Stand showed us one of their heads. Now it is finally coming, and we only have to pay ten quid to see it in the cinema whereas they’re having to pay $100 million to deliver it. So I’m delighted [laughs].”Millar: “Ach, I cannae get into that [laughs]. As soon as I say something it will turn into a big internet story. Let me put it this way though: Kitty Pride fans will not be disappointed."Much more from Millar at the source including tidbits onand. Click the link below to read the full interview. X-Men: Days of Future Past is currently scheduled to hit theaters July 18, 2014.In the hearts of residents, Grand Rapids will always be BeerCity, U.S.A.
But in the eyes of the nation, the formal title could come to an end this month, unless Grand Rapids is voted to the top of the list again.
Voting for BeerCity begins on Monday, and voters can vote once per device. Examiner, the site conducting the poll, said the online poll will be accessible soon via its beer section.
Voting-inspired beer
The city’s brewers have teamed up once again for a new beer series in celebration of the vote and have events planned to get the word out to vote.
On Sunday, 10 area breweries will release the newest in the series of beers — the #55555513.
The hashtag name comes from the idea that the beer will be released with an alcohol content of 5.5 percent, 55 International Bitterness Units and on 5/5/13. The beer will contain two grains and one hop, varying by brewery.
Wob Wanhatalo, the media liaison for the release and brewer at Mitten Brewing Co., said Mitten’s #5555513 is full of “Simcoe-y” goodness.
Reigning champion
The vote will pit Grand Rapids against Asheville, N.C., which tied for the title last year, and more cities across the country.
“We’re up against some big cities and beer meccas in the country,” Wanhatalo said. “But we’re just as big of a destination as they are.”
The vote also includes two other Michigan cities, Kalamazoo and Ann Arbor, after they were voted in during a preliminary round.
Although Experience GR President Doug Small said Kalamazoo could take away votes from Grand Rapids, Wanhatalo is confident Michigan will do what’s right.
“Honestly, in a sense, Kalamazoo can be included in the Grand Rapids region,” he said. “Although it says Grand Rapids, it really encompasses all of West Michigan, from Founders to New Holland to Bell’s, we have three of the state’s biggest breweries within an hour of each other.”
The beer scence
Small also said people come from around the state — and country — for Grand Rapids’ craft brewing scene.
He recently ran into a man from Wisconsin at Siciliano’s Market filling up on Michigan beer.
“That’s so cool to see a guy from out of state filling a counter with beer he can only get here,” he said. “To see our grocery stores to have the craft beer market they do — it’s amazing.”
Aside from Siciliano’s, which won Best Beer Grocer in the nation earlier this year, Grand Rapids also has HopCat, which has been on various lists as one of the best beer bars in the world, as well as the area’s 15 breweries.
“It’s still fun, but it’s turned into big business for us,” Small said. “We’d like to win.”
Every vote counts
Brewers, local celebrities and politicians also will take to the streets for four days next week in an effort to get out the vote.
The group will take a bus around the city to various beer bars with QR codes on handouts and stickered on their clothes.
“It’s just another effort to get as many votes as we can,” Wanhatalo said. “The breweries should be a given with getting votes from regulars, but we need to go outside of that.”
There also is a video, produced by local company Whiskey Neat, that will help try to catch an Internet voting audience.
Always a champion
Regardless of what happens in the vote, though, Wanhatalo reiterated the fact that once a BeerCity, always a BeerCity.
“Once we’ve achieved that status, we are forever,” he said. “But our goal is to continue to be at the top of the list every year, and we’re fighting tooth and nail to be there.”
Update
The Examiner has posted its 2013 BeerCity, U.S.A. poll online. The poll is open through 11:59 p.m. on Friday, May 10.Persona 5 Original Soundtrack
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~Atlus Sound Team
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Persona 5 Original Soundtrack
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further info Official Release Date Jan 12, 2018 Artist Atlus Sound Team Genre Video Game Soundtrack Version US PAX-Code PAX0008993748 Item Code 0852428007785 Product Measures 32cm x 32cm x 3cm
features Four-disc set
track listing Disc 1:
Side A
1. Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There
2. Life Will Change
3. Last Surprise
4. Beneath the Mask
5. The Whims of Fate
Side B
1. Beneath the Mask -Rain-
2. Tokyo Daylight
3. Rivers in the Desert
4. Hoshi to Bokura
5. Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There, (Opening Movie Version)
Disc 2:
Side C
1. Beneath the Mask (Instrumental)
2. Life Will Change (Instrumental)
3. Rivers in the Desert (Instrumental)
4. Beneath the Mask -Rain- (Instrumental)
5. Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There (Instrumental)
Side D
1. Interrogation Room
2. Recollection and Foreboding
3. Disquiet
4. Ark
5. Desire
6. Blooming Villan
7. Awakening
8. Star Forneus
9. Punch Ouch
10. Train of Life
11. Power Intuition
12. Legend of Gambla Goemon
13. Pro Golfer Sarutahiko
14. Crane Game
Disc 3:
Side E
1. Meeting
2. Confession / Secret
3. Blood of Villan
4. Regret
5. Butterfly Kiss
6. My Homie
7. A Woman
8. Sunset Bridge
9. When Mother Was There
10. Limitless Pride
Side F
1. Treading on Scorched Sand
2. Alleycat
3. Planetarium
4. Freedom and Peace
5. Jaldaboaoth
6. Swear to my Bones
7. Our Beginning
Disc 4:
Side G
1. Phantom
2. Escape
3. Tension
4. Will Power
5. Triumph
6. Layer Cake
7. The Collapse of Lust
8. High Pressure
9. Price
Side H
1. Keeper of Lust
2. Life Goes On
3. New Beginning
4. Home Electronics Store
5. Welcome Home, Master!
6. Sweatshop
description Persona 5 is a massive and epic opus of a game - the kind of 100-hour-plus JRPG journey that it is impossible to peel away from.
The soundtrack is equally epic, featuring hours of jazzy, poppy, energetic musical magic that you’ll find yourself unconsciously whistling throughout the day. From upbeat vocally-driven songs (many featuring the incomparable throaty gusto of Japanese soul singer, Lyn Inaizumi) to more contemplative, instrumental riffs - it’s an impressive ensemble of tunes.
Quite simply, Persona 5 is one of our favorite videogame soundtracks to date.
We’re so proud to be releasing the Persona 5 soundtrack that, together with ATLUS and SEGA, we decided to do something rather radical - we’re going to document and share the entire process of creating a vinyl album with Persona 5 fans, from start to finish.
Recommended for youWelcome once again to the Hog Molly Report, where winning in the trenches is all that matters. Before we begin, we open with the reciting of our usual motto:
“Big men allow you to compete. We're certainly going to look at the big hog mollies.”
In the spirit of Mr. Gettleman’s words, and the philosophy of building a team from the inside out, my goal will be to watch the hog mollies each game during the season, and give them a grade based on their performance. This week we will look at the complete win over the Washington Redskins and see where the Pig Pounders excelled, and how they can continue their recent dominance.
Offensive Hog Mollies
*Season average in parentheses
Week 15 Yards per carry: 4.5 (3.9, T-23rd NFL)
Third down conversions: 4 out of 15, 27% (40%, T-16th NFL)
Sacks given up: 2 (31, T-16th NFL)
Rating: 5 out of 5 BBQ BOUNCERS
This was without a doubt, the best effort one could expect from our patchwork offensive line. The team was able to both efficiently pass and run the football, with the only main detriment to scoring and 3rd down conversion being penalties, deserved or not. The hogs were helped with what I would say was one of Jonathan Stewart’s best games as a pro, but they did help create those lanes to begin with in many cases. Some of it was pure will by Stew, some of it was good blocking.
In pass protection, they did get swarmed a couple of times on blitzes resulting in two sacks, but the consistent pressure on Cam Newton was not there. Tyler Larsen continues to be a worthy backup to Ryan Kalil, and was notably starting to be more active in calling out protection assignments. Trai Turner did get victimized at RT a couple of times, but it was pretty forgivable. As a result, Cam turned in a beautiful stat line, that could have been better if our wide receivers had better hands. While beating a team once you’re already practically out of the playoff race isn’t as good as the alternative, it was nice to see last year’s Carolina Panthers appear and show they are still in there somewhere.
Defensive Hog Mollies
Yards per carry allowed: 2.2 (3.7, T-4th NFL)
3rd Down Conversions allowed: 2 out of 12, 17% (38%, 8th NFL)
Sacks: 1 total with 1 from DL (40, T-1st NFL)
Rating: 5 out of 5 Potbelly Pounders
Where you going Robert Kelley?
NOWHERE!
Total and complete shut down of the Washington running game was the lynchpin for defensive dominance in this game. Without being able to pound the rock, Kirk Cousins and his receivers were exposed. While the sack total is low, the impact of that one sack by Wes Horton was very high, resulting in a quick six points after halftime that really hurt the skins’ chances of a comeback. Besides, even though they didn’t always get there, the amount of pressure generated by four lineman was adequate to make Cousins make nervous rushed throws.
Defensively, things really could not have gone better for the Panthers, as the Redskins were the third ranked offense in the league entering this game. All this accomplished without Charles Johnson and Luke Kuechly was really a sight to behold.
Hog Molly of the Week: Wes Horton
Coming out of halftime it only took one big play to crush the Redskin’s spirit, and that was a strip sack created deep in their own territory by perennial punching bag Wes Horton. While it’d be hard to be presented with an easier opportunity for Horton to make that play, since Vernon Davis was asked to pull and make a block on him, give Horton credit for finishing by sacking and scooping up the fumble. From my angle, I thought the tip of the ball crossed the plane before he was down, but it didn’t matter. Notorious carbohydrate enthusiast Mike Tolbert was able to stretch out and snatch the last cookie from the Skins’ theoretical cookie jar two plays later.Video games do not exist in a vacuum. Part of the medium’s magic comes from developers taking cues from one another, leveraging each other’s breakthroughs to develop their own. The reliance on borrowing is both a blessing and a curse, and these days, the ethics in-between are very, very blurry.
You might have played Threes, the card stacking number game, except you know it as 2048. There’s a chance you know it as 1024. There’s a chance you know it as the countless other clones of Threes. 2048 and 1024 are their own riffs on the concept of Threes, though neither could exist without Threes.
Clone is a curious word, especially in the context of video games. What constitutes a clone, and what's the difference between stealing and inspiration? The question becomes tougher as the games become smaller, and the democratization of development tools makes it easier and easier to make games.
If you search for 1024 in the App Store, here’s what comes up:
You'll find a similar situation on the Google Play store. Searches on both stores for 2048 are just as prolific:
In short, the popularity of Threes proved attractive. Clones don’t arrive unless there’s something worthy of cloning. Threes, like Flappy Bird, is worth cloning. There's money in this banana stand.
Our journey into the world of Threes clones begins at ground zero. 1024, which first appeared on the App Store on February 27, was created by 28-year-old designer Yeung Jason in Beijing, China. Threes first appeared on the App Store on January 22.
A look at 1024 and Threes side-by-side.
Jason told me he’s a big fan of thatgamecompany’s Journey, and Threes co-creator Asher Vollmer once worked at that studio. That’s how he found Threes, and became entranced by it. 1024, he told me, was created for his fiancée, and he only later decided to publish it to the App Store and Google Play.
He does not consider 1024 a clone.
“No,” he said over email. “Never. As I said, I made it for fun and for my fiancée.
Jason explained that the reason 1024 not only borrows the design of Threes but the game's visuals, as well, is because he wanted to make the game “fast.” His work on 1024 led him to create Monster Grow!, a conceptually similar game for “kids and girls” with a new look and without any of the math. The numbers turned some players off.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal,” he said. “Clone=Copy. Inspiration=Steal. Any design cannot be completely free of plagiarism. But the difference between clone and inspiration is how much thought was put into it. It does not matter what it looks like.”
As of this week, Jason said he’s made around $1,000 off 1024.
The release of 1024 is where the worm began to turn. Two clones of 1024, each called 2048, sprung up. One was created by a French designer by the pseudonym of Samig. This version of 1024 lacks any charm, and the coder was aggressively hostile about his game’s origins in a FAQ on the website:
Q: You're just a shitty ripoff
A: That's not a question. But yes, I did copy the concept from other guys. However they had it on Android and iOS only and my mobile isn't compatible. You know what is compatible with almost anything? A web page. That's compatible with PCs, tablets, smartphones, consoles... hell even some fridges. I don't put make the visitors pay anything to play the game, that would be morally bankrupt.
The version of 2048 most are familiar with, however, is from 19-year-old Italian designer Gabriele Cirulli. Though it doesn’t have the colorful characters and voices from Threes, the animation channels the playfulness that helps make Threes such a delight to mess around with.
Cirulli’s version of 2048 did not launch with a credit to Threes for a good reason: he hadn’t played it. The hat tip to Threes came later, once Cirulli’s 2048 became a viral sensation. Though his version of 2048 has taken some of the attention away from Threes, he’s not trying to hide the reason 2048 exists in the first place.
“Essentially, it is a clone of Threes, although an indirect one,” he said over email. “I was inspired by 1024, which is an actual clone of the game. Due to that, it probably wouldn’t exist without Threes. Personally, I only use the word clone when something is the exact same, both visually and in terms of gameplay, to the allegedly cloned game. Personally, I believe spin-off, or 'inspired by' is a more appropriate term for the other cases.”
When Cirulli launched 2048, he actually sent an email to Jason, the Chinese designer of 1024.
“I built this as a fun weekend project, with no intention to profit off it,” wrote Cirulli in an email exchange that I confirmed with both designers. “I credited your original game in the footer as the source of my inspiration. […] I wanted to be proactive in email about his hoping that this wouldn’t give rise to any problems. I’m not planning to profit over this game concept either now or in the future.”
The email is proof of Cirulli's naivety about what he was actually cloning. This is the slippery slope, and reflects how the Internet both connects us and disconnects us at the same time. Threes is both present and not present.
A clone of a clone of a clone. This is a comparison of 1024, Cirulli's 2048, and Threes.
Cirulli does not have ads on his website, but he does have an option for fans to submit donations. Though he hasn’t disclosed how much he’s made from people’s charity, he told me he's “happy” with them so far.
The young designer is aware that 2048 has impacted Threes, and doesn’t appear he takes that notion lightly.
“I can understand the frustration of the creators of Threes, though, and I believe it’s motivated,” he said. “ […] The amount of effort they put into Threes is very appreciable, and I’m sorry that I accidentally damaged it in part with 2048."
The difference between 2048 on the web and 2048 on iOS and Android? Ads.
If Cirulli couldn’t have anticipated how far 2048 would spread, he likely didn’t anticipate what would happen as a result of making 2048’s code open source on GitHub, either. Making the game open source meant anyone could take the code and make their own variations on 2048. Some of them, like Doge2048, are hilarious, and very much in the spirit of the Internet’s collaborative nature.
Right now, 2048 is at the top of the “free” spot in the App Store. It hasn’t budged for well over a week, and it only seems to be accelerating in popularity. Cirulli did not make this version, which not only does not mention Threes or Cirulli’s original work. And this version has a very key difference: ads.
Who made this version of the game? Based on my reporting, it’s French designer Antoine Morcos.
This mobile version of 2048 was published by a company called Ketchapp, whose website has zero information about the people behind it. An email to the address listed went unanswered. I know about Morcos because I looked up the domain for ketchappstudio.com, and found him talking about other Ketchapp games:
His Twitter and Facebook feeds do not make mention of 2048, though the company is credited with publishing the game on the App Store. On Google Play, it's listed under Presselite, another mobile company Morcos is associated with. Morcos did not return any of my repeated attempts to discuss his business.
“I think it’s up to the people who are doing it to judge whether they’re doing the right thing,” said Cirulli.
Here are the other games Ketchapp has been responsible for in the last few months. Notice a trend?
Flappy Fish - Bird Flyer, Bird in the Dark - Flappy Flyer, Hoverbird Rider, Skater Monkey - No Flappy No Bird, Kitty Jetpack, and Grabby Bird - Flappy Bird Flyer are all shameless grabs at Flappy Bird's massive success. None of them appear to have really taken off, which cannot be said about the chart-topping 2048.
Ketchapp's business model, at least in games, seems to largely be about finding existing designs and looking for a way to ride the wave. One could argue 1024 and 2048 were creative riffs on Threes. One cannot make the same claim for Ketchapp's published version of 2048, which does not acknowledge Threes.
In 2048, Morcos found a goldmine. People love free, 2048 is a beloved riff on Threes, Threes isn’t free, and mobile-ready code was available for free online. The money was gift-wrapped for someone like Morcos.
There's nothing illegal about what Morcos pulled off, but that doesn't mean it sits well with everyone.
“That’s the incarnation of unethical behavior,” said Threes co-creator Greg Wolhwend. “That’s the culmination of it all right there in this long chain of clone of clone of clone of clone of clone blah blah blah. That’s the end thing. I do think if it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. I’m betting that he rests on that at night when he goes to sleep. ‘It had to be somebody, it might as well be me.’’
Wohlwend has made his peace with most of this, including the web version of 2048. But not the app.
Wohlwend was also involved with Ridiculous Fishing, a game that went through its own cloning saga.
The designer doesn’t try to hide his obsession with reading what people think about the game. Google Alerts send him updates to articles written about Threes, and he will often spend hours browsing Twitter looking for idle conversations about his game. That means he’s constantly looking at 2048, too.
“I still sort of check the App Store top charts,” he said, “and it’s still number one, ‘’Oh, maybe it’ll go down a little bit!’ [laughs] It’s like checking your ex-girlfriend’s Facebook or something. You just shouldn’t do that. It still stings.”
As half of the team behind Threes, Wohlwend has reason to be frustrated. Though the clones of Threes vindicates the design, it not only means money and attention diverted elsewhere, it means others ran off with the game that took more than a year to create.
In response to the clones, Wohlwend and co. published a novel-length blog that outlined the lengthy creative process behind Threes, and how the seemingly simple game almost never came to be.
“We were thinking about so many different ways to tackle it,” he said. “‘Should we just throw a free version out there? We should try to compete! Maybe we should try to open source and put it on the web.’ It’s not like we’re not still thinking about those things because…how can you not? We felt like this was our answer, and it was the right answer.”
The nature of what defines a clone is complicated, and Wohlwend has given it substantial thought as this arc in the Threes story has played out. We talked about how when DOOM was originally released, games that would now be called first-person-shooters were commonly referred to as DOOM clones.
“When people see something new and they don’t know what else to call it, they call it that kind of clone,” he said. “With Threes, this is why it is complicated. In development communities especially, it’s not exactly a clone. It’s not the exact game system, but it is heavily borrowing and heavily derivative of what we’ve done.”
“I think Threes came out and people didn’t really know [how to classify it]” he continued. “It’s the beginnings of what I think are a bit of a genre thing, even though it’s very hard to call it a genre. Threes still does borrow from plenty of games, too. That’s how game development works, and that’s another complex thing.”
"Threes still does borrow from plenty of games, too. That’s how game development works."
Some prefer 2048 and 1024 to Threes, partially because of the easier learning curves. That’s fair, but a huge part of the viral success came from both being free.
Charging money for Threes was, in some way, a design choice. The price point for Threes might change in the future. Free was considered during the game's development. At one point, it could have been free with in-app purchases, such as the ability to “undo” moves on the board.
“That was a terrifying endeavor,” he said.
Ads were considered, but few games reach the popularity to make the ads a viable business model. Flappy Bird is an aberration, with a success that's impossible to replicate. A closer examination of in-app purchasing prompted them to back off the idea.
“To do that well,” he said. “It takes a village. [laughs] The worst kind of village, a village you don’t want to be in or visit. You need an economist, you need a psychologist, and you need all this testing and analytics people. It feels gross, and it’s nothing I ever want to be a part of.”
Threes is not the first time Wohlwend has experienced the consequences of cloning. He worked on the updated version of Ridiculous Fishing, a game that was cloned before it was released. (Read about that here.) But Wohlwend learned an important lesson on Ridiculous Fishing that informed the price of Threes.
“People are just so thirsty and so starving for a game that’s just honest,” he said. “Just get it, and you don’t have to deal with any of these psychological yearnings.”
All that said, Threes has soured Wohlwend on the prospect of making more mobile games. He hasn’t ruled it out, though, and he’s working on finishing a completely separate mobile project--another puzzle game--that will be released in the next few months. But the experience has given him pause on future designs.
“I’m trying to go towards the uncloneable games,” he laughed.
(Full disclosure: On some afternoons, I work in the same office as Wohlwend.)London Team Goes Into Frenzy At Lewis Pep Talk The crowd literally went wild when linebacker Ray Lewis was announced as the motivational speaker.
The London Warriors are an amateur football team (not soccer, American football) and they were looking for a little extra inspiration before their clash this weekend with the London Blitz, the reigning BAFA National Leagues champions. Who knew Lewis was so popular across the pond? The Warriors players had no idea Lewis was about to walk on stage before them, but when coach Tony Allen announced the arrival of “No. 52,” the local school auditorium erupted, spiraling into a frenzy. Lewis then dropped on the Warriors one of his trademark pump-up talks, which can partly be seen in the video |
yourself, which will make for a stronger relationship when you really are ready to find love. So go ahead and embrace the most fleeting of romances. Spend a steamy evening with your Grandmother’s hot best friend. Date the single mother of three who lives in Madagascar. Court that underaged go-go dancer with a drinking problem. Your future wife will thank you.Remember in science class when you learned about how the water cycle works? The water in oceans, rivers, and lakes is heated by the sun, then it evaporates, meets colder air, condenses, and comes back down in the form of rain or snow, filling up the oceans, rivers, and lakes so that the cycle can start over.
A new company called Skywell is trying to make all that happen themselves. The idea is that this machine takes in air and then cools and condenses it to create water. It then purifies the water so that it’s drinkable.
The company’s goal was to create an environmentally friendly solution that would bring water to people in the best way possible. One of the benefits is that it gets rid of the need for truck deliveries, saving fossil fuel consumption. It also gets rid of the need for plastic containers.
Skywell has other cool features as well. It lets you customise how hot or cold you want the water. And it doesn’t need a pipe or water line, just an electrical outlet.
The water you get from the Skywell machine is also healthier since it doesn’t get any of the harmful chemicals that can come from plastic bottles, such as BPA.
There’s a cool interactive screen at the top of the machine that tracks your water consumption.
A few machines have already gone out to a few homes and offices, but the formal launch is set for the summer.
Here’s the Skywell machine itself:
And this is how it works:
First air passes through an electrostatic air filter, which traps and blocks any large airborne particles. Then it gets condensed.
The water is treated with natural ozone to disinfect it and prevent bacteria from growing inside the collection area. It goes through lots of other filters to make it as clean as possible.
And there you have it. Water from air.
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Assistant Democratic Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) called out Paul Ryan for lying about immigration reform and warned the new speaker that his pro-billionaire economic agenda is dead on arrival.
Video:
Transcript via Face The Nation:
DICKERSON: He talked about a bold vision. And when he offered bold visions in his budget years, it was often a big, big target for democrats. I mean isn’t that a recipe — if he’s going to offer bold vision — for more fighting over ideology?
HOYER: Well, if he’s going to offer, as he says, movement conservative bold visions, yes, the answer to that is — is correct. We’re not for changing Social Security as it exists today. We’re for strengthening it. We’re not for making Medicare a voucher program. So some of those bold vision that he talks about are things that are worthy of a good debate we think we win that debate with the American public.
On the other hand, to the extent he wants to sit down work collaboratively to solve problems, one of those is comprehensive immigration reform and he’s already taken that off the table because they don’t trust the president. I’m not sure what that has to do with the House of Representatives passing substantive, constructive legislation that the — that the chamber of commerce supports and labor supports and a broad spectrum of the country supports.
Hoyer was reacting to Paul Ryan’s claim that he will not allow a vote on immigration reform because President Obama is “untrustworthy.”
House Democrats are going to sit around and let Speaker Ryan pile up lie filled excuses as for why he refuses to do his job and allow votes on bills that a majority of Americans support.
Ryan is also on notice that his economic agenda is dead on arrival. Rep. Ryan is not going to be able to use his position to push gutting Social Security and Medicare. Ryan’s “bold vision” for the House is about to run into a brick wall if he insists on pushing his unpopular agenda.
The message is clear. Paul Ryan is going to be in for a bumpy ride if he refuses to work with Democrats.
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:Looking again at the NUFORC data, starting out in July, we have the second biggest UFO sightings month of all time (only surpassed by a July two years earlier). This is followed by records set in August, October, December and January (2012). August was not only the biggest August in at least the last eleven years (and likely the past 30 years), but the third highest of any month ever. Similarly, October was the biggest October ever and the fourth highest month on record. December, usually the slowest month of the year, had it's biggest December for sightings ever and it was the only time a December made it into the top 50 months of all time. Although December places second to last out of the last six months of 2011, it is the highest month when looking at how many times it was above its average (1.55Xs compared to 1.42Xs for October, 1.37Xs for July, and 1.27Xs for August). What that may indicate is that December could likely have been when a present wave of activity peaked and that things should begin to wind down at this point but, at the same time, it should probably take a few more months for things to get back to normal (unless there is another wave due in the coming summer months). The first month of this year got off to an intense start with a record number of sightintgs on the 1st of the month as well as the last day of the prior year. Both December 2011 and January 2012 registered about 500 sightings by NUFORC and were the highest totals for those two months on record there (January also had 1.49Xs more sightings than is average for that month or very close to December's 1.55Xs its average).
In an earlier hub (Where to Really Go to See UFOs) I tried to give a better determination of what states were the best to see a UFO than one could get from MUFON's monthly UFO report totals by state. I think I did a good job but realized lately that I could probably do better. My reasoning is due to the fact that when one looks at just a month or two of data, it is hard to get a precise read on the status of sightings in states with small populations and thus a small number of sightings as well. At least in those areas, the bigger the pool of data the better. This time I expanded current sightings from 51 days to 6 months. In the spreadsheet illustration below you can see how it gives a better representation in most cases of these smaller states. Wyoming for example moved from 11th to 3rd place in the rankings, giving what I believe is a more accurate view of the situation there (mostly due I feel to the greater amount of data). Conversely, New Mexico went from 3rd to 12th place (practically switching places with Wyoming). This is partly due to there being such a big difference between the sighting numbers between the two sources (again this kind of thing happens more often in the states with smaller populations/sighting totals). There were big differences in the two sources of data with larger states as well, however. MUFON had more than twice as many reports for Missouri as NUFORC did (perhaps because that state is closer to MUFON's Texas state headquarters). Looks like Missouri had a major flap in early October, racking up 46 sightings in 5 days. The resulting high number of sightings for the period studied caused that state to jump from 13th to 8th place on the list. Another success story is Texas, moving from 12th to 7th place. Both these last two states had been ranked as average by me earlier but moved up into the significantly above average category.Michael McDonald is set for his promotional debut against Peter Ligier in the main event of Bellator 191 in Newcastle on Dec. 15, but he isn’t feeling any added pressure to please his new employers.
“Mayday” believes the contract Bellator offered him already underlined the faith that they have in him as a fighter and despite the magnifying glass that is cast over fighters moving from UFC to its main rival, the 26-year-old is far from overwhelmed by his situation.
“From my very first interaction with Bellator they’ve made it clear that they believe in me and they’re willing to show it, and I’m very appreciative of that,” McDonald told MMAFighting.com.
“They believed in me and were willing to give me what the UFC wasn’t and because of that I feel very valued.
“I don’t feel pressure in the sense that I have to show them that I’m good and that they were right to hire me. I’m really not feeling a whole lot of pressure coming into this, even personally.”
The former UFC title challenger insisted that the UFC’s bonus structure allows them to manipulate fighters. Without winning those bonuses, McDonald believes it’s very difficult for the majority of athletes to be “comfortable in life”.
“With the UFC’s bonus system and how it’s structured, if you win and you get a bonus you’re doing good, you’re comfortable in life. If you don’t win it, you’re starving. A lot of the guys in the UFC are at that place and it’s not a very good place to be,” he explained.
“Now I’m with Bellator and it’s not the way it is and I’m very happy about that. The bonus structure isn’t applied here with Bellator and because of that the base payments can be a bit better.
“In the UFC, they used to use the bonuses against you, they used them like a gun to your head.
“They would say, ‘We don’t want to raise your contract because you’re last fight was this or that’ or, ‘all you have to do is win some bonuses, if you win some bonuses you’ll be fine.’
“It was used more like a weapon than a reward, and I’m honestly glad that I don’t have to deal with that anymore.”
McDonald underlined that his signing for Bellator was a “business move,” citing financial stability as one of the main factors behind his decision.
“I had to really come to grips with this conflict – am I doing this as a business or a fighter?” he said.
“For the longest time I would tell myself that the money didn’t matter and I was only in this sport because I love it. Eventually that wears off once you have bills and a family and other responsibilities.
“If you don’t make that monthly requirement people start turning off your stuff. It’s a predicament because once you start becoming an adult, money does matter and I started fighting when I was a kid.
“Maybe it was all about the love of the game back then, but I had to make the decision that this is going to be my job.”
Although he believes he sacrificed some pride as a competitor by committing his future to Bellator, he knows he still has plenty of fire in his belly as evidenced by his gunfight with John Lineker in his last outing.
“I’m happy I made the decision but I guess part of that is me putting away my pride as a competitor, but sometimes that still comes out,” stated McDonald.
“In my fight with John Lineker, I didn’t want to take him down. I wanted to show the world that my hands were better than John’s. The fight showed his chin was better than mine, we were both hitting each other.
“My pride as a competitor can still come out, but as a businessman if I did that over again I would have thought, ‘Mike, you’re a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a fantastic wrestler – put this guy down and put him where he is least comfortable.’
“I still have that pride as a competitor, but moving over from the UFC was definitely a business decision. There is some great competition in Bellator as well so this should not come as an insult to the promotion, but some of the best in the world right now are in the UFC.”
While a lot of former UFC fighters that sign on the dotted line with Bellator look to thrust themselves into the title conversation as soon as possible, McDonald has some criteria that needs to be reached before he’s ready to commit to a title showdown.
“I have to leave that to my management, they’re the smart people behind my career and I need to take their council about who I’m fighting, for what amount of money and where,” he outlined.
“As a competitor I’m thinking, ‘give me the title shot right now’, but again, this has to be my business. When the money is right and the time is right we’ll have to make it happen.”BREA – Courtney Chapman had never seen $5,000 disappear so fast … fly away really.
In May, one of two toucans she purchased as birthday gifts for her husband and her son, escaped the aviary of her Fullerton home not 15 minutes after being dropped off by the breeder.
“The chances of getting her back are slim to none,” Chapman said she was told. The toucan had not yet been microchipped.
var _ndnq = _ndnq || []; _ndnq.push([’embed’]);
On Tuesday, Fern flew into a Yorba Linda auto repair shop, where an Omar’s Exotic Birds employee, Connor Chubbuck, captured her.
On Thursday, she was reunited with her owner.
While free, Fern gained quite the following.
Fern the Toucan was spotted in trees and on power lines, lounging with crows, parrots and other birds on residential gates and lawn posts.
One man said Fern, named after her Fullerton community, ate berries from his Yorba Linda back yard.
“She was quite striking,” recalled Allison Howell, whose chance encounter with the keel-billed toucan came on Dec. 20 in downtown Fullerton. “I’m not particularly an animal person, but it was definitely a sight to see.”
Chapman, 39, joined Nextdoor, a private social network app intended for neighbors, shortly after Fern’s escape, hoping someone would see her 6-month-old toucan. Before long, pictures of Fern perched around Fullerton were shared on the app. Chapman also started a Facebook page under Fern’s name. Videos of the bird were posted.
On more than one occasion, Chapman tried capturing Fern herself. Those who saw the bird in recent months said she flew independently, not with groups of parrots or other feathered friends.
Let the toucan be free, Chapman was told.
Chapman, who owns several other pets, bought a replacement female toucan to breed with her male, Fruity Loops.
But the hunt for Fern continued.
On Tuesday morning, technicians at Yorba Linda’s Good Guys Automotive in Savi Ranch saw Fern in one of their garages.
Janine Guy, a service representative, called a bird sanctuary in Silverado, the animal service hotline, the Santa Ana Zoo and Omar’s, looking for someone to rescue the bird. The employees put apple slices on a shelf to lure Fern down from their 16-foot rafters.
“You could tell it was a happy bird,” Guy said.
Omar Gonzalez, owner of Omar’s, said Chapman and a couple other people said Fern belonged to them. He said he exchanged more than 40 emails this week with Chapman to verify her claim. Ideally, Gonzalez said, he would’ve liked to run tests on Fern and the male toucan Chapman bought at the same time to confirm they are a breeding pair. That likely would’ve taken two to three weeks, he said, adding his “gut feeling” is Fern is home.
Gonzalez agreed to return the toucan if Chapman provided a receipt of sale. Gonzalez accepted no form of payment for the return.
Free all these months, Chapman expects Fern will need time to adjust to domestic life.
In his 32 years in business, Gonzalez said he has captured a handful of loose birds and returned them to their owners.
Chapman called Fern’s return the unlikeliest Christmas miracle.
“It was awesome seeing all of Fullerton come together and track Fern, well-wishing her constantly,” Chapman said. “I’m glad she got to go out and share her experiences. Everybody’s had an experience with her, and I think it’s awesome that she got to go out and meet friends.
“She has a lot of Fern fans now.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7724 or bwhitehead@scng.comChris Crisman
This article was taken from the March 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Sometimes it almost seems to disappear into the desert.
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Conceived as a conjuring trick of architecture and topography, the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space rises in a sinuous curve from the harsh New Mexico dust, its steel surfaces weathered into a red-brown mirage on the horizon; at twilight, the silhouette of the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport melts slowly into the ridgeline of the San Andres mountains, 30 kilometres away.
The route that the package-tour astronauts of tomorrow will take through the building has been meticulously devised by the architects of Foster + Partners to foreshadow the journey they will make into space: a concrete ramp ascends gently towards the centre of the building -- a narrow, hooded cleft that even in the blinding southwestern sunshine forms a small rectangle of perfect darkness.
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A magnetic tag worn by each passenger triggers heavy steel doors that will open into a narrow and dimly lit passageway, the walls curving out towards another blackened doorway, and a catwalk with views of the 4,300-square-metre hangar four storeys below, housing the fleet of spacecraft in which they will travel.
And then, the finale: the last set of doors swings open into the astronaut lounge, a vast, open space filled with natural light from an elliptical wall of windows, offering a panorama of the three-kilometre-long spaceport runway, and the sky beyond. The effect is just as the architects intended: although the building is not yet complete, when a group of prospective space tourists was brought to it, they found the experience so overwhelming they were moved to tears.
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it's the beginning of a whole new era in space travel Richard Branson
Yet there remains a great deal at stake out here in the desert.
There are now nine locations in the United States designated as spaceports, but the New Mexico complex -- Spaceport America -- is the only one built from scratch and designed to accommodate a regular passenger service. It was raised from nothing on an isolated plain 50km from the nearest town. Creating it has not been cheap: to date it has cost almost a quarter of a billion dollars (£155 million); engineers have paved 16 kilometres of road simply to connect the site to the outside world; the bill for the runway alone will eventually be $37m. And, although the building at its centre bears Virgin Galactic's name and was designed to the company's requirements, it has been paid for by the state of New Mexico, whose citizens voted for a sales tax designed to finance its construction.
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Chris Crisman
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Chris Crisman
On a cold November morning, Christine Anderson, the former US Air Force official now charged with bringing Spaceport America to life, stands on a wind-whipped access road near the Gateway to Space. "This is the beginning of the commercial passenger space-line industry," she says. Anderson's crews are on target to complete their work by the end of 2013; Virgin Galactic plans a regular service -- launching daily flights into space -- for the start of 2014. Anderson is optimistic about the future: daily suborbital passenger flights will be followed by point-to-point intercontinental travel that will traverse the globe in the time it takes to watch an in-flight movie; trips out of the Earth's atmosphere will become as commonplace as taking a bus. "I hope,"
Richard Branson says later, "it's the beginning of a whole new era in space travel."
But before any of that can happen, Virgin Galactic will have to build a rocket that flies.
Read next Never before seen Nasa photos show the majesty of space travel Never before seen Nasa photos show the majesty of space travel
Passenger space travel has been a staple of sci-fi for almost as long as there have been commercial airlines -- the prefiguring of a frictionless future never more perfectly visualised than in the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a white-turbaned Pan Am stewardess dispenses snacks in zero G, en route to an orbiting Hilton hotel.
And by the time Kubrick's film was released in 1968, the real Pan American -- corporate pioneers who had flown the first transatlantic and trans-Pacific commercial services -- had already opened a waiting list for trips to the Moon. They estimated the service would begin no later than 2000, and began issuing numbered membership cards for their First Moon Flights club. It was part corporate optimism, born of a confidence in the technology of the high frontier, and part publicity stunt. Galvanised by the Moon landing the following year, 98,000 people worldwide eventually signed up; one tried to guarantee his seat by sending a deposit cheque for $1 million (£620,000).
But the euphoria of Apollo 11 didn't last long. Nasa slashed its lunar-exploration programme, and in 1971 a similarly cash-strapped Pan Am closed the waiting list; when the airline finally went bankrupt in 1991, the First Moon Flights club became a mocking footnote to the company's obituary, a bellwether of fatal corporate hubris.
Now 62, his blond mane steadily becoming a jaundiced white, Richard Branson still remembers sitting in his parents' living room, watching Armstrong and Aldrin walk on the Moon. He had turned 19 just a few days earlier, and was one of the generation of starry-eyed Aquarians who felt cheated by the future when their dreams of space travel for all fizzled away. "I definitely thought that one day soon we'd all be doing it," he says. And yet, he says, he could still have made a pleasure trip into orbit in the late 80s, before anyone else on Earth.
Chris Crisman
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By then, Branson was already one of the world's richest men, proprietor of his own airline, and exploring a popular sideline in daredevil brand-building -- transatlantic powerboat rides, record-breaking balloon trips -- when he took a call from the USSR's ambassador in London. Mikhail Gorbachev, the ambassador explained, had a proposition for him: how would he like to become the first tourist in space? It would require 18 months' training at Star City outside Moscow, and came with a significant catch: "It would cost $50m or something," Branson says. The price was a problem. "I just felt that to spend that sort of money going to space, people just might feel it was a bit of a waste. We did quite a lot of charitable work in Africa and so on, and I just felt that the amount of money -- although I might have been able to afford it -- was just a little bit... gross."
So Branson declined; later, he regretted it. "I think maybe I should have said yes," he says. "I could probably have justified it from a marketing point of view." And the fact that space tourism had become possible -- yet only for those who were absurdly wealthy -- brought him to a more profound realisation. "What I regretted more was that neither Russia nor America was really that interested in enabling the millions of people who would love to go to space to have the opportunity to do so." Afterwards, he began canvassing people about the idea. "I said, 'If you had the chance to go to space, and were pretty sure it would be a return ticket -- and you could afford it -- how many of you would go?' And 95 per cent of people would stick their hands up."
In 1995, following a conversation with Buzz Aldrin, Branson began seriously exploring the potential for democratising space travel. But when his head of special projects, Will Whitehorn, attempted to register the Virgin identity for use by a spaceline at Companies House in London, he discovered someone had beaten him to it. Branson had quietly trademarked the brand for use in space more than a decade earlier.
Wearing black pilot's overalls bearing a winged design and a patch embroidered with his name, Sir Richard Branson emerges from a hangar on the outskirts of Mojave Air and Spaceport in California. Above him, the building has been recently painted with the Virgin Galactic eye logo. As he crosses the concrete apron of the hangar, he carries under his arm a cardboard cutout of the six-seat Virgin spacecraft, known as SpaceShipTwo. Today is a lightning-quick corporate meet-and-greet at Mojave, a cluster of dun-coloured corrugated steel buildings scattered along a concrete airstrip in the desert a few kilometres from Edwards Air Force Base.
He is here to mark Virgin's final acquisition of its dedicated spacecraft-manufacturing arm, The Spaceship Company (corporate motto: "We Build Spaceships"). The newly painted building behind him is the Final Assembly Integration and Test Hangar -- or, in the best acronym-friendly traditions of spaceflight, "Faith" -- where the company's fleet of new vehicles will be put together. Gathered around Branson on the Tarmac to have their picture taken are 200 staff from Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company and a scattering of engineers from experimental-aircraft manufacturers Scaled Composites. They're the ones who have spent much of the last ten years building the prototype of the world's first spaceliner, in another giant shed on the other side of Mojave airport known as Building 75.
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Chris Crisman
Chris Crisman
Branson and Scaled Composites' notably eccentric founder, Burt Rutan, go back a long way. Rutan made his reputation by selling plans for unconventional-looking aeroplanes with gimmicky names -- the VariEze, the Long-EZ -- that DIY-minded pilots could build from foam and fibreglass in their garages. But in 1986 he became better known as the designer of theRutan Model 76 Voyager, the first aircraft to fly non-stop around the world on a single tank of fuel. When Branson began building equipment for his series of trans-oceanic balloon flights, beginning with an Atlantic crossing by hot-air balloon in 1987, he came out to Mojave for advice. "Burt is a genius when it comes to things such as pressurised capsules," he says.
While his record-breaking balloon exploits continued, Branson's search for a viable vehicle to take the Virgin name into space grew more earnest, and he and Will Whitehorn began travelling the world to look at potential spacecraft. The launch of the X Prize in 1996 -- which offered ten million dollars (£6.2m) to the first team to put a reusable vehicle capable of carrying passengers, twice, over the threshold of space -- sparked an explosion in the number of private companies hawking technologies they claimed could be the future of space tourism.
Branson and Whitehorn would eventually look at 50 concepts. "Most of them were father-and-son businesses. So few were trying it in a serious way," Branson
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says. "But you never quite knew."
In 1999, he returned to the Mojave desert to see Rotary Rocket's Roton concept, the most promising scheme yet. Funded by investors including the novelist Tom Clancy, who had hoped that the project would "put Nasa out of business", the Roton was a reusable 18-metre rocket with helicopter blades, designed to fly vertically into space and back, using rotor-tip peroxide jets. Built under contract by Scaled Composites, the prototype Roton was exceptionally light, but almost impossible to control and, even at a maximum height of 20 metres, flew as if dangled from a thread by an impatient giant.
Branson thought about it, but not for very long: "It looked quite perilous," he says.
And in the meantime, Burt Rutan had secretly begun developing plans for his own spaceship.
Flying human beings safely into space is not easy, and getting them back is harder still. The goal of the X Prize was to reach suborbital space -- which begins at the Karman Line, around 100km above sea level. This is far less costly, in both energy and money, than reaching Earth orbit.
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Rutan's inspiration was more elegant, and reached back to technology born before Nasa existed, with the X series rocket planes in which US Air Force test pilots first broke the sound barrier, and later tested the boundaries of space. These reached their zenith with the X-15. Lifted to a height of 13.6 km, shackled beneath the belly of a B-52 bomber, the dart-shaped aircraft saved 50 per cent of the fuel it would otherwise have needed, before being released to begin a rocket-powered flight to the edge of space. It then glided back to Earth. But the X-15 also required a computer guidance system. Rutan wanted his rocket ship to be flown entirely by stick and rudder. His solution was the "feather" system, by which his vehicle's wings could fold up hydraulically in flight, so at re-entry it would fall -- slowly and with great stability -- like a giant and very expensive shuttlecock.
With more than $20m of funding from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, Rutan embarked on a programme to build and testSpaceShipOne, and the mothership designed to carry it to launch altitude, WhiteKnightOne. Rutan used a hybrid design, in which a tank of nitrous oxide was used to burn through a hollow cylinder of solid rubber, hurling SpaceShipOne into space in under two minutes.
'Look: we don't know how long this project's going to last, we don't know when the product's going to be delivered; we don't know what it's going to look like; we don't really know much about what it's going to be like for you on board; we don't whether you're going to be eligible to fly, because we don't understand too much about the fitness requirements... but if you want to join, we need $200,000 up front
In November 2003, Alex Tai, a Virgin Atlantic captain flying the London-Los Angeles route, was in Mojave. Tai had heard from adventurer Steve Fossett that Rutan had something exciting in Building 75 (at the time Fossett, Rutan and Branson were collaborating on the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, which Fossett would fly nonstop around the world in 2005). When Rutan revealed the nearly complete SpaceShipOne, Tai called Will Whitehorn, who reached Branson. "Fuck GlobalFlyer," Whitehorn told his boss, "they're building a spaceship."
A few months later, Branson flew in to have dinner with Paul Allen and Rutan, at the engineer's pyramidal house outside Mojave. "I was frothing with excitement," Branson says. "This was a dream come true -- and I knew that if anybody could pull it off, it would be Burt. I was determined that when it went into space it had the Virgin brand on it, and if it was successful, then we would take it on to the next stage."
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Rutan and Allen, who had no interest in running a passenger spaceline and planned simply to put the spacecraft in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum once it had achieved its objective, agreed to license the technology to Virgin. According to Branson, there was no competition: "Bizarrely," he says, "I think we were the only people who put our hands up."
Chris Crisman
[Quote##"There were things that you probably would've done differently if you're going to carry Angelina [Jolie\c"####KeepInline]
On June 21, 2004, 64-year-old test pilot Mike Melvill flew SpaceShipOne over the Karman Line for the first time. Seven months later, when Rutan's rocketplane made the two flights within a fortnight necessary to win the X Prize, the Virgin Galactic logo was on its twin tails.
Twodays before the first X Prize-qualifying flight, at a press conference, Branson announced his intention to launch a passenger service into space, just as soon as he had a vehicle in which to do it. Tickets would be going on sale shortly, with the full fare payable immediately as a deposit. Although fully refundable, this required each potential passenger to put down $200,000 in advance.
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Branson said flights could begin as soon as 2007.
The new company's first full-time employee was Stephen Attenborough, a former City investment manager who organised a team of five to put the foundations of the company in place. Working from spare desks they had found at the Virgin Group's corporate headquarters in Notting Hill, the team set up a rudimentary website -- a logo, some footage of the X Prize-winningSpaceShipOneflight, and an application form -- to take reservation enquiries. When it went live, Attenborough sat back to see what would happen. "Although we expected to get a lot of hits," he says, "we were far less sure about whether we would find people to do what we asked. We were saying, 'Look: we don't know how long this project's going to last, we don't know when the product's going to be delivered; we don't know what it's going to look like; we don't really know much about what it's going to be like for you on board; we don't whether you're going to be eligible to fly, because we don't understand too much about the fitness requirements... but if you want to join, we need $200,000 up front."
The site crashed under the weight of responses. "There was a deluge," says Attenborough. He began receiving cheques from all over the world, and people came to Notting Hill in person to deliver deposits.
Chris Crisman
Chris Crisman
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Early applicants were -- necessarily -- very wealthy, and most were keen to make sure they were at the head of the queue to go into space. Seats on the first Virgin Galactic trips were reserved for the earliest buyers, their number capped at 100, known as the Founders. This private club of high-rolling adventurers would have privileged access to the programme as it developed and, when the time came, their names would be entered
into a draw to decide who would fly first.
Back in Mojave, the Scaled Composites team began work on turning an experimental three-seat rocket ship, which had only ever carried a single experienced test pilot and 180kg of undemanding ballast, into a vehicle that could meet the requirements of the Virgin customer experience. No one had ever done anything remotely like this before, and Matt Stinemetze, the engineer who become the project manager overseeing the new programme, recalls that initial discussions were very general indeed. "Just a lot of rough order-of-magnitude guesswork," he says. Why not build a big rocket?
A small one? One that would carry 11 passengers? Fifteen? Twenty?
They also considered building several more SpaceShipOnes, to send passengers into space two at a time. But the prototype was a crude research aircraft, built to prove simply that it was possible to get into space cheaply, and it suffered from several potential "single point failures". "If one bolt falls off and you die,"
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Stinemetze explains, "that's a single point of failure. There were things that you probably would've done differently if you're going to carry Angelina [Jolie]."
Stinemetze -- who has a shaved head, and when we first meet is wearing a single earring and a "I went so fast my hair blew off"
T-shirt -- joined Scaled immediately after graduating in aeronautical engineering in 1998. A licensed pilot, whenever he refers to the needs of Virgin Galactic's paying passengers in describing the design process, he has a habit of using the names of the vehicle's most well-known celebrity ticket-holders as a sardonic shorthand: "You don't want to take Angelina and tumble her around leaving the atmosphere," he'll say. "Is Angelina really going to shimmy down a rope ladder when some emergency happens?"
The team soon realised that the commercial needs of Virgin Galactic and the expectations of its ticket holders necessitated the design of an entirely new vehicle. It would have to carry enough passengers to bring the individual seat price down relatively quickly, but not so many that they would be competing with one another for the best view. From London, Stephen Attenborough canvassed his early customers on what they would like. "They wanted to get out of their seats in zero gravity, and they put very high priority on seeing Earth from space," he says.
Neither of these things was easy in the cramped cabin of SpaceShipOne.
So the new vehicle would be designed |
it’s nice material.”
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“In the lining, it’s my handwriting which is not the best … it’s a little serial killerish, I wrote a bunch of phrases about what makes you a good friend,” she said.
The words inside the clutches, in Colonna’s handwriting, are ‘fearless,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘strong.’
“You open it up and be reminded that you are awesome,” she said.Emperor Reigen (霊元天皇, Reigen-tennō, 9 July 1654 – 24 September 1732) was the 112th emperor of Japan,[1] according to the traditional order of succession.[2] Reigen's reign spanned the years from 1663 through 1687.[3]
Genealogy [ edit ]
Before Reigen's ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne, his personal name (imina) was Satohito (識仁);[4] and his pre-accession title was Ate-no-miya (高貴宮).
Reigen was the 16th son of Emperor Go-Mizunoo. His mother was the daughter of Minister of the Center Sonomotooto (内大臣園基音), Lady-in-Waiting Kuniko (新広義門院国子).
Regien's Imperial family lived with him in the Dairi of the Heian Palace. This family included at least 13 sons and 14 daughters:[2]
Lady-in-waiting: Bōjō Fusako (1652–1676; 坊城房子), Bōjō Toshihiro’s daughter Second daughter: Imperial Princess Ken'shi (憲子内親王; 1669–1688) married Konoe Iehiro
Lady-in-waiting: Chunagon-Naishi (1653–1691; 中納言典侍) First son: Imperial Prince Priest Saishin (1671–1701; 済深法親王)
Lady-in-waiting: Matsuki Muneko (松木宗子) later Keihōmon’in (敬法門院), Mutsuki Muneatsu’s daughter Fourth son: Imperial Prince Asahito (朝仁親王), also known as Tomohito [5] Later Emperor Higashiyama Fifth daughter: Imperial Princess Tomiko (福子内親王; 1676–1707) married Imperial Prince Fushimi-no-miya Kuninaga Sixth daughter: Princess Eisyū (永秀女王; 1677–1725) Seventh son: Imperial Prince Kyōgoku-no-miya Ayahito (1680–1711; 京極宮文仁親王) – Sixth Kyōgoku-no-miya Seventh daughter: Princess Ume (1681–1683; 梅宮) Eighth daughter: Imperial Princess Katsuko (1686–1716; 勝子内親王) Eighth son: Prince Kiyo (1688–1693; 清宮)
Handmaid: Atago Fukuko (1656–1681; 愛宕福子), Atago Michitomi’s daughter Second son: Imperial Prince Priest Kanryū (1672–1707; 寛隆法親王) Fourth daughter: Princess Tsuna (1675–1677; 綱宮)
Handmaid: Gojyō Yōko (1660–1683; 五条庸子), Gojyō Tametsune’s daughter Third son: Prince San (1675–1677; 三宮) Fifth son: Imperial Prince Priest Gyōen (1676–1718; 尭延法親王) Sixth son: Prince Tairei'in (1679; 台嶺院宮)
Handmaid: Higashikuze Hiroko (1672–1752; 東久世博子), Higashikuze Michikado’s daughter Eleventh son: Prince Toku (1692–1693; 徳宮) Twelfth son: Prince Riki (1697; 力宮)
Court lady: Onaikouji-no-Tsubone (?–1674; 多奈井小路局), Nishinotōin Tokinaga‘s Daughter First daughter: Princess Chikōin (1669; 知光院宮)
Court lady: Gojyō Tsuneko (1673–?; 五条経子), Gojyō Tametsune’s daughter Ninth son: Prince Saku (1689–1692; 作宮) Tenth son: Imperial Prince Priest Syō'ou (1690–1712; 性応法親王) Ninth daughter: Princess Bunki (1693–1702; 文喜女王) Tenth daughter: Princess Gensyū (1696–1752; 元秀女王)
Court lady: Tōshikibu-no-Tsubone (d.1746; 藤式部局), Imaki Sadaatsu‘s Daughter Thirteenth son: Imperial Prince Priest Sonsyō (1699–1746; 尊賞法親王) Eleventh daughter: Princess Bun'ō (1702–1754; 文応女王)
Court lady: Irie Itsuko (?–1763; 入江伊津子), Irie Sukenao’s daughter Fourteenth son: Prince Kachi (1709–1713; 嘉智宮) Twelfth daughter: Princess Tome (1711–1712; 留宮)
Court lady: Chūjō-no-Tsubone (1691–1753; 中将局), Kurahashi Yasusada‘s Daughter Fifteenth son: Prince Mine (1710–1713; 峯宮)
Court lady: Matsumuro Atsuko (?–1746; 松室敦子), Matsumuro Shigeatsu’s daughter Sixteenth son: Imperial Prince Arisugawa-no-miya Yorihito (1713–1769; 有栖川宮職仁親王) – Fifth Arisugawa-no-miya Thirteenth daughter: Imperial Princess Yoshiko (吉子内親王, 1714–1758), betrothed to shōgun Tokugawa Ietsugu Eighteenth son: Imperial Prince Priest Gyōkyō (1717–1764; 尭恭法親王)
Court lady: Shōshō-no-Tsubone (1702–1728; 少将局), Minami Suketada’s daughter Fourteenth daughter: Princess Yae (1721–1723; 八重宮)
Court lady:Matsumuro Nakako (1707–1751; 松室仲子), Matsumuro Shigenaka’s daughter Seventeenth son: Imperial Prince Priest Son'in (1715–1740; 尊胤法親王)
His posthumous name was created during the Meiji Era by combining the kanji from the names of two previous Emperors, Emperor Kōrei (孝霊) and Emperor Kōgen (孝元).
Events of Reigen's life [ edit ]
9 July 1654 : The birth of an Imperial prince who will become known by the posthumous name of Reigen -tennō. [6]
: The birth of an Imperial prince who will become known by the posthumous name of Reigen. 1654 : Prince Satohito, who is also known as Ate-no-miya, is named as heir before the death of his eldest brother, Emperor Go-Kōmyō; however, the young prince is considered too young to become emperor. It is decided that until the young heir grows older, his elder brother will accede to the throne as Emperor Go-Sai.
: Prince Satohito, who is also known as, is named as heir before the death of his eldest brother, Emperor Go-Kōmyō; however, the young prince is considered too young to become emperor. It is decided that until the young heir grows older, his elder brother will accede to the throne as Emperor Go-Sai. 5 March 1663 ( Kanbun 3, 26th day of the 1st month ): Emperor Go-Sai abdicated; [7] and Prince Satohito received the succession ( senso ). Shortly thereafter, Emperor Reigen formally acceded ( sokui ) and his reign began. [6]
( ): Emperor Go-Sai abdicated; and Prince Satohito received the succession ( ). Shortly thereafter, Emperor Reigen formally acceded ( ) and his reign began. 1665 ( Kanbun 5, 6th month ): Courts of inquisition were established in all the villages of Japan. These courts were charged with discovering and eliminating any vestiges of Christianity in each community. [8]
( ): Courts of inquisition were established in all the villages of Japan. These courts were charged with discovering and eliminating any vestiges of Christianity in each community. 1666 (Kanbun 6, 4th month): Hokke shu Buddhist religious practices are preserved for those who believe that their spiritual and moral purity may be tainted by close association with others.[8]
View across the roof of Tōdai-ji becomes a panoramic vista as seen from the elevated walkway of Nigatsu-dō
1667 ( Kanbun 7 ): After fire destroyed the main temple structure, work on rebuilding Nigatsu-dō ( 二月堂 ) at Nara commenced. [8]
( ): After fire destroyed the main temple structure, work on rebuilding Nigatsu-dō at Nara commenced. 13 February 1668 ( Kanbun 8, 1st day of the 2nd month ): A great fire broke out in Edo—a conflagration lasting 45 days. The disastrous fire was attributed to arson. [8]
( ): A great fire broke out in Edo—a conflagration lasting 45 days. The disastrous fire was attributed to arson. 1669 ( Kanbun 9 ):There was a famine in this year; and a military expedition was sent to northern Honshū against Shakushain's Revolt. [8]
( ):There was a famine in this year; and a military expedition was sent to northern Honshū against Shakushain's Revolt. 1673 ( Enpō 1 ): There was a great fire in Kyoto. [8]
( ): There was a great fire in Kyoto. 21 May 1673 ( Enpō 1, 5th day of the 4th month ): The Chinese Buddhist teacher Ingen dies in the Ōbaku Zen temple, Manpuku-ji at Uji. [8]
( ): The Chinese Buddhist teacher Ingen dies in the Ōbaku Zen temple, Manpuku-ji at Uji. 1675 ( Enpō 3 ): There was a great fire in Kyoto. [8]
( ): There was a great fire in Kyoto. 4 June 1680 ( Enpō 8, 8th day of the 5th month ): Shōgun Ietsuna dies; and he is succeeded by Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. [8]
( ): Ietsuna dies; and he is succeeded by Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. 15 June 1680 ( Enpō 8, 19th day of the 5th month ): Former-Emperor Go-Mizunoo died. [8]
( ): Former-Emperor Go-Mizunoo died. 1680 ( Enpō 8, 8th month ): A great flood devastates Edo. [8]
( ): A great flood devastates Edo. 1680 ( Enpō 8 ): Gokoku-ji is founded in Edo. [8]
( ): Gokoku-ji is founded in Edo. 1681 ( Tenna 1 ): Tsunyoshi's investiture as shōgun. [8]
( ): Tsunyoshi's investiture as. 5 February 1682 ( Tenna 1, 28th day of the 12th month ): A great fire sweeps through Edo. [9]
( ): A great fire sweeps through Edo. 1681 ( Tenna 2 ): A great famine devastates Kyoto and the surrounding area. [9]
( ): A great famine devastates Kyoto and the surrounding area. 1682 ( Tenna 3 ): Tomohito-shinnō is proclaimed Crown Prince; and the ceremonial investiture is held (after being in abeyance for over 300 years). [2]
( ): Tomohito-shinnō is proclaimed Crown Prince; and the ceremonial investiture is held (after being in abeyance for over 300 years). 26 March 1685 ( Jōkyō 2, 22nd day of the 2nd month ): Former-Emperor Go-Sai died; and a great comet was observed crossing the night sky. [9]
( ): Former-Emperor Go-Sai died; and a great comet was observed crossing the night sky. 2 May 1687 ( Jōkyō 4, 21st day of the 3rd month ): Emperor Reigen abdicates in favor of his fifth son who will come to be known as Emperor Higashiyama. [9]
( ): Emperor Reigen abdicates in favor of his fifth son who will come to be known as Emperor Higashiyama. 1687 : Former-Emperor Reigen begins to rule as a cloistered emperor; and after abdication, Reigen's new home will be called the Sentō-gosho (the palace for an ex-Emperor). [10]
: Former-Emperor Reigen begins to rule as a cloistered emperor; and after abdication, Reigen's new home will be called the (the palace for an ex-Emperor). 4 December 1696 Former Empress Meishō died.
Former Empress Meishō died. 1713 : Former-Emperor Reigen enters a monastery under the name Sojō (素浄)
: Former-Emperor Reigen enters a monastery under the name Sojō (素浄) 1715 : Former-Emperor Reigen's 13th daughter, Princess Yoshiko (1714-1758) married seventh Tokugawa shōgun Ietsugu
: Former-Emperor Reigen's 13th daughter, Princess Yoshiko (1714-1758) married seventh Tokugawa Ietsugu 1716 : The seventh Tokugawa shōgun Ietsugu died, he was age 7
: The seventh Tokugawa Ietsugu died, he was age 7 24 September 1732 (Kyōhō 17, 24th day of the 9th month): Reigen died;[6] he was age 78.
Emperor Reigen's memory is honored and preserved at his designated Imperial mausoleum (misasagi), Tsuki no wa no misasagi at Sennyū-ji in Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto. His immediate Imperial predecessors since Emperor Go-Mizunoo – Meishō, Go-Kōmyō and Go-Sai are also enshrined along with his immediate Imperial successors, including Higashiyama, Nakamikado, Sakuramachi, Momozono, Go-Sakuramachi and Go-Momozono.[11]
Kugyō [ edit ]
Kugyō (公卿) is a collective term for the very few most powerful men attached to the court of the Emperor of Japan in pre-Meiji eras. Even during those years in which the court's actual influence outside the palace walls was minimal, the hierarchic organization persisted.
In general, this elite group included only three to four men at a time. These were hereditary courtiers whose experience and background would have brought them to the pinnacle of a life's career. During Reigen's reign, this apex of the Daijō-kan included:
Eras of Reigen's reign [ edit ]
The years of Reigen's reign are more specifically identified by more than one era name or nengō.[8]
Ancestry [ edit ]
[12]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]“This old girl’s going to stay in pieces in the garage for sure”, this self-doubt echoed in Dean’s melon after taking on his first custom bike build, but the long road to victory paid off with a final product that is an elegant take on the Bobber style.
Dean was on the hunt for a bike to start his first build, with the only condition that it had to be old. Sure enough, a 1984 Yamaha SR400 popped up for sale close to his home. The bike ended up being in immaculate condition, and was still stock to the bone. This would be Dean’s blank canvas, much to the hesitation of it’s previous owner. “The bloke I thought the bike off nearly didn’t want to sell it to me when I mentioned that I was going to be pulling the bike apart and breaking out the angle grinder!”
After paying close attention to the chopper and bobber builds coming out of the US, Dean had enough creative juices ready to fuel the direction for this SR400 build. “I’m a huge fan of Kim Boyle, the bikes he builds are so clean and tidy, this was the direction I wanted to go with the SR. I’ve been riding since I was around 6 or 7, but this would be my first build – though certainly not my last.”
Dean thought to himself countless times “This old girl’s going to stay in pieces in the garage for sure” during the elongated build process, but persevered and kept chipping away at it over the years. “My good mate Goaty welded everything on the bike, we spent a few late nights in his workshop bending up and welding. The build had taken me around 2 years in total to the day me and my mate kicked it over! Fuck I was so stoked to hear her roar to life, I was just as stoked to know I was soon to be riding this thing, especially after the wiring process which was prolonged for quite some time. The bike was finally ready to be out on the road!”
The final product is a stand out as far as SR400 builds go. It’s an elegant take on the Bobber feel, replacing aggression with style and finesse. “I think the main standout feature of the bike is the alloy tank that has been brushed vertically and horizontally to give it some depth. The old fella Chris from Two Wheel Custom Paint & Fairing in Russellvale nailed it!”
Dean’s SR400 is currently for sale – Click here to find out moreThe High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the European Commission today adopted a Joint Communication, entitled "Elements for a new EU strategy on China", which maps out the European Union's relationship with China for the next five years.
The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the European Commission today adopted a Joint Communication, entitled "Elements for a new EU strategy on China", which maps out the European Union's relationship with China for the next five years.
Federica Mogherini, the High Representative/Vice-President, said: "The European Union and China already cooperate on so much: we work together on the global and political issues of our times, such as Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, migration and climate change. But we can and must do more to connect the European Union and China. Our citizens, industries, and organisations can all benefit from a closer, improved, and better-defined EU-China relationship based on shared responsibility. The Joint Communication that we have adopted today will, I am sure, enable our relationship to fulfil its clear potential."
The Joint Communication identifies major opportunities for the EU's relationship with China, in particular with the aim of creating jobs and growth in Europe as well as vigorously promoting a greater opening up of the Chinese market to European business, thus contributing to the first priority of President Juncker's Commission.
Such opportunities include concluding an ambitious and comprehensive agreement on investment, a Chinese contribution to the Investment Plan for Europe (*), joint research and innovation activities, as well as connecting the Eurasian continent via a physical and digital network through which trade, investment and people-to-people contact can flow.
Looking further ahead, broader ambitions such as a deep and comprehensive Free Trade Agreement can be considered once an ambitious investment agreement between the two sides has been concluded and reforms that level the playing field for domestic and foreign companies have been implemented. In this regard, China must make significant, time-bound and verifiable cuts in industrial over-capacity, notably in the steel sector, to prevent negative consequences from unfair competition. Further strengthening the effectiveness of the EU's Trade Defence Instruments, notably through the swift adoption of the Commission's Trade Defence Instruments modernisation proposal of April 2013, is key. The EU will continue to support China's economic and social reform programme through its many dialogues with China so that the country can reap the full benefits of market-led reform, including by eliminating state-induced economic distortions and reforming state-owned enterprises.
The Joint Communication also highlights opportunities for closer cooperation and partnership between the EU and China in the fields of foreign and security policy. Building on the positive experience of the Iran nuclear talks, the European Union and China should work more closely together in order to resolve international conflicts and foreign policy priorities both bilaterally and in multilateral contexts such as the UN system and in the G20. Issues of a global nature like migration, international development assistance, the environment and fighting climate change can only be resolved through a global response, and for this reason a collaborative EU-China relationship is crucial.
The EU's engagement with China will be principled, practical and pragmatic, staying true to its interests and values, in particular adherence to international rules and norms, and respect for human rights. The EU should continue to work cohesively and effectively as a coherent block to achieve ambitious objectives on behalf of European citizens.
The Joint Communication will now be presented to the Council and to the European Parliament.
Background:
The European Commission's last Communication on China in 2006 was adopted a decade ago. The EU and China have both undergone considerable changes since then. China is becoming more present in all regions of the world, economically and politically. This new reality calls for a fresh EU narrative that recognises the need to deal with these new developments. The EU's new strategy therefore sets out to promote EU interests and underline EU values in its relationship with China for the next five years.
(*) Updated: 22/06/2016 at 14:24While some people have offered their support for LGBT+ rights in the Arab world, others have made it clear that they staunchly oppose it. (File photo)
The topic of LGBT+ rights is fortunately not confined just to the West, with movements gaining strength across the world, including in the Middle East. While there are protests and demonstrations in some Islamic countries, a large part of the LGBT+ rights movement takes place online—perhaps unsurprisingly.
With the entire issue remaining very controversial, it is not surprising that a hashtag which went viral this week was met with a varied response in the Arabic-speaking and Islamic world.
#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين, meaning “Respect Gay Rights” began trending on Twitter, with analysis suggesting that a huge portion of the Tweets came from Saudi Arabia.
While it appears that the hashtag was started in order to promote respect for LGBT+ rights in the Arabic speaking world, it was unfortunately hijacked by those who offered less-than-supportive opinions on the matter.
Take a look at the range of views on the matter, via Twitter.
Some people challenged anti-LGBT+ rhetoric by asking why people's private lives mattered to others.
Like seriously, why do y'all care about how gay ppl have sexHow does it even affect yo life!#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين pic.twitter.com/bLrIdCAGGr — MahraAlAhbabi* (@MahraAlAhbabi) February 6, 2016
Others were a little more blunt in their comments.
#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين
تحوير نظرتك كاملة عن الشخص حول ما يفعله في فراشه مع شخص اخر بالغ
توضح تفاهة و بدائية عقليتك. — العُزّى ما غيرها (@TheRubyy) February 6, 2016
Judging someone by their sexual orientation only means that you are sick and have a primitive mentality.
#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين
كل إنسان له حقوق.
لا يهم توافق أو لا توافق صحة اختياره في حياته، عقيدته، ميوله الجنسي.
له حقوق كما لك حقوق. — الربوبي الأخير (@Unknown3rd) February 6, 2016
Everyone has rights. It does not matter if you agree or disagree with their choice of life, faith or sexual orientation. They have rights just like you.
Some stressed the importance of freedom.
#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين أبسط حق للجميع أنك تحترم حريته February 5, 2016
Everyone's most basic right is that you respect their freedom.
Unfortunately, not everyone was tweeting the hashtag in support of LGBT+ rights in the Arabic-speaking world.
Content warning: Due to the threatening and extreme nature of some of the following tweets, reader discretion is strongly advised.
Some were tame in their opposition to the hashtag.
I am sure that gays will respect us more if we don't respect them at all and pushed them to give up this bad habit.
#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين — مجهول لدى الحفاظ (@Oanonymous19) February 6, 2016
Sounding like broken records, others decided to go for more cliche arguments.
God created Adam & Eve, Not Adam & Steve.
#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين — ༄ོ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ (@Jeriicho6) February 6, 2016
Unfortunately, a quick search through the hashtag on Twitter finds that a huge portion are extremely violent. #سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين
i would throw you in a pit and watch you burn thats one way to respect you
هذا الي ناقص هؤلاء يظهر لهم صوت — مواطن خليجي (@upnormalcitizen) February 7, 2016
#سنحترم_حقوق_المثليين الى جهنم وبئس المصير — Aysha (@AaeshaHM) February 7, 2016
To Hell and good riddance.
This is how we respect homosexuals in Saudi Arabia, and we are proud of it..Ok, here it is. Quentin Tarantino confirmed that his movies exist in two different universes: The Realer than Real World Universe and the Movie Universe (they're separated in the credits of the video ). Since they inhabit the same world, I tried to acquaint, or reacquaint them (see Vega Brothers) with each other.
To do that I made tons of different connections, with two biggest threads: phone calls and the radio. Between inter-universal references I had fun with the editing and tried to highlight Tarantino's style.
I was torn between using all the references and visually point them out or even narrate them, or making narrative and let you find the references within Tarantino's universes. They're almost all there but a few I just couldn't fit in.
If there's any interest I can edit a short clip with the ones that didn't make the cut. For now, here are the lesser obvious connections.
There you go. If you liked this, click the buttons and do the things. This is not what I'll make more frequently so don't support me on Patreon if you don't like videos like this.It only took eight months, a lot of misrepresentation, plenty of media slander, and perpetual reminders from thousands of gamers that #GamerGate is about ethics in games journalism for the editor-in-chief at Kotaku to acknowledge this very thing in a long and detailed post on Kotaku.
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Stephen Totilo, the editor-in-chief at Kotaku, made an article-length comment at the bottom of an article that dealt with an incident involving a group of people at the Calgary Expo being wrongly ejected for their association with #GamerGate. Totilo’s comment was in reply to a user who took Kotaku to task for their perceived lack of ethics and the pressure by the #GamerGate consumer revolt to get them to make any sort of change to elevate to the journalistic standards that gamers expect from them.
Majority of the comment from Totilo covers many of Kotaku’s major journalistic screw-ups, from Dragon’s Crown to the Max Temkin case, and a few things in between. I’m not going to quote the entire comment, because as I mentioned, it’s the length of an article. However, there are some choice bits in there that acknowledge what gamers, consumers and protestors against unethical journalism have been trying to point out all along: #GamerGate is about ethics in journalism. Totilo stated…
“I had long talks with my staff about disclosure back in August. And then I wrote this on the site, I said: “We’ve long been wary of the potential undue influence of corporate gaming on games reporting, and we’ve taken many actions to guard against it. The last week has been, if nothing else, a good warning to all of us about the pitfalls of cliquishness in the indie dev scene and among the reporters who cover it. We’ve absorbed those lessons and assure you that, moving ahead, we’ll err on the side of consistent transparency on that front, too.” From what I’ve seen, though, the Gamergate anti-Kotaku narrative is that we avoided talking about journalism ethics, that we didn’t acknowledge any mistakes. I hope you can see how that doesn’t square with me.”
If anyone from Gawker or Kotaku had bothered to interview someone like Sargon of Akkad, Christina Hoff Sommers, Mundane Matt, Ashton Liu, Adam Baldwin, LeoPirate, Allison Prime, Jennifer Medina, Daddy Warpig or any of the moderators from Kotaku in Action, it would have been made abundantly clear that it wasn’t that Kotaku avoided talking about journalism ethics, it’s that Kotaku avoided doing anything about their failure at upholding even the most basic of ethics principles in the world of video game journalism.
To this day, Nathan Grayson has not been publicly reprimanded for his blatant conflicts of interest with the developer for whom he had personal relations with while also paying money to this individual after their relationship ended, while infrequently covering the individual in articles. He covered the developer on multiple occasions and only added disclosure statements after #GamerGate made a stink about the issue. It is true that Totilo discussed ethics with TotalBiscuit and it’s true that Totilo did make a post about Grayson’s impropriety, but in the post from back on August 21st, 2014 Totilo writes…
“In recent days I’ve been asked several times about a possible breach of ethics involving one of our reporters. While I believe no such breach occurred, I feel it is important for Kotaku readers who have questions to get clear answers.”
If no breach occurred then why were disclosure statements retroactively added to Kotaku articles for Nathan Grayson and Patricia Hernandez?
The breach itself was the conflicts of interest that were not disclosed. And before #GamerGate, these conflicts of interest were not disclosed.
Totilo also further notes that #GamerGate’s obsession with ethics didn’t prompt Kotaku to address certain issues, but that some of the issues – such as affiliate link disclosures – was something Totilo was doing all by his lonesome outside of any pressure from #GamerGate, Gawker or the FTC, writing…
“Finally, no, it didn’t take “#gamergate to even make you guys disclose about making profit from sales referrals.” I know some people in Gamergate think that, but they also think that we didn’t care about ethics until they started talking about ethics.”
Well at least Totilo acknowledges #GamerGate is talking about ethics.
Nevertheless, Totilo steps up to take credit for disclosures of affiliate links on Kotaku, stating…
“[…] about the affiliate link disclosures. No one asked me to add them to our recurring lists of the Best games on each platform. No one in our company mentioned in. That was my decision, made on my own, without consulting anyone outside of my staff.” “In November, I decided we’d refresh our Bests posts to reflect our tastes through the holiday releases. Around the same time, our Commerce team asked if I’d mind if all the links in the Bests were changed to affiliate links. I guess some had been affiliate links already, without me realizing it. I decided I’d be okay with that—we were giving readers multiple retail links for each game anyway and were recommending these games—but I knew that I’d be way more comfortable if we then also added a disclosure about the links. So we added it once all the links were changed. I know Gamergate was trying to make a thing about this around the same time, but as far as I know there’s no connection.”
For as far as Totilo is concerned, there may not be a connection, but during this time – following an e-mail campaign to the FTC – Vox Media decided to overhaul their disclosure policies as well.
Totilo is also mistaken about the affiliate disclosures: it was for all of Gawker, not just Kotaku.
#GamerGate ran a consumer campaign operation to e-mail the FTC specifically about Gawker’s lack of disclosures regarding native advertising and affiliate link disclosures. This took place in late 2014, around November 1st, 2014. The FTC directly addressed the consumer complaints on November 27th, 2014.
On December 1st, 2014 one of the FTC officials who requested not to be named, stated…
“Although we were already planning on updating our Endorsement Guide FAQs to address various issues that have arisen with respect to endorsement-related practices, the fact that we recently received many complaints about undisclosed affiliate links has made it clear that the FAQs need to address that specific practice.” […] Although the pure number of complaints won’t necessarily affect our analysis of whether the FTC Act has been violated, we do strive to be responsive when we see a pattern of complaints in our database, and certainly we saw a pattern here.”
Shortly thereafter, it was reported on December 18th, 2014 that Gawker had a site-wide notice about their policies regarding affiliate disclosures being overhauled for a January 19th, 2015 issuance.
While the media has been silent on what’s been deemed “#GamerGate victories”, spinning stories to suit their own concocted narratives, consumers have been doing the legwork to get things changed in the media arena, regardless.
Totilo closed out his comment, stating…
“I’ve talked about most of this stuff many times before, and here and there I’m sure I’ll wind up talking about it again. Does this make us a bastion ethics? I have no idea. But I’d like to think that what we actually do—that the kind of approach we’ve taken even at our worst moments—reflects an outlet that is always trying to do its best.”
At this point, it appears many gamers see a bridge that’s been burned too badly to even consider crossing. After eight months of media slander and an entire Wikipedia page full of defamation and many blatant lies, it’s not surprising that one of the sites responsible for the entire #GamerGate consumer revolt blowing up has been hit the hardest when it comes to criticisms from the core gaming community.The level crossing removals at Ginifer (Furlong Road) and St Albans (Main Road) are nearing completion, and yesterday the new stations opened.
Originally the plan had been to remove the St Albans (Main Road) crossing — this was funded by the Coalition government in 2014, for a massive $200 million, recouped from savings during the Regional Rail Project. When Labor came to power in November 2014, they added the nearby Furlong Road crossing to the list, making it part of a $481.2 million package that also includes crossings at Blackburn and Heatherdale — packaging the four together appears to have brought the cost down.
(Labor claims in their press release of 8/9/2015 that they funded the Blackburn Road crossing. But a Coalition press release of 27/8/2014 said they funded it, and this appears to be backed-up by the 2014 State Budget. There was a bunch of chopping and changing when Labor added extra crossings, but I’m not sure quite what’s happened here.)
Importantly, the Main Road and Furlong Road level crossings were the ranked most dangerous in the 2008 ALCAM list, after those at Nunawading, Springvale and Mitcham (all since removed), so these grade separations are very welcome.
The re-opening of the stations was not without some confusion.
Originally the line and stations were to open first thing Monday, but there were (understandable) delays with the work due to bad weather last week.
Then they said everything would open first thing Tuesday. But there were more delays.
By Tuesday morning, they were saying that Metro services would resume at 2pm. V/Line were saying their trains would resume at 10am, and PTV were saying that V/Line’s trains would resume on Wednesday morning.
What actually happened was that trains resumed at about 9am.
Sunbury line: Train services have now resumed between Sunbury and Sunshine after the completion of @levelcrossings project works. — Metro Trains (@metrotrains) October 31, 2016
I took a look on Tuesday afternoon.
Ginifer
Not being a local, I’d wondered for ages if Ginifer is pronounced with a soft or a hard “G” — according to the automated lady on the Siemens train I caught, it’s a hard G.
Being Cup Day, there weren’t a huge number of people around. The confusion over the opening time may have prevented any fanfare as occurred at Mckinnon, Ormond and Bentleigh when they opened.
There are currently stairs from the concourse, which is at the southern end of the station. Lifts are there as well, and I think they were working, but didn’t see anybody using them.
The concourse and platform screens weren’t quite working, but will be handy once operational. It’s an unstaffed station, so there are standalone (old, slow) Myki readers on poles.
Some areas are fenced off. Behind one fence on the concourse I found an old boom gate. Waiting for an official ceremony/opening?
Edit: Yep, there it is:
2 boom gates gone + |
for the Western music market. And she's not playing around, having enlisted mega-manager Scooter Braun to help launch her solo debut. “I want to have something personal for me,' she told Billboard. "With 2NE1... it's about all the members. But I have so many things I want to say. I have this other side of me.” With her fierce stage presence and eye-popping visuals, expect an electrifying debut.A new Thai airline is hiring transsexual ladyboys as flight attendants, aiming at a unique identity to set itself apart from competitors as it sets out for the skies.
Known as katoeys or ladyboys, transgenders and transsexuals have greater visibility in Thailand than in many other nations, holding mainstream jobs in a variety of fields. They are especially common in cosmetics shops or health stores, which almost always have a ladyboy shop assistant.
PC Air, a charter airline set to start operations on Asian routes in April, originally planned only to hire male and female flight attendants. But it changed its mind after receiving more than 100 job applications from transvestites and transsexuals.
Four were chosen, along with 19 female and 7 male flight attendants.
When I knew that I got this job, I burst into tears because I'm very happy, said 24-year-old Chayathisa Nakmai.
I had sent many applications to different airlines.
The airline said that the qualifications for the ladyboy flight attendants were the same as for female flight attendants, with the additional provisos that they be like women in how they walk and talk, and have a feminine voice and the right attitude.
Though there is very little discrimination against ladyboys in Thailand, they are not officially recognized as women and their identification cards will always say male.
While the airline strives for equality, PC Air president Peter Chan, who chooses the transsexual cabin crew himself, said he needed to spend longer with interviews for such applicants.
For male flight attendants, if I don't want to hire them, it's because of their attitude or their characters, like the way they walk and smile. For female flight attendants, if they have no patience and their character does not qualify, we won't hire them, he added.
For transsexuals, we can't just spend 5 or 10 minutes with them, we have to spend the whole day with them to make sure they have feminine characters.
The airline says it may hire more flight attendants from the third gender in the future since the Department of Civil Aviation has no objections.
Though excited by the opportunity, the transsexual flight attendants said they were aware they needed to prove themselves.
People will keep their eyes on us... There will be more pressure, said Dissanai Chitpraphachin, 23, who was crowned as Thailand's most beautiful transvestite in 2007.
We have to prepare ourselves more than the women.
The airline is initially set to fly to South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and China.
(Editing by Elaine Lies)Yeovil Town 0-1 Bristol Rovers
Attendance: 5,895 (2,038)Ellis Harrison's late thunderbolt secured all three points in a very dominant performance by Darrell Clarke's side.Darrell Clarke made three changes to his side that exited the Capital One Cup on Tuesday night. New goalkeeper Aaron Chapman comes straight into the starting 11 and Chris Lines and Matty Taylor were recalled to the starting line-up.Rovers started the game like a house on fire and Daniel Leadbitter found himself in acres of space and was able to pick out Lee Brown in the Glovers area. Brown took the ball down and played it into the path of Chris Lines who scuffed his shot which allowed Artur Krysiak to catch easily.Ellis Harrison was causing lots of problems for Yeovil's back line and with 17 minutes on the clock tried his luck from the edge of the area with his left foot which forced a great save from Krysiak.The home side rarely threatened in the first half and Rovers seemingly did everything except hit the back of the net.Tom Parkes started a Rovers counter attack with just over 20 minutes gone as his last ditch tackle on Mark Beck won the ball back allowing Rovers to break with pace. Darrell Clarke's men worked the ball around well before laying it off to Ellis Harrison who fired another thunderbolt towards Krysiak's goal but again the keeper was equal to it.Town's only real effort of the game came on the half hour mark as Matthew Dolan's 35-yard free kick went straight into the Rovers wall, the Glovers recovered the ball to cross but Alex Lacey couldn't direct his header goalward.Rovers continued to press for the opening goal and a powerful run through the middle of the pitch from James Clarke created space for the defender to take a shot. He struck the ball powerfully towards the goal but it was Krysiak again who denied him.Moments later Rovers had a free kick following a foul on Ollie Clarke. Chris Lines passed the ball to the edge of the area to Ellis Harrison but the young Welshman couldn't get his shot on target under heavy pressure.Chris Lines thought he had put his side in front on the stroke of half time as his corner appeared to curl all the way inside the far post but referee Brendan Malone said the ball hadn't crossed the line.Yeovil came out in the second half looking a bit more positive as Matthew Dolan struck the ball on the volley which forced a good save from Rovers new keeper Aaron Chapman.Just after the hour mark Yeovil were reduced to ten men as Matthew Dolan was given a red card following a second bookable offence. Daniel Leadbitter pulled away from Dolan down the Rovers right and Dolan left his leg in earning his second yellow of the game.Darrell Clarke tried to freshen things up in attack with 20 minutes remaining as Jermaine Easter came on for Matty Taylor.Moments later Rovers had a flurry of chances as James Clarke and Tom Parkes came close with efforts before Ellis Harrison tried an audacious bicycle kick which went narrowly wide.With just over 15 minutes left on the clock a change in shape for Rovers saw both Jeffrey Monakana and Cristian Montano come into the game at the expense of Tom Lockyer and Ollie Clarke as Darrell Clarke's moved into a 4-4-2.Seconds after the change Harrison stung the palms of Krysiak again as Jermaine Easter's cross was hit up into the air before the young Welshman let fly with his right foot but again the Glovers keeper was there to deny him yet again.Rovers finally took the lead with just a few minutes remaining as substitute Monakana's cross was headed into the path of Ellis Harrison who thundered a left footed strike past Artur Krysiak to secure Rovers a vital first three points of the 2015/16 season.Up next for Rovers is the trip to Luton Town on Tuesday night before entertaining fellow Conference promotion side Barnet at the Memorial Stadium on Saturday.Krysiak, Smith (C), Dolan, Arthurworrey, Sokolik, Bird, Fogden, Lacey, Beck (Burrows - 78), Cornick (Jeffers - 64), RobertsWeale (GK), Compton, Allen.Chapman; Leadbitter, J. Clarke, Lockyer (Monakana - 75), Parkes, Brown; O. Clarke (Montano - 75), Sinclair, Lines (C); Harrison, Taylor (Easter - 67).Preston (GK), Malpas, Gosling, Bodin.A still from the video produced by al-Kataib Media.
The slickly-produced video promises the vacation of a lifetime — going up an equatorial river in a rowboat, camping by a jungle lake, and a chance to shoot giraffes and Cape buffaloes. It’s the kind of big-game holiday that has long outraged environmentalists, and for which bored oil millionaires are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars.
Except, this trip costs nothing.
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“You eat, drink and hunt for free,” the video quotes jihadist patriarch Abdullah Azzam, Osama Bin Laden’s mentor, as saying. “Not in Bangkok or Los Angeles, or paying $500 a night at a London hotel. It is an entertaining journey of tourism and hunting. Indeed, the tourism of my nation is jihad.”
[related-post]
Produced by al-Kataib Media, the propaganda wing of Somalia’s al-Qaeda wing, Harakat al-Shabab al-Mujahideen, the video seems intended to draw the kind of adventure-seeking youth who have swelled the Islamic State’s ranks in recent years.
“Here you do not need a permit to hunt these animals,” an al-Shabab insurgent says in the video. “In the land of Islam, these animals are free. Praise be to God, there is no shortage of meat here.” Another adds, “Today, we will feast on delicious meat.”
“The mujahideen is close to nature,” the video quotes slain United States-origin jihadist ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki as saying. “He eats different food from around the world.”
In the video, recruits — at least one of them appears to be of Western origin — swim in a jungle lake, row through tropical rivers, and train on Indian Ocean beaches.
“My dear brothers, do not be deceived into believing that when people fight jihad, they are accompanied by hunger. Just look at this meat here! So what are you waiting for?” says a masked insurgent in the video.
In passing, he adds: “We send our condolences to the widows of our martyred Sheikhs, and other Muslim brothers, who were killed by the Kenyan government” — a reference to the military campaign against Somalian jihadists that has pushed them out of their stronghold in Mogadishu. “Let them know that we are now in Kenya, and that we will take revenge on their behalf.”
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Evicted from Mogadishu by African Union troops in a campaign spearheaded by Kenya, al-Shabaab has staged a series of attacks. The latest was a strike on the al-Sahafi hotel in Mogadishu on Sunday, which claimed at least 15 lives, including that of a Somali General and a Member of Parliament.About two months ago (April 15th 2015) I visited Miami and presented at the INFILTRATE Security Conference a talk on Firefox heap exploitation, titled “OR’LYEH? The Shadow over Firefox”. The organization of the conference was flawless and the people I met there were amazing. A special thank you to the Immunity team for being great hosts and for their helpful feedback.
In the talk I expanded upon and updated previous work I have done on Firefox/jemalloc heap exploitation, taking into account Firefox’s new GC implementation. Also, I introduced a major upgrade of the “unmask_jemalloc” Firefox heap exploration utility with new features, and support for Windows (and the WinDbg debugger). The new version of unmask_jemalloc, named “shadow”, is available on GitHub.
You can find the public version of my slide deck here. If you have attended INFILTRATE 2015, mail me to request the full version of the slides and the version of the shadow utility I demonstrated at the conference.
In case you missed my talk at INFILTRATE you have another chance to catch it at Summercon on July 18th at NYC. I hope to see you there.FRUITA, Colo. (KKCO) -- After spending nearly 150 million year buried in the ground, a 700 pound dinosaur bone has been unearthed by a group of researchers from the Dinosaur Journey Museum.
Experts say the bone, which came from the animal's back, belonged to a long-necked dinosaur called Apatosaurus.
Because it was so large, the team spent two years digging it out from the Mygatt-Moore quarry near the Rabbit Valley / state line area. Now they must carefully chip away the rock that's still around it before it can be added to their collection.
"It's very exciting and just rewarding when we finally get the bone in here and know that it's safe," said Krista Brundridge, a Field Coordinator for the Dinosaur Journey Museum.
The team says Apatosaurus was approximately 60 feet long and weighed up to 76 tons.Our friendly team is here to help Monday - Friday from 10a-5p PST.
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*NOTE: No returns on Electrical ItemsSome Battlestar Galactica fans love the show so much they want to visit the "real" Caprica, the cylon-occupied planet portrayed in Sci Fi Channel's hit show.
Valorie Hoye, a resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, where the series is shot, makes the perfect tour guide.
Hoye founded the Meetup.com group The 13th Colony in January. Since then, she's led Battlestar fans on three "Caprica scouting missions" to sites around Vancouver that serve as the show's outdoor backdrops. The group's members have also served as informal tour guides to visitors from as far away as Massachusetts – helping facilitate trips that, to true Galactica geeks, are tantamount to an Elvis fan's pilgrimage to Graceland.
"You're standing there where Helo was standing," Hoye said of visiting a spot where a Battlestar scene was shot. "It's a way to let your imagination take flight. Most of the reaction seems to be finding it and going, 'Wow, that's really cool.' Then we haul out our cameras and take photos."
Fans of quirky TV shows seem especially susceptible to this type of feverish dedication. Mystery lovers followed Twin Peaks' siren call to the Pacific Northwest locations where David Lynch shot the show. Cosplayers dress as their favorite geek characters and Trekkies are famous for their Star Trek conventions.
It's only natural that Battlestar would be next. While most of the show's scenes are shot on one of 13 sound stages in the off-limits Vancouver Film Studios, a crucial minority immortalize locations around the city that Canadians call "Hollywood North." At least two Google Earth mini-atlases of the top Battlestar locations have also been compiled.
The best place to start, Hoye said, is downtown at the distinctive Vancouver Public Library.
"As a feature in the city, it actually dominates the skyline around it and is built kind of like the Roman Colosseum," she said.
In June, Hoye and her group set off on a scouting mission that turned up some of downtown Vancouver's more obscure locations that frame tense chase scenes and shootouts with the Cylon overlords of Battlestar's colonial base planet, Caprica.
Two months later, a couple from Easthampton, Massachusetts, contacted Hoye outlining their plans to visit the real-life setting for Caprica in October.
Battlestar fan Michael Dow said that when filming starts again on the final season, which is slated for broadcast in April if the Hollywood writer's strike doesn't interfere, the time will be right for a geek pilgrimage.
"Since (Battlestar) Season 4 is going to be the end of it, this will be our last chance to go where they make it, while they're making it," he said.
Dow's wife, Michelle Aguilar, an equally avid fan of the series, planned the itinerary for their trip to Vancouver and arranged to meet up with The 13th Colony during the jaunt.
Guided by Hoye and her 73-member group's experience, Aguilar and Dow spent five days as Battlestar tourists tracing through the series' downtown locations. They also hit Vancouver's two major universities, the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University, which together provide most of the show's outdoor shots.
"If you're a big enough fan, and these places have become imprinted in your brain, it's really neat to see them right in front of you," Aguilar said.
As the Pacific Northwest enters its rainy season, even 13th Colony locals will be putting off scouting missions till at least spring, Hoye said.
"We'll probably be doing more episode-viewing parties over the winter," she said.
(The two-hour extended episode of Battlestar Galactica: Razor airs Saturday, Nov. 24, on the Sci Fi Channel.)BJP leader Subramanian Swamy accused Raghuram Rajan of 'harming the nation's economy' (File Photo)
Highlights In letter to PM, Swamy accuses Dr Rajan of trying to 'wreck' economy He suggests sacking Mr Rajan immediately, or when his term ends Mr Swamy has made multiple attacks on Dr Rajan, who has not responded
BJP lawmaker Subramanian Swamy has written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommending that he "consider terminating the appointment" of Reserve Bank Governor Raghuram Rajan "effective immediately or when his term ends" in September.In his letter to the PM, dated yesterday, Mr Swamy has accused Dr Rajan of an "apparently deliberate attempt to wreck the Indian economy," and contends that the RBI governor is "mentally not fully Indian." since he continues to renew the Green Card issued to him by the US government.As an example of Dr Rajan's actions that he alleges have hurt the economy, Mr Swamy cites what he calls the "disatrous" concept of containing inflation by raising interest rates. He has alleged that Dr Rajan's decisions have squeezed small and medium business and increased unemployment in the country.The letter follows Mr Swamy's suggestion last week that Raghuram Rajan - who teaches at the Booth School of Business at Chicago University and is on leave to serve as the central bank's governor - be "sent back to Chicago". In his letter to the PM, Mr Swamy points out that it was the previous Congress led UPA government that appointed Dr Rajan."Don't politicise the RBI governor's post, these are hallowed institutions and respected. Manmohan Singh appointed him with due consideration," said senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh, reacting to Mr Swamy's comment."This is Subramanian Swamy's opinion. Final call will be taken by the government when this comes up for discussion when his (Raghuram Rajan's) term expires in September," BJP Spokesperson on Economic Affairs Gopal Krishna Aggarwal said.Dr Rajan has not responded to the multiple attacks by Mr Swamy, who had hit out at Dr Rajan last year too.Appointed by the previous regime, Dr Rajan's position was seen as precarious when the BJP came to power in 2014. But the governor has emphasized that there is a "respectful relationship" between the central bank and the government. Last year, PM Modi had publicly praised the RBI Governor for "perfectly" explaining complex economic issues to him in regular one-on-one meetings.In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted.
In closed door testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, the unidentified IRS agent said requests for special tax status from Tea Party groups is being forced into a special "secondary screening" because the agency has yet to come up with new guidance on how to judge the tax status of the groups.
In a redacted transcript from the committee provided to Secrets, a Ways & Means investigator asked: "If you saw -- I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group -- a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case? Is that something you would do?"
The agent said, "At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy."
The committee staffer then said, "So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?" The agent admitted, "Based on my current manager's direction, uh-huh."
Camp called the renewed targeting of Tea Party groups "outrageous."
Added a committee aide, "In plain English, the IRS is still targeting Tea Party cases."
During 2010-2012 period when the anti-Obama Tea Party groups faced special scrutiny from the president's IRS, agents used a "be on the lookout," or BOLO, list which said groups with words like "Tea Party" in their title should face special, secondary screening for political activities that might hamper their special tax status.
When the scandal erupted after a Treasury Department inspector general revealed the improper political scrutiny, the acting head of the IRS, Danny Werfel, said the BOLO list had been suspended. That was six weeks ago.
But because there is nothing in its place, agents apparently either don't know how to handle Tea Party tax exempt applications, or are too scared to make a decision.
Asked by the committee how it handles Tea Party applications, the agent said, "If a political advocacy case came in today, I would give it -- or talk about it to my manager because right now we really don't have any direction or we haven't had any for the last month and a half."
Camp, the Michigan Republican, told Secrets, "It is outrageous that IRS management continues to target Tea Party cases without any justification. The harassment, abuse and delays these Americans have faced over the last few years has been unwarranted, unprovoked and, at times, possibly illegal. The fact that the IRS still continues to treat the Tea Party differently and subject them to additional targeting is outrageous and it must stop immediately."
In response, the IRS reiterated Werfel's pledge to not target groups because of political labels. "The IRS has taken decisive action to eliminate the use of inappropriate political labels in the screening of 501(c)(4) applications. We look forward to seeing the full transcript to gain a fuller understanding of the context of the interview," they said early Friday.
Werfel, called in to fix the scandal, directed the IRS to eliminate the use of BOLO lists. The statement said that "IRS policy is now clear that screening is based on activity, not words in a name. The new steps and current policies...specifically spells out that political campaign intervention will be reviewed without regard to specific labels. The IRS will not tolerate any deviation from this."
In an IRS review, the plan was that after the BOLO lists were removed, political labels would be ignored by the "Determinations Unit" as they screened for information for those seeking tax exempt status.
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Below is the Ways & Means Committee transcript of the IRS official.
Wednesday, August 1, 2013
Committee: Today, currently, how do you analyze advocacy cases. If, for example, Tea Party of Arkansas came in today, how would you handle it?
IRS agent: Well, the BOLO list doesn't exist anymore.
Committee: Sure.
IRS: If a political advocacy case came in today, I would give it -- or talk about it to my manager because right now we really don't have any direction or we haven't had any for the last month and a half.
------
Committee: If you saw -- I am asking this currently, if today if a Tea Party case, a group -- a case from a Tea Party group came in to your desk, you reviewed the file and there was no evidence of political activity, would you potentially approve that case? Is that something you would do?
IRS agent: At this point I would send it to secondary screening, political advocacy.
Committee: So you would treat a Tea Party group as a political advocacy case even if there was no evidence of political activity on the application. Is that right?
IRS agent: Based on my current manager's direction, uh-huh.
Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.I’ve been putting a considerable amount of time over the last few months into raising public awareness of the current state of cyber crime. Large scale breaches such as Home Depot’s are helping to raise awareness – but we can agree that this isn’t a method we’d like to use.
Who’s it costing?
In short, you.
The infographic below, recently released by Authentify, has shed light on the costs of data breaches. The major talking points of this infographic are half way down: So how do I end up with the bill?
When a retailer suffers a large scale data breach (Target, Home Depot) they incur major costs that affect you. It’s common practice for organizations to raise prices on products in an effort to help cover the cost of data breaches such as fines and insurance premiums.
While retailers are secretly dropping their costs on you, credit card providers are doing the same. When a data breach occurs involving payment information, credit card providers are required to issue new cards. You won’t be asked to pay directly, but don’t be surprised when interest rates creep up.
For me, the worst of the points made in this infographic is about the loss of jobs. 500,000 people have lost their job due to organizations not taking care of customer data – seem fair?
I’m hoping that these statistics have shocked you, meaning one more person is aware of the current state of cyber crime. While the number of organizations who are doing information security correctly is going up, it’s not going up fast enough.
Next steps…
The most effective method of getting organizations to improve their security is if their customers demand it. Share this page on twitter using the hashtag #wewantsecurity and let’s see if we can make a difference.Before the academic year gets into full swing and I am swallowed up by the maelstrom of daily chores, I wanted to send off this four-part post with my impressions of the second Southwest USA trip that my partner Agnieszka and I took this past summer. It isn’t meant to be a tedious travelogue – nor is it, I hope, the equivalent of the proverbial slide show a distant relative puts you through during a weekend family brunch. Rather, I’d like to record and reflect on certain things about the United States’ past or present that I think might be relevant for all those of us who care about perma-circularity (by that name or any other) and about a lastingly maintained one-planet footprint.
In the “age of Trump,” as these troubled times are more and more often coming to be known, straining to see the forest for the trees is pretty hopeless. The general shape of American policies and ideologies is baffling, to say the least – among others, in the area of environmental issues. The outwardly visible contours of the “forest” that is America are looking increasingly unattractive and worrisome. The reverse strategy of seeing the trees for the forest seems more promising: not looking just at the overall ugliness of US politics, media and ideology, but focusing instead on grassroots, ground-level, piecemeal initiatives, of which there are a lot. One the enduring paradoxes of the United States throughout the ups and downs of its reactionary temptations (whether they be Republican or Democrat) is how many truly progressive, daringly visionary minds and communities it keeps producing. The reactionary “forest” keeps giving life and energy to progressive “trees.” If ever there were a tangible illustration of what “dialectic” means, this would be it.
After a few days of getting over our jet lag in Los Angeles (where Agnieszka grew up and where her father still lives), our trip took us up to Berkeley and Bodega Bay, then back through the Central Valley down to L.A. From there, we embarked on a long drive through and into the gorgeous Southwest: first to Arizona where we stopped in Phoenix, Arcosanti and Sedona, then on to New Mexico where we visited Àcoma Pueblo, Truth or Consequences (yes, there’s a town called that…), Santa Fe, Taos, and Taos Pueblo. An excursion took us to the fabled ruins of Chaco Canyon and then back to Arizona – through Navajo and Hopi territory, on to Winslow and then back up to the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Driving south once more, we relaxed a second time in Sedona and then finally headed back to southern California through the sweltering Sonoran Desert near Yuma, ending up in San Diego – our last leg before the final return to L.A. for a precious few remaining days before the return flight to Switzerland.
All along the way, we witnessed mostly the proverbial gigantism and unsustainability of Southwestern American life – the oases in the desert, the pharaonic water diversion works, the massive highways, the air-conditioned strip malls. It’s all true, blatantly so. The United States’ still dominant Euro-American colonial import culture is deeply fragile and has the lack of resilience of a hippo that strayed out into the Sahara. And yet – in the midst of the reminders of past failures and the signs of present ones, there are islands of hope, initiative and potential. Those of you who are interested in the broader issues of America’s culturally ingrained lack of self-restraint can periodically consult my other blog, which I entitled “U.S.A.: The Unsustainable State of America.” But for now, let’s head out to northern California and then to the Southwest, shall we?
1. The perpetually postponed ecocity: Berkeley
The previous summer, Agnieszka and I had only been able to spend a few hours in Berkeley, quickly downing a latte in the legendary (and since then shut-down) Med Café, wanting to hastily browse through a bookshop but finding out it was still closed, and walking along Telegraph Avenue for a swift selfie in front of Sproul Hall, the epicenter of the 1964 student protests. This time, we had the good fortune of kindly being hosted by Linda Williams, one of Agnieszka’s former mentors who is now a retired professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She and her husband Paul showed us around the city, and I understood why ever since last year I had wanted to come back. Bookshops galore, of course – my personal soft spot (or is that vice?) – but overall a wonderfully relaxed, small-town feel that, I’m sure, persists even during the hustle and bustle of the academic year. Berkeley is one of the hot spots of California’s progressive population, and is pretty much despised (and notoriously sought out as an emblematic speaking venue) by the conservative right as a hotbed of liberal adversaries. Pretty much everything I saw convinced me that this is indeed the case.
Talking with Linda and Paul, who had lived through and been active in the 60s protests here, we found out that Ernest Callenbach, the author of the famous ecological utopia entitled Ecotopia (as well as its prequel, Ecotopia Emerging), had lived and worked here – and had even been Linda’s mentor. Callenbach’s books are part of the long line of utopias inaugurated by Thomas Moore in the 16th century, but it specifically deals with the construction of a perma-circular society and economy (although of course he didn’t use the term). Its context is the hypothetical secession of northern California from the rest of the United States in the 1970s, to form a new country called Ecotopia. A fictional newspaper reporter from the USA sends vignettes home to describe the Ecotopian mores, and at the same time records his own gradual realization of the benefits that come with breaking away from the unsustainable model of US culture. A timely and engaging read, Callenbach’s books encourage us to take an unflinching look at how an “ecotechnic” culture using simpler (though not necessarily rudimentary) tools and technologies, and consuming far less could durably fit into our one and only available planet. As such, it provides the exact reverse utopia to what the “spaced-out” promoters of the high-tech experiment of Biosphere-2, which we visited last year and which I chronicled in a previous post, attempted and failed to construct in the desert near Tucson, AZ.
While Callenbach doesn’t explicitly say so, Berkeley must have been a backdrop for his reflections on how to scale down and “ecologize” California’s urban landscape. The whole Bay Area (on clear days you can glimpse San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge from the hills above the Berkeley campus) has long been, and remains, a teeming hotbed for radical ecological re-thinking. I have no aversion to hippie-ism – quite to the contrary, I believe that some strands of the hippie constellation understood the world a lot better than what Reaganite critics (including the University of California’s own directors in the mid-1960s) claimed. They fully realized that what I’ve called the “5 Rs” of perma-circularity demand radical social and cultural change – that would be a sixth “R” for “radical mutation.”
I felt inspired during our Berkeley stay to have a deeper look at Richard Register’s book from the mid-1990s, entitled Ecocity Berkeley. Based in Oakland – right next to Berkeley – Register has been one of the most visionary proponents of radically re-thought models of urban life, as I documented in this blog in an earlier post on isotropy and fractality. In this book, he delineates the key elements of a transformation of Berkeley into a perma-circular eco-settlement. A significant amount of this process rests around what Register calls “creek restoration” – the act of re-opening creeks (most notably Strawberry Creek) that were built and paved over so that Berkeleyians can enjoy the sight and sound of running water again, and so that wetlands at the seafront can be revitalized. Less car traffic and better public transport, as well as a degree of densification, would transform Berkeley into an ecocity.
This has never actually happened – at least not yet. Berkeley is charming and tightly knit but, both on the outskirts and right in the center, it nevertheless bears many of the hallmarks of what makes US culture fundamentally unsustainable. Even entrenched remnants of hippie-ism and staunchly progressive politics haven’t crowded out consumerism and wastefulness – and perhaps that’s the main obstacle towards a truly perma-circular America: that most hipsters and “culture jammers” are, in the way Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter put it in their hard-hitting, abrasive book Nation of Rebels, still too compromised with the dominant way of life to fully grasp the deeper demands of what a one-planet life would really demand. Culture jamming, Heath and Potter suggest, can and often does invert itself into a commercial culture of its own, with fashion items, books, media, “alternative” tourism, “cool” but expensive venues and a general consumerist thrust that can often defeat the purpose. Perhaps what “alternative” Californians – just like the rest of us – need alongside Callenbach’s enthralling ecotopia and Berkeley’s mellow bobo-ism are somewhat darker prophecies of decline and slowdown, such as John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent and The Ecotechnic Future.
This is all the more so since, as soon you extract yourself from the comparatively lush and moist Bay Area (check out Sausalito’s |
credit cards and pay down America's record debt, in essence voluntarily doing what Obama plans to enforce for everyone else. We are certain that Mr. Buffett will promptly demonstrate to the public his receipt from precisely such a patriotic transaction.
As for the proposal, to say that it is doomed would be optimistic:
The Obama proposal has little chance of becoming law unless Republican lawmakers bend. But by focusing on the wealthiest Americans, the president is sharpening the contrast between Republicans and Democrats with a theme he can carry into his bid for re-election in 2012. It could also reassure Democrats who have feared that Mr. Obama would agree to changes in programs like Medicare without forcing Republicans to compromise on taxes. The administration wants such a tax to replace the alternative minimum tax, which was created decades ago to make sure the richest taxpayers with plentiful deductions and credits did not avoid income taxes, but which now hits millions of Americans who are considered upper middle class. Mr. Obama has said that many average Americans could see a tax cut if the system is overhauled, since ending many tax breaks would allow for lower rates while raising more revenues from the wealthiest. The millionaires’ tax is among several changes Mr. Obama will propose in urging Congress to overhaul the federal income tax code next year, both to raise revenues for reducing deficits and to make the tax system simpler and fairer, said the administration officials, who agreed to speak in advance of the president’s announcement on the condition of anonymity. The millionaires’ rate would affect only 0.3 percent of taxpayers, they said. That would be fewer than 450,000; 144 million returns were filed for 2010.
That's wonderful: in other words it is very few of the people who, mostly through years of hard work, have succeeded in breaking through the vaunted 7 digit net worth figure. But the good news is that Buffett, instead of focusing on his own share of philantropy, believes that it is his centrally planned duty to enforce his strict lack of moral code on everyone else. Too bad the other millionaires do not have the billions necessary to become one with the TBTFs and know that whatever they put their money in, Uncle Sam will never let it blow up.
If Obama wants to enact a Buffett Rule, how about instead of addressing taxes, said rule makes it clear that capitalism is coming back to replace the crony communist regime we have all grown to love and enjoy for the past 3 years, and individual failure is once again an option, instead of the socialist risk phenomenon that Buffett, more than any one individual America has grown to symbolize and represent?
Furthermore, when the $1MM cutoff fails, which it inevitably will (the rich are rich for a reason: they tend to be, for the most part, quite adept at finding loopholes), and those targeted promptly "offshore" themselves, what will Obama's next "rich" cutoff be: $500,000? $100,000? $25,000? Those on Earned Income Tax Credit? Sooner or later, you know Obama is coming for you.
Lastly, and presumably comically, considering that 41.2% of the "middle class" pays no income taxes, we wonder if this is not just a ploy by a wily Buffett, who knows the loophole in the tax code better than anyone, to make sure that nearly half of all millionaires pay... absolutely nothing.Buy Photo Leroy Butler greets Jmari Williams, 6, from Milwaukee during the Milwaukee Health Department's Back-to-School Health Fair at North Division High School on Aug. 7, 2015. (Photo: Rick Wood / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)Buy Photo
Editor's Note: LeRoy Butler, who originated the Lambeau Leap and was a four-time All-Pro safety in the NFL, played for the Green Bay Packers from 1990-2001. He wrote this essay for the Journal Sentinel.
It’s Game Day. Packers, Bucks, Brewers, or some maybe other town and team; it doesn’t matter. Maybe you just spent a few hours in the parking lot, before starting time, grilling burgers and playing catch with a few other fans. You crowd your way through the gate and get your ticket scanned. You find your seat and settle in with a mass of cheering fans all around you. You drink your beer or soda and munch on something from the stadium concessions. You scream like crazy when the home team scores, or when someone makes a great play. You slap high-fives with everyone around you when something good happens. You boo together when the official makes a bad call. And when the game’s over and your team has been victorious, you hoot and holler at each other all the way to the parking lot.
Here’s the thing: Maybe that guy in front of you in line is a Republican, and you’re a Democrat. Maybe that woman sitting next to you is Christian or Jewish, and you’re Muslim. Maybe the fan in front of you is White or Hispanic, and you’re Black. Maybe anywhere else than at that game, you and anyone around you might be all but blood enemies. Yet here at the game, you’re all in it together. You’re on the same team. You don’t pick and choose the people to celebrate with, and you don’t care what color skin the player has when he scores. It just. Doesn’t. Matter.
There are so many reasons to love sports, but maybe the best reason of all is that sports bring us together like that. Whatever differences there may be between us in our day-to-day lives, they become irrelevant when the game starts, and beliefs that might have us at each other’s throats any other day simply cease to be so awfully important for three or four hours.
So I ask myself, when I think about this, “How can America take this example off the field?” How can we take our team solidarity with us when we leave the stadium, and let it guide us through our daily disagreements? We’re all God’s kids, and I think He wants us to play nicely together on this playground called Earth, and not hurt one another. I’m not sure how to capture and keep that team spirit alive in the hearts of my fellow Americans, but I do know this: Sports show the way.
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Does anyone even think about what color LeBron James’ skin is? Does anyone care who Aaron Rodgers is going to vote for in November? Does anyone know what religion I am? As sports fans, we’re all part of the team, and being part of a team gives us a sense of pride and comfort and togetherness. It takes away fear, it takes away prejudice, it takes away isolation and loneliness. It takes away hate.
LeRoy Butler played for the Packers from 1990-2001. Butler originated the Lambeau Leap and was a four-time All-Pro safety in the NFL. (Photo: Journal Sentinel files)
As Americans, we’re all on the same team. There should be no “sides” between the police and the public; they all need air to breathe, love their children, want to live in peace, and cheer for the Green & Gold (etc.) on Sundays. There should be no hate between Republicans and Democrats; they all love their country, believe in freedom, and want the country to be the best it can be. When people gather together on Game Day, the only colors that matter are those of the team jerseys; there’s no reason why we can’t feel the same the rest of the week.
I’m not naïve. I don’t expect sports to be the cure. But let sports be the lesson. When Giannis Antetokounmpo nails a three-pointer and you fist bump the stranger next to you, remember how nice it feels to experience a moment of simple shared pleasure with someone you’ve never met. When Ryan Braun parks one in the cheap seats and you dance a little jig with your entire row, hold onto that feeling of togetherness that doesn’t require approval of who they are. When Jordy Nelson performs a little move I once came up with, and Robert Brooks made famous, called the Lambeau Leap, watch how everyone around him joyfully gathers him into their arms, together, in pure elation.
Every day, all around you, there are reasons to root for a team win. Political rivals can put country first, and cooperate on issues that everybody agrees on. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and all other people of faith can agree that God is Love, and love demands forgiveness and respect. Together, the police and Black Lives Matter people can strive as one to make sure no one dies. Heck, just getting to and from work requires cooperation with hundreds of strangers, so we can all return home safely to our loved ones.
On and off the field, team spirit brings us together. As a professional athlete, I obviously see the world through the prism of sports, but I no longer suit up on Sundays, and still the things I learned from sports stay with me. You don’t have to be a pro to learn what I’ve learned, though. If you’re a fan, or even if you’re not, you can see tens of thousands of people coming together as one every time you see a game, and you know they are not all one color, one religion, one political party, or one anything else but one team.
Think about it. And let's get it together.BUSINESS
The head office of Samsung Electronics in Seocho-dong (Yonhap)
Top executives at Samsung Electronics’ mobile business unit will step down to take responsibility for the sluggish mobile business this year, according to sources Monday.Market watchers had expected the anticipated reshuffling, as Samsung had signaled that it would take action to streamline its oversized mobile business down the road.Lee Don-joo, chief of the mobile business unit’s strategic marketing office, Kim Jae-kwon, chief of the global operations office and Lee Chul-hwan, head of the mobile R&D office will resign from their posts due to the disappointing business performance this year.Hong Won-Pyo, former head of the media solution center under the mobile business apparatus, has been named head of the global marketing strategy office at the tech giant.The number of presidents at the tech giant’s mobile business will consequently be reduced to three ― mobile business chief Shin Jong-kyun, Kim Young-ky, president of the networks business, and Kim Jong-ho, president of the global production technology center.Contrary to industry speculation, Shin retained his post and was granted another chance to revive the sluggish mobile business next year.“Shin has made significant contribution in helping Samsung to become the global No.1 in the mobile market,” said Lee June, Samsung Groups’ communications chief, at a media briefing.“The president will have another chance to reinvigorate the mobile business in a new business environment,” he added.With the departure of Lee Don-ju, the strategy marketing office is expected to be dissolved into several units directly controlled by Shin, according to industry watchers.Executive vice president Roh Tae-moon, who has been credited with the success of the Galaxy smartphone models, is also expected to work closely with the mobile chief to fill the management void caused by the latest presidential reshuffles.Samsung Group, meanwhile, announced its annual executive reshuffle Monday. Former executive vice presidents Kim Hyun-suk, and Jun Young-hyun became the presidents of Samsung Electronics’ visual display and memory businesses, respectively.Lee Yun-tae, former executive vice president of Samsung Display’s LCD development team, will serve as the president and chief executive of Samsung Electro-Mechanics.It is said that the annual shake-up was conducted on a relatively small scale compared to those in the past since the conglomerate’s affiliates were underachieving overall this year.Samsung Group did not unveil any restructuring plan throughout its business units in Monday’s announcement, however, the communications chief said the conglomerate would announce the plan for organizational realignment soon after the annual shake-ups for managers next week.By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
WASHINGTON -- The Israeli government asked President-elect Donald Trump's transition team to intervene before a vote scheduled for Thursday at the UN Security Council condemning its settlement activity in the West Bank, just as Barack Obama planned to allow the resolution to pass.
The Obama administration intended to let the resolution, spearheaded by Egypt, survive a vote in the chamber. Their plans to abstain were stymied, however, when Egypt decided to delay its motion to proceed with the draft.
According to Reuters, four Security Council members are now warning Egypt that if it does not put its resolution up for a vote, then they reserve the right to do so.
Western diplomats lashed out at Egypt's president, Fattah al-Sisi, for "caving" to Israeli pressure on an initiative that it had originally pioneered. But it may have been Israel's clout with the incoming US administration that, in turn, gave Jerusalem political leverage over Cairo.An Israeli official confirmed to The Jerusalem Post on Thursday night that Netanyahu's government reached out to Trump's team, hoping for his help as the vote approached. Trump released a statement on the topic this morning calling on the outgoing administration to veto the resolution.Obama urges Israel end occupation and Palestinians accept IsraelIsraeli officials believed the Obama administration had planned its abstention for some time, and was angered by Egypt's decision to suddenly change course. The goal of the White House, according to the Israeli government's assessment, was to let off a parting shot at a prime minister with whom it has fought for years and to bind the incoming administration with new international language.As its suspicions grew, the government warned the Obama administration that it would ask the president-elect for help.State Department officials declined to comment on whether Trump's aides had reached out ahead of time, and would not confirm that the US had plans to abstain.But "we’ve been very clear about our position on settlements," State Department spokesman John Kirby said, "and the degree to which we don’t find them to be constructive to the overall cause of peace."
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. Energy Information Administration, International Energy Statistics
China and the United States are the two countries with the most energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, together accounting for about 40% of global emissions in 2012. Late last year, China and the United States each announced intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) to mitigate their respective greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but there is still uncertainty in each country's ability to meet those targets. Further efforts to reduce GHG emissions will be discussed at the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris.
The United States, which had previously set a goal of reducing GHG emissions by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, has proposed in its INDC to bring emissions 26% to 28% below the 2005 level by 2025. China's INDC proposes to achieve the peaking of its CO2 emissions around 2030, making best efforts to peak early. China's INDC also proposes 20% non-fossil energy use in that year. Additionally, on September 25, China announced its intent to expand the seven regional emissions trading programs to a national cap-and-trade program that begins in 2017, although specific emissions caps and other policy details have yet to be announced.
In the United States, about 80% of all CO2 emissions in 2012 were related to energy, with the remainder attributed to sources such as cement production, agricultural activities, land use changes, and forestry. China surpassed the United States as the world's largest CO2 emitter in 2008. In 2012, China's per capita CO2 emissions were about one-third the U.S. level, while its emissions per unit of economic output were about 70% more than the United States.
In the United States, two of the largest sources of energy-related CO2 emissions are the transportation and electric power sectors. For transportation, the main mechanism for reducing emissions is the increasing stringency of fuel economy and GHG emissions standards, both for light-duty vehicles and heavy trucks. For electric power, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized the Clean Power Plan (CPP) that is aimed at significantly reducing CO2 emissions from existing fossil-fueled generators.
In China, the ultimate achievement of emissions targets will depend on its need to balance environmental goals with economic growth and development. Chinese energy demand growth has historically been driven by five-year planning cycles and has centered mainly on industrial energy demand. China is still industrializing, and its energy needs will grow despite slowing economic growth and a shift to less energy-intensive industries.
China's energy mix is dominated by coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future. If total CO2 emissions are to peak near 2030, coal consumption would need to stop growing and perhaps decline substantially between 2015 and 2035 unless carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, a relatively nascent technology, is rapidly adopted.
As per capita income increases, China's growing middle class is expected to increase its demand for energy services, and China's balance of energy use by sector will continue to shift from industry to the building and transportation sectors. Chinese transportation and building technologies have seen improvements in energy efficiency in recent years that should help China curb its growth in energy use.
Principal contributor: Perry LindstromYou’re going to think “Oh great, Another blog about Fall Out Boy, I remember them! They used to play on the radio all the time, They had a bunch of great songs and then a shitty third album.” or “I hate Fall Out Boy, all their albums are gay” Whatever you think about the band, Just – Hold on for a few and let me talk, Because I haven’t been able to articulate quite how I have been feeling for the past month because nobody would listen, and I don’t know if anyone would even understand.
Fall Out Boy started as a kind of unknown group of guys making music in Chicago, they made some albums, but then they kind of got Big, Unexpectedly, and things started happening – big things, Things that kind of change you when you are a teenager or you are barely out of highschool, They were all young and they were just starting on this exciting and terrifying journey of starting this group, Their music was pop-punk and the lyrics were catchy, Some songs are the kind of songs you’d hear in those movies about those people that go to highschool and theres this big high school dance or prom or this big moment where these people are together, Thats what their old music reminds me of, I was never a Fall Out Boy fan, perse.. But I don’t really hate a lot of things, especially things I don’t know anything about.. and plus I heard some of their songs in movies and on the radio, They weren’t terrible, I just never really had the urge to check out their music because it wasn’t what I was into, it wasn’t my style. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.
So when Spotify told me to check out Fall Out Boy’s new song “My songs know what you did in the dark” I was intrugied, I didn’t know the band had gone on hiatus in 2009, I didn’t know they ever stopped making music, I listened to some of the new songs off their brand new album Save Rock and Roll (Thats kind of a tongue in cheek title, by the way, If you think it’s a pompous thing for the band to assume they are saving rock and roll or that it needs saving at all, They aren’t. Seriously watch interviews, they talk about what it means.) I was mezmerized, It was danceable, catchy, fun, the music I liked, Then I found out they had music videos for three songs off the album, They’re doing this cool project where they are telling a story with all the songs turned into music videos, It starts off as the lead singer (Patrick Stump) Showing his bandmates this suitcase full of something they never show, Everyone is excited (And I believe this scene in the video could be a reference to how they reunited the band, In complete secrecy, They didn’t talk about it on social sites, Nobody even knew they announced the tour, the album, the single, the video, All in the span of a day, basically.. They were pretty ninja-tastic about it, They didn’t want anyone to know because they didn’t know what kind of back-lash people would have considering people weren’t too happy with the last album they made, Foile A Deux, Which people hated and I don’t see why because it was actually awesome, I guess some people just can’t stand change, and this album was a total departure from “Their old stuff”. They got a lot of hate for that album and things started spiraling out of control. But more on that later.)
The lead singer handcuffs the suitcase to his wrist and leaves the area probably to deliver the contents of the suitcase to where ever, But he (And the rest of the band members) get kidnapped, First the lead is taken to a place before they capture the rest of his friends, They chop his hand off to get around the whole “Handcuffed” thing, and they strap him down to a table and torture him (Sexy) Presumably removing his organs (Not so sexy), The rest of the band gets captured and show up in the next music video released about a month later, They are all tied up and are force fed cocaine, Patrick’s organs and weird smoke, Obviously they are all drugged up quite a bit, The women who captured them suddenly become topless and they all have a party, Oh okay you’re not paying attention anymore? Cool but don’t take my word for it, The videos are actually pretty awesome, and my description isn’t doing them justice, Go check ’em out!
Anyway! I thought that was awesome, I became a fan immediately, and over the past month of my life I have been a liiiitle bit obsessive, Not only because I think the lead singer is incredibly adorable, But because they are honestly really great people and they inspire me, I was a little wary to listen to their older stuff because I didn’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I enjoyed “Save Rock and Roll” But I have over the course of the month, It’s great, I’ve found songs I love and some I don’t like that much but that’s life, I also enjoyed the solo album that Patrick Stump made during the hiatus (Which fans didn’t really like, They all said horrible things “You changed”, “You sell out!”, “We liked you better fat!” Harsh words from people claiming to be fans.. I read all about the band and the hiatus and what caused it and, They started this out and they didn’t really know how big it was going to be back in the day, So it wore on them.. Constantly being on tour and constantly being around each other but not really communicating in a way that they needed to, Stressful real life events surrounding each of them and bringing them down, So one day they all sat down and had a serious conversation about the fate of the band, People weren’t liking the new album, their sales were down, But most importantly.. They just weren’t having fun anymore.
“We need to take a break, Because if we don’t take a break now.. We will hate each other and never want to do this again.” Said the lead singer, So that began the hiatus – A lot of people mistook that for the band breaking up and hating each other and everything sucking for them, That they just didn’t want to be around each other anymore, and part of it was that during the early days, They didn’t know how to speak up, or talk to each other about things that they wanted to say, So they kept quiet and I think some resentment might have popped up through ought the constant touring and fan-hatred and creative process, Pete Wentz, the bands bassist and main lyricist felt like the world had “Too much Pete, I think Pete Wentz needs a break” He was always stylized as the front man even though Patrick sang lead vocals, Magazines mostly did this for whatever reason, But you have to think that being in the focus all that time would start to wear on you.
They all went to do solo projects, work on writing different things for different bands, different styles of music and whatever else, Thats when Patrick came out with Soul Punk (His solo album, That didn’t do too well among fans, Which is sad because I really enjoyed it when I listened to it) After you pour your heart and soul into an album that almost nobody likes, You sort of feel a little bit upset, After a while not doing anything, Patrick and Pete got together like they sometimes did, They tried writing but nothing exciting came out of it (this also shows that just because the band was on hiatus, doesn’t mean their friendship wasn’t still intact) One day they got together and then, something happened.. a spark! A flame..!… But what?
They wrote some stuff, then they got excited – Patrick called up his friends and convinced them to come back and try this again, They all had to kind of learn if they could even still work with each other anymore, “Will we be able to do this?” was a question that was answered when they came up with some golden tracks, They realized “This is it, We’re going to do this, We are going to make an album” They went through great measures making sure the album process stayed a secret, Which wasn’t really that hard since nobody was expecting anything from them, They thought the band broke up! Sure there were rumors, But they were dispelled quickly, The band finally announced their reunited status in February 2013, The album came out recently and it’s been topping, Everywhere.
After 3 years apart, the boys are back.. And I was never a fan of fall out boy, I didn’t grow up listening to them or knowing of their lives and the troubles they all had writing and making music and just trying to get by, But I am a fan now and all of this has taught me a very valuable lesson, In the 3 years apart the band has matured a lot, Pete has stepped out of the light a little bit, Grown up into a man, a father, Patrick has gotten more confident about his abilities and everyone in the band has more freedom to speak about what they want to speak about, To suggest this or that, There is more trust there this time around, There is more patience and friendship, The bond is stronger now than it was back in the early days.
“What was crazy is that you’re in this band because you’re best friends to start. Then the band drives you apart. We talked through managers and didn’t see each other enough. Everyone had their own agenda. Especially with me and Patrick. Then it goes “poof”, It all goes away and you ask “Why aren’t we friends? We were friends to begin with.” To me, it’s important, not just for the band” – Pete Wentz – – – – – – – “We actually had a call about it where we hadn’t seen each other in a little while, We had both read some weird things in interviews. Sometimes you say things and it’s taken out of context, It’s not always the whole truth, I think we had both been scared to interact with each other, I got a call from Pete and he goes “I think it’s kind of weird that we haven’t really seen each other this year, We paid for each others houses and you don’t know my kid” – Patrick Stump
Listening to their music and reading things they have written about their life and watching interviews, seeing them interact now as opposed to how they all interacted back then is really inspiring to me in a lot of ways and it really does emphasize the absolute necessity and importance of knowing when to give someone space, Eventually if you interact with people enough, and you clash with them and you fight with them, It gets exhausting and you physically and emotionally can not handle it anymore, You have to take a break before you hate each other and you don’t ever want that person in your life again. It’s something I can relate to a lot with a situation I’m going through in my life right now, It’s interesting to know that even during the hiatus, they didn’t know for certain if anything would ever happen again with the band but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t thinking about it sometimes, That maybe they would think of a melody or some lyrics that would be great in a song, And just push it aside for that day that maybe Fall Out Boy would be a thing again, I’ve done the very same thing – With doubt in my mind but hope in my heart, I’ve pushed aside certain things I’ve wanted to do because “It would be better with this person”, “It’s not as exciting without this person” So I really relate to this in a lot of ways, I mean call me silly if you want but I won’t hear none of that, You may not like Fall Out Boy as a band, you may hate their music or how they look or their names or their faces (Which is pretty dumb if you ask me) But don’t tell me I’m wrong for feeling strongly about all of this, Four kids from Chicago changed the way I view friendship.
“For me, Patrick has always instructed me on how to live, Regardless of whether Fall Out Boy existed, I would still need to be friends with Patrick” – Pete Wentz
It just kind of makes you think, And it gives you hope in situations where you don’t know what to expect out of this friendship or this relationship and everything seems to be at a standstill or you don’t think there is any possible resolution on the horizon That this is just something that can not or will not happen, The most important thing is that you know even though things may have gotten rough and maybe driven away that friendship and broke your spirits as friends, Or you don’t feel like you have anything in common anymore, It just kind of makes you think that maybe there still is a chance, Even if you don’t believe it, You still -sort- of hope in the back of your mind that those piles of things you’re putting off for that one day when you’re friends again, Won’t just turn into a pile of dusty old papers.
“I’ve heard a lot of really awful, negative things said about Pete, and it’s like, “Dude, you don’t even have a clue how honest and real that guy is” for the amount of crap that people talk about him.” – Patrick Stump – – – – “We always had this thing, If Patrick was batman I’d be Bruce Wayne ” – Pete Wentz
And last but not least, but of course most important, My friend may never see what I wrote here and he may not even care about it one bit, It may not change anything between us or erase the bad moments, But I hope that he remembers there were good moments too, a lot of good moments, and if this is all said and done, I am happy to have known him and I write this with regret that I have said a lot of mean and not-very-nice things to him over the years, I’ve said a lot of things regarding our friendship but I may not have mentioned how much he has changed my life for the better, I think without him I am a much lonelier person regardless of who is around me, No offense to my other great and amazing friends, Sometimes you just connect with one person in such a way that you are practically twins, He will always continue to inspire me to be a better person and If we are never friends again, at least I still have Azeroth and all our old stomping grounds. With love. I hope you continue being as great of a person as you always have been. Shine on, Brother. You’re smart and you are capable of doing great things. I will always be happy that I had the chance to know you.. To end this post on a relevant quote which speaks volumes about the meaning of being friends.
“Pete’s my best friend, I was the best man at his wedding, I love that man to death. I’d take a bullet for him.” – Patrick Stump
My favorite song from one of their older albums, Dedicated to my best friend – Even if we’re not talking, even if we may never again. I will always appreciate you and everything you’ve done.
AdvertisementsOn Tim Kaine: "In exchange for campaign contributions, he appointed a radical jihadi to the Virginia Immigration Commission."
A chain email says of Tim Kaine: "In exchange for campaign contributions, he appointed a radical jihadi to the Virginia Immigration Commission."
A reader sent us a copy of the Sept. 21 email and asked if it’s true.
No group or individual takes credit for the email, but its content is a verbatim copy of a 20-paragraph blog that was posted July 25 by American Thinker, a conservative website. The blog was headlined "Clinton’s VP pick Kaine: Promoting jihadis in America in exchange for cash."
The blog names Esam S. Omeish, a Fairfax County surgeon and Muslim activist, as the jihadi with whom Kaine had a "quid pro quo" relationship.
Omeish, born in Libya, has lived in Virginia since 1982 and is a U.S. citizen. He’s been chief of the division of general surgery at Inova Alexandria Hospital since 2006.
In August 2007, Kaine, then governor, appointed Omeish and nine others to the Virginia Commission on Immigration, a new panel that was set up to advise Kaine on state immigration policies.
A month later, Kaine was on a radio show when a caller complained about Omeish’s appointment, saying the surgeon had made controversial statements about jihad and Israel. Kaine said he was unaware of the statements and would look into them. Later that day, Kaine announced that Omeish had resigned from the commission at his urging.
Newspapers reported then that the controversy sprang from internet-posted speeches Omeish had given as president of the Muslim American Society, a nonprofit set up to promote charitable, religious and educational causes.
In December 2000, Omeish spoke at a rally across the street from the White House protesting Israel’s occupation of Jerusalem. He told the crowd, "... you have learned the way and you have known that jihad is the way to liberate your land."
At an August 2006 rally in Washington, when Israel was fighting a border war with Lebanon, Omeish criticized the "Israeli war machine." He called the Israeli action "criminal" and accused the nation of "massacre and genocide against the Palestinian people." Omeish called on people "not to allow an Israeli agenda that controls our Congress and holds us hostage."
The day after Kaine ousted him from the commission in 2007, Omeish held a news conference. He said his call for jihad came before the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and, in using the term, was referring the concept of Islamic struggle rather than a holy war. Omeish said the word "jihad" can be misunderstood in a post 9/11 environment.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary says the full definition of " jihad " is "a holy war based on behalf of Islam as a religious duty; also: a personal struggle in devotion to Islam especially involving spiritual discipline."
As for Israel, Omeish said he favored a two-state government in the city with Israel and Palestine.
"It is not a call for violence. We never condone terrorists," Omeish said of his speeches.
Kaine, in a prepared statement announcing Omeish’s resignation, praised him as a "respected physician and community leader."
A spokesman for Kaine said then that the governor was concerned Omeish’s controversial comments would "distract" the commission’s work. The spokesmen also said the governor’s office would improve its vetting of potential political appointees.
We tried to reach Omeish, but he did not reply to messages we left with personnel at his office.
The money
The email, based on American Thinker’s blog, says Kaine appointed Omeish "in exchange for campaign contributions."
American Thinker, in making that claim, points to a July 23 blog posted by the Clarion Project, a nonprofit that says it’s "dedicated to exposing the dangers of Islamist extremism while providing a platform for the voices of moderation and promoting grassroots activism."
Clarion’s effort to establish a quid-pro-quo link starts with the New Dominion PAC - an organization founded by Arab-Virginians that contributes almost exclusively to state and local Democrats. The blog notes that the PAC from 2003 to 2005 contributed $43,050 to Kaine’s gubernatorial campaign, a figure we confirmed through records kept by the Virginia Public Access Project.
The blog offers no evidence that the money came in exchange for Omeish’s appointment which, again, didn’t occur until 2007. And records show that Omeish never has contributed money to the PAC.
Clarion also seeks to link a payback through the International Institute of Islamic Thought, a Fairfax County-based think tank whose stated goal is "to bridge the intellectual divide between Islamic tradition and western civilization." The Washington Post reported in 2006 that a federal grand jury was investigating whether the institute and other Islamic organizations in Northern Virginia were financing terrorist organizations.
The blog notes that in May 2011, the institute donated $10,000 to the New Dominion PAC - the organization which years earlier given money to Kaine’s gubernatorial campaign.
Kaine’s term as governor ended in January 2010 - more than a year before the institute’s contribution to the PAC. The New Dominion PAC did not contribute money to Kaine’s successful 2012 campaign for the U.S. Senate; it was ineligible to give money to a federal candidate, because it never registered with the Federal Election Commission.
Records show Omeish never personally contributed money to Kaine’s gubernatorial campaign or his Senate campaign.
We should note that a small money link can be traced between Omeish and the International Institute for Islamic Thought. In 2009, Omeish ran unsuccessfully in a Democratic primary for a Fairfax seat in the House of Delegates. The institute contributed $3,500 to the campaign - |
' notes recall decision sucked out a total currency worth Rs 15 lakh crore form the banking system thus leading to long queues outside ATM booths and bank branches across the country.We often receive applications questions relating to the power supply, input and output voltage range capabilities of our op amps. It can be confusing so here is an attempt to sort it out:
First, common op amps don’t have ground terminals. A standard op amp does not “know” where ground is so it cannot know whether it is operating from a dual supply (±) or from a single power supply. As long as the power supply, input and output voltages are within their operating ranges, all is good.
Here are the three critical voltage ranges to consider:
The total supply voltage range. This is total voltage between the two supply terminals. For example, ±15V is a total of 30V. The operating voltage range for an op amp might be, for example, 6V to 36V. At the low voltage extreme this could be ±3V or +6V. At maximum, ±18V or +36V or even ‑6V/+30V. Yes, unbalanced supplies are okay if you heed points 2 and 3 below. The input common-mode voltage range (C-M range) is generally specified relative to the positive and negative supply voltages, shown graphically in figure 1. In some equation-like form, C-M range of this hypothetical op amp would be described as 2V above the negative rail to 2.5V below the positive rail. Something like this… (V-)+2V to (V+)–2.5V. The output voltage range (or output swing capability) is. again, commonly specified relative to the rail voltages. In this case, (V-)+1V to (V+)–1.5V.
These examples (figures 1, 2, 3) are shown in a G=1 buffer configuration. A key point here… the output capability of this example in figure 1 will be limited to 2V from the negative rail and 2.5V from the positive rail and due to the limited input C-M range. This op amp would need to be configured in a higher gain to deliver its full output voltage range.
The example in Figure 1 is typical of an op amp generally used on dual ± supplies. It would not be called a “single supply” type but it certainly could be operated on a single supply just by staying within these ranges.
Figure 2 shows a so-called single supply op amp. It has a C-M range that extends to, and often slightly below the negative rail. This allows its use in a wider range of circuits that operate close to ground. So an op amp that is not called “single supply” could be used in some single supply circuits but a true single-supply type is more versatile in these applications.
In this G=1 buffer circuit, this op amp would could produce an output swing of 0.5V from the V- rail (limited by output capability) and 2.2V from the V+ rails (limited by the input C-M range).
Figure 3 shows a “rail-to-rail” op amp. It can operate with input voltage equal to or even slightly beyond both supply voltage rails as shown in figure 3. Rail-to-rail output means that output voltage can swing very close to the rails, often within a 10mV to 100mV from the supply rails. Some op amps claim only a rail-to-rail output, lacking the input characteristics shown in figure 3. Rail-to-rail op amps are very commonly used on single 5V supplies and lower because they maximize signal voltage capability on their limited supply range.
Rail-to-rail op amps are appealing because they ease signal voltage constraints but they are not always the best choice. Like other of life’s choices there are often tradeoffs with other performance attributes. But that’s why you are an analog designer. Your life is full of complex issues and tradeoffs and you love it!
Thanks for reading,
BruceTo celebrate the launch of the new Firefox on Nov. 14, Mozilla is going to give New Yorkers a faster and more fun commute for a few days. Firefox will be taking over a fast ferry in NYC to shuttle riders between Pier 15 in lower Manhattan and Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Join us at our Firefox Tech Talk to hear Selena Deckelmann, Director of Engineering for Firefox Runtime, share the story of the road to Firefox Quantum.
In this hour, Selena will present exciting developments in 57 including a brief overview of her team's work on integrating Tor patches into Firefox. Through a collaboration with Tor Project engineers and a team of Mozilla engineers spread around the globe, 100+ patches were integrated into Firefox, and the team is working on many more. These patches are privacy-enhancing on multiple fronts, using features only available in Firefox. Grab a bite and learn what makes Firefox fast and secure.
Logictis Details:Memories of
David Foster Wallace.
An interview with David Foster Wallace can be found here.
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My mom has been in this David Foster Wallace book group for years. A few years ago, she got breast cancer for a second time. At some point during her treatment, she received a postcard from David Foster Wallace saying that a mutual friend had told him that she was sick, and that she was in his thoughts and prayers. He added that one of his favorite words was “abide.” That touched all of us so deeply. We never even found out who the “mutual friend” was.
After she got better, I wrote him a letter thanking him for his kind words. I didn’t need or expect him to write back. Of course he did, wishing again that we were still OK. I think these small gestures show what a sensitive and caring person he was. He will be missed.
— Lilly de Lucia
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I had a chance to see David Foster Wallace onstage at a Portland Arts and Lectures event about 10 years ago. He appeared with Sherman Alexie, Gish Jen, and Cristina García as part of a panel discussion on what it meant to be a young writer in America. The event was a large one—probably 1,500 people. It was held in one of those elaborately refurbished downtown movie palaces. Everyone onstage and in the audience was, to some degree, gussied up for the occasion—everyone except Dave, that is. He arrived wearing a pair of big blond work boots, ratty jeans, and some sort of long-sleeve, waffle-weave undershirt. He looked like a down-on-his-luck logger.
There was little reading that night; it was mostly a Q&A. Something Dave said about his nervousness and the peculiarity of the affair made me think of an old Kurt Vonnegut anecdote.
Vonnegut was giving a speech he was nervous about. He didn’t think it was any good. He mentioned this sotto voce to the eminence sitting on the dais beside him and this man told him, by way of reassurance, that he, KV, shouldn’t worry about it—nobody really cared anything about what he had to say; they were just there because they wanted to see if he was an honest man.
When I got home, I wrote Dave a note, passing this little story on. I introduced myself and explained that I had just seen him “flamboyantly underdressed” at the Arts and Lectures event in Portland.
A few weeks later, Dave wrote back. He used a small thank-you card (Expressions from Hallmark). He said he understood Vonnegut’s unease. “These ‘writerly’ forums are a priori impossible to be honest at.”
In a postscript, he replied good-naturedly to my comment about his appearance. He wrote, “I was not underdressed. The lady said casual—the other three were overdressed.”
Given the demands on his time and for his attention, this thoughtful, funny little note to a complete stranger struck me as a surprising and generous thing. From reading these posts, it is obvious that it was not unusual.
— K.B. Dixon
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Here is what I think I know about David Foster Wallace: He was humble when he had every right not to be; he was a genius who didn’t ask to be; and he was graced with a piercing self-awareness.
Here is what I am sure I know about David Foster Wallace: He took time to sit down with a self-important pupil and told him to strive to be more authentic. He meant it as a critique of my writing, but I have always taken it as a life lesson. And, as much as anything else has in my life, it has helped.
— Brian Atwood
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When I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I decided I wanted to be him. He was so funny, so smart. I was more than smitten. I almost fell off my chair when, during the first week of my postcollege internship at the Boston Review, I learned that my fellow intern, Chrissy, was one of his students at Pomona College—and he’d written her recommendation. What was he like? How she described him was as a goofy man, a guy who, when the class got into a heated discussion, would pause to slap a fresh nicotine patch onto his arm. When he’d prop his feet up onto his desk, you’d sometimes see discarded nicotine patches stuck to the bottom of his shoes.
That summer, he did a reading from Oblivion at a church in Harvard Square. James and I went and had planned on meeting Chrissy there. We found a spot in a pew, and Chrissy snuck in a few minutes after he’d already started to read. He noticed her and stopped midsentence: “Oh, hey, sorry. I just noticed one of my students in the audience. How are you?” I did not know him, but at that moment I knew without a doubt that he was a good teacher and a genuinely kind man.
To me, David Foster Wallace symbolized the possibility to be great. He inspired me and he will continue to be an important influence in my life. I cannot thank him enough.
— Rasika Welankiwar
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I obtained Dave Wallace’s address through mildly illicit means to send him some of my early mini-comics. Although he alluded to dark reprisals that were even then on their way to the person who’d passed his information on to me, he was willing to excuse the indiscretion because “these comix are extremely extremely fucking good.” He sent me a check for a subscription, which I don’t believe I ever cashed. I sent him each new issue. In response to one, he wrote that he and his girlfriend had laughed so hard they “got all adrenalized and lost sleep,” which, as you can imagine, was very pleasing indeed.
We corresponded intermittently, by which I mean I wrote him effusive, confiding letters and he wrote cordial, friendly notes or postcards in reply. Now and then, he’d include a little doodled face alongside a note saying something like “You aren’t the only artiste around here, buckaroo.” Once, there was even a self-portrait, with a grossly elongated nose and buckteeth.
Obviously, our slight and mostly unilateral personal connection isn’t the main reason his death has shocked and upset me so. Just as, when I first read him, I thought that here was exactly the writer I would be if only I were much smarter, and a much better writer, reading his more recent work I felt that David Foster Wallace was the person I would be if I were less intellectually lazy and more honest and conscientious, kinder and truer to myself. His authorial voice is always in my head like a conscience, reminding me when I forfeit fairness for humor or compromise my intellectual integrity for a good punch line. Now that he’s gone, I feel like I have to try harder.
— Timothy Krieder
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In 2000, when I was a student at Kenyon College, Wallace gave an evening reading on campus. The book-jacket photos fed expectations of a casually cool figure: long hair and a bandanna, perhaps a subtly ironic T-shirt. But in person he looked more like a computer programmer than a celebrated novelist. The way he delivered the material that night—with limited eye contact, standing hunched over and clutching the stapled pages—reinforced this impression of an unassuming, self-effacing man. He seemed, simply, kind.
He read a typically strange and intriguing story (a work in progress) about a boy who was attempting to touch his mouth to every part of his body. When he finished the reading, Wallace positioned himself on a sofa in the refectory lounge, where he signed books for a small group of admirers. It would be a stretch to call it a carnival atmosphere, but the mood was far from staid: At one point, a willowy redhead brought her ankle to her mouth and kissed it.
Someone wanted to know if he still watched Baywatch, as had been reported in the New York Times. “It’s not like I watch it for the boobs,” he said.
As a joke, I had him fill out one of the campus dining-service comment cards. In block letters, he wrote: “Loved the cod! More breading!” To his signature, he added a doodle of a man’s face with a long nose.
Late he sat with us at a long table at the Cove, Kenyon’s dingy on-campus bar with a pirate theme. Wallace ordered a large Coke and took out a stick of gum. Sensitive to our anxieties and aspirations, he talked of how keenly his own students felt the gulf between the published and unpublished. “You’re here, probably, because you’re interested in writing,” he said. “It’s a mixed blessing, finding success when you’re young. If you aren’t published until you’re 40, then you’ve been through the fire.”
Two of us walked him to the bookstore in downtown Gambier. Night had long since fallen, and the guest of honor had forgotten where his accommodations were. Gambier, Ohio, is a picturesque enclave of white picket fences and looming trees where, during the day, the Amish often park their horse-drawn buggies and sell pies, jams, and quilts. On that nightsave for the light in the bookstore—there were few signs of life. We pointed to the Kenyon Inn at the end of the street. The author thanked us warmly and ambled off into the dark.
— Joel Rice
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In 1992, I was in Montana working on an MA in literature. A friend of mine was president of the creative-writing club and invited David Foster Wallace to come speak. There was no budget for this club, so DFW stayed at my friend’s house.
After his reading, we went grocery shopping for dinner—the others picked out fixings to make pizza while DFW and I picked out ice cream. I don’t remember what kind we ate or how dinner went, since that night mixes with lots of times like it in grad school, when I ate Gouda and drank microbrews and made witty remarks and stepped around big dogs all night with these smart friends.
After dinner, we watched A Clockwork Orange. I think DFW was somewhere else in his mind. Near the end, he got up without a word and wandered into the hall. In a minute, we heard the shower running.
Years later, as I read through the end of Infinite Jest with confusion and greed and satisfaction and wonder, there was A Clockwork Orange, driving some scenes too spiritually grotesque for me to imagine that they came from that young man who so quietly stood up to take a shower. I don’t try to imagine what was going on in his head that night, just how much of it was there.
Even more years later, I attended a book event for A Supposedly Fun Thing, where I thought I’d reintroduce myself to him and maybe take him out for some sushi. But he read so modestly, so quietly, and answered questions so patiently, and I remembered that I didn’t know him at all.
— Shelly Cox
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I played a tennis match against him when I was in the fifth or sixth grade in Urbana, Illinois. He was a better player, and at match point against me I knew I hit the ball out. I went to the net to congratulate him, but he stood there on the baseline and said, “What are you doing? It was in.” I liked that. He just wanted to keep playing.
I lost track of him and, years later, picked up his first collection of stories. And then a collection of essays. Then more stories.
He did something very few people in the world are ever able to do: He made everyone smarter. He took snapshots of our brains, our interior footnoted realities. He made us see that there was always more to say, and ways to say it better.
— Randall Hurlbut
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I took a graduate creative-writing course with David Foster Wallace at Illinois State University in 1995 and talked with him occasionally in 1996 when Infinite Jest came out. He had a big influence on my writing, and my favorite story of his, “Good Old Neon,” hit me like no other piece of fiction has—I had this amazing feeling of being interconnected with all life after I read it.
I was not successful with fiction at ISU, but the fact that he (as a faculty adviser for the ISU literary journal Druid’s Cave) liked a poem of mine helped move me toward writing and publishing poetry. His work went to some pretty dark places, and he wrote the best story I’ve ever read about depression (“The Depressed Person”).
In the class, he spoke about addiction and success, how it can eat someone up if a person writes purely for fame and money. He brought in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and talked about the capacity of a reader to accept metafictional gimmicks if the prose is good enough. He wanted to write for the right reasons, to hit true feelings rather than just be ironic and funny. I hope that, wherever he is, he is at peace. He has had a giant influence, on writing and on the world, that won’t soon be forgotten.
— Don Illich
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I was lucky enough to be one of David’s students at ISU; he was the director of the thesis that finished my degree there. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that his influence changed my life’s direction, and I have no doubt that without his encouragement and support I would have returned to my old job instead of continuing to write and teach. When I began studying with him, though, I was more than a little intimidated. I almost immediately saw that his person/writer ratio was much more person and less writer, which sounds obvious but was both comforting and surprising to me at the time. He was real, to an intensifying point. Even though we hadn’t been in touch lately, he’s still the voice in my head that tells me to try to write something original, interesting, and different, or don’t even bother.
I remember him being kind of a private person, but there is one thing to share, because it made me smile during this sad time: Dave could do the most oddly accurate impression of Mary Tyler Moore saying her famous “Oh, Mr. Grant!” line from her old TV show. It was hilarious, complete with wringing hands and eyes toward the sky.
Although he was brilliant and incredibly generous and honest in the kindest way, he could also be wicked funny. I’ll miss him very much.
— Amy Havel
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At public readings, Wallace was funny and polite. He was self-effacing, even when it was clear he was the sharpest cookie in the box. He had a tendency to accelerate when he readevidence, I think, that he was sure of what he had written, that though the sentences were often long and full of all sorts of Faulknerian qualifiers and subordination, he had wrangled his ideas from the bush and captured them, for us, with words that best showed their plumage. I mean to say that, contrary to some perceptions, he was easy to follow.
At one reading I attended, he stopped and apologized for this reading acceleration and said he would try to slow down. We shook our heads and implored him to just please keep reading already. As he signed the new Oblivion and my old Infinite Jest, I thanked himnot for the signatures but for his writing, all of it. In the face of an idol, I didn’t want to sound idiotic or sentimental without cause, but I told him how IJ’s footnotes sent me home from the video store with armloads of Tarkovsky films, how I spent weeks reading the novel commuting on the T.
He thought about it a second, then said, “That’s probably a perfect place to read it. I wrote a lot of it on the T.”
“Ah,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
Whole worlds.
When I got home, I checked the inscription. In all caps, with faux pomposity, yet insistently, he had written: “”-1">THE DF LIVES!"
Amen.
— Chad Willenborg
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The earliest issues of McSweeney’s are smeared and grubby with David Foster Wallace’s intricate fingerprints. My contributions were no exception to that. The first few issues had footnotes, and diagrams, and discursive digressions, and acrobatic culs-de-sac—and an unrelenting hypersincerity that was then so often mistaken for irony. Also, like David Foster Wallace’s writing, the magazine was often as funny as it was knowing. Eggers had called for cartoons that would be described rather than illustrated, and my friend Jason Zengerle, a New Republic writer and David Foster Wallace fan, contributed the following (uncredited) story, reproduced here in its entirety:
PICTURE:
A high-rise Chicago housing project. Two white men with clipboards are walking in a courtyard. Above them, two black women are looking down at them from a window. One of the two women is pointing.
CAPTION:
“Look, Florence, it’s dissertation time again.”
One day, Adrienne Miller told me that David Foster Wallace was actually teaching Jason’s cartoon in his fiction class, and when I passed along the good news, Jason—who’d had David Foster Wallace sign his galley of A Supposedly Fun Thing with the sheepish caveat “Typo alert!!”—was over the moon.
And then there was Meg McGillicuddy. For the first issue of McSweeney’s, I did a back-of-the-book catalog page, modeled after the kind you would see in the back of a Hardy Boys book. On this page, I wrote about the adventures of Meg McGillicuddy, a 10-year-old sleuth in Chuck Taylors with a magnifying glass and a missing tooth, and listed about 40 different Meg McGillicuddy adventures that you could order (e.g., Meg McGillicuddy and the Cracked Valise, Meg McGillicuddy and the Gym Teacher, Meg McGillicuddy and the Stolen, Hidden Treasure).
After the first issue came out, we got a letter from Bloomington, Illinois. Inside was the page copied and folded, and on the order form, three Meg McGillicuddy titles were circled in red ink. The letter was from David Foster Wallace.
When I read Jason’s New Republic blog entry last Sunday, describing his reaction to the “heartbreaking, stomach-punching news,” I was hoping I was reading him wrong—hoping that Jason’s “DFW, RIP” was meant, somehow, metaphorically. Of all the loving tributes I’ve been reading on mcsweeneys.net this week, the common thread seems to be David Foster Wallace’s generosity, his inability or unwillingness to feel threatened by a crop of younger writers who obviously hoped a footnote or two from his stylebook might rub off on us—and his willingness to encourage us, even indirectly, to leap past our inhibitions and dive in. More than a writer, he was just a brilliant teacher, on and off the clock, on and off the page.
—Todd Pruzan
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By the time I first met David Foster Wallace, I was part of the swaying mass of those who idolized him. He was my hero, the person I aspired to be. Still is. But I caught him on a bad day, at an event he didn’t want to attend, discussing business he’d rather not have bothered with. We had a brief exchange and he was somewhat rude to me. I was crushed, confused. My wife and my brother saw this happening and they could see the tears of disillusionment creeping into my eyes, but I defended him! He’s really not like this! He’s a nice guy, I swear! He later e-mailed me a wonderful apology and sincerely felt bad for “snarling” at me. He sent me a beautiful card for my wedding and again apologized and offered heartfelt good will on the marriage. So, even when he was rude (and he was human), he took responsibility for it, truly felt bad for it.
When I discovered Wallace’s writing and Infinite Jest, something resonated in me unlike anything else before or after. I felt in his work a consistent ringing of Truth, a Truth that marries postmodern intellect and sadness with heartwarming humanity. Now my heart is broken, but I take consolation in the fact that his art will live on.
—Matt Bucher
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I’ve owned three copies of Infinite Jest. The first copy went missing when lent to a friend. The second copy was, believe it or not, a mass-market paperback found on a bargain table. I remember rereading it in the summer of 1999, while doing fieldwork in the western Aleutian Islands. The binding could not, of course, sustain the weight of the text and Copy Two soon fell to pieces. The third copy is the trade paperback that I still own. When I opened it in search of a few passages yesterday, two bookmarks fell out—one from the main text and the other from the footnotes.
I once had a vivid dream of owning a chocolate Labrador retriever named Hal Incandenza.
Since buying my house, in May 2008, I have thought of the essay “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” every time I’ve pulled out my lawnmower.
I saw DFW read selections from Oblivion in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was only a few days after I’d fallen down the stairs at work and I was nursing a rather swollen sprained ankle. Because of the crutches, I was slow to make it to the signing line, and ended up bringing up the rear. It was hot and there was no air-conditioning. I was knitting an intentionally ugly sweater out of extremely ugly yarn from the 1970s, and the guy in front of me in line joked that I should tell DFW that the sweater was for him.
Having spent years of my life as a bookseller, I’ve met quite a few authors, but none I admired so much as DFW. I was a little worried that meeting him would diminish my opinion of him. I only spoke to him for about a minute, and I could tell he was exhausted, but he was genuine and kind. He signed my copy of Oblivion “To Ellen—thanks for hobbling to the reading.”
Last night, when looking for a passage in which Kate Gompert describes depression—the only written description that has ever captured my own demon—I began to sob. My dog woke from his gassy slumber and bounded into my lap to lick the tears off my face. I can’t stop thinking about his dogs.
—Ellen Knowlton Wilson
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“Mr. Squishy” originally ran in McSweeney’s No. 5, under the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm. When Dave sent it to me, he asked that this pen name be used, and for the life of me now I can’t remember why. I didn’t even question it, really, because we had already published a bunch of stuff in the journal under other authors’ pseudonyms, and I knew there are plenty of good reasons to occasionally write under a different name. We wanted of course to publish it under his given name, because the story was brilliant and was the longest DFW story we ever got hold of. We were so proud to publish it, but we respected his wishes.
This was the first and only piece we ever published that I attempted to edit. And it was a pretty basic thing I tried to do. His work, as everyone knows, was very difficult to edit, because he made no mistakes, really, and could outthink and outlast anyone when it came to debating changes to his work. It wasn’t that he was combative, but more that he had thought pretty much everything through, and had good reasons for every comma.
Which made it all the more surprising that I got him to break up a few paragraphs. I didn’t think I had a right to ask, but, at the same time, I wanted people to read “Mr. Squishy,” and I felt that some of the paragraphs were both very long and possessing some pretty comfortable places to start anew. So I wrote a note explaining all this, with a copy of the story indicating about 10–15 places we could start new paragraphs.
I didn’t expect him to even entertain the notion, but he did. What became relatively clear in our exchange was that he hadn’t really ever considered breaking up these or any long paragraphs. It was as if he were visiting the notion—sometimes exceedingly long paragraphs can impede one’s enjoyment of a story—for the first time. He was that kind of genius, whose understanding of the workings of his own fiction was, I think, largely separate from ideas of audience.
But he went with the changes. There’s room for debate whether or not they were best for the story.
We published “Mr. Squishy” with the fake name, but I don’t think we fooled anyone for very long. Dave had at least four distinct styles, maybe more, but “Mr. Squishy” was written in his most recognizable. (OK, acknowledging that this is ill-thought-out and incomplete, a stab at his four most clear-cut styles would be: (1) the plainspoken and fluid journalistic style demonstrated in his McCain piece (this is the style that goes down the easiest, and where his passion and opinions are most unguarded); (2) the ramped-up journalistic style of the cruise-ship piece and similar pieces of epic observation (these pieces have the more elaborate footnotes and digressions); (3) the humor-isolating and accessible style of Brief Interviews and the “Porousness of Certain Borders” stories; and (4) the dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style of his novels and certain stories.)
“Mr. Squishy” was probably closer to Infinite Jest in style than any other short story he wrote, so I wondered aloud to him whether anyone would really buy that it was written by someone named Elizabeth Klemm. And even if they did buy it, wouldn’t they accuse Ms. Klemm of aping DFW’s style? We both sort of laughed it off and agreed to let the whole thing play out.
About a day after shipping the issue, we started getting letters and e-mails, even phone calls to the office, demanding to know whether Wallace was the author of this incredibly Wallace-like story. And the jig was up shortly thereafter, because he went on a book tour, and everyone was asking him about it, and I think he felt bad about fibbing about the authorship issue. At the same time, a few of us McSweeney’s people were doing events, too, and people kept asking. It was killing us, fibbing about it to very nice (though very intense) DFW fans. We’d perfected a non-answer answer, which was something like “Well, it came through the mail, and the byline on it was Elizabeth Klemm.” Usually, the fans would walk away, feeling that, with this non-answer answer, their suspicions had been confirmed.
Not too long after, Dave owned up to the story, and we did, too. He was too honest to fib, too recognizable to hide, too singular to fool anyone.
Thank you all for continuing to share your thoughts and memories. Please keep them coming. This site will continue to celebrate his life for the foreseeable future.
— Dave Eggers
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When I was a younger writer caught up in the fever dream of what would be my first abandoned novel, I wrote in a state of panic and dread to David Foster Wallace, then stationed at Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois. Call this invasion an act of literary stalking, but this was before Infinite Jest came out and I’d read excerpts in various literary journals and was hooked. I don’t know if Dave received much fan mail or if he was one of those guys who, if written to, felt compelled to write back. Whatever, a letter arrived a few weeks later, postmarked from Peoria, Illinois. Inside was a neatly folded note, handwritten in bright-red ink, the penmanship slanted and a smiley face adjacent to his signature. This is what it said:
—Alec Michod
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Three times I saw David Foster Wallace speak: once at the Hammer Museum at UCLA; a second time back at the Hammer in conversation with Mona Simpson; and at the Webb Schools in Claremont. The Claremont event was a workshop for private-school English teachers.
When I finally got up the nerve to ask DFW a question, I felt red-faced and nervous. I asked him how I, an ordinary, seldom-published writing teacher, could ever have any clout with my students, as opposed to a teacher like him, who could point over his shoulder at the genre-shattering masterpieces he’d written to get his aspiring writers to be like, “Wow, this guy’s not fucking around.”
He answered that as teachers what matters is that we provide a generosity of comment and time, that we display to our students a commitment to their work. And, sure, they’re still going to write a story about the boy with the backwards ball cap getting surly at the keg party, but maybe we can take them seriously and have them write a better, more lucid and honest, backwards-ball-cap-boy-at-kegger saga.
—Alex Ross
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Needing something honest but nonfawning to say while he signed my book at the Strand in 2006, I told him that “The Suffering Channel” was the best thing I’d read about September 11.
“Really? Some people think it’s tasteless,” he said.
“No,” I said (and fawned), “nothing else gets how it really felt, how it made everything seem so silly, but nostalgic, too.”
I expected a contemplative “Thanks” (and I would’ve left happy), but he replied: “Well, I hope you’ll find a larger platform for your views.”
This still makes me laugh out loud.
—Rob Stillwell
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In the year 2000, my friend and I rented a car and drove all the way from California to Bloomington, Illinois, where David Foster Wallace was teaching at the time. I wanted to finally meet him in person, after I had been publishing his books in Italian for a few years. He had told me on the phone I could meet him at the local secondhand bookstore. The store had a big mirror on the back wall, and when he entered (I was already there) I caught him looking at himself in the mirror, with a curious expression. Unlike in any picture I had ever seen of him, his hair was surprisingly short, and he was wearing no bandanna.
He addressed me with a funny Spanish “Señor Cassini?,” probably thinking the Spanish could easily pass for Italian. I told him I expected to meet a longhaired man, and he replied, “Yeah, I just had a haircut, and I can’t get used to the way I look now. When I entered the bookstore a minute ago, I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror.”
He was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and I noticed how he had apparently cut the upper part of his right sock, in order to carry his wallet in it. We then went to a restaurant for lunch (cheeseburger, french fries, Coke—he taught me what a “free refill” is: we have nothing like that in Italy; if we did, everyone would drink liters and liters of free soda) and had a nice, long, complicated conversation.
At one point, he confessed with obvious embarrassment that he and his girlfriend had recently gotten cable TV, which he had for a long time resisted getting, and he told me how every time he found something good to watch, he immediately feared that there might be something better to watch on the next channel, and therefore he would never stop zapping, and never really watch anything at all, which usually resulted in an argument with his girlfriend.
He insisted on buying my friend and me lunch. When I asked him to sign copies of his books I had been carrying with me during my road trip (a copy of Infinite Jest and Italian versions of his books I had published), he wrote, “To Marco, who actually made me pay for his lunch.” (In the meantime, the waiter had prepared his doggy bag; Dave had eaten only half of his cheeseburger and was happy to take the remaining half to his Labrador back home.)
Then we moved outside the restaurant, to the parking lot, because I’d asked him to show us on a map the road to wherever my friend and I were going next. When he opened his car door to get a road atlas, I saw his red bandanna in the back, and asked him if I could have it. He told me I could, but in exchange he wanted the T-shirt I was wearing, and that I had bought two months before in Rome, at a flea market, for 3,000 lire (a couple of bucks). It was a Lucky Charms T-shirt, and he said he used to eat Lucky Charms every day when he was a kid.
Exchanging pieces of clothing in a parking lot outside a restaurant in rural Illinois must have been quite strange, and therefore my friend decided to take a few pictures of this mise en scène.
In the four-frame sequence, you can see:
1. DFW, eyeglasses in hand, putting my red Lucky Charms T-shirt on over his Notre Dame Fighting Irish T-shirt, while I’m trying to cover my nudity with yet another two-buck flea-market T-shirt, this one celebrating Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme.
2. DFW explaining to me the sophisticated techniques of bandanna-wearing.
3. DFW putting his very |
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Read More: The Bulletproof Coffee Recipe (and also some approved additions).
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Why cheap coffee makes you weak
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Grass-fed butter is much healthier than other butter. Starting your day with grass-fed butter will give you lots of energy and it will give your body healthy fats that it will use to make cell membranes and hormones.
You don’t have to like coffee
You don’t have to use coffee to get the boundless energy and focus of butter and Brain Octane. In fact, the first time Dave experienced the benefits of a buttered beverage, it was in tea.
You can make just about any hot beverage into a creamy, frothy version of itself by adding butter and Brain Octane to your hot liquid in a blender. Hot chocolate, tea, and turmeric tea are just a few options.
Where Bulletproof Coffee began
Dave Asprey was a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur when his health really started to take a hit. He was obese, weighing in at almost 300 pounds. He was also chronically tired, and his brain function was starting to suffer.
For years, he tried restricting calories and working out every day. Nothing helped. By the time he was 30, Dave’s doctors told him he was at strong risk for a stroke or heart attack — not at some indeterminate time in the future, but soon.
Dave got the idea for Bulletproof Coffee after a trek in Tibet in 2004. At 18,000 above sea level and -10°F, his energy was plummeting – until he staggered into a guest house and a local handed him a creamy cup of yak butter tea.
The butter-infused drink is a necessity for the people in Tibet, who live and work in such rugged, high altitude terrain. The drink instantly rejuvenated Dave. It was like a flip was switched on in his brain and body.
The biohacker in him wondered why the tea made him feel so good, and he embarked on years of research into why the yak butter turned his brain on. Eventually, Dave substituted tea for mold-free coffee, and yak butter for regular old grass-fed cow’s butter. Brain Octane Oil was the final missing piece. Together, those three ingredients gave Dave the abundant energy and effortless mental clarity he felt in that hut in Tibet. That’s how Bulletproof Coffee was born.
Make Bulletproof Coffee a part of your day
The best way to figure out if Bulletproof Coffee works for you is to try it. Here’s how you can incorporate Bulletproof Coffee into your day for boundless energy and focus:
Buy some Upgraded Bulletproof Beans; grass-fed, unsalted butter or ghee; and Brain Octane Oil. (Or, opt for ready-to-drink Bulletproof Cold Brew.) Replace your usual breakfast with a Bulletproof Coffee for about a week. It may take your body a while to adapt to burning fat for energy instead of sugar and carbohydrates. Eat your lunch and dinner as usual or just eat when you’re hungry. For maximum results, stay in the “green” zone of the Bulletproof Diet. Enjoy fat loss, muscle gain, and better performance overall.
We want to hear about your experience with Bulletproof Coffee. But first, you need the ingredients. Get started with Bulletproof Coffee, then learn more about the Bulletproof Diet and how to supercharge your weight loss.
Try Bulletproof Coffee now!
Read Next: Going Bulletproof for Beginners“There’s no question Egypt was very much on the mind of the president,” said a senior official who helped draft the report and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its findings. “You had all the unknowns created by Egypt’s succession picture — and Egypt is the anchor of the region.”
At the time, officials said, President Hosni Mubarak appeared to be either digging in or grooming his son, Gamal, to succeed him. Parliamentary elections scheduled for November were widely expected to be a sham. Egyptian police were jailing bloggers, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the former chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had returned home to lead a nascent opposition movement.
In Yemen, too, officials said Mr. Obama worried that the administration’s intense focus on counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda was ignoring a budding political crisis, as angry young people rebelled against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an autocratic leader of the same vintage as Mr. Mubarak.
“Whether it was Yemen or other countries in the region, you saw a set of trends” — a big youth population, threadbare education systems, stagnant economies and new social network technologies like Facebook and Twitter — that was a “real prescription for trouble,” another official said.
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The White House held weekly meetings with experts from the State Department, the C.I.A. and other agencies. The process was led by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East; Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues; and Gayle Smith, a senior director responsible for global development.
The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo.
Indeed, except for Egypt, the officials refused to discuss countries in detail. The report singles out four for close scrutiny, which an official said ran the gamut: one that is trying to move toward change, another that has resisted any change and two with deep strategic ties to the United States as well as religious tensions. Those characteristics would suggest Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.
By issuing a directive, Mr. Obama was also pulling the topic of political change out of regular meetings on diplomatic, commercial or military relations with Arab states. In those meetings, one official said, the strategic interests loom so large that it is almost impossible to discuss reform efforts.
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The study has helped shape other messages, like a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave in Qatar in January, in which she criticized Arab leaders for resisting change.
“We really pushed the question of who was taking the lead in reform,” said an official. “Would pushing reform harm relations with the Egyptian military? Doesn’t the military have an interest in reform?”
Mr. Obama also pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did not. He is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.
While the report is guiding the administration’s response to events in the Arab world, it has not yet been formally submitted — and given the pace of events in the region, an official said, it is still a work in progress."I must type out this screed! I am accomplishing a revolutionary victory!"
Several years ago I ended up in argument with a fellow Toronto activist about "internet presence" and its supposed necessity. His argument was that communist groups needed to use various "social networking" tools to make themselves viable while my argument was, despite recognizing the importance of using whatever means were available for agitation, that it might be a mistake to treat internet activism as a stand-in for on the ground organizing. (And yes, I realize the possible irony of discussing this problematic on a blog.) That is, I was opposed to the idea that organizations were somehow defunct or passé simply because they lacked an internet following. My contention was that a presence on the internet––particularly because internet presence speaks to a certain level of first world privilege and even the privilege ofto work online rather than organizing in concrete circumstances––is in no way a substitution of on-the-ground agitation and organization.Here it is worth citing some examples. First of all, the CPI(Maoist) lacks a significant and coherent internet presence and yet, despite this, it is leading the people's war in India. Although this lack of internet presence may indeed produce problems when it comes to expressing its existence, development, and aims to a broader audience, it has not affected its ability to grow in regions where, to be clear, people are not able to access the internet on a regular basis anyhow. By the same token, when we look at a smaller but still large revolutionary organization (compared to first world organizations) such as the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan, we also find an inability to plug into "social media" aside from a very small and struggling website. Nor are CmPA activists online arguing for their point of view, despite being the largest secular revolutionary organization in Afghanistan, especially in comparison of at least one other Afghani maoist organization (who I won't bother to name because the few activists of this extremely marginal group have nothing better to do but troll on the internet) that the CmPA couldn't locate for a long time in Afghanistan, despite their internet presence, due to their marginal status.What we discover, here, is a disparity between concrete organizing and an (overbloated) focus on internet presence. And in this disparity, which was the point I was trying to make to this old activist acquaintance, we might learn something about the limitations of social networking. While it is important to note that the tools afforded by various online sites and mediums are indeed useful, and should be treated as part-and-parcel of organizing (not only are these useful for agitation/propagation, they can also bolster on-the-ground campaigns), we should also recognize that such tools may become treated as intrinsically rather than instrumentally revolutionary. The always immanent danger is that a person or group with significant internet presence may mistake this presence as evidence that they possess revolutionary significance and thus valorize a retreat into internet leftism.Internet leftism can and does produce the illusion that an active website possesses a significant level of political strength simply because it regularly publishes analyses and debates with other websites that also produce a similar quantity of theoretical engagements. To claim that this demonstrates the efficacy of organization, without investigating whether this internet leftism communicates to any concrete mass organizing, simultaneously demonstrates the limits of this kind of discourse. We often discover (and I have been guilty of this) a theory alienated from practice due to the fact that the only practice is internet ideological engagement, a refined version of the "talk-shop". A theory divorced from any form of revolutionary activity amongst the masses in the social context in which one lives is a theory that cannot thrive on a deep form of social investigation; it investigates only amongst a vague internet population from anywhere and everywhere––it is close to book worship While the theoretical engagements of that emerge from internet leftism may not appear as divorced from reality as extreme versions of academic obfuscation––and some internet leftists (though not all) may even demonstrate their scorn for the theoretical work of "petty bourgeois" academics––the content, if not the form, is most often the same. Moribund theory couched in the right terminology, determined by axioms pulled only from books and other online screeds, stands in for a living theory derived from struggle, distorting one's concrete circumstances. Perhaps the most asinine variant of this theory is the kind that openly and unapologetically fetishizes internet organizing itself as a stand-in for doing something in the real world, hence the innumerable theories promoting crowd sourcing and social media as revolutionary praxis It is in this context that a call for new methods, practices, and symbolic orders makes sense. The old methods of organizing in the city, town, and region––in the streets themselves, in sites of production and reproduction, in the concrete and messy world that is embodied rather than abstracted online––are treated as old-fashioned a priori. Clearly this kind of organizing doesn't work if you aren't actually doing it: opportunism is normative because it has been embraced, treated as a fact of nature. What is actually a retreat is conceptualized as embarking on a new front, a new stage of struggle.A certain disdain for the people is often produced by activity primarily confined to internet agitation, and it is easy to demonstrate that such a disdain exists simply by examining how leftists treat each other, and not necessarily because of an actual line struggle, on sites such a revleft or what have you. And these are only leftists engaging with other leftists; the people as a whole––those masses we are trying to reach––are treated with disdain because they exist only symbolically, or as objects to be determined and redetermined in whatever argument we're invested in (and yes I am using thebecause I am also and often guilty of this practice). This disdain also has to do with the medium: we are engaging with others as if they are disembodied consciousnesses; space is heavily mediated but time is not––we can hammer out an angry reply without having time to second-guess ourselves, without having to engage with someone directly. Outside of these online engagements, when we deal with the other in day-to-day organizing, only dogmatic Sparts demonstrate this kind of disdain for the masses and other leftists––they've been trolling long before internet leftism even existed!There is, of course, a certain approach to the mass-line that I have encountered on more than one occasion that, based on the [false] understanding that agitation/propagation is something separate from a mass-line politics, could produce a critique of internet leftism that is dismissive simply by arguing that it is a violation of the mass-line. That is: the masses are not online and, since internet leftists spend all their time online, they aren't engaged with the masses at all. After all, if you assume that agitational work is not part of mass work then you will also assume that internet leftism is a violation of the mass-line for the wrong reasons. [] The online tools afforded to usput us in touch with the masses but only if they are directly linked to the work we are doing in our concrete social circumstances. In this way, like a communist newspaper or campaign propaganda if used correctly, they can extend the sphere of influence and become part of a politics that seeks to embed itself in the masses.Back to my original point. Internet leftism is not a substitute for on the ground organizing just as a newspaper, a book, or a journal are also not substitutions. The use of the tools afforded to us by online mediums can definitely supplement our organizational potential, but these tools are also limited just as they are monopolized by the particular privileges of class in terms ofand––there is not some idealwhere everyone in the world possesses equal access to online tools and the time to use these tools. Add to this the problem of translation, the problem of dealing with imperialist fire-walls, the problem of having to devote revolutionary resources that need to be in the streets to online agitation and it may be that those who have the most time to represent themselves organizationally online in a manner that makes them look more significant than they actually are might also be those who are utterly insignificant in the concrete terrain of their struggle (again, the Afghanistan example is salient).If we think of the Spartacist League as being a good example of how agitation/propagandization becomes a stand-in for a more comprehensive form of organizing––how they have confused the instrumental with the intrinsic––we can understand the meaning and limits of internet leftism. Interestingly enough, these dogmato-revisionists are disinterested in contemporary forms of social media, still fetishizing the newspaper over everything else. This obsession with the newspaper is not, unfortunately, driven by the fact that newspaper agitation forces the activist to be in contact with the masses; this is clear because the Spartacists disdain the masses and, at every moment when they have the chance, treat the very people they hope to "convert" (since they are, ultimately, an organization that treats communism as a religion) as ignorant dupes. Rather, this is simply a fetishization for a particular instrumentality. The fetishism inherent to internet leftism is similar; it is just an ironic fact that the Sparts, still acting as if they live in 1917, don't realize that they could better operationalize the same tired politics through social media conventions. And we should know better than to imitate their approach online, assuming we are different simply because we are not annoying people by shoving a newspaper in their faces. At the very least the Spartacist League interacts with people, however badly, face-to-face. We should not replicate their practice online.It was a good idea, but in 2000, it didn’t work. Word didn’t spread fast enough, and the internet was still in its infancy. But it’s worth revisiting.
First, consider the size of the #NeverTrump Republican vote. In 2012 Ohio Republicans went 94 percent for Mitt Romney; President Obama received 5 percent of their votes and 1 percent went to “other.” This year, because of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, the percentage of Republicans who have indicated they are voting for Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Johnson or are unsure is 18.2 percent.
The problem is that in many close states, the number of Republicans who say they will vote for Mr. Johnson or stay at home is larger than the difference in support for Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton. Again, in Ohio, if the election were held today, polls predict that Mrs. Clinton would win 6.1 percent of the Republican vote and Mr. Johnson would win 6.2 percent (the additional 5.9 percent is undecided). This could decide the election: The latest Quinnipiac University poll in Ohio has Mr. Trump up by a point, 46 to 45.
Gary Johnson won less than 1 percent of the vote in Ohio in 2012. Has he done anything in four years to improve his lot with Republicans, other than forgetting (or never knowing) about Aleppo, Syria? The only reason for his rise is that so many Republicans back him as a protest vote against Mr. Trump.
At the same time, we hear from many Republican friends in our home states of Louisiana and California, as well as former colleagues here in Washington, that they would vote for Mrs. Clinton if their vote “mattered.” Too bad they are in deep red or deep blue states, in a system where a handful of states will decide the fate for the country.Another week, another batch of Impact player for us to look over and see if anyone is worth investing in.
Three of this weeks players look set for a gold to elite upgrade next week, so there is definitely some profit to be made if you invest well.
Make sure you check back shortly after each game to see what upgrade they earned, as I will be updating this post with their score once the games have finished.
This week's starting elite card is PSV Eindhoven's centre back Héctor Moreno. The Mexican international will be hoping that his side can overcome the odds and gain the 3 points on Ajax, and goal differential, to earn a spot in the Champions League qualifiers for next season.
This week, PSV travel to 10th place Groningen side, who have scored an impressive 13 goals in their last four games. Should this form continue, it looks good for Moreno as it give him more opportunities to make interceptions and boost his Overall. However, I have my doubts as their previous matches have all been against teams well below them in the league and not against a team of PSV's calibre.
Plays: Groningen (A), Sunday 1:30pm (BST)/ 8:30am (ET)
Prediction: +3
Result: +2
A poor performance from PSV saw them only manage a 1-1 draw against Groningen.
Moreno had an extremely quiet game, only having 2 Shots in the second half which will boost him to 84 Overall.
For a few weeks, it looked like Schalke were being drawn into the relegation battle at the foot of the Bundesliga, but they have recovered now and sit 10th. They are still in with an outside chance of getting into the Europa League next season, and a win against 7th placed Freiburg will help them massively in their aim. With just six points separating 5th to 11th place, a win is essential for both teams so it should be a very interesting and open game.
Goretzka has been in good form recently, scoring +9 and +8 in his previous two matches, so he looks like a solid investment as he has the potential to move to 85+ rating if he has a great game. I expect him to finish just under that though, but there hopefully he will get higher.
Plays: Freiburg (A), Sunday 4:30pm (BST)/ 11:30am (ET)
Prediction: +6
Result: +6
A solid performance from Goretzka was not enough for Schalke, as Freiburg took all three points thanks to a Niederlechner brace.
Goretzka had 4 Shots and made 2 Interecptions, boosting him to 84 Overall
Having left Barcelona last summer in an attempt to find first team football, Sandro Ramírez has found good form at Malaga, with 13 goals in 27 appearances in the league, with 4 of those goals being scored in the last 3 games.
Recently, Malaga have been in excellent form - winning five of their last six games - as they have moved up to mid-table. This week's opponents Celta Vigo's form is exactly the opposite, with five losses in their last six, so it should be a good game for Malaga, and a good upgrade for Ramírez, who should react an elite rating fairly comfortably.
Plays: Celta Vigo (H), Sunday 7:45pm (BST)/ 2:45pm (ET)
Prediction: +6
Result: +8
An excellent performance from Sandro helped lead Malaga to a 3-0 win over Celta Vigo.
The former Barcelona striker had 8 Shots which will boost him to an impressive 84 Overall.
Bournemouth have been a great team to watch this season, with the highest average goals per game ratio in the league of 3.22 goals in each game they play, so their defenders are always good bets for getting a few upgrade points.
Cook is one of their mainstays at the back, and has had some solid performances recently, with +5 in two of his last five matches. However, Stoke are not in the best of form recently, so Cook may not be in line for a great upgrade, with an upgrade to an elite even fairly unlikely.
Plays: Stoke (H), Saturday 3:00pm (BST)/10:00am (ET)
Prediction: +3
Result: +1
Cook’s Bournemouth side managed a 2-2 draw with Stoke City, but the centerback was largely inconsequential in the stats that determine Impact card’s upgrades.
Cook only made 1 Interception, boosting him to 77 Overall, so it would be advisable to sell him ASAP if you aren’t a hardcore Cherries fan.
Vitória de Guimarães are having one of their best seasons in recent times, as they sit in 4th place in the Primeira Liga. They are guaranteed a place in the Europa League, and will be aiming to top off a successful season and keep their run of 10 league games unbeaten in going for as long as possible. This week, they host 14th place Arouca, in what should be an easy win for the home side.
Hurtado has been in good form recently, with two goals and two assists in his last four games. This should hopefully mean that he is able to get to an elite overall, but I doubt he will get much higher than that.
Plays: Arouca (H), Sunday 6:00pm (BST)/1:00pm (ET)
Prediction: +4
Result: +2
A below-par performance from Peruvian international saw was masked by a close fought 1-0 win for Vitória.
He only had 2 Shots in the game, meaning he will only move to 78 Overall.
Make sure you follow me on Twitter, @Darren_8196, to keep up with all of my predictions and articles, and you can find my FIFA Mobile Impact Player upgrade predictions on Futhead, as well. And don’t forget to subscribe to joebilineHD on YouTube for his Impact Predictions too!Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world
President-elect Donald Trump has appointed a retired US Army Lieutenant as National Security Advisor, despite a history of opposing the rights of LGBT+ people.
Retired Lieutenant Flynn most recently attacked debates around allowing transgender people to use gender appropriate bathrooms.
He said, at the Republican National Convention in July: “My God, war is not about bathrooms. War is not about political correctness or words that are meaningless. War is about winning.
“My message to you is very clear: Wake up, America! There is no substitute for American leadership and exceptionalism.”
Going on, to chants of “U-S-A… U-S-A…”, the retired Lieutenant attacked “political correctness”.
The New York Times confirms that Trump has offered the National Security Advisor position.
The NYT article expresses concern at the former Democrat’s “Islamophobia”.
Trump has also chosen Senator Jeff Sessions as the next US Attorney General.
The Alabama Senator is known as one of the most conservative and anti-LGBT members of Congress and has been a vocal opponent over any attempts to bring about LGBT equality.A Kilbourn Park man was ordered held on $150,000 bail Sunday after prosecutors said he drunkenly crashed into several parked and moving vehicles and injured a handful of people, including a 4-year-old child.
Three adults were treated and released in connection to the auto collisions, and the child sustained cuts to his face that required stitches, according to Cook County prosecutors and court records.
Mario Ramirez, 41, is charged with felony aggravated DUI in the incident, which took place Friday night in the nearby Hanson Park neighborhood, according to Cook County court records.
Ramirez was driving a van in the 2300 block of North Marmora Avenue when he struck multiple parked vehicles before heading east in the 5400 block of West Fullerton Avenue, according to court records.
He then struck multiple vehicles that were stopped at an eastbound red light, according to court records, before coming to a stop on a sidewalk.
It is not clear at what point the victims were injured, but police said there were no reports of pedestrian injuries.
Numerous witnesses and victims said they saw Ramirez climbing out of the driver’s side window of the van after he stopped on the sidewalk.
Ramirez was uncooperative with hospital staff after the incident and had a blood alcohol level of 0.184, more than twice the legal limit, according to court records.
geoffz@tribune.com
Twitter @JournoGeoffZIn the fossil-rich region of South Africa known as the Cradle of Humankind, scientists have discovered the earliest known case of one of the world’s most deadly diseases.
Using 3-D imaging, the researchers have diagnosed an aggressive type of cancer called osteosarcoma in a foot bone belonging to a human relative who died in Swartkrans Cave between 1.6 and 1.8 million years ago.
The discovery—which has just been published in the South African Journal of Science—suggests that, while modern lifestyles have increased the incidences of cancer, especially in industrialized countries, the triggers for the disease are embedded deep within the human evolutionary past.
“You can opt for the paleo diet, you can have as clean a living environment as you want, but the capacity for these diseases |
magazine calledfolded with Crestwood (Simon & Kirby's 1950s comics company) and we were left with the script. I believe I said this could become a thing called Spider-Man, see, a superhero character. I had a lot of faith in the superhero character that they could be brought back... and I said Spider-Man would be a fine character to start with. But Joe had already moved on. So the idea was already there when I talked to Stan". ^ The Comic Book Makers (Crestwood/II, 1990) ISBN Black Magic involved at all.... Jack brought in the Spider-Man logo that I had loaned to him before we changed the name to The Silver Spider. Kirby laid out the story to Lee about the kid who finds a ring in a spiderweb, gets his powers from the ring, and goes forth to fight crime armed with The Silver Spider's old web-spinning pistol. Stan Lee said, 'Perfect, just what I want.' After obtaining permission from publisher Simon, Joe, with Jim Simon.(Crestwood/II, 1990) 1-887591-35-4. "There were a few holes in Jack's never-dependable memory. For instance, there was noinvolved at all.... Jack brought in the Spider-Man logo that I had loaned to him before we changed the name to The Silver Spider. Kirby laid out the story to Lee about the kid who finds a ring in a spiderweb, gets his powers from the ring, and goes forth to fight crime armed with The Silver Spider's old web-spinning pistol. Stan Lee said, 'Perfect, just what I want.' After obtaining permission from publisher Martin Goodman, Lee told Kirby to pencil-up an origin story. Kirby... using parts of an old rejected superhero named Night Fighter... revamped the old Silver Spider script, including revisions suggested by Lee. But when Kirby showed Lee the sample pages, it was Lee's turn to gripe. He had been expecting a skinny young kid who is transformed into a skinny young kid with spider powers. Kirby had him turn into... Captain America with cobwebs. He turned Spider-Man over to Steve Ditko, who... ignored Kirby's pages, tossed the character's magic ring, web-pistol and goggles... and completely redesigned Spider-Man's costume and equipment. In this life, he became high-school student Peter Parker, who gets his spider powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.... Lastly, the Spider-Man logo was redone and a dashing hyphen added". ^ Mondello, Salvatore (March 2004). "Spider-Man: Superhero in the Liberal Tradition". The Journal of Popular Culture. X (1): 232–238. doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1976.1001_232.x.Abstract
Purpose of the Study: Until recently, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) adults were excluded from full participation in civil marriage. The purpose of this study is to examine how legal marriage and relationship status are associated with health-promoting and at-risk factors, health, and quality of life of LGBT adults aged 50 and older. Design and Methods: We utilized weighted survey data from Aging with Pride: National Health, Aging, and Sexuality/Gender Study (NHAS) participants who resided in states with legalized same-sex marriage in 2014 (N = 1,821). Multinomial logistic regression was conducted to examine differences by relationship status (legally married, unmarried partnered, single) in economic and social resources; LGBT contextual and identity factors; health; and quality of life. Results: We found 24% were legally married, and 26% unmarried partnered; one-half were single. Those legally married reported better quality of life and more economic and social resources than unmarried partnered; physical health indicators were similar between legally married and unmarried partnered. Those single reported poorer health and fewer resources than legally married and unmarried partnered. Among women, being legally married was associated with more LGBT microaggressions. Implications: LGBT older adults, and practitioners serving them, should become educated about how legal same-sex marriage interfaces with the context of LGBT older adults’ lives, and policies and protections related to age and sexual and gender identity. Longitudinal research is needed to understand factors contributing to decisions to marry, including short- and long-term economic, social, and health outcomes associated with legal marriage among LGBT older adults.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, June 2015, ruled same-sex couples have the constitutional right to marry, marking one of the most profound changes to social policy in recent history. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) older adults have experienced a long history of struggle for civil rights, including legal marriage, sparked by the Stonewall riots in 1969. Ensuing decades were marked by contentious state-level rulings both for and against the right to same-sex marriage (Freedom to Marry, 2016) including, in 1996, the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage in federal law as the union between one man and one woman, allowing states to not recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states and excluding same-sex couples from receiving federal marriage benefits (Congress.gov, 1996).
In the court of public opinion, however, acceptance of LGBT people and same-sex marriage increased more rapidly (McCarthy, 2015). More than 30 years after the first same-sex couples set legal proceedings for marriage in motion, in 2004 Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in Massachusetts led to the first legal state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in the United States; by this time nearly three quarters of states had enacted bans on same-sex marriage. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court reversed portions of DOMA, extending federal recognition to those in legal state-sanctioned same-sex marriages. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that states could no longer ban same-sex marriage, 75% of the states (36) sanctioned same-sex marriage. Many have characterized this rapid shift in attitudes and support of same-sex marriage as one of the most dramatic in history.
The benefits associated with marriage are reflected in decades of research documenting that married individuals in the general population report more economic resources (Brown, Bulanda, & Lee, 2012; Lin & Brown, 2012), better overall health (Fuller, 2010; Lee & Payne, 2010; Manzoli, Villari, Pirone, & Boccia, 2007; Pienta, Hayward, & Jenkins, 2000), higher quality of life (QOL), including happiness (Lee & Bulanda, 2005; Wienke & Hill, 2008) and longer life (Lee & Payne, 2010) as well as more social and community resources (Brown et al., 2012) compared to those who are cohabiting, dating, or single. Although marriage is associated with better security of resources and health among older adults in general, there is a dearth of knowledge about how marriage may influence the lives, health, and well-being of LGBT older adults. Relationship status and related factors are likely influenced by legal, cultural, and political contexts, especially historical marginalization, previous social exclusion from civil marriage, and recent changes in social policies.
Because most same-sex couples have not had the option of civil marriage until recently, their reasons for becoming married or remaining unmarried may vary greatly and differ from heterosexual couples in the general population. Like the general population, LGBT adults benefit from being partnered. Among sexual minority older adults, being partnered or married was found to be protective for physical and mental health (Williams & Fredriksen-Goldsen, 2014) and associated with lower levels of stigma and loneliness (Kim & Fredriksen-Goldsen, 2016). Also, as in the general population, limited evidence suggests that being married is associated with benefits beyond merely being partnered. Among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults, for example, same-sex marriages have been associated with benefits, including higher levels of happiness and lower levels of psychological distress, compared to those who are dating or single, even prior to the federal legalization of civil marriage (Riggle, Rostosky, & Horne, 2010; Wienke & Hill, 2008). Partnered gay adult men have reported fewer depressive symptoms than those not partnered, and having a same-sex legal spouse was more protective than being domestic partners (Wight, LeBlanc, de Vries, & Detels, 2012).
The goals of this study are to understand who, among older same-sex couples, opts to legally marry and who does not; what is the association of relationship status (legally married, unmarried partnered, single) with socioeconomic and social resources, LGBT contextual and identity factors, health, and QOL among LGBT older adults; and whether there are similarities and differences between women and men in factors associated with relationship status. This research has important implications for practitioners, policymakers, and communities to better understand the relative benefits and constraints associated with legal marriage in later life in this population.
Conceptual Framework
Both health-promoting and at-risk factors explored along with relationship status in this study are derived from the Health Equity Promotion Model (HEPM; Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2014), which highlights potential mechanisms associated with health and QOL of LGBT populations. The HEPM posits that intersections between social positions (e.g., sexual identity, sex, and race/ethnicity), and individual- and structural-level contexts shape access to health-promoting and at-risk factors (e.g., socioeconomic, LGBT contextual and identity factors, and social resources and risks), which in turn contribute to overall physical and mental health across the lifespan. The HEPM also incorporates the life course and considers the timing of individuals’ lives: Today’s LGBT older adults have faced enormous stigma and did not have access to civil marriage earlier in life, experiences that are bound to inform their perceptions and decisions later in life, including those related to marriage.
The study employs gendered and life-course lenses in order to explore the differences that exist within groups of LGBT older adults according to diversity in experiences and social contexts (Calasanti & Slevin, 2001; Dannefer & Settersten, 2010). A gendered lens of aging examines power relations and inequalities shaped and reinforced by social processes and structures that influence how people act and perceive themselves as men and women (Calasanti & Slevin, 2001). A life-course lens posits that the dynamic process of aging is influenced by cumulative life experiences within structural and cultural contexts (Dannefer & Settersten, 2010). Life-course analyses, embedded within an equity perspective, consider the consequences of earlier life transitions, such as the timing of marriage, on later-life trajectories of adult development (Elder, 1994; Fredriksen-Goldsen & Muraco, 2010). Although marriage rates in the United States are decreasing (Schoen, 2016) and the average age at marriage for heterosexuals is increasing (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013), current cohorts of LGBT older adults were unable to civilly marry a same-sex partner until just over a decade ago and not until 2013 and 2014 in most states, even if they have been in a long-term relationship. Thus, in some respects, LGBT older adults are “off time” in that they may not experience the transition to marriage until mid or late life (Elder, 1994), which may have subsequent effects on the aging process.
Social Positions
Relationship status and its correlates may be influenced by an individual’s other social positions, such as gender, sex, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. From studies of the general population, we know the health benefits of marriage are larger for African Americans and Latinos than for Whites (Pienta et al., 2000). Also, single older women outnumber single men and experience the poorest overall health (Liu & Umberson, 2008) and highest rates of disability (Lin & Brown, 2012) and depression (McDonough, Walters, & Strohschein, 2003). A community-based study found that LGBT older adults living with a partner or spouse were more likely to be younger, female, and of higher socioeconomic status (Williams & Fredriksen-Goldsen, 2014).
Socioeconomic Resources
Economic resources shape health-promoting and at-risk factors and may influence and be influenced by relationship status. Compared to those who are married, unmarried Baby Boomers in the general population have lower educational attainment and household income (Lin & Brown, 2012). Additionally, single older adults with limited economic resources are less likely to become partnered in later life (Brown et al., 2012). Moreover, there are gender differences in economic resources by relationship status. In the general population, single older women are more likely to experience lower socioeconomic resources than married women and married or single men (Lin & Brown, 2012). Female same-sex couples are more likely to live in poverty than heterosexual couples and male same-sex couples (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014).
LGBT Contextual and Identity Factors
The HEPM takes into account life events related to sexual or gender identity. For example, a common life event of LGBT individuals is identity disclosure (or coming out), which is not a single event, but rather a continuous process of identity management. Furthermore, experiences of LGBT microaggressions are also common, that is, biases encountered in everyday life. Being married may voluntarily and involuntarily indicate one’s sexual or gender identity to others, likely resulting in less control over one’s degree of outness and visibility as a LGBT person. Marriage may thus lead to greater risk of being a target of LGBT bias.
Social Resources and Risks
Relationship status may interact with social network structure and support because having a partner can bolster social and family network size, and create opportunities for contact, socialization, and assistance. Married adults in the general population have larger social networks compared to single and cohabitating individuals (Brown et al., 2012). Social resources may also be gendered, such that lesbians’ close networks of support include partners, children, friends, and ex-partners as a buffer from both sexism and heterosexism, and as a result of women’s socialization “to be better at and care more about relationships” (Weinstock, 2004); gay men may also maintain close relationships with ex-partners, though to a lesser extent than lesbians (Nardi, 1999). In gay and lesbian couples, those with longer relationships have larger social networks, including more same-sex couples (Fokkema & Kuyper, 2009). LGBT older adults living alone, on the other hand, report lower levels of social support and greater loneliness compared to those living with a spouse or partner (Kim & Fredriksen-Goldsen, 2016).
It is important to recognize that the progression in marriage policy needs to be considered in research of same-sex couples; the legalization of civil marriage among same-sex couples was not a single event, but rather an incremental process that needs to be studied as such. Many states legalized same-sex marriage prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2015, and in fact, federal-level policy change occurred only after the majority of states had changed state-level policies, which has been defined as the critical moment in which the U.S. Supreme Court was willing to recognize federal marriage for same-sex couples. Thus, in this article, we assess LGBT older adults’ relationship status in 32 states (plus the District of Columbia) that allowed same-sex civil marriage with access to federal benefits as of November 1, 2014, to analyze outcomes that may be related to the incremental nature of change in same-sex marriage policies as well as to assess the eventual impact of national same-sex marriage recognition at differing time points. We examine the demographic characteristics of LGBT adults aged 50 and older who are married, unmarried partnered, and single, and analyze how health-promoting and at-risk factors and outcomes are associated with relationship status by gender. We hypothesize that married participants will have greater socioeconomic and social resources, fewer LGBT contextual and identity risks, and better health and QOL compared to those unmarried partnered, and that those single will have the fewest resources and face the greatest risks. Furthermore, we expect women and men, as they differ in their social positions, to show different patterns in relationship status, resources, and risks, and the correlates independently contributing to relationship status.
Design and Methods
We conducted cross-sectional analysis using 2014 data from Aging with Pride: National Health, Aging, and Sexuality/Gender Study (NHAS), a national longitudinal study regarding health and well-being among adults aged 50 and older who self-identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, or engaged in a sexual or romantic relationship with someone of the same sex or gender. Participants completed a paper or online survey and were compensated $20 for their time. For this analysis, we used a subsample of participants (N = 1,821) living in the 32 states, plus the District of Columbia, with legal same-sex marriage and access to federal benefits by November 1, 2014 (the date of survey distribution) and who met the following criteria: (a) identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual; (b) identified their sex as male or female; and (c) if partnered, were in a same-sex couple.
Measures
Relationship status: “What is your current relationship status?”, with responses: partnered, married, or single. If partnered or married, they were asked, “What is the current legal status of your relationship?” with answer options married, legally recognized; married, not legally recognized; partnered, legally recognized (such as domestic partnership or civil union); and partnered, not legally recognized. Based on this information, relationship status was categorized as single, legally married, or partnered unmarried (including those in marriages not legally recognized and those in legally recognized non-marriage partnerships).
Demographic characteristics included age in years, gender (women or men), sexual identity (gay/lesbian or bisexual), race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic White or other race/ethnicity), and length of relationship in years for those who were in a same-sex couple.
Socioeconomic resources included level of education (high school graduate or less = 0; more than high school = 1); household income (less than 200% of federal poverty level [FPL] = 0; at or greater than 200% of FPL = 1); total value of household assets (less than $10,000 = 0; $10,000 or greater = 1); home ownership (not a homeowner = 0; homeowner = 1); possession of private health insurance (no insurance or public insurance only = 0; private insurance = 1); employment status (unemployed = 0; employed = 1); and retirement status (not retired = 0; retired = 1).
LGBT contextual and identity factors were assessed with two indicators. Outness (one’s level of visibility as an LGBT person) was assessed with a single item “Please indicate your level of visibility with respect to being LGBT,” which was rated on a scale of 1 (never told anyone about your sexual orientation or gender identity) to 10 (told everyone you know about your sexual orientation or gender identity). Guided by previous literature (Sue et al., 2007; Woodford, Chonody, Kulick, Brennan, & Renn, 2015), LGBT microaggressions (subtle comments or actions directed toward LGBT individuals which are intentionally or unintentionally offensive) was assessed with eight items (α =.85), for example, “People use derogatory terms to refer to LGBT individuals in your presence” (never = 0, almost every day = 5).
Social resources and risks included having children (no living children = 0, at least one living child = 1); living arrangement (live alone = 0, live with at least one other = 1); availability of social support assessed by the abbreviated four-item scale (Gjesfjeld, Greeno, & Kim, 2008) of MOS-Social Support Scale (Sherbourne & Stewart, 1991; e.g., “Someone to help with daily chores if you were sick”; never = 0, very often = 4; α =.88).
Physical health included self-rated general health (poor = 1, excellent = 5) and the presence or absence of disability (e.g., limited activities or need for special equipment due to health problems; absent = 0, present = 1).
QOL was assessed using the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF (WHOQOL-BREF), a 26-item questionnaire that provides four subscales: physical QOL (e.g., “Do you have enough energy for everyday life?”; α =.87); psychological QOL (e.g., “How much do you enjoy life?”; α =.85); social QOL (e.g., “How satisfied are you with your personal relationships?”; α =.78); and environmental QOL (e.g., “How satisfied are you with the conditions of the place where you live?”; α =.84; Bonomi, Patrick, Bushnell, & Martin, 2000). Each item was rated on a 5-point Likert scale with a summary score ranging from 0 to 100 computed for each subscale using the recommended formula (World Health Organization, 2004).
Data Analysis
Statistical analysis was performed using Stata (Version 14.1). In order to reduce sampling bias and increase the generalizability of the findings, we applied survey weights to statistical analyses. Survey weights were computed utilizing three external probability samples’ data as benchmarks following two-step postsurvey adjustment, as has been applied to other types of non-probability samples (Lee, 2006; Lee & Valliant, 2009). In the first step, the Aging with Pride: NHAS sample was combined with the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) sample ascertaining sexual orientation by sexual identity, and we computed the probability of being selected from the NHIS versus the Aging with Pride: NHAS sample by using a logistic regression model with age, sex, sexual orientation, Hispanic ethnicity, race, education, region, and home ownership as covariates. In the second step, we further calibrated the weights for those in same-sex partnerships, another indicator of sexual orientation. The population totals by age, race/ethnicity, gender, education, marital status, and region were estimated from the NHIS, the American Community Survey (ACS), and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). See Fredriksen-Goldsen and Kim (2017) for detailed information regarding the postsurvey adjustment procedures.
To examine the demographic profiles of each relationship status, estimated means and proportions for variables of interest were computed and compared. Next, to examine whether the associations between relationship status and individual and structural factors remained consistent after controlling for demographic characteristics, we conducted a series of multinomial logistic regression analyses predicting relationship status (reference category = single), controlling for age, race/ethnicity, and sexual identity. These analyses were separated by gender to examine patterns between women and men.
Results
Demographic characteristics by relationship status are displayed in Table 1. Weighted proportions indicate that 23.91% of the sample was legally married, 26.29% unmarried partnered, and 49.80% single. A significantly higher proportion of men than women were single. Married and unmarried partnered participants were, on average, significantly younger than those who were single, and more likely to identify as gay or lesbian rather than bisexual. Those married were more likely to identify their race/ethnicity as non-Hispanic White than unmarried partnered or single. The average duration of married participants’ relationships was significantly longer (on average, about 23 years) than those unmarried (about 16 years).
Table 1. Legally married Unmarried partnered Single Unweighted n 375 428 1,018 Weighted proportion.24.26.50 Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Demographic characteristics Age 61.82 (0.61)b 62.38 (0.63)c 63.98 (0.45) Gender: women 52.65b 44.77c 34.44 Sexual identity: gay/lesbian 91.60b 89.64c 76.94 Race/ethnicity: non-Hispanic White 91.45a,b 77.63 79.54 Length of relationship (years) 23.20 (8.68)a 16.38 (11.45) Socioeconomic resources Education > High school 85.92a,b 66.76 63.89 Household income > 200% FPL 91.00a,b 74.11c 60.61 Household assets ≥ $10,000 95.98a,b 82.21c 62.63 Own home 90.84a,b 66.81c 48.58 Private health insurance 86.05a,b 64.09c 52.35 Employed 63.56b 53.42c 33.71 Retired 28.20b 26.53c 37.38 LGBT contextual and identity factors Microaggressions 1.21 (0.06) 1.12 (0.96) 1.12 (1.02) Outness (1–10 scale) 9.36 (0.07)a,b 8.36 (1.17)c 7.83 (0.16) Social resources and risks Have children 40.84a,b 26.21 25.25 Live with others 94.90a,b 82.84c 19.13 Social support 3.55 (0.06)a,b 3.29 (0.08)c 2.03 (0.06) Death of partner or spouse (ever) 11.86a,b 24.14c 35.36 Receiving informal care 22.65a 33.02c 17.73 Health/QOL General health rating 3.63 (0.07)a,b 3.36 (0.09)c 3.09 (0.06) Disability 40.64b 40.55c 59.16 Physical QOL 75.33 (1.40)b 71.23 (1.87)c 65.67 (1.18) Psychological QOL 71.98 (1.06)b 69.64 (1.47)c 61.95 (1.20) Social QOL 71.02 (1.41)a,b 64.93 (1.70)c 50.24 (1.39) Environmental QOL 81.77 (1.06)a,b 76.14 (1.34)c 70.68 (0.99) Legally married Unmarried partnered Single Unweighted n 375 428 1,018 Weighted proportion.24.26.50 Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Demographic characteristics Age 61.82 (0.61)b 62.38 (0.63)c 63.98 (0.45) Gender: women 52.65b 44.77c 34.44 Sexual identity: gay/lesbian 91.60b 89.64c 76.94 Race/ethnicity: non-Hispanic White 91.45a,b 77.63 79.54 Length of relationship (years) 23.20 (8.68)a 16.38 (11.45) Socioeconomic resources Education > High school 85.92a,b 66.76 63.89 Household income > 200% FPL 91.00a,b 74.11c 60.61 Household assets ≥ $10,000 95.98a,b 82.21c 62.63 Own home 90.84a,b 66.81c 48.58 Private health insurance 86.05a,b 64.09c 52.35 Employed 63.56b 53.42c 33.71 Retired 28.20b 26.53c 37.38 LGBT contextual and identity factors Microaggressions 1.21 (0.06) 1.12 (0.96) 1.12 (1.02) Outness (1–10 scale) 9.36 (0.07)a,b 8.36 (1.17)c 7.83 (0.16) Social resources and risks Have children 40.84a,b 26.21 25.25 Live with others 94.90a,b 82.84c 19.13 Social support 3.55 (0.06)a,b 3.29 (0.08)c 2.03 (0.06) Death of partner or spouse (ever) 11.86a,b 24.14c 35.36 Receiving informal care 22.65a 33.02c 17.73 Health/QOL General health rating 3.63 (0.07)a,b 3.36 (0.09)c 3.09 (0.06) Disability 40.64b 40.55c 59.16 Physical QOL 75.33 (1.40)b 71.23 (1.87)c 65.67 (1.18) Psychological QOL 71.98 (1.06)b 69.64 (1.47)c 61.95 (1.20) Social QOL 71.02 (1.41)a,b 64.93 (1.70)c 50.24 (1.39) Environmental QOL 81.77 (1.06)a,b 76.14 (1.34)c 70.68 (0.99) View Large
Table 1. Legally married Unmarried partnered Single Unweighted n 375 428 1,018 Weighted proportion.24.26.50 Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Demographic characteristics Age 61.82 (0.61)b 62.38 (0.63)c 63.98 (0.45) Gender: women 52.65b 44.77c 34.44 Sexual identity: gay/lesbian 91.60b 89.64c 76.94 Race/ethnicity: non-Hispanic White 91.45a,b 77.63 79.54 Length of relationship (years) 23.20 (8.68)a 16.38 (11.45) Socioeconomic resources Education > High school 85.92a,b 66.76 63.89 Household income > 200% FPL 91.00a,b 74.11c 60.61 Household assets ≥ $10,000 95.98a,b 82.21c 62.63 Own home 90.84a,b 66.81c 48.58 Private health insurance 86.05a,b 64.09c 52.35 Employed 63.56b 53.42c 33.71 Retired 28.20b 26.53c 37.38 LGBT contextual and identity factors Microaggressions 1.21 (0.06) 1.12 (0.96) 1.12 (1.02) Outness (1–10 scale) 9.36 (0.07)a,b 8.36 (1.17)c 7.83 (0.16) Social resources and risks Have children 40.84a,b 26.21 25.25 Live with others 94.90a,b 82.84c 19.13 Social support 3.55 (0.06)a,b 3.29 (0.08)c 2.03 (0.06) Death of partner or spouse (ever) 11.86a,b 24.14c 35.36 Receiving informal care 22.65a 33.02c 17.73 Health/QOL General health rating 3.63 (0.07)a,b 3.36 (0.09)c 3.09 (0.06) Disability 40.64b 40.55c 59.16 Physical QOL 75.33 (1.40)b 71.23 (1.87)c 65.67 (1.18) Psychological QOL 71.98 (1.06)b 69.64 (1.47)c 61.95 (1.20) Social QOL 71.02 (1.41)a,b 64.93 (1.70)c 50.24 (1.39) Environmental QOL 81.77 (1.06)a,b 76.14 (1.34)c 70.68 (0.99) Legally married Unmarried partnered Single Unweighted n 375 428 1,018 Weighted proportion.24.26.50 Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Demographic characteristics Age 61.82 (0.61)b 62.38 (0.63)c 63.98 (0.45) Gender: women 52.65b 44.77c 34.44 Sexual identity: gay/lesbian 91.60b 89.64c 76.94 Race/ethnicity: non-Hispanic White 91.45a,b 77.63 79.54 Length of relationship (years) 23.20 (8.68)a 16.38 (11.45) Socioeconomic resources Education > High school 85.92a,b 66.76 63.89 Household income > 200% FPL 91.00a,b 74.11c 60.61 Household assets ≥ $10,000 95.98a,b 82.21c 62.63 Own home 90.84a,b 66.81c 48.58 Private health insurance 86.05a,b 64.09c 52.35 Employed 63.56b 53.42c 33.71 Retired 28.20b 26.53c 37.38 LGBT contextual and identity factors Microaggressions 1.21 (0.06) 1.12 (0.96) 1.12 (1.02) Outness (1–10 scale) 9.36 (0.07)a,b 8.36 (1.17)c 7.83 (0.16) Social resources and risks Have children 40.84a,b 26.21 25.25 Live with others 94.90a,b 82.84c 19.13 Social support 3.55 (0.06)a,b 3.29 (0.08)c 2.03 (0.06) Death of partner or spouse (ever) 11.86a,b 24.14c 35.36 Receiving informal care 22.65a 33.02c 17.73 Health/QOL General health rating 3.63 (0.07)a,b 3.36 (0.09)c 3.09 (0.06) Disability 40.64b 40.55c 59.16 Physical QOL 75.33 (1.40)b 71.23 (1.87)c 65.67 (1.18) Psychological QOL 71.98 (1.06)b 69.64 (1.47)c 61.95 (1.20) Social QOL 71.02 (1.41)a,b 64.93 (1.70)c 50.24 (1.39) Environmental QOL 81.77 (1.06)a,b 76.14 (1.34)c 70.68 (0.99) View Large
As shown in Table 2, weighted proportions by relationship status and gender reveal that among women, 30% were legally married, 29% unmarried partnered, and 41% single. Among men, 19% were legally married, 25% unmarried partnered, and 56% single. Legally married and unmarried partnered women were, on average, younger than single women; there were no significant age differences by relationship status for men. Legally married men and women were more likely to identify their race/ethnicity as non-Hispanic White and to have longer partnership durations than unmarried partnered. They also evidenced the most socioeconomic resources across a variety of indicators, especially among legally married men, with advantages compared with both unmarried partnered and single men in education, income, assets, home ownership, health insurance, and employment status. Legally married women had those same advantages compared with single women and showed greater economic resources compared to unmarried partnered women in income, home ownership, and health insurance.
Table 2. Women Men Legally married Unmarried partnered Single Legally married Unmarried partnered Single Unweighted n 187 186 353 188 242 665 Weighted proportion of gender.30.29.41.19.25.56 Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Mean (SE) or % Demographic characteristics Age 61.13 (0.78)b 61.37 (0.87)c 64.01 (0.65) 62.58 (0.97) 63.20 (0.89) 63.97 (0.59) Sexual identity: gay/lesbian 84.04b 87.31c 69.03 100b 91.53 81.09 Race/ethnicity: non-Hispanic White 90.89b 83.91 75.38 92.09a 72.53 81.72 Relationship length (years) 22.47 (12.10)a 14.79 (14.76) — 24.02 (12.77)a 17.66 (16.35) — Socioeconomic resources Education > High school 90.64b 79.36 68.89 80.67a,b 56.54 61.27 Household income > 200% FPL 90.67a,b 73.22 59.84 91.37a,b 74.83c 61.00 Household assets ≥ $10,000 94.84b 90.37c 68.88 97.26a,b 75.68c 59.37 Own home 94.85a,b 75.92c 50.62 86.37a,b 59.40 47 |
at least manageable, ‘eellogofusciouhippopokunurious’ strains the tongue and the eyes. So why bother? The word’s value lies in its very size. Compare ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’, another super-long English word that, contrary to popular belief, didn’t originate with Mary Poppins at all, but, quite possibly, in a very similar context, among the youth of the 1910s, and certainly by the 1930s. Or ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’, created by students at Eton in the 18th century out of four Latin roots, to mean ‘to value as worthless’. Or ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’, created as a joke in the 1930s by the president of the National Puzzlers’ League. All of these words are coined facetiously, have simpler synonyms, and serve as an emblem of social value for their users, pointing to themselves as clever people who know long words. Even ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’, which refers to a real 19th century political movement in Great Britain, wasn’t actually used as a word in 19th century Great Britain. The earliest reference in the OED is from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1923 edition) in the ‘Long words’ section.
In fact, the only places where any of these words normally show up in ordinary usage today is in discussions of what is the longest English word. They each have a definition, which gives their lexical meaning, but their meaning in context and in actual use – their social meaning – is to show off the fact that one knows long words, and presumably, by extension, that one is intelligent. It is a small wonder that these words are developed and used frequently by students – those who have the most to gain by claiming cultural capital associated with intellect. As a linguistic anthropologist, I want to know what words mean, of course, but I also want to know how they are used in actual social contexts. And really, what we have here is a whole category of words that, regardless of their specific meaning, are used in the same way, to impress and overawe the listener or reader with their users’ erudition. That’s pretty darn eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious indeed.
AdvertisementsThanks to new rules instituted after HBO and the NFL had difficulty finding a team to appear on Hard Knocks, the league can now force teams to take part if they meet certain criteria. Nine teams fit the bill: The Browns, Redskins, Giants, Buccaneers, Vikings, Texans, Rams, Titans, and Jaguars. Most of those, unsurprisingly, still don’t want to do it.
According to a report from ESPN Cleveland, NFL Films would prefer to feature a team that volunteers to have cameras at training camp, rather than one compelled to accept them. That means the Browns, previously rumored as favorites, are out—they want to make life as easy as possible for Johnny Manziel, who left alcohol rehab last month. Other eligible teams have expressed their opposition as well.
According to the report, the Bills, Skins, and Texans are “potential participants”—seeming to imply they haven’t straight-up said no. Buffalo would be fantastic; we all need more Rex Ryan in our lives. Washington, too, never fails to bring the drama, and Robert Griffin III’s potential last season in D.C. would be a compelling storyline. Houston appearing would just speed up J.J. Watt’s world domination.
Anyone but the Jaguars.
[ESPN Cleveland]Campus Pride, a nationally-recognized organization dedicated to making colleges and universities safer, more inclusive spaces for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) individuals, released its annual list of the "Top 25-LGBT Friendly Colleges And Universities" in the country today.
The organization determined the listing, which presents the 25 schools in alphabetical, rather than ranked, order, by utilizing the data gathered from the Campus Pride Index. "Campus Pride's Index is the only one of its kind," said Campus Pride Executive Director Shane Windmeyer. "Unlike other commercially-driven rankings, our ratings are done for and by LGBT people and set in a foundation of solid research practice."
Each campus included in the final listing achieved 5 stars overall in the index, plus 5 stars in sexual orientation and 5 stars in gender identity/expression for an LGBT-friendly campus. In addition, the campuses had to have 4.5 stars or above (or the highest percentages) in all eight LGBT-friendly factors.
Free of charge, any college or university is invited to participate in the index by self-assessing their campus climate through a set of 50+ questions, corresponding to eight different LGBT-Friendly factors:
1. LGBT Policy Inclusion
2. LGBT Support & Institutional Commitment
3. LGBT Academic Life
4. LGBT Student Life
5. LGBT Housing
6. LGBT Campus Safety
7. LGBT Counseling & Health
8. LGBT Recruitment and Retention Efforts.
As part of the branding process of "LGBT-friendly" undergone by the universities taking part in Campus Pride's Index, universities have the opportunity to "come out" and claim that label within the index itself. "By doing so [coming 'out'] these campuses are taking active responsibility for their LGBT campus community," said Windmeyer. “The Campus Pride Index grew for the seventh consecutive year, but there are still many, many other colleges and universities who have yet to ‘come out’ for their LGBT students and then take adequate steps to protect and ensure a safe, welcoming learning environment.” Windmeyer also noted that in 2011, only 290 colleges were listed as "out" on the index, while as of Aug. 14, 2013, the group now includes almost 400.
The efforts of Campus Pride over the past several years have, in turn, encouraged and aided colleges and universities to make policy changes and take steps toward ensuring that their campuses cater to LGBT individuals and a diverse range of experiences. In a statement to The Huffington Post, Windmeyer stated that in the five years since Campus Pride began implementing their index as an assessment tool, the organization has learned and translated an immense amount of information to university officials in regards to LGBT campus life, specifically transgender issues, health and well-being, and recrutiment/retention efforts. Campus Pride intends for the the index questionnaire to be more than just a ranking system, but also a guide for universities and colleges that want to make institutional changes in order to make their campuses safer spaces for LGBT students.
Campus Pride is planning a series of LGBT-friendly college fairs in six major cities this upcoming fall: Charlotte, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston. For more information visit their website, and check out the list of "Top 25 LGBT-Friendly Universities And Colleges" in the slideshow below.I have learned that two freshman CBS series that have been looking good for renewal, Code Black and Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, have received permission from the network to begin making if/come deals with writers for Season 2. Both are co-productions between ABC Studios and CBS TV Studios. Among the remaining CBS series whose fate has not been decided, sophomore comedy The Odd Couple starring Matthew Perry is looking good to return after better-than-expected ratings performance for the current second season. I hear the show also had asked for approval to make if/come deals but it already has many of the writers in place, so there was no real need to do much more. Meanwhile, I hear freshman drama Limitless is not likely to continue at CBS. It is being shopped.
Medical drama Code Black, from creator Michael Seitzman, had been gaining momentum the past couple of weeks. I hear the show, which is expected to undergo some changes for Season 2, already has been looking into director hires for next season. It was a consistent ratings performer, never falling under 1.1 ratings among adults 18-49 in Live+same day.
Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders also has held up well, especially when airing behind a new Criminal Minds episode. The mothership series was recently renewed for Season 12.The X-Wing meta is the best it’s ever been, but not all ships are equal.
This is a list of ships based on actual performance at major tournaments. As a casual player looking to become more competitive, sticking to these Proven ships is a fast, surefire way to up your game.
The List
Click on a ship name for more details.
Proven
These pilots and builds are proven tournament dominators. They are top threats, and perform exceptionally in most lists.
Rebel
Imperial
Scum
Solid Ships
These ships are struggling to be top threats in the current meta, but they’re certainly not bad. Lists constructed with these ships can still perform very well with skilled piloting.
Rebel
Imperial
Scum
Unproven Ships
These ships are the sad and forgotten. They’re just fine if you’re playing for fun, but should basically never be used if you’re trying to be competitive.
Rebel
Imperial
Scum
Notes
Proven Ships
A-Wing – Prototype Pilot – Chardaan Refit
For 15 pts, a single A-Wing is a great spend. 4 HP and an incredible dial. Spending 3 pts to upgrade a Z-95 to an A-Wing is often better than 3 pts elsewhere. Only good for finishing off a list, though – multiple A-Wings is Unproven.
B-Wing – Blue Squadron Pilot
One of the best jousters in the game, 22 pts gets you 3 red dice and a massive 8 HP. For best results, don’t overload with upgrades that worsen its efficiency.
E-Wing – Corran Horn – EPT + R2-D2 + Push the Limit or Veteran Instincts
With R2-D2, Corran can dash into combat, “double tap” for huge damage, and then dash out and recover up to do it again. Push the Limit lets him arc dodge better and focus/evade more often, but Veteran Instincts lets him move after PS8-9 aces. Engine Upgrade lets you arc dodge more. Shield Upgrade is also acceptable to give Corran a larger health buffer to regen. All other E-Wing pilots are Unproven.
K-Wing – Warden Squadron Pilot, Miranda Doni – Twin Laser Turret
Miranda Doni with Twin Laser Turret (TLT) is a mobile, regenerating, late-game beast. K-Wings with TLT still throw 3 dice at range 1 (Miranda throws 4 if she burns a shield). SLAM gives high mobility for getting out of trouble or positioning. Warden Squadron Pilot with Tactician + TLT causes 2 stress, but otherwise a Y-Wing is more points-efficient for fielding TLT. Bombs/ordnance are Unproven, even with Extra Munitions.
T-70 X-Wing – Poe Dameron – Veteran Instincts + R5-P9 or R2-D2
With R5-P9 or R2-D2, Poe is a strong, regenerating, late-game ace with 3 red dice, 6 HP, boost, and a great dial featuring Tallon Roll. Veteran Instincts lets him hunt PS8-9 aces and win 1v1s in the late-game. He can arc dodge with boost and get great mobility even when limited to greens with R2-D2. Autothrusters gives more survivability and helps counter turrets.
YT-2400 – Dash Rendar – EPT + Outrider + Heavy Laser Cannon or Mangler Cannon
Outrider title and a Cannon make Dash a durable kiter. Push the Limit + Kyle Katarn are effectively 3 actions per turn. Engine Upgrade with the YT-2400’s barrel roll give incredible mobility while ignoring obstacles. Predator and Lone Wolf are also Solid choices.
Y-Wing – Gold Squadron Pilot, Gray Squadron Pilot – Twin Laser Turret or Ion Cannon Turret
For 24 pts, a Y-Wing with Twin Laser Turret (TLT) is consistent damage in a large area, sitting behind 8 HP. BTL-A4 title with R3-A2 is only 2 points more for the best control ship in the game. (World Champion Paul Heaver said, “every Rebel build…should put that guy in.”) Gray Squadron is an option to shoot before PS2 pilots. Ion Cannon is decent with BTL-A4 title.
Z-95 – Bandit Squadron Pilot
12 pts for 4 HP with red dice. Not spectacular, but usually better than 12 pts of inefficient upgrades. Great for rounding out lists and as a blocker.
Lambda-Class Shuttle – Omicron Group Pilot – Emperor Palpatine
For 21 pts, the Lamba Shuttle has the most efficient red dice and HP in the game. Palpatine provides the cornerstone for amazing 2 Ace lists. Shuttle provides great firepower at the beginning of the match, while Palpatine help ensure the aces remain untouched, and keeps the shuttle a threat even after enemies maneuver around it. Sensor Jammer can extend the life of the shuttle even more. Only Proven with 2 aces as the rest of the list.
TIE Advanced – Darth Vader – TIE/x1 + Advanced Targeting Computer
The TIE Advanced has solid defensive stats, but terrible offense. TIE/x1 + Advanced Targeting Computer (ATC) solves all that, giving it effectively almost 4 red dice. Darth Vader is the best pilot in the game, gets Target Locks for ATC easily, and with Engine Upgrade is a top-tier arc-dodger. Veteran Instincts let him hunt all other aces while still getting 2 actions per turn. Predator increases damage even more. Lone Wolf helps offense and defense but may not activate with another ace on the list.
TIE Fighter – Academy Pilot, Obsidian Squadron Pilot, Black Squadron Pilot, Howlrunner
The basic TIE Fighter is extremely cheap, maneuverable, and deadly in large numbers. Howlrunner hugely increases the damage of a TIE Swarm. Obsidian Squadron Pilot lets you shoot before PS2 ships (especially Twin Laser Turrets). Black Squadron Pilot does the same but also lets you take Crack Shot, increasing damage and helping against token-hoarding aces.
TIE Interceptor – Carnor Jax, Soontir Fel – Push the Limit + Autothrusters
The basic TIE Interceptor is a fragile, overcosted ship, but with Push the Limit and Carnor/Soontir, it becomes almost invulnerable. Boost and barrel roll give incredible arc-dodging ability. Autothrusters protect against turrets you can’t dodge and let you barrel roll into range 3 for safety. Stealth Device is usually added to help keep you invulnerable for as long as possible. Soontir Fel with Push the Limit gets effectively 3 actions per turn and can beat entire lists by himself.
TIE Phantom – Whisper – Veteran Instincts + Advanced Cloaking Device
With 4 red dice and (usually) 4 green, Whisper is a potent, high-mobility threat at all points in the game. Requires careful piloting and a good amount of prediction (since you have to decloak before anyone’s moved). Whisper absolutely needs to shoot first (with Advanced Cloaking Device) to survive, so Veteran Instincts is mandatory to tie with PS9 pilots. Echo and other pilots are Unproven simply because their PS is too low to shoot first/arc dodge.
VT-49 Decimator – Rear Admiral Chiraneau – EPT + Gunner + Darth Vader
The Decimator provides a powerful 360° attack on a massive pool of hitpoints. Its high base cost warrants further investment to get the most performance out of it. Gunner increases damage and helps break through tokened-up aces, and Vader ensures a damage and plays well with the Decimator’s HP. Engine Upgrade gives great mobility and the high-PS Chiraneau helps it dodge low-PS fire and gives a potent damage ability.
Aggressor – IG-88A, IG-88B, IG-88C – EPT + Autothrusters + Heavy Laser Cannon or Mangler Cannon
The Aggressor has excellent stats, dial, and HP. 36 pts is too much to field three, but double Aggressors loaded to the teeth have been a staple list since the Aggressor was released. There are myriad ways to equip them, beyond the scope of this article. Only lists including IG-88B are Proven, because it’s a free Gunner if you add a secondary weapon. Autothrusters is probably the best modification as well.
Y-Wing – Syndicate Thug – Twin Laser Turret
The Scum 25 point Y-Wing + TLT is even better than the Rebel. Unfortunately the other Scum options right now are pretty poor, so only lists that were primarily Y-Wings + Turrets performed well. 4x Y-Wings with TLT is also particularly potent, landing 8th place.
Solid
A-Wing – Jake Farrell – A-Wing Test Pilot + Veteran Instincts + Push the Limit + Autothrusters + Proton Rockets
Jake is an excellent ace, able to arc dodge with the best of them at PS9 (with Veteran Instincts + Push the Limit). Proton Rockets gives him excellent damage for one round, but his weak 2 red dice keep him at just Solid.
B-Wing – Ten Numb – Veteran Instincts + Mangler Cannon
With Mangler Cannon, Ten Numb’s ability pushes through an unavoidable crit every attack. At PS10, it’s probably the best TIE Interceptor counter in the game. The rest of the time, though, it’s an overly-expensive B-Wing.
HWK-290 – Rebel Operative, Roark Garnet – Twin Laser Turret
The HWK is a cheaper way to field a turret compared to the Y-Wing, for less HP. The extra agility is not usually worth the 3 HP, and HWKs are vulnerable to being focused early. The Y-Wing is usually superior, but in the right list and upgrades, they can perform well enough.
YT-1300 – Chewbacca, Han Solo – EPT + Millennium Falcon + C-3PO + Gunner or Luke Skywalker
The “Fat Han” build has high HP and with Millennium Falcon + C-3PO, can mitigate 2 damage every round. Gunner/Luke with Han’s ability give it very reliable damage and can break through token-hoarding aces. Twin Laser Turrets and the shift away from the two-ship meta really hurt the title/3PO combo though, as it performs worse against more attacks. Dash Rendar (YT-2400) is usually preferred in the current meta.
Z-95 – Tala Squadron Pilot
13 points for a Z-95 is almost as good as 12 points for one. Shooting before PS2 could come in handy, but most of the time it won’t matter.
VT-49 Decimator – Captain Oicunn
The VT is a solid pile of stats for its cost. Even without all the common upgrades, it will perform decently. Captain Oicunn is a solid low-PS blocker, and his ability can damage somewhat reliably.
HWK-290 – Torkil Mux – Turret
The HWK is a cheaper way to field a turret compared to the Y-Wing, for less HP. The extra green is not as good as the 3 HP, and HWKs are vulnerable to being focused early. The Y-Wing is usually superior, but Torkil’s ability performed well enough in a mixed-turret list at Worlds to earn him Solid.
Kihraxz Fighter – Cartel Marauder
The Kihraxz has decent stats for 20 points, and its 3 red dice perform well in the meta. They’re essentially better X-Wings. Unfortunately they’re not exceptional, and there really isn’t something they do so well you can build a superior list out of them, yet.
YV-666 – Trandoshan Slaver, Bossk
The YV-666 has a solid statline for its cost with 3 red dice. The dial is bad but the 180° arc really helps keeping targets under fire. There are a ton of upgrade options and slots. The problem is just Scum generally has trouble fielding anything outstanding; the killer YV-666 list either doesn’t exist or hasn’t yet been discovered.
Z-95 – Black Sun Soldier
Like the Tala Squadron pilot, upgrading the Z-95’s pilot skill for one point is a solid spend. It’s just slightly less points efficient and doesn’t often pay off.
Unproven
X-Wing
The X-Wing was one of the first ships created for the Miniatures Game, and it was unfortunately designed about 2 points too expensive. None of the higher pilots are must-haves and basic B-Wings are better jousters. The T-70 X-Wing likely put the last nail in the coffin, being better in every way.
Firespray-31
The Firespray is overcosted for what it brings to the table. The rear arc isn’t that useful, and encourages the Firespray to K-Turn more often (missing out on actions). Not only is its top pilot ability pretty terrible, but Imperials have access to game-winning aces in that price range, and the VT-49 Decimator for higher points.
TIE Bomber
There just isn’t any outstanding ordinance that makes the TIE Bomber worth bringing along, and its base stats aren’t geared toward swarms.
TIE Defender
The statline on the Defender is amazing, and the white K-Turn is super-efficient when you can use it regularly. After that, the rest of its dial is really bad (only one white hard turn and no green turns is a terrible combination) but what ultimately sinks the Defender is that it’s just way too many points for its cost.
TIE Punisher
Whereas the K-Wing is able to equip amazing turrets, the TIE Punisher doubles down on ordinance, which is still super overcosted and difficult to use. Worse, after you load it up with ordinance and Extra Munitions, it’s fairly easy to blow it up before it can even fire it all.
TIE/fo Fighter
Point for point, the TIE/fo is probably better overall than the regular TIE. The extra shield helps a ton, and the dial is way better with the green Hard turn and Segnor’s Loops. Unfortunately the TIE/fo finds itself in a difficult position: TIE Swarms would much rather take additional red dice and bodies, and the TIE/fo aces can’t hold up to the likes of Soontir Fel and Darth Vader.
Firespray-31
Like the Imperial Firespray, the Scum version is a little too expensive for what you get. The rear arc is difficult to get a ton of use out of, and encourages K-Turning too much. The aces are not outstanding for Scum, either.
M3-A Interceptor
One point less than an A-Wing for a lost point of shield and a way worse dial (no green hard turns). Maybe could have been useful as a filler ship the way Prototype A-Wing is, except Scum can’t really field grab-bag lists the way Rebels can because overall they have too many underwhelming ships.
StarViper
Stat-wise the StarViper is set up to be a killer Ace. Unfortunately, it has no amazing ace pilot abilities, and they top out at PS7. The lack of a green hard turn also hurts. You bought one anyway because you needed Autothrusters though…
AdvertisementsLast night (Friday), organisers estimated that 170,000+ people surrounded LEGCO – police put the figure at 36,000. For the full lowdown explaining the demonstrations, click here. Latest:
CY Leung, Carrie Lam and Anna Wu called a press conference and announced today (Saturday) that the government will give schools full autonomy on whether to introduce National Education. Originally, schools had to implement the programme by 2015 – the deadline has now been scrapped as he asked for protests, boycotts and hunger strikes to end. He claimed the instructions came directly from Beijing and that he will also re-examine curriculum guidelines.
Protesters are cautious, saying Leung owes them an apology, that schools can still receive tax-payer’s money for the subject and that not all schools (such as those funded by the University Grants Committee or under the School-based Management Programme) will have autonomy to decide. Click for a live stream of continuing protests tonight as thousands continue to call for a full cancellation of the programme.
Yesterday, hunger strikers hit 140 hours, ATV were welcomed with protest signs and banners and Tamar Park, LEGCO and Connaught Rd were packed…
Tonight, thousands remained in the heat, wearing black, defiantly surrounding the government headquarters…
Student volunteers directed attendees, gave out ‘love HK’ buns and water whilst protest leaders, bands and celebrities sang, chanted, cheered, jeered and rallied demonstrators to accept only full cancellation of the subject…
Attendees on Twitter repeatedly remarked on the welcoming and friendly atmosphere, possibly related to a very minimal police presence…
The HKPTU and Scholarism called for an overnight occupation…
There have also been protests in London, Paris, Melbourne and Little HK (Vancouver) this weekend.
The SCMP reported that “More than 100 academics from universities and other tertiary institution… signed a joint statement in newspapers asking officials to shelve the Moral and National Education programme.” and they estimated that between 2/3 and 3/4 of passers-by in Central were wearing black on Friday in solidarity with the campaign…
There were 13 hunger strikers at the Tamar site on Friday and the protest group Scholarism claims that 314 secondary schools out of the 524 in the city have Facebook pages set up by alumni to petition against the subject. Meanwhile, the government has published 1-and-a-half million pamphlets to educate us about these terrible ‘misunderstandings’…
Leader CY Leung, who cancelled overseas plans this weekend to deal with the crisis slowly backed down. Earlier in the week he insisted that ‘scrapping’ the subject is not on the table…
All manner of phrases related to National Education have been censored from the search engines over the border.
Below is an explanatory discussion on RTHK from July with legislator Tanya Chan, To Kar-hing, chairman of the Hong Kong Moral and National Education Teachers’ Association, and activist Heidi Ma. The Education Bureau declined to send a representative. Part 2 here.
SCMP’s video summary of the first week of ‘Occupy Tamar’…
Going viral on the SCMP site, attracting almost 100 comments, is Alex Lo’s rant which laments how “pure enthusiasm, youthful rebellion, rejectionism, intransigence and total contempt for the authorities are all on display.” He believes the protesters are brainwashing the rest of us. Here is a (albeit low quality) screenshot for those blocked by the paywall, and some equally nonsensical propaganda courtesy of China Daily.
Children and some teachers have been wearing black armbands to school. The SCMP confirms that schools recieved calls from the Education Bureau requesting to know how many teachers wore such bands…
The latest coverage:
Finally, a letter in the SCMP in response to some of the crazier examples published over the last couple of days.
“Protest is vital to a thriving democracy” – Tony BennSeveral Star Ocean V: Integrity and Faithlessness Videos Land During E3
Square Enix has released several new trailers, b-roll footage and screenshots prior to the release of Star Ocean V: Integrity and Faithlessness on PS3 and PlayStation 4. With these new videos you can get to know Relia, one of the characters in the game as well as meet the actors behind the voice talent that bring the characters to life.
Star Ocean V: Integrity and Faithlessness is the fifth entry in the long running RPG franchise that has been around since the days of the original PlayStation back into the 90s. Utilizing a real time battle system players are able to take control of 1 of 7 characters in combat seamlessly with a new system that allows Square to have the game seamlessly transition between gameplay and cinematic cut-scenes. Story wise the main protagonist comes from an ‘under developed’ planet with another species that has highly advanced technology.
The game will be out on June 28th in North America and was released on March 31st in Japan.Race-realism is an acknowledgment of reality; it’s not the exclusive property of any particular race or ethnic group. Most of y’all are already aware that there are Asian race-realists. Some of y’all may be familiar with jayman. He’s an accomplished HBD blogger, and partly black himself. But there are also some full-fledged blacks who have accepted race-realism, and who are pro-white.
One such person is a lady who had commented on this blog. She goes by Jane Doe, and has agreed to an online interview. I have chatted with her face-to-face (edited/added 10/23/14), so I know she is what she says she is. Here’s the text of that interview, and I hope there will be further discussion in comments:
1) Can you describe your journey to race-realism?
I have been interested in the subject of intelligence since high school. When I discovered the subject I learned that there is a one standard deviation difference in the average IQ scores of blacks and whites, with whites being higher. I was curious about whether this difference was mainly environmental or genetic. As a black woman of Nigerian ancestry I was eager to believe that the difference was entirely environmental. My bias led me to read all the negative reviews of The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein and all the positive reviews of Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J. Gould. (I didn’t know at the time that only one chapter of The Bell Curve covered race.)
When I got to college I took an introduction to philosophy course which required me to read a book by Michael Levin. This book had nothing to do with race, but it introduced me to the author. I later discovered that he wrote many controversial books about feminism and racial differences in intelligence. Since I had already read another book by the author and liked it, I decided to check out Why Race Matters. It didn’t take long for me to become convinced that the intelligence disparity may well be genetic. In the beginning of his book Levin asked his audience why anyone would think that blacks are equally as smart as whites. Blacks have never behaved as though they are. That introduction was all I needed to read, although I did go on to devour the rest of the book.
2) When you reached your HBD conclusions, who were the first people
(both online and in real life) you shared them with? What were their
reactions? Although I have never admitted to anybody face to face that I am a race realist, I regularly comment on American Renaissance articles and also on a blog called Occidental Dissent. Every once in a while a white person will respond to my comments. They typically express their surprise that a black person could become a race realist and tell me that while they have no problems with decent blacks, they don’t want to live among blacks in general. I have rarely encountered hostility, although one person from Romania asked me to sterilize myself.
I’ve also posted articles from AR and OD on my facebook. I generally get pretty angry responses from both blacks and whites alike. I have gotten into debates about the book Why Race Matters with a cousin and my postings have garnered accusations of self-hatred from former friends.
3) Have you met any other race realists face to face? Do you desire
friendships with them? Have you attended any race-realist/ pro-white
conferences?
I have never met a self-professed race realist in person. As much as I love my egalitarian friends I would love to find friends that accept HBD. I’ve never attended any race realist/ pro-white conferences either and I’m actually unsure about whether it would be moral to attend any of these types of events. The very least I can do as a black is let whites associate with each other once a year without black intrusion. 4) As a black race-realist, how would you use this knowledge for the
betterment of your own race? What do you think the prospects are that
other blacks, in significant numbers, will listen? Years ago, AR posted an article about an organization founded in California that pays addicts to be sterilized. It is currently called Project Prevention. I would love to get involved in that organization someday even though the sterilization is only temporary. Given that it was a white woman who founded the organization I think chances are remote that blacks will join.
I’ve also heard of organizations that pay black girls not to get pregnant in high school. I hope that blacks will not scream “eugenics” and protest against those organizations when I get involved, but I’m not optimistic.
5) Do you believe there’s a more receptive audience among African
blacks than among American blacks? No. I find that African blacks blame whites for all their problems just as American blacks do. I only have anecdotal evidence to back up my assertion, but I’m convinced that most African blacks think that colonization is responsible for most of Africa’s woes. I’ve asked many of my relatives why we don’t just beg the Europeans to re-colonize us and I’ve gotten scoffs from most of them, although one aunt did say that nobody wants to admit that we were better off being ruled by Europeans. 6) Does it bother you that, when you visit sites like Amren.com, or
even my own site, there’s so much anti-black diatribe? Do you find
yourself in inner conflict when you sympathize with the cause of
people, so many of whom hate you because of your race? Of course, as a
Jew, I’m in a similar situation. It used to bother me a bit, but I’ve since become more tolerant. In an ideal world, white race realists would understand the facts of HBD without having any animosity towards blacks at all, but our world is imperfect. Many AR readers have witnessed black pathology and the unluckiest have been victims of our violence. I can’t expect them not to go off on rants every once in a while.
As a young black woman who has yet to be in a romantic relationship, it used to severely hurt my feelings that AR readers find black women so unattractive. (I remember one reader saying that he finds the creatures from the movie Avatar more attractive than black women!) But now I’m happy about that. The fewer white men that find black women attractive, the less miscegenation there will be.
I used to experience severe cognitive dissonance on a regular basis. On one hand, I want the world to accept HBD before the West becomes a third world cesspool. On the other hand, I want my family to be safe and happy. I found a solution to not feeling guilty about my activism, though. Mestizos and Arabs will mistreat blacks far more than whites would if they ever come to power, therefore, it is in the interests of every black person to prevent Mestizos from taking over the U.S. and Arabs from taking over Western Europe. 7) I’ve written some negative things about blacks myself. Does it
sting, inside, when I write such things, or do you take them in
context and understand that I mean them only as generalizations, and
sometimes as a means of venting? It doesn’t sting at all. I’m glad you’re racially aware and I hope you never stop fighting for your race. Although to be honest, I’ve often wished you would be less blunt about how Ethiopian women are beautiful and black women are unattractive! 8) What can we do to make more intelligent blacks aware of HBD? Do you
have hope that race-realists of all races can work together for our
mutual benefit, and to ensure respectful boundaries and autonomy
between us? I’ve often considered trying to get blacks interested in eugenics by merely lying to them. We could tell them that most scientists believe the IQ gap to be entirely environmental, but since we haven’t yet found a way to permanently raise the IQs of the lower income population we should try to prevent them from out-breeding the higher income population. And also since we haven’t found a way make Head Start successful we shouldn’t let mestizos, Africans, and West Indians emigrate here.
I wish I could say that I have hope that all the races could live in harmony side by side, but I don’t. I believe that blacks will always demand more.
9) Can you share some stories about your interactions with whites,
where you spoke the truth and they weren’t sure how to react, or they
pitied you as a “self-hating black?” I told a white friend of mine who majored in anthropology that blacks on average score one standard deviation lower than whites on IQ tests. She scoffed and said she wanted to see the sample size on that. I had a long debate with an acquaintance who majored in anthropology about whether race is biological. I told him that scientists can tell a person’s race from their bones, their DNA, and other biological characteristics. He disagreed and de-friended me on facebook. He wouldn’t read AR’s book review of The g Factor by Arthur Jensen or anything else I sent him. My black friends just pity me because they think that I feel bad about myself because I’m black. 10) If you had 5 minutes to address the entire American Jewish
community, what would you tell us? The American Jewish community should emulate the Israelis. Sterilize blacks, secure the American border, and declare the U.S. a homeland for whites. 11) If you had 5 minutes to address the entire American white
community, what would you tell us?
Stop caring what happens to blacks. Stop adopting black children. Stop sending aid and food to Africa. For the love of God, stop having offspring with blacks. Repatriate every last one of us and never look back.Canadians have reason to remain hopeful that a national pharmacare program will be taking shape by 2020, a senior member of the Commons Health Committee said Wednesday.
“The expectation, the hope, from those that have been championing this for some time is that 2020 is the year that we see the beginning,” Liberal MP John Oliver (Oakville) told an iPoliticsLive luncheon panel event to discuss drug costs and public health care. Oliver is a member of the Health Committee and a longtime hospital administrator before going into politics. “It’s going to be gradual but that’s the year we begin to see national pharmacare being implemented.”
The Health Committee has been studying the feasibility of a pan-Canadian pharmacare program. |
blind hero who embarks on a journey through a dark, cursed land, where the sun has been ripped out of the sky.
Using binaural audio techniques to define the gameplay, it brings to life a convincing 3D world that is navigated solely with your ears.
Eleven crowd-funding Kickstarter packages are available to buy, ranging from £1 to £1,000. Each package gives a reward, with the top packages enabling the backer to have involvement in the production of the game and voice a character.
As with all Kickstarter projects, unless the funding target of £28,000 is reached by the campaign cut-off date of Thursday, March 12, Incus Games will not receive any of the pledged funds.
Founded at the Innovation Birmingham Campus in 2013, Incus Games comprises four acclaimed games developers, audio designers and script writers.
Stephen Willey, co-founder of Incus Games, said: "We’ve got an ambitious vision to create new content that really pushes the boundaries in audio-driven gameplay. We’ve developed the trailer for the Three Monkeys with visually impaired gamers and have been blown away by their reaction and how much it empowers them. We are now ready to enter the full development phase and get the game in the marketplace later this year.
"While we have had other offers of funding, we need to raise an initial tranche of cash to develop part one of Three Monkeys.
"Launching a Kickstarter campaign is a very public way of raising both money and exposure for the project, and it’s not without its risks. Providing the target of £28,000 is reached or exceeded, all those that we entice to donate will be able to feel like they have a stake in the game, especially if they buy one of the top packages which grants them specific involvement."
Co-founder Jamin Smith said: "While audio games in themselves are not new, they tend to rely on the same scare tactics of having a player deprived of their primary sense. In contrast, Three Monkeys empowers players, using mechanics that allow you to be proactive; to attack and make the first move.
"The most powerful graphics card at your disposal is your brain. We want the players to bring the Three Monkeys world to life, conjuring up imagery in the same way you would as you read a good book. The story will feature memorable characters and puzzle solving for your ears."
Incus Games is based in Innovation Birmingham’s Entrepreneurs for the Future (e4f) centre. The specialist tech incubator facility provides bespoke mentoring from Entrepreneurs in Residence.
The incubation process includes business planning to achieve investor readiness, free telephone usage, 20Gbit/s broadband and office space for nine months; a package which has a monetary value of £10,000.
Part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, e4f is unique to Birmingham and is specifically designed to harness and support the city’s burgeoning tech community.Earlier Tuesday, we looked at why a trade with Baltimore to move up to No. 17 in the first round of next week’s draft would make sense to the San Francisco 49ers.
Truly, any team is a potential trade partner when the clock starts and the board starts to fall, but here are some teams that could stick out as other potential trade partners for the 49ers:
Oakland Raiders
Where they pick: No. 5
Cost range: It would probably cost the 49ers No. 30, No. 56, No. 61, No 77 and perhaps even No. 94.
Possible targets: Clemson receiver Sammy Watkins, Texas A&M receiver Mike Evans.
How it could happen: Only if the 49ers felt Watkins or Evans was the missing link to a Super Bowl win. I’m sure the Raiders, who need all the help they can get, would jump at this. I’d say it’s a longshot.
Pittsburgh Steelers
Where they pick: No. 15
Cost range: No. 30, No. 56, and No. 94 or No. 56 and No. 61. and No. 77
Possible targets: Oklahoma State cornerback Justin Gilbert, Michigan State cornerback Darqueze Dennard, LSU receiver Odell Beckham Jr.
How it could happen: I’m not sure the 49ers would give up their first three picks for any of these prospects, but if they are desperate for a particular player it could happen.
Kansas City Chiefs
Where they pick: No. 23
Cost range: Perhaps No. 56 and No. 61.
Possible targets: Virginia Tech cornerback Kyle Fuller, Oregon State receiver Brandin Cooks.
How it could happen: I’m sure the Chiefs would like to get back No. 56, which was part of the Alex Smith trade last year.
Cleveland Browns
Where they pick: No. 26
Cost range: No. 56 and No. 61
Possible targets: Cooks, Indiana receiver Cody Latimer, TCU cornerback Jason Verrett
How it could happen: The Browns are reloading. They could be interested, especially if they get their quarterback at No. 4.Canadian PM Justin Trudeau recently announced a $50 million investment in the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics for facilitating cutting-edge research in fundamental physics. After the announcement, during the question and answer session, a journalist jokingly asked – “I was going to ask you to explain quantum computing, but…. haha…”. To everyone’s surprise, the Canadian PM launched into an answer and the video of Justin Trudeau explaining what Quantum states are has gone viral. (watch video above)
This is the answer that left the audience stunned:
[pullquote align=”full”]Normal computers work, either there’s power going through a wire or not. It’s one or a zero, they’re binary systems. What quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit. A regular computer bit is either a one or a zero: on or off. A quantum state can be much more complex than that because as we know, things can be both particle and wave at the same times, and the uncertainty around quantum states allows us to encode more information into a much smaller computer. So that’s what’s exciting about quantum computing.[/pullquote]
Consequently, many in India started comparing Canadian PM’s impromptu answer to the question about Quantum Physics to Mr Modi’s comments on scientific issues including his comments on climate change, ganesha being a case of plastic surgery and the mythological character Karna being a case of genetic engineering and so on. Facebook page ‘Thinking Ape’ put up a video juxtaposing Mr Modi’s comments on plastic surgery and Trudeau’s comments on quantum physics.
This particular comparison of Mr Modi’s comment about super computing wherein he states “Super computer will do super computing and will be the reason for super commitment” and Justin Trudeau’s comment on quantum physics became viral soon after.
There were also many critical comments about Mr Modi’s approach to science and his penchant of clubbing mythology and science.
Alok Jagdhari says:
[pullquote align=”full”]The curious tale of two Prime MinistersOne who understands quantum computingAnd the other who can’t find his school leaving certificate#EducationMatters[/pullquote]
Suchismit Mahapatra says:
[pullquote align=”full”]I am like wow after this. Had read about the great Dinanath Batra and his rubbish of having airplanes (think: garuda viman), artificial insemination (think: birth of karna) and plastic surgery (think: ganesh and the elephant head) in ancient india, who was actually forging what books students would read in schools in gujarat and haryana etc. But I had never imagined our prime minister utter the same words. Our prime minister. The most important person in our country at least theoretically.
I mean my respect for my prime minister knows no bounds anymore. Tacit support of some supposedly sanghi intellectual with a twisted ideology is one thing, blurting out the exact same mythical stories on a world stage in front of dignitaries is a world apart. Everyone at that instant would have been able to judge the depth of the problem facing India. And would be asking themselves. Did India really vote for this man? Seriously.[/pullquote]
Utkarsh Kumar says:
[pullquote align=”full”]Though knowledge of science or physics is no prerequisite for being a leader. We should not judge our leaders in them.
But as a leader, prime minister, and ex-officio chairperson of Indian Science Congress, Supreme Leader should have refrained for the verification of myth without proper knowledge.[/pullquote]
Amitava Mukherjee says:
[pullquote align=”full”]We can laugh on the difference of the two PM. We can say one is educated well versed in technology and will take his country forward where as the other is of course uneducated, uncouth and believer of mythology which can only take us backwards or at the most stagnate.[/pullquote]
Rajiv Sharma says:
[pullquote align=”full”]Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau versus Indian Prime Minister. One shows his flair for scientific temper and Technology & knows a bit about next generation Quantum computing, Watch the other. The less said the better.
Some of us may laugh on this. But actually our head hangs in shame.[/pullquote]
Not so long ago, Trudeau had himself created a controversy of sorts by comparing himself with Mr Modi when he had said “I have more Sikhs in my cabinet than PM Modi”. This time around, his stunning riposte has started yet another comparison of Mr Modi and himself. This is probably going to happen again as the Canadian PM continues to become very popular on social media, a space Mr Modi successfully captured on his way to becoming the PM of India.
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You could follow Alt News posts either via our Facebook page or by following us on Twitter or by subscribing to our E-mail updates.North Korea tops CPJ's list of "10 Most Censored Countries"
New York, May 2, 2006
North Korea
•
•
• Use of the "Big Lie."
• Zero tolerance for negative coverage.
• Cynical disregard for people's welfare.
1. NORTH KOREA
2. BURMA
3. TURKMENISTAN
4. EQUATORIAL GUINEA
5. LIBYA
6. ERITREA
7. CUBA
8. UZBEKISTAN
9. SYRIA
10. BELARUS
--North Koreans live in the most censored country in the world, a new analysis by the Committee to Protect Journalists has found.The world's deepest information void, communisthas no independent journalists, and all radio and television receivers sold in the country are locked to government-specified frequencies.andround out the top five nations on CPJ's list of the "10 Most Censored Countries."In issuing its report to mark World Press Freedom Day on May 3, CPJ called state-sponsored censorship one of the most urgent threats facing journalists worldwide. CPJ studied press freedom conditions in dozens of countries around the world to assess the access people have to independent information and the methods leaders use to stifle the news.CPJ regional staff used their extensive knowledge of local press conditions and applied a rigorous set of criteria to determine the rankings of the most censored list. The criteria included state control of all media, the existence of formal censorship regulations, the use by the state of violence, imprisonment and harassment against journalists, jamming of foreign news broadcasts, and restrictions on private Internet access.The other countries on the list areand"People in these countries are virtually isolated from the rest of the world by authoritarian rulers who muzzle the media and keep a chokehold on information through restrictive laws, fear, and intimidation," said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper.Patterns that emerge from CPJ's analysis include:Total control.Print and electronic media in all 10 countries are under heavy state control or influence. Some countries allow a few privately owned outlets to operate but most of these are in the hands of regime loyalists. In, there are no independent broadcast or print media, an anachronism even by Middle East standards.has one private broadcaster; its owner is the president's son. In, citizens risk arrest for listening to the BBC in public.One-man-shows. Most of the countries on CPJ's list are ruled by one man who has remained in power by manipulating the media and rigging any elections that are held. The media foster a cult of personality. On state television in, "President for Life" Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov's golden image is constantly displayed in profile at the bottom of the screen. State-run radio inhas described President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo as "the country's God."In, all "news" is positive. According to the country's rigidly controlled media, North Korea has never suffered famine or poverty, and citizens would willingly sacrifice themselves for their leader. The official Korean Central News Agency said that leader Kim Jong Il is so beloved that after a deadly munitions train explosion in a populated area, people ran into buildings to save the ubiquitous portraits of the "Dear Leader" before they rescued their own family members.In, a government crackdown forced more than a dozen foreign correspondents to flee abroad after they covered a massacre of antigovernment protesters in Andijan in May 2005. Reporters covering opposition toPresident Aleksandr Lukashenko's recent re-election were jailed and charged with crimes such as "hooliganism." In, the government organizes "repudiation acts" for recalcitrant journalists; demonstrators surround the journalist's home and prevent people from coming or going.Governments suppress news of the dangers and hardships faced by their citizens.covered up a famine that affected millions.stifled coverage of the effects of the tsunami that hit the country in December 2004."By any international standard, the practices of these governments are unacceptable," said Cooper. "We call on the leaders of these most censored countries to join the free world by abandoning these restrictive actions and allowing journalists to independently report the news and inform their citizens."Here are summaries of the Most Censored Countries:Kim Jong Il, chairman, National Defense Commission, in power since his father Kim Il Song's death in 1994North Korea has wedded the traditional Confucian ideal of social order to the Stalinist model of an authoritarian communist state to create the world's deepest information void. All domestic radio, television, and newspapers are controlled by the government. Radio and television receivers are locked to government-specified frequencies. Content is supplied almost entirely by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). It serves up a daily diet of fawning coverage of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il and hisofficial engagements. The country's grinding poverty or famines are never mentioned. Only small numbers of foreign journalists are allowed limited access each year, and they must be accompanied by "minders" wherever they go.After a deadly munitions train explosion in April 2004 in Ryongchon near the Chinese border, KCNA reported that citizens displayed the "spirit of guarding the leader with their very lives" by rushing into burning buildings to save portraits of Kim "before searching for their family members or saving their household goods." The international press, meanwhile, was barred from the scene, where more than 150 died and thousands were injured.Than Shwe, who took over as chairman of the military junta known as the State Peace and Development Council in 1992 after the resignation of 1988 coup leader General Saw MaungThe junta owns all daily newspapers and radio, along with the country's three television channels. Media dare not hint at, let alone report on, antigovernment sentiments. Burma's few privately owned publications must submit content to the Press Scrutiny Board for approval before publishing; censorship delays mean that none publishes on a daily basis. In 2005, the junta took control of Bagan Cybertech, Burma's main Internet service and satellite-feed provider. Citizens have been arrested for listening to the BBC or Radio Free Asia in public. Entry visa requests by foreign journalists are usually turned down except when the government wants to showcase a political event.An article in the June 4, 2005, edition of New Light of Myanmar (Burma) titled "Have positive attitude in broadcasting news" explains the government's approach to media: "The Myanmar people do not wish to watch, read, or listen to corrupt and lopsided news reports and lies. The Myanmar people even feel loathsome to some local media that are imitating the practice of featuring corrupt and lopsided news and lies." The Voice, a Rangoon-based weekly, was suspended in May 2005 as punishment for an innocuous front-page story about Vietnam's withdrawal from Burma's New Year water festival, which the junta found embarrassing.Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov, elected 1991 and declared President for Life in 1999Niyazov has isolated the country from the rest of the world and created a cult of personality declaring himself "Turkmenbashi," father of the Turkmen. The state owns all domestic media and Niyazov's administration controls them by appointing editors and censoring content. Niyazov personally approves the front-page content of the major dailies, which always include a prominent picture of him. In 2005, the state closed all libraries except for one that houses the president's books, and banned the importation of foreign publications. The state media heap fulsome praise on Niyazov as they ignore important stories on AIDS, prostitution, unemployment, poverty, crime, and drugs. A handful of local and foreign correspondents work for foreign--primarily Russian--news agencies, but their freedom to report is minimal.State television displays a constant, golden profile of Niyazov at the bottom of the screen. Newscasters begin each broadcast with a pledge that their tongues will shrivel if their reports ever slander the country, the flag, or the president.President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in power since a coup in 1979Criticism of Obiang's brutal regime is not tolerated in the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa. All broadcast media are state-owned, except for RTV-Asonga, the private radio and television network owned by the president's son, Teodorino Obiang Nguema. A handful of private newspapers officially exist but rarely publish due to financial and political pressure. An exiled press freedom group ASOLPEGE-Libre says the only publication that appears regularly is a pro-government magazine published in Spain and financed by advertising revenue from companies operating in Equatorial Guinea, "mainly North American oil companies." The group says the government has forced all private companies to pay for advertising spots on state broadcast media. It describes state broadcasters as "pure governmental instruments in the service of the dictatorship, dedicated uniquely and exclusively to political narcissism and the ideological propaganda of the regime in place." The U.S. State Department reported in 2005 that foreign celebrity and sports publications were available for sale but no newspapers, and that there were no bookstores or newsstands. Foreign correspondents have been denied visas or expelled without official explanation.State-run Radio Malabo broadcasts songs warning citizens that they will be crushed if they speak against the regime. During parliamentary elections in 2004, state media called opposition activists "enemies" of the state. State radio has described Obiang as "the country's God" who has all power over men and things.Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, unchallenged in power since a bloodless 1969 coup.Libya's media are the most tightly controlled in the Arab world. The government owns and controls all print and broadcast media, an anachronism even by regional standards. The media dutifully reflect state policies and do not allow news or views critical of Qaddafi or the government. Satellite television and the Internet are available, but the government blocks undesirable political Web sites. The Internet is one of the few avenues for independent writers and journalists, but the risks are exceedingly high. Dayf al-Ghazal al-Shuhaibi, who wrote for London-based opposition Web sites, was found shot in the head in Benghazi last year. No one has been charged with the murder, which has sent an unmistakable message to would-be critics. In addition, Internet writer Abdel Razek al-Mansouri was jailed in reprisal for online writings critical of the government.In 1977, Qaddafi laid out his ideas for Libya's cultural revolution in The Green Book. On the press he wrote, "The press is a means of expression for society: it is not a means of expression for private individuals or corporate bodies. Therefore, logically and democratically, it should not belong to either one of them."President: Isaias Afewerki, elected by the national assembly in 1993Eritrea is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa without a single private media outlet. More than four years after a vicious crackdown shuttered a fledgling independent press, the government's repressive policies have left the tiny Horn of Africa nation largely hidden from international scrutiny and with almost no local access to independent information. A privileged few have access to the Internet. The handful of foreign correspondents in the capital, Asmara, are subject to intensive monitoring by authorities.At least 15 journalists have been jailed or otherwise deprived of their liberty. Most are held incommunicado in secret detention centers. When CPJ sought information about the imprisoned journalists in fall 2005, Information Minister Ali Abdou told Agence France-Presse, "It's up to us what, why, when, and where we do things."President Fidel Castro, who has run a one-party state since seizing power in a 1959 revolutionThe Cuban constitution grants the Communist Party the right to control the press; it recognizes "freedom of speech and the press in accordance with the goals of the socialist society." The government owns and controls all media outlets and restricts Internet access. News is carried on four television channels, two news agencies, dozens of radio stations, at least four news Web sites, and three main newspapers representing the views of the Communist Party and other mass organizations controlled by the government.The media operate under the supervision of the Communist Party's Department of Revolutionary Orientation, which develops and coordinates propaganda strategies. Cuba remains one of the world's leading jailers of journalists, second only to China, with 24 independent reporters behind bars. Those who try to work as independent reporters are harassed, detained, threatened with prosecution or jail, or barred from traveling. A small number of foreign correspondents report from Havana but Cubans do not see their reports. Officials grant visas to foreign journalists selectively, often excluding those from outlets deemed unfriendly.The government organizes demonstrations known as "repudiation acts" outside the homes of independent journalists. Government supporters congregate around the homes, intimidate those inside and prevent them from leaving or receiving visitors.President Islam Karimov, elected 1991; presidential term extended by referendums in 1995 and again in 2002.Karimov has re-established a Soviet-style dictatorship that relies on brutal political intimidation to silence journalists, human rights activists, and the political opposition. Karimov's regime uses an informal system of state censorship to prevent the domestic media from reporting on widespread police torture, poverty, and an Islamicopposition movement. Uzbekistan has also distinguished itself among the former Soviet republics as the leading jailer of journalists, with six behind bars at the end of 2005.After troops killed hundreds of antigovernment protesters in the city of Andijan in May 2005, Karimov's regime cracked down on foreign media. The BBC, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Institute for War & Peace Reporting were forced to close their Tashkent bureaus. A dozen foreign correspondents and local reporters working for foreign media had to flee the country.President Bashar al-Assad, who took over upon his father's death in 2000The media are under heavy state control and influence. Some newspapers and broadcast outlets are in private hands but are owned by regime loyalists, or are barred from disseminating political content. Some private and party newspapers offer mild criticism of some government policies or the Baath party, but they are largely toothless. State papers and broadcasters remain unflinchingly supportive of the regime. The press law maps out an array of restrictions against the media, including a requirement that periodicals obtain licenses from the prime minister, who can deny any application not in the "public interest." The regime has harassed critics through arrests or warnings.State repression has spawned newspapers so bland that even a top government official, the late Interior Minister Ghazi Kenaan, once called Syria's news coverage "unreadable." Despite efforts to privatize the press, newspapers that overstep the mark in their criticism are shut down or their editions confiscated.President Aleksandr Lukashenko, elected 1994; last re-elected in March 2006 in polls the European Union called "deeply flawed."Most broadcast and print outlets are owned by the government, and they are effusive in their praise of Lukashenko. Nominally independent radio and television stations avoid politically sensitive subjects. The state has shuttered dozens of independent newspapers in recent years, and the few that remain have been subjected to a government onslaught: Lukashenko's administration has pressured state printing houses not to print critical newspapers, barred the post office and state newspaper distributor from distributing independent publications, seized entire press runs of independent newspapers, and set prison penalties of up to five years for criticizing the president.More than two dozen domestic and foreign journalists were jailed during the tumultuous presidential campaign, most while covering antigovernment rallies staged after the vote. Reporters were often charged with "hooliganism" for being at the rallies.CPJ staff judged countries according to 17 benchmarks. CPJ established the criteria after consultation with experts in the fields of press freedom, human rights, and media law. In order to appear on this list, countries had to meet at least nine of the 17 criteria. The benchmarks included: absence of independent media; existence of formal censorship regulations; state control of all media; state-sponsored violence against journalists; jamming of foreign news broadcasts; restrictions on Internet access; limits on journalists' mobility; interference in the production and distribution of publications; and existence of laws forbidding criticism.Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
In the Hasidic enclave of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, there are many things that women can’t or just don’t do: Be counted as one of the 10 people needed to make up a minyan, or prayer quorum. Walk around in pants. But vote?
According to the bylaws of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, a social service agency and community pillar that has received millions of dollars in government grants over the years, only those who meet the following requirements can vote for its leadership:
Jewish and religiously observant residents of Crown Heights
Married, previously married or at least 30 years old
Male
Now Eliyahu Federman, a Crown Heights resident and recent law school graduate, is challenging that last requirement, saying he believes it to be unconstitutional.
In Crown Heights, religion and life are inextricably interwoven. But the council itself is not a religious organization, Mr. Federman argues. And in 2008, according to the most recent tax filings available, the council received $1.9 million in government grants.
“Women, especially widows and divorcees, are gravely impacted by decisions regarding the distribution of food stamps, housing subsidies and other vital social services” that the council handles, Mr. Federman, 26, wrote in an April 7 letter to the council and the local rabbinical court. “It should hurt us to see religion being misapplied to wrongfully subjugate women in a context that has no basis under Jewish law and is probably unconstitutional.”
Since Mr. Federman first raised the issue, in 2009, he has heard several explanations for the policy: that voting is immodest, that this is how it’s always been done — and that allotting women votes could sow discord among married couples, working against the ideal of “Shalom Bayit,” or marital tranquillity.
Mr. Federman argues that women are encouraged to vote in secular elections — and that true marital harmony comes from “a couple appreciating and accepting each other’s viewpoints.”
“If there is one vote per household, then the husband and wife have to fight over that one vote!” he wrote. “If they each get a vote, then let them vote for whomever they each want. It’s just common sense.”
His wife, Shainy, 21, agrees, saying, “Judaism empowers women to have a voice.”
Rabbi Eli Cohen, the council’s executive director, said the entire structure of the council was being reconsidered, with the voting policy “definitely in the mix of issues.” The next election is scheduled for the summer of 2013.
In an e-mail to Mr. Federman on April 6, Isaac Tamir, a lawyer known as Zaki who is the council’s chairman, mentioned the possibility of a “hybrid vote” on community matters, with one vote per household — giving a say to widows and unmarried women over 30. In a telephone interview, Mr. Tamir said the council’s bylaws were being reworked, and that he was confident that all adult women would be able to vote in the next election. Mr. Federman said that would be welcome news — which he looked forward to seeing in writing.
Marc D. Stern, the associate general counsel at the American Jewish Committee, said it was not at all clear whether the voting policy was unconstitutional, and that the only way to find out would be to litigate it.
“There is a crazy quilt pattern of anti-discrimination provisions and funding provisions,” said Mr. Stern, a lawyer who has specialized in religious liberty and civil rights for more than 30 years. “They are in a constitutional gray area. The government is in a constitutional gray area.” Were government financing not involved, he said, the policy would be “plainly legal.”
On the one hand, he said, the Supreme Court has in several cases ruled that organizations receiving most of their money from the government should not be held to the same standards as government agencies on matters including hiring and firing — so “merely having taken government money doesn’t make it unconstitutional for them to discriminate.”
On the other hand: “If the government, by some neutral rule, decided it wasn’t going to fund organizations whose boards were picked in a discriminatory way, that would probably pass constitutional muster.” Such a decision, however, would have major ramifications for the debate over faith-based initiatives.
Mr. Federman said he decided to speak with The New York Times only after his behind-the-scenes efforts were unsuccessful, saying, “I believe this discussion belongs in the public forum, not behind closed doors.”
“The topic of women’s suffrage in Crown Heights is apropos considering that Passover, a celebration of liberation from slavery, is around the corner,” he said. “According to tradition, the women are credited for redeeming the Jewish people from slavery by defying Pharaoh’s orders to kill their newborn children.”KABUL, Afghanistan — Taliban gunmen and a suicide bomber unleashed a wave of violence in the capital and beyond on Saturday, killing six Afghan soldiers aboard a Kabul bus, assassinating a Supreme Court official and shooting to death 12 men working to clear land mines in Helmand Province.
The attacks underscored what has been an exceptionally violent fall in Afghanistan, a departure from past years when violence has typically slowed during the cold months. Recent attacks have also heightened feelings of fear and uncertainty permeating the capital, as the new administration of President Ashraf Ghani struggles to appoint a cabinet.
In the last month, insurgents have claimed responsibility for attacks during a performance at an elite Kabul high school, on a British Embassy vehicle, on the compound of an aid group and against a prominent member of Parliament. Perhaps most unsettling, a suicide bomber infiltrated the Kabul police chief’s heavily fortified offices just over a month ago in an attempt to assassinate him. That attack, which killed another police official, was the first in the wave of assaults that have left Kabul feeling under siege.
Saturday’s attack on the soldiers, which occurred around 4 p.m. in southwest Kabul, only amplified that feeling. Six soldiers on the bus were killed and 10 were wounded by a suicide bomber. Details about civilian casualties were not immediately available. It was the second targeted attack against Afghan soldiers in Kabul within a week. Two days earlier, five soldiers were killed in a similar fashion.AutoGuide.com
With a claimed 261-mpg rating, the Volkswagen XL1 is the most fuel efficient car in the world while sporting a design like no other car on the road today.
The production model of the XL1 made its official debut at the 2013 Geneva Motor Show today, with a fuel consumption of 0.9 liters per 100 km. According to the German automaker, the two-seater hybrid can be driven up to 31 miles in pure electric mode. It barely tips the scales at over 1,750 pounds and has a drag coefficient of just 0.189, and a low center of gravity.
SEE ALSO: 2013 Geneva Motor Show Coverage
The XL1 is powered by a 47-hp, two-cylinder turbo-diesel engine paired with a 27 hp (20 kW) electric motor. All the power is sent through a seven-speed, dual-clutch transmission and can accelerate to 62 mph in 12.7 seconds.
With a side-by-side seating position, this is not (we reapeat, NOT) a concept car. VW will make just 250 models with a price rumored to be close to $100,000.
GALLERY: Volkswagen XL1
GALLERY: Volkswagen XL1
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Discuss this story at VWForum.comFor me, the Liberal Democrats have always been about reducing the inequality that poisons our society, that holds people back from opportunities.
We have always talked about it, but perhaps in the last few years the language has been a bit different. I was really chuffed when Vince talked about the need to tackle inequality so explicitly in his leadership manifesto. Today, his first major speech since becoming leader is on this issue and you can watch a clip here.
The full text of the speech is below. It’s thoughtful, serious stuff as you would expect.
Yes, under his leadership we’ll be looking for the exit from Brexit, but our main mission as a party is to do something about this inequality. That works for me.
Politicians talk at length about fairness and unfairness. Verbal confetti. Bland. Something almost everyone can relate to emotionally. And it can be defined in so many different ways that it can be applied in almost every situation, for about every audience. Inequality narrows the subject down a bit but, again, has a wide range of definitions and meanings.
Putting aside the health warnings and the academic qualifications there is however, in the UK in 2017, something stirring around the idea of inequality: something new and worrying. It starts from the observation, or the belief, that inequalities of income, wealth and opportunity, between classes, regions and generations, are getting worse; that Britain is becoming relatively as well as absolutely unequal when we look at comparable countries, especially in Europe; and that this inequality is not merely offensive to the sensibilities of progressive minded folk but is doing serious damage to the wider society and economy.
Sometimes an event crystallises this feeling. The Grenfell Tower disaster wasn’t just a horrific accident with a large loss of life but illustrates in a graphic way that relatively poor people were not listened to by those in authority and attracted a casual approach to life threatening risk. And close by geographically, but light years away socially and economically, lived London’s super-rich.
What motivates me personally and politically is the way this this new Britain contrasts with the more egalitarian culture and mobile society that I grew up with: parents who progressed in 20 years from being factory workers living in a terraced house with an outside loo to being part of the professional class living in a detached house; from parents who left school at 15 progressing though ‘night school’ to a son at an elite university. There were of course ‘posh’ people in post-war Britain but they were few and largely inconspicuous; and there were poor people on the council estates but they were distant relatives or friends and we played and watched football together. A provincial British city, even today, does not have the jarring contrasts of London; but my sense is that even there, big differences in living standards and opportunities have opened up.
The Evidence
It is possible to argue interminably about definitions. There are however some trends that are strong.
First, in the UK, gross real earnings of the top 10% of full-time workers doubled between 1978 and 2008; the median grew by 60% and the lowest 10% by 25%. After the financial crisis, overall gross real earnings fell by 8% over the next five years; have barely recovered to the 2008 level; and are now falling again. The combination of absolute decline following generations of widening inequality explains much of the current sense of malaise and unfairness.
Second, the standard measure of income inequality. The Gini coefficient, shows Britain’s post-tax inequality, rising strongly in the 1980’s (from 28% in 1978 to 41% in 1990) though it has stabilised a little since (to around 37%). But from having been one of the more egalitarian developed countries, the UK is now one of the least, well behind Scandinavia and also behind Germany and France. The Scandinavian comparison is telling in that, pre-tax incomes there, are significantly more unequal than in the UK but, after tax and benefits much less. We are less unequal than the US, post-Communist Russia, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa though that isn’t a very high bar.
Third, and in common with other countries, there has been an extraordinary concentration of rewards in the hands of the top 1%, and within that group, the top 0.10%. The top 1% consists of roughly half a million individuals with an income of just over £150,000: mostly middle aged men in financial services and senior management or the upper reaches of professions like law and medicine. The super-rich – the 0.10%- are roughly 50,000 people earning £1 million or more a year. This group consists on the one hand of people with unique talents in sport and entertainment and on the other of business executives and investment bankers on large bonuses. Public attitudes seem to differ considerably as between those groups which suggests that the issue is not inequality as such as the route to it. When Arsenal or Tottenham football players complain about being underpaid on £200,000 a week the fans’ reaction is less one of anger at the players as at their managers |
, allegedly for helping a friend to elope with her lover.
Zeenat's husband Hasan told local TV station Geo News that the pair had eloped, but he had reluctantly allowed her to return to her family home after they promised they would hold a celebration and not harm her.
He said: "After living with me for four days following our marriage, her family contacted us and promised they would throw us a proper wedding party after eight days then we could live together.
"Zeenat was unwilling to go back to her home and told me that she would be killed by her family but later agreed when one of her uncles guaranteed her safety.
"After two days, she called me and said that her family had gone back on their word and asked me to come get her, but I told her to wait for the promised eight days. Then, she was killed."
Ashraf, the police official, said Perveen and other family members had confessed to the crime and that police had seized kerosene oil from the scene.
Another senior police official confirmed the details of the killing.
Hundreds of women are murdered by their relatives in Pakistan each year on the pretext of defending what is seen as family honour.
"A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness" -- a film telling the story of a rare survivor of an attempted honour killing -- won an Oscar for best documentary short in February.
Amid publicity for the film, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif vowed to eradicate the ‘evil’ of honour killings but no fresh legislation has been tabled since then.“It is fifty-one years since we first met, and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women,” Susan B. Anthony wrote her friend Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1902.
The letter, in honor of Stanton’s eighty-seventh birthday, was printed in Pearson’s Magazine. It continued: “We little dreamed when we began this contest, optimistic with the hope and buoyancy of youth, that half a century later we would be compelled to leave the finish of the battle to another generation of women. But our hearts are filled with joy to know that they enter upon this task equipped with a college education, with business experience, with the fully admitted right to speak in public—all of which were denied to women fifty years ago. They have practically one point to gain—the suffrage; we had all.”
Anthony’s reflections reveal a friendship that was public and political but also private and genuine. From their activist beginnings in the antislavery and temperance movements to their leadership of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the two women—Anthony as an on-the-ground organizer and strategist and Stanton as a writer, thinker, and commentator—were an inseparable force.
The women had first met in 1851 when Anthony traveled to an antislavery meeting in Seneca Falls, New York, where Stanton had organized the first national woman’s rights convention there in 1848. In remembering the day Amelia Bloomer introduced them on a street corner, Stanton said, “There she stood with her good, earnest face and genial smile, dressed in gray delaine, hat and all the same color, relieved with pale blue ribbons, the perfection of neatness and sobriety. I liked her thoroughly, and why I did not at once invite her home with me to dinner, I do not know.”
Both women were in their thirties: Anthony had been teaching, and Stanton was married to abolitionist Henry B. Stanton. Their involvement in the antislavery movement had cultivated a shared interest in broader equality issues, and each was passionate about the right of women to participate in the governing process and have control over their own lives. Anthony was inspired by Stanton’s vision for advancing women, and Anthony’s organizing skills were soon apparent to Stanton, who had young children and could not travel regularly. Together, they launched a national woman’s suffrage movement, published the newspaper The Revolution, and lectured, lobbied, and protested for equal rights.
Remembering their earlier struggles, Anthony closed her letter: “And we, dear old friend, shall move on the next sphere of existence—higher and larger, we cannot fail to believe, and one where women will not be placed in an inferior position, but will be welcomed on a plane of perfect intellectual and spiritual equality.” The sentiment was timelier than anyone expected. Stanton, who had been homebound and in ill health but still publishing commentaries, died before the letter was published on October 26, 1902, two-and-a-half weeks before her birthday.
In her letter, Anthony sounds optimistic, despite her lament that only in death will they experience equality. She seems confident in the suffrage movement’s new leaders. There is a sense that things can only move forward for women.
In fact, the previous five years had tested the two women’s faith in progress. As they were handing over the reins to a new generation of suffragists, America went to war with Spain, gained control of new island territories, and set up governments that limited women’s rights. On the mainland, a post-Reconstruction backlash against African-American civil rights was growing stronger in the South. By the turn of the century, Anthony and Stanton worried the fight for equality was moving backward. Overall, voting rights for anyone other than white men were becoming more restricted, not less. Women’s gains in the workplace—as public school teachers, for instance—were also under fire. And the elder suffragists weren’t sure their young coworkers understood the threat.
The sixth and final volume of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony Papers Project, An Awful Hush, 1895–1906, offers an intimate look at how Stanton and Anthony confronted these issues at the end of their lives. Through a selection of personal letters, articles, and other papers, the book documents their last political project together and their concerns about the future of the suffrage movement. The book also shows the tenacity with which the two worked until their deaths and how each still depended on the other to debate new ideas and spearhead action. Their letters to each other reveal what made the partnership work: unfailing respect for each other, scathing honesty when one thought the other was wrong, and a commitment to take on challenges as a team.
One such challenge came in early 1896, when delegates at the NAWSA convention passed a resolution to denounce Stanton’s two-volume work The Woman’s Bible, a collection of commentaries by Stanton and others on religion and women’s subjugation. In the controversial best-seller, Stanton analyzed scripture and rebutted those who used the Bible to justify denying women rights. Some more conservative members of the suffrage association disapproved of the book, and others thought it detracted from their suffrage goal.
At the time, Anthony was president of the association, having succeeded Stanton four years earlier. She had no desire to champion Stanton’s Bible and saw no reason for the convention to take up the issue. “Anthony did not like the book, but she certainly agreed with Stanton on religion,” says Ann D. Gordon, editor of the Papers project and research professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University. Anthony opposed the book on strategic grounds—she felt it was a damaging digression from their suffrage work. But in a letter to Stanton, she disparaged those “who voted for this interference with personal rights” of their “co-worker.” She wrote: “No, my dear, instead of my resigning and leaving those half-fledged chickens without any mother, I think it my duty and the duty of yourself and all the liberals to be at the next convention and try to reverse this miserable, narrow action.”
Reaction to The Woman’s Bible, along with poor health, isolated Stanton from the suffrage movement toward the end of her life, but Anthony remained her eyes and ears on the ground. Stanton continued to write, and her unrelenting critiques of religion—and other topics that Anthony felt were tangential to suffrage—fueled an ongoing disagreement between them. “How many topics can you associate with suffrage and still win? Susan B. Anthony almost always wanted a clean ticket,” Gordon says.
Take a letter Anthony sent Stanton from the 1896 California campaign for suffrage, which was ultimately unsuccessful: “You say ‘women must be emancipated from their superstitions before enfranchisement will be of any benefit,’ and I say just the reverse, that women must be enfranchised before they can be emancipated from their superstitions.” Superstition, in this case, referred to women’s irrational belief in oppressive religion. Anthony believed that when women could vote and be participants in civic society, other types of “emancipation” would follow. “Women would be no more superstitious today than men, if they had been men’s political and business equals and gone outside the four walls of home and the other four of the church into the great world, and come in contact with and discussed men and measures on the plane of this mundane sphere, instead of living in the air with Jesus and the angels,” she argued.
Determined to preserve that “clean ticket,” Anthony refused to introduce any other issues into the California campaign. She had finally succeeded in convincing the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to stay out, she reported. “Now, for heaven’s sake, don’t you propose a ‘Bible invasion,’” she wrote Stanton. “I shall not circulate your ‘Bible’ literature a particle more than Frances Willard’s prohibition literature.”
“People see a fight and assume they’re not getting along,” Gordon says. “I don’t think these two ever gave up on each other.” Anthony wrote in another letter from California, “Oh how I have longed for you at my side to put into your matchless sentences the words that wait the saying—none of the young women are good—clear, crisp writers.... the two of us together being an invincible team—I feel every day—like Sampson shorn of his locks—without you.”
Anthony relied on Stanton’s “matchless sentences,” and Stanton knew Anthony would keep things moving and focused. While preparing for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, Anthony wrote Stanton: “I hope you are concentrating your every thought on the addresses which you wish to make to go down to history as your final and most complete utterances on the question of the enfranchisement of women. I wish it were possible for me to be in two places and do two things at once. If it were, I should certainly be with you and keep you stirred up,” she wrote. “If possible, you should overtop and surpass anything and everything you have written or spoken before. Now my dear, this is positively the last time I am ever going to put you on the rack and torture you to make the speech or the speeches of your life.”
In the end, Stanton’s poor health—including near blindness—kept her from attending the February 1898 celebration in Washington, D.C., but she wrote an address that suffrage leader Clara Colby read. Toward the end of the speech, Stanton asserted: “The suffrage question is practically conceded. With full suffrage in four States, municipal suffrage in another, and school suffrage in half the States of the Union... the opposition with their flimsy protests and platitudes are wandering in fields where long ago the harvests were gathered and garnered.”
Later that year, however, a confluence of events seemed to call Stanton’s assertion into question. At its 1898 convention, the American Federation of Labor—historically a backer of woman’s suffrage—heard a resolution that called on Congress to remove all women from government jobs and set a precedent for keeping women in the home. Delegates shot it down, but its mere introduction was disconcerting. The Chicago and Northwestern Railroad adopted a new policy of “promoting from within,” and, to avoid having women in management, fired many female employees. A commission led by University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper to study Chicago’s public schools claimed that pay raises won by the teachers’ union for the majority female workforce were unearned. Harper said men should be paid more because they showed “superior physical endurance,” and he advocated promoting men to better paid positions over women.
All this followed the short Spanish-American War, which resulted in U.S. control of islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. At the same time, the United States annexed the sugar-rich Hawai’ian Islands after helping to take down the monarchy. Congress was deciding what type of governance to foist on the territories. On the mainland, Jim Crow legislation was in full swing in the South. In this same decade, the Supreme Court had affirmed “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, and Southern states had begun passing laws to limit black men’s suffrage. The country’s political language was thick with references to race and sex, writes Gordon. “War and empire complicated the whole nation’s understanding of what it meant to talk about the consent of the governed.”
To Stanton and Anthony, one thing was clear: The country was in danger of regressing. While women in some states were winning elections for municipal office, the proposed constitution for Hawai’i was more discriminatory than any state’s. Not only were women denied voting rights, they were banned from holding public office. Stanton and Anthony thought this set a dangerous precedent for suffrage. “They look at this [and think,] ‘It’s like my whole adult life has been erased,’” Gordon says.
Younger suffragists didn’t seem to get it. Anthony was appalled that her potential successors had nothing to say. “I really believe I shall explode if some of you young women don’t wake up.... Do come into the living present & work to save us from any more barbaric male governments,” she wrote one activist. “Our souls ought to be on fire—& yet no one seems awake to the threatening signs of the times,” she wrote to another.
Of course, she could count on Stanton to be on fire. “The old Slave Ocrats are bound to push out every man & woman of color from the enjoyment of civil rights,” Anthony wrote her friend. Every day she saw another instance of “colorphobia & sexphobia” that she thought Stanton should write about. Yet she questioned Stanton’s insistence that religion was the root of discrimination: “On every hand American civilization—which we are introducing into Isles of the Atlantic & Pacific—is putting its heel on the head of the negro race—Now this barbarism does not grow out of ancient Jewish Bibles—but out of our own sordid meanness!! and the like of you ought to stop hitting poor old St Paul... Nobody does right or wrong because Saint Paul [tells] them to—but because of their own black “true inwardness”—The trouble is in ourselves to day—not in men or books of thousands of years ago.” She chided Stanton: “I do wish you could centre your big brain on the crimes we ourselves as a people are responsible for—to charge our offenses to false books or false interpretations—is but a way of seeking a “refuge of lies.” Anthony signed off “lovingly yours.”
For all their debate, the two women always agreed on the basics. So they teamed up for a last political project with the proposed Hawai’ian constitution in their crosshairs. In their 1899 open letter to Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, who had previously been a supporter of woman’s suffrage, they wrote: “The women of Hawaii should be accorded the highest position occupied by any in the United States.... By limiting all official positions to ‘male’ citizens there is a new depth to women’s degradation we of the States have not yet experienced.”
Today, many historians believe Stanton and Anthony’s advocacy amounts to collaboration with the imperial project, writes Gordon, but the two women saw it as good political strategy, she says. They operated on the conviction that “my Congress should not treat women this way.” Their “Petition for the Women of Hawaii,” which ran in The Sun in New York and other national publications, read: “As in four States of the Union women now enjoy civil and political equality, to create a male oligarchy, by restricting the right to vote and hold office to men, would be to ignore all the steps of progress made during the last fifty years and reestablish at the very dawn of the new century a government based upon the invidious distinctions of sex, which have ever blocked the way to a higher civilization.”
They encouraged women to sign and send the petition to Congress, noting, “When the emancipation of black men was under discussion the Women’s Loyal League sent 400,000 petitions to Congress in favor of that measure. Shall we do less for the political freedom of the women of Hawaii?”
In the end, Hawai’i’s new government was instituted as written. But Stanton and Anthony had weathered numerous defeats together—for them, it was all part of a long revolution. The next year, in 1900, Anthony retired as president of NAWSA, though she would continue to crisscross the country, agitating. On the occasion of her eightieth birthday that year, Stanton wrote her a poem that ran in national newspapers. She remembered their first meeting and instant inseparability: “We’ve traveled West, years together, \ Day and night, in stormy weather.” Stanton remembered “sleighs, ox-carts, and coaches, \ Besieged with bugs, and roaches.” She closed the poem looking forward:AT&T and Verizon have been fighting to preserve 4Mbps as the nation’s definition of “broadband,” saying the Federal Communications Commission should abandon plans to raise the minimum to 10Mbps.
The companies also argue now that the FCC should not consider data caps when deciding whether an Internet service qualifies as broadband.
Verizon does not impose any caps on its home Internet service. AT&T advertises 150GB and 250GB monthly limits with financial penalties when consumers use more than that. While AT&T sends notices to customers about heavy usage, it generally hasn’t enforced the financial penalties.
Still, the companies want the ability to charge heavy broadband users extra in the future, just as they do today with their cellular offerings. In filings with the FCC posted on the commission’s website yesterday, AT&T and Verizon object to proposals by Netflix and others that would include data caps in the FCC’s definition of broadband. The definition affects the FCC’s analysis of nationwide broadband deployment, and companies that accept Universal Service funds when building networks in rural areas must match the standard.
“Despite Netflix’s assertion that data usage thresholds should be accounted for in the Commission’s deployment benchmarks, the Commission should not utilize pricing plans in its determination of whether advanced capabilities have been deployed to all Americans,” AT&T wrote. “As an initial matter, AT&T is not aware of tiered data plans that actually limit the amount of data a customer can use. Rather, to the extent providers use tiered data plans, those plans attach different prices to different buckets of data and require that customers who exceed the allowance associated with their chosen plan to pay for their additional usage. In this respect, tiered data plans are no different from any other pricing model that relates charges to usage.”
The FCC's proposal to raise the minimum broadband definition asked the public to comment on whether the FCC should also "consider latency and data usage allowances as additional core characteristics of advanced telecommunications capability."
In response, Netflix argued that the commission’s “revised benchmark also should account for data caps and other terms of service that may restrict broadband use even when a broadband connection is technically capable of achieving minimum threshold speeds.” Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge made similar arguments.
“Public Knowledge—whose agenda here and in other proceedings to impose heavy regulation on broadband depends on proving market failures—argues that usage-based billing may create disincentives for consumers to use broadband and for providers to invest in broadband networks, and may undermine broadband competition," Verizon wrote.
On the contrary, usage caps "encourage all users to make efficient use of finite network resources," Verizon argued. (In fact, a government survey of Internet service providers found that congestion is not a problem for wireline ISPs, but usage-based pricing can boost revenue.)
Usage-based pricing “provides a way for consumers who are not heavy users to keep their costs down” and “increases incentives to invest in broadband networks,” Verizon further wrote. “Because such pricing helps ensure a superior broadband experience for most consumers, it better enables providers to win and retain subscribers, thereby generating the revenue necessary to make broadband investments in the first place. By contrast, rate regulation, such as through restricting usage-based pricing, would suppress investment and risk undermining the goals of Section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act].”
AT&T also said the FCC should not consider latency in its broadband analysis, arguing that the commission’s “most recent Measuring Broadband America report demonstrated that latency is not a critical issue because consumers generally have access to broadband services that exceed the latency requirements necessary for VoIP.”
Comcast, which is enforcing data limits in some parts of its territory before an anticipated nationwide rollout, has not submitted comments on the FCC proceeding. But the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, of which Comcast is a member, argued that the FCC should keep its broadband definition at 4Mbps and said the commission should not set latency or usage thresholds.
A trade group representing wireless Internet service providers also objected to raising the minimum broadband definition above 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream.
The FCC filings are available under proceeding 14-126.
The Internet Association, which includes Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, reddit, Netflix, Twitter, Yahoo, and others, argued that data caps should be monitored because they "effectively ration consumer use of broadband." The group also urged the commission to examine restrictions that prevent certain set-top boxes from accessing online services.
"The Commission and the Department of Justice have recognized that MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors] have a vested interest in protecting their own video services and, as a consequence, often restrict competitive set-top equipment from operating on or through their systems, while often closing to third-party applications the few devices that are operable," the group wrote. "These practices inhibit consumer uptake of third-party devices and services, which in turn limits deployment of third-party content. For example, Comcast does not allow its subscribers to access HBO Go through the popular Roku device."Ryan Spilborghs is returning to the Rockies. Not as a player but as a TV broadcaster.
A fan favorite and key member of the 2007 World Series team, Spilborghs will join Root Sports as part of the Rockies’ pregame and postgame shows.
“It was an obvious next step in my career,” Spilborghs wrote, in part, on a blog for denverpost.com explaining his decision to retire. “It’s funny when you do things … you get presented with more opportunities, and it feels right pursuing them.”
Root Sports is expected to announce its full baseball talent lineup at a later date.
The decision wasn’t easy for Spilborghs. He considered resuming his career with the Rockies on a minor-league contract, but he couldn’t pass up this opportunity. He played last year for Japan’s Seibu Lions, chronicling his experience for The Denver Post in a series of popular blogs.
Spilborghs, 34, has a variety of media experience, including appearing in car commercials and hosting “Spillin’ The Beans,” a comedy short for the Rockies’ website.
Spilborghs played seven seasons with the Rockies, last in 2011, hitting.272 with a.345 on-base percentage, 42 home runs and 218 RBIs.
“We are very pleased to announce the addition of ‘Spilly’ to our Root Sports telecasts,” said Root Sports general manager David Woodman. “His background as a player, as well as his charismatic personality, add a new energy and insider focus to our Colorado Rockies broadcasts.”
Troy E. Renck: trenck@denverpost.com or twitter.com/troyrenckSHELBY, N.C. (Feb. 16, 2017) – Beaver Motorsports today announced its debut in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. Led by veteran team owner Mark Beaver, Beaver Motorsports will field the No. 50 Chevrolet full time in 2017 with driver Travis Kvapil.
Beaver Motorsports will kick off its 2017 campaign at Daytona International Speedway in the NextEra Energy Resources 250, with the Florida Lottery as the primary sponsor for the No. 50 Chevrolet.
“We are excited for Daytona with Travis and the Florida Lottery," said Mark Beaver. "There are a lot of good things happening right now and with the great people working at Beaver Motorsports, I’m looking forward to a great season in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series.”
Travis Kvapil, the 2003 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series champion, has served as the primary driver for Mark Beaver for the past two years, with a partial season in 2014. Kvapil collected a top-five finish last year at Daytona.
“I can’t wait to be back on the track at Daytona for Beaver Motorsports and the Florida Lottery," said Kvapil. “I can’t thank the Florida Lottery enough for being part of the team at Daytona. Daytona is always fun and every team out there has a chance to win. It is cool to see how well a small team with an even smaller budget can run well at the super speedways.”
Since 1988, the Florida Lottery has contributed more than $30 billion to education. Profits from all Lottery games are transferred to the Educational Enhancement Trust Fund. The Florida Legislature appropriates those funds with input from the Florida Department of Education. Florida’s state universities and colleges have also benefited, receiving a combined total of more than $7.8 billion since the Lottery’s inception.
The NASCAR Camping World Truck Series NextEra Resources 250 at Daytona International Speedway will take place Friday, Feb. 24 at 7:30 p.m. ET. Be sure to catch the action on FS1, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Ch. 90 and MRN.Rotterdam police are trying to develop a portable scanner which will allow them to see through people’s clothing and look for concealed weapons, the NRC reports on Friday.
The force has been given a €500,000 government grant to develop the mobile weapons detector, which would use similar technology to the scanners being introduced at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, the paper says.
The aim is to develop a prototype ready for production within three years.
The paper bases its claim on a confidential document which suggests the scanner could first be used as an alternative to random body searches in high risk areas. The mobile detector would enable the search to be carried out more quickly and would only be used on people suspected of carrying concealed weapons, police spokesman Paul De Kruijf told the paper.
The document also mentions the possibility of carrying out long-distance scans and mass scans on crowds at events such as football matches. In addition, the scan could be combined with a sniffer detector which would analyse an ‘air sample’ from a suspect for traces of drugs or explosives, the paper says.
Giampiero Gerini, a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology told the paper the technology to develop such scans is now mature. ‘The biggest challenge is making it portable and ensuring it can carry out a scan in seconds,’ the NRC quotes him as saying.Bill and Hillary's Berkeley days
1993: US President Bill Clinton, center, in a picture dated 05 July 1993 in San Francisco and his wife, Hillary, wave to Arkansas delegation at NEA Convention. 1993: US President Bill Clinton, center, in a picture dated 05 July 1993 in San Francisco and his wife, Hillary, wave to Arkansas delegation at NEA Convention. Photo: LUKE FRAZZA/AFP/Getty Images Photo: LUKE FRAZZA/AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 32 Caption Close Bill and Hillary's Berkeley days 1 / 32 Back to Gallery
Bill Clinton's lengthy speech on the second night of the Democratic National Convention, is being credited for its attempt to "humanize" his wife and her history, political and otherwise.
The deep dive into who Hillary Clinton is, as seen through Bill's eyes, was a different look at the Democratic presidential nominee. Not only did the former president mention their courtship, but he went back even further, to Hillary's family and background.
One of the glossed-over sections of the couple's history — other than the most obvious one — is a summer the two spent in Berkeley in 1971. Hillary (then Hillary Rodham) and Bill began dating in the spring of that same year, and during the summer break from Yale Law School, they made the drive to the Bay Area. Hillary was set to be a clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a law firm in Oakland.
Rather than go their separate ways, Bill gave up a chance to work on the presidential campaign for Sen. George McGovern to stay with Hillary at a house on Derby Street.
Hillary's days in Berkeley aren't steeped in activism, as the Daily Cal points out. Instead, portions of both Hillary's and Bill's biographies showcase their burgeoning relationship — and likely the first time the couple formally lived together. The New York Sun called that period the couple's "Berkeley Summer of Love" in a 2007 article.
The time in Berkeley is briefly covered in Hillary's 2003 book, "Living History," and mentions her law firm work in passing. ("I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case.") Most of Hillary's writing on Berkeley focused on more trivial couple stuff, discussing their cooking attempts and trips to "a restaurant in North Beach or a vintage clothing store on Telegraph Avenue" scouted out by Bill. In his biography, "My Life," he also mentioned a Joan Baez concert the couple attended at Stanford.
During that same summer, it was later discovered that Hillary penned a letter to controversial writer Saul Alinsky, who is known for his community organizing (considered extreme, by some measures) and his 1971 book, "Rules for Radicals." Hillary had also written her Wellesley College thesis on Alinsky and his views, and had met with him. The link between Hillary and Alinsky most recently became fodder for a speech by Ben Carson at last week's Republican National Convention, in which he tried to link Hillary to Satan, through an association with Alinsky. (Really.)
The brief notes on Berkeley also included this tale about a supposed brief encounter with a person who apparently thought that 25-year-old Bill would later become president:
People have said that I knew Bill would be President one day and went around telling anyone who would listen. I don't remember thinking that until years later, but I had one strange encounter at a small restaurant in Berkeley. I was supposed to meet Bill, but I was held up at work and arrived late. There was no sign of him, and I asked the waiter if he had seen a man of his description. A customer sitting nearby spoke up, saying, "He was here for a long time reading, and I started talking to him about books. I don't know his name, but he's going to be President someday." "Yeah, right," I said, "but do you know where he went?"
While seemingly not worthy of a mention on Tuesday night, Berkeley played a part in solidifying the Clintons as a couple, although not making as big an impact on the two, politically. The Bay Area has since served as a key political spot for both in the years afterward, however, including hosting fundraisers for Hillary's presidential bid.
Click through the slideshow above to see photos of the Clintons visits to the Bay Area since they first lived in Berkeley.A top Italian DJ who was left paralysed after a horror car smash has taken his own life at the press of a button at a Swiss suicide clinic.
Fabiano Antoniani passed away after he was approved for euthanasia in a facility in the city of Forch, Switzerland this week.
The 40-year-old died surrounded by his family and his girlfriend after he battled for years to have approval from the Italian government to end his own life.
Mr Antoniani was left partially paralysed in 2014 after he was involved in a car crash. He had dropped his phone while driving and bent down to pick it up when he smashed into another car in the accident which changed his life forever.
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Top Italian DJ Fabiano Antoniani (pictured) was left paralysed after a horror car smash. He has taken his own life at the press of a button at a Swiss suicide clinic
Fabiano Antoniani (pictured performing) passed away after he was approved for euthanasia in a facility in the city of Forch, Switzerland this week
Mr Antoniani was left partially paralysed in 2014 after he was involved in a car crash. He had dropped his phone while driving and bent down to pick it up when he smashed into another car in the accident which changed his life forever
Fabiano Antoniani's girlfriend, Valeria Imbrogno, posted a heartbreaking message saying 'I wish this night would never end' on Facebook earlier this week
He campaigned for a change in the law in Italy to allow assisted suicide but the debate was shelved 11 times in Parliament after drawing strong opposition from the Church.
Marco Cappato, an activist who supported Mr Antoniani in his quest, also travelled with him to Switzerland and claimed the well-known DJ ended his own life pressing a button himself which contained a lethal substance.
He was forced to undergo a series of medical and psychological tests to determine whether it was something he did want before he was given the green light for the procedure.
Mr Antoniani (pictured with girlfriend Valeria) campaigned for a change in the law in Italy to allow assisted suicide but the debate was shelved 11 times in Parliament after drawing strong opposition from the Church
Last month the DJ from Milan sent a video to Prime Minister Sergio Mattarella begging him: 'Please, let me die. I live in a nightmare that never ends.'
The controversial case has since sparked a debate in Italy, with it now being said that Mr Cappato could face charges after helping Mr Antoniani to book tickets to travel to Switzerland.
Last month the DJ from Milan sent a video to Prime Minister Sergio Mattarella begging him: 'Please, let me die. I live in a nightmare that never ends.'
In a final statement before his death he added: 'Finally I have managed to arrive to Switzerland. I have arrived alone, without the help of the State. I will be relieved soon from this hell of pain.'
His girlfriend, Valeria Imbrogno, posted a heartbreaking message saying 'I wish this night would never end' on Facebook earlier this week.
Fabiano Antoniani is pictured with girlfriend Valeria. He campaigned for a change in the law in Italy to allow assisted suicide
The DJ was forced to undergo a series of medical and psychological tests to determine whether it was something he did want before he was given the green light for the procedure
Mr Antoniani (pictured with Valeria) made a televised appeal for the Italian government to intervene in his case
The debate about a change in the law in Italy was shelved 11 times in Parliament after drawing strong opposition from the Church
Flomena Gallo, the secretary of a pro-euthanasia charity called Association Luca Coscioni said they regularly have people contacting them and asking for help.
She said euthanasia in Switzerland costs around 10,000 EUR (8,510GBP) so is not something that is done on a whim.
She said: 'There are a lot of Italians who ask us for information about how to do it. In 2015, 225 asked us. Of those, 117 decided to go to Switzerland and not all of them decided, in the end, to die.
'Some of them, after some tests and medical revisions decided to come back to Italy. The question is to have the option of deciding for yourself.'Google Street View offers a glimpse into the not-so-distant past
Located in the heart of Riversdale, 20th Street is now a major financial and cultural artery. Where pawn shops and dicey bars once reigned supreme, it is now checkered with upscale furniture stores, perpetually renovated office space and places to get brunch.
It’s an interesting part of the city. But then again it always has been.
Navigate Riversdale via Google Street View and you will see what looks like a very different neighbourhood.
For a kid from the suburbs, the ‘hood had a dangerous, but enticing, reputation.
Punk shows sprang up in some of the most unlikely spots, like the Wah Qua Chinese smorg (now the parking lot next to the Farmer’s Market), the upstairs of Toon’s Kitchen (now the PAVED Arts centre) and in the alleyway entrance of the church on Avenue G (still a church).
Just a block off of the drag was Pure Hate Productions, a punk rock record store that sold some of the dirtiest grindcore ever. The best part? If you called to a phone that had call display (which was relatively new and uncommon in the mid ‘90s) the location would be shown as “Pure Hate”.
Thankfully the punks stuck around. Bands now play shows at the Underground Café while next-door neighbours Village Guitars host musicians on the folk end of things. And, if you’re one of those in the know, you can still catch one of the sporadic grind, punk, crust and hardcore sets at The Sweat Lodge.
– “Before” photos courtesy of Google Street View. All other photos via Ominocity.Image caption Dr Rowan Williams is planning to visit Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia in October
The Archbishop of Canterbury has requested a meeting with President Robert Mugabe amid reports of violence between rival factions of Anglicans in Zimbabwe.
Dr Rowan Williams is visiting Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia in October.
His spokeswoman said the "pastoral visit" was to "show solidarity" with Anglicans in the region.
The Foreign Office said as head of the church, Dr Williams' "desire to support them was understandable".
Dr Williams will become the first prominent British representative to visit Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, in a decade.
The country's violent regime has previously come under criticism from the Church.
In 2007, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, cut up his clerical dog collar in protest at President Mugabe's regime, saying he would not wear it again until the president had left office.
'Pastoral'
Dr Williams' spokeswoman said: "[Dr Williams] will meet with bishops, clergy, and is going to be looking at church development initiatives in all three countries.
"The aim of the trip as a whole is a pastoral visit and it's to show solidarity with Anglicans there, that's really the aim of the trip."
She added that Lambeth Palace had not received a response for the meeting request.
The Foreign Office said: "The archbishop's visit is in a pastoral capacity as the head of the Anglican Church - he is not a representative of the government.
"The situation of Anglicans in Zimbabwe has worsened in recent months and as head of the church, his desire to support them is understandable."
Ever since the Anglican Communion split |
-maker Otto Nupponen that Lunyamila appeared to be a changed man was only “based on a hope and a prayer.”)
It has created what Crampton calls “a stalemate.”
In response, he overturned each of the IRB decisions as unreasonable and laid down a framework for future decisions to be decided.
“To permit someone in these circumstances to take the position that he should be released on the grounds that his detention had become indefinite would be effectively to allow that person to frustrate the will of Parliament and, in essence, ‘take the law into his own hands’,” wrote Crampton. “That would undermine the integrity of our immigration laws and public confidence in the rule of law.”
Crampton ruled that a balance between public safety and the concern of indefinite detention must be struck.
“The indefinite nature of an individual’s detention under the (Immigration Act) is only one factor to be considered when conducting a detention review, and cannot be treated as determinative.
“Resolving a stalemate” — when a detainee refuses to co-operate with the government to allow his removal from Canada — Crampton ruled, demands a decision “in favour of continued detention.”
Crampton’s attempt to create landmark rules for handling these cases was made Oct. 27, 2016, but only published in the Federal Court decision registry on Tuesday. (The court said the decision was inadvertently omitted at the time.)
Lunyamila has appealed the decision.
The IRB is already taking Crampton’s ruling into account, said Anna Pape, an IRB spokeswoman.
“Jurisprudence concerning immigration detention is evolving and Immigration Division members have been applying the Lunyamila ruling in their decision-making since its release,” Pape said.
The CBSA could not provide comment on the decision Tuesday. Lunyamila’s lawyer, Robin Bajer, could not be reached.
• Email: ahumphreys@postmedia.com | Twitter: AD_HumphreysLong lines of cars wait to cross into the United States from Mexico at the San Ysidro border crossing (Photo11: LENNY IGNELZI, Associated Press)
The automotive industry is making it clear that it is strongly opposed to the so-called border adjustment tax, saying it would raise the cost of cars and hurt both the industry and customers.
As proposed by U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans, a border adjustment tax would give tax breaks to American companies that ship products to other countries. At the same time, it would remove tax breaks for American companies that import goods from other countries. But there is not Republican unity on the issue: As reported Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the Financial Times that the proposed tax is unlikely to survive.
That would be good news for lobbyists and other representatives of the auto industry. While praising the "pro-business" policies favored by the Trump administration, they have been making sure the administration and Congress know it is strongly opposed to a tax on imports.
"Tax reform should not be financed by an increase in border taxes and goods, taxes that will drive up the prices of trucks and cars sold in the USA," Mark Scarpelli, chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association, said at the 2017 Automotive Forum last week. "That is not a good equation."
Scarpelli urged dealers to talk to lawmakers to oppose the idea even though no specific legislation has been introduced.
"We need to make sure that Washington fully understands the potential for this tax to pose a serious threat to vehicle affordability," Scarpelli said.
Scarpelli wasn't alone. The leaders of two lobbying groups, a highly-ranking Wall Street analyst and a top industry executive also warned that a border adjustment tax would cause the cost of new cars and trucks to increase by as much as $3,000 and could cause U.S. auto sales to drop by as much as 2 million units per year.
Some in the automotive industry have begun to believe that the border adjustment tax has already lost substantial support and is never going to make it through Congress. Trump appears to now be following a more business-friendly agenda, driven by the influence of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and is moving away from a nationalist agenda driven by Steve Bannon, his chief strategist.
But John Bozzella, CEO of Global Automakers, another automotive lobbying group, said it's dangerous for the industry to become complacent.
"I come from the school of politics that it’s never dead until it's actually dead," Bozzella said. "Look, this is a proposal that raises taxes to cut taxes. And it raises taxes on every single car that every single dealer in this room sells.
“This raising taxes to lower taxes just should not be done.”
Trump hasn't specifically endorsed the border adjustment tax but has talked frequently about imposing a 20% or 30% tariff on goods from Mexico — an idea that is different than the more comprehensive border adjustment tax. On Wednesday Trump said he doesn't like the term but does like a similar idea.
"I don't like the word 'adjustment,' because our country gets taken advantage of, to use a nice term, by every other country in the world," Trump told Fox Business News. "Adjustment means we lose. We lose."
"Let's call it an import tax. Let's call it a reciprocal tax," he added. "Nobody gets angry when you say reciprocal tax."
Trump made "America first," and manufacturing jobs a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. Since he was elected, Trump has met multiple times with the CEOs in the automotive industry. He also has taken credit for a number of jobs and plant investments even though most of them were planned months, if not years, ago.
The United Auto Workers union has even found itself in alignment with Trump's desire to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement and has said it is considering a "Buy American" automotive campaign.
"We think that’s intriguing. And part of it is because we are a big exporter," Ford CEO Mark Fields said at the New York International Auto Show.
In 2016, 80% of the vehicles Ford sold in the U.S. were made in the U.S. while 13% were made in Mexico and 7% were made in Canada. Ford makes the Ford Fusion and Ford Fiesta in Mexico and, starting in 2018, it will make the Ford Focus at its plant in Hermosillo.
"If you look at (the border adjustment tax) in its current iteration — and I am sure it is going to change a lot... it's probably neutral to positive for us," Fields said.
For many, NAFTA has become the embodiment of a free trade agreement that caused manufacturing job losses while the automotive industry is booming in Mexico. But experts say more manufacturing jobs have been lost to automation and to China than to Mexico.
Bozzella argued that NAFTA has helped the automotive industry in North America become more efficient and maintain leadership in global automotive production.
"The fact is, NAFTA has been a success story for the industry," Bozzella said. "And as we look to modernize NAFTA... let's make sure that we continue to recognize that agreement has made this market an absolute powerhouse."
Toyota Senior Vice President Bob Carter said that even cars assembled in America would be impacted by a border adjustment tax.
Carter said 75% of the parts on the Toyota Camry, which is built in Georgetown, Ky., are from the U.S., making the Camry the most American-made car according to an annual study conducted by Cars.com.
"But 25% of them come from an international supply chain," Carter said. "And keep in mind that’s the best, most U.S. car. It takes time to have that supply chain adjusted. I think Congress is starting to understand that."
Carter said industry studies have shown that the border adjustment tax would increase the cost of a car by $2,000 or $3,000. That would force manufacturers to either raise prices or would cut into profit margins or some combination of both.
Higher prices also could cause vehicle sales to fall by 1 million to 2 million, he said.
"So please, please keep the heat on your congressmen and senator," Carter told the dealers in the audience.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2oNbxqFCan A 32-Year-Old Doctor Cure Baltimore's Ills?
Enlarge this image toggle caption Meredith Rizzo/NPR Meredith Rizzo/NPR
Neighborhoods in Baltimore are still struggling to recover from the riots that broke out following the funeral of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal injury to his spine while in police custody. In the aftermath of the unrest, we here at NPR spent many hours trying to understand the raw anger on display. We looked at police brutality, economic disparities and housing segregation in Baltimore.
Our conversations eventually led us to Leana Wen.
Wen, a 32-year old emergency physician, had become Baltimore's health commissioner just a few months earlier. With Baltimore leading the news day after day, she seized the moment to get her message out, including on this blog, where she has been an essayist.
She wrote about the health department's immediate response to the unrest, making sure hospitals were protected and that staff and patients could get to them, and that ensuring seniors could still get prescriptions when their pharmacies were looted and burned.
After calm was restored, she turned her focus to the city's more chronic issues. For years, she argued, Baltimore has been traumatized by poverty, violence and drug abuse, problems that can be treated through public health.
"We have to make the case that actually, everything comes back to health," she told us in May. "My hope is that we can really make Baltimore into a model for the rest of the country to follow when it comes to treating the core roots of our problems."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Patrick Semansky/AP Patrick Semansky/AP
That left us wondering, does everything actually come back to health? If so, what can you accomplish in city government? And can a health commissioner really make a difference?
Starting today, we're going to try to answer those questions. We're following Leana Wen over the coming months as she takes on some of Baltimore's thorniest problems. One thing already clear is that she's in a hurry.
Deputy Commissioner Olivia Farrow, a veteran at the health department, laughs remembering how Wen was holding meetings before she'd even officially started the job.
"Someone was telling me a joke," she says. "It's not 'Wen,' it's 'Went.' I mean, she's already ahead of you and gone, trying to make the fix."
New to Baltimore, Wen is relying heavily on Farrow and other senior staff to help her navigate the often murky politics of the city. Farrow believes Wen's lack of political experience is a plus.
"There's something about people who come from the outside," she says. "Just their ability to kind of say, 'Hey, let's think about things differently.' A lot of times that can rub people the wrong way. Some people survive that and some people don't."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Meredith Rizzo/NPR Meredith Rizzo/NPR
Leana Wen was born in Shanghai and came to the United States at the age of 8. Her parents were Chinese dissidents who sought political asylum here, first landing in Logan, Utah, and a couple of years later moving on to Los Angeles. They lived in Compton and East Los Angeles, neighborhoods Wen describes as not so different from the poorer parts of Baltimore.
As a child, she dreamed of becoming a doctor. She entered college at the age of 13 and majored in biochemistry. After medical school, however, she was confronted by a sad reality. In the emergency room you can resuscitate victims of gun violence and overdose, she found, but you can't prevent them from returning over and over again.
"It is not a satisfying cycle for us to be in, when we're treating problems at the very end of those problems, rather than preventing them from happening in the first place," she recently told her staff.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Meredith Rizzo/NPR Meredith Rizzo/NPR
This summer, homicides in Baltimore have soared to levels not seen in four decades. The heroin epidemic is showing no sign of abating, and throughout the city there is a sense of frustration that no matter what happens, and no matter how many leaders speak out, nothing changes.
So Wen is asking her team to think big, to come up with innovative approaches to these festering problems. She believes that given all the focus on Baltimore since the death of Freddie Gray, this is a rare opportunity to act.
"I don't want that window of opportunity to close for us," she says. "I don't want to be the person who isn't leading us toward this vision at a time that's so critical in Baltimore's history."US Congressman Pete Sessions TX-32 Town Hall Meeting at L.V. Berkner High School
http://youtu.be/bQdScs9UfNk?t=43m54s
Congressman Pete Sessions Answers 9/11 Truth Question with Bizarre Question
http://youtu.be/0L4U6C7N7q4
Congressman Responds to 9/11 Truther by Musing About JFK Conspiracy
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/06/sessions-911-truther-JFK-conspiracy-video.html
Congressman Pete Sessions Quizzed on 9/11 "Conspiracy" by High School Student. Gets a D.
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2014/06/pete_sessions_held_a_weird_town_hall_meeting_with_a_bunch_of_high_schoo...
Asked if the government was withholding information about 9/11 because it doesn’t fit with the official narrative, Republican Rep. Pete Sessions replied with a question about who shot President John F. Kennedy.
“Do you think that Oswald was the only person to shoot Jack Kennedy, our president?” Sessions said in response to a student in a Berkner High School AP government class in December 2013.
“Do you think that Oswald was the only person who to shoot Jack Kennedy our president?” Sessions said. “I don’t know. You know, if they go down there and recreate it, it’s really hard for a guy with that rifle to pop-pop-pop. When my dad was the FBI director the number one question was ‘Who really killed Kennedy?’ I don’t know. I don’t know. I was in Washington; I wasn’t close, but let me tell you what: That plane did come and land at the Pentagon and that was a bunch of evil people and I will tell you the guys that took down the plane over Pennsylvania were heroes and I will tell you that guys were thugs that initially came after us and we were innocent people who never thought this would happen.”
A spokesperson for the Rep. Sessions’ office clarified his comments to BuzzFeed:
Congressman Sessions was responding to a question that, remarkably and despite all evidence to the contrary, still pops up from time to time about what actually happened on 9/11. Unfortunately, innocent people never could have imagined such a horrific attack prior to its occurrence and because of that some people still might not believe what actually happened. The Congressman’s response to that disbelief is clear. We know precisely what happened on September 11, 2001. Terrorists from al-Qaeda hijacked four planes, one of which was flown into the Pentagon here in Washington and another which was taken down by American heroes in Pennsylvania so that the terrorists could not kill more innocent people wherever the terrorists had intended to fly that plane.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/republican-congressman-has-interesting-response-to-911-truth
GOP Congressman Pete Sessions Answers 9/11 Truth Question with Bizarre Question
http://youtu.be/0L4U6C7N7q4
Washington, D.C. Office:
Congressman Pete Sessions
2233 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-4332
Phone: (202) 225-2231
Fax: (202) 225-5878
Dallas, Texas Office:
Congressman Pete Sessions
Park Central VII
12750 Merit Drive, Suite 1434
Dallas, Texas 75251-1229
Phone: (972) 392-0505
Fax: (972) 392-0615
As your Member of Congress, I welcome your comments and suggestions on the issues that are important to you. Please note that U.S. postal mail sent to my Washington, D.C. office will be delayed 2-4 weeks due to security scanning measures. Click here to reach me via email.The route of the Kerry Camino From Tralee to Camp Section DAY 1 OF 3 DAYS
Distance: 18km | Ascent: 200m | Time: 5 - 7 hrs
The Kerry Camino starts and finishes in Tralee at St John's church. A sign for the official start can be found at the church entrance. A quick stroll through the park will lead to Princes Street where a left turn continues through Princes Quay and on to a busy roundabout. Turning right here will set the Kerry Camino in motion as the trail quickly escapes the town traffic by joining the gentle curve of the canal path for 2km to Blennerville.The first of the stamping stations can be found at the town end of the canal.
The walk along the canal comes to an end upon reaching a bridge opposite the Blennerville Windmill. At this point, the Kerry Camino branches off from a second trail called the 'North Kerry Way' and crosses the canal to approach the village.
The Kerry Camino follows the main N86 road to Dingle for a short distance when passing through Blennerville. After crossing the canal, the trail takes the second left turn and follows some quieter country back roads that gradually start to rise up into the flanks of the Slieve Mish mountain range. After around 3km, the trail eventually reaches Tonevane and sharply turns west and out into the open mountainside.
The following section of the Kerry Camino can get quite marshy and is dotted with large red sandstone rocks which have been laid for use as stepping stones A pair of gaiters is of great advantage as its almost inevitable that at some point a foot will go astray and end in bog that could be ankle-deep!
As the Kerry Camino passes the entrances to several impressive glacial valleys, a number of streams make their way towards the sea. These are easily crossed by either bridge or stepping stones. Features of interest to keep an eye out for along this mountain section are an old Victorian-era reservoir that used to supply water to Tralee. Towards the end of this section the trail descends onto a hedge-lined stone path which used to be the old Tralee-Dingle road in the distant past. The preserved ruins of Killelton Oratory can be found alongside the trail here to the left of the path. This part is often used as a cattle drove which means it can get quite mucky. Several stiles have to be crossed before finally reaching a tarmac road.
The final section of the walk comes down into a valley, crosses the Finglas River and takes in a short uphill stretch before meeting a minor road.. The turn to the right leads downhill for around 1km to Camp Village. The road straight ahead continues in the direction of Dingle.This village is ideal for your first overnight and whether it is simply resting over a pint and sharing the experiences of the day or enjoying some of the local characters and eateries you are sure not to be disappointed
View The Kerry Camino Tralee To Camp Leg in a larger map
This is a an approximate outline of the route. On the ground the route is marked by stakesAccording to Variety, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH has resolved its dispute with its longtime record company, Prospect Park. The band and the label have announced the release of a greatest-hits album with two new songs in December, with a brand new full-length album to follow next year.
FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's follow-up to 2015's "Got Your Six" was delivered to Prospect Park last December, but a legal battle with the company delayed the LP's arrival.
FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH guitarist Jason Hook said in an interview this past summer that the band's new album was "completely done. There was sixteen songs completed, sitting at Prospect Park, ready to go," he told SpazioRock. "Everybody that's heard the record so far thinks it's our best record. I'm super excited about it. I thought we fucking knocked it out of the park. There's some really cool, different things on there that are slightly different for us. There's certainly a chunk of what you would expect from FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH, but there's some solid songs that are slightly outside of our regular box. But everyone thinks it's a smash."
According to Hook, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's new album finds the band once again walking the fine line between subtle experimentation and continuing with the tried-and-tested formula which has turned them into arena headliners.
"We can't really do anything differently," Hook admitted. "We are what we are. And it's an interesting challenge, because when you get to your seventh or eighth or ninth record, it comes naturally to do what we do. So we can't be fake about it, we can't fabricate something that's different — we have to just do what comes naturally. Fortunately, when we're making records, you have to come up with sixteen or so songs, so you can do a little bit of experimentation and try to break outside the box a little bit. Sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes it's, like, 'Okay, that's way too fucking different.' But it's very easy for us to come up with the bulk of our sound in sixteen songs. And I think you'll be very delighted. It's a powerful record."
FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH in April filed a new lawsuit against Prospect Park, asking a judge to release them from their contract with the label and to order the company to pay more than a million dollars in damages.
Prospect Park told TMZ at the time that the real issue was the band still hadn't delivered the album "required under the recording contract and expected by their fans."
Prospect Park sued FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH more than a year ago for breach of contract, alleging that the group wanted to rush the recording of a new album without proper creative input from the label and in order to "cash in" before the anticipated "downfall" of singer Ivan Moody, who was revealed at the time to be in rehab. In addition, Prospect Park wanted more time to promote "Got Your Six", and asked the band to provide just two new songs for a greatest-hits collection in the interim.
According to Prospect Park's original lawsuit, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH's four-album contract prohibited the band from beginning to record a new effort until at least nine months have passed since the release of the previous one.
In May 2016, FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH announced it had signed a new North American recording deal with the BMG-owned rock label Rise Records.Some people like to do crossword puzzles. I like to do machine learning puzzles.
Lucky for me, a new contest was just posted yesterday on Kaggle. So naturally, my lazy Saturday was spent getting elbow deep into the data.
The training set consists of a series of ‘skies’, each containing a bunch of galaxies. Normally, these galaxies would exhibit random ellipticity. That is, if it weren’t for all that dark matter out there! The dark matter, while itself invisible (it is dark after all), tends to aggregate and do some pretty funky stuff. These aggregations of dark matter produce massive halos which bend the heck out of spacetime itself! The result is that any galaxies behind these halos (from our perspective here on earth) appear contorted around the halo.
The tricky bit is to distinguish between the background noise in the ellipticity of galaxies, and the regular effect of the dark matter halos. How hard could it be?
Step one, as always, is to have a look at what you’re working with using some visualization.
If you want to try it yourself, I’ve posted the code here.
If you don’t feel like running it yourself, here are all 300 skies from the training set.
Now for the simple matter of the predictions. Looks like Sunday will be a fun day too! Stay tuned…The Siggraph conference is going down in Vancouver, Canada this week, bringing a bunch of graphics goodness into the back yard of TR's northern outpost. Freshly minted AMD "Gaming Scientist" Richard Huddy spoke at the show, and we sat down with him yesterday to discuss a range of topics that included AMD's "FreeSync" alternative to Nvidia's G-Sync adaptive refresh tech.
The first FreeSync monitors will start sampling as early as next month, Huddy told us, and finished products are due to hit the market early next year. That's a little more precise than the release timeframe AMD mentioned in May.
"Multiple" vendors are preparing displays based on the technology, though Huddy declined to name names. Interestingly, he suggested there's more excitement surrounding adaptive refresh mojo than there is for 4K resolutions. You'll certainly need a lot less graphics horsepower exploit the benefits of a dynamic refresh rate than you will to run games at 4K.
FreeSync is based on an embedded DisplayPort capability that was formally added to version 1.2a of the standard spec. Like the rest of the standard—and unlike G-Sync—this "Adaptive-Sync" feature is royalty-free. There are some associated hardware requirements, but the additional cost should be minimal, according to Huddy, who told us he'd be surprised if FreeSync compatibility added more than $10-20 to a display's bill of materials. Even taking additional validation costs into consideration, monitor makers should be able to support adaptive refresh rates fairly cheaply. They're still free to charge whatever premium they want, though.
There are no requirements surrounding the range of refresh rates that monitor makers must support. However, Huddy expects entry-level models to start at 24Hz, which is the most desirable update frequency for typical video. Higher-end implementations could scale up to 144Hz and beyond.
Some of AMD's current products use cheaper display controllers that won't be compatible with Adaptive-Sync. (A full list of compatible GPUs and APUs is available here.) However, Huddy said all future AMD hardware will support the feature. The firm is evidently committed to the technology, and it will be interesting to see how the finished products compare to equivalent G-Sync solutions. We will dutifully subject ourselves to hours of gaming "tests" to get to the bottom of that important question.How Congress Secretly Just Legitimized Questionable NSA Mass Surveillance Tool
from the just-slipped-it-right-in dept
Backers of the section argue it would actually limit to five years the amount of time communications data could be kept at intelligence agencies, certain exceptions permitting. But it is generally acknowledged that such data is already rarely kept beyond five years, which Amash characterized as a trade-off that "provides a novel statutory basis for the executive branch's capture and use of Americans' private communications."
"The provisions in the intel authorization appear to be an attempt by Congress to place statutory restrictions on the retention of information collected under Executive Order 12333, which is not subject to court oversight, has not been authorized by Congress, and raises serious privacy concerns," said Neema Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. "However, these restrictions are far from adequate, contain enormous loopholes, and notably completely exclude the information of non-U.S. persons."
"If this hadn't been snuck in, I doubt it would have passed," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who voted against the bill. "A lot of members were not even aware that this new provision had been inserted last-minute. Had we been given an additional day, we may have stopped it."
We recently noted that, despite it passing overwhelmingly, Congress quietly deleted a key bit of NSA reform that would have blocked the agency from using backdoors for surveillance. But this week something even more nefarious happened, and it likely would have gone almost entirely unnoticed if Rep. Justin Amash's staffers hadn't caught the details of a new provision quietly slipped into the Intelligence Authorization Act, which effectively "legitimized" the way the NSA conducts most of its mass surveillance.For a while now, we've discussed executive order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan, which more or less gives the NSA unchecked authority to tap into any computer system not in the US. Over the summer, a former State Department official, John Napier Tye, basically blew the whistle on 12333 by noting that everyone focused on other NSA programs were missing the point. The NSA's surveillance is almost entirely done under this authority, which has no Congressional oversight. All those other programs we've been arguing about -- Section 215 of the Patriot Act or Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- are really nothing more than ways to backfill the data the NSA has been unable to access under 12333. In other words, these other programs are the distraction. 12333 is the ballgame, and it has no Congressional oversight at all. It's just a Presidential executive order.Yet, what Amash and his staffers found is that a last minute change by the Senate Intelligence Committee to the bill effectively incorporated key parts of EO 12333 into law, allowing for "the acquisition, retention, and dissemination" of "nonpublic communications." Here's where those who slipped this bit into the law got sneaky. Recognizing that they might be called on it, they put it in with language noting that such information could only be held on to for five years -- and then claimed what they were really doing wason data already collected:This seems particularly nefarious. In trying to claim that they're putting a limit on this activity (that's already happening) they can claim that they're not really expanding the power of the NSA and the surveillance state. But, by putting it, rather than just having it in an executive order, they're effectively legitimatizing the practice, and making itto roll back.And they did it all quietly without any debate.That's massively troubling. Inserting such a major powerat the very least deserves (and should require) a full and fairdebate about the issue and whether or not it is truly needed. Doing it in secret, at the last minute, with no public acknowledgement or discussion, and then pretending it's about "limits" rather than legitimizing what's in EO 12333 is really, really nefarious.Unfortunately, even with Rep. Amash raising the alarm about it, the bill easily passed 325 to 100, without most in Congress probably having any idea about this issue and what it meant. Rep. Zoe Lofgren claimed that if Congress fully understood the provision, it almost certainly wouldn't have passed:This is the kind of crap that the intelligence community, and it's why there's so much that's troubling in the way they play the legislative game. Not only do they write the legislative language in sneaky ways that they can carefully interpret themselves -- they then get "friends" in Congress to quietly insert the language when no one's looking. By putting it in bills that have to pass, these things get put into the law and aren't at all easy to remove.
Filed Under: 12333, congress, eo 12333, executive order 12333, intelligence authorization act, justin amash, nsa, surveillance, zoe lofgrenMexico legislators seek to change freedom-of-information law
In discussions held largely behind closed doors, congressional committees approved a provision that would allow the Supreme Court to review and potentially overturn any decision by the IFAI. As it stands now, the institute receives petitions from citizens, reviews the request and then, if in agreement, orders the target of the petition to disclose the information sought.
But this week, Congress was poised to change the law governing the Federal Institute for Access to Information, or IFAI, in ways that critics say will gut the public’s ability to gain access to important, sometimes sensitive, material.
Availing themselves of a relatively new freedom-of-information law, journalists and ordinary citizens have been able to learn facts that the government sought to hide -- from homicide statistics to what the first lady spends on her wardrobe.
The new rules, however, would allow those targets to appeal to the Supreme Court. Critics say that favors the presidency and other branches of government over the little guy, who would have to hire lawyers and fight a protracted legal battle.
“In practice, this means that authorities can stall and ultimately deny releasing information to the public,” a coalition of “pro-transparency” and human rights groups said in a statement. “This would be a major setback in the democratic development of this country.”
Some opponents also see the move as another indication of the return to government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, with its reputation for secrecy and loyal discipline -- despite President Enrique Peña Nieto’s campaign promises to lead a “transparent” administration.
“This seriously calls into question President Peña Nieto’s words,” Sen. Laura Rojas of the opposition National Action Party said in a news conference Tuesday.
She and several members of her conservative party lashed out against the changes and threatened to try to block them. The Congress’ full lower House of Deputies must still approve the new rules, a vote likely to come this week.
Initially, the reforms received praise because for the first time they sought to require political parties and unions to also submit to the IFAI's jurisdiction. Neither parties nor unions have been held accountable for the millions of dollars they routinely spend, an arrangement that has led to widespread corruption and vote-buying scandals.
But once it became clear that the Supreme Court was being given final say, critics began to express anger and dismay. Authorities would be allowed to appeal the IFAI’s rulings under a “broad and ambiguous” set of “exceptions,” such as national security or economic stability, that the critics said could be too easily cited to undercut the federal information institute’s authority.
Rep. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, head of the PRI faction in the House, defended the changes to the IFAI as a way to strengthen it by giving it more autonomy. But critics said autonomy that can be overruled is meaningless.
In a news conference Tuesday, Guillermo Ortega, director of one of the transparency groups, Sonora Citizen, said the reforms represented “a sham” that would render the institution “toothless.” Investigative journalists also complained that they would be deprived of a crucial tool in their work.
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Palestinian killed by Israeli soldiers in West Bank clash
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wilkinson@latimes.comBUENOS AIRES, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Argentina will ease currency controls under its new President Mauricio Macri, but not until the true amount of central bank reserves is known and its board of directors has been replaced, a senior incoming bank official told Reuters on Friday.
Macri took office as Argentina’s first non-Peronist leader in more than a decade on Thursday, promising to end the protectionist policies of outgoing leader Cristina Fernandez and to use the free market to revive an ailing economy.
Fernandez clamped down on access to U.S. dollars in a bid to protect the central bank’s precarious reserves. The bank counts its total reserves at $25 billion, but private economists say only $3 billion to $6 billion are in cash that could be disbursed if currency controls were lifted.
“We need to know the truth. We know that liquid reserves are thin, and to lift restrictions on dollar access will be complicated,” said the incoming official, who spoke anonymously.
“If the bank does not have a significant cushion of dollars, it will be difficult to completely free the foreign exchange market,” he said.
Macri inherits an economy plagued by double-digit inflation, a yawning fiscal deficit and a sovereign default that has made international bond financing impossible.
He says he will name free-market economist Federico Sturzenegger as central bank president. Sturzenegger will be initially hemmed in by a nine-member board of directors, seven of whom were appointed by Fernandez over the last 15 months.
“We also have to wait for some of the board members to resign in order to work more freely,” said the source, who is directly familiar with Sturzenegger’s thinking.
If the directors decline to step down, the government can take action to remove them, according to the bank’s charter.
The central bank has been spending reserves to prop up the peso currency. The current official peso rate of 9.75 to the dollar is 51.5 percent stronger than the black market rate. Most of the country’s transactions take place between the official and black market rate.
Macri has said he wants the two to gradually converge. Argentina’s economy will be managed by Alfonso Prat-Gay, a Wall Street veteran who scheduled his first news conference as minister for later on Friday.
Dollars are in high demand from importers and savers seeking a safe-haven currency to protect them from the financial volatility that has buffeted Argentina in recent decades.In a move to prevent "wrong acts" by men and to provide for women safety, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has cleared a proposal banning the display of lingerie on mannequins in Mumbai, reported CNN-IBN.
The proposal has been cleared on the grounds that such mannequins will excite men and pose a danger to women.
The move would allow civic officials to ask shopkeepers to remove a mannequin if they think it is indecently dressed. The officials will also take strict action against shopkeepers and hawkers who display such mannequins.
The proposal was mooted by BJP corporator from Ghatkopar, Ritu Tawade, on 26 April and passed on 16 May.
Tawde had complained that the mannequins were seen as “sex toys”, provoking sexual crimes against women and the civic body needed to take action against them as part of its women’s safety initiative.
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.A bronze statue of Ghanaian leader, Kwame Nkrumah, presides over the entrance of the headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as a tribute to this pioneer of African independence. Photo: Reuters
The University of Havana marked Africa Day, celebrated each May 25, with a panel discussion entitled “Rethinking Africa, its history and contemporaneity”.
During the event, the strong bonds of brotherhood that unite both peoples, stemming from solidarity efforts, and the benefits of cooperation in sectors such as education, health and sports were highlighted.
Clara Pulido, coordinator for Africa and the Middle East of the International Relations Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, noted that consolidating peace, independence and regional integration for |
ountain area. Of 43 private wells tested recently, county officials have received results from 37 tests, with PFC levels in 26 exceeding the EPA limit, spokeswoman Danielle Oller said.
In Security, all 32 municipal wells are contaminated, and water officials ranked the wells based on levels of contamination. One well where the level was nearly 20 times higher than an EPA health advisory limit has been shut down. Security officials urged voluntary cutbacks in lawn watering to reduce the need to use contaminated groundwater.
Security Water and Sanitation District manager Roy Heald has divided the city into three zones and said about 25 percent of residents live in a zone receiving water from contaminated wells. The residents in two other zones “are supplied water mainly from surface water sources,” Heald said.
“I am very concerned about it and frustrated,” Melanie Sweeney, 33, a mother of two boys in the problem zone said, pointing out her wheelchair-bound father may be particularly vulnerable. “Nobody is taking responsibility for this, and we feel people are trying to cover it up.”
Next week, utility officials plan to begin re-plumbing, installing new pipelines, trying to blend in more water from Pueblo into that zone and other areas.
“That work will take several months but will help us supply surface water to schools, day cares and the general public in that zone,” Heald said. “We are looking into other ways in which we can bring more surface water into our system to be able to stop using groundwater until treatment is available.”
Air Force representatives at the forum, where residents filled an auditorium, adjacent cafeteria and stood in hallways at Mesa Ridge High School, said the Air Force will pay $4.3 million to set up temporary treatment systems — while local utilities address the long-term implications of contaminated groundwater and a possible fix. Military airfields are suspected as a source of PFC contamination, and a broad investigation is planned, with drilling in October at Peterson Air Force Base east of Colorado Springs.
“Our short-term to mid-term solution is to use more surface water, which is not affected by these contaminants. Our mid-term to long-term solution will be to treat the groundwater,” said Heald, who met with Air Force officials and will continue those discussions. Security also has requested financial help from the EPA, CDPHE and elected officials.
“Security Water is a relatively small water district, and the costs of managing this issue is expensive for our customers,” Heald said.
Security residents typically pay about $25 a month for their water.
Widefield officials said they’ll set up a free bottled water distribution station — limiting residents to 10 gallons a week. They’re relying as much as possible on water from Pueblo, although they may draw from contaminated wells to meet peak demands during summer as temperatures rise.
Fountain utility officials planned to notify residents about PFCs in notices mailed along with July water bills. Fountain normally draws from eight municipal wells, all now contaminated with PFCs above the EPA limit, and has shifted to water from Pueblo while contract engineers search for a solution.
Yet Ingals from CDPHE pointed out that these cities “cannot function on surface water alone. … There are groundwater wells that are being pumped. … The wells kick on and off at different intervals. … Because it is not predicable, we cannot tell you that it always is safe.
“People are being exposed. That is a very serious issue. That is why we are here tonight. We are sampling the wells. We are sampling the tap water.”
EPA officials have suggested that the utilities should encourage residents to consider bottled water.
Every five years, the EPA reviews data on up to 30 emerging contaminants detected in water supplies for which federal controls may be warranted. Because PFCs currently are not regulated under any national water quality standard, state and local officials say they are powerless to control them.
But the EPA in May issued a health advisory limit of 70 parts per trillion for PFCs, raised from a previous limit of 400 ppt. PFC contamination of water at levels exceeding 70 ppt is considered harmful, especially for women and children. A recent CDPHE sample south of Peterson Air Force Base east of Colorado Springs detected PFC groundwater contamination at 2000 ppt.
Prolonged exposure to PFCs has been linked to health harm: developmental damage to fetuses during pregnancy, low birth weight, accelerated puberty and distorted bones. The EPA’s advisory also links the chemicals to kidney and testicular cancer, liver tissue damage, impaired production of antibodies and cholesterol changes.
“EPA appreciates the Air Force’s commitment to the community in El Paso County and the steps they are taking to provide water treatment,” an EPA official wrote in a prepared statement to The Denver Post. “We continue to support state and local communities as they determine appropriate actions and next steps in evaluating and addressing water quality concerns. We have not reviewed Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment’s (CDPHE) preliminary assessment on cancer and birth outcomes.”
Air Force officials said they are helping as “a good neighbor gesture” — not admitting fault.
“The Air Force is committed to protecting human health and the environment. When missions have an adverse impact on communities, our priority is to restore health and safety,” Peterson Air Force Base spokesman Steve Brady said. “The Air Force is committed to open dialogue with regulators, communities and other stakeholders.”
CDPHE experts in February began a preliminary assessment of cancer rates in the area south of Colorado Springs and on June 30 completed a report showing elevated cancer rates. The CDPHE team found lung cancer rates 66 percent higher than expected, bladder cancer up 17 percent and kidney cancer up 34 percent. CDPHE officials emphasized there’s no clear link to PFCs.
“While there is very limited scientific information on the health effects of PFCs, there have been human and laboratory animal studies that suggest a link between exposure to PFCs and low birth weight. Other human and laboratory animal studies show a possible link — but not a cause-and-effect relationship — between levels of PFCs in the blood and kidney cancer and testicular cancer,” CDPHE toxicologist Mike Van Dyke said.
The assessment looked at births from 2010-14 and all cases of 11 types of cancer from 2000-2014 in 21 census tracts covering Security, Widefield and Fountain. CDPHE researchers compared these with birth and cancer data from the rest of El Paso County.
They found no spike in low birth weights in the areas where water is contaminated with PFCs. But there were a higher-than-expected rates of lung, kidney and bladder cancers.
“Of these types of cancer, only kidney cancer has been plausibly linked to PFC exposure in human and laboratory animal studies,” Van Dyke said.
The increases may be explained by higher rates of smoking and obesity in the area. Smoking and obesity, CDPHE officials said, may be factors explaining the increased kidney cancer.Since today is Valentine’s Day, I thought posting a review of a beer called “Love Buzz” would be most appropriate. Anchorage Brewing Company’s Love Buzz Saison is Craft Beer #2 from the Mike and Linda Craft Beer Christmas Present series of reviews. Beer #1 in this series was the Mikkeller Draft Bear.
To be completely honest, I had never heard of Anchorage Brewing Company until I pulled this bottle out of my gift bag. Since the label clearly states that this beer is a Saison (aka Farmhouse Ale), I was instantly intrigued since this is one of my favorite beer styles.
Here is what Anchorage Brewing Company has to say about their Love Buzz Saison:
A feeling overcomes, deriving of a most curious perplexity. A rich desire awakens to explore the contents of such delicate loveliness. Upon a deep connection with rounded lips, a bitter sweet complexity enters the soul…and so begins an amorous affair. Heightened awareness envelopes the senses as the grandeur of such bold character develops. Caramel beauty exhibits itself, sprawling its full body widely upward, bubbling with excitement. Tantalizing effects of peppery bitterness grasps the tongue. Enchantment takes hold as a blanket of citrus slowly unfolds. As in any noteworthy love story, a subtle fruity sweetness of a rose emerges to the finish. A warm contentment grazes over, signifying a united marriage of balance and pleasure. Fortitude has revealed itself to those who have encountered such an enriching experience. An experience so delectable, so defining, so unequivocal. An experience that is Love’s Buzz.
Was that the description of a Farmhouse Ale or an excerpt from a suburban housewife’s smut filled romance novel from her Kindle library??? Perhaps it was a bit of both. Anyway…
Let’s get on with the review…
Appearance: Cloudy pale orange color. Thick and fluffy head that tops off at about an inch, then settles down to a thin layer of off white foam. Mild lacing.
Cloudy pale orange color. Thick and fluffy head that tops off at about an inch, then settles down to a thin layer of off white foam. Mild lacing. Aroma: Classic Farmhouse Ale scents, but with a slight twist thanks to the aging in French Oak Pinot Noir barrels. I’m getting honey, vanilla, tangerine orange zest, white grape juice, cloves, and last but not least, a mild dose of that Farmhouse Ale B.O. like funk.
Classic Farmhouse Ale scents, but with a slight twist thanks to the aging in French Oak Pinot Noir barrels. I’m getting honey, vanilla, tangerine orange zest, white grape juice, cloves, and last but not least, a mild dose of that Farmhouse Ale B.O. like funk. Taste: Moderate carbonation with a smooth and creamy mouthfeel thanks to the soft bubbles. Slightly tart and citrusy at the onset. At the half way point, some pepperiness kick in, as well as a good bit of bitterness. Tart, tasty, and somewhat astringent finish. Mildly bitter aftertaste that reminds of what happens when you bite into a a lemon peel.
Moderate carbonation with a smooth and creamy mouthfeel thanks to the soft bubbles. Slightly tart and citrusy at the onset. At the half way point, some pepperiness kick in, as well as a good bit of bitterness. Tart, tasty, and somewhat astringent finish. Mildly bitter aftertaste that reminds of what happens when you bite into a a lemon peel. ABV: 8%
Although I don’t have a favorite or “go to” beer, there are several beers out there that I would never hesitate to order, and several of them just happen to be Farmhouse Ales (Saison Dupont, Goose Island Sofie, and Lost Abbey Red Barn Ale are three that immediately come to mind). Why do I love Farmhouse Ales so much? Because when they are done right, they are (a) incredibly refreshing, and (b) they pair well with a wide variety of food. I am pleased to report that the Anchorage Brewing Company’s Love Buzz Saison is a beautifully crafted and delicious interpretation of the beer style that I love so much. This is a seriously crisp and infinitely drinkable beer that screams to be paired with a luscious meal (a Valentine’s Day meal for two perhaps?). I’m thinking an assortment of cheeses, some grilled meats, and a plethora of roasted vegetables alongside the Love Buzz Saison would be a match made in heaven.
Happy Valentine’s Day!As reported in Sunday’s Guardian, the Archbishop of Canterbury has given his Easter Speech (called by some bloggers “Facepalm Sunday”), which is notable for containing two big whoppers:
New Atheism is dying off and a fruitful dialogue is emerging between faith and unbelief.
“Recent years have seen so many high-profile assaults on the alleged evils of religion that we’ve almost become used to them; we sigh and pass on, wishing that we could have a bit more of a sensible debate and a bit less hysteria. But there are a few signs that the climate is shifting ever so slightly,” he said at Canterbury cathedral... Contrasting the “hysteria” of “aggressive polemic against religious faith” with an increasing recognition among “serious and liberal-minded commentators”, he said faith was no longer seen as “a brainless and oppressive enemy” but recognised as a potential ally against a greedy and individualistic way of life that feels “increasingly insane”.
Although perhaps the Archbishop isn’t required to adduce evidence in an Easter homily, I don’t believe this for a moment. It’s pure wishful thinking—which of course is what he’s trained in.
But he then raised the mllion-pound question, one blithely ignored by many “liberal” theologians who emphasize that all scripture is metaphorical:
But he said Christians could not be satisfied with this. “Easter raises an extra question, uncomfortable and unavoidable: perhaps ‘religion’ is more useful than the passing generation of gurus thought; but is it true?”
Indeed. Faitheists and accommodationists, when extolling the virtues of faith, often overlook this crucial question. Is it true? For if it wasn’t, and believers actually found that out, religion would vanish. It’s more than just a bonding mechanism, or a chance to admire the stained glass in the company of confrères. Ergo the second lie:
Jesus really rose from the dead. I was of the impression that Williams had equivocated on this in conversations with Richard Dawkins, but I may be wrong. At any rate, he makes no bones about his belief:
The archbishop concluded that Christianity was true and the resurrection was a fact, not “a beautiful imaginative creation that offers inspiration to all sorts of people” nor merely a way of saying that “the message of Jesus lives on”. He added: “Even if every commentator in the country expressed generous appreciation of the church (and we probably needn’t hold our breath …), we’d still be bound to say, ‘thank you, but what matters isn’t our usefulness or niceness or whatever, it’s God, purposive and active, even – especially – when we are at the end of our resources.”
On what basis, I wonder, does Williams conclude that the resurrection was a fact? If it’s just because Scripture says so, then he’d better get his methodology in line with that of Archbishop Pell. But pay attention to what Williams said: what matters isn’t the usefulness or niceness of faith, but the truth of scripture and the existence of God.
h/t: GraniaAmerican High Society
Did the Founding Fathers of the United States of America smoke cannabis? Some researchers think so. Dr. Burke, president of the American Historical Reference Society and a consultant for the Smithsonian Institute, counted seven early presidents as cannabis smokers: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce. 41 "Early letters from our founding fathers refer to the pleasures of hemp smoking," said Burke. Pierce, Taylor and Jackson, all military men, smoked it with their troops. Cannabis was twice as popular among American soldiers in the Mexican War as in Vietnam: Pierce wrote to his family that it was "about the only good thing" about that war.
Central and Western African natives were farming and harvesting cannabis sativa in North America as slaves. If they did smoke on the plantations, that would be kept secret. 42 By the time of the Louisiana purchase in 1803, New Orleans had a mixed Spanish, French, Creole, Cajun, Mexican and Black population. The city teemed with adventurers and sailors, wise to the ways of cannabis. It was mixed with tobacco or smoked alone, used to season food 43, to treat insomnia and impotence, and so on.
Cannabis was mentioned as a medicinal agent in a formal American medical text as early as 1843. 44In a match where both sides had their chances to win, these sides deservedly drew in this fixture. Arsenal started this match brightly with two goals inside the first 23 minutes, before Fulham scored two goals before the half time break. Despite the match ending 3-3, the action didn’t stop until the last whistle, with Mikel Arteta having a 95th minute penalty saved by Mark Schwarzer, the Fulham keeper.
Line-ups
Arsenal lined up in their usual 4-2-3-1 formation, while Fulham lined up in a 4-4-1-1. Arsenal bought in Francis Coquelin for Jack Wilshere, who was suspended. The rest of the team was as expected, with Walcott starting only his 2nd league match of the season after some good performances in recent matches.
Fulham started with Kieran Richardson on the left side, instead of Damien Duff, who has been a starting player for Fulham regularly this season. Also, Ashkan Dejagah was handed his first EPL start, after coming from Wolfsburg in the summer transfer window. During the match, when in transition, the Fulham wingers were playing high up the pitch and coming in field, allowing the fullbacks, Riether and Riise, to overlap and join in the attack.
First Half
Arsenal started the match cautiously with Fulham having the first genuine shot at goal with Ruiz flashing wide after a deflected shot. Not long afterwards, Giroud had a long range effort which was unable to trouble Schwarzer in the Fulham goal. Giroud, in the 11th minute, made up for his poor effort with a great header from a Walcott header. It was a poorly tracked run from Hughes but a great header which Schwarzer wasn’t able to keep out.
In the 23rd minute, Podolski made it 2-0 to Arsenal. This was a well worked move from Arsenal, who were able to take advantage of Fulham being down to 10 men when this play ensued, due to Richardson going off with a hamstring injury and the substitute Kačaniklić not being ready. As Sagna got the ball and attempted to cross the ball, Sidwell cut the ball out and the ball dropped to Cazorla. As Cazorla received the ball, Theo Walcott made a very smart run pulling Hangeland out of position for Arteta to have a free run through the ball to cross the ball for Podolski, who finished with the outside of his left foot and nipping in front of Riether.
Not long later, in the 29th minute, Berbatov caught Arsenal’s defence out from a well taken Bryan Ruiz corner, getting a free header from 5 yards out to get Fulham back to 2-1. The marking from Arsenal was very poor, as the ball was able to go over 4 Arsenal players heads (Coquelin, Giroud, Mertesacker and Koscielny) before Berbatov got the free header. Question marks could also be thrown at Mannone who didn’t come to claim the ball, even though the ball was within the 6 yard box.
In the 40th minute, Fulham were able to equalise through Alexander Kačaniklić. The ball was played across the Fulham back line before being played into Sidwell (see above pic). Sidwell, then, played a ball out wide to Reither, who was able to put Dimitar Berbatov in behind the Arsenal defence, into space. As Podolski chased back to try and put pressure on Berbatov, the Fulham striker was able to get in a cross for Kačaniklić, who had made a smart run to the penalty spot. As the Arsenal defenders were running back facing their goal, they didn’t spot the run of Kačaniklić, who powered a header in from 15 yards with Mannone unable to keep the ball out.
Second Half
Fulham started the better side in the second half, even though Arsenal had the best chance early in the second half with a Walcott cross just evading Giroud’s head. In the 67th minute, Berbatov put Fulham 3-2 after Bryan Ruiz was dragged down by Mikel Arteta, who was too casual in possession in this instance.
Only two minutes later, Arsenal equalised through Giroud. The ball was played by Vermalen into Podolski, who was able to hold the ball up, with a few Fulham players pressuring him. Podolski was able to play a pass into Santi Cazorla, who played a delightful pass to put Giroud through on goal. Giroud was unable to put the ball on target and it cannoned back off the post. Luckily for Arsenal, Walcott was the first player to react and played a cross onto Giroud’s head, who flicked the ball past Schwarzer to equalise and make it 3-3.
In the 85th minute, Walcott came off for Arshavin. Only a matter of minutes later, in the 94th minute, with almost the last kick of the game, Arshavin was able to win a penalty for Arsenal. As he attempted to play a cross, the ball was blocked by Riether’s arm. However, Riether was attempting to move his arm away, behind his back. Arteta stepped up to take the penalty, but Schwarzer correctly guessed to his left, his much stronger side, and pulled off a great save to keep the score at 3-3.
Conclusion
The match deserved to end in a draw, with some good attacking play and also some poor defensive work from both teams. Giroud played very well, as did Berbatov. Both these players caused great concerns for their opposition central defenders. Both managers won’t be happy with the goals they conceded, but Fulham will be happy with the point.America has taken a dramatic step towards becoming more attractive to business as the Senate approved the biggest tax cut for 31 years.
US corporation tax will drop from 35 per cent to 20 per cent under Donald Trump’s overhaul which has been backed by Congress.
The move piles pressure on Britain to increase its competitiveness as the country seeks business and investment after Brexit.
America will have a corporation tax rate just 1 point higher than Britain’s 19 per cent once the change is adopted. It is currently 16 points higher.
Other new tax changes discourage US businesses from moving their profits overseas, further enhancing the country’s corporate appeal.
Mr Trump predicted companies would continue to return to America as he heralded his "historic" tax cuts.
“We're going to grow the country, we’re going to grow jobs, we're going to be growing everything,” Mr Trump said in New York.
“We have companies now that are pouring back into our country, even before this. We’ve just set [economic] records in so many different ways.”One aspect of anarchism that differs from Marxist socialism is there is less divisiveness and sectarianism. This is not to say we do not have our dogmatists and hair-splitters. We do, but such people make up the minority, increasingly so, it seems as our movement grows and implants itself. Predominately, the trend is for anarchists to work together on projects even when they belong to different tendencies and to not see others as enemies, traitors or fools, just because they have a few different ideas.
One example of many; In France, a land of 50 million people with 55 million political views, Alternative Libertaire (AL) and the Federation Anarchiste (FA) work on common projects. Neither group spends time in their media castigating each other for doctrinal sins. This, in spite of the fact that the AL split off from the FA some years ago and the former is Platformist and the latter Synthesist. (1)
Unity In Diversity
It is possible to divide anarchists along a number of lines, "life style anarchists" vs. "social anarchists", is one possibility. Reformists and revolutionaries another. While these differences exist in theory, in reality it is more complex. Someone may engage in a lot of "lifestyle" activities but be a member of the IWW. Another anarchist might think a revolution in the American context a pipe dream, but see the possibility elsewhere. As long as you adhere to basic anarchist principles such as self-management, anti-capitalism and anti-statism, anarchists have not found diversity to be a problem. When people are willing to work together in key areas such as media, trade unions, community organizations and anarchist gatherings, diversity becomes a strength. Anarchists are divided in a number of ways – type of organizational approach, anti-religion vs, religious anarchists, type of future economy, and favored area of activity. As such, anarchists who favor a more "individualistic" approach will attract artists and poets to the cause, religious anarchists, a conduit for those who take the egalitarian words of ther Gospel seriously and eco-anarchists and anarcha-feminists link us to the environmentalists and women's movements.
There also exists a large number, many times more numerous than ideological anarchists, of semi-anarchists. These are people who favor some, but not all, of the anarchist program. These folks will say, be interested in worker self-management or popular power, but not consider themselves anarchist.
It thus becomes possible, as long as you refrain from dogmatism, to create a broad-based movement. One composed of anarchists and semi-anarchists based upon key common goals such as self-management, direct democracy and autonomy.
When the working population begins to act upon these ideas, you have the beginning of a social revolution.
What To Do Next?
What anarchists ought to do next, is a source of division within the movement. Revolutionary change can be made, but can it be kept? The traditional position anarchism had been more spontaneous in nature, encourage the masses to self-organize and the revolution will carry itself. The anarchist defeats in the Russian and Spanish Revolutions caused many to consider a tighter form of program and organization. These are the Platformists. At first there was animosity between the two groups, with the traditionalists accusing the Platformists of authoritarianism and the latter acting in a very divisive manner within the larger movement. But this was all in the past, and today's Platformists are Neo-Platformists, are not at all sectarian, and as shown above, work freely with other anarchists. It should be noted that the Platform is not an attempt to form a party ot organization standing over other anarchists or working people. The function of the Platform is to be a tendency within the broader movement to influence that movement in the direction of greater programatic, organizational and tactical coherence.
1. For The Platform See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platformism
Synthesist anarchism seeks to unite several different anarchist tendencies within the same organization. Its program is thus more general and the different groups making up the federation are free to choose whether to support an action or not.Fox News’s Kimberly Guilfoyle says that President Trump called her to discuss the Paris climate deal before formally withdrawing the U.S. from the pact.
“I spoke to him about it, and this was something that was very much so on his mind,” she said Thursday on Fox News’s “The Five.”
“I think he did the brave and courageous thing,” Guilfoyle added. “And, in fact, I told him that this morning at 8 a.m. when he called.”
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Guilfoyle said no one should be surprised by Trump following through on his promise to pull the U.S. out of the agreement.
“[Trump] promised he would do this,” she said. “I don’t think this is a deal that anybody should be crying about.
“Why would we, in fact, put ourselves at economic disadvantage, giving and subsidizing an economic windfall to other countries, in sort of a climate redistribution of wealth scheme? It makes no sense to me.”
The Mercury News reported last month that Guilfoyle was in talks with Trump administration officials about replacing Sean Spicer as White House press secretary.
Guilfoyle told The Bay Area News Group that "a number of people" in the administration had approached her, adding she thought it would be "a fascinating job."
After the report, Fox News issued a statement that noted Guifoyle is "under a long term contract with the network."
"I really love what I do," Guifoyle said in the statement, adding ther her co-hosting role at Fox "is tough to beat."
Trump on Thursday said he is formally withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate deal, which includes nearly 200 nations.
“The bottom line is that the Paris accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States,” he said in the White House Rose Garden.
Trump faced pressure from world leaders, environmental groups and the business community to stay in the pact before Thursday’s decision.
The president has long argued that the 2015 deal is slanted against the U.S. and unfairly impacts American workers.
The accord consisted of individual greenhouse gas limits each signatory nation determined for themselves.
Former President Obama had pledged that the U.S. would cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025.CLOSE Here are some of the best pass rushers available in the 2017 NFL Draft. Clark Wade/IndyStar
Mar 6, 2017; Indianapolis, IN, USA; Michigan Wolverines defensive back Jabrill Peppers does a workout drill during the 2017 NFL Combine at Lucas Oil Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports (Photo: Brian Spurlock, Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports)
INDIANAPOLIS – He is falling to the Indianapolis Colts now, falling like a rock, falling like an undiluted dream. Michigan’s Jabrill Peppers almost certainly will be there when the Colts are on the clock with the 15th overall pick in the 2017 NFL draft, and first-year general manager Chris Ballard will have a decision to make.
Ballard is a card-carrying member of the BPA Party — Best Player Available — and as such has said he will prioritize a player’s talent over the Colts’ needs. But sometimes the planets align and the urine test complies and you can address both with the same pick. If he’s there at No. 15, Peppers would almost certainly be the Best Player Available. And on defense, the Colts have Needs.
Lookit, this team has needs everywhere. Ballard could throw a dart at the Colts’ 2017 depth chart and hit a bull’s-eye on a need, not because he’s all that good at darts — maybe he is, who knows? — but because the Colts have needs everywhere but quarterback. Andrew Luck is coming off January shoulder surgery that will delay his participation in offseason workouts, but the Colts don’t need a quarterback. OK, fine, they don’t need a kicker either. They have the GOAT, the greatest ever at the position, Adam Vinatieri.
They need everything else.
More Colts:
Insider: Who are the Colts targeting at cornerback?
Draft preview: Which RB will the Colts take?
Some needs are bigger than others, I’ll give you that. The Colts have enough receivers to get by, though an offense like this could always use more. They have enough tight ends, although: ibid.
They have a lot of offensive lineman, and they have a lot of linebackers after Ballard cornered the market at that position in free agency. They don’t have anyone at any of those positions headed to the Pro Bowl. Which means they need to get better there.
And Ballard is big on competition, a by-the-book general manager if the book is “The Hunger Games.” He wants a locker room on edge, a locker room where talent is always arriving — by trade, by free agency, by draft — and competition culls the weakest from the herd.
This herd at 56th Street, it’s weak. The last GM made it so, missing on draft picks and missing on free agents and whiffing so often that Ryan Grigson kept in business that wind farm on I-65.
Ballard will be better, I’m sure of that, though he hasn’t shown it yet. He shopped this offseason at the free agent thrift store, grabbing used bargains at linebacker and receiver and linebacker and defensive line and also at linebacker. The Colts added a lot of new talent. And a lot of linebackers.
CLOSE Colts insider Stephen Holder talks about the team's need at cornerback heading into the 2017 NFL Draft.
The Colts haven’t added anybody special. Not yet. That’s what makes Thursday so important, and to a lesser extent Friday and Saturday as well. But especially Thursday, when Ballard has the chance to give this Colts team something it has lacked since Robert Mathis was running amok in 2013: a defensive player to fear.
The Colts have had quality defensive players since then, don’t get me wrong, but the best of the bunch — cornerback Vontae Davis — was defined not by the plays he made, but by the plays he forced someone else to make. Because when Davis is at his best, quarterbacks don’t throw it near him.
The Colts defense needs a playmaker. Well, it needs three or four playmakers, but let’s not get greedy. Let’s settle on one for now, and seeing how Ballard wasn’t able to — maybe wasn’t going to — throw money at the problem in free agency, he has backed himself into the corner that is the 2017 NFL draft. He has to get a defensive stud in the draft, or the 2017 Colts will be without one. Again.
On the bright side, this draft is believed to be loaded — I mean, abnormally loaded — with stars on the defensive side. And as luck would have it, one of those studs has an issue, a red flag you might say, that should have him still on the board when the Colts take their turn with the 15th overall pick.
CLOSE Colts insider Stephen Holder takes a look at the wide receivers and tight ends the Colts may take a look at in the draft. Stephen Holder/IndyStar
Jabrill Peppers is the stud, and by now you’ve surely heard the problem. The red flag, you might say. Peppers peed too purely at the 2017 NFL combine here in Indianapolis, literally presented a specimen that had too much H2O. A dilute sample, they call it — “diluted sample” sounds better to me, but whatever — and a dilute(d) sample implies obfuscation by urination.
CLOSE Insiders Stephen Holder and Zak Keefer look ahead to the NFL draft. Clark Wade/IndyStar
Hiding something, in other words. Drinking so much water that whatever else was in his system, it would be masked by the overwhelming amount of water. Peppers’ camp released a statement saying he was sick before the combine, knew he’d be asked to work out at Lucas Oil Stadium not just at safety but also at linebacker, and prepared by “drinking 8 to 10 bottles of water before he went to bed.”
Hence, the dilute sample.
CLOSE IndyStar's Stephen Holder discusses whether the Indianapolis Colts should pick a running back in Thursday's NFL Draft. Stephen Holder/IndyStar
Look, I don’t care if his dog ate his homework and then provided the water-full waterfall. It’s like Chris Ballard was telling us this past week when asked for his stance on drafting a so-called character risk: “These guys are young. They make mistakes.”
Did Peppers make a mistake, or did he make a mistake? Doesn’t much matter to me. Far as we know, he has never failed a drug test before. This is not Hamilton Southeastern’s Randy Gregory failing a drug test at the 2015 NFL combine, the reddest of red flags given his two failed drug tests while at Nebraska. Gregory fell to the second round, where the Dallas Cowboys took him because of course they did, and they have been rewarded by seeing Gregory fail so many drug tests in the NFL that he has been suspended for the upcoming season.
Peppers is not Gregory.
CLOSE IndyStar's Stephen Holder discusses whether the Indianapolis Colts should continue pursuing offensive linemen in Thursday's NFL Draft. Stephen Holder/IndyStar
Peppers is the most interesting player in the 2017 draft class, a linebacker or a safety, unless he’s a cornerback, and he’s also a kick returner and a potential wildcat quarterback.
Whatever he is, Peppers has my vote. Luckily for Colts fans, Ballard didn’t ask. The Colts’ GM will lean on his scouts before making the pick, and he says: “Ultimately, the pick is on me. If the guy doesn’t work out, then that’s my fault. That’s on me for not making sure we did everything we could to make the player successful. If we get it right, then that’s for us. We, as a group, got it right.”
Too many times for too many years, the Colts have gotten this day wrong. That’s why they missed the playoffs each of the last two seasons. That’s why they have a new general manager. Now it is Chris Ballard on the clock, and let's not be diluted, er, deluded. He needs to grab the BDPA: best defensive player available.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.A New York City teacher was arrested early Friday morning, hours after he allegedly crashed a small quadcopter drone into an empty seating area during a match at the US Open tennis tournament in Queens.
According to the New York Daily News, Daniel Verley, 26, was arrested and charged with “reckless endangerment, reckless operation of a drone and operating a drone outside the prescribed area.”
The newspaper also reported that Verley is a teacher at the Academy of Innovative Technology, a public school in Brooklyn.
The drone flew overhead just before 8:30pm Eastern Time on Thursday evening during a sparsely attended match between Monica Niculescu of Romania and Flavia Pennetta of Italy. The pilot seemingly lost control and the drone went down into an empty section of the stands—there were no injuries.
"A little bit scary, I have to say," the Associated Press quoted Pennetta as saying. "With everything going on in the world... I thought, 'OK, it's over.' That's how things happen.”
An unnamed United States Tennis Association source told the Daily News that police somehow located the drone’s pilot at “a marina on the opposite side of Citi Field.”
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, drone use is forbidden within five miles of an airport—Louis Armstrong Stadium sits 4.2 miles from LaGuardia Airport.
Back in 2014, the Federal Aviation Administration published Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) No. FDC 4/3621, the first time US flight regulators have moved to criminally punish wayward drone pilots.Twitter’s service was disrupted early Monday evening for some users, just as Sony took the stage to show off new products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
The outage is noteworthy given its timing, coming after the massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures. Twitter would serve as a vital tool for Sony and reporters there to disseminate the news, though the outage likely crippled some of their efforts.
“We are currently experiencing an issue with tweeting and a delay in timelines,” Twitter said in a post of its |
107 schools when over 140 students died that day.
He demanded the remaining names be added to the government’s list. Khan also urged the government to refrain from dragging its feet on the matter.
According to Khan, a meeting of the Shuhada Forum was held in Peshawar in which they have rejected the federal government’s decision to award posthumous Tamgha-e-Shujaat and Sitara-e-Shujaat–the highest civilian awards–to the victims. The forum has instead demanded Nishan-e-Haider, the highest military award for gallantry, for the slain students.
As many as 151 people, most of them schoolchildren, died in the worst terrorist attack in the country on December 16 when terrorists armed to the teeth laid siege to the military-run school for several hours and killed students and teachers indiscriminately. The attack was later claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.
In the aftermath of the bloodbath, a national consensus was forged among all political parties to root out terrorism and extremism from the country. The prime minister lifted a moratorium on the death penalty, the National Action Plan was devised and military courts were formed to try terrorists.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 6th, 2015.
Read full storyShafqat Malik, the assistant inspector general and head of the bomb-disposal unit for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s police department, in Peshawar, Pakistan, fills out evidence reports and inspects evidence. Shafqat is one of the best-trained bomb-disposal experts in the country.
June 26, 2014 Shafqat Malik, the assistant inspector general and head of the bomb-disposal unit for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s police department, in Peshawar, Pakistan, fills out evidence reports and inspects evidence. Shafqat is one of the best-trained bomb-disposal experts in the country. Max Becherer/Max Becherer/Polaris Images For The Washington Post
Members of a bomb-disposal unit are at risk from handling explosives and facing violent militants.
Members of a bomb-disposal unit are at risk from handling explosives and facing violent militants.
— In a country awash in bombs, Shafqat Malik races against time.
He has discovered some of the world’s biggest bombs — 8,000-pound bundles of explosives hidden in trucks — and some of the tiniest, slipped into Coke cans. He has defused bombs secreted in computers and television sets and disabled a suicide vest before its wearer could blow himself up.
Malik is one of Pakistan’s top explosives experts and head of the police bomb disposal unit in one of the country’s most conflictive provinces — Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the country’s northwest near the Afghan border. Malik’s job offers a window into a country suffering not just from Islamic extremism but a broader breakdown in order, with bombs planted by extortionists, people feuding over money and property, and assassins targeting religious minorities.
“Let me assure you, everyone is a target,” Malik, 49, said during a recent interview, moments after one of his staffers brought in two grenades that had been thrown at a police vehicle.
Last year, 4,268 civilians in Pakistan were killed or wounded by explosive devices, according to Action on Armed Violence, a London-based group that monitors violence worldwide. Only Iraq and Syria have logged more casualties from bombings, the group said.
Police Constable Abdul Raheem, age 28, and member of the Bomb Disposal Unit in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province police department displays a timer used in some of the bombs he encounters in his work in Peshawar, Pakistan. (Max Becherer/Max Becherer/Polaris Images For The Washington Post)
The problem has grown so severe that Malik and his 440-member team even examine bodies before funerals to make sure they have not been booby-trapped by terrorists or personal enemies.
Many analysts say the increasingly pervasive culture of bombings can be traced to the 1980s, when Pakistan hosted hundreds of thousands of Islamic fighters battling the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan worked with the United States and other countries to make sure the guerrillas were trained to use land mines and plastic explosives, said Saad Muhammad, a retired Pakistani army brigadier.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Islamist extremists began shifting their fight toward Pakistan. They were aided by the remnants of al-Qaeda, which had chemists and engineers capable of making bombs, Muhammad said.
“We should have realized when we embarked on the jihad in Afghanistan, that this was a very dangerous game we were playing,” said Muhammad, who served as Pakistan’s military attache in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. “At the time, nobody gave a thought to the endgame.”
As the violence increased in the mid-2000s, Malik was thrust onto the front lines of a new kind of war.
He had become a highly specialized ammunition and explosives expert during a two-decade career in the Pakistani army, a time of considerable tension between Pakistan and long-standing rival India. In 2006, he retired from the military and went to work as a counterterrorism investigator for the Federal Investigation Agency. It was the start of a tumultuous new chapter for him, involving some of Pakistan’s grisliest tragedies.
In late 2007, Malik was at home in Islamabad when he learned of an assassination attempt in Karachi on former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was returning from self-imposed exile. Bhutto survived, but 130 people were killed in an explosion that was initially reported as a grenade attack.
When Malik arrived on the scene the next day, he stumbled upon a piece of metal.
“I said, that is a mechanical trigger, and that had to be pulled by a suicide bomber,” Malik recalls. He later used his forensics background to help identify the suspected bomber at the hospital.
Malik also helped to investigate the attack in December 2007 that ultimately cost Bhutto her life and the 2008 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, which killed 53 people.
In the early days, he said, suicide bombers “didn’t know what they were doing” and would just sit on a suitcase packed with explosives and hope it detonated.
But terrorists gradually became more sophisticated, transitioning from wearing bulky vests packed with explosives to sleeker belts and using remote-control triggers that made it harder for suicide bombers to abort their mission, he said.
By 2008, provincial officials were overwhelmed by the bombings, especially in the northwestern part of the country. Four bomb technicians from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were killed when their vehicle struck an improvised explosive device, or IED.
Shortly after that attack, Malik received a call from a senior provincial official.
“He said, ‘Malik, please save us. We are dying,’ ” the bomb expert recalled.
Since taking charge in January 2009, Malik has increased the number of bomb technicians in the Peshawar-based unit from about 35 to 440. He also has sought donations of robots, sniffer dogs and armored vehicles from the United States and governments in Europe.
Over five years, his squad has encountered more than 5,500 devices, Malik said. But bombs are still found in Peshawar just about every day.
Malik describes bombs as a modern-day form of mugging in Peshawar, with extortionists and robbers increasingly using them.
Ajai Sahni, executive director of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, said the explosives represent a “weaponization of society” in Pakistan, enabled by political leaders who waited too long to crack down on their favored militant groups.
“Either you neutralize everyone doing this kind of thing or you can’t control anyone,” Sahni said.
The victims include civilians such as Jamshed Baghwan, a journalist in Peshawar. He said in an interview that two men on motorcycles threw a white bag filled with 15 pounds of explosives at his garage this month, setting off a blast thatheavily damaged his car. It was the third time this year his residence had been hit with explosives.
“I have no idea why this is happening,” said Baghwan, the Peshawar bureau chief for Pakistan’s Express News Live television station. “I am just a local journalist. I am not someone famous, and I don’t have much money.”
A dangerous living
The provincial bomb technicians earn just $230 a month, including a paltry 50 cents or so a month in hazard pay, and complain that they still lack equipment. But many say they are proud to work for Malik.
“If Mr. Malik didn’t join the bomb disposal unit, there would be no bomb disposal unit at all,” said Wasal Khan, who has defused more than 150 IEDs over the past five years.
Ijaz Khan, Peshawar police chief, said Malik has a reputation for being fearless and thorough.
In January, police responded to an explosion at a mosque that killed 11 people. They initially thought it was caused by a gas leak.
“But Malik walked in and told us, ‘This was caused by a five-kilogram explosion’ ” and suggested there might be more bombs in the mosque, Ijaz Khan said. “We then found two others, and he defused them right in front of me.”
Malik is so confident of his skills that, in 2012, he disabled the suicide vest of a teenager, saving his life, as TV news crews followed his work live. The boy had been blocked from reaching his intended target, and police were preparing to shoot him, fearing he or someone using a remote trigger might detonate the vest.
“He was lying there, begging, ‘Don’t kill me,’ ” Malik recalls. “I said, ‘Don’t worry.... This is my scene, and God was very kind to have given me the chance to defuse you.”
Malik has had so many threats on his life that he keeps a file of the letters in his desk drawer.
The most serious attempt against him occurred in 2010, when he was investigating an attack on a police vehicle in Peshawar, he said.
As he surveyed the crime scene, he noticed a young woman in a black burqa moving toward him. As she approached, a small explosion tore off her left shoulder, killing her.
When Malik rushed over to the woman’s body, he noticed she was wearing a vest loaded with explosives. Some had apparently gone off, he said.
Malik bent down and, his hands covered with blood, began dismantling what remained of the device. He tried to avoid looking at the woman’s intact face.
“You are imagining the fate of your life if she had succeeded,” Malik said.
Aimar Iqbal contributed to this report.Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today's WorldView newsletter.
President Trump won an election based on a promise about the past: "Make America great again," he proclaimed, conjuring up the mythic "good old days" while railing about the supposed disaster and mess of the present.
But the funny thing about Trump's nostalgia is that the president has proved, time and again, that he doesn't know much about the past after all.
That was obvious on Monday after Trump was interviewed on radio by the Washington Examiner in which he extolled President Andrew Jackson and suggested Jackson could have prevented the Civil War from taking place.
Here's the full excerpt of what Trump said:
I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn't have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. And he was really angry that -- he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There's no reason for this.” People don't realize, you know, the Civil War — if you think about it, why? People don't ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?
As we wrote earlier, the White House has overtly embraced Jackson's proto-populist legacy. Trump showed off a Jackson biography on his desk at the Oval Office and paid a visit to Jackson's grave in Tennessee in March. His advisers grandiosely described Trump as a "Jacksonian" president. But there are so many dubious claims in just a few sentences here that they cast doubt on Trump's basic grasp of his own branding, let alone American history.
"One glaring issue here: Jackson wasn't really angry about what was happening with the Civil War, because he died more than a decade (1845) before it started (1861)," observed my colleague Aaron Blake, who generously pointed to the source of what may have been Trump's confusion. "Jackson in 1832 and 1833 oversaw the Nullification Crisis, in which Jackson used the threat of military force to make South Carolina pay tariffs. The situation was eventually resolved but is viewed as a precursor to the Civil War."
Later on Monday, the president went on to tweet:
President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War started, saw it coming and was angry. Would never have let it happen! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 2, 2017
But while Jackson may have preserved the Union during his time in office, he was hardly opposed to slavery — the fundamental issue at the heart of the Civil War. Jackson was a slave owner and displayed no "big heart" for the human chattel who secured him his livelihood. My colleagues at the Retropolis blog wrote about a notice Jackson published in the Tennessee Gazette in 1804 urging the return of a "runaway" slave, a "mulatto" who "talks sensible, stoops in his walk, and has a remarkable large foot, broad across the root of the toes" and "will pass for a free man."
“Stop the Runaway,” Andrew Jackson urged in an ad placed in the Tennessee Gazette in October 1804. pic.twitter.com/SX0B99Uryt — DigiLibraryUSSlavery (@DigiSlavery) May 1, 2017
Jackson's vicious campaigns against the indigenous populations of the American South paved the way for the expansion of slavery there. When he was in power, he banned the post office from delivering abolitionist literature in slave states.
"Jackson had a big heart for white farmers," Nicole Hemmer, a historian at the University of Virginia, told Yahoo News. "Less so for the American Indians he slaughtered and the African-Americans he enslaved. Given Trump’s own focus on white Americans over non-white Americans, it’s not surprising that he would fail to see the limits of Jackson’s big-heartedness."
Trump's rhetoric echoes that of people who cling to an earlier revisionist reading of the Civil War, which sought to minimize the significance of slavery as a cause of the war and, instead, framed the conflict as a tragic blunder that could have been avoided.
That reading underlies the "Gone With the Wind" romanticism and Confederate nostalgia that sees the 150-year-old flag of a treasonous, white supremacist breakaway faction still plastered on American cars, flown from houses and even enshrined in some state capitols. But, as Post columnist Jonathan Capehart pointed out, it's also simply wrong. "Forget the 'War Between the States,' 'War of Northern Aggression' or 'The Lost Cause,'" he wrote. "They are euphemisms to make a war about maintaining the evil of slavery and the economy it built seem like a noble effort by a noble people."
"The entirely uncontroversial consensus among professional historians is that slavery caused the war, although this conclusion has not reached much of the general public," wrote the Atlantic's Yoni Applebaum, who is also a former academic in American history. "Leaders like Jackson, then, only postponed the inevitable reckoning."
President Trump doesn't understand why there was a Civil War. It's because my ancestors and millions of others were enslaved. https://t.co/dFjpbp1pUy — Rep. Barbara Lee (@RepBarbaraLee) May 1, 2017
So, yes: When Trump asks why the Civil War "could not have been worked out," he's asking a question that historians have spent years debating and pursuing. But as the president, he shouldn't be naive about the racial tension at the heart of that question.
This is, after all, not an isolated incident. Trump has demonstrated an ignorance about figures in the history of African American liberation. The White House has repeatedly fumbled over the question of the Holocaust and how it should be remembered. And, throughout their time on the campaign trail and in power, Trump and his allies have aped the rhetoric of segregationist politicians and fascist sympathizers from earlier eras — all the while complaining when any critics connect the dots.
Trump's brand of populism may invoke a romantic past, but it needs to be distanced from the real one to succeed. The same is true across the pond, where French far-right leader Marine Le Pen — recently praised by Trump as the candidate "strongest on borders" — constantly plays a double game, invoking an older, more glorious France while also playing down her own party's connections to neo-fascism and Holocaust denial. If she loses a run-off election this weekend, her opponents might well consider it history's own kind of revenge.
But for Trump, barely more than 100 days into his term, there's a lot more reckoning to come.
Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know? Sign up for the Today's WorldView newsletter.Spencer Stone, one of three young men from Sacramento who gained worldwide fame for foiling a mass shooting in Europe in August, will attend Tuesday’s State of the Union address as a guest of first lady Michelle Obama.
Stone, a staff sergeant stationed at Travis Air Force Base, said he learned of the invitation last Monday when the White House called during his morning commute from Sacramento.
“They called my cellphone directly,” he said. “I was surprised.”
Stone flew out of Sacramento at 7 a.m. Sunday. After a layover in Dallas, he arrived in Washington, D.C., at 6 p.m. Eastern time. He spoke with a Sacramento Bee reporter from Maxime, a Georgetown steakhouse where he was having dinner.
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Stone said he expects to spend time doing media events at the White House on Monday before visiting CNN studios for an interview. He also hopes to find time for sightseeing with an uncle and a friend who are traveling with him.
On Tuesday, Stone will sit in the first lady’s guest box with about two dozen other people invited because, according to a White House news release, “they represent who we are as Americans: inclusive and compassionate, innovative and courageous.”
Among the other guests: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Syrian refugee Refaai Hamo, and Ryan Reyes, whose partner Larry Kaufman was one of 14 people killed last month in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino.
Aside from the first lady, Stone may be the most well-known person in the box. He and local childhood friends Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos gained worldwide fame last summer for overpowering a man armed with an assault rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition on a crowded train bound for Paris. Parades, medals, a visit to the Oval Office and television appearances followed. Stone, who was injured in the struggle with the gunman, received a Purple Heart and a promotion from airman first class to staff sergeant.
Everything I’m doing is once in a lifetime. I’m enjoying every second of it. If I’m well known, at least it’s for doing something good. Spencer Stone, one of three men from Sacramento who gained fame for foiling a mass shooting in Europe
In October, Stone again confronted a life-or-death challenge when he was stabbed during a late-night altercation in midtown Sacramento. His wounds – a punctured heart, liver and lung – were so serious that police expected he would die. UC Davis Medical Center surgeons saved his life, and after about a week in the hospital he was discharged.
“I know internally that things are still going on,” Stone said, “but I feel great.”
He has returned to full-time hours at Travis, where he works as a pediatric medical technician.
But for a few days, that life is on hold while he’s in the nation’s capital. Stone said he’s not tired of the fame or the attention.
“Everything I’m doing is once in a lifetime,” he said. “I’m enjoying every second of it. If I’m well known, at least it’s for doing something good.”ThrottleStop is a small application designed to monitor for and correct the three main types of CPU throttling that are being used on many laptop computers.
The left side of ThrottleStop contains a variety of options which can be used to bypass CPU throttling and on the right side is a Monitoring panel that shows you the current state of each thread on your CPU.
Some laptops are using clock modulation and multiplier reductions to lower the performance and power consumption of your computer. This is done deliberately to either allow your computer to run cooler or to allow your laptop to operate with a power adapter that is not sufficient to fully power your laptop and recharge its battery at the same time.
When using ThrottleStop, it is strongly recommended to monitor power consumption at the wall with a Kill-a-Watt meter or similar device and make sure that you don't exceed the power capabilities of your power adapter. Use of ThrottleStop to bypass these throttling schemes is at your own risk and can result in permanent damage to your power adapter or computer or both which may not be covered by your warranty.I like the Texas Mile because it's big and crazy, just like an event in my home state ought to be. There's the record-breaking runs from the Hennessey Venom GT and other cars with horsepower in the four digit range, plus ridiculous wild cards like this: a 1996 Saab 900 that made it to a staggering 174 mph.
Yes, 174 mph. In a Saab that's almost 20 years old and still looks basically stock.
This Swedish land missile's 2.0-liter four was running on E85 ethanol gas and had an upgraded Garrett turbo, a custom tune and other goodies to make it put down 465 horsepower, presumably going to the front wheels. It was fast enough to hit 143.7 mph at the half-mile mark before going all the way to 174.
Kudos to whoever built this monster sleeper, and especially to the sumbitch who was brave enough to get behind the wheel and take it to that speed. Everything's bigger in Texas, even our Saabs. (Even if he is running Colorado plates. I say he gets a pass here.)
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Hat tip to Autoblog!Shelly Cawley was in a coma for a week after the emergency delivery of her daughter. A nurse suggested skin-to-skin contact might improve her condition. This family cell phone footage shows what happened about an hour after she started to wake up. (Youtube/TheJcawley)
In the predawn hours of one Saturday last September, Shelly Cawley's husband and their newborn daughter were being escorted through hallways of a North Carolina hospital. Cawley had slipped into a coma during childbirth and some thought it might be time for her family to say goodbye.
Her blood pressure was dangerously low (60/40, doctors later told the family) and her heart rate was soaring (more than 180 beats per minute). Cawley was hooked up to what doctors called "the last-chance ventilator," a machine pumping air into her lungs with such force that it rattled her hospital bed with each artificial breath, her husband, Jeremy Cawley, said.
But the hospital staff had one more idea to try.
"The nurses instructed us to strip the baby down and put her skin-to-skin with Shelly," her husband told The Washington Post. "Their hope was that if Shelly could smell the baby, feel the baby, hear the baby — even in the coma — it would give her a reason to fight.
“They needed her to start to fight."
And they thought Rylan Grace Cawley — just hours old — might be the only one who could help.
[Woman ‘spontaneously’ revives after 45 minutes without a pulse]
They put the newborn on her mother's chest, Jeremy Cawley recalled, and the child went right to sleep.
"We pinched Rylan and tickled her a little bit so that Shelly would hear her cry," he said with a chuckle.
When the baby did, her mother's vitals jumped, doctors told Jeremy Cawley. He said he was told it may have given her the strength she needed to push through. A week later, Shelly Cawley woke up and met her baby daughter.
“It was a weird feeling — like I was between a dream and reality," she told The Post. "But I do remember as clear as day looking at her face, how beautiful she was. I don’t think I knew at the time I had been asleep for a week. But it was my first time meeting my daughter. I was so overwhelmed."
Top: Shelly Cawley in September 2014. Bottom: Cawley and her daughter, Rylan. (Courtesy of Shelly Cawley)
Jeremy Cawley, now 35, is a YMCA director in Concord, N.C. Shelly Cawley, now 24, is a nursing student. The couple wasn't trying to get pregnant, they said, but they weren't trying not to. When they did, they were excited.
It would be her first and last pregnancy.
[Woman gives birth to 10-pound baby just an hour after discovering she’s pregnant]
Shelly Cawley planned to deliver naturally, bringing her husband to weekly classes on natural birthing.
"Having a child with the person you love is such a big deal, and I was looking forward to getting to experience that with him," she said. "We knew what we were going to do, and then all of the sudden that plan was taken away from me."
A month before Cawley's due date, she said she developed a blood clot in her leg. Doctors began treating it with blood thinners.
On Sept. 5, 2014, her water broke.
She and her husband went to the Carolinas Medical Center-NorthEast in Concord and waited for her labor to progress. It never did.
Doctors diagnosed Cawley with preeclampsia — characterized by extremely high blood pressure — and a life-threatening condition called HELLP syndrome. Doctors, she said, told her that the only option was to deliver by C-section.
She was wheeled into the operating room at around 11:30 that night.
[‘It’s a miracle': Rare identical triplets — two of them conjoined — born in Texas]
“I was telling the doctors that I was scared I wasn’t going to wake up," she said. "To this day, I don’t know why I had that feeling. I guess it was some sort of sense I had that something was going to go wrong — a premonition — because they had treated everything throughout my pregnancy just fine.”
At 11:44 p.m. on Sept. 5, Rylan was born. She weighed 7 pounds, 11 ounces and was 21 inches long.
Within minutes, she was in her dad's arms.
“They just told me that Shelly was going to be in recovery and it would be a little bit before she reunited with us," Jeremy Cawley said.
Then, he was told his wife had taken a turn.
Doctors told him that Cawley's lungs were filling with fluid and she was having trouble breathing on her own. He said doctors later discovered that Rylan's weight was holding the blood clot in place and, when she was delivered, the clot migrated to Cawley's lung — quickly causing a pulmonary embolism.
Ashley Manus, Rylan's nurse, said the medical team decided it was time to bring the family together.
"We didn't know how she was going to make it and she had had no interaction with her child," she told The Post. "If that was going to be it for her, we wanted to be able to tell the baby: 'Your mom held you.'"
Manus and others on Cawley's medical team came up with the idea to lay Rylan on Cawley's chest.
The skin-to-skin method is used to reinforce the mother-baby bond — a technique, doctors say, has noticeable benefits for both a mother and her child. Immediately after childbirth, the baby is placed on the mother’s chest. This physical touch has been shown to stimulate the newborn’s brain development, stabilize heart rate and help maintain body temperature.
Research has shown that it also helps prepare both mother and baby for the first breastfeeding.
"We put infants on their moms' chests every day and it seems to be beneficial for the babies," Manus said.
In Crawley's case, the nurse said: "Shelly was the one in crisis so we thought we should try to have the baby with her as much as possible and, maybe somewhere in Shelly's subconscious, she would hear her baby was calling out to her."
Once they finally got the baby to cry, Manus said, the medical staff saw "a little spike" in Cawley's vitals.
As the week wore on, Jeremy Cawley tried to forge a bond between his unconscious wife and newborn daughter, he said. He swaddled Rylan in one of Shelly's T-shirts so the baby could smell her mom. He learned how to pump his wife's breast milk (the lactation consultant told him he was the first husband she had ever taught), so she could breastfeed if she ever woke up.
Shelly Cawley and Rylan in September 2014. (Courtesy of Shelly Cawley)
“It was such an emotional and spiritual journey for our family while she was gone,” Jeremy Cawley said. "God’s hand was all over everything."
[A 65-year-old mother of 13 is pregnant with quadruplets]
Doctors kept Shelly Cawley in a coma so they could give her the care she needed to survive. She was pumped with 21 units of blood to replace what she lost due to blood thinners, Jeremy Cawley said. She was hooked up IVs, ventilators and a heart-and-lung bypass machine to keep her body functioning.
"But all the doctors said there’s no way they would have gotten to that point if Shelly hadn’t made it through the night," Jeremy said.
Rylan made all the difference, the couple said.
"In my heart I like to think that," said Manus, the nurse.
On Sept. 12, 2014, seven days after giving birth, eight days after falling into a coma, Shelly Cawley opened her eyes.
"One of my clearest memories was asking her if she knew who I was, asking her if she knew my name — and with the most breathy voice she said my name," Jeremy Cawley said. "It was just such a huge thing."
Then, he brought Rylan in.
"She still couldn’t move," he said of his wife, "but you could see her eyes — and as soon as I brought in Rylan, her eyes locked on Rylan. She just stared at her. And I laid Rylan on her chest."
Cawley's mother stood nearby with a camera, showing Cawley — eyes half-closed, mouth wide open — looking at her baby for the first time.
Jeremy Cawley brushed the hair from her forehead and asked her a question: "Are you happy?"
Cawley nodded.
"I’ve got stories to tell you," he said.
Shelly Cawley (center) with her husband, Jeremy, her newborn daughter and her step-son. (Courtesy of Shelly Cawley)
This story has been updated.
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For more health news, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) announced his intention to run for president in the 2016 election during a speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. (AP)
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) announced his intention to run for president in the 2016 election during a speech at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. (AP)
Here is a complete transcript of Ted Cruz’s address at Liberty University in which he officially announced his 2016 presidential bid.
CRUZ: Good to see you.
(APPLAUSE)
Thank you. (APPLAUSE)
Thank you so much, President Falwell. God bless Liberty University.
(APPLAUSE)
I am thrilled to join you today at the largest Christian university in the world.
(APPLAUSE)
Today I want to talk with you about the promise of America.
Imagine your parents when they were children. Imagine a little girl growing up in Wilmington, Delaware during World War II, the daughter of Irish and Italian Catholic family, working class. Her uncle ran numbers in Wilmington. She grew up with dozens of cousins because her mom was the second youngest of 17 kids. She had a difficult father, a man who drank far too much, and frankly didn’t think that women should be educated.
And yet this young girl, pretty and shy, was driven, was bright, was inquisitive, and she became the first person in her family ever to go to college. In 1956, my mom, Eleanor, graduated from Rice University with a degree in math and became a pioneering computer programmer in the 1950s and 1960s.
(APPLAUSE)
Imagine a teenage boy, not much younger than many of you here today, growing up in Cuba. Jet black hair, skinny as a rail.
(LAUGHTER)
Involved in student council, and yet Cuba was not at a peaceful time. The dictator, Batista, was corrupt, he was oppressive. And this teenage boy joins a revolution. He joins a revolution against Batista, he begins fighting with other teenagers to free Cuba from the dictator. This boy at age 17 finds himself thrown in prison, finds himself tortured, beaten. And then at age 18, he flees Cuba, he comes to America.
Imagine for a second the hope that was in his heart as he rode that ferry boat across to Key West, and got on a Greyhound bus to head to Austin, Texas to begin working, washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour, coming to the one land on earth that has welcomed so many millions.
When my dad came to America in 1957, he could not have imagined what lay in store for him. Imagine a young married couple, living together in the 1970s, neither one of them has a personal relationship with Jesus. They have a little boy and they are both drinking far too much. They are living a fast life.
When I was three, my father decided to leave my mother and me. We were living in Calgary at the time, he got on a plane and he flew back to Texas, and he decided he didn’t want to be married anymore and he didn’t want to be a father to his 3-year-old son. And yet when he was in Houston, a friend, a colleague from the oil and gas business invited him to a Bible study, invited him to Clay Road (ph) Baptist Church, and there my father gave his life to Jesus Christ.
(APPLAUSE)
And God transformed his heart. And he drove to the airport, he bough a plane ticket, and he flew back to be with my mother and me.
(APPLAUSE)
There are people who wonder if faith is real. I can tell you, in my family there’s not a second of doubt, because were it not for the transformative love of Jesus Christ, I would have been saved and I would have been raised by a single mom without my father in the household.
Imagine another little girl living in Africa, in Kenya and Nigeria. That’s a diverse crowd.
(LAUGHTER)
Playing with kids, they spoke Swahili, she spoke English. Coming back to California.
(APPLAUSE)
Where her parents who had been missionaries in Africa raised her on the Central Coast. She starts a small business when she’s in grade school baking bread. She calls it Heidi’s Bakery. She and her brother compete baking bread. They bake thousands of loaves of bread and go to the local apple orchard where they sell the bread to people coming to pick apples. She goes on to a career in business, excelling and rising to the highest pinnacles, and then Heidi becomes my wife and my very best friend in the world.
(APPLAUSE)
Heidi becomes an incredible mom to our two precious little girls, Caroline and Catherine, the joys and loves of our life.
(APPLAUSE)
Imagine another teenage boy being raised in Houston, hearing stories from his dad about prison and torture in Cuba, hearing stories about how fragile liberty is, beginning to study the United States Constitution, learning about the incredible protections we have in this country that protect the God-given liberty of every American. Experiencing challenges at home.
In the 1980s, oil prices crater and his parents business go bankrupt. Heading off to school over a thousand miles away from home, in a place where he knew nobody, where he was alone and scared, and his parents going through bankruptcy meant there was no financial support at home, so at the age of 17, he went to get two jobs to help pay his way through school.
He took over $100,000 in school loans, loans I suspect a lot of ya’ll can relate to, loans that I’ll point out I just paid off a few years ago.
(APPLAUSE)
These are all of our stories. These are who we are as Americans.
And yet, for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant. What is the promise of America? The idea that -- the revolutionary idea that this country was founded upon, which is that our rights don’t come from man. They come from God Almighty.
(APPLAUSE)
And that the purpose of the Constitution, as Thomas Jefferson put it, is to serve as chains to bind the mischief of government.
(APPLAUSE)
The incredible opportunity of the American dream, what has enabled millions of people from all over the world to come to America with nothing and to achieve anything. And then the American exceptionalism that has made this nation a clarion voice for freedom in the world, a shining city on a hill.
That’s the promise of America. That is what makes this nation an indispensable nation, a unique nation in the history of the world.
And yet, so many fear that that promise is today unattainable. So many fear it is slipping away from our hands.
I want to talk to you this morning about reigniting |
live album.[55]
After a time of grief and recovery, and while visiting long-time Rush photographer Andrew MacNaughtan in Los Angeles, Peart was introduced to his future wife, photographer Carrie Nuttall. Peart married Nuttall on September 9, 2000. In early 2001 he announced to his bandmates he was ready to once again enter the studio and get back into the business of making music.
2002–2009: Comeback, Vapor Trails, and Snakes & Arrows [ edit ]
"One Little Victory" (2002) Sample of "One Little Victory" from the album Vapor Trails. This song's rapid tempo and heavy double bass drumming was done intentionally to herald the comeback of the band after their hiatus. Problems playing this file? See media help.
With the help of producer Paul Northfield the band returned in May 2002 with Vapor Trails, written and recorded in Toronto. To herald the band's comeback, the single and lead track from the album, "One Little Victory", was designed to grab the attention of listeners with its rapid guitar and drum tempos.[56] Vapor Trails marked the first Rush studio recording to not include any keyboards or synthesizers since Caress of Steel, released 27 years earlier. While the album is almost completely guitar-driven, it is mostly devoid of any traditional guitar solos, a conscious decision by Lifeson. According to the band, the entire developmental process for Vapor Trails was extremely taxing and took approximately 14 months to finish, by far the longest the band had ever spent writing and recording a studio album.[56] The album was supported by the band's first tour in six years, including first-ever concerts in Mexico City and Brazil, where they played to some of the largest crowds of their career.
A live album and DVD, Rush in Rio, was released in late October 2003 featuring an entire concert performance recorded on November 23, 2002, at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The show was the last of the Vapor Trails Tour. To celebrate the band's 30th anniversary, June 2004 saw the release of Feedback, an extended play recorded in suburban Toronto featuring eight covers of such artists as Cream, The Who and The Yardbirds, bands the members of Rush cite as inspiration around the time of their inception.[57] To help support Feedback and continue celebrating their 30-year anniversary as a band, Rush hit the road again for their 30th Anniversary Tour in the summer of 2004 playing dates in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. On September 24, 2004, the concert at The Festhalle in Frankfurt, Germany was filmed for a DVD titled R30: 30th Anniversary World Tour, which was released on November 22, 2005. This release omitted eight songs also included on Rush in Rio; the complete concert was released on Blu-ray on December 8, 2009.[58]
During promotional interviews for the R30 DVD, the band members revealed their intention to begin writing new material in early 2006. While in Toronto, Lifeson and Lee began the songwriting process in January 2006. During this time, Peart simultaneously assumed his role of lyric writing while residing in Southern California. The following September, Rush chose to hire American producer Nick Raskulinecz to co-produce the album. The band officially entered Allaire Studios in Shokan, New York in November 2006 to record the bulk of the material. Taking the band five weeks, the sessions ended in December. On February 14, 2007, an announcement was made on the official Rush web site that the title of the new album would be Snakes & Arrows. The first single, entitled "Far Cry", was released to North American radio stations on March 12, 2007 and reached No. 2 on the Mediabase Mainstream and Radio and Records Charts.[59]
"Far Cry" (2007) Sample of "Far Cry", first single from the album Snakes & Arrows. Problems playing this file? See media help.
The Rush website, newly redesigned on March 12, 2007, to support the new album, also announced the band would embark on a tour to begin in the summer. Snakes & Arrows was released May 1, 2007, in North America, where it debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 with approximately 93,000 units sold in its first week.[60] It sold an estimated 611,000 copies worldwide. To coincide with the beginning of Atlantic Ocean hurricane season, "Spindrift" was released as the official second radio single on June 1, 2007, while "The Larger Bowl (A Pantoum)" saw single status on June 25, 2007. "The Larger Bowl" peaked within the top 20 of both the Billboard Mainstream Rock and Media Base Mainstream charts, but "Spindrift" failed to appear on any commercial chart.[61] The planned intercontinental tour in support of Snakes & Arrows began on June 13, 2007 in Atlanta, Georgia, coming to a close on October 29, 2007, at Hartwall Arena in Helsinki, Finland.[62]
The 2008 portion of the Snakes & Arrows tour began on April 11, 2008, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, and concluded on July 24, 2008 in Noblesville, Indiana at the Verizon Wireless Music Center.[63] On April 15, 2008, the band released Snakes & Arrows Live, a double live album documenting the first leg of the tour, recorded at the Ahoy arena in Rotterdam, Netherlands on October 16 and 17, 2007.[64] A DVD and Blu-ray recording of the same concerts was released on November 24, 2008. The video also includes four songs added to the 2008 portion of the tour, recorded at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Atlanta, Georgia.[65][66][67]
On May 11, 2008, original Rush drummer John Rutsey died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack, related to complications from diabetes.
As Rush neared the conclusion of the Snakes & Arrows tour, they announced their first appearance on American television in over 30 years. They appeared on The Colbert Report on July 16, 2008, where they were interviewed by Stephen Colbert and performed "Tom Sawyer".[68] Continuing to ride what one film critic called a "pop cultural wave", the band appeared as themselves in the 2009 comedy film I Love You, Man, starring Paul Rudd and Jason Segel.[69]
2009–2013: Time Machine Tour and Clockwork Angels [ edit ]
On February 16, 2009, Lifeson remarked the band may begin working on a new album in the Fall of 2009 with American producer Nick Raskulinecz once again producing.[70] In November 2009, Lee, Lifeson and Peart were awarded the International Achievement Award at the annual SOCAN Awards in Toronto.[12] On March 19, 2010, the CBC posted a video interview with Lee and Lifeson where they discussed Rush's induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame on March 28, 2010, at the Toronto Centre for the Arts' George Weston Recital Hall. The band was recognized for the songs "Limelight", "Closer to the Heart", "The Spirit of Radio", "Tom Sawyer" and "Subdivisions". In addition to discussing their induction, Lee and Lifeson touched on future material, and Lee said, "Just about a month and a half ago we had no songs. And now we've been writing and now we've got about 6 songs that we just love..."[71] On March 26, 2010, in an interview with The Globe and Mail, Lifeson reconfirmed the band had already written a half-dozen songs and there was the potential for two supporting tours, one planned for Summer 2010 and a more extensive tour planned for Summer 2011. While still uncertain of exactly how and when the new material would be released, at the time he projected a tentative Spring 2011 release date.[72] Soon after, Peart confirmed Nick Raskulinecz had returned as co-producer.[73]
In April 2010, Rush entered Blackbird Studios in Nashville, Tennessee with Raskulinecz to record "Caravan" and "BU2B", two new songs to be featured on the band's studio album Clockwork Angels. Mixing was done by record engineer Richard Chycki at the Sound Kitchen in Franklin, Tennessee. "Caravan" was released June 1 to radio stations and made available for digital download at this time along with "BU2B".[citation needed] Lifeson's predictions from March were confirmed, and the Time Machine Tour's first leg began on June 29 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and finished October 17 in Santiago, Chile, at the National Stadium. It featured the album Moving Pictures played in its entirety, as well as "Caravan" and "BU2B".[citation needed] It was suggested Rush would return to the studio after the completion of the Time Machine Tour with plans to release Clockwork Angels in 2011.[74] Nonetheless, Rush announced on November 19, 2010, they would extend the Time Machine Tour. The second leg began on March 30, 2011, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and came to an end on July 2, 2011, in George, Washington.[75] On November 8, 2011, the band released Time Machine 2011: Live in Cleveland, a concert DVD, Blu-ray and double CD documenting the April 15, 2011, concert at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. After the tour's second leg was finished, Rush entered Revolution Recording studios in Toronto, Ontario, to finalize the recording of Clockwork Angels.[76] The second single, "Headlong Flight", was released April 19, 2012. Peart and author Kevin J. Anderson collaborated on a novelization of Clockwork Angels that was released in September 2012.[77]
Clockwork Angels was released in the United States and Canada on June 12, 2012,[78] and its supporting Clockwork Angels Tour began on September 7, 2012. As of August 31, 2011, Rush switched their American distribution from Atlantic Records over to the Warner Brothers majority-owned metal label, Roadrunner Records. Roadrunner is handling American distribution of Time Machine 2011: Live in Cleveland and Clockwork Angels. Anthem/Universal Music will continue to release their music in Canada.[79] On April 18, 2013, Rush was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[80]
During Rush's European leg of the Clockwork Angels Tour, the June 8, 2013, show at the Sweden Rock Festival was the group's first festival appearance in 30 years.[81] The band's performances on November 25, 2012, in Phoenix, Arizona and November 28, 2012, in Dallas, Texas were recorded to make a live CD/DVD/Blu-ray that was released on November 19, 2013.[82]
On November 18, 2013 Lifeson said the band has committed to taking a year off, following the completion of the world tour in support of Clockwork Angels. "We've committed to taking about a year off", Lifeson says. "We all agreed when we finished this [Clockwork Angels] tour [in early August] we were going to take this time off and we weren't going to talk about band stuff or make any plans. We committed to a year, so that's going to take us through to the end of next summer, for sure. That's the minimum. We haven't stopped or quit. Right now we're just relaxing. We're taking it easy and just enjoying our current employment."[83]
2014–2018: R40 Tour and disbandment [ edit ]
In September 2014, the Rush R40 box set was announced to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the release of the band's self-titled debut album. It included five previously released live video albums, as well as various previously unreleased footage from across the band's career.[84] On January 22, 2015, the band officially announced the Rush R40 Tour, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Peart's membership in the band. The tour started on May 8 at the BOK Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma,[85] and wrapped up on August 1 at The Forum in Los Angeles.[86]
On April 29, 2015, Lifeson stated in an interview R40 might be the final large-scale Rush tour due to his psoriatic arthritis and Peart's chronic tendinitis.[87] He noted that it didn't necessarily mean an end to the band, suggesting the possibility of smaller tours and limited performances. He also said he would like to work on soundtracks with Lee.[88] On December 7, 2015, Peart stated in an interview he was retiring. The following day, Lee insisted that Peart's remarks had been taken out of context, and suggested he was "simply taking a break".[89][90] Lifeson confirmed in 2016 the R40 tour was the band's last large-scale tour.[91] The band's latest documentary, Time Stand Still, was announced in November 2016.[92]
On January 19, 2018, Lifeson said: "We have no plans to tour or record anymore. We're basically done. After 41 years, we felt it was enough."[8][7]
In October 2018, Rolling Stone published an interview with Lee, who stated, "I'd say I can't really tell you much other than that there are zero plans to tour again. As I said earlier, we're very close and talk all the time, but we don't talk about work. We're friends, and we talk about life as friends. I can't really tell you more than that, I'm afraid. I would say there's no chance of seeing Rush on tour again as Alex, Geddy, Neil. But would you see one of us or two of us or three of us? That's possible."[93]
Musical style and influences [ edit ]
Rush's musical style changed substantially over the years. Its debut album was strongly influenced by British blues-based hard rock: an amalgam of sounds and styles from such rock bands as Black Sabbath, the Who, Cream and Led Zeppelin.[20][94][95] Rush became increasingly influenced by bands of the British progressive rock movement of the mid-1970s, especially Genesis, Yes and Jethro Tull.[96][97] In the tradition of progressive rock, Rush wrote extended songs with irregular and shifting time signatures, combined with fantasy and science fiction-themed lyrics. In the 1980s, Rush merged their sound with the trends of this period, experimenting with new wave, reggae and pop rock.[98] This period included the band's most extensive use of instruments such as synthesizers, sequencers, and electronic percussion. In the early 1990s, the band transformed their style once again to harmonize with the alternative rock movement.[99]
Band members [ edit ]
Final line-up
Former members
John Rutsey – drums, percussion, backing vocals (1968–1974; died 2008)
Jeff Jones – bass, lead vocals (August – September 1968)
Lindy Young – keyboards, backing and lead vocals, guitars, percussion, harmonica (January – July 1969)
Joe Perna – bass, lead and backing vocals (May – July 1969)
Mitchel Bossi – guitars, backing vocals (February – May 1971)[102][103]
Reputation and legacy [ edit ]
More than 40 years of activity has provided Rush with the opportunity for musical diversity across their discography. As with many bands known for experimentation, changes have inevitably resulted in dissent among critics and fans. The bulk of the band's music has always included synthetic instruments, and this has been a source of contention among fans and critics, especially the band's heavy reliance on synthesizers and keyboards during the 1980s, particularly on albums Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows, and Hold Your Fire.[104][105]
The members of Rush have noted people "either love Rush or hate Rush",[106] resulting in strong detractors and an intensely loyal fan base. In 1979 The Rolling Stone Record Guide called it "the power boogie band for the 16 magazine graduating class".[clarification needed][107] A July 2008 Rolling Stone article stated "Rush fans are the Trekkies/trekkers of rock".[108] They have been cited as an influence by various musical artists, including Alice in Chains,[109] Anthrax,[110] Fishbone,[111] Foo Fighters,[112] Jane's Addiction,[113] Manic Street Preachers,[114] Metallica,[115] No Doubt,[116] Pixies,[117] Porcupine Tree,[118] Primus,[119] Queensrÿche,[120] Rage Against the Machine,[121] Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Smashing Pumpkins,[119] Elliott Smith[122] and Soundgarden[123] as well as progressive metal bands such as Meshuggah,[124][125] Prototype, Dream Theater,[115] Puya,[126] Tool,[127][128] Cynic,[129] and Symphony X.[130] Trent Reznor considers Rush to be one of his favourite bands in the 2010 documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage and has particularly cited the album Signals as a major influence on how to incorporate keyboards and synthesizers into hard rock.
Rush was eligible for nomination into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame beginning in 1998; the band was nominated for entry in 2012[131] and their induction was announced on December 11, 2012.[13] A reason for their previous exclusion may have been their genre. USA Today writer Edna Gunderson criticized the Hall of Fame for excluding some genres, including progressive rock.[132] Supporters cited the band's accomplishments including longevity, proficiency, and influence, as well as commercial sales figures and RIAA certifications.[133] In the years before induction, Lifeson expressed his indifference toward the perceived slight saying, "I couldn't care less. Look who's up for induction; it's a joke".[134]
On April 24, 2010, the documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, directed by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It went on to receive the Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award.[135] The film explores the band's influence on popular music and the reasons why that influence has been under-represented over the years. This is done via interviews with popular musicians, music industry professionals, and the band members themselves.
On June 25, 2010, Rush received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6752 Hollywood Boulevard. Critical acclaim continued to mount for Rush in 2010 when, on September 28, Classic Rock announced Rush would be that year's Living Legends awarded at the Marshall Classic Rock Roll of Honour Awards in the UK.[136] The award was presented November 10, 2010. On September 29, Billboard.com announced Rush would also receive the 2010 Legends of Live award for significant and lasting contributions to live music and the art of performing live and reaching fans through the concert experience.[137] The award was presented at the Billboard Touring Awards on November 4, 2010.
The band members were made Officers of the Order of Canada in 1996.[138] In May 2012, the band received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement at a ceremony at Rideau Hall followed by a gala at the National Arts Centre celebrating the award recipients the following day.[139][140][141] In 2017, the band members had three new microbe species named in their honour.[142]
Geddy Lee [ edit ]
Geddy Lee's high-register vocal style has always been a signature of the band – and sometimes a focal point for criticism, especially during the early years of Rush's career when Lee's vocals were high-pitched, with a strong likeness to other singers like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin.[107][143] A review in The New York Times opined Lee's voice "suggests a munchkin giving a sermon".[144] Although his voice has softened, it is often described as a "wail".[143][145] His instrumental abilities, on the other hand, are rarely criticized. He has cited Jeff Berlin, Jack Casady, John Entwistle, Jack Bruce and Chris Squire as the bassists who had the biggest impact on his playing style.[146] Lee's style, technique, and ability on the bass guitar have been influential to rock and heavy metal musicians, inspiring players including Steve Harris,[147] John Myung,[148] Les Claypool,[149] and Cliff Burton.[150] Lee is able to operate various pieces of instrumentation simultaneously during live concert, most evidently when Lee plays bass and keyboards, sings, and triggers foot pedals as in the song "Tom Sawyer".[97]
Alex Lifeson [ edit ]
Alex Lifeson, 2011
Lifeson as a guitarist is best known for his signature riffing, electronic effects and processing, unorthodox chord structures, and a copious arsenal of equipment used over the years.[151][152]
During his adolescent years, he was influenced by Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.[153] Lifeson incorporated touches of Spanish and classical music into Rush's sound during the 1970s, reflecting his interest in progressive rock guitarists like Steve Hackett and Steve Howe.[154] To adapt to Lee's expanding use of synthesizers in the 1980s, Lifeson took inspiration from guitarists like Andy Summers of The Police and The Edge of U2, who gave him models for rethinking the guitar's role in Rush's music.[155] Lifeson's guitar returned to the forefront in the 1990s, and especially on Vapor Trails (2002). During live performances, he is still responsible for cuing various guitar effects, the use of bass-pedal synthesizers and backing vocals.[156]
Neil Peart [ edit ]
Peart has been voted the greatest rock drummer by music fans, critics and fellow musicians, according to Drummerworld.[157] He is also regarded as one of the finest practitioners of the in-concert drum solo.[158] Initially inspired by Keith Moon, Peart absorbed the influence of other rock drummers from the 1960s and 1970s such as Ginger Baker, Carmine Appice, and John Bonham.[159] Incorporation of unusual instruments (for rock drummers of the time) such as the glockenspiel and tubular bells, along with several standard kit elements, helped create a highly varied setup. Continually modified to this day, Peart's drumkit offers an enormous array of percussion instruments for sonic diversity. For two decades Peart honed his technique; each new Rush album introduced an expanded percussive vocabulary. In the 1990s, he reinvented his style with the help of drum coach Freddie Gruber.[160]
Peart also serves as Rush's primary lyricist, attracting much attention over the years for his eclectic style. During the band's early years, Peart's lyrics were largely fantasy/science fiction-focused,[161] though since 1980 he has focused more on social, emotional, and humanitarian issues. In 2007, he was placed second on Blender magazine's list of the "40 Worst Lyricists In Rock".[162] Allmusic, however has called Peart "one of rock's most accomplished lyricists", Gibson.com describes Rush's lyrics as "great", and others believe the lyrics are "brilliant".[163][164][165]
Sales [ edit ]
Rush has released 24 gold records and 14 platinum records (including 3 multi-platinum), placing them fifth behind The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Kiss and Aerosmith for the most consecutive gold or platinum studio albums by a rock band in the United States.[166][167][168] As of 2005, Rush had sold about 25 million copies of their albums in the U.S. (ranking them 79th among recording acts[168]) and 40 million worldwide.[169][170][171][172] As of 2012, Moving Pictures was the band's highest-selling album (4.4 million units).[173]
Despite dropping out of the public eye for five years after the gold-selling Test for Echo (which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 chart) and the band being relegated almost solely to classic rock stations in the U.S., Vapor Trails reached No. 6 on the Billboard 200 in its first week of release in 2002 with 108,000 copies sold. It has sold about 343,000 units to date. The subsequent Vapor Trails tour grossed over $24 million and included the largest audience ever to see a headlining Rush show: 60,000 fans in São Paulo, Brazil. Nevertheless, Vapor Trails remains their first album not to achieve at least gold status in the U.S.[citation needed]
Rush's triple-CD live album, Rush in Rio (2003), was certified gold, marking the fourth decade in which a Rush album had been released and certified at least gold. In 2004, Feedback cracked the top 20 on the Billboard 200 and received radio airplay. The band's 2007 album, Snakes & Arrows, debuted at number 3 (just one position shy of Rush's highest peaking albums, Counterparts (1993) and Clockwork Angels (2012), which both debuted at number 2) on the Billboard 200, selling about 93,000 its first week of release.[174] This marks the 13th studio album to appear in the Top 20 and the band's 27th album to appear on the chart. The album also debuted at number 1 on the Billboard's Top Rock Albums chart, and, when the album was released on the MVI format a month later, peaked at number 1 on the Top Internet Albums chart.[175]
The tours in support of Snakes & Arrows in 2007 and 2008 accrued $21 million and $18.3 million, respectively, earning Rush the number 6 and 8 spots among the summers' rock concerts.[176][177]
Live performances [ edit ]
The members of Rush share a strong work ethic, desiring to accurately recreate songs from their albums when playing live performances. To achieve this goal, beginning in the late 1980s, Rush has included a capacious rack of digital samplers in their concert equipment to recreate the sounds of non-traditional instruments, accompaniments, vocal harmonies, and other sound "events" in real-time to match the sounds on the studio versions of the songs. In live performances, the band members share duties throughout most songs. Each member has one or more MIDI controllers, which are loaded with different sounds for each song, and use available limbs to trigger the sounds while simultaneously playing their primary instrument(s).[178] It is with this technology the group is able to present their arrangements in a live setting with the level of complexity and fidelity fans have come to expect, and without the need to resort to the use of backing tracks or employing an additional band member.[179] The band members' coordinated use of pedal keyboards and other electronic triggers to "play" sampled instruments and audio events is subtly visible in their live performances, especially so on R30: 30th Anniversary World Tour, their 2005 concert DVD.[citation needed]
A staple of Rush's concerts is a Neil Peart drum solo. Peart's drum solos include a basic framework of routines connected by sections of improvisation, making each performance unique. Each successive tour sees the solo more advanced, with some routines dropped in favour of newer, more complex ones. Since the mid-1980s, Peart has used MIDI trigger pads to trigger sounds sampled from various pieces of acoustic percussion that would otherwise consume far too much stage area, such as a marimba, harp, temple blocks, triangles, glockenspiel, orchestra bells, tubular bells, and vibraslap as well as other, more esoteric percussion.[citation needed]
One prominent feature of Rush's concerts are props on stage, at one point called diversions. These props may include washing machines, vintage popcorn poppers, or animations and inflatable rabbits emerging from giant hats behind the band.[180]
Philanthropy [ edit ]
Rush actively participates in philanthropic causes. The band was one of several hometown favourites to play Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto, also dubbed SARStock, at Downsview Park in Toronto on July 30, 2003, with an attendance of over half a million people. The concert was intended to benefit the Toronto economy after the SARS outbreaks earlier in the year.[181] The band has also sustained an interest in promoting human rights. They donated $100,000 to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights after a concert they held in Winnipeg on May 24, 2008.[182] Rush continues to sell T-shirts and donate the proceeds to the museum.[183]
On July 24, 2013, Rush performed a benefit concert in Red Deer, Alberta, at the ENMAX Centrium with all proceeds going to the Canadian Red Cross to help victims of the 2013 flooding that devastated many regions of southern Alberta. The original venue for the show, the Scotiabank Saddledome, was heavily damaged from the flooding and was unavailable for the concert date as originally planned.[184]
The individual members of Rush have also been a part of philanthropic causes. Hughes & Kettner zenTera[185] and TriAmp[186] electronics have been endorsed and used by Lifeson for many years. A custom signature amplifier was engineered by Lifeson and released in April 2005 with the stipulation UNICEF will receive a donation in the amount of $50 for every Alex Lifeson Signature TriAmp sold.[187] Lee, a longtime fan of baseball, donated 200 baseballs signed by famous Negro League players, including Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Josh Gibson, to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in June 2008.[188] In late 2009, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson launched an auction for their initiative "Grapes Under Pressure", in support of the cause "Grapes for Humanity". The auction consisted of items from the band such as signed guitars, cymbals and basses, as well as autographs on all items by the band members. There were also autographs by band members from Depeche Mode, Tool, the Fray, Judas Priest, Pearl Jam and more, as well as signatures from Ricky, Julian and Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys: The Movie on a rare Epiphone guitar.[189]
The band is featured on the album Songs for Tibet, appearing with other celebrities as an initiative to support Tibet and the current Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso. The album was made downloadable on August 5, 2008, via iTunes and was released commercially August 12, 2008.[190]
Rush has also been a big supporter of Little Kids Rock, a national nonprofit that works to restore and revitalize music education programs in disadvantaged U.S. public schools. They teamed up with Musician's Friend and Sabian to help Little Kids Rock provide percussion to public schools nationwide. They donated $500 of the proceeds from every Neil Peart Paragon Cymbal Pack sold, each of which came with a free splash cymbal personalized, autographed, and dated by Peart. The cause-based marketing initiative raised over $50,000 for Little Kids Rock.[191]
Discography [ edit ]
Studio albums
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Books [ edit ]
Analysis and appreciation [ edit ]
Birzer, Bradley J. Cultural Repercussions: An In-Depth Examination of the Words, Ideas and Professional Life of Neil Peart, Man of Letters. Wordfire Press, 2015. ISBN 1614753547.
. Wordfire Press, 2015. ISBN 1614753547. Freedman, Robert. Rush: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Excellence. Algora Pub, 2014. ISBN 1628940840.
. Algora Pub, 2014. ISBN 1628940840. Mobley, Max. Rush FAQ: All That's Left to Know About Rock's Greatest Power Trio. Backbeat Books, 2014. ISBN 1617134511.
. Backbeat Books, 2014. ISBN 1617134511. Popoff, Martin. Rush: Album by Album. Voyageur Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0760352205.
. Voyageur Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0760352205. Price, Carol S. and Robert M. Price. Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of Rush. Wildside Press, 1999. ISBN 1-58715-102-2.
. Wildside Press, 1999. ISBN 1-58715-102-2. Roberto, Leonard. A Simple Kind Mirror: The Lyrical Vision of Rush. Iuniverse Star, 2000. ISBN 0595213626.
. Iuniverse Star, 2000. ISBN 0595213626. Telleria, Robert. Rush Tribute: Merely Players. Quarry Press, 2002. ISBN 1-55082-271-3.
Biographies [ edit ]
Banasiewicz, Bill. Rush: Visions: The Official Biography. Omnibus Press, 1988. ISBN 0-7119-1162-2.
. Omnibus Press, 1988. ISBN 0-7119-1162-2. Collins, Jon. Rush: Chemistry : The Definitive Biography. Helter Skelter Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1-900924-85-4 (hardcover).
. Helter Skelter Publishing, 2006. ISBN 1-900924-85-4 (hardcover). Gett, Steve. Rush: Success Under Pressure. Cherry Lane Books, 1984. ISBN 0-89524-230-3.
. Cherry Lane Books, 1984. ISBN 0-89524-230-3. Harrigan, Brian. Rush. Omnibus Press, 1982. ISBN 0-86001-934-9.
. Omnibus Press, 1982. ISBN 0-86001-934-9. Popoff, Martin. Contents Under Pressure: 30 Years of Rush at Home and Away. ECW Press, June 28, 2004. ISBN 1-55022-678-9.
. ECW Press, June 28, 2004. ISBN 1-55022-678-9. Popoff, Martin. Rush: The Illustrated History. Voyageur Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0760349953.
Memoirs [ edit ]By Jean Lotus
Editor
The science of using fingerprint evidence in police investigations is older than Sherlock Holmes. But police have long had a problem matching a fingerprint collected as evidence to an unknown offender.
The Forest Park Police Department is getting some help from the FBI in fingerprint identification, said a report submitted to the Forest Park Village Council Monday.
The pilot program links local police departments to the federal Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a national database of fingerprints and criminal histories.
Law enforcement officials have long complained that the Illinois State Police take months and even years to process requests for fingerprint identification.
In Forest Park, this lag time caused a three-year delay in the arrest of a man who was eventually convicted of a violent crime that took place locally in 2008.
The female owner of Baubo's Garden, a now closed lingerie shop at 7234 Madison St., was tied up with several pairs of underwear while she was alone in her store in the afternoon by an unknown man. The man threatened to shoot and stab her. He robbed her of the money in the cash register and stole her jewelry.
Police recovered latent fingerprint and DNA evidence in August, 2008 and sent it to the Illinois State Police Crime Laboratory. They did not get results until May 1, 2011, when state police identified 43-year-old convicted sex offender Edmond Tate, then living in Lafayette, Ind. Tate turned himself in to Country Club Hills police in 2011.
Tate was finally tried in December, 2013 and two weeks ago Judge Gregory Ginex sentenced Tate to 28 years in prison.
Police at the time of Tate's arrest blamed a backlog of fingerprint work at the state police lab for the delay.
With the new FBI system, things are much faster.
"What used to take years, now literally takes minutes," said the report.
According to the report, a latent fingerprint collected by an evidence technician is captured digitally and then enhanced on the computer with Adobe Photoshop. The print is emailed to the FBI using a secure encryption system.
"Within minutes a list of candidates is automatically generated from the IAFIS system," the report says.
Private contractors who have been trained as certified fingerprint examiners match the print, if possible, with a candidate. Locally, the prints are matched by Chuck Schauer, a former DEA officer and retired River Forest Police sergeant.
"This program is one of the few of its kind in the United States," the report said. Forest Park participates, along with 13 other suburbs in the West Suburban Directed Gang Enforcement (WEDGE).
Forest Park police said fingerprint matching through IAFIS helped solve five cases in Forest Park in 2013.
Contact:
Email: jlotus@forestparkreview.com Twitter: @FP_ReviewSince Ed Miliband stepped down as the leader of the Labour party, the Labour MP for Doncaster North has vowed to keep a low profile as a hard-working backbencher.
So Mr S suspects that the former Labour leader was disappointed to discover that half of the lobby have joined him this morning on his train journey to his constituency. Several political journalists travelling up to Doncaster for the Ukip conference have reported that Miliband is also on the train:
If you think you're having a bad morning, Ed Miliband just boarded a train to Doncaster only to find half UK political journalists on board. — Jim Waterson (@jimwaterson) September 25, 2015
However, it’s not all bad news for the backbencher, who was snapped buying breakfast ahead of the journey, with staff in Pret a Manger claiming they once voted for him:
Ed Miliband at Pret Kings X. Overheard |
less budget cuts that are now crippling our military.
These additional defense dollars will be prioritized to address critical readiness shortfalls, fix training and maintenance backlogs, and ensure that our troops are ready to deploy rapidly. Then I will set out to modernize our forces.
I will strengthen our ground forces by restoring the Marine Corps to an active-duty end-strength of 182,000 and the Army to 490,000. This will reverse cuts that are taking the Army toward pre-World War II levels and allow us to take common-sense measures like stationing more troops in Europe to deter Russian aggression.
I will recapitalize our Navy and increase the size of our fleet to a minimum of 323 ships by 2024, reversing cuts that have slashed our fleet to its smallest size since World War I. Because a major part of this effort must be to ensure a large and modern U.S. submarine fleet, I will order at least two Virginia-class submarines to be built each year.
South Carolina has an important role to play in this process. The Navy’s Nuclear Power School, located just outside of Charleston, helps train the next generation of officers and enlisted sailors to operate many of the vanguard ships in our fleet. In all, defense spending accounted for more than $6 billion in economic activity in South Carolina in 2014. That’s $1,262 per resident. A strong defense industrial base is essential to both our national security and our local economies, and that is why I will oppose another round of base realignment and closure, or BRAC, which threatens vital military installations in South Carolina and across the country.
Finally, I will modernize our Air Force by accelerating fighter procurement and fully supporting the development of a next-generation bomber. This effort will recapitalize an Air Force that has the smallest and oldest combat force in its history. I will also ensure that America preserves its robust aerial refueling capabilities with the procurement of the KC-46A tanker aircraft, and stop the Obama administration’s reckless proposed cuts to nuclear weapons.
I am running for president to make the 21st Century another American Century. That will require restoring American military strength — the underpinning of our security and prosperity.
South Carolina long has made a vital contribution to our defense and when I am president it will continue to help ensure that Americans are safe and free.What happens when words fail us, when we are in that depthless black void where action, non-action, and all forms of interpersonal communication fail us? The state where the loss is so unbearable, so unspeakable, that we are stopped dead in our tracks, as if locked in a grimy room from which we cannot escape?
In German, when we meet (“treffen”) but are stopped by what we meet, we are “betroffen,” falling into the state of betroffenheit. This place of pain and emptiness is familiar to those who have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
To go to such a place in and through live performance would seem to go well beyond what our ancient Greek philosopher friend Aristotle had in mind when he suggested in his famous essay, The Poetics, that tragedy’s chief function was to evoke emotions of pity and fear on the part of the audience, which would serve as a kind of social corrective through the collective experience of catharsis.
With their brilliant and searing work Betroffenheit, Canadian artists Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young take the audience on a journey that parallels that of Young himself when, in 2009, he lost his only daughter, along with two of her young cousins, in a tragic cabin fire.
Choreographer Pite has the ability to make dancers appear to fly in and through space as if their hands and feet were suction cups capable of attaching and releasing onto any surface entirely through their own internal impulses. Her choreography here is brilliantly paired with the work of writer/performer Young.
In this collaboration between his Electric Theatre Company and Kidd Pivot, a dance theatre company with which Pite has created a dynamic body of contemporary work, Young himself moves through the emotionally stunted landscape in which he found himself trapped following his daughter’s death.
The place of entrapment is given the physical form of a room with filthy institutional green walls. It is indeterminately inside and outside, backstage and frontstage, a place from which there appears to be no escape, only doors that fly open and throw dancers onto the stage as if shooting out from a volcano.
Initially, these dancerly intrusions into Young’s world are pleasant distractions from pain. One of the first is a staggeringly feathery and pink Carnival routine that seems to have wandered in from a favela in Rio de Janiero, slightly askew after dancers had consumed perhaps too many mojitos.
Another one, reminiscent of the Bob Fosse choreography in Cabaret with its so-called “jazz hands” reaching out to the audience, at first delights, but turns to menace, as the furious tap-dancing devolves into the marching steps of an army, one that invades not just countries, but bodies.
Throughout the first half of the two-hour long work, Young is onstage almost continually, remaining within the room even as he returns to his former job as the high-octane host of what appears to be a kind of deranged, coked-up, television variety show. Here he meets himself in the form and body of one of the dancers, variously transferring himself between bodies and into a tiny mini-me puppet manipulated by the dancers.
It is only at the start of the second act, following an interval, that the internal logic of the work becomes apparent. Now the horror of the event itself unfolds before us, not a literal fire, but dancers moving through the light and darkness of a closed room filled with thick smoke that appears to have the density of raindrops.
Shane Reid
The genius and integrated artistic vision of the design and sound team create an environment for this distinctively non-cathartic place of entrapment. At this point, spectators are themselves trapped in this state of betroffenheit and escape is no longer possible.
One of the many successful features of this collaboration is the way in which movement and text work as co-activators. Instead of dancers speaking text — a trend which hopefully has peaked — all of the words seem to have been uttered by Young, referred to only as “Him” in the work.
“He” speaks to himself from outside of himself as a pre-recorded disembodied voice; speaks with his own voice, and ventriloquises his speech through the bodies of others. The collective impact of this is to bring us inside his head, one that is just as claustrophobic as the room in which he appears to be trapped.
As the walls fly out and at one point almost literally devour him, Young is left to argue with himself in a kind of Abbott and Costello routine. But rather than a comic foil of the other, it is as if each voice is answering back to itself.
One such exchange argues, “I’m not the victim, it’s the others, who need help.” The response, “It’s you who’s the disaster waiting to happen,” points to what we now know to be true: that those who perished, while they will not go away, cannot be helped, and that anyone trapped in the state of betroffenheit is dangerous to themselves and others.
There is of course no heroic ending to this work, no catharsis in the Aristotelian sense. There will be no walking out into the bright light of day. The mystery is perhaps why human beings gather to witness such pain and why a performer such as Young would endlessly relive it onstage.
Perhaps it’s because we need to collectively experience the suffering that is part of life so that we can live with it, and continue to live the best possible lives we can, in spite of it.A new Rugby XV’s season is quickly approaching. College kids are returning to school. Senior sides are closing out their Rugby 7s season and opening up training camp for the 2015-2016 season. With the teams prepping for the start of the season, new faces will be entering into the mix.
In Alexandria, Louisiana, a sleepy central Louisiana town, rugby is about to open new territories for them. Earlier this year, Louisiana State University’s Alexandria Campus approved the creation of a university funded rugby program. This endeavor was enacted by LSU-Alexandria chancellor, Dr. Daniel Howard. Dr. Howard, who has been described as “one of the most passionate fans of rugby”, was the former chancellor at Arkansas State University. The university that is home to the Arkansas State Red Wolves Rugby side, a team notorious in American rugby community for their elite level of collegiate rugby play. On May 2015, Howard directed his attention in-state and hired long time UL-Lafayette Rugby head coach, Boyd LeJeune, to help pilot the new program.
LeJeune has been a big fixture in the collegiate rugby environment in south Louisiana and is no stranger to building collegiate rugby programs from the ground up. Having coached at UL from 2005 – 2014, LeJeune racked up an impressive record, winning more than 80% of his matches, coaching the team to multiple conference titles and sweet 16 playoff spots, including one win away from a national title spot. LeJeune did this while also guiding the program from a division III program to a division II rugby program. Despite all the success that LeJeune has had, he still a firm believer that while statistical accolades are great to achieve, the positive influence that he can have on the athletes he coaches is his top priority.
“I’m passionate about being a character builder. I want to help these kids develop leadership skills, and provide them with the things that lead them to being successful in life.”
LeJeune is bringing the same mindset and coaching style to LSU-Alexandria that made him successful and beloved in Lafayette. As a result he has made it his mission to bring in diverse, high character athletes to play for the team. This is a benefit for the cohesion of the team, but also an asset for the city of Alexandria. For the city, with a population under 50,000, and a university enrollment of just under 3000 people, this new injection of life is expected to have an impact on the local community. LeJeune has been working to recruit athletes from all over the world. While it has not prevented him from recruiting in-state, LeJeune has traveled around to recruit and offer scholarships to kids from major rugby beds like New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and South Africa, as well as less auspicious rugby locales like Hawaii and Trinidad and Tobago. Domestically, LeJeune has worked to attract athletes that may not have considered Louisiana to be an option for college, but with the new opportunity, has sparked the interest of kids from as far as Oregon and Montana.
The new rugby program will look to mimic its training regimen to that of a rugby Olympic sports academy. Focusing on nutrition and conditioning will be key to the progress of the team. LSU-Alexandria will provide the new rugby program with three new Rugby fields that are expected to be breaking ground shortly. For the time being, the rugby team will be playing on fields located near the Alexandria International Airport.
As LSU-Alexandria Rugby begins its climb, look forward to watching rugby take another step closer to mainstream publicity.
“I want to get kids a four-year college education and they are for that. That’s everything. I want them to build trust with their teammates. To win games is the outcome that we want, but if we can be successful in building kids for everything, not just the game, then that is where our real success is.”
LSU Alexandria is looking to open up their first season in NSCRO. The excitement and investment by LeJeune and Howard will hopefully give the program a chance to grow, a city to embrace them, and a university that can only hope to see new opportunities arise from it.
To find out more information about LSU-Alexandria Rugby contact Boyd LeJeune at BLeJeune@LSUA.com
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PinterestJERSEY CITY -- A 40-year-old city woman was sentenced to six years in prison today for giving birth to a boy, putting the newborn in a plastic bag and throwing it over a fence into her neighbor's yard on Kensington Avenue in 2013.
"This is just a very, very, very sad event, which nonetheless has to be dealt with pursuant to our laws," Hudson County Superior Court Judge Joseph Isabella said before sentencing Rosibel Lanza this afternoon at the Hudson County Administration Building.
On May 13, Lanza pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of her baby, a first degree crime carrying a possible sentence of 10 to 20 years in prison. But as part of the deal, she was to be sentenced in the second degree range, which is five to 10 years.
"Ms. Lanza put the baby in a plastic bag, threw the baby over a fence in the plastic bag to, basically to the other side of the yard, to deter detection," Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor John Mulkeen said in court today of the Aug. 31, 2013 incident. "Some children heard a noise, what they thought was a cat, and they find the baby. They find some adults and they save the baby."
The judge noted that the child has been adopted, it was born premature and has some cognitive issues. Mulkeen said it is not known yet whether the time the baby spent without oxygen in the bag has resulted in any cognitive issues.
Mulkeen asked Isabella to sentence Lanza to seven years in prison. Lanza was out on a bail of $75,000 cash or bond.
In court this afternoon, Lanza was wearing a white jacket, white blouse, white pants, white sneakers and white socks. Upon being sentenced, she was handcuffed and led from court by a sheriff's officer. She showed no emotion at the hearing and when given a chance to speak, she simply said she agreed with what her attorney had said.
"If you have a baby and you don't want a baby, it is very simple, based on the internet and thanks to the press," Mulkeen said. "You just have to type in on Google, 'How to leave a baby someplace.' You bring it to a police station or a hospital. It's that easy."
For information on how to safely, legally and anonymously surrender an unwanted infant, go to www.njsafehaven.org to learn about New Jersey's Safe Haven Infant Protection Act or call the Safe Haven Hotline at (877) 839-2339.
Lanza will also have to serve five years of parole after her release.Episode 3 of tvN’s “Hwayugi,” starring Lee Seung Gi, Oh Yeon Seo, and Cha Seung Won, has been delayed to next week. Originally scheduled to air tomorrow, episode 3 will now be airing on January 6, followed by episode 4 on January 7.
Here is the full statement from “Hwayugi” regarding the delay:
“In order to carry out thorough inspection of our set, we’ve decided to postpone episode 3 of ‘Hwayugi,’ which was originally to air on December 30, one week.
“We bow our heads in apology to all of our viewers for causing concern, regardless of the reasons behind the December 24 broadcast issues and the accident that befell our staff member.
“Currently, in order to improve the production environment on the ‘Hwayugi’ set, we have reinforced the staff with additional personnel, and through additional safety inspections, we are improving filming and working conditions for our staff, as well as reworking our production schedule.
“We ask for your kind understanding and consideration, as this is all part of the process to prevent any further accidents and to facilitate the production process.
“Once again, we apologize to everyone who has shown an interest in ‘Hwayugi,’ and after thorough inspection and improvements, we will return with a high quality program.”
“Hwayugi” airs on Saturdays and Sundays at 9 p.m. KST. The drama will resume with episode 3 airing on January 6.
Watch “Hwayugi”:
Source (1)It took the election of Donald Trump for the progressives to unmask themselves, to reveal their true identities, just like the sinister aliens in that old television mini-series V: The Final Battle. In the series, having disguised themselves as humans, the aliens are ultimately shown to be reptiles from another planet who came to take over Earth. Over the years, they had infiltrated governments, businesses, and religious institutions. The actual humans finally develop a poison that afflicts only the aliens, rather as Trump afflicts Democrats. It is dispersed, and the aliens are forced to evacuate.
Those reptilian humanoid aliens are a pretty good analogy for our current crop of progressives. How else do we explain the inhumanity of people like now former anchor Scott Pelley of CBS, who opined to his audience that "the [House majority leader, Steve] Scalise attack was to some degree self-inflicted"? Joy Reid of MSNBC wondered if Scalise's positions on "moral issues" like gay marriage and Obamacare did not make his shooting somehow understandable! She later tweeted that Scalise "was a white man with a violent background [a blatant lie], and saved by a black lesbian, and yet..." She could not bring herself to congratulate those two Capitol Police officers.
At whose knees did these people learn to not be civilized adults? Certainly no one ever taught them the Golden Rule: kindness to others, simple consideration for their fellow humans at times of pain. Even if they differ on political issues.
A Democratic Party strategist from New Jersey, James Devine, almost immediately after the shooting, launched a couple of hashtags, #HuntRepublicans and #HuntRepublicanCongressmen! He appeared on the Tucker Carlson program to defend his scurrilous behavior to no avail. He had tweeted: "We are in a war with selfish, foolish & narcissistic rich people. Why is it a shock when things turn violent?"
The man is a reptile.
A writer at the Washington Post, Malcolm Harris, tweeted that "the shooting of conservative Republicans could be justified." He implied that he hoped Scalise would die! His actual tweet is beyond the pale. The New York Times embarrassed itself by dredging up the lie that Sarah Palin was responsible for the Gabby Giffords shooting in Tuscon in 2011 because of an ad showing targeted districts in the crosshairs of a gun sight, an ad not even created by her campaign. The charge was disproven long ago. Jared Loughner, the schizophrenic who shot Giffords, had never heard of Palin and had been angry at Giffords for years. The Times knew that the charge was specious but used it anyway in its post-shooting editorial. Like the rest of the media talking heads and self-described elite opinion editors, they continue to believe that the American people are terminally stupid. Why anyone reads this propaganda rag is a mystery. There is rarely an objective word among the paper's full-time anti-Trump campaign.
The Scalise example isn't the only one. After the young man, Otto Warmbier, was imprisoned in North Korea and sentenced to fifteen years' hard labor, former late-night comic Larry Wilmore said the young man "might be America's biggest idiot frat boy," a despicable slander against a young man who was described by eyewitnesses as "mature and polite." Then he mocked Warmbier's name for sounding like "warm beer." He called him "Otto von Crybaby. This is a man so ignorant of the facts about the North Korean regime, he actually thinks his mockery is funny. Writers at Salon and the Huffington Post also attacked Warmbier. The HuffPost said he deserved to be imprisoned because he's white.
Who are these vile, thoughtless, cruel people, and how did they come to infect our politics and media?
Albert Einstein wrote: "If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don't read that hogwash, but rather leave it for the reptile from whom it has been fabricated."
This who they are. It is time for decent people to reject the vicious nonsense perpetrated by the left on a daily basis. The agony they are suffering since the election is self-inflicted. One cannot treat the majority of the American people like insects to be swatted away except at election time and expect to win respect or elections. The repulsive things said and or written in the wake of the Alexandria shooting by the persons cited above are just a few, those that came from news outlets. Much worse appeared all over social media, which is consistent with the left's venomous rejection of the election results. Time to take Einstein's advice and not listen to or read their hogwash. With each passing day, Trump is seeming more and more like an eagle.Ask the Scientists
Join The Discussion
What is the context of this research?
When we open our eyes, we see a world full of objects. But our retinas receive only messy blobs of colors and patterns. How do we construct an orderly world from such chaos? The visual system of humans and other primates binds separate visual features together to create coherent objects. What about birds who fly without colliding with objects? To answer this question, we will let pigeons play a video game on a touchscreen computer in order to test whether bird brains handle object perception the same way that the human brain does. If so, then the fundamental process of object perception evolved at least 275 million years ago when mammals and birds share the last common ancestor.
What is the significance of this project?
The bird brain has a very different organization than the brains of humans and other mammals. Birds don't have a visual cortex, for example. Also, the brain of a pigeon is the size of your thumb! So how can birds, like pigeons, see objects the way that we do? Knowing how birds see the world can tell us a lot about what is unique about human vision, and what we share with other species. We can also use our knowledge of how small bird brains efficiently create visual objects out of messy input to find new and powerful ways to build artificial visual systems for small mobile devices, such as drones and robots.
What are the goals of the project?
The study of visual object perception in humans uses computer-based visual tasks. We will adapt this task for pigeons. We will reward pigeons with food for playing a "video game", that is, pecking at four visual objects presented sequentially on a touchscreen. Objects will be presented in orderly or random sequences.
Objects will be created with unique combinations of visual features of place, color, and shape. After the pigeons learn to peck at these objects for food, we will occasionally present objects in novel sequences.
Like humans, pigeons should be slower to respond to objects presented out of sequence only when the object's color-shape-place feature information is changed. Response times should NOT be slower for an object shown out of sequence if feature information is preserved.Actor and Dorchester lunk Mark Wahlberg was at Super Bowl LI between the Patriots and Falcons, but he left before the game was over, with New England facing a deficit. Wahlberg caught shit for being a frontrunner, then said that the reason he’d departed was because his son wasn’t feeling well. That was accurate, but not in the “barfing kid” sense.
Stephen Rodrick profiled Wahlberg for Men’s Health and received this explanation: Small Wahlberg was throwing a damn fit because his team was losing.
But not everyone listens to Mark Wahlberg. You see, he’s got kids. Last year, a mini-scandal arose when Wahlberg was seen leaving the Super Bowl before his beloved Patriots mounted their historic comeback. At the time, he told reporters he had a sick son who needed to get back to their hotel. That’s partly true. The Wahlberg family was watching the game in a luxury suite in Houston’s NRG Stadium while the Patriots were getting pounded. Wahlberg and Rhea Durham’s second son, 8-year-old Brendan, was not handling it well at all. “He was spitting out F-bombs and going crazy. It was bad,” says Wahlberg, shuddering as if he’s reliving the moment. “He was lying down on the carpet. He was very upset.” Rhea wanted to stay, but Wahlberg wasn’t having it and left with his boy. I ask Wahlberg if his son learned a valuable lesson about not giving up on your team, and he laughs. “Heck no. He’s a vicious sore loser. He wants the ball. He hates when his brother gets it. When he doesn’t get the ball, he goes crazy. He throws rocks.”
Brendan really is his father’s son.
[Men’s Health]Faith Healer Adam Miller (YouTube/screen grab)
A self-described faith healer has filed a lawsuit against atheist video blogger Stephanie Guttormson after she posted a video debunking his claim that he was a medical professional.
Guttormson, who is Operations Director for the Richard Dawkins Foundation, posted a video to YouTube last December explaining why she was skeptical that Adam Miller’s 1977 near death experience (NDE) gave him special abilities to heal people.
“Let’s start by pointing out that the germ theory of disease accounts for how illnesses affect us,” Guttormson pointed out. “He makes this claim that these experiences in your lives and traumas create dark cellular structure — whatever that is — and that by invoking this magic spirit, it will come down and break up this — quote, unquote — dark cellular structure.”
“Sometimes we want the answers so badly and want to help so badly that we’ll believe just about anything,” she added in a subsequent video. “Usually out of fear and hopelessness and desperation.”
“Adam Miller is a charlatan, he’s a swindler, he’s a snake oil salesman. You risk your lives delaying or forgoing proper medical treatment by going to him for help. And more importantly, for believing his unsubstantiated claims.”
Miller posted a video in response announcing that he would take legal action for copyright and other violations. According to the faith healer, Guttormson “mutilated and molested” his original video, which he said was “a very holy work.”
Miller’s video also repeatedly suggested that Guttormson could not be trusted because she was transgender.
“She never once states herself what she is or who she is,” a woman in the video notes.
“She’s not actually showing anything for the community either by saying, you know, she was a guy,” a second woman agrees. “She’s not really being who she is. You know, she’s lying about that.”
On a GoFundMe page created to fund her defense, Guttormson said this week that she had been officially served with a summons to appear in court.
Watch the video below from ThinkStephtically.
Watch the video below from Adam Miller.
(h/t: What Would JT Do)KBS2 TV‘s drama “Moorim School” is facing some rough waters, as the drama may be halting production due to issues between the production company and KBS.
According to an initial statement on January 23, the production company JS Pictures and KBS are currently in conflict over whether the drama will end at 16 episodes rather than the originally planned 20. However, the production company has since clarified their position.
“The drama will not end early, and it will air over the Lunar New Year holiday. Production of the drama has not stopped, either. Everything is being filmed ahead of time. Only this weekend’s filming scheduled has been cancelled, and that’s due to the severe cold snap. Next week’s press conference will continue as planned.”
A representative of the drama added, “There is no incorrect information in the official statement. Nothing has been decided up on yet. Everything will be discussed at next week’s press conference.”
KBS also dismissed the news of “Moorim School” ending early or halting production as rumor, and denied the conflict between the broadcaster and JS Pictures.
Sources (1) (2)Geneseee County has more concealed handgun permits per capita than state's other high-population counties
A Ruger LCP 380cal and it's holster is seen at Williams Gun Sight in Davison on Nov. 7, 2014. Laura McDermott | MLive.com
(Laura McDermott | MLive.com)
LANSING, MI -- Gun owners would be prohibited from openly carrying weapons in Michigan schools, day care centers and some other areas under legislation set to be formally introduced next week in Lansing. But the
would allow permit holders to carry concealed pistols in those areas instead, provided they first request an exemption from the state. Sponsoring Sen. Mike Green, R-Mayville, likened the proposal to a "peace pipe" designed ease tensions between gun rights groups and school officials, some of whom have complained about open carry in their buildings. "I basically want to trade open carry for concealed carry in those zones," Green said. "I shopped it by the gun groups some time ago, and everybody seemed to be OK with it, but now some of them are having a little trepidation. I'm not sure where it's headed." Michigan law currently prohibits concealed pistol license holders from carrying concealed guns in schools and other so-called "pistol-free zones." But the law, in what some have called a glaring "loophole," does not prevent them from openly carrying in those same areas. A series of open carry run-ins have caused controversy in recent years, but the issue exploded in March when a man
. Police interviewed him, confirmed his CPL status and determined he was within his rights. The Ann Arbor school board responded by banning all guns on school property, prompting a lawsuit from a gun group and parent. State law is designed to preempt a local unit of government from enacting gun regulations. Green's bill would prohibit open carry in schools, day care centers, sports arenas, bars, churches, entertainment venues, hospitals, casinos and college dorms or classrooms. CPL holders could request an exemption during the original application or renewal process, which would be granted in the form of an endorsement on the actual license. Applying at any other time would cost up to $20 to cover processing costs. State Rep. Andy Schor, D-Lansing, would prefer to keep most concealed guns out of schools too. He's introduced legislation that would prohibit open carry in the areas where concealed pistols are currently prohibited and add public libraries to that list. "Not a week goes by that someone doesn't email me or tell me we need to take guns out of schools or take openly carried guns out of schools," Schor said Thursday. "I have to let them know I'm very supportive of my bill, but I'm not a committee chair or in the majority, and I can't get anyone on the other side of the aisle to take it up."
GUN GROUPS STUDY UP
Green is one of the most gun-friendly lawmakers in Michigan, having recently led a successful push to make Michigan a true "
" CPL state by eliminating county gun boards, shifting responsibility for license applications and background checks to county clerks and state police. But gun groups and owners have
with a draft copy of his new bill that was distributed online this week, although they expect to see some changes during the legislative process. Not surprisingly, Michigan Open Carry Inc, which champions open carry rights allowed under current law, will "heavily oppose" the bill, according to President Phillip Hofmeister. "School districts say guns cause disturbances and frighten children. No, the gun doesn't create the disturbance and frighten children, the school administrators do by making a big issue out of it," he said. The bill, as written, could also penalize CPL holders who inadvertently expose their concealed gun in a pistol-free zone, according to Hofmeister. The draft proposal would prohibit the intentional display or open carry of a gun but does not clearly define either term. "We're taking otherwise law-abiding, peaceful people and turning them into felons because their shirt rode up a couple inches one time," he said. Steve Dulan, a spokesperson for the Michigan Coalition for Responsible Gun Owners, said the group generally supports allowing concealed carry in schools but has not yet taken an official position on Green's pending bill. Allowing CPL holders to legally carry their guns in more places is the best way to deter predators, Dulan said, arguing that by allowing concealed carry in schools, the state could enhance student safety. "I think even the most ardent open carry advocates have to admit there would be more people carrying in these '
' if concealed pistols were allowed," Dulan said. More than 475,000 Michigan residents currently have concealed carry permits, according to the latest statistics from the Michigan State Police.
LONG SHOT LEGISLATION?
Republican Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a similar bill in 2012, and Green acknowledged Thursday that the administration has already hinted at concerns with the new proposal. Th 2012 measure would have prohibited open carry in pistol-free zones while allowing private property owners, along with some colleges and universities, the option to prohibit concealed weapons as well. But Snyder,
, expressed concern that public schools, public day care centers and public hospitals would not have had that same ability. "I believe it is important that these public institutions have clear legal authority to ban weapons on their premises," he wrote. "Each is entrusted with the care of a vulnerable population and should have the authority to determine whether its mission would be enhanced by the addition of concealed weapons." The new bill would not stop private property owners from prohibiting concealed weapons, but it does not extend that option to public institutions. While Snyder doesn't comment on pending legislation, a spokesman said in April that the governor generally opposes open carry in schools and supports allowing concealed weapons, "but only if the district has had the opportunity to set its own policies and would be allowed to opt out of such laws." Schor, whose bill to prohibit open carry in areas where concealed guns are currently not allowed has not advanced, said he would also be more amendable to a concealed carry measure that allows public schools to make that choice on their own. But Green's pending bill sounds like it may at least be an improvement over current law, according Schor, who noted that he has not yet seen the final language and is curious to see how the Snyder administration responds. "It prevents the fear factor, prevents someone openly carrying a gun from walking into a school and causing fear and trouble and the cops being called and all of the issues that come along with that," he said. "But I'd prefer people not be carrying guns in schools at all." Schor disputed the common argument from gun rights groups that allowing more weapons in schools would make them safer. It could cause chaos if police officers are called in to respond to an active shooter and find multiple people wielding guns, he suggested. Green, for his part, said he is listening to feedback on the pending bill and is focused on crafting a final product that is amenable to gun rights advocates, who don't necessarily see any need to change existing law and are unlikely to support anything that is too restrictive. "We'll see where the discussion goes," he said. "There could be changes. I'm open to talking. This is not something I feel we need to have, but I'm more than willing to look at it to ease the minds of some people."
Jonathan Oosting is a Capitol reporter for MLive Media Group. Email him, find him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter.ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Last weekend, Hillary Clinton dispatched her husband, former President Bill Clinton, to offer a defense of her alleged espionage. The espionage allegations against her are that in order to escape public and Obama administration scrutiny, she had all of her emails as secretary of state diverted from a secure government server to a non-secure server in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., and in so doing, failed to protect state secrets in at least 2,200 instances during her four-year tenure.
The essence of her husband’s defense is that the secrets were not secrets when she saw them, and the investigation of her is all “a game.”
We know that the FBI is getting closer to Hillary Clinton, because Bill Clinton had not addressed her email issues publicly before last weekend. The defense he offered belies the facts and the law.
He argued that prosecuting his wife over her emails is akin to prosecuting someone for driving a car in a 50-mile-per-hour zone at 40 mph because the police have arbitrarily and without notice changed the speed limit to 35 mph.
The implication in his argument is that Mrs. Clinton’s emails were retroactively classified as confidential, secret or top-secret after she received or sent them and, therefore, she had no notice of their sensitivity.
His argument is unavailing for two reasons. The first is that it is untrue. Emails are confidential, secret or top-secret at the time they are created, whether marked or not.
The second reason is that Mrs. Clinton signed an oath on her first full day as secretary of state — after she received a two-hour tutorial from two FBI agents on the proper care and lawful handling of state secrets. In that oath, she acknowledged that she had an obligation to recognize and protect state secrets on the basis of the sensitive nature of the information contained in them — whether they bore classified warnings or markings or not.
State secrets are materials that, if revealed, could harm the national security of the United States.
Bill Clinton’s speed zone example, if true, would be a profound violation of due process, the foundation of which is notice. In a free society, for a prosecution to be successful, the government must show that the defendant had notice of the behavior expected of her. Hence, changing the speed limit without notice would be a profound violation of due process and fatal to a prosecution for speeding.
His example is not even remotely analogous to Mrs. Clinton’s behavior while secretary of state.
Why did he address this last Saturday?
He probably did so for two reasons. The first is that people in Hillary Clinton’s inner circle from her time as secretary of state have been offered interviews by the FBI. They all hired the same lawyer, and with that lawyer, they are in the process of answering FBI questions. Bill Clinton — for whom the FBI once worked — knows that the investigation will soon be at his wife’s doorstep, and he wanted to get her version out to Democratic primary voters.
The second reason for Mr. Clinton’s broadside relates to an obscure but profound admission by the Department of Justice. Here is the back story.
One of the 39 Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought in connection with Mrs. Clinton’s email scandal was filed recently by Jason Leopold, a reporter for Vice News. He seeks copies of the emails Mrs. Clinton tried unsuccessfully to wipe clean from her server, as well as copies of communications between the Department of Justice and Mrs. Clinton.
The Justice Department moved to dismiss his lawsuit, and in support of its motion, it filed a secret affidavit with the court, signed by an FBI agent familiar with the bureau’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton. In its brief filed the day before Mr. Clinton made his silly speeding prosecution analogy, the Justice Department — which also once worked for him — characterized the secret affidavit as a summary of the investigation of Mrs. Clinton. The department argued that |
exercises. Just about everything is covered in the entire series.
7. Podcast in Spanish.org (website)
When you listen to Spanish.org’s podcasts it feels like you are eavesdropping on a genuine conversation between friends. The dialogues are spoken at normal speed, and as the website says, this is “natural conversations real Spanish”. The trick is obviously to try and understand as much about what is being said as possible. But don’t worry if any or indeed most of it sounds alien to you. Each podcast is accompanied by a transcript, worksheet, answers and vocabulary tasks. Once you have a worked through those, go back and listen to the podcast again. All should be clear now. A lot of thought and effort has gone into making these Spanish podcasts as stimulating as possible since the conversations cover a broad range of subjects. For example, there are podcasts on how social networking has changed the way we relate to each other, neighborhood services and a trip to the zoo.
8. Notes in Spanish (iTunes – website)
Notes in Spanish is made by a husband and wife team based in Madrid. Ben is from England and Marina is a Madrileña, and together they offer the next best thing to full immersion. That’s because they use real conversational phrases to talk about real life happenings. The podcasts are accompanied by worksheets and each program starts with a recap of the previous edition. There are editions for beginners, intermediates and advanced Spanish language learners. The dynamic language duo must be doing something right, as they have built up a large following. There have been more than 14 million worldwide downloads of their Spanish audio since 2005.
Examples of content: A Grandmother Explains Twitter, HBO’s The Pelayos, Your Emotions Are Contagious, Man and Science: From Myth to Reason, Antonio Bandera’s Favorite Word, Three Tips for Public Speaking, Frida Kahlo’s Daily Routine.
OK, so actually FluentU isn’t a regular Spanish podcast – it’s actually a learning platform where you can learn new words through real live videos and Spanish audio dialogues, check out annotated definitions, add new words to your own personal vocabulary lists, and much more!
So, how does it work?
In a nutshell, FluentU has a big library of videos and short audio dialogues that cover a variety of situations. While the dialogues aren’t as long, they can be very topic specific, which is great if you’re learning Spanish topic by topic.
The great thing about these audio dialogues is that they cover a range of levels – from complete Newbie, all the way to Native if you’ve been around Spanish for a while, so you don’t have to feel left out whether you’re a novice looking for easy audios, or you’re approaching native level and just looking for audios to brush up your listening skills!
What makes FluentU unique is the platform’s design. Within every video or audio dialogue, there’s a full dialogue and vocabulary section covering the main vocabulary and grammar points.
And if you go into the audio lesson, the audio will start playing, but alongside the audio track, there are interactive subtitles you can engage with. You can hover over the subtitles, which effectively pauses the audio and zooms in on a word definition, and if you click on the word, it’ll pull up extended examples, saving you the trouble from checking up every word in the dictionary!
Not to mention you can add these words to your custom vocabulary list if you want to, helping you keep track of what you learned in each lesson!
Within each lesson, there’s also a Learn feature. It’s sort of like vocabulary flashcards for you to review all the words you’ve learned up until now. What’s unique about this is that for each word that shows, multiple clips where that word is used are also showed below. You can select any of these clips and they’ll play just the section containing that word.
So if you’re looking to learn vocabulary through context and actual examples, FluentU might be a good choice for you!
Start using FluentU on the website with your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Play store.
Other Resources on Spanish Podcasts for Learning Spanish
And if you want more information about learning Spanish with podcasts, here are some extra tips:
How to download free native-spoken podcasts & MP3s in almost any language: In case you’re an intermediate or advanced Spanish learner, then here’s a tip for quickly accessing a ton of native language Spanish podcasts.
60 (More) Insanely Useful Resources To Get You Learning, Reading, Writing and Speaking Spanish Right Now!!!: There are some additional Spanish podcasts here that we didn’t mention. Also, many other useful resources for learning Spanish.In South Korea, the ₩1,000,000 mark holds just as much psychological weight as $1,000 does in the United States — though the former actually buys about $884 at the time of this post.
That has not stopped Samsung from breaking it with impunity, though, pricing the base model 64GB Galaxy Note 8 at about ₩1,090,000 ($964) and the 256GB model at a harrowing ₩1,250,000 ($1,105).
LG was highly expected to park right against its rival chaebol with its new V30. It did not. The Korea Herald reports that the top-end 128GB version will cost ₩998,000 ($882) while the 64GB device will cost ₩949,300 ($840).
The company has usually and marginally underpriced its larger competitor but has, regardless of pricing strategy, undersold them as well. It reportedly continues to operate under a consumer price advantage motif. The relatively diminutive difference between the two storage sizes should help encourage sales of the 128GB model.
“Due to the two strongest rivals [Apple and Samsung], it is not easy to see gains,” LG Mobile CEO Juno Cho said. “But the performance of our smartphone business is improving quarterly, year-on-year. Yet, it is difficult to say when it will swing back into the black.”
LG posted minor losses on its mobile unit last quarter.Photo
The Irish writer Colm Toibin was shaving in his bathroom on Tuesday morning, and savoring the news that his “Testament of Mary” had just been nominated for a best play Tony Award, when the telephone rang. The voice on the other end said, “I have Scott Rudin on the line for you.” And so began one of the more surreal phone conversations that Mr. Toibin ever had: He was a freshly minted Tony nominee, but his producer Mr. Rudin was telling him that the play would close on Sunday, after only 43 performances and far earlier than planned, due to poor ticket sales.
Mr. Toibin said he took the news in stride – commercial Broadway is a brutal business, with only 25 percent of shows ever turning a profit – and went off to his teaching job at Columbia University. On Wednesday, after the news had sunk in, Mr. Toibin – whose novels include “The Master” and “Brooklyn” – reflected on his rookie outing as a Broadway playwright with the one-woman show about the mother of Christ, which stars Fiona Shaw and was directed by Deborah Warner.
Q.
What was the strangest part of seeing your work on Broadway?
A.
One Saturday I flipped through the paper and suddenly saw a full-page ad for the play with this extraordinary image of Fiona and the crown of thorns around her mouth. It was so stark and stunning. But it was also just bizarre – here it’s a Saturday morning, you’re having your coffee, you’re thinking about going for a walk in Central Park, and then you see this huge ad for something you wrote. Something I wrote. I couldn’t really believe it.
Q.
You learned about the Tony nomination around 8:45am Tuesday, and learned the play would close an hour or so later. How did you feel?
A.
I had read about the nominations online, and made some calls to people, as one does. I was happy. Then I realized I had to get ready to discuss essays with my undergraduates. So I had a shower and was half-shaved when the phone rang, and it was that lovely voice saying, ‘I have Scott Rudin on the line for you.’ These are hard calls to make. He was very nice about it. But you know, about 30,000 people will have seen the play over a 6-week run by the time it closes, with a standing ovation every night. In European terms, that’s a huge success. In Dublin I’d be walking around with everyone saying, what an amazing success you’ve had with your play. But in New York the template is another of Scott’s shows, “The Book of Mormon,” where you’d have three productions touring the world and never ending. We won’t do that. The play will have productions in Spain, Brazil, Denmark, and some other countries we’re talking to.
Q.
Fortunately, a lot of the “Mary” producers are also “Mormon” producers – that’s how the business works, and I’m sure they will be fine financially. But did you ask Scott to reconsider closing the show?
A.
You know, I really trust his judgment. If he was calling to say that this was the decision he’d come to, then in my view the finances of the show – whether it could run an extra week or not – is of no concern to me.
Q.
How did you deal with the news?
A.
I think dark laughter might be the best way to put it. And when in doubt, consult Oscar Wilde. I’ve been teaching him in this semester. He has a quote – success is merely a preparation for failure. Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you’re writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, your time is up.
Q.
Once the play was in rehearsals, did you find that some pieces of the writing weren’t having the impact or the power that you expected?
A.
Fiona and Deborah had really parsed and analyzed every single word in the play, so there was nothing left unchallenged. For example, when the cross is lifted up, I had a line, “His voice deepened.” And Fiona and Deborah immediately wanted to know: Why did his voice deepen there? What did that sound like? And I couldn’t say to them, I just wrote “deepened.” So they did so much work with the text that, when Fiona was performing, I had this faith and trust that they believed very deeply in the way they were doing the play and she was saying the words.
Photo
Q.
As a novelist you’re used to authorial control. How did it feel having an actor and audience members take some of that control away.
A.
There were shocking moments. One was when the audience, from the very beginning, found a line funny that I didn’t intend – I hadn’t written it with a note in the script, “stop for a laugh at this point.” But I came to enjoy some of that reaction. My favorite was when Fiona talks about the water changing into wine. She would do a line, “I may have sipped some wine myself.” I had put that in to convey that Mary didn’t really care about wine, that it wasn’t a big deal to her. But the audience found it funny. It was the way Fiona said it – there was a great comic undertone to it.
Q.
Did that teach you anything?
A.
Yes. I thought that because she was allowing a comic undertone at certain points, they were more willing to accept her pain when it came. When Fiona screamed out something later, the audience followed her more easily to that place of pain because they had laughed before. The next time I write a play – in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I’ll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that – that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.
Q.
Scott Rudin is one of the most successful and strong-minded producers on Broadway. What was working with him like?
A.
The amount of care and work he did was extraordinary. He was around all the time. There was a moment two weeks ago, after seeing a performance, when I thought a line needed fixing, needed one more thing in it. I said afterward to everyone, I’m sorry but I think we need to fix a line. I began to describe it when Scott turned to me and he just delivered the line as it should have been delivered. It turned out that, at the performance, Fiona had gotten one word wrong in the line. But Scott knew the line by heart – he knew the whole play by heart, I think. And in rehearsals he was very interested in storytelling. He knew that in the second arc of the play, it couldn’t merely be about the Passion and the Crucifixion – rather it was also a story about her speaking and it would change something in her.
Q.
Did you two get along well, even when he told you that the play would close?
A.
Yes. There moments of frustration, like when he decided to have an author’s note put in the Playbill, then called me to ask if I had written it. I pointed out to him that he had just decided to have one, and that I hadn’t written it yet. He said OK, but he needed it A.S.A.P. And I said, OK, but I would send it when I was done writing. I had some research to do. He was being a producer, and he was an excellent one.
Q.
Was the pre-show idea yours, with Fiona Shaw posing in a glass box like the Virgin Mary we’ve seen in so many paintings?
A.
No, the idea arose in rehearsals. I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don’t have a strong visual imagination. So what would work and not work theatrically was not something I would easily see in my mind.
Q.
What did you think of the pre-show?
A.
There was one night when I stood at the back of the theater and watched all the people walking around on stage, around Fiona, and I thought it was amazing. It was something new in my experience going into a Broadway theater. I thought we were in a recreated space.
Q.
One Broadway veteran said to me Tuesday that perhaps the play wasn’t controversial enough to get an audience – that it had to become a must-see flash point in the culture wars.
A.
I think it might have been possible for us to provoke people into buying tickets, but I was concerned about that. I wanted this play to be a theatrical experience rather than a culture war over religion. You could have marketed the show to Catholics and others as “the most shocking thing you will ever see,” and I’m glad we didn’t do that. It would have harmed the integrity of the production and performance. I think we have a right and a duty to put on good theater, and I think we did that.Thanks to a landmark agreement between the United States and Mexico, the parched Colorado River Delta will get a rejuvenating shot of water this spring for one of the first times in five decades, just in time for World Water Day on March 22.
On March 23, 2014, the gates of Morelos Dam on the Arizona-Mexico border will be lifted to allow a "pulse flow" of water into the final stretch of the Colorado River. Officials and scientists hope the water will help restore a landscape that has long been arid but that once supported a rich diversity of life.
"The pulse flow is about mimicking the way the Colorado River flowed in the springtime, thanks to snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains, before all the dams were built," says Sandra Postel, director of the Global Water Policy Project and a National Geographic Freshwater Fellow. By the early 1960s, dams on the Colorado, such as Glen Canyon and the Hoover Dam, had diverted so much water that there was precious little flow entering the lower Colorado.
Water that did make it to Morelos Dam was diverted into Mexico's Mexicali Valley for crop irrigation, leaving little for the wildlife or indigenous people living in the delta.
View Images This spring, a "pulse flow" of water will be released through Morelos Dam on the U.S.-Mexico border in order to benefit the plants and animals in the parched delta. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER MCBRIDE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Water for the pulse flow is being released from Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam at an unspecified time. It will take a few days to travel some 320 river miles (515 kilometers) to the Morelos Dam. On March 23, the gates of Morelos Dam will be opened by the International Boundary and Water Commission, which operates the structure. That will allow the pulse flow to enter the last 70 miles (113 kilometers) of the Colorado River. Peak flow through the gates is expected around March 27, and then the flow will taper to a lower volume for about eight weeks.
As agreed upon by the U.S. and Mexico, the total amount of flow over the period will be 105,392 acre-feet of water (130 million cubic meters). That represent less than one percent of the pre-dam annual flow through the Colorado, "but in terms of recent flows it is very significant," says Postel.
The outcome of the pulse flow remains somewhat unpredictable. Groundwater "sinks" along the route will trap an unknown amount of the water, and debris could block part of the flow or cause it to reroute. "There's a lot of uncertainty because this is an experiment that hasn't been done before," says Postel. (See "The American Nile.")
If the flow reaches the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California), as scientists hope, it should happen in about two weeks. Except for a few short periods of heavy precipitation (most recently in the 1990s), the Colorado has not reached the sea since 1960. That has negatively impacted what used to be one of the world's most productive fisheries, which previously benefitted from the nutrients brought by the river. (See "8 Mighty Rivers Run Dry From Overuse.")
View Images Formerly lush, the Colorado's delta in the Sea of Cortez has long been an arid wasteland, thanks to overuse of the river. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER MCBRIDE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Rebirth of a Lush Ecosystem
"We can't wait for the water to come," says Osvel Hinojosa Huerta, a Mexican ecologist with the nonprofit Pronatura Noroeste who has spent years studying the delta. Hinojosa Huerta, who is also a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, says the pulse flow will help restore about 70 miles (113 kilometers) of the river's course and 2,300 acres of floodplain, including freshwater marshes.
The region once boasted two million acres of wetlands that comprised one of the planet's great desert aquatic ecosystems. But decades of scarce water have reduced vegetation in the delta by 90 percent, and recent years of drought have made the situation even more extreme.
The flow will benefit hard-hit cottonwood and willow trees and provide habitat for a host of wildlife, including endangered birds such as Yuma clapper rails, Virginia rails, and California black rails, says Hinojosa Huerta. Migratory birds like warblers and flycatchers will also benefit from restored habitat in the delta, which serves as an important corridor on their journey. The southwestern willow flycatcher is one species of special concern, he notes.
The pulse flow is timed to coincide with maximum seed production of native willows and cottonwoods, says Hinojosa Huerta. Those trees have been dying off in the delta in recent decades, because floodwaters are the primary way they disperse their seeds, he notes.
"The reason the pulse flow ramps up quickly and then has a long tail is because the peak flow is to spread the seeds and the tail is to maintain soil moisture so the seedlings can grow and the roots can follow the water down into the soil," says Hinojosa Huerta.
View Images The mighty Colorado is reduced to a trickle in Mexico. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER MCBRIDE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Monitoring the Flow
For months scientists have been making detailed ecological studies of the lower Colorado River in order to gather baseline data before the dam gates open. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, the Mexican government, the University of Arizona, the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, Pronatura, and others have been studying the river and the surrounding ecology. Once the pulse flow starts, scientists will be monitoring water flows, salinity, temperature, groundwater recharge, vegetation growth, and impacts on birds, fish, and other wildlife.
A primary goal is to "see how water behaves in this system," says Jennifer Pitt, who works on Colorado River issues for the Environmental Defense Fund in Boulder, Colorado. Pitt and Hinojosa Huerta co-chair a binational working group on the river's restoration.
"We might learn that it would have been better to have less volume of water for more days, or that we got it just right, or maybe that we need twice the volume for one day, and so on," says Pitt. "Osvel [Hinojosa Huerta] did his dissertation on where the best bird diversity exists in the delta and found a strong correlation to open water, and now we'll be able to test his conclusions," she adds.
View Images Instead of wetlands, much of the Colorado River Delta is now covered by dry, salty, cracked earth. PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER MCBRIDE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Binational Cooperation
The landmark agreement clearing the way for this spring's water release, known as Minute 319, was signed in November 2012 as an addendum to the 1944 water treaty between the U.S. and Mexico.
In addition to the pulse flow, the agreement allows Mexico to store water in U.S. reservoirs, and it specifies that both countries will share the benefits of water surpluses and the burdens of water shortages. It also promotes cooperation on conservation projects such as removing invasive tamarisk.
Minute 319 provides benefits that are "critically important on both sides of the border," says Anne Castle, the assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of Interior in Washington, D.C.
The agreement is the first in which two countries have come together to allocate water specifically to benefit the environment in a cross-border setting, Castle says. Governments in other countries are watching the pulse carefully, she added. Kyrgyzstan has already expressed interest in the agreement as a model for how an international river might be shared.
The current agreement between the U.S. and Mexico expires in 2017, but Castle says there is "very significant interest in discussing an extension of Minute 319.
The pulse flow will give us more information to work out the details for future agreements."
Hinojosa Huerta says a key to winning widespread support for the pulse flow along the Colorado has been assuring water users that the event will not affect their own water rights in any way. "Farmers, irrigation districts, and water managers have been very supportive," he says. "They are excited that the river is going to have water again."
The Colorado River Delta may never recover to its former size and glory, "but we know that if you add some water, life does return," says Postel. "We've seen rivers running dry all around the world, from being dammed and diverted, and here's one ecosystem of great significance that two countries are working cooperatively to try to restore. So many others need restoration too."
Help restore water to the Colorado River Basin by joining Change the Course, a project of National Geographic and partners. Sign up online or text "River" to 77177.Google today announced the new Gmail compose window is being rolled out to everyone “over the next few days.” Furthermore, the company is “saying farewell” to the old compose version, meaning there is no longer an opt-out option.
The revamp was first launched in October 2012 and Google has been trying to improve it ever since, usually in response to user feedback. There was quite a bit of backlash at the beginning, but the uproar increased significantly in March when Google turned Gmail’s new compose on by default for everyone.
Google’s main argument for the new design has been that it lets you reference your inbox while writing a new email, but many argue this is more distracting than useful. As such, the company last month pushed out a full-screen option, plus a switch to set it as the default.
With an alternative available for a few weeks now, Google is removing the option to switch back to the old experience (Click Compose => At the bottom corner of the message pane, click the More menu icon next to the Discard button => Select “Temporarily switch back to old compose”). You’ll probably still see it around for a bit, but by next week it will be gone.
If you were still using the old version, you’ll want to enable the full-screen option (click on the expand button in the top right of the new compose window) and set it as the default (select “Default to full-screen” in the more options menu at the bottom-right). It’s not ideal, but it looks like Google has decided this is the way forward for those who don’t like the latest changes to Gmail.
See also – Gmail now lets you insert up to 10GB of Google Drive files directly into an email and Gmail graduates 3 Labs features: Send and archive, Default reply to all, and Quote selected text
Top Image Credit: Johannes Eisele/Getty Images
Read next: Wordpress.com Connect launches as yet another way to log into third-party websites and appsLa Roche basketball coach Lang collapses, dies
Scott Lang, the La Roche College men's basketball coach who led the team to a conference championship in his second year, died Friday night after collapsing at center court in the school's Kerr Fitness and Sports Center.
Colleen Ruefle, vice president of student life, said the 41-year-old Lang was with the team at practice when he fell to the floor around 5 p.m. The team's head trainer rushed to his assistance and performed CPR. He was transported to UPMC Passavant, where he died a short time later.
Today's games against Penn State Behrend have been cancelled for both the men's and women's basketball teams, along with a reception for former members of the men's basketball team.
Lang was just 27 when he was picked to head the team in 1997, which made him the youngest men's basketball coach in the NCAA at the time.
Athletic Director Jim Tinkey promoted him to head coach after Lang had served as assistant coach for four years.
"His work ethic was always second to none," said Tinkey, who was impressed by his rapport with his players.
Ironically, it was later Tinkey who encouraged him to leave after he got job offers from larger Division I and II schools to advance his coaching career. But Mr. Lang wanted to stay.
"This is where his heart is and he just didn't want leave," he said.
The Mars native made his mark at La Roche College, leading the team to a Allegheny Mountain Collegiate Conference Championship game in 1998, a remarkable feat given the program was just six years old at the time. Since then, the team twice finished second in the conference and he holds the record for the highest winning percentage in the school's history and the highest number of wins at 150 games.
The Redhawks were off to their strongest start in the program's history this season at 7-1.
And in spite of his streak of success at the school, Reufle said Lang valued character above anything that happened on the court. His team twice won the Schoenfield Sportsmanship Award, which is given annually to an AMCC school.
She said Lang remained at La Roche because he felt he could make a bigger difference in the lives of his players at the Division III school.
"He loved coaching at La Roche," she said. "He made a difference in these kids' lives. He made sure they graduated. He made sure they came out better people."
"That was more important to him than basketball."
First published on December 11, 2010 at 12:12 am
Correction/Clarification: (Published December 12, 2010) Scott Lang, the late men's basketball coach at La Roche College, led the team to a conference championship game in 1998. A story in Saturday's paper stated incorrectly that the team won that championship.MOSCOW (AP) — The spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin says the Kremlin is unaware of a meeting between Donald Trump’s senior staff and a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign where the Russian reportedly said she had information about Hillary Clinton.
President Donald Trump’s eldest son changed his account of the meeting he had with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign over the weekend, saying Sunday that Natalia Veselnitskaya told him she had information about Clinton. A statement from Donald Trump Jr. one day earlier made no mention of Clinton.
Asked about the reports, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday the Kremlin does not know who the lawyer is and added that the Kremlin “cannot keep track” of every Russian lawyer and their meetings in Russia or abroad.Dear Readers: When someone communicates to me their relationship experiences, which I believe may be helpful to many, I’m happy to share them. The following reader provided views from a website posting which he related to, on “Understanding the Pain of an Affair.” I’m including some selections from that posting:
Knowing the pain and repercussions that often follow infidelity, can inspire other spousal solutions, says Ellie. ( dreamstime )
My wife had an affair and got caught 20 months ago. I loved her and would’ve been with her until my dying day. I would tell my children, early-20s, how lucky I was to still be so in love with someone after all these years. And that they should hope for the same. So much for long range planning! I’ve been to many web sites and read much on the subject (of being betrayed). I recently came upon an article that really verbalized how I have felt.
Article Continued Below
Still Hurting Posted April 19, 2013 by “Doug” — excerpted from the book Healing From an Affair: A Cheater’s Guide for Helping Your Spouse Heal From an Affair: “Most cheaters (or ex-cheaters) have no clue how much pain we’re causing, especially when we’re in our affairs and immediately after our affairs are discovered. More Ellie columns on Thestar.com “We are too wrapped up in the affair or in our own issues to notice.
“Many victims have said that the pain is worse than losing a loved one… (it’s) a pain that keeps on giving and it lingers in the victim’s mind for a long time. “Each time they experience a trigger, the pain is there again as if the affair just occurred. They have many questions, emotions, images, and feelings that constantly stir up more pain. The affair remains in the mind of the betrayed through every waking moment.
Article Continued Below
“We’ve caused a severe trauma to our spouses, and it’s a trauma that they never deserved. So we have to do our best and work our hardest to help them past this. “Ask your wife about her pain after your affair if she hasn’t already told you…. do some surfing online and check out almost any infidelity forum or blog and read some of the entries from those who have suffered as a result of an affair. “Understanding that pain alone can help to change your way of thinking almost immediately. “Experts say it takes anywhere from two to four years for a person to recover from infidelity. We are aware of some situations where the trauma has been an issue for 20 years or more. “Your spouse feels shock, both emotionally and physically. She’s exhausted, feels worthless… has felt anger, sadness, and despair. “She may suffer from panic attacks and has totally lost her confidence, her self-esteem, and cannot trust herself to make good decisions any longer. “She may have even thought of suicide. She feels disrespected and wonders how you could’ve done this to her. She trusted you and now everything she believed in as far as your relationship, your marriage, and you as a person has been flushed down the toilet.” Ellie: In this post, the writer, “Doug,” who cheated, is male, and so his message is on behalf of betrayed spouses who generally are women. Of course, men whose wives have cheated experience very similar feelings. Male or female, the act of cheating creates repercussions for many people – your own loved ones including relatives who feel shamed, any children whose lives are changed by the fallout, and the family and any children of the partner in the affair. Something to think about. TIP OF THE DAY Knowing the pain and repercussions that often follow infidelity, can inspire other spousal solutions. Read Ellie Monday to Saturday. Email ellie@thestar.ca. Ellie chats at noon Wednesdays at https://www.thestar.com/elliechat thestar.com/elliechat END. Follow @ellieadvice on Twitter.A 16-year-old student at a high school in Indiana decided to post a flyer emblazoned “Straight Pride” in an attempt to bring understanding between the straight community and the LGBT community.
The flyers, which featured two rainbow flags, were posted at Jasper High School last week. They were titled “Celebrate Straight Pride at JHS” (we are taking back the rainbow).
The flyers read:
Celebrate being straight at JHS by not annoying the heck out of everyone about your sexual orientation! It’s easy! Just come to the JHS, then you go about your day without telling everyone about how “different” and “special” you are! Brought to you by all the students that are sick of hearing about your LGBT pride. Nobody cares about what you think you are. If you want equality, stop shoving your ideas down our throats! We have nothing against your sexual orientation. We just don’t care!
The flyers were taken down, as they did not follow the necessary protocol for the display areas in which they were posted.
Principal Brian Wilson would not say whether the student who posted the flyers would be punished. Greater Jasper Superintendent Tracy Lorey stated, “It is our intent to provide students opportunities to express themselves in a way that helps them to be understanding of the unique qualities of all individuals. The world is full of unique individuals (regardless of) race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. That’s the world, and it’s our job to prepare students to function within that world and to have respect for others.”
A group calling itself Huddle: Dubois County posted a message on its Facebook page to support students who might have been upset by the flyers:
We know what it’s like to grow up feeling marginalized among your friends, family and peers. We know what it’s like to be unsure about whether you can be yourself in your home, your church, your school and public places,” the message read. “We support your right to live a life free of persecution. We support you if you choose to speak out about your safety and well being, and we support you if you choose to keep your sexual orientation or gender identity private. Know you have many people cheering for you, and you don’t have to be silent if you don’t want to be.
On Sunday, roughly 40 students decorated the sidewalks outside the school’s main entrance with a rainbow of chalk artwork, featuring quotes such as “Love is for ALL,” “We rise by lifting others,” and “Be kind to one another.”
The student who posted the flyers offered a lengthy explanation of his actions to the Dubois County Herald:
I am writing this letter in response to the posters that I hung around the school on Thursday. My intent is to refine my reasons for doing so and to hopefully bring understanding between the GSA and the GSA reactionaries.
On Thursday, I wrote about how Jasper High School should recognize the straight community with equal enthusiasm as the LGBT community since both are filled with amazing human-beings that should be treated equally. Everybody is entitled to share their own thoughts on how a stronger community can be achieved and how the acceptance that everyone shares with one another can be improved.
In no way was my flier intended to offend and demean the GSA, and if it hurt anybody's feelings I would encourage my condolences to be accepted. Hurting your feelings was not my intention.
The purpose of my flier was to not only recognize the straight community, but to also give a message to the LGBT community that equality is not effectively found in granting special privileges to minorities by differentiating them from our great society, but should rather be found in gaining support through cooperation and equal incorporation into society.
All people experience hardships; some more than others. Everyone should push through these hardships and do great things in spite of them. People should not use these hardships as a reason for promoting their equality, but should use the fact that everyone is a human being as a justification for ensuring equality among all people.
When an opposing side voices their opinion and offers constructive criticism, the intent is not to suppress the other side’s voice. At the end of the day, everyone is a human being and should be treated as such with equal opportunities, and in a lot of ways people are already treated equally.
Great progress has been made in many realms as far as social issues have gone in recent years, and I feel like an alteration in the basis of why people should be accepting of one another has good reason to be accepted. If our society adopts the idea that everyone should be given equal opportunities because everyone is a human being over the promotion of the idea that certain individuals are underprivileged or more prone to being offended, our communities can learn to be more accepting of one another.
With this alteration, our society can eventually toss aside the idea that everyone is separate, and everyone can become recognized as part of a cohesive community. This cohesive community can only become reality by all parties recognizing the fact that facing people who are not accepting of their own views is part of the process of living.
People should recognize that facing people of opposing views and hearing ideas from other people is simply an element of what the education process was derived from. Creating a cohesive society where topics can be discussed and progress can be achieved without the fear of offending groups of people is not effectively achieved by censorship. Everyone can become part of a cohesive society by recognizing that integration is more constructive than separation and differentiation from society.
The basic principles of our nation grant all people freedom and equality under our Constitution.
I would now like to address some parts of my flier that many people have interpreted incorrectly.
“Go about your day without telling everyone about how different and special you are.”
• If everyone is truly equal, then nobody should differentiate themselves from society by means of protective isolation and stating that they are not like others. If everyone is equal and should be treated as such, it should not be necessary to state that certain individuals are different or special.
|
’s Hospital.
Toronto Police are searching for a man caught on security camera April 19 at 6:30 p.m. carting away nine 18-inch-square framed prints that once hung in the Burton Family Wing of the hospital.
The prints were stolen along with a plaque bearing the artist’s name: Darren Rigo.
Rigo, 24, a recent OCAD graduate, said he’s shocked someone would take the framed photographs and can’t imagine a motive for doing so.
“That’s just so terrible, to steal from a hospital,” he said. “They only went up at the end of March, too. I really hope they get them back.”
Rigo said he got a small artist’s fee when he was selected by the hospital to create the exhibit last May.
The suspect is described as white, 6-feet tall with a medium build, dark brown hair, glasses with dark frames. He was clean-shaven, wearing a dark long-sleeve shirt, dark pants, and black shoes.
Const. Tony Vella said the suspect was believed to not be at the hospital as a patient or visitor.
He was seen on camera placing the framed prints on what looked to be a metal cart before taking off in a light-coloured Mercedes.
Police are asking anyone with information to contact Det. Paul Rinkoff at 416-808-5204 or Crime Stoppers at 416-222-TIPS (8477).Late last night, Team Liquid posted a statement on their Twitter page, announcing that they are disbanding their CS:GO roster and creating their own female team, instead.
After a controversial campaign from players of the female CS scene, new legislations brought in from Valve have made female teams earn the same amount as males in their new tournaments and Liquid have announced that they are making a business decision to remove the penises of all of the current Team Liquid players, so they are able to play in the upcoming World Championships, where the World Champion (of women) will be fought over.
“It was a tough decision to make,” Pimp, now known as Pippa, told Global Defensive, “But we want to make sure that we are winning as much as possible and this is the best way of doing so.”
Amidst backlash from /r/globaloffensive, Hiko (now wishing to be known as Hilda) told Global Defensive that: “I don’t think it’s too bad. These people are arguing that it’s unfair to give females their own tournaments because they’re sub-par, yet they’re alright with there being a North American version of the ESL Pro League.”
However, it appears they have jumped the ship too early as MissHarvey is set to reveal the “World Championships for Non-Binary CS:GO Players” later today, which is sure to attract a whole new set of great talent to the CS:GO scene.
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AdvertisementsMore boys are among top performers, girls get more intermediate results. The Pisa Study (Program for International Student Assessment of the OECD) shows major gender sex differences in almost all countries. Why is this so?
Pisa results: Boys perform better than girls (German) reports German News Magazine "Der Spiegel"
In the new Pisa Test, boys achieve top results more frequently then girls. This is not valid only for Germany, but for almost all 44 participating countries.
If males have an advantage in anything, our feminist society feels compelled to fix this inequality.
"We must analyze, if we give boys and girls equal incentive for top performance", says Franceso Avvisati, one of the authors of the study.
Of course, inborn sex differences must not exist, by Political correctness dogma. There must be other reasons.
Among the best performing 15 year old Germans there are significantly more boys (60%) then girls (40%). In almost all participating countries, more boys then girls are top performers. Among the weakest students boys and girls are equally distributed. In general boys’ results show more variance, while girls tend to be more average performers. Study Author Avisati has seen this before, in earlier Pisa Studies about math and reading competency.
[…]
Different in countries like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, societies where men and women are quite equal: here equal numbers of girls and boys were found among the top performers. Avvisati presumes, that teachers have equal expectations of boys and girls, that they motivate girls differently
We dare to suggest the opposite, that in these countries’ feminized school system boys are disadvantaged and de-motivated.
As usual, Der Spiegel’s comments are uncensored by PC and much more interesting then the original article.
Boys continue to outperform girls in maths, despite attempts to close the gap, according to a study from the University of Leeds and the University of Missouri. Significantly, the gap is largest at the higher end of the academic scale; twice as many boys than girls are in the top 1% of maths students across the globe.
Sex differences in mental test scores, variability, and numbers of high-scoring individuals. Hedges LV, Nowell A. Science. 1995 Jul 7;269(5220).
From the abstract: "…the test scores of males consistently have larger variance"
In the EEA, most females had offspring, but only the top 40% of males. Thus males have a higher risk strategy to risk all to be in the top. Men are consistently among the best, and among the worst.
Men are top performers in tennis, chess, snooker, darts, and yes, cooking.
The findings also indicate that wide gaps in achievement between boys and girls in maths are common in more economically developed countries, where considerable efforts are typically being made to promote equality and encourage more girls to engage in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths).
Again: no efforts to encourage the best and brightest to become better.
The gap in achievement in maths in the UK is one of the widest in the world, along with countries such as the US, the Netherlands and Germany.
The study used data of 1.5 million 15 year olds across 75 countries, and examined the gap between boys’ and girls’ achievement levels in maths and reading from 2000 to 2009.
Co-author of the study, Dr Gijsbert Stoet from the University of Leeds, said: “The maths gender gap continues to exist, with boys continuing to outperform girls at all levels. But what is more striking is the extent of the gap at the top, between the brightest girls compared to the brightest boys. This is where we see the biggest gap in maths, despite recent reports that the gap is closing.
Some hints are in the original PISA report. Of course, with efforts the data can be extracted and verified in the original reports.
The report also reveals worrying gender differences in students’ attitudes towards mathematics: even when girls perform as well as boys in mathematics, they report less perseverance, less motivation to learn mathematics, less belief in their own mathematics skills, and higher levels of anxiety about mathematics. While the average girl underperforms in mathematics compared with the average boy, the gender gap in favour of boys is even wider among the highest-achieving students. These findings have serious implications not only for higher education, where young women are already under-represented in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields of study, but also later on, when these young women enter the labour market. This confirms the findings of the OECD Gender Strategy, which identifies some of the factors that create – and widen – the gender gap in education, labour and entrepreneurship. Supporting girls’ positive attitudes towards and investment in learning mathematics will go a long way towards narrowing this gap. Pisa 2012 foreword
Supporting top performing boys, of course, could yield even better results, an intellectual elite that could help advance science and mathematics. But if the Best get better, that would be good for society, but bad for equality.
With high levels of youth unemployment, rising inequality, a significant gender gap, and an urgent need to boost growth in many countries, we have no time to lose. The OECD stands ready to support policy makers in this challenging and crucial endeavour. Pisa 2012 foreword
We dare suggest that promoting top performing boys would boost growth, by raising a cutting edge scientific and Engineering elite. Oh, maybe if all are equally mediocre, there will be more equality and thus there will be more growth /sarcasm!
RelatedThis asset will allow you to generate few different shapes you may need in your project and modify them in inspector or through your code.
Simply drag the Shaper2D prefab onto your scene and use the sliders in inspector panel to change the mesh to desired shape: circle, star, polygon, sector or an arc.
You can change those values in your code to achieve animations.
Check out my other assets!
2017-01-29 - Optimized it a lot. Now it produces zero garbage.
2017-02-23 - Wow, so many people downloaded this script in last few days! I guess it's useful after all. And thanks a lot to those who payed for it! This means a lot to me and encourages me to keep working on things like this.
2017-04-12 - I've published a newer version of this asset on Unity's Asset Store. Main differences are: it has a circular gradient (between inner color and outer color), it draws mesh using MeshRenderer component instead of DrawMesh function so it now fully conforms to Transform (scaling, rotation, etc), it can be drawn inside of a UI Canvas hierarchy if you place it there. Also now it's not a prefab, but an item in objects menu.At the end of every year, the entire Roblox team gets an opportunity to collaboratively explore visionary ideas and present experimental technology in front of the entire company. This is a tradition we affectionately refer to as “Hack Week.” Over the course of five days, Roblox employees shift gears to work tirelessly on a variety of pet projects ranging from mind boggling engineering achievements to creative process improvement projects. We’d like to share what our team has been cooking up in the Roblox labs for our four-part Hack Week 2016 series.
Model Studio for Mobile by UristMcSparks & Silent137
One of the biggest requests we hear from our community is to make a mobile version of Studio. During last year’s Hack Week, Silent137 and I decided to rise to the challenge and attempt to build a functional prototype of Studio for mobile devices in just five days. In so doing, however, we needed to narrow the scope of our project to create a more manageable mobile experience. Here’s what we came up with!
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For our Hack Week demonstration, we ported over most of the basic Studio tools—Move, Scale, and Rotate, for example—into a 3D space, and added a Toolbox UI on the bottom of the screen so you could easily insert new objects, like constraints and attachments. The idea was to show how someone could build a model of a car using these tools without any scripting knowledge whatsoever. Rather than porting over the full Studio experience on mobile, we wanted to create a scaled down version that would allow developers to create models of anything they could possibly imagine, whether it’s a house or a car, as we illustrate in our demo. Our prototype was also designed to allow objects to snap together so developers could easily attach them without having to fiddle around too much on a smaller screen.
Down the line, our vision is that developers could use this framework to build a model, and then export it to the desktop version of Studio. That way, you could simply drag your model onto your computer and do all sorts of cool things with the full Studio experience. Aside from building, one last big component of our project is that developers could also test their model so they could make sure everything was working properly. All in all, we found that these solutions provided the best Studio experience on phones.
New High-Resolution Lighting Technology by zeuxcg
You may remember back in late 2015 when I previewed a new voxel-based lighting system for Roblox during Hack Week. It was essentially our current lighting system re-imagined so that it would work completely on GPU with minimal CPU intervention and 1x1x1 voxels. Although it was well received by the community at the time, I encountered a few problems that were difficult to surmount and the system did not lay a good enough foundation for us to build on in the future. For example, the shadow quality—especially for humanoids—was not as good as I’d like it to be, the system only performed well on top-tier desktop GPUs, the shadow fidelity from CSG/MeshParts was lackluster, and the specular highlights didn’t look quite right if there were several sources of lights nearby each other.
So, for Hack Week, my goal was to create a dynamic non-voxel lighting system that would be more responsive and look significantly better than the technology I showed back in 2015.
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I prepared three separate demos for my project, each one demonstrating how the specular lighting and shadows have been improved over my last iteration. I wanted to create a unified solution that would not only create glare on bright surfaces, but also cast high-quality shadows realistically and dynamically—including shadows being emitted by CSG parts—from multiple light sources. I can even illuminate particles using a much more optimizable solution.Short-haul flights across Europe could be replaced by high-speed rail under ambitious European Union proposals to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from transport by 60% over the next 40 years.
According to the EU, Heathrow's congestion problems could be eased by cutting domestic and European flights, while demand for new runways could be suppressed by building new rail networks. The EU transport commissioner, Siim Kallas, has announced a series of green transport goals including phasing out the use of petrol cars in city centres by 2050.
"At Heathrow there are no new runways, but we desperately need to increase capacity and you can do this if you reduce short-haul flight connections," said Kallas. The commissioner added in an interview with the Guardian that the UK should look at the example of Spain, where high-speed rail has hit demand on a previously popular flight corridor.
"This has happened in Madrid and Barcelona, where 50% of the market has moved to high-speed rail. It is comfortable for everybody. Airlines can put emphasis on long-haul flights, which is better for their business."
Noting the debate over expanding London's squeezed airports, he added: "If we are successful in creating new railways they can take over short-haul airline connections. It makes it easier for the runway issue."
Kallas hit the headlines this month when he declared a target of phasing out petrol and diesel cars from city centres by 2050. The commissioner said he was unfazed by criticism of the benchmark. "If you don't like the idea of reducing the use of conventional cars in city centres, what are your proposals?"
Kallas said EU countries needed to reduce the "mass need" for short journeys in petrol and diesel cars. "It is a desirable goal to phase out conventional cars," he said. However, Kallas added that mass adoption of electronic cars also posed problems because major city roads would continue to be clogged by traffic.
Speaking after a meeting with officials at Transport for London, Kallas said: "The congestion charge is a step that many cities [in Europe] will follow." Kallas's 2050 targets include connecting all hub airports to high-speed rail lines and connecting majors ports to rail networks in order to reduce dependency on road freight.BANNERS COMING DOWN......GUESS ITS REALLY HAPPENING pic.twitter.com/CKmIngcrSy — WILLIAM GREENBLATT (@BILLGREENBLATT) January 14, 2016
Sad day. The banners are coming down from the Edward Jones Dome rafters #Rams https://t.co/yckrR6GIfP pic.twitter.com/6hAj7rImLj — Rob Edwards (@RobertDEdwards) January 14, 2016
PHOTOS: #Rams banners come down at the Edward Jones Dome (Courtesy Bill Greenblatt/UPI) pic.twitter.com/V5uiGB69eF — Rob Edwards (@RobertDEdwards) January 14, 2016
And with that, we got the perfect embodiment of the end of an era.
The St. Louis Rams ended tonight as the best remnants of their best moments were carefully pulled from their lofty perches onto mortal grounds...ok, that's a bit overblown,
But it deserves to be.
We're being forced to say goodbye to an era. Really, we're being forced to say goodbye to multiple eras. But a group of those eras make up the 21 years we'll forever recognize as the St. Louis Rams.
That's over. It's just so hard...to say goodbye...to yesterday.FUJIFILM is proud to announce a new addition to its popular top-end series of FinePix Long zoom bridge cameras. The new flagship FinePix HS50EXR features a manual zoom mechanism for high precision zooming over the huge 42x focal length range (24-1000mm*2). Boasting stunning autofocus speeds of just 0.05seconds*1 thanks to new Phase Detection pixels on its ½-inch EXR CMOS II sensor, this all-in-one camera is a high-speed performer and will capture images with stunning crisp quality. No linkhandler TypoScript configuration found for key tx_fujifilmproducts_digicams..
1. Manual 42x optical zoom lens (24mm-1000mm*2) This newly developed 42x FUJINON zoom lens offers the precision of a manual barrel zoom and the stunning optical performance for which FUJINON lenses are world renowned. From 1cm Super Macro photography, 24mm wide-angle through to 1000mm telephoto*2, this lens offers focal lengths which would require several different lenses on a DSLR. To ensure premium image quality, the HS50EXR’s lens uses aspherical, ED and cemented elements and achieves blur reduction with optical Image Stabilisation, over the entire aperture range of f/2.8 to f/5.6. The lens features 17 elements in total, 15 of which have FUJINON’s Super EBC coating on both sides, for reducing ghosting and flare in backlit and other challenging situations. 2. New EXR CMOS II sensor with Phase Detection for high performance The HS50EXR boasts the latest FUJIFILM EXR sensor technology: a 16 megapixel ½-inch EXR CMOS II sensor, coupled with the EXR Processor II, which achieves twice the processing speed of the previous EXR processor. The biggest difference over the previous HS30EXR is the inclusion of Phase Detection pixels on the sensor to achieve an incredibly fast autofocus speed of just 0.05 seconds in fastest conditions, less than a third of the 0.16 seconds AF speed of the HS30EXR. The Intelligent Hybrid AF system can choose between Phase Detection AF or switch to Contrast AF in low light to ensure the optimal focus system is used – dependent on the shooting conditions. A Focus Peak Highlight feature helps photographers manually focus by highlighting the area of your composition in focus. It provides a guide for focusing in situations where it’s difficult to tell whether the subject is correctly focused; allowing users to manually focus whilst viewing on the LCD monitor. The new EXR CMOS II sensor and EXR Processor II make the HS50EXR a truly powerful camera when it comes to capturing moving objects. In addition to the 0.05 seconds AF speed*1, it also achieves a start-up time of 0.5 seconds. *3, interval time between shots of just 0.5 seconds. And if you engage the Continuous Shooting mode it can shoot in burst of 11fps at the full 16 megapixel resolution (max 5 frames) and seamless 6fps shooting at 8 megapixel resolution. Combined, these technologies mean that you will never miss that crucial shot, no matter how fast your subject is moving. If you select EXR Auto, the HS50EXR uses FUJIFILM’s widely acclaimed auto mode to select from the three in-built sensor modes (HR, SN or DR) and determine the scene-type you are shooting, from the 108 permutations recognised, ensuring that the optimum settings are employed. 3. Hassle free, any-angle shooting made easy The HS50EXR boasts two key features which help you shoot your favourite types of scene. Its 920K dot, highly detailed Electronic Viewfinder is perfect for helping you frame your composition in bright sunlight, or if you wear glasses. And if you are trying to take tricky, close to the ground, macro flower shots or want to capture the band on the main stage above the heads of the crowd, you can switch to the very useful 3.0-inch Vari-Angle LCD screen. Again boasting a detailed 920K dots, the LCD screen can fold out and flip around so you can see what you are taking – no matter what the angle you’re trying to shoot at. The styling of the HS50EXR is well thought through. Dials are placed on a sloping, rounded shoulder for easy access during shooting in a design that is both attractive and functional. 4. Artistic shooting effects This exciting new camera features FUJIFILM's proprietary Film Simulation modes. Users can choose from ten different modes which simulate the effects of traditional FUJIFILM films. Including colour reversal film effects (Velvia / PROVIA / ASTIA). Also available on the HS50EXR are the Advanced Filter functions; users can choose from 8 different artistic filters which can be previewed on the LCD screen: Pop Colour - emphasises contrast and colour saturation Toy Camera - creates shaded borders as if you were taking a photo on a toy camera Miniature - adds top and bottom blur for a diorama or miniature effect Dynamic Tone - creates a fantasy effect by dynamically-modulated tonal reproduction Partial Colour - retains one selected original colour and change the rest of the photo to black and white. Colours can be selected from red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple for dramatic effect. High Key - enhances brightness and reduces contrast to lighten tonal reproduction Low Key (NEW) – creates uniformly dark tones with few areas of emphasised highlights Soft Focus (NEW) – blurring the focus of the image edges to create a softer effect Multiple Exposure - this function offers users the chance to combine two separate subjects into one photo, ideal for creative photos with artistic effects. 5. Full HD Movie 1080p/60fps with continuous phase detection AF and stereo sound The HS50EXR is now the ideal camera for the budding cinematographer thanks to the built in stereo microphone. Thanks to the ½-inch EXR CMOS II sensor, the HS50EXR is capable of Full 1080p HD movie recording at up to 60 fps. Plus if you want to be more a little more creative you can record lower resolution movies at up to 480 frames per second*4 – and capture some amazing slow motion action. The Phase Detection pixel technology and scene recognition modes aren’t limited to still photos; they also come into play when recording video to ensure that your masterpiece stays focused. FinePix HS50EXR Key features list: · FUJINON 42x optical manual zoom (f/2.8-5.6 24-1000mm*2) · Optical Image Stabilisation · Up to 84x with Intelligent Digital Zoom · 16 megapixel ½-inch EXR-CMOS II sensor with Phase Detection AF · EXR Processor II · Intelligent Hybrid AF : 0.05sec, world’s fastest *1 · Continuous shooting: 11fps at full resolution (Max 5 frames), 6fps at 8M for seamless capture · Start-up time of 0.5 sec.*3 · Shooting interval of 0.5sec. · 108 EXR Auto shooting patterns · Full HD movie 1080p/60fps with continuous phase detection AF and stereo sound · 3.0-inch Vari-Angle LCD screen(920K-dot) · High resolution EVF(920K-dot) with eye sensor · Q button for direct control of settings · Super Macro down to 1cm · Manual exposure control(P/S/A/M modes) · Focus Peak Highlight function on the LCD screen · RAW shooting (RAW, JPEG, RAW+JPEG image capture modes) · 8 Advanced Filters · 10 Film simulation modes · Multiple exposure · Image capture aspect ratio of 1:1 (square) in addition to 4:3, 16:9, and 3:2 · Virtual horizon “electronic level” display · External microphone input (microphones sold separately) · Hot-shoe attachment for the use of external flash guns · Lithium-ion battery with up to 500 shots per charge *1 Fujifilm research as of 30,November 2012. Compared with other compact digital cameras based on CIPA standards and conducted in High Performance mode. *2 35mm format equivalent *3 Quick start mode *4 HS320 x 240 pixels (480 fps)By Andrew Burnes
There are many great games coming to PC this year, and if you’re a fan of RPGs The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is undoubtedly on your ‘most anticipated’ list. If you’ve somehow avoided the hype, the jaw-dropping screenshots and trailers, or the many previews, The Witcher 3 is the conclusion to a trilogy of action RPGs that each feature excellent storytelling, branching quests with morally ambiguous choices, and advanced graphics that use all available horsepower to render incredible scenes.
For The Witcher 3, developer CD Projekt Red has raised the bar for all others, creating the most detailed game ever seen. New techniques and the latest effects are employed to bring fantastical scenes to life, and on PC the stunning graphics are further enhanced by a host of NVIDIA GameWorks effects, including HBAO+, HairWorks, and PhysX. For further details stay tuned.
To experience The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at its very best, with every effect enabled at a high resolution, you may well need an upgrade, so kill two wyverns with one stone by buying an “Undeniably Epic” GeForce GTX 980, 970 or 960, which’ll give you the performance you need as well as a free copy of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt*.
A list of e-tailers and retailers selling the “Undeniably Epic” Witcher 3: Wild Hunt GeForce GTX bundle can be found here, and if you’re in the market for an entirely new gaming PC or notebook you’ll also find a list of partners selling qualified “Undeniably Epic” GeForce GTX desktops and notebooks at the same link.
Please note, NVIDIA cannot provide The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt game codes for purchases made at non-participating e-tailers and retailers.
*Terms and conditions apply.BEIJING – Beijing's most popular newspaper has unwittingly republished a bogus story about U.S. Congress threats to skip town for Memphis or Charlotte unless Washington builds them a new Capitol building with a retractable dome.
The source? America's celebrated spoof tabloid, the Onion.
The Beijing Evening News, which claims a circulation of 1.25 million, translated portions of the Onion's tall tale word-for-word in the international news page of its June 3 edition.
The reprinted version of the May 29 article, which parodies Congress as a major league baseball team, also copied the Onion's would-be blueprint for a new legislative home that resembles a ballpark.
"Don't get us wrong: We love the drafty old building," the Onion jestingly quoted House Speaker Dennis Hastert saying.
"But the hard reality is, it's no longer suitable for a world-class legislative branch. The sight lines are bad, there aren't enough concession stands or bathrooms, and the parking is miserable."
The spoof from the brazen entertainment tabloid, which dubs itself "America's finest news source," apparently took in the Evening News.
"The story was written by one of our freelance writers," an editor at the Evening New told Reuters on Friday. "His stuff has been pretty much reliable before."
The editor said he had received other calls from readers about the article. "They were also suspicious of the contents."
Told the story came from the Onion and was not true, the editor said, "We would first have to check that out. If it's indeed fake, I'm sure there will be some form of correction."It’s been a few years since Marie Kondo and her book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, went mainstream and changed the world forever—teaching us to embrace “decluttering” and banish anything that doesn’t “spark joy,” in what is collectively referred to as the KonMari Method.
If you thought KonMari’s reign in popular culture is waning (never mind that some New York apartment buildings have started advertising KonMari-trained consultants as amenities), well think again: Marie Kondo is doing a TV show.
In an Instagram post from December 2017, the Japanese cleaning consultant teased that she’s working on a show for “a global TV platform,” in which she’ll be “working with people to transform their home & spark a personal transformation.” The post also announced a casting call for folks—specifically those living in the LA area—interested in this brand of transformation.
Now, in a “Valentine’s Day surprise” announcement, Kondo revealed that her show will be coming to Netflix (presumably the “global TV platform” in her previous post). The reality series will have eight episodes in its first season. The title and release date have not been announced yet, so stay tuned.
As Apartment Therapy pointed out, this isn’t the first KonMari-focused TV concept. There was a two-part special featuring Kondo and Brooklyn homeowners produced by Japanese broadcaster NHK World TV in 2016. A KonMari-inspired comedy series from NBC also made headlines a few years ago but so far has had no further updates.
A decluttering makeover show is presumably more compelling than a decluttering sitcom, but will it be as utterly satisfying as, say, Fixer Upper? We’ll have to wait and see.It’s hard to be delicate about this product, but I shall try. The Artificial Virginity Hymen is something that could have life-saving uses in parts of the world where women’s sexuality is oppressed. The diaphragm is designed to break and discharge fluid during intercourse, and while it could actually be used to avoid life-long stigmatization in cultures which demand virginity before marriage, it is more likely to be used as a toy or even as a value-added extra for sex professionals.
And as the Lady pointed out when her essential opinion was solicited, it is unlikely that a woman who may need this would have access to it anyway. Then again, it is being marketed on a sex-toy website, and catering to all kinds of fetishes is of course just fine. Maybe it’s the produce pitch itself which rankles so, insensitive and rather icky as it is. I have pasted it in below so you don’t have to click through to a sex-toy site from your office computer.
There is one thing we can learn from this. If you ever find yourself thinking “I wonder if they make …?” then the answer is almost certainly a big “yes.”
Product page [Gigimo via Geekologie]This past weekend, I made a trip out to the Bay Area for a little bit of work, and a little bit of vacation. For those that are not aware, I live in Washington, D.C., so trips out to the Bay Area are not exactly frequent. I was out there for the Falcons and Colts games last year, but I'm hoping to get out a little more frequently this year.
Part of my trip involved a visit down to Santa Clara. I scheduled the trip in part because I shot some video with their "49ers Studios" crew. They are putting together a lot of video content down there for 49ers.com. If you watch NFL Network, you might recall their various Top 10 shows. They do Top 10 quarterbacks, top 10 running backs and so many more. 49ers Studios is using that idea, except they are focusing exclusively on our favorite team. They had me in to shoot some video for some of that production. They'll start airing later this summer as training camp gets going, so I'll make sure and drop in some links.
I also managed to schedule a tour of Levi's Stadium. I got to check out much of the stadium, which means I also got some photos from different areas. Above, you can see a gallery of some of the pictures I took. I got a fairly comprehensive tour of the stadium, although there were a few areas I could not get pictures. I've included brief captions for the photos. Just scroll over the photo, and it will explain what you are looking at. Big thanks to the 49ers for setting this up.
The stadium itself is getting closer and closer to completion. The grass is not yet installed, but it sounds like that will be happening sometime soon. The stadium itself will open on August 2, with an MLS match between the San Jose Earthquakes and the Seattle Sounders. The 49ers will host their two home preseason games, hosting the Denver Broncos the week of August 14-18, and hosting the San Diego Chargers on August 24. Their next home game will be Week 2. That means the team basically has a month of a sort of soft opening to get ready for the kickoff of the regular season. Considering there is a good chance they open Levi's on Sunday Night Football, they'll want to make sure things are as close to perfect as possible.Since the launch of Apple’s ARKit, there’s been a ton of buzz and amazing demos shared, we recently shared a video on Twitter that showed WRLD working in ARKit. Given the interest we’ve received we decided to lay down steps for anyone who wants to get started with ARKit and WRLD SDK and see for themselves how amazing it is!
In my ongoing quest to get on @madewithARKit we've fixed lighting, shown planes flying over and added pan and zoom. @wrld3d pic.twitter.com/zju0fXFt2i — Faizaan Ghauri (@Faizaangeles) July 6, 2017
Please check the requirements mentioned in the Unity-ARKit-Plugin for the software and hardware required for ARKit.
To get started simply set the platform to iOS on your project and follow the steps below.
Step 1: Import ARKit Unity Plugin
The team at Unity has created a great plugin that allows us to utilize ARKit easily in any Unity projects. Currently it requires that you are using Unity version v5.6.1p1 or later. For detailed documentation please see the download page for the ARKit Plugin.
Step 2: Import WRLD Unity SDK from Asset Store
Download and import the WRLD Unity SDK. If you need a key and then click “Get Key” when prompted or simply click later if you already have one.
Step 3: Modify a couple of files
WRLD SDK is built to be used with real world scale such that 1 unit in Unity is considered 1 meters. You can read more about our coordinate system on our Unity documentation. ARKit however require objects to be quite small, so we will need to scale down our map. In order to do that we need to add a couple of lines of code in our SDK. We will add an API to enable this more seamlessly in future release.
In /Assets/Wrld/Scripts/Streaming/GameObjectFactory.cs go to Method CreateGameObject and Add
gameObject. transform. localScale = Vector3. one ;
Below
gameObject. transform. parent = m_parentTransform ;
In /Assets/Wrld/Scripts/Streaming/GameObjectRepository.cs go to Constructor and Add
m_root. transform. localScale = Vector3. one ; m_root. transform. localPosition = Vector3. zero ;
Below
m_root. transform. parent = parentForStreamedObjects ;
Step 4: Making a scene for ARKit
Create a new scene so we can set up ARKit and follow the steps below.
Create a new GameObject called CameraParent and make Main Camera its child.
On Main Camera make the following changes
Building Control system status Set Clear Flags to Depth Only Set Field of View to 60 Set Clipping PLanes to 0.1 Near and 30 Far Set Depth to 0 Add Component UnityARVideo (In Clear Material set YUVMaterial) Add Component UnityARCameraNearFar See the image below for reference
Create a new GameObject and name it ARCameraManager Add Component UnityARCameraManager In Camera field drag drop our Main Camera
Save your scene.
And that’s it!, ARKit is ready to be used.
Step 5: Setting up WRLD SDK
Now that we have ARKit ready, we can start setting up our map. Follow the instructions below.
Setup iOS Assets through the Assets Menu.
Create a new Camera and name it Streaming Camera. We will use this camera to stream our map. Disable the Camera component as we will not be using this to draw anything. Set Y position to 1000. This means we will be streaming from an altitude of 1000 Meters. Set X rotation to 90 so our StreamingCamera looks towards ground. Remove all the extra components such as AudioListener etc Set Near to 10 and Far to 5000
Create a new GameObject and name it WRLD Map. Add component WRLD Map Set your API Key Set Camera to StreamingCamera Set scale to 0.001 Set y position to -0.3 Set the Latitude to 40.748376 and Longitude to -73.985632
Save your scene.
We are now ready to view WRLD Map in ARKit.
Step 6: Build Unity Project
We have completed all the necessary steps, we can finally build our xcode project and see it running on an iOS Device.
If you are having trouble with compiling libStreamAlpha.a then just set “Enable Bitcode” to No in Xcode Build Settings. Also make sure that you add Camera Usage Description for iOS in Player Settings->Other Settings.
If you are having trouble getting shadows then you might need to go to quality settings and set the Shadow distance to 2 and Shadow Near Planes to 0.01.
Step 7: Further improvements
Now that you have a working project with WRLD in ARKit you can start to build new exciting things. Check out our next post that covers stencil masks and how to show a map on a surface within a certain area.
We are excited to see what you build with WRLD so feel free to reach out and share with us @wrld3d, #madewithWRLD.
If you have any questions, please reach out to us at support@wrld3d.com.
Cheers,
Ali ArslanAfter all of Colorado’s forward progress on marijuana law reform – some of Denver’s mile high politicians |
relationships with,” Wessler told us. The fact that we have no choice in giving up this data to third parties, if we want to use their services, could cause the court to reevaluate how it considers our expectations of privacy.
“The choice the government says we have is that we can either opt-out of modern society and not use technology, and protect our privacy,” Wessler said. “Or, we can ‘choose’ to use cellphones and other technologies and therefore sacrifice our privacy. That just can’t be the rule.”
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This conundrum goes beyond the way the law carries out procedures. It hits on something almost existential. Society has become accustomed to clicking past the Terms of Service for a tech company without reading it, and we all just accept that we have to give up our privacy to get by in the world. While Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that privacy is no longer a “social norm,” it’s less a case that people don’t expect privacy, and more that a new social norm has been foisted on us. So, we have to ask if the government will protect our expectation of privacy even though it’s being pried from our hands one click at a time.
Wessler says the ACLU is asking the court not to overrule the previous cases that used the statutes that are under debate, but “to reject the government’s invitation to radically extend this to this very new digital world we’re in.” Above all, the group just wants to see the more rigorous standards of requesting a warrant to be applied in these situations. “Now, the court is very unlikely to answer the question of what the rule should be for all the other kinds of sensitive digital data stored somewhere in the cloud,” Wessler told us. But by redefining how location data is treated, the Supreme Court’s decision and reasoning could create a domino effect in lower courts, state legislatures, and Congress to address other types of data.
No one we spoke with for this story felt like the case will split along partisan lines in a 5-4 decision. In Riley v. California, the court decided that police need a warrant to search a cellphone, as Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, wrote:
The storage capacity of cell phones has several interrelated consequences for privacy. First, a cell phone collects in one place many distinct types of information—an address, a note, a prescription, a bank statement, a video— that reveal much more in combination than any isolated record. Second, a cell phone’s capacity allows even just one type of information to convey far more than previously possible. The sum of an individual’s private life can be reconstructed through a thousand photographs labeled with dates, locations, and descriptions; the same cannot be said of a photograph or two of loved ones tucked into a wallet. Third, the data on a phone can date back to the purchase of the phone, or even earlier. A person might carry in his pocket a slip of paper reminding him to call Mr. Jones; he would not carry a record of all his communications with Mr. Jones for the past several months, as would routinely be kept on a phone.
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In United States v. Jones, the court decided that sticking a GPS-tracker on a suspect’s car without a warrant constituted trespass. The decision avoided making a determination about whether a person’s location in public was something that they could reasonably expect to be private, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor did write that the Third Party Doctrine is, “ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.”
The court isn’t expected to make a decision until at least June of next year, but McAndrew told us that if you want to get a feeling for which way the justices are leaning, pay attention to whether or not they’re asking questions in personal terms. “When they tend to say things in personal terms, which a lot of judges do when talking about technological issues, it’s because they’re literally thinking about their own privacy,” he says.It seems as if the same battle is being fought in every aspect of American society. On one side are the forces of egalitarianism, economic opportunity and self-determination. On the other is a well-funded and entrenched elite bent on hijacking our media, our political process and our institutions for their selfish ends.
Sadly, the classrooms of this country haven’t been spared.
Means and Ends
The Wall Street crowd wants us to think of education in terms of means – which usually means finding ways to spend less – rather than ends. But when it comes to education, the “ends” are our children. And the means we choose for them, either consciously or through indifference, reveal who we really are as a people.
Perhaps that’s why a new ‘education declaration’ has attracted signatories as diverse as author Dave Eggers; Prof. Robert Reich; education reformer Diane Ravitch; Larry Groce, host of NPR’s Mountain Stage; economist Lawrence Mishel; Prof. Theda Skocpol; and a number of other prominent political, academic, cultural, religious, and educational leaders. (You can sign it too.)
A quick disclaimer: I’m affiliated with the Institute for America’s Future, one of the sponsors of this initiative. I wasn’t involved with its preparation, but I’ve wanted to write about primary and secondary education for a long time. I’ve held off, partly because the moral truths have been restated so many times that they’ve become clichés.
You know the clichés I mean: Nothing’s more important than our children. Kids come first. It takes a village. “I believe the children are our future/teach them well and let them lead the way …”
The real deficit.
When ideas become clichés, we stop listening. As soon as the song’s over we go back to watching politicians boast about who’ll do a better job reducing the deficit – by which they mean the deficit in federal spending, not the deficit in educational resources for our children.
That’s the real deficit, the one that matters, the one that will shape our future. Kids need those resources – not just to learn their ABCs and their 123s, but to help them become fully realized human beings and full participants in society.
Did you know that, according to the most recent Census Bureau report, the amount we spend per child on education just dropped for the first time in nearly forty years? “Teach them well and let them lead the way,” indeed.
The playbook.
A conscience is a tricky thing. It’s tough to live with yourself when you’re shortchanging our kids and our future, no matter how many times you play that old song. What you need is an infusion of “free market” voodoo to convince you – and others – that depriving children of educational resources is for their own good.
Enter Michelle Rhee and Rahm Emanuel and the rest of their ilk, using the same playbook that’s been deployed against Social Security, Medicare and other vital government services. It goes like this:
Pretend that “budgets” are the real crisis – but never mention that corporations and the wealthy are paying less in taxes than ever before in modern history. Make scapegoats of innocent people to draw attention away from yourselves. For Social Security they’ve attacked “greedy geezers,” but it’s hard to come up with a catchy equivalent for kids. (“Insatiable imps”? “Avaricious anklebiters”?) So they vilify teachers instead. Sell a fantasy which says that the private sector can do more, with less money, than government can. (Never, never mention that private insurance provides far less healthcare than public insurance, at much higher cost. And don’t bring up the mess privatization’s made of prisons and other government services.) Find a name that doesn’t use words like “money-making.” How about “charter schools”? Describe yourselves as “reformers” – rather than, say, “demolishers.” That’s why “entitlement reform” is used as a euphemism for cutting Social Security and Medicare. (Michelle Rhee even called her autobiography “Radical.” Apparently “Shameless” was taken.) Employ the political and media elite’s fascination with (and poor understanding of) numbers. Suggest that “standardized” and “data-driven” programs will solve everything – without ever mentioning that the truly ideological decisions are made when you decide what it is you’re measuring. Co-opt the elite media into supporting your artificial description of the problem, as well as your entirely self-serving solution. Use your money to co-opt politicians from both parties so you can present your agenda as “bipartisan” – a word which means you can “buy” a few “partisans” from both sides.
It shouldn’t be surprising that all these attacks share a common playbook. The money’s coming from the same pockets, and for the same reasons: so they can keep their own taxes low – and make money from the privatization schemes.
The Declaration
A lot of well-intentioned people get taken in by cynical agendas like this, especially when the other side isn’t being heard. That’s where the “Declaration” comes in. It says that “Education is a public good.” A public good is something that is, or should be, available to all without exception, like clean air, drinkable water, and the national defense.
The Declaration also says education funding should be “equitable and sufficient.” No child should be deprived of educational opportunity because of race or income. The map shown below reveals how badly we’re breaking that promise and targeting budget cuts toward minority schools. The Declaration points a finger at this shameful outcome and says that minority children, like all other children, deserve an opportunity to learn.
The Declaration also says that “National responsibilities should complement local control,” which I would interpret as follows: Every state or county manages its schools. But as the nation learned in Birmingham and Little Rock, our civil rights are universal.
And the opportunity to learn is a civil right.
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Standards, not standardized.
The Declaration doesn’t reject the idea of standards per se. But it does say, rightly, that they should be “diagnostic assessments that go beyond test-driven mandates and help teachers strengthen the classroom experience for each student.”
Instead, for 30 years we’ve been moving our educational system toward a goal of absolute standardization, a production-line process in which graduating students are uniform and interchangeable “outputs” to be produced at the lowest possible cost – each equipped with the optimum utility value for the corporations that will employ increasingly few of them.
But that’s not what education is for. Not in a free and democratic society.
The Declaration also observes that “an education agenda that imposes top-down standards and punitive high-stakes testing while ignoring the supports students need to thrive and achieve … (is) turning public schools into uncreative, joyless institutions.”
Joyless lives are for kids in Dickens novels or systematized Orwellian dystopias. They shouldn’t be the fate of today’s American children.
Beating the System
The corporate System – and it is a system - doesn’t want to produce any more student “outputs” than it needs, or any who won’t be useful corporate tools. And it’s perfectly fine for the System if poor and minority kids don’t get a decent education. The System didn’t need their parents and it doesn’t need them either.
Music programs? The System doesn’t need violin-playing ghetto kids or schoolgirls who’d rather play the drums than twirl a baton. Arts programs? Our corporate walls are already lined with Kandinskys and Klees, thank you very much.
But our nation’s children aren’t “outputs.” They’re human beings. “Education is not the filling of a pail,” said William Butler Yeats, “but the lighting of a fire.”
We’re told that our children are citizens of a great, powerful, and democratic nation. Their education must be equal to those claims. They should be prepared to assume the full rights and duties of citizenship, prepared to determine their society’s fate. The System may not want that kind of education for our children. But we do. That’s why we have a democracy.
In the face of a heartless system, it’s time to reaffirm a basic human value: Education is every child’s birthright, and it should honor the humanity which every child possesses.
Human.
That includes arts programs. “Imagination is not a state,” said William Blake, “it is the human existence itself.”
The purpose of education is to help us fully realize and express our identities, and to enable us to exercise our freedoms wisely. Anything less means we are a society that is neither fully human nor fully free.
It’s time to declare our unequivocal support for education that draws on the best of us, in a humane and just way. It’s time to reject the cynical values that choose profits over people – especially the youngest people among us.
It’s time to declare that each and every one of our nation’s children possesses a rare and precious quality, whether their schools are in the Hamptons or Harlem, Northampton or the Navajo Nation, Arcadia or Appalachia.
It’s time to declare that each is, fully and profoundly and beautifully, human.
(You can sign the Declaration here.)OTTAWA — The Bank of Canada warned Wednesday that the country’s housing market could be overvalued by as much as 30%, but still predicted it was headed for a “soft landing.”
[np_storybar title=”Why the IMF can’t stop worrying about Canada’s housing market” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/2014/11/26/the-imf-cant-stop-worrying-about-canadas-potential-housing-bubble/”%5DCanada’s housing market is likely to achieve a soft landing but authorities may need to tighten mortgage rules further to contain vulnerabilities to a crash, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday.
Canada avoided the housing market crash that accompanied the financial crisis in the United States. But a post-recession housing boom, fuelled by record-low borrowing costs, has prompted some analysts to warn a bubble may be in the works. Keep reading.
[/np_storybar]
It was the first time, the central bank has put a number on housing market overvaluation, suggesting it was between 10% and 30%.
“This situation raises the risk that a shock to the economy could trigger a correction in house prices,” governor Stephen Poloz told reporters in Ottawa, following the release of the bank’s semi-annual Financial System Review, a closely watched research document on potential shocks and their effects on economic stability.
“The probability of this risk materializing is low, but if it did occur, the effect on the economy would be severe.”
Douglas Porter, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets, said the bank’s 10%-to-30% estimate is “a big range, [and] a similar figure to what they would find in Australia and New Zealand.”
“However, [policymakers] note that the market has been at least 10% overvalued since 2007, and there has been only a ‘modest upward creep’ since 2009.”
That said, the Bank of Canada still believes the housing market is headed for a soft landing — dependent on the global economy gaining strength and as interest rates “normalize.”
The probability of this happening is low... But if it did, the effect on the economy would be severe
That statement “is pretty far from ringing alarm bells,” Mr. Porter said.
The bank has held its trendsetting lending rate at a near-record-low 1% since September 2010, giving consumers ample time to pile up debt since the 2008-09 recession. The resumption of rate increases is not expected until around mid-2015.
As well, policymakers feel the overall chance of an “adverse shock” to the country’s financial system has eased since they issued their previous review document in June.
“The governor sounded more optimistic on Canada’s economic backdrop, which is ‘gathering strength,’ highlighting the broadening American recovery’s effect on its northerly neighbour’s exports,” said Nick Exarhos at CIBC World Markets.
Mr. Exarhos noted improvements in the labour market and business investment also show why risks to Canada’s financial system have decreased.
Still, the Bank of Canada acknowledged that plummeting oil prices could be a threat to growth in this country, likely shaving 0.3% off gross domestic product in 2015.
“At this stage, we do see it as primarily an economic risk [rather than a risk to the financial sector] and one that, at the moment, looks like it would keep us in the zone of our outlook,” Mr. Poloz told reporters.
But, he added: “Lower oil prices are more likely to boost global growth.... That’s a positive thing, both directly and of course indirectly, for Canada.”
The Bank of Canada also pointed out in its Financial System Review that Canadians’ high level of borrowing for vehicles, “substantially outpacing the growth in other forms of household credit.”
“This can be explained, in part, by strong auto sales and also by important structural changes in the market for auto financing,” the review states. “In particular, there has been a broad shift from lease financing to loan financing since the financial crisis, and banks are taking a more prominent role.”
However, just as with the housing market, the bank said these developments present “only modest concerns, given its small share of overall household debt and the limited exposure of banks.”Representatives of the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments confirmed on August 9 the presidents of the two countries will hold a three-party meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The three presidents will meet on August 10 at Putin's summer retreat near Sochi.
Tensions have recently flared up again in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. There has been fighting between Azerbaijani soldiers and pro-Armenian fighters from Karabakh, and between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops.
At least 20 people have been killed.
The announcement of the three-party meeting came as Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev held talks with Putin.
Putin told Aliyev it was time to address the "sore and longstanding problems, concerning the Karabakh settlement process."
Aliyev said after the meeting he agreed that the Karabakh problem had dragged on for far too long and said he was grateful for Russia's interest in resolving the problem.
Putin then met with Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian where the subject of Nagorno-Karabakh again took a center place in talks.
Sarkisian described the recent hostilities in the region as a "premeditated escalation" without elaborating.
There was no word about when the three would hold their August 10 meeting but Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin, Aliyev and Sarkisian would together attend an international sambo (eds: a form of martial arts) tournament during the evening of August 9 in Sochi.
Baku and Yerevan remain locked in hostilities over Nagorno-Karabakh, which was seized from Azerbaijan by Armenian-backed separatists during a war in the early 1990s in which some 30,000 people were killed.
Meanwhile, Armenian Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan and Defense Minister Seiran Oganian visited the Nagorno-Karabakh region on August 9, accompanied by some members of the Armenian parliament.
Armenian government spokesman Tigran Abrahamyan said the officials were there to view the situation along the Line of Control and the fortifications of the self-proclaimed Nagorno-Karabakh Republic's self-defense forces.
With additional reporting from Interfax and Trend.azOn 7th December 2012 Shell decided to move the Kulluk floating drill platform from its berth in Dutch Harbour, south to a Seattle shipyard where it would receive major repairs and general maintenance during the off-season. Shell claimed that they had assessed the possibility of making the repairs in Alaska, but it was deemed that a larger shipyard was needed.
The Kulluk, under tow from the Aiviq, departed Dutch Harbour on 21st December. On 27th December the main towing gear failed, just as an Arctic storm approached and the seas began to pick up. Repeated attempts to connect the Kulluk to a number of different vessels that had come to help, all failed, and the rig finally drifted off and ran aground on New Year’s Eve.
The whole fiasco continued for some days and was well documented by the media as it capped off a dismal year for Shell’s Arctic operations.
Related article: BP, Shell, Statoil, Platts Raided for Price-Fixing
At the time, when asked by reporters if the main reason for Shell’s decision to rush the Kulluk rig down to Seattle had been to avoid Alaskan taxes, Sean Churchfield, the operations manager for Royal Dutch Shell in Alaska, stated: “No, the reason we boated down there was actually to get the off-season repairs done. Once we had the rig ready for tow, prepared and inspected, was when we moved down to give us the maximum time to ready for the 2013 season.”
In later interviews with Shell representatives it was mentioned that the tax issue was indeed a factor to be considered, but by no means the deciding factor.
Now Churchfield has admitted in his testimony for the Coast Guard’s investigation into the matter, that the prospect of paying millions in taxes had forced Shell to move the rig from Dutch Harbour.
When addressed by Lt. Cmdr. Brian McNamara, the Coast Guard’s legal adviser, Churchfield said that the “preference for the timing was to be gone before the end of the year, driven by the economic factors.”
Related article: The Arctic is Thawing, but Hasn’t Released Trapped CO2
“Why specifically was the end of the year such a concern?” McNamara asked.
“The end of the year to my understanding was when the tax liability potentially would have become effective,” replied Churchfield.
The Kulluk rig would have had to be back up in Alaska by the beginning of June to take part in this year’s drilling season, but Shell has decided to postpone its Arctic drilling program for this year as it regroups and prepares for a new attempt next year.
By. Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com(CNN) Bisaso Dauda isn't your typical prop maker. Today, he's building a full-sized helicopter from scrap metal. As he works away in Wakaliga, one of the poorer suburbs just outside of Kampala, Uganda, he tinkers with a diesel engine to help spin the rotors. Next, he'll build a tank, then a submarine. Welcome to Wakaliwood.
Wakaliwood is the brainchild of self-taught director Isaac Nabwana, who launched his own amateur production company, Ramon Film Productions, in 2005. Since then, he has seen trailers for his films go viral (the clip for the action movie Who Killed Captain Alex? garnered almost 2.4 million views on YouTube).
He is 42-years old, and has made over 40 films in the past decade, all on a budget of less than $200. He gets creative. Machine guns are made from scrap metal, bullets carved from wood, and fake blood bursts out of bags made from free condoms sourced at the local health clinic.
Nabwana's love of film began in childhood.
"I used to draw comics and my brothers would tell me what happened in the films -- Rambo is chasing Chuck Norris -- and I would draw it."
It wasn't until he was 32 that Nabwana attempted to make his own movie.
"I didn't know how to write a script so the scenes I'd film weren't connecting," he recalls. A partnership with an actor who had written a play and needed Nabwana's help to film it provided the director with his first opportunity to learn how to string a story together.
A one-man film industry
It says something about Nabwana's ambition that in addition to launching his own production company, he's also coined the name for an entire movie industry. Wakaliwood might not have the resources of Hollywood, the glamor of Bollywood or the reach of Nollywood -- it is not even the official film industry in Uganda which is the little-known Ugawood. But Nabwana's passion for film and his eagerness to teach others is already spawning other film stars.
Kunf Fu master, Bruce U, training the next generation of action movie stars - The Waka Starz..
"Western and Nigerian movies are popular but here but we have to teach our people to watch Ugandan films. People don't believe our films can be good, until we show them. Now even universities are sending their students to do internships here," he says.
But the road has not been smooth for Nabwana, who went from making bricks to making films. Some of the challenges he faces are common to all filmmakers (raising finance comes top of that list), while others are unique to making movies in a developing country. Nabwana speaks of the need for government support and investment in Uganda's film industry. He notes that the businesses that exist in other regions to support movie making -- the prop shops, actors' agencies, location scouts and so on -- simply don't exist in Uganda. Nabwana had reached out to the army to borrow a chopper ("it didn't even have to fly," he tells me) but got nowhere. Then there's the constant power outages, the lack of parts to build stronger computers (an aim for the near future is to make high-definition movies) and rampant piracy.
Sometimes Wakaliwood actors get into character to gain some extra attention while selling the films.
Without a distributor, the actors and actresses, sometimes in full costume, double as door-to-door salespeople, hawking the films as soon as they come out. This grassroots approach means news of a new film spreads fast by word of mouth.
"People are calling me up from [other regions of Uganda] asking me for more films. It is the audience that has made me famous."
A family endeavor
Ramon Productions is named after Nabwana's great grandmothers, Rachel and Monica, as is the first of the three children he has with wife, Harriet Nakasuga. Nakasuga also works as an editor for the company and Nabwana smiles as he details all the things she helps out with.
"Sometimes I work late at night," he explains. "Harriet is always here."
The newest member of that family is American Alan Hofmanis. The program director for the Lake Placid Film Festival saw the Who Killed Captain Alex? trailer in 2011. After visiting Nabwana seven times, Hofmanis sold his belongings and moved to Wakaliga in 2014 to help Nabwana realize his vision.
Director Isaac Nabwaana and Alan HofmanisThe Arab Spring is not an outcome, it is a process. For those countries at the forefront of regional transformation, the fundamental question is can democracy become institutionalised? Though progress has been uneven and the outcomes of many state-society struggles have yet to be resolved, the answer is a cautious yes. In at least a few countries, we are witnessing the onset of democratic institutionalisation: whether the process of reform and transformation spreads to other parts of the Middle East depends on many factors — religious tensions, political mobilisation, regime adaptations, geopolitics. Meanwhile North Africa provides the most promising preview of the future.
Democratic institutionalisation means the healthy convergence of politics around three arenas of competition: elections, parliaments and constitutions. When these institutions are robust and durable, then the democratic governments they engender are relatively safe from radical groups, reactionary forces and authoritarian backsliding (due to alternation: democracies that uphold the rule of law and hold regular elections require that power alternates between competing parties).
In Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, this process is unfolding, if at an unsteady pace (1). All three have had founding legislative elections that were far more competitive and pluralistic than those held in their authoritarian past. In Tunisia, the project to re-craft the national constitution nears completion by the Constituent Assembly, which itself was the product of electoral competition. The crisis there has two dimensions: the new government’s passivity in response to Salafist violence (which came to an end after the attack on the US embassy in Tunis) and the delay in getting economic reform under way, especially in the poorest regions. In spite of often acute tensions and conflicts between different political interest groups, all but the tiniest minority have accepted that democracy is now the name of the game.
In Libya, the post-Gaddafi political order has been rockier, with armed militias initially fighting amongst themselves (2), while in Egypt, presidential elections resulted in the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi. Once in office, Morsi asserted civilian power over the military by dismissing Field Marshall Tantawi. This was a crucial step towards redefining civilian-military relations in a historically praetorian state.
In these transitional states, most political actors recognise the new reality — except of course hardliners and extremists, such as some Salafists and defenders of the autocratic past. But the new reality does not mean that these institutionalising democracies will become liberal democracies. The democrats of the Arab Spring did not embrace revolution to advance liberalism — which many in the West may see in the Arab context as advancing the cause of gender equality, unshackling censorship of pornography and other “immoral” materials, and otherwise widening the boundaries of expression. Liberalism is in truth a body of political thought that may give preeminence to the individual and freedom, but can only emerge from a later stage of democratic consolidation. It will not result from an early showdown between secularists and Islamists, and compromise on such values at this nascent stage is unlikely.
The priority for these transitioning states is not ideational, but rather the continued struggle towards institutionalisation. Democracy does not require that every citizen and every party embrace the same ideological framework, but rather that democratic rules and procedures become the definitive rules of the game. Even the Islamists are discovering that electoral triumphs require more than slogans: like democratic governments elsewhere, they need to deliver the goods through governance and policy, not empty promises of bliss and orthodoxy.
The Islamist apparition
From America to Europe, policymakers and publics alike were shocked to see Islamist parties like the Nahdha movement in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt emerge as winners of revolutions they did not trigger. However, fears of Islamisation must be tempered by several realities.
Western observers often forget that Islamists have no symbolic monopoly over the interpretation of Islam in the public sphere. In Egypt, classical educational institutions like Al-Azhar University and doctrinal sects like the Sufis frame faith and politics in ways distinct from Islamists. Within the broad Islamist category, the Brotherhood and more hardline Salafists clash over major issues and disagree about numerous religious tenets. The decentralised and horizontal freedom given by Islam to the individual believer ironically sabotages those who seek to dominate religion for their own political gain.
And though the Islamist trend encompasses groups ranging from social service providers to extreme Salafist voices, its mainstream face that will shape politics in most transitional countries — the Muslim Brotherhood — is no revolutionary vanguard. The Brotherhood did not support Iran’s call for Islamic revolution against the region’s secular dictatorships after 1979. Nor did they embrace Osama bin Laden’s call to replace politics with jihad in the late 1990s.
Third, Islamist victories have hardly been sweeping, so Islamism cannot be taken as the unambiguous voice of the Arab masses. The Muslim Brotherhood, and to a lesser degree the Salafists, dominated the first post-Mubarak elections by winning over 300 out of 500 parliamentary seats. Yet their popularity has faded since 2011, and the result of the June 2012 presidential contest was stunning: Morsi barely achieved victory over Ahmad Shafik, a symbol of the old autocracy who secured nearly half the popular vote.
Similarly, the Nahdha Party controls 40% of the Tunisian Constituent Assembly — not enough to survive without a coalition with powerful secular and leftist forces. In Libya, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party barely won 10% of seats in the June 2012 elections for the General National Congress.
Many Islamists are being transformed by the democratic process of inclusive contestation, however reluctantly they entered this new arena. In Egypt, how to integrate the well-organised Muslim Brotherhood and its more hardline Salafist cousins into the long-term democratic game takes precedence. The reality is that Islamists cannot take power by force; the Brotherhood is a well-mobilised social movement but it lacks coercive muscle.
The September 2012 uproar over the anti-Islam film The Innocence of Muslims provides yet another way to poke holes in the Islamist apparition. The episode forced wider Islamist forces to put a clear distance between themselves and the more radical groups. And many leaders protested against the film by invoking such legal concepts as defamation rather than resorting to the canon of sharia law’s proscription of blasphemy.
The secular pretext
Still, it would be remiss to ignore that the central message of many Islamists is to implement the pillars of Islam more strongly in Arab-Muslim societies in accordance with sharia. The Brotherhood is no liberal organisation and for that reason, many secularists have become fearful of theocracy should they attain complete power. The key is to remember that the Islamist majority, represented by the Brotherhood and other mainstream groups, can “internalise” democratic norms in a way that preserves the importance of religious identity while still preserving the institutional rules of electoral competition and consolidating the gains made through regime transition. One does not need a cadre of western-educated liberal ideologues to create democracy: democracies emerged without democrats in Portugal and Spain in the 1970s, and then much of Latin America throughout the 1980s as what Samuel Huntington called the Third Wave of Democratisation unfolded (3). The logic of democracy is agreeing to disagree within an institutional ecology bounded by accountability and pluralism — because the alternative is perpetual instability, conflict and stalemate.
Once democracy institutionalises, so that most political groups can accept the inviolability of elections and participation, citizens and politicians can engage in civic debates about transforming state and society into more (or less) liberal forms. This means that countries like Libya, Tunisia and Egypt need not be thoroughly “secularised” to quicken their transitions to democracy. Secularism almost never preceded democracy in the western experience.
Youth protesters — mostly urban, largely middle-class, and decidedly secular in the sense of not being members of any Islamist group — led the regional wave of revolutions. Today though, these youth movements have been marginalised in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, and with it their particular vision of a more secular democratic future, because they failed to organise a cohesive political front once authoritarianism collapsed. Whereas Islamists took advantage of the resulting vacuum to mobilise (with varying electoral results), the youth movements refused to enter formal institutional politics.
This has had destructive consequences. By emphasising “the street” (the idea that grievances should be expressed by loud contentious protests rather than the quieter, more structured rules of electoral politics), these secular youths have gained little formal power and virtually no representation in new democratic institutions such as parliaments and popular councils.
Street politics have a dual function. They allow ordinary people to serve as civic watchdogs of the state (the January 25 Revolution in Egypt happened only because students, workers and other middle-class citizens could crowd into urban centres in defiance of central authority and demand more rights). However, constant protesting cannot replace the institutional rhythms of democratic elections and political campaigns, because the very act of protest implicitly rejects the legitimacy of the system — and democracy consolidates only when most accept its legitimacy.
What these youths must do to prolong their contribution to the Arab Spring is to align their interests with nascent institutions. The time has come to invest their energies, and the spirit of their activism, into formal politics such as parliaments and consultations. They can also act as surrogates for a new political scene that encourages the expression of religious opposition, nationalist tendencies, secular trends and centrist or centre-left values that span the entire spectrum of society. Uncontrolled, street protests can even undermine the best of policies. Unless these popular interests can be institutionalised into the system, there is a danger that a well-organised minority could rise to power, silence the moderate majority and slide the state back into authoritarian practices. This is a recurrent theme in the aftermath of the Third Wave of Democratisation: autocrats often find ways to subvert new democratic institutions. The greatest danger in the Arab world is not a return to the old model of personalistic dictatorships, whose time has passed; rather, it is the rise of new authoritarian systems based upon oligarchic coalitions that manipulate democratic institutions.
Those left behind
Like all moments of historical change, the Arab Spring has created as many losers as winners. The secular youth movements discussed earlier are a prominent example. Yet another losing faction is the intellectual elite class, who have repeated the mistakes of their predecessors in failing to link the concrete concerns of localities and communities with their academic ideologies and grand visions.
Since the advent of Arab nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, generations of educated elites have spoken in favour of progressive issues that have electrified the press and wooed the middle classes. Early on, many of these themes were oppositionist (against Zionism, imperialism, Orientalism, capitalism and other perceived threats). There were also positive demands, for pan-Arabism, regional justice and equality with the West. Arab intellectuals are far more progressive than their societies but remain crippled by their inability to organise at the grass-roots level and translate their social influence into concrete political parties.
Another reason for the intellectual elite’s marginalisation is that their discourse of opposition could not fathom the possibility of an indigenous revolution. Their longstanding accusations that Zionism and western imperialism were the dual threats oppressing the Middle East were disproved when it became clear that the real problem was not the outside world, but the durability of authoritarianism and the lack of good governance. Some intellectuals today have reacted so extremely to the dashing of their expectations that they now believe the Arab Spring to be a western or Israeli conspiracy: with the defeat of the Ba’ath regimes of Iraq and perhaps of Syria next, the last vestiges of pan-Arab nationalism will have disappeared.
Another reason why youth movements and the intellectual elite have failed to capture mass support is that some of them have become extremely hardline in their opposition to any form of Islamism; they have become secular fundamentalists who cannot fathom the possibility of allowing even the most moderate Islamists to play a marginal role in governance.
A third set of losers is the Arab monarchies. This may seem contradictory. After all, no kingdom fell during the Arab Spring, and indeed a common refrain in the western press has been that, compared to their republican counterparts, the autocratic monarchies of the region have proven exceptionally resilient in the face of social unrest. The reasoning encompasses two arguments: these royal regimes enjoy a deeply rooted sense of cultural legitimacy that resonates throughout their societies. Unlike other authoritarian leaderships, they retain traditional acceptance with the public given their |
2009. Grace Fisher Renbarger is a donor to the Tribune.
The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one.Apocalypse fiction has become all the rage in recent years, with authors and filmmakers churning out countless depictions of imaginative methods of wiping out mankind. Indeed, even I have jumped on the bandwagon and produced a post-apocalyptic novel (Soulless: Book 1). But with all this fictional focus on humanity's end, one has to question what the likelihood is of any of these doomsday scenarios actually happening.
Just how doomed are we?
Well, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock ahead to three minutes to midnight on January 2, 2015. This is the closest it's been to midnight (midnight signaling our annihilation) since the days of the Cold War. Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin stated, "Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity. And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe."
Sooo... pretty freakin' doomed!
The only question left is, how will we go out? Listed below are 9 potential apocalypses we may face, and the likelihood of each one occurring. Cheers!Every time the Orlando Magic and Charlotte Hornets play each other, the game renews a friendship.
The Magic's Victor Oladipo and the Hornets' Cody Zeller attended Indiana University together and grew close during their two overlapping years at the school.
On Tuesday night, on the eve of a game between the Magic and the Hornets at Amway Center, Oladipo invited Zeller to his home, and they watched the Republican presidential debate and basketball on TV, Oladipo said.
Oladipo and Zeller cut sharply different profiles.
Oladipo hails from suburban Washington, D.C., while Zeller grew up in southwestern Indiana. Oladipo is a 6-foot-4 perimeter player, while Zeller is a 7-footer.
But they're close.
Why are they such good friends?
Scott Skiles discusses the Orlando Magic's 113-98 over the Charlotte Hornets on December 16, 2015 Scott Skiles discusses the Orlando Magic's 113-98 over the Charlotte Hornets on December 16, 2015 SEE MORE VIDEOS
"I think the biggest thing is because opposites attract," Oladipo said. "We act in completely, totally different ways, but we have a few things in common. Cody's kind of quiet and laid-back. I'm kind of outgoing.
"But me and Cody, when you go through a struggle like we did of going in and trying to bring a program back like we did at Indiana and go through the up-and-downs and you go through all the hardships and work hard and all the endless workouts... and playing for something bigger than yourself, it brings you closer together. So I think that's a huge reason why we're so close."
PICTURE GALLERY: Check out pictures from the NBA game between the Orlando Magic and the Charlotte Hornets during Star Wars Night at Amway Center in Orlando, Florida. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda)
Hornets point guard Kemba Walker and Magic reserve point guard Shabazz Napier also are close. Their University of Connecticut tenures overlapped for one year: the 2010-11 school year, when Walker was a junior and Napier was a freshman. Walker mentored Napier, and the Huskies won the 2011 NCAA Tournament.
Oladipo's influence
For the third consecutive game, Magic coach Scott Skiles played 6-foot-8 rookie Mario Hezonja at point guard. Hezonja entered Wednesday's game with 3:09 remaining in the first quarter.
It was no coincidence Oladipo was in the game then at shooting guard.
Skiles said Oladipo's skill as a defender makes it possible for Hezonja to run the offense, because the Magic cross-match defensively. Skiles asks Oladipo to guard the opponent's point guard and asks Hezonja to guard the opponent's shooting guard.
"So when we bring Mario in, he doesn't have to guard Kemba or somebody like that," Skiles said. "The pressure can be off of him on the defensive end. So that's really the only way we can pull it off."
Longtime admirer
Hornets coach Steve Clifford first saw Skiles coach during the 2000-01 season, when Skiles coached the Phoenix Suns and Clifford worked as a New York Knicks advance scout.
"I've always loved the way that his teams play," Clifford said. "They play hard, smart. They play with purpose at both ends of the floor."
Seeking a carry-over
The Magic hoped power forward Channing Frye would sustain the momentum he built during the Magic's 105-82 win over the Brooklyn Nets two nights earlier.
That night, Frye went 4 for 6 from the field, including a 3-of-5 shooting from 3-point range.
When asked if Magic players urge Frye to remain assertive, small forward Tobias Harris answered, "To be honest, Channing just got a lot of open looks and was able to make the shots. We were able to look for him and feed him. So it's not really on Channing being assertive. It's on us getting him open looks and getting him shots. We know he can shoot the ball, and he has a great IQ for the game. He's not going to take a bad shot."
jrobbins@orlandosentinel.com. Read his blog at OrlandoSentinel.com/magicblog and follow him on Twitter at @JoshuaBRobbins.This post takes a quick look at EventedArray, a small Array-like JavaScript data structure (written in CoffeeScript) that allows you to register callbacks on accessor/mutator operations and also create fixed size buffers. All examples are in JavaScript.
Background
The concept of Reactive Programming has been gaining a lot of traction lately, especially when working with user interfaces. To oversimplify, Reactive Programming deals with streams of data or events which can be sampled, combined and observed to try an bring order to the chaos found in your typical web application. A lot of very smart folks have written some excellent libraries to achieve this, such as RxJS and Bacon.js. Go check ‘em out.
When working on small applications I often find a need for an “observable” data structure. It would be great to have something like an Array which I could treat like a stack, with events triggered whenever values are pushed on or shifted off. I could achieve this with either of the libraries noted above, or even Backbone.js’s Events mixin, but sometimes I just need something small and simple. Also, it’s fun to learn how things work by rolling your own toy implementations.
The Basics
I wanted this data structure to be as close to a regular Array as possible, with a standard Object Oriented type interface. The core library is written in CoffeeScript but you can pull it into any JavaScript project as a global or with RequireJS. Let’s take a look:
// Create a new data structure var E = new EventedArray ( 1, 2, 3, 4 ); // It has setters & getters E. set ( 5, 6 ); E. get ( 4 ); // returns 5, the 0 indexed value of the array E. toString (); // "[1,2,3,4,5,6]" // Remove values E. remove ( 3 ); E. toString (); // "[1,2,4,5,6]" // Mess with the stack E. pop (); E. toString (); // "[1,2,4,5]" E. shift (); // 1 E. toString (); // "[2,4,5]" // Underscore collection functions E. each ( function ( i ){ console. log ( i * i ); }); // 4 16 25 E. map ( function ( i ){ return i ^ 2 ; }); // [0,6,7] E. filter ( function ( i ){ return i % 2 == 0 ; }); // [2,4] // Raw access to the values E. values ; // [2,4,5]
So that’s cool, it behaves like an Array for the most part. Now I want to add some callbacks that are triggered when I set, get, shift, etc.
E. register ('set', function ( i ){ console. log ( i +'was set on E' ); }); E. set ( 6 ); // '6 was set on E' E. register ('remove', function ( i ){ console. log ( i +'was removed!' ); }); E. remove ( 2 ); // '2 was removed!'
You can register events on most of the methods available, like reduce, every, contains and many more. Take a look at the source to see all the methods available.
The Conveyor Belt
A lot of times I want to treat my data structure like a fixed size stack, something that will only hold n values, shifting older values off the front as new ones are pushed onto the end. So I went ahead and added a setBuffer method to do just that:
var E = new EventedArray (); E. setBuffer ( 5 ); E. set ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ); E. toString (); // "[2,3,4,5,6]" E. set ( 7, 8, 9, 10 ); E. toString (); // "[6,7,8,9,10]"
So what can we do with EventedArray? It really lends itself to managing streams of values, so here’s a little DOM based animation example. Go ahead and waggle your cursor around in the box:
The code for this is pretty simple, you can view it in action here, we have one EventedArray with a buffer of 25 storing Box objects and a listener on the mousemove event passing those Boxes in:
// Create a queue to display our points var displayQueue = $ ( '#displayqueue' ); var P = new EventedArray (); P. setBuffer ( 25 ); // When points are set to this queue display them as a string P. register ('set', function () { displayQueue. html ( P. toString ()); }); // Create a Queue that holds 25 items and attach events var Q = new EventedArray (); Q. setBuffer ( 25 ); // As Boxes are set tell them to appear and also set their // [x,y] to the displayQueue Q. register ('set', function ( b ) { b. showBox (); P. set ( b. point ) }); // As boxes are shifted off, tell them to fade out // and null them out Q. register ('shift', function ( b ) { b. hideBox (); b = null ; }); // Drawing area var canvas = $ ( '#drawing' ); // Mousemove listener var onMove = function ( e ) { Q. set ( new Box ([ e. x, e. y ], canvas )); // Make a Box }; document. getElementById ( 'drawing' ). addEventListener ('mousemove', onMove );
So this nice, Boxes are pushed into the queue and shifted off, with events triggering their behavior. You could wire up more elaborate systems using this general concept, such as a simple Flickr search which filters items from one EventedArray into another:
In this case we’re using events on the filter method from Underscore to shift Photos off one stack and into another:
// Register a filter callback on stream which removes // photos from the stream itself stream. register ( 'filter', function ( f ) { _. each ( f, function ( i ) { stream. remove ( i ) }); }); // Filter photos from Stream based on title $filter_submit. on ( 'click', function ( e ) { e. preventDefault (); // make the search term lowercase var filter = $. trim ( $filter. val ()). toLowerCase (); // filter stream by the search term. This will trigger // the filter callback on stream var f = stream. filter ( function ( i ) { return i. title. toLowerCase (). indexOf ( filter )!== - 1 ; }); // Take all the filtered photos and create new elements // in the filtered list if ( f. length > 0 ) { filtered. each ( function ( i ) { filtered. remove ( i ) }); _. each ( f, function ( i ) { filtered. set ( new Photo ( i. entry, $filtered, filtered_remove )); }); }; });
You could get fancy and use drag and drop events to move items from one array to another, using events to do cleanup, trigger animations and such (at that point you would probably want one of the more fleshed out libraries I mentioned up at the top).
EventedArray is a simple data structure. You could blow it out into something a bit more robust, registering multiple callbacks on a single event, feel free to expand it as a learning exercise.On Friday, Netflix released all 10 episodes of Aziz Ansari's new dramedy, Master of None.
The show was met with ubiquitous praise from both critics and streamers for its intelligent brand of early-years, Woody Allen-like comedy; its sharp take on cultural and racial issues prevalent on television; and its scarily accurate portrayal of trying to date within the complex world of New York City.
In an attempt to keep conversation flowing around the show, Ansari made himself available all weekend on Twitter and addressed quite a few questions fans had about the making of the show and the decision to include certain jokes or themes.
One of the biggest revelations Ansari shared with Twitter was just how much former Parks and Recreation writer Harris Wittels had to do with the show. Wittels, who died Feb. 19 from an apparent overdose, was one of the go-to writers in the comedy scene and had worked with everyone from Amy Poehler to Scott Aukerman to Sarah Silverman before his death.
Ansari said that they tried to include as many Wittels jokes as they could in the show, and some of the most notable scenes all came from his late friend.
When asked by Twitter user Rajiv Karia what the most "intrinsically Harris Wittels line/moment of the season" was, Ansari couldn't nail it down to just one.
Turtle in briefcase, dominos bit, Eminem debate. FUCCCCKKKK I miss that guy :( https://t.co/6Dyt7zS6pG — Aziz Ansari (@azizansari) November 9, 2015
In an answer to a previous tweet, Ansari said that it was also Harris who came up with the hilarious Funyuns joke in the series' third episode, "Hot Ticket."
Besides including as much of Wittels' original material as they could in the show, Ansari also revealed that there were a few running inside jokes from the Parks and Rec writing room that made it, but none as funny as the Washington Breadsticks gag from the show's fourth episode, "Indians on TV."
In the sketch, Ansari goes to talk to someone about leaking an embarrassing email from a television executive who made a racist joke about Indian people. While in the meeting, Ansari discovers that the guy they're talking to has come up with the Washington Breadsticks as a replacement name for the Washington Redskins. It's one of the more memorable jokes from the episode — alongside the "is Mindy Kaling real?" question at the very end — and stemmed from his work on the aforementioned show.
Ansari also confessed that most of the situations that take place in the show, from dating to auditioning, all have seeds in his stand-up routines, and therefore, stem from events that have transpired in real life.
Yes in college I googled to see what that Indian actor was up to and was shocked https://t.co/A9FbGnQsMu — Aziz Ansari (@azizansari) November 9, 2015
For example, the discovery that the actor who played the doctor in Short Circuit 2 was a white man who wore brown paint to make him appear Indian happened to Ansari while in college.
More intimately, many of the conversations and scenarios that occur in the fan-favorite episode "Mornings" were based on past relationships that he's had that.
Lot of that based on real stuff from my own relationships https://t.co/GlJaqALpvx — Aziz Ansari (@azizansari) November 9, 2015
Ansari added that he created Master of None because he wanted to star in a show that he could write and have creative control over. It's obvious that the show is just as close to Ansari's heart as his past books have been.
Master of None is available to stream in its entirety right now on Netflix.Four seasons removed from the Crew's last postseason series win, president and general manager Mark McCullers said things could be drastically different this season.
Four seasons removed from the Crew�s last postseason series win, president and general manager Mark McCullers said things could be drastically different this season.
After missing the playoffs for the first time since 2007, the Crew parted ways with 11 members of last year�s roster and signed six players to improve the team�s defense. With the Major League Soccer season opener set for Saturday, McCullers has set the bar high.
�I think this team can contend for the MLS Cup,� McCullers said. �There�s no doubt in my mind. A lot of things have to happen, but I have no reason to shy away from that as an expectation. We can accomplish it.�
McCullers� optimism is not confined to the field. After the 2011 season, McCullers pointed to three crucial benchmarks that would help the Crew become financially solvent: selling naming rights to Crew Stadium, acquiring a jersey sponsor and reaching 10,000 season-ticket holders. After signing Barbasol as a jersey sponsor last winter, McCullers said the Crew is seeing progress on both fronts.
In December, McCullers said a possible sponsor was �kicking the tires� for acquiring naming rights to the stadium. Since then, talks have progressed.
�There�s one company that is in serious analysis mode,� he said. �We�ve gone from tire-kicking to presentation to evaluation on their part. There�s still some other tire-kicking going on, so it�s much more activity and there�s a better level of activity recently.�
The front office has been tight-lipped on exactly how many season tickets have been sold, but McCullers said after the 2012 season that the Crew reached a threshold it had reached on several other occasions in club history and been unable to eclipse. Although he declined to give a number, McCullers said he feels the Crew can reach its goal this year � one year ahead of schedule.
�We are tracking that very closely and I�m confident that we�re going to hit it,� he said. � There�s some aggressive growth that needs to happen, but our sales staff, they�re doing fantastic."
The Crew had 10,000 season-ticket holders when it opened Crew Stadium in 1999, but McCullers said a number of those were tickets purchased by one corporation.
�I don�t want to call it smoke and mirrors, but it wasn�t fans buying season tickets,� he said. � That (situation) doesn�t exist right now, so maybe it�s more meaningful.�
This year, season-ticket holders might get access to a game not played at Crew Stadium. After the Crew played host to English Premier League club Stoke City for an exhibition last summer, McCullers said the club is looking at alternate options this season. A spokesperson for FirstEnergy Stadium, home of the Cleveland Browns, declined to comment on any negotiations with the Crew.
�We�re still working on how can we have the big games?� he said. �How can we get the big teams in here? That model might include us playing in the region but not in Crew Stadium, so we�ve been having some discussions along those lines recently. I would love to bring Manchester United to Crew Stadium, but I would have to charge $200 a seat in order for it to work.�
ajardy@dispatch.com
@AdamJardyIn the last decade several genetic risk factors for Alzheimer's disease have been found by comparing cases with normal controls. Unfortunately discoveries of these gene variants have so far failed to lead to effective therapies. Now, in a research article published in Genome Medicine, researchers have taken the opposite approach by examining elderly people with a high risk of for Alzheimer’s disease who remain cognitively healthy. They find that rare variants in the RAB10 gene may provide protection from the disease.
Alzheimer’s is the leading cause of dementia in elderly people Pixabay
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder and the leading cause of dementia in the elderly; it is emotionally and financially devastating to those affected and their caregivers. The cost of caring for this deadly disease is projected to rise as high as $1.1 trillion by 2050 and yet there is not an adequate method to prevent, treat or cure the disease.
Genetic risk factors
It is known that genetics plays an important role in risk for Alzheimer’s disease, and having a parent or sibling with the disease increases your risk by about 3-fold.
Variants in the apolipoprotein E gene (APOE) are the strongest known genetic factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Extensive studies have demonstrated that APOE has three forms: e2 – a rare allele in the general population and is associated with the protection against developing the disease, e3 — the most common form in the population has a neutral effect on disease risk, and e4 — a moderately common allele that increases risk for by more than 5-fold per copy.
Nearly half of the genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease remains unexplained.
In the last decade several other genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease have been discovered by comparing cases to cognitively normal controls. To date these variants have not led to effective therapies and nearly half of the genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease remains unexplained.
Genes protecting against Alzheimer’s
In a recent study, a team of researchers are tackling the problem from a different angle, asking why some elderly people that are very high risk for Alzheimer’s disease remain cognitively healthy. This strategy has led to the discovery of a protective genetic change that may provide important insights into therapeutic interventions.
To find protective mutations for Alzheimer’s, the scientists used two unique datasets from Utah: the Cache County Study on Memory in Aging and the Utah Population Database. The Cache County Study, which includes over 5,000 subjects over the age of 65 who have 15 years of longitudinal cognitive assessment, was used to identify individuals who exhibit Alzheimer’s disease resilience. This is defined as people who are cognitively normal, over the age of 75, and carry at least one APOE e4 allele. They then selected pedigrees from the Utah Population Database, which combines genealogical records with medical records for the original founders of the State of Utah and their descendants (over 6 million people and 12 generations).
The goal was to find families with above-average rates of Alzheimer’s disease that also had at least four people who were resilient to the disease and several relatives who died from Alzheimer’s disease. In other words, they were cognitively normal, despite being 75 years old or older, and had the APOE e4 allele. The key question was simple, “Do these resilient people have something unique in their DNA that is protecting them from Alzheimer’s disease?”
Both variants are rare and both genes (RAB10 and SAR1A) interact with amyloid precursor protein, which is thought to be key in the development of the disease.
The group found 5 families that matched the criteria and had DNA samples from Alzheimer’s patients and Alzheimer’s-resilient people. The team then found areas of the DNA that were shared among resilient members of the family and absent in those who had Alzheimer’s disease. They found plausible protective variants in two families. These variants where in the genes RAB10 and SAR1A. Both variants are rare and both genes interact with amyloid precursor protein, which is thought to be key in the development of the disease.
The researchers checked two separate datasets to confirm this finding, and found confirmation that the RAB10 variant was associated with reduced Alzheimer’s risk. To see how this variant might be protective, the scientists performed a series of experiments where they altered expression of RAB10 in neuroblastoma cells. Knockdown of RAB10 resulted in amyloid beta secretion patterns that are associated with protection from Alzheimer’s. Consistent with these findings and a possible role in the disease, the team also found that RAB10 expression was significantly higher in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.
These results suggest that RAB10 may be an ideal drug target to prevent Alzheimer’s. It may be possible to reduce its expression or limit its activity in ways that could mimic the effect of the variant in resilient people. This could offer others the protection from Alzheimer’s disease that these resilient individuals have, leading to reduced rates of the disease.
Video abstractImage caption It has only recently come to public attention that Ian Devlin who works at the Ian Mikardo High School in Tower Hamlets is a convicted killer
A school has defended employing a man convicted of the manslaughter of a Bangladeshi father in a racially-motivated attack.
Ian Devlin was 17 when he was sentenced to serve nine years at a young offenders' institution for killing Shiblu Rahman in London in April 2001.
Devlin has been employed at Ian Mikardo High School, Tower Hamlets, as an assistant since 2010.
It said he had passed security checks and was a model rehabilitated offender.
While the school was aware of Devlin's conviction, parents and the wider community were not. The information came to light following a recently published article in a Bangladeshi language newspaper.
'Valued member of community'
Devlin has declined to comment.
The school in Talwin Street, east London, caters for boys aged 11-16 with serious social, emotional and behavioural issues.
Head teacher Claire Lillis said: "Ian Devlin has worked at the school for the last five years. He has been an excellent example of how a rehabilitated offender can contribute to his community and he is a valued member of our school community.
"The school took all appropriate checks and advice in appointing Mr Devlin and wish to support him in continuing to do the work which he has been legally appointed to perform.
"I am concerned that the reaction of the community to this news presents more of a safeguarding risk to our vulnerable children than his presence at the school and would urge local people to react in a calm and measured way."
Image caption Councillor Khales Ahmed said the appointment of Ian Devlin was a "huge mistake" by the school and highly provocative
Tower Hamlets Labour councillor Khales Ahmed said residents were horrified by Devlin's employment at the school. When Devlin was sentenced in 2001, Judge Richard Hawkins said "I am in no doubt that this was a racially motivated attack."
Mr Ahmed told the BBC: "Many residents [have] approached me about their concerns about this issue. I immediately asked for an investigation. It is a huge mistake by the school.
"Fifteen years ago Shiblu Rahman was killed by this person. It was a terrible racist killing.
"I know he has a right to a job. In this country he has a right to do everything but not locally, where he killed someone.
"It is a disaster. It is terrible for us, a local diverse community.
"Local residents remember what happened. I am shocked by this school. It is poor management. He shouldn't be employed here in this school.
"He can get a job anywhere else in this country. I know the employment process was legal, but as a local community we need to live together but that is difficult if he is here."
Mr Ahmed is calling for Devlin to be redeployed to another area where he does not have the same "provocative" community links.
The Met Police said local community tensions were "not a policing matter at this stage".In the first part of this two-part series, Joe McQuillan and Alan McCubbin introduced us to high-fat, low-carbohydrate (HFLC) diets and compared two athletes who were about to start a HFLC diet. In the second and final part in this series our authors show how the two athletes responded to their diets and show you what a HFLC diet actually looks like.
If you haven’t already, we recommend you read part 1 of this series before reading on.
Follow-up lab results
In the first part in this series we presented results from Joe’s lab, showing two athletes’ responses to a incremental step test in which they cycled with an increasing power output. We measured the percentage of energy the athletes got from carbohydrates and the percentage they got from fat.
We repeated the tests 10-15 weeks later — after the athletes had completed their HFLC diets — and compared the two tests, showing just how differently the two athletes responded.
Athlete 1:
Here’s how Athlete 1 sourced energy in the step test before taking on a HFLC diet:
And here’s how Athlete 1 sourced energy in the same test after the HFLC diet:
Athlete 1 was able to ride at a much higher intensity using a lot less carbs after the period of reduced carb (and higher fat) eating. While the reduced reliance on carbs occurred across all intensities, from about 74% up to 100% VO 2 max this athlete still relied heavily on carbs as the predominate fuel source.
Athlete 2
Here’s how Athlete 2 sourced energy in the step test prior to a HFLC diet:
And here’s how Athlete 2 responded to the same test after the HFLC diet:
Athlete 2 completed a solid 10 weeks training block during this period, and lost significant weight in the process. This combination explains the increased relative power output between tests. The post-HFLC weight was one this athlete last saw in his teenage years, despite being a regular Ironman and half-Ironman podium finisher over the last decade.
As you can see from the graph, the combination of 10 weeks solid training and a HFLC diet significantly increased the proportion of fat contributing to total energy production, all the way up to 100% of VO 2 max. The test was stopped at this point, so we don’t have data to show what happened to fat and carbohydrate use at higher intensities, such as during sprints or all-out hill climbing. But being a long course triathlete, such intensities are not so relevant to him anyway.
How to achieve “fat adaptation”
Being “fat adapted” isn’t so much about eating lots of extra fat as it is about changing the amount of fat and carbs available to the body. By restricting the carbohydrate in the diet, the body is forced to utilise fat as its main energy source. At least some of the carbs will need to be replaced with fat though, otherwise you’ll be in a massive energy deficit. A small energy deficit is fine and will result in weight loss if desired, but there’s health risks from very large energy deficits (click here for a previous article on the topic).
So how low do you need to go on the carbs? Because of the fairly limited data on the topic, there’s no particular level recommended as a maximum per day before the affects of fat adaptation are not realised. But suffice to say the level of carbohydrate restriction would need to be fairly tight to achieve the changes seen in the lab results of Athlete 2, probably less than 100 grams of carbs per day.
Failure to restrict carbs enough could land you in no-man’s-land — not getting the changes from fat adaptation, but also being under-fuelled with carbs to tackle harder training sessions, and requiring lots of carbs to prevent bonking on the bike.
Cutting carbs
So what does 100g of carbs look like? Well, a slice of bread is about 15-20g. A banana’s another 20g. A latte is around 10g (add more for sugar). Add in a tub of strawberry yoghurt, an apple and some marinade or barbeque sauce on your steak and that’s your carbs for the day.
Here’s a list of carbohydrate containing foods. Have a look before committing to a HFLC diet; these are the foods you’ll be seeing a lot less of.
Cereals and grains (including oats)
Fruit (except berries)
Biscuits
Bread, toast and wraps
Fruit juice
Cakes
Pasta
Yoghurt (small amounts of plain yoghurt are OK)
Lollies
Rice
Sugar as an ingredient in anything
Potato
Milk (small amounts are OK)
Sports drinks
Corn
Ice cream
Soft drinks
Legumes
Cordial
But it’s not all doom and gloom. Here are some of the things you can eat on a HFLC diet:
Breakfast: Eggs with bacon or deli meat, spinach, avocado and mushrooms, black coffee OR Specifically formulated low-carb muesli made from nuts and seeds (no grains), with a small amount of plain yoghurt or milk
Morning snack: A handful of nuts (e.g. almonds), or non-sweetened peanut butter with non-starchy vegetables (e.g. celery or capsicum)
Lunch: Meat, fish or chicken cooked in oil, with salad (including avocado and vinaigrette dressing) OR Omelette with cheese, ham and non-starchy vegetables
Afternoon snack: Plain yoghurt with berries
After a ride: Whey protein isolate, egg protein isolate or pea protein isolate OR Tin of tuna, salmon or chicken
Dinner: Meat, fish or chicken cooked in oil, with non-starchy vegetables or salad and oil & vinegar dressing
Dessert: Cheese and olives, vegetables with low-carb dip
Things take time
It can take a few weeks for the body to adjust to exercising using predominately fat as its energy source. Some people have described symptoms of “carbohydrate withdrawl” in the early days of a HFLC diet — headaches, hunger and cravings, fatigue and tiredness on the bike and, not surprisingly, a tendency towards bonking (hypoglycaemia).
These symptoms usually disappear after the initial period, provided the level of carbohydrate restriction is sufficient. We (Joe and Cliff) are currently investigating other novel approaches that may minimise these symptoms, including supplementation of specific types of fats and amino acids.
What did the two athletes tested do to achieve “fat adaptation”?
By his own admission Athlete 1 had a ‘sweet tooth’ and would often consume high amounts of refined sugary foods prior to his HFLC intervention. He continues to eat some higher carb meals (e.g. oats for breakfast) and quite a few pieces of fruit, but has cut bread, rice, pasta and potatoes back to only once or twice a week. He also minimises all sources of sugar.
He’s reduced the amount of food he takes on the bike to an occasional banana plus water with no bonking issues (although it wasn’t an issue beforehand either). Athlete 1 certainly doesn’t eat a super-low carb diet, but it’s much lower than what he previously ate.
Athlete 2 began trying to follow a strict HFLC diet with less than 50g of carbs a day, but quickly found it too restrictive for his liking. Instead he removed all grain-based foods and fruit. This suited his personal taste preferences and was far more sustainable over the testing period.
Our opinion – Is the low carb, high fat approach the way to go?
Cliff Harvey:
I believe that for most people, most of the time, a ‘lower-carb’ approach is the way to go. By this ‘lower-carb’ I don’t necessarily mean a typical keto-diet (restricting carbohydrate to very low levels), but instead a nutrition strategy that allows for someone to become more highly fat-adapted, and thus able to use fat for fuel, and also alternate fat fuels at higher thresholds of exercise intensity.
This strategy also allows the athlete to take in enough carbohydrate (especially during exercise and after training) to replenish muscle glycogen and allow for efficient, effective high-threshold activity bursts.
Joe McQuillan:
I believe athletes will report positive and negative outcomes on this type of dietary intervention, be they professional or recreational cyclists. Moreover, there is a ‘metabolic flexibility’ in which someone who is on a HFLC diet has the option to eat a reasonable carb intake but still remain ‘fat adapted’; we do this as part of preparing for, assisting with or recovering from high-intensity training bouts.
Would I encourage you to try the HFLC approach? Absolutely! This would be for both cycling and as an alternative lifestyle choice, just as I would encourage further informed reading to assist your education.
While I’m not anti-carbs it is a necessity to take a healthy dose of scepticism when intending to consume gels, carb based drinks and other high GI products that we are encouraged to feast on as endurance athletes all the time. Aside from the competitive side of sport, a lot of us participate for the associated health benefits. The health aspect of a HFLC diet is a much larger part of the overall picture than what the sporting aspect is.
In summary, if you want to be competitive in a sport such as road cycling there is an absolute need for some level of carbohydrate supplementation. This can be employed in the lead up to and during the event. Likewise in times of high intensity training bouts some carbs before, during and after is recommended.
Similarly, steady state ultra-endurance athletes will still stand to benefit from carbohydrate supplementation, but by being fat adapted will have less carbs required during exercise, and reduce the chances of gastric upset.
Alan McCubbin:
Asking if HFLC is the answer for cyclists is a bit like asking “what type of bike should I buy?”. The answer is going to be different for different people, in this case depending on their level of training, racing, body composition and health.
I’m not convinced that the HFLC approach will provide a benefit to competitive road cyclists. In road cycling inevitably the outcome of the race is determined by short periods of very high intensity riding (e.g. establishing a break, sprinting, dragging off an opponent on a climb, etc). It’s likely that the HFLC approach will probably reduce the ability to put out maximum power when the race is up for grabs.
It’s not a surprise to me that the professional peloton hasn’t embraced the HFLC concept — if there was a benefit to it they would’ve been doing it years ago (after the research of the early 2000s).
But it’s not about lots of carbs all the time |
erton, he lectured in Greek and promoted Hebrew.
In virtue of traveling on the Continent Boldey has improved his knowledge of Italian, French and Spanish, the great part of his four-year traveling remains in the Bodleian library — his Spanish copy of the Girolamo Franzini’s guidebook to Rome. His fellowship at Merton was over in 1586 on his marriage, and two years later he went to the United Provinces as envoy. Anglo-Dutch relationships were strained at that time, and Sir Bodley resigned from all the State employments in 1597. Yet his personal inclination and public expectation were the reason he kept seeking for other ways to be the profitable part of the community. After some time Thomas Bodley threw his forces and enthusiasm for the neglected Oxford library.
What about the history of the library before Sir Thomas? It was Thomas Cobham, Bishop of Worcester, who founded the first Oxford library, and for quite a while it was housed in a small room next to church St Mary the Virgin. After the generous donation from Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester that resulted in 279 rare manuscripts being added to the library between 1439 and 1444 the library was moved to a bigger library room. It was built over the Divinity School, and the building was over in 1488. In 60 years, when Sir Bodley has come to Magdalen College, the library room was already neglected.
In 1598 as Bodley left his diplomatic service, he started working on the renovation and reviving of the library. In his letter to the Vice-Chancellor he promised to take all the costs and efforts on his own – Bodley believed his leisure, education, friends and money would bring him success. And it seems like he really succeeded in his noble mission.
He started from the very beginning – there was a group of six people to inspect the renovated library room. The changes in the interior were inspired by the library of Bodley’s friend Henry Savile, Warden of Merton. Craving for the truly university-based library, he repaired the roof, paneled the ceiling of the new library room with the arms of the University and filled it with bookcases and tables. In 1600 when all the building was done, Sir Bodley switched from constructing the great place for those seeking knowledge to actually fill the shelves of the library with books.
In five years, due to Bodley’s talent to encourage the benefactions he had about £1,700 – the money donated by both famous people of that age and smaller ones. The library had a nice register book where all the contributors were listed. Kept on the display, it was the best way to remember the tiniest gift and to please those who contributed to the library – simple psychology, but it worked. The money received in this way Bodley spent on hiring two London booksellers, John Norton and John Bill, and on buying some of the new books.
The wide range of book procurement for the library was based on numerous donations from friends and contacts of the Mycenas of his time. Several hundreds of priceless medieval manuscripts transferred to the Bodleian Library were one of the most notable gifts. In fact, Bodley went far beyond the needs of the Oxford University curriculum – he encouraged the addition of books in other languages such as Persian, Arab, Turkish and Syrian. While there was no one in Oxford to read them, Bodley was sure they would be useful in future.
On 8 November 1602 the library was open to public, and soon scholars were traveling all over the Europe just to study here. Thomas James, young scholar with the same background as Bodley, was chosen to be the first bookkeeper at the Bodleian Library and sort of the right hand for the famous executant. In fact, James helped to realize his vision of the library as the ornament of the University and great source of knowledge for people from all over the world. The extensive correspondence between these two shows all kinds of directions concerning the library and all the administrative issues James received from Bodley. Covering the time period between 1599 and 1613, these letters tell us about the production of their first catalogue, Bodley’s endowment of the library in 1608 and a lot more – it is an epistolary reflection of the majesty and significance the Bodleian Library earned with years.
After Sir Thomas Bodley died the library was governed by the Curators and administered by the Oxford University. James continued as the Librarian – he kept buying more books and working on new catalogue until 1620. After that the library expanded the second time – this was the beginning of the continuous growth of this science center at the heart of the University.The days of a depending on a human doctor may soon be numbered, as the future of the health industry looks increasingly like an AI-assisted scenario.
Researchers and startups are developing artificially intelligent systems that are capable of diagnosing disease using a patient’s breath and even from the emotional inflection of their voice. Someday, your smartphone may help you and your doctor determine whether a strange-looking lesion on your skin is cancerous or not, thanks to a team of Stanford University scientists that have developed a deep learning algorithm tailored just for the task.
Led by Sebastian Thrun, an adjunct professor at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the team found that their diagnostic tool, which builds upon the same classification technique used by Google to differentiate between images of cats and dogs, performed as well or better than 21 board-certified dermatologists. Their findings were detailed in a recent paper published in Nature.
Typically, a skin cancer diagnosis starts with a human dermatologist visually examining a patient’s skin, both with the unaided eye and with a handheld, low-power microscope called a dermatoscope. If the dermatologist suspects that the lesion is cancerous, a biopsy will be performed. The team’s algorithm is designed to help dermatologists at this stage of the process, to better determine which lesions actually need a biopsy.
“We made a very powerful machine learning algorithm that learns from data,” said Andre Esteva, a graduate student and co-lead author of the paper. “Instead of writing into computer code exactly what to look for, you let the algorithm figure it out.”
Thousands of Blobs
In particular, the team refined a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithm previously used by Google that was already trained to classify 1.28 million images of 1,000 different object categories. Instead of using it to identify objects, as Google researchers did, the Stanford team used it to train on 130,000 images of 2,000 different skin diseases, culled from the Internet, so that the model could use them to train and learn to pinpoint markers of disease even with variations in lighting, camera angle and zoom.
“There’s no huge dataset of skin cancer that we can just train our algorithms on, so we had to make our own,” explained graduate student Brett Kuprel, another study co-author. “We gathered images from the internet and worked with [Stanford’s] medical school to create a nice taxonomy out of data that was very messy – the labels alone were in several languages, including German, Arabic and Latin.”
The model was then tested against 370 high-quality images of cancerous skin lesions, with a resulting accuracy rate matching or even surpassing that of 21 board-certified human dermatologists, with one distinct advantage being that the algorithm can be adjusted for sensitivity and specificity, depending on what its human users are looking for.
The team’s aim is to incorporate the technology into tomorrow’s smartphones, which will be especially helpful in developing nations where ownership of cellphones is quickly growing. Such a tool will mean quicker and more accurate diagnoses in skin diseases: with earlier detection, that also translates into greater chances of survival.
“My main eureka moment was when I realized just how ubiquitous smartphones will be,” said Esteva. “Everyone will have a supercomputer in their pockets with a number of sensors in it, including a camera. What if we could use it to visually screen for skin cancer? Or other ailments?”
While it will probably take some time and further testing before such a system will be widely used, it’s yet another illustrative example of how recent advances in deep learning are changing our world. From automatic language translation of text or images, to object classification in images and speech recognition, deep learning is making deep inroads into our lives. Though nothing beats the reassuring and healing bedside presence of a living, breathing human, the quicker and more accurate diagnosis of disease is yet another problem that deep learning could help solve, hopefully in a healthcare system that partners human doctors and healers with technology, rather than replacing them with it.
Images: Stanford University.45User Rating: 4 out of 5
Review title of H8edHero Launch day player years of review.
As the title states I have been playing ESO since launch day. Yes the game has bugs/glitches, but this is an MMO, they all do. What I can say as far as improvements to core gameplay and bugs go, ZOS has been great about addressing and fixing most of those problems with each patch. Does it happen overnight? No. The process and fees involved in doing so make it understandbly take longer than any dedicated player would want to wait. People have complained about a grind to get leveled up, get gear, and level skills etc. That is no longer an issue. As a day one player to hear these new people still complaining about any kind of grind irritates me to no end. If you want to power level a character it can be done in 5-6 hours with the help of online leveling videos. Getting to max Champion points takes a bit more dedication, but an exponential leveling system has been put in place that makes it very quick now. I am out of space but the game is worth the money. The end game PVP needs work.Please see the update at the bottom of this post.
Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo’s state budget plan would change the definition of “other tobacco products” to include e-cigarettes and would impose a new 80 percent wholesale tax on these products.
This week the state’s House Finance Committee will take testimony and consider the governor’s proposal.
Nearly everything about Gov. Raimondo’s approach to this issue runs counter to the goals of improving public health and reducing smoking. When Rhode Island governors have proposed similar taxes in the past, the legislature has wisely rejected them — and they should reject this ill-conceived tax.
For starters, e-cigarettes and vapor products don’t contain any tobacco. They don’t have the tar or smoke of traditional cigarettes either. E-cigarette users inhale vapor from flavored liquids. Yes, most of those e-liquids contain nicotine. It’s the same nicotine you’d find in nicotine gum or a nicotine patch, which doctors view as replacements to tobacco and use to help patients quit smoking.
Millions of Americans use these products and nearly all of them are smokers or former smokers, who use the products in an effort to quit or reduce their smoking. Last year the Royal College of Physicians, which surveyed all the available scientific literature, found “e-cigarettes are much safer than smoking” and the “hazard to health arising from long-term vapor inhalation from the e-cigarettes available today is unlikely to exceed 5 percent of the harm from smoking tobacco.”
That would make e-cigarettes 95 percent safer than cigarettes. And it’s not difficult to understand why. Put simply, it’s not nicotine that causes smokers to get sick and die. No, it’s lighting tobacco on fire and breathing in the toxic and carcinogenic products of combustion that kills some smokers.
Rhode Island should do what public health officials in Great Britain do — encourage smokers who won’t or can’t quit cigarettes to switch to e-cigarettes.
In addition to harming public health in Rhode Island, the tax would also be harmful to the businesses that are providing a safer alternative to smoking.
Pennsylvania recently included a 40 percent vapor tax in its state budget and over 160 small businesses have closed their doors because of the tax. Because of the significant and immediate unintended consequences of the tax, Pennsylvania legislators are already trying to reverse their actions just months after the tax took effect.
The situation is even more dire in Rhode Island, where the tax would be twice the size of the great Pennsylvania mistake. With Connecticut and Massachusetts just a short drive away, this tax would encourage consumers to flock out of state or online to purchase e-cigarette products. As a result, Rhode Island will see lost revenues from income taxes and sales taxes, as those sales go to businesses in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
One of the most common arguments trying to justify the e-cigarette tax is that taxes are needed prevent teens from taking up smoking. But federal data reveals that as vapor products have grown in popularity in recent years, teen smoking rates have taken a nosedive. It’s no coincidence that in state after state, teen smoking rates are lower than any time in recorded history.
Instead of fighting a misguided war on e-cigarettes, Rhode Island leaders should focus on fighting lung cancer and other smoking-related diseases. The Royal College of Physicians found that getting smokers to switch to e-cigarettes could “prevent death and disability from tobacco use, and to hasten our progress to a tobacco-free society.”
In this battle, e-cigarettes aren’t the problem – e-cigarettes can help us win.
[Rhode Island Update April 5, 2017]
On March 22, 2017 (after the publication of this post) the Rhode Island House Finance Committee held a public hearing to discuss provisions of Gov. Gina Raimondo’s budget, including the concerns expressed here about language related to the other tobacco products (OTP) tax. Language in the proposed budget included references to “any tobacco substitutes” and “an apparatus made of any material designed to burn or vaporize products” that arguably opened the door to applying the OTP tax to e-cigarettes and vapor products, as referenced in my commentary above.
Representatives from the Rhode Island Department of Revenue, with whom I have spoken, attended the hearing and gave a clear presentation including specific reference (verbally and in the visual presentation) indicating that it was not Gov. Raimondo’s intent to extend the OTP tax vapor products in this budget and the language in question was not an effort to do so. When officials indicated such at the legislative hearing, Rhode Island vapor business owners and other vapor advocates (who had been calling, emailing and meeting with legislators on this issue for weeks) cheered and chose not to testify further regarding the proposed budget language at the hearing. This has been confirmed by the Department of Revenue and representatives of organizations opposing vapor taxes that were in attendance at the time.
Gov. Raimondo made the correct decision and it’s important to clearly indicate such here in this post.
Additionally, I respectfully suggest that the governor, the Department of Revenue and legislative leaders in Rhode Island consider including language specifically exempting e-cigarettes and vapor products from provisions in the OTP tax here, as future politicians and state leaders may not interpret the statutory language referencing “tobacco substitutes” and devices that “vaporize” in the same, enlightened manner as Gov. Raimondo.
I’d like to thank Gov. Raimondo and the Department of Revenue for providing us with additional information.As the government evacuates thousands of Chinese from Vietnam following deadly anti-Chinese riots, Chinese tourism to the country is also taking a hit.
Both travelers and local travel agents appear to be taking heed of the Chinese government’s Sunday warning against travel to Vietnam, with many abandoning previous travel plans. Multiple airlines have also canceled flights.
Qi Yehua, a Shanghai-based advertising firm professional, had been planning to enjoy a five-day beach vacation in central Vietnam’s Da Nang City with a friend in early June, when China celebrates its three-day Dragon Boat holiday. But the package was canceled by the tour operator, much to Ms. Qi’s disappointment. “Some things are getting exaggerated—the riots didn't impact the whole country,” she said.
The tour operator that Ms. Qi had planned to use, Super Ocean International Travel Co. Ltd, said it was offering passengers refunds or options to fly to other vacation destinations in Asia, including Thailand and the Philippines, following the cancellation of all Shanghai-Da Nang flights operated by Vietnam Airlines.
Over the weekend, the official microblog of state news agency Xinhua reported that Chinese low-cost carrier Spring Airlines was suspending all charter flights from Shanghai to Vietnam until June 19. Reached by phone, an employee at the Beijing office of Vietnam Airlines said the airline was canceling some of its regularly scheduled flights to Vietnam, as such bookings from China have dropped by up to 90% since the weekend. Neither airline could be reached for comment.
While Vietnam is often a connecting point for Chinese travelers going to Cambodia, Burma and other Asian countries, it hasn’t been as popular a vacation destination as countries such as Thailand and Mauritius. “There are many alternatives” for Chinese travelers, said Ge Lei, a marketing manager at China Youth Travel Services, one of China’s largest travel agencies, adding that the disruptions won’t cut too much into industry’s business.
A Chinese company said Tuesday that four of its workers were killed in anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam that damaged foreign-owned factories last week. Numerous Chinese have continued streaming out of the country, with hundreds who suffered injuries in riots having already returned via plane.
Casey Guo, a public relations professional in Shanghai, is among those who decided to skip Vietnam, though she’d previously seen the country as her first-choice destination for the June holiday. Since the riots, she opted to buy a ticket to Saipan, an island in the Pacific Ocean that belongs to the U.S., instead. “I don’t know much about the situation in Vietnam, but I don’t think it’s safe,” she said.
Meanwhile, some Chinese travelers already in Vietnam are being careful not to stand out. One Chinese woman visiting the country recently told a Hong Kong television station that she and her companions speak Shanghainese when they’re out in public, because fewer people understand it and they’re less likely to stand out.
China estimates that more than 10,000 of its citizens are still in Vietnam, according to a Tuesday briefing by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At least 3,000 had left by Saturday, according to Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua.
Reached by phone, one Vietnamese hotelier said that the conflict was between governments and wasn’t likely to affect tourists venturing into the country. “We are people,” said the owner of Cocosand Hotel in the coastal resort town of Mui Ne in southeast Vietnam, who asked to be identified only by his last name, Li. “I still welcome you to come here. People here are still thinking the Chinese are our friends,” he said. “After the Vietnam War, even Americans are our friends.”
--Chao Deng and Olivia Geng
____________________________________
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What the U.S. and China Aren’t Saying About the South China SeaTom Harley seen at last year's AFL Hall of Fame dinner
Related Swans make three further list changes
THE Sydney Swans are pleased to announce the appointment of Tom Harley as General Manager – Football, following Dean Moore’s decision to step down after five years in the role.
Newly appointed General Manager - Football, Tom Harley played 198 AFL matches and is a dual premiership captain of Geelong. He will commence the role on November 3.
Since retiring from AFL football at the end of the 2009 season, Harley has held key roles at AFL NSW/ACT, including the role of General Manager, and has also been a part of Channel 7’s AFL coverage.
Sydney Swans CEO Andrew Ireland said Harley was an exciting appointment for the club.
“Tom is a highly regarded person who comes to us with great football experience,” Ireland said.
“He was part of a great club in Geelong throughout a very successful era and was one of the most respected leaders in the game.
“We have worked closely together while he was at AFL NSW/ACT and I think he is a great appointment to what is a very challenging role.
“Through his role with AFL NSW/ACT, Tom has played a leading role in the development of the code here in Sydney.”
Ireland said he wished to pay particular tribute to the work of outgoing General Manager - Football Dean Moore, whose association with the Swans dates back to the late 1970s.
“Dean has done a wonderful job overseeing our football department since joining us in late 2009,” he said.
“While understated, his leadership has been outstanding.
“Dean has played a vital role in the success of our football program over the past five years, which includes a premiership in 2012 and a Grand Final berth this year.”
Ireland said that whilst Moore would step down from a full-time role with the club, he would stay involved, working on upcoming major projects including a review and upgrade of the club’s facilities.
Moore served as the Club’s team manager in the late 1970s and managed the logistics of South Melbourne’s move to Sydney in 1981, remaining with the club in its formative years in Sydney, before he moved on to join the then VFL. He returned to replace Andrew Ireland as General Manager – Football, at the end of the 2009 season.
Senior Coach John Longmire added his thanks to Moore.
“Dean is a fantastic Swans person and he has been a wonderful support to me personally and the entire football department,” he said.
“He is as hard a worker as you will ever find and his work for our organisation over a long period of time has been outstanding.”
Moore said that after five years in the role, he felt it was the right time to step aside.
“This is something that has been in the planning for some time, and while it is disappointing to bow out after Saturday’s match, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in the role,” Moore said.
"I love this club and it has been an enormous privilege to part of the football department.
“I have worked with some wonderful people here at the Swans and I look forward to staying involved.”Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Wonga UK Managing Director Tessa Cook: "Today is not a proud day for Wonga and I'd like to apologise"
Payday lender Wonga must pay £2.6m in compensation after sending letters from non-existent law firms to customers in arrears.
The letters threatened legal action, but the law firms were false. In some cases Wonga added fees for these letters to customers' accounts.
The City watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), said 45,000 customers would be compensated.
Wonga has apologised and said the tactic ended nearly four years ago.
The City regulator has told the BBC it has sent a file to the police.
The company is the UK's largest payday lender, making nearly four million loans to one million customers in 2012, latest figures show.
'Serious' misconduct
An investigation found that Wonga sent letters to customers from fake law firms called "Chainey, D'Amato & Shannon" and "Barker and Lowe Legal Recoveries".
We would like to apologise unreservedly to anyone affected Tim Weller, Interim chief executive, Wonga
The plan was to make customers in arrears believe that their outstanding debt had been passed to a law firm, with legal action threatened if the debt was not paid.
The company was using this tactic to maximise collections by piling the pressure on customers, the regulator said.
"Wonga's misconduct was very serious because it had the effect of exacerbating an already difficult situation for customers in arrears," said Clive Adamson, director of supervision at the FCA.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Martin Wheatley, FCA: "We have got concerns about whether this is more widespread"
"The FCA expects firms to pay particular attention to fair treatment of those who have difficulty in meeting their loan repayments."
The situation occurred between October 2008 and November 2010, and involved Wonga and other companies within its group.
Apology
As this happened before the FCA took over the regulation of payday lenders, it is unable to fine Wonga. It also said there would be no criminal investigation as it wanted to set up a compensation scheme as quickly as possible and a criminal probe would take time. Affected customers will receive about £50 each.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The company also discovered errors that meant 200,000 people have overpaid
Instead, Wonga will start contacting customers in July to offer compensation, with money likely to be paid by the end of the month. This will either be paid in cash or customers will have their outstanding debt reduced.
It is a shocking new low for the payday industry Richard Lloyd, Executive director, Which?
"We would like to apologise unreservedly to anyone affected by the historical debt collection activity and for any distress caused as a result," said Tim Weller, interim chief executive of Wonga.
"The practice was unacceptable and we voluntarily ceased it nearly four years ago."
Anyone who might have changed address in the intervening period should contact Wonga.
Labour MP and campaigner against payday loans Stella Creasy has questioned the lack of criminal investigation.
"Why in those instances where customers of Wonga charged debt collection fees for these letters is that not police matter?," she asked on social media site Twitter.
Richard Lloyd, executive director of consumer group Which?, said: "It is right the FCA is taking a tougher line on irresponsible lending and it does not get much more irresponsible than this.
"It is a shocking new low for the payday industry that is already dogged by bad practice and Wonga deserves to have the book thrown at it."
More errors
The investigation was started by the FCA's predecessor, the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). Wonga said it stopped the tactic voluntarily then offered information to the OFT.
In addition, in April this year, Wonga discovered that it had miscalculated some customers' balances.
This resulted in 200,000 people overpaying the company. Wonga said that the majority overpaid by less than £5, and a larger number underpaid.
Those who overpaid will be contacted by Wonga, and the underpaid debt will be cancelled.
Mr Weller said the company "will learn from these mistakes" and was strengthening its internal controls.
The problems for Wonga come shortly after its boss Niall Wass quit after six months in the job of chief executive. Mr Wass joined Wonga in January 2013 as chief operating officer - after the fake lawyer tactics ended - and became chief executive in November.
Earlier this month, chairman and founder Errol Damelin also announced that he was planning to quit.Coming into the Blackhawks’ first game of the season, I was expecting to get a couple of good contrasts in.
Some people had brought up questions about certain aspects of Corey Crawford’s game after our introductory edition of Behind the Save. Teams tend to allow their biggest mistakes in opening games, with linemates still unfamiliar and systems yet unpolished and goalies just coming back from the summer as well. Thursday’s game seemed like the perfect one to address some differences in good and bad decision-making when it comes to goaltending.
Instead, we were all treated to a gongshow.
When all was said and done, the Blackhawks walked away from their opener with an alarmingly-high 10-1 victory and a whopping 44-29 edge in shots on goal across all situations.
Matt Murray got shelled with 31 shots in just 2 1/2 periods, while backup Antti Niemi – who was supposed to be giving Murray a rest after an overtime loss the night...Dick Advocaat’s growing discontent with life at Sunderland is reaching the stage where it would be no surprise if he decided to resign.
Much depends on whether Ellis Short, the club’s owner, strengthens Advocaat’s squad before next week’s transfer deadline. “I am not happy at all,” said Sunderland’s manager as he approached Tuesday night’s League Cup tie at home to Exeter City. “We have to improve and we can only improve if we get some other players in. We really need two or three more players. I have told everyone and I will keep saying it until the last day – but not much has happened.”
Advocaat exonerated Lee Congerton, Sunderland’s sporting director, from blame but, perhaps significantly, did not mention Short or Margaret Byrne, the chief executive. “Lee Congerton is doing a great job with little money,” he said. “We really appreciate what he has done so far – but we need more.”
Jermain Defoe advertises for 24/7 assistant to grow global brand … and stock fridge Read more
It is clear that the much-travelled former Holland manager is not exactly delighted with his current personnel. After abject surrenders at Leicester and at home to Norwich in the season’s opening games, Sunderland improved markedly in securing a 1-1 draw with Swansea at the Stadium of Light on Saturday but Advocaat remains unconvinced as to the team’s potential.
“The last line [the defence] has to improve,” he said. “We put them together this morning [in training] and the co-operation on some set pieces was very poor. Instead of watching the ball and the man, sometimes they were sleeping and you don’t know why. We can only do better but the first two games were very bad.
“The difference with a team like Swansea is that at Swansea everyone knows if they have to go this way or that way. The way they operate is natural. But sometimes we have to tell our players what to do. In my opinion, if you play at this level, you should know what to do.”
When Advocaat was asked if the current squad was capable of avoiding relegation and enjoying a cup run there was a long pause. “Do I have to give an answer to that?” he said. “I think it will be very difficult. Last year we were lucky to stay up. Almost every other team is improving if you see the investments they have made, especially to the front line – there is mammoth inprovement.”
He appears concerned by Short’s enthusiasm for shopping in the bargain basement area. Jeremain Lens, an £8.5m signing from Dynamo Kyiv, shone against Swansea, as did Yann M’Vila, who is on loan from Rubin Kazan, but the summer’s other signings, Adam Matthews (£2m from Celtic), Younès Kaboul (£3m from Tottenham) and Sebastián Coates (£2m from Liverpool) are yet to impress. Meanwhile Connor Wickham has been sold to Crystal Palace for £8m.
“In the last 20 minutes against Swansea Lens showed what you get if you buy a player for that price,” Advocaat said. “All the other players are bargains. Some people still believe in numbers, instead of quality. But a player of that calibre £8m-£10m, you know what they bring.”
Asked if Sunderland were finding the transfer market a difficult place this summer, he replied somewhat cryptically. “It’s as hard as they want,” he said.
Another comment he made could be interpreted as a plea for Short to place his trust in both the manager and Congerton: “If you bring in the right players and the right managers and the right people – and I think they are here now – and you trust them and you have some resources to do something, knowing, and I wasn’t intending to say this but I will say this, because I don’t care, knowing what will come in the next three years [the new TV deal], I would do it differently, let’s say that,” he said.
Jonathan de Guzmán’s agent has said his client could leave Napoli to join Sunderland on loan. The 27-year-old midfielder made 12 Serie A starts for Napoli last season. And Fabian Parisi claimed a move to Sunderland was possible, though Advocaat has shown no clear interest.REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
At least 51 supporters of ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi were killed outside a military facility and nearby mosque in Cairo, according to the Egyptian ministry of health.
Two police and one army officer were also killed in the clashes.
The ministry added that more than 430 people have been injured.
Accounts vary as to what exactly happened.
The military contends that "an armed terrorist group" affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood tried to storm the Republican Guard headquarters, where Morsi is believed to be held, with live ammunition and firebombs shortly after dawn.
Here's what Mohamed Saber el-Sebaei, who was praying outside the Republican Guard facility before suffering a head wound, told Patrick Kingsley of The Guardian:
There were dawn prayers and then I heard someone calling for help, so the imam finished the prayers quickly. Just before we finished, the shooting started. The army units that were standing in front of the Republican Guards' headquarters first started shooting tear gas, then live ammunition above people's heads.
The administration of Egypt interim president Adli Mansour sided with the military, saying the incident resulted from an attempt to storm the Republican Guard headquarters.
Tweets from reporters on the ground give a further sense of the conflicting reports.
Supporters of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Mursi display spent ammunition from clashes with army soldiers near the Republican Guard headquarters, in Cairo, July 8, 2013. REUTERS/ Asmaa Waguih
The event could lead to a major escalation in an already unstable situation.
Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party has already called for an "uprising" based on the incident, and the ultraconservative Islamist Al Nour party said it is suspending its participation in efforts to form an interim government.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Egypt is on the verge of civil war.
The incident occurred near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque, where Morsi supporters have been gathering for massive demonstrations and are staging an ongoing sit-in.
Paddy Allen of The Guardian points to this map showing the proximity of Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque to the Republican Guard HQ along with the location of Tahrir square:
View Cairo Republican Guard HQ in a larger map
The Republican Guard, the senior-most corps in the Egyptian Army and one of its largest divisional commands, is an armored division with the main responsibility of defending the Capital of the Republic (mainly the major government and strategic industrial institutions).
Al-Jazeera posted this video purportedly showing tear gas being fired at Morsi supporters.
These videos, which are graphic, also shows the shooting's aftermath.The outdoor industry is leading the fight to protect America’s public lands from being developed for gas and oil
Utah, a state rich in epic landscapes and national parks, is becoming ground zero for a fight between the $646bn outdoor industry and state lawmakers over public land management.
At a trade show for outdoor clothing and gear makers in Salt Lake City this week, two prominent figures from the industry called on their peers to move the semi-annual event out of the state unless Utah leaders stop supporting efforts by Republicans in Congress to transfer or sell federal land to states. Utah governor Gary Herbert was also called out for challenging a federal law that allowed President Obama to create the new, 1.4m-acre Bears Ears National Monument in southeast Utah last month.
Utah prepares for legal showdown with government over control of public lands Read more
“Utah’s political leadership has unleashed an all-out assault against Utah’s protected public lands and Utah’s newest monument,” wrote Peter Metcalf, a long time Utah resident who founded climbing and ski gear maker Black Diamond, in an opinion piece published in the Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday to coincide with the start of the trade show. He noted that the trade show brings more than $40m to the city in direct spending each year, while the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) estimates the figure can reach $80m annually.
The next day, Yvon Chouinard, founder of clothier Patagonia, said in an open letter to Herbert that the company will no longer attend the trade show unless the governor “wants our business – and that he supports thousands of his constituents of all political persuasions who work in jobs supported by recreation on public lands”.
Metcalf and Chouinard’s criticism reflect growing concerns by their industry and outdoor enthusiasts, such as hunters, over what they see as public land grabs by state politicians who want to open up more of that land to oil and gas development. Such a move would limit or eliminate public access for recreation, disrupt wildlife and pose threats to air and water quality.
In 2014, a lengthy study found that if Utah took control of 31.2m acres of federal land in the state, for oil and gas development, it could generate around $50m in profit each year – but only if oil and gas prices were to remain at the 2014 rates. In Utah and other states, including Wyoming, in which some lawmakers are pushing for transfers, opponents worry that if the states find that they can’t afford to maintain those lands, they’ll be forced to sell them to private buyers.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Left Fork of North Creek runs through the mystical Subway tunnel in Utah’s Zion National Park. The federal government manages over 60% of the land in Utah. Photograph: Larry Geddis/Alamy
Last week, Republicans in the House in Congress voted to eliminate a rule that requires the government to calculate the value of federal land, including the value created through recreation, before transferring or selling it to states or others. That change, if enacted, could remove a major barrier for speeding up land transfers.
Utah is a fitting place for a battle over public land. The state is home to Arches, Canyonlands and Zion national parks, as well as some 22m acres overseen by the federal Bureau of Land Management. The state is filled with red rock canyons and rivers that are the stuff of climbers’ and whitewater paddlers’ dreams.
Unsurprisingly, tourism and recreation fuel the state economy. Utah’s outdoor recreation industry is worth $12bn, including $3.6bn in wages and salaries, and supports approximately 122,000 jobs, according to the OIA.
According to the University of Utah’s Kem C Gardner Policy Institute, which provides research and analysis to the state government, the leisure and hospitality industry (which encompasses more than just outdoor recreation) accounts for 146,795 jobs, outpacing manufacturing (125,160) and finance and insurance (62,860). The development of natural resources, such as oil, gas and minerals, generates a small slice of the pie at 8,500 jobs.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Turret Arch can be seen in Arches National Park in Utah, where outdoor recreation businesses oppose the state’s attempt to take control of federal land. Photograph: Nick Jackson/REX Shutterstock
In a statement, the OIA said it will continue to take feedback from its members on determining the best venue for the trade show going forward. It added: “We must be clear that protection of America’s public lands, including those in Utah, are critical and any threat to their protection is a threat to the outdoor industry.”
Patagonia’s CEO Rose Marcario, who was at the trade show, said the company relies on the event to meet buyers and partners and promote its philanthropic efforts, but she added that “standing up for our principles is always our top priority”. She also noted that Patagonia alone can’t force change in Utah’s capital |
marriage equality in India, just not anytime soon.
Swapnil ShindeI think India is just opening up to gay and lesbian relationships, so it’s too early to expect our government to have such laws, more so even in the general eye as far as media, television and the Hindi cinema is concerned. Homosexuality is still used as a humour quotient and even ridiculed. It’s bizarre that a lot of people still think of it as a curable “disease”. So many parents take their kids for counselling. Aniket SatamThis is the land of Kamasutra. Spiritual gurus with no firm base of religious understanding are just in a race to challenge the superiority of other faiths and fuel gender politics. Being an optimist and strong supporter of individual freedom, I can see that day coming soon. Legalising gay marriages would install a stronger base for LGBT groups.
Rajat TangriIndia is a very traditional country and we have yet to accept love marriages so accepting gay marriages is way behind. We do not even respect women and have gone viral for rapes even gang rapes and torture. How can a society that does not respect its women be progressive in its thinking? Ignorance is one of the main reasons why homosexuality is looked down upon in India. We mostly follow a herd mentality and do not analyse an issue before coming to a judgment. I do not see gay marriages happening in India.Never be afraid to become something larger than yourself!
Through the eyes of your brothers you can see forever!
The call to glory beckons you!
Are you brave enough for the Legion?
Two years ago, we started a project to make a science-fiction fantasy role-playing game that we would enjoy playing. Based on our love of many movies, books, and video games, we came up with Legion. We have tested the rules and made many changes from the original concept all thanks to our friends and fans. Now it is time to take the next step: the production of our core rulebook and the launching of other supplement books. We need your help with in doing this.
What is Legion?
Legion is a science fiction fantasy role-playing game where you take on the role of a soldier in the United Defense Force to protect the galaxy from threats. A military based game of high fantasy, Legion has a space opera setting of multiple possibilities with the discipline and drive of military focus.
The galaxy is made of worlds rife with alien creatures, star-spanning enemies, traitorous soldiers, and the re-born Shade. On these worlds, experienced soldiers are sorely needed, if only to hold back the enemy until the Legion arrives.
Thank you for looking over our Kickstarter Webpage. We would like to talk about some of the rewards we are offering. We have tried to come up with a great selection of rewards for everyone that will be supporting us. We feel that these rewards are fun and will be quality pieces that you will be excited to own. More importantly, as you go higher into the reward tiers, they will actually impact the universe that we have created. We hope that being able to have a piece of you interjected into the game will spark your interest in Legion, so let’s look at the individual rewards for donating a little closer. Each reward is based off a rank within the military hierarchy and that rank will be afforded to you for future giveaways. These ranks will be used in future Kickstarter projects, if possible. Once you have donated at the Cadet level, if you contribute multiple times you will move up the rankings on our website and gain a promotion. This does not entitle you to future rewards that you do not donate for based on your rank. Please feel free to Like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/legionthegame and check us out at www.legionthegame.com as we get that site up and running at full capacity. On to the rewards!The group, Indivisible St. Louis, and others, are hosting an ‘action’ — “This Is Not Okay” — at the fountain at Brentwood Boulevard and Eager Road 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, July 28, according to a Facebook post.
They hope to have their numbers to spread to all four corners of the intersection. They also say they don’t want to disrupt traffic.
The participants plan to highlight whichever “outrage(s)” they feel deserve attention: “TrumpRussia, nepotism, threats to our free & fair elections, emoluments clause violations, Russian hacking/meddling, Muslim ban, voter suppression, attacks on the free press, white supremacists working in the White House, the effort to take healthcare away from millions of Americans despite overwhelming public opposition, trying to roll back LGBTQ+ rights…”
They are planning to park in the Galleria south lot.Following up from our double victory at Your Lifestyle (see here and here), we are delighted to announce another win for a Fellow Worker, this time in the Bar and Hospitality sector.
A Fellow Worker (FW) worked for 5 weeks in the kitchens of Beefeater restaurant, next to the Bear Pit in the centre of Bristol. After he left he didn’t get paid, and then spent weeks chasing the company for the £797 they owed him with no luck. So, he turned to his union for support.
We assigned a caseworker who had the same first language as the FW, who got the details of the case and then contacted the company on his behalf. They did not reply so the FW, accompanied by another IWW caseworker, carried out a ‘demand delivery’ – hand delivering a letter to the company making it clear that we would start demonstrating outside the restaurant until the money was paid.
After some further correspondence, Beefeater eventually made an offer close to the amount the FW was looking for, and he decided to accept. Victory to the Fellow Worker with the support of his union – the Fighting IWW!
The Fellow Worker writes:
“Acabo de recibir la transferencia de Beefeater. Mil gracias por vuestro apoyo, interés, empatía e implicación. Siempre os estaré agradecido por todo lo que habeís hecho por mi. Da mucha alegría ver que la acción sindical funciona en este país. Un abrazo a todos/as.”
“I have just received the bank transfer from Beefeater. Thank you very much for your support, interest, empathy and involvement. I will be always be grateful to you for everything you have done for me. It’s uplifting to see that syndicalist action in this country works. Hugs to all.”
Have you had problems with your employer? Or do you want to help support those who have?
Join the IWW today, and join the fight for a better, fairer deal between workers and bosses! We can train you to be a workplace organiser and a union rep, and support other members in disputes with their employers.Earlier today the MBA released their Q2 National Delinquency Survey: Delinquency and Foreclosure Rates Decrease in Second Quarter
One of the key questions for housing is when will delinquencies and foreclosures be back to normal?
As Joel Kan, MBA’s Director of Economic Forecasting, said this morning:
“Some states hardest hit by the crisis, for example California and Arizona, now have foreclosure inventory rates that are both back to pre-crisis levels and less than half the current national rate. On the other hand, despite declines last quarter, states with slower-moving judicial foreclosure regimes, like New Jersey, Florida and New York, have foreclosure inventory rates two to three times the national average."
... 75 percent of seriously delinquent loans were originated in 2007 and earlier. Loans with vintages started in 2011 and later only accounted for six percent of all seriously delinquent loans.
Click on graph for larger image.
So the answer about when delinquencies and foreclosures will be back to normal depends on the state and foreclosure process. Some states have already recovered and others are lagging behind.A key point to remember is that most of the problem loans were originated in 2007 or earlier (a long time ago), and the lenders are just working through the backlog. From the MBA:This graph shows the percent of loans delinquent by days past due.The percent of loans 30 days and 60 days delinquent are back to normal levels.The 90 day bucket peaked in Q1 2010, and is about two-thirds of the way back to normal.The percent of loans in the foreclosure process also peaked in 2010 and is close to two-thirds of the way back to normal.So it has taken about 4 years to reduce the backlog by two-thirds, so a rough guess is that delinquencies and foreclosures will be back to normal in about 2 years.Editor's note: We originally published this look at tech ads throughout the years for Computerworld's 40th anniversary. It's just as fun -- maybe even more so -- a decade later for our 50th.
It's rare for us to spend an hour-long staff meeting in nonstop laughter.
But that's pretty much what happened when we gathered to go through old print issues of Computerworld as part of our 40th anniversary celebration.
The original idea of hauling those Computerworld issues out of storage was to look at important stories we've covered. But we couldn't get over the ads!
[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]
"80 Mbytes of storage for less than $12,000!" boasts one. In another, a woman in hot pants touts a modem that's, yes, "maybe even sexy." There's even a campy B movie celebrity hawking development software.
It was too much fun not to share. So after one of the best meetings ever, we bring you 10 of our favorite, most entertaining IT ads from Computerworld throughout the years.
1. Such a deal
System Industries Company: System Industries
You could purchase this 80MB disk system for less than $12k -- and even better, 300MB for under $20k!
Not very irresistible today, but apparently a bargain back when this was published. So good, in fact, that prices were valid only for resellers buying at least 40 systems.
Any idea when that was published? (Answer on the next page).U.S. Soccer extended Tab Ramos' contract last week and ASN spoke with the U-20 national team coach and youth technical director about player development, Major League Soccer, the senior team, and more.
BY Brian Sciaretta Posted
September 28, 2017
5:00 PM SHARE THIS STORY
LAST WEEK U.S. SOCCER announced that Tab Ramos had signed a contract extension that would have him continue his tenure as both the U-20 men's national team coach and the federation's youth technical director.
Under Ramos, U-20 national teams have advanced to the quarterfinals in the last two World Cups, including this past summer when, after claiming the CONCACAF title for the first time, the team performed well in the tournament without several of its top eligible players such as Weston McKennie and Christian Pulisic.
Ramos, 51, will now return for his fourth cycle leading the team. American Soccer Now spoke with the former United States national team captain on Tuesday.
Brian Sciaretta for ASN: The last two cycles have been very productive for the U-20 team. Why return for a fourth cycle instead of moving on to different challenges?
Tab Ramos: I didn't want to be afraid to do better. Of course there are always going to be people who are not satisfied but I think we've done great the past few cycles and I want to continue to try to push the envelope. I am excited about the work we've been doing in many ways. I feel rewarded by all this work and all the work we are doing will all the youth national teams. To be honest, the answer would be that I'm happy.
ASN: In your fourth cycle you have a good idea of the process and how to evaluate a talent pool. How do you evaluate the incoming group of players? How does this group at its starting point compare with the beginning period of the last three cycles?
Ramos: I think it's right there with the last two cycles. When I first started I think one of the issues in 2011 was not so much maybe that all the talent wasn't there, it was the fact that at U.S. Soccer we weren't organized enough to have all the talent in one place and to know the talent. I think that has changed over the past four-to-five years. I think that helps a lot. It's hard to say how the players will develop over the next few years but I am comfortable saying that with this group we are going into the cycle with the same expectations for the last two groups. We believe we have good players who can do well in CONCACAF and do well at the World Cup.
ASN: We've seen the last two U-20 classes improve in terms of sending players to the national team or producing players who look like they could have big futures at the international level. What has changed for the better? What have you learned about the process?
Ramos: First of all we have to acknowledge the fact that soccer has improved so much over the past 10 years alone. That makes a huge difference. I think there is more talent just because there are a lot more good environments for players to train.
The next thing you notice over the past few cycles is that our team has gotten younger rather than older. I think that comes down to us being able to know all the players in our age group—not just the U-20 age group, but all the age groups. Now we can give opportunities to younger players.
When I picked Josh Sargent to go to the U-20 World Cup, I actually already decided on Josh in December of the year before. I decided that probably taking him to qualifying was not a good idea because that is more of a grind. But I thought that here is one of our great young players coming through who knows the game really well and I think going to the U-20 World Cup will be a great experience for him and we need to provide that. John Hackworth and I met and we already had a full plan for him.
These are kind of the things we weren't able to do six or seven years ago that now are a lot easier for us. All of those little things contribute to us being able to do better.
ASN: You invested a lot in recent years in the U-19 and U-18 national teams. It seems that has allowed you to cast a wider net and expand the youth player pool which gives players opportunities. Schalke spotted Weston McKennie, for instance, when he was with the U-19 team. How much of a return have you seen on that investment? Not only with helping you pick your U-20 team but also helping players with their careers?
Ramos: Weston is a perfect case. Here is a player who, I guess, wasn't in a great place when our U-17 residency program had him. Richie Williams had an opportunity to see him. At that point I guess he wasn't doing well. He sort of fell off. A lot of those players that go into the next [U-20] cycle from the U-17s, unless they made the U-20 team they really had no place to go. By creating a U-19 national team, now we have all those players who are not the top five or six from the U-17 national team still training together with a national team. That gave an opportunity for guys like Weston McKennie and Djordje Mihailovic—and a lot of the guys who are starting to come through that would have otherwise been lost from the national team perspective.
In Weston's case, who knows how it would have developed with him going to Schalke or if that would have happened at all? We don't know. We can't take credit for that because I think a good player is always a good player but it certainly helped a lot
ASN: When you have a U-20 team with a core group of players, do you have a specific benchmark as to what would be successful in terms of how many eventually join the full national team? The 2015 team already has Matt Miazga, Kellyn Acosta, Paul Arriola in the mix with Ethan Horvath maybe in a good spot for a backup goalkeeper job. Do you ever think that there is a target number you want to have become full internationals?
Ramos: At the end of the day, that is our goal for all of our youth national teams. How can we provide the best experiences to the players we believe will one day push for a spot on the senior national team?
A lot happens in between youth national teams. We don't necessarily develop players. We only get players for seven or eight days at a time, try to blend them together, and try to compete against other countries. Going into a cycle, I might see a player like Josh Sargent in January for our first camp of the U-20s and may not see him again for another year [until] qualifying because a club doesn't release him or whatever else. So what happens outside of where we are is a lot more important than what happens with us. All we can do is provide good experiences.
I can tell you, from the way I see players and the experience I now have from having seen so many cycles, who could potentially be the next one to go through. But then I don't see the player for a year and it's hard to tell how they do at their club.
We'd like to have as many [players become full national team contributors] as possible but there are only so many spots. What you are also hoping for is that the players who made it from the last cycle are good enough to keep their position. There is one thing I always mention to the U-20 groups when I get them. We are not looking for the three-game national team player. We are looking for guys who are going to be committed, guys we believe are going to be good enough to be decade-long senior national team players. Those are the ones that are really important to us.
When I see somebody like Kellyn Acosta going through, that to me is the perfect player that makes sense because he played in the U-17 World Cup with us, he was in two U-20 World Cups with us. Here is a guy who was making room for himself all along. There is no question, for me, that Kellyn will be one of those decade-long senior national team players. So you're looking for those as you go along.
But then because Kellyn Acosta is a decade-long senior national team player, guess what? That leaves less room for Marky Delgado, or Tyler Adams, or all the players that come behind him. The fact that some players don't make it through isn't necessarily a failure for them.
If you happened to be behind Brad Friedel and Kasey Keller for a decade you weren't on the national team not because you weren't good enough. You might have been good enough for the last 100 years for the national team but just at that time you weren't good enough. That is just something you have to deal with.
ASN: Jonathan Gonzalez was with your U-20 team for World Cup qualifying and now is coming through in a major way with an outstanding Monterrey team. After turning 18 in May, he is an everyday starter over a full Mexican national team player. How excited are you for his development at U.S. Soccer and with him also eligible for Mexico, are you worried about him perhaps playing for Mexico? There are reports that Mexico might be interested in him.
Ramos: You could potentially always be worried. I am in contact with Jonathan probably every other week. I am in very close contact with him and Bruce has reached out to him a couple of times to let him know we're watching him and that he's an important player for us going into the future.
Obviously our senior national team is at a point where—I don't want to speak for Bruce but he has said this—we're not at a point to be trying new things. This is a time to qualify for the World Cup. So the younger players will be in the background but I do believe that once we qualify for the World Cup, the doors will open for a lot of the younger players. Looking into next year our senior national team is a bit on the older side. I think it's going to be important to have some fresh blood.
Over the next year, you don't know what could happen but Jonathan is certainly one of those guys who I believe Bruce will have under consideration.
ASN: When you look at MLS and the opportunities it gives to U-20 eligible players, are you satisfied? Obviously there are players like Tyler Adams and Djordje Mihailovic but do you think there needs to be more opportunities? As a U-20 coach, are you at all frustrated that more players are not getting regular minutes?
Ramos: No. Because at professional clubs, no one owes you anything. You have to earn a spot. So the fact that they leave the World Cup where they did great, and they go back to their clubs and they don't play, that falls squarely on the players and not on their coach. Yes, of course, when you have a coach in MLS you want to have a coach that can win games, win the championship, and recognize young talent. Of course coaches have to give young players the benefit of the doubt because otherwise we would never replace the older players. But in the end, you have to earn your spot. If you earn it, I believe coaches will give you the opportunity.
ASN: One of the players who did earn the opportunity was Tyler Adams, who starts every game for the Red Bulls and is probably the top teenager in the league right now. He was a big part of your 2017 U-20 team and is eligible for the 2019 U-20 team as well. We talked about Jonathan Gonzaelz's big breakthrough in Mexico, but Tyler is the big domestic breakthrough so far. Are you expecting big things from him for your new U-20 team?
Ramos: Look, I think Tyler Adams is a great young player. I am not sure he will fit into this U-20 national team. I mean, I would like to have him. But hopefully for Tyler Adams, there are bigger and better things waiting for him.
ASN: In 2014 we start to see the U-23 Olympic team start to begin training nearly two years out before qualifying for the 2016 Olympics. Can we expect the same this cycle with the U-23 Olympic team beginning its preparations next year in 2018?
Ramos: The answer to that is Yes. The time frame we don't know exactly but I would assume that by next summer we will have something for that specific 1997 age group.
ASN: The U-17 World Cup is coming up in a week. As the youth technical director, what are your thoughts on the U.S. team in India?
Ramos: I'll be in India. I am leaving on Tuesday and I'll be with the team. I am very excited about this group. I think it's very talented and very dynamic. I think if anything we may be struggling a bit on the defensive side but attacking-wise, we have great talent. I think we have to be happy about that because that is where it is more difficult to get talent.
ASN: Speaking of which, the last two U-20 cycles had top-level central defense production with Matt Miazga, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Erik Palmer-Brown, Justen Glad, and Tommy Redding. Is that an area of concern for you heading into the next U-20 class?
Ramos: The short answer would be Yes. That's a little bit more of a concern because in the first cycle we had, that is where we were the weakest. Walker Zimmerman wasn't really coming through yet. John Brooks wasn't released. We had to put Caleb Stanko in central defense although he was a central midfielder. We did the same with Shane O'Neill. But the last two cycles, we have had excellent centerbacks. It's going to be tough to match those. So we're going to try to score more goals than the other team [laughter].
ASN: The last few years have seen big breakthroughs for American teenagers. Christian Pulisic is the biggest case but he's not alone. Weston McKennie at Schalke, Jonathan Gonzalez at Monterrey, and also Josh Sargent for Werder Bremen and Erik Palmer-Brown for Manchester City. Domestically you have Adams and Justen Glad. Is this wave just an anomaly of a strong class or do you think it could become more of the norm?
Ramos: I think it is going to be a lot more common. If you look at the last two cycles I've had in particular, sometimes I can't even believe some of the players that couldn't make the team because they deserved to make the team but at the time there were other players who were doing better at that moment. I think that is a great thing because we have gone to the last two World Cups with two excellent teams and yet we can name another 15 players that didn't make it and put a great team together.From DARTMOUTH COLLEGE and the “snowfalls are a thing of the past” department.
Unprecedented findings strengthen connections between winter storms and tropical waters
HANOVER, N.H. – December 19, 2017 – Snowfall on a major summit in North America’s highest mountain range has more than doubled since the beginning of the Industrial Age, according to a study from Dartmouth College, the University of Maine, and the University of New Hampshire.
The research not only finds a dramatic increase in snowfall, it further explains connections in the global climate system by attributing the record accumulation to warmer waters thousands of miles away in the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans.
The research demonstrates that modern snowfall in the iconic Alaska Range is unprecedented for at least the past 1200 years and far exceeds normal variability.
“We were shocked when we first saw how much snowfall has increased,” said Erich Osterberg, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Dartmouth College and principal investigator for the research. “We had to check and double-check our results to make sure of the findings. Dramatic increases in temperature and air pollution in modern times have been well established in science, but now we’re also seeing dramatic increases in regional precipitation with climate change.”
According to the research, wintertime snowfall has increased 117 percent since the mid-19th century in southcentral Alaska in the United States. Summer snows also showed a significant increase of 49 percent in the short period ranging less than two hundred years.
The research, appearing in Scientific Reports, is based on analysis of two ice cores collected at 13,000 feet from Mount Hunter in Denali National Park. According to the authors, accumulation records in the separate samples taken from just below the summit of the mountain known as “Denali’s Child” are in nearly complete agreement.
“It is now glaringly clear from our ice core record that modern snowfall rates in Alaska are much higher than natural rates before the Industrial Revolution,” said Dominic Winski, a research assistant at Dartmouth and the lead author of the report. “This increase in precipitation is also apparent in weather station data from the past 50 years, but ice cores show the scale of the change well above natural conditions.”
Once the researchers established snowfall rates, they set out to identify why precipitation has increased so rapidly in such a short amount of time. Scientific models predict as much as a 2 percent increase in global precipitation per degree of warming because warmer air holds more moisture, but this could not account for most of the dramatic increases in Denali snowfall over the studied period.
The research suggests that warming tropical oceans have caused a strengthening of the Aleutian Low pressure system with its northward flow of warm, moist air, driving most of the snowfall increases. Previous research has linked the warming tropical ocean temperatures to higher greenhouse gas concentrations.
The analysis includes a series of dramatic graphs that demonstrate extreme shifts in precipitation and reinforce the global climate connections that link snowfall in the high reaches of the North American continent with warm tropical waters. As noted in the paper, this same atmospheric connection accounts for a decrease in Hawaiian precipitation.
“Everywhere we look in the North Pacific, we’re seeing this same fingerprint from warming tropical oceans. One result is that wintertime climate in the North Pacific is very different than it was 200 years ago. This doesn’t just affect Alaska, but Hawaii and the entire Pacific Northwest are impacted as well,” said Winski.
The research builds on a recent study using the same ice cores that showed that an intensification of winter storm activity in Alaska and Northwestern Canada, driven by the strengthening Aleutian Low, started in 1740 and is unprecedented in magnitude and duration over the past millennium. The new record shows the result of that increase in Aleutian Low storm activity on snow accumulation.
For this analysis, researchers were able to segment the ice core records by seasons and years using markers like magnesium from spring dust to separate winter snow from summer snow. To account for snow layers getting squeezed and thinned under their own weight, the researchers applied four separate equations used in other studies, and in all cases the corrected record shows at least a doubling of snowfall.
According to the paper, while numerous snow accumulation records exist, “to our knowledge, no other alpine ice core accumulation record has been developed with such a thorough characterization of the thinning regime or uncertainties; all of the thinning models produce a robust increase in accumulation since the mid-19th century above late-Holocene background values.”
The researchers note that the findings imply that regions that are sensitive to warming tropical ocean waters may continue to experience rain and snowfall variability well outside the natural range of the past millennium.
“Climate change can impact specific regions in much more extreme ways than global averages indicate because of unexpected responses from features like the Aleutian Low,” said Osterberg. “The Mount Hunter record captures the dramatic changes that can occur when you get a double whammy from climate change – warming air combined with more storms from warming ocean temperatures.”
However, the researchers also note that the regional findings do not necessarily mean that the same level of snowfall increases will occur elsewhere throughout the mid- and high latitudes.
“Scientists keep discovering that on a regional basis, climate change is full of surprises. We need to understand these changes better to help communities prepare for what will come with even more carbon dioxide pollution in the air,” said Osterberg.
As part of the analysis, the authors suggest that current climate models underestimate the sensitivity of North Pacific atmospheric connections to warming tropical ocean temperatures. They argue that refining the way the modeled atmosphere responds to tropical ocean temperatures may improve rain and snowfall predictions in a warming world.
###
Ho, hum.
From my viewpoint, in their rush to blame “climate change” they missed the biggest factor of all: increased pollution leads to increased cloud condensation nucleii. For example, watch aerosol loads from the pacific hit the southern Alaska mountain ranges:
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Sep. 12, 2016, 2:53 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 12, 2016, 2:53 PM GMT By Adam Howard
After an initial backlash and a flurry of bad press, it appears that San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's symbolic protest during "The Star-Spangled Banner" is really catching on.
Kaepernick has been deliberately not standing at NFL games during the national anthem of the United States because of the history of racial oppression in the country, and more specifically the recent spate of unarmed black men killed under suspicious circumstances.
During the NFL's first weekend of regular season games—and ironically on the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—a number of players demonstrated solidarity with the 49ers star through silent demonstrations while the song was played:
After days of speculation that the entire Seattle Seahawks squad would sit out the national anthem, all 53 members of the team and their coach Pete Carroll linked arms in a display of unity during the song.
"I spoke with the players, and they realize that 9/11 is a very important day in our nation's history. The Seahawks, and probably every team, will be honoring those who serve in camouflage and also those in blue who served on such a difficult day," Nate Boyer, a former Green Beret who had a short stint with the Seahawks as an undrafted free agent last season, told Fox Sports Radio.
"Shortly after 9/11, our country seemed more unified than I had ever experienced and was the most unified it has been since I have been alive. Since that date, we have grown farther apart in our unity," Boyer said. "Standing together this Sunday is key to making progress. What the team will do is a powerful sign of unification."
"It has to be a team-first approach in order to get anything done," he added. "Whether it is Kaepernick's mission-changing policy or changing things on the field, you have to be unified."
Even though the Seahawks' demonstration has received widespread praise, not everyone was pleased with the increasing outspokenness of NFL stars.
“Dear @NFL Any player wants to boycott the anthem on 9/11 should be asked to remain in the locker room until kick off. It’s not their moment,” wrote actor Rob Lowe on Twitter.
Supermodel Kate Upton went even further, calling NFL player protests on the 9/11 anniversary "horrific" in a lengthy Instagram post. “Sitting or kneeling down during the national anthem is a disgrace to those people who have served and currently serve our country,” Upton wrote.
"Protest all you want and use social media all you want. However, during the nearly two minutes when that song is playing, I believe everyone should put their hands on their heart and be proud of our country for we are all truly blessed,” she added, before citing the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American U.S. president as proof that the country has turned a corner on race.
After receiving considerable pushback on social media, Upton conceded that the justice system is "corrupt."
Meanwhile, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who is infamous for weighing in on sports matters, made his displeasure with the weekend's activities known during a "Fox and Friends" call-in appearance early on Monday.
"I think it's a lack of respect for our country. I think it's a lack of appreciation for our country and it's a very sad thing. I've never seen anything quite like it actually," Trump said.
Related: Colin Kaepernick's Protest is Part of Long Sports Tradition
Trump went on to repeat his past suggestion that Kaepernick and like-minded football stars "should try another country, see if they like it better."
"See if they'll make 20 million dollars a year for being the second string quarterback," the Republican presidential nominee added in a direct dig at Kaepernick's diminished status on the football field.
As for the official franchises and the league itself, the leadership of the NFL has walked a much more egalitarian line when it comes to the political protests of players.
For instance, in an official statement, the Miami Dolphins said that while they encourage members of their organization to stand during the anthem, they also "recognize that it's an individual's right to reflect during the anthem in different ways."
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, no stranger to controversy himself, has said that while he doesn't necessarily support the statements and protests of Kaepernick and company personally, he is pleased that the league has been able to accommodate their freedom of speech.
"We play a role in society, an important role in society. We understand that," Goodell told NBC's Matt Lauer last week prior to the games on Sunday. "We're careful about that because we still believe that at the bottom people come to enjoy the sport, they come to enjoy the game. But they recognize the importance that the NFL plays in our society. And we all have to be responsible for that."
"We encourage our players to be respectful," Goodell added. "But they also have rights and we have to respect that."
However, outside the NFL, athletes may not enjoy the same protections that professionals enjoy. Rodney Axson, a 16-year-old high school football player from Ohio, has reportedly been subjected to racial slurs and threats because he chose to take a knee during the anthem as an homage to Kaepernick.From pie baking to sale stalking, it’s going to take more than a pretty party dress to stay cool this season.
To help keep the peace, we polled Marcia M. Degelman, a specialist at UCSF’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine for easy, do-anywhere, de-stressing solutions.
Waiting to Exhale
While standing in line, count your breath. Breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly (one). Breathe in again slowly, breathe out again slowly (two). Now pause for a moment. Then breathe in slowly, breathe out slowly (three). Start over at the beginning. Let the exhalations become longer than the inhalations. This will naturally slow your breathing and heart rate.
Flower Power
When you’re frustrated or overwhelmed by your to-do list, breathe in like you’re smelling the roses, and then breathe out like you’re blowing out birthday candles.
Car Insurance
When stopped in traffic, raise your shoulders while inhaling, then let them drop while exhaling. Rotate your shoulders while waiting for a light to turn green.
Hit the Wall
After a stressful day, take a moment to lie face up on a yoga mat. Bend your knees with your feet on a wall, then roll your pelvis off the floor and lower it gently. Repeat.
Animal Kingdom
Do a few cat-cow stretches. With your hands and knees on the floor, arch your back like a scaredy cat and then round it out and stick your rump up like a cow.
Water Park
When you have to let it all go, take a hot bath with Epsom salts and let your stress float away.
Hawaii 5-0
Picture yourself lying on a warm, white sand beach. Imagine the sound of the surf and bird song and the sweet smell of jasmine.
Pick and Choose
Life is stressful enough without crazy holiday expectations. Decide which traditions are important to you and your family, and let the other ones go. We can’t all make gourmet gifts for everyone we know. Set limits.
UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, 1545 Divisadero Street, at Garden Street, fourth floor (415-353-7720 or osher.ucsf.edu).
Photo: Serg Myshkovsky / Getty ImagesA Stateside Puerto Rican,[2][3] also ambiguously Puerto Rican American (Spanish: puertorriqueño-americano,[4][5] puertorriqueño-estadounidense),[6][7] is a term for residents in the mainland United States who were born in or trace family ancestry to Puerto Rico.[8]
Puerto Ricans who were born in Puerto Rico are American citizens as if they were born |
, though it has an extremely devoted, practically religious fanbase (including a sizeable contingent of “Hannigram” shippers), has failed to achieve quite the level of widespread success attained by similarly lurid series like American Horror Story or The Walking Dead. It’s hard to be told, week after week, that though you might become a better person by watching a show, you’re a bad one for wanting to watch it in the first place. And this new season, which finds the show essentially done digesting its original police procedural elements, is even less visually accessible. “There’s a real attempt to take this material to another level in terms of how poetic and abstract and surrealistic we can be,” Natali says, sounding like a network executive’s worst nightmare.
Still, those who stick around won’t be disappointed. The mood of these new episodes is starkly contemplative – Will and Hannibal relive the events of the second season finale repeatedly, imprinting their grieving on to the other inhabitants of their worlds. That includes flashbacks shot in black and white and with altered aspect ratios, an idea pushed by Natali. “I really strongly felt that kind of aggressively bold aesthetic choice was right for the new season, and kind of made a statement that this wasn’t in any way going to rehash what had come before.”
Clicker-bait: our guide to summer's best television Read more
The show does appear to be intent on one-upping its own visual invention. Natali, who has become Hannibal’s go-to guy for sex scenes (including a hallucinatory five-way), filmed another one for the sixth episode of the season, which is apparently even more unsettling. He recounts Fuller’s directive: “You’ve got to do something that tops the previous ones, and you’ve got to do something that shocks people, and pushes the boundaries of what is showable on network television.”
These shifts have happened for a reason – Fuller claims that the changes and challenges happen to “prevent my own internal boredom of storytelling” – but where do you go from something like a man eating his own nose? If the new episodes are any indication, the answer is “deeper, darker and weirder”. While the contortions of the deceased human form are old hat by now for the man who directed the “horse birth” scene from last season, Natali kept busy by creating a new (and far grosser) manifestation of the stag that represents Hannibal in Will’s mind (what Fuller describes as “a skinned, antlered thing that is more of a nightmarish ablution of what he experienced in the first two seasons”).
Somehow, he managed to do all this shooting his first three episodes over only 21 days, while, for the most part, substituting Toronto for Florence. This process was deeply stressful for the entire crew. The members of the Hannibal team try to actualize Fuller’s vision to the best of their ability with limited time and resources, and they manage to succeed. “It is an intensely difficult show that breaks people,” Natali admits. When I note that this makes Fuller sound suspiciously similar to the title character, he laughs. “That’s right, exactly. We’re all part of his design.”Image copyright AFP Image caption Syrian Democratic Forces fighters have been gradually encircling Raqqa since late last year
A US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters has launched an offensive to capture the jihadist group Islamic State's Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said the assault began on Monday, with fighters advancing on several fronts.
A monitoring group reported clashes in the east of Raqqa and at a military base on the northern outskirts.
The US-led coalition said the operation would deliver a "decisive blow to the idea of [IS] as a physical caliphate".
The SDF, which says it is not aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or the rebel forces seeking to overthrow him, has driven IS from about 6,000 sq km (2,300 sq miles) of northern Syria since October 2015.
It has been gradually encircling Raqqa since November, at the same time as Iraqi pro-government forces have been driving IS militants out of the city of Mosul.
IS seized Raqqa in early 2014, months after it became the first Syrian provincial capital to fall to the rebels in the civil war, and established its headquarters there.
On Tuesday morning, SDF spokesman Talal Silo told a news conference in the village of Hazima: "We declare today the start of the great battle to liberate the city of Raqqa, the so-called capital of terrorism and terrorists."
Mr Silo said SDF forces were attacking the city from the north, west and east, and urged civilians to keep away from the frontlines and nearby IS positions.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that the assault began at dawn following heavy coalition air strikes overnight.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Talal Silo announced the start of the offensive from a village on Raqqa's northern outskirts
The UK-based monitoring group said the SDF was attacking the eastern Mishlab district and the Division 17 military base, north of the city centre.
The anti-IS activist group, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, said rockets and shells had been falling on Mishlab and Qitar Street since Monday night.
US commander Lt Gen Steve Townsend said the battle would be "long and difficult", but that the coalition and its partners were "steadily dismantling the physical caliphate of [IS]".
"It's hard to convince new recruits that [IS] is a winning cause when they just lost their twin 'capitals' in both Iraq and Syria."
"We all saw the heinous attack in Manchester," he added. "[IS] threatens all of our nations, not just Iraq and Syria, but in our own homelands as well. This cannot stand."
Image copyright AFP Image caption About 60% of the SDF's 50,000 fighters are Arabs, according to the US-led coalition
The coalition, which has deployed special forces personnel to train and advise SDF fighters on the ground, believes there are between 3,000 and 4,000 IS militants holed up inside Raqqa.
It is not clear how many fighters the SDF has deployed around Raqqa. However, the SDF has about 50,000 fighters in total, with Arabs making up about 60% of the force and Kurds 40%, according to the coalition.
Last week, the US announced that it had begun providing arms to members of the Kurdish militia that dominates the SDF, the Popular Protection Units (YPG).
The move was denounced by the Turkish government. It considers the YPG an extension of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is fighting for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey.
Image copyright AFP Image caption The UN says 100,000 people have been displaced by recent fighting around Raqqa
The coalition has also stepped up air strikes around Raqqa in recent weeks, which has led to a rise in reported civilian deaths.
On Monday, the Syrian Observatory and Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said an air strike had killed at least 17 civilians, including women and children, as they tried to escape Raqqa by crossing the River Euphrates in small boats.
The UN says 100,000 people have been displaced by the fighting around Raqqa since April.
Inside the city, food prices are said to have increased significantly. Water is reportedly available for only four hours per day on average, and there are shortages of medical services, supplies and staff.Benighted student members of the Union Council at University College London have made headlines internationally after voting to ban a student group, "the Nietzsche Club," on the grounds that Nietzsche is "on the extreme-right," a "racist" with connections "direct or indirect, with Italian fascism and German Nazism." The ban is on hold, given its dubious legality.
The student action betrays profound misunderstandings of both Nietzsche and of universities. The latter can be dispensed with quickly. Freedom of inquiry and thought must surely encompass the right of students to discuss and think about ideas, including illiberal ideas. Universities may put constraints on racist abuse and discrimination, but they can not, consistent with the mission of a university, put constraints on the right to discuss any and all ideas, including ideas that others deem offensive or immoral.
The idea that a "Nietzsche Club," in particular, is not appropriate for a serious university (one with several Nietzsche scholars on its faculty, ironically enough) is astonishing. Nietzsche and Marx are the two most important philosophers of the 19th century whose ideas have exercised enormous influence in literature, art, politics, psychology, historiography and philosophy. Is discussion of the work of Mann, Freud, Weber, Hesse, Sartre, and Foucault off-limits as well, since all of these thinkers (among many others) were profoundly influenced by Nietzsche?
But what of the absurd misunderstanding of Nietzsche? When Nietzsche -- probably the victim of undiagnosed syphilis -- suffered a mental collapse in early 1889, he was barely read. Over the next two decades, he became the most celebrated intellectual figure in Europe. His cultural stature was so high that at the start of World War I, the German Kaiser purchased 250,000 copies of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra for the troops, to boost their morale. During and after the WWI, everyone in Germany fought to claim Nietzsche's legacy, from German nationalists to anarchists and socialists.
The Nazi takeover in 1933 settled these debates by political force, and nothing less would have made the Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche possible. After all, as actual readers of Nietzsche know, he hated Germans most of all, famously titling an entire chapter of one of his last books, "What the Germans Lack." He ridiculed the German militarism and nationalism of his own day -- in terms equally applicable to the Nazi version -- and, most importantly, was a scathing critic of anti-Semitism, endlessly baiting anti-Semitic readers in his books. This passage from Beyond Good and Evil is typical:
[T]he Jews are without a doubt the strongest, purest, most tenacious race living in Europe today....The fact that the Jews, if they wanted (or if they were forced, as the anti-Semtes seem to want), could already be dominant, or indeed could quite literally have control over present-day Europe--this is established. The fact that they are not working and making plans to this end is likewise established. Meanwhile, what they wish and want instead...is to be absorbed and assimilated into Europe....[T]his urge and impluse...should be carefully noted and accomodated--in which case it might be practical and appropriate to throw the anti-Semitic hooligans out of the country.
Nietzsche's anti-anti-Semitic insult is twofold: First, he affirms the superiority of the Jews over most Europeans by noting how easy it would be for Jews to take over Europe; and, second, he denies the anti-Semitic trope that Jews have any intention of doing so. Nietzsche's main complaint about Judaism is that it gave birth to Christianity -- and 19th-century Christian anti-Semites would not have been happy to learn that, as Nietzsche put it, they are the "ultimate Jewish consequence."
If the smear of Nietzsche as a "fascist" and "anti-semite" has no textual basis, it would be wrong to conclude that Nietzsche is some benign secular liberal: He is not. When the Danish critic Georg Brandes first introduced a wider European audience to Nietzsche's ideas during public lectures in 1888, he concentrated on Nietzsche's vitriolic campaign against morality and what Brandes dubbed (with Nietzsche's subsequent approval) Nietzsche's "aristocratic radicalism." On this reading, Nietzsche was primarily concerned with questions of value and culture, and his philosophical standpoint was acknowledged to be a deeply illiberal one: What matters are great human beings, not the "herd." The egalitarian premise of all contemporary moral and political theory -- the premise, in one form or another, of the equal worth or dignity of each person -- is simply absent in Nietzsche's work.
The question about the basis of equality remains a live one in political philosophy: How can it be that we all have equal moral worth given that we are plainly not equal along almost any relevant dimension one can think of (intelligence, rationality, integrity, talents and so on)? Some contemporaries, like Jeremy Waldron, the current Chichele Professor of Social & Political Theory at Oxford, have argued that only with a belief in God can we find a basis for the moral equality of persons. Nietzsche would have agreed, which is why he thought the growing recognition that "God is dead" would be so momentous.
The implications of Nietzsche's anti-egalitarianism remains a vexed interpretive question, though as I have argued elsewhere, the most plausible reading is that Nietzsche had no political philosophy, that his focus was increasingly esoteric, on transforming the consciousness of select individuals -- his rightful readers -- about the extent to which morality was really compatible with the flourishing of the kinds of genius he most admired, as exemplified by figures like Beethoven and Goethe. Whether or not that reading is correct, it is clear there is no evidence that Nietzsche supported a fascist state, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Nietzsche's Zarathustra calls the "state... the coldest of all cold monsters... whatever it says it lies... Everything about it is false," concluding that, "Only where the state ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous."Boulder's location of vegan spot Native Foods slipped Colorado Congressman Jared Polis a note to go along with his takeout order on Easter Sunday. Here's what it said:
"The constituency has spoken. Use your power wisely. Feel the Bern. With the utmost respect, Native Foods. Happy Easter!"
Polis tweeted the note to his some 35K followers with the message: Even my food takeout is lobbying me for #FeelTheBern. It has been retweeted 145 times so far.
As a member of Congress, Polis is Democratic superdelegate. He has publicly endorsed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the party's primary. Senator Bernie Sanders won Colorado's caucus and in Boulder, part of the district Polis represents, he received 63% of the votes.
A statement from the California-based Native Foods obtained by the Daily Camera said the following: "We certainly appreciate the enthusiasm and passion of our team members, but it's important that everyone knows they are welcome at Native Foods and we embrace differing points of view."This post was migrated from Justin’s personal blog, 'Codethinked.com.' Views, opinions, and colorful expressions should be taken in context, and do not necessarily represent those of Simple Thread (and were written under the influence of dangerous levels of caffeination).
There is a lot going on in the JavaScript world these days, both in and out of the browser. Talk about script loaders, client side MVC frameworks, minifiers, AMD, Common.js, Coffeescript, can quickly get your head spinning. And for those people who are completely immersed in that world, it can be easy to forget that the vast majority of JavaScript developers today haven’t heard of any of these tools, and in fact, they likely aren’t even equipped to try these tools.
This post is going to be an attempt to simply address some of the low hanging fruit out there, and try to bring together a few different concepts that a developer should understand before they go out and try to tackle something like Backbone.js or Ember.js. Once you understand most of the concepts in this post, then you can go out and approach more advanced JavaScript topics with a bit of confidence. This post does assume that you have developed with JavaScript before, so if you haven’t, then you might be better off starting with something a bit more basic. With that out of the way, here we go!
Modules
How many of you are working with an application that has JavaScript that looks like this just sitting in a file (notice I didn’t say embedded in your html files, there is no good excuse for that):
var someSharedValue = 10; var myFunction = function(){ //do something } var anotherImportantFunction = function() { //do more stuff }
If you’ve made it to this point in the post, then most likely you are dealing with (or creating) code that looks like this. I’m not judging you, I wrote code like that for a really long time. The problems here are many, but the one that we are going to focus on is the pollution of the global namespace. When writing code like this, you are just shoving all of these methods and variables into the global namespace. We need some way to keep this kind of data out of the global namespace, and the technique we are going to use here is the module pattern. There are different forms that modules can take, but I’m going to start off with the easiest method that you can start using today, an IIFE (Immediately Invoked Function Expression).
It is a big name, but the implementation is very simple:
(function(){ //do some work })();
If you haven’t used an IIFE before this might look at bit weird at first. There are a lot of parentheses going on around here! Basically we have an anonymous function with a set of parentheses following it which cause the function to be immediately invoked. So we are creating the function, then immediately calling it. Hence the “immediately invoked function” part of the name. The “expression” part of IIFE comes from the fact that we need to turn this into an expression and not a statement, since a function statement must have a name. We do this by adding the extra set of parentheses around the outside. This also gives us an easy way to spot IIFE’s when looking through our code.
Now that we know how to implement it, let’s talk about why we do this. In JavaScript all we have to work with for scoping is functions, and so if we want to create scope, we use a function. By executing code inside of the IIFE we are scoping all variables and functions inside of the IIFE and so we aren’t polluting the global namespace. The only problem is that all variables we create are now scoped inside of the function, so if we want to access them outside of the global scope, we need to get them into the global namespace, or at least into something that is in the global namespace.
One thing we can do is to use the window object and assign any functions or values to this object, which allows us to call these methods externally. In order to guarantee that nothing messes with the window variable, we can pass the window object as a parameter to our IIFE. We can do the same thing with references to libraries or even the value ‘undefined’. Our IIFE ends up looking like this:
(function(window, $, undefined){ //do some work })(window, jQuery);
As you can see, we are passing in the window and jQuery variables (the jQuery $ variable is just an alias for the ‘jQuery’ variable, and we use it here in case another library has redefined the $ variable), but then we have three parameters going into the method. The idea is that since we aren’t passing a third parameter, it ends up being undefined, so we get a variable called ‘undefined’ local to the method that is guaranteed to actually have the value ‘undefined’, in case another piece of JavaScript modified it. Notice that we could call any of these values within the function without passing them in, this works because functions in JavaScript form closures where they “close over” the outer scope that they reside in. This topic can be an entire post, and I have written one which explains closures in terms of C#, but the concepts are very similar.
Now we have a a method which is executed immediately, has a much safer execution context containing valid window, $, and undefined variables (it is still possible that something could have reassigned one of these variables before we hit this script, but it is much less likely). We are in a pretty good place, having saved our code from becoming a bunch of clutter in the global namespaces and reducing the potential for collisions with other JavaScript running in our application.
At this point anything we want to export from the module we are just assigning direction to the window object. But often I don’t want to just assign everything in my module directly to the window object, I want to have some way of grouping functionality. In most languages we call these containers namespaces, and we can emulate them in JavaScript using objects.
Namespaces
If we wanted to declare a namespace, and assign a function to it, we could do something like this:
window.myApp = window.myApp || {}; window.myApp.someFunction = function(){ //so some work };
We are merely creating an object in the global namespace by checking to see if the object already exists, and if so we use it, otherwise we create a new object using the object literal notation: {}. At this point we could just start building up the namespace by assigning functions like we are doing above, but we don’t want our code just hanging out there, we want to combine our namespaces with our modules, like this:
(function(myApp, $, undefined){ //do some work }(window.myApp = window.myApp || {}, jQuery));
This could also be written like this:
window.myApp = (function(myApp, $, undefined){ //do some work return myApp; })(window.myApp || {}, jQuery);
Now, instead of passing in window to our module, we are passing in a namespace object that is hanging off the window object. The reason we assign it using || is so that if we use this namespace in multiple places we will end up using the same object over and over instead of creating a new object each time which would clear out our namespace. Many libraries include namespace functions which will create namespaces for you, or you can use something like namespace.js which allows you to easily create nested namespaces. I generally try not to create deeply nested namespaces, since in JavaScript you have to specify the namespace on every item that is in the namespace. So if you created a “doSomething” method in the MyApp.MyModule.MySubModule namespace, you would either have to reference it like:
MyApp.MyModule.MySubModule.doSomething();
every time you called it, or you would have to alias the namespace inside of your module by doing:
var MySubModule = MyApp.MyModule.MySubModule;
This way you would only need to say “MySubModule.doSomething()”. It just makes things more complicated, and unless you have a ton of code, it can be unnecessary.
Revealing Module Pattern
There is another pattern that you’ll often see being used to create modules, and it is called the revealing module pattern. This pattern is just a different approach to creating a module, letting you define everything privately inside of the module, then expose what you want to expose by returning an object which has references to everything you want to expose publicly. Let’s take a look at how you would define this:
var myModule = (function($, undefined){ var myVar1 = '', myVar2 = ''; var someFunction = function(){ return myVar1 + " " + myVar2; }; return { getMyVar1: function() { return myVar1; }, //myVar1 public getter setMyVar1: function(val) { myVar1 = val; }, //myVar1 public setter someFunction: someFunction //some function made public } })(jQuery);
As you can see, we are creating a module in one pass which makes it more simple, and then we are returning an object which exposes the pieces of our module that we are interested in making public, while allowing us to keep our private variables hidden. The variable “myModule” is going to contain the two publicly exposed items, but as you can see, “someFunction” uses “myVar2”, but it is not externally accessible.
Creating Constructors (Classes)
In JavaScript we don’t have classes, but we can create objects, and we do this by creating a constructor function. Let’s say that we wanted to create a bunch of Person objects, and we wanted to pass in a first name, last name, and age. We could define our constructor like this (we would most likely put this inside of a module):
var Person = function(firstName, lastName, age){ this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; this.age = age; } Person.prototype.fullName = function(){ return this.firstName + " " + this.lastName; };
Looking at just the first function for now, you’ll see that we are creating a Person constructor. This is what we will use to build new person objects. It takes three parameters and it assigns them all to the execution context from the current invocation of the constructor. This is how we get public instance variables. We could create private variables here too, by assigning the constructor parameters to local variables inside of the constructor, but the problem becomes that public methods can’t access those variables, and so you’re probably better off making them all public. You can create methods inside of the constructor which are publicly accessible, and can access the private variables, but they create a whole different set of problems.
Next you’ll see that we accessing the “prototype” of the Person constructor. The prototype of a function is an object that all instances of a function will go to when trying to resolve fields or functions called on the instance. So what we are doing here is creating a single instance of a “fullName” method that all instances of “Person” can access without having a ton of instances of “fullName” hanging around. We could have defined “fullName” inside of the constructor as “this.fullName = function() { …” but then every person would have another copy of the fullName method, which is not what we want.
If we wanted to start creating people, we could do so like this:
var person = new Person("Justin", "Etheredge"); alert(person.fullName());
If we wanted to, we could also create another constructor that inherits from the Person constructor. Let’s say we wanted to create a Spy constructor, that would build an instance of Spy, but would only declare a single method:
var Spy = function(firstName, lastName, age){ this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; this.age = age; }; Spy.prototype = new Person(); Spy.prototype.spy = function(){ alert(this.fullName() + " is spying."); } var mySpy = new Spy("Mr.", "Spy", 50); mySpy.spy();
As you can see, we are creating a constructor that looks just like the person, but then we are settings its prototype to an instance of the Person constructor. Now we can add methods, and when we create an instance of Spy, it can access methods in the Person constructor, and the methods can access variables which were assigned in the Spy instance! It is a bit convoluted, but once you get past the details, it is pretty elegant.
Wrapping It Up
At this point, if you have learned something, then awesome! But unfortunately we really haven’t touched on any “modern” JavaScript development. All of the topics that we have gone over in this blog post are relatively old, and have been in fairly wide use for at least the last few years. But now hopefully you are at least heading down the right road. Now that you are splitting up your code into modules and using lots of different files (you should be!), the next step for you should be to start researching JavaScript combination and minification. If you are a Rails developer, and are using Rails 3, then you get all of this for free in the asset pipeline. If you’re using.NET then you can look at the framework that I started, SquishIt. If you’re using ASP.NET MVC 4, then it also has some built in combination and minification support.
Hope this helped, and I hope to see you back here next time when I will start to explore a few topics in modern JavaScript development!Get the biggest Celtic 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
DUNDEE United midfield man Paul Paton has launched an astonishing attack on Celtic, accusing them of manipulating referees for years.
The Northern Ireland international says officials never give the Tannadice men a fair crack of the whip against the Hoops – especially in Glasgow.
In an amazing broadside Paton also had a pop at Celtic boss Ronny Deila after he said United defender Ryan McGowan’s challenge on Celtic midfielder Liam Henderson on Wednesday was “career threatening”.
The Parkhead manager had also branded Aidan Connolly a diver after the youngster won a penalty at Tannadice in the original tie that ended in a 1-1 draw.
The Taysiders lost 4-0 to Celtic in Wednesday night’s Scottish Cup quarter-final replay as the League Cup winners booked a return trip to Hampden to face Inverness in the semi-final next month.
However, Paton was seething at the perceived injustices done to his club in the last three games against Celtic.
United have had four players sent off – Calum Butcher, Paul Dixon, Sean Dillon and Ryan McGowan – and looked to have been denied a stonewall penalty at Hampden last Sunday when Celtic skipper Scott Brown barged Ryan Dow over in the box.
Paton said: “Ronny Deila has an opinion on everything but we see things differently.
“Ryan McGowan’s challenge looked like a good tackle to me but that is only my opinion. I will have to see it again to see who is right.
“I don’t really read too much into what Deila has to say or who he puts pressure on but I think Celtic as a club can manipulate people more than Dundee United can.
“That kind of thing has been happening for years.
“We have seen some injustices in the last few games we have played and that causes frustration. It feels we do not get any decisions – and that it is continual.
“There is no edge between the two teams and I think it has been taken out of context as there were not really any bad challenges in Wednesday’s game. It wasn’t a game like that and I don’t think Gowser deserved to get sent off.
“I don’t know if I am being biased but it was a hard tackle and he clearly won the ball.
“I might need to see it again but I don’t think there was much in it and they seemed to make an awful lot of it.”
The 27-year-old also claimed Hoops defender Efe Ambrose should have walked after being booked in the first half of the Parkhead clash – and then going on to commit a string of yellow-card offences.
Paton said: “I thought he was lucky to stay on the park as they were stonewall yellows but we have seen in the last few meetings that we don’t seem to get things like that going for us against Celtic.
“How he stayed on the park I will never know but when you come to places like this you never seem to get these decisions.
“I don’t know if it is just coincidence but you saw last weekend in the League Cup Final we should have had a clear penalty when Scott Brown pushed Ryan Dow in the box.
(Image: Action Images)
“We didn’t get it and then Ambrose should have been sent off when we were on top in the game at Parkhead and it didn’t happen. Small things like that change games.”
Paton also played down the off-the-ball incident that led to Celtic hitman Anthony Stokes being sent off near the end of another ill-tempered match between the sides.
The Irishman left the pitch with a bloodied lip and took to social media site Twitter to have a go at Paton, insisting he had been caught by a “sly elbow” from the United man.
Stokes tweeted: “Great performance. On another note I get a sly elbow in the face by someone that has got nothing about them and get sent off, typical!”
Paton though denied any wrongdoing. He said: “What happens on the pitch stays on the pitch.
“I ran across him and I don’t know if he thinks I meant to hit him but he lashed out and caught me on the side of the face. These things happen during games.
“I stepped across him and I don’t know if I caught him with my leg or my arm, I honestly don’t know but it was most certainly not intentional.”
Paton admits United will have to dust themselves down for tomorrow’s visit to Parkhead on Scottish Premiership duty when the clubs meet again in the final match of their four-in-a-row game sequence.
Paton admitted United are getting to the stage where they are sick of the sight of Celtic.
And as if to rub salt into the wounds the Hoops will be able to welcome back former Dundee United stars Gary Mackay-Steven and Stuart Armstrong for this one.
Paton said: “The first goal on Wednesday was crucial. We gave away a free header and then a long ball for the second.
“It is not good enough and once you go 2-0 down at Celtic Park it is always going to be hard. We are professionals, Celtic are the best team in the country and we have come here and lost 4-0.
“You just have to take it on the chin and get on with it. We are big enough and we will be back here again on Saturday with a clean slate.
“You could say that we really are heartily sick of the sight of them
“We know it won’t be any easier on Saturday and they will have our two former players
available as well.
“Parkhead is a hard place to come and win but we don’t make it easy for ourselves either.”
Try your hand at our daily sport quiz:The city with the longest working hours in the world has found a way to de-stress: bunnies.
At Rabbitland Cafe in Hong Kong, visitors can spend time with fluffy bunnies while enjoying snacks and drinks. The cafe, which opened four months ago, has 12 rabbits to play with and costs about $9 for an hour-long visit.
Rickey Lam, one of the cafe’s co-founders, got the idea of opening a rabbit cafe from the world’s animal-cafe hub: Japan, where you can have a cup of coffee while petting cats, dogs, and even owls. Unlike cats and dogs though, rabbits are sensitive and aren’t necessarily the most cuddly of creatures. “They might see you more like friends instead of their masters,” Lam says, “and they don’t like being held in arms.”Thingol thought to place the Silmaril into the Necklace, and hired the Dwarves of Nogrod to do so. The Dwarven craftsmen also coveted the jewel and seeing that it was by their skill that the piece was made, saw no reason to give it up willingly. Thingol became enraged declaring that he was of the first Eldar to set off on The Great Journey and that they were guests in his realm. When he tried to take it from the Dwarves they slew him. This set off a chain of events leading to the destruction of Doriath and the scattering of its people. After Thingol's death Melian, who remained in Middle-earth by binding her spirit to that of her husband, chose to forsake her body and return to Aman as a Maia, removing the power which once protected it, leaving Doriath vulnerable to attack from without.Image copyright Reuters Image caption The JMC meeting was held at Cardiff City Hall
The prime minister has told the leaders of the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that she will "intensify" work on their proposals for Brexit.
Theresa May was speaking during a meeting of the leaders in Cardiff.
The Scottish and Welsh governments have produced plans that would allow them to keep full access to the single market.
Scotland's first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said time was "fast running out" for an agreement to be reached.
But the Welsh government said its differences with the UK government were "not irreconcilable".
Ahead of the Joint Ministerial Committee meeting, Mrs May had made it clear the devolved administrations would not be given a decisive role in the UK's divorce from the European Union.
Image copyright PA Image caption Theresa May attended the Joint Ministerial Committee meeting before travelling to Dublin for talks with Taoiseach Enda Kenny
Ms Sturgeon said after the meeting that she "remained to be convinced" that her government's proposals were being taken seriously, but welcomed the prime minister's commitment to intensify joint work on the Scottish government's proposals.
She also warned that she needed to see "tangible evidence" that UK ministers will take forward the proposals for a differentiated deal on European single market membership and a review of the devolution settlement.
Ms Sturgeon said: "The next few weeks are not going to resolve every issue of Brexit, but in terms of me being able to judge whether Scotland's voice is going to be heard at all in this process... the next few weeks are very important."
Independence referendum
Asked if such a timescale could see her announce a second independence referendum by March, she added: "I'll do what needs to be done to protect Scotland's position. We are running out of time for this process.
"It can't go on indefinitely and it won't go on indefinitely.
"This is one of the last key opportunities for me to make clear to the prime minister that I have to see some movement on her part, and over the next few weeks she has got the opportunity to demonstrate whether that movement is going to be forthcoming."
Image caption Nicola Sturgeon has accused the prime minister of not taking the Scottish government's position seriously
Monday's agenda included proposals for alternative settlements for the devolved administrations as well as ideas on helping British businesses to trade and invest in the run-up to Brexit.
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones called on Mrs May to uphold pledges made during the referendum campaign that Wales would not lose funding as a result of the UK leaving the EU.
Mr Jones spoke to the prime minister ahead of the main meeting, with the first minister raising his concerns about the UK's government's handling of Donald Trump's immigration order.
He also welcomed a "firm commitment" from the prime minister that Brexit would not be used as cover for a "land grab" on devolved powers.
There were also discussions about full single market access, and its importance to the Welsh economy.
Image copyright PA Image caption Sinn Fein's new leader, Michelle O"Neill, has called for Northern Ireland to be given a special status within the EU
A spokesman for the Welsh government said: "The positions are not identical, but not irreconcilable at this stage".
Democratic Unionist Party leader Arlene Foster, who was Northern Ireland's first minister until recently, was at the talks.
Also attending was Sinn Fein leader Michelle O'Neill, who urged the prime minister to "respect the vote of the people in the north and that we should be designated special status within the EU".
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Welsh government said the position of Carwyn Jones was "not irreconcilable" with that of the prime minister
The UK government's Scottish Secretary David Mundell later confirmed "inter-governmental discussions" on proposals brought forward by the devolved administrations would be intensified.
He said: "The question is not about can there be differentiation (for Scotland), the question is whether Scotland would benefit from differentiation, and that's what really has got to be at the heart of these intense discussions," he said.
"Is it necessary to have |
they were from out of town, they had no idea about what happened at Rafting Gone Wild 2012. No one in his group knew about the one-day ban. “We had to pull over to the side. And unfortunately, we took our cars to the end of the river, so we have nowhere to put it back. So we're going to have to toss it out. I guess it's better to be safe than sorry.”
Participants of Rafting Gone Wild 2015 took to their Facebook to express their disapproval of the special ban. One person posting:
“Alcohol is only banned on the shoreline. Figure out a way to get it in the water and your good. Also don’t forget your fourth amendment right to refuse to be searched without probable cause.”
“I understand what they're saying, but history is the best predictor of future behavior,” Chief Doane said. He also explained how the voluntary checkpoints work.
“We ask them, ‘Can we have permission to look in there to make sure you don't have any alcohol?’ The vast majority of people comply because they don't want a ticket when they hit the water. And if they don't, we don't force the issue because they do have 4th Amendment protection. But we will let them know out Ranger boats are on the river, and they'll get a ticket, because it is against the ‘Business and Professions’ code to have alcohol on the river today,” Chief Doane said.
While some took the alcohol ban to heart, others liked Austin Fisher said that affected him in no way. The college student from Reno, Nevada, was just excited about finally being on summer break.
“I'm a big Dr. Pepper guy myself. I love my dark sodas… actually, Cream sodas... I'm a cream soda guy. Just give me the sugar, baby. Give me the sugar, baby.” Fisher said.A federal judge ordered the Justice Department to send its lawyers back to remedial ethics classes Thursday after finding that the administration repeatedly misled the court in the high-profile challenge to President Obama’s deportation amnesty.
Judge Andrew S. Hanen said the lawyers knew the administration was approving amnesty applications but actively hid that information both from him and from the 26 states that had sued to stop the amnesty.
Worse yet, even after the court ordered a halt to the whole amnesty, the Department of Homeland Security approved several thousand more applications, in defiance of the court’s strict admonition, Judge Hanen said, counting at least four separate times the government’s attorneys misled him.
He even quoted from the scene in “Miracle on 34th Street” when the boy is called to testify to Santa’s existence and says everyone knows not to tell a lie to the court. Judge Hanen said the Justice Department lawyers have an even stricter duty: Tell the truth, don’t mislead the court and don’t allow it to be misled by others.
“The Government’s lawyers failed on all three fronts,” he wrote in a 28-page ruling. “The actions of the DHS should have been brought to the attention of the opposing counsel and the Court as early as December 19, 2014. The failure of counsel to do that constituted more than mere inadvertent omissions — it was intentionally deceptive.”
The spanking was the most serious rebuke — but by no means the only one — that Obama administration lawyers have faced at the hands of judges in recent months, and Judge Hanen questioned what was going on at the Justice Department to have reached this point.
Justice officials were not amused.
“The department strongly disagrees with the order,” said spokesman Patrick Rodenbush.
It’s unclear how many of their lawyers would be forced to retake ethics classes under the scope of the judge’s ruling.
The case stems from Mr. Obama’s policy, announced in November 2014, to try to grant a proactive three-year stay of deportation, and legal work permits, to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants.
Texas led a large group of states in suing, arguing the proposal violated both federal law and overstepped the president’s constitutional powers.
Judge Hanen agreed, halting the amnesty just days before it was to begin accepting applications in February 2015.
But in the months between November and February, the Department of Homeland Security had already begun approving three-year amnesties for so-called Dreamers, or young illegal immigrants who’d already qualified for two-year amnesties under a previous 2012 Obama policy. All told, more than 100,000 Dreamers’ applications were approved during that time.
The government lawyers said they didn’t think the Dreamers’ applications were an important part of the court case, arguing those should have been treated as a change to the 2012 policy, not part of the new 2014 policy.
They undercut their credibility, however, when several thousand more applications were approved in the weeks after Judge Hanen issued his February order halting the amnesty — something the government didn’t admit to until early March.
“The decision of the lawyers who apparently determined that these three-year renewals under the 2014 DHS Directive were not covered by the Plaintiff States’ pleadings was clearly unreasonable. The conduct of the lawyers who then covered up this decision was even worse,” Judge Hanen wrote.
In court, the government lawyers had admitted they’d left the judge with the wrong impression and expressed regret and sorrow. But the government said it wasn’t intentional, and said it had taken steps to try to correct the problems — including going back and recapturing almost all of the amnesties approved or sent out after Judge Hanen’s February order officially halting the program.
They did not, however, cancel the 100,000 three-year amnesties approved between November and February.
Judge Hanen ordered the government to turn over a list of those names to the court, and said the 26 states that sued can move to get a look at the lists if they can prove damages stemming from any of those applications.
Judge Hanen thought about tossing all of the government’s arguments out, but said since the merits of the case are now pending before the Supreme Court, he couldn’t do that. He also thought about imposing a financial penalty on the government, but said since taxpayers would end up footing that bill, it seemed pointless.
Instead, he said the best he could do was order the remedial ethics classes. His order applies to department lawyers at headquarters in Washington who practice in any of the 26 states that sued over the amnesty.
He ordered at least three hours of ethics training a year, and said it must be “taught by at least one recognized ethics expert who is unaffiliated with the Justice Department.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.“I haven’t been served. But, no ma’am, that is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Milsap said, chuckling before adding he had no comment.
County Commissioner Clarence Brown also declined comment on the suit because he said he had not seen it. Bartow County attorney Boyd Petit said his office received a notice in November of a possible lawsuit being filed, but that he had not seen a copy of the suit and also could not comment.
Attorney Anthony Perrotta, who represents Booker, said what the Sheriff’s Department and county condoned in its treatment of Booker was “egregious.”
“Any violation of a court order is egregious, and especially by the Sheriff’s Department — this is beyond the pale,” he said.
Perrotta added that Booker has been incarcerated in South Georgia at Pulaski State Prison since October after the Bartow County Sheriff’s Department arrested her and charged her for, among other things, damage to a police vehicle.
Perrotta said he learned of the case from Booker’s ex-girlfriend.
“She’s not doing well. She’s not getting the care she needs for her drug addiction. She’s hurting,” he said. “My first priority is to get her out of prison.”
Lawsuit: ‘Normal to punish homosexuals’
The lawsuit alleges throughout that, “At all times relevant to this action, it was normal procedure, practice and custom of defendants Bartow County, Brown, and Milsap to punish homosexuals and persons holding different religious beliefs.”
The lawsuit further states that it was also the normal procedure for Bartow County officials named in the suit to “harass homosexuals taken into custody, to mandate that homosexuals taken into custody refrain from living as homosexuals, and to forbid them from maintaining any homosexual relationships.”
Booker alleges in the suit that after her family called the Bartow County Sheriff’s Department in April 2010 to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital due to her drug addiction, the deputies ignored a judge’s order to take her to Northwest Georgia Regional Hospital in Rome, Ga.
According to the lawsuit, Deputy Pam Ploof picked up Booker on April 22 to transport her to the hospital. However, en route to the hospital Booker began having seizures. According to the suit, an ambulance was dispatched and Booker was taken to Cartersville Medical Center.
At the Cartersville hospital while Booker was being treated were Bartow Sheriff’s Department Lt. Mark Mayton, commander of the Bartow County Sheriff’s Drug Task Force, and deputies Ploof and Nathan Gibbs, the suit states. Also at the hospital was Booker’s probation officer, Tracy Jacobs, to administer a drug test, the suit further states.
While in the Cartersville hospital, Lt. Mayton “began harassing Ms. Booker, making numerous threats concerning her lesbian relationship with her partner,” according to the suit.
“Lt. Mayton then forbade Ms. Booker from having a lesbian relationship and ordered Ms. Booker not to contact her partner,” the suit alleges.
Evangelists asked to ‘convert’ plantiff?
Cartersville Medical Center released Booker the evening of April 22, 2010, and, according to the lawsuit, Lt. Mayton put Booker into Ploof’s squad car and Ploof drove her to a nearby shopping center.
Lt. Mayton followed Ploof to the shopping center, transferred Booker into his personal vehicle and then drove Booker to the home of his friend, Gary Allen Covington, and asked Covington to watch Booker. According to the lawsuit, Covington was paid $200 in county funds to do so. And, according to the lawsuit, Booker remained at Covington’s home up to a week.
Lt. Mayton then returned and, according to the lawsuit, transported Booker to the private residence of Chris and Donna McDowell, two self-described “evangelists.” The couple was paid $600 of county funds “to attempt to convert Ms. Booker from being a lesbian,” the suit alleges.
After several days, Booker attempted to escape from the McDowell’s home and then went to her mother’s home, where she had been staying, to get some personal items. Lt. Mayton went to the home on May 18, 2010, and attempted to arrest her without a warrant, according to the suit. Booker resisted and Lt. Mayton slammed her against a patrol car and “lifted up Ms. Booker’s shirt to expose her bare breasts.”
Perrotta said Booker has suffered immeasurably from the alleged false arrest and harassment and is asking for a jury to award her an amount to be determined.
Top photo: Amanda Booker, a lesbian from Bartow County, is suing county law enforcement officials for violating her constitutional rights when they allegedly took her to a home to be ‘converted’ from being gay. (via Georgia Department of Corrections)In Southern California, generations of immigrants are creating an evolving definition of "American." Multi-American is your source for news, conversation and insight on this emerging regional and national identity.
For the record, Suey Park does not like the term "hashtag activism." A freelance writer from the Chicago area, Park says her crusades against sexism and racism go beyond pithy one-liners on Twitter.
But Park, who is 23, doesn't deny she’s got a freakish aptitude for making Twitter campaigns go viral.
"I think I've definitely figured out the trick to make hashtags trend," Park said. "I know what drives corporations and Twitter kind of crazy."
She's taken aim at everything from racial stereotyping (#NotYourAsianSidekick #BlackPowerYellowPeril) to popular network television shows that have white actors play Asian roles (#HowIMetYourRacism #SaturdayNightLies).
RELATED: When the twit hit the fan: 'I'm still here,' Colbert says
Her most recent target is the fake news show The Colbert Report. She started the #CancelColbert hashtag on Thursday, after the Twitter account for the Comedy Central program tweeted this punchline from an earlier show:
The joke stemmed from host Stephen Colbert’s takedown of Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who’s ignored calls to retire the mascot and instead launched the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation to benefit Native Americans. To mock Snyder, Colbert slipped into his alter ego, a racist blowhard who thinks nothing of faking a bad Asian accent and calling someone a “Chinaman,” but wants to start a foundation for Asians.
Given that the ostensible target was Snyder, many thought the bit harmless and all was quiet until Park got wind of the tweet.
@suey_park
She focused her ire on "white liberals" whom, she said, think they can't be racist because they hold progressive views. Others were soon tweeting alongside her.
@ChiefElk
Part of the reason the hashtag was trending was because some on Twitter found it ridiculous.
@bradnd99
Park said she never thought there was ever a real chance of the show getting canceled. But she wanted an apology, and came up with a hashtag that would get noticed.
“I don’t think it would have gotten attention if not for such overt, pushy demands,” Park said. “It wasn’t like ‘Apologize Now, Colbert.’ I don’t think it would have really caught on.”
“A virtual neighborhood”
Park is still waiting for an apology from The Colbert Show, which has since deleted the offending tweet. (As for Colbert, he distanced himself from the tweet late Thursday, pointing out it didn’t come from his personal account. He added, with his alter ego's typical flourish, "I share your rage.")
But the hashtag had by then created a firestorm on Twitter, leading to a flurry of stories by mainstream news outlets and for Park, a disastrous interview on HuffPoLive on Friday. She accused host Josh Zepps of using a “patronizing” line of questioning and failing to see the perspective of minorities as a white man. Zepps said she was missing the point of Colbert’s satire, and that her opinion was “stupid.”
Rallying to Parks’ side was her base of supporters on Twitter, predominantly women of color who consider themselves feminists. Through them, Park’s hashtags are given the legs to trend.
“About the same 10 people tweet me frequently,” Park said. “Maybe there’s about 50 to 100 people that are always participating in the same hashtags that I’m involved with. It’s kind of like a virtual neighborhood.”
Los Angeles-based comedy writer Andrew Ti covers similar ground as Park as the host of the podcast “Yo, Is This Racist?” and creator of a blog by the same name.
He's followed some of her hashtag campaigns without realizing they were all originating from one person. To him, Park's success demonstrates that "anyone can do this."
“Anyone can see injustice and anyone especially with the power of the Internet now can help other people express it,” Ti said.
But what is it about Park's campaigns that make them go viral? Could it be as simple as the way she phrases her hashtags? Her doggedness in keeping them trending by encouraging retweets? The sense of community she builds with like-minded tweeters? She won't say.
"I have this paranoid fear that it could be bad if this kind of knowledge got in the wrong hands, so I just share it with other activists to make sure we're not sharing all our secrets," Park said.
Nagging memories
Suey is not Park’s real first name. It's an online pseudonym playing off the name of the Chinese dish.
Back in grade school, she went by her Korean first name.
"My own elementary teacher said 'Your name sounds like what would happen if I dropped a bunch of silverware onto the ground: 'ching chong,'" Park said. "It was supposed to be a joke and I remember being horrified."
Park was raised by conservative immigrant parents in the Chicago area. Her late father was a sales executive at a company, her mother took care of the children. Park has a sister in medical school.
She said her parents felt helpless against discrimination. She recounted how her father, a sales executive at a company, came home from the golf course one day “so mad.” He told Park, then in high school, that a group of white golfers had been swinging balls aimed at his head.
“I remember being so upset for him and knowing that he did nothing,” Park said.
Park had her own struggles — primarily an eating disorder that she said lasted nine years. It was not until she started attending the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign that she got into activism. She and her friends called out the administration for not cracking down on the use of an Indian chief mascot that had been retired by the school, but still lived on unofficially at sporting events.
Mixed reception
In conversation, Suey Park is soft-spoken, serious-minded, candid and academic.
Her Twitter persona comes off as more brash and strident, apt to drop an expletive here and here. And it's earned her many enemies online. People tell her they wish she would die, that they want to #CancelSuey. She's called racist, opportunistic, annoying and a host of sexual slurs.
How Park and her campaigns are regarded by some other socially-minded Asian-Americans is more complex.
Podcast host Ti, for example, saw the benefits of the #HowIMetYourRacism campaign. Park conceived it after the white cast of "How I Met Your Mother " dressed up as Asian characters for a martial-arts themed show. After the hashtag went viral, the show's co-creator issued a public apology on Twitter.
"In an ideal world, anyone should be able to point out that yellow face is wrong," said Ti, who is Chinese-American. "It’s not hard."
But Ti questioned whether all Twitter campaigns are equally constructive. He for one, thought the campaign against The Colbert Report, was not worth all the angst.
“There is a part of the Asian-American community that I wish would pick its battles a little bit more and focus,” Ti said.
Park said she doesn’t worry about what others think of her outside of her close-knit network of Twitter followers.
And she said she’ll keep up with her Twitter campaigns until she doesn’t see a need anymore for them, even though "it's not fun for me to focus and react to all these acts of racism that I see."
“I really want to retire,” she said with a laugh.The video will start in 8 Cancel
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More than 70 refugees are now believed to have died after their remains were found in the back of a freezer truck at the roadside.
The grim discovery was made after a workman mowing the grass on the hard shoulder of A4, in eastern Austria, noticed a putrid liquid leaking from the vehicle.
It is thought the victims became trapped in the trailer and suffocated around two days before their bodies were discovered.
Channel 4 reporter Lindsey Hilsum Tweeted of a "terrible smell of death" as she passed the vehicle.
Police said identifying the number of victims has been difficult as their bodies were so badly decomposed.
(Image: Rex)
(Image: Reuters)
Spokesman Peter Doskozil told a press conference: "It's not clear exactly how many people were inside. It was not possible to verify this visually.
"At the moment we do not know if women and children were among the dead.
"Taking into consideration the current weather conditions we can perhaps assume the time of death was one-and-a-half to two days ago."
Austrian newspaper Krone reported three people were arrested in Hungary this morning after a huge manhunt was launched.
(Image: Getty)
(Image: Rex)
German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said she was “shaken by the awful news”
She said: "This reminds us that we in Europe need to tackle the problem quickly and find solutions in the spirit of solidarity.
Meanwhile, Austria's interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner spoke of a "dark day" for the country.
She added the government would take a 'zero-tolerance' approach and said the trafficking "mafia" belong "behind bars"
(Image: Reuters)
(Image: Reuters)
The vehicle was towed away from the scene for the bodies to be removed and it is now being examined by forensics officers.
The 7.5-tonne vehicle had previously belonged to Slovakian chicken meat company Hyza and still has the slogan “honest chicken” on the side.
The company said it sold the lorry in 2014.
According Hungarian officials, it is registered to a Romanian citizen from the central city of Kecskemét.Hours after his rain-soaked inauguration as president of France, François Hollande flew to Berlin for a summit with Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. The pair met amid gathering clouds over the prospects for the euro zone as the political crisis in Greece rumbles on. Mr Hollande wants Germany's remedy of austerity for troubled countries to be balanced by growth-promoting measures. See article
After nine days of post-election wrangling political leaders in Greece gave up their attempt to form a government. A new election will be held on June 17th. Polls suggest that parties opposed to the bail-out programme will again do well, raising questions over whether Greece can stay in the euro. See article
Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
Mrs Merkel's centre-right Christian Democratic Union took a walloping in an election in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state. The state is a bellwether for national politics, though the CDU's poor showing was also affected by local factors, including a shoddy campaign by Norbert Röttgen, its main candidate. See article
Ratko Mladic, who led Bosnian Serb forces during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s, went on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in The Hague.
Rebekah Brooks, a former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper operations, her husband and four associates were charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. The six are accused of concealing material from police in July 2011 during a phone-hacking investigation.
Competition killers
In a fresh outbreak of drug-mob violence in Mexico, at least 49 mutilated bodies were found near Monterrey, apparently killed by the Zetas as a warning to their rivals, the Sinaloa cartel. The incident followed several months in which the murder rate had dropped. See article
Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, installed a truth commission to investigate abuses carried out between 1946 and 1988. The inquiry is likely to focus on events during the military regime of 1964-85.
A long-awaited free-trade agreement signed in 2006 between Colombia and the United States came into force. On the same day two people were killed in a bomb attack on the car of Fernando Londoño, a former Colombian interior minister, who was injured. The police blamed FARC guerrillas. See article
Peru's defence and interior ministers resigned, after public criticism of a security operation in a remote jungle region in which several police and soldiers were killed by Shining Path guerrillas.
Vote for me
Abdel Hakim Belhadj, a powerful Islamist commander in Libya, resigned from his position as head of Tripoli's military council to form his own political party. Mr Belhadj is suing Jack Straw, a former British foreign secretary, for allegedly signing papers that allowed the CIA to transport him back to Libya in 2004 via British territory.
Iran executed Majid Jamali Fashi, whom it accused of working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and for being behind the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist on Israel's behalf. Iranian state media said that Mr Fashi confessed to the crime. See article
At least 55 people were killed on May 10th in two bombs in Damascus, the Syrian capital. The al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group, claimed responsibility for the attacks, the worst Syria has seen since its uprising began.
Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails ended a hunger strike that had lasted for weeks, after the Israeli authorities agreed to improve prison conditions. Israeli officials said that Egypt and Jordan helped to end the strike. There had been growing concern about the potential for unrest in the event of a prisoner's death.
Caesar Acellam, a senior commander in the Lord's Resistance Army, was captured by Ugandan soldiers in the Central African Republic. Mr Acellam might be able to apply for amnesty under Ugandan law. Joseph Kony, the LRA's leader, is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. See article
Half the population of South Sudan is facing food shortages because of the continuing conflict with Sudan, according to the United Nations. It said that fighting on the border between the two countries and the shutdown of South Sudan's oil production have devastated the economy.
Border co-operation
Pakistan announced that it will reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan that it closed in November in response to a NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border. Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, said he would attend a NATO summit in Chicago on May 20th. See article
Mullah Arsala Rahmani, a negotiator on Afghanistan's High Peace Council and former Taliban minister, was assassinated by a gunman as he travelled in his car.
The International Committee of the Red Cross decided to suspend its work in Pakistan. The decision was made after news that an ICRC worker abducted four months ago in Baluchistan province had been killed in April.
It emerged that four South Korean activists have been arrested in north-east China near the border with North Korea. The activists say they were interviewing North Korean refugees. China says they were spying.
A court in Delhi granted bail to Andimuthu Raja, a former telecoms minister in India. He had been held since February 2011 on corruption charges for granting questionable wireless spectrum licences at giveaway prices in a case that has rocked India's political establishment. See article
No gay liberation at Liberty
Mitt Romney gave a big speech at Liberty University, an evangelical Christian college, in which he trod a careful line linking his Mormon faith to conservative religiosity. Mr Romney steered away from launching an all-out assault on gay marriage in his speech, just three days after Barack Obama finally came out in support.
More births of non-white babies than white babies were recorded by the Census Bureau for the first time in the United States. Hispanic, black, Asian and mixed-race babies made up 50.4% of total births in the 12 months to July 2011.It’s the penultimate round of games in the RBS Six Nations tournament and the headline act is Wales v Ireland. The Irish will be looking to keep their Grand Slam hopes alive as they travel to the Millennium Stadium on Saturday, to face a resurgent Wales. (KO 14:30)
Ireland
Joe Schmidt makes just one change to the Irish team that defeated England 19-9 in Dublin last time out. Jamie Heaslip has recovered sufficiently after he cracked three vertebrae, having been kneed in the back by French forward, Pascal Pape, almost four weeks ago.
Jordi Murphy drops to the bench despite an impressive campaign thus far and in turn ensures Munster’s Tommy O’Donnell drops out of the match-day squad, such is the strength in-depth at Schmidt’s disposal.
“It’s not the easiest of things as a player to stand on the sidelines, being held on a leash a little bit, probably for my own good,” stated Heaslip on his return to the starting XV.
“I’m a stubborn git. Joe knows that better than anyone. I want to live life at hundred miles an hour. The medical team have been great to get me back on my feet.”
Johnny Sexton is fit to play at out-half, despite picking up a hamstring strain against England. Jared Payne and Sean O’Brien have both recovered from concussion to retain their starting berths in the team.
Ireland go in search of a second Grand Slam in six years. While their style of play, with its large volume of kicking, has been widely scrutinised and criticised, it is still a team that is bubbling with experience, mental strength and an unbeaten run that stretches just over a year.
Confirmation of Sexton’s starting place on Saturday may prove pivotal to Ireland’s Grand Slam hopes. Touted by many as the world’s current no.1 out-half, it is testament to a player who once jousted with Munster legend, Ronan O’Gara, for the coveted number 10 jersey.
Ian Madigan has shown he is capable of top quality performances in green and is adept at guiding Irish teams to victory, but Sexton has proved to be a level above and with his array of consistently precise kicking coupled with his passing and running game, the 29-year-old has now become indispensable to this Irish team.
Another player who may have a say on the outcome of Saturday’s game is loose head prop, Cian Healy. The ex-Clontarf man will be disappointed to miss out on a starting place, with Jack McGrath’s consistency being rewarded with a stay in the team. Healy’s ferocious power off the bench and ability to punch holes in any defence may very well help Ireland eke out a victory in the dragon’s lair.
Ireland team to face Wales:
Rob Kearney (Leinster); Tommy Bowe (Ulster), Jared Payne (Ulster), Robbie Henshaw (Connacht), Simon Zebo (Munster); Johnny Sexton (Racing Metro), Conor Murray (Munster); Jack McGrath (Leinster), Rory Best (Ulster), Mike Ross (Leinster), Devin Toner (Leinster), Paul O’Connell (Munster, capt), Peter O’Mahony (Munster), Sean O’Brien (Leinster), Jamie Heaslip (Leinster).
Wales
Warren Gatland’s team sees no changes to the one that outclassed France at the Stade de France a little over two weeks ago. Flanker, Sam Warburton, will captain his country for a record 34th time, overtaking Bristol’s Ryan Jones in the process.
While there are no changes to the starting XV, there are new faces on the bench. Injuries to prop, Paul James and second row, Bradley Davies, will see Scarlets duo, Rob Evans and Jake Ball, taking a seat on the replacements’ bench.
Wales will be buoyed by the fashion in which they dispatched France in Paris, with a comfortable 20-13 win. Leigh Halfpenny’s devastatingly accurate left-boot kicking five penalties and ensuring the win. It will serve as a warning to the Irish, that they must keep their penalty count to an absolute minimum or punishment will be dished out by the diminutive full-back.
Gatland has described clashes between the Celtic nations as having “extra spice” anytime they meet. The Scoville rating of this contest may yet to be seen, but Wales will be motivated in the knowledge that a win on Saturday will see them blow the championship race wide open, giving them every chance of clinching the championship.
“If we win, we stay in the hunt for the championship. If we lose, we are out of it,” stated Wales and Lions centre, Jamie Roberts.
“It is one of those big games that do not come around too often in your career. It is against a team who are the best team in Europe at the moment.”
Gatland and his men will be wary of the challenge ahead, but if Ireland stick rigidly to their current kick-chase game, the tactic may very well play right into the hands of the Welsh team, with backs Halfpenny, George North and Dan Biggar all astute under the high-ball
While the outcome of this affair may not be decided until late on Saturday afternoon, one thing is certain. The iconic retractable roof of the Millennium Stadium is set to be left open. This is the first time during Gatland’s entire reign as Wales coach that he has asked for the roof not to be closed.
Wales team to face Ireland:
Leigh Halfpenny (Toulon); George North (Northampton Saints), Jonathan Davies (ASM Clermont Auvergne), Jamie Roberts (Racing Metro), Liam Williams (Scarlets); Dan Biggar (Ospreys), Rhys Webb (Ospreys); Gethin Jenkins (Cardiff Blues), Scott Baldwin (Ospreys), Samson Lee (Scarlets), Luke Charteris (Racing Metro), Alun Wyn Jones (Ospreys), Dan Lydiate (Ospreys), Sam Warburton (Cardiff Blues, capt), Taulupe Faletau (Newport Gwent Dragons).
Ross Cannon
Image via GoogleNorthern aboriginal leaders say they are furious that a court ruling let Catholic groups off the hook from fundraising tens of millions of dollars for healing programs for former students of residential schools.
The 2006 Indian Residential School Settlement required Catholic groups to pay compensation for its role in the abuse and trauma inflicted on thousands of aboriginal children.
The agreement required the Catholic entities to pay $29 million in cash to the now defunct Aboriginal Healing Foundation, $25 million in "in-kind" services, and to try and fundraise $25 million for healing programs for former students.
A monument in Fort Providence, N.W.T., names about 300 children who died at the community's Sacred Heart Mission school. (CBC)
Pierre Baribeau, a lawyer for the Catholic groups told CBC that raising $25 million was simply a goal and that the settlements agreement states the Catholic groups were only obligated to put in their "best efforts."
The Catholic entities were able to raise about $4 million of that $25 million goal.
"We had a very difficult time convincing public corporations to consider giving money to a Catholic-related foundation," Baribeau said.
"Unfortunately, we did not get as much as one would have expected. The efforts were there and a lot of money was put into the campaign also."
Federal lawyer didn't intend to alter agreement
In 2013, when the Catholic groups fell $1.6 million short in payment requirements to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, the federal government took the groups to court.
The lawyer for the Catholic entities, Gordon Kuski, and the lawyer for the federal government, Alexander Gay, began negotiations in hopes of settling.
In court documents, Kuski proposed to the federal government that the Catholic entities pay an additional $1.2 million and in turn be released from their duty to continue fundraising for healing programs for former students.
In the documents, the federal government suggests Kuski tricked Gay into that deal.
Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus says 'Raising money doesn't necessarily mean going to the public. It could mean going to the Vatican.'
But a Saskatchewan judge ruled that responses from Gay and other federal lawyers led the Church to believe the deal was done. Gay testified that was not his intention and that he would never agree to such a deal, however last year a judge ruled the deal was binding.
Baribeau says he disagrees with Gay's testimony.
"The federal government put in writing, black and white, what we were willing to do so there's no misstep here. And the court also says it 'there's no misstep here.' It was clear from the beginning."
'The Church is still on the hook'
Northern aboriginal leaders say, regardless of legal wrangling, the Church still owes more to the Dene people who are still recovering from decades of trauma suffered at residential schools.
"As far as we're concerned the Church is still on the hook," says Chief Joachim Bonnetrouge of the Deh Gah Got'ie First Nation in Fort Providence, N.W.T.
Fort Providence was home to the Sacred Heart Mission, a Catholic-run residential school.
Dene National Chief Bill Erasmus says he doesn't believe the Catholic groups put forth their "best efforts."
"It's really bothersome because it's not like the church was broke. They have money. How does it look for the agreement? It doesn't make it look very good. If reconciliation is based on this agreement that we made, then we ought to follow it.
"Raising money doesn't necessarily mean going to the public. It could mean going to the Vatican."Gaza-ruling terror group Hamas is currently hosting an ISIS bigwig, Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Thursday.
According to the report, Shadi Al-Mani’i (also known as Abu Mus’abi) — commander of Wilayat Sina, ISIS’ Sinai branch — is meeting with heads of Hamas’ military wing to discuss expanding cooperation between the two terror organizations.
Al-Mani’i has been wanted by Egyptian authorities for years and was even targeted in a failed assassination attempt last May. He has been accused of masterminding a number of terrorist attacks on Israelis, among them the 2011 attack on Route 12, in which nine Israelis were killed, and the firing of rockets at Eilat.
His visit to Gaza reflects the strengthening of ties between ISIS and Hamas. According to Israeli and Egyptian intelligence, nrg reported, Hamas has already been using its tunnels to smuggle advanced weapons to ISIS in the Sinai, which have been used in combat against the Egyptian army.The following is the complete inauguration speech delivered Tuesday by Delaware Gov. John C. Carney Jr.:
On Saturday night, some of you here today braved the freezing rain and came out to the Clear Space Theater in Rehoboth for our first Inaugural event — a Celebration of the Arts.
In addition to a jazz band from Cape Henlopen High School and a traditional dance by members of the Nanticoke tribe, we heard from Polytech High School Senior Hannah Sturgis. Hannah’s a teenage poet, but she has a wise old soul.
She recited for us a poem she wrote called “Vision.” It struck a chord with me, and I think it sets the tone I’d like to set here today. I won’t do Hannah’s delivery justice, but I’d like to read a few excerpts now:
“When I look up at the sky I see my dreams bouncing by
Like clouds of promise that keep me honest
Where they can go I don’t know but the road I walk might be long
I get vision when I know that life is changing and my goals are rearranging
I have vision because life is not a hopeless dream
Life is what we make it seem
And when we were young we were told to be like the sun and beam
So I keep on with that vision”
As I made a list of thank yous for today, I realized that I could |
') rail cars, local media has reported.
The new trains, featuring four person sleeping compartments with 64 passenger capacity (compared with the usual capacity of 36 persons) are also equipped with modern conveniences. These include comfortable sleeping places, roomier storage compartments, several power outlets, Wi-Fi, air conditioning, magnetic card-based locks, energy-saving windows and bright energy-saving LED lighting. The cars also feature satellite communications and navigations equipment. Steps to the second level are located at either end of the car.
The train will include sleeping cars, a so-called staff car and a dining car. The staff car, with space for 50 passengers, is equipped with spaces for people with disabilities, including special spaces for the disabled and their carers, along with a wheelchair lift. The dining car, with room for up to 44 people at a time, features a six-cooker convection oven and a roomy freezer, allowing for meals to be cooked fresh right on the train.
© Photo : Tver Carriage Works Sleeping places, four to a room in the sleeping car, in Tver Carriage Works' new double decker design.
The trains are set to set off from St. Petersburg daily at 8:50 pm, arriving in Moscow around 7:00 am the next morning. The first train departing Sunday night from St. Petersburg will see a departure ceremony, with passengers being given special commemorative certificates to mark the event. Tickets for the new route, starting from 1299 rubles (about $20 US), sold out quickly, presumably out of interest in the new cars, designed by the Tver Carriage Works (TVZ), a holding of Transmashholding, for Russian Railways.
© Sputnik / Sergei Pyatakov Moscow Metro Testing Subway Trains Which Will Run on Autopilot
© Photo : Tver Carriage Works Interior of Tver Carriage Works' new bilevel design.
The TVZ designs were first introduced in October, 2013 on the Moscow-Adler, Sochi route, in preparation for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. Russian Railways purchased 50 of the double-decker cars in 2011, and is planning the purchase of dozens more for the St. Petersburg-Moscow, as well as for the Moscow-Kazan route to be introduced later this year, Kommersant explains. The company has also purchased cars for shorter distance routes featuring sitting places, including for the Moscow-Voronezh corridor. Business-class carriages in these trains will have 58 places, with 104 spaces in the economy class.
The new trains are part of a plan to reduce strain on the country's infrastructure of the most heavily used arteries.
In addition to the double-decker train cars, Transmashholding has also signed agreements with Russian Railways subsidiaries on the creation of new, modern designs for electric trains for shorter distance intraregional travel.Are you an avid user of OS X's FileVault encryption and running a recently updated version of Lion? It may be time to consider changing your passwords. According to security researcher David Emry, users who used FileVault prior to upgrading to 10.7.3 may be able to find their password in a system-wide debug log file, stored in plain text outside of the encrypted area. This puts the password at risk of being read by other users or enterprising cyber criminals, Emry explains, and even opens the door for new flaw-specific malware. FileVault 2, on the other hand, seems to be unaffected by the bug. The community doesn't currently have a way to fight the flaw without disabling FileVault, so users rushing to change their password now may find it being logged as well. Obviously, we'll let you all know once we hear back from Apple regarding this matter.WASHINGTON — The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.
Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other American allies, according to former United States and foreign officials, computer experts later briefed on the operations and a newly disclosed N.S.A. document.
A classified security agency program expanded into an ambitious effort, officials said, to place malware that could track the internal workings of many of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers, a force that South Korea’s military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people. Most are commanded by the country’s main intelligence service, called the Reconnaissance General Bureau, and Bureau 121, its secretive hacking unit, with a large outpost in China.
The evidence gathered by the “early warning radar” of software painstakingly hidden to monitor North Korea’s activities proved critical in persuading President Obama to accuse the government of Kim Jong-un of ordering the Sony attack, according to the officials and experts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the classified N.S.A. operation.In his Rumblings blog on Wednesday, Pierre Lebrun of ESPN shared a few nuggets from Islanders GM Garth Snow regarding what the team needs to take another step next season.
Lubomir Visnovsky may not be one of those things.
Snow is quoted in the article saying that the Islanders "don't anticipate" Visnovsky, an unrestricted free agent, to re-sign with the team and that his spot in the line-up could be up for grabs between a trio of young defensemen.
"We obviously have an opening in net behind Jaro [Halak]," Snow said. "That's no secret. I don't anticipate [blueliner Lubomir] Visnovsky coming back so there's potential for one of our young defensemen to earn a spot, whether it's [Scott] Mayfield, [Ryan] Pulock, [Griffin] Reinhart, we'll see what happens via the trade route at the draft and then look into free agency. Those are not guarantees. We feel we have a good group. I'm not shy to say we'd be happy to have the same group back."
While it's not necessarily surprising that the Islanders may not want to bring back a soon-to-be 39-year-old player with a history of concussions, Visnovsky has carved out a place on the team that won't easily be replaced by a kid from Bridgeport, however talented they are.
Dubbed "The Silver Fox" by Kyle Okposo during the playoffs, Visnovsky is a valued voice in the locker room and on the ice, where he excels at moving the puck on the power play and is a trusted presence on the third pair. Mayfield, Pulock and Reinhart have their strengths and young legs, but aren't even almost as experienced as Visnovsky, who's been in the NHL for 15 years.
Just last month, Visnovsky's agent Neil Sheehy shot down a rumor of his client moving to the KHL, saying the focus is on the NHL and that preliminary talks with the Islanders had already taken place. Yesterday via Twitter, the Daily News' Stephen Lorenzo quoted Sheehy has saying Lubo "likes the Islanders for sure."
But as Arthur Staple of Newsday theorizes, perhaps there was something in those preliminary talks that wasn't to Snow's liking, especially now that the salary cap ceiling for next season has been set at $71.4 million. With a little over $16 million in cap room and three RFAs to sign, Snow has some tough decisions to make.
Had heard #Isles and Lubo's agent were still talking. Could be asking price on a 1-year deal is more than Snow is willing to give. — Arthur Staple (@StapeNewsday) June 24, 2015
As a guy who owns a Visnovsky shirsey (yes, I know, I've said that a million times) and loves that smooth-skating high-risk adventure, I want to see Visnovsky back. But as the Islanders venture into previously unexplored territory - where they actually have to worry about the cap ceiling (good lord) - I can understand if Snow doesn't want to commit too much of his remaining space to an aging player.
Even one as fun as The Silver Fox.In January, Ohio State QB Cardale Jones visited some kids in the hospital and played one of them in NCAA Football... he also won by a bunch. But apparently THIS ISN'T OVER.
Hey cardale it's Jared and I'm doing we'll wanted to know if I can get that rematch. @CJ12_ pic.twitter.com/6Ggsj2iaS3 — jared foley (@bearfoley) April 23, 2015
@bearfoley rematch? You sure? May I remind you....... 98-35, lucky that wasn't on PS4, I really took it easy on you bro — Cardale Jones (@CJ12_) April 23, 2015
@CJ12_ @bearfoley lil bro said he wants the rematch — Johnnie Dixon (@MakeHistory_JD) April 23, 2015
@MakeHistory_JD @bearfoley bro, you only can say rematch when the game was close, I destroyed him man, go practice Jared — Cardale Jones (@CJ12_) April 23, 2015
@CJ12_ hey let me know when I can get it and maybe I'll also play you in somthing I can beat you in — jared foley (@bearfoley) April 23, 2015
@bearfoley what game you THINK you can beat me in man — Cardale Jones (@CJ12_) April 23, 2015
@bearfoley NHL 15 bro, I'm black, I don't play NHL — Cardale Jones (@CJ12_) April 24, 2015
@bearfoley give me a couple weeks, I'm about to go buy it now, if I lose you have to reimburse me for buying NHL — Cardale Jones (@CJ12_) April 24, 2015
AND FOR THE RECORD:San Francisco rescinded Tuesday the sale of a private street used by 35 wealthy homeowners of the Presidio Terrace Association.
Tax Collector José Cisneros had put the street up for auction in 2015 after the association failed to pay its annual $14 tax bill for a number of years, amounting to a debt of $994.
“This is an obviously unique and bizarre situation. And there is plenty of blame to go around,” said Supervisor Mark Farrell, who represents the area. The board had approved the sale in 2015, but Farrell said he was unaware of this specific case at the time.
“What happened was totally inappropriate,” Farrell said, arguing the Cisneros should have done more to notify the homeowners before auctioning off the street.
Farrell voted to rescind the sale along with supervisors Malia Cohen, Sandra Fewer, Jeff Sheehy, Ahsha Safai, Katy Tang and board President London Breed.
Supervisors Hillary Ronen, Norman Yee, Aaron Peskin and Jane Kim opposed it.
Ronen argued rescinding the sale was caving to the influence of wealthy people, and that low-income residents or people of color don’t receive similar treatment by City Hall.
“There is no discretion in the law when it comes to poor people,” Ronen said.“I get that it sucks. But did the treasurer act unreasonably? I don’t think so.”
The property was among 389 properties that was auctioned for delinquent property tax bills in 2015 and among the 57 that were sold.
The property was purchased in 2015 by South Bay real estate investor Michael Cheng and his wife, Tina Lam — one of eight bidders — for $90,100. But the homeowners only recently learned of the sale and called on the Board of Supervisors to rescind the sale.
“We are here today because no one regardless of who they are should be deprived of their property without due process of law,” the Presidio Terrace Association’s attorney G. Scott Emblidge said. He argued Cisneros should have done more to notify property owners of the sale based on various court rulings.
But Cisneros said he followed the law and proper notice was provided, including with public notices in the San Francisco Examiner.
“I am not up here saying the treasurer didn’t check the boxes on the tax code about notifying the Board of Supervisors, putting an ad in the Examiner and sending out mail. He did that,” Emblidge said.“But the question is when the mail comes back and you know the property owner didn’t get it, the law says you have got to do more, and [the treasurer] didn’t.”
Emblidge said the association didn’t receive notices due a change in accountants and the address on file with the treasurer no longer went to the association.
The association had also filed a lawsuit against The City and the property owners to regain their street for the cul-de-sac of the multi-million dollar homes.
The association has the backing of former influential Presidio Terrace resident Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco, who wrote asking the board to rescind the sale.
Cheng was unapologetic for the purchase. “We all know we have to pay our taxes,” Cheng said. “They should have known.”
It wasn’t exactly clear what the couple intended to do with the street, but Farrell said he heard that the couple had offered to sell the street back to the homeowners for $1 million.
Click here or scroll down to commentIn a blog post, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Watson says he has quit the Toronto Star newspaper. His resignation comes after his claims that the paper refused to publish a story about the Franklin Expedition.
Watson writes that federal civil servants and others involved in searching for Sir John Franklin's lost ships are accusing an expedition member of spreading "distorted and inaccurate accounts."
He says that person has access to the prime minister's office — and editors at the Star. John Geiger is CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS), a non-profit organization that was heavily involved in the search. Geiger was not available for comment, prior to us going to air.
Paul Watson's author photo from thestar.com (Toronto Star)
On Wednesday, Watson spoke with As It Happens guest host Susan Bonner.
"Some of those details are going to be in [my] story. There are a lot of instances where people are unhappy with accounts that are coming from John Geiger."
Watson makes a point of saying RCGS was only brought into the search operation last April. "The broader issue here to me is, people who are experts in their field being silenced by our government."
He sheds some light on his interactions with his editors, "I was contacted by my immediate editor roughly three hours after I made first contact with Mr. Geiger. This would have been sometime in May...I had been informed that Mr. Geiger knew people among editors at the Star and that he had been in contact with them."
Watson says he was told by the paper's Executive Editor Paul Woods that he must cease reporting on anything related to Mr. Geiger.
In response to some of his claims, the Toronto Star has said it rejects Watson's accusations, "We don't suppress stories. We haven't done that in the past and we're not doing that now."
A sea floor scan reveals one of the missing ships from the Franklin Expedition in an image released in Ottawa on Tuesday September 9, 2014. (Parks Canada/Canadian Press)
In our interview, Watson mentions a letter from Jim Balsillie. He sent this to Minister of the Environment Leona Aglukkaq. As It Happens has seen the letter (dated April 30th, 2015). The former co-CEO of Research in Motion and member of the Arctic Research Foundation expresses his concerns about the documentary, "Franklin's Lost Ships."
Balsillie says the film contains errors. In the letter he writes that he's "troubled that Canadian history is not being presented accurately...[the film] creates new and exaggerated narratives for the exclusive benefit of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society."
The documentary aired on CBC's The Nature of Things. Chuck Thompson, head of Public Affairs, gave us this statement:
"We are confident the documentary is factually sound. And it will air again in the normal telecast cycle." Thompson says the film is a Canadian-UK co-production produced for the CBC.
The film's executive producer Gordon Henderson tells As It Happens that Balsillie's claim that the government had final approval on the film is not true, "Nobody in the government saw our film before it went to air." He calls Balsillie's letter "much ado about nothing...people jockeying for position [who] want credit."
After our interview went to air, Andrew E.M. Gregg posted this message to Facebook. Gregg was a producer and writer for the same film. Here's part of what he had to say:
"As for errors and distortions, our narrative centred on the two Parks Canada archaeologists who were responsible for finding the HMS Erebus. Can't see how we could be accused of making a mistake there.
And finally Paul Watson went on CBC Radio last night and said the film makers -- that would be us -- refused to speak to him. Outright lie. And we have the email trail to prove it. We went so far as to set up a time to talk with him and he never called us back.
On the surface this all seems to have the makings of a juicy story. If I was on the outside looking in I'd be all over this. But I can tell you, from the inside looking out, that I have no idea what Paul Watson is talking about. Maybe over the next few days we'll find out. But I doubt it."
With files from the Canadian PressThis is one of the most-requested quotes I get and I’ve been wanting to adapt it for awhile now. Besides being a wonderful message, the main reason I wanted to feature it was so I could give proper credit to the author. The entire internet seems to think this is a Dr Seuss quote, but it’s actually from Robert Fulghum, the best-selling author of All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten. The origin of the quote was researched by the fantastic Quote Investigator, with the real source being Fulghum’s book True Love. So hopefully this comic helps in giving Mr Fulghum his due. I previously adapted one of his quotes way back in June, 2012.
And yes, I am super-excited about Episode VII and have watched the teaser countless times. December can’t come soon enough!
RELATED COMIC: C.S. LEWIS – To Love at All
– Thanks to everyone who submitted this quote. I hope you all have your own weirdo to spend Valentine’s Day with.TORRANCE, Calif. -- Anderson Silva appears to be comfortable in his new home.
The former UFC middleweight champion held a media day to promote UFC 168 at his gym, Anderson Silva's Muay Thai College, located in an industrial section of the suburban Los Angeles city in which the UFC evolved out of Rorion Gracie's garage.
And unlike the Silva of recent media appearances, who came across like he would have rather been anywhere else, Silva was in a relaxed and playful mood Wednesday.
As he bounced his eight-year old son, Jerome, off his knee, an easygoing Silva appeared to revel in the attention his sparkling new facility, decorated with Nike logos and memorabilia from his magnificent career, was getting.
So he was playful with many of his answers as reporters gathered around.
What of the fact that Chris Weidman, the man who knocked him out at UFC 162, said Tuesday that he planned on finishing Silva again in Las Vegas? Silva laughed, mimicked a panic, and said "I'm scared."
What of those who have compared some of his feats in the Octagon to his martial arts hero, Bruce Lee? "I'm down here," said Silva while pointing to the floor, "and Bruce Lee is up here."
When it comes to the heart of the matter, though, Silva remained as elusive as he was dodging Forrest Griffin's punches at UFC 101. The reason the rematch between Silva and Weidman on Dec. 28 is going to be one of the most-viewed fights in UFC history, of course, is because of what happened the first time out.
Some viewed what happened that night as Silva clowning and Weidman making him pay. Others saw it as Silva playing his usual game but getting caught. Either way, the end result was one of the most shocking moments in the history of combat sports, as Weidman knocked Silva cold.
So what happened? "Sometimes you have good days for working, sometimes you have bad days for working. My last fight was a bad day."
Are we going to see what we saw last time? "I watch the last fight," Silva said. "And I see my technique and I talk to my friends and my coach and I don't change too much. I train hard (on) my mental (game) because my mental was bad."
So maybe, come Dec. 28, we'll see the Anderson Silva who came out with fire in his eyes against Rich Franklin and knocked him halfway back to Cincinnati. Maybe we'll see the Silva who toyed with his foes before finishing them. Maybe we'll see the fighter who got off to slow starts with wrestlers like Chael Sonnen and Dan Henderson and somehow willed his way to victory.
No matter how hard we pry between now and the end of next week, Silva isn't going to tell us his plans. And according to his manager, Ed Soares, that's exactly why UFC 168 is going to be so big.
"We don't know which Anderson we're going to see," Soares said. "I don't even know. Look, what happened in Anderson's last fight is, in every Anderson Silva fight, you're going to see a magic moment happen. For 16 fights, Anderson was on the right end of the magic moment. In the last fight, Anderson was on the wrong end. Hat's off to Chris for pulling it off. But I don't know what we'll see and the fans don't and that's why so many people are going to tune in."
Interest in the fight is such that even Silva's fellow UFC 168 card-mates have thoughts to share. Josh Barnett has been around MMA as long as Silva. The former UFC heavyweight champion, who fights Travis Browne on the main card in Las Vegas, isn't an easy man to impress, but even he's blown away by what the champ's been able to accomplish.
"Silva's awesome," Barnett said in a recent chat with MMAFighting. "To be as good as he's been in this business as long as he has, that's something else. This isn't an easy game to get to the top and it's more difficult to stay there. Honestly, I think Silva wins this one handily. No disrespect to Chris, he has a humble attitude and he's putting in his work, but I saw things in that first fight that I think Silva's going to exploit."
Silva's not going to discuss those "things" Barnett referenced. He did open up, though, when asked questions about matters other than Weidman. Silva was asked how he managed to get things together at his career's midpoint, when he suffered three losses in eight fights and appeared to have stalled out. Silva credited the Nogueira brothers for getting the most out of his talents.
"Rogerio and Minotauro helped me straighten my faults for training and my dream to fight," said Silva, who memorably submitted Sonnen in the fifth round of their UFC 117 fight after Sonnen had mocked Silva's black belt. "I need to say thank you so much for Rodrigo and Rogerio because the guys gave me the chance to follow my dream."
That dream turned into his unprecedented run at the top, holding the UFC middleweight title just shy of six years and nine months and winning 17 fights in a row.
Which brings us back to Weidman. Finally, after shrugging it off, Silva admits that the Weidman fight means something more to him than just any old fight.
"This is very important for me," Silva said. "For my family, my coach, for my legacy, this is very important."
And what does Silva view as his legacy?
"So the people, maybe in five or 10 years, the people say ‘my gosh, this guy changed the sport. For five years this guy fight for the best fight for the people.' In Brazil, I have a program for kids and I see the kids, ‘oh my gosh, one day I go to fight because you changed my life.' This is more important to me, to change kids' lives, than to beat Chris Weidman."Terron Beckham, the 5-foot-11, 230-pound running back who is the closest thing we have to a real life Incredible Hulk, is chasing his dream of playing in the NFL. He recently smashed through his Pro Day, posting a 4.47-second 40-Yard Dash and hitting 36 reps on the 225-pound Bench Press, the latter of which would have ranked first among all draft prospects who participated in the NFL Combine. Beckham also went 44.5 inches high on the Vertical Jump, just 1.5 inches short of the all-time Combine record.
Aside from his otherworldly physical talents, Beckham is also famously known as the cousin of Odell Beckham Jr., the stud wide receiver for the New York Giants. We hadn't heard much from Odell about the NFL potential of his larger, more jacked cousinâuntil now, which might have been for the best. When finally asked if he thought his cousin had a shot at joining him in the pros, Odell sort of sidestepped the question.
"I hope that he can make it in there," Beckham Jr. says in a recent video. "I want him to come in there and shine, Beckham on the back of his jersey. I would love to see that. I wish him the best."Media Create has noted that PS4 sales over in Japan have now crossed over 800,000 units since it came out earlier this year in February.
DualShockers obtained an image of the graph showing that PS4 sales in Japan are now at 809,074 units. It reached this milestone on its 40th week being on sale.
The PS4 managed to have a decent launch last February in Japan selling well over 300,000 units in its first week. After that, sales have been averaging over 10,000 or so units per week since then.
In around nine months, the PS4 has crossed the 800,000 unit mark. It’s safe to say with the upcoming Holiday season, the console should be able to sell over 1 million units in Japan very soon.
The PS4 crossed the 1 million mark over in Germany just a few weeks ago. Germany had a head start since the console came out in November 2013 as opposed to the February 2014 release in Japan.
PS4 sales are likely to spike when more Japanese developed games are released for the console in 2015. Games like Bloodborne, Final Fantasy Type-0 HD and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain are sure to increase interest in the console in Japan.
From a worldwide standpoint, close to 14 million people now own the PS4.The number of people killed in twin vehicle attacks in Spain last week rose to 16 on Sunday, local authorities in Barcelona said.
"This morning a 51-year-old German woman died after being treated in a critical condition in hospital," said a statement from the region's civil defence.
The attacks on Las Ramblas boulevard in Barcelona and in the seaside resort of Cambrils left around 120 wounded.
The woman who died on Sunday was hurt when a man ploughed a van through crowds of tourists on Spain's most famous street on August 17 -- an attack that was claimed by the Islamic State group.
Hours later, a car sped into Cambrils some 120 kilometres (75 miles) south, hitting people before crashing into a police vehicle.
The five occupants of the Audi A3 jumped out and went on a stabbing spree, killing a woman, before they were shot dead by police.
Read more: 'Not afraid': defiant Barcelona to march against terror. @TGowdySC : There's been more coverage of Bieber canceling his tour than of Lynch talking to Comey about if it's an investigation or matter pic.twitter.com/GylmM0IPVL
Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said mainstream media’s decision to give Justin Bieber’s tour cancellation more coverage than former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch telling former FBI Director James Comey to call the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information on a private email server a “matter” is the reason why Democrats get away with criminal activity.
“[T]here’s been more coverage of Justin Bieber canceling his tour than there has been Loretta Lynch talking to Jim Comey about whether it’s investigation or matter. It breaks my heart, what’s left of it as prosecutor, to see the justice system politicized, criminalized or held up in subject to election cycles. I have a lot higher expectations for our justice department,” Gowdy stated.
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent"What's just weird is you imagine to be traded, but you never imagine to be traded to maybe your biggest rival," Francoeur said in Denver, before the Braves played the Rockies.
Discussions began only this week, and Church was told when he came in from batting practice Friday, just before he was to get taped up. The Mets receive $270,218 as part of the trade to equalize salaries.
"As a front office, we're going to continue to try to do things to, you know, shake it up a little bit, not just be complacent and say this is it," Mets general manager Omar Minaya said. "I'm hoping that between here and the All-Star break, you know, we have other things that we talk to teams about, and they may come to reality."
Church is hitting.280 with two home runs and 22 RBIs. A solid right fielder with a good arm, he got off to a terrific start last year in his first season with the Mets before he was slowed by a second concussion. Church collided with teammate Marlon Anderson during spring training, then was accidentally kneed in the head by Braves shortstop Yunel Escobar while trying to break up a game-ending double play at Atlanta on May 20.
Church was stunned by the deal.
"Shocker. Came out of nowhere," he said outside the Mets clubhouse. "The good thing is I get to play these guys next week."
New York opens the second half at Turner Field on Thursday. Church immediately sent Chipper Jones a text message.GLENDALE, Ariz. -- The Phoenix Coyotes have traded center Petteri Nokelainen and minor league defenseman Garrett Stafford to the Montreal Canadiens for center Brock Trotter and a seventh-round pick in next year's draft.
Coyotes general manager Don Maloney announced the deal Sunday hours before his struggling team was to play the Ducks in Anaheim. Phoenix is off to a 2-3-1 start.
The 25-year-old Nokelainen played five games for the Coyotes this season and had one assist. He was signed as an unrestricted free agent in May.
Stafford had one goal and three assists in six games for Phoenix's AHL affiliate in Portland this season.
Trotter had two goals and five assists in five games this season for the AHL's Hamilton Bulldogs after playing last year for Riga in the Kontinental Hockey League.Turkish Nobel laureate blames Erdoğan for bringing country to brink
ROME - Agence France-Presse
DHA photo
Turkey's Nobel laureate has warned the country could collapse into sectarian conflict and blamed President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the climate of insecurity brutally illustrated by Oct. 10 deadly attacks in Ankara.Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 winner of the Nobel prize for literature, told Italian daily La Repubblica that Turkey's increasing instability was linked to Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party's (AKP) failure to retain a parliamentary majority in June."The electoral defeat enraged Erdogan," Orhan told the daily, arguing that the setback, which resulted in new elections being scheduled for November 1, was also behind the recent resumption of hostilities between the army and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militants."He didn't succeed in convincing the Kurds to give him their votes for his plan to create a presidential republic," Orhan said."That is why he decided to go to the polls again on Nov. 1. But neither the government nor the army were satisfied with how things were going and they agreed to resume the war against the Kurdish movement."Asked if he feared a return to civil war, Orhan replied: "Certainly I fear that. Especially in the 1970s the streets of my city (Istanbul) witnessed a real conflict between people of the left and those of the right."Anyone over 35 has terrible memories of that period and never wants to go back there."Orhan, who lives between Istanbul and New York, where he teaches at Colombia University, said most Turks understood what Erdoğan was up to."The entire country has understood his calculation," he said. "At first he did not want to be part of the international coalition fighting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Then he agreed to do what the Americans asked him to but at the same time he started bombing the Kurds."People are surprised, in shock," he said. "A country at peace has suddenly found itself at war both against the ISIL and the Kurds."I am worried (for Turkey) because I know that in the end Erdoğan wants to govern alone at all costs."He does not want to share power."When we daydream about the future, we tend to focus on the fabulous belongings we're going to have. Jet packs, flying cars, weapons to kill aliens, cell phones that make today's sleek models look clunky -- you name it, we're going to have it. We don't tend to focus, however, on who we'll be in the future. Most of us probably picture ourselves exactly the same, though maybe thinner, as surely we'll all have robot personal trainers by then. While we see the world's technology evolving to meet our needs, we may not think about how we ourselves might be evolving.
The story of evolution up to this point explains how we became the upright walking, tool-using homo sapiens of today. The turning point of this story so far concerns cranial expansion. About 2.5 million years ago, hominids started out with a brain weighing approximately 400-450 grams (approximately 1 pound), but around 200,000 to 400,000 years ago, our brains became much bigger than those of other primates [source: Kouprina et al.]. Now, we humans walk around with brains tipping the scales at 1350 to 1450 grams (approximately 3 pounds) [source: Kouprina et al.].
As humans, we enjoy a much larger neocortex. This area of the brain is the key ingredient that separates us from other species -- it allows us to do our deep thinking, make decisions and form judgments. And while our brain has served us well so far, it certainly has a few defects we wouldn't mind eliminating, like disease, depression and the tendency to make drunken phone calls at 2 a.m. to an ex-boyfriend. But until recently, scientists thought that we were done evolving, that we had reached a sort of evolutional apex. Now, though, some researchers think that we're not quite done.
Could our brains be evolving right now? Could we gain the intelligence to make our dreams of the future come true, or will we return to the hominid state of yesteryear? Go to the next page to find out if brain evolution is possible.Halima Lucas
2018/2019 Writing Program
In the mid-’90s one could find a young inquisitive Halima daydreaming in the middle of the street or chasing lizards in her awesome farmland-y, yet urban hometown of Stockton, California. Although she’s small in stature, she comes from a huge family of nine kids. That’s right, Halima is one of NINE brothers and sisters.
Being second oldest of the bunch, she spent most of her time as an unpaid babysitter. At first the gig was tough -- changing diapers, cleaning up toys, and sucking snot out kids’ noses with that blue thingy. However, over time she learned that the key to getting her siblings to behave was telling stories. Whether it was getting them ready for school or to take a bath, she had a theatrical performance to get the task done. Believe me, Halima’s rendition of “The Poo-Poo Pee-Pee Monster” was enough to make any kid wipe thoroughly!
While Halima developed a love for storytelling early on, she wasn’t quite sure of how to channel it into a career. Then, in her third year in college she received the gift of a lifetime - the password to a friend’s Netflix account. After a summer of binge watching everything from indie rom-coms to historical dramas, she fell in love with the world of TV & film and changed her career plans from college professor to starving artist -- I mean filmmaker. Although it was tough to leave her family and hometown, Halima moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts’ MFA Production program. There she developed her storytelling skills by writing and directing short films.
After graduating film school, Halima assumed her big break would happen in no time! After all, her short thesis film was nominated for a Student Academy Award. Instead she ended up sweeping glitter from the floors of Joann’s Fabrics for ten bucks an hour. Somewhere between the angry customers and the constantly clogged toilet, Halima developed a quirky, yet dark sense of humor – likely as a coping mechanism. She found herself thoroughly entertained by the different characters of the store and when she wasn’t at work stocking shelves of construction paper, she was at home channeling the hilarity of her day to day experiences into scripts. One fateful day at Joann’s while mopping up parrot poop (because someone just HAD to bring a parrot in the store), Halima spotted someone shoplifting and was instantly inspired. Clearly this person was out there living their “best life”, and maybe now it was time for her to do the same, so she quit.
Shortly after retiring from glitter sweeping, Halima was selected as |
also involvement of local communities around protected areas.
Together, we need to commit to long-term demand reduction efforts to protect rhinos.
Take action to stop wildlife crime.Bernie Sanders’ campaign calls for a political revolution against the billionaire class. He is rejecting all corporate money, and he said during the November 14 debate: “Here’s my promise: Wall Street representatives will not be in my cabinet!” Bernie’s openness to fighting back against a system where political and economic decisions are dictated by the billionaire class has had an electrifying effect on working class and young voters.
Hillary is trying to package herself as Bernie-lite. She recently said to The Late Show, “We’ve got to get back to providing opportunities, we’ve got to get back to making the economy work for everybody, and we have to defend the progress we’ve made in women’s rights and gay rights, and we have to protect voting and immigrant rights and everything else.”
While Hillary is trying her hardest to rebrand herself and pull the wool over people’s eyes, the stark underlying difference is shown by their campaign contributions. While Hillary’s campaign is awash in corporate money, with Wall Street topping the charts, Bernie is rejecting big business contributions, relying instead on over 800,000 small donors and counting. So why is big business lining up behind Hillary if she’s a born again progressive? Ample reasons can be found in Hillary’s long political history, which speaks much louder than any progressive proclamations made on her website.
Financed by Wall Street
During Bill Clinton’s presidency, where Bill and Hillary always worked very much as a team, the road was paved for the deregulation of the financial market, which helped lead to the 2008 crisis. So when Hillary started her own political career, she had the instant backing of Wall Street. Her current campaign website declares that “Wall Street Should Work for Main Street,” but when the banks collapsed in 2008, she sold out “Main Street” by voting for the bank bailouts. To date, her top five donors are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, DLA Piper (a corporate law firm), JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley (OpenSecrets.org).
Hillary now claims that, as president, she would have the strongest program to hold Wall Street accountable, but would Wall Street executives be lining up behind her if they believed that were true? The investment industry has already given Hillary a total of $5.5 million during this election campaign alone.
Warmonger
As a Senator, Hillary not only voted for Bush’s Iraq War, but distinguished herself as a fierce advocate for it. She voted for the Patriot Act both times, helping to build the basis for the surveillance state we now have. As Secretary of State, Hillary consistently supported U.S. “allies,” no matter how oppressive. During the Arab Spring, Hillary supported the brutal dictatorships of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain against the peaceful pro-democracy uprisings in those countries.
Attacks on the Poor
Perhaps the strongest progressive narrative around Hillary is that she is a populist fighter who for decades has been an advocate for families and children. Does this line up with her record?
When it comes to helping low-income families, Hillary supported the repeal of welfare. She talked about undeserving, lazy parents to justify gutting the program. But, whatever she thinks about the parents, the reality is that 70% of the recipients of this program were innocent children who were left with limited or no benefits. This one act, arguably, did more harm to families and children in the U.S. than anything else in recent history.
“Tough On Crime”
Hillary helped Bill campaign for the “tough on crime” laws that created the mass incarceration system we have now. “We need more police,” she said in 1994. “We need more and tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders. The ‘three strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets” (Salon.com, 4/13/2015). This has resulted in the highest prison incarceration rate in the world, and there are almost six million ex-felons who are deprived of their voting rights and face discrimination when seeking jobs and housing.
Many people are unaware of the instrumental role that Hillary and Bill played in building our current system of mass incarceration. Pushing harsher and harsher penalties for crimes related to poverty resulted in what many refer to as “The New Jim Crow,” where currently 1 in 3 black men will go to prison at some point in their lifetimes.
Fighter for the Oppressed?
When it comes to the rights of LGBTQ people, Hillary says she is a fighter for gay rights, but as late as 2013 she maintained that marriage was between a man and a woman (The Atlantic, 6/13/2014). As regards the rights of undocumented workers, Hillary now says that she supports a pathway to citizenship, but in 2006 she voted for a Republicanbacked bill to build a 700-mile wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Keystone XL
In another one of her numerous flip-flops in this electoral race, Clinton recently announced that she is opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline. But as late as July 2015, she was still undecided on this widely despised project. Two big Canadian banks who are key investors in Keystone XL paid Clinton over $1.6 million in speaking fees from 2014-2015, giving her ample reason to remain undecided until it was too late for her opinion to make a difference.
Corporate Trade Deals
This isn’t Hillary’s first time reinventing her stances on issues. During her presidential bid in 2008, Barack Obama called her out during a debate for her opportunist flip-flop on NAFTA. “The fact is, she was saying great things about NAFTA until she started running for president,” he said. As Secretary of State, Hillary then went on to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which has been called “NAFTA on steroids.” She has spoken over 45 times in support of TPP over a five-year period before recently changing her stance.
Hillary is the only Democratic candidate not supporting a $15 an hour minimum wage; instead, she only calls for $12. This reluctance is consistent with Hillary Clinton’s record on the Walmart Board of Directors from 1986-1992, when she did nothing to raise the wages of workers or combat the company’s unionbusting practices. While Hillary would like to pretend her Walmart days are behind her, her current campaign treasurer, Jose Villarreal, is a Walmart insider who was on their Executive Advisory Council until 2013.
Walmart’s Candidate
While Hillary Clinton looks progressive in comparison to anyone in the Republican race, she has a long history of showing that she is not the candidate able to fight back against the advances of the right wing. It was disappointments with Obama that opened the door for Republican gains. Obama had promised to offer a change from the Bush administration, yet he packed his cabinet with Wall Street bankers. If elected, we won’t get the new, progressive-looking Hillary Clinton. We will get what she has always delivered: a Hillary who serves the interests of Wall Street and the 1% over the needs of working people.The polygraph is commonly referred to as a "lie detector." Critics of the device say the biggest lie is that it works, while supporters say it's an essential crime-fighting tool.
Federal investigation targets anti-polygraph crusaders.
"It's a joke to call it a lie detector and it's foolish and dangerous for the government and the criminal justice system to rely on it for anything," said Doug Williams who teaches people how to pass a polygraph.
Williams wasn't always the anti-polygraph crusader he is today. He spent the first few years of his career as a police officer who actually ran polygraph exams for the Oklahoma City Police Department. "I knew it was really, really good at getting confessions," Williams said.
The tipping point for Williams came when he listed to private polygraph examiners boast about the number of for-profit tests they ran and when he discovered he could manipulate the results of a standard exam.
"Basic biofeedback, just calm yourself down on the relevant questions and think of something frightening on the control questions," Williams told Fox 25, "And lo and behold I could control every tracing on that chart."
Williams wrote manuals on how to beat the polygraph and testified before congress to help pass laws banning polygraphs by private employers. However, the exam is still required as a condition of employment by many law enforcement and government agencies.
Williams told Fox 25 the federal government spends $150 million each year on polygraph exams for various agencies that use it as a condition of employment. He says that money essentially funds ways to bypass discrimination laws.
"I have one thing on my bucket list and that is to destroy this industry, this insidious, Orwellian instrument of torture to make everybody quit using it," Williams said.
"In the hands of some guys, some examiners, it's probably not more than chance they get the correct answer," said Bill Brown a former FBI polygraph examiner, "But if you know what you're doing and have the right equipment and you understand what polygraph is, it's extremely reliable."
Brown says the polygraph measures the "fight or flight" response; a function of the autonomic nervous system and uncontrollable. He says people he's tested that tried to control their responses during the test ended up revealing much more than they intended. "It's my belief when you try to manage one the other three are exacerbated, they're made even more emblematic."
"When your mouth says something your mind knows is not soyour mind has to acknowledge it's not so," Brown said. Brown said his research into the polygraph has shown it is a scientifically sound instrument in the hands of the right examiner.The soldiers came looking for weapons of mass destruction. What they found in the flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's secret police headquarters was a legacy of destruction -- the demise of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world.
There was a treasure trove of Torahs and Haggadas, centuries old. And there were marriage records, university applications, financial documents -- the living record of a community, seized by the Mukhabarat from the homes of Jews as they fled Iraq under pressure and amid persecution, with only a handful remaining.
Now comes the historical conundrum: Who owns these materials?
In the chaotic aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, the thousands of sodden documents were spirited out of the country with an assist from then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney's office and a vague promise of their return once they had been restored. With the materials still sitting in a College Park office building, stabilized but with mold on them, the Iraqi government is demanding that they be shipped back, saying they are the property of the Iraqi people.
"They represent part of our history and part of our identity. There was a Jewish community in Iraq for 2,500 years," said Samir Sumaidaie, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. "It is time for our property to be repatriated."
A high-level Iraqi delegation, led by Deputy Culture Minister Taher al-Humoud, met Thursday with senior State Department officials to press for the return of the artifacts.
But others, including many involved in saving the materials, say that they belong to the Jews who fled, or their descendants -- many of whom live in Israel.
"I don't see any reason for it to go back to Iraq, because if it is the patrimony of the Jewish community of Iraq, then wherever they are it's theirs," Harold Rhode, a former Defense Department official, told the Jerusalem Post last month. "When they left, they would have taken it with them had they been able to take it with them. You don't abandon Torahs."
The State Department does not dispute Iraq's claim to the documents. But another concern is the condition of the materials, which total 3,500 tagged items, including clumps of paper yet to be separated. They were found floating in three feet of sewage water because U.S. bombs had burst the pipes in the Mukhabarat's basement.
Preservation efforts
Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration, said the agency takes no position on who owns the documents but believes the materials need much more preservation work. "They continue to be very fragile and have mold on them," she said. "There are health implications to materials that have mold."
NARA has spent less than $1 million stabilizing the material, Cooper said. The agency's staff members recently completed an item-by-item assessment and are in the final stages of estimating the cost of a full preservation, including digitizing images of the pages. An NARA estimate in 2003 pegged the cost at $1.5 million to $3 million.
Sumaidaie said he had been told that the cost could be as high as $6 million. But he said he thinks that the materials are stable enough so that no "further damage or decay can take place" and that Iraq can handle any additional restoration work.
After the discovery of the materials by troops looking for illegal weapons, Rhode, working at the time in Iraq, sought help from Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile leader and at the time a U.S. favorite. Chalabi provided a pump, bins and other help. The materials were left in the sun to dry, but when Rhode learned that freezing kills mold, they were transferred to a refrigerator truck running 24 hours a day.
"It was absolutely awful. No one was interested," Rhode said. "And then very simply [former Russian dissident Natan] Sharansky, who phoned me from time to time when I was there to make sure I was still alive -- I've known him for many years -- called Cheney. The American government, all of a sudden, got very interested."
With the apparent blessing of what was left of the Iraqi Ministry of Culture, the materials were flown to Texas to be freeze-dried and then were transferred to College Park for preservation and restoration. The State Department says that when the Coalition Provisional Authority transferred sovereignty to Iraq in June 2004, it gave the Ministry of Culture the right to demand the documents upon written request.
Point of contention
Dov. S. Zakheim, a senior Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration, is opposed to sending the materials back to Iraq. "I have no sympathy for a government which stole it from the rightful owners and then a successor government saying it belongs to them," he said.
Iraq would be willing to consider individual claims to the documents, Sumaidaie said, but the question of giving them to descendants is "not for us a matter for dispute or discussion." He pledged that the documents would be made available in Iraq to any researchers.
Sumaidaie noted that "we had a huge amount of plunder of our historical artifacts as a result of the American intervention." Any full accounting of what is owed to whom, he said, "is not going to be very favorable to our American friends."Lady Gaga has long since professed her love of metal music, and we think she might be the real deal as Judas Priest ’s Rob Halford recently called the pop star a “ heavy metal music maniac.” With that in mind, it may not come as a big surprise that in a recent interview Gaga said she has always aspired to be the next Iron Maiden, rather than the next Madonna.
In a talk with CF Fashion Book magazine, Gaga said of Iron Maiden, "They're one of the greatest rock bands in history, in my opinion." She went on, "Some people really don't know the importance of metal and the scope of it. Those guys were filling stadiums, and they still are. And it's because of the culture of the music, the poetry that's so powerful, that whenever the fans come together, they unite in the essence of what Iron Maiden is all about. I always used to say to people, when they would say, 'Oh, she's the next Madonna.' No, I'm the next Iron Maiden."
She not only references her love for the group in the article, but she’s pictured in the high fashion magazine wearing one of their band shirts. In two posts on Twitter, Gaga shows a picture of her “Number of the Beast” tee and reveals that it’s from her own personal collection. She even got a response from Iron Maiden, with the band telling Gaga that she’s “looking good.” While in her last post, the pop star writes that she is “so proud to be a fan.”
In late July, Judas Priest’s Halford talked about his run-in with Gaga and her love for metal. “Let me tell you: that lady is a heavy metal maniac,” he said. “She loves Priest, she loves [Iron] Maiden, she loves Motorhead — all of these kinds of heavy metal bands that have been roaring on throughout the decades; she’s a big fan of all [of them].”
He even went on to say that he would love to sing with her someday. “You know, you have to cut through a lot of the visual stuff with Gaga and then get to what her voice is about.” He continued, “For me, as a singer, as a fellow singer, she’s absolutely sensational and I would love at some point to do something with her. I don’t know if that’s ever gonna happen, but it’s on my bucket list. I think we’ve all got a bucket list, and that’s on mine.”
You Think You Know Iron Maiden?Russian security services said Sunday that they killed eight Islamists who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and were behind attacks in the Caucasus region.
Special forces clashed with a "group of armed persons" in a mountain forest area near to Chechnya, said the National Antiterrorist Committee, without saying when the incident happened.
"As a result of a firefight, eight militants were neutralised."
The committee added in a statement that the slain militants "recently pledged allegiance and joined the international terrorist organisation Islamic State" and were implicated in a series of police murders and other crimes.
The statement, published by Russian news agencies, said one of the men was identified as Adam Tagilov, who organised an armed raid on Grozny, the main city in Chechnya, in December 2014.
Fourteen security officers were killed when armed militants stormed several buildings in Grozny on the day of President Vladimir Putin's state of the nation address.
In June, Islamist militants in four regions of Russia's Caucasus pledged allegiance to ISIS, which accepted their pledge and appointed a "governor" of the Caucasus.
Russia estimates that several thousand of its citizens are fighting for factions affiliated with ISIS jihadists in Syria, many of them from the Caucasus, where a simmering insurgency had existed since Moscow fought two wars with separatists in Chechnya.
Last Update: Sunday, 2 August 2015 KSA 21:34 - GMT 18:34A close friend asked me a few days ago – “You’ve covered decent ground on the science, dimensions, characteristics, design aspects, process and pervasiveness of usability considerations. How about doing a reverse bit? What usability is not about? Or the myths of usability?” I jumped at the chance.
In choosing to write this, I am simply reinforcing the simple concept that it is also necessary to talk about the “NOT” part in a subject as complex as usability. This shall (I hope!) help in resolving ugly assumptions about the subject and expose more dimensions for discussion. Let’s take a journey of both – popular and unpopular myths of usability. The following are prevailing misconceptions (fast becoming legends!) of usability, in no particular order.
Usability is expensive
It is known that Stanford University, Microsoft, IBM, and many others spend tons of resources (money and human) on usability research, which is quite expensive. But regular and daily usability need not be expensive – thanks to a much evolved ecosystem that allows the science to be applied without having to spend a lot.
I agree that it’s not a commodity – that there’s a price to pay. But from a cost-benefit standpoint, more often than not, usability is not as expensive as it is perceived to be. The major contributor to this misconception is that usability is non-measurable in nature, hence it allows the argument and myth in question.
Usability is free
At the opposite end of the first misconception, a large number of people believe that usability can be free. I’ve seen many people ask suggestions on improving the usability of their site or product – on LinkedIn. There is a regular crowd that asks me personally about giving usability suggestions on their site. Well, for a matter as subjective as usability, the lack of real engagement in this kind of flat question-advice round, makes it even more subjective. Free advice and usability tips are available everywhere, but they’re more like the generic horoscope guidelines and predictions, in my opinion.
Usability is minimalism
The concept of minimalism is usually a nice and welcome change in today’s noisy world. Minimalism is about reducing clutter from your presence, by playing with content, number of pages, element sizes, images, white spaces and navigation. What we need to be aware of is that while usability will almost always get in some minimalism, the reverse is not necessarily true.
Going minimal is not alone going to get you usability. There are many areas of compromise if the distinction between the two is not well understood. Like, having graphic icons/buttons that consume less space instead of textual menus that consume more space. Or trying to fit all content on one screen by adjusting to a very difficult-to-read font size. Different solutions are appropriate at different times.
Usability is user experience
The fundamental difference is “Can easily use” vs. “Want to use”. Let’s take the best possible example here – the usability guru: Jakob Nielsen’s website. Usability guru that he is, his site is very functional and easy to use. But how do you think it scores on user experience? Would visitors love to browse the site for better experience? The answer is NO.
Again, there are some practitioners who believe building a good user experience is all that’s needed for making the site usable. That had led to the myth in question. Superior user experiences have failed miserably in usability, as it’s just one of the dimensions of usability. It is still important to have the right balance.
Usability is all art
Image by MitchellZappa
Art is something that mostly makes sense to the creator alone! Using that as an analogy, I’ve experienced my usability suggestions and advice being alienated to art and abstraction. This myth is more about a mind-block and prejudice than anything else. People think that you need to be an artist or a designer to create usability. Usability does not need artists, it requires fundamentalists and practical observers.
Being an artist can definitely provide an edge of translating the usability practice into a visual design. But otherwise, so much has been institutionalized as a science in the field of usability that companies can do without engaging an artist. However, one point in favor of the myth: There’s no denying that the best usability cases around us did have an art element and that shall continue to be the case. But…
Usability is simplicity
Simplicity is subjective. Even usability is subjective, but simplicity is consciously and directly subjective. Typical end-users are ignorant of technology/design, but they are not dumb. Making it simple is often understood and implemented, sadly, by treating users as dumb consumers.
So, most commonly, you will find people having giant task buttons, heavy label texts, prominent hints on screen, basically, all-important-functions-in-your-face attitude. Your concept of simple may not be so for your audience. This blind simplicity approach does not yield usability mostly, let alone always. Usability will drive simplicity laterally, not literally. Hence the myth is risky.
Usability kills creativity
This is one of the most common misconceptions (also nicely explained on Jakob Nielsen’s website). People think that following formal and scientific process in usability compromises the creative aspects, and leads to a compromised output. We need to appreciate here that the formal techniques, scientific processes are all a framework to guide and engage into usability practice. They are guidelines, not strict rules. Following them as such, you’ll undoubtedly fall prey to losing out on creativity. Following them as guidelines, you’ll get your out-of-the-box element inside your design.
Usability is common sense
The point of argument here is that common sense has a risk of being singular in nature, only with the assumption that it’ll be common to all. Like the famous quote: Common sense is not so common! In the perspective, common sense is merely an opinion at large with weak justifications from a random collection of users or concepts. So, it’s difficult to theorize based on the common sense equation. Very few things can command usability as common to all as a Google’s search. It’s more about amalgamation of varied wisdom and practicing that into your usability design. Naturally, this myth complements myth #2; since usability is perceived as common sense, it can be free.
Usability is good design
Good design (leaving apart the subjective angle) is only an element or output of usability – in practical sense. Otherwise, it’s more like a philosophy. Usability done with a philosophy of good design, would make it effective, error-tolerant, engaging, etc. This part I echo. My argument is towards the literal aspect about the myth, that a good design brings usability. In a way, this has a resemblance to myth #4: usability is User Experience. A good user interface design is not going to save a product if it is not useful or low on performance or erroneous. The usability and acceptance of such products have no connection with the presence or absence of good design.
Usability is about following some rules
Allow me to paint a wider picture here. Millions of books are available, being published and read all the time, that are self-help, how-to-guides, step-by-step. Thousands of blogs and articles teach and preach (including mine, I’m afraid!) about things you assume you’ll be able to learn and apply. That’s a fair assumption, albeit if all the literature is not taken literally. You need to constantly remind yourselves that there are no rules, only guidelines. You need to treat these reference materials as unbiased guidelines that you will taken into account – devising your own framework, your own rule-set, allowing enough flexibility too – if you want to apply consistently. Complex subjects are never mastered with step-by-step-wizard like software installations. Usability is no exception to this.
Usability is a luxury
The myth and the related corollaries that “usability can be done at the end”, “we don’t need usability to survive” can be near fatal, if given into. In today’s competitive times, where switching cost is so low, consumers will not hesitate switching to a more usable product with less features. Consider how DropBox scores over Minus and other similar products – only because they have done a fantastic usability job. DropBox does not even offer maximum storage space for free as others; still it commands the loyalty leading to a market valuation of 5 Billion Dollars!
Usability is fast becoming the key to survival; just that many are not aware of this. If you ignore or take it up as a low priority, the perceived quicker time to market is only going to cause harm. We cannot afford any myths. We need to be embracing reality and changing business and user needs; we need to be more agile to these demands, and from a product/website perspective, we need a more conscious effort on usability. It will enable marketing and empower sales. You will find this element common to all the successes in the world, and also find this element missing from all the failures in the world. And that’s not a myth!
Related ResourcesMy Santa is a Santa Angel! Not long ago I moved and had cut it down to the wire on getting every thing out and the apartment cleaned. On my last day at the apartment, in between trips back and forth, someone ran a red light and hit me. Well that ended my moving, but I was pretty sure I only had some light cleaning left. The wreck was bad and I was out a car because my car needed 7,000 in repairs. It wasn't until a few days later, that I realized I had left my cookbooks in a very high cupboard. When I called my landlord, it was too late and I was unable to get back the cookbooks. So along comes the Reddit cookbook exchange. Now I am a really bad cook and had been collecting the Alton Brown cookbooks, because they are basically "explain like I'm five with pictures". With those books, not even I could mess up the recipes lol. Tonight I got home from work and found a package at my door. As I opened the box, I couldn't believe it. My Santa Angel is so kind, and generous, and amazing! My Santa replaced the whole Alton Brown collection!!!! I can't thank my Santa enough for being so generous to me. Thank you kind stranger. You made my day, week, year!! I love my cookbook Santa!!!My Sims 3 Store Free Store Items Haul
♠ 18 Aries 14, Frigg's Day ♣
In a sort of some-benevolent-god-is-watching-me way, a day after I posted about how to get free Sims3 Store items, I got a whole lot more free items.
(This post is about getting free stuff from the Sims 3 Store. If you’re looking for downloads, check the other pages.)
The Sims3 Store is having a store-wide sale (it’s still on!). Because the Complete Your Set and store discounts stack, I went to check out the sets.
My Purchase History
I bought the India Inspirations Collection for 105 SimPoints, which I now realise I possibly didn’t even have to pay, but that’s okay, because lots of free stuff.
I got Morocco Mystique for free because I already had Cante Captivating (it was given for free last Christmas). Combined with the stuff I got a few days ago (for free), I got the Best of 2012 Compilation for free. Which gave me enough items to get the April 2012 Compilation – you guessed it – for free. It’s fun just to say it: Free free free! Freedom!
The green button (instead of blue), means that I don’t own it yet.
Oh, and Killer Classics, which I mentioned a few days ago was offered to me for 160 SimPoints? I was too cheap to buy it then. I got it for free today.
♥ Best of 2012 Compilation (which includes the Stones Throw Greenhouse and Itadakimasu!)
♥ Stones Throw Greenhouse (SwiftGro Gardening Station, Plants vs. Zombies Sunflower)
♥ Itadakimasu! Japanese Inspired Dining (Chun Co. Teppanyaki Grill)
♥ April 2012 Compilation
♥ Fabulous Fiesta! (Sizzle Baby Pro Deep Fryer, Frost-Bite Pro Ice Cream Machine)
♥ Killer Classics (Laganaphyllis Simnovorii (aka The Cow Plant))
♥ Storybook Bathroom Set (63 SimPoints)
♥ India Inspirations Collection (105 SimPoints)
♥ Morocco Mystique + Cante Captivating
Something witty this way comes…
346 words / 7565Time travel is something which has always captured our imagination and its concept has been a part of science fiction for a number of years. In a way we are all time travelers moving ahead with time everyday but the question is, can we make time to go slow or move faster.
Einstein’s theory of special relativity already specifies that time could slow down or speed up depending on the speed at which any object moves relative to another object. A person travelling at light speed would age much slower than similarly aged people on Earth. It’s been proven with GPS satellite technology that the satellites that rotate around Earth at higher speeds gain 38 microseconds a day relative to the observers at the ground. That also means, the astronauts living on the space station are actually time travelers as they come back slightly younger than their identical twins on Earth.
Ancient Astronaut theory suggests that we are being visited by humans from future. Let’s start with some evidence to support the theory of time travelling humans.
The Time Travelling Hipster
This picture was taken in Nov, 1940, As you can notice the mysterious person marked in this picture looks way different than anyone else in the picture. He has modern day hairstyle, clothing and seems to be holding a digital camera. Various tests have been conducted on this photograph since 1940 proving that the hipster is not photo shopped.
Astronaut on a Pillar of Salamanca Cathedral Church
This cathedral located in the Spanish city of Salamanca was built in 1102 and its one of the oldest church constructions in the world. It has some of the best stone carvings on its walls. Amongst this, one can also see a carved depiction of an astronaut wearing a space suit. This carving is so intricate that one can even see the sole of the shoes. What is a 20th century astronaut doing on a religious building built in 1102.
Ancient Astronaut of Guatemala
In the heart of the Guatemala city there is a sculpture which shows uncanny resemblance to a modern day astronaut in full gear. It clearly shows a Helmet, visor and some kind of communication and breathing apparatus built into the helmet. This sculpture dates more than 2500 years old making people wonder about its existence.
The Greys
They are most recognizable form of alien beings known to the humankind. They have enlarged heads, large dark eyes, small mouth and tiny nostrils, very skinny body with long fingers on arms and legs. Their shape is so similar with humans that they are also known as humanoids. Ancient Astronaut theorists believe that in the future humans will expand their intellectual knowledge exponentially as compared to today resulting in an enlarged brain, also we would be so dependent on machinery that it will render us physically inert causing us to lose muscle and be skinny. The Greys could actually be future humans visiting us to alter our DNA or to alter events in the history to ensure human survival or any other reason.In my post on October 19 (which seems soooo long ago), No, the CIA is not going to take the fall for Obama on Libya-gate, I predicted:
In a ritual as old as the existence of the modern intelligence community, leaks are beginning to spill out protecting the CIA from having to take the fall for Obama’s Libya cover-up…. 18 days until the election. I hope the bureaucrats have recharged their cell phones. Maybe there will be an October surprise after all.
Jennifer Griffin of Fox News reports, today, EXCLUSIVE: CIA operators were denied request for help during Benghazi attack, sources say:
Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. Consulate and subsequent attack several hours later was denied by U.S. officials — who also told the CIA operators twice to “stand down” rather than help the ambassador’s team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11. Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. Consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to “stand down,” according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to “stand down.”
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Who are these mysterious sources?
Well, the ones with the fully charged cell phones.Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office was more involved in a $20.5 million school contract with a now-indicted consultant than previously disclosed, public records indicate, but his administration has refused to release hundreds of emails that could provide a deeper understanding of how the deal came to be.
Emanuel and his aides have maintained that the mayor's office had nothing to do with the contract to provide leadership training for principals that is at the center of a federal bribery indictment against ex-schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and the consulting firm where she once worked.
When asked in April if his administration had any role at all in the SUPES contract, Emanuel told reporters, "No, you obviously know that by all the information available. And so the answer to that is no."
Yet the mayor's office and schools officials have been in an ongoing struggle with the Tribune over reporters' public records requests that could bear directly on the controversy, withholding many emails for months before releasing them, several so heavily redacted that little more than the subject line and addresses remain.
The Emanuel administration has declined to provide about half of the roughly 1,000 emails requested. As part of that fight, the Tribune in June sued the city under the state Freedom of Information Act after the mayor's office redacted or withheld about two dozen emails emanating from Emanuel's office.
While much of the picture remains missing, the email logs and documents the administration did release show frequent communication among key Emanuel aides, Chicago school leaders and the heads of the SUPES Academy consulting firm in the months, weeks and days leading up to Emanuel's hand-picked school board awarding the contract in June 2013.
The consulting firm's ties date to the beginning of Emanuel's administration in 2011; in addition to recommending Byrd-Bennett, SUPES co-owner Gary Solomon helped recruit Emanuel's first schools CEO.
Specifically, the email logs indicate that key CPS officials and SUPES executives had numerous discussions about the SUPES firm and principal leadership training — a crucial element of Emanuel's education agenda — ahead of education meetings in the mayor's office in May 2013 and in June 2013, prior to the board vote. Those meetings included the mayor, his top education adviser Beth Swanson, Byrd-Bennett and top CPS officials involved in the SUPES discussions, according to copies of Emanuel's public calendar.
On Thursday, Byrd-Bennett and the co-owners of SUPES were indicted on charges that she steered them the no-bid business in return for promises of more than $2 million in kickbacks, other perks and a future job. Prosecutors alleged that Byrd-Bennett schemed with her SUPES colleagues even as she was joining CPS.
Much of the alleged scheming is laid out in the federal indictment by way of emails between Byrd-Bennett and Solomon. It's unclear what type of email accounts were involved and therefore hard to know whether the emails should have been turned over in response to Tribune requests for public records.
SUPES' work at CPS predated Byrd-Bennett's time as CEO. The firm had begun providing leadership training for school executives in 2012, months before she took over the reins at CPS.
But by early 2013, efforts to expand the program were growing, and emails obtained by the Tribune show SUPES' co-owners and CPS officials discussing how to secure more money to broaden the training. Some |
with the Warriors providing a hard ceiling for the rest of the NBA, but if Kyrie and his Celtics aren’t going to have much more than an outside shot at a title for the next little while, this is at least the beginning of Kyrie Irving as his own thing, walking around with the giant trademark attached to his name—that threshold athletes cross where they become objects of public fascinations and ambassadors for all kind of entities, not least of all themselves. This is an odd thing to want, and not everyone as great at basketball as Kyrie seems to want it, or it becomes a somewhat incidental part of what (if not necessarily who) they are, or it’s a byproduct buckraking. For Kyrie, it’s been a bona fide professional goal for a long time now. Finally loosed from LeBron’s shadow, he’s about to achieve it.
This feels worth asking: has Kobe Bryant ever seemed particularly happy? Kyrie apparently sees in him what most of us don’t. Time will tell whether that’s clarity or someone who got hooked by a hard sell.
More Futures: Atlanta Hawks, Brooklyn Nets, Charlotte Hornets, Chicago Bulls, Cleveland Cavaliers, Dallas Mavericks, Denver Nuggets, Detroit Pistons, Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Clippers, Los Angeles Lakers, Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat, Milwaukee Bucks, Minnesota Timberwolves, New Orleans Pelicans, New York Knicks, Oklahoma City Thunder, Orlando Magic, Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, Portland Trail Blazers, Sacramento Kings, San Antonio Spurs, Toronto Raptors, Utah Jazz, Washington WizardsBest-selling author encourages Indiana residents to support LGBT community
Buy Photo John Green advises Hoosiers who oppose the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to support LGBT residents of Indiana. (Photo: Matt Kryger/The Star)Buy Photo
Author John Green, likely the most high-profile Indiana resident in contemporary pop culture, expressed today his opposition to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to his audience of 3.9 million Twitter followers.
"The law Indiana governor Mike Pence is signing today legalizes discrimination against LGBT people," Green tweeted at 8:41 a.m. "It's horrific."
In a follow-up tweet, the best-selling author of "The Fault in Our Stars" commented, "As a Hoosier, I'm deeply saddened and embarrassed. A government exists to protect its citizens; instead, it is legalizing their oppression."
The measure, Senate Bill 101, could allow business owners to refuse services to same-sex couples. Supporters say the law is needed to protect those with strong religious beliefs from government overreach, but opponents say it would allow discrimination, particularly against gays and lesbians.
Born in Indianapolis, Green was an infant when his family moved to Michigan and eventually to Florida. As an adult, he's lived in Indianapolis with his wife, Sarah Urist Green, since 2007.
He attended boarding school in Alabama, an experience that inspired his debut novel, "Looking for Alaska."
"I grew up in Alabama, not far removed from a time when people used their religious faith to justify laws opposing interracial marriage or school integration," Green told The Star today. "I am embarrassed and horrified to live in a state that has legalized discrimination."
Green characterizes himself as a religious person, and he worked as a children's hospital chaplain after graduating from Ohio's Kenyon College in 2000.
"I don't think that people can use their religious beliefs as an excuse for discrimination," said Green, selected in 2014 as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.
Noting statements in opposition to Senate Bill 101 from the Gen Con gaming convention and cloud computing company Salesforce, Green said he expected Pence to consider the legislation's impact on Indiana's economy.
"It's horrible for business," Green said. "It's horrible for our national reputation. We're going to lose Gen Con. We're going to lose lots and lots of business from SalesForce.com. It is a huge step back for the national reputation of the state. And I don't blame people for not wanting to do business here. Frankly, I'm a bit embarrassed to be doing business here."
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Green employs a staff of six at his Broad Ripple office, where he makes educational videos for YouTube and Sarah oversees her PBS video series "The Art Assignment."
Looking ahead, Green said voters will dictate Indiana's future. He also advised Hoosiers who oppose Senate Bill 101 to rally around gay and lesbian residents.
"I think this is a time to support LGBT residents of Indiana," Green said. "Something that Sarah and I do, certainly, is give money to LGBT youth organizations. Because, man, it's hard to grow up in a state that has said that it's legal to discriminate against you."
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1CeQqftCatherine Killen remembers Doe Lake, about a half hour north of Huntsville, with its yellow docks on the waterfront, outlined by a sandy beach.
There are walking trails, lookouts on clifftops and two islands, one of which is steeped in camp legend.
The whole camp gathers for a closing campfire at the waterfront on the last evening of camp each session in the 1990s. (Catherine Killen)
She spent a decade swimming, canoeing and sailing in the waters there in the 1970s and 1980s. Her years at Doe Lake camper made such an impression that she went back as a staff member for another six years.
In 2004, Killen and her husband made the decision to return to the camp and get married.
Catherine Killen and Karl Baader's wedding at Doe Lake in 2004. (Catherine Killen)
"It was such a special place," she told CBC Toronto, through tears. "When I was a girl at camp, it was freedom to be a girl with other girls. That's something that doesn't happen where the Girl Guides don't control or own the property. We developed a way of doing things because we had a place of our own."
Killen calls the Girl Guides of Canada's decision to sell the 17 Ontario camps by 2020 "heartbreaking," especially since the camp has been a family tradition for generations.
"My mother attended Doe Lake as a camper," she said. "She went on the first lightweight canoe trip Doe Lake ever offered. There's a long history of girl guides camping in their own way and doing things as women."
Now, Killen's own daughter spends time as a guide at Doe Lake.
"You can walk on the trails where hundreds and thousands of campers and staff went before you," she said.
Charlotte Baader, Catherine Killen's daughter as a brownie at Doe Lake in 2012. (Catherine Killen)
Costs are high
Susan Birnie, the Ontario commissioner for Girl Guides said keeping the properties doesn't make financial sense anymore because the "costs are quite high" to maintain the camps year-round.
Less than half of the organization's camping experiences take place at its own properties, she said.
But other women like Killen, who spent their childhoods gathered by campfires at sunset, say that shouldn't matter, including Krista Petrie-Wallace.
She was a camper from the late 1980s and also returned to Doe Lake as staff.
In an Instagram post, Petrie-Wallace wrote, "I have cried many times this week. Summer camp has given me so much. It has taught me to be physically confident by giving me all sorts of outdoor skills... It gave me social confidence."
Some camps could be saved
Killen agrees, saying she fondly remembers seeing the girls gain confidence from learning life skills while she was a staff member.
"Seeing a switch from being part of the everyday world to becoming self-reliant was pretty amazing," she said.
Pipers Hill camp, about 20 minutes east of Orangeville, is the first to close Friday. The organization will sell off the others as it partners with third-party sites.
The Ontario Guides of Canada says it may reverse its decision to close some camps if it's able to improve its financial situation.
Killen said she and other former girl guides are looking to make that happen.Supporters of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) rally with with party flags through Kirtipur, in the outskirts of Kathmandu on April 6, 2008. REUTERS/Adrees Latif Russia has signed an agreement with the government of Nepal for the repayment of a $1.16 million Soviet-era loan.
It is not clear why Russia is bothering to collect such a small, old debt. But given Russia's troubles — its currency has collapsed along with its economy, and demands on its foreign currency reserves have sharply increased — and the mercurial nature of president Vladimir Putin, it is temping to read the Nepal agreement as a sign of... something.
The landlocked nation of Nepal, which became a republic in 2008 after almost half a century of rule by monarchs or a ruling family, remains one of the world's poorest countries, with a GDP per capita of $694.10. It suffered from a decade of civil war after Maoist rebels took on the monarchy under King Gyanendra, which only ended last November when a peace deal was finally signed.
Its relationship with the Soviet Union began in 1956, three years before the US set up an embassy in the capital Kathmandu. According to US diplomatic cables from the time, by June, 1958, the Nepalese King Mahendra had agreed, in principle, to accept Soviet economic aid. Now the Russian Finance Ministry wants the country to pay back its debt.
Yet it's unclear why it has taken the decision now. Russia is significantly richer than Nepal with per capita income at around $14,600 in 2013, according to World Bank data.
The move could be seen as part of a trend of Russia leaning on its debtors in order to raise funds as the country's economy suffers in the wake of the collapse in global oil prices and Western sanctions over its role in the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Earlier this month Russian president Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine should repay a $3 billion loan because Russia needs that money to fight the economic crisis that's currently ravaging the nation, reports Bloomberg's Anton Doroshev.
However, the tiny size of the Nepal loan relative to the Russian economy makes this move look decidedly odd not least as the country still has some $368 billion in international reserves in its coffers, the majority of which is held in dollars and euros. It should already have enough to take care of its damaged economy — for the time being at least.
Perhaps then this loan recall from Nepal is just a shot across the bow for its larger debtors. Russia is simply saying: It may soon be time to pay up.We’re now living in the era of self-driving cars. By 2030, industry experts predict there will be more than 71 million self-driving cars on the road. What a change the digital landscape undergone in a few short decades. We owe these expansive changes in large part to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
However, machine learning and AI technologies have been around for decades. Machine learning has been around since the 1960s, and saw significant advances in core algorithms such as neural networks in the 1980s. But we’ve never before seen such an explosion of interest them until recently.
The truth is that self-driving cars are complex engineering systems. I think the real breakthrough occurring today is not only due to the increased capabilities of underlying algorithms but also the ingenious ways these systems are being architected. The world is evolving from the pure use of machine learning techniques to the invention of machine learning systems.
From Algorithms To Systems
There are a few key components that encompass a machine learning system and make it different from just a machine learning algorithm. Overall, a machine learning system should be able to:
See through multiple channels/mediums. Learn constantly to update its model of the world. Act in real-time. Remember and easily recall all that it has seen before.
This might sound easy, but let’s break these components down a bit further to better understand the magnitude and expanse of such systems and why they're so important in today’s digital landscape.
"Seeing"
To "see," AI must be able to take in and make sense of data from multiple channels – text, audio, video, sensors and more.
Allow me to put these in the context of a self-driving car, the most visible AI system in our world today. An average car produces 1.3GB of data per/hour from its onboard sensors. This includes everything from the condition of the car, mileage and more. A hybrid car produces up to 20 times that amount of data.
When we say the AI system is able to “see,” we're referring to its ability to take in and process these streams of big data in real time. For the context of its operation, this system needs to be as agnostic to the types and formats of this data as possible, able to input and interpret each format equally.
Learning
To learn, AI must be able to constantly update its model of the world.
While machine learning systems have – and still do – provide holistic and accurate “models” of the world, they may also require regular updates, as in retraining and updating their information. Using machine learning foundations, more modern AI systems are able to constantly evolve their models of the worlds.
This has been one of the major issues with artificial intelligence systems, so much so that it has a specific name. It’s called the “frame problem:" As the world evolves, it’s hard to keep the computer’s view of the world consistent and actionable. It’s still very hard to do, but it's the same concept that speaks to the capability of self-driving cars and their ability to constantly evolve based on new landscapes.
Acting
To act in real time, AI must be able to make decisions and/or conduct actions in real time.
Depending on the application focus for an AI system, these real-time capabilities can be difficult to accomplish. Today’s commerce landscape demands that machine learning systems enable seamless customer experiences in real time. This means that such a system has to act in latencies of as little as 20 milliseconds, implying that the system needs to look back at its entire memory and make an educated, snap decision.
For my work, this meant my company had to engineer our AI system like a race car engine. Instead of using traditional hard drives, we used Solid State Drives (SSD) and instead of wasting time querying a database, we built our own real-time event processing engine that keeps information ready for access in-memory. This meant that our system could meet latencies as little as 3 milliseconds and achieve the ability to act in real-time.
Remembering
To "remember," AI must be able to easily recall what it has seen before in order to make new decisions.
Today, Google is currently racking up miles with its self-driving car systems on roads across California. By doing this, their system is generating a base set of memories that encompass traffic behavior, weather conditions, terrain, road types and more. It can then reference these memories -- in essence, remember the data -- to enhance the decision-making capability of the system in the future.
Generally speaking, what we're seeing today is the growth of a new breed of AI systems that have built upon and expanded already intelligent machine learning algorithms to create even smarter, more sophisticated technology. These advances are the reason AI is able to make a tangible impact in many different areas of application today and will continue to make big impacts well into our future.Police talk to Shawki Ahmed Omar’s family outside the Iraqi Embassy during a recent silent protest.
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Citing security concerns, on April 15, the Iraqi government reported the closure of the notorious torture prison, Abu Ghraib. In the week prior to closure, 2,400 inmates were reported to have been moved to other prisons in Baghdad or Jamjamal Prison in the Kurdistan Region, where conditions are reported to be better, if not compliant with human rights standards.
Shawki Ahmed Omar, an American-Jordanian prisoner, held without due process in Iraq for almost 10 years, “disappeared” around the time the others were transferred. Repeat requests for information on his whereabouts by his family have fallen on the deaf ears of the Iraqi authorities; the US authorities claim to know nothing as well.
Omar was arrested by the US military in Baghdad with his Iraqi wife in 2004 as part of counterinsurgency operations. Held and tortured at a number of US torture prisons across the country, including Abu Ghraib at the height of the prisoner abuse scandal there, his wife was also tortured into making false confessions. The US accused him of terrorism-related offenses and recruiting for al Qaeda, but it took many years for his case to be referred for trial. Brought before an Iraqi court in 2010, in a trial for which no charges were listed, and without legal representation, due to miscommunication between the court and his counsel, he was instead convicted of illegal entry to the country. He maintains he entered the country lawfully, but could not contest the claims as his passport had been confiscated when he was arrested by the US military. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail, mitigated to 7 years upon appeal in 2011 by the Iraqi Supreme Court.
In February 2013, days before Guantánamo Bay prisoners commenced similar mass action, Omar went on hunger strike, an action he maintained until August 2013 to the detriment of his own medical and physical condition. He was protesting his ongoing incarceration in spite of having served his sentence; having been held for 9 years by that point; and the harsh conditions of detention, such as torture, overcrowding and lack of due process in Iraq’s jails.
His family was told by the Iraqi authorities that they had not taken the years he spent in US custody into account and that he still has 3 years of his sentence left to serve. They were also informed that the authorities do not intend to release him after that, as he will then face fresh prosecution for the terrorism-related claims made in 2005.
The hunger strike has had a considerable impact on the health of the 54-year-old and left him weakened and suffering new illnesses. He was not seen by a doctor throughout and has never been seen by an independent doctor to check or verify his claims of torture.
Held at the maximum-security Al-Karkh Prison in Baghdad (formerly Camp Cropper), he “disappeared” weeks after ending his hunger strike in September 2013. In November, the family were contacted by the Red Cross to inform them that he was in Baghdad Central Prison, as Abu Ghraib had been renamed by the Iraqi government. Used as a torture facility for dissidents under Saddam Hussein and insurgents under US occupation, with a new name and cosmetic refit, the Iraqi government reportedly kept up the tradition of torturing prisoners there.
Omar was held in solitary confinement during his first two months at Abu Ghraib, where he was when the Red Cross visited him in November 2013. Inmates at Abu Ghraib were not allowed to see doctors or to have medication, even if they supplied their own. Omar had his taken away from him. Prisoners held at Abu Ghraib were also not allowed to have any family visits or make telephone calls. Previously, Omar was allowed at least one call a month to his family.
Following a raid last summer, in which gunmen freed over 500 prisoners and others were killed, conditions for prisoners became even harsher. Other prisoners’ families have reported that their family members have been tortured without interrogation, denied medication, given food unfit for human consumption and forced to remain in their cells.
Omar was moved to a cell shared by 18 men with adequate room for seven only. Cells are reportedly windowless, and since last July, prisoners have not been allowed to leave them even to exercise for fear of further attacks from outside. Cell inspections were also carried out, on average, 7 to 8 times each day during both the day and night, and more frequently in some cases.
In addition to notice by the Red Cross in November 2013 that Shawki Ahmed Omar was still alive, the only other correspondence the family has had is a letter he wrote in October 2013, which was delivered by the Red Cross in February 2014. In it, he tells his family that he is unwell: “My health is really bad, [been] throwing [up] blood for the last 3 months; my blood pressure is very high, and they took all the medication from me.”
Throughout his 8 months at Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi authorities have refused to comment on his situation, and the US authorities have failed to adequately monitor it. In November 2013, Amnesty International launched an urgent action for Shawki Ahmed Omar, stating, “He should be released immediately, as he has served his sentence.” The group also demanded his legal status be clarified by the Iraqi authorities.
Desperate for any information about his situation, earlier this year his family launched a petition to the Iraqi ambassador to the United Kingdom asking for information about his well-being and demanding his release. With reports of other Abu Ghraib prisoners having been transferred and seen at other prisons, including another American-Jordanian national detained in similar circumstances, but no news – official or otherwise – on Omar’s whereabouts, that desperation has gone one step beyond.
Rather than admit to its mistakes and those of its US predecessor, the Iraqi authorities are instead punishing prisoners, like Omar, for an arbitrary situation they have allowed to spiral out of control. In the ever-precarious and volatile situation in Iraq, his family fears the worst. The Iraqi authorities must at a minimum disclose his whereabouts to his family and the US authorities, and the US authorities must step up their half-hearted quest for answers.If airlines are going to force wider passengers to pay an upgrade fee because of safety or passenger comfort or whatever, why aren’t we asking excessively tall people to do the same thing?
On my flight home last week, the guy sitting next to me was thin and very, very tall. He had no respect for my personal space or the safety of the passengers. He didn’t stop moving around the whole ride, crossing the line between our seats and at one point even leaning his back against my arm and I had to say something. He was also sticking his bare feet into the aisle.
Setting aside this guy was a total jerk, can we talk about the fact that he was probably legit uncomfortable and the space was too small for him? He was impacting the safety and comfort of other passengers by leaning on me and invading the narrow aisle space with his legs.
He was also related to the man who was sitting behind me, a man who was also too tall, and kept sticking his legs all the way through the bottom of my seat and kicking me.
And no one thinks about that or asks tall people to pay for extra space? But we do it to wide people?
Thin privilege is being too big for the airplane seat but not being asked to pay an upgrade fee because you’re too big in the acceptable way.McCain endorses 'big oil'' predictions to push offshore drilling David Edwards and Nick Juliano
Published: Tuesday July 22, 2008
Print This Email This Republican Presidential candidate John McCain is relying on the projections of oil company executives to push his coastal drilling plan that would enrich those same executives -- who by the way aren't already exploiting every opportunity they have to drill where they're already allowed to. At a campaign stop in New Hampshire Tuesday, McCain said Congress must allow offshore drilling for oil and natural gas simply because the possibility to drill there exists. He dismissed suggestions that offshore drilling would have negligible effects on lowering the price of gasoline. "The oil executives say within a couple years we could be seeing results from it. So why not do it," McCain said in Rochester, NH. "We need to do it." Offshore drilling proponents point to industry estimates that oil could begin flowing in "three to four years," but environmentalists and Democrats say the amount of recoverable oil isn't enough to make a difference in prices to justify the environmental consequences. The environmental blog Gristmill notes a recent study from the US Energy Information Administration that predicted offshore drilling likely wouldn't make any difference in prices until 2030. The same outlet calls McCain's proposal a cruel "hoax." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced drilling plans in similar form. This call for drilling in areas that are protected is a hoax, its an absolute hoax on the part of the Republicans and this administration Pelosi said last week. Its a decoy to punt your attention away from the fact that their policies have produced $4-a-gallon gasoline. McCain went on to argue that lifting the moratorium could affect short term prices because oil is traded on futures markets and a demonstration of extra domestic supply would cause traders to adjust their long term projections. "When the president announced we were lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling, the price of oil went down 10 dollars a barrel.... so it can have a beneficial effect in the short term as well as the long term," McCain said. A $10 drop in per-barrel oil prices did follow President Bush's ultimately meaningless gesture last week to lift a moratorium on coastal drilling (a Congressional drilling ban remains in place). But reports on the price drop said it was a response to gloomy economic forecasts from US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke who said rising prices were driving down demand for oil and gasoline. And a nearly identical price drop preceded Bush's speech by a week before the prices shot back up. Investors Business Daily, in a pro-drilling editorial laid out a similar futures-market argument to open the coasts, pointing out that Ronald Reagan eased restrictions on drilling in 1981 and prices fell by 1986. However, the oil glut of the mid 1980s had many causes beyond Reagan's gesture, including an increased emphasis on conservation inspired by the energy crises of the 1970s. Democrats also argue the oil companies are not taking advantage of the offshore leases they already have. Of 43 million leased acres, only 8 million are producing oil, they say. One of the biggest oil companies, ExxonMobil, is seemingly less concerned about finding new domestic oil now than they were in 1981, at least if their spending priorities are to be believed. As of last year, the company, which formed in a 1999 merger, was spending 60 percent as much looking for oil than Exxon and Mobil did in 1981. The same company has been turning out record profits for the last several years, as gas prices have soared. This video is from CNN.com, broadcast July 22, 2008.
Download videoMana Leader Hone Harawira
Urgency Applications to the Waitangi Tribunal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement
On 23 June 2015, two Waitangi Tribunal claims were filed alleging that the Crown’s negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement were in breach of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Wai 2522: a claim lodged by Papaarangi M J Reid, Moana Jackson, Angeline Greensill, Hone Harawira, Rikirangi Gage and Moana Maniapoto, concerning the Crown’s actions and omissions in its negotiations over the TPPA; and
Wai 2523: a claim by Natalie Kay Baker, Hone Tiatoa, Maia (Connie) Pitman, Ani Taniwha, Pouri Harris, Owen Kingi, Justyne Te Tana and Lorraine Norris, that alleges that without consultation with or consent from the hapū of Ngāpuhi, the Crown is ceding elements of NZ’s sovereignty before considering what effect this will have on hapū in light of the conclusions of the Wai 1040 Stage 1 Report He Whakaputanga me te Tiriti – The Declaration and The Treaty.
The Tribunal has classified Wai 2522/2523 as claims that concern issues of national significance.
Our lawyers have asked that both claims be heard urgently, before events take place that overtake the necessity of the claims.
Judge Savage has directed the Crown to respond to Wai 2522/2523 by this Friday 3 July 2015, which suggests the Tribunal understands how fast events are moving, and how quickly these claims must be heard if the Tribunal is to make findings and recommendations before the Crown signs off on the TPPA.
Once the Tribunal has received the Crown’s response the Judge will set us a deadline to reply.
The Tribunal will then make a decision on whether to hold a fixture to hear the claims urgently.
More to come …
HoneJournalist Robyn Doolittle's new book Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story could soon be headed to a TV or cinema near you.
Toronto-based production company Blue Ice Pictures has purchased film and television rights for the new book, released one week ago.
Published by Penguin Canada, Crazy Town currently holds the No. 1 spot on the Amazon.ca bestsellers list.
Penned by the Toronto Star's city hall journalist, the book recounts the rise of Rob Ford, the colourful Toronto councillor who became the city's scandal-plagued mayor, and who has since made headlines worldwide for his antics and behaviour.
"This is a story about the city in which I have lived my entire life and has great political, cultural and civic meaning to me," said Blue Ice Pictures executive Daniel Iron, who has produced films such as the documentary Watermark and international dramas Cairo Time, The Bang Bang Club and Away From Her.
"Robyn Doolittle's book is a testament to dogged, fearless and exemplary journalism. We are excited to be working with Ms. Doolittle to bring this story to the screen."
Toronto Star city hall reporter Robyn Doolittle's book Crazy Town covers the saga of scandal-plagued Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. (David Donnelly/CBC)
Iron will co-produce the film with Lance Samuels, whose credits include The Bang Bang Club, Inescapable and the upcoming miniseries adaptation of The Book of Negroes.
Talk of a movie about the life of Ford had people on the street providing plenty of suggestions about who could play Toronto’s notorious mayor in a movie.
Torontonians who spoke to CBC News on Monday suggested Woody Harrelson or John Goodman.
But casting director Marsha Chesley said that finding the perfect person to play Ford won’t be easy.
"I do think he is a living, walking caricature. He is not like a man on the street. He is someone who looks different, who acts different," she said.
Doolittle was being deluged with casting suggestions on Monday, which the journalist noted on Twitter wasn't something she could help them with:
News of the Crazy Town deal comes the same day Ford and his brother, Coun. Doug Ford, launched a YouTube web video series called Ford Nation.
Last fall, Sun News Network briefly tested out a one-hour TV show featuring the Ford brothers, also entitled Ford Nation, but cancelled the production after one episode because of the cost and the lengthy time commitment for shooting and editing.
A weekly radio show hosted by the brothers on Newstalk 1010 also ended in November upon mutual agreement between Ford and the station.Members of the House of Representatives adopted a resolution this week that would require each of them, along with House employees and officers, to complete an annual mandatory training on workplace rights, including on preventing sexual harassment. The Senate passed a similar resolution last week.
This is good news. If done well, these kinds of trainings can help employees identify the types of behaviors — beyond the obvious — that constitute harassment. They also strengthen employees’ resolve to report offenders.
But let’s be real.
We know that trainings will never end the scourge of sexual harassment that infests Congress and other workplaces across the country. Congress must do more to clean up both of its chambers. And it can start with a laser focus on accountability and leadership in its 535 offices in our nation’s capital and thousands more in states and districts across the country.
A 2016 report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission outlines everything that employers and employees across America, including those on the Hill, need to do. To truly have a sexual harassment free workplace, it is crucial that the commitment and example come from the top and that systems are instituted to hold each individual accountable, including those whose responsibility it is to help prevent and respond to sexual harassment.
The report should be required reading for every congressional office. There’s little doubt that a piercing, honest, and painful discussion about leadership, accountability, and power dynamics in every congressional office and workplace in America is long overdue.
Fortunately, some members of Congress are attempting to go even further to get their house in order. They have introduced legislation — The Member and Employee Training and Oversight on Congress Act, also known as the ME TOO CONGRESS Act— that would pretty much scrap the much maligned, and deservedly so, process for investigating and resolving claims of sexual harassment and other workplace violations.
Congress is starting to take steps in the right direction, but our elected leaders must go much further than mandatory sexual harassment training for members and congressional staff if they want to change the culture on the Hill.There is a brightness in all things, but particularly in bif’s opening title sequence for OFFF Festival 2015, held in Porto, Portugal. Designers Jules Janaud and Fabrice Le Nezet, otherwise known as bif, were tasked with creating the festival’s main titles and preparing an audience of hundreds for two days of inspirational talks about animation, illustration, and design. As was the case with their previous festival titles work for Playgrounds Fest 2014, the duo let their sense of play and wonder guide them and infuse the work. Paired with music by Echolab and effects support from Mill+, the result is both gritty and light, downtrodden and uplifting. The sun goes down and the figures radiate their colour, dancing away the darkness.
A conversation with Designers FABRICE LE NEZET and JULES JANAUD of the directing collective bif.
The last time we chatted was for your work on Playgrounds Fest 2014. What has bif been up to since then?
Jules: Playgrounds was a starting point to a rich and creative year. It was the beginning of some sort of a “bif style”.
Fabrice: We had a pretty busy year working on several projects: commercials and music videos. We were happy and proud to be alongside the best titles of 2014.
Jules: We love title sequences, being recognized for it by experts means a lot to us.
Fabrice: It is surprising to end 2015 with another titles project! I guess we love it so much.
3D is a very interesting tool to use rich and complex data with slightly twisted minds like we have
So how did you tackle this project? What was the brief from OFFF?
Fabrice: The brief was actually completely open. Héctor Ayuso, creator of the OFFF Festival, didn’t even want to see anything before the festival to keep this as a surprise.
Jules: OFFF is well known for the quality of its titles so I would say the only brief was probably “come up with something fresh and original”.
Fabrice: Initially we wanted to develop some graphic researches we had done a while ago based on the visual representation of characters, using lines and dots, playing with dancing motion capture clips.
Jules: We like data visualization and 3D is a very interesting tool to use rich and complex data with slightly twisted minds like we have. We were developing an old test experiment with abstract motion capture dancing clips.
Fabrice: And then by accident – we love happy accidents – we scaled up some of the joints of the skeleton of a character and we discovered a silhouette of a round chubby quirky fellow dancing.
Jules: We loved it straight away and decided to push the test further.
Fabrice: We shifted toward something with those characters, but made of balls. From this point, we had our initial concept – somehow simpler and stronger with potential to make a short film. That was it, it was funny and playful, so we decided to push further.
Still from the production process
Jules: We quickly had the idea to have these guys dancing in a real environment. We ended up with some unexpected effects and surprisingly very powerful result without having to create everything from scratch. We took a 5D camera and went filming straight away around London. By doing the test shot we quickly decided that we liked that way of working with a raw, hand-held, live-action kind of look.
We wanted music that would bring a dreamy atmosphere, something you could easily lose yourself in.
Video: VFX shot breakdown by bif
Fabrice: The main idea was to create smooth musical titles, something easy to watch – a bit like a music video. We thought it would be a bit different than all the typical “sci-fi / end of the world / motion graphic” title sequences.
Jules: The look, once we had the first shot, came quite quickly. We wanted to inject some elegance and bring the main focus on the characters, so one way was to shoot live action in black and white and have colours on the bubblemen. The glowing effect was an idea we had at the very beginning.
From there we also found an easy way to bring the names in – it is a title sequence, after all – and create a structure. Each speaker name would be like a small chapter with its own first page: its own character design, its own colours, and then perhaps more gang-mates following.
Full sequence contact sheet in which the relationships between each initial figure and its title card and the succeeding figures can be seen
How did you work with the music?
Fabrice: Once we had a first edit, we contacted Gavin at Echolab – who previously worked with us on the Playgrounds Fest title sequence – to see if he would be keen to help us on this one. We knew the music would be very important on this project. Also, because of the picture quality – all handheld shots – we thought it could be interesting to mix the soundtrack with some kind of urban atmosphere to bring a documentary feel to it.
Jules: Gavin started by creating the base layer for all the street and city sound design and then came up with different music options. We wanted music that would bring a dreamy atmosphere, something you could easily lose yourself in. Also the track had to be not too fast in terms of rhythm to preserve the sense of slowness and nostalgia brought by those dancing fellas.
It looks like many of them are doing a specific sort of dance. What kind of moves are those?
Jules: Good question. We used various motion capture clips, but after playing with a Cypriot dance, we decided that it was the one we wanted to use for the dance. It was fun |
Btw should I purchase this, would anyone recommend paracord wrapping the handle based on size? Or should I get the gerber basic and wrap it?
Its a survival blade not a hobby blade so if u can't deal with serrations than don't buy it gerber has wonderful HOBBY knives if you want a fine edge with a big orange BG on it get the ultimate fine edge or ultra compact fixed blade but buy from outdoors hunting essential or industrial and stop complaining about serrations
Ok, now here is a knife that in all essence of the word is an ultimate surviver. The serration is a key element, you have to think about the audience this knife was made for and where this knife is designed to be at home. Plus, if bear grills sees it fit to have the blade the way it is, we best not argue, show me a man that knows better than he what is good in a survival knife. The blade is smaller making it easily controlled and the point is close to your hand, opposite to the other bigger bg ultimate srvl knife. This is not a throwing knife. It is not a box cutting knife. If its a little heavy on the handle side, who cares? why are you throwing it anyway? its not meant for that. If your serration are breaking or the tip is breaking, your using it wrong. This knife is easily consealed and easy to find a spot in any outfit. I agree the alloy could be a little higher in quality, but then again, i probably would not own it if it cost $200. If you need a knife, fixed, this size, this price, then look no further. If you want a fine blade, or a throwing knife, or a folder, or a slower sheath, dont buy it but also dont complain if you do, people who buy knives and just hate all the features are clearly not understanding the market. Thankyou Gerber keep this up!!
Why make a nice durable knife then slap it in the most useless cheap plastic sheathe
i reasently got this knife for my birthday and it is so strong and durable! its a good little knife!
can you guys make one in plain edge i hate serrations
please make a fine edge virson
I purchased my knive at Walmart. I found it to be a very well constructed knife. The sheath clip was found wanting until I lost it. Now I can find it. Wonder if the sell them separate.
This knife fills a niche that is surprisingly empty. A fixed-blade knife the size of a folding pocket knife. Very nice fit and grip. Thick, robust blade. Functional serrations. Can't go wrong with this item. Thanks, Gerber for giving this to us!!!
I have to say, the knife itself is really nice. But more about the sheath that is annoying me! the sheath is just not good enough. The lock on the sheath for the knife was not a good design. Once I put in the knife into the sheath, it would easily slip right out when I shake it a bit. Gerber blades are quite nice, but the sheaths needs catching up.
Great Knive, very handy, low weight, would like a black oxyde version!
I have bought this knife because I have heard many good things about it and at Dick's Sporting Goods, the knife was suggested so I bought it! The knife is durable and I have not had a problem with it! The blade holds its edge for a while. I have banged it against rocks and concrete and haven't had to sharpen it yet! The sheath could be a little better because I have found the knife to be falling out of the sheath every once in a while. Although this happens, I am happily giving it five stars due to the durability of the knife and the blade!
I love this knife! Great feel, Great weight, and the heavy grip feels fine to me, the blade is still heavy too! I have to keep pulling this thing out just to hold it lol. My only gripes are about the sheath, looks cool but the clip is cheap, and the lock-in-sheath mechanism tends to scratch the finish on the blade! GRR!!! Other than that this knife first to all but the Ultimate Knife by Bear Grylls
I bought this knife a couple weeks ago and ive only needed to use it once. It makes a great throwing knife. only bad thing is the p o s sheath. The knife fell out when i bumped against the wall, luckily it didnt break. what i ended up doing was made my own urban sheath, if you go to youtube you can watch videos on how to make em. overall i give it a 4 bc of the sheath
A plain edge wld b nice if it wasnt for survival. The serations are crucial. In speed and a clean cut.. great job on this knife. The handle is slightly heavy compared to blade balance. But i agree. Very well built knife. Im very satisfied.
I bought this knife and i am very pleased. Keeps a good edge. For the size and weight ratio very nice. The handle is a lil heavy. Easily comes out of balance. But this was def worth buying. Its a good solid knife.
best nife i ever used no need for plain edge it has the best grip and dose every thing need it to do
Love this knife. Great knife for the money! Great size that is easy to keep close at hand. Wish people would nicely SUGGEST a straight edge instead of complaining. Tired of seeing those who like the balde one way knocking those who like it a different way. Everyone has their preference. I like the serrated edge myself, but do think it would be great is they also made a straight edge version
plain edge please
Great knife, just wish it had a fine edge. I'll give it 4/5 because of that. Besides that, it is my favorite knife I have at the moment.
please no serations all they do is get in the way
you need serratations on a knife in the wild because a fine edge will not cut through wet slipery things. I mean, come on think about it thats what serratations are for. think about it
Great knife! but.. This is pretty much my dream knife. Right size, right shape, really sharp. This could be the perfect knife if it weren't for two things:
1. The metal is too soft. I literally broke the tip the first day I used it. (And I wasn't trying) and the blade dulled VERY quickly.
2. The sheath. It fits great and never falls off but it's so impractical. It has a huge plastic clip that makes it almost impossible to put anywhere handy. A leather or nylon sheath makes more sense.
Keep trying Gerber! I love your stuff!
I can't get over how natural the draw is on this knife! I love how it feels in the hand. Great sheath & release/retention mechanism. I am glad to have the serrations, since this knife is clearly made for rough use. The blade shape is perfect! I like the grind too
.
The clip is a bit too loose on the sheath, but I have an easy, unobtrusive solution (see tip below).
I wish I had reason to carry a fixed-blade; I love just having this knife close at-hand. It's sharp & tough, and not as intimidating/out-of-place in EDC as the excellent LMF II.
Tip: To fix the loose sheath clip, wrap a thin piece of black wire behind it, sliding the wire between the clip & the sheath and twisting it at the bottom and wedging it behind the tip of the clip. This tightens it up & eliminates the chance of it accidentally disengaging from the sheath.
How about a black copy without the Grylls name or serations.
I just don't understand why Gerber is not getting it...
We want a fine edge option on all the knives.
Serrations always get in the way,are easily broken and are hard to sharpen.
Come on Gerber, lots of people are wanting this and its a win-win situation.
I've ofton found small compact knives to be more useful than big ones, so this is a welcome. I'd prefer a fine edge, and hopefully if enough people complain Gerber will make one. Also I'd like the sheath to be given a diamond sharpener and make an even smaller one to be hung from the neck.
Please please, an option with no serations. also an option to carry the sheat horizontaly. thank you!
I bought this knife more out of curitousity than anything else. I thought it might be a handy kind of knife to have around. What I got was a awesome little knife that I can use instead of the survival knife, which is a little to big to carry all the time. I carry this knife on my backpack and easy to pull out of it's plasitc sheath. The knife is just and strong and durable as the ultimate survival knife. I have this knife with me when ever I go out, even if I don't take my backpack. I higly recommend this knife to all backpackers and campers. It is a very usefu knife and dependable
I have this knife and I love. I carry it all the time
Please make this knife with a full plain edge.
I have also had the previous fixed blade BG Knifes and feel this one is more user friendly and nicely weighted for its size. I hope for a straight edge in this model in the future as well.
Thankyou
Great knife except the clip that comes off all the time
Awesome looking knife and great to use
I want one of these knives but I am not sure of buying online from over seas, looks great!
ive had 4 other models of the bear grylls knives and this by far the best. love it love it love it
Very,very good idea love the knife
i going to get it
I just got this knife, I am very satisfied!
My husband bought this knife for me and I absolutely love it! He has bought me several knives in the past but this one is my fave!!! I dont leave home without it.
Want it
The handle is very comfortable and I was impressed with the quality of the actual knife, thinking it was just going to be some market ploy to slap a well known name on a piece of junk. My only problem is with the sheath. It's nice and all, but there's a groove on the inside that the blade goes into and sometimes the blade doesn't slide right into it and gets hung up and leaves wear marks on the blade.
I absolutley love this awesome blade!
ok, so im a 14 year old girl and i just got this knife in the mail, and i am pleased to say, I absolutely love it! its very sharp, very durable, has a good grip, and it fits me! i usualy have a hard time finding good knifes but not now. one thing that dissapoints me though is the sheath. i will be making a custom sheath that fits my expectations. thanks Bear Grylls and Gerber! this knife is amazing!
serrations are useful but not in a knife of this size. make a fine edge version and it will sell out. also the belt clip is not a good idea, get rid of it and put a sharpener there instead.
I've been waiting for this knife my whole life. Perfect size, perfect color, perfect.. All of it. I'll be making a custom sheath for it. This one is lacking. I'm not sure how to use it for every day carry. Other than that, thanks Gerber and Bear Grylls for making just what I need (and want) at a price I can handle.
I just got this knife in the mail and i can say i'm not disappointed. I havn't tested it yet but it feels very rigid and tough. My only complaint is the reversible clip, it feels less than secure.
Serrations are necessary in a survival knife for cutting rope and/or vine. Which is very difficult with a fine edge knife. I love this knife and all the other Bear Grylls knives.
Remember its a survival knife it should have serrations so stop slating it. Its very good btw!!!!!
i wanted to buy it today but it had serrations, you should make it in a fine edge like you did with the ultimate knife. If you guys make it in a fine edge then I will buy like 6 of them. But it is a good little knife!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then I will buy more than one.....
Just bought this knife from bass pro and I already love it. Haven't used it yet but can instantly tell when I held it in my hands that it felt like a solid workhorse for its size, also looks like it would make for a very good dive or watersports knife. Overall an excellent knife for the money, keep up the good work Gerber andBear Grylls
the serrations would be useful if they didn't bent over by sawing hardwood like oak..... now i have a $40 knife with serrations that are bent.... the serrations are alot stronger on any of the other bg knife this one failed my field test horribly.. guess i have another beater
Everyone forgets that this is a survival knife. It should have serrations. If you want a picture of it in a sheath go to amazon.
I just got this knife..great little knife..the sheath is pretty solid keeps the knife safe..also like the removable clip..the knife its self is awesome i dont mind the serrations...it still has a lot of straight edge for your cutting task
serrations are for cutting rope.
Very nice little knife I have bought bunches
Of survival knifes and kits for my kids and grandkids they all love them well worth the money Gerber tools are number 1
Keep up the good items
John R
What serrations take away from a knife is that most of the time, they just get in the way. A fine edge is much smother cutting action. The serrations are to short to be of any use. Serrations are intended to be used to saw through materiel. However, I think that this is a great knife. Just wanted to put that in as my opinion.
asome i want it so bad I'm going to get it at dicks sporting goods
i like this knife.their are two things i would like for the knife to come with,a ferro rod,and that the blade would be at least 2 inches longr so it is more like a survival knife
very good knife and great style sheath with it.i think the serrations are great for cutting a lot of materials but serration do take up a lot of the blade and some people may have no use for them so its a waste on the blade, they should make another version of all of the bear grylls series knives with fine edges like the ultimate knife.
Look guys serrations are excellent and they make a knife more useful and all around better. the stay sharper longer and are just a good thing to have on a knife.
Totally disagree with most of these reviews... the serration's take nothing away from the knife (except maybe aesthetics) and add a whole useful element. If you live off the wild - you welcome this feature...
I like this knife how it is the only thing i would change is that iwould either make it foldable and have a sheath like the folding sheath knife or i would put it in the same sheath as the ultimate knife, also the blade is a little small.
Please make this knife with a full plain edge, I promise you that this will sell a LOT more.
please do it with out seration...it is a nicer knife than the ultimate surv knife...great master piece...except the seration...why dont gerber ever learn from mistakes? why do whe have to pray for you to make 2 options? with an without?
I agrea that it is a very good knife, but the serations spoil the feel of the thing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Very nice knife. Please also offer the option to buy just the blade.
Whats up with serations, I'm trying to get clean cuts and the serations are annoing. Please straight lade! No serations, please and thank you
this looks to be a great knife and I have one on pre order. I just hope you will bring out a plain edge one aswell.
I love the shape of this knife and the design and full thang construction. serations are more useless then usefull for survival situation in my opinion though.
could you please insert a compass on that plastic sheat? also please make this modele without seration as well. thank you!
great knife!
i dont like the seration however, make it without seration and I buy one.
i just recieved my 'exclusive tactical' fixed blade. looks a lot like(but is a little different) the knife you see above. but it is a bear grylls/gerber product and on first inspection it looks nifty. go to 'cabelas' as they are the exclusive sellers of this gerber product. like i say..the blade is very much like the above knife..but with subtle differences. compare them..but i very much like mine.
please make a fine edge and a non-bear grylls design and I will buy.
Sorry Bear, but I dont like orange.
Received my knife today, I can can tell you this knife is great. Will take out and put it to the test this weekend. Great job Gerber for another awesome knife!
The knife looks really nice,but like many before me has said,it would be even better WITHOUT the serrations,but i ight consider buying it anways :)
Good knife, but when i took mine from the package the serrations were bent and such
please make a fine edge and I will buy
Looks sweet, now just make it fine edge and you got a deal!
Very nice and useful. Must have!
Looks very nice! I totally agree with many other comments here that a fine edge, ie non-serrated, would be more interesting.
Maybe a version that has serrations along all of the edge would be of interest to some too?
Scandi-grind anyone?
this knife is perfect fot throwing, i threw it at a deer because somehow i forgot my arrowsand it hit itirghtbetween the eyes thanks gerber
What does it look like with the case on??
you should put this thing on the Parang! ;)
This would be a grea tknife for scouts because we need something under 4".
I would like to see a fixed blade scout knife with the same sheath as the ultimate survival knife but under 4" and dosent burn a hole in your pocket.
will this be in fine edge as well.
i am a rock climber so the size of this thing is perfect, and the serrations are perfect
Looks promising! Can't wait to pick one up! I would really like to see a BG E-Tool some day!
You can go to rocky mountain knife works and buy it there and it is on their website. Great knife though, I also have the ultimate knife, works great!!!!!!!, I highly recommend it.Man it is amazing, never puts you down.
i think this knife is a very good idea because of the shape of the blade as well as the size of the knife, but the serrations should go because they can get damaged really easy in the field, and please get it in stock soon.
The serations cut better than fine edge but any way GET IT IN STOCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
COME ON WHEN ARE YOU GUYS GONA GET IT IN STOCK?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Looks amazing! Serrations are great for suvial, you guys are under the suvial category!! Plus its fine edge plus serrated...If you want a full fine edge look at the rest of gerber!
make a fine edge one and that would be great:-)
hi gerber coud you get this in stock
you need to make more bear grylls knives, and with a little bit bigger blade
I love the knife, but you guys need to make this knife with a little bigger blade, and have a stright edge one too.
I love your bear grylls line, but along with 99% of everyone else I find combo edges to be the biggest pain in the a** ever! Just forget about the serations, and stick to fine edge blades.
serrations are good for when you are in the wild cutting through vines rope and wood so the serrations make it a good SURVIVAL knife because you survive in the WILD. Get with it people.
hey it's look like a nice knife. But I has a question. how does the knife lock i the sheat? is there eny thing you should push at?
I'm italian,how much does it cost in italy? I'll buy it certainly because also the folding scheath is great,but fine edge would better
Get this knife in stock with a picture of the sheath, and make a fine edge one please
okay.......when did this guy come in stock here? and what the heck is it? It looks awesome! but i wish i new what the price was! Because of it being out of stock i cant see the price! once i found out what it is maybe with the money i have left i could buy one!
Serretations again?! Stop this nonsense!
get it in stockFor forty years as the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School—twenty-six of which were also spent as Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital—I’ve been studying people who claim to be transgender. Over that time, I’ve watched the phenomenon change and expand in remarkable ways.
A rare issue of a few men—both homosexual and heterosexual men, including some who sought sex-change surgery because they were erotically aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women—has spread to include women as well as men. Even young boys and girls have begun to present themselves as of the opposite sex. Over the last ten or fifteen years, this phenomenon has increased in prevalence, seemingly exponentially. Now, almost everyone has heard of or met such a person.
Publicity, especially from early examples such as “Christine” Jorgenson, “Jan” Morris, and “Renee” Richards, has promoted the idea that one’s biological sex is a choice, leading to widespread cultural acceptance of the concept. And, that idea, quickly accepted in the 1980s, has since run through the American public like a revelation or “meme” affecting much of our thought about sex.
The champions of this meme, encouraged by their alliance with the broader LGBT movement, claim that whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, is more of a disposition or feeling about yourself than a fact of nature. And, much like any other feeling, it can change at any time, and for all sorts of reasons. Therefore, no one could predict who would swap this fact of their makeup, nor could one justifiably criticize such a decision.
At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of “transgendered” among young and old.
Olympic Athlete Turned “Pin-Up” Girl
This history may clarify some aspects of the latest high-profile transgender claimant. Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion, is turning away from his titular identity as one of the “world’s greatest male athletes.” Jenner announced recently that he “identifies as a woman” and, with medical and surgical help, is busy reconstructing his physique.
I have not met or examined Jenner, but his behavior resembles that of some of the transgender males we have studied over the years. These men wanted to display themselves in sexy ways, wearing provocative female garb. More often than not, while claiming to be a woman in a man’s body, they declared themselves to be “lesbians” (attracted to other women). The photograph of the posed, corseted, breast-boosted Bruce Jenner (a man in his mid-sixties, but flaunting himself as if a “pin-up” girl in her twenties or thirties) on the cover of Vanity Fair suggests that he may fit the behavioral mold that Ray Blanchard has dubbed an expression of “autogynephilia”—from gynephilia (attracted to women) and auto (in the form of oneself).
The Emperor’s New Clothes
But the meme—that your sex is a feeling, not a biological fact, and can change at any time—marches on through our society. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes. In that tale, the Emperor, believing that he wore an outfit of special beauty imperceptible to the rude or uncultured, paraded naked through his town to the huzzahs of courtiers and citizens anxious about their reputations. Many onlookers to the contemporary transgender parade, knowing that a disfavored opinion is worse than bad taste today, similarly fear to identify it as a misapprehension.
I am ever trying to be the boy among the bystanders who points to what’s real. I do so not only because truth matters, but also because overlooked amid the hoopla—enhanced now by Bruce Jenner’s celebrity and Annie Leibovitz’s photography—stand many victims. Think, for example, of the parents whom no one—not doctors, schools, nor even churches—will help to rescue their children from these strange notions of being transgendered and the problematic lives these notions herald. These youngsters now far outnumber the Bruce Jenner type of transgender. Although they may be encouraged by his public reception, these children generally come to their ideas about their sex not through erotic interests but through a variety of youthful psychosocial conflicts and concerns.
First, though, let us address the basic assumption of the contemporary parade: the idea that exchange of one’s sex is possible. It, like the storied Emperor, is starkly, nakedly false. Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.” In that lies their problematic future.
When “the tumult and shouting dies,” it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers.
How to Treat Gender Dysphoria
So how should we make sense of this matter today? As with any mental phenomenon, what’s crucial is noting its fundamental characteristic and then identifying the many ways in which that characteristic can manifest itself.
The central issue with all transgender subjects is one of assumption—the assumption that one’s sexual nature is misaligned with one’s biological sex. This problematic assumption comes about in several different ways, and these distinctions in its generation determine how to manage and treat it.
Based on the photographic evidence one might guess Bruce Jenner falls into the group of men who come to their disordered assumption through being sexually aroused by the image of themselves as women. He could have been treated for this misaligned arousal with psychotherapy and medication. Instead, he found his way to surgeons who worked him over as he wished. Others have already commented on his stereotypic caricature of women as decorative “babes” (“I look forward to wearing nail polish until it chips off,” he said to Diane Sawyer)—a view that understandably infuriates feminists—and his odd sense that only feelings, not facts, matter here.
For his sake, however, I do hope that he receives regular, attentive follow-up care, as his psychological serenity in the future is doubtful. Future men with similar feelings and intentions should be treated for those feelings rather than being encouraged to undergo bodily changes. Group therapies are now available for them.
Most young boys and girls who come seeking sex-reassignment are utterly different from Jenner. They have no erotic interest driving their quest. Rather, they come with psychosocial issues—conflicts over the prospects, expectations, and roles that they sense are attached to their given sex—and presume that sex-reassignment will ease or resolve them.
The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only “gender counselors” who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions.
Those with Gender Dysphoria Need Evidence-Based Care
There are several reasons for this absence of coherence in our mental health system. Important among them is the fact that both the state and federal governments are actively seeking to block any treatments that can be construed as challenging the assumptions and choices of transgendered youngsters. “As part of our dedication to protecting America’s youth, this administration supports efforts to ban the use of conversion therapy for minors,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Obama.
In two states, a doctor who would look into the psychological history of a transgendered boy or girl in search of a resolvable conflict could lose his or her license to practice medicine. By contrast, such a physician would not be penalized if he or she started such a patient on hormones that would block puberty and might stunt growth.
What is needed now is public clamor for coherent science—biological and therapeutic science—examining the real effects of these efforts to “support” transgendering. Although much is made of a rare “intersex” individual, no evidence supports the claim that people such as Bruce Jenner have a biological source for their transgender assumptions. Plenty of evidence demonstrates that with him and most others, transgendering is a psychological rather than a biological matter.
In fact, gender dysphoria—the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex—belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.
The larger issue is the meme itself. The idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics. It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.
But gird your loins if you would confront this matter. Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.We talked a lot about QA, what we expect in the next year, and more!
Back, first show of the new year, and with us this week to celebrate / be awesome, we had Mici from CIG join us!
We're back, just like we said we'd be!
This being our first show of the year, it was also our best show of the year. It set the bar high, but we're only going to try to make them better. It's a new year, and we Relay can't wait to show you what we've got coming.
The Relay Station airs every Saturday at 2:30 - 4pm Eastern time, so tune in and join us over on twitch.tv/relay_sc!
Want to know the latest in Star Citizen news and community? Check out our News feed!
Have a suggestion for the cast, or a guest you think we should get on to join us, let us know!
Do you like what we're doing, and have disposable income you would like to throw our way so we can try to do things better? You can do that too!Unless you’re walking up and down the Strip, Las Vegas is a difficult city to navigate without a car. The city’s taxi drivers are known to overcharge customers and have so far kept the Uber car-service app out of Vegas.
A new service called Shift (formerly Project 100) is fusing the offerings of Uber, Zipcar, a bike share, and public transportation.
The Las Vegas company launched last year after placing an order for 100 Tesla sedans, which will be used for on-demand car and driver services via an app serving the Strip and downtown areas. In addition to electric-bike sharing and a trolley service (think party bus), Shift’s all-electric fleet will include the Renault Twizy and Smart cars. The company is testing its service with a small beta group this summer and plans to do a staggered launch in the fall.
“The challenge for companies like Uber in Las Vegas is their black-car service charges are based on time and distance and are often below the regulated minimum fare,” Shift founder and CEO Zach Ware told Quartz. “UberX and Lyft are driven by non-regulated, non-employee drivers and also charge by time and distance.”
The taxi industry has a stronghold in Las Vegas, which relies heavily on tourism dollars. To reduce competition for the industry, the Southern Nevada livery services require a high minimum hourly rate for limos and other car services—around $40/hour at a one-hour minimum—which prevents companies like Uber from serving customers with shorter trips at reduced rates.
To get around this, Shift hires its own drivers and operates on a membership basis, where each user has a set number of service hours and pickups. Premium members could eventually have access to private jet service through a partnership with SurfAir.
For now, Shift’s 30-person team is focused on ground transportation. Shift plans to increase the number of vehicles it offers as membership grows and demand rises. That means that the initial order of Tesla cars it uses will be delivered in waves. The company is launching in Las Vegas with plans to expand to other cities. It has raised $10 million in funding from Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh who sees the project as a key part of his investment in downtown Las Vegas, where the ecommerce site owned by Amazon is headquartered.So. Elm. It’s been an interesting experience for me, coming from a procedural language (JS) background. The learning curve is steep, but the functional nature of Elm, along with its compile time type safety really pays off. One of the (few!) problems I’ve found as a newcomer however, is that the documentation can be really frustrating sometimes. In this post, I hope to remedy that slightly by providing a newcomer’s perspective on a little bit of data processing in Elm.
Header photo by @rawpixel
Let’s say I’ve collected a list of tags from questions on StackOverflow. I want to create a unique dictionary of tags and the number of times they occur in the dataset. To do that, we’ll need to process the data from a flat list into a Dict of key/value pairs. The key will be the name of the tag, and the value will be the number of occurrences in the dataset.
Starting at the beginning (whoa)
First, let’s just render this List of tags:
tagList = [ "elm", "javascript", "javascript", "rust", "elm", "rust", "javascript", "typescript" ]
Cool. We’ll store that list in a Model to pass to some rendering layer:
import List type alias Model = { tagList : List String } init : ( Model, Cmd Msg ) init = ( { tagList = [ "elm", "javascript", "javascript", "rust", "elm", "rust", "javascript", "typescript" ] }, Cmd. none )
This will store the list of tags under model.tagList, which we can use in the view to render a (not so) pretty list:
view : Model -> Html msg view model = div [] [ section [] [ text "All the tags", ul [] ( List. map ( \ tag -> li [] [ text tag ]) model. tagList ) ] ]
The entire program so far is shown below. It’s a pretty standard Elm boilerplate app. The most interesting bits are described above; how we store the list, and how we present it.
Great, we’ve got a working Elm program. Next, I’ll go into a bit of data processing to turn this flat, boring list into a Dict of tags and counts.
Dicts
As a first step towards grouping the data, we need to start using a Dict. Dicts contain unique keys with an associated value. They’re the same as Map() s in JavaScript. As a first step we’ll just render a list of unique tags to keep things understandable. The counts will come later.
First, the model type needs to change to use an Elm Dict for our list of tags:
import Dict exposing (.. ) type alias Model = { tagList : Dict String Int }
tagList is now of type Dict String Int, which is a map of String keys to Int values. This will hold the tag -> count mapping.
We need to write a function to transform the list of tags when the model is initialised, so let’s write that:
import Dict exposing (.. ) --... groupTags : List String -> Dict String Int groupTags tags = tags |> List. foldr ( \ tag -> Dict. insert tag 0 ) Dict. empty
This function will foldr ( Array.reduce() in JavaScript parlance) the tag list and create a Dict. The keys will be the unique list of tags from the input, while the values at the moment will all be 0 for simplicity’s sake.
The |> is some syntactic sugar. The above is the same as this:
groupTags : List String -> Dict String Int groupTags tags = List. foldr ( \ tag -> Dict. insert tag 0 ) Dict. empty tags
The |> operator “fills in” the last argument of List.foldr function with tags.
A quick aside: in the docs for foldr you’ll see a signature that looks like this: foldr : ( a -> b -> b ) -> b -> List a -> b This is frustratingly obtuse for a beginner (or at least was for me), so let’s rename the variables to make it a bit clearer: foldr : ( item -> carry -> carry result ) -> initialValue -> inputList -> returnType The example in the docs is foldr (+) 0 [1,2,3] == 6. I found this pretty confusing, although it’s wonderfully concise. Rewritten in longer form, it’s a bit |
of years. But I’ve joked about it in the past, that I’ve always thought it’d be a funny idea if Abed was sort of a Richard Alpert that’s never aged, but if we opened a dusty old Greendale yearbook from 1924 there’s going to be a picture of Abed looking exactly how he looks right now. So who knows? Maybe there’s some magical road that we’re destined to end on here.
Last season saw more of a serialized approach to some episodes. Is that going to continue, or are there more self-contained stories?
No, definitely this year there’s things that we’re addressing, and we’re dealing with the consequences of that. I think already, early on this season, one of the big things that we’re addressing is, we’re meeting Jeff Winger’s [Joel McHale] father -- which I think is especially important for the character development of Jeff Winger. But also I think as a fan of the show, I’ve always been interested in knowing, "Who is the guy that made Jeff Winger, Jeff Winger? Who’s the guy that’s given this guy his ability to talk his way out of anything?" At the same time, maybe that’s who he’s been text messaging all the time with his phone... [Laughs.] I’m wondering.
In the premiere, we're already addressing what took place at the end of last year. And it is senior year now, so how are we going to approach this year? What’s going to make this year different? I think that’s it in terms of thematically larger episodes. Out of the first five, the Halloween episode is pretty fun. It's a typical one-off "Community" Halloween episode where we all go on a mission. And this particular mission involves Pierce’s mansion. I think people will like that.
Can you reveal what your costume is yet, or are you keeping it under wraps?
I can’t reveal it. But you know what? It’s one of those that’s worth waiting to see on camera for the reveal. I think the audience will really, really, really love it. It’s a great campus costume. I can just say that it is both Troy and Abed. We have to be together for this costume to work.
We know there's going to be an "Inspector Spacetime" convention episode, and Tricia Helfer's involved -- can you say anything about that episode specifically?
Yeah, I can not only say something, but I can emote something. [Makes high-pitched dreamy sigh.] I don’t even know what that is. It’s smileful giggles. That was pretty incredible, to see her on set, in the makeup trailer. It made my year. It was pretty cool. I also got to work in that episode with Matt Lucas, who was fantastic. I’m such a huge fan of him, and working with him... he’s a really generous actor on top of being really hilarious, and I think the fans are really going to dig his role in that episode. To me he makes perfect sense for being this character at an Inspector Spacetime Convention. He’s a fanboy like Abed in many ways. I think the fans will get a kick out of watching both Abed and Matt Lucas’ character together.
You mentioned Troy and Abed's joint Halloween costume, so I'm assuming they're back on track? They had a fair amount of growth and conflict last season, but obviously their friendship is such a cornerstone of the show.
Yeah. I think, judging by their Halloween costume, they’re in a good place, I will say that. [Laughs.] I think what’s been nice is they had to sort of work through those tough times in the blanket and pillow war. So this is a new understanding of each other. I think everything came easy to Troy and Abed since they first met. They just understood each other with their nonsensical Spanish raps and all. And so I think it was important to show what would it be like if each character had to do their own thing. Because usually Troy and Abed just agree on everything. But some things might not be right for Abed that are right for Troy, and vice versa. I think they reached a common understanding that they are the best friends, but they also know that sometimes they each have to do their own thing, whether it’s AC repair school or the Dreamatorium. So yeah, they’re back, and there are a couple of really fun tags as well that we’ve already done this year that I think people will like.
How much impact has Dan Harmon's absence had for the show on a day-to-day basis? Is it business as usual?
It’s still business but, I mean, there is definitely an impact. It’s been hard because it’s not like we’ve been able to sort of grieve appropriately, because it happened while we were gone. I’m super thankful for what Dan did, because without Dan there would be no Abed, and I wouldn’t have this wonderful role in this wonderful show to work on. A large part of the show has been the creations and the imagination of Dan Harmon, so I’m forever grateful for that. But in terms of the show, we’re all really busy. We’re back at it. Our fifth episode is out, and I think we’re sort of getting into a rhythm here.
The cast is just really, really incredible. It’s just good to be back with everyone. I think we miss each other and we also realize how much we miss goofing around with each other. There was multiple scenes where me, Alison [Brie], and Donald are in this one scene together -- I don’t want to say what it is, but Annie, Troy and Abed are together concocting a plan and each time on camera we’re fighting to either get a weird dance in or a strange inside joke from the debate episode in. Last year, for instance, Alison, and I were trying to get this weird high five into an episode all year, but they were cutting it in the editing bay. It’s moments like that that I still live for and that I think I’m excited about because they’re still there; we’re having fun. On top of that we have a great director, Tristram Shapeero, who’s our executive producer this year, who’s been with us since the chicken fingers episode of Season 1. He’s been really great at helping us through this transition process with all the new writers. It’s nice to have someone with sort of an outside eye being able to look at the scenes and the episodes, and tell us, are we staying true to who we are?
As you mentioned, you have a lot of new writers. Have you noticed a difference in scripts or tone?
I have noticed a little difference. I think it’s natural. I think we’ve noticed differences in all three seasons. I think that’s what kind of makes our show special too, though, is that you just really never know what to expect. But it’s kind of been the same about our show, which I think people are either drawn to or not. You can’t tune in one week and expect to see what you saw last week. But in terms of this year I think, yeah, the writers are getting up to speed, and though we miss Dan, I’m excited to see what their new spin is.
You've been doing a number of videos and campaigns for Speed Stick online. What's your latest installment?
Well we unveiled the contest winner of our Speed Stick “Handle It” Campaign, which we started a couple of months ago. We asked guys to send in their uncomfortable, sometimes hilarious situations that they’ve been in, where they’re able to conquer, and keep cool under pressure. We got some really great responses. The winner was picked, and we made it into a video that I narrated with my sheer panic voice -- my internal voice, which is my external voice in real life. [Laughs.] We made that video and it's live on YouTube’s Speed Stick page. It involves a gentleman shrinking his girlfriend’s laundry...
You've also got a hilarious new webseries going on. How did "The Book Club" come about?
It actually came in through another “Community” connection. Justin Lin, who directed our first paintball episode and directed the “Fast and Furious” movies, he had been given this opportunity to produce some content for a YouTube channel. He asked me if I had any ideas, and so I got together with a couple of buddies, and it was a fun project for us. It was kind of a new experience, where we did everything in terms of writing, directing, producing.
Me and my two friends Chris Marrs and Tim Kendall came together. We had done another video for their organization called “Blowout Sale,” and they likened the tone of that. They wanted something kind of fun and playful, and so we came up with this idea to do a series about a book club meeting that goes into weird places each week. It’s an excuse for us to blow things up and to go on action adventures. We’ve done six episodes, of increasing craziness.
Speaking of webseries, have you seen Travis Richey's unofficial "Inspector Spacetime" series that can't legally be called "Inspector Spacetime"? [Called "Untitled Web Series About A Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel Through Time."]
It’s got the longest title of all time! I actually have not seen it, but I just heard about it. I need to watch it, actually. But I actually ran into Travis not too long ago at the ”Six Seasons and a Movie” art show in Downtown Los Angeles. I’m actually really eager to see it. It’s an exciting time to kind of see all these weird offshoots going, and see what people come up with on the fly, on the Internet. And for me, that’s pretty exciting, especially when it has something to do with “Community.”
Would it break the fourth wall too much for you to do a cameo?
I think that’d be awesome. It would be like Abed’s role on “Cougar Town.” Maybe he’ll be an Inspector stand-in...
What are you looking forward to seeing most in the new season?An Edmonton man who stabbed a mall patron through the tongue after the man joked about the music being played by the attacker’s sister was put behind bars Thursday.
Ian Houle-Dvorak, 24, was sentenced to two years in jail, to be followed by three years of probation, after earlier pleading guilty to aggravated assault and possession of a dangerous weapon.
Provincial court Judge Joyce Lester called it one of the “most difficult” cases she had ever dealt with due to the “tragic” circumstances of both Houle-Dvorak and victim Vance Howse, but said she must deter those who bring weapons to public places.
“The damage to Mr. Howse, both physically and emotionally, was severe,” said Lester, calling Houle-Dvorak’s “severe physical response to unsolicited banter by an unarmed stranger in a shopping centre” an aggravating factor in the case.
The judge said Houle-Dvorak’s use of a knife, his extensive criminal record, which includes prior convictions of violence, and Howse’s “ongoing suffering” were also aggravating factors. She found Houle-Dvorak’s guilty plea and remorse were mitigating factors in sentencing.
Lester also spoke about Houle-Dvorak’s psychological issues, his “very troubling” upbringing involving a “dysfunctional” family and a court-ordered psychiatric assessment that concluded his violent behaviour is “unpredictable.”
Court heard Houle-Dvorak had gone to Bonnie Doon Shopping Centre, in the area of 82 Avenue and 83 Street, with two younger siblings, one of whom was listening to music that could be heard by others, about 4 p.m. on Jan. 31. He had not taken his prescribed medication as he had not refilled his prescription.
Howse, who had been sitting on a bench in the mall concourse, jokingly told the girl listening to music that if she was going to play music, she could at least play something good like Aerosmith.
Houle-Dvorak and Howse then got into an argument over the comment and Houle-Dvorak pulled out a knife and stabbed Howse once under the chin. Court heard the blade went into the victim’s mouth, through his tongue and into the roof of his mouth.
Houle-Dvorak fled the mall. Howse was taken to University Hospital suffering from a substantial loss of blood. He needed surgery and spent seven days there.
In a victim impact statement, Howse said he now speaks with a “dead” tongue, making him difficult to understand. He also said he hasn’t worked since and doesn’t feel safe in public.
After getting 13-1/2 months credit for time spent in pre-trial custody, Houle-Dvorak has 10-1/2 months still to serve.A new report from FDA suggests that use of the diabetes drug saxagliptin hydrochloride (Onglyza—AstraZeneca) was associated with "significant or near-significant" increases in all-cause death, not just heart problems, in a clinical trial. The report was released ahead of an April 14 meeting of outside advisers who will discuss the heart effects of saxagliptin hydrochloride and alogliptin benzoate (Nesina—Takeda). The two drugs are DPP-4 inhibitors, but FDA did not see an increase in deaths associated with alogliptin benzoate. FDA noted that patients taking saxagliptin hydrochloride have a 27% higher risk of hospitalization for heart failure compared with those receiving a placebo. However, the analysis did not indicate the cause of the increased risk of death, and FDA asked its advisers to discuss the study results. Manufacturers of drugs for type 2 diabetes have been required since 2008 to demonstrate that their products do not raise the risk of heart attack or other cardiovascular events.Minimalism was always appealing to me. The philosophy of not having more than one would need is close to my heart. Over the past few years, I’ve been “trimming the fat” off various parts of my life.
I can’t recall when I started being drawn to a minimalistic lifestyle. I think my passion for minimalism originates in my desire for organization and order. It’s comforting to know that a world around me has a certain structure.
I remember the time when I started living on my own. I just moved to United States, away from my family. All my life fit in a half-empty suitcase at that time. Few sets of clothes, a blanket, a pillow, some hygiene products, a small laptop. Moving to a new place was as easy as throwing few things in that suitcase.
After some time, I started accumulating more things. A guitar. More variations of clothing. Cheap coffee table and a shoe rack from a dollar store. At that time I rented a room in one of the shady areas of the city. Adding a few pieces of furniture made a place feel like home.
Time has passed, and I moved again. Left the furniture behind, took the rest. Still light, but I did have to make a few trips to move everything I needed. I got even more comfortable. A gaming PC. Significantly more junk here and there.
That’s when I did my first big cleanup. I went through every item I owned, and tossed it a trash bag if I didn’t use it in the past 6 month. Old clothes, some action figures, other useless junk I accumulated. As a result, I tossed two big bags of stuff I didn’t need. I still remember the liberating feeling. Knowing that everything I own serves a purpose.
It felt like I could breathe again.
Years pass. I don’t rent rooms anymore, but apartments, houses. This comes with having to own more things. Real furniture. A TV. More musical instruments. Having to accommodate guests. Cooking supplies. A bike. Outdoor furniture.
But I’ve kept the minimalistic mindset, and I still do periodical clean outs. Tossing almost everything I haven’t used in a past six months. Reducing what I own only to things that I need to have comfortable and enjoyable living.
Today, I don’t think I can fit everything I own in that single suitcase. Hell, I most certainly will need to hire a truck for my next move. But that’s not important. Minimalism isn’t about the absence of things. If you feel like you don’t have enough - you’re probably doing something wrong. Minimalism is about not being excessive.
For me, knowing that my belongings serve a purpose makes me feel content, clear-headed. It’s comforting. It feels right.
Sometimes, I forget and start accumulating stuff. And that’s when I go back to reducing again. It’s not an obsession, but a healthy periodical maintenance. Often it takes months, or even years to get rid of certain things.
Replace a queen sized bed with a Japanese futon mat. Digitalize the growing paper trail I keep. Travel the world for with a single suitcase.A number of people have expressed disquiet during the last year over the proliferation of undercover investigations and so-called exposés of what is euphemistically referred to as ‘the far right’ by the police, by the mass media and by malign NGOs such as Hope-Not-Hate, and it is perhaps appropriate for us to examine in detail the kind of people, and the organisations that are driving a desperate campaign to demonise and vilify honest patriotic groups and individuals who are merely trying to save our nation from looming disaster.
Starting with the murder last year of Labour MP Jo Cox, the media went into overdrive to float the idea that her killer, Thomas Mair, was not just a sad loner, a victim of ‘Care in the Community’ style healthcare that allowed a mentally ill man to run amok, but that he was a ‘terrorist’ and representative of a rising tide of ‘far right terrorism’ that the public should be every bit as fearful of as we are of the Islamic terrorism inspired by very real terrorist organisations such as ISIS.
I have already explained why Thomas Mair’s killing of Jo Cox was not an act of terrorism, but a politically motivated murder, and while some may not appreciate this distinction, it is both valid and fundamental to our understanding of recent events.
Prior to the day of her murder I doubt that many people, nationalist or otherwise living outside of her constituency of Batley and Spen had ever heard of Jo Cox or of Thomas Mair. They were, without wishing to be too pointed, nonentities as far as most people were concerned and it is only the brutal nature of her murder that has subsequently won widespread sympathy for Jo Cox, it certainly wasn’t the politics she pursued while alive.
Jo Cox’s murder is now invoked every time there is a so-called exposé of ‘far right’ activity. She has taken over from Stephen Lawrence as the more ‘appealing’ face of multicultural martyrdom, more appealing merely because she was a young, attractive looking White woman, but her murder had nothing to do with anyone active in nationalist politics and it is a falsehood to claim otherwise.
The first of this year’s so-called exposés was a brief news item produced for ITV News and syndicated out to a number of other news outlets including the ITV website where it can still be found.
This programme, entitled, ‘Exclusive: Former members of banned terror group meet at far-right training camp’ implied outrageously that a perfectly legal hiking and outdoors activities weekend incorporating an afternoon of self-defence training, was a secret training camp for members of National Action the group proscribed by the Home Office. Of course this is not stated in so many words, but the message is heavily implied throughout.
The programme focused on an event organised by Legion Martial Arts Club (LegionMAC), which was advertised quite openly on the Legion website and on Facebook. This was therefore, most definitely not a secret event, and it was open to anyone applying through the proper channels to attend.
The only secretive aspect to the event was that the precise location was kept confidential until the day before the event started as a security precaution to limit the possibility of violent Antifa demonstrators turning up and making a nuisance of themselves.
Another security precaution was that we made every effort to ‘vet’ the people attending in order to prevent trouble-makers from attending and spoiling the event.
Had a member of the police or a journalist approached us honestly and asked to attend the event, this could have been arranged without any problems. Nothing illegal was planned, nothing illegal took place and nothing was said by anyone who attended that they would not have been willing to say publicly. There was no need therefore, for ITV to go to great expense to secure a place for one of their undercover journalists. Nor was there a need for the journalist to assume a false identity and so rudely and dishonestly film other attendees at what was a private event, without their knowledge or consent.
After the event. I received an email from ITV News informing me that an undercover reporter had attended the Legion event and his findings would be broadcast on 20th March in the evening news, and that an online story would be published also. The sender of this email did not divulge their name, signing off as ‘ITV News specialist producer’. I believe this email to have come from ‘specialist producer’, Becky Kelly.
The news broadcast was attributed to Rohit Kachroo, the supposedly, bright, rising star of ITV News, who was appointed Security editor in 2014.
The so-called exposé claimed that two of the attendees at the Legion event were former members of National Action, when in point of fact only one of them was, however the most striking aspect of the programme was that it was so lacking focus and content, relying on innuendo in an attempt to convey what was a rather garbled message. In fact the whole thing was a bit of a damp squib and out of potentially twenty-six hours of secret filming by the undercover reporter, all that ITV found usable was approximately three minutes of short clips spliced together, showing nothing very much. This was a pitifully small ‘harvest’ when one considers the months that ‘Vlad’, as the reporter called himself, must have spent building up his ‘back-story’ on Facebook and the £150,000 budget this programme probably consumed.
Counter Terrorism police who received alarming reports of a secret ‘far right’ terrorist training camp will have had some of their time wasted before realising that nothing untoward had taken place. Indeed, so uninterested were the police that no-one attending or organising our event was even contacted by them or asked to make a statement.
Furthermore, despite the sensationalism employed by ITV in promoting their so called exposé and syndicating articles out to some of our daily national and regional newspapers, the Youth Hostels Association were forced to admit that we had conducted ourselves impeccably in terms of the hiring of their facilities, we had paid promptly, we had not abused their facilities and their premises were left clean and tidy.
The Derbyshire Times reported the chairman of the management committee of Youlgreave Village Hall saying the committee had accepted our booking in good faith after being told we were a sports club. He added: “It was a complete shock when we saw this on the news – it was unexpected because they appeared credible”.
Yes, we appeared to be “credible” as a sports club, because that is exactly what Legion Martial Arts Club is!
He continued, “They used the hall for a couple of hours to do some fitness training and went and had a meal in one of the pubs, causing no trouble at all.
“They were just ideal users who didn’t make any mess and cleared up after themselves”.
How about that? We were “ideal users” who conducted ourselves impeccably, “causing no trouble at all”. It would seem therefore that the so-called exposé achieved nothing at all, apart from alarming unnecessarily the Youth Hostels Association and the Youlgreave Village Hall Committee, and apart from wasting police time with spurious allegations.
Let us now turn our attention to the people who perpetrated the undercover filming and the misreporting of what had taken place, Rohit Kachroo and Becky Kelly.
Kachroo has a vested interest in promoting multiculturalism because he is of mixed race. His mother is Jamaican and his father is Indian. He and Becky Kelly were presented with an award at the 2017 Asian Media Awards in the category, ‘TV Report of the Year’, for their fake news exposé of our Legion event.
Asian Media Awards as we might anticipate is another of the racist organisations that have come into being in recent years to promote the specific interests of the Asian community in Britain.
Their website states, “Established in 2013, the awards aim to highlight the ground breaking work of reporters and producers in highlighting issues affecting race relations and human rights”.
Asian Media Awards, “showcases the very best talent working in the Asian media and those working in the mainstream media”.
So, let us end this article by ‘showcasing’ the ‘unique talent’ that is Rohit Kachroo, as seen in his most famous outside broadcast, demonstrating clearly his scintillating grasp of spoken English and his uncanny ability to define in precise and cogent terms the key aspects of the news we so urgently need to hear:
Our readers may be amused at the sight and lack of sartorial elegance displayed by Rohit Kachroo, wearing what appears to be, a jacket and shirt that are possibly as much as two sizes too small. Perhaps they shrank in the rain?
Spurred on by his recent award, and not quitting while he is ahead, it appears Rohit Kachroo has commissioned more ‘undercover investigative journalism’ targeting advocates for the indigenous White people of Britain and I will be reporting more fully on Rohit and his associates in further articles, so we can all gain a fuller understanding of the little games they play.
By Max Musson © 2017
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# # # #The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has granted compensation to another former service member for exposure to Agent Orange while stationed on Okinawa during the Vietnam War era. Dated October 2013, the award was made to a retired marine corps driver suffering from prostate cancer that, the presiding judge ruled, had been triggered by his transportation and usage of the toxic defoliant on the island between 1967 and 1968.
The decision to grant the claim comes in spite of repeated Pentagon denials that Agent Orange was ever present in Okinawa.
According to the ruling of the Board of Veterans’ Appeals (BVA), the unnamed marine alleges he came into contact with Agent Orange while transporting it in barrels and rubber bladders between U.S. military ports at Naha and White Beach — a navy installation on the island’s east coast — and a warehouse on Kadena Air Base. He also claims to have sprayed the defoliant in the Northern Training Area, in the Yanbaru jungles, to keep back foliage and reduce the risk of forest fires.
The former marine was able to identify the barrels he helped to transport as the infamous Vietnam War defoliant due to the tell-tale orange stripes painted around their middles.
The retired service member had first applied for compensation in 2004 but his claim was initially rejected. Following appeals by the veteran, Judge Mary Ellen Larkin ruled in his favor last October, stating, “While neither the service department nor DOD confirms the presence of Agent Orange on Okinawa during 1967 and 1968, the veteran offers a highly credible, consistent account that he was directly exposed thereto during those years while performing his assigned military duties.”
According to U.S. government records and interviews conducted by The Japan Times, more than 250 former service members claim to have been sickened by exposure to Agent Orange on Okinawa, but only a handful have ever been given help by their government. Other veterans who have successfully sued for compensation include a former marine stationed on the main island during the early 1960s and a retired army truck driver exposed while driving the defoliant from Okinawa’s ports to Kadena Air Base between 1965 and 1966 (see “Vets win payouts over Agent Orange use on Okinawa,” Zeit Gist, Feb. 14, 2012).
This latest win is believed to be the first time a veteran has been awarded compensation since the Pentagon issued a 29-page report in February 2013 denying Agent Orange had been present on the island. That report, written by former USAF Col. Alvin Young, came under fire from experts for failing to order environmental tests or interviews with any veterans alleging exposure on Okinawa.
In comments to The Japan Times regarding the latest VA ruling, Defense Department spokesman Mark Wright reaffirmed the Pentagon’s confidence in the credibility of Young’s report.
“The research showed that there are no source documents that validate the claims that Herbicide Orange was shipped to or through, unloaded, stored, used or buried on Okinawa,” Wright said by email.
Additionally, Genevieve Billia, VA public affairs specialist, said, “This BVA decision was case-specific, giving the benefit of doubt to the veteran claimant, and has no impact on Dr. Young’s report.”
Billia apparently ruled out the possibility of the decision opening the floodgates to similar payouts by explaining that such rulings do not set a precedent for other cases.
However, Don Schneider, a former military veterinary technician who believes he was exposed to defoliants on Okinawa in 1968, the same year as the marine in the latest case, is hopeful the ruling will make a difference.
“This will hearten and encourage other veterans to resubmit their claims for consideration. The VA has continued to ignore other valid claims but I think this decision will eventually prove to be as meaningful for the people of Okinawa as it is for the veterans who served on the island during the Vietnam War era,” Schneider told The Japan Times.
During the Vietnam War, Kadena Air Base — the installation cited in the October ruling as the location of the Agent Orange warehouse — was one of the Pentagon’s primary launchpads for the conflict. A 1971 U.S. Army report on Agent Orange — revealed by The Japan Times last year (‘71 Pentagon paper says Agent Orange was stored on Kadena Air Base,” Jan. 12, 2013) — cited a herbicide stockpile at Kadena, and it has been reported that the C-123 airplanes that sprayed defoliants over Vietnam were sent to the base for maintenance.
Recently, the installation has been the focus of public health fears following the discovery of 83 barrels — some stenciled with markings identifying the Dow Chemical Co., a defoliant maker — on land that was formerly part of the base. Tests on 22 of the barrels revealed some of them contained high levels of herbicide and dioxin, leading some scientists to assert that they may have contained military defoliants.
The results of tests on the remaining 61 barrels are expected to be made public in mid-April.
Meanwhile, last month, Kadena Air Base officials gave the all-clear to two Defense Department schools adjacent to the dump site following environmental tests on the surface soil of their grounds.Elphinstone Station Stampede: Passengers and local people were seen carrying the injured down the bridge.
Highlights 22 dead in stampede near Parel suburban station The incident took place around 10.30 am during rush hour Passengers were seen carrying the injured down the bridge
Elphinstone Station Stampede: All the injured were rushed to the nearest hospitals
A pile of footwear was lying next to the bridge.
Elphinstone Station Stampede: There were more than the usual people on the bridge at the time.
Twenty-two people including a child were killed and over 30 seriously wounded in a rush-hour stampede in Mumbai that broke out when thousands took a narrow railway bridge connecting two stations after heavy rain. Phone videos taken by witnesses show a crowd on the British-era bridge and people climbing over the railing and hanging onto it precariously. Moments later, bodies are piled up on the stairs, pressing against the railing.The stampede took place around 10.30 am on the tiny bridge between the Elphinstone Road and Parel stations, which are among Mumbai's busiest. Witnesses say four trains rolled in at the same time and a large crowd poured into the bridge that was already bursting with people taking shelter from a sudden, heavy downpour. A few commuters slipped, and people fell on them. People on the bridge were in a rush to get down, while those who had arrived on suburban trains were making their way up," said Kishore Thakkar, a commuter."The crowd was increasing...We couldn't breathe, we were falling on each other, there was panic. There was no exit. There was also a rumour that the bridge is falling, the bridge is breaking," shared Shruti Lokre, who survived the horror.Visuals after the stampede showed multiple bodies and attempts to revive them. Passengers and local people were seen carrying bodies down the bridge. Footwear was scattered next to the bridge."The overbridge of Elphinstone station was overcrowded and due to rain it got slippery too. This caused panic and resulted in the stampede," said Atul Shrivastav, inspector general of the Railway Protection Force.The police are investigating reports that a short-circuit caused a loud sound near the bridge and led to panic and chaos.
Railways Minister Piyush Goyal, who was in Mumbai today, has ordered an inquiry led by a top railway safety official. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis visited the injured in the hospital late on Friday night and said a probe will be ordered.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted condolences.
3/GM, WR reached the site and visited the injured at KEM Hospital with medical team of WR for assistance pic.twitter.com/dgjbwVQT7C - Ministry of Railways (@RailMinIndia) September 29, 2017
The two stations get much of Mumbai's local train commuter traffic as there are a large number of offices in the area. Security personnel are usually posted for crowd management at the bridge.Angry commuters and residents said the bridge is too old and narrow and not strong enough to take the busy sector. "It was a disaster waiting to happen," remarked a local resident, saying that the bridge has been overcrowded for years and there have been multiple demands for more railway bridges for the area.Many on social media targeted the bullet train project to link Mumbai with Ahmedabad launched earlier this month. Tweets urged the government to fund basic rail upgrades instead. Local trains are the lifeline for the 20 million people of Mumbai.With life getting in the way of this ukulele blog, I have been finding it hard to get reviews done as quickly as I would like. And as part of that I have a stack of ukulele albums that I have been listening to that I haven't got around to reviewing on this site as yet. Feeling guilty about that, I figured I would give them a shout out in a combined roundup of what I have been playing in the last few months.
Manitoba Hal - Dancing In The Moonlight
Ben Rouse - Love Of Rin
Ric McCormick - Pies, Love and Ukulele EP
Jono and The Uke Dealers
I adored Hals 'Flirting With Mermaids' album, and have seen him perform live a couple of times since then, so have really been enjoying this one. The Canadian bluesman really shines on this short album in what sees his blues show of more of their country side (which is a real love of mine). A mix of originals and covers (including a sublime take on Wayfaring Stranger) I thoroughly enjoyed this one and it cements his position as being one of this bloggers favourite ukulele artists.Available from http://www.manitobahal.com/#!music/c1erv If you have not been wowed by one of Bens stage performances lately, then you have missed a treat. But for those that struggle to get to shows, you can now hear what all the fuss is about with this 12 track recording of total wizardry on the strings. For anyone who thinks Ben is 'that guy who plays rock tunes' on the ukulele then this album really shows that the breadth of his tastes go way beyond that. Whilst we have rock in covers of Zeppelins Immigrant Song and a sublime medley of Thunderstruck and Highway To Hell we also have the likes of tango in Por Una Cabeza, classical music, folk and an inspired choice of 'Baby Now That I Found You'. If you like your solo ukulele you will love this. Something for everyone really. Another performer in the 'how does he do that' category.Available from - http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/benrouse2 I first saw Ric perform at the Grand Northern Ukulele Festival but had been hearing good things about him for a while. Really enjoyed listening to his new EP selection of self penned witty tunes. If you are compelled by song titles such as 'Bunny Stew' and 'Who The Hell's George Formby?' or subject matter including Ethel Austin knickers you will like this. It's all very tongue in cheek, but well performed. In addition, Ric is making this available in return for a charitable donation to The Christie hospital.Available from - https://www.justgiving.com/ricmacfeegle/ I had no idea what to expect with this one. I have been in touch with Jono Bell, lead singer and uke player with this Northampton four piece for some time, but I have to admit that I had not heard his music before this EP arrived. It's really nice when something new arrives that is just up your street and this certainly is. Six self penned tunes and one of those records that, whilst clearly having a ukulele in their, is more of a full band sound. Kind of a punk / mod / grebo / groove sound to it which I am really enjoying. Includes a guest performer in the form of Rev D Wayne Love from Alabama3 just to add to the cool factor. I'd recommend you give this a listen. It's my pick of the bunch.Available from http://grassrootsrecords.bigcartel.com/product/jono-the-uke-dealers-ep More reviews coming soon!University of California (UC) president Janet Napolitano says her school system is “committed” to extending student loans to illegal immigrants at the expense of American taxpayers.
“We are committed to continuing a path forward for undocumented students at the University of California,” Napolitano says in a press release. “This funding will further strengthen the university’s undocumented student initiative, and help ensure that these students receive the support and resources they need to succeed.”
Napolitano – the former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security – continues that UC will designate $8.4 million a year for the next three years for illegal immigrants attending college on UC |
was instantly killed.
Now I know they just jumpscare me to launch me into the spirit world, and I’m not afraid of them anymore. They may be scary, but they’re not evil, they are helpful.The Visegrád Post offers you the translation of an article published on September 25, 2017, on Mandiner, a centrist and conservative media of Hungary.
Visegrád Group – The place of national parliaments should be strengthened in the European decision-making process, says the final communiqué of the V4 on Monday. The Visegrád countries have also expressed their expectations regarding the Brexit negotiations, which should also represent the interests of the four Central and Eastern European countries in the negotiations.
The countries of the Visegrád Group want to strengthen the weight of national parliaments in EU policy, and the V4 countries – Czechia, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia – expect the EU representatives to defend their interests effectively during the Brexit negotiations.
This is what contains the closing declaration which was approved by the council of parliamentary committees for European affairs of the V4 countries in Sárospatak in the county of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén (Hungary, Ed.) on Monday. Richards Hörcsik (Fidesz), chairman of the Hungarian parliamentary committee for European affairs, said at a press conference after the meeting: Hungary took over and assumed the V4 presidency for one year from July 1, and the first parliamentary meeting of this cycle was that of Sárospatak.
He stressed that the countries of Visegrád have already repeatedly stated that they consider it important to strengthen the role of national parliaments in the EU. It is a possibility offered by two points of the Treaty of Lisbon, to which they will refer when they will intervene in Brussels against “the silent legislation”, he said.
Mr Hörcsik announced that the other important item on the agenda was the Brexit, while the UK’s exit from the EU will “hurt everyone”. Reducing the resulting damage is in the interest of all EU countries – he stressed. According to his statement, the V4 member states will not sign separate agreements with the British, as the negotiations have to take place on behalf of the 27 Member States. However, the V4 countries expect that during the negotiations the EU delegation will consequently defend the interests of the four countries of Central and Eastern Europe. If it turns out that the interests of one of the four countries of the Visegrád group is being aggrieved during the Brexit negotiations, the four countries will then stand up as a whole to defend the interests of the latter, Richárd Hörcsik concluded.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!
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!
9/10/2016 – What an astonishing round it was! It literally saw all the previous leaders suffer setbacks. The biggest headline was without question the crushing victory of Team USA over India by 3.5-0.5. But this was not the only eye-opener. Previous co-leaders Netherlands lost badly to Latvia 3-1 and China, ranked third, lost 3-1 to England. Russia's 3.5-0.5 win over the Czechs sets up a double-date with the USA. In the Women's event, Russia was held to a draw by Poland, while China beat Ukraine. Full report, results and GM analysis.
2016 Baku Olympiad
All games start at 3 p.m. local time = 1 p.m. in Europe (CEST), one hour earlier in Britain, and 2 p.m. in Moscow. You can find the starting time at your location here.
Watch it live on Playchess!
Round seven
Surprises don’t begin to describe the seventh round, whether the Open section or the Women’s, though the lion’s share of unexpected results certainly came from the Open. In such a large event, and certainly with it in full sway with far more balanced pairings, the occasional upset of surprise is the norm, not the exception, but today none of the leaders were spared.
The foremost match of the day was between the sole leaders India and the US Dream Team. On paper, the US was favorite, so to call a win by the Americans a surprise would be to deny the obvious. Still, with the Indians having displayed such great form, no one would have expected the near whitewash the US players inflicted with their 3.5-0.5 score.
It was a key match, and thrilling to follow live. In the end, the USA prevailed by a large score, but it could have gone differently. (photo by Paul Truong)
Truth be told, the final result did not reflect the positions after two plus hours of play, with both Fabiano Caruana in trouble, as well as Sam Shankland. India’s board one, Pentala Harikrishna had a very promising position, with a potential to go for more with a precise sequence, but alas for his team and the Indian fans, he missed it.
Fabiano Caruana and Pentala Harikrisha get ready for the big match (photo by M. Emelianova)
Pentala Harikrishna - Fabiano Caruana (annotated by GM Alejandro Ramirez)
[Event "42nd Olympiad Baku 2016 Open"] [Site "Baku"] [Date "2016.09.09"] [Round "7.1"] [White "Harikrishna, P."] [Black "Caruana, Fabiano"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [ECO "C83"] [WhiteElo "2752"] [BlackElo "2808"] [PlyCount "91"] [EventDate "2016.??.??"] [EventType "team-tourn"] [EventCountry "AZE"] [Source "ChessBase"] [WhiteTeam "India"] [BlackTeam "United States"] [WhiteTeamCountry "IND"] [BlackTeamCountry "USA"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Nxe4 6. d4 b5 7. Bb3 d5 8. dxe5 Be6 9. Nbd2 Nc5 10. c3 Be7 11. Bc2 d4 12. Nb3 d3 13. Bb1 Nxb3 14. axb3 Bf5 15. b4 O-O 16. Bf4 Qd7 17. h3 Rfd8 18. g4 Bg6 19. Bg3 Kh8 20. Re1 Qc8 21. Nd2 a5 22. bxa5 Rxa5 23. Rxa5 Nxa5 24. f4 f5 25. exf6 Bxf6 26. Ba2 Nc4 27. Bxc4 bxc4 28. g5 Qxh3 29. Qf3 Bh5 30. Qf2 Be2 31. gxf6 gxf6 32. Qg2 Qe6 33. Kh2 Rg8 34. Ra1 Rg6 35. Qe4 $2 (35. Ra8+ $1 Rg8 36. Rxg8+ Kxg8 37. f5 $1 {leaves Black in a very bad position.}) 35... Qxe4 36. Nxe4 Bf3 $1 {Harikrishna must have missed that Ra8+ is not possible.} 37. Nf2 (37. Nd2 Rh6+ 38. Kg1 Rh1+ 39. Kf2 Rxa1 40. Kxf3 {already looks dangerous for White, though with good play it might be a draw.}) (37. Ra8+ Kg7 38. Re8 Rh6+ 39. Kg1 Rh1+ 40. Kf2 Bxe4 41. Rxe4 d2 {loses for White.}) 37... d2 38. Ra7 Rh6+ 39. Bh4 (39. Kg1 Rh1+ 40. Nxh1 d1=Q+) 39... d1=Q 40. Nxd1 {Now the game is a simple draw.} Bxd1 41. Kg3 Kg8 42. f5 Bc2 43. Rxc7 Bd3 44. Rc5 Rh5 45. Bxf6 Rxf5 46. Rxf5 1/2-1/2 [Event "42nd Olympiad Baku 2016 Open"] [Site "Baku"] [Date "2016.09.09"] [Round "7.1"] [White "Harikrishna, P."] [Black "Caruana, Fabiano"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [ECO "C83"] [WhiteElo "2752"] [BlackElo "2808"] [PlyCount "91"] [EventDate "2016.??.??"] [EventType "team-tourn"] [EventCountry "AZE"] [Source "ChessBase"] [WhiteTeam "India"] [BlackTeam "United States"] [WhiteTeamCountry "IND"] [BlackTeamCountry "USA"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. O-O Nxe4 6. d4 b5 7. Bb3 d5 8. dxe5 Be6 9. Nbd2 Nc5 10. c3 Be7 11. Bc2 d4 12. Nb3 d3 13. Bb1 Nxb3 14. axb3 Bf5 15. b4 O-O 16. Bf4 Qd7 17. h3 Rfd8 18. g4 Bg6 19. Bg3 Kh8 20. Re1 Qc8 21. Nd2 a5 22. bxa5 Rxa5 23. Rxa5 Nxa5 24. f4 f5 25. exf6 Bxf6 26. Ba2 Nc4 27. Bxc4 bxc4 28. g5 Qxh3 29. Qf3 Bh5 30. Qf2 Be2 31. gxf6 gxf6 32. Qg2 Qe6 33. Kh2 Rg8 34. Ra1 Rg6 35. Qe4 $2 (35. Ra8+ $1 Rg8 36. Rxg8+ Kxg8 37. f5 $1 {leaves Black in a very bad position.}) 35... Qxe4 36. Nxe4 Bf3 $1 {Harikrishna must have missed that Ra8+ is not possible.} 37. Nf2 (37. Nd2 Rh6+ 38. Kg1 Rh1+ 39. Kf2 Rxa1 40. Kxf3 {already looks dangerous for White, though with good play it might be a draw.}) (37. Ra8+ Kg7 38. Re8 Rh6+ 39. Kg1 Rh1+ 40. Kf2 Bxe4 41. Rxe4 d2 {loses for White.}) 37... d2 38. Ra7 Rh6+ 39. Bh4 (39. Kg1 Rh1+ 40. Nxh1 d1=Q+) 39... d1=Q 40. Nxd1 {Now the game is a simple draw.} Bxd1 41. Kg3 Kg8 42. f5 Bc2 43. Rxc7 Bd3 44. Rc5 Rh5 45. Bxf6 Rxf5 46. Rxf5 1/2-1/2
If Caruana could count himself fortunate to draw and have avoided a worse fate, Sam Shankland had to feel he had a Guardian Angel at his side. As he himself explained after the game, he had been so lost that he had debated resigning, but because it was a team event and there was more on the line than just his personal result, he played on, seeking only moves that did not lose outright. Incredibly, his refusal to give up was rewarded, not just by a chance to save, but a full win.
A dramatic win by the United States over India by a crushing 3.5-0.5 takes them to first (photo by M. Emelianova)
Sam Shankland - S.P. Sethuruman (annotated by GM Alejandro Ramirez)
[Event "42nd Olympiad Baku 2016 Open"] [Site "Baku"] [Date "2016.09.09"] [Round "7.4"] [White "Shankland, Samuel L"] [Black "Sethuraman, S P."] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "D13"] [WhiteElo "2679"] [BlackElo "2640"] [Annotator "Ramirez Alvarez,Alejandro"] [PlyCount "150"] [EventDate "2016.??.??"] [EventType "team-tourn"] [EventCountry "AZE"] [Source "ChessBase"] [WhiteTeam "United States"] [BlackTeam "India"] [WhiteTeamCountry "USA"] [BlackTeamCountry "IND"] 1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. e3 Bg4 5. cxd5 cxd5 6. Nc3 e6 7. Qa4+ Nbd7 8. Ne5 a6 9. f3 $5 {A new idea, perhaps, playing against the bishop. The computer doesn't approve, but what do they know.} Bf5 10. g4 Bg6 (10... b5 {is necessary according to the mechanical brain, let's analyze a little bit why:} 11. Qd1 Nxe5 $1 (11... Bg6 12. h4 {is the game}) 12. dxe5 (12. gxf5 Nc4 { doesn't make sense for White.}) 12... Nxg4 13. fxg4 Qh4+ 14. Kd2 Bxg4 {And Black's pair of bishops, better structure and better king give him enough compensation for the piece. Is this easy to evaluate during the game? No, quite the contrary.}) 11. h4 b5 12. Qd1 b4 13. h5 $1 Bxh5 14. Nxd7 (14. Ne2 $1 {is a very computer like move} Bg6 15. Nxg6 fxg6 16. Nf4 Kf7 17. e4 $1 { With a big initiative.}) 14... Nxd7 15. Rxh5 $2 {This move is strange, though, it makes sense to eliminate d5} (15. Nxd5 Bg6 (15... exd5 16. Rxh5 Bd6 17. Kf2 {also looks very good for Shankland.}) 16. Nf4 {still gains the pair of bishops, and the central pawn mass gives White a big advantage.}) 15... bxc3 16. bxc3 Qc7 {The pressure on c3 now gives Black counterplay, not to mention d5 is not a weakness anymore.} 17. Bd2 Bd6 18. Bd3 Nb6 19. Ke2 h6 20. g5 Kd7 $5 {With the kings in the center, anything can happen!} 21. gxh6 gxh6 22. Rb1 Rag8 23. Bxa6 $2 {a bit greedy, there was no reason to allow the move Rg2+.} (23. Qh1 $13 Nc4 $1) (23. Kf2 $1 {is a move so brave I wouldn't really consider it.} ) 23... Rg2+ 24. Kd3 $2 {Shankland seriously underestimates the attack.} (24. Kf1 Rhg8 25. Rh1 {keeps White afloat, though his position is obviously grim.}) 24... Ra8 25. Bb5+ Kd8 26. Rxh6 Rxa2 {It seems like White has threats, but in truth it is only a few checks.} 27. Rh8+ Ke7 28. Re8+ Kf6 29. Be1 Kg7 30. f4 { With Black's king safe on g7, it is time for him to restart his attack.} f5 31. Qb3 Qf7 (31... Ra3 32. Rb2 Rxb3 33. Rxg2+ Kf7 34. Reg8 $1 {And Black is the one that has to be careful} Bf8 35. Rh8 $1 {And things are far, far from clear. }) (31... Rh2 $1 {was winning, threatening now Ra3,}) 32. Qd1 Nc4 33. Rd8 $1 { After this move Sethuraman fell to below two minutes, with many moves to go the win is not easy to find.} Be7 $6 (33... Nxe3 $1 34. Kxe3 (34. Qc1 Qh5 $19) 34... Bxf4+ $1 {Nothing else works.} 35. Kxf4 (35. Kd3 Qh5 $1 {is the prettiest.} 36. Qxh5 Rad2+) 35... Rg4+ $1 36. Ke3 f4+ $19 {White gets mated.}) 34. Rd7 Rab2 (34... Nb2+ 35. Rxb2 Rgxb2 {at least won the exchange} 36. Bh4 Bxh4 37. Rxf7+ Kxf7 $19 {But the evaluation I gave at the end is very computer like. With two minutes on the clock who knows if White has a perpetual or more. }) 35. Bxc4 dxc4+ 36. Kxc4 Qe8 37. Rxb2 Rxb2 38. Qa1 Rb8 39. Qa7 Kf8 40. Kd3 Ra8 41. Qb7 Rb8 42. Qh1 $6 Qxd7 {The endgame is tough to win, but only two results are possible. Shankland wins after a very long struggle.} 43. Qh8+ Kf7 44. Qxb8 Qc6 45. Qb2 Qe4+ 46. Kd2 Qg2+ 47. Kc1 Qf1 48. Kd1 Qd3+ 49. Qd2 Qc4 50. Qe2 Qa4+ {Shankland,S (2679)-Sethuraman,S (2640) Baku 2016 playchess.com (ChessBase)} 51. Qc2 Qc4 52. Kd2 Qf1 53. Qd3 Qh1 54. Qe2 Qe4 55. Qh2 Qb7 56. Ke2 Qb2+ 57. Bd2 Qb5+ 58. Kf2 Kg6 59. Qg2+ Kf7 60. Qf3 Bh4+ 61. Kg2 Qd3 62. Qh5+ Kf8 63. Qd1 Kg7 64. Qg1 Qxd2+ 65. Kh3+ Kf8 66. Kxh4 Qxc3 67. Kh5 Qc6 68. Kh6 Qf3 69. Qg7+ Ke8 70. Qe5 Kd7 71. Kg7 Qg4+ 72. Kf8 Qh4 73. Qg7+ Kd6 74. Ke8 Qh5+ 75. Qf7 Kd5 1-0 [Event "42nd Olympiad Baku 2016 Open"] [Site "Baku"] [Date "2016.09.09"] [Round "7.4"] [White "Shankland, Samuel L"] [Black "Sethuraman, S P."] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "D13"] [WhiteElo "2679"] [BlackElo "2640"] [Annotator "Ramirez Alvarez,Alejandro"] [PlyCount "150"] [EventDate "2016.??.??"] [EventType "team-tourn"] [EventCountry "AZE"] [Source "ChessBase"] [WhiteTeam "United States"] [BlackTeam "India"] [WhiteTeamCountry "USA"] [BlackTeamCountry "IND"] 1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. e3 Bg4 5. cxd5 cxd5 6. Nc3 e6 7. Qa4+ Nbd7 8. Ne5 a6 9. f3 $5 {A new idea, perhaps, playing against the bishop. The computer doesn't approve, but what do they know.} Bf5 10. g4 Bg6 (10... b5 {is necessary according to the mechanical brain, let's analyze a little bit why:} 11. Qd1 Nxe5 $1 (11... Bg6 12. h4 {is the game}) 12. dxe5 (12. gxf5 Nc4 { doesn't make sense for White.}) 12... Nxg4 13. fxg4 Qh4+ 14. Kd2 Bxg4 {And Black's pair of bishops, better structure and better king give him enough compensation for the piece. Is this easy to evaluate during the game? No, quite the contrary.}) 11. h4 b5 12. Qd1 b4 13. h5 $1 Bxh5 14. Nxd7 (14. Ne2 $1 {is a very computer like move} Bg6 15. Nxg6 fxg6 16. Nf4 Kf7 17. e4 $1 { With a big initiative.}) 14... Nxd7 15. Rxh5 $2 {This move is strange, though, it makes sense to eliminate d5} (15. Nxd5 Bg6 (15... exd5 16. Rxh5 Bd6 17. Kf2 {also looks very good for Shankland.}) 16. Nf4 {still gains the pair of bishops, and the central pawn mass gives White a big advantage.}) 15... bxc3 16. bxc3 Qc7 {The pressure on c3 now gives Black counterplay, not to mention d5 is not a weakness anymore.} 17. Bd2 Bd6 18. Bd3 Nb6 19. Ke2 h6 20. g5 Kd7 $5 {With the kings in the center, anything can happen!} 21. gxh6 gxh6 22. Rb1 Rag8 23. Bxa6 $2 {a bit greedy, there was no reason to allow the move Rg2+.} (23. Qh1 $13 Nc4 $1) (23. Kf2 $1 {is a move so brave I wouldn't really consider it.} ) 23... Rg2+ 24. Kd3 $2 {Shankland seriously underestimates the attack.} (24. Kf1 Rhg8 25. Rh1 {keeps White afloat, though his position is obviously grim.}) 24... Ra8 25. Bb5+ Kd8 26. Rxh6 Rxa2 {It seems like White has threats, but in truth it is only a few checks.} 27. Rh8+ Ke7 28. Re8+ Kf6 29. Be1 Kg7 30. f4 { With Black's king safe on g7, it is time for him to restart his attack.} f5 31. Qb3 Qf7 (31... Ra3 32. Rb2 Rxb3 33. Rxg2+ Kf7 34. Reg8 $1 {And Black is the one that has to be careful} Bf8 35. Rh8 $1 {And things are far, far from clear. }) (31... Rh2 $1 {was winning, threatening now Ra3,}) 32. Qd1 Nc4 33. Rd8 $1 { After this move Sethuraman fell to below two minutes, with many moves to go the win is not easy to find.} Be7 $6 (33... Nxe3 $1 34. Kxe3 (34. Qc1 Qh5 $19) 34... Bxf4+ $1 {Nothing else works.} 35. Kxf4 (35. Kd3 Qh5 $1 {is the prettiest.} 36. Qxh5 Rad2+) 35... Rg4+ $1 36. Ke3 f4+ $19 {White gets mated.}) 34. Rd7 Rab2 (34... Nb2+ 35. Rxb2 Rgxb2 {at least won the exchange} 36. Bh4 Bxh4 37. Rxf7+ Kxf7 $19 {But the evaluation I gave at the end is very computer like. With two minutes on the clock who knows if White has a perpetual or more. }) 35. Bxc4 dxc4+ 36. Kxc4 Qe8 37. Rxb2 Rxb2 38. Qa1 Rb8 39. Qa7 Kf8 40. Kd3 Ra8 41. Qb7 Rb8 42. Qh1 $6 Qxd7 {The endgame is tough to win, but only two results are possible. Shankland wins after a very long struggle.} 43. Qh8+ Kf7 44. Qxb8 Qc6 45. Qb2 Qe4+ 46. Kd2 Qg2+ 47. Kc1 Qf1 48. Kd1 Qd3+ 49. Qd2 Qc4 50. Qe2 Qa4+ {Shankland,S (2679)-Sethuraman,S (2640) Baku 2016 playchess.com (ChessBase)} 51. Qc2 Qc4 52. Kd2 Qf1 53. Qd3 Qh1 54. Qe2 Qe4 55. Qh2 Qb7 56. Ke2 Qb2+ 57. Bd2 Qb5+ 58. Kf2 Kg6 59. Qg2+ Kf7 60. Qf3 Bh4+ 61. Kg2 Qd3 62. Qh5+ Kf8 63. Qd1 Kg7 64. Qg1 Qxd2+ 65. Kh3+ Kf8 66. Kxh4 Qxc3 67. Kh5 Qc6 68. Kh6 Qf3 69. Qg7+ Ke8 70. Qe5 Kd7 71. Kg7 Qg4+ 72. Kf8 Qh4 73. Qg7+ Kd6 74. Ke8 Qh5+ 75. Qf7 Kd5 1-0
As to boards two and three, Hikaru Nakamura and Wesley So dispatched their rivals, India’s top scorers, in clinical fashion. In fact, it should be noted that the three US stars have all performed above and beyond their duty with superlative rating performances for all. Fabiano Caruana has a 2848 performance, Hikaru Nakamura is at 2835, and Wesley So continues the form he showed at the Sinquefield Cup with 5.0/6 and a 2869 performance.
Wesley So, seen here with Baskaran Adhiban, has been a star with a 2869 performance (photo by David Llada)
It bears noting that they will need this level of performance, since tomorrow they will finally face the Russians, who have demonstrated superb recovery strength. After the loss to Ukraine, the Russians have regrouped and come back firing all cylinders, winning all their subsequent matches and convincingly so. In round seven they faced the Czechs, who had held the US to a draw, and ran over them without looking back, winning by 3.5-0.5.
Sergey Karjakin has more than justified the decision to place him on board one over a higher rated Vladimir Kramnik. With 6.0/7 and a 2872 performance, the World Championship Challenger is promising not only great results at Baku, but a serious threat for the title in November. (photo by E. Kublashvili)
If Karjakin’s performance is worthy of all the accolades, his teammate Ian Nepomniachtchi is enjoying a run like few, with 7.0/7. So far he has been the team’s six-million-dollar man. (photo by E. Kublashvili)
Ian Nepomniachtchi - Zbynek Hracek (annotated by GM Elshan Moradiabadi)
[Event "42nd Olympiad Baku 2016 Open"] [Site "Baku"] [Date "2016.09.09"] [Round "7.11"] [White "Nepomniachtchi, Ian"] [Black "Hracek, Zbynek"] [Result "1-0"] [ECO "B33"] [WhiteElo "2740"] [BlackElo "2591"] [Annotator "GM Elshan Moradiabadi"] [PlyCount "81"] [EventDate "2016.??.??"] [EventType "team-tourn"] [EventCountry "AZE"] [SourceTitle "playchess.com"] [Source "ChessBase"] [WhiteTeam "Russia"] [BlackTeam "Czech Republic"] [WhiteTeamCountry "RUS"] [BlackTeamCountry "CZE"] [TimeControl "40/5400+30:1800+30"] {Nepomniachtchi (Nepo from now on because I feel too lazy to write down the whole name!) has been an instrumental figure in Russia's strong comeback to table one. WIth seven in seven, you cannot ask for more than that!} 1. e4 {(00:00)} c5 {(00:00)} 2. Nf3 {(00:00)} Nc6 {(00:00)} 3. d4 {(00:00)} cxd4 {(00:00)} 4. Nxd4 {( 00:00)} Nf6 {(00:00)} 5. Nc3 {(00:04)} e5 {(00:00) Hracek is a veteran GM with years of experience at the highest level. He always plays 'healthy' openings with a good grasp of middlegame nuances. His opening choice today is a Sveshnikov!} 6. Ndb5 {(00:20)} d6 {(00:06)} 7. Bg5 {(00:21)} a6 {( 00:07)} 8. Na3 {(00:07)} b5 {(00:04)} 9. Nd5 {(00:05) The favorite move of 12th world champion Anatoly Karpov.} (9. Bxf6 gxf6 {used to be the main line but it is not so any more!}) 9... Be7 {(00:04)} 10. Bxf6 {(00:06)} Bxf6 { (00:03)} 11. c4 {(00:08) Nepo plays this against the Sveshnikov, exclusively.} b4 {(00:05)} 12. Nc2 {(00:08)} O-O {(00:07)} 13. g3 {(00:14)} Be6 {(00:20)} 14. h4 {(00:44)} a5 {(01:21)} 15. Bh3 {(01:57)} a4 {(03:31) Nepo himself had reached this position back in 2009 against Ni Hua} 16. Qd3 $146 {(07:34) This move seems very natural but it is a novelty! We may not be surprised to see a novelty on move 16 in a Berlin, Spanish or even a French Defence, however, it is rare to see a novelty in the Sveshnikov this early!} (16. b3 Bxd5 17. cxd5 Nd4 18. Nxd4 exd4 19. O-O Re8 20. bxa4 Rxe4 21. Rc1 Re8 22. Rc4 d3 23. Qxd3 Rxa4 24. Rfc1 Ra3 25. Qc2 Bc3 26. Rc8 Qe7 27. Rxe8+ Qxe8 28. Bf1 g6 29. Bc4 Ra7 30. Qd3 Re7 {1/2-1/2 (30) Nepomniachtchi,I (2632)-Ni,H (2701) Sochi 2009}) 16... b3 $1 {(12:46) This is why nobody plays Qd3. Nepo on the other hand has a different opinion.} 17. Nce3 $6 {(00:08) Very very dubious!} bxa2 $2 {(08:09) a weak reaction from Hracek. He had to go "all in" in this position. It may not be something he likes but it is what the position calls for.} (17... a3 $1 18. Qxb3 (18. axb3 axb2 19. Rb1 Bxh3 20. Rxh3 Ra1 21. Rh1 Qa5+ 22. Kf1 Rxb1+ 23. Qxb1 Qa3 24. Qd1 Rb8 25. Kg2 Bd8 $17) 18... Nd4 19. Qc3 Qd7 $1 {I think Hracek missed the power of this move and that is why he did not enter this line.} 20. Nxf6+ gxf6 21. Bxe6 fxe6 22. b3 (22. b4 Qb7) 22... Qb7 23. Qd3 f5 24. O-O fxe4 25. Qd1 Nf3+ 26. Kh1 Rad8 {and d5-d4 seems unstoppable.}) 18. Rxa2 {(06:56)} Qa5+ {(27:10)} 19. Kf1 {(00:46)} Bxd5 {(06:45)} 20. Nxd5 {(05:37)} Nb4 {(03:40) } 21. Nxb4 {(03:23)} Qxb4 {(00:02)} 22. Bd7 {(00:07)} Bd8 {(09:13) Both players are activating their bishops.} 23. Bc6 {(08:37)} Ra7 {(01:20)} 24. Qc2 {(00:12)} a3 $2 {(03:06) This is a tactical blunder. Hracek does not play active chess today.} (24... Bb6 25. Rxa4 Rxa4 26. Bxa4 Bd4 27. b3 f5 28. exf5 Qb7 29. Rh2 g6 30. g4 (30. h5) (30. fxg6 Bxf2 31. gxh7+ Kh8 {was very dangerous for White.}) 30... Qf3 31. Rg2 Kh8 32. b4 gxf5 33. gxf5 Rg8 34. Rxg8+ Kxg8 {And Black's activity should suffice for a draw despite White's two extra pawns.}) 25. Kg2 {(00:03)} Qc5 {(07:17)} 26. Bd5 {(00:09)} g6 $2 {(07:21) This is just a waste of time.} (26... axb2 27. Rxb2 Qc7 28. Rhb1 Qd7 29. Rb7 Rxb7 30. Rxb7 Bc7 31. Qb3 {And White's attack may or may not be decisive but at least not sometimes soon!}) 27. Rb1 $1 {(00:23) A strong move which assures White's control over the seventh rank.} axb2 {(02:34)} 28. Raxb2 { (00:11)} Kh8 {(03:43)} 29. Rb5 {(00:29)} Qc8 {(00:57)} 30. Rb8 {(01:20)} Qd7 { (00:49 |
leading up to the game.
"He's not just a veteran guy, he's one of the better players in college football right now," Malzahn said Tuesday. "He's a great competitor.... This is a big game, and he'll do whatever he can [to play]."
Auburn's Kerryon Johnson missed Monday's practice but has since been able to do "some things" during practice this week, coach Gus Malzahn said. Butch Dill/AP Photo
Kamryn Pettway, the team's leading rusher a year ago, was ruled out by Malzahn earlier in the week as he recovers from a fractured shoulder blade that could sideline him the rest of the season.
No. 2 Auburn plays No. 6 Georgia in Atlanta on Saturday for the SEC championship.
When the two teams played one another four weeks ago, Johnson had 233 yards and a touchdown during the 40-17 win at Auburn.Just in time for the biggest dip day of the year, Kraft Foods announced that Americans might notice a distinct lack of Velveeta on their grocery store shelves. Following an announcement by the company, which noted that consumers in some states might have a hard time finding their liquid gold cheese in the coming weeks, the Internet wasted no time in completely freaking out, dubbing the shortage "Cheesepocalypse" on Twitter and creating imitation Velveeta-dip recipes on Lifehacker. There's even a website, Cheesepocalypse.org, which shows a map of the conversation about the Velveeta shortage by pulling geographic information via Twitter (currently, users are talking most about the shortage in places like Massachusetts and Maryland).* In reality, people looking to munch on a chip with dip might have to resort to traditional cheese for their melty concoctions--which, while reassuringly natural, will also mean less-than-velvety texture for a lot of Super Bowl dips.
It's an unfortunate reality that cheese, when melted, becomes imperfect--it pools oil (more, the fattier it is) and coagulates quickly, turning a once molten bowl of queso dip into a sad stringy mess. Seekers of gooey cheese can work around this by using a young cheese or a less-fatty cheese, but sometimes, standard hacks just won't cut it: enter Velveeta, a cheese named for the fact that it melts so smooth.
In reality, the makers of Velveeta weren't looking for a way to melt cheese down--they were looking for a way to put cheese back together. And, though it's owned by, and most heavily associated with, Kraft now, Velveeta was not one of James L. Kraft's cheese creations.
The Frankenstein behind the cheese creation was one Emil Frey, a Swiss cheesemaker who moved from Switzerland to upstate New York, where he worked in cheese factories in the late 1880s. While working at the Monroe Cheese Factory in Monroe, New York, Frey made a name for himself in cheese history by creating Liederkranz, an American-made version of Limburger, a particularly odoriferous semi-soft cow's milk cheese. Liederkranz was extremely successful, but the Monroe Cheese Company wasn't so lucky: in 1891, the business was foreclosed upon by a bank and bought by a New York City grocer named Jacob Weisl. Under Weisl's new leadership, the company opened up a second factory in Covington, Pennsylvania, which produced mostly Swiss cheese. Unfortunately, cheesemaking wasn't--and still isn't--a perfectly precise process, and the factory noticed that many wheels were broken or misshapen, wasting valuable product. Not wanting to let this waste fall by the wayside, the company shipped the broken bits back to Monroe, where Frey was charged with figuring out a way to make something valuable from the scraps.
Laura Werlin, cheese historian and author of The New American Cheese, speculates that the rise in cheese factories might have been the final push to save these broken bits. "Cheese manufacturing was new, meaning that it was done on a much smaller scale prior. On a smaller scale, if you lose a little bit here and there, it still has an impact on you the producer, but when you see it coming off the line on a larger scale and there’s all this waste piling up, maybe it seemed like, 'Wow, we're losing a lot here and it's time we try to think of something to do with it,'" she speculates.
Frey was tinkering with the recipe for Velveeta at an interesting time in American cheese history. "The whole 20th century, there’s so much technology and rapid change," says Paul Kindstedt, professor and author of Cheese and Culture: A History of Cheese and Its Place in Western Civilization. "Velveeta is a very important part of the story." The Industrial Revolution of a century before had turned the world on its head, and cheese production was no different: small, farm-based cheesemakers of yesteryear had turned into large, industrial cheese operations. Moreover, the cheesemaking industry was crossing into science like never before, with the first processed cheeses coming out of Europe in the early part of the 20th century (from the Swiss tradition of melting cheeses for fondue). In America, James L. Kraft became perhaps the most recognizable face of processed cheese when he discovered that heated cheese with added emulsifying salts would form into a solid mass when cooled--and would keep much longer than non-processed cheese. Processed cheese was immediately welcomed by American consumers because of its consistent quality and increased stability.
In 1918, Frey figured out how to use similar technology to help recoup some of the factory's waste. He learned that by adding a by-product of cheesemaking called whey, which is the liquid released from curds during the cheesemaking process, to the leftover Swiss bits, he could create a very cohesive end-product. Frey named the product Velveeta, and in 1923, the Velveeta Cheese Company became its own corporation. It was successful for a while as its own company (which was based out of Monroe, NY), but in 1927, it was sold to Kraft Foods.
(UPDATE: A Kraft spokesperson, meanwhile, states that the company created Velveeta internally, using just Frey's name in the marketplace, but not his product.)
Kraft wasted no time marketing the cheese product for its nutritional value, arguing the addition of whey (which includes potentially desirable carbohydrates and minerals) made the cheese a kind of dairy wonder-product. The company even paid for a research study at Rutgers University to confirm Velveeta's nutritional benefits. In 1931, the American Medical Association gave Velveeta its stamp of approval, citing that the product had all the necessary nutritional value to build "firm flesh."
Velveeta's popularity increased throughout the '30s, '40s and into the '50s--studies of consumer preference done in the 1930s found that two-thirds of Americans preferred processed cheese to natural cheese. But it wasn't just the product's advertised nutritional advantage that kept consumers interested.
"We as a culture have tended to gravitate toward foods that were—and are—predictable, unchanging and relatively bland," Werlin explains. "Processed cheese fit the bill, and it is also easy to use."
Advertising campaigns from the 1950s touted Velveeta's mild flavor, ease of use and nutritional value. As far as cheese products went, Velveeta was a convienent food that was also mild enough to please most consumers, from "Grandad to two-year-olds" as one 1951 newspaper ad proclaimed.
But for moms who wanted the convenience of Velveeta without the hassle of slicing it from the block (like the above video shows), the 1950s brought an alternative: Kraft DeLuxe Slices, which promised more convenience and none of the dried edges of block cheese. Slowly, Velveeta advertisements moved away from competing with the sliced cheese market, toward the now more recognizable iterations of Velveeta as a perfect melting cheese for dips or pastas.
In 1978, Velveeta Shells and Cheese became the first of Kraft's products to claim a portion of the "shelf-stable market," which describes foods that normally would need refrigeration but processing allows them to remain stable at room temperature. A commercial from the 1990s advertises the shells and cheese, with the help of some soulful crooners, by tapping into Velveeta's seemingly endless supply of wonder: it's not the same-old mashed potatoes or rice--it's something new and exciting.
Still, even with the introduction of Velveeta Shells and Cheese, the product only represented a small amount of Kraft's overall profit shares (currently, Velveeta is estimated to account for only 5 to 8 percent of the company's overall revenue). So, in the early 2000s, Kraft decided to enter into a mutually benefically partnership with ConAgra Foods. If when you think of Velveeta, you think of a cheesy queso chile dip, it's because of this very partnership. Neither Velveeta nor RoTel tomatoes and chiles, a ConAgra brand, represent enough of either company's total profits to earn much of their own share of the marketing budget. But by pairing the two items in advertising campaigns together, Kraft gained two things: advertising for Velveeta that it could afford, and a brand-association with a competitor.
Even as the cheese industry shows steady growth in the creation and sale of artisan cheeses, it's unlikely that Kraft's liquid gold will disappear (for more than a few cheesepocalyptic weeks) anytime soon.
"For those many, many people who were raised on processed cheese, there is a memory connected with it that can’t be discounted in terms of its importance," Werlin says. "It’s a bite of the past, and that trumps flavor every time."
*Editors note: The original statement has been modified to clarify that Cheesepocalypse.org does not actually track the amount of Velveeta on store shelves, but acts as a "heat map" to see where conversations about Velveeta are happening around the country.Recently by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.: My Challenge to Max Keiser
Twenty years ago, as I was completing my freshman year in college, I was a full-blown neoconservative. Except I didnt know it. Having concluded that I was not a leftist, I simply decided by process of elimination that I must be a Rush Limbaughian.
Like most people, I was unaware that any alternative to those two choices existed, or that in some ways they were two sides of a common statist coin. In particular, I embraced a neoconservative foreign policy with gusto. The way to show you werent a commie was by supporting the U.S. military as it doled out summary justice to bad guys all over the world. And frankly, it was exciting to watch it all unfold on TV.
I never gave the human cost of war a second thought and became impatient with anyone who did. War was like a video game I could enjoy from the comfort of my home. Devastation and human suffering were quite beside the point: the righteous U.S. government was dispensing justice to the wicked, and that was that. What are you, a liberal?
The Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first U.S. conflict of my college career. During the months-long U.S. military buildup in the Gulf known as Operation Desert Shield I eagerly promoted the mission to anyone foolish enough to listen.
When war came, it was swift and decisive. Very few American casualties were suffered, while the Iraqi forces were destroyed. Some 100,000 were burned alive by a chemical agent or buried alive in the desert while making a retreat.
Believe it or not, that actually bothered me, in spite of how voracious a consumer of war propaganda I was. No one defended Saddam Husseins invasion of Kuwait, which he launched in response to that countrys slant oil drilling, but was the outcome of the Persian Gulf War not a terrible tragedy for the Iraqi people virtually none of whom had had anything to do with Saddam Husseins fateful decision all the same? A far poorer country than ours suddenly had a lot more widows and orphans, not to mention a great many civilian deaths to grieve over and much destruction to repair.
Lopsided counts
Mothers and fathers were crying themselves to exhaustion over children they had lost, or who, worse still, were dying agonizing deaths before their very eyes. There is no worse anguish for parents than to watch their children suffer and to be helpless to do anything about it.
Was it really right that we Americans should meanwhile be celebrating with a Bob Hope special, and on cue flattered by the ceaseless reminders that ours was the awesomest country ever?
It later transpired that the Kuwaiti government had hired a public-relations firm in the United States to sell the idea of military invasion to the American people. We later learned that the major atrocity story that Iraqi troops had removed Kuwaiti babies from incubators and thrown them onto hospital floors had been a fraud: the emotional young woman who testified to that effect in Washington turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.
Although I had strongly favored military action by the U.S. government from the start, in the wake of George H.W. Bushs declaration of victory I could not stop thinking about the lopsided casualty counts, the waves of killing rained down on a ramshackle army facing the greatest military machine in the world. Now these were soldiers, not civilians, so by the logic of war I was supposed to hate them or at least not care about them, their deaths being cause for celebration rather than regret.
I was having trouble doing that.
I went to see my European history professor, Charles Maier, to discuss my misgivings about the war. Maier, a liberal in the New Republic mold, suggested I read a recent article in that magazine making the case for the war. I did, and (believe it or not) that helped to suppress any contrary thoughts for a while.
I was already beginning to read libertarian literature by the early 1990s because of my support for the market economy. My reading of the economic works of Murray Rothbard led inevitably to his philosophical works. The Rothbard essay War, Peace, and the State leaves an impression on the mind one can never quite shake.
Rothbard famously observed that one could uncover the libertarian position on X by imagining a gang of thugs carrying out the state action in question. If thugs cant just grab your money, for instance, neither can a well-dressed group of thugs calling itself the state.
War, Peace, and the State takes that analysis and applies it to war. If you steal my TV, I can take it back from you. But I may not walk down the street firing a gun every which way and harming third parties in order to make you surrender my TV. Likewise, even assuming a warmaking state to be absolutely in the right, it has no greater moral entitlement to harm third parties in pursuit of its ends than a private individual does.
Simply because some politician utters the word war, we have been conditioned to believe it just and good that the rights of everyone within the confines of an arbitrary border are abruptly cancelled. What would in any other circumstance be murder and atrocity becomes an antiseptic matter of public policy.
The lingering effects of war can inspire callousness even after the guns have fallen silent. Many of us have seen the notorious clip from 60 Minutes in which Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and soon-to-be U.S. secretary of State, declared that the price of half a million dead children as a result of the sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s had been worth it. Note that she did not dispute the figure. She looked the interviewer in the eye and said that the deaths of half a million kids were worth it in pursuit of one man she and her colleagues didnt like.
Now suppose the Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War, had killed half a million children in the course of a sanctions policy. We would never have heard the end of it.
We
One of the great triumphs of the government propaganda machine in self-described democracies is the we are the government line. It makes the subject population somewhat more compliant than it might be if a particular family passed down the power to govern from one generation to another, with no chance (short of outright revolution) that anyone else will ever hold the reins of power. More important, criticisms of their governments foreign policy now come to be seen as personal affronts. We are the government, after all, so how dare you criticize our foreign policy!
For that reason, opponents of American foreign policy should, when speaking on this topic, eliminate the pronoun we from their vocabulary. We did not kill those Iraqi kids. In 2002 and 2003 we did not repeat transparent untruths about the alleged threat posed by a devastated Iraq. We did not lay waste to an already-suffering country, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing four million others.
They did this. The American political class. We did not.
What some Americans did do, though, was to make sorry excuses for their political overlords. Some Americans defended a series of policies which, if pursued by the Soviet Union 30 years ago, they themselves would have condemned as grotesque violations of basic standards of morality. But with the U.S. government as the perpetrator, everything was different. They were as gullible on foreign policy as left-liberals are on domestic policy. They dutifully searched for evidence to corroborate their leaders claims, even when their leaders had long since abandoned those claims. They accepted the most transparent propaganda without batting an eye.
The insensibility to suffering
Until 1991, I had done pretty much the same thing. But following the Persian Gulf War I began to have doubts. Within a few years I had come to regret my laziness, and the readiness with which I accepted foreign-policy propaganda from the very people I knew I couldnt trust when it came to the economy, the Constitution, or pretty much anything else.
The 19th-century writer Elihu Burritt noted the great sympathy the human race extended to those who have been the victims of misfortunes: famine, shipwreck, railway accidents, whatever. He then invited his readers to compare the feeling with which the community hears of the loss or peril of a few human lives by these accidents with which the news of the death or mutilation of thousands of men, equally precious, on the field of battle is received.
How different is the valuation! how different in universal sympathy! War seems to reverse our best and boasted civilization, to carry back human society to the dark ages of barbarism, to cheapen the public appreciation of human life almost to the standard of brute beasts…. And this demoralization of sentiment is not confined to the two or three nations engaged in war; it extends to the most distant and neutral nations, and they read of thousands slain or mangled in a single battle with but a little more humane sensibility than they would read of the loss of so many pawns by a move on a chessboard. With what deep sympathy the American nation, even to the very slaves, heard of the suffering in Ireland by the potato famine! What shiploads of corn and provisions they sent over to relieve that suffering! But how little of that benevolent sympathy and of that generous aid would they have given to the same amount of suffering inflicted by war upon the people of a foreign country! This … is one of the very worst works of war. It is not only the demoralization, but almost the transformation, of human nature. We can generally ascertain how many lives have been lost in a war. The tax-gatherer lets us know how much money it costs. But no registry kept on earth can tell us how much is lost to the world by this insensibility to human suffering which a war produces in the whole family circle of nations.
I was once blind to the effects of war on my own moral compass and to how callous I had become toward entire countries and the fellow human beings who inhabited them. When I collaborated with Murray Polner on We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (Basic Books, 2008), it was in a spirit of contrition and reparation for having once cheered on what I now know to be evil.
I am getting more and more convinced that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business, Rothbard noted privately in 1956. I am equally convinced. If we cant get this right, who cares about the Department of Education or the minimum wage?
The Best of Tom WoodsThe law being protested states that certain bars without the license can be fined by authorities if police were to catch anyone engaged in the act of dancing.
The protest is intended to be a carnival type procession through the streets of central Stockholm.
"We have permission to protest but not to dance. But we're well aware of that. If the police should stop us then people would understand how strange the law is," said organizer Sonia Javer to the Östermalmsnytt newspaper.
The protest has been organized by Dans, Trams & Acceptans, and is scheduled to take place from midday onwards, beginning at the Humlegården park.
"During the summer we have enjoyed the warmth and welcomed the mornings to the sounds of dance music without commercial interest,” the group writes on their official website.
“The winter awaits and the freedom we enjoy summer turns into a battle against the authorities which require us to seek permission to dance together.”
The group envisions a dance-filled parade through the streets of Stockholm, with the hope of “showing how free dancing can be, but also that we as participants should control the emergence of clubs and their dance floors, not the bureaucracy.”
It is up to the police to ensure that the law is abided, and one police officer, Robert Lindgren, is concerned that changing the law could be detrimental to the safety of bar goers.
“The purpose of having a permit for a dance floor is first and foremost a point of safety,” he told Sveriges Radio (SR).
“It's known that dance floors lead to more fights, mess, and situations that need police intervention when compared to a normal restaurant environment.”
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updated below
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted that British RAF pilots have borrowed USAF Reaper drones more than 250 times in Afghanistan, launching weapons on at least 39 occasions. However the numbers of strikes by RAF pilots using US Reapers drones is likely to be higher as the MoD are keeping secret the number of weapons launches by RAF pilots when they have been officially embedded with the USAF.
The revelations come in a much delayed response to a Freedom of Information request by Drone Wars UK.
Although defence ministers have reported several times in the House of Commons on weapons launched by British Reaper drones in Afghanistan, the strikes by RAF pilots using USAF drones have gone completely unreported. For example on 12 November 2012 Labour MP David Anderson asked the MoD to give details of “how many unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have been conducted by the UK since operations commenced in Afghanistan.” Replying on behalf of the MoD, Defence Minister Andrew Robathan stated:
“As of 1 November 2012, 297 Hellfire precision guided missiles and 52 laser guided bombs have been employed by the UK Reaper remotely piloted air system (RPAS) since operations commenced in Afghanistan.”
We now know that what Robathan didn’t say was that RAF pilots also flew borrowed US Reaper drones 271 times in Afghanistan to also launch a further 39 weapons by the end of December 2012 – meaning that at least 10% of drone strikes undertaken by British RAF pilots at the time were not reported to Parliament. Given that RAF pilots have also flown US Reaper or Predator drones a further 1,800 times while officially embedded with the USAF it is highly likely that RAF pilots have launched even more strikes.
Two weeks after Robathan’s answer, Conservative MP Rehman Chishti asked “how many times (a) British forces have flown US unmanned aerial vehicles and (b) US forces have flown British unmanned aerial vehicles.” Five months later on 24 April 2013, Andrew Robathan confirmed that RAF Pilots had flown 2,150 missions using USAF Reaper and Predator drones in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq (correcting an initial brief response he had given in November 2012). Curiously he appears to have simply forgotten to respond to the second half of the question, asking about US pilots flying UK drones. However, recently appointed Defence Minister Anna Soubry appears to have ruled out any flights of UK drones by US pilots, stating in response to a question from Tom Watson MP that “outside of the launch and recovery phase, UK Reaper RPAS have always been operated by UK pilots.”
Drone Wars UK wrote to the MoD in April 2013 asking for a breakdown of the drone missions undertaken by British RAF pilots using USAF drones and whether any weapons had been launched during these flights. After a nine month delay, during which we had to repeatedly press for a response, the MoD replied on February 4 2013 stating:
“Of the 2,150 missions flown by UK personnel, there were 271 missions in Afghanistan when UK personnel utilised a US Reaper as a UK Reaper was unavailable. During these missions, UK personnel released 39 weapons. I am withholding information about weapons released by UK personnel embedded with the United States Air Force on operations in Afghanistan and Libya under Section 27 [of the Freedom of Information Act].”
The response from the MoD also does not break down the 2,150 times RAF pilots flew US drones between the three countries where they were flown as we requested. No specific details are given about the RAF’s use of US drones over Libya and the the MoD simply (and rather bizarrely) says “information is not held for operations in Iraq.”
UK and USAF Reapers normally carry both Hellfire missiles and GBU-12 Paveway bombs. However unlike British Reapers, USAF Reapers also carry the GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition.
Chris Cole of Drone Wars UK said:
“This latest revelation once again demonstrates the secrecy surrounding the use of armed drones and underlines the need for greater transparency. Given the controversy surrounding the US use of armed drones, it is essential that information about drone operations – and in particular drone strikes – undertaken by British RAF pilots while embedded with US forces is made available for public scrutiny and debate rather than being withheld. The Defence Select Committees, which is holding an inquiry into the use of drones by UK forces, has recently decided not to hold any of its sessions on this issue in public. We have urged the Committee to reconsider and do so again in the light of these revelations. “The nature of this technology means that drones can simply and secretly be ‘borrowed’ between different operators making public accountability when strikes take place very difficult if not impossible. Even the UK, which is often portrayed as the ‘good guy’ when it comes to the use of armed drones, has undertaken 10% more drone strikes than it has reported to Parliament. Unless we act now to curb this new weaponry it seems inevitable that drones will increasingly be used to launch secret and unaccountable military attacks leading to global instability and increased insecurity.”
In the same FoI response, the MoD have given a more detailed breakdown of weapons launched by British Reapers in Afghanistan which we report in more detail here.
Update 27 Feb 2014
Responding to a question from Tom Watson MP, the MoD minister Mark Francois has now said
“Reaper Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) weapon release figures previously provided include missions involving UK-owned remotely piloted aircraft and UK use of US-owned remotely piloted aircraft.”
This is bizarre as answers given on this issue have specifically said the weapons were released from UK Reapers (see here and here for examples). We have written to the Secretary of State on the matter and will update when we have further information..
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Categories: UK Drones - OperationsIn my experience as a paper and pencil RPG player, I have seen mysteries attempted by multiple GM’s, with mixed results. On one occasion, the party came close to quitting in frustration because they hadn’t done “the right thing.” On another, the mystery was told to us as we looked at objects and people the GM deemed important to mention, and the illusion of investigation was shattered as the railroad tracks were made apparent. On other occasions, there was simply nothing memorable about the adventure. When I decided to try my own hand at the genre, I discovered the traps that can lead to these issues, and from my own experience, I would like to offer some advice on writing and running a mystery for your own group.
Before I get into the actual advice, I’d like to briefly touch on the structure of a standard mystery, which I will divide into four parts: the hook, the investigation, the escalation, and the showdown. In the hook, the situation is presented, and the protagonist is somehow drawn into involving his/herself in the story. In the investigation, the protagonist will look into events, talk to witnesses, explore motivations, hit a few dead-ends, and otherwise collect information to help them solve the mystery they are involved in. The escalation occurs when events are set in motion, either by the protagonist’s action or inaction, wherein the stakes are raised, and some of the true nature of the situation is revealed. This leads naturally to the showdown, in which the protagonist confronts the story’s villain, and the outcome of the story is decided.
When writing a short story, novel, screenplay, etc, the author is making the decisions of who the protagonist will talk to, where they will focus their investigation, what they will deduce from their findings, and in general, every aspect of the story. This is not the case in RPG’s, and therein lies the biggest trap into which the GM’s can blunder. These are decisions you cannot and should not make for your players. If they are to be the protagonists in your mystery, they must dig up information, track down important NPC’s, and draw their conclusions based on their investigation, all on their own. A guiding hand from the heavens will give them the feeling that they are in a Choose-your-own-adventure book, where all possible paths have been planned out ahead of time.
Preparing to run a mystery requires a different kind of preparation than a “standard” session. Rather than planning encounters, scene flow, and story arcs, most of the pre-game effort should be put into developing the setting. Besides the standard questions of who did what to who in order to set off the whole scenario, extra effort needs to be put into the locations, the preceding events, and most importantly, the involved NPC’s. Ideally, you should have a good half to full-paged word document on each NPC, starting with stats, and then moving into their involvement in the preceding events, and what motivates their actions. The final piece of prep work is to create a timeline of sorts that represents what occurs if the players do nothing, or are not in the scenario at all. Know how events would play out, and the unaltered plans of each NPC.
As the GM, the only part of the story you have direct control over is the hook. Getting the players involved in the story is easy enough, provided they have a stake in the situation. Maybe the players are detectives, and investigating is their job. Maybe a friend or family member is the victim, or even a suspect. Maybe these events tie into your larger story arc. However you decide to hook the players in, they will need leads to follow. Provide them with an NPC’s version of the situation, and a few places or people involved, and set them loose. The story is now largely in their hands.
The purpose of all of the prep work you have done is to prepare yourself to react properly to your players’ interactions with your sandbox scenario. Since you can’t control the investigation phase, you will need a depth and breadth of knowledge about the scenario. Note, however, that I did not mention clues in the section about prep work. Banish the idea of a point-and-click adventure from your mind. You may premeditate some clues, but be aware that the players may not find them. They may not look where the clues are, talk to the right person, or follow your train of thought. For this reason, understand that in a mystery, the clues are where the players look.
This is un-intuitive for many GM’s, but if you are experienced in improvisation, then you already know how to do this. The players dig a hole, and you toss a clue into the hole. They may hit a dead end or two, but “this is a dead end” can also be a clue. Rather than hunting for the clues that you thought of, they decide on their investigation approach, and with that, you feed them some information about the scenario based on where they look.
As an example, let’s say you are running a Hunter: The Vigil game, and behind the scenes, there is a sinister reason why monster attacks in the area have stopped. Through the course of their investigations, the players do some research with back-issues of the local paper. With this, you can feed them the information that suspicious events were on the rise until a certain recent point, after which there is relative silence. The players then move on to finding out what changed at that time. Or the players might start interviewing talkative old people, uncover a local legend with a grain of truth in it, and never get to the newspapers at all.
As the story progresses, your huge sandbox will begin to narrow in focus. Just by taking part in the investigation phase, the players set events in motion, determined by the motivations of the involved NPC’s, which will lead to the escalation phase. Perhaps the party is getting close to uncovering a dangerous truth, and steps are taken to discourage them, or remove them from the scenario entirely. Maybe they uncover information that implicates a perceived ally in the crime in question. Maybe the serial killer publicly proclaims a specific about his next murder. The important idea in this phase is that the stakes are raised, and the tension builds toward the mystery’s climax. Don’t be afraid to call short breaks so that you can consider the implications of the players’ actions during the investigation phase and decide on an logical and exciting escalation.
Finally, when the truth (or at least most of it) is revealed, it will be time for a showdown. It could be that the villain knows the jig is up, and attempts to skip town, setting up a confrontation as he is packing a suitcase, or a high-speed chase as he makes for the state line. Maybe a web of deception unravels, exposing a grisly, long-buried secret behind a seemingly idyllic setting. Perhaps the players figure out the serial killer’s next target, and race against time to stop him before the body count rises. Whether the showdown is physical or social, it must do one of two things: either draw the story to a close, or provide a clear line to the next adventure. Whether there is more to the story or not, the GM should strive to relieve most of the built-up tension, so that the curtain can fall with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.
Mechanically, only one new element need be introduced: some sort of way for the players to know if they’ve found all of the pertinent information in a scene. In my preferred system, new World of Darkness, I handle this with Willpower. Any player may spend a willpower, and I will tell them if everything has been found, or if not, point them in the right direction. In systems that don’t have such a convenient stat, I recommend a pool of a few points or counters based on some mental attribute, representing intuition, or hunches. This will end, once and for all, all the prodding things with sticks, searching for secret doors, peeling off wallpaper, and wandering around in frustration and boredom. Truthfully, you may only end up using this mechanic once or twice, but it’s a good safeguard against the point-and-click adventure pitfall.
Also, make sure you are not writing (and make sure your players know they aren’t playing) a short Sherlock Holmes style mystery. Do not expect your players to know that the scuff mark on the floor means that their suspect is a soccer player with only one ear and a slight lisp. Make sure your players understand that this is not expected of them. If nothing makes sense, the investigation phase is not over, and there is more to learn. Novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler, considered by many to be a founder of the hard-boiled detective genre, had this to say about this particular trap:
At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
By the time you reach the confrontation, the NPCs may be surprised by the outcome, but the players should not be. Any twists thrown in at the last minute should not invalidate the players’ conclusions; rather, they should complicate the final confrontation. The players want to solve a mystery, and taking that away from them will ultimately leave them frustrated and unsatisfied.
Bringing the mystery genre to the gaming table can result in a fun and intriguing multi-session adventure. With good understanding of the structure of mysteries, good preparation, and good practice, players and GM can create a greatly enjoyable role-playing experience together. I hope this long post, if you managed to get through it all, can provide you with some good ideas. Happy RPing!What are the most dangerous intersections in Texas? Which city has the greatest number of them?
We wanted answers to these questions. So our office worked with data visualization company 1point21 interactive to analyze four years worth of collision data (2012 – 2015) from the Texas Department of Transportation. We sifted through more than 2 million records to find all intersection-related accidents as defined by the Texas DoT.
According to the agency, an intersection-related crash is: A traffic crash in which the first harmful event both:
occurs on an approach to or exit from an intersection, and
results from an activity, behavior or control related to the movement of traffic units through the intersection.
This definition includes intersections of freeways (and their subsequent on-ramps off-ramps and service streets), major thoroughfares and country roads.
With that in mind, we combined, cleaned and parsed the raw DoT data and identified 279 Texas intersections where 48 or more collisions occurred between 2012 and 2015. From that list, we calculated a Danger Score using the number of crashes, injuries and fatalities at each intersection.
Based on that information, these are the most |
getting weather that would not disappoint during the summer, never mind the spring! Long may it last.
The fine weather is too good to waste so it only made sense that the kayak should be launched. Finishing work a little later than planned, Rory and I decided to have a go at the inner reaches of the bay once more. I wanted to head south and fish the Clare coastline in the hopes that there may be better pollock there but time was very much against us.
The bigger fish have not made it right into the bay yet and talking to a couple of charter skippers over the weekend confirmed this. Still, we could have a bit of craic with some of the smaller fish and Rory, a fly fisherman at heart, decided he wanted to try fly fishing for the smaller pollock. I was going to jig in an effort to locate the fish and then put him over them with the fly.
The first mark that we fished was looked at with the hope of it producing a few wrasse but again, the fish have not made it in this far yet. We headed out further and found a rocky, weedy reef that harbours fish. Almost first drop down say me connect straight away and the pattern continued with a fish or two on almost every drop. Unfortunately they were all tiddlers but I was happy enough that I was locating the fish for Rory. Unfortunately Rory didn’t connect with a fish but he did become rather comfortable casting flies from the kayak.
It’s hard to feel short changed when you get out on the water in conditions like that and this evening was no different. We decided that the summer weather had tricked us into thinking that fish should be there when in reality it’ll be a couple of more weeks before they land here. Local knowledge says the same thing and it always pays to listen to local knowledge. I’m retreating from the salt for the next couple of weeks in favour of freshwater. There is a roach run imminent and I am keen to try and intercept it.The '÷' artist linked up with Fuse ODG and hip-hop duo R2Bees on a 2016 visit to Ghana
Ed Sheeran has teased the release of a new collaborative single that he recorded while visiting Africa last year.
The ‘÷’ artist released his third studio album one month ago today (March 3), which went straight to number one in its first week.
Sheeran has now revealed that he has more unreleased songs in the vault, referencing one particular recording session that he completed in Ghana with Fuse ODG and hip-hop duo R2Bees back in June 2016.
“We made a bunch of music, one song made the album then there’s more coming out,” Sheeran told The Sun. “There’s actually a full song being released with me, Fuse and R2Bees.”
Sheeran recently returned to Africa to film an appeal video for Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day.
While visiting children on the streets in Liberia, Sheeran was so moved by their plight that he resolved to save five orphans. Thanks to the help of the Norfolk songwriter and the charity Street Child, the five children are now under the protective custody of a guardian in a safe dwelling in the country’s capital Monrovia.
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One boy who met Sheeran in Liberia expressed his gratitude to the ‘Castle On A Hill’ singer for saving him. The boy, who went by the name JD, said: “If I had not met Street Child and Ed, I would still be sleeping in canoes on the beach.”Somedays, everyone wants to leave work early (aka everyday). While we’re day-dreaming about hitting happy hour semi-early and not being stuck at a desk plugging away – we try to figure out the “perfect excuse” to leave before closing time. But, you’d never think your own mother was trying to get herself out of work early. And, you’d never ever think she’d turn to you for a perfect excuse.
One mother turned to her daughter for a “perfect excuse” to get out of work early – and of course, her daughter delivered in the most epic way.
Savage. Surely enough – it went viral.
Twitter, of course, thought this was brilliant and – they’re probably going to copy this ASAP.
“ This is the best thing I've read this morning (@_Luuucccyy) — Call me luci(@_Luuucccyy) July 23, 2017
“ lol I absolutely love this. Your mom is great — Alestine (@x__alestine) July 23, 2017
“ YO this be my mom af!! She'll literally text me An be like "call me and sound like you're in trouble these people are boring" — StressedBlessedMess (@naturalflikchik) July 23, 2017A new batch from Wikileaks appears to show Hillary Clinton and her team scrambling to "dump all those e-mails" the same day a New York Times investigation revealed her use of a private e-mail server while she was secretary of state.
In leaked e-mails from March 2, 2016, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta tells the now-Democratic presidential nominee’s aide Cheryl Mills to "dump" e-mails as soon as possible. Podesta’s instruction came just a week before Clinton admitted at a press conference she had deleted over 30,000 e-mails, insisting none of them were classified.
“Not to sound like Lanny," Podesta writes. "But we are going to have to dump all those emails so better to do so sooner than later.”
It is not known which e-mails Podesta is referencing, but "Lanny" is thought to be Lanny Davis, a lawyer who served as special council to then-President Bill Clinton.
“Think you just got your new nickname,” Mills responded.
Wikileaks claims it will leak 50,000 e-mails in total before election day on Nov. 8. This latest information dump brings the tally up to 42,000.During the last two years, the 3D fractal field has undergone a small revolution: the Mandelbulb (2009), the Mandelbox (2010), The Kaleidoscopic IFS’s (2010), and a myriad of equally or even more interesting hybrid systems, such as Spudsville (2010) or the Kleinian systems (2011).
All of these systems were made possible using a technique known as Distance Estimation and they all originate from the Fractal Forums community.
Overview of the posts
Part I briefly introduces the history of distance estimated fractals, and discuss how a distance estimator can be used for ray marching.
Part II discuss how to find surface normals, and how to light and color fractals.
Part III discuss how to actually create a distance estimator, starting with distance fields for simple geometric objects, and talking about instancing, combining fields (union, intersections, and differences), and finally talks about folding and conformal transformation, ending up with a simple fractal distance estimator.
Part IV discuss the holy grail: the search for generalization of the 2D (complex) Mandelbrot set, including Quaternions and other hypercomplex numbers. A running derivative for quadratic systems is introduced.
Part V continues the discussion about the Mandelbulb. Different approaches for constructing a running derivative is discussed: scalar derivatives, Jacobian derivatives, analytical solutions, and the use of different potentials to estimate the distance.
Part VI is about the Mandelbox fractal. A more detailed discussion about conformal transformations, and how a scalar running derivative is sufficient, when working with these kind of systems.
Part VII discuss how dual numbers and automatic differentation may used to construct a distance estimator.
Part VIII is about hybrid fractals, geometric orbit traps, various other systems, and links to relevant software and resources.
The background
The first paper to introduce Distance Estimated 3D fractals was written by Hart and others in 1989:
Ray tracing deterministic 3-D fractals
In this paper Hart describe how Distance Estimation may be used to render a Quaternion Julia 3D fractal. The paper is very well written and definitely worth spending some hours on (be sure to take a look at John Hart’s other papers as well). Given the age of Hart’s paper, it is striking that is not until the last couple of years that the field of distance estimated 3D fractals has exploded. There has been some important milestones, such as Keenan Crane’s GPU implementation (2004), and Iñigo Quilez 4K demoscene implementation (2007), but I’m not aware of other fractal systems being explored using Distance Estimation, before the advent of the Mandelbulb.
Raymarching
Classic raytracing shoots one (or more) rays per pixel and calculate where the rays intersect the geometry in the scene. Normally the geometry is described by a set of primitives, like triangles or spheres, and some kind of spatial acceleration structure is used to quickly identify which primitives intersect the rays.
Distance Estimation, on the other hand, is a ray marching technique.
Instead of calculating the exact intersection between the camera ray and the geometry, you proceed in small steps along the ray and check how close you are to the object you are rendering. When you are closer than a certain threshold, you stop. In order to do this, you must have a function that tells you how close you are to the object: a Distance Estimator. The value of the distance estimator tells you how large a step you are allowed to march along the ray, since you are guaranteed not to hit anything within this radius.
Schematics of ray marching using a distance estimator.
The code below shows how to raymarch a system with a distance estimator:
float trace(vec3 from, vec3 direction) { float totalDistance = 0.0; int steps; for (steps=0; steps < MaximumRaySteps; steps++) { vec3 p = from + totalDistance * direction; float distance = DistanceEstimator(p); totalDistance += distance; if (distance < MinimumDistance) break; } return 1.0-float(steps)/float(MaxRaySteps); }
Here we simply march the ray according to the distance estimator and return a greyscale value based on the number of steps before hitting something. This will produce images like this one (where I used a distance estimator for a Mandelbulb):
It is interesting that even though we have not specified any coloring or lighting models, coloring by the number of steps emphasizes the detail of the 3D structure - in fact, this is an simple and very cheap form of the Ambient Occlusion soft lighting often used in 3D renders.
Parallelization
Another interesting observation is that these raymarchers are trivial to parallelise, since each pixel can be calculated independently and there is no need to access complex shared memory structures like the acceleration structure used in classic raytracing. This means that these kinds of systems are ideal candidates for implementing on a GPU. In fact the only issue is that most GPU's still only supports single precision floating points numbers, which leads to numerical inaccuracies faster than for the CPU implementations. However, the newest generation of GPU's support double precision, and some API's (such as OpenCL and Pixel Bender) are heterogeneous, meaning the same code can be executed on both CPU and GPU - making it possible to create interactive previews on the GPU and render final images in double precision on the CPU.
Estimating the distance
Now, I still haven't talked about how we obtain these Distance Estimators, and it is by no means obvious that such functions should exist at all. But it is possible to intuitively understand them, by noting that systems such as the Mandelbulb and Mandelbox are escape-time fractals: we iterate a function for each point in space, and follow the orbit to see whether the sequence of points diverge for a maximum number of iterations, or whether the sequence stays inside a fixed escape radius. Now, by comparing the escape-time length (r), to its spatial derivative (dr), we might get an estimate of how far we can move along the ray before the escape-time length is below the escape radius, that is:
\(DE = \frac{r-EscapeRadius }{dr}\)
This is a hand-waving estimate - the derivative might fluctuate wildly and get larger than our initial value, so a more rigid approach is needed to find a proper distance estimator. I'll a lot more to say about distance estimators inthe later posts, so for now we will just accept that these function exists and can be obtained for quite a diverse class of systems, and that they are often constructed by comparing the escape-time length with some approximation of its derivative.
It should also be noticed that this ray marching approach can be used for any kinds of systems, where you can find a lower bound for the closest geometry for all points in space. Iñigo Quilez has used this in his impressive procedural SliseSix demo, and has written an excellent introduction, which covers many topics also relevant for Distance Estimation of 3D fractals.
This concludes the first part of this series of blog entries. Part II discusses lighting and coloring of fractals.Buy Photo Austin Manning,left, fights Jeff Clancy in the 123lbs open match during the Indiana Gold Gloves finals Thursday, April 13, 2017, evening at the Tyndall Armory. (Photo: Matt Kryger/IndyStar)Buy Photo
INDIANAPOLIS – Team Achieve 123-pound boxer Austin Manning defended his state Golden Gloves title Thursday night at Tyndall Armory with a convincing 5-0 win over opponent Jeff Clancy.
Oddly enough, coach James Curles wouldn’t have cared if Manning had lost. When one of his fighters recently got a job at UPS, that was a needle-mover in Curles’ eyes.
“The goal is to get them working and then pursue some type of post-secondary education,” Curles said. “Not to have returning champions, but that these guys are succeeding out of the ring.”
And what if fighters at Team Achieve don’t have transportation to the gym or a warm meal at home? No problem.
“We run two van routes every day — pick kids up, drop them off,” Curles said. “An organization called Second Helpings brings food out to us.”
It’s all part of Team Achieve’s plan to build successful adults. But they’ll gladly take the championship belts, too. Another Team Achieve fighter, Almonte Washington, also left Tyndall Armory with a state title.
“I have more of a bond with Team Achieve than I do with my real family,” Manning said, only half-jokingly. “I go there four days a week.”
In the ring, Manning used his excellent footwork to dance in and out of range while peppering Clancy with his superb hand speed. He also scored with several short, compact hooks, and even switched to southpaw briefly to befuddle Clancy.
“I knew I had to push the pace to win the fight,” Manning said. “I knew I had to show the judges I wanted to win and outwork him.”
Southpaw Frank Martin also was victorious, a feeling that’s nothing new for the decorated 141-pounder.
Last year, Martin became the first pugilist from the Hoosier state to win a national Golden Gloves title since 1993. Among his notable performances: a victory over now-rising professional prospect Virgil Ortiz Jr., who’s signed to Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions.
Martin frequently cut off the ring against his opponent, Terrell Hargrove, then landed devastating straight lefts upstairs and hooks to the body. He easily earned a 5-0 win.
The fight of the night was produced by 132-pounders Carlos Dixon and Andronicus Trigg, in which the final 5-0 Dixon victory didn’t reflect how close it was. Both fighters received standing eight counts while trading haymakers all over the ring throughout.
The winners of the open division bouts will head to the Golden Gloves National Tournament of Champions in two weeks in Lafayette, La.
But as close a group as Team Achieve is, the whole team won’t be making the journey south to support their fighters. You can probably guess why.
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“Our kids have school,” Curles said.
With 1,473 people in attendance, this was the biggest crowd in 20 years, according to Indiana Golden Gloves board member George DeFabis.
Results:
Youth – 145 pounds
Demetricus Duncan (Louisville Select) def. Nick Weckenmann (Indy Boxing and Grappling) 5-0
Youth – 165 pounds
Karon Spivey (J Boxing) def. DeAngelo Mason (Sims Boxing) 3-2
Junior Open – 165 pounds
Courtney McFarland (Sarge Johnson Boxing) def. Ubaldo Lara (Indy Boxing and Grappling) 5-0
Novice – 123 pounds
Demarcus Dabney (Spearman Boxing) def. Alberto Sostre (B-Town Boxing) 5-0
Novice – 132 pounds
Jared McKinley (Indy Boxing and Grappling) walkover
Novice – 141 pounds
Adrian Lara (Indy Boxing and Grappling) def. DeAngelo Rascon (Top Notch Boxing) TKO
Novice – 152 pounds
Almonte Washington (Team Achieve) def. Jaylin McClung (Badd Boys) 5-0
Novice – 165 pounds
Yorman Guerrero (Indy Boxing and Grappling) def. Matt Burk (DeMotte Boxing) TKO
Open – 108 pounds
Humberto Calderon (Indy Boxing and Grappling) walkover
Open – 114 pounds
Saleto Henderson (Sarge Johnson Boxing) walkover
Open – 123 pounds
Austin Manning (Team Achieve) def. Jeff Clancy (Top Notch Boxing) 5-0
Open – 132 pounds
Carlos Dixon (Top Notch Boxing) def. Andronicus Trigg (Sarge Johnson Boxing) 5-0
Open – 141 pounds
Frank Martin (Indy Boxing and Grappling) def. Terrell Hargrove (Top Notch Boxing) 5-0
Open – 178 pounds
Joe Broys (DeMotte Boxing) walkover
Note: Some bouts finished too late to make Friday’s edition of the paper. For the full list of results, visit Indiana Golden Gloves’ Facebook page.It isn’t the first time the mayor of a major city has spoken out against Chick-fil-A.
With the national chicken chain planning to open its first location in Queens and its fourth in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio isn’t exactly getting in the sandwich line.
“What the ownership of Chick-fil-A has said is wrong,” De Blasio said, referring to Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy’s past donations to anti-LGBT rights groups, according to a report Wednesday by DNAinfo New York.
“I’m certainly not going to patronize them,” he added, “and I wouldn’t urge any other New Yorker to patronize them. But they do have a legal right.”
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The chain had been the target of protests upon opening its first standalone location in Manhattan last October.
De Blasio’s stance echoes that of the late Boston Mayor Tom Menino, who in 2012 wrote a strongly-worded letter to Cathy amid the donation backlash, saying the chain, which was considering a location near Faneuil Hall, was not welcome.
“There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it,” Menino wrote. The mayor later clarified that the city would not deny Chick-fil-A a permit, but would “do everything we can, bully pulpit-wise.”
In response to de Blasio’s comments Wednesday, a Chick-fil-A spokeswoman told DNAinfo New York that the chain does not discriminate against anyone, either in employment or service.
“The Chick-fil-A culture and service tradition in our restaurants is to treat every person with honor, dignity and respect—regardless of their beliefs, race, creed, sexual orientation or gender,” the spokewoman said.
In 2013, the company dramatically reduced its contributions to anti-LGBT rights groups and in 2014, Cathy said he regretted injecting Chick-fil-A into the debate over same-sex marriage.
Either way, it appears de Blasio and Menino would agree on more than just the Red Sox.
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Read Menino’s full 2012 letter below:
To Mr. Cathy,
In recent days, you said Chick-fil-A opposes same-sex marriage and said the generation that supports it has an “arrogant attitude.”
Now — incredibly — your company says you are backing out of the same-sex marriage debate. I urge you to back out of your plans to locate in Boston.
You called supporters of gay marriage “prideful.” Here in Boston, to borrow your own words, we are “guilty as charged.” We are indeed full of pride for our support of same sex marriage and our work to expand freedom to all people. We are proud that our state and our city have led the way for the country on equal marriage rights.
I was angry to learn on the heels of your prejudiced statements about your search for a site to locate in Boston. There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it. When Massachusetts became the first state in the country to recognize equal marriage rights, I personally stood on City Hall Plaza to greet same sex couples coming here to be married. It would be an insult to them and to our city’s long history of expanding freedom to have a Chick-fil-A across the street from that spot.
Sincerely,
Thomas M. Menino
Mayor, City of BostonIn this advanced project with the GoPiGo3 we build a Browser video streaming robot which streams live video to a browser and can be controlled from the browser.
In this project we use a the Raspberry Pi Camera module with the GoPiGo3. You can control the robot using the a controller on the browser as the live video streams directly on the browser. The video quality is very good and the latency of the video is low, making this ideal for live video streaming robot projects.
Hardware Needed
Connecting the Camera module
Attach the Raspberry Pi camera module to the port on the Raspberry Pi. For more details on how to attach the camera, see our tutorial here.
Setting up the GoPiGo Video Streaming Robot
You should have cloned the GoPiGo3 github code onto your Raspberry Pi. Install the Pi Camera dependencies and Flask by running the install.sh script:
sudo bash install.sh
Reboot your Pi.
Setup to Run on Boot
You can run the server on boot so you don’t have to run it manually. Use the command install_startup.sh and this should start the flask server on boot. You should be able to connect to the robot using “http://dex.local:5000” or if using the Cinch setup, you can use “http://10.10.10.10:5000”
You can setup Cinch, which will automatically setup a wifi access point, with the command
sudo bash /home/pi/di_update/Raspbian_For_Robots/upd_script/wifi/cinch_setup.sh
On reboot, connect to the WiFi service “Dex”.
Running the Project
Start the server by typing the following command:
sudo python3 flask_server.py
It’s going to take a couple of seconds for the server to fire up. A port and address will be shown in there. By default, the port is set to 5000.
If you have Raspbian For Robots installed, then going to http://dex.local:5000 address will be enough. Be sure you have your mobile device / laptop on the same network as your GoPiGo3. Otherwise, you won’t be able to access it.
Have a question? Go check out our support page here or post it on the forums here.A lot is happening in the Ubuntu world these days after Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth shocked the entire Linux community when he announced that the Unity 8 user interface would no longer be developed.
Unity 8 was Canonical's latest vision for the future of the Ubuntu desktop, along with convergence. It was supposed to give Ubuntu a bump by acting the same on both mobile and PCs, something that no other GNU/Linux distribution does, at least not at the moment of writing this article.
But it turned out its development process was slowed down by various factors, including that the Ubuntu community was not really interested in that fancy look and feel of Unity 8 on the desktop. It was fine on mobile, but the desktop feeling was not so good, not to mention that it didn't work on some hardware.
Long story short, the decision made by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was to completely drop support for the Unity interface as default desktop environment on Ubuntu, and this is more shocking than the Unity 8 development being terminated. As such, starting Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, GNOME will become default desktop.
Of course, most of you already knew that, but what you probably didn't know was that Mark Shuttleworth decided to switch to Ubuntu GNOME as default flavor, which answers the big question everyone was asking lately: "What will happen to the Ubuntu GNOME flavor now that Ubuntu is switching to the GNOME desktop?"
"Canonical desktop team will help the Ubuntu GNOME team deliver an amazing GNOME experience," says Mark Shuttleworth on Google+. "We're helping the Ubuntu GNOME team, not creating something different or competitive with that effort. While I am passionate about the design ideas in Unity [...] I think we should respect the GNOME design leadership by delivering GNOME the way GNOME wants it delivered."
Unity 7 interface to be installable from the Ubuntu repositories
Another question that was on everyone's lips these days was: "What will happen to the Unity 7 interface? Will it disappear forever?" We were also curious to know the answer to that question, and Mark Shuttleworth calmed everyone down by announcing that the Unity 7 packages would be installable from the repositories.
It won't be default, though, of course, which means that you'll need to manually install them using a tool like Synaptic Package Manager, but it won't be hard and you'll still be able to enjoy your beloved Unity 7 user interface even on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, due for release next year on April.
The even greater news that many Unity 7 fans probably would like to hear right now is that the interface will continue to be maintained by a small team over at Canonical, though we don't know yet if new features will be added in the long run.
Probably not, and you should expect it to go away someday, unfortunately, if Canonical decided to stay with GNOME. Until then, we can't wait to enjoy the Ubuntu 17.04, launching in only three days from today, and Ubuntu 17.10 releases, both shipping with the Unity 7 desktop environment by default.-- Past Reviews -- Uncle Orson Reviews Everything Uncle Orson's All-time Film List Uncle Orson Reviews 1999 Uncle Orson Reviews 1998 American Culture 1996 F&SF Reviews 1987-1993 Unraveling Piltdown Rewrites - A Memoir
Uncle Orson Reviews Everything
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.
Let's Unlose This War
The reason it is so depressing to read Alone, the middle volume of William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill, is not because the British government was so obtuse in failing to listen to Churchill's constant warnings about the rising menace of Adolf Hitler.
Why should that be depressing? After all, when Hitler finally got the war he had wanted for so long, Churchill was elevated at last to be prime minister of Britain, and in that position he saved Britain and, by the way, the world.
So this is the prelude to a tale of triumph. It is sad to see all the wasted opportunities, and to think of all the millions of deaths that could have been prevented if Churchill's warnings had only been heeded.
If Britain's pacifistic government had not deliberately concealed evidence that supported Churchill's view and not their own.
If Britain's press had not deliberately suppressed accurate stories from reporters in the field that made it clear exactly what Nazi government would and did mean in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and in Germany itself.
Yet sad as these errors are, one can understand them, to a degree. The British public had not forgotten the horrors of trench warfare, the millions of lives lost in pointless charges against machine guns.
(They had never been told that it was Winston Churchill himself who had struggled and nearly succeeded in preventing most of that wastage. Unfairly, he had been given the opposite reputation.)
Also, Hitler encouraged the pacifists by his constant use of the Big Lie. Even though he never kept a promise, he did keep making them. "This is the last territorial demand Germany will ever make," he said over and over, and each time the pacifists were eager to believe him.
No, the reason I find myself consumed with sadness as I listen to Alone, 1932-1940 is that on point after point, foolish mistake after foolish mistake, criminal neglect after criminal neglect, I see that we are exactly echoing the errors of that time.
Bill Clinton was our Stanley Baldwin, a genial pol whose wetted finger was always up to test the winds of public sentiment.
But Barack Obama is our Neville Chamberlain, a committed True Believer in the mad notion that our enemies want peace as much as we do, and only hate us because of our mistakes.
We face enemies remarkably like Adolf Hitler. The leaders of Islamist fanatic groups and governments, from Iran to Hamas and Hezbollah, from the Taliban to the Muslim Brotherhood, from Al-Qaeda to the Syrian regime, resemble him in these ways:
1. They hate Jews. Call their victims "Zionists" in order to pretend, but it is Jews they kill whenever and wherever they can.
And, just as in Hitler's day, the intellectuals of Europe and far too many in America rather agree with them that Jews -- er, no, Zionists -- ah, that is, Neo-Conservatives -- are evil, cannot be trusted, and deserve to be destroyed.
Thus when Iran threatens to use its nukes against Israel, there are many who are unconcerned because as long as Jews are the only intended victims, they don't really mind all that much.
So much for learning and remembering the lessons of the Holocaust. Nukes are quicker and cheaper than gas chambers. And if a few millions Muslims die along with the Jews.... Inshallah. It is the will of God. They are martyrs.
2. Just like Hitler, they always cast themselves as the victims. Hitler pretended only to be trying to protect people of German nationality wherever they lived.
Now Islamists claim to be victims everywhere. Let someone speak ill of their religion, their scripture, or their founder, and they believe that this justifies them in any kind of thuggery, murder, assassination, riot, and terrorism.
3. They are thugs. Like Hitler's Brown Shirts and SS, who terrorized Germans first in order to bring Hitler to power and keep him there, Islamist thugs work first to terrorize other Muslims and keep them from speaking out against their rule. Thus a tiny minority comes to dominate the millions of Muslims, not just in Muslim-majority countries, but around the world.
No other world religion claims the right to be able to enforce their laws on unbelievers, to impose the death sentence on anyone of any faith who offends their dogmas, and to kill any member of their own faith who is insufficiently faithful or who attempts to leave Islam.
Quick, are there any Muslims reading this who are not afraid to speak up against any of these Islamist groups or governments? Yes, raise your hands! But... not very high. I don't want your blood on my conscience.
4. They aim at nothing less than complete world domination. They have said so just as clearly as Hitler did in Mein Kampf, and they continue to say it.
5. Like Hitler, these Islamists are contemptuous of Westerners who think negotiations mean anything. When they think they're losing, they negotiate -- but then they keep none of the promises they make. Not one. Not ever.
6. Like Hitler, they cheerfully exploit the Westerners who support their cause, but feel nothing but contempt for them. The only people they respect are the ones who stand against them firmly.
7. Like Hitler, they have a whole list of kinds of people who need to be suppressed, oppressed, or destroyed. The Islamist list includes:
Women, who must be made powerless and invisible, utterly uneducated and unfree.
Jews, who must be killed or expelled.
In Egypt, the Coptic Christians are being murdered in "spontaneous" (i.e., well-planned) pogroms, while the authorities stand by to arrest the surviving Christians. This despite the fact that Christians have been in Egypt far longer than any Muslims, since Egypt was a completely Christianized land for centuries before Islam was founded.
In Iran, followers of Bahai and other minority faiths are jailed or murdered, forbidden to practice their faith.
In Afghanistan, when the Taliban ruled, followers of any religion but Islam were persecuted, their holy sites obliterated or defaced.
In Nigeria, Muslim mobs massacre Christians, as the Muslim government stands by and then pretends to investigate.
In places where Islamists rule, anyone who believes in democracy, or supports any law but the fanatical Islamist version of Shari'a, or pursues any education but the study of Muslim scripture in Arabic, is liable to be imprisoned, exiled, or impoverished -- if they aren't killed outright.
8. Like Hitler, Islamists are arming themselves and preparing for total war. Iran aims for nukes and means to use them. Pakistan has nukes, but dares not use them because India has better ones.
But the Islamists' real total war is not dependent on nukes. Iran's nukes are just as much about dominating the other Muslim nations in their vicinity; though they are sincere about using them against Israel, once they have done so, will Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates, Iraq, or any other Muslim nation resist their leadership?
Their war against the West is to bring us down, and Osama bin Laden showed them how. Attacks on public trust will eventually break down our economy, force governments to bow to Muslim "sensibilities."
Because just as the Islamists use Hitler to teach them how to destroy us, it is as if our "intellectual" elite -- our tenured professoriate, our monolithic news establishment, and Hollywood -- were also following a script.
The script given them by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the politicians and newspaper editors who co-starred with him in a play they did not have to write down, because they acted it out for us on the world stage:
How to Bring on a World War by "Appeasing" Those Who Do Not Want Peace.
Do you doubt me? Our mediacrats and professoriate bent over backward after 9/11 to make sure not to sound patriotic, not to label Islamists as our enemies.
They are eager to blame terrorist acts on anyone but Islamists.
When a homegrown terrorist blows up a government building or assassinates a government official, they blame conservative American talk radio shows -- on no evidence whatsoever.
But the assassination of an American ambassador in Libya and the storming of our embassy in Egypt (a supposed ally) are blamed on a stupid movie. Our government does not defend our principles of freedom of speech; instead, our government apologizes for offending Muslim sensibilities.
In fact, Barack Obama didn't defend American values because he doesn't value them. He has already expressed his envy of the Chinese government's ability to make decisions without consulting their people. He has already promised to give Putin a free hand, once he gets reelected.
He joins the professoriate and the mediocracy in their contempt for dissenting views, punishing anyone who says things he doesn't like. He began his term by evading the Constitution by replacing his cabinet with "czars" who do not have to be confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans might question their shoddy credentials.
In this, too, Obama, the professoriate, and the mediacrats resemble Neville Chamberlain, the pacifist politicians, and the newspaper owners and editors during the run-up to World War II, when they constantly papered over or simply lied about Hitler's actions and the danger he posed.
They keep believing, as Chamberlain's companions kept believing, that negotiations only fail because we haven't yet given enough, even though we have already given more than was safe or even decent.
Even now -- just as Chamberlain bullied Czechoslovakia's leaders in 1938 into giving up their defensible borders and then kept no promises to protect them as their nation was erased and their people enslaved or murdered -- so also Obama pressures our only reliable ally in the Middle East not to defend themselves by the only possible means: preemptive destruction of their (and our) enemy's nuclear strike capability.
Here is what happens when you pursue the Neville Chamberlain course that Barack Obama is so carefully, systematically pursuing:
1. Negotiations lead to nothing. The enemy keeps no promises, and can't believe you keep believing them.
2. Yet as long as we keep giving them what they want, or postponing taking any action as long as they hold out the promise of negotiations, they are happy to accept the extra time in which to build up their ability to attack and destroy us.
3. Obama inherited two battle zones in the war against radical Islamism: Iraq and Afghanistan. He has declared both wars over and is withdrawing our troops.
This is the equivalent of France and Britain allowing Hitler's Nazis to occupy the demilitarized Rhineland and then to force anschluss with Austria.
4. The people of Afghanistan hated the Taliban and rejoiced when their murderous, repressive regime fell. Just as Iraqis hated Saddam, and far more than Egyptians hated Mubarak, anyone who has lived under Islamist rule hates the Islamists and longs for their destruction.
But Barack Obama and his fellow appeasers believe that other, lesser peoples don't really need the same rights Westerners have. We have no responsibility to help them gain or keep such rights.
Barack Obama has shown them (like Carter, Reagan, and Clinton before him) that there will be no effective support from America for local resistance to the extension of Islamist rule.
Briefly, two presidents named Bush stood against Muslim aggressors, and a remarkable thing happened: The Muslims who don't want to be ruled by these mad dictators fell in behind American leadership and bet their lives and their futures on our victory.
And we won. |
them, when he bent down to wash the feet of the disciples (cf. Jn 13:1-13) and above all when he gave his life for us (cf. Jn 13:1, 15:13).
The Spirit is also the energy which transforms the heart of the ecclesial community, so that it becomes a witness before the world to the love of the Father, who wishes to make humanity a single family in his Son. The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an undertaking that is often heroic in the way it is acted out in history; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man's sufferings and his needs, including material needs. And this is the aspect, this service of charity, on which I want to focus in the second part of the Encyclical.
Charity as a responsibility of the Church
20. Love of neighbour, grounded in the love of God, is first and foremost a responsibility for each individual member of the faithful, but it is also a responsibility for the entire ecclesial community at every level: from the local community to the particular Church and to the Church universal in its entirety. As a community, the Church must practise love. Love thus needs to be organized if it is to be an ordered service to the community. The awareness of this responsibility has had a constitutive relevance in the Church from the beginning: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-5). In these words, Saint Luke provides a kind of definition of the Church, whose constitutive elements include fidelity to the “teaching of the Apostles”, “communion” (koinonia), “the breaking of the bread” and “prayer” (cf. Acts 2:42). The element of “communion” (koinonia) is not initially defined, but appears concretely in the verses quoted above: it consists in the fact that believers hold all things in common and that among them, there is no longer any distinction between rich and poor (cf. also Acts 4:32-37). As the Church grew, this radical form of material communion could not in fact be preserved. But its essential core remained: within the community of believers there can never be room for a poverty that denies anyone what is needed for a dignified life.
21. A decisive step in the difficult search for ways of putting this fundamental ecclesial principle into practice is illustrated in the choice of the seven, which marked the origin of the diaconal office (cf. Acts 6:5-6). In the early Church, in fact, with regard to the daily distribution to widows, a disparity had arisen between Hebrew speakers and Greek speakers. The Apostles, who had been entrusted primarily with “prayer” (the Eucharist and the liturgy) and the “ministry of the word”, felt over-burdened by “serving tables”, so they decided to reserve to themselves the principal duty and to designate for the other task, also necessary in the Church, a group of seven persons. Nor was this group to carry out a purely mechanical work of distribution: they were to be men “full of the Spirit and of wisdom” (cf. Acts 6:1-6). In other words, the social service which they were meant to provide was absolutely concrete, yet at the same time it was also a spiritual service; theirs was a truly spiritual office which carried out an essential responsibility of the Church, namely a well-ordered love of neighbour. With the formation of this group of seven, “diaconia”—the ministry of charity exercised in a communitarian, orderly way—became part of the fundamental structure of the Church.
22. As the years went by and the Church spread further afield, the exercise of charity became established as one of her essential activities, along with the administration of the sacraments and the proclamation of the word: love for widows and orphans, prisoners, and the sick and needy of every kind, is as essential to her as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel. The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the Sacraments and the Word. A few references will suffice to demonstrate this. Justin Martyr († c. 155) in speaking of the Christians' celebration of Sunday, also mentions their charitable activity, linked with the Eucharist as such. Those who are able make offerings in accordance with their means, each as he or she wishes; the Bishop in turn makes use of these to support orphans, widows, the sick and those who for other reasons find themselves in need, such as prisoners and foreigners.[12] The great Christian writer Tertullian († after 220) relates how the pagans were struck by the Christians' concern for the needy of every sort.[13] And when Ignatius of Antioch († c. 117) described the Church of Rome as “presiding in charity (agape)”,[14] we may assume that with this definition he also intended in some sense to express her concrete charitable activity.
23. Here it might be helpful to allude to the earliest legal structures associated with the service of charity in the Church. Towards the middle of the fourth century we see the development in Egypt of the “diaconia”: the institution within each monastery responsible for all works of relief, that is to say, for the service of charity. By the sixth century this institution had evolved into a corporation with full juridical standing, which the civil authorities themselves entrusted with part of the grain for public distribution. In Egypt not only each monastery, but each individual Diocese eventually had its own diaconia; this institution then developed in both East and West. Pope Gregory the Great († 604) mentions the diaconia of Naples, while in Rome the diaconiae are documented from the seventh and eighth centuries. But charitable activity on behalf of the poor and suffering was naturally an essential part of the Church of Rome from the very beginning, based on the principles of Christian life given in the Acts of the Apostles. It found a vivid expression in the case of the deacon Lawrence († 258). The dramatic description of Lawrence's martyrdom was known to Saint Ambrose († 397) and it provides a fundamentally authentic picture of the saint. As the one responsible for the care of the poor in Rome, Lawrence had been given a period of time, after the capture of the Pope and of Lawrence's fellow deacons, to collect the treasures of the Church and hand them over to the civil authorities. He distributed to the poor whatever funds were available and then presented to the authorities the poor themselves as the real treasure of the Church.[15] Whatever historical reliability one attributes to these details, Lawrence has always remained present in the Church's memory as a great exponent of ecclesial charity.
24. A mention of the emperor Julian the Apostate († 363) can also show how essential the early Church considered the organized practice of charity. As a child of six years, Julian witnessed the assassination of his father, brother and other family members by the guards of the imperial palace; rightly or wrongly, he blamed this brutal act on the Emperor Constantius, who passed himself off as an outstanding Christian. The Christian faith was thus definitively discredited in his eyes. Upon becoming emperor, Julian decided to restore paganism, the ancient Roman religion, while reforming it in the hope of making it the driving force behind the empire. In this project he was amply inspired by Christianity. He established a hierarchy of metropolitans and priests who were to foster love of God and neighbour. In one of his letters,[16] he wrote that the sole aspect of Christianity which had impressed him was the Church's charitable activity. He thus considered it essential for his new pagan religion that, alongside the system of the Church's charity, an equivalent activity of its own be established. According to him, this was the reason for the popularity of the “Galileans”. They needed now to be imitated and outdone. In this way, then, the Emperor confirmed that charity was a decisive feature of the Christian community, the Church.
25. Thus far, two essential facts have emerged from our reflections:
a) The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia). These duties presuppose each other and are inseparable. For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.[17]
b) The Church is God's family in the world. In this family no one ought to go without the necessities of life. Yet at the same time caritas- agape extends beyond the frontiers of the Church. The parable of the Good Samaritan remains as a standard which imposes universal love towards the needy whom we encounter “by chance” (cf. Lk 10:31), whoever they may be. Without in any way detracting from this commandment of universal love, the Church also has a specific responsibility: within the ecclesial family no member should suffer through being in need. The teaching of the Letter to the Galatians is emphatic: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (6:10).
Justice and Charity
26. Since the nineteenth century, an objection has been raised to the Church's charitable activity, subsequently developed with particular insistence by Marxism: the poor, it is claimed, do not need charity but justice. Works of charity—almsgiving—are in effect a way for the rich to shirk their obligation to work for justice and a means of soothing their consciences, while preserving their own status and robbing the poor of their rights. Instead of contributing through individual works of charity to maintaining the status quo, we need to build a just social order in which all receive their share of the world's goods and no longer have to depend on charity. There is admittedly some truth to this argument, but also much that is mistaken. It is true that the pursuit of justice must be a fundamental norm of the State and that the aim of a just social order is to guarantee to each person, according to the principle of subsidiarity, his share of the community's goods. This has always been emphasized by Christian teaching on the State and by the Church's social doctrine. Historically, the issue of the just ordering of the collectivity had taken a new dimension with the industrialization of society in the nineteenth century. The rise of modern industry caused the old social structures to collapse, while the growth of a class of salaried workers provoked radical changes in the fabric of society. The relationship between capital and labour now became the decisive issue—an issue which in that form was previously unknown. Capital and the means of production were now the new source of power which, concentrated in the hands of a few, led to the suppression of the rights of the working classes, against which they had to rebel.
27. It must be admitted that the Church's leadership was slow to realize that the issue of the just structuring of society needed to be approached in a new way. There were some pioneers, such as Bishop Ketteler of Mainz († 1877), and concrete needs were met by a growing number of groups, associations, leagues, federations and, in particular, by the new religious orders founded in the nineteenth century to combat poverty, disease and the need for better education. In 1891, the papal magisterium intervened with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum of Leo XIII. This was followed in 1931 by Pius XI's Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. In 1961 Blessed John XXIII published the Encyclical Mater et Magistra, while Paul VI, in the Encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967) and in the Apostolic Letter Octogesima Adveniens (1971), insistently addressed the social problem, which had meanwhile become especially acute in Latin America. My great predecessor John Paul II left us a trilogy of social Encyclicals: Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) and finally Centesimus Annus (1991). Faced with new situations and issues, Catholic social teaching thus gradually developed, and has now found a comprehensive presentation in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church published in 2004 by the Pontifical Council Iustitia et Pax. Marxism had seen world revolution and its preliminaries as the panacea for the social problem: revolution and the subsequent collectivization of the means of production, so it was claimed, would immediately change things for the better. This illusion has vanished. In today's complex situation, not least because of the growth of a globalized economy, the Church's social doctrine has become a set of fundamental guidelines offering approaches that are valid even beyond the confines of the Church: in the face of ongoing development these guidelines need to be addressed in the context of dialogue with all those seriously concerned for humanity and for the world in which we live.
28. In order to define more accurately the relationship between the necessary commitment to justice and the ministry of charity, two fundamental situations need to be considered:
a) The just ordering of society and the State is a central responsibility of politics. As Augustine once said, a State which is not governed according to justice would be just a bunch of thieves: “Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?”.[18] Fundamental to Christianity is the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God (cf. Mt 22:21), in other words, the distinction between Church and State, or, as the Second Vatican Council puts it, the autonomy of the temporal sphere.[19] The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions. For her part, the Church, as the social expression of Christian faith, has a proper independence and is structured on the basis of her faith as a community which the State must recognize. The two spheres are distinct, yet always interrelated.
Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics. Politics is more than a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public life: its origin and its goal are found in justice, which by its very nature has to do with ethics. The State must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even more radical question: what is justice? The problem is one of practical reason; but if reason is to be exercised properly, it must undergo constant purification, since it can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests.
Here politics and faith meet. Faith by its specific nature is an encounter with the living God—an encounter opening up new horizons extending beyond the sphere of reason. But it is also a purifying force for reason itself. From God's standpoint, faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to be ever more fully itself. Faith enables reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly. This is where Catholic social doctrine has its place: it has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.
The Church's social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being. It recognizes that it is not the Church's responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest. Building a just social and civil order, wherein each person receives what is his or her due, is an essential task which every generation must take up anew. As a political task, this cannot be the Church's immediate responsibility. Yet, since it is also a most important human responsibility, the Church is duty-bound to offer, through the purification of reason and through ethical formation, her own specific contribution towards understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically.
The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice. She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper. A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church. Yet the promotion of justice through efforts to bring about openness of mind and will to the demands of the common good is something which concerns the Church deeply.
b) Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbour is indispensable.[20] The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces: she is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support. In the end, the claim that just social structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live “by bread alone” (Mt 4:4; cf. Dt 8:3)—a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human.
29. We can now determine more precisely, in the life of the Church, the relationship between commitment to the just ordering of the State and society on the one hand, and organized charitable activity on the other. We have seen that the formation of just structures is not directly the duty of the Church, but belongs to the world of politics, the sphere of the autonomous use of reason. The Church has an indirect duty here, in that she is called to contribute to the purification of reason and to the reawakening of those moral forces without which just structures are neither established nor prove effective in the long run.
The direct duty to work for a just ordering of society, on the other hand, is proper to the lay faithful. As citizens of the State, they are called to take part in public life in a personal capacity. So they cannot relinquish their participation “in the many different economic, social, legislative, administrative and cultural areas, which are intended to promote organically and institutionally the common good.” [21] The mission of the lay faithful is therefore to configure social life correctly, respecting its legitimate autonomy and cooperating with other citizens according to their respective competences and fulfilling their own responsibility.[22] Even if the specific expressions of ecclesial charity can never be confused with the activity of the State, it still remains true that charity must animate the entire lives of the lay faithful and therefore also their political activity, lived as “social charity”.[23]
The Church's charitable organizations, on the other hand, constitute an opus proprium, a task agreeable to her, in which she does not cooperate collaterally, but acts as a subject with direct responsibility, doing what corresponds to her nature. The Church can never be exempted from practising charity as an organized activity of believers, and on the other hand, there will never be a situation where the charity of each individual Christian is unnecessary, because in addition to justice man needs, and will always need, love.
The multiple structures of charitable service in the social context of the present day
30. Before attempting to define the specific profile of the Church's activities in the service of man, I now wish to consider the overall situation of the struggle for justice and love in the world of today.
a) Today the means of mass communication have made our planet smaller, rapidly narrowing the distance between different peoples and cultures. This “togetherness” at times gives rise to misunderstandings and tensions, yet our ability to know almost instantly about the needs of others challenges us to share their situation and their difficulties. Despite the great advances made in science and technology, each day we see how much suffering there is in the world on account of different kinds of poverty, both material and spiritual. Our times call for a new readiness to assist our neighbours in need. The Second Vatican Council had made this point very clearly: “Now that, through better means of communication, distances between peoples have been almost eliminated, charitable activity can and should embrace all people and all needs.”[24]
On the other hand—and here we see one of the challenging yet also positive sides of the process of globalization—we now have at our disposal numerous means for offering humanitarian assistance to our brothers and sisters in need, not least modern systems of distributing food and clothing, and of providing housing and care. Concern for our neighbour transcends the confines of national communities and has increasingly broadened its horizon to the whole world. The Second Vatican Council rightly observed that “among the signs of our times, one particularly worthy of note is a growing, inescapable sense of solidarity between all peoples.”[25] State agencies and humanitarian associations work to promote this, the former mainly through subsidies or tax relief, the latter by making available considerable resources. The solidarity shown by civil society thus significantly surpasses that shown by individuals.
b) This situation has led to the birth and the growth of many forms of cooperation between State and Church agencies, which have borne fruit. Church agencies, with their transparent operation and their faithfulness to the duty of witnessing to love, are able to give a Christian quality to the civil agencies too, favouring a mutual coordination that can only redound to the effectiveness of charitable service.[26] Numerous organizations for charitable or philanthropic purposes have also been established and these are committed to achieving adequate humanitarian solutions to the social and political problems of the day. Significantly, our time has also seen the growth and spread of different kinds of volunteer work, which assume responsibility for providing a variety of services.[27] I wish here to offer a special word of gratitude and appreciation to all those who take part in these activities in whatever way. For young people, this widespread involvement constitutes a school of life which offers them a formation in solidarity and in readiness to offer others not simply material aid but their very selves. The anti-culture of death, which finds expression for example in drug use, is thus countered by an unselfish love which shows itself to be a culture of life by the very willingness to “lose itself” (cf. Lk 17:33 et passim) for others.
In the Catholic Church, and also in the other Churches and Ecclesial Communities, new forms of charitable activity have arisen, while other, older ones have taken on new life and energy. In these new forms, it is often possible to establish a fruitful link between evangelization and works of charity. Here I would clearly reaffirm what my great predecessor John Paul II wrote in his Encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis [28] when he asserted the readiness of the Catholic Church to cooperate with the charitable agencies of these Churches and Communities, since we all have the same fundamental motivation and look towards the same goal: a true humanism, which acknowledges that man is made in the image of God and wants to help him to live in a way consonant with that dignity. His Encyclical Ut Unum Sint emphasized that the building of a better world requires Christians to speak with a united voice in working to inculcate “respect for the rights and needs of everyone, especially the poor, the lowly and the defenceless.” [29] Here I would like to express my satisfaction that this appeal has found a wide resonance in numerous initiatives throughout the world.
The distinctiveness of the Church's charitable activity
31. The increase in diversified organizations engaged in meeting various human needs is ultimately due to the fact that the command of love of neighbour is inscribed by the Creator in man's very nature. It is also a result of the presence of Christianity in the world, since Christianity constantly revives and acts out this imperative, so often profoundly obscured in the course of time. The reform of paganism attempted by the emperor Julian the Apostate is only an initial example of this effect; here we see how the power of Christianity spread well beyond the frontiers of the Christian faith. For this reason, it is very important that the Church's charitable activity maintains all of its splendour and does not become just another form of social assistance. So what are the essential elements of Christian and ecclesial charity?
a) Following the example given in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Christian charity is first of all the simple response to immediate needs and specific situations: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for and healing the sick, visiting those in prison, etc. The Church's charitable organizations, beginning with those of Caritas (at diocesan, national and international levels), ought to do everything in their power to provide the resources and above all the personnel needed for this work. Individuals who care for those in need must first be professionally competent: they should be properly trained in what to do and how to do it, and committed to continuing care. Yet, while professional competence is a primary, fundamental requirement, it is not of itself sufficient. We are dealing with human beings, and human beings always need something more than technically proper care. They need humanity. They need heartfelt concern. Those who work for the Church's charitable organizations must be distinguished by the fact that they do not merely meet the needs of the moment, but they dedicate themselves to others with heartfelt concern, enabling them to experience the richness of their humanity. Consequently, in addition to their necessary professional training, these charity workers need a “formation of the heart”: they need to be led to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others. As a result, love of neighbour will no longer be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a consequence deriving from their faith, a faith which becomes active through love (cf. Gal 5:6).
b) Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies. It is not a means of changing the world ideologically, and it is not at the service of worldly stratagems, but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs. The modern age, particularly from the nineteenth century on, has been dominated by various versions of a philosophy of progress whose most radical form is Marxism. Part of Marxist strategy is the theory of impoverishment: in a situation of unjust power, it is claimed, anyone who engages in charitable initiatives is actually serving that unjust system, making it appear at least to some extent tolerable. This in turn slows down a potential revolution and thus blocks the struggle for a better world. Seen in this way, charity is rejected and attacked as a means of preserving the status quo. What we have here, though, is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future—a future whose effective realization is at best doubtful. One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now. We contribute to a better world only by personally doing good now, with full commitment and wherever we have the opportunity, independently of partisan strategies and programmes. The Christian's programme —the programme of the Good Samaritan, the programme of Jesus—is “a heart which sees”. This heart sees where love is needed and acts accordingly. Obviously when charitable activity is carried out by the Church as a communitarian initiative, the spontaneity of individuals must be combined with planning, foresight and cooperation with other similar institutions.
c) Charity, furthermore, cannot be used as a means of engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism. Love is free; it is not practised as a way of achieving other ends.[30] But this does not mean that charitable activity must somehow leave God and Christ aside. For it is always concerned with the whole man. Often the deepest cause of suffering is the very absence of God. Those who practise charity in the Church's name will never seek to impose the Church's faith upon others. They realize that a pure and generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8) and that God's presence is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love. He knows—to return to the questions raised earlier—that disdain for love is disdain for God and man alike; it is an attempt to do without God. Consequently, the best defence of God and man consists precisely in love. It is the responsibility of the Church's charitable organizations to reinforce this awareness in their members, so that by their activity—as well as their words, their silence, their example—they may be credible witnesses to Christ.
Those responsible for the Church's charitable activity
32. Finally, we must turn our attention once again to those who are responsible for carrying out the Church's charitable activity. As our preceding reflections have made clear, the true subject of the various Catholic organizations that carry out a ministry of charity is the Church herself—at all levels, from the parishes, through the particular Churches, to the universal Church. For this reason it was most opportune that my venerable predecessor Paul VI established the Pontifical Council Cor Unum as the agency of the Holy See responsible for orienting and coordinating the organizations and charitable activities promoted by the Catholic Church. In conformity with the episcopal structure of the Church, the Bishops, as successors of the Apostles, are charged with primary responsibility for carrying out in the particular Churches the programme set forth in the Acts of the Apostles (cf. 2:42-44): today as in the past, the Church as God's family must be a place where help is given and received, and at the same time, a place where people are also prepared to serve those outside her confines who are in need of help. In the rite of episcopal ordination, prior to the act of consecration itself, the candidate must respond to several questions which express the essential elements of his office and recall the duties of his future ministry. He promises expressly to be, in the Lord's name, welcoming and merciful to the poor and to all those in need of consolation and assistance.[31] The Code of Canon Law, in the canons on the ministry of the Bishop, does not expressly mention charity as a specific sector of episcopal activity, but speaks in general terms of the Bishop's responsibility for coordinating the different works of the apostolate with due regard for their proper character.[32] Recently, however, the Directory for the Pastoral Ministry of Bishops explored more specifically the duty of charity as a responsibility incumbent upon the whole Church and upon each Bishop in his Diocese,[33] and it emphasized that the exercise of charity is an action of the Church as such, and that, like the ministry of Word and Sacrament, it too has been an essential part of her mission from the very beginning.[34]
33. With regard to the personnel who carry out the Church's charitable activity on the practical level, the essential has already been said: they must not be inspired by ideologies aimed at improving the world, but should rather be guided by the faith which works through love (cf. Gal 5:6). Consequently, more than anything, they must be persons moved by Christ's love, persons whose hearts Christ has conquered with his love, awakening within them a love of neighbour. The criterion inspiring their activity should be Saint Paul's statement in the Second Letter to the Corinthians: “the love of Christ urges us on” (5:14). The consciousness that, in Christ, God has given himself for us, even unto death, must inspire us to live no longer for ourselves but for him, and, with him, for others. Whoever loves Christ loves the Church, and desires the Church to be increasingly the image and instrument of the love which flows from Christ. The personnel of every Catholic charitable organization want to work with the Church and therefore with the Bishop, so that the love of God can spread throughout the world. By their sharing in the Church's practice of love, they wish to be witnesses of God and of Christ, and they wish for this very reason freely to do good to all.
34. Interior openness to the Catholic dimension of the Church cannot fail to dispose charity workers to work in harmony with other organizations in serving various forms of need, but in a way that respects what is distinctive about the service which Christ requested of his disciples. Saint Paul, in his hymn to charity (cf. 1 Cor 13), teaches us that it is always more than activity alone: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, I gain nothing” (v. 3). This hymn must be the Magna Carta of all ecclesial service; it sums up all the reflections on love which I have offered throughout this Encyclical Letter. Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for man, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ. My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift.
35. This proper way of serving others also leads to humility. The one who serves does not consider himself superior to the one served, however miserable his situation at the moment may be. Christ took the lowest place in the world—the Cross—and by this radical humility he redeemed us and constantly comes to our aid. Those who are in a position to help others will realize that in doing so they themselves receive help; being able to help others is no merit or achievement of their own. This duty is a grace. The more we do for others, the more we understand and can appropriate the words of Christ: “We are useless servants” (Lk 17:10). We recognize that we are not acting on the basis of any superiority or greater personal efficiency, but because the Lord has graciously enabled us to do so. There are times when the burden of need and our own limitations might tempt us to become discouraged. But precisely then we are helped by the knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord's hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord. It is God who governs the world, not we. We offer him our service only to the extent that we can, and for as long as he grants us the strength. To do all we can with what strength we have, however, is the task which keeps the good servant of Jesus Christ always at work: “The love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14).
36. When we consider the immensity of others' needs, we can, on the one hand, be driven towards an ideology that would aim at doing what God's governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolving every problem. Or we can be tempted to give in to inertia, since it would seem that in any event nothing can be accomplished. At such times, a living relationship with Christ is decisive if we are to keep on the right path, without falling into an arrogant contempt for man, something not only unconstructive but actually destructive, or surrendering to a resignation which would prevent us from being guided by love in the service of others. Prayer, as a means of drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently needed. People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone. Piety does not undermine the struggle against the poverty of our neighbours, however extreme. In the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta we have a clear illustration of the fact that time devoted to God in prayer not only does not detract from effective and loving service to our neighbour but is in fact the inexhaustible source of that service. In her letter for Lent 1996, Blessed Teresa wrote to her lay co-workers: “We need this deep connection with God in our daily life. How can we obtain it? By prayer”.
37. It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work. Clearly, the Christian who prays does not claim to be able to change God's plans or correct what he has foreseen. Rather, he seeks an encounter with the Father of Jesus Christ, asking God to be present with the consolation of the Spirit to him and his work. A personal relationship with God and an abandonment to his will can prevent man from being demeaned and save him from falling prey to the teaching of fanaticism and terrorism. An authentically religious attitude prevents man from presuming to judge God, accusing him of allowing poverty and failing to have compassion for his creatures. When people claim to build a case against God in defence of man, on whom can they depend when human activity proves powerless?
38. Certainly Job could complain before God about the presence of incomprehensible and apparently unjustified suffering in the world. In his pain he cried out: “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!... I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?... Therefore I am terrified at his presence; when I consider, I am in dread of him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me” ( |
to happen.
Our team was just about unstoppable that season — we started the year 22-0. ESPN was calling us the national title favorites. Our only loss during the regular season was against Mizzou in double OT, and we beat them by double-digits the next two times we faced them.
We entered the 1997 NCAA tournament that year as the No. 1 overall seed and won our first two games convincingly. In the Sweet 16, we were set to face No. 4 Arizona. We had beaten them the previous season in the Sweet 16, so I felt like we were ready.
Arizona was good — they had a tremendous backcourt comprised of Mike Bibby and Jason Terry — but I didn’t have much doubt that we would win. Honestly, I thought we would crush them. Our team was stacked with NBA talent. The expectation was that we were going to bulldoze through the early rounds of the tournament. I had my sights set on the Final Four, where I figured we’d probably meet Kentucky, the defending national champs. That was the game we were all looking forward to.
But Arizona came to play, and we weren’t at our best.
It was pretty close throughout, but late in the second half, the Wildcats built a lead that was as many as 13 late in the game.
I remember that we were down 79-71 with just over 1:30 left and Arizona had to inbound the ball under their own basket, so we started pressing. They threw the ball long and I deflected it like I was a cornerback, which led to a steal and a bucket.
Down by six.
On the ensuing inbounds pass, we pressed again and I came up with another steal — it was unbelievable.
We went down the court and swung it around to Billy Thomas, who hit a three-pointer to bring us within three with a minute left. And at that time, I started to get really excited. We had all the momentum. I thought I was about to be part of an exciting win on our way to the national championship.
With 18 seconds left we were still down by three. I wanted the ball in that situation. I’ve always loved those moments, from the time that I was in high school to today as a 17-year NBA veteran.
I found an open spot on the perimeter, but the ball never came to me and we missed our last shot.
Coming all the way back from a big deficit and me not having a crack at the final shot made it hurt that much worse. I just remember crying in the locker room after that game. All of us were crying — the entire team was completely devastated. To us, it was a wasted season.
I played with Jason Terry in Boston and Brooklyn the last couple of years, and we’d talk about this game from time to time. It was memorable for both of us for very different reasons.
The tournament is unforgiving. If you have one bad game, that’s it. Throughout my career I’ve had many losses, but all these years later, this is one that still stings.
For more Tales of Madness, visit our Tales of Madness page.The continued interest in alternative cryptocurrencies to bitcoin is clear to see Swedish-based KnCMiner selling $2 million (£1.2m)worth of scrypt-based mining rigs in just four hours.
The Titan is the company's first scrypt-based mining rig and costs $10,000, meaning the company sold 200 units in the first four hours it was available to pre-order on the website.
KnCMiner saying the Titan rigs will be shipping in the second or third quarter of 2014. The company said it would make 2,500 units in the initial run but with interest in scrypt-based coins growing, KnCMiner is likely to sell out of the devices.
The company also sells the Neptune bitcoin mining rig which also costs $10,000, and in December the company revealed it had sold $8 million worth of Neptune hardware in just 24 hours, claiming the Neptune rig would be able to mine 2.1 bitcoins a day - then worth over $2,000 but now worth around $1,300.
"The scrypt mining market has grown over the last six months and we have been watching it very closely. The time is now right for the launch of our new offering," the company said on its website.
Bitcoin uses the SHA256 cryptographic hash function but most of the newer cryptocurrencies use the scrypt function, meaning that you can still use your GPU and CPU to mine the coins - something which is no longer really possible in bitcoin mining.
Popular scrypt-based alt-coins include litecoin (the world's second most valuable cryptocurrency) and dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency.
Until recently there no one was selling specially-built mining rigs for scrypt-based alt-coins as the return on investment on such coins was not at the level where people were willing to invest a lot of money in hardware like Titan.Today the federal government and America’s president, among others, dedicated a National Memorial to Martin Luther King in the National Mall in Washington DC. He is the only non president to have receive such an honor. While,for the most part, politically, Dr. King and I are not compatible. I have great respect for a man who sacrificed himself trying to lead our glorious race to a better place in the US and indeed the world. So in honor of his special day I will post my favorite Martin Luther King clip.
The MLK that’s never quoted.
“”The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom”
— Martin Luther King
The good Dr and I shared a favorite song and gospel artist in How I Got Over by Mahalia Jackson. Listen to both they will deepen your life experience and help you along with your day.I trust you had a delicious weekend. I did. Between stuffing myself at Festa Italiana downtown [porchetta sandwich, tiramisu, and a bottle few small glasses of moscato], making my first ever protein pancakes, baking eggs on the grill, making the spiciest curry yet, cradling a machaca burrito on Sunday morning, and eating half a batch of cinnamon roll muffins, I’d say mine was pretty yum.
I finally tried field roast meatloaf today. I headed to the vegan BBQ cart, Homegrown Smoker.
It was decent. The texture was very overly mixed meatloaf with a slightly weird taste. I can’t pinpoint it. I was super thankful for the BBQ sauce it was smothered in, otherwise it would have been a real bummer. The highlight of the whole meal was the MacNoCheese they topped the meatloaf sandwich with. That’s a huge mess of braised greens, too. I’d probably give the meal a 3/5. It’s probably a might 5/5 if I weren’t eating meat. Meat > Field Roast. Sorry, Field Roast. I’d definitely head back for other things, like the Side Plate, but not meat substitutes. It’s just not for me.
In meaty news, this is the beautiful chicken I told you about. Look at that caramel colored crust on that bird! Man, I miss it already.
Do you know how hard it is to find just a regular 6-pack of crappy beer in 12oz cans in my neighborhood? Most of the cheap stuff comes in massive 12+ packs, which I didn’t want. I ended up going for a 6-pack of IPA just so I didn’t have to stare at 11 cans of gross beer. I don’t drink IPA, but Andrew does. Thankfully, IPA doesn’t affect the chicken’s taste. Or maybe it does. If it does, I like it.
Beer can chicken is almost too easy. It’d be easy to set it and forget it and totally overcook it. Prepping the bird is the hardest part, and it isn’t even hard. That’s my kind of meal.
It took every ounce of my willpower not to tear into it and eat it all in one sitting with my hands. I’m classy.
Inspiration: Bell’amiento
Ingredients
a whole chicken
1/2 12oz can beer of choice
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon carne asada seasoning
pepper
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
Preparation
Pre-heat grill to medium. Rinse the chicken and remove all the insides. Pat dry. If you haven’t done so already, drink half of the beer so you only have 60z left. Puncture the sides of the can to give it more ventilation holes. Grab a cookie sheet that you wouldn’t be devastated if it got really, really gross, and line it with tinfoil. Insert the beer can into the chicken. Prop the chicken up, beer can down, on the cookie sheet so its sitting at attention. In a small bowl, mix dry ingredients to create the rub. Pour a tablespoon or two into your hands and cover the skin of the chicken with the oil. Take the rub you made, and massage it into the skin. Really cover it. Really. Wash your hands, you filthy animal. Place the chicken on the grill for 60-90 minutes depending on the size of your chicken. Check for doneness by cutting one of the legs. The juice should run clear. Remove from the grill and allow to cool. That beer can is going to stay ridiculously hot for awhile, so good luck with that.
Advertisements• Ricardo Ferreira also sprayed water at Swiss official • ‘I had expected one or two years maximum. But 50?’
A fourth division player in Switzerland has been handed a 50-year ban after kicking a ball in the referee’s face and then spraying him with water.
According to the Swiss newspaper Blick, the defender Ricardo Ferreira of Portugal Futebol Clube was an unused substitute in the 1-0 defeat by SC Worb in the local Bern league. But it was not until after the match that he entered the fray, kicking the ball in the referee’s face and then hurling insults as the official made his way to the tunnel before squirting him with water.
“We do not want such a player in our league,” said Robert Breiter, the lawyer of Switzerland’s amateur football league. “Unfortunately we encounter such cases about once a year.”
Ferreira has previously found himself in hot water with the authorities, having once been banned for 45 matches after being found guilty of assaulting opposition players and abusing officials.
“I had expected one or two years maximum. But 50 years? Football’s my life,” he said.
Ferreira’s new suspension is officially for an indefinite period but because the governing body’s computer requires an end date, it was set 50 years later. That means he will be free to return to football on 5 June, 2064, when he will be 78.Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Greek Orthodox Christian from Lebanon; the Levant. In the course of his book Antifragile, he promotes skepticism, theism, tradition, the writings of the stoics and seeks to restrict the claims of theory and "naïve rationalism."
Elsewhere I have said that often theory seems to make us stupider than we would be without the theory. This is particularly true when theory says something is not possible. A key phrase Taleb appeals to is from Friedrich Nietzsche, hardly a defender of tradition or theism, “Just because something is unintelligible to you does not mean it is unintelligent.” Many traditions, such as those involving fasting may seem unintelligible to many but there can be reasons for thinking that they are intelligent.
One of the things I have found interesting about Taleb is the way he extends what I had in my own thinking thought of as ‘mystery’ to areas of human life I had not previously considered. My list of the ‘mysterious’ had included life: what is it, where did it come from and why; consciousness, morality and free will. Emotion too is mysterious because it is implicated in a proper existential attitude to the world and yet it is not fully intelligible. Emotion complements reason but by definition is not simply reason itself. Thus its workings and logic has to be intuited and felt rather than fully explicated.
Thinkers devoid of intuition and emotion make a terrible impression on me. However, it is hard to point out the violence these thinkers do to the subtleties of human life. Our primary relationship with the world is not a theoretical one, thus a proper orientation to life allows for the unintelligible and doesn’t seek an unreasonable demand for clarity and explication.
Taleb extends mystery to include historical events, the workings of medicine and the future. We simply cannot predict the future and certainly not from extrapolating from current trends. If we can’t explain the past nor predict the future, then it may seem as though life is just a little too mysterious. But, like Socrates, Taleb’s starting point is that much of wisdom consists in acknowledging what we don’t know. Plato's Socrates thinks that having discovered our ignorance, we should seek to remedy the situation. Taleb probably has a more modest idea about how far we really do this.
Historical knowledge is limited by our inability to employ counterfactuals as a way of testing claims. The Treaty of Versailles is supposed to have caused World War Two. We can’t test this because we can’t re-run history between the wars to see what would have happened without the treaty. Similarly, we can’t remedy our inability to predict the future. We can appeal to certain heuristics, as Taleb points out, such as the Lindy effect. This states that the longer something has been around, the longer it will be around. For every passing year, we can add another in the future. For instance, if the pyramids have existed for four thousand years, we can anticipate another four thousand. If Twitter has existed for five years, we can expect another five years. This rule of thumb does not apply to living creatures since each passing year brings us one year closer to death and even for inorganic objects, no infallibility is claimed.
The skepticism of Taleb is applied to knowledge and theory but does not propose we might be brains in vats or similar logical possibilities. Like me, Taleb proposes to test whether someone is really skeptical or not by how he lives his life. David Hume, for instance, explicitly says that once he stops philosophizing he is happy to forget all about his supposed skeptical assertions and that he goes back to accepting reality much as he finds it. Such skepticism is thus phony and contrived. If an engineer tells you that a bridge is safe but one observes him driving ten miles out of his way to avoid it, then it’s safe to say that he doesn’t believe what he is saying.
Taleb’s skepticism does not extend to the fundamentals of our existence, nor to God. Taleb claims that the best historical skeptics have either believed in God or approved of doing so, hence he calls himself and them a skeptical fideist. Taleb claims that belief in God facilitates an appropriate skepticism about what we can know and could, to a degree, be replaced by notions of fate.
God, in via negativa theology is mysterious, hence there is likely to be an ineluctable element of mystery at the core of life. I have a colleague who says he does not believe in life because he says it is a poorly defined concept. I have another who doesn’t believe in free will because he ‘just doesn’t see how it’s possible.’ Here Nietzsche’s phrase is particularly applicable.
It has always seemed no coincidence that in seeking to kill God, the logical positivists also killed consciousness, meaning, purpose, emotion, beauty and morality because none of these things are susceptible to scientific verification and reference either.
A belief in an ineffable God does seem to make intellectual room for other ineffable aspects of life.
Concerning the prediction of the future, Taleb argues that rare events will be systematically missed. That is because many significant rare events have no precedent. We judge how high the Nile may flood by the previous high water mark, but that mark itself had no precedent and was thus unpredictable. Taleb’s The Black Swan goes on to enumerate the unpredictable rise and effects of inventions, political events, large weather events, etc., as also contributing to the unpredictability of the future.
Attempts to use mathematical models to assess the stability of systems have systematic problems. Rare events lie in the ‘tails’ of assessments of probability (the points to the left and right of the main bell shape in bell curves) and are thus immeasurable. They will be particularly missed by model error since they are so rare they get mixed up with the ground level of what scientists call noise. In trying to distinguish signal and noise, signal has to rise in intensity and/or frequency above the base noise level, like a voice on a staticky telephone line. Thus we are bound to continue to be surprised by the unpredicted.
Imagine that your model missed just one event in fifty million. One person, Carlos Slim, in Mexico owns a huge proportion of the total wealth of the whole country, being at one point, the richest man on the planet. Your entire model will grossly misrepresent the wealth of Mexico by missing just that one person.
For Taleb, skepticism about knowledge is replaced by relative faith in trial and error and the exercising of optionality. Trial and error involves small scale tinkering whereby any error has no major consequences, but the pay-off may be enormous. This lopsided benefit-to-cost ratio is called asymmetry. It can go the other way too where you take a drug that is only even predicted to give a modest benefit of any kind, but may do you major damage, such as Vioxx’s damage to heart valves. The upside was modest pain relief and the downside was permanent heart damage and death.
‘Optionality’ involves recognizing the unexpected and unpredictable consequences of trial and error tinkering. Most inventions and discoveries are chance events; intelligence is involved in recognizing a good thing when you see it, even though you weren’t expecting it.
Medical error kills between three times, as accepted by doctors, and ten times as many people as car accidents, so one might be advised to avoid the medical community unless one’s condition is relatively serious, e.g., a matter of life or death. In that situation you don’t have much to lose so the downside is negligible and you have everything to gain. This avoidance of the medium or moderate Taleb calls barbelling – combining mostly low risk with some high risk. This describes tinkering above – failure doesn’t mean anything much. So, concerning one’s personal finances, Taleb recommends having most of one’s savings in the safest, most low risk form that one can find, perhaps inflation protected cash, and investing 10% of one’s money in high risk speculative ventures. You may gain a lot, but if you lose, you still have 90% of what you started with. Big upside, little downside. The ‘moderate’ option of investing all your money in medium risk ventures exposes oneself to rare events, Black Swans, that may have catastrophic effects. Those ‘rare’ events are far more common than theory and math based models predict.
So intelligence is employed in employing optionality, rather than needing a correct theory that explains why everything is the way it is, usually impossible, or predicting the future. Taleb’s recommendation is to rely on empirical observation as much as possible and to be skeptical about theories. Theories come and go, but the empirical remains stable. Weight training, properly done, will increase muscle size and strength. We don’t know why. Theories as to why are fragile. Today you get one explanation, tomorrow a new one.
Most inventions have been due to chance and involved little or no theory. The power loom and spinning jenny of the Industrial Revolution had nothing to do with science or Newton. They were the result of tinkering, as was the jet engine. The theory about how jets work came after the fact. Airplane wings work and we design them in wind tunnels. This is empirical. We don’t know why they work.
We can’t predict the future or future catastrophes, but we can predict that fragile things break and we do know that if a terrible event happens involving a nuclear power plant, the consequences will be horrendous. So we should design nuclear power plants anticipating terrible and rare events, not because we have ‘evidence’ that disasters will occur. We shouldn’t over optimize, but build in redundancies and back-up systems. Mathematical models encourage over optimizing and ‘efficiency’ but make things fragile to disaster.
Mathematical models and theories make things fragile. Empiricism and tinkering are antifragile. Tinkering benefits from uncertainty and variability and the unpredictable. Trial and error benefit from the unexpected. The fragile suffers from the unexpected and variable.
Taleb’s skepticism about the inappropriate use of mathematics and measurement in modern life fits my own. He has helped make me more skeptical of theory and explanations in a good way and he argues that good thinkers who give advice tend to focus on what doesn’t work rather than setting out some positive program, much as Socrates’ daimon tells Socrates what not to do. This fits my own pattern of lecturing in ethics, following Boethius in describing various illusions that we are prone to, such as the notion that complete sexual freedom is an unqualified boon.
What Taleb likes about tradition is that it tends to develop by trial and error and it is not dependent on theory to back it up. It is by definition not a passing fad. Like Nature, tradition has had a long time to fail. Nature and evolution are like a very very long scientific study and proceed by trial and error too. The errors are brutally selected out and happy accidents remain. Any proposal to alter the natural or traditional is an attempt to alter something that has proven to work by surviving. Therefore, the burden of proof is on those who want to introduce something unnatural and non-traditional. The person who wants to assert something controversial must provide evidence for it. We have evidence for the non-lethality and good of the natural and traditional due to their longevity. But we don’t for the unnatural and novel.
Butter is natural; margarine, man-made. Sugar is natural; artificial sweeteners and high fructose corn syrup are not. Scientifically created evidence of safety is required for one and not the other.
Taleb argues that scientists tend to get this confused and say, ‘where’s the evidence that margarine is unsafe?’ At the time margarine was introduced, there was no evidence it was unsafe, but no evidence that it was safe. If butter were lethal, we would have found out by now. It took thirty or forty years to discover that margarine was terrible for you and worse than butter, but by then the damage was done.
James Le Fanu in The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine describes how Ancel Keys succeeded in getting the public to pathologize meat and potatoes, falsely claiming that the high fat Western diet is implicated in heart disease. It is not, although this idea is still current. Before the 1920s, almost no one died of heart attacks. The phenomenon of otherwise healthy seeming middle-aged men experiencing crushing chest pain and dying mostly did not exist before then. Starting from the 1920s there was an epidemic of heart disease that continued to get worse and worse until the late 1960s when it started to decline. In the 1950s, Keys suggested the culprit was fat in the Western diet; later noting the relative absence of heart disease in countries like Japan. Heart experts sensibly rejected this suggestion because the massive rise of heart disease was not accompanied by any change in Western eating habits. The consumption of fat remained level, while heart attacks were increasing exponentially. That should be the end of the discussion for any sensible and logical person. In addition, doctors knew that heart attack sufferers ate no differently from anyone else. The American Heart Association refused to recommend lowering fat consumption because of the clear lack of association. However, two years later, Keys and a like-minded colleague, Jeremiah Stamler, got themselves appointed to the AHA committee and got the committee to reverse the committee’s earlier recommendation despite no further evidence arising and even the new committee’s admission that no clear connection had been established.
Ancel Keys’ initial study involved three hundred ‘at risk’ Minneapolis businessmen. The risk factors included smoking, high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol which is basically unrelated to cholesterol consumption, being manufactured by the liver if consumption falls. In the 1970s, the most expensive medical experiment ever undertaken, at a cost of two hundred million dollars, was performed involving 50,000 factory workers. Radically changing their diets had no appreciable effect, as predicted all along. The most extreme dietary changes could only alter blood cholesterol by five percent, which was medically insignificant.
It turned out the incidence of heart disease which declined in the 1980s, was due to the bacterium chlamydia and could be treated with antibiotics. Those at the highest risk could also take small doses of aspirin to reduce the chance of clots which, in combination with plaque narrowed arteries, play a role in triggering a heart attack.
This was all part of the Social Theory of Disease that blamed poor health on sick people when their behavior was typically no different from anyone else’s.
So, we in the West can go back to steak and potatoes and need not think that a Mediterranean or any other non-traditional diet will confer health benefits. Japanese people get stomach cancer more often; Westerners, colon cancer. There do seem to be health benefits from fasting, but this is traditional; being a part of many religious traditions worldwide. These benefits became noticeable when the incidence of death from all causes went down in Norway in WWII when the Nazis invaded. Likewise, the health of the Holocaust victims initially improved in the early stages of food deprivation and longevity increased by six years during the Great Depression in the U.S.
Again, the theories as to why fasting is good for you can come and go. The empirical observation is that for whatever reason fasting is beneficial. Mice live much longer and suffer much less from Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s if subjected to alternate day fasting, though the total number of calories over time remains constant. One theory is that your body is in a go-go-go mode when protein is ample, but repair mode in times of scarcity. This may be wrong, but if one bases one’s actions on observation rather than theory, then it doesn’t matter if the theory is right or not.
Taleb’s skepticism is a skepticism you can live by. Taleb argues that believing in God can keep Man’s arrogance in check and is an admission that he can’t understand everything since God is ineffable. Math and theory can be kept in bounds. God is not to be replaced by scientism claiming to provide a theory of everything, and certainly not prospectively. We can remember to trust what has been around for a long time and get over our neomania accompanied by the conviction that our lives are dominated by change when in fact many many features of our lives have remained more or less stable for two thousand years and technology is fragile and will disappear. The clothes we wear, the houses we live in, the beds we sleep in, the taverns we drink and eat in, the chairs we sit on and the kitchen utensils we use are mostly old and stable. Even cars and bicycles are just refinements of older technology. Our obsession with pleasure and money is not new and the wine we drink and the artisanal cheese we eat have been around for millennia or centuries.
Most inventions were not the result of theory and most modern medicines were chance discoveries. We still don’t know why many medicines work, particularly psychiatric ones. If we insisted that we needed a theory and explanation for everything we would have deprived ourselves of medical advances, not to mention life, consciousness, morality, beauty, free will and God.
By 1601, according to David Wootton in Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates, scurvy was effectively cured by carrying lemons on ships. This practice, however, was abandoned. Wootton surmises that it was due to doctors who could make no sense of it theoretically. Bad arguments drove out good ones and theory trumped empiricism. The phenomenon of telepathy continues to be rejected partly because it tends to occur between people closely emotionally connected like friends and relatives, thus it is almost impossible to study in randomized trials and partly because atheists intuit that something nonmaterial may be involved and hence it might provide a toehold for God and partly because like the doctors with regard to scurvy, it makes no sense on current theoretical grounds. Many have in fact refused to look at any evidence precisely because they have deemed it impossible theoretically and because it is threatening to crude materialism. This kind of willful blindness led to nearly two thousand five hundred years of almost no therapeutic progress in medicine. One may not care about telepathy, but when free will and morality are also rejected for similar reasons, then one can’t claim that their existence is irrelevant to one’s life.uTorrent's latest update may be hijacking computers to turn a profit. According to a report from Trusted Reviews, the latest update to the popular torrent management software comes bundled with a program called Epic Scale, a Windows program that uses the computer's processor to mine a bitcoin variant called Litecoin in the background. Many users were unaware that their computers were being used to mine the currency, and only discovered the program was running after noticing the significant increase in processor load.
"There is no silent install happening."
In a statement to The Verge, uTorrent's parent company BitTorrent confirmed that the program was bundled, but disputed that it was happening without user consent. "We have reviewed the issue closely and can confirm there is no silent install happening.... Most likely these users accepted the offer during install," a representative wrote. "Like many software companies, we have partner offers in our install path and our policy is that they are strictly optional."
Bitcoin miners are a common way for botnet owners to make a profit off of compromised machines, leaving users to bear the cost of the excess computing power, which has left a lot of mining software with a less than savory reputation. Users that don't notice the program may find significantly decreased performance as a result. In a forum thread, uTorrent recommended that dissatisfied users uninstall Epic Scale and remove the associated folder.
Update 3/6 10:41am ET: Updated to include BitTorrent statementArsenal defender Per Mertesacker believes his side could have challenged Chelsea for the Premier League title this season without what he describes as a "World Cup hangover" in the opening weeks of the season.
A host of Arsenal stars struggled to find top form following their exploits with their national teams in Brazil last summer, with the Germany players in Arsene Wenger's squad especially affected by an early-season dip in form after their coronation as world champions.
Fellow German World Cup winners Mesut Ozil and Lukas Podolski struggled for form and fitness in the first half of this season, with Mertesacker suggesting the sluggish start was crucial in allowing Chelsea to build up a healthy lead at the top of the table.
"The first months, in particular, were quite difficult to come down and to forget that, forget the feeling of being a world champion," Mertesacker told reporters.
"That's what you need to have, you need to forget about that, to come down a bit, to calm down and to restart. That took nearly half a year to realise that.
"Most of the players got injured, I avoided that but didn't play at my best. That was because I hadn't experienced this feeling before. I didn't know how to handle the situation. I tried to forget about that, about the World Cup.
"At one point I was happy not to get an injury, but on the other hand it was very difficult to find the form and the fitness because we hadn't had that preseason and the season was already being played when we just started. It was very strange.
"Mentally it affects your body as well, you know. You can't say one or the other. It was just the whole thing. Without preseason, physically as well to come back to compete at Premier League level.
Arsenal's German trio of, from left to right, Per Mertesacker, Lukas Podolski and Mesut Ozil paid the price for their Cup win.
"I knew maybe there would be some criticism to form, but I didn't get injured so I tried to prepare even more -- doing more yoga, more treatment, more things like that to come to a certain level where I can compete again. From my experience, it took half a year."
Mertesacker revealed that Wenger tried to educate him on how to handle his new status as a world champion, with the Gunners boss having experience of a similar scenario as Patrick Vieira and Emmanuel Petit returned to Arsenal after their World Cup win with France in 1998.
"He spoke to me because he had a few examples for me," Mertesacker stated. "It was very interesting for me how certain players coped with the situation. A few managed to deal with it and a few didn't.
"I think he mentioned Vieira who coped with it really well. He gave me kind of a challenge and said: 'I want you to come back quickly and find your form quickly' because he knew it was going to be difficult.
"In the second part of the season, when the injured players came back and we had more competition, more players, more centre-backs as well, we could rotate a bit, share, that's something we created.
Arsenal Arsenal Aston Villa Aston Villa 4 0 FT Game Details GameCast
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We have stability and we tried to benefit from that for the FA Cup final and next season as well."
Mertesacker went on to suggest Arsenal's experience of playing four games at Wembley in a little over a year will help their cause in Saturday's FA Cup finale against Aston Villa, as he suggested the challenge of playing at a neutral venue has unsettled his teammates in the past.
"We know how difficult it is to compete at Wembley," he added. "It's different from being away or at home -- you can't compare it.
"We have a certain mental strength in this competition to come back. We've been successful at Wembley, we've done well there but not shown our best form which is weird.
"We just have to be aware that anything can happen on the day. If we turn up with a good performance at Wembley then it's difficult to stop us. You can feel the excitement about Wembley with the British boys but also [because it is] the final of the FA Cup. It's special in every country and everyone is really proud to be involved in a big football night.
"Everyone is really up for it. It's another special occasion for us to show we are capable of winning something. But we need the right attitude to compete at that high level and we need to turn up with our best performance, maybe of the season, to grab the trophy again."An array of figures from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s inner circle—including a confidante so close the governor called him “my father’s third son”—got slapped with a sweeping 14-count federal indictment today, which alleges they colluded in a pair of schemes to solicit bribes for state assistance and to rig economic development contracts for companies that gave to Cuomo’s campaigns.
A grand jury gave crusading U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara the go-ahead to prosecute his case against Joseph Percoco, the governor’s former campaign manager, deputy executive secretary, political fixer and body man, on charges he solicited bribes and a “low-show job” for his wife from two major Cuomo contributors. In return, the federal government alleges Percoco pressured executive agencies and entities to offer assistance and loosen regulations for the companies’ operations in New York State—and lied about the arrangement on disclosure forms.
“Percoco had a longstanding relationship with the governor and the governor’s family, and was generally seen as the governor’s ‘right-hand man,’ who coordinated access to the governor and often spoke for him on a broad array of substantive and administrative matters,” the indictment reads. “Percoco also served as the ‘gatekeeper’ of opportunities to speak or meet with the governor, oversaw logistics of the governor’s events and travel and supervised appointments and administrative matters for the executive chamber.”
Executives from the two companies, Competitive Power Ventures and COR Development, were among the seven other men indicted today.
Also among the accused is Dr. Alain Kaloyeros, the former head of the State University of New York Polytechnic. Acting under the auspices of the Cuomo-controlled SUNY system, Kaloyeros ran the governor’s signature economic development initiatives through several semi-private companies, including the Fort Schuyler Management Corporation.
The biggest of Cuomo’s revitalization programs was the Buffalo Billion, which Bharara charges became a cash cow for “friends of the administration”—developers who channeled cash into the governor’s campaign. The indictment claims Kaloyeros colluded with mega-donor executives from the company LP Ciminelli to rig the bidding process so their firm received fat contracts for building facilities in Western New York.
The linchpin of both cases appears to be former lobbyist Todd Howe, another longtime Cuomo aide, who has already pleaded guilty
Asked for comment, Percoco’s attorney Barry Bohrer responded with a string of Thanksgiving puns and an allusion to the Supreme Court’s Skilling v. United States decision, which substantially narrowed the scope of honest services fraud statutes like the one Bharara hopes to convict his client on.
“This case is a real turkey. We will knock the stuffing out of it at trial,” Bohrer said in an emailed statement. “We give thanks for a system in which a jury can reject the government’s efforts to criminalize conduct that has been found unworthy of prosecution by the highest court in the land. Mr. Percoco is innocent and will enter a plea of not guilty because he is.”
Kaloyeros’s lawyers said they were “disappointed” in the grand jury’s decision, but expressed similar confidence he would ultimately be acquitted.
“Dr. Kaloyeros is innocent of the charges filed against him and looks forward to being exonerated,” said attorney Michael Miller, noting his client’s pioneering work in the field of nanotechnology. “Dr. Kaloyeros has dedicated his life to training young scientists, developing cutting-edge research, and attracting outstanding tech companies, economic development and jobs to Upstate New York. We are confident that, at the end of this process, a jury will conclude that he committed no crimes along the way.”
Cuomo, who does not face any accusations of wrongdoing, has maintained that he was utterly oblivious to any nefarious dealings allegedly going on in his administration. He has shifted responsibility for his upstate New York initiatives from SUNY Polytechnic to the Empire State Economic Development Corporation, another entity he unilaterally controls.
“This is a profoundly sad situation for me |
simultaneously, the joy and the freedom that can come when someone else looks at you and says, ‘You can be exactly how you are right now. It’s okay not to be okay. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to need space, it’s okay to not need space.’ It’s the magic that happens when you get that kind of acceptance, when it’s not a prescription from society telling you that you have to fit certain expectations. It’s an invitation to be who you are. That’s what the game is about.”
Adds Floyd, “I’ve always seen that there’s been a built-in irony of that term backtalk. The way we use it is kind of describing that moment from the perspective of Chloe’s antagonist, respected. But what the player experiences in the game, we intended those to be moments of empowerment and her pushing back. I think that’s what players will see. We’re also really excited as the series goes along to take that mechanic to a couple of unexpected places that I think are going to change the player’s perspective on it as they go along.”
As we closed the interview I reflected on Garris’s words about interpersonal connection, and the sentiment that “it’s okay to not be okay.” Says Garris, “I definitely sympathize with that. My interest in the story comes from a very personal experience of not [being okay].”
I find the sentiment immensely compassionate. Teenage girls need to hear that more often. I think we all do.
Holly Green is the assistant editor of Paste Games and a reporter and semiprofessional photographer. She is also the author of Fry Scores: An Unofficial Guide To Video Game Grub. You can find her work at Gamasutra, Polygon, Unwinnable, and other videogame news publications.Bonus Events
Entering a Timewalking Dungeon will no longer clear any planted plants from the Druid Evergreen upgrade.
The fireballs from the cooking buff "Pepper Breath" should now scale properly in Timewalking.
Class Hall Set 6-piece and 8-piece bonuses should now scale properly in Timewalking.
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Druid
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Ironfur no longer incorrectly multiplies Bonus Armor effects from temporary buffs.
(Balance) New Moon, Half Moon, and Full Moon are now in the Arcane spell school.
Items
Spirit Cauldrons no longer have collision.
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Mage
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Ice Form now has a 60 second cooldown (was 45 seconds).
Ice Form can no longer be cast while stunned.
Ice Form will now cause the Mage to be immune to only stuns, instead of other unintended crowd-control effects, such as Paralysis.
Frostbolt no longer deals increased damage in PvP (was a multiplier of +10%).
Developers’ Notes: Frost Mages are intended to create burst windows with Shatter and Glacial Spike, but have been reaching unintended levels of damage. By reducing Frostbolt damage, we’re reducing the potential size of Icicles and Glacial Spike burst. The Ice Form fixes should reduce its uptime, which was too high.
Hunter
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Beast Mastery Agility reduced by 10% in PvP.
Developers’ Notes: We’ve found Beast Mastery damage to be too high, but we don’t feel that it’s due to any specific ability or mechanic, so we’re reducing the overall PvP template.
Monk
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Mistwalk can no longer be cast while silenced.
Soothing Mist healing reduced by 10% in PvP. (Soothing Mist version of Ancient Mistweaver Arts is unaffected.)
Soothing Mist healing cast by Summon Jade Serpent Statue reduced by 10% in PvP.
Developers’ Notes: Mistweavers been one of our strongest healers. We feel Soothing Mist is doing too much healing per second on its own, making it so that the Mistweaver doesn’t have to use cast-time healing spells as much as other healers, even when their target is taking high amounts of damage. We’re reducing Soothing Mist slightly to address this. Mistwalk was never intended to be used while the Mistweaver was silenced or locked out of Nature, so we’ve fixed that as a bug.
Paladin
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Pure of Heart no longer causes Cleanse to incur a cooldown when it removes poisons and diseases.
Pure of Heart no longer triggers when healed by a periodic heal effect, but will trigger when a spell such as Rejuvenation is initially cast.
Developers’ Notes: Retribution Paladins are designed to be a formidable damage dealer and also have a protective, counter-control kit for their allies. Pure of Heart is intended to “soft-counter” poisons and diseases, but we feel it’s too strong currently when the Paladin is paired with a healing-over-time healer. Pure of Heart will now only trigger when a healing spell is applied, but not periodically during the spell.
Blessing of Sanctuary now has a 30 second cooldown, up from 25 seconds.
Developers’ Notes: Blessing of Sanctuary has proven to be a strong, signature Honor Talent, but we feel its cooldown is too short.
Rogue
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System Shock now properly requires an Envenom cast with 5 or more combo points.
System Shock’s damage has been reduced by 20%.
Assassination’s Agility has been reduced by 5% in PvP.
Developers’ Notes: The Assassination Rogue is intended to be a strong, persistent damage dealer that pressures targets but lacks the utility that Outlaw excels in or the mobility that Subtlety provides. We’ve been monitoring their damage and feel its higher than intended, and we’ve found some bugs with System Shock contributed to this. We’ve also altered their PvP template to effectively reduce their damage.
Control is King will no longer stack Adrenaline Rush above a 3 second duration.
Developers’ Notes: Control is King is intended to be an attractive choice for the Outlaw Rogue when within a control oriented team composition. This has worked out a bit too well. Now, subsequent procs of Control of King will no longer add to the duration, and instead will just refresh itself.
Shaman
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Stormstrike’s damage is reduced by 15% in PvP.
Heroism and Bloodlust now have a 60 second cooldown when modified by Shamanism (was 45 seconds).
Developers’ Notes: The Enhancement Shaman is intended to be a formidable damage dealer who also provides offensive group utility through totems and buffs. Shamanism has been a popular choice for the Enhancement Shaman, allowing them to use Bloodlust/Heroism frequently and also in Arena combat. We like the utility this gives the Shaman, but feel its uptime is too high. Further, we feel the Enhancement Shaman’s burst damage with Stormstrike has been reaching unintended levels.
Reminder: These changes are only active while in PvP combat situations and do not affect PvE. Many more Honor Talent changes are coming with Patch 7.1, including changes to Destruction Warlocks, Windwalker Monks, Death Knights, Balance Druids, and Restoration Druids.A kidnapping charge against four men with alleged Black Power links has been dropped after the alleged victim had a sudden loss of memory at the Christchurch District Court trial.
He told the jury: “I was wasted as, and drunk on alcohol as well. All I can remember was really wanting to go to sleep.”
The Crown originally alleged that the victim was bashed and kicked hard enough to break a bone in his face, bound with tape, and held for hours by the four accused and about six others.
But the trial before Judge Tom Gilbert came to an early end today, when the Crown and defence agreed that the kidnap charge could be dropped, and then all four defendants pleaded guilty to a charge of intentionally injuring the victim.
The trial was originally meant to last for up to two weeks, but after it had stuttering along with a clearly reluctant witness and delays for an ill lawyer, the jury was told what had happened and then sent home after two-and-a-half days.
Before the court were Robert James Beazley, 21, Enzed Norman Beazley, 23, Liam Teau Ariki Strickland, 19, and Jahmystic Raerae, 22, who were all remanded in custody for sentencing on November 3 after their guilty pleas.
All have already been in custody for long periods awaiting trial. Judge Gilbert remanded them for pre-sentence reports, including reports on their suitability for home detention but he said that was no indication of the likely sentence.
They all denied kidnapping and assault charges when the trial began on Monday, but it had to stop after opening addresses so that the victim could be brought to court.
Crown prosecutor Claire Boshier alleged in the opening that the victim had been attacked by the group over a drug debt, bound with tape, put into the boot of a car, and driven to another address in Havelock Street where he was held for several hours. His cheekbone was broken in the assault.
Many of those allegations have now disappeared, after the witness obviously became reluctant to give evidence and discussions took place between the lawyers.
The witness gave evidence from behind a screen so that the four defendants could not see him.
He said he had lived at an address in New Brighton where he knew the four men. “They were mates,” he explained.
The men were “gangsters,” he told the court. They were linked to Black Power, but “at the start they were real nice to me”. That apparently changed when a story went around about some missing methamphetamine.
The trial then moved on to the events of July 15, 2015, and the witness – after long pauses when Miss Boshier asked him questions – said: “I have tried to forget this so it is hard for me to remember. I can’t remember much, eh.”
He said it was more than a year ago, and “I can’t really remember.”
The trial then stopped for legal argument in closed court, and when the jury returned to court, the four defendants had all pleaded guilty to the injuring charges and the kidnapping charge had been dropped.
The summary of facts presented to the judge said the four defendants and about six others dragged the victim outside an address where he was punched and kicked and put in a vehicle to be taken to Havelock Street, Linwood.
He stayed in a bedroom for an unknown length of time and was “intermittently assaulted” by being punched and kicked. The assault was said to be over a drug debt.
He was then taken away in another car by three of the defendants, but it was stopped by the police. The victim gave a false name in the hope of being arrested so that he could get away from the defendants, a ploy that apparently worked.
He was left with numbness in his face, and the left side of his jaw and eye socket were sore. His left cheekbone was broken.
Judge Gilbert told the jury what had happened with the charges and thanked them for attending. “I apologise for having you waiting,” he said. “You saw (the victim) give evidence yesterday. Clearly he wasn’t particularly willing.”Can we talk about the stories that we tell each other about life transitions? It seems as though, during wedding planning (and, as I'm learning, childbearing — and as I suspect most big life transitions) we tell each other a lot of scary stories.
I mean, of course people want to share their experiences with each other. But all too often this storytelling slips into fear mongering. It's sort of a pre-emptive commiseration — an anticipatory sing-song of Oh, you'll seeeee…. It's our way of telling each other, "I had this experience, and I'm assuming my experience is universal and you'll have the exact same one. And mine was like this, so yours will be too — and then we can roll our eyes and bond over how awful it was together." We all love a common enemy, and all too often in pursuit of this shared experience, we project our challenges onto others.
Oh, you'll seeeee… people say once you announce your engagement…
"It's going to be so high drama and hard and you're going to be forced to do all these things you don't want to." And maybe it will be hard and high drama — but it doesn't have to be. If you chose to side step the drama ("Actually we're planning to skip place settings completely and let people sit where they want, so I'm not worried at all") people then seem aghast. "But, you can't do that," they say. "You can't just skip place settings!" I think what goes unsaid is You HAVE to worry! It's what we're going to bond over, because bonding over hardship is awesome!
Certainly I experienced some of this in my own wedding planning — friends who told me, "Just accept it: you WILL be a bridezilla at some point." And I think I had exactly one moment, when our 10 minute ceremony walk-through got interrupted by some guests arriving early. I bugged out for a minute and then calmed back down. Oh wait! There was one other, when I wanted to get everyone out on the front lawn for toasts during the Golden Hour. That's why we're holding champagne bottles instead of glasses in the photos. NO TIME TO POUR DRINKS!
But a cumulative 5 minutes of freaking out was hardly the inevitable bridezilla prediction I'd gotten, and in fact now I've spent five years trying to get people to STOP FREAKING OUT ABOUT THEIR WEDDINGS. Recognize the challenges and meet them front on, but with compassion and intention and minimized drama. Stop telling stories about how awful it all is — it doesn't help anyone. Don't white wash the challenges, but stop projecting that the challenges you experienced will going to be everyone else's challenges.
The wedding fear mongering is just one of the stories we tell. The expectations of marriage after the wedding are often heavily weighted. "Marriage is a lot of hard work," people confide with furrowed brows.
"You'll never have sex again," they wink.
"You'll stop hanging out with your single friends," they sigh.
"My stupid hubs!" they laugh. "YOU know how husbands are. Stupid, stupid husbands."
They whisper about cheating and boredom and bed death. And certainly these things can happen if you fall asleep on your life and just start going through the motions. But if you pay attention and go into with a lot of intent and questioning your own assumptions about why you're supposed to do anything … it just doesn't have to be that way.
I'm learning this about another phase with the fear mongering around pregnancy, childbearing, and babies. I've never heard more sing-songy You'll seeeeee!s than I have when talking to people about becoming a mother. I've witnessed the other end of the spectrum too — people chided when they opt NOT to have children, told "Oh, you'll change your mind about having kids. You'll seeeee…"
Certainly I've seen it in other parts of my life — my career, my home, my education, etc etc etc. You'll seeeeeee, people have always told me. And maybe because I'm a brat and want to prove them wrong, or maybe just because I live my life differently, or maybe just because I've been blessed and lucky … I've found myself NOT seeing.
My husband being an irritating ball and chain that takes "work"? I didn't seeeeee. Ignoring my dog because I had a baby? No, I don't seeeee. Spending a lifetime locked in a meaningless job? No, I don't seeeee. I don't want to be naive, but when it comes to having to accept other people's visions as what I seeeeee … I don't want to seeeeee.
It seems that in our effort to find shared experiences, we turn to each other and tell awful stories about how hard it all is. And you know what? Sometimes it IS hard. Sometimes the wedding plans fall apart and relationships fall apart and it feels like our life is falling apart.
But rather than tell the horror stories, why not share the lessons? Learn as much as you can and share the positivity of what you learned, rather than the shared grumping about didn't work.
Snarking and bitching feels awesome for a while — I totally get it. Four years ago, my job involved writing a celebrity fashion blog called "Carpet Burn" that was all about insulting red carpet attire. But snarking just doesn't really get you anywhere. So that outfit's ugly. So that's stupid. So that's not quite your taste or your values or your nature. Who cares? Time spent bitching could be time making yourself smarter and stronger and more awesome.
So, here's to each of us vowing that once we've gone through one of life's big, rocky transitions (whether it be wedding, graduation, marriage, career shift, lifestyle earthquakes of all sorts) we'll turn to those around us and tell the stories of what we learned and how we grew. Here's hoping we'll offer each other encouragement and support instead of fear and snark.Oliver North is the new foreign policy adviser for the House Republicans. House GOP turns to Oliver North
House Republicans have a new foreign policy adviser with a controversial pedigree: Oliver North.
North, an aide on Ronald Reagan's National Security Council who is best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scheme to sell arms to Iran and divert the funds to Nicaraguan revolutionaries in the 1980s, was the special guest at a House Republican Conference meeting on Tuesday. North was convicted on three counts related to the Iran-Contra scandal and his efforts to cover it up, but the convictions were later overturned.
Story Continued Below
North’s mission: Relay his insights into the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, where he recently visited.
North's message reinforced the advice of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who wants to add tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan.
“Basically, his point was unless we put the troops in there, it’s lost,” said Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.).
Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence of Indiana and Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), who is the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, joined forces to issue the invitation to North.
“Col. North is someone who enjoys the very broad respect of the House Republican Conference,” Pence said.FILE - In this Dec. 18, 2013, file photo, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio speaks at a news conference at the Sheriff's headquarters in Phoenix, Ariz. President Donald Trump has pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio following his conviction for intentionally disobeying a judge's order in an immigration case. The White House announced the move Friday night, Aug. 25, 2017, saying the 85-year-old ex-sheriff of Arizona's Maricopa County was a "worthy candidate" for a presidential pardon. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)
PHOENIX (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump pardoning former Phoenix metro sheriff Joe Arpaio (all times local):
7:55 p.m.
U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona is voicing his displeasure at President Donald Trump’s pardon of the former Phoenix metro area sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of a misdemeanor contempt-of-court charge for defying a judge’s orders that he stop conducting immigration patrols.
Arpaio was facing the prospect of jail time at his sentencing in October.
McCain says in a statement that “no one is above the law” and “sworn law officers should always seek to be beyond reproach in their commitment to fairly enforcing the laws they swore to uphold.”
By pardoning Arpaio, McCain says it undermines Trump’s claim for the respect of rule of law.
He also says Arpaio has shown no remorse for his actions.
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7:40 p.m.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Arizona congressman Andy Biggs are supporting the presidential pardon of former metro Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Ducey says Arpaio “deserves credit for helping to reduce crime in Maricopa County over his long career in law enforcement and public office.”
He says Trump’s pardon “has brought finality to this chapter in Arizona’s history.”
Ducey adds that Arpaio is his friend and now the 85-year-old ex-lawman can move on and enjoy his retirement with his wife and family.
Biggs says he applauds Trump for pardoning Arpaio and adds that “America owes Sheriff Arpaio a debt of gratitude and not the injustice of a political witch hunt.”
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7:35 p.m.
Some top members of the American Civil Liberties Union are voicing their displeasure over the pardon of ex-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio by President Donald Trump.
Cecillia Wang, an attorney who helped press the racial profiling case against Arpaio, says Trump’s pardon “is a presidential endorsement of racism.”
She says Trump “has acted in support of illegal, failed immigration enforcement practices that target people of color and have been struck down by the courts.”
ACLU of Arizona Executive Director Alessandra Soler says “the racist practices that Arpaio implemented and Trump foolishly admires are illegal and immoral and no pardon will ever change that reality.”
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7:20 p.m.
President Donald Trump has tweeted about his pardon of the former sheriff of the Phoenix metro area, who was convicted of a misdemeanor contempt-of-court charge for defying a judge’s orders that he stop conducting immigration patrols.
Ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio was facing the prospect of jail time at his sentencing in October.
Trump tweeted that he was “pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon to 85 year old American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio. He kept Arizona safe!”
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7 p.m.
Maricopa County Supervisor Steve Gallardo calls the presidential pardon of former sheriff Joe Arpaio “a travesty” and says the board has to look at ways of recouping taxpayer money, likely through lawsuits.
Arpaio’s criminal case sprang from the profiling lawsuit that ultimately discredited Arpaio’s immigration patrols and is expected to cost taxpayers $92 million by next summer.
Gallardo, a longtime Arpaio critic, says county taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the former sheriff’s illegal behavior.
He says Arpaio should not be allowed to walk away from his civil liability and he should reimburse county taxpayers.
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6:55 p.m.
The Arizona Latino Legislative Caucus says President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Phoenix metro sheriff Joe Arpaio “is yet another display of disrespect to the Latino community in Arizona.”
In a statement, caucus members say Arapio abused his position of authority during his 24 years as Maricopa County’s sheriff “to drive a personal agenda that promoted racism.”
They add that “no amount of time will erase Arpaio’s hateful harassment and the fear he instilled in our community, and no one should be above the law.”
______
6:35 p.m.
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton says the presidential pardon of the metro area’s former sheriff “is a slap in the face to the people of Maricopa County.”
He says it’s especially a slap in the face of the Latino community and those ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio “victimized as he systematically and illegally violated their civil rights.”
In a statement, Stanton says Arpaio received “a fair trial and a justifiable conviction” and there’s nothing President Donald Trump can do “to change that awful legacy and the stain he has left on our community.”
Stanton says it’s not a proud day for Phoenix and “the city is moving on and moving forward from the divisiveness that defined the Arpaio era.”
____
6:20 p.m.
The chair of the Democratic National Committee says President Donald Trump’s decision to pardon former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a “free pass.”
DNC Chair Tom Perez says in a statement that “prejudice doesn’t deserve a pardon” and that Trump “just gave a free pass to his buddy Joe Arpaio, the nation’s most notorious agent of racism and bigotry.”
He said Friday that Trump’s decision to issue the pardon just as a dangerous hurricane is bearing down on Texas is “not presidential, that’s a coward.”
Perez was assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights when he handled the Justice Department’s 2012 lawsuit against Arpaio for racially profiling Latino residents in the Phoenix area.
_____
6:25 p.m.
Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio tells The Associated Press that he appreciates Donald Trump pardoning him after his recent federal conviction and says he’ll always stand by the president.
Arpaio talked to the AP by phone while he was eating dinner at an Italian restaurant on Friday. He says he is thankful for the work his legal team did in securing the pardon. He plans to discuss his case more next week.
He said he learned of the pardon after the papers absolving the conviction were mailed to one of his lawyers.
He also said he’s not ruling out a return to the political arena. Arpaio says he’s going to be “very active.”
Arpaio was convicted of a misdemeanor contempt-of-court charge for defying a judge’s orders that he stop conducting immigration patrols. He was facing the prospect of jail time at his sentencing in October.
______
5 p.m.
President Donald Trump on Friday pardoned former sheriff Joe Arpaio, the retired Arizona lawman who was convicted for intentionally disobeying a judge’s order in an immigration case.
The White House said the 85-year-old ex-sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County was a “worthy candidate” for a presidential pardon.
The action came several days after Trump, at a rally in downtown Phoenix, strongly hinted that he intended to issue a pardon.
Arpaio became linked to Trump during the campaign for their hardline immigration views.
He was convicted of a misdemeanor for intentionally defying a judge’s order to stop his traffic patrols that targeted immigrants.
Both politicians questioned the authenticity of then-President Barack Obama’s birth certificate and have a similar history in sparring with judges.As if our decorations weren't spooky enough, the sky has gone into full gloom from the curse. (I say we just pretend it's part of the decorations.)
This funny wizard guy named Jack O' Kazam has spread mysterious bags all around Toontown. Something about jellybeans and potential of some sort of trick that'll affect your friends too. The risk is worth it for some extra beans, right?
has spread mysterious bags all around Toontown. Something about jellybeans and potential of some sort of trick that'll affect your friends too. The risk is worth it for some extra beans, right? Every Toon who hits all of the Toontown Trick or Treat hot spots listed in our riddle will be cursed with a very stylish Pumpkin Head!
October 28, 2016 [ttr-beta-v1.13.0 (patch)]
Features:
• Halloween is upon us! The Spooktown Curse has returned, giving Toons who get treats a little trick as well until November 1st.
• Spooky Bean Bags are scattered throughout the town. Pick one up to get a spooky spell, but beware -- the results are not always quite as sweet as candy!
Tweaks:
• Macs now display a warning about the audio bug. A fix for this crash is in the works!
Bugfixes:
• ToonFest Fireworks now spawn correctly.
Ah, what a wonderful week! Just take a moment to step outside and smell the dead flowers, swarming bats, and observe that truly beautiful gloom that's covering the whole town. It's that time of year again: Time for theI've decided that this year, instead of being fearful of the scares and spooks that Ihave brought upon us those many years ago, it's best just to embrace it. It's just like what they always say: "If you can't beat the curse, give up and give in to your new lifestyle!" I mean, they probably say that. I think I read it in a magazine once. Might be paraphrasing.Let me give you a rundown of what this curse actually entails:See? Spooky stuff can be fun. It's all about what you make of it! I bet that Jack O' Kazam guy isn't even a real wizard and has just been duping us year after year. My money says he's a weatherman. Besides, no one has even seen him around this year.I bet that means he's calling off the curse for next year. I mean, it's not like he's going into hiding so he can cook up something even worse for the future...More news has emerged from the camps of Nike regarding their upcoming collaborative pack with fragment design. After fragment’s Hiroshi Fujiwara released a preview picture of three Nike x fragment design shoe models, the team over at NikeLab premiered images of the upcoming Nike Sock Dart x fragment design sneaker. Headed by Nike’s Tinker Hatfield, Mark Parker and fragment’s Hiroshi Fujiwara, the collaborative effort will be compromised of four distinct colorways and is set to be released this December, in conjunction with the Nike Air Jordan 1 x fragment design sneaker. Discussing the design process, Fujiwara notes, “The first time I saw the Sock Dart—it wasn’t even a shoe. Tinker showed me a knit, like a sock, and explained they were going to put an outsole on it.” Note that despite the fact that the preview images feature fragment’s familiar the POOL aoyama olive colorway, this particular colorway will not be included in the upcoming release. Share your thoughts below, and stay tuned to Hypebeast for future release information.The Michigan Democratic Party and Indivisible groups around the state are teaming up for a series of town halls as the debate over how to change the nation's health care system continues in Congress.
Starting this weekend, Democrats and local Indivisible groups are kicking off a summer long series of public events on health care policy featuring health experts, members of Congress and state lawmakers. The kickoff events on Sunday will run from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Plymouth-Ann Arbor Elks Lodge, 41700 Ann Arbor Road E., Plymouth, and 4-6 p.m. at Wildwood Amphitheater, 2700 Joslyn Court, Orion Township.
Michigan Democratic Party Chair Brandon Dillon said the events are meant to educate people about the questions they have regarding potential changes to health care and continue discussions on how to protect their benefits.
"We will never stop fighting against GOP efforts to eliminate protections for people with pre-existing conditions or their plan to allow insurance premiums to skyrocket, especially for seniors," Dillon said.
See how your Michigan U.S. Representative voted on Obamacare repeal See how your representative voted on the American Health Care Act.
The events come as U.S. Senate leadership continue to work towards repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act with a new plan. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he hopes to put the revised Senate Republican plan up for a floor vote next week, but some moderate and conservative Republicans have expressed concerns with the current version.
The U.S. House passed its version of repeal and replace earlier this year. Democrats in both the House and Senate have remained unanimously opposed to the Republican plans.
Both of Michigan's U.S. senators, Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow, have been vocal about their opposition to the plan in comments on the Senate floor, on social media and in statements to the press.
12 ways the Senate GOP health-care plan could impact Michigan enate Republicans have released their replacement plan for the Affordable Act, which could have big implications for Michiganders' access to affordable health care.
U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Twp., will be headlining the first two events hosted by the state party and Indivisible groups on Sunday in Plymouth and Orion Township. This weekend, he's also planned two unaffiliated Saturday discussions regarding health care with labor leaders and retirees in Howell and Flint with fellow Congressman Joe Crowley, D-N.Y.
Kildee said although he's against the health care legislation that's been put forward so far, he and other Democrats are ready to work with Republicans to look for potential compromise and have ideas to bring to the table. He said he plans to bring a nonpartisan approach to the upcoming health care discussions and listen to the concerns and suggestions from attendees.
"Let's stop the partisanship and fix the problems in the Affordable Care Act that we all know we need to address," he said. "I think that when it comes to something as serious as health care, politics should be of no consequence to anyone."
Since the 2016 election, Democrats, Indivisible groups and other organizers have rallied and protested around the potential repeal and replace of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Indivisible groups throughout Michigan have also called on Republican members of Congress to host more in-district town halls to address their concerns.
Democratic and progressive groups aren't the only ones hosting summer events throughout the state. Michigan Trump Republicans, a group committed to supporting the policies of President Donald Trump, recently kicked off a series of meetings to get more people involved and discuss updates on the president's agenda.
Michigan Trump Republicans group plans meetings throughout state A conservative group recently formed to support the policies of President Donald Trump is planning events throughout the state this summer to drum up support for the current administration.
A full list of scheduled MDP/Indivisible events is below:
Plymouth
11 a.m.-1 p.m. Sunday, July 16
Plymouth-Ann Arbor Elks Lodge, 41700 Ann Arbor Road E., Plymouth
Orion Township
4-6 p.m. Sunday, July 16
Wildwood Amphitheater, 2700 Joslyn Court, Orion Township
Clinton Township
2-4 p.m. Sunday, August 27
Clinton-Macomb Public Library, 40900 Romeo Plank Road, Clinton Township
Southfield
10 a.m.-noon, Saturday, August 26
Shriners Silver Garden Event Center, 24350 Southfield Road, Southfield
Traverse City
11 a.m.-1 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 20
Location TBD
Bloomfield Hills
11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday, September 9
Birmingham Unitarian Church, 38651 Woodward Ave., Bloomfield Hills
Grand Rapids
7-9 p.m. August 9
Location TBD
Monroe County
11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday, September 9
Location TBD
Muskegon
10 a.m.-noon August 19
Location TBD
Bay County
Time and location TBD
Saginaw
Time and location TBD
Kalamazoo
Time and location TBDRemember the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy?
Well, after four years gathering dust in the trophy cabinet of Cricket Australia's Melbourne headquarters it is likely to be back on the table for this Saturday's World Cup blockbuster at Eden Park in Auckland.
New Zealand Cricket chief executive David White approached his Australian counterpart James Sutherland yesterday about putting the forgotten piece of silverware on the line and an official announcement confirming it is due today.
The Chappell-Hadlee Trophy, named after two great famous cricket families, was last contested at the 2011 World Cup in India.
Since then, New Zealand has played 70 one-day internationals but staggeringly only against Australia once, and that was a rained-out affair at the Champions Trophy at Edgbaston, Birmingham, in 2013.
Strangely, the trophy was not put on the line on that occasion, which White said was "an oversight".
The lack of one-day matches played between New Zealand and Australia since the game in Nagpur in 2011 is hard to comprehend.
White pointed to the set-in-stone International Cricket Council future tours programme, which dictates the playing schedule for test playing nations in four-year blocks, as the main reason.
New Zealand's 70 games since 2011 have been against Sri Lanka (17), South Africa (10), West Indies (9), England (8), Pakistan (8), Zimbabwe (7), India (5), Bangladesh (3), Canada (1), Scotland (1) and Australia (1).
"It is crazy we haven't played them more," White said.
"We are coming to the end of the current future tours programme.
"In the next cycle we will be playing them [Australia] more and that will be announced in the next couple of months.
"We are playing them in three tests at the end of the year and then they are coming to us for three tests as well. There is some one-day cricket as well coming up."
White was unable to provide dates for future one-day games but some digging revealed February 2017 as available for a probable series.
Whether the two boards can negotiate a window for one-day cricket before then remains to be seen but with the trans-Tasman neighbours regarded as close to No 1 and No 2 in the world, it is a less than satisfactory situation.
"One of the challenges with Australia is because we share the same summer we both want to be playing as much as we can at home," White said.
"But it is fair to say we will be playing them more than we have, in the next four-five years.
"We'd love to play Australia more, they are consistently one of the best teams in the world, and they are our neighbours, but the reality is we share the same summer so it can be challenging from a scheduling point of view."
The Chappell-Hadlee Trophy was introduced in 2004 but in 2009 Sutherland said Australia could not commit to an annual series amid a packed schedule. Former New Zealand Cricket boss Justin Vaughan engaged Sutherland in discussions but it was a losing battle.
It was last contested as a series in the five-game rubber in New Zealand in 2010, which Australia won 3-2.A few things you’re unlikely to read elsewhere: Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy – and Americans’ ability to choose their next leader – is being destroyed by a sequence of events way too well orchestrated to be coincidental.
[This election is scaring the hell out of people // Wikileaks shows Univision chairman influence over Clinton campaign // Women’s groups treat Bill Clinton and Donald Trump differently]
This is not about the billionaire’s qualifications or disqualifications to move into the Oval Office, his braggadocio, his awful manners, alleged sexual harassment, crass behavior, ostentatious wealth.
Americans have had unsavory political leaders before, most recently Hillary Clinton’s charming unfaithful hubby who, among other things, received oral sex from an intern in that same revered office. And then lied about it to authorities.
If you want media to |
Monologues, assuming it’s all “Yay trans women!”, because the world I live in is nice and easy like that. I skim through the comments and find some keywords that indicate a faptrot has begun – words like “always” and “never” and “all you people” and “censorship!” and “ruining our space.” So I figure, because my world is nice and easy, that some assholes came in and had a trans-terror, and all the usual commenters jumped in to start shouting them out. I go back to the comment area where I am mentioned to see where I fit in to all this. I read a comment that is about as shitty as I can imagine. Like, if I were writing a novel with a character called Stereotype McDouchington, this is what they would say about transfolk. Ah! I think. This must be the person causing all the trouble here. Let’s see how somebody jumps in to shut them down, yes yes, because that will be satisfying!
And as I keep reading, the comments keep coming. Things I couldn’t even imagine that people – that feminists! – were still saying, in this day and age, about transfolk. About anybody! On my blog, I wouldn’t let people talk about Ann Coulter that way, because it is So. Fucked. Up. I do not even want to repeat these things, because I read them enough, in the comments I delete, and they’re horrible and sickening. Of course, I expect those things in the comments I get – boys with the Hulk Rage come here to try and make me fear for my life, because my existence punches their privileged belly. I do not expect to read those things from feminists. I do not even expect to read those things from feminists talking about the unfeminist world, because I expect that feminists have a basic understanding (even if it’s a spotty application) of the concept that a rotten principle is a rotten principle. If it’s not okay for Defenders of the Patriarchy to advocate that you oughta get raped so you know what it’s like to be a real woman, then it’s not okay for you to advocate that the Defenders get raped in turn. Master’s tools, master’s house.
Check. Out. My. Privilege.
So I go back to the place I’ve been linked and read the comment more carefully. I am an example of how things go wrong. I am an example of a feminist discussion that was ruined – RUINED – by trans women. I am an example of a woman who was SILENCED. I am a reason why trans women need to sit down, shut up, and possibly do us all a favor and die, because Harriet over at Fugitivus was so oppressed by you.
Fuckin’ ouch.
I knew I didn’t handle myself well in that post that was linked. I knew I was making mistakes. I knew I was too ignorant to get it together, and that ignorance was a reflection of what I had, up till that point, considered important enough to learn about. But approaching it from a personal perspective, I allowed myself the privilege of taking a long and quiet time of reflection. I didn’t step forward quickly with an apology, I didn’t challenge some comments I should have, because I was busy thinking and not talking. And because this was all personal, there was nothing wrong with that.
But from the other perspective, where this is a community where I am the most powerful representative, I created a certain kind of atmosphere. It wasn’t, I hope, an atmosphere where questions couldn’t be asked, disagreements raised, or conversations had. But I did the thing that I loathe so much in other situations, though it always sounds like such a good idea: I refused to take sides. That seemed like a perfectly appropriate way to handle things when I’m talking about my personal space, and the time I need to work things out. There’s nothing appropriate about that in a public space, where the fucked members of the kyriarchy come to be safe. By refusing to take sides, by refusing to take a firm position, I created an image of myself that let a bigot identify with me. I created an event that other bigots can point to and say, “See? See how you’re ruining everything?” I can’t take responsibility for every bigot out there. People see what they want to see, and I have seen some of my posts go to really weird places, full of wild speculations and TimeCube logic. But I can’t honestly say that my actions here have been patently misinterpreted. I can see pretty clearly how they got from Point A to Point B, and I didn’t really offer anything up in between to derail that train.
I don’t have a good conclusion here. Things aren’t all different now, and I haven’t got a plan for how I’m going to fix this. I’m trying to educate myself more. I don’t know where that will lead. I’m still very uncomfortable talking about anything that isn’t cis, because I don’t think I have a right to assume I can be an authority on anything that isn’t cis. But there is a conversation I’ve been having over and over with some no-name bloggers I’m soliciting. I ask them what they want to write about, and they say, “I haven’t been raped, so obviously I can’t write about that.” Nobody has to write about rape here, but I don’t want to let that statement go by unchecked. So I tell them, you don’t have to be raped to be affected by rape. There are a thousand ways rape has limited or damaged your life, too, even if you’ve never known a rape victim. You live in the same pond the rape victims do, and you’re drinking the same water. You know what we’re thinking because you’ve thought it about us, about yourself, about others, because we all grew up with the same toxic thoughts about rapists and rape victims.
But I understand why the no-name bloggers believe this. I imagine my awareness sometimes like a big bubble surrounding me. The more I learn, the bigger my bubble gets, and new things end up inside, bouncing around. Inevitably, every time my bubble has expanded, the “new” thing that shows up turns out to be not so new at all. Before I became aware of the thing, I thought of it as something out there, independent, floating around in the World I Do Not Understand. After I become aware of the thing, I realize that it was actually another bubble, surrounding me and mine. Like a big failure of a Venn diagram. Suddenly, I can look through the keepsakes in my bubble and see all the different moments in my life that were touched by this “new” thing, because it was never new or different. It was always there, but unconnected, without a name. My new awareness is actually just a new name.
Intellectually, I understood a lot about rape before I was ever raped. Only afterwards did the personal start to reconnect itself, reform under this new name: This Is What Rape Looks Like, Harriet. I was able to see all these little times and places in my life that were a part of what I experienced, finally, at the hands of my husband. My life had been filled with rape, but I had been calling it jokes, drunk assholes, catcalls, bad sex, fear out of nowhere, self-injury, self-hatred, eating disorders, locker room conversations of “what did she expect?” Before I was raped, though, if you were to tell me, “You have lots to say about rape!” I would have parroted back some statistics I’d read. Certainly, I have no personal investment in this word, this concept. It exists out there, for the people who know something about it. All those moments in my life? They belong under different names.
So I’m trying to apply that to this. I’m cisgendered, and I don’t have any right to talk about a transgender experience. But I do have a right – and now an imperative – to talk about the ways in which strict gender roles have limited or damaged my life. These are things that have always fallen under the concept “Feminism,” but that’s a word that very obviously isn’t specific enough, because it’s a word that allows transphobic bigots to spread their wings. I need to find ways to understand, personally and politically, how my freedom rests on the freedom of transfolk, that these things cannot be divided. I know I have these experiences – I know many people have – and have just never believed that they had anything to do with transsexuals.
A brief example: at the start of junior high, my grandmother chopped all my hair off against my will. It’s a longer story than that, but to shorten it, I hadn’t really developed yet, and I was going into a new school and a new period of my life looking like a boy. Girls wouldn’t let me into the bathroom unless I stripped. Boys made gay sex jokes around me, and simulated anal rape in the halls. Teachers frequently called me by the wrong pronoun. People who knew my mother was a lesbian told me that must be why I thought I was a boy. None of this was helped by the fact that, in real life, I have a somewhat gender ambiguous name. I’ve often thought about those experiences under the umbrella of “feminism.” I surprised myself, considering this the other day, when I realized that I’d never thought about this when reading about trans issues. I’ve never read a news story about the Bathroom Panics and remembered being followed into stalls. I’ve never heard a transgendered person describe the personal pain it causes them when they’re called by the wrong pronoun and remembered what it was like to have shopkeepers address me as “little boy,” and then treat me with open hostility when I corrected them. I’m amazed at my lack of empathy with so much opportunity to connect. But this is why it’s important to call a thing by the proper name. It’s not just confusion, ignorance, or foolishly good intentions that kept me from pulling on my own experience. It’s bigotry. And it’s bigotry that feminism is still happily flirting with, bigotry that will cause future generations to call this a part of our dark age (if we’re lucky).
END OF SQUALID INTROSPECTION
Now a solicitation.
I am seeking a self-identified transgendered no-name blogger to make a post. Let me know if you’re interested!WASHINGTON — News bulletin in 1957: Sputnik stuns the world. CIA in 2017: Not really.
The CIA released newly declassified documents on Wednesday revealing that while the American public was surprised when the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite 60 years ago, intelligence agencies weren’t caught off-guard.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower had advance knowledge about the Soviets’ work on Sputnik, which was launched by a rocket on Oct. 4, 1957. He had been worrying for several years about the Kremlin’s long-range missile capability and how rockets armed with nuclear warheads could threaten America.
The documents indicate that U.S. intelligence and military officials and members of the Eisenhower administration not only knew that the Soviet Union was planning to launch Sputnik, but knew it could be put into orbit by the end of 1957.
The launch of Sputnik opened the space age and became a major victory for the Kremlin that highlighted its military might and technological abilities. But it wasn’t a surprise to those in the know within the Eisenhower administration.
Before the launch, the CIA issued two National Intelligence Estimates that included possible timelines for what was then called an “earth satellite vehicle.” In December 1955, one predicted the Soviets could launch one by 1958. In March 1957 — about six months before the launch — another intelligence estimate said Moscow was capable of putting a satellite into orbit before the end of that year.
And even earlier, then CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote a letter to the defense secretary in which he pushed for rapid development of an American earth satellite and warned of a public relations fallout for the United States if the Soviets were first to launch one.
“In addition to the cogent scientific arguments advanced in support of the development of earth satellites, there is little doubt but what the nation that first successfully launches the earth satellite, and thereby introduces the age of space travel, will gain incalculable international prestige and recognition,” Dulles wrote in January 1955.
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“Our scientific community as well as the nation would gain invaluable respect and confidence should our country be the first to launch the satellite.”A family of rogue landlords have been convicted of breaching landlord licensing rules after they were caught cramming 31 people into a four bedroom property in Wembley.
Mother and daughter Harsha and Chandani Shah, and Mrs Harsha Shah’s brother, Sanjay Shah, were caught following enforcement action taken by Brent Council at the property on Napier Road during a raid in July last year.
Officers found a woman living in a lean-to shed in the back garden. The shack had no lighting or heating and was made out of wood offcuts, pallets and tarpaulin.
Inside the house, officers found some residents hot-bunking with occupants sharing a single bed with night workers swapping sleeping shifts with those who worked during the day.
Four beds were discovered piled into the front room and three in each bedroom. The tenants are all migrants, who said they could not afford to live anywhere else. One of the residents, Bagharad, revealed he lived in the house on Napier Road because he worked as a carer for the elderly and was only paid £30 a day.
The family earned around £112,000 a year from the tenants and were found guilty of breaching landlord licensing rules.
Jaydipkumar Valand, who collected the rent for the Shah family, pleaded guilty at trial in December last year.
Judgement
Spencer Randolph, head of private housing services at Brent Council, said: “This judgement sends out a clear message that Brent has a zero tolerance policy towards landlords who break the law and exploit vulnerable tenants.
“The lean-to shack we found in the back garden of the property in July last year looked like something you would expect to find in a Hollywood depiction of a shanty town.
“We will prosecute any landlord or agent we find housing tenants in cramped or hazardous conditions.
“Brent’s aim is to help renters by ensuring decent living conditions within the borough.”
On Tuesday 23rd May, the judge at Willesden Magistrates Court said: “This trial has revealed how people desperate for accommodation in London can be exploited and have paid to live in grossly overcrowded, unhygienic and unsafe conditions.”
The judge also ordered the defendants to pay Brent Council £35,000 in costs. The four defendants will be sentenced at a crown court at a later date.
The Renters Alliance helps renters with bad landlords and letting agents. If you have a story you would like to share, please contact the National Renters Alliance through our website or email us at contact@nralliance.co.ukSEATTLE— (club release) This Saturday, Seattle Reign FC will host the Houston Dash for the first time this season. It is the club’s last home match in the month of April, before heading on a two-game road trip.
Kickoff at Seattle Memorial Stadium is set for 7:00pm PT and the match is presented by Carter Subaru. Fans can watch the match on their mobile devices through the go90 app. They can also follow live play-by-play of the match at Reign FC’s official Twitter page, @ReignFC, and can join the conversation using the hashtag #SEAvHOU.
Reign FC’s (0-0-1, 1 point) previous match was a 1-1 draw against Sky Blue FC to open the season. Both goals in the match came from penalty kicks, with Megan Rapinoe scoring the lone goal for Seattle.
“I think there were a number of positives to take from the game,” said Seattle Reign FC head coach and general manager Laura Harvey. “We had a bit of grit and determination back about us which to be successful in this league you have to have that. We know who we want to be and where we want to go we just aren’t quite there yet.”
Reign FC hold a perfect 7-0-0 record against the Dash, with four of those wins coming at Memorial Stadium. The last time these two squads met was to close the 2016 season, with Seattle becoming the first team to overcome a two-goal deficit to win the match.
“New group, new season, and so many changes to the starting eleven we’ve got to stay focused on what we want to be which is hard to beat,” said Harvey. “If you can get a performance that you improve on week in and week out then you have a chance of getting the results you need.”
All-time, Seattle has scored 19 goals against Houston, while allowing just five. Four players who have scored against the Dash return to the Reign FC roster this season: Megan Rapinoe, Nahomi “Naho” Kawasumi, Beverly Yanez, and Rachel Corsie.
“We have the players higher up the field to win games,” said Harvey. “With people like Pinoe, Naho, and Bev you can have one chance to create an opportunity to score.”
Defensively, the Dash opened the season with a shutout victory over the Chicago Red Stars. In their 2-0 win, goals came from Kealia Ohai and Rachel Daly. Ohai is one of just three Houston players to score against Seattle.
Finding the back of the net against Seattle could be a challenge if Haley Kopmeyer puts in another solid performance. Kopmeyer is coming off a Player of the Week performance against Sky Blue FC, making eight saves in the match.
“I don’t really want her to get player of the week every week because it means she’s busy,” said Harvey. “She needed it and we needed it obviously to get the result. I thought she was excellent in goal, but we want to make sure she has the least amount to do possible going forward.”
Single match tickets and VIP experience packages are available for Saturday’s match. To purchase tickets, visit reignfc.com/tickets or call the Reign FC ticket office at (855) REIGN-FC.
Reign FC Match Forecast presented by The Seattle Times.
About Seattle Reign FC
Seattle Reign FC is one of ten teams in the National Women’s Soccer League. The two-time winner of the NWSL Shield, Reign FC features world-class talent from around the world, including USWNT superstar Megan Rapinoe. Reign FC plays its home matches at Memorial Stadium, located in the shadow of the Space Needle on the Seattle Center campus. For more information about Reign FC please visit http://www.reignfc.com.
#LetItReignFaking it
The Case against Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories By Keith Schneider
Editor's Note. This article is from the The Amicus Journal, spring 1983 edition, published by the This article is from the The Amicus Journal, spring 1983 edition, published by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It is not an easy article to read and may indeed be one of the most disturbing things you've ever read. It chronicles the scandal that destroyed the credibility of the safety testing lab industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly Industrial Bio-Test Labs of Northbrook, Illinois. The article reveals the fraudulent practices of IBT and other laboratories, the horrendous treatment of animals, and the total disregard of human health and the integrity of the regulatory process. Many of the products the safety of which was declared falsely are still on the market. I first encountered this issue when covering PCBs in the mid-1990s and reported my findings in an article in Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club. With assistance of NRDC, which retrieved this nearly-forgotten article from its archives for us, we are able to offer it to Planet Waves readers. Special thanks to Raluca Albu at NRDC in Manhattan for her research assistance, and Tania Derck in Brussels for typing the manuscript. A sequel to this article, called "IBT Guilty," and a product list of pesticides approved by IBT Labs, will follow shortly. -- Eric Francis, NYC, winter 2007
WITHIN THE FERVID, unseemly world that was Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, the place where things turned gruesome was a room called “The Swamp”. In 1970, IBT’s directors installed a Hoeltge automatic watering system for one large animal feeding room midway through Number Three building. Although it was designed to fill drinking bottles and flush wastes from hundreds of rodent cages, the equipment rarely worked properly. Faulty nozzles sprayed the room with a continuing chilly mist, showering the caged animals. Water streamed off cages and racks, submerging the floor under a four-inch deep pool. Mice regularly drowned in their feeding troughs. Rats died of exposure. No technician entered the Swamp without rubber boots, and many wore masks to protect themselves from the hideous stench of disease and death.
During the course of a two-year feeding study, involving more than 200 animals, the mortality rate in the Swamp reached 80 percent. Worst of all was cleaning the cages. Dead rats and mice, technicians later told federal investigators, decomposed so rapidly in the Swamp that their bodies oozed through wire cage bottoms and lay in purple puddles on the dropping trays.
It was in conditions like these in the Swamp and four other major animal feeding areas that IBT conducted thousands of critical research projects for nearly every major American chemical and drug manufacturer, dozens of foreign concerns, and several federal agencies as well. Nearly half of IBT’s studies were used to support federal registrations of a mammoth array of products: insecticides, herbicides, food addictives, chemicals for water treatment, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, soaps and bleaches, even coloring for ice cream.
One of the nation’s oldest independent laboratories, during its last decade IBT was also the largest, performing more than 1,500 studies at its main facility in Northbrook, Illinois, twenty-five miles north of Chicago, and in two satellite laboratories in Neillsville, Wisconsin and Decatur, Illinois. It has been estimated that between 35 and 40 percent of all toxicology tests in the country were conducted by IBT.
Still, for all its prosperity and spurious prestige, IBT’s business crumbled rapidly starting in 1976, when at the zenith of the lab’s corporate strength, investigators from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) uncovered what they alleged is the most massive scientific fraud ever committed in the United States, and perhaps the world.
In May 1981, after a five-year joint FDA-Justice Department probe, Dr. Joseph C. Calandra, IBT’s president, and three of his top associates – Dr. Paul Wright, section head for rat toxicology; Dr. Moreno Keplinger, manager of toxicology; and James B. Plank, senior group leader for rat toxicology – were indicted in Chicago by a special federal grand jury. Each defendant is accused of eight counts of conducting and distributing fake scientific research and then of attempting to cover up the scheme. After several postponements, the IBT trial is scheduled to begin April 4. If convicted on all counts, each defendant faces up to forty years in prison and fines totaling over 40.000 US dollars.
US attorneys in Chicago say the IBT prosecution will be torturous. Calandra and the other defendants claim they are innocent, and have hired the Midwest’s finest trial attorneys to make their case. In the months since the indictment, the defendants have filed stacks of legal motions seeking dismissal of the charges. They insist that FDA and Justice Department agents “harassed, abused, misled, bullied, intimidated and coerced” key witnesses, in order to prove their case. Chief FDA investigator Carlton Sharp is accused of “abuse of the grand jury”, because he knowingly presented “false, misleading and inflammatory” statements during his two grand jury appearances.
Similar tactics were employed by defense attorneys, in two cases prosecuted several years ago by US attorneys in Chicago with distressing results. In the first case, the government gained an eleven-count indictment in 1977 against Velsicol Chemical for concealing key scientific results in the carcinogenicity of the restricted insecticides chlordane and heptachlor. The case was dismissed in 1979 on procedural grounds. US attorneys were turned away one more time in 1980 in a case against G.D. Searle, a major pharmaceutical manufacturer, accused of falsifying scientific research. In that case, Chicago prosecutors could not gain an indictment.
In the IBT case, however, the prosecutors successfully have answered each motion. Frederick Branding, a former federal prosecutor who recently left the Chicago office, calls it "one of the most important cases ever investigated out of this office."
During the trial, which is expected to last at least six weeks, prosecutors hope not only to prove the defendants' guilt, but will also outline a pattern of chemical company knowledge of fraudulent research taking place at IBT. They will also attempt to prove that those practices were promoted by chemical company executives, in order to secure results that would pass registration standards at the FDA and US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Said one Justice Department investigator: "IBT became the largest testing lab in the country, because companies knew this was the place to get the results they wanted."
A primary example, prosecutors allege, is the case of defendant Dr. Paul Wright. Before he started work at IBT in March 1971, Wright was employed as a toxicologist by Monsanto in St. Louis. Prosecutors say Wright went to IBT to manage Monsanto's contract to test the safety of TCC, the company's anti-bacterial agent widely used in popular deodorant sprays. TCC was under suspicion by the FDA for causing testicular atrophy in laboratory rats fed the compound. At the same time, Monsanto was counting on TCC as a major product to replace hexachlorophene, another anti-bacterial chemical just withdrawn from the American market. Monsanto needed a "clean" IBT study to convince the FDA that TCC was safe so the agency would grant them a registration to increase the levels of TCC in deodorant soaps.
Wright stayed at IBT for eighteen months, to supervise most of the TCC research then returned to Monsanto where he was named its manager of toxicology for its department of medicine and environmental health. While at Monsanto, according to prosecutors and witnesses, Wright wrote several critical sections of the final TCC summary report and pressured a key IBT scientist into changing his finding that TCC did, in fact, cause testicular atrophy in laboratory rats. The sections Wright authored were included in IBT's summary report, which was sent to the FDA. The agency eventually approved the new higher levels in some deodorant soaps. Millions of pounds more of TCC are now manufactured each year by Monsanto as a result.
IBT's test on TCC was just one of 22.000 toxicology studies the lab performed in the quarter century it operated. Since late 1979, pathologists at FDA, EPA and in Canada and Sweden have undertaken an immense and complex program of auditing IBT studies. They have determined that more than 10.000 were used to register products for the American market, and they consider nearly 2.000 as primary research. Most of these were for 325 insecticides and herbicides. The vast majority have been declared by American and Canadian scientists to be "invalid."
Until recently, the details of the joint investigation were untouchable as prosecuting attorneys, defendants and witnesses declined to comment pending the outcome of the case. Last December, however, as part of a motion to dismiss made by Calandra's attorneys, almost 1.000 pages of secret grand jury testimony and related documents were entered in US District Court, publicly revealing for the first the nauseating saga of IBT's demise.
Most infuriating is the legacy left by IBT's scandal. There are few Americans who do not make daily contact with chemicals IBT tested and declared "safe" chiefly from pesticide residues contained in their food and water. Since the scheme was first pinpointed, some of those chemicals have been declared by federal agencies to be hazardous to human health and environment. Many others are accused by researchers across the country of causing illnesses and environmental contamination.
In this continent and in Europe, health authorities have begun to take regulatory action against chemicals registered with IBT data. Sweden recently outlawed eight IBT pesticides. Last year, after studying IBT data on 113 pesticides, Canada outlawed six and severely restricted application of the fungicide Captan. In the United States, the EPA's final summary report on 212 pesticides registered with IBT data is due to be released in May, according to Kevin Keany, an official in the Office of Pesticide Programs (OPP). In other actions, the EPA has suspended the use of the herbicide Silvex, and cancelled most uses of the insecticide toxaphene and DBCP, all of which were registered with extensive IBT data. Still, one thing is all too clear: the magnitude of the IBT scandal may never be known, and its effect is likely to carry on for generations.
There is nothing remarkable in the way Frontage Road runs alongside Interstate 94 in Northbrook. Like a hundred other two-lane industrialized corridors across America, Frontage Road is home to a dull array of squat motels, three-storey corporate headquarters and small manufacturing plants.
It was here in 1953 that Joe Calandra established IBT. Then a 35-year old graduate of the Northwestern University School of Medicine, the young Calandra, according to colleagues, was a man of high scientific standards who also knew how to make a dollar. Calandra could foresee that a toxicology lab, which contracted its services, was very much a growth business of the future.
All signals pointed that way. The federal government was increasing the standards required for registration. Manufacturers, pressed to account for the safety of their products, needed firms to prepare the scientific research. And Calandra, from the start, had a real prize for a client: the Pentagon.
Between 1953 and 1977, in an effort to discover better ways to preserve food for the troops during war, the Pentagon paid IBT more than 8 million US dollars to carry out a long-term study in which irradiated beef was fed to mice and rats. The Pentagon was not the only US agency to contract IBT's services. In the early 1970s, the National Institute of Drug Abuse spent 972.000 US dollars on four long-term studies, one of which was to test the toxicity of methadone. The FDA too was a client. In 1974, the agency spent slightly more than 400.000 US dollars on four tests of their own.
IBT grew quickly. Behind the first two administration buildings stood four nearly identical animal buildings, long and low, used to house IBT's horde of rats, mice, guinea pigs, dogs and chickens.
Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, IBT's growth lagged far behind the demand for its services. The lab's reputation circulated quickly through the science and development areas of corporate America. IBT's work was good, they said. It was moderately priced. Most importantly, it passed examination in Washington. While its finances were closely guarded, several estimates put IBT's revenues in the mid-1960s at close to 2 million US dollars annually, enough to attract the attention of the officers of Nalco Chemical (1981 revenues: 666.5 million US dollars), a specialty chemicals manufacturer based in Oak Brook, Illinois. In 1966, Nalco bought IBT from Calandra for a reported 4.5 million US dollars.
Backed by Nalco's millions, Calandra began a program of expansion to turn his pioneering lab in to America's largest chemical testing firm. Two smaller satellite labs were built. In 1970, construction began on a 2 million US dollar, four-storey research building on the Frontage Road site. Calandra was also making several important staff appointments. Dr. Moreno Keplinger was named manager of toxicology in 1970, followed by James Plank's being named as group leader of rat toxicology. In March 1971, Paul Wright joined the staff from Monsanto, and in August, Dr. Donovan E. Gordon became IBT's pathologist.
During the same period, events were occurring in Washington which turned a river of business IBT's way. The environmental movement, an infant in the early 1960s, had matured by the end of the decade, compelling President Nixon to establish the EPA in 1970. With the agency came the publication of dramatically more stringent regulations for pesticide registration and use, requiring a broad range of scientific studies. Though even the largest companies like Dow prided themselves in maintaining laboratories of their own, they too contracted with IBT.
IBT thought it was ready for the new business and welcomed all its new clients. But it was soon in the position of having much more than it could handle.
If they were not so serious, the continuing slapstick events at IBT might seem humorous. The first time Manny Reyna, an animal technician at IBT, was ordered out on a mouse hunt, he thought it was a joke. Armed with a plastic squeeze bottle filled with chloroform and outfitted in thick gloves and a white lab coat, Reyna joined a squad of technicians in a search-and-destroy mission of rats and mice running wild at IBT.
Soon after he was hired at IBT in May 1971, Reyna realized that not all the rodents he tended finished their lives in cages. Every week, dozens of research mice and rats squeezed through the bent wires of IBT's mangled cages, raced across the long wooden racks and dropped to the grimy floor to breed with wild rodents living behind tall stacks of animal bedding piled in the corners of the lab's feeding rooms. During the night mice climbed back up the racks to feed on spilled food and feces, and they persisted in poking their snouts through the bottom of cages. "For some reason, they would cannibalize the toes of the animals that were standing on the wire," Reyna testified in his grand jury appearance. “In the morning we would see where the toes had been chewed off. So, you know, we were at a loss as to what to do... It was a never-ending battle."
The only temporary solution was a mouse hunt. For hours the armed squad would flush rodents from cover and douse them as they skittered past. "The animals were very wild,” Reyna testified. They would run from humans. So our only chance was to slow them down with the chloroform." Once snared, technicians sacrificed their bounty, throwing the carcasses into plastic bags, and then tossing the mess into trash heaps behind the animal buildings.
Reyna had other choice stories for federal investigators. More than once, he said, rats on two-year feeding studies were fed the wrong compound, something IBT never reported to its sponsors. Then there was the time the air conditioner in the brand new research building quit, and technicians hauled half a ton of ice to the third floor, setting up fans behind the blocks to cool hundreds of animals housed there. “It was a mess, and of course the temperature didn't change but a degree or two," Reyna said.
Occasionally mouse hunts would get out of hand. During the course of the Pentagon's irradiated beef study, Reyna claimed the hunt became so enthusiastic that chloroform fumes killed dozens of caged research mice. "I don't know how many mice died that were on tests," he said. "It was just amazing; it was a substantial number like 50." Was the test halted or was its sponsor notified? "No, the tests continued," according to Reyna, "I think they just filled in the gaps."
Wherever Reyna looked there were follies to be witnessed. One of his responsibilities was keeping track of frozen tissues, which needed to be stored in the main freezer upon arrival from IBT's satellite labs. One day a panel truck backed up to IBT's receiving dock loaded with twenty-five or thirty boxes of frozen tissues. Later Reyna found out that Gerald Kennedy, a high IBT official had arranged with a meat processor in Wisconsin to butcher hogs involved in a skin burn test at the Neilsville lab. “So he had all of this meat processed and sent to us evidently under the guise of being sample tissue for a sponsor," Reyna told federal agents. "Meanwhile, I had to just about nail that freezer door shut to keep it from popping open. I mean that freezer was just packed."
The Justice Department's prosecution, headed by Deputy Chief of Special Prosecutions Scott Lassar, involves fraudulent research alleged to have been conducted on four compounds: the insecticide Nemacur and the herbicide Sencor produced by Chemagro, now owned by Moby Chemical; the drug Naprosyn manufactured by Syntex to treat arthritis swelling and Monsanto's anti-bacterial agent TCC.
On April 14, 1971, IBT began two long-term feeding studies for Chemagro's newest agriculture chemicals. The company hoped that Nemacur would compete with Dow and Shell's popular soils fumigant DBCP. Sencor was a multi-purpose herbicide.
Chemagro's protocols for the two studies called for feeding two groups of mice for eighteen months. In addition, a control group would be established and fed a known animal carcinogen, in order to make comparisons with the results found in animals fed the test compounds.
On June 19, 1972, IBT sacrificed Chemagro's mice studies, fourteen months after they began. This was not reported to the company until the summer of 1977, when IBT's testing had nearly come to a halt.
In late July or early August, Philip Smith, then a 25-year old technician at IBT, was assigned by Dr. Wright to prepare the final summary report for the two studies. At the same time, Wright handed Smith a completed mortality table detailing the number of mice that had died and the dates of their deaths. It showed that almost no mice died prematurely. Smith told the grand jury that he knew immediately that the table had been faked. How? Michael Black, the technician who tended to the feeding study, had told Smith that the mortality of the mice on Chemagro's tests had been enormous. In fact, Wright ordered 1.000 new mice to take the place of mice that died during the test and specifically ordered Black not to report the addition in his records. Attorneys for Monsanto said Wright would not comment on these or any other allegations until the trial.
During the first week |
a simple Over-the-air (OTA) Antenna. If you have the right equipment, you can hook it into a DVR and still enjoy the convenience of time-shifting and commercial skipping.
So there’s two basic ways to do this:
The easy option: Get a Tivo and an antenna.
This is all you’ll need:
If you do this, you should probably get the lifetime subscription deal. Plug the antenna into the Tivo, and you’re done!
The Maker option: Build your own DVR from a PC and an antenna.
For those of you who want a little more flexibility from your system, or just like to build things on your own, a HTPC (home theater PC) is the way to go. A HTPC will do a few things that a Tivo can’t – but to be honest the list is pretty small. For my family, the only important one is that I also use it as a media and file server for storing videos, music, and photos as well which I can access from my other PCs in the house. We’ve been using our system for about 3 years now, and we’re very happy with it. It’s easy enough to use that even my 5 year kid knows how to use it to watch her recorded cartoons.
To build it, I basically followed the directions on this blog post, with some small updates.
1. Buy an antenna and tuner
The tuner converts the antenna signal to something with which your PC will know what to do. I liked the HD Homerun because it connects to the antenna and then to a router Ethernet port. Connect your PC to the same router (either wirelessly or wired), and your PC will find the tuners so that Windows Media Center can record shows from the OTA broadcasts. Having the signal sent through the wireless router makes it so you don’t need the antenna and the PC in the same room (unlike some tuners which require USB connections to the PC).
2. Buy the computer
You could buy pretty much any PC that runs Windows 7, but these Zotac PC’s are quieter, lower power, and are built in a more living room friendly form factor. Since the system is sold as a barebones system (no memory, no hard drive), these need to be purchased separately.
Also, you’ll want an HDMI cable and a wireless keyboard.
3. Install Windows 7
I opted for Windows 7 because apparently Windows Media Center with Windows 8 doesn’t offer any improvements, and Windows 7 in my mind will have less hardware and software compatibility issues with other items you may be using. [Read more: Is it worth upgrading a media centre to Windows 8? ].
The Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate editions all include Windows Media Center, so any version except for the Starter is ok. [Update: Microsoft only sells the Professional version now, so you have to buy that one unless you get something aftermarket]. After the installation completes, you will have to do some setup the first time you run Windows Media Center. This will involve configuring it to find the HDHomerun tuner, scanning the airwaves for the local channels, and configuring the TV schedule to show the channels you’re interested in. All of these steps are described in the HDHomerun documentation.
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[Update – added cost summary table] This table below summarizes the cost of this system.[Update] Check out this price comparison of the best OTA DVR options.In his recent Nautilus essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” Cormac McCarthy suggests that our unconscious mental processes are a modern echo of the prelinguistic minds of our prehistoric ancestors. He sees a stark contrast between language as a fairly recent cultural invention and the unconscious as an ancient biological system; the two are made from entirely different cloth, which is why, according to McCarthy, the unconscious is “loathe to speak to us.” It is “just not used to giving verbal instructions and is not happy doing so,” preferring to communicate with our consciousness in images and metaphors.
As a linguist, I don’t think I quite agree with the renowned novelist’s characterization of the unconscious mind as fundamentally non-verbal—which I guess is Canadian polite-speak for: Wow, I really don’t agree with that at all. The unconscious mind of the modern human—after language—is inexorably altered by it. It has swallowed language up in itself (along with everything else it encounters). In fact, the vast majority of language learning and processing operates below the threshold of consciousness and not in the domain of deliberate thought. So language is truly not banished from the unconscious.
Symbols can’t be the whole story. It’s possible to get apes to learn to use visual or manual signs as symbols.
Aside from the border between language and the unconscious, much of McCarthy’s essay is devoted to the idea that language is not a product of biological evolution, but that it is a cultural development that quickly “infected” human minds once it was introduced, much as any staggeringly useful idea—like the invention of the wheel or the Internet—is bound to spread. This notion of language as a cultural virus is interesting and provocative. And quite possibly true. Certainly, in the vicinity of a modern human mind, language has this character. Language doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like arms or breasts or hair. Those whose access to language is blocked—for example, deaf children who are surrounded by people who speak but don’t sign—usually grow up with little or no language. But when these same children spend their days with others like themselves, the smallest spark of signed language flares and catches through the group as if through dry grassland. Or, if you will, like the measles.
The question is whether language spread like this through the minds of our prehistoric ancestors, leaping from one mind to another rather than evolving slowly, like a working eye. McCarthy locates a key moment in the emergence of language: the insight to use symbols to stand in for things in the world. This, he suggests, was the moment when “some unknown thinker sat up one night in his cave and said: Wow. One thing can be another thing.”
DULY NOTED: Some birds compose song patterns by combining units that resemble human syntax or musical notes.
Symbols are indeed crucial to human language. As McCarthy points out, this is the difference between the alarm calls of small mammals that use different sounds to signal different kinds of predators and Helen Keller’s sudden insight that “the sign for water was not simply what you did to get a glass of water. It was the glass of water. It was in fact the water in the glass.” Or, as she would discover, the idea of water in any form whatsoever.
But symbols can’t be the whole story. With some concerted effort it’s possible to get apes to learn to use visual or manual signs as symbols—as true symbols that stand for the idea of an apple, say, rather than a gesture you make to get an apple. Still, language doesn’t infect them in the same way. Once a chimp has learned to use symbols, it doesn’t go around spreading its newly acquired insights with its fellows, whereas humans feel utterly compelled to.
As a linguist, I don’t quite agree with the novelist—which I guess is Canadian polite-speak for: Wow, I really don’t agree at all.
If language is a virus, then several qualities have allowed human minds to be infected by it, including an ability to grasp symbols and a social compulsion to share thoughts. One quality that’s often overlooked—perhaps because we are so rarely conscious of it—is our ability to trade in what linguists call compositionality. This is the way in which meaning is systematically conveyed by language structure. It’s what gives symbols such expressive power. Symbols alone allow you to convey concepts like apples or woman. Useful? Probably. But compositionality is what allows you to understand descriptions of events (Bob stole your apples/woman) or, better yet, descriptions of thoughts and intentions (Bob plans to steal your apples/woman). It’s what allows you to compute the meaning of any new sentence expressed in that language—just as, once you know how basic arithmetic operations like addition and division work, you can apply them to any new combination of numbers.
It’s possible to combine symbols in a way that’s not compositional. For example, you can join two nouns together into a compound to make a complex meaning, but the meaning of the whole isn’t fully predictable based on the parts. Think about the words houseboat, housewife, house guest, housecoat, house arrest, house lust. The same structural relationship holds between the individual words in all of these compounds, but there isn’t a uniform semantic relationship. A houseboat is a boat that is also a house, but a housewife is certainly not a wife that is also a house. While you could construe both a housewife and a house guest as living in a house (sort of), this doesn’t apply to a housecoat, which is something you use in a house. And house arrest and house lust fit none of these at all. When you meet a new compound (house book), you have to try to work out a reasonable guess. But you can’t just automatically compute its meaning with any certainty.
Also in Linguistics The Strange Persistence of First Languages By Julie Sedivy Several years ago, my father died as he had done most things throughout his life: without preparation and without consulting anyone. He simply went to bed one night, yielded his brain to a monstrous blood clot, and was found the...READ MORE
Luckily for us, most of language doesn’t rely on this squishy method of combining symbols. Take adjective-noun combinations such as red dog, corrupt executive, long book, and broken computer: A red dog is a dog that is red. A corrupt executive is an executive that is corrupt. A long book is a book that is long, and so on. Any time you join an adjective with a noun, the adjective serves to name a property that the noun possesses. Mathematically, we could say that a phrase formed by an adjective plus a noun corresponds to the intersection of the sets of things denoted by the adjective and the noun—red dog refers to the set of things in the world that are both red and dogs. This rule holds for any combination of an adjective and noun, so that, faced with a combination you’ve never heard before, you can easily compute its meaning. Just about all of language works this way, noun-noun combinations being a striking exception.
Compositionality scales up—way up, all the way up past basic parts of speech like adjectives and nouns to really abstract notions likes subjects and verb phrases, so that the relationship between the subject and verb is identical in Sally laughed and The little red-haired girl who repeatedly rejected Charlie laughed—even though the subject in the latter sentence is itself a complex phrase that has ingested a relative clause. Like math, the same tools that allow you to generate simple equations can be used to create complex ones. And while apes can use linear order to distinguish meanings in simple phrases (Fred tickles Lana vs Lana tickles Fred), there’s no evidence that they can cope with true compositionality or deal with recursive structures like relative clauses.
Here’s the viral moment I’d plunk my money on: the moment when symbols were married to structure by socially compulsive creatures.
What’s interesting is that some species of songbirds possess an essential ingredient of compositionality—they’re able to create long song patterns by combining smaller units in ways that resemble human syntax. Human music has this quality too, and along with many parallels between the structure of human languages and the structure of human musics, there’s evidence that language and music share neural circuitry in the human mind. But birds don’t have language; what they seem to be missing is the notion of symbols. The songs of some species can be very complex, but we have no reason to believe any of it ever means anything (much like human music, sans lyrics). This is interesting—it suggests that complex mental structures didn’t necessarily come after humans figured out how to use single words, and were motivated to combine them to convey more complex meanings. They may have already existed on a separate nonlinguistic plane.
McCarthy acknowledges that in order to take hold, a virus has to find a receptive environment: “the scrap heap will be found to contain any number of viruses that did not fit.” Figuring out what made the human mind receptive is, to many who study the evolution of language, precisely where all the action is. Language seems to depend on a variety of mental components being in place. How did they get there? And, just as a species might evolve a resistance to a malignant virus, did humans evolve a receptiveness to the beneficial virus of language?
If I were a betting woman, here’s the viral moment I’d plunk my money on: the moment when symbols were married to structure by socially compulsive creatures. But I hesitate to call it a moment. The infection may have taken quite a while; quite a few humans may have been immune at first. When exposed to symbols, it turns out that a few chimpanzees do show an interest in teaching them to other chimps. I can imagine that language may have lurched along like this at first: Someone was obsessed by this symbol thing and went around proclaiming its coolness; after he died, everyone else more or less went back to what they were doing before, until some gregarious symbol-obsessed individual passed on his traits to enough offspring for the notion to truly catch on. Becoming infected by the language virus would be advantageous, hence a whole slew of qualities that made minds susceptible to infection probably did evolve over time: a desire to meld minds with others, the ability to discern patterns that underlie sequences of sounds, a memory capacious enough to process complex mental structures, a facility with symbols, an agility of tongue, a perceptual system tuned for minute speech differences, and perhaps others we have yet to discover.
Julie Sedivy has taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary, and is the author of Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. She is currently writing a book about losing and reclaiming a native tongue.$50-$60 Billion Laundered from US/other nonprofits into illegal West Bank colonies creates threat of terrorism backlash Documents The following document case file reveals the failure of US law enforcement agencies to act on credible, specific public and private allegations that up to $60 billion has been laundered from the United States and other sources into illegal colonization of the West Bank. The US national security interest in averting another 9/11style attack motivated by this type of ongoing illegal activity continues to be high. The Jewish Agency was identified in the 1960's as a source of $35 million illegally laundered into the United States for stealth grassroots action, PR and lobbying. In 2005 the Jewish Agency was again identified at the center of an international money laundering ring—building settlements that are illegal, according to Israeli prosecutor Talia Sasson. Jewish Agency laundering was shut down during Senate and DOJ investigations during the 1960s. The Jewish Agency - American Section itself was shuttered after the DOJ forced it to register its covenant agreement revealing it as an agent of the Israeli government in 1969. But since the flow of funds has now reversed, the US Department of Justice and Treasury Department would have to either confront individual persons and entities channeling funds toward illegal ends, or their financial consolidation points. This would occur only if both agencies have escaped regulatory capture and are free to actively pursue the enforcement of US law. DOJ and Treasury response to US Nonprofit Money Laundering to the West Bank Document /PDF Date Contents 04/13/2011 New US Treasury Department response to 9/27/2007 FOIA: "Unfortunately, we were unable to locate or identify any responsive records pertaining to..internal reports about Treasury Department investigations triggered by public revelations that U.S. charitable funds flows are used to illegally confiscate Palestinian lands and commit crimes overseas…Meeting minutes of key Treasury Department officials charged with combating money laundering conducted in Israel and the U.S. dealing with the Sasson report money laundering issues especially those with a focus on U.S. … organizations managing WZO money laundering." 9/26/2008 New York US Attorney Michael J. Garcia receives a formal criminal complaint on US-Israel charitable money laundering activity in his jurisdiction, but refuses to comment about possible law enforcement action. "We will review the information you have provided, but as a matter of course we do not respond to inquiries regarding intended enforcement actions, if any." 8/25/2008 Reuters reports on US nonprofits that continue to benefit from tax exemptions while raising funds for West Bank colonization. " Despite its stated policy against settlement growth, the United States grants tax-exempt status to organisations that openly raise money to aid Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. " 1/24/2008 Internal Revenue Service receives an IRmep criminal complaint about US nonprofit organizations laundering money and benefitting from IRS granted tax exempt ion, but refuses to comment on enforcement action: "The Internal Revenue Code includes taxpayer privacy provisions enacted by the Congress to protect the privacy of tax returns and tax return information of all taxpayers. Therefore, I cannot comment on what action, if any, we may take regarding the information you provided." 12/10/2007 IRmep sends a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking information into whether the US Treasury Department is cracking down on indirect terrorism generated by money laundering from the US to the West Bank. The Treasury Department's Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office rejects IRmep's FOIA inquiry under the Bank Secrecy Act. "The statutory provision that specifically exempts records collected under the Bank Secrecy Act from disclosure under the FOIA can be found in Section 5319 of title 31 of the United States Code." 2006-2007 Justin Dempsey, the DOJ official designated for follow-up, is transferred to the DOJ's Anti-Trust Division. 12/23/2005 IRmep sends a follow-up letter to Barry M. Sabin, Chief of the Counterterrorism Section urging law enforcement: " Many agree with Sasson and IRmep that massive illegal activities are occurring and continue to place America at risk. However, cynics believe that while this activity and connection is easily auditable and could be shut down by applying existing American laws, that nothing will be ever be done about it. They've told me that equal application of US law is not possible in such politically sensitive cases. They've stated what while a hair trigger DOJ response is all but guaranteed upon the slightest evidence of Islamic charity involvement in direct or indirect terrorism generation, that no such tripwire exists for similarly involved Christian, Jewish, or Zionist organizations." " We've reached out to many groups about this indirect terrorism generator because we continue to believe that US justice is blind, and that indirect terrorism generators will soon become a US law enforcement priority. I hope that the DOJ Counterterrorism Section will begin to confront the indirect terrorism generators our research has identified. " 12/7/2005 Barry M. Sabin, Chief of the Counterterrorism Section officially thanks IRmep and confirms commitment of officials sent to the briefing: "We appreciate your hard work in researching links between money laundering and Middle Eastern violence as well as the implications on the security of the United States. As you know, the Department of Justice is very involved in efforts to ensure that tax exempt entities are not involved in funding violence or engaging in other non-charitable functions. Two members of my staff recently attended a briefing given by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy at which you spoke on these issues and obtained a copy of the distributed materials. I also understand an attorney from the Counterterrorism Section has recently been in touch with you regarding your work. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any additional questions or concerns." 11/21/2005 The Council for the National Interest and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy convene a public meeting for the US Department of Justice and US Treasury Department in the Russell Senate Office Building. DOJ officials including Justin Dempsey and David Bose are briefed about how US money laundering toward West Bank settlement is illegal and an indirect generator of terrorism blowback against the United States. 10/14/2005 FBI Director Robert Mueller, US attorney Elliot Spitzer, at the US Department of Treasury Foreign Assets Control official Julia Philip, US Department of Treasury Terrorist Financing and Financial Crime Division head Carlos Zarate are urged to enforce Title 18, Part I, Chapter 45 from US criminal code which prohibits US- West Bank money laundering : "Whoever, within the US, knowingly begins or sets on foot or provides or prepares a means for or furnishes money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition or enterprise to be carried on from thence against the territory or dominion of any foreign prince or state, or of any colony, district, or people with whom the US is at peace, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both." 10/05/2005 The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy issues the report "US Tax-Exempt Charitable Contributions to Israel: Donations, Illegal Settlements and Terror Attacks against the US" (PDF) to key American government officials and the public. The report reveals how violence, land theft, and hopelessness generated by nonprofit money laundering fuels terrorism blowback against the United States. 8/14/2005 A USA Today article "No one knows full costs of Israel's settlement ambitions" reports upper limit of money laundering at $60 billion while raising questions over US tax exemptions and stealth AIPAC aid penalties on activity: "Vice Premier Shimon Peres estimates Israel has spent about $50 billion since 1977, when the hard-line Likud government took over from his Labor party. Other former finance ministers and government officials don't discount a price tag — commonly floated but never documented — of $60 billion..." "Israel's effort since the 1967 Mideast war to fill the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jews has grown from the scattered actions of zealous squatters into a network of 142 towns and villages that house nearly 240,000 people...." "In 2003, when Israel was granted $9 billion in loan guarantees over three years, the cut was $289.5 million. Officials familiar with the issue, and speaking on condition of anonymity, say that low figure was reached with the help of the influential pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)...." "Israel also used private U.S. donations for which it secured U.S. tax-exempt status, said David Newman, a political scientist at Israel's Ben Gurion University who researched settlement funding... " "U.S. tax laws don't exempt donations for political activities such as settlements. Israel separated the World Zionist Organization from the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, a move that allowed donors to inject money into settlements without losing tax exemptions. In reality, the two groups operate under one umbrella, with the same officials, departments and administrators overseeing the activities, Newman said." 05/01/2005 University of Chicago researcher Robert A. Pape compiles a database of 315 suicide terrorism campaigns around the world from 1980 through 2003, and 462 individual suicide terrorists. He finds that the major motivation of such attacks was " to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." 03 /18/2005 The Jewish Daily Forward reports that US nonprofit organizations are directly tied to entities involved in illegal settlement money laundering : "Hadassah, B'nai B'rith, and offshoots of the Reform and Conservative movements. American groups control 30% of the organization's main governing bodies, including the World Zionist Congress which is convened in Jerusalem every four years." The report also mentions the Jewish Agency being in charge of a $420 million network of programs funded by overseas charities and at the center of illegal settlement financing. 03/05/2005 The former head of the State Prosecution Criminal Department Talia Sasson delivers an Israeli government commissioned report (Summary) that finds quasi government bodies diverted funds to establish West Bank colonies that are illegal under Israeli and international law. 07 /21/2004 Responding to heavy AIPAC lobbying t he White House creates a new "Terrorism and Financial Intelligence" office at the US Treasury Department toward "countering threats to U.S. national security and protecting the international financial system from abuse." 06/22/2004 The 9/11 Commission Report finds US policy toward Israel was a major motivator of the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States. Page 147: "By his own account, KSM's [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] animus toward the United States stemmed not from his own experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel." 10/26/2001 The USA Patriot Act establishes targeted mechanisms for interrupting financial flows used by terrorists. 1989 The Financial Action Task Force on money laundering (FATF) is established by a G-7 Summit in Paris in 1989. It defines money laundering as actions such as false accounting, misuse and misdirection of legitimate funds toward illegal ends. 1970 The US passes the "Bank Secrecy Act of 1970" or "Currency and Foreign Transactions Reporting Act" which requires US financial institutions to detect, report and prevent money laundering."You only know my name. You don't know my story..."
Afrofeminism: The What vs. The How
From the work that I do and from the things that I say, I've seen quite a number of people over the past year or so been calling themselves Afrofeminists. In fact, just very recently, someone sent me a letter thanking me for offering her a new way to think about her own identity. She asked permission to call herself an afrofeminist because she dug my approach and could relate to most of my commentary, even though she actually had no idea what it meant! It turns out that connecting with people -- or even inspiring them -- doesn't start and end with what you are but who you are.
"Hi, my name is Spectra, and I'm an afrofeminist"? It would almost feel like cheating: here's this cute little label that sounds like an amalgamation of afro and feminist (which it isn't, by the way), suggesting she must have an afro and she must be feminist, and somehow that's supposed to serve as a shortcut for people to actually get to know who I am. And then, I'm supposed to gather in large numbers with people who dig the afro and/or the "feminist" and because we totally understand each other, we'll be better equipped to change the world. Ha! That almost always backfires.
Straight Allies, White Anti-Racists, Male Feminists, Blablabla
Now don't get me wrong; labels can be very useful in facilitating initial connections. But people get so hung up on them, activists especially. And as a society, we've become so narrowly focused on the theoretical "what" at the expense of the practical "how" of creating change, we've forgotten that change happens primarily through our personal relationships, not just passionate rhetoric.
The use of identity labels (the "what") to build unity and shared understanding often sidelines the need to actually explore complexities and difference i.e. just "how" said identities intersect and manifest in different contexts; since a single word can carry so many subjective meanings for different people, movements are often stumped or stunted the minute they realise that not everyone's "how" is the same or -- even worse -- not even functioning.
The Curious Case of "Allies" In General
If my detest for words and definition stems from anything at all it's the "allies" I've experienced in both my personal life and my work as an activist. I've met hundreds of "white allies," for instance, many of who profess their "consciousness" via some digital channel (e.g. an overly serious twitter bio or utopia-inspired vision statement) or, in person, via some self-congratulatory speech masquerading as a relevant anecdote... especially when surrounded by women of color.
"We white allies have so much work to do," they'd go. "Women of color shouldn't always have to be our teachers." When I first heard this tune, it was music to my ears, and oh boy did I fall for it. It worked every. single. time.
"Oh my god, yes!" I'd exclaim, "Wow - truth! You're seriously my favorite person right now!" ('Cause it was my turn to offer music to their ears.) In retrospect, I realize that many of my initial responses to white allies were pre-programmed -- a socialised reaction to ensuring that white women never lingered too long in their vulnerability without affirming their "goodness." I resisted any responses that would risk making white people feel wrong--or exposed--in their self-righteousness. In fact, making them feel like they needed to *do* anything at all to earn my trust and respect as a woman of color always felt more like a risk than an opportunity. So I'd find myself dishing out exaggerated, empty, endorsements, couching my emotions in the elation I felt at even just the idea that a segment of white people had taken it upon themselves to give a damn about me.
But, here's the thing: half the time, I never ever remembered their names, or remembered any of our conversations moving beyond the scope of the burden of racial consciousness they had taken up for themselves as "the good white people." In fact, it took me quite a while to figure out that most of the "white allies" I'd meet in social change spaces (never - NEVER - at work, or at the grocery store, or in my regular every day life) were only ever "white allies" around women of color, and mainly to seek my/our approval.
I'll never forget this one time a "white ally" had offered to volunteer at a professional networking event I was hosting for women of color a few years back; she'd insisted that she wanted to "do her part in supporting queer women of color community" by showing up and offering her help. She justified this act of good will with all the right rhetoric too: women of color rarely get this space, as a white ally I'm happy to do labor etc. Honestly, I felt so relieved and grateful for her support. I had no idea that her "help" would become my burden for the entire duration of the event.
It's as though the minute she walked in, all eager and ready to be put to work, she realised that there'd actually be no more than a handful of white people at the event, and became really uncomfortable. "Oh wow, I'm one of the few white people, here...," she said awkwardly, as she set down her bag and coat, "So cool." [Replace with "Fuck! I'm not ready for this."] So what did she do? This seemingly racially-conscious, well-meaning white ally followed me around like a nervous baby duckling for the entire event. Yup, the entire event. She was so nervous about being left on her own to mingle and - god forbid - socialize with any of the women of color at the event, that she didn't give me a single moment to have conversations with anyone else but her. Over 100 women of color attended my event that evening, and I don't think I was able to really connect with any one of them because I had an over-eager, jittery, nervous white girl all up in my business every single minute.
I learned very quickly that being a "white ally" had nothing to do with how I, as a woman of color, needed them to show support when it mattered. Shoot, it was in a conference room of "white allies" that I found myself on the verge of tears (of anger and frustration), my voice shaking as I tried to explain to a privileged white gay dude that doing community outreach to people of color for a program that claimed to be advocating for diversity wasn't a "distraction." The "white allies" in the room sat back and watched the carnage as I pushed, and I fought, and I fell back, defeated. Then the "white allies" came to me after the meeting was over and denounced their brethren -- "privileged white guy, he needs to do a lot of work on himself." Apparently, being a white ally meant reminding women of color that they weren't "those kinds" of white people, that they had our backs, just only ever in private, conveniently away from any of the actual emotional work involved in standing up to racism.
But Here's an Afrofeminist Principle for You: Relationships Over Rhetoric
Don't get me wrong -- not all people who identify as "allies" do such a terrible job. I know dozens of self-identifying "allies" who hold themselves to a much higher standard, and actually practice their values. (Stay tuned, I'm running a series of interviews with them in June!). That said, terming oneself an ally doesn't necessarily imply this standard. Some of my closest friends and family are the fiercest "allies" I have, but they'd never call themselves that. They'd insist, instead, that they're being considerate, trying to get to know me better, or, as one of my best white guy friends says, "resisting against the default of being an asshole." And you know what? I prefer it that way.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'd rather experience people--and their politics--through unlikely, awkward, strained, challenging, beautiful relationships built over time. That way, when we do clash or differ, we love each other enough to express the full range of our raw emotions - cry, yell, storm out - and always return to build the deeper, more intimate connections we need to take on the world together, truly united.
When someone fights for me, I want them to do so because they care about me as an individual - or as someone who reminds them of someone else that they care about - not just as some abstract theoretical concept. I'd rather that the "white allies", the "straight allies", the "male feminists" of the world do the work to build authentic relationships based on real love and respect, not just politically correct lexicon and rhetoric.
So, despite starting off as an activist who was really excited about the concept of "allies", as I've gotten older, I've found less use for words and definitions in social justice; labels like feminists, anti-sexists, radicals, allies etc simply don't mean much to me anymore. Though I certainly see these ideas/concepts as a way of connecting with others initially, ultimately, relationships that last aren't sustained by what you are to each other, but how you treat each other.
Falling back on words and phrases that are intended to convey some sort of ideological purity won't ever trump the transformation you'll experience within yourself (and others) if you truly put yourself out there -- if you dare to be vulnerable, admit wrongs, take responsibility for your blind spots, hold your damn self accountable, an not for show, but for real.For the last few months, I've been tracking my activities, location, happiness, sleep cycles, among other things, using fun tech gadgets (such as the Fitbit) and smartphone apps. I had to trade my Blackberry in for an Android, since most apps are designed for that or the iPhone -- no complaints here. The tale of what I got out of all this appears in the next issue of Forbes, along with (embarrassingly) some photos of me, including a shot that required the photographer to get into bed with me.
Of course, Forbes is one of those wonderful magazines that provides all of its content online, so you can get the story here, too, below. The magazine title is "Taking My Measure." My significant other has taken to calling it the "My Data Tells Me To Dump My Boyfriend" piece. I think of it as "How I Learned My Bedtime is Midnight." Hope it's an enjoyable read:
A woman entrepreneur, who wishes to remain anonymous, drinks her first stream of urine every morning as a "natural form of tracking" in order to remind herself of what she ate and drank the night before. A help-desk analyst at a corporate law firm started monitoring his spending after racking up five figures in debt on iTunes and buying CDs. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell keeps an audio recorder running all day and takes digital photos every 30 seconds--with the idea of outsourcing his memory to a computer. Psychology professor Seth Roberts eats a half stick of butter every day because, he says, it speeds up his ability to do simple math problems by 5%.
More prosaically, perhaps, graphic designer Nicholas Felton compiled various biographical data to produce a visually spectacular tribute to his father after he died. Digital diva Esther Dyson keeps an eye on her unread e-mails in order to measure her stress levels. Tim Ferriss, a former sports nutrition company CEO and angel investor in start-ups like Twitter and StumbleUpon, tracks his brain waves while sleeping; he has inserted a blood sugar monitor into his torso and biopsied his thigh to analyze his muscle fibers and endurance enzymes. The 4-Hour Body, Ferriss' treatise on using tracking to lose weight, maximize efficiency and "become superhuman," shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list in January.
Extreme navel-gazing is probably as old as staring at the stars. The Catholic Church gave us confession, which helped organize our thoughts about ourselves (how far we have fallen, how close salvation lies). Psychoanalysis flipped the paradigm, transmuting sin into unconscious desire. Now comes a phenomenon known as the Quantified Self, or self-tracking, which posits a sort of truth in numbers. Its adherents believe that gadgets can help organize torrents of personal data that can help turn us all into happier, healthier, wealthier and more productive human beings. Founded three years ago by two Wired magazine editors, the Quantified Self is an organization in San Francisco with Meetup groups in 23 cities around the world, including Europe, Africa and Australia. Its members obsessively track biometric, behavioral and environmental information with smartphone apps and body-monitoring devices, and perform experiments on themselves to try to improve their lives.
If this sounds weirdly narcissistic, consider that the movement has a forebear in a quintessential American: Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of self-tracking. To chart his progress toward "moral perfection," Franklin kept a daily ledger in red ink of 13 virtues, from temperance to humility. Each day he dotted the virtues he failed to fulfill with a black lead pencil. After tracking for some time, he wrote in his Autobiography: "I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined, but I had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish."
My name is Kashmir Hill and I am a self-tracker. I got into this a few months ago for a number of reasons. One, it raises intriguing questions about technology and privacy--my beat at FORBES. For another, I'm a social creature; I like to hang out with people online and offline, and sharing data is a great way to do it. I'm also a runner and learned the |
. On the 10th day of the shutdown, she posted a photo of an “Expected Date of Confinement Wheel” on Facebook. The circular calendar is used by obstetricians to predict when a baby will be born, based on the date of conception.
Furlough babies? (Getty)
The caption “Furlough babies????” earned Newman 16 likes, 22 comments and a little boost in hospital fame come June, when the number of births was on the rise.
Nurses at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Md., were making the same jokes this month, when births in the first half of July increased from 265 in 2013 to 385 in 2014.
There were 99 additional births at Virginia Hospital Center in the months of April, May and June, although spokeswoman Maryanne Boster acknowledged that birth rates have been rising at the hospital for a few years.
The fruitful aftermath of shutdown boredom could also be seen in federal offices. Jessica Hernandez, a program analyst for the Food and Drug Administration, was one of three pregnant women in her 150-person office after the shutdown. She traced the conception of her daughter Gabrielle Nadine, who was born June 3, to her time off work, although she admits it was “all kind of hazy.”
“It was definitely stressful not knowing when we would get paid, but I actually had a great time,” Hernandez said. “I got lunch with other feds, hung out with my mom, volunteered at my other daughter’s school, cleaned some closets and then just relaxed.”
Her relaxation contributed to her better mood, she recalled, and her better mood contributed to her choice of activities when her husband came home from his sales consulting job.
Carl Woog, a Pentagon employee whose wife recently gave birth to a baby boy, said they tracked her conception date back to just after the shutdown ended. Although Woog wasn’t furloughed, he and his wife “may have been celebrating congressional action,” he joked.
Of course, with this raft of happy new arrivals come the baby-boom skeptics — those who say that any uptick in Beltway babies is purely coincidental. And there isn’t an increase everywhere. Nationwide, birth rates are still near historic lows. Communications departments at Medstar Washington Hospital Center, Medstar Georgetown University Hospital and Inova Fairfax Hospital balked at the post-shutdown baby-boom claim, saying they have seen no significant rise in births.
Statisticians have also weighed in, noting that claims of baby booms have previously popped up in the news media after severe weather or events. A well-known 1970 study discredited a baby boom reported in the New York Times after the Great Blackout of 1965.
But more recent work has shown tangible increases in fertility after the Oklahoma City bombing and after a string of hurricane advisories on the East Coast.
Newman, the nurse at Sibley Hospital, says there will always be skeptics of the theories that she and many other maternity nurses believe in: that full moons, drops in barometric pressure and bad weather all can affect conception and birth rates.
“But every time [something unusual happens], I think, nine months from now, here we go!” Newman said. “And sure enough, I’m usually right.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the sex of one of the children mentioned. Carl Woog’s wife gave birth to a boyAs Americans enjoy the holiday weekend, does anyone know how Memorial Day originated?
On May 1, 1865, freed slaves gathered in Charleston, South Carolina to commemorate the death of Union soldiers and the end of the American Civil War. Three years later, General John Logan issued a special order that May 30, 1868 be observed as Decoration Day, the first Memorial Day -- a day set aside "for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land."
At the time, the nation was reunited politically, but it remained culturally divided, and so did Memorial Day observations. In the North, the federal government created national cemeteries for men who died in the war, while state governments from New York to Michigan gradually made Decoration Day an official holiday throughout the 1870s. In the South, from April to June, women dressed in white and knelt beneath statues of fallen Confederate leaders; they told stories about the men who appeared in portraits lining the walls of many Southern homes. By the early 20th century, as Americans faced enemies abroad, many of the surviving Civil War veterans recognized their shared wartime history and reconciled their differences -- turning Memorial Day into a national holiday.
As America recognizes the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, we would do well to revisit the origins of Memorial Day among freedpeople in Charleston. While they honored those who fought for their emancipation (which also celebrates its 150th birthday this summer), it was not simply a moment of great triumph and celebration for freedpeople, but a complicated process that led to the unexpected death of hundreds of thousands of former slaves.
While former slaves venerated the staggering number of Union soldiers who died during the war, few have observed the ways in which war and emancipation led to the astonishing mortality of many ex-slaves. Former bondspeople liberated themselves from chattel slavery and entered into an environment that was plagued by cholera, dysentery, and yellow fever -- devastating nineteenth-century illnesses for which the medical profession knew no cure, and from which the poor and the marginalized suffered disproportionately. One of the most often-forgotten facts among the public displays and memorials about the Civil War is that the vast number of soldiers died from disease and sickness, not from combat wounds or battle -- in fact, the war became the largest biological crisis of nineteenth-century America.
In their journeys toward freedom, ex-slaves often lacked adequate shelter, food, and clothing. Without the basic necessities to survive, freed slaves stood defenseless when a smallpox epidemic exploded in Washington in 1863 and then spread to the Lower South and Mississippi Valley in 1864 to 1865. A military official in Kentucky described smallpox as a "monster that needed to be checked," while another federal agent witnessing the "severity and almost malignancy of the epidemic" believed that the virus was on the increase and predicted that "before the coming summer is over it will decimate the colored population." In the end, the epidemic claimed the lives of over 60,000 former slaves, while other disease outbreaks and fatal epidemics raised the death toll of freedpeople to well over a million -- more than a quarter of the newly freed population.
When historians describe casualties of the war, they uncover photos of mostly white enlisted men -- bodies strewn across an image of a battlefield or, worst, piled on top of one another in a deep ditch, dead from the effects of a cannonball explosion. What we don't see is dead freedpeople. The death of white participants in the Civil War is both valued and commemorated: framed as part of a larger saga of war and victory, and then propped up as the heroic embodiment of nationalism on Memorial Day. White people's death is reenacted annually by thousands of people-who, for a hobby on a holiday weekend, get to play dead.
There was no rebirth for former slaves who died of disease and sickness after the war. There was no chance of them coming back to life in a costume worn by an admirer a century later. Buried under the fallen cities and the new harvests, the South, at its foundation, is a graveyard: a place where black people died in unimaginable numbers not from battle, but from disease and deprivation.
In the recognition of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, let us not forget that freed slaves created Memorial Day. Let us remember that their prayers and observations were not just for the deceased Union soldiers on that first Memorial Day, but also for members of their families and their community who died in a war that was meant to free them.I stayed home on a Sunday for the first time this year and watched every game I could. Although that obviously leads to a lot of football thoughts bouncing around the brain, one kept coming back at me all evening:
Could the Bills be for real?
This isn't something we normally have to worry about. When we do our preseason predictions, we all know there are few reliables, but the Bills missing the playoffs is a straight-up given. Buffalo has played the past 17 NFL seasons without reaching the playoffs, and in that time has had only two winning seasons. It's death, taxes and the Bills not making the playoffs.
There they are, though: 5-2 after a 34-14 thumping of the Raiders. They sit a half-game behind the Patriots, who beat the Chargers 21-13 Sunday -- and Buffalo's was the more convincing home victory over a struggling AFC West opponent. The Bills have a short-week road game this Thursday, but it's against the Jets, and a win would tie the Bills with New England at the top of the AFC East with two head-to-head games left.
Now, don't read me wrong here. This isn't to say the Bills are on the verge of some changing of the guard. The gulf between these two franchises is so huge that Niagara Falls could pour into it for the next 17 years and not fill it. During Buffalo's 17-year playoff drought, New England has made the playoffs 14 times (including each of the past eight seasons), won five Super Bowls and gone 29-5 in head-to-head games against Buffalo. The Patriots are basically the opposite of the Bills.
But if those 6-2 Patriots, who lost their best defensive player to injury last week, are inclined to check their side-view mirror, they might find that the Bills are closer than they appear.
If the Bills beat the Jets on Thursday night, Buffalo will own a 6-2 record, which is the team's best mark through eight games since a 7-1 start in 1993. Brett Carlsen/Getty Images
If nothing else, rookie coach Sean McDermott knows that his bunch is resilient. The Bills played Sunday without three injured defensive starters and another -- defensive tackle Marcell Dareus -- who got traded on Friday. McDermott explained after the game that the players weren't that shaken up by the Dareus deal because they all remember the team trading its best wide receiver, Sammy Watkins, before the season started, so they know the front office could make any roster move at any time, and it's important to not let it mess them up. Message delivered. The battered Bills defense clamped down on a Raiders team that was working on nine days' rest since dropping 505 yards on the Chiefs in Week 7.
Buffalo isn't loaded with offensive weapons, but it isn't making mistakes, either. The Bills have turned the ball over three times all season -- fewer than any team but the Chiefs. They had an NFL-best plus-10 turnover differential heading into Sunday and improved it by four. Only Jacksonville and Pittsburgh have allowed fewer points per game. They might not be spectacular, but the Bills are pretty finely tuned. And you know what? The trades they've made in the past six months have landed them extra first-, second- and third-round picks in the 2018 draft. So if they wanted to augment their roster with a big-splash trade in advance of Tuesday afternoon's deadline, they could.
Again, no one's going to bet their retirement plan on the Bills' making the playoffs. But one of these years, they will. The Buffalo team that breaks the drought will be one that doesn't beat itself and knows how to overcome adversity. Halfway through the season, this year's bunch fits the description. With two head-to-head games against the Patriots still on the docket, one thing the Bills definitely have is an opportunity.
Some things we learned (and didn't learn) about the other division races in Week 8:
The Steelers should be embarrassed if they don't win the AFC North
A bunch of first-place teams are dealing with potentially crippling crises right now. New England's injuries. Seattle's run game. Kansas City's defense. In Pittsburgh, all is not smooth, as the offense still seems forced and halting most of the time, Ben Roethlisberger is not in rhythm, and the Martavis Bryant situation has created an obviously annoying internal issue for coach Mike Tomlin to manage.
But the best teams are the ones that find ways to overcome their problems, and the Steelers are 6-2 with a two-game lead over a Ravens team they've already beaten in Baltimore. Now, I'm well aware of the score of the Ravens' Thursday night victory over Miami. But 153 passing yards per game isn't playoff-caliber in 2017, and it's hard to see where Baltimore's offensive spark will come from.
Tennessee, Green Bay and New England are the only teams left on Pittsburgh's schedule that have winning records, and the Patriots game is in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh's defense has looked legit all season, and keeping the Lions out of the end zone in goal-to-go situations all night Sunday was a big step for the one part of that unit that hadn't looked great. If the Steelers can smooth things over on offense, they should be playing for the AFC's top seed.
Deshaun Watson leads the league in Total QBR (81.8), and the Texans' offense is much improved in 2017. Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images
Reality check: The Texans still have two teams in front of them
The Deshaun Watson story is fantastic, and the young man is obviously the real deal. You don't perform the way he did as a rookie in Seattle if you're a mirage, and it isn't Watson's fault that Russell Wilson is playing better than any quarterback west of the Liberty Bell right now.
But the standings show the Texans at 3-4, behind both Jacksonville and Tennessee in the AFC South. They're 1-1 in the division, having lost to Jacksonville in Tom Savage's Week 1 start and beaten Tennessee a couple of weeks later. While Houston's offense is operating at a higher level than any other in the division, the Texans' high-profile defensive injuries could continue to cause problems.
Jacksonville's defense looks legit, and Marcus Mariota was Watson before Watson was, so it's not as if the rest of the division is going to step aside and watch this guy's coronation. The Texans and their young quarterback still have plenty of work to do, and those who would tout Watson for MVP should remember that MVPs almost always have winning records.
The Chiefs have made a mockery of what should have been the toughest division in the league
Whipping Denver on Monday night put 6-2 Kansas City 2.5 games in front of the rest of the division. No other team is even.500. Imagine what this would look like if the Raiders hadn't gotten, like, 14 shots at the game-winning touchdown in that Thursday night game in Week 7.
The Chiefs have beaten the Patriots and Eagles outside the division and the Chargers and Broncos in it. Of their remaining eight opponents, only Buffalo, Miami and the now Zeke-less Cowboys have winning records. This race is over, and while the Chargers, Broncos or Raiders might have chances to turn things around and make a wild-card run, all three have to be in the running for AFC's most disappointing team of the season.
Ezekiel Elliott has 88 carries for 413 yards and four touchdowns in the past three games. Photo by Daniel Kucin Jr./Icon Sportswire
The Southern District Court might have decided the NFC East on Monday
Barring some sort of legal Hail Mary pass in the Second Circuit Court, Judge Katherine Failla's ruling means Ezekiel Elliott has to start serving his six-game suspension now. Without Elliott for the next six games, the Cowboys probably won't have enough to catch the Eagles. The only reason they had a chance to begin with was the fact that they still have games against the Eagles in Weeks 11 and 17, but this certainly doesn't help their cause. The chances are even slimmer for Washington, which sits 3.5 games out of first and has lost to the Eagles twice already. (Washington is 0-3 in the division. For goodness sake, the only other teams that are 0-3 in division play are the Browns and 49ers.)
At some point, that "road to victory" on which the song instructs the Eagles to "fly" is bound to encounter a pothole or two. The 49ers aren't the kind of defense that takes advantage of Jason Peters' absence. The Broncos, Cowboys, Bears and Seahawks just might be, and those are Philly's next four opponents. But the Eagles are absolutely in the driver's seat in the NFC East, and while Dallas is a defending division champ with a monster offensive line, Elliott's an MVP-caliber talent who's going to be missed.
It might not matter who plays quarterback for the Vikings
Has there ever been a 6-2 team heading into its bye with three legitimate possibilities to start at quarterback the rest of the way? You could make the case that it's crazy to take Case Keenum out while the Vikings are winning, but he's 25th in the league in touchdown passes and 22nd in yards per attempt. If Teddy Bridgewater and/or Sam Bradford is ready in two weeks, is it crazy to try to elevate the team's ceiling at the sport's most important position?
Four of Minnesota's next five games are on the road, including trips to Detroit, Atlanta and Carolina. There's nothing that says Brett Hundley can't get his act together in Green Bay, where the Packers are still just a game and a half back. Vikings coaches have a lot to consider during the bye.
The Saints have won five games in a row, but they've played only one division foe so far. Chris Graythen/Getty Images
The NFC South race has yet to begin
Nothing has gone right for defending NFC champ Atlanta, but the Falcons are nonetheless 4-3 and haven't played a single division opponent yet. That changes next week with their trip to Charlotte, but they don't play the Buccaneers until after Thanksgiving, and they don't play the first-place Saints until Dec. 7.
The Saints have won five in a row since their 0-2 start and need to go just 3-6 the rest of the way in order to surpass their win total of each of the past three seasons. They're legit. But so is Carolina's defense, and the Panthers have five home games left. Don't forget, the Falcons went 6-2 in the second half last season and rode that wave to the Super Bowl.
The NFC South could've put three teams in the playoffs if they weren't about to spend the second half of the season beating up on each other.
Russell Wilson should be in the MVP discussion
Sure, Wilson had 451 passing yards and four touchdown passes in the Seahawks' breathtaking comeback victory over Houston on Sunday. But he also had 30 of his team's 33 rushing yards, and each of those four touchdown passes tied the game or turned a deficit into a lead. Seattle's defense is the leakiest we've seen it in years, the Seahawks can't run the ball a lick, and the offensive line is, as it is annually, a wreck.
Wilson won that game by himself, with everyone in the world marveling at the kid quarterback on the other team. At this point, Seattle's most important win was a three-point victory over the Rams, without which the Seahawks would be 4-3 and trailing the Rams in the division by two games. Instead, they're both 5-2, with Seattle owning the edge in the tiebreaker.
Seattle is the New England of the NFC West. Even when so much seems to be going wrong, it has the coaching and the quarterback to figure it out.I've heard a rumors that DJ Snake wasn't actually producing the records that he's been putting out for the past year, but until factual information is handed to me, my hands are tied. He isn't the first that we have had industry insiders alert us to, and he won't be the last. But a tune that we covered today got handed back to me, and it was produced by someone else completely, an artist from Seattle by the name of Breaux.
After the Juke Ellington debacle last year, people are quick to hand us tunes that might have been stolen. Listen to both of these tunes back to back, and decide for yourself. The sequencing is exactly the same, and less some minor changes and added drums, these sound like the same exact record that was somehow produced by two different people. Even the vocal samples land in the same place.
Breaux Remix:
Snake Remix:I invited Dr. Blomberg to write a post to challenge us at DC, and he's graciously responded in the interests of a fair discussion of the ideas that separate us. No disrespectful skeptical response to such a respected scholar will be published., by Dr. Craig Blomberg:I was raised in what I later learned to identify as a very liberal parish of the old Lutheran Church in America. I was confirmed in 1968, the year American society seemed to be falling apart. I took it as seriously as anyone in my confirmation class, which isn’t saying all that much. We spent more time discussing Simon and Garfunkel lyrics and Jesus Christ Superstar than we did Luther’s Catechism.In my public high school my best friend brought me to our Campus Life club. There for the first time I met kids my own age who spoke about having a personal relationship with Jesus and it was clearly making a difference in their lives. In a culture in which “eggheads” like me who were neither athletic nor very good looking, and as a result had very few friends, they genuinely befriended me (and many others). I wanted what they had and prayed one February night in 1970 to receive Jesus as my Savior and to make him my Lord. But it wasn’t so much a revolutionary new idea as my sense that this was what the Lutherans had once been about but had given it up, at least in my church, for newer, trendier things.I was valedictorian of my high school class of 750. I set out to be a mathematician. (I did teach high school math for one year.) In college, I encountered religious studies taught from a perspective that publicly acknowledged it was trying to destroy historic Christian faith. A delightful church history professor (and an ordained Lutheran) once told us with a big grin but very seriously that it was impossible to be an evangelical Christian and maintain one’s intellectual integrity. I was enough of an intellectual I determined to see if I thought he was right. Fortunately we had a good library and a couple good local bookstores where I found resources in abundance, not in any religion professor’s bibliographies, that convinced me he was wrong. A disproportionate number of those books in the mid-1970s were written by British scholars or by Americans who taught at a school near Chicago called Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, so I decided to go to seminary at TEDS and, later, to doctoral study in Aberdeen, Scotland.Most seminarians complain of periodic spiritual dry times. I didn’t have that experience. I had spent the previous eight years trying tactfully to share my faith with any who would listen. I’m not sure there were any of the major challenges to Christianity that I didn’t encounter in those volatile years. I had found what I thought were some good answers to some of the questions, but seminary enabled me to find a whole lot more and, of course, to discover how much I didn’t know in other areas of theology. So I proceeded to doctoral study. I felt called to teach New Testament studies and have done so ever since, first at the undergraduate and then at the graduate level.Why am I still a Christian all these years later? First, I have to stress what I don’t mean by the word “Christian”. I don’t mean someone who has to be politically conservative. On many issues, I am not; I voted for Obama. I don’t mean someone who has to be a creationist; I believe in an old earth and theistic evolution. (One of my daughters, when she was too young to know her hilarious double-entendre, once summed up my views as succinctly as anything I’ve ever heard: if there was a big bang, there had to be a big banger!) By Christian I don’t mean someone who knows God’s will for those who haven’t been given a credible chance to respond to the gospel. As I’ve studied Christian history, I’ve learned there are about six major approaches to the question. I have some hunches, but I ultimately retreat to my convictions about God’s justice and grace. I can trust him to work it out. As for judgment more generally, I like two excerpts from C. S. Lewis in particular. First, there will be three surprises in heaven: who’s there, who’s not there, and there I’m there! Second, there are only two kinds of people in the world—those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “thy will be done.” Finally, by a Christian, I don’t mean someone who pretends to have the problem of suffering and evil solved. But again, an easy-to-remember tripartite answer goes a long way for me. Why doesn’t God do something (or do more than he has)?(1) He has done something. He sent Jesus to die for human sin, which is a major contributing factor to suffering and evil, and to begin a process of transformation in them for the better. (2) He is doing something, not least in the ways throughout church history in which Christians have helped make the world a substantially better place. (If all you’ve ever studied are the ways people have done bad things in the name of Jesus, check out a book like New Zealander and Oxfordian Nathan Hill’s What Has Christianity Ever Done for Us: How It Shaped the Modern World [2005] and discover the disproportionately large role it has played over the centuries in the disciplines of literature and law, medicine and science, art and education. Note, too, who comes forward to help the most in response to contemporary disasters and who most keeps long term relief and development programs afloat.) (3) He will do much, much more, eventually righting all the wrongs of the world. But the only way that can happen will be for him to intervene so as to abolish human freedom to rebel against him, which will mean the end of the world as we know it and the end of any opportunity for people to freely choose for him as well. He delays the end because of his mercy.As you can tell, I’ve already begun to answer my own question. The short summary answer to why I am still a Christian is because I haven’t found any other world view, ideology, religion, or –ism that makes nearly as much sense of all of the pieces of the world as I have studied and experienced it. After tragedies like 9/11 or, locally, Columbine, I marvel at those people who can say all humans are basically good. It was G. K. Chesterton who once wrote that the depravity of humanity is the most empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith! But I also marvel at those who can say that atheistic evolution can account for all of human behavior. What about the sheer altruism, utterly unmotivated by self-interest, which leads firefighters to sacrifice their lives by running back into towering infernos? Only the concept of humans made in the image of God can account for that in my estimation.In fact, if Christians have to wrestle with the problem of evil, so must everyone else. Indeed, we must all wrestle as well with the problem of good. Where do these concepts come from? What makes the most hardened atheist (usually) insist that there is something just plain wrong, perhaps even immoral, with torturing prisoners, abusing children, raping women, and with someone else gratuitously murdering them. The most advanced of apes has never disclosed any awareness of systems of morality, which is why we never arrest and imprison them, even if they kill humans. (We might euthanize them once in awhile, but not as retributive punishment, merely to protect the rest of humanity.) And we certainly don’t condemn multiple-partner animals of being unfaithful to their mates. Mark Twain (no evangelical he!) put it well: “Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.” Near the end of his life, Darwin admitted he had no satisfying explanation for human moral consciousness and reasoning.Most (not all) atheists I meet are not interested in talking about religion or ideologies that function like religion. No matter how tactful I try to be, they respond to my questions either by changing the subject or by ridiculing or getting angry with me. I do not see them having an overarching purpose that gives their life meaning and fills them with deep joy and confidence in the future despite all the trauma of the present. I do see this, though, in countless theists, especially Christians (which is not to deny that we still sin, sometimes in big ways, and that there are even a few perennial “jerks” in our midst!).Watching people die is an experience everyone should have at not too old an age in life, but many today don’t because we have hidden death by institutionalizing it. I’ve watched a number of people dying in my 53 years of life and it’s then when you find out someone’s true colors. If there is no afterlife and this life is all there is, I still can’t think of any better way to die than with the peace and quiet confidence I’ve observed in and discussed with several Christians who’ve told me they can’t explain it, it wasn’t anything they conjured up in their own strength, it was simply given to them for their last days. If there is an afterlife and the possibility of being part of the new heavens and earth as Revelation 21-22 describes, however metaphorically, why would anyone not want to be a part of it?That, in a nutshell is why I am still a Christian. Thanks for reading!MONTANA-
A man driving with thousands of bees in his car was pulled over by Montana Highway Patrol last month.
Montana Highway Patrol dispatch said they received a call of a car driving all over the road on May 22. The caller said the inside of the car had bees all over the windows and that bees were flying around inside the car.
Troopers located the car and pulled it over.
The driver was removed from the vehicle and said that the bees were harmless “Russian Honeybees.”
The car contained five hives with thousands of bees.
The state beekeeper was contacted and troopers learned that although a very unsafe way to transport bees, the driver did not need any permits to transport the bees through the state.
The driver was issued a citation for careless driving and was allowed to continue on his way.Executive Summary
The name of the business to be set up is called “Ali Musa Scribble Pen enterprise”. The business will be situated in Machester City, London. The business product is “scribble pen”. The purpose of my business plan is to enable me have a guide and a focus on the method and means of achieving the business in a very good and successful way. The business target market includes everyone, but most especially, artist and graphic designers. The mission of the business is to provide quality, standard and affordable scribble pen in order to make life easy for anyone interested in scanning a color of an object, drawing, writing, sketching an image from its original form to a paper or digital device.
The business is aim is to provide a scribble pen service to its targeted market and to ensure that the needs of its target market are met. It is not the day that s new business is set up that the business and its location becomes popular so, different marketing strategy such as advertisement, sharing of fliers, e-publications, seminars, etc. will be employed so as to make the business popular, known and for customers to easily access the product.
The strength of the business is that the Scribble pen is a very unique and special pen with special features and function. The pen can recognize and scan any color of an object (as many colors as possible), and then replicate it on a paper or digital display. The pen can even store thousands of colors, the pen is long lasting and the colour does not easily fade off.
The weakness of the scribble pen is that the pain is sold at a high price. The price of each Scribble pen is $150 and it is much higher than other type of pen in the world.
The opportunity the business offers is the fact that Scribble is a product of new technological innovation, it is a recent development of the ongoing 21st century that does not have too many competitors in the market. In addition, Scribble pen is an extremely new product In London and as such, the consumer can be accessed and approached without stress or worry. (Tien, 2016)
Threat
The threat the business poses is that of the price, the price could discourage the consumer. The price could serve as a big obstacle when promoting the product.
The awareness of the brand in Vietnamese market is very low because this product has never been launched in Vietnam before. Basically, there is really no competitor, but the weakness of the product, such as the price might become the big obstacle of this promotional campaign. (Tien, 2016)
BUSINESS DESCRIPTION AND MARKET OPPORTUNITIES
The type of business I will like to set up is a scribble pen business. The business has a very large market opportunity because the business is a new innovation and only a few knows about it. Presently, the business is not so competitive which gives room for higher sales and profit making. The existence of the business will help increase the knowledge of people about the use, function and importance of the product (scribble pen). (Scribble, 2014)
The goals and objective of the business
The goal and objective of this business is to provide users the opportunity to scan, write, draw, sketch, paint and share on devices such as surface Pro, Android Tablet, iPad and iPad Pro without stress and with ease.
Description of product
The unique features of the pen, is that the pen has two ends (a nib and a scanner), it also has five refillable cartridges that are made up of white, black, yellow, magenta and cyan colours. It can be used to draw directly on paper. The unique features of Scribble pen are the most prominent advantages of Scribble. First, you can scan any colour that you want on any items and subjects such as fruits, animals or flowers in a very simple way. You just have to point the RGB colour sensor to the objects (Franco, 2014), the colours will immediately be identified. With a huge internal memory, Scribble can identify and store the 16 million different colours (Lowe 2014). Moreover, the custom colour will be transferred easily to the electronic devices such as tablets or mobile phones, and it also can be easily combined with various popular design or graphics softwares like Photoshop or Corel draw. (Scribble 2014)
The functions that this pen provide are very unique. The pen provides users the opportunity to scan objects as well as draw/write object just the way the objects are. Whenever an object is scanned with the pen, the pen mixes the inks in its appropriate proportion so as to ensure that the object scanned is replicated and immediately, gives users the opportunity to draw the object. This special pen can work with any type of device provided that the device has a Bluetooth or a micro USB. The unique colours the pen provides makes the pen suitable for any type of digital work. This pen can discover millions of colours and thousands of colours can be stored on the pen at any point of time. The pen is specially designed for everyone. The pen will be made available in stores. Users can easily access the pen by going to nearby stores. The location of the business will be favourable to distributors (customers). The company will be located in Manchester city, London. The company will be accessible by major roads, freeways, walking depending on where customers or buyers are coming from. The company will be recruiting about a maximum of 100 staffs for a start, as the business progresses, more staffs will be recruited. These staffs will be employed and positioned based on their level of education. The company will need both skilled and unskilled labours. The business will make money by inviting investors to come and invest in the business. The price of each of the pen will be determined by the cost of production for each pen. The business will be a sole proprietorship kind of business but will give room for investors /shareholders. The business will go through all legal process, and be legally authorized.
Market Analysis and Strategy
Presently, the product is not rampant in the market. The market demand for the product is not so high because the product is a new innovation and many don’t yet know about it. The price of each Scribble pen is $150 (Scribble, 2014). Moreover, Scribble is a new brand all over the world. The latest promotional campaign of Scribble was launched only on the internet. They did not have any offline activity particularly. (Tien, 2016)
In a few years from now, the business will be competitive in nature because of the market demand for the product will be high and almost everyone would have known about it functions value. Setting up the business at a period when it is not so competitive will be of a great advantage to my company business because my business company would be able to make its name and gain its customers. For the business to grow, customers are needed. The business will get customers by advertising the product on social media such Facebook, Twitter, etc. the company will also use e-marketing to publicize the product such as ebay, the company will hold a public lecture/seminars on the product and services the business will provide and the company will sponsor events where the product can be advertised. The business target is the whole sellers who will help channel the product to the retailers and the retailers will sell to the final consumers.
DETAILED COMPETITORS ANALYSIS
The San Francisco-based startup Scribble Technology, Wenzhou forever electronic Co.,Ltd, Ningbo, yizhou totop stationary manufacturing company are major competitors. My company will continue to compete and ensure it stands out by bringing new innovation that will continue to make the business attractive to the market. The company will ensure that the product is easy to use by all users. When the market demand for the product because very high, the business will not relent, it will continue to ensure it stands out among many competitors. The business will start with unique quality and essential features which will be improved upon timely to suit technological advancement. The product will help ease the stress of drawing, designing, colouring, painting, sketching, etc. depending on the purpose the user wants it for. The business will have a better advantage |
weights do you advise?
I don't think of it in terms of ratio. You need to hit at least 10,000 steps every day of your life. That's aerobic. Resistance-wise, it depends on who you are and your goals, but I suggest doing 10 to 30 minutes three to five days a week.
Q: What is your number one way of keeping your clients motivated to continue a workout?
I don't believe you can meaningfully motivate anybody. I believe we are already motivated, and just need the simplest and most comfortable ways to achieve our goals.
Q: What do most of us get wrong when we aren't seeing results?
You're either not moving enough throughout the day, not eating clean enough, or maybe not sleeping well enough.
This article was originally published by HealthistaIt was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done.
Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.
To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. And a result of that is Places being killed off and being replaced by new “Nearby” area, as Jason outlined along with the bigger privacy changes today.
Reading over Facebook’s own post on the location changes, it wasn’t entirely clear what these changes meant for the concept of the check-in itself. But this page appears to make it a little more clear. As I read it, check-ins will remain as a part of the product, but they’ll no longer be emphasized. It seems that the hope is that people will move away from thinking of location in terms of “checking in” and instead think about it in terms of tagging your location to what ever it is you’re doing — sharing a thought, posting a picture, etc.
As the new location page makes clear, Facebook now views location usage in three main ways:
Share where you’ve been
Share where you are now
Share where you’re going
Past. Present. Future.
This is smart, as it’s something none of the other location services have really nailed yet. And now that location is being emphasized on every Facebook action (though it can easily be turned off) — and not just on mobile — a lot of people are going to use it. Location as a layer of context is about to get a big upgrade.
All of this is also smart from a location-based advertising strategy. It’s more data and more strong signals. What I’m not yet clear on is what this means for Facebook’s location-based deals service. Launched alongside Places last year, it would seem that this never really took off. And Facebook doesn’t mention it today. I’ve reached out to them to clarify.
The video on the location info page details how location tagging will work. The default on facebook.com appears to be city-level, and there’s a secondary location button to add an actual venue (which is then inserted into your status message). You can also add location to photos you’ve already posted.
The video also points out that on mobile devices there will still be a check-in button, but the functionality will be different. It apparently will only exist as a part of a status update and there will be no more big blue “Check In” button that inserts your check-in into a stream of other check-ins (and again, no more Places area itself). Instead, once you select a place, it will simply be tacked on to the end of your status message.
Location sharing will also be tied to the more direct and simplified privacy changes Facebook outlined today.
Update: Here’s what Facebook has to say on the check-in deals:
Once someone tags where they are on Facebook, they will be directed to the News Feed. If the Place is offering a Check-in Deal, the title of the deal will appear below the News Feed story. You’ll then be able to click on the deal title and will then be taken to the claim flow.
Below, find the flow diagram of how it will now work.On Sunday morning, Arab media outlets reported that Israeli forces launched a missile strike that killed Samir Kuntar, a senior Hezbollah leader, and several others in Syria.
Following the reports, Hezbollah released a characteristically bellicose statement confirming his death:
At 10:15 p.m. on Saturday December 19, Zionist warplanes struck a residential building in Jaramana city in Damascus countryside. The dean of liberated detainees from Israeli prisons, brother Mujahid Samir Kuntar was martyred along with several Syrian citizens in the strike.
While Israel did not take responsibility for the strikes, several Israeli government officials and former military officers let it be known they were not sad to learn of Kuntar’s untimely demise. “It is good that people like Samir Kuntar will not be part of our world,” one member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet told Israel Radio.
Hours after the episode, Israeli media reported that at least three missiles fired from Lebanon landed in northern Israel, causing no damages or injuries. The projectiles landed near the Israeli city of Nahariya, which is meaningful in the context of Kuntar’s violent legacy.
In 1979, Kuntar led a raid in which he and a group of attackers infiltrated Israel from Lebanon, killed an Israeli police officer, and then kidnapped Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter from their Nahariya home. As Israeli troops bore down on them, Kuntar executed the two on a beach. Haran’s two-year-old daughter also died when his wife, Smadar, accidentally smothered her while trying to stifle her cries from the crawlspace where they were hiding. (On Sunday, more than 45 years later, Smadar Haran called Kuntar’s death “historic justice.”)Microsoft Corp. could finally unleash Windows apps on the Xbox One. The company is bringing the core of Windows 10 to the Xbox One, allowing developers to bring apps and games from Windows Phone and PCs to Microsoft's latest console.
The update for the Xbox One will arrive sometime in 2015, the company said Tuesday. Microsoft said "Windows 10 will run across an incredibly broad set of devices,” some with 4-inch screens, others with 80-inch screens, as well as those without a screen that "primarily use [a] controller/gesture" interface.
Windows 10 on Xbox One could finally make good on Microsoft's promise to bring Windows apps to the console. Dell originally boasted that "every" Windows app would come to the console before its release, but Microsoft clarified that only "some" would make it. In reality, practically no Windows apps have made it to the console, so far, but Microsoft says that will change next year.
Photo: Microsoft.com
Not every Windows or Windows Phone app will be available for the Xbox One, developers will now be able to make apps that can work -- with a few caveats -- on any Microsoft device. Microsoft said it was “delivering one application platform for our developers. Whether you’re building a game or a line of business application, there will be one way to write a universal app that targets the entire family" with more details on Windows 10 coming “early in 2015.”
The way the apps will be able to work on different devices with several different hardware configurations is that Microsoft structured Windows 10 with a common core of services capable of running underneath any device, from Xbox One, Windows phones, tablets to PCs. On top of those services is a user-interface that will vary on the device’s form factor.
The apps that will be able to run on Xbox are made to run on multiple devices, said Steve Kleynhans, vice president and research analyst at Gartner. Those so-called "universal Windows" apps are the ones Microsoft previously called "metro," and while PCs will still be able to run "legacy," or traditional Windows programs like Adobe Photoshop and Excel, which won't come to the Xbox.
A number of new apps in the Windows Store are “universal” apps -- ones with a small icon indicating their cross-device support, that will eventually run on the Xbox One. Developers will still have to deal with the user interface issues that would come from porting an app made for a 5-inch touchscreen smartphone to the Xbox One, but the concept is that Microsoft will allow users to play any game on any platform: the company’s long-term goal. Microsoft is also reportedly working on allowing people to play full resolution Xbox One games on lower-powered PCs and tablets through Internet Explorer.
“Strategically, Windows 10 is the right move for Microsoft. It plays on their strengths. They’ve got a lot of talent when it comes to building operating systems, and this move allows them to focus that talent and build one product instead of several,” Kleynhans said. “This allows them to build an excellent operating system all the way through, that runs on any kind of device.”
On PCs and tablets, the new operating system will largely do what many had expected from the Redmond, Washington-based software company: The best features of Windows 8 are coming to a desktop more like Windows 7.Crepitus is an alleged Roman god of flatulence. It is unlikely that Crepitus was ever actually worshipped. The only ancient source for the claim that such a god was ever worshipped comes from Christian satire. The name Crepitus standing alone would be an inadequate and unlikely name for such a god in Latin. [ further explanation needed ] The god appears, however, in a number of important works of French literature.
The origin of the myth is somewhat obscure, as it is possible that the existence of this god is an invention by a satirist. No ancient polytheistic source appears for this deity.
The earliest mention of a god of flatulence is as an Egyptian, not a Roman deity. This comes from the hostile pen of the author of the Recognitions dubiously attributed to Pope Clement I, in which it is reported that:
alii... crepitus ventris pro numinibus habendos esse docuerunt. "others (among the Egyptians) teach that intestinal noise (Latin: crepitus ventris) ought to be regarded as a god."[1]
It is unlikely that Clement I was the author of the extant Recognitiones; these are extant chiefly in a Latin translation, presumably out of the original Greek, made by Tyrannius Rufinus in the late fourth or early fifth century. The passage of Pseudo-Clement stands within a Western Christian tradition of satire against the variety of minor deities worshipped by classical pagans; similar passages exist in The City of God by Saint Augustine of Hippo, and Tertullian's Ad Nationes.[2]
Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, mentions a god Crepitus Ventris among a variety of other deities allegedly worshipped in classical antiquity:
Lilius Giraldus repeats many of her ceremonies: all affections of the mind were heretofore accounted gods, love, and sorrow, virtue, honour, liberty, contumely, impudency, had their temples, tempests, seasons, Crepitus Ventris, dea Vacuna, dea Cloacina, there was a goddess of idleness, a goddess of the draught, or jakes, Prema, Premunda, Priapus, bawdy gods, and gods for all offices.[3]
Burton cites a work called Syntagma de Diis ("A Compendium of the Gods") by Lilius Giraldus as his source for the existence of such a god; by this reference, Burton probably meant Giraldus' Historia de diis gentium ("History of the Pagan Gods"); but because Burton wrote in what he called an "extemporean" style, quicquid in buccam venit ("whatever came into his head"),[4] Burton's quotations and references are not always reliable.[5] Because of Burton's mixed Latin and English style, this passage may not say that there was a god named "Crepitus Ventris", (Latin for "intestinal noise"), but only that there was a god of intestinal noise. The Latin word crepitus, moreover, did not exclusively mean the sound generated by intestinal gas; it referred to squeaks, groans, knocks, and any nondescript noise in general. In The City of God, Augustine elsewhere refers to crepitus cymbalorum, the clang of cymbals.[6] Medical jargon gives the name crepitus to the creaking or popping noises made by the joints. The Latin word for "to fart" is pēdere.[7]
Voltaire, in a passage of his Philosophical Dictionary devoted to changing conceptions of deity, alludes to a number of real or alleged Roman deities of a less exalted status:
La déesse des tétons, dea Rumilia; la déesse de l’action du mariage, dea Pertunda; le dieu de la chaise percée, deus Stercutius; le dieu Pet, deus Crepitus, ne sont pas assurément bien vénérables... Il est sûr que deus Crepitus, le dieu Pet, ne donnait pas la même idée que deus divum et hominum sator, la source des dieux et des hommes. "The goddess of breasts, dea Rumilia; the goddess of the marital act, dea Pertunda; the god of the toilet, deus Stercutius; the god Fart, deus Crepitus, were surely not quite objects of reverence... It is certain that deus Crepitus, the god Fart, did not give the same sort of idea as deus divum et hominum sator, the creator of gods and men." — "Polytheism", entry in the Philosophical Dictionary of Voltaire.[8]
Through these passages, the noun Crepitus moves from a common noun to a proper noun. Previous authorities had only claimed that the ancient polytheists, whether Egyptian or Roman, worshipped a god of intestinal noises. Perhaps in Burton's mention, and certainly in Voltaire, Crepitus is the name of a god of flatulence.Thousands of bands have made strong debuts, and many of those have made good second and third records — it's harder, but not unusual. It's truly rare to make your 10th album exciting and relevant more than 20 years on. For all that, I'd say Wilco is an American legend.
Though Wilco is basically a conventional rock band in form — guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, one lead songwriter — it defies expectations in so many other ways. In 2001, the group put an entire new album (the instant classic Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) online for all to hear; it's one thing to do that in 2015, as Wilco did with Star Wars, but it was virtually unheard-of in 2001.
This is a deeply imaginative band, with evocative imagery and relatable storytelling; drummer Glenn Kotche is one of the best around, while Nels Cline's crazy, textured guitar layers add adventure to everything he touches. I could go on, but let's just say that breaking my rule of never bringing a band back to the Tiny Desk — Wilco performed here back in 2011 — was easy once I heard Star Wars.
Wilco opened this set with "The Joke Explained" from that album, but then dug deep into its catalog, performing 1996's "Misunderstood" and two songs from the 1999 pop masterpiece Summerteeth. I'm thinking we make a date: When Wilco turns 25 in a few years, let's break more rules and bring back their magic once more.
Star Wars is available now. (iTunes) (Amazon)
Set List
"The Joke Explained"
"Misunderstood"
"I'm Always In Love"
"Shot In The Arm"
Credits
Producers: Bob Boilen, Niki Walker; Audio Engineer: Josh Rogosin; Videographers: Niki Walker, Kara Frame, Becky Lettenberger; Production Assistant: Ben de la Cruz; Photo: Brandon Chew/NPR.
For more Tiny Desk concerts, subscribe to our podcast.WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon said Wednesday it has told family members of the four U.S. soldiers killed last month in Niger that its investigation won’t be finished until at least January.
In a brief written statement, the Pentagon said Army officials contacted the families this week to give them an idea of when to expect answers to the many questions that have arisen since the soldiers were killed in an ambush Oct. 4.
Among the unanswered questions is whether the soldiers’ commando unit was carrying out its assigned mission at the time it was ambushed about 200 kilometers (120 miles) north of Niamey, by what officials believe was a relatively new offshoot of the Islamic State group that calls itself Islamic State in the Sahel. Some reports have indicated the commando unit, which was operating with a larger team of Nigerien soldiers, might have been retasked at some point.
Also unclear is why one of the four Americans killed became separated from the others and why his body was not found until two days later. Others have raised questions about the adequacy of intelligence information available to the soldiers prior to the start of their mission.
The families were told the investigation is expected to be finished in January but could go longer.
An Army investigation team will travel to numerous locations in the U.S., Africa and Europe to gather information. The team is led by Army Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier, the chief of staff at U.S. Africa Command.
The four killed were Staff Sgt. Bryan C. Black, Staff Sgt. Jeremiah W. Johnson, Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright and Sgt. La David T. Johnson.49ers beat writer Matt Barrows put together a post today indicating that cornerback Phillip Adams is ahead of schedule in rehab as he looks to rebound from his brutal ankle injury last season. Adams broke his left ankle and appeared doomed to miss a sizable chunk of offseason training. As Barrows points out, a seventh round pick cannot afford to miss much practice or he quickly becomes "out of sight, out of mind."
Before the injury, Phillip Adams had shown a fair amount of promise. He spent a sizable chunk of his time on special teams, but from what I can remember he looked rather solid when he received opportunities in the secondary. He's got a lot of work to do to work his way into consistent playing time. However, if he can get as close to 100% healthy as possible by the time the lockout ends, he could be in a position to make a name for himself in the the Vic Fangio defense.
Given the 49ers concerns in the secondary, it will be all hands on deck once training camp actually begins. The 49ers drafted two cornerbacks in this year's draft: Chris Culliver in the third round and Curtis Holcomb in the seventh round. While we wait to see what the 49ers might or might not do in free agency, we can still look at the corners currently in place.
Prior to the draft, the top four corners on the team were Nate Clements, Shawntae Spencer, Tarell Brown, and Will James. When training camp gets going, competition will likely include some of all of those four (pending Clements' contract, and James' free agent status) along with Culliver, Holcomb, Adams, and Tramaine Brock. The question is what kind of playing time the latter four will be competing for as compared to the first four.
Depending on how free agency plays out, I'd imagine the 49ers probably let Will James walk. However, that still leaves an interesting battle for the third and fourth cornerback positions. Holcomb's best roster chance right now would likely be on special teams. If Adams is sufficiently healthy by the start of training camp his one year of playing time will give him a sizable advantage over Holcomb, even with the new Fangio defense.
How do you think the depth chart emerges at the cornerback position? I realize several significant roster changes could very well happen between now and training camp. Nonetheless I'm curious how you at least rank these corners in terms of expected playing time as the roster currently stands.This post comes from Allison Miller, an avid birder and raptor technician at the Avian Reconditioning Center in Apopka, FL. Allison was lucky enough to travel to Tokyo recently, and has these bird hotspots to share with us.
I recently found myself in Tokyo for a week, and unlike my previous visits to the city, I spent a lot of time looking at birds. I’m a much bigger bird nerd than I used to be – before, I only really noticed Tokyo birds enough to note that the crows were huge (they still are).
Before arriving, I Googled around for bird watching places in Tokyo, and couldn’t find many sites in English, although there were a lot of helpful forum posts. As it turned out, almost any green space in Tokyo was host to many varieties of birds, and since there’s no shortage of public parks in the city, I saw new birds almost everywhere I went.
I didn’t bring my DSLR on the trip, as I was trying to keep luggage light, so the pictures are a little lacking, but I still have eBird. Even though I was abroad, my OCD habit of list keeping forced me to drag my travel-weary body home and enter a full list of birds seen into my laptop at the end of each day. So I have a good written record of my trip, even if it’s somewhat lacking in visual aids.
So, after a week beating street in Tokyo and surrounds, here are a few of my favorite spots for bird watching.
Ueno Park – Central to Tokyo, and accessible by the Ueno subway station, this is a good option if you only have an hour or two to spare. I stopped here after arriving on the train from Narita, and quickly picked up Japanese White-eye, Japanese Tit, Oriental Turtle-dove, Large-billed Crow (the aforementioned massive corvid), and the Brown-eared Bulbul, which I would soon tire of, as they were in virtually every tree, screaming their fool heads off.
Around Shinobazu Lake, on the south end of the park, I found both Great and Japanese Cormorants, as well as a man feeding a huge mass of Eurasian Tree Sparrows and ducks, mostly Mallards, Northern Pintail, and Eastern Spot-billed Ducks. Hiding in the reeds were some Northern Shovelers, Common Pochards, and Eurasian Coots.
There were also a bunch of Tufted Ducks snoozing in the lake with some Black-headed Gulls, bobbing about like corks in the lake, and a Little Egret hunting on the shore. Not bad for a single afternoon.
Yoyogi Park – near the Harajuku, or Meiji-jingu Mae stations, Yoyogi is a great place to people watch, in addition to the birds, in one visit, I saw a girl group practicing their dance moves, a yoga class, and a bunch of pompadour-clad rock stars jamming out on their boom box.
Despite all the activity, there’s no shortage of birds. The usual suspects are present all over the park – Tree Sparrows, Large-billed Crows, Brown-eared Bulbuls, Rock Doves, and Eurasian Spot-billed Ducks in the pond.
But the real gem of Yoyogi-Koen is the large fenced in Bird Sanctuary on the eastern corner. While people can’t physically enter the sanctuary, you can look over the short fence into the trees, where a myriad of smaller birds live. In one visit, I saw several Japanese White-eyes, both Varied & Japanese Tits, a Dusky Thrush, Grey & White Wagtails, a Pygmy Woodpecker, and several colorful Bramblings.
You probably won’t have the place to yourself though – at any one time, there were roughly 7-10 other birders with their spotting scopes and massive lenses, all good-naturedly jostling for the best views of the avian inhabitants. They also seem to have trained a few Varied Tits to take seeds out of your hands. Some of the more daring birds were darting from person to person, collecting treats.
Shinjuku Park National Garden – I was unfortunate to visit this park in Shinjuku on a day that turned into a rainy mess, but the Japanese Tits and Eurasian Tree Sparrows were out in force – as well as a bunch of Tufted & Eastern Spot-billed Ducks, and a few Common Pochards, among the more common domestic Mallards. I also found a Common Kingfisher hunting in the rain, near the Japanese garden, and a Little Grebe hunting not far away.
Hibiya Park – While this wouldn’t be considered the best birding ever, Hibiya-koen is as central to Tokyo as you can get. A quick walk through this small park near the Imperial Palace and Tokyo Station yielded Mallards, Tufted & Eastern Spot-billed Ducks, White Wagtails, a plethora of Brown-eared Bulbuls, Rock Doves, Large-billed Crows and Tree Sparrows everywhere you look, as well as a pleasant pond to sit and have lunch beside.
Mt. Takao – About 45 minutes outside Tokyo, a short hike up this mountain from the Takao-san Guchi train station makes a good day trip, if you’re itching to get out of the city and into some real woods. I say hike, but it’s really a stroll up an inclined paved path, and you can even take a tram half-way up, so it’s not exactly strenuous. It did snow at the top though, so dress warmly in the winter, even if it’s mild at the bottom.
My noisy friends, the Brown-eared Bulbuls were everywhere here too, apparently undaunted by the cold, as well as Japanese White-eyes, and Large-billed Crows. Best of all, I found four kinds of Tits here – Japanese, Varied, Coal and two Long-Tailed Tits. I also found four Pygmy Woodpeckers here, and I’m sure there were many more.
Also, Varied Tits are apparently fearless – I set my Onigiri (rice ball) lunch down on a wooden bench and one of the little devils was perched on top, digging rice out of it before I could blink.
Kasai Rinkai Park – Across the bay from Tokyo Disney, this park – half grassy woods, and half wetlands – was probably the best birding I found in Tokyo, and the one spot I really wish I could have spent more time in.
It’s easily accessible from central Tokyo, Kasai-Rinkai Koen is just a few stops away from Tokyo Station on the JR Keiyo line. I heard some people talking about how they got there at the crack of dawn (I admire their stamina) and saw a slew of raptors, none of which I managed to spot while I was there. Although you can’t enter the wetlands area, which is left as natural habitat, you can walk out on a long spit of rocky land nearby, and look over with binoculars or a spotting scope.
This was the best place I’d found for the Japanese Cormorant, and the Great Cormorant was there too. There were probably 300 Greater Scaup rafting in the bay in early December – I thought they were debris at first, there were so many.
Closer to hand, there were Eastern Spot-billed Ducks, Common Pochards, and Eurasian Wigeons. Around the wetlands there were Little, Eared, and Great-crested Grebes, Little Egrets, and a Grey Heron. There were also peeps along the rocky shore, including Dunlin and Common Sandpipers. I also found White-cheeked Starlings here, and a mess of Black-headed Gulls. In addition to the usual suspects – Tree Sparrows and Brown-eared Bulbuls – the Japanese Wagtails seemed to be everywhere, as well as their White Wagtail buddies.
There’s no shortage of good birding in Tokyo – most of the parks are centrally located, and easily accessible by public transportation. Mt. Takao and Kasai-Rinkai Koen would be better done has half-day or full day trips, but wherever you end up, you should be able to find some birds to keep you busy.Following a previous Dutch court ruling that Apple cannot provide refurbished products as warranty replacements, a new ruling has outlawed ‘remanufactured’ units also. Apple must, the court found, supply brand new models exactly as it would to a paying customer …
NordVPN
Following the ban on issuing refurbished products in the country, Apple switched to what it called ‘remanufactured’ units. The company said that these used the same manufacturing and inspection standards as brand new ones, and therefore were different to refurbished products.
A woman offered a remanufactured iPad as a warranty replacement rejected this argument and took the company to court, reports Tweakers.
In 2015, the woman bought an iPad Air 2 and took extra warranty through Apple Care. After four months, the tablet experienced Wi-Fi problems, a problem Apple could not fix. The manufacturer provided a remanufactured model, but the woman did not like it.
The judge ruled that the woman was entitled to a brand new replacement, and that Apple would be fined €100 for each day that the woman was left without that replacement.
Apple’s refurbished products are ones which have been sold and later returned to the company. They are returned to as-new standard, and given the same warranty as brand new devices. In addition to being used for warranty replacements, they are also made available for sale at a typical discount of around 14-15%.
Remanufactured products are newly-manufactured but may include used parts harvested from broken models. These are not made available for sale, says the company, but used only as warranty replacements.
Photo: iFixitThe Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) is a 3,000-mile (4,800 km) inland waterway along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of the United States, running from Boston, Massachusetts, southward along the Atlantic Seaboard and around the southern tip of Florida, then following the Gulf Coast to Brownsville, Texas. Some sections of the waterway consist of natural inlets, saltwater rivers, bays, and sounds, while others are artificial canals. It provides a navigable route along its length without many of the hazards of travel on the open sea.
Context and early history [ edit ]
The shipping hazards and safe havens of the Atlantic coast have been well known and appreciated since colonial times, and considered of great commercial, communication, and military importance to both the colonial power and the newly established, independent United States. The physical features of the eastern coast were advantageous for intracoastal development, resulting from erosion and deposition of sediment over its geologic history, but also enhanced and redistributed by the action of the Atlantic Ocean currents along it.
Since the coastline represented the national border and commerce of the time was chiefly by water, the fledgling US government established a degree of national control over it. Inland transportation to supply the coasting trade at the time was less known and virtually undeveloped, but when new lands and their favorable river systems were added in 1787, a radically new and free national policy was established for their development and transportation use.[1]
Over time, internal improvements of natural coastal and inland waterways would develop into the Great Loop, which allows for waterborne circumnavigation of the eastern continental United States, using minimal ocean travel, with the Intracoastal Waterway providing its eastern end.
Initial suggestions [ edit ]
The improvement of the country's natural transportation routes was a major concern for all geographic regions and from a national perspective of building and binding the nation. These improvements were also a source of political division about where and how improvements should be developed, who should pay, and who should perform the work.
In 1808, the first federal government report on existing, possible, and likely avenues of transportation improvement was presented; it included much of the distance where the ICW now traverses the Atlantic coast. In 1802, at the request of the Senate, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin presented an overall plan for future transportation developments of national importance and scope.
Along with inland east–west improvements, Gallatin's north–south improvements included the following:[2]
While Gallatin discussed the details of engineering, construction, and costs, including the national benefits to accrue from lowered transportation costs between domestic and international markets, his full $20 million, 10-year plan was never approved. That is not to say his plan was never implemented, however, for with experience in the War of 1812 shortly thereafter and the attendant British blockade, the continued need for such facility was soon highlighted.
Since Gallatin had based his proposals on the known advantageous natural geographic features of the country, many of his proposals became the locations of navigation improvements that were surveyed, authorized, and constructed starting with the 1824 General Survey Act and the first of many pieces of rivers and harbors legislation,[3] as well by individual state-built improvements.
Since these 1824 acts, the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) has responsibility for navigation waterway improvements and maintenance. All four proposed sections of Gallatin's intracoastal plan were eventually built; the Delaware and Raritan Canal was later abandoned for a better alternative, but the Cape Cod Canal remains in operation, and the Delaware and the Dismal Swamp portions still form part of the larger present-day Intracoastal Waterway.
19th-century growth [ edit ]
Starting in 1826, Congress authorized the first survey for an inland canal between the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and during early developments, the growth of steam power to propel water, land, and sea transportation. Over time, additional portions of other coastal improvements were authorized for development, including the Houston Ship Channel and the Delaware River in 1872.[4] Following the Civil War, developments to the waterway system suffered as government funding moved increasingly from navigation to railroads; over time this resulted in anti-competitive pricing and acquisition practices by railroads over water transportation, but also in insufficient haulage capacity to move the required freight to the coasts. These conditions were investigated, accompanied by considered conclusions and recommendations, as early 1873 by the Report of Windom Select Committee from the Senate's Select Committee on Transportation Routes to the Seaboard,[2] but their plans and recommendations "received less attention than was anticipated, of course by reason of the rapid growth of interest in railways."[2] While some policy corrections were implemented over the ensuing 30 years, continued insufficient capacity of railroad transportation became apparent following the harvest of 1906.[2]
In the River and Harbors Appropriations Acts of 1882 and 1884, Congress signaled its intent to improve waterways to benefit the nation by promoting competition among transportation modes. The 1882 act was the first act of Congress to combine appropriations for development of the nation's waterways with a reaffirmation of the policy of freedom from tolls and other user charges,[4] first stated in 1787; it was passed over President Chester Arthur's veto, who considered it wasteful spending for the government's growing federal surplus.[5] In 1887, the Interstate Commerce Act established federal regulation of railroads; Congress continued to promote freedom from tolls or special taxes on waterways.[4] In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies, but the federal government used it minimally until Theodore Roosevelt's presidency more than 10 years later.
20th-century developments [ edit ]
The invention of the diesel engine in 1892 eventually led to the conversion of fuels for transportation from coal and steam to diesel and the internal combustion engine. This was greatly enhanced by World War I military uses and the beginning of a new age of fuel usage and consumption. The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1909 set national policy for an intracoastal waterway from Boston to the Rio Grande,[4] and the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1910 authorized a 9-by-100-foot (2.7 m × 30.5 m) channel on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway between the Apalachicola River and St. Andrews Bay, Florida, as well as a study of the most efficient means to move cargo. Between 1910 and 1914, navigation channels were deepened, and the screw propeller proved efficient for improved steering and flanking qualities.[4] Also during this period the Panama Canal Act was passed, in 1911; it proved key to the revival of waterway transportation in the United States, because the opening of Panama Canal in 1914 allowed coastal shipping to extend to the US west coast for the first time. The law also prohibited railroads from owning, controlling, or operating a water carrier through the canal and led to succeeding legislation that eliminated monopoly of transportation modes by railroads. The country's World War I experience demonstrated the need for bulk cargo transportation, with Congress establishing the Federal Barge Lines and spurring development of cheaper ways to transport farm commodities, including the first use of standardized freight barges.[4]
In 1924, Congress incorporated the Inland Waterways Corporation, generally regarded as the beginning of modern water carrier operations, and in 1925 it authorized construction of the Louisiana and Texas Intracoastal Waterway, as well as surveys east of New Orleans to Apalachicola Bay; this was the first legislation to treat the ICW as a continuous whole.[4] The River and Harbor Act of January 21, 1927, passed by Congress, authorized the portion of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, using the route planned out by the Jacksonville District of the Corps of Engineers.[6] In 1936 the continuous 9 ft × 100 ft (2.7 m × 30.5 m) channel was completed between the Apalachicola River and New Orleans. During World War II, the need for efficient transportation of bulk materials within the continental United States was well demonstrated after German submarines sank numerous merchant ships off the East Coast. By 1942, the 9 ft × 100 ft (2.7 m × 30.5 m) ICW channel was completed between New Orleans and Corpus Christi.
Today, federal law provides for the waterway to be maintained at a minimum depth of 12 feet (3.7 m) for most of its length, but inadequate funding has prevented that.[citation needed] |
visit http://www.nintendo.com/wiiu.I wanted to know, was she going to authorize us to confirm we had an investigation? And she said, yes, but dont call it that, call it a matter. And I said, why would I do that? And she said, just call it a matter. And, again, you look back in hindsight, you think should I have resisted harder? I just said, all right, it isnt worth this isnt a hill worth dying on.
Click Image to Enlarge FBI via Wikipedia
* * *
Those are the words that stick in our mind from Director Comeys testimony today before the Senate. The former top G-man was speaking about how Attorney General Lynch had tried to get him to put the gloss on the investigation of Secretary of State Clinton. Mr. Comey sensed his boss was wrong but decided not to fight her on the matter.
So on what hill is Mr. Comey prepared to make a stand? Its impossible to tell from his testimony today. He was all over the map. He seemed shocked when President Trump said he hoped he could let go of General Flynn investigation go, but then he merely wrote a memo to the file. He didnt want to die on that hill either, it seems, at least not until he was fired.
Yet it strikes us that there is a hill worth dying on here and that is the Everest of democracy. By our lights, it is President Trump who holds the high ridge of the Constitution. The thing to remember about the Russian question is that Mr. Trump took it to the people in an election. He campaigned for a mandate to reach out to Moscow, and the voters gave him one.
Once Mr. Trump was president, he had every right to ask or even instruct the director of the FBI to go easy on any one of the presidents operatives pursuing that policy, including General Flynn. It is no doubt true that Mr. Trump has no right to shut down an investigation for corrupt reasons, a point noted by two op-ed contributors to the New York Times.
Yet as near as we can tell from Mr. Comeys testimony, the President, after expressing his hopes, never impeded any investigation of General Flynn or anyone else. And if he had, weve noted before, the right place to take the case would have been to the House of Representatives, to which was granted the sole power of impeachment.
By all accounts, it seems that Mr. Trump himself was not the target of the investigation. It was a counter-intelligence matter. But there is no reason at all to suppose that Mr. Comey is more patriotic than Mr. Trump, who is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. In the event, it wasnt Mr. Comey who put paid to General Flynns career.
That was Mr. Trump himself, because as he told a press conference in February the general didnt tell the vice president of the United States the facts. And then he didnt remember. And that just wasnt acceptable to me. Mr. Trump was signaling, early in his administration, the he would insist on honesty, a point that has gained scant appreciation in the Democratic press.
The President, in short, is the one who has acted more forthrightly. By Mr. Comeys own account, the President has the right to fire an FBI director for any reason, or no reason at all. Mr. Comey himself wrote that in a letter to his own staff after he was fired. At the time he claimed he was not going to spend time on the decision or the way it was executed.
It was an admirable position, but Mr. Comey didnt stick to it. At one point he seemed to suggest that the reason Congress established a 10-year term for the FBI director is so that he is not looking over his shoulder. He talked about the blindfold of Justice. Yet Mr. Comey had already emerged as the most political FBI director in history, having concluded long ago that honestly characterizing his investigation of Mrs. Clinton wasnt a hill worth his risking his career.About
Bacchanal Pepper Sauce brings together some of the things I believe in and am completely obsessed with - My love of pepper, working in my Brooklyn community, and amazingly Flavorful Food! Words can’t express how happy I am to be making something that makes people so excited when they eat it!
Bacchanal Pepper Sauce was honored to have been interviewed by FoodCurated.com view video below then read all about this sweet heat!! #share #support #love
The Project
Thank you so much for joining me! I am so excited to launch Bacchanal Pepper sauce on Kickstarter! Bacchanal Pepper Sauce is Brooklyn Made, Caribbean Hot and so much more than just a hot sauce! It’s 100% Natural, Vegan, Uniquely Amazing, Fiery and made with Joy in small batches. The days of bland, super vinegary, salty, hot sauces or extremely mustard based pepper sauces are a thing of the past.
What makes this sauce different is its distinct ability to not only bring heat but enhance the flavor of every dish! We achieve this by our unique blend of wonderful ingredients such as scotch bonnet peppers, habanero chilies, pineapple, papaya, and tamarind. If you love heat and can’t live without flavor this is the pepper sauce for you!
The business has been incorporated, the labels have been designed and we’ve completed our initial run of batches to our revelers (in case you're wondering we call our customers and Bacchanal Pepper Sauce supporters revelers). Now it’s time for expansion! We want to get Bacchanal Pepper Sauce out to more revelers. That means getting it into local Brooklyn specialty stores and markets. Your funds and support will get us from launch to expansion with the ability to get nifty nutritional labels, equipment for more efficient bottling, consistent access to our commercial kitchen and tweaks in our current packaging.
Remember if we do not meet the goal 100% we get none of the money. Without achieving the full $8000 we get nothing. Kickstarter is an all hands on deck deal, so once you choose your amount and fund the project pass along the details to the next pepper lover, food aficionado, or small business supporter and keep the Bacchanal going! facebook.com/bacchanalsauce
The Story
I absolutely love food, it’s one of the best reasons to leave the house! I enjoy exploring Brooklyn, cooking, baking and creating new and exciting recipes. I enter food competitions any chance I get and will take any opportunity to organize a pot luck or impromptu cook-up! It was in May of 2012 at the Googa Mooga hot sauce contest presented by Matt Timms http://www.googamooga.com/hot-sauce-takedown/ in Prospect Park where Bacchanal Sauce was first unveiled. It placed in the people’s choice category and people have been asking for it ever since.
I am always amazed when someone uses it in a way that I haven’t even thought of. We truly believe the list of dishes that shine once you pour on this liquid gold is limitless. Personally I adore it on seafood, roasted vegetables, tacos, grilled steak, guacamole and sandwiches! My fave is a juicy roasted chicken sandwich on crusty bread with spinach, sharp cheddar, and creamy mayo, liberally topped with Bacchanal pepper sauce as the wonderful highlight! Can you say heaven? Heaven.
Quotes from Bacchanal Pepper Sauce Revelers:
•“Your Bacchanal Sauce is the best-est! …hot and full of bacchanal - it
is flavorful! I need big bottles - please?!”
• “Had it with home made burgers! Very good. Loved the scotch bonnet,
habenero combination! Nice flavor, pleasant heat!”
• One of the best I've had in a long time :)…Wow. It's so so so good, and
on everything too!
• “It was great! I loved it on my baked pork chop and salad.”
• “…I made a fabulous steak and potatoes using your pepper sauce
tonight! it was delicious, great job!”
Fuzzy pic of me doling out some serious sauce! Heat+Flavor = Bacchanal Pepper Sauce
• “I gave one of the bottles to a friend from work. He loved it!”BARCELONA
"Siempre cae muy ligero, apenas puedes tocarlo. Neymar es el actor más grande del fútbol". El defensa sueco del Celtic Mikael Lustig no se ha mordido la lengua a la hora de calificar al delantero brasileño del Barcelona, con el que no mantiene precisamente una buena relación.
El enfrentamiento entre ambos se remonta al Celtic-Barcelona de la fase de grupos de la Champions el 23 de noviembre de 2016, y que acabó con triunfo azulgrana por 0-2.
Aquella noche de Celtic Park, Lustig y Neymar mantuvieron una dura batalla durante todo el partido -intercambio de escupitajos incluido- que acabó con tarjeta amarilla para ambos en la segunda parte.
Las palabras del lateral derecho del Celtic se han producido durante la concentración de la selección sueca, donde los periodistas le han pedido que eligiera al actor más ruin del deporte. Y Lustig no ha dudado al responder: "Neymar. Siempre cae muy ligero, apenas puedes tocarlo. Es el actor más grande del fútbol", afirmó.
Pese a sus duras críticas contra el brasileño, el sueco explicó que "Neymar es mejor que yo, por lo que para competir intentas estar cerca y, a veces, necesitas hacer trucos y meterte en su cabeza para adivinar lo que hará".
Neymar PSG
Delantero
BrasilIn a slightly ironic twist for the National Security Agency, Reuters reports that as many as 25 members of its staff have been "removed from their assignments" because they shared their private passwords with Edward Snowden while he worked there. A number of government offices are currently trying to find out just how Snowden got hold of so much confidential data, and sources close to those investigations now claim that the PRISM whistleblower used his position as a systems admin to dupe colleagues into handing over their passwords. It's not clear whether the NSA staff involved in the breach have been fired or re-assigned, but if the allegations are true then there are likely to be some red faces at the agency once the various investigations reach their conclusions, because such a large-scale failure by supposedly highly-trained staff would implicate the NSA's systems and practices, rather than just a few naive individuals.John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and Arizona senator, said he plans to endorse his party's nominee for president in 2016, even if it's Donald Trump.
"I'm a loyal Republican," McCain said in an interview with CBS News Chief White House Correspondent Major Garrett. "I believe the best way to shape the agenda of the next president of the United States is to be part of the team and make my influence felt as strongly as possible."
John McCain on the GOP race
"For me to walk away from the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan would be I think an abrogation of my responsibilities to the voters," he added.
Garrett asked McCain whether Trump, the businessman who has a substantial lead over the other 2016 candidates in national polls, represents the same party as his two predecessors McCain named.
After a pause, McCain responded, "I think he wants to."
"I disagree with him on a number of the statements and positions that he's taken, obviously. But if that's the verdict of the Republican Party and the majority of Americans, then I will do everything I can to help that president whether it be Trump or whoever because we are in a state of crises the likes of which we have not seen."
Republican candidates battle for position in early voting states
He said he believes he can bring "advice and counsel" to the next president because of his experience.
McCain said that Trump taps into "anger" and "frustration" among the electorate, especially among voters who haven't seen significant improvements in their lives. Those voters, he said, believe Republicans leaders in Washington have contributed to the gridlock, but he argued that's only valid to a degree.
He pointed to the bills that have passed recently, including a federal education overhaul, a budget deal and defense authorization bill. Plus, he said, the Republicans in the House and Senate finally put a bill to repeal Obamacare on the President Obama's desk.
"It takes a while to turn around people's views. But Americans are frustrated and here's a person who says he's going to make America great again. Here's a person on the other side that's giving Hillary Clinton a much bigger fight than we ever anticipated that's saying take out Wall Street. They're the bad people. I mean, that strikes a chord with Americans as well," he said, referring to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, who is challenging Clinton for the Democratic nomination.Most of our greatest politicians were parliamentarians like AK Fazlul Huq, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Dhirendranath Datta, Ataur Rahman Khan, not to mention Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Tajuddin Ahmad, Syed Nazrul Islam, M Mansur Ali and many others. As a son of a parliamentarian, I remember vividly the pride with which my father, Abul Mansur Ahmad, spoke about his being a member of this august body which was located in Karachi of what was then West Pakistan. I have vague memories of the weeks and months of preparation he would subject himself to before a session would start and the speeches and the bills he would submit or support or oppose in any particular session. In those days there was a general awe about members of parliament, for they were the lawmakers. It is on them that the future direction of the country and its people would come from. Speeches made in parliament became documents of history to be treasured by the succeeding generations to read and learn from.
Much before Bangalees became parliamentarians, they became teachers. In fact, historically Bangalee culture, literature and folklore revered teachers more than the people of any other profession. It was the dream of most of the good students to grow up to be a teacher as it was a glorified profession, if not the most glorified of all. It was an honour to be called a teacher. He or she (though there were very few female teachers) would be a part of every society, club or group that would be formed for any social activity. In almost every village, a teacher would be the natural leader of that community to whom everybody would turn to for guidance on every conceivable issue -- from what to plant this season to what medicine to take for any ailment to how to solve problems with relatives. He was the centre of his community.
In our own student life, a teacher was a man of reverence and respect. Later as we passed out of the university, my friends who were far brighter and more competent than myself all went on to become teachers either here or abroad. I recall feeling somewhat jealous hearing stories of how their former students would leave everything aside to rush to help them in any way they could and would actually feel privileged for being able to do so.
But these are stories of old times.
Now we have a new one about the two above-mentioned professions that we once revered so much. A member of the current parliament forced a serving teacher (headteacher) to repeatedly “stand and squat holding his ears with his two hands” (kan dhorey uth bosh kora) till he was too tired to continue, and fell down. Only a Bangalee can comprehend the severity of this punishment. Culturally, there cannot be a more humiliating act that one can be forced to perform in public. This is the most shameful, disrespectful and humiliating punishment that one can subject another to. This is what is done when we want to rob a person of all his sense of dignity and self respect. (This can only be compared to the notion of “losing face” in Japanese, Korean or other cultures).
It is more so for a teacher. What is a teacher if he does not command respect of his pupils? How can he face his students unless there is a relationship of dignity with those he teaches? What the MP has done is destroy forever this teacher's capacity to face his students with self respect. He may be forced to continue in his job because of pecuniary considerations but his life as a teacher is all but destroyed.
A natural question that arises is does the MP have a right to do what he did? Even the most hardened of criminals have a right to a due process of law before being punished. Here, the teacher was meted out a punishment -- the cruelest that can be for a teacher -- by a public representative who should have known well what impact such an act is likely to have on a teacher. That is of course if he has enough sensitivity to appreciate the status of a teacher.
The MP's explanation is equally astounding. He said he had to humiliate the teacher to “save his life”. The choice, according to him, was between the teacher's dignity and life. How credible is the MP's claim? Other teachers of the school have stated that the headteacher did not say anything of the sort that the MP used as an excuse to do what he did. The imam of the nearest mosque asserted that he did not recognise the accusers, meaning these people may well be from outside the locality.
As far as we have been able to collect, the story is this: The teacher punished a student on May 8 and made a comment critical of Islam, which the teacher outright denies. The next day, the boy's family lodged a verbal complaint with the school managing committee, saying the teacher beat up their son. There was no mention of the alleged derogatory comments about Islam. On May 12, the family filed a written complaint over the alleged beating. Again, there was no mention of any remark about Islam.
The public shaming of the teacher came on May 13, from out of the blue. As if that was not enough, it now emerges that the school managing committee made a unanimous decision on the very day to suspend the teacher on grounds of torturing students, receiving money in the name of teachers' appointment, making derogatory comments about Islam and taking leave without permission. Interestingly, the suspension order was signed only on May 16 and it became public yesterday.
But why now? And on what basis? We have no knowledge that this teacher was served with any notice to explain the allegations brought against him. Why didn't the managing committee suspend him, say, a month ago or two months ago? Is the managing committee trying to save someone now that an MP and his men are drawing widespread criticism for humiliating the teacher?
We call on the education ministry to launch a thorough investigation of the whole matter.
There are four issues that concern us: the mysterious suspension of the teacher, the highhandedness of the MP, the public humiliation of a teacher, and finally the use of religion to instigate mob anger against a member of a minority community leading to a situation where the MP had to humiliate him “to save him”. While the first three must be addressed adequately, it is the fourth that warrants urgent attention and firm action.
To us, it is a clear case of a motivated group spreading a dangerous rumour of an alleged insult to religion to create a mob frenzy to force a member of another religion to plead for mercy to save his life. If we take the MP's claim at face value, then the mob was ready to kill the teacher for a so-called “insult” that, as far as we can tell, never occurred.
Can we imagine the implication of this incident for all the teachers of minority communities in all the schools in the country? This is a deliberate attempt to weaken communal harmony and create fear in the minds of religious minorities. All of us, especially the ruling party and its government, must see the wider implications of such acts and act urgently and concertedly. Just saying that all these are “isolated incidents” can only isolate us from the danger that we may be facing.1925 College Football National Championship
Pictured above is Alabama halfback Johnny Mack Brown about to break free for a long gain against Washington in the Rose Bowl. Alabama won a great game 20-19 to finish 10-0 and lay claim to the school's first mythical national championship (MNC). They are the consensus choice for MNC of 1925 among retroactive selectors.
: Here is how the "major selectors" listed in the NCAA Records Book, all selecting long after the fact, see the 1925 college football national championship (omitting math/computer ratings, which neither I nor anyone else recognize as constituting titles)
10-0 Alabama :
,
,
8-0 Dartmouth :
However, if there had been an AP poll in 1925, 8-0 Dartmouth would have finished #1 by a landslide, and in fact Alabama would likely have finished no better than 3rd (at best), behind 7-1 Michigan. And that's a post-bowl poll-- Alabama would have been more like #8-15 before their big win over 10-1-1 Washington in the Rose Bowl.
10-0 Alabama and 8-0 Dartmouth are the teams everyone focuses on for the 1925 MNC, but 7-1 Michigan and 8-1 Pittsburgh should also be considered contenders because both played much tougher schedules than either Alabama or Dartmouth did. Michigan and Pitt each defeated 3 top 25 caliber opponents, while Dartmouth and Alabama each defeated just one.
All rankings in the following article, except as noted, come from my 1925 top 25, which is based on a hypothetical post-bowl AP poll (within logical reason of course)
.
Dartmouth 1925
Norwich (4-5) 59-0 Hobart (5-4) 34-0
Vermont (3-6) 50-0 Maine (5-2-1) 56-0 at Harvard (4-3-1) 32-9 at Brown (5-4-1) 14-0
Cornell (6-2) 62-13 #22
at Chicago (3-4-1) 33-7 (#29)
This season is the only mythical national championship Dartmouth claims, but they had been fielding strong teams since 1901. 1901-1924, the Big Green had gone 159-36-15, and if there had been an AP poll for those seasons, they would have finished top 25 about 20 times, half those in the top 10. They had thrice gone unbeaten, but took a tie each time, and 10 other years they suffered just 1 loss. The program had faded a bit 1916-1922, going 38-16-4 during that time, but they were still generally a #15-25 type team. Head coach Jesse Hawley brought them back to top 10 caliber immediately upon taking over the team in 1923, going 8-1 that season, 7-0-1 the next, and 8-0 this season, the school's first perfect finish.
Hawley was a Dartmouth grad who had coached at Iowa 1910-1915, going 24-18 there. They were generally mid-level, losing to good teams and beating bad ones, but they drew a lot of attention for a wide-open spread passing attack that enabled them to score 310 points in 7 games in 1913. Hawley then retired from coaching and went into business, but when his alma mater came calling in 1923, he became their coach as an unpaid volunteer. He blew the cobwebs off of his old spread passing attack and went 39-10-1 at Dartmouth 1923-1928.
The East had never seen anything quite like this offense, and most teams were quite unprepared to deal with it. In 1923 Dartmouth lost only to national champion Cornell, and in 1924 they were perfect except for a tie at 6-0-2 Yale. This season Dartmouth went all the way, outscoring their opponents 340-29 (average score 43-4), and no one came within a touchdown of them.
The Players
If there had been a Heisman Trophy in 1925, Dartmouth's Hall of Fame halfback Andy "Swede" Oberlander (pictured at left) would have easily won it, despite this being Red Grange's senior season at Illinois. Oberlander was a unanimous All American, and Grange wasn't (Nebraska's legendary tackle Ed Weir was the only other unanimous AA in 1925). Oberlander scored 12 touchdowns this season, but he was also the passer in Jess Hawley's attack, and he threw for another 14 touchdowns. He was a great punter as well.
In Dartmouth's biggest game, against rival Cornell (6-2), Oberlander produced 477 yards of total offense and accounted for 8 touchdowns in a shocking 62-13 beatdown. He was 11 of 14 passing for 317 yards and 6 touchdowns, and he rushed 19 times for 160 yards and 2 touchdowns. He also set up his team's 9th touchdown with a 55 yard punt, because when the returner ran back trying to field it, he muffed it, and tackle Nathan Parker recovered the ball at the Cornell 11 yard line. Oberlander's 6 touchdown passes is still the school record.
Dartmouth led the nation with 3 consensus All Americans. Joining Oberlander were end George Tully and guard Carl "Dutch" Diehl, who had also been consensus AA in 1924. Tackle Nathan Parker was a nonconsensus AA and the team captain, and off the field he was class president and a Rhodes scholar.
Halfback Myles Lane never made an AA list, even as a 2nd or 3rd teamer, but he is Dartmouth's 2nd Hall of Famer. He scored 17 touchdowns this season, placing him 2nd in the nation in scoring. In 1927 he would up that to 18 touchdowns, then add 17 extra points to lead the nation in scoring with 125 points. For his career, he scored 307 points on 48 touchdowns and 19 extra points. So I think the Hall of Fame got this one right. Hockey was Lane's true love, though, and he played pro for a while after graduation, winning the Stanley Cup with Boston in 1929. After that he pursued a career in law, eventually becoming a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. If there had been a Heisman Trophy in 1925, Dartmouth's Hall of Fame halfback Andy "Swede" Oberlander (pictured at left) would have easily won it, despite this being Red Grange's senior season at Illinois. Oberlander was a unanimous All American, and Grange wasn't (Nebraska's legendary tackle Ed Weir was the only other unanimous AA in 1925). Oberlander scored 12 touchdowns this season, but he was also the passer in Jess Hawley's attack, and he threw for another 14 touchdowns. He was a great punter as well.In Dartmouth's biggest game, against rival Cornell (6-2), Oberlander produced 477 yards of total offense and accounted for 8 touchdowns in a shocking 62-13 beatdown. He was 11 of 14 passing for 317 yards and 6 touchdowns, and he rushed 19 times for 160 yards and 2 touchdowns. He also set up his team's 9th touchdown with a 55 yard punt, because when the returner ran back trying to field it, he muffed it, and tackle Nathan Parker recovered the ball at the Cornell 11 yard line. Oberlander's 6 touchdown passes is still the school record.Dartmouth led the nation with 3 consensus All Americans. Joining Oberlander were end George Tully and guard Carl "Dutch" Diehl, who had also been consensus AA in 1924. Tackle Nathan Parker was a nonconsensus AA and the team captain, and off the field he was class president and a Rhodes scholar.Halfback Myles Lane never made an AA list, even as a 2nd or 3rd teamer, but he is Dartmouth's 2nd Hall of Famer. He scored 17 touchdowns this season, placing him 2nd in the nation in scoring. In 1927 he would up that to 18 touchdowns, then add 17 extra points to lead the nation in scoring with 125 points. For his career, he scored 307 points on 48 touchdowns and 19 extra points. So I think the Hall of Fame got this one right. Hockey was Lane's true love, though, and he played pro for a while after graduation, winning the Stanley Cup with Boston in 1929. After that he pursued a career in law, eventually becoming a justice on the New York State Supreme Court.
Dartmouth's Season
Dartmouth's big problem as a national championship contender is their very thin schedule. The first half of it was made up of nothing but minor schools, and weak ones at that. The season didn't really begin until game 5, with a trip to Harvard, but they were no longer the power team they once were. They finished 4-3-1, salvaging their season in their last 2 games with a win over 5-4-1 Brown and
a tie with 5-2-1 Yale. Dartmouth dispatched them easily enough, 32-9, but 5-1-1 Princeton stomped them too, 36-0. Oberlander threw for 123 yards and 2 touchdowns, ran for 122 yards and another touchdown, and returned interceptions for 129 yards.
Speaking of 5-4-1 Brown, they were Dartmouth's next road trip, and they were the only team to give Big Green any trouble this season.
They made wholesale changes to their line this week to adjust to Dartmouth's finesse attack, but for their part, Dartmouth still had their attack largely under wraps, hidden from the prying eyes of their rival, Cornell, whom they were to play the next week. Dartmouth's captain, tackle Nathan Parker, was injured, and he was held out of the game so as to be ready for Cornell. That was the plan, at least, but as has been said before, the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.
Brown kept Dartmouth's offense out of their end zone the entire game, but Big Green still found their way there. A huge punting advantage delivered by Oberlander kept the ball on the Brown side most of the game, and in the 2nd quarter, a bad snap on a Brown punt enabled Myles Lane to get in and block the kick, and a lineman fell on the ball in the end zone. After that, Brown sprung their surprise attack-- a substitute quarterback whose only skill was throwing the ball. They drove straight down the field to a 6 yard touchdown pass, but it was called back due to an offside penalty, and that was the end of Brown's best chance. Nathan Parker was sent into the game and it went back to a field position contest until the 4th quarter, when Dartmouth saw their best drive end at the Brown 2 yard line. But Brown's ensuing punt-out was ruined by another bad snap, another blocked kick, and another Dartmouth lineman falling on the ball in the end zone.
Just as in the 2nd quarter, Brown responded by sending their passer in, and again they found success, but a promising drive was ended when the clock ran out. Dartmouth's twin blocked kicks delivered a 14-0 win. Brown finished with 11 first downs to Dartmouth's 10, almost all of their offense coming from their passing attacks in response to the touchdowns, but while the offensive yardage was fairly even, Dartmouth's advantage in the kicking game was vast, never mind the blocked kicks. End George Tully had a great game for Dartmouth with his kick coverage and defense, and he was also the top receiver for his team and kicked both extra points.
Cornell
1921-1923, when Cornell went 24-0, they had routed Dartmouth 59-7, 23-0, and 32-7. The third game was Jess Hawley's first season at Dartmouth, but all 3 games stuck in his craw, as he felt that Cornell coach Gil Dobie unnecessarily ran up the scores. But rather than get mad, he got even. He beat Cornell 27-14 in New York City in 1924, but that wasn't good enough. This season, though Cornell came into the game 5-0 (average score 42-3), he got what he was looking for : a maximum-impact 62-13 lesson in humility for Gil Dobie. Gloomy Gil had been tormenting opponents on the West Coast and East for decades, and coaches, former players, fans, and writers from across the country had something to smile about when they heard or saw the score.
It was as though a modern spread passing attack had been transported back to 1925, and Cornell was utterly helpless to stop it. Oberlander was a big, mobile passer who could take off on the run (thus his 160 yards rushing), and while most great passing attacks from this time featured a specific passer-receiver combo (such as Michigan's Bennie Friedman and Bennie Oosterbaan), Dartmouth had 3 fast, sure-handed receivers who could flood 3 different parts of the field. Someone was almost always open, and when they weren't, the defensive backs weren't there to stop Oberlander from running for a first down. Furthermore, Dartmouth had been showing a more conservative, short-route passing game previously, but for this game it was bombs away. Oberlander hit end George Tully for touchdowns of 50 and 49 yards, and halfback Myles Lane caught touchdowns of 15, 21, and 52 yards. Tully was also 8 for 8 on extra points.
Cornell lost their finale 7-0 at 7-2 Penn, finishing 6-2. They would have been ranked about #15 in a final AP poll, but adjusting that poll for logic moves them back to #22. Either way, Cornell was the only top 25 caliber team Dartmouth played this season. Cornell would get some measure of revenge the next season, besting Dartmouth 24-23, but Dartmouth came right back in 1927 with another beatdown, 53-7, and Hawley ended his career 4-2 against Gil Dobie.
Dartmouth finished their season with what was supposed to have been a big intersectional game at Chicago, but the Maroons were just 3-2-1, albeit against a very tough schedule. Dartmouth won 33-7, Oberlander tossing 4 touchdown passes, 3 of them to Myles Lane. Oberlander also had a 51 yard punt that was mishandled by a Chicago player running back for it, and Nathan Parker scooped the ball up and returned it 13 yards for a touchdown. Quarterback Bob McPhail had over 100 yards rushing, including runs of 10, 15, 13, 25, and 30 yards.
Chicago lost their finale to 6-1-1 Wisconsin as well, finishing just 3-4-1, but all 4 of their losses came to top 25 caliber teams, and they tied 4-3-1 Ohio State, who also lost only to top 25 teams. Chicago beat 6-3 Kentucky 9-0 and 5-3 Northwestern 6-0, and Ohio State won 10-3 over 7-1-1 Ohio Wesleyan (who tied 8-1-1 Syracuse) and 9-0 over 6-3-1 Columbia (who routed 7-2 Army, who routed 7-2-1 Notre Dame), so both Chicago and Ohio State were pretty good teams, and I have Chicago ranked at #29 for 1925.
The dust now settled, writers hailed Dartmouth as the national champions. Grantland Rice : "In the midst of all the noise and excitement, football's main banner for the waning year goes to the peace and far-away restfulness of Dartmouth, the college on the hill."
Dartmouth was invited to the Rose Bowl to play 10-0-1 Washington, but they were already widely considered the national champions, and the players didn't want to give up their Christmas holidays, so they voted to reject the offer. That was critical for Alabama, who would not have emerged decades later as the consensus national champion among retroactive selectors without that game.
Alabama 1925
Union (TN) (4-5) 53-0 Birmingham Southern (7-3-1) 50-7 at Louisiana State (5-3-1) 42-0 Sewanee (4-4-1) 27-0
at Georgia Tech (6-2-1) 7-0
Mississippi State (3-4-1) 6-0 Kentucky (6-3) 31-0
(Montgomery) Florida (8-2) 34-0 Georgia (4-5) 27-0 Rose Bowl
Washington (10-1-1)
20-19
#6
Alabama first emerged as a strong Southern team coming out of World War One. They were 8-1 in 1919, losing 16-12 at 5-1-2 Vanderbilt, and 10-1 in 1920, losing 21-14 at 8-0-1 Georgia. They fell back to 5-4-2 the next season, but in 1922 they posted a big 9-7 win at 6-3 Penn, finishing 6-3-1. In 1923, the same year Jess Hawley started at Dartmouth, Alabama hired Hall of Fame coach Wallace Wade (pictured at left) away from Vanderbilt's staff. He went 7-2-1 his first season, losing 23-0 at 8-1 Syracuse and 16-6 against 6-1-2 Florida, and in 1924 he went 8-1, losing 17-0 to 5-1-1 Centre, the Alabama first emerged as a strong Southern team coming out of World War One. They were 8-1 in 1919, losing 16-12 at 5-1-2 Vanderbilt, and 10- |
Georges Bataille, no stranger himself to writing about sexual extremes. Sade – the bored and morbidly obsessed prisoner – takes his revenge on the world by creating literature which is not only about evil, but, in its power to subvert, disturb or corrupt, is evil.
“The 120 Days of Sodom” is a historical document that matches and illustrates the tensions of pre-revolutionary France, a country in historical free-fall. In their scholarly and wise introduction, the translators of Penguin’s new edition, Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn, are careful to emphasise the historical context, pointing out that for large chunks of his posthumous career Sade was more discussed than read (they give many good examples, including Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who read bowdlerised versions of Sade). They also provide a guide to how the book has entered contemporary French thought. As well as Bataille, Sade’s other influential readers include Pierre Klossowski, who focused on the rationalism of his atheistic system, and Annie LeBrun, who defined Sade as the prophet of the post-Enlightenment era. Above all, however, the great merit of this edition is the thoroughly excellent translation by McMorran and Wynn. It has none of the phoney archaism of earlier English translations. Instead it is like a window, allowing us to have as clear of view as possible of Sade’s mind and world.
The quality of Sade’s mind is the reason that he is still worth reading in the 21st century – if you have the stomach. In his own time, his appalling vision of Absolute Freedom was an accurate mirror of the real atrocities of the Terror. Later Raymond Queneau, a French novelist, wrote that Sade’s writings were “a hallucinatory precursor of the world ruled by the Gestapo, its tortures, its camps.” Albert Camus agreed, noting that “from Sade’s lurid castle to the concentration camps, man’s greatest liberty consisted only of building the prison of his crimes”.Update, August 8, 2017: There are set to be a total of four six-core CPUs in the upcoming Intel Coffee Lake range of processors: two K-series and two 65W chips.
Ah, it’s all still so far off… but what are the best CPUs for gaming you can buy right now? Allow us to explain and delight.
We’ve also got a better idea of the actual clockspeeds the 8th Gen chips will be working with too. Previously WCCFTech had reported a low base and Turbo speed for the K-series Core i5, but the latest information from VideoCardzsuggests a more impressive hexcore gaming chip is on its way.
With a base clockspeed of 3.6GHz and an all-core Turbo of 4.1GHz the Core i5 8600K is looking like a more tantalising option for gamers. When these Coffee Lake CPUs do launch, hopefully this year, then we could have a real head-to-head battle for the title of best gaming CPU between this and the AMD Ryzen 5 1600X.
Both are six-core processors, and both are likely to cost around the same ~$250, but the AMD chip comes with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) which enables it to process 12 threads – twice what the resolutely six-core i5 8600K can deliver. That said, the Intel Core i5 will have their traditional single-threaded dominance, which ought to give it the edge in gaming performance.
After a stagnant couple of years in the CPU world, things really are changing at a hell of a speed. And if the rumours of an eight-threaded Core i3 are true, then things are going to go a little nutzo at the entry level end of the market too. At 4GHz across eight threads you’ll end up with higher multi-threaded performance compared with the hexcore K-series i5, even if they’re all running at 4.1GHz.
Interesting times…
Original story, July 26, 2017: The perennially leakyWCCFTechhave posted the reported specifications for the three six-coreIntel Coffee Lakeprocessors set to arrive in our desktops before the end of the year.
The top-spec Core i7, the i7 8700K, is the expected six-core, 12-thread processor and will be able to keep all those eighth Gen cores running at a Turbo frequency of 4GHz. The base clock comes in at 3.7GHz, and the single-core maximum is set at 4.3GHz. Given the way motherboard makers, such as Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte operate, it’s pretty likely we’ll see compatible boards capable running the 12-threaded i7 at that 4.3GHz frequency across all of its six cores.
And the compatible boards could end up covering a broad range, because as expected, they’re sticking with the same LGA 1151 socket which has existed from the 100 and 200-series motherboards introduced for Skylake and Kaby Lake respectively, and using it for the upcoming 300-series boards too.
It is possible Intel will put in place some sort of limiting factor to force 100-series mobo owners to upgrade, but there’s no hint of that so far.
The second chip looks to be the Core i5 8600K. Again, it’s a six-core CPU, but without the Core i7’s HyperThreading technology in play. The clockspeeds are a lot lower for this cheaper chip, with the base clockspeed at just 3.2GHz and the all-core Turbo set at just 3.4GHz. That’s a long way short of the 4.2GHz performance of the Kaby Lake i5 7600K.
It is likely, however, that we’ll see the Coffee Lake i5 batting around the 3.6GHz mark in high-end gaming motherboards, which would put it at the same sort of level as AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600X, and probably in a similar pricing bracket too. But, without the HyperThreading, the AMD processor will probably remain the go-to chip for the PC allrounders.
Both these K-series, overclockable, six-core Intel Coffee Lake CPUs are 95W parts, but the specs leak also details a third, non-overclockable 65W CPU. That could end up being the straight Core i7 8700 as it looks a lot like a Coffee Lake upgrade of the current i7 7700 chip.Not to be confused with buttercream
A custard cream is a type of biscuit popular in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Its structure is that of a sandwich, with a creamy, custard-flavoured centre between two flat biscuit layers. Traditionally, the filling was buttercream (which is still used in home-made recipes) but nowadays cheaper fats have replaced butter in mass-produced biscuits. The filling tastes of vanilla and as such is more akin to the taste of custard made with custard powder than egg custard. It is believed that the custard cream biscuit originated in Britain in 1908.[1] They usually have an elaborate baroque design stamped onto them, originating in the Victorian era and representing ferns.[2]
Some British and Irish supermarkets produce own brand versions, with variations including lemon, orange, chocolate, strawberry, coffee and coconut flavours. There is a digestive cream version available, the biscuit is replaced with a digestive biscuit. In a 2007 poll of 7,000 Britons, 9 out of 10 voted custard creams to be their favourite biscuit.[2] In 2009 it was ranked the eighth most popular biscuit in the UK to dunk into tea.[3]
World record [ edit ]
The largest custard cream in the world, certified by Guinness World Records, was created in November 2010, by amateur biscuit master Simon Morgan and chef Paul Thacker, at Chino Latino's restaurant in Park Plaza, Nottingham, England.[4] It weighed 15.73 kilograms (34.7 lb) and was 59 centimetres (23 in) long, 39 centimetres (15 in) wide and 6.5 centimetres (2.6 in) high. It was auctioned in aid of the Children in Need appeal, then donated to Nottingham homelessness charity Framework.[4]
In popular culture [ edit ]
A biscuit dispenser which includes custard creams appears in the Thirteenth Doctor's (Jodie Whittaker) TARDIS in the long-running British sci-fi show, Doctor Who.Improve Avada SEO
If you use the Avada WordPress Theme, you might be interested to know how you can improve the Avada SEO. Avada is the best selling WordPress Theme on Envato, selling over 300,000 times and generating revenues in the millions of dollars.
After using it for six months, I've found a couple of ways to improve the on-page SEO and boost rankings in SERPs.
How to improve Avada SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the process of making your page as relevant as possible to search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo in order for them to list your page. The better SEO you have, the higher your pages will rank in these search engines, which in turn means more traffic to your site.
Using a WordPress Theme such as Avada means you get a working website within minutes. But to improve SEO there are a number of techniques you can use that will help get your site onto the search engine rankings.
Some of these techniques involve modifying the theme code of Avada- but don't worry, it's nothing too drastic. You will just need some kind of text editor to modify the files.
Improving header tags
Heading tags are some of the most important tags you can use for on-page SEO. It is recommended to always wrap your page title in H1 tags and your sub-headings in H2 tags. This is where google looks for your main keywords and determines the relevancy of your page.
Unfortunately, on most of the demos/themes that come with Avada they use H2 tags as their main heading titles. In order to change this, we need to dive into the theme code and modify it. Luckily, it's super simple to do.
To change the Avada page title tags from H2 to H1, we need to modify the file: wp-content/themes/Avada/Single.php Look for the following line:
avada_render_post_title( $post->ID, false, '', '2' )
This is Avada's function that is used to parse titles. All you need to do is change the 2 in the function to 1, like so:
avada_render_post_title( $post->ID, false, '', '1' )
Now your titles will output in H1.
You may find that your styling of titles changes when you do this. This is because the CSS that Avada builds is based around using H2 tags, so you will have to either copy the H2 CSS or add your own H1 CSS. You can do this in the Avada Custom CSS area.
Avada Theme SEO Plugins
This tip isn't specifically designed for just Avada WordPress Theme, but for all WordPress sites! There are a number of SEO Plugins that you can install on your WordPress site that help improve your SEO automatically for you.
These plugins will help maintain SEO metrics such as handling meta tags, keyword density, title page length and the general formatting of your posts. These tips will help make your posts much more appealing to search engines when they visit your page, giving you more ranking power.
I'm going to suggest to use the Yoast SEO Plugin.
While Avada is pretty good for SEO on it's own, with the Yoast SEO plugin powering it, it becomes a powerhouse for ranking on google.
I have been using this plugin for many years now and it comes with a plethora of features that will help improve your WordPress site. The best part of Yoast SEO is the fact it will improve your own WordPress writing skills.
Writing on a blog as a hobby versus writing on a blog for SEO are two very different writing techniques. With Yoast SEO, it will review your post as you are writing it, giving you tips and techniques to improve the formatting of the writing and making sure you are getting the most out of your page's content.
Yoast SEO also helps generate XML Sitemaps, which are beneficial for getting search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to index your site's content. It gives you the options of removing certain pages and also includes the indexing of images too.
Yoast Seo Plugin is free to use on your Avada Theme, but there is also a Premium version that you may want to consider in the future. The Premium version offers extra features and one-to-one support for your SEO. I don't recommend buying it if you are just starting out as the free version offers you more than enough options.
Other SEO plugins that are good alternatives are All in One SEO Plugin. This plugin is very close to Yoast in terms of feature availability and I definitely wouldn't bemoan you using this instead. I just prefer Yoast's user interface and on-page SEO analysis better. All In One SEO plugin also comes with a Premium option to upgrade to, unlocking some of the more in-depth features it has to offer.
This post isn't a SEO plugin comparison so choosing either one will work well for your Avada WordPress Theme.
Avada Page Speed
One of the ranking factors that Google uses to determine SERPs is page speed. How fast a page loads is important not just to Google, but also to your users. In an age where we are used to getting everything instantaneously, having to wait even 5 seconds for your WordPress site to load can be insufferable for some users.
Avada does come with a lot of demos and theme options. They include elements like sliders, image galleries, portfolios, media pop-ups, scrolling effects and more. When combining these elements into a single page, the page speed can be hit quite hard.
This is a problem for our SEO. Although having a pretty slider can entice first-time viewers, it can also turn away repeating ones. Loading a welcome video each time someone hits your page also can have a significant impact on your page's loading time.
One way to analyse your site's pagespeed is to use Google's PageSpeed Tool. This tool will check your website and look for content that can be improved. It will give you a score out of 100 based on your server's response time, image compression, minified CSS/JavaScript, optimized images and more.
Using this tool can really help you understand how Google see's your site from a search engine perspective. Finding a balance between fancy webpages and smooth lightning-quick loading webpages is one of the hardest parts of SEO.
You can find more tips on improving page speed using Moz's PageSpeed guide. It explains in-depth the different page elements that can effect the speed of your page and the impact it has on Google search rankings.
Check out the video below to learn more about PageSpeed from Google.
Page Caching
Another tip for improving PageSpeed is to use something called Page Caching. A WordPress site is built using PHP, so each time your WordPress site is loaded, it is rendered by your site's PHP compiler, making queries to your database and doing lots of intensive work behind the scenes to present you with your WordPress page. However for most sites, the page content doesn't change. The content is mostly static, so having it processed over and over again is a waste of resources and very slow.
This is where Page Caching comes in.
Using a free WordPress Plugin like WP Super Cache, pages are rendered only once every couple of hours (or however long you specify) and a simple HTML static version of the page is served. It still contains all your content, only the data isn't live so it doesn't have to be processed by the PHP parser or query the database. This results in lightning fast pages being loaded since no processing has to be done.
Each page will have it's own timestamp loaded onto it, so the plugin knows when it becomes outdated. Once that happens, the page is then rendered like normal (and updated) and then cached again. This means you're saving lots of internal resources and making your site super fast.
As mentioned, you can implement this functionality into Avada using a plugin like WP Super Cache. It doesn't take much to setup, even for beginners, and you can have your own advanced caching system setup within minutes. You can use Google's PageSpeed ranking tool to see the difference with caching enabled and caching disabled.
Keep Avada Theme Up To Date
Updating your WordPress site can be a pain. Over the last month, I've updated my site's plugins, themes and core files no less than thirty times. That's literally once a day. The problem with not updating your theme, is that it can:
Leave security holes making your site vulnerable.
Break areas of your site, which is bad for SEO.
Cause user unsatisfaction, making them spend less time on your site.
Avada's recent update to version 5.0 includes a new in-built patching service. This feature provides hotfixes to the theme, such as if there is an issue with the Portfolio meta tags or they need to update the structure of their page builder. All you have to do to apply these hotfixes is simply click a button and it will update the theme.
Leaving them unfixed, however, can be bad for SEO. When a search engine takes a look at your page, it anaylses the validity of your page's HTML. If it finds broken tags, broken links or missing tags, it will count against you when ranking against other sites.
Avada is normally very good with getting out fixes to users with a fast-response rate. You just have to remember to check your WordPress Dashboard and keep everything up to date. It can be a pain, but it's well worth it in the end.
The same goes for your WordPress Plugins too. Keeping them up to date is just as important as their functionality can cause issues with your Avada WordPress Theme.
A good plugin to have is Wordfence Security. This plugin will send you daily email reminders about plugins/themes that need to be updated. It also has lots of other security features that can safeguard your site from attackers, spam and potential problems with your site.
Adding images to Avada posts
This tip isn't very well known, but search engines don't just read the text in a post, but they also look at the names of the images in your posts too.
Naming your images with SEO relevant keywords can help boost your rankings in search engines. It can even help to get your content listed in Google Images, which can be another source of traffic for your site.
When using the Media Manager in WordPress, it gives you the option of adding Image Title and Alt attributes. These are what search engines look at when visiting your page to make sense of images. Make sure the text you put in these fields is relevant to your post and accurately describes your post's content. If you try and stuff too many keywords into images, it can have a negative effect on SEO.
Improve SEO by modifying Avada files
Finally you may want to look under the hood of the Avada Theme files and change some of the HTML tags, links, images and other elements to improve your SEO. You can do so by looking in your wp-content/themes/Avada/ folder. All these files relate to how your theme is presented to users.
Making changes to these files can cause some conflict issues however, so before you begin, make sure you know what you're doing. You may have trouble updating the theme in the future if you make custom changes.
So what other ways can you improve SEO by directly modifying the Avada theme files?
Prevent duplicate content by adding canonical links.
Add nofollow links to pages you don't want to pass link-juice to.
Optimise inline-built CSS/JavaScript
Change the HTML structure to be more suited to your site
These are just some of the benefits of being able to modify the code directly. Of course, this isn't for everyone as it requires knowledge of the WordPress API, PHP and HTML.
Remove Broken Avada Links
Having lots of broken links on your site can have a negative impact on your SEO and user experience. When you install a demo for Avada, it generates lots of different demo "posts" and "pages" automatically.
Most of these you won't need- they're just for demo purposes. Deleting them is fine, however, there can be traces of these broken posts and pages left in your site's structure. You can find them using special WordPress Plugins or the Google Webmaster Tools.
To use Google Webmaster Tools, you need to signup and add your own website. It can take a day or two to get verified, but once done you can navigate to your site's search console.
Under the Crawl tab, you can find any missing pages on your site listed under Crawl Errors. On this page, it will list all of the pages that it found to have 404 errors returned by them. Your next job is to hunt these pages down on your site and remove the links linking to them.
There are some plugins that can help find missing/broken links on your site. One of these plugins is called the Broken Link Checker; it scans all your posts, pages, custom fields, comments etc for broken links. It can take a while for it the process, but once done it will provide you with a report of all the links and where to find them.
Avada SEO Final Thoughts
There is no doubt that Avada is one of the most powerful WordPress Themes out there. The fact that it's sold over 300,000 copies is a true testament to it's customer satisfaction level. With the changes listed above, it can also be great for ranking in google with. SEO is an expensive game, so doing little bits of it yourself can save you a lot of money in the future (and even earn you money!).
You can purchase Avada WordPress Theme on ThemeForest. If you're on a tight budget, be on the lookout for an Avada discount that can reduce the price drastically. They've already had one discount this year!
If you have any tips for improving the SEO on the Avada WordPress Theme, feel free to post them below for others!
Enjoyed that? Check These Posts OutIn my review for “Speed” I wrote about how not all movies need to have deep characters and spectacular artistic direction to be great. “Speed” is the perfect example of a dumb movie which is just superbly done, and masterfully embraces what it is. It has no pretense of being more grand than it is, which paradoxically makes it far greater. “Starship Troopers” has fallen into the trap, it’s a dumb movie that tries to be smart and then stumbles over its own dumb limitations. Did you notice my subtle repetition? Felt quite forced didn’t it, sort of like the satire “Starship Troopers” attempts to sandwich between its own buns of stupidity. Hopefully my opinion has been hammered home sufficiently by now.
Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) has decided that he wants to join the army and fight the alien race known as “The Bugs” that are flinging asteroids across the solar system at earth much in the same way a child would throw a snowball at a car then hide behind a tree. After the asteroid hits Buenos Aires and incidentally kills Johnny’s parents, he and the army go off to war on Klendathu — The Bug homeworld — and exterminate them somehow. “No more snowballs for us” says the human race, with all their militaristic prowess.
To decipher the narrative between characters is something of an enigma, the code-breakers of the Second World War would have had a tough time on their hands if the Axis’ messages were encrypted in “Starship Troopers” supposed character development. Lt. Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) is some kind of love interest, but then so is Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer) and the main character just sort of jumps between them like he’s the ball in a game of ping-pong. I’m sure there is a reason for this in the movie and you are welcome to find it for yourself, but I just wasn’t sure what the point of it all was.
After Johnny Rico goes to war on planet Klendathu, he has to effectively lead the effort to destroy the Bugs. The Bugs themselves are pretty well designed creatures and they certainly make formidable and imposing opponents. The CGI on the creatures themselves holds up to this day (the film was actually nominated for an Academy Award for its special effects) surprisingly, and for this it deserves praise. There are moments where the humans are absolutely swarmed by insurmountable numbers of Bugs that really creates the sense of an unattainable victory. Earlier in the film we have seen four soldiers gang up on one Bug and seen them struggle significantly to actually bring it down. When the Bugs swarm the humans, they go down in a few bullets like in a video game, and then for some reason once the bugs are out of site outside a walled compound they stop trying to infiltrate. Usually I can deal with a misguided sense of realism in films, but in this case it does feel like the worst form of deus ex machina. Will the marines survive? Well that depends on whether or not Paul Verhoeven decided that these bugs would have chitin made of popadums or reinforced steel.
The first half of the film concerns the marines interacting and developing, much like the first part of “Full Metal Jacket”. The movie moderately succeeds at taking a step up from the “Full Metal Jacket” Drill Sergeant however, making this one a ruthless man that will happily break recruits arms and stab them in the hand to make a point. It’s a moderate success, but it does feel ham fisted. I can see what the satire was going for (I think). To portray the monotony of war and how it turns essentially everyone into a fascist. Propaganda is worked into schools and we see news reports with superimposed texts that show soldiers giving bullets and guns to children. One scene even shows a child fully armoured and blended into a rank of soldiers, the reaction of the citizens in the film is clearly one of laughter, not of shock. I understand that the portrayal is meant to be somewhat brain dead, and in doing so being glaringly obvious to us that this is wrong. A movie that tries to be idiotic then, should have a lot more going for it to validate this. A movie that tries to portray a message by being boring and desensitizing you to the war that makes up half of the film, may well portray the message (it does) but it is still an idiotic movie that is not interesting as a result.
I felt like the second half of the movie was the termite battle scene in “Antz” repeated in verbatim and I can’t shake this feeling. Any illusions of grandeur are shattered by the films insistence of filling bugs with as much lead as possible in the two hour run time. For some reason it didn’t feel like it dragged all that much with that length, but it certainly could have been shorter. Paul Verhoeven has seen better days…
He’s also seen far worse.
4/10
AdvertisementsWe have loads of images showcasing Naughty Dog’s undeveloped sci-fi game and damn do they look awesome!
After viewing the artwork for Naughty Dog’s undeveloped sci-fi game I was left in amazement. Whatever Naughty Dog was cooking up looked very intriguing, and I really would like to see this title come to fruition.
Check out the images below courtesy of our boy James M.
Here are some close ups…
Some environmental designs…
And last, but not least…
Just in case you did not catch the tidbits on a few of the images, here is what Naughty Dog’s sci-fi game would have been about.
We explored the idea of doing a science fiction game following the Jak and Daxter franchise, complete with androids, robots, and futuristic weapons. The sci-fi game was going to be centered around a city that had been built up around a giant hole in the ground. No one knew exactly what created the hole, but the adventure would have the player exploring the depths.
I would really like to see Naughty Dog tackle this game. If you find this undeveloped game as compelling as us let us know in the comments below!
If you are interested in obtaining this art book you can get it over here.
Stay tuned to Junkie Monkeys for more Naughty Dog treats!Story highlights Former South Carolina police officer faces a jury for a second time in controversial killing of an African-American man.
Prosecutors are retrying Michael Slager after a mistrial was declared earlier in December
(CNN) A former police officer charged with murdering a black motorist in North Charleston, South Carolina, will go on trial for a second time on March 1, a court has ordered.
A state judge had declared a mistria l in the case of Michael Thomas Slager, who is accused of fatally shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott, on December 5 after jurors failed to reach a verdict following 22 hours of deliberation.
The April 2015 killing was among a string of fatal police shootings of African-Americans that fueled nationwide protests, which became even more visible after the death of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
JUST WATCHED Scott's mother after mistrial: It's not over Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Scott's mother after mistrial: It's not over 00:54
Slager shot and killed Scott, after an April 4, 2015, traffic stop. The shooting was captured on a bystander's cellphone video, which showed Scott running away as Slager fired eight times, striking Scott three times in the back.
This photo from the family of Walter Scott shows ex-police officer Michael Slager readying to shoot Scott.
The jurors -- 11 white people and one black person -- were deadlocked several times after the five-week trial. In the last trial, Judge Clifton Newmans allowed the jury to consider the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter, meaning the killing happened in the heat of passion. One juror, in a note, said he couldn't vote for a conviction and wouldn't change his mind.
Read More[Update 10:30 p.m. ET] A ship filled with activists who say they are there to help women receive abortions was escorted out of the Moroccan port of Smir after the government initially blocked the harbor and prevented residents from accessing the vessel.
Abortion is illegal in Morocco, and the country's Health Ministry said in a statement that it had not authorized the vessel's visit or any procedures by nonresident doctors.
The "abortion ship" is run by Women on Waves, which was founded in 1999 by a Dutch doctor to provide abortions to women in countries where the practice is illegal.
The Women on Waves ship takes women into international waters to perform the abortions, which are legal under Dutch law, until 6.5 weeks into the pregnancy.
But authorities in the predominantly Muslim country seemed to effectively block the activists efforts on Thursday.
"The ship was searched, and the captains were informed that they had to leave the harbor," Women on Waves said in a statement. "When asked the reason why, they were informed that although no laws were broken, the ship had to leave Smir."
The ship was then "escorted from the harbor by the navy," though the crew plans to "stay near Morocco" and "strategize their next move."
"I will not be practicing as a gynecologist in Morocco," said Gunilla Kleiverda, a Women on Waves gynecologist aboard the vessel. "We are not going to perform any abortions within Morocco. We are sailing out with women to international waters where in the international sea the Dutch law applies," she said.
A female member of the group told CNN that she and a number of other demonstrators had been in front of the marina in Smir. She said there was a big, aggressive protest taking place and police were present.
She said police said she was "not authorized" to be there.
"I am not going to be intimidated by them," she told CNN before the phone line dropped.
Women on Waves also advocates the use of a drug called misoprostol, which it says is available legally in Morocco, to perform abortions up to 12 weeks after conception. The group says it is establishing a phone hotline in Morocco for women to get information on how to perform the abortions at home.
Kleiverda said Moroccan women need access to safe abortions. About 90 women die from illegal abortions in the country every year, she said.
The ship has previously taken the campaign to Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Spain, but this is its first attempt to offer abortions for women in an Islamic country.
Women on Waves said on its website that it is looking into alternatives to get the ship into port in Morocco after the Smir harbor was blocked.
CNN's Stephanie Halasz, Jo Shelley and journalist Aida Alami contributed to this report.
[Original post 10:48 a.m. ET] The government of Morocco has closed the port of Smir and is blocking the harbor with warships to prevent the entry of a Dutch "abortion ship" to the Islamic country, the organization running the ship said Thursday.
Abortion is illegal in Morocco, and the country's Health Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that it had not authorized the vessel's visit or any procedures by nonresident doctors.
The abortion ship is run by Women on Waves, which was founded in 1999 by a Dutch doctor to provide abortions to women in countries where the practice is illegal.
Women on Waves doctor Marlies Schellekens told CNN that she and about 10 other members of her group and Alternative Movement for Individual Freedoms, the Moroccan activist group that invited the abortion ship to Morocco, are trying to make their way to the harbor in Smir.
The main entrance has been blocked by police; a female Moroccan lawyer representing the group is trying to negotiate with officers to let the group enter, Schellekens said. Dutch lawmaker Liesbeth van Tongeren is also with the group, she said.
The abortion ship has not yet tried to enter the port, she said.
The Women on Waves ship takes women into international waters to perform the abortions, which are legal under Dutch law, until 6.5 weeks into the pregnancy.
Gunilla Kleiverda, a Women on Waves gynecologist aboard the vessel, stressed that point in an interview with CNN on Thursday.
“I will not be practicing as a gynecologist in Morocco," Kleiverda said.
“We are not going to perform any abortions within Morocco. We are sailing out with women to international waters where in the international sea the Dutch law applies," she said.
Women on Waves also advocates the use of a drug called misoprostol, which it says is available legally in Morocco, to perform abortions up to 12 weeks after conception. The group says it is establishing a phone hotline in Morocco for women to get information on how to perform the abortions at home.
Kleiverda said Moroccan women need access to safe abortions. About 90 women die from illegal abortions in the country every year, she said.
The ship has previously taken the campaign to Ireland, Poland, Portugal and Spain, but this is its first attempt to offer abortions in an Islamic country.
Women on Waves said on its website that it is looking into alternatives to get the ship into port in Morocco after the Smir harbor was blocked.
CNN's Stephanie Halasz, Jo Shelley and journalist Aida Alami contributed to this report.On the same day Ottawa announced its controversial decision to give Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline the go-ahead, the company behind another major pipeline project in B.C. was courting Metro Vancouver’s Chinese community in its drive to shore up public support.
Ian Anderson, president of Kinder Morgan Canada, was in Vancouver last Tuesday for a meet-and-greet with about 20 members from the Lower Mainland’s Chinese media outlets. With the company’s planned expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline aiming to connect North American oil producers with the Asian — or, more specifically, Chinese — market, reaching out to a local community with active ties and interests with that market only seems logical.
“There are always communities within communities, and I believe it’s time we reach out to these communities,” Anderson said of the lunch meeting, held in Vancouver’s Chinatown. “If they have concerns different from what we are hearing from others, we want to hear them … If Chinese residents of Burnaby have issues we are not aware of, please, let us know.”
Just as Enbridge is facing stiff opposition to its Northern Gateway proposal from environmentalists and some First Nations members, Kinder Morgan’s plans to more than double the capacity of the Trans Mountain pipeline (from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels per day) with a $5.4-billion expansion is running into challenges. One of the most vocal is coming from Burnaby’s city council.
Kinder Morgan is planning to change the pipeline’s routing under Burnaby Mountain, which Anderson says will minimize the disturbance to residents in the city. Burnaby mayor Derek Corrigan has repeatedly made clear that council is opposed to the pipeline. The two sides are at such a deadlock that Kinder Morgan is considering asking the National Energy Board to force access to the land where the company wants to test the feasibility of its tunnel route.
“I’m always worried about antagonizing (Burnaby officials), because it’s not the type of relationship we want to have,” Anderson said, but added he is working hard to find a solution that will address both energy producers’ need for market access and local residents’ well-being. “We have the obligation to regional authorities and the residents of Burnaby to explore all the options available to us.”
That need may be the reason Kinder Morgan is now reaching out to the Chinese community. It may be doing due diligence in seeking the public opinions of all communities affected. Or it could be seeking to build support in a community that, with its closer business ties to Asia, would benefit economically from an increased energy trade with China and beyond.
Anderson said at the meeting he has spoken with business leaders in the Chinese-Canadian community, and many could be interested learning more about the economic opportunities that an expanded pipeline would afford them.
However, courting the Chinese-Canadian community brings its own set of challenges, as the questions and responses later in the meeting demonstrated.
Questions from media members spanned many issues. Why wasn’t the plan to divert the pipeline to Delta port, thus avoiding adding tanker traffic to the Burrard Inlet and adjacent Stanley Park? What would happen in an earthquake? What will the pipeline do to the values of homes along the pipeline route? In many ways, the Chinese-Canadian community’s questions were no different than those found in the public.
There lies the challenge with courting Chinese-Canadians: Despite the common misconceptions (we’ve all heard them), the community defies stereotypes. It is so diverse in its background, culture, interests, income, immigration status, self-identity and even language, that it can be argued it shouldn’t really be regarded as a single “Chinese-Canadian” community. Rather, it is a collection of smaller subgroups, each with its specific ideas and interests |
iving Palestinians of the right to own land or to claim even the very land upon which their homes and villages existed for tens and hundreds of years.
It should come as no shock, then, to learn that, while Palestinian citizens of Israel are estimated at 20 percent of the population, they live on merely 3 percent of the land, and many of them face the constant danger of being evicted and relocated elsewhere.
The story of Al-Araqeeb is witness to the never-ending Israeli desire for colonial expansion at the expense of the indigenous population of Palestine, but also of the courage and refusal to give in to fear and despair as demonstrated by the 22 families of this brave village.
In some way, Al-Araqeeb represents the story of all of Palestine and its people.
The struggle of Al-Araqeeb should evoke outrage at Israel’s constant violation of human rights and its refusal to recognize the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, but it should also induce hope that 70 years of colonial expansion cannot defeat or even weaken the will of a village, of a nation.
– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’ (Pluto Press). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California. Visit his website: www.ramzybaroud.net.Research by Yanus et al. assessing the human risk of trace metals in chocolate said that although the lead concentration found in a variety of global brands analyzed was below the US Pharmacopeia (USP) 1,000 ng/g limit, the lead concentration should, “still be considered a health concern”.
Risk exceeding daily limit
“Children, who are big consumers of chocolates, may be at risk of exceeding the daily limit of Pb [lead], due to their low body weight and higher digestive tract uptake,” said the Israeli researchers.
“They may be vulnerable to lead exposure from these products – one cube of dark chocolate can contain up to 20% of the lead oral limit; furthermore chocolate may not be the only source of lead in their nutrition thus increasing the risk of exceeding the daily limit.”
The same risk does not apply to adults, whose digestive absorption of metals is poor.
The more cocoa solids, the more lead
The research found a correlation between a high cocoa solid content and high levels of lead.
“In large quantities it is preferable for children to eat milk or white chocolates than eating dark chocolates [which have a higher cocoa solid concentration],” said the study.
Earlier research has shown that lead takes a long time to exit the body and in a short time can cause health problems in children including vomiting, constipation and weight loss as well as behavioural changes, slowed growth and memory and impaired language development.
version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? The amount of 10 g cubes of chocolate a child (two to six year old) would need to eat to be above the daily USP limit for lead. Source: Yanus et al.
Method
The researchers tested several unnamed chocolate bar brands from Europe, the US and Israel for eight trace elements: Lead, cadmium, chromium, manganese, cobalt, arsenic, bismuth and molybdenum.
They used inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), which the team described as “the method of choice” for determination of trace levels of heavy metals.
Bismuth and arsenic only in shells
Bismuth and arsenic were found in cocoa bean shells, but not in the cocoa bean itself and or the finished chocolate.
Cocoa beans are separated from the shell during the production process. The beans are processed to produce cocoa butter and cocoa powder which are used to manufacture chocolate.
Cocoa shells are often burnt for fuel at cocoa processing plants, but recent research has highlighted potential for using this waste material as a fiber and antioxidant-rich food ingredient.
Production increases presence of metals
The present researchers found that higher concentrations of lead, cadmium, chromium, manganese, cobalt and molybdenum in cocoa butter and powder than in the cocoa bean core.
“This indicates that most of the trace metal contaminations in these products are found after the beans are harvested, dried and shipped, namely during the manufacturing of cocoa and chocolate products.”
That correlates with earlier research by Rankin et al.
Dark chocolate contains more lead Concentration of lead higher in dark chocolate (47-85% cocoa solids) than milk chocolate (27-30% cocoa solids)
Yanus et al. found there was no real risk from chromium in chocolate because the antioxidants in chocolate convert the toxic metal into a non-toxic element.
Balancing risks with benefits
The concentration of cobalt, cadmium, molybdenum in the chocolates analysed was well below USP oral limits leaving lead as the only real health concern, particularly for dark chocolate.
“These potential risks should be considered against the benefits of the antioxidant content and concentration of other components that contribute to health and wellbeing of consuming dark chocolate,” said the researchers.
Cocoa contains high quantities of phenolic phytochemicals known as flavanols (flavan-3-ols), which recent studies have linked to a series of benefits such as cardiovascular health, skin health, mood, brain health and cognition, and even reduced cancer risk.
Source:
Talanta 119 (2014) 1–4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.talanta.2013.10.048
‘Trace elements in cocoa solids and chocolate: An ICPMS study’
Authors : R.L. Yanus et al.A North Carolina appeals court has temporarily reinstated a state law that stripped the governor of his oversight of elections.
The law was approved by Republican lawmakers two weeks before Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper took office. It was blocked by a three-judge panel after Cooper sued.
The state Court of Appeals’ decision Thursday means the law can be enforced while the court decides whether to take up a request by Republican legislative leaders to overturn the lower court’s decision.
The measure merges the state ethics and elections boards into one and gives legislative leaders half of the board appointments going forward. Previously the governor made the elections board appointments with a majority coming from his party.
Late Thursday, Cooper’s attorneys asked the state Supreme Court to continue blocking the law.
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.For years, Chaldean Town was a vibrant, ethnic neighborhood. Then crime skyrocketed and the neighborhood emptied out. The story of another lost Detroit enclave, through the eyes of the last people left.
Buy Photo Detroit brothers Joseph Kawa, 66, and Steve Kawa, 57, own S&J Meats in what was once Chaldean Town, a dying neighborhood on 7 Mile Road between Woodward and John R in Detroit. (Photo: Salwan Georges Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
DETROIT – The end could come any day now.
“We need to shut the door and get the hell out of here,” said Joseph Kawa, the 66-year-old owner of S&J Meats, a small, old-fashioned butcher shop on 7 Mile Road. He’s the J in the name. His brother Steve is the S.
Their shop sits in what was once the heart of Chaldean Town, a neighborhood along East 7 Mile at the northern edge of the city. For years, this area was the first stop for many Chaldean immigrants. They bought houses, opened businesses on the main strip and created a thriving neighborhood of restaurants and shops with a Middle Eastern flavor.
“It was beautiful,” said Steve Kawa, Joe’s 57-year-old brother. He stood behind the meat counter wearing the white smock of a butcher, waiting for customers. “We’d stay out here all night, and nobody would bother us. Everyone was very happy.”
All that’s gone now. Of the dozens of little businesses on the 7 Mile strip that catered to the Chaldeans and gave this area its ethnic flavor and its name, only two are left.
S&J Meats is one of them. A restaurant down the street is the other. And they might not be left for long.
“Sometimes I open about 9, close around 5:30, and there’s no customers — not even one customer all day,” Joe Kawa said in a thick accent. “Why I stay? For waste of my time? It’s not worth it. It’s not going to help me in my retirement.”
In fact, he’s been putting some of his $700-a-month Social Security money into keeping the shop open for his brother, for their one employee from the neighborhood and for the handful of customers who still come in every month.
This can’t go on, though. And when they leave, when the last man standing closes his door, this part of town will share the fate of Poletown and Chinatown, and several other once-vibrant ethnic Detroit neighborhoods that survive only in the memories of the suburbanites who once lived there.
For these last two businesses, it’s been a long, painful decline.
“You watch movies?” Steve Kawa asked. “You know when somebody falls off the cliff and they hold onto a rope, and after some time it wears away a little bit until there’s just a thread and it breaks down? That’s what happened. It’s been cut so much you don’t know when it’s going to break. You’re hanging on for your life.”
A new homeland
Catholic Iraqis, known as Chaldeans, began coming to Detroit a century ago. In the 1960s, they began pouring in, some to join their families, some to escape the persecution that this Christian minority faced over the years in Iraq.
Metro Detroit now is home to 121,000 Chaldeans, according to the Chaldean Community Foundation. Tens of thousands of them started their lives in Chaldean Town. And, at one point, a quarter of the area’s Chaldeans lived here.
They settled in the Penrose neighborhood, which flanks 7 Mile between Woodward and John R, where some streets had homes so old they didn’t have driveways because they were built before cars were invented. There was barely space to walk between them. The crowded housing meant a life intertwined with the neighbors.
“They’re built next to each other; they’re close, so it kind of automatically brings people closer since everybody’s bunched up,” Kawa said.
Many were already family. John Kuza came to America as a toddler, living with his parents and nine siblings in a tiny house just south of 7 Mile. His relatives followed and bought other houses on the street. “They were all within reach. Literally, the whole community was right within reach,” the 52-year-old said.
The new immigrants started businesses, brought relatives to work in them and passed them down through their families. By the 1970s, their stretch of 7 Mile was dense with dozens of little bakeries, specialty stores, ethnic restaurants and social halls. The small-town walkability appealed to the newcomers.
“Seventy-five percent of the people who came from the old country, they didn’t drive,” Kuza said. “They came here because they could walk to the meat market, walk to the coffeehouse. That’s why they didn’t want to move, because everything was here.”
Strangely enough, one of Chaldean Town’s earliest and most infamous boosters was Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq.
The priest at Sacred Heart Chaldean Church on 7 Mile, the spiritual center of the community, congratulated Hussein in 1979 on his new presidency, and that flattery prompted the dictator to send the church a check for $250,000. Later, when the priest went to Baghdad and told Hussein of his church’s debt, he got another $200,000, which helped pay off the bank loan and build the Chaldean Center of America next door to the church.
And for that, Mayor Coleman Young awarded Saddam Hussein the key to the city of Detroit. Really.
Then came crack
A few years later, everything changed. The crack epidemic that swept through the city and the crime that followed ravaged the neighborhood.
“The reasons we left Iraq was because of persecution, because it wasn’t going to be a healthy lifestyle for us eventually. Same thing here,” said Kuza, now of Bloomfield Hills. “The neighborhood kept deteriorating, the schools were getting more dangerous. The reason we keep moving our families is to get away from crime, or anything that’s going to harm our family. It’s just the way we are by design.”
Like many immigrants before them, the Chaldeans’ success led them to seek better homes in the suburbs of Macomb and Oakland counties. Many of them moved on while the neighborhood was still solid. But rising crime and falling police response accelerated the exodus.
“If there was stronger police enforcement in the area, it wouldn’t have gone down,” Kawa said. “You call the police, sometimes it took four hours, sometimes they don’t come until the next day. You go to a different area, call the cops, two minutes they’re there, crime solved. Here, they rob 20 houses by the time the police come.”
Sahir Gappy came to Chaldean Town from northern Iraq, where the term “war zone” isn’t thrown around lightly. But even for him, the crime and violence in the neighborhood became too much. At one point, the burglar alarm at his business was tripped so often in the middle of the night he stopped going into work to see what happened.
“When people want to live in a neighborhood, the first thing they ask is, ‘Is it safe?’ ” said Gappy, 58, now of Orchard Lake Village.
Nakia Yousif just moved away after decades here. “She was scared here,” Kawa said, translating her animated explanation. The 66-year-old moved to Sterling Heights barely a year ago. It became unbearable here, she said, for an older woman surrounded by criminals who prey on elderly people. She drives in now only to buy spices at S&J Meats.
Chaldeans like these who remember the area’s heyday are saddened and infuriated by what it’s become. It didn’t have to die like this, they say.
“It’s a shame in this goddamn city to have a neighborhood like this one end up being the way it is,” Gappy said. “And the only reason, the biggest reason, is the crime.”
A few still believe
There are some still here who hold out hope.
Nida Samona grew up in the neighborhood when her family immigrated to Michigan in the 1970s. “It was the true sense of community,” said Samona, senior vice president of operations for the Arab and Chaldean Council. “You knew people, you knew your neighbors, and they weren’t even all Chaldean. There were white people and black people, too. But it was a very homogenous community that worked beautifully together. There was a real safety net because they all knew each other or watched out for each other.”
Her organization opened a nonprofit facility on 7 Mile in 1997 offering services like counseling, health care, social services, job training and language classes. Ten years later, they built another learning center nearby. Both are open to anyone from the area, Chaldean or not.
“Long after people were leaving the city, we stayed and invested a lot of time and money in that area, because we believe in that area and that community and the city of Detroit,” she said.
Her efforts are just the latest to revive this area. In 1999, the city had the idea to stem the decline by investing in and promoting the neighborhood, and came up with the name Chaldean Town to mark it as a destination — like a Middle Eastern version of long-successful Greektown.
There would be colorful banners hanging from light posts, declaring the area’s new name. An annual ethnic festival on 7 Mile would close the street to traffic. A Chaldean Town Development Authority would oversee the neighborhood’s progress.
But like a lot of plans in Detroit over the years, the grants never came, the idea faded away and the strip continued its free fall.
Samona, now of Bloomfield Hills. still refuses to give up on the old neighborhood.
Where there are whole streets with no houses anymore, she sees a future of new duplexes. Where there are empty storefronts, she visualizes a walkable neighborhood that can be restored. Her group has spruced up the sidewalks and won small grants to make little improvements. And though 7 Mile is dead, she points to the collision shops and auto lots and liquor stores and dollar stores in the area that are still owned by Chaldeans.
She thinks this neighborhood could still be an ideal starting place for the ongoing wave of Christians fleeing Iraq. Just like the wave that brought her and her family here years ago.
“I’m there often, and I drive up and down those streets often and kind of reminisce about that beauty and hope that as an immigrant you’d assimilate and be a productive part of society.” Those memories motivate her to keep believing things can be better.
“I know what that once was,” she said. “And what it could be.”
Last man standing?
There’s no menu at Sullaf Restaurant. The entrées are whatever the cook makes that day.
“All my customers, they know what I have,” said Khidar Mikha, the restaurant’s 64-year-old owner. “I don’t have too many items.”
Buy Photo Khidar Mikha, 65, of Warren, the owner of Sullaf restaurant in Detroit, works in the kitchen on Monday, July 27, 2015. (Photo: Salwan Georges Detroit Free Press)
He serves food the way it was at family dinners back home, he says. There’s kabob, made of beef tenderloin. Lamb shank that falls off the bone. There are stews and sauces using old country spices, and lots of bread and rice, all of it fresh and made to order. Hot tea, brewed long and served in a clear glass cup, is free after a meal.
Mikha has owned the restaurant on 7 Mile for 19 years, first down the street, now in this building. He, too, started his new life in this neighborhood. He, too, moved.
“This here very bad area,” said Mikha, now of Warren. “No people. Everybody move. Sometimes when people have money, they go to area that is better.”
Yet, in contrast to the meat market, he still draws dozens of diners a day. Though nearly all the Chaldeans moved away, many still drive in every day to work in the collision shops and auto lots on the fringes of the neighborhood. And his restaurant is the only place for them to eat around here.
“It’s good old wholesome food,” Kuza said, as he sat down with friends for a multicourse lunch featuring a dozen Old World dishes spread out over a long table. “There’s not many places that serve our food. It’s usually Lebanese in Detroit. It looks the same, but it doesn’t have the same spices, the same taste.”
He’s been gone from the neighborhood for nearly four decades. And he still drives back every week, just to come here.
That’s why Mikha thinks his restaurant will be the last business left here on 7 Mile — because it’s the last link to the past for people who grew up here. As long as he stays open, he’ll have customers coming in.
“I am OK here,” he said. “I like my job. I like my people. I come here, I see my friends,” he said, standing in the kitchen of his crowded restaurant. “I am happy.”
Columnist John Carlisle writes about interesting people and places in Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/1Id3HImThe federal government's building watchdog cut a deal to keep a disgraced former union official out of jail in return for testifying against his former colleagues, the Federal Court has found.
Seven of Canberra's top CFMEU officials could have been hit with fines of more than $1 million over the allegations of breaking industrial laws in a case which relied heavily on the word of convicted blackmailer Halafihi Kimonu Kivalu.
Convicted blackmailer Halafihi "Fihi" Kivalu. Credit:Jamila Toderas
But the Australian Building and Construction Commission's case against seven members of the union's ACT branch has failed with the evidence of Mr Kivalu deemed, by Federal Court Judge Geoffrey Flick, too unreliable.
A criminal case against CFMEU official, former rugby league player Johnny Lomax, which also relied heavily on Mr Kivalu's evidence, collapsed last year and the Canberra Raiders great is now suing the Australian Federal Police over their conduct in the matter.An image showing what cities will be under excessive heat warning is seen on Thursday, August 31, 2017.
Air conditioners will be pumping today, but with the extreme weather comes the possibility of power outages.As the sun came out this morning, some people got their outside activities done early, knowing very well that temperatures would soar over 100."During the rest of the day we're going to stay in the house and be comfortable and be smart, drink water," said Marilyn Wright, Newark.With so many people planning to stay cool indoors with air conditioning, PG&E says an all-time record may be set for electricity use."This is certainly going to be the most extreme heat wave we have seen this summer, certainly these are record breaking temperatures, so it's something we're really trying to prepare for," said Tamar Sarkissian, PG&E spokesperson.PG&E has emergency command posts set up in different regions. They also have crews picking up transformers, cables, and power poles at their supply center. From there, they are deployed to areas vulnerable to outages."The crews don't have to travel to get their material it will be right there when they need it," said Clint West, PG&E Superintendent.PG&E has been work with its meteorology department tracking the heat. That technology helps them pinpoint where crews should be."We're anticipating we may seeing outages in Concord, Livermore, Antioch possibly North Bay and San Jose area, so we're really going to focus on those areas," said Sarkissian.Cal-ISO which runs the state's electric grid issued a Flex Alert and is asking people to conserve from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m. today. To avoid outages, PG&E is asking people to not use large appliances until nighttime and to keep the thermostat at 78 degrees when home and 85 when away.In a year where smartwatch momentum has lost some of its steam, smartglasses have made a surprise resurgence. The hand of wearable tech giveth and it taketh away.
Snap Inc's Spectacles played a big role in this, amping up hype that even wearable fans like ourselves couldn't predict. A campaign based on artificial scarcity helped it along, but it's hard to deny that the user experience was compelling too. It turns out that with a strong enough angle, smart eyewear can in fact achieve great things - Oakley's Radar Pace glasses were another good example of this.
So where to next? Are smartglasses now destined to be the big wearable event of 2017? Nobody out there knows better than Vuzix, and nobody within Vuzix knows better than CEO Paul Travers. Since 1997 (it was named Icuiti for the first ten years), Vuzix has been quietly working on the smartglasses revolution with a focus on enterprise - a low hanging fruit, Paul admits - building devices for helping professionals in warehouse logistics, healthcare, quality assurance, and even the military field.
Almost all of them have been fashionably questionable, which is fine when nobody else sees them, but it's also given Vuzix the time to build slowly towards the consumer.
Fine for a warehouse, not so much a drink in the bar
At CES 2017 it will be demoing its new pair of specs, the Blade 3000. This marks a midway point between business and the everyday user - what Paul calls the "prosumer" - for consumer-facing professionals; doctors, dentists, secretaries etc. Using Vuzix's waveguide technology they'll provide a digital display onto the lenses, providing anything from GPS navigation data to patient information, to Skype video calls and HD movies.
They're notably more stylish and averse to Glasshole-name-calling than what Vuzix has offered so far, but don't expect to see teens hopping in helicopters to the Grand Canyon for a pair. It's more of a step process towards what's next, when Vuzix heads to the consumer market.
"They can't look like Google Glass," says Travers, "they can't look like HoloLens, the tech has to disappear."
He tells Wareable that we'll probably see Vuzix in the consumer space before 2017 is over, "but in 2018 certainly"; the smartglass revolution may hit us sooner than we thought.
"We have third party partners that will probably band it with their name, who will be going after that space," adds Paul. "In the long run it won't just be Vuzix. We've already announced some relationships. Although we can't talk about names, there are already other folks that are involved."
The Blade 3000 look closer to something we'd wear
Partnering seems sensible: Vuzix holds the know-how but lacks the big brand name. With speculation that Apple, Google (again) and no doubt plenty more have plans for augmented reality and/or smartglasses, drawing on Vuzix's expertise could be better than going it alone.
Unknown to many, Vuzix was quietly helping Google work on Glass in its early days. "We did a bunch of stuff with Google when they first started," says Paul. "In fact some of the first stuff guys were jumping out of airplanes with, it was all Vuzix."
Paul's excited about bridging the gap to consumers, and closing the chasm between the virtual and physical. "If you look out down the street and there's a balloon floating over the ATM, it'll be really easy to spot," Paul says, offering an example of AR in practice. "It's the beginning of closing the connection between the digital world and the real world. And not having to take your phone out of your pocket to do it."
And lest we forget Pokémon Go, which proved just how brilliant and captivating AR can be.
"With a smartwatch you can't really connect the digital and real world together," Paul adds, but he thinks bringing these together with a pair of glasses is "going to incredibly compelling... much more so than VR."
"In VR you put your head in a bucket - don't take it the wrong way, we make VR products - but you do, and you're isolated from the real world. I'm convinced it's going to create really great experiences, but it's going to be in a confined space. But AR, it's going to be everywhere. And we're seeing that right now in enterprise."
Read next: VR enters its awkward teen years
Cost is obviously another concern, but maybe not as much as we think. For $130 Snap's Specs seem dear for a pair of quirky shades that perform one function, but demand remains high, and Paul believes a $300-$500 price range feels right for consumer smartglasses. That would be at least double the cost of Snapchat's specs, but then the functionality would be tenfold.
"If the experience is good enough, I think people will pay 500 easily," says Paul. "It's different to Snapchat glasses which record just a short video - [AR smartglasses] will do a lot for you."
"When it's right, it's just going to make so much sense for people."by Darryl RichardsonMegan Kinch
This appears to be a photo of the graffiti in question, it is literally the size of a brick. There is no indication that The Indignants did anything but take a photo of existing graffiti.
Yesterday afternoon, the London Police raided a house and confiscated thousands of dollars worth of computers and video equipment. Their justification? A single act of graffiti.
Mike Roy and Bailey Lamon are both members of The Indignants, a media collective that covers stories relevant to the marginalized and under-represented. Mike is a founding member of The Indignants: he and Bailey have traveled far and wide covering indigenous, social, environmental and animal rights issues. The Indignants is probably best known for their breaking coverage of Occupy London Ontario, the protests around the closing of the Caterpillar manufacturing plant, and of IdleNoMore actions in the London area. Mike Roy and the Indignants are also contributing members of the Media Co-op.
New details emerged late on Thursday night with regards to the arrests. It would seem that Bailey's partner who was eventually arrested later was originally allowed to leave. He was arrested a short time later when he returned with Mike. At some time during their overnight incarceration Mike and Bailey were offered early release if they agreed to a number of conditions. They were asked to sign a paper stating that they would not access the internet, associate with each other or participate in activism; they both refused to sign. This is part of pattern of police attempting to silence and frighten activists using minor offenses. They were released after a hearing in the afternoon with conditions to not possess markers or paint and keep the peace.
The London police have released a statement that they are being investigated for graffiti, specifically a graffiti on a downtown building reading "I'm not just another brick in the wall." Mike Roy and Bailey Lamon are being charged with mischief and possession of "marihuana" as is a third person. The confiscation of computers and other devices was also noted in the police statement. Mike and Bailey were released this afternoon with a notice to return to court on August 15.
Sakura Saunders, an activist and journalist of ProtestBarrick said "a house raid and the confiscation of equipment is an overblown reaction to an eventual charge of graffiti on one wall. Mike and Bailey are social justice media makers, covering activist movements. It seems obvious to me that the police are using petty charges to violate privacy and gain intelligence on social movements."
This fits in with a pattern in London, Ontario of persecuting activists severely for minor charges. In the leadup to the 2010 G20 protests, activists were arrested and jailed overnight for putting up posters in London, Ontario.
This story has been live-updated as we have learned more.
Update 2:45PM July 25th: Bailey and Mike have been released. They are next scheduled to appear in court for a hearing on August 15.
Update 12:36PM July 25th: The London police have released a statement that they are being investigated for graffiti, specifically a graffiti on a downtown building reading "I'm not just another brick in the wall." Mike Roy and Bailey Lamon are being charged with mischeif and possesion of "marihuana" as is a third person.
Update 1:12AM July 25th: The police forcefully entered the apartment with warrants to collect computers, hard drives, cameras, memory cards and other digital media. More charges may follow.
Update 1:06AM July 25th: Mike and Bailey will be appearing in London Ontario Court at 9:45AM. A Facebook page has been created to co-ordinate court support.
Corrections: It was earlier reported that Mike and Bailey would be appearing in court via video conference. It has now been confirmed they will appear in person. It was originally reported that they had been charged with conspiracy as well, this is not the case. Bailey Lamon was originally misidentified as Bailey Goldman-Sagan, her Facebook alias. The Media Co-Op regrets these errors and appreciates our readers' patience as this story develops.“That historic mission of NATO will go forward. I’m confident,” Mike Pence told NBC’s Chuck Todd. | Getty Pence: NATO will remain a check on Russia
NATO will remain a check on Russian power under the Trump administration, Vice President-elect Mike Pence said Wednesday.
Pence’s comments come days after President-elect Donald Trump said the post-war alliance was “obsolete.”
“That historic mission of NATO will go forward. I’m confident,” Pence told NBC’s Chuck Todd when pressed on whether the organization will remain a counterweight to Russia.
Pence, though, defended some of Trump’s criticisms of the alliance. Pence said NATO members needed to increase their defense spending and widen their focus to include more aggressive action against terrorism.
“NATO needs to refocus its mission on confronting radical Islamic terrorism, the threat of ISIS, and the threat that that poses to member nations,” Pence said.
Pence noted, as Trump repeatedly has, that the majority of NATO members do not spend the required minimum 2 percent of GDP on defense. The U.S. spends about 3.3 percent of GDP on defense.
Pence also said Russia’s election-hacking showed a lack of respect for the U.S.
“Well, there's no question that they view us as a rival,” Pence said of Russia. “But there's also no question that the actions of Russia, which the president-elect confirmed last week, disseminating information, hacking in the last election, show a fundamental lack of respect for the United States of America.”
The incoming administration’s attitude toward NATO has been muddled. Trump has been quick to level criticism at the alliance, but his choice to lead the Pentagon, retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, recently called it “the most successful military alliance certainly in modern world history, probably ever.”
Transition spokesman Sean Spicer sought to clear up the confusion earlier Wednesday, saying what Trump is “clearly talking about is what it does and what it’s able to do,” rather than taking issue with the concept of NATO.
“Much like the U.N., I don’t think the president-elect feels as though it is as productive as it could be,” Spicer said. “And I think there’s a big difference between the existence of the forum and the output of it. And that’s the distinction.”From George (For Context see Chapter 1
Dec 23, 2016
Sam,
Hopefully you have a great Christmas and a happy New Year.
George
My Response
Dec 23, 2016
Greetings My Friend,
You’re growing on me. I’m really starting to love you, my brother. Thanks for the last two messages. You made some great points and raised important issues. The busy holiday season has prevented my response. But, it will be coming.
Now, I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
-Sam
To All My Friends and Family
Along with my new friend George, I sincerely wish that you have a perfect and happy Christmas celebration. May the magic of Love be woven in all your activies. Thank you for enriching my life with the bonds of our friendship.
Merry Christmas!MEXICO CITY (AP) – Legendary Mexican soccer player Rafael Marquez Alvarez and a well-known band leader are among 22 people sanctioned for alleged ties to a drug trafficking organization, the United States Treasury announced Wednesday.
The sanctions are the result of a multi-year investigation of the drug trafficking organization allegedly headed by Raul Flores Hernandez, the Treasury said in a statement.
It will also sanction 43 entities in Mexico, including a soccer team and casino.
It is the single largest such designation of a drug trafficking organization ever by its Office of Foreign Assets Control, the statement said.
Marquez, 38, is a former Barcelona, Monaco and New York Red Bulls defender who currently plays for the Mexican soccer club Atlas in Guadalajara and is captain of the Mexican national team.
Messages left for Marquez's agent Enrique Nieto seeking comment were not immediately answered.
Flores Hernandez allegedly operated independently in the northern city of Guadalajara, but maintained alliances with the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.
OFAC Kingpin action targets 22 Mexican Nationals & 43 entities—the largest Kingpin designation against a Mexican drug network pic.twitter.com/RaGfecYahf — Treasury Department (@USTreasury) August 9, 2017
The Mexican Attorney General's Office also seized related assets, including the Grand Casino near Guadalajara, according to the Treasury statement.
''Raul Flores Hernandez has operated for decades because of his longstanding relationships with other drug cartels and his use of financial front persons to mask his investments of illegal drug proceeds,'' OFAC Director John E. Smith said in the statement.
Federal drug trafficking indictments against Flores Hernandez were returned in March in Washington and the southern district of California.
The U.S. government referred to Marquez and 34-year-old norteno singer Julio Cesar Alvarez, better known as Julion Alvarez, as people with longstanding relationships with Flores Hernandez who ''have acted as front persons for him and his (drug trafficking organization) and held assets on their behalf.''
Alvarez has been nominated for Latin Grammys and has won Billboard awards. His latest album, ''Not a Devil, nor a Saint,'' released in May was his fifth No. 1 on the Billboard list of regional Mexican music.
Emails to Alvarez's manager were not immediately answered and a spokesman for Universal Music, the parent company of Alvarez's record label Fonovisa, declined to comment.
The Treasury statement did not say that Marquez or Alvarez face charges in the U.S.
Marquez is famed as a tenacious defender whose crunching tackles sometimes saw him sent off in high-profile matches. In Mexico he is revered as one of the country's all-time greats, though many U.S. fans remember him for a studs-up, head-butt foul on Cobi Jones that earned him a direct red card at the 2002 World Cup.
Marquez debuted in Mexico's top-flight league in 1996 with Atlas and moved to AS Monaco of France's Ligue 1 three years later. In 2003, Marquez joined Barcelona and spent 10 years there, helping the Spanish super-club win La Liga and Champions League trophies.
Advancing into his 30s, Marquez then had stints with the New York Red Bulls of Major League Soccer, Leon of Mexico and Hellas Verona in Italy's Serie A before returning to Atlas.
A longtime fixture of Mexico's national team, he led ''El Tri'' at four World Cups and hopes to become only the third player ever to play in five. Marquez has scored 13 goals wearing the green jersey in 158 appearances between 1997 and 2017, according to statistics published by the Mexican Soccer Federation.
The entities the Treasury tied to Marquez include his soccer academy and health and rehabilitation clinics.
The sanctions freeze |
, which gives foreign investors preferential treatment in the immigration process in exchange for investing in American companies that create jobs.
In a brief interview after the meeting, Niemeyer said he planned to use the tax-breaks promised by the board to entice EB-5 investors. The tax breaks will improve Deep South's cash flow projections, and the Development Board's stamp of approval will help demonstrate to potential investors that his project his viable, Niemeyer said.
The $14 million or so not covered by EB-5 investors will be raised by selling equity in the company, Niemeyer said.German Court Tells Wikimedia Foundation That It's Liable For Things Users Write
from the that's-a-problem dept
I've spent a bit of time in Germany over the past few years, and the entrepreneurial community there is really interesting. It's become a hot place for emerging startups and there's a lot of excitement, especially in Berlin. Similarly, it appears that a number of internet activists have been flocking to Berlin. So it's become a really vibrant community of folks trying to make the internet better.But the one thing that worries me quite a bit about the German internet scene is its very dangerous view of secondary liability -- in that German law and courts tend to lean towards blaming the intermediary for the actions of their users. I learned this the frightening way on stage at conference in Germany, under some very hot lights (in a decommissioned airport) where a somewhat angry questioner in the audience insisted that some comments written on Techdirt by some of our users were "illegal in Germany" and that, under German law,was liable for them. He stood at the microphone with a laptop reading the comments and demanding I answer for them, despite never having even read those comments, let alone created them. I suddenly started mentally counting down the time until my flight home. I defended secondary liability (and basic free speech concepts) and was able to leave the country without problem (and have been back a couple times since then). However, as a few people explained to me on that trip, a real hindrance to innovation in Germany is this antiquated view of secondary liability whereby sites can almost always be declared liable for actions of their users.It appears that this tragic view has struck again -- this time against the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia. The Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart, has found that the Foundation can be held liable for content on Wikipedia. In this specific case, someone argued that some Wikipedia content was libelous. While the court says that the organization doesn't need to proactively police its content, it does say that if anything has received any sort of complaint, suddenly the Foundationbe held liable.Of course, this is a recipe for easy censorship. If you don't like something in Wikipedia, just file a complaint, and to avoid liability, the Wikimedia Foundation will have strong incentive to delete the contested language. Of course, this goes against nearlythat Wikipedia stands for in terms of how content gets edited on the site. Even if legally required to, it's ridiculous for a German court to basically tell the Foundation that it needs to effectively delete passages of Wikipedia editors and then block that content from being put back. Rulings like this make true user-supported media operations legally difficult to maintain, and will increasingly scare top internet companies out of Germany.If someone posted libelous information, go after them. Putting the blame on an intermediary isn't just misguided, but it also creates a strong chilling effect on innovation.
Filed Under: germany, secondary liability, wikipedia
Companies: wikimedia foundation, wikipediaNEW York was today rocked by a suspected ISIS-inspired pipe bomb terror attack carried out at a subway station near Times Square which three victims injured.
The suspect, named as Akayed Ullah, 27, from Bangladesh, strapped the device to his body using Velcro-style fixing before "deliberately" detonating it as he walked through the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
16 The suspect was apprehended by cops after the blast
The rush hour blast, which ripped through the busy terminal at 7.20am this morning, has been described as an attempted terror attack by cops.
Dramatic video footage shows the moment the device explodes sending a cloud of smoke up into the packed station.
Former New York Police commissioner Bill Bratton has told MSNBC that Ullah was inspired by ISIS, a detail officials have yet to confirm.
Police have said the suspect, who was reportedly taken to Bellevue Hospital, suffered burns and wounds to his body after the bomb detonated in the packed transport hub.
A picture of the suspect shows him being restrained on the floor with his clothes ripped and cuts to his body.
The three people have were wounded suffered minor injuries including ringing in the ears and headaches.
Ullah carried out the depraved attack in a bid to exact revenge for Israeli actions in Palestine, reports CNN citing a police source.
The Bangladeshi reportedly told cops that he wanted vengeance for attacks in Gaza— where four people have been killed amid protests since President Trump declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
16 Akayed Ullah, pictured being stretchered away following the bomb attack, has worked as a cabbie and lives in Brooklyn with his parents
Reuters 16 Suspect Akayed Ullah has been detained by New York cops after attempting to carry out a bomb attack
Twitter 16 The suspected terrorist was taken to Bellevue Hospital where he is being treated for serious burns to his body and hands
Twitter 16 Police have named the suspect as 27-year-old Akayed Ullah - this is reportedly the ID he was carrying
Twitter 16 Police said the suspect had used a Velcro-style fixing to attach the pipe bomb to himself
EPA 16 Emergency crews at the scene close to New York's Times Square
AFP or licensors 16 The FBI and bomb squads have been pictured at the scene of the blast
Getty - Contributor 16 The bus terminal is the biggest in America with millions passing through each year
Reuters 16 The attacker targeted one of the city's busiest transport hubs
Reuters 16 Police have described the blast as an attempted terror attack
New York Police Commissioner James O'Neill confirms it was an 'attempted terrorist attack' in Times Square, New York City
Describing the device FBI spokesman John Miller said: "The device is based on a pipe bomb, it was fixed on his person and was a combination of Velcro and zip ties"
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo described the device as "amateur level" and said the attacker learned to make the bomb online.
Cops briefly spoke to Ullah, who told them he made the explosive device at the electrical company where he works, reports the New York Post.
The suspect reportedly arrived in the country seven years ago and was recently living in Brooklyn and working as a cab driver.
A person briefed on the investigation said Ullah arrived in America on an F-4 visa, a preferential visa available for those with family in the US who are citizens.
The blast erupted in a passageway leading to train platforms, when many would have been heading to work and was captured on CCTV.
What we know so far:
A pipe bomb exploded at Port Authority Bus Terminal, close to Times Square in New York at 7.30am local time this morning
Cops said the suspect had a bomb strapped to him
The explosion left three victims with minor injuries and the suspect with serious wounds
The suspect has been officially named as Akayed Ullah, 27
Ex-New York Police commissioner Bill Bratton earlier said the suspect was a Bangladeshi national who was inspired by ISIS
Police have described the incident as a “terror-related incident”
16 A graphic showing where the 'ISIS-inspired' bomb attack took place in New York City
Reuters 16 One man has been taken into custody with reports he had 'low-tech' a pipe bomb strapped to him
New York police announce suspect bomber is in custody and is the only person injured in Times Square attack
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told a press conference: "There was an effectively low-tech device. There were several injuries, we hope minor. And it was handled extraordinarily well.
"There was a disruption in train and bus service while a sweep was being done. That’s all being restored now."
He continued: "This is New York. The reality is that we are a target by many who would like to make a statement against democracy, against freedom.
"We have the statue of liberty in our harbour and that makes us an international target. We understand that.
"Anyone can go on the internet and download garbage and vileness about how to put together an amateur-level explosive device.
"And that’s a reality that we live with."
The New York Post, citing police sources, said "wires" were seen protruding from the suspect's body in the aftermath of the blast, a detail which police have yet to comment on.
NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill has confirmed that the suspect "did make statements" but has not revealed any details of what was said.
Twitter 16 Armed cops at the scene after reports of an explosion at a major traffic terminal
Reuters 16 Commuters evacuate the busy interchange, which is America's largest bus terminal
Twitter 16 Several people have reportedly been injured in the blast close to Times Square
Loud blast reportedly heard inside bus terminal sparking ‘stampede’ in New York
Witnesses reported a stampede as panicked commuters rushed to escape the scene.
The bomb squad and FBI officers were quickly pictured at 42nd Street and 8th Avenue where the blast was heard.
Cops, fire crews and paramedics remain at the scene and President Trump and the city's mayor have been briefed.
The bus terminal has been reopened as investigations continue.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said he has ordered extra security at mass transit hubs in his state.
The explosion came just days after ISIS issued a specific threat against popular tourist spot Times Square.
Port Authority Bus Terminal is the largest in America with more than 65million people passing through each year.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4368. We pay for videos too. Click here to upload yoursHAYMARKET, Va. (WUSA) -- They call themselves the "Christmas Sweater Club" because they wear the craziest ones they can find. They also sing Christmas songs at school and try their best to spread Christmas cheer.
Now all 10 of them are in trouble because of what they did at their school.
"They said,'maliciously maim students with the intent to injure.' And I don't think any of us here intentionally meant to injure anyone, or did," said Zakk Rhine, a junior at Battlefield High School.
The boys say they were just tossing small two-inch candy canes to fellow students as they entered school. The ones in plastic wrap that are so small they often break apart.
Skylar Torbett, also a junior, said administrators told him, "They said the candy canes are weapons because you can sharpen them with your mouth and stab people with them." He said neither he nor any of their friend did that.
Next thing they knew, they were all being punished with detention and at least two hours of cleaning. Their disciplinary notices say nothing about malicious wounding but about littering and creating a disturbance.
"It was at 7 in the morning, before school even starts, so I don't what we'd be really disrupting," said Cameron Gleason, also a junior.
Principal Amy Etheridge-Conti says she can't comment on the students' discipline but did say there was a lot more to it than handing out candy and that the discipline was warranted.
The boys admitted their incident may have caused litter since some kids dropped their candy canes on the floor. But Cameron Gleason said he spent an hour cleaning up the dropped candy.
The boys' parents think the school went overboard and maybe administrators were trying to stop their boys from spreading Christmas cheer.
Mother Kathleen Flannery said an administrator called her and explained "not everyone wants Christmas cheer. That suicide rates are up over Christmas, and that they should keep their cheer to themselves, perhaps."
Patti Gleason, the mother of Cameron Gleason says, "I am 100 percent sure they did nothing wrong. We've gotten so many different stories. It went from maiming kids with candy canes, to littering. And then when received the referral (disciplinary notice) it said 'disruption.' So nobody really knew what they were getting in trouble for, they were just making up a whole bunch of different things."
But, like Who's of Whoville, the boys are still singing, not letting what happened to them dampen their cheer.
Written by Peggy Fox
9NEWS NOW & wusa9.comPart two of my conversation with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Part one is here.
Klint Finley: Can we talk about Pandrogeny?
Sure.
You already touched on male aggression earlier, but just for any of our readers that — I’m already pretty familiar with the project — but for anyone who isn’t maybe you could talk a little bit about the original intentions.
It’s funny as time goes by and you get older it gets harder and harder to answer things because you see all these links and all these parallel pieces of information, and parallel things that have happened in the past that have led to these points. And you can also start to see potentially where they may be going. So it gets harder and harder to answer things lately. But, in a way, it all goes on from what we were just saying with TOPI: we were really focusing on behavior and breaking that.
And then we came into the USA in exile and we met Lady Jaye in New York. And the very first day we were together she dressed me in her clothes, put make-up on me, decorated my dreadlocks with Tibetan trinkets — which she didn’t even know I knew anything about. And it was just very crucial for us to immediately go into mirroring each other. And the initial impetus came from insanely powerful love.
We usually explain by saying: people will say, “I wish I could just eat you up.” Well, we really wanted to eat each other up. We were really frustrated that we were in two bodies. We wanted to literally be able to just get hold of each other, crush ourselves together and then be just one consciousness in one body or just one entity in any form.
And after a while, to emphasize that, we started to do mirroring. Luckily my feet were the same size as Jaye’s, although she was taller. So we started to wear each other’s clothes and shoes and then we started to dress in the same outfits and get the same haircuts and same color of hair. Whilst it was originally triggered by this just instinctive urge to blend and merge, inevitably we both started thinking about why. Why is this is happening? Why do we feel this is so important? What’s going on? Because of that thing we were saying about constantly asking questions and checking. Okay, we’re doing this but why are we doing this? Is it just decorative or is there something more going on? And so we started to talk to each other and learn about each other’s lives and she said she always felt uncomfortable being in a body. She used to call her body a cheap suitcase. And to her the self is the mind, not the body. The body is just the cheap suitcase that carries around the mind and gives you mobility.
And so as we thought about it, we thought, well, what is it that’s making us dissatisfied? And what is it that’s going on in the world around us, in the environment, that makes us feel that this is the right response for us? We were looking at the Village Voice sex adverts over a period of time and we noticed that when we first moved to New York they were nearly all biological women offering sexual services to heterosexual men. But over a few years we noticed that they shifted until it was nearly all shemales and transsexuals offering sexual services to heterosexual men. And we also noticed on the television that transsexuals and drag queens were becoming more and more common and getting a more sympathetic characterization. And that cosmetic surgery, which had been the biggest secret of the elite, was becoming something to boast about by the elite. We thought: there’s something going on here. People are starting to gravitate towards this more hermaphroditic self. Straight men wanting to be with women with cocks — what’s that about? What’s going on?
So we looked at that and we again looked at gender and identity and we thought: where does all this come from? There’s two threads, there’s DNA and then there’s conditioning, if you like. From the moment you’re in the womb, before you’re even out, people are giving you a boy’s name or a girl’s name, if they know. And they talk about you and what you’re going to be like, what they’re going to do when you’re born or what they want you to be like as a child. They’re already trying to condition you and program you before you even appear. And then it gets stronger and stronger from more and more directions the older you get.
So we just decided that we wanted to go deeper into all of this. And we also looked back at this behavior thing and we thought, well, if we’re at this larval stage and our behavior is still so prehistoric, what’s the big issue? Then, as you say, it’s the male aggression syndrome. Something is different, something is from elsewhere, something is from another culture, something looks different — and the response is to attack it, to intimidate it. This happens with school, between religions and it happens in all different ways. But the basic thing is: different, attack. And that came from preserving the clan and so you get clan warfare, you get groups trying to protect their food resource or their water resources or their cave. And at some point that made some kind of sense. But that’s still going on, on the grandest scale. And we’re using smart bombs and all these other technologies, but it’s basically still the same thing.
The “powers that be” utilize this “it’s different be afraid, attack it” to their own ends to maintain control, to maintain the pyramid of power and to intimidate the population. So that made us think this is really important. Is there a way to change this? We thought “wouldn’t it be great if men had to breastfeed?” Maybe that would make them a lot more compassionate and gentle being involved physically with propagating children. And so we just started to dialogue on gender and identity and we came to the conclusion that DNA is yet another recording device and within it is a program about male and female.
We looked at different mythological stories that we know. In the original paintings of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve and God were hermaphrodites. And that when you start tracking back there’s the divine hermaphrodite. The perfect form is the hermaphrodite, the male and female unified as one. Even the last Pope said, “God must be male and female.” So if God as a symbol of a perfected being, of the ultimate consciousness, is male and female, is a hermaphrodite, then that is what we are supposed to evolve towards as beings. That, if you like, all of life and civilization of species is growing towards this exalted state of divinity, which is the hermaphrodite.
Which made us decide that we wanted to represent that, to symbolize both our rejection of the way that current society works, current power structures work. Certainly for me, we didn’t want to be associated with maleness as a stereotype. And Jaye didn’t want to be female as a stereotype either. We have a button badge on that jacket she gave me that says, “Not every ejaculation needs a name.” And she was really adamant about the tricks and the traps of biological materiality. And so we started to explore that more deeply and we thought DNA programs us to be what we become physically and biologically. So, to short circuit DNA — which we saw as control — obviously we can’t completely reprogram DNA yet, but to symbolize rejection of its tyranny, first of all, actually we got a vasectomy. I said: “That’s it, we’re not going to let it perpetuate itself. Whatever DNA is in me, that’s it. No more.”
But that wasn’t enough. That’s when we began to blend the sociopolitical aspect with personal loving aspects. So we were more determined to look more alike. We also wanted to reject the predicted DNA path of our bodies and so we started to use cosmetic surgery, tattooing, all the different toolkits of contemporary society to look more and more like each other so that we became this new being that we called Pandrogyne, the next evolutionary step for the species, personified as two bodies becoming one.
We decided that we really wanted to make a commitment to our rejection of the DNA program. And that’s when we decided to get the breast implants together, which was Valentine’s Day 2003. We already got her beauty marks tattooed on here. [Points to face] She got eyeliner tattooed to make her eyes look as big as mine. And so on Valentine’s Day we both got matching breast implants and woke up holding hands in the recovery room.
And my first words were “These are our angelic bodies.” That just came out. That made a lot of sense. And so we continued with that because we saw it yet again a form of cut-up, literally cutting up our bodies and also cutting up the biological program.
But we also had begun to see that the implications were far beyond gender or even just identity but they were about the dire need for the species to reconsider itself.
You’ve been a pioneer of a lot of things that have caught on. Industrial music, rave culture, extreme body modification. So have you seen Pandrogeny catch on? Have you met other people, other couples?
We have, interestingly. Obviously Pandrogeny, taken to a physical expression, is going to be to the minority for practical reasons — depending on what people’s job are, etc. It’s hard enough for traditional transsexuals to adjust into this society, but for people to be openly androgynous is going to be difficult.
So that we have- we’ve met several – interestingly, nearly always heterosexual couples — loving couples. Inevitably we’ve been adopted to some degree by the queer community, but not the conservative gay community.
Ironically, the only real resistance we had to the idea is from transsexuals who want to take the male into becoming female but they want to be accepted as, if you like, like as a straight female. They don’t want any confusion, they don’t want to be noticed or stand out, they want to be absorbed and just be ordinary, which, to us is anathema. We don’t want to be ordinary. We want to radicalize society and break its preconceptions and its stereotypes, come what may.
So what is good and what is really encouraging is that apart from these few little pockets of…confusion, really. Not so much antagonism as confusion as to what we’re saying and doing, because we don’t fit this new stereotype of becoming male. Because as we used to say, some people say they are a man trapped in a woman’s body, some people say that they’re a woman trapped in a man’s body. The Pandrogyne is just trapped in the body. That’s the quick way of explaining this.
So we’ve been giving talks and lectures at colleges, universities, GBLT event, seminars, all over the United States and Europe, Canada, Germany, Italy and every single one of them has been packed. At NYU and at Rutgers we broke the attendance records. For a lecture talking about Pandrogeny. And the word is beginning to be absorbed into the language. It’s getting used by journalists, finally, and other artists and the writers are using it as a fresh term. Because we wanted a word that wasn’t about transsexualism and so on.
The thing we wanted was a word that didn’t have baggage yet, that was gender neutral and would become whatever you make of it. So it gives us a completely fresh playing ground to build from. A completely fresh point for the discussion and there’s none of the GBLT politics, there’s none of the straight politics. There’s no real preconceptions as of yet, but inevitably, at some point it will always come to the package of information. When people hear it, whatever that version of it is, it will be what they think of when they hear it.
But the moment has given a big space for a reconsidered discussion and because when we got to the point of thinking “What would happen if we decide that we can actually reengineer DNA?” Which is beginning to happen with science. What are the implications of this? That’s not just something about becoming a species of hermaphrodite although, personally, we would love that. To actually get rid of male and female altogether and just have Pandrogynes, which would mean people have both genitals, etcetra.
But why even stop there? If we want to travel into space and colonize space, why don’t we find out how to hibernate? Primitive animals can do it, surely we can do it. And if we could do that, what about growing gills? Having fur or feathers? Why stop at just gender? Why not just say, “Anything we imagine we have the right to become.” And that’s when it started to become an issue.
And then we thought about the issues of the self and what we go through at the beginning, about the economy and the fact that the current totalitarian capitalism as exemplified by China right now is taking over. It’s still based on this flawed thinking that you can have growth forever, which you can’t. It goes against the laws of nature. So how do you deal with that? We have to rethink the way we see ourselves in relation to human species. If we imagine ourselves and perceive ourselves as one cell or one person, one being, but as one part of the human species and that the actual organism is the entire species… When you make all the decisions based on the well being of the species, you would naturally assign resources to where the whole species needed it most. You would heal the species with what was available.
So you would not build weapons, you’d get food to Africa. Or you would not waste money on one-time research, you would find cures for AIDS. You might not have five hundred different car designs every year, but you might decide to find out how to build underwater cities. And so, ultimately, it’s about learning to keep on allowing the vision to have no limits. To keep going: “What else after that?” “What does that imply?” And that’s the point that we’re up to. Why not grow horns, furs, gills?
We do think we have to colonize space, just as Gysin and Burroughs said. And that’s another reason we feel the human species biologically must evolve. Because space travel becomes easier if you can hibernate. If we’re going to be in weightlessness most of the time: have shorter legs.
What sorts of things do you think people can start doing right now to either push those limits or prepare for these sorts of changes?
Some of them are really simple. Whether or not this is fact, we don’t know, but we tended to think left is female and right is male. So people can look at themselves and, for example, if you think of male and female, not as genders, but as ratios of behavior — most of which comes from society’s imprint conditioning — then look at yourself with an unbiased eye and think: Am I too submissive? Am I too giving?
If so, should I be stronger? And in which way that is non-damaging to others? And then think of exercises to remind yourself, “I’m doing that again, therefore, I need to do the other thing.” So you can start to analyze the ratios of behavior and come up with little tricks, little disciplines and exercises to balance them out. That’s one of the reasons we like the Process — because the Four Gods we saw as personality traits. So if you were too Luciferian, then you would focus on Jehovahian behavior and so on. So a bit like that. And of course, some are very simple. Experiment with changing the way that you dress. And switch roles with your partner. Have you seen the film about The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye?
No, I haven’t had the chance to.
There’s a part in that where we’re dressed in fetish lingerie and high heels and a little skirt doing the washing up in the kitchen. Lady Jaye said doing the household chores is always much more fun when you’re dressed up sexy. And we talked about it in the film. And several people have come up to me since and said: “We’ve tried that thing of dressing in fetish clothes when cleaning up. It’s true. It’s more fun. I enjoy it now.”
Silly things. You can make it as deep as you want. You change your hair. Even if you don’t do it in the street, wear a makeup at home. Experiment. But don’t think it’s about gender. Maybe think: how do I usually present myself to the world? What would be the opposite? Say you’re scruffy and a goth. Get a suit and a tie and some shoes, see how your behavior and posture changes.
We don’t like to really say what to do. We prefer that people develop their own self-analysis and then explore. But explore with no limitations. Imagination should never, ever be limited.
And… try some rituals.
Looking back on your life, can you think of an example of a time that you changed your mind about something? That there was something that was significant to you that, you know, that you completely changed your opinion about?
Yes. When we began Throbbing Gristle we were, we being me, really angry about the inequities of society. Especially being from Britain, with the royal family and aristocracy and the really ingrained class system. Enraged by the inequity and the bigotry and the inherited privilege whether people have the skills or the qualities to exercise it.
So my approach to expressing the anger was very aggressive and enraged, furious. But over the years we’ve come to believe that there’s never a need for anger in order to demonstrate or propose change. That a friendly, seductive presentation is just as effective, if not more so. And also in a way it’s more insidious and subversive to smile and talk gently and still say something that contradicts everything somebody else has imagined to be the truth. It can be far more disturbing than screaming at them because we ought to learn how to deal with anger and screaming and defend ourselves from that. It’s really hard to accept confidence and know how to respond to it. It’s usually embarrassing. And so subtlety, instead of head-on collision, with the status quo.
But make no mistake, the status quo is always our enemy.From full exchange machines to one-way dispensers, CoinDesk brings you the latest in bitcoin automated service news from around the world.
It seems the community is still deciding on an official name that describes the wide variety of machines offered as bitcoin ATMs – except for Robocoin, that is, which now describes its machines as ‘branches’.
While supporting the new term, we’ll continue to use ‘bitcoin ATM’ here for the time being for consistency and Google-ability.
The last week has provided another technological buffet of of ATM/BTM installations and news, further proving that bitcoin and the hardware supporting its economy are global and unstoppable.
Taiwan
Taiwan has had its ice-cream store-based ATM for a while and now its operators have added a multilingual interface for their international clientele.
The Lamassu machine now serves customers in English, Italian, German and French. The notable exception is Chinese, which is still in development and planned for release in the near future.
#Taiwan’s first #Bitcoin machine now offers multi-language support. pic.twitter.com/EJC2NFkZAE
– Bitcoin in Taiwan (@BitcoinFormosa) 13th May 2014
In further news from the company, its second bitcoin ATM is to be launched soon.
Glasgow, Scotland
The country that gave the world liberal economics now is now furthering that cause with a Lamassu ATM, and charging a more than reasonable 0% fee on transactions.
CeX, a tech retailer, is promoting its machine as a way to encourage the general public into using bitcoin via a simple way to buy the digital currency at its bricks-and-mortar location in Glasgow.
China
Last weekend’s Global Bitcoin Summit in Beijing wasn’t just about central bank regulations and mining hardware. Startup BitOcean also demonstrated a pair of active ATMs it has developed in partnership with major exchange OKCoin.
Vancouver, Canada
Vancouver has been the spiritual home of bitcoin ATMs since it installed the world’s first machine back in October last year. Now it has another, a Lamassu kiosk owned by Yuri Yerofeyev, a local bitcoin entrepreneur, trader and Director of The Bitcoin Co-op.
The new ATM can be found at 1195 Robson Street, Vancouver, and, going forwards, customers will be able to purchase their bitcoin at an exchange rate of Virtex +5%. For now, though, the rate is +3% as a promotional offer, so get round there pronto if you need some bitcoin.
DIY vending machine
If you would prefer to spend a day or so building your own machine and saving some bucks in the process, the Open Bitcoin ATM project is now selling kits for its DIY one-way vending kiosks for $645 to US and Canadian customers.
The machine’s clear acrylic case shows you and everyone else just how much fiat currency is being funnelled into bitcoin, although at this stage its note reader accepts US dollars only.
Bristol and London, UK
UK company SatoshiPoint says it has a Robocoin waiting in customs to be installed at Superfoods (25-27 St Stephens Street, Bristol), which also accepts bitcoin and has plans for expansion across the country.
SatoshiPoint has also been seen unloading other Robocoin machines in London and said it will be launching them officially after the Bitcoin2014 conference Amsterdam, which finished yesterday.
London is now on track to rival Singapore as the city with most bitcoin ATM installations.A happy golfer. Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump likes to golf. He owns golf courses around the world, after all. Donald Trump does not like the media. We know this because he talks about it, he tweets about it, and he likely dreams about it. This weekend, the president took another break from Washington and headed south to Mar-a-Lago. On Saturday, Trump suited up to play a round of golf with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. The weather looks nice enough in Jupiter, Florida, the site of the Trump National Golf Club—mid-70s, bit of cloud cover, but nothing to stress over. As good a day as any for a little golf diplomacy.
But what to do with the press while you’re teeing off?
Trump's press corps has been placed in a basement suite at Jupiter golf club. Black plastic over windows to give Trump privacy as he golfs. pic.twitter.com/8zbqi5HGSD — Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) February 11, 2017
Our view of Trump's Jupiter golf course from the pool hold. pic.twitter.com/VCtTIJaSLQ — Jill Colvin (@colvinj) February 11, 2017
Yikes. Needless to say, that seems a bit extreme.
American presidents playing golf has never been a particularly top-secret affair.
Barack Obama putting on the 18th green at the Kapolei Golf Club on Dec. 21. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
George W. Bush with his father, former President George Bush, playing golf in July 2002 at the Cape Arundel Golf Course in Kennebunkport, Maine. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Bill Clinton after teeing off at the Farm Neck Golf Course on Martha’s Vineyard in August 1999. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images
Update, 1:32 p.m.: Donald Trump just didn’t want the media to steal his likes.In a turn for the worse Reddit, once a haven for the free exchange of thoughts and ideas, is now actively profiting from users contributions in a form outside of normal social media practice.
Many of us have heard and come to terms with the saying “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product”. In the social media and search engine world that means we essentially have given up our right to privacy to the websites we use so they can help advertisers use our information to target us with ads. In Google this essentially works by matching the keywords you type into the search engine to high quality ads you might click on, In Facebook it works by showing you ads targeted to things you like or websites you’ve visited in the past, and on Reddit until last week it meant seeing a confusing ad on the home page or one targeted to the sub area you’re in.
Last week Reddit changed the rules and took their rights to user submitted content to a previously unthinkable level. They published a book of AMA’s that included users submitted questions and the conversations had between users and celebrities doing the AMA’s. The move was met with a high volume of concern and jest and with good reason. Essentially, for the first time in history, a social media network has not only claimed the rights to user submitted content in mass they are now profiting off it without the direct consent of users for each usage and doing so off of their own website.
The implications are vast for thousands of users on the social networking site. Not just for commenters, but for those that post their own original, unique content to the site in sub-reddits like the following:
/r/Poetry – 47,796 users, ~66,000 unique posts
/r/OCPoetry – 8,404 users, ~26,000 unique posts
/r/WritingPrompts – 4,548,667 users, ~307,000 unique posts
/r/AskReddit – 10,147,215 users, ~13,000,000 unique posts
/r/LifeProTips – 5,612,574 users, ~197,000 unique posts
/r/Travel – 225,557 users, ~242,000 unique posts
As you can see in the above data millions of users have posted millions of unique submissions and comments in just these 5 sub-reddits that encourage original text based content. I reached out to the mods of the above sub-reddits to gauge how they felt about Reddit’s new profit model. The mods of /r/Poetry were against Reddit republishing the original content submitted on their sub, but admitted that they could do little to stop corporate. The mods of /r/WritingPrompts said they would work with Reddit to publish a book only if the original authors were fairly |
of six team captains for the season. They were appointed by coach Rex Ryan, who announced his choices in training camp.
Except for Moore. He didn't receive the distinction until Oct. 9, when he put on his uniform before facing the New England Patriots and noticed a captain's "C" on the jersey.
Ryan never announced it to the team and never told Moore about it. Weird, huh? Ryan called it an oversight on his part, saying he should've recognized Moore -- the longest-tenured player on offense -- from the outset.
A delay-of-name penalty?
"This is terrible, but I overlooked the obvious," a sheepish Ryan told ESPNNewYork.com Monday. "Out of the blue, I decided I gotta have Brandon as a captain. It wasn't right, so I just slipped (the C) on there and literally nobody noticed. I never said it to the team. I just put it on there."
Asked why he never announced it, Ryan said, "I kind of felt embarrassed that I never recognized it. I never even told him."
The timing of Moore's unspoken promotion might raise some eyebrows because it happened around the time of his war of words with teammate Santonio Holmes. For the record, Moore received the "C" before his spat with Holmes -- or "before the eruption," as Ryan called it.
The eruption occurred when Moore, objecting to Holmes' public criticism of the offensive line, fired back, saying, "I've never seen a captain" rip his own teammates. At the time, Holmes and Mark Sanchez were the offensive co-captains -- or so most people thought. Turns out that Moore was a captain, too.
Three days later, Moore and Holmes served as game captains when the Jets faced the Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football. They walked together to midfield for the coin toss, a Ryan-orchestrated show of unity.
In case you're wondering, the other Ryan-appointed captains for the season are Sione Pouha and Darrelle Revis on defense and Eric Smith on special teams.
Moore is a quiet leader, one of the most respected players on the team. Ryan said he often consults with him when organizing practice schedules and team-related issues.
"I lean on Brandon quite a bit," Ryan said. "He knows what I think of him. We don't always agree, but if I'm looking for input from one person on the team, I go to him."
How does Moore feel about his unusual captaincy?
"It's an honor I take great pride in," he said.
Rich Cimini covers the Jets for ESPNNewYork.com.White House Chief of Staff John Kelly made headlines again this week, following a Fox News interview in which he did fresh damage to his credibility. Asked, for example, whether he’s prepared to apologize to Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.), about whom Kelly recently told a false story, Donald Trump’s chief of staff replied, “Oh, no. No. Never. Well, I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like that, absolutely not. I stand by my comments.”
In the same interview, Kelly, while explaining his reverence for history, argued that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.” It wasn’t long before historians, scholars, and people who know what they’re talking about explained just how wrong Kelly’s assessment was.
In a press briefing yesterday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked, “Does the White House at least acknowledge that the chief of staff’s comments are deeply offensive to some folks, and historically inaccurate?” She replied, “No.”
And while that wasn’t surprising – this isn’t a White House that acknowledges mistakes – something else Sanders said struck me as especially notable. From the official transcript:
“I think the fact that we keep trying to drive – the media continues to want to make this and push that this is some sort of a racially charged and divided White House.”
I’m afraid it’s a little late from Trump World to express discomfort with the “racially charged” label.
This is, after all, a rather unique presidency. Donald Trump’s rise to political power was fueled in large part by his role championing a racist conspiracy theory about the nation’s first black president. As a candidate for public office, Trump went after Judge Gonzalo Curiel because of his ethnicity, hesitated when asked to denounce David Duke, and equated Mexican immigrants with rapists.
As a president, Trump has pushed several versions of a Muslim ban, defended some racist activists as “very fine people,” and launched a prolonged feud with athletes engaged in a silent civil-rights protest.
Now, the president’s chief of staff is describing the cause of the Civil War in a decidedly ahistorical way.
If there’s a “racially charged” narrative surrounding this White House, it isn’t “the media” that created it.By Maggie Masetti
September 8, 2014
Comments Off on Neil deGrasse Tyson Pays a Visit
While in DC for a Cosmos screening, a simple email from the James Webb Space Telescope team was all it took to get Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson (astronomer, Hayden Planetarium director, and general advocate for science) to come by NASA Goddard for a visit.
It was truly exciting to meet him and to get the chance to hear him talk and tell stories. He had interesting insight on being a public speaker about astronomy. Early on in his career, he had done an interview for a news report, and had thought he had done a good job explaining accretion disks, and when he watched the news segment, it was massively cut down to basically him just him gesturing, doing an imitation of an accretion disk.
After this, he decided to train himself to talk in sound bites. He came up with a whole slew of astronomy topics, and then three small bits about each one. A hook, something funny, a fact, etc. The next time he was interviewed, they didn’t cut his sound bite down, because he’d already done it for them, but in a calculated way.
Obviously he’s become very in demand for this, for being able to distill things down without dumbing them down.
Here are some photos of his visit.
Telling stories to the James Webb Space Telescope team in front of the cleanroom window:
Asking questions of Dr. John Mather, about the sunshield. Even as he asked questions about the mission, you could tell that he was, in his head, trying to pull interesting facts out that he could use later.
Getting a tour of our Integration & Test facilities:
View the full set on Flickr.
All photos credit: NASA/Goddard/Rebecca RothIncluded as a costume for SP-Studio.de:
I included parts of this drawing to my website sp-studio.de, a picture maker for cartoon characters.
Please remember:
If you want to copy this drawing anywhere, please link back to my DeviantArt accounts or sp-studio.de. Don't steal pictures you did not draw yourself.
As a huge Game of Thrones fan it was just a matter of time... This is Sandor "The Hound" Clegane (played by Rory McCan) in South Park style.HBO's popular tv show Game of Thrones is based on the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin.I will upload more GOT characters to my gallery soon and a nice wallpaper with all of them is in the making as well. Of course your feedback is welcome!Drawn with Flash, vector, 4/2015.Updated with a response from the GSM Association below.
Researcher Chris Paget pulled off a stunt at the Defcon security conference Saturday that required as much legal maneuvering as technical wizardry: eavesdropping on the cell phone calls of AT&T subscribers in front of thousands of admiring hackers.
With about $1,500 worth of hardware and open source software, Paget turned two on-stage antennas into a setup capable of spoofing the base stations that connect the GSM cell phone signals used by AT&T and T-Mobile. Paget set his hardware to impersonate an AT&T signal, and dozens of phones in the room connected to his fake base station. "As far as your cell phones are concerned, I'm now indistinguishable from AT&T," he told the crowd.
Paget invited anyone with an AT&T phone to make a call, and using his GSM hijacking trick, routed their calls through a voice-over-Internet system that connected their calls even while recording the audio to a USB stick--which he promptly destroyed with a pair of scissors to make sure he hadn't violated any privacy laws. The hack, after all, was intended to show the fundamental insecurity of GSM cell signals--not spy on callers.
Even minutes before his demonstration, it wasn't clear whether Paget would go through with his cell-snooping act. He says he received a call from the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) on Friday morning, warning him about a long list of potential federal regulations that he might be violating with the demo.
"It wasn't a particularly productive conversation," he said in a meeting with reporters before his talk. "It seemed more like scare tactics to me."
Requests for comment from the FCC and the GSM Association, which represents companies that use the GSM protocol, weren't immediately returned, though we'll update this post when we hear from them.
Paget's demo sidestepped the FCC's legal hurdles with a clever loophole. Creating your own GSM cell tower isn't generally legal. But Paget used a GSM radio spectrum that's reserved for HAM radio in the United States but GSM phones in Europe; Since Paget is licensed as a HAM radio operator, he's ostensibly protected from charges of running an unlicensed base station. "I'm operating as a licensed HAM radio transmitter, but your handset thinks I'm a European cell tower," he said.
Paget's fake base station trick is one that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been using for years. But Paget says his $1,500 method is the least expensive and most accessible version of the hack ever performed. "This is a thousand times cheaper than anything that's done this before," he says.
Though Paget's hack can only intercept the 2G GSM protocol, his equipment first sends out a "jamming" signal of radio noise to block 3G connections, forcing phones to automatically search for a 2G signal and connecting with his hardware instead.
For now, his method can only intercept outgoing calls, and displays the wrong caller ID on the phone of the call's recipient. But neither of those problems applies to the more expensive versions of the interception technology, and could be fixed in his cheaper attack with more time, he says.
The highly-public hack is intended to show that GSM is a fundamentally insecure system, and should be dumped altogether in favor of 3G protocols. "GSM is broken," says Paget. "The primary solution is to turn it off altogether."
In practical terms, that would T-Mobile and AT&T phones shouldn't be set to search for 2G signals when a 3G connection isn't available. While BlackBerry phones have an option to only use 3G signals, iPhones and Android handsets don't, Paget says.
Paget says he's warned the GSM Association--the industry organization that oversees the standard--about his hack, but his concerns have been dismissed. "The GSMA says GSM is secure," he says. "The only defense I can put forth is to demonstrate that it isn't."
Update: The GSM Association responded in a statement that lists the limitations to Paget's method: the eavesdropper would have difficulties identifying or targeting any specific user, the interception only works within a certain range, in some cases, the call's encryption could prevent eavesdropping, and GSM phones are designed to alert users when encryption is removed by a base station. (Paget said in his talk that no device he's tested--including iPhone and Android phones--has had this option enabled.)
In summary, the GSM Association spokeswoman writes, "The overall advice for GSM calls and fixed line calls is the same. Neither has ever offered a guarantee of secure communications. The great majority of users will make calls with no reason to fear that anyone might be listening. However users with especially high security requirements should consider adding extra, end to end security features over the top of both their fixed line calls and their mobile calls."Imagine being able to record your intimate thoughts on your wedding day, or as your first child is being born. Or the dreams you can't quite remember when you wake up.
And then, years later, play them back in vivid, crystal clear detail.
It may sound like science fiction, but one man is today pioneering the development of a technology to capture your thoughts and dreams and offering the service to anyone with enough money.
Meet the Mind Reader
The recording and storing of thoughts, dreams and memories for future playback - either on a screen or through reliving them in the mind itself - is now being offered as a service by a US-based neurotechnology startup.
Millenium Magnetic Technologies (MMT) is the first company to commercialise the recording of resting state magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, offering clients real-time stream of consciousness and dream recording.
Dr. Donald Marks, founder and chief science officer of MMT, claims that his patented Cognitive Engram technology can record detailed brain patterns and correlate them to thoughts and emotions for future interpretation.
"Some people call it 'thought identification' but it is essentially mind reading. It is the process of recognising activation patterns in the brain and identifying what thoughts are associated with them," Marks tells IBTimes UK.
The service is currently aimed at people wanting to preserve memories that they are worried might fade or disappear, however in the future Marks hopes that MRI scanning technology will be advanced enough to record thoughts as they are occurring, such as at significant life events like weddings, births or sporting events.
Recording thoughts
The possibilities of neurotechnology first caught Marks' attention in 2003 when he read a paper that demonstrated how brain activity patterns when looking at different images could be distinguished between each other.
"The paper said that if you showed somebody an image of a face, a chair or a house while they were in an MRI, you would see different patterns," Marks says. "So I thought it would be possible to see different activation patterns if you looked at different faces.
"I ran some experiments and there it was: The data clearly showed different activation patterns when you looked at different faces."
Subsequent research found that through resting state MRI - which scans the brain without using a stimulus like a picture of a face - thoughts could be reconstructed from the data gathered.
Those currently inquiring about MMT's technology include academic institutions, individuals and law firms interested in the recordings for lie detection purposes. Other potential applications include neuromarketing - a field which studies consumers' cognitive response to stimuli in order to test the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Reconstructing recordings
While the technology is there to record thoughts, the ability to play them back is still very limited.
Marks gives the example of someone thinking about a face. Currently, if someone thinks of a face while having their thoughts recorded, the image that is played back is "fuzzy", however Marks believes that over the next few years playback will improve much like the advancement of television.
"The visual reconstruction is kind of crude right now but the data is definitely there and it will get better. It's just a matter of refinement," Marks says. "That information is stored - once you've recorded that information it's there forever. In the future we'll be able to reconstruct the data we have now much better."
Services for having your thoughts preserved forever, which includes the rental costs of the MRI machine, start at around $2,000 (£1,200). This is a small price to pay, Marks argues, when you consider the inadequacies of current methods to record important events, such as video and audio recording and writing.
All of these methods "are simply not the same thing as recalling the event as if it was happening", Marks says.
MMT is also hoping that playback technology will advance to such an extent that it will be possible for someone to revisit memories whenever they want through a series of impulses sent to the brain that would reactivate the original neural processes.
Messing with the mind
Research into neurotech goes well beyond simply recording and storing thoughts and dreams. A technique that is reminiscent of the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has already been developed that can erase memories from a brain.
Earlier this year, researchers at the University of California demonstrated their ability to erase a memory in rats and then subsequently reactivate it - profoundly altering the animals' reaction to past events.
"We can form a memory, erase that memory and we can reactivate it, at will, by applying a stimulus that selectively strengthens or weakens synaptic connections," said Roberto Malinow, lead author of the study.
A more recent paper published in Nature this week describes how the brains of mice can be manipulated to remember unhappy experiences in a positive way by identifying the part of the brain that the memory is associated with and linking it with a positive feeling.
Marks claims that the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US is already working on such techniques to be used on military personnel and veterans suffering from combat injuries such as post traumatic stress disorder.
"We're not even near that right now," he says, "but we are part of the way because we can record the memory. Neurotechnology's hay day is on its way."About
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MOBILE GAMING JUST BECAME EPIC!
Playing games on your iPhone will never be the same! Bladepad brings a full console controller to your phone with a convenient and comfortable gamepad that maximizes portablility and minimizes unnecessary bulk.
Bladepad is made up of two parts:
1) A Protective Case for your iPhone
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HOW IT WORKS:
Connect Bladepad to your iPhone via Bluetooth. Place your iPhone in the protective case and the gamepad slides out beneath your phone. When you are done playing, the gamepad slides back in place under your phone.
If you don't want the gamepad attached, you can easily remove the gamepad from the protective case by sliding the gamepad off via a track along the sides of the case. The protective case stays attached to your phone.IGN commits to layoffs, "winding down" 1UP, Gamespy, and UGO A number of IGN employees are out in new restructuring
Mike Williams Reviews Editor, USgamer Thursday 21st February 2013 Share this article Share
Companies in this article IGN Entertainment
IGN has laid off an undisclosed number of staff members today, in addition to revealing the impending shut down of 1UP, GameSpy, and UGO. Confirmed layoffs include head of news and features Colin Campbell and social media coordinator J. Kartje.
Earlier this month, IGN was acquired from NewsCorp by publisher Ziff Davis. In an internal memo obtained by Polygon, Ziff Davis chief executive officer Vivek Shah explained the strategy behind the layoffs.
"Today, we took some difficult but important actions that will ensure the continued growth and health of IGN and AskMen," wrote Shah in the memo. "The changes we made today are designed to allow us to Simplify and Focus. Our goal is to do fewer things and to do them exceptionally well. In that vein, we want to direct all of our energy and work behind our two flagship brands: IGN and AskMen."
The company is also in talks to divest itself of the IGN Pro League eSports network, with IGN itself gaining a new role: "to broadcast and cover a variety of eSports events."
There's also been some executive shuffling at the new IGN. Peer Schneider will oversee "all of editorial and product", while Charlie Barrett will be concerned with IGN's sales and advertising efforts. Frank Puma will be the organization's new executive director of programs and solutions, reporting directly to Barrett. IGN is also looking for a new head of engineering and technology.
GamesIndustry International hopes those affected by the layoffs find new employment soon.“It’s Not an Accident, It’s a Disaster:” The Water Crisis in West Virginia
by Wiley Cypress / Earth First! Newswire
[Earth First! Journal editor’s note: The Elk River chemical spill is not a past crisis. The water supply for thousands of Appalachians is still poisoned and friends at West Virginia Clean Water Hub have been working tirelessly to meet demands for clean water. See how you can support them regionally by volunteering or donating water, or from afar by donating cash.]
Only a month has passed since Freedom Industries spilled 7500 gallons of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol into Elk River, poisoning the water supply for 300,000 West Virginians. Yet mainstream media coverage of the disaster has almost disappeared. This week, for example, MSNBC pulled a story on the chemical spill to make room for more newsreel about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s traffic scandal.
Still, on the ground, “The overwhelming reality is that the water is not safe,” said Gnat, a volunteer with West Virginia Clean Water Hub (CWH) in an interview with Earth First! Journal yesterday. “It’s not an accident, it’s a disaster,” said Gnat.
West Virginia Clean Water Hub (CWH)—one of the only remaining organizations distributing potable water in the spill zone—is a loosely formed collective of volunteers that have been distributing donations from Appalachian environmental coalitions and individual donors to impacted communities. CWH has seen a recent spike in requests for clean water and reports of chemical related illness. This week in Kanawha County, at least five schools closed to protect students from contaminated water. At Midland Trail Elemenatry School, a student and teacher were both hospitalized after inhaling toxic fumes when the school tried to flush the pipes with school still in session.
“I talk to people on a daily basis who say ‘I tried to take a shower and now I have blisters and burns,'” said Gnat. By mid January, American Water Company, the corporate municipality in control of the pipes, declared the Elk River water safe to drink for most of the nine counties dependent on the poisoned municipality. By January 17, the color-coded system that American Water set up to notify residents about water safety labeled all nine counties blue (“go ahead and drink it”), though the safety assurance was quickly rescinded for pregnant women. “At this point the red/blue thing is a little bit irrelevant,” said Gnat, “because people know that you should smell your water and decide for yourself.”
Chemical spill related E.R. visits doubled in the week after the “do not use” ban was lifted. In a condescending statement from the Bureau of Public Health, Dr. Letitia Tierney seemed to blame the spike in E.R. visits on hysteria. “Anxiety is a real diagnosis and it can be really hard on people and it’s OK to be seen by a health professional to ensure you’re OK.”
On the ground, however, it appears that the relationship between illness and lingering chemicals in the water is actually under-reported. Gnat has one friend whose two-year-old child started “coughing up foam” last week after exposure to contaminated water. When they visited the hospital the doctor was dismissive of the the link to the spill and referred to the symptom as “vomiting.” “There are a lot of politics about reporting health impacts,” said Gnat, who referred to the crisis as “a 300,000 person lab experiment.” “People are getting sick on a massive scale.”
The most obvious and frightening consequence of American Water preemptively lifting the “do not use” ban on Elk River water is that people drank poison and bathed their children in it believing, with all assurances from the authorities, that it was safe. Big picture, the declaration of safety meant that FEMA, Red Cross, and other emergency response organizations abandoned the crisis when thousands of people still lacked access to safe water. (Hey FEMA, stop stalking Florida protestors and get back to your real job.) The declaration of safety meant that MSNBC could go back to talking about traffic jams while the crisis in West Virginia persisted. This initial declaration was not made by public health officials, but by a for-profit water company.
A neglected aspect (among many) of this story is the overall impact of 7500 gallons of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol on the Elk River watershed and all connected ecosystems. If, weeks after the spill, Elk River water could cause someone to cough up foam, what could that water do to the critters that live in it—the tad poles, the river otters, and everything in between? Impacted residents and grassroots activists on the ground understandably have no capacity to assess the ecocidal nature of this disaster if they are busy providing mutual aid for rural West Virginians who have been abandoned by state politicians, emergency response services, journalists, and municipalities.
Who is Responsible?
State politicians have moved on to talking about regulating chemical companies, in many cases actively denying the relationship between this spill and the omnipotence of the coal industry in Appalachia. “This was not a coal company. This was a chemical supplier where the leak occurred. As far as I know, there are no coal mines within miles of this particular incident,” said Governor Tomlin at a news conference after the spill.
Besides the most obvious link to coal—that 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol is a chemical used solely by the coal industry—the spill was also a massive demonstration of how dependent folks in coal country have become on municipal water sources because of local water contamination from mountain top removal runoff and coal slurry.
“The coal companies have been poisoning local water sources for 125 years,” said Gnat. “That is the reason that nine counties were put on the American Water municipality.”
For example, Gnat said that the people of Prenter, WV fought for years to have pipes built from the American Water Company after they found out that coal companies had contaminated all of their ground water by injecting coal slurry into decommissioned mines. The issue only came to light after Prenter residents experienced a proliferation of brain tumors, kidney and liver failure and respiratory problems. In “the cruelest of ironies,” Prenter has again been screwed over by the coal industry. This time there is no recourse besides bottled water.
What Can We Do?
Reminiscent of post-Katrina and Sandy solidarity efforts (though admittedly at a much smaller scale) mutual aid activists in West Virginia have banded together to replace the government-sponsored support systems that withdrew after after American Water arbitrarily decided 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol was safe to consume at one part per million. Currently Clean Water Hub is using a facebook page and google voice number to match water donations with requests from the nine counties. Until last week, Gnat said, they were getting two to three calls a day from communities (families, schools etc.) requesting water, but that number has spiked as the crisis continues and word spreads about the organization.
Recently they’ve been contacted especially by low income public housing projects in Charleston. The water crisis in both rural and urban areas is exacerbated by poverty. “To force people to begin paying for their water by the jug […] is out of the range of possibility for so many West Virginians,” said Gnat, who also mentioned the added cost of paper plates, plastic forks, hand wipes and sanitizer.
In the short term, CWH is constantly in need of more donations to meet requests for water and sanitation. Volunteers are needed to move water and check up on water distribution points that have supposedly been reinstated by the governor. “We really need people who can stay for more than just a single water drop,” said Gnat.
Long term, the collective seeks grant funding for rain water catchment systems. The bottled water system is “unsustainable,” said Gnat, so they are attempting to partner communities that have clean water with those who still have water contamination.
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TumblrHit them before they can hit you.
The match lasted an hour and a half, but Roger Federer was well on his way to winning it before a ball had been struck. Federer defeated Jack Sock 6-4, 7-6(4) in their opening round match at the Nitto ATP Finals on Sunday in no small part to winning the toss and electing to receive.
The decision went against Federer’s normal front-running tactics of serving first and letting his opponent chase him. This time around, Federer was on the hunt to immediately break and instantly unsettle his American opponent. Six points later, his goal was accomplished and Sock played the rest of the match in Federer’s rear-view mirror.
Federer’s early strategy of playing to Sock’s stronger forehand wing seemed counter-intuitive, but it was layered in strategic brilliance. Sock loves to run around his backhand and hit forehands from the ad court, so Federer simply went the other way, attacking Sock’s forehand out wide in the deuce court. Sock loves moving to his left, so Federer attacked him to the right. That works at every level of our sport.
Sometimes it takes a few games to figure out a player’s strategy. But in this match it took exactly four shots. On the opening point of the match, Sock predictably served to Federer’s backhand, and the blocked return predictably went to the ad court. On cue, Sock ran outside the doubles alley to hit his forehand as he loves to do, and he targeted the Federer backhand cross-court. It was all going to script, until Federer rifled a backhand down the line to the vacant deuce court for a dazzling winner. Gotcha.
At 30/30, Federer targeted the same location wide to Sock’s forehand in the deuce court for another clean winner — this time from his own run-around forehand. At 30/40, Federer blocked a backhand return cross-court, and then crushed his second backhand winner of the game down the line to the vacant deuce court.
The match was just six points old, but Federer had masterminded his early blitz to perfection. Sock’s confidence and momentum had taken a direct hit after just over two minutes of play.
Federer’s control of the match was also seen in the aggressive manner he collected his points. Overall, he hit 28 winners and forced another 24 errors, while also receiving 24 unforced errors from Sock.
Federer Points Won By Style Of Play
Style Points Won Aggressive Play 64% (52 winners and forced errors) Consistent Play 36% (24 unforced errors)
Federer won the “first strike” rally length of 0-4 shots 58-50, gaining an eight-point advantage in these shorter points. Of all rallies five shots or longer, Federer only won five more points than Sock (23-18). Seventy-two per cent of all points in the match featured a maximum of just two shots hit in the court, and Federer was on the front foot for the vast majority of them.
Federer only lost four points behind his first serve for the entire match (36/40), and backed that up with a healthy 65 per cent win percentage (15/23) behind his second serve. The power game of Sock was negated early by the precision game of Federer.
Sock’s average first-serve speed was eight miles per hour faster (124 mph to 116 mph), and his average second serve speed was a dominant 11 mph faster (107 mph to 96 mph). Sock was also more powerful off the ground, averaging 70 mph with his groundstroke speed to Federer’s 66 mph. How hard the ball was hit was trumped by where it went and when.
Crunch time in a match typically comes with the finish line in sight. On this occasion, it was just a few paces past the starting line.It read: “Dear Mr President-Elect. We extend our sincere congratulations on your election as the 45th President of the United States of America.
The letter expressed their hope Mr Trump would help foster a close relationship between America and the 28-country bloc.
The Brussels mandarins sent a letter to the Republican leader immediately after his victory, extending their “sincere congratulations”.
Branson blasts Trump as ‘RACIST’ and warns ‘Brexit pain still to come'
“Today it is more important than ever to strength transatlantic relations. Only by cooperating closely can the EU and the US continue to make a difference when dealing with unprecedented challenges, such as Da’esh, the threats to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, climate change and migration.”
Speaking at the European Council today, President Donald Tusk said the result of the US election would bring with it "uncertainty of transatlantic relations".
Mr Tusk said: "While respecting the democratic choice of the American people, we are aware of the new challenges the results bring, one of them is the uncertainty of transatlantic relations."
Speaking hours after Mr Trump was announced as president, Mr Tusk said: "It is good to remember the strengths of the Western community.
“The United States did more than anyone else to help build the European Union.
“No one can take away our links or make us give up our shared memories and values such as freedom, solidarity and respect for the individual.
“The events of the past month and today should be treated as a warning for all who belive in liberal democracy.
"This means we should get our act together and bring back a sense of direction, bring back confidence and a sense of order."GARDAI finally caught up with a thief more than 150km from where he stole a car as he attempted to evade pursuing officers.
Passengers at Heuston train station watched in bemusement as gardai chased the 21-year-old criminal across train tracks before finally catching him.
The drama began at around 7pm on Tuesday when the man is alleged to have jumped into a silver Honda car which its owner had left running at Castle Street in Roscommon town.
The man drove off in the direction of Dublin in the car which was next spotted at around 9.30pm by gardai attached to the Dublin Regional Traffic Division at Palmerstown, west Dublin.
A garda spokesman explained: "The car failed to stop for gardai and was intercepted a short time later on St Johns Road West."
However, the suspect then got out of the car - which had travelled 155km at this stage - and ran into Heuston train station as gardai chased on foot.
The pursuit continued in the station with the suspect trying to flee as he was followed across the train tracks by officers who eventually caught up with him.
The arrested man who is a traveller criminal from Navan, was released from Kilmainham Garda Station yesterday after the bizarre incident which unfolded on Tuesday evening.
Sources said that the 21-year-old suspect is well known to gardai for burglary crimes and spends his time between Navan and the Birmingham area.
It is the second incident in the space of just over a fortnight in which a criminal has run onto train tracks in a busy Dublin train station.
Earlier this month, rush hour commuters watched in horror as two thugs chased after a young man in Dublin's Connolly Station before he was eventually rescued by Irish Rail staff.
In that incident the terrified 23-year-old, from Dublin's north inner city, jumped over barriers and across train platforms before he was saved by security.
kfoy@herald.ieDan Webster's constituents react to his support for the GOP non-jobs budget.
Working America is setting up "Buyer's Remorse" booths in Minnesota, Colorado, Florida, Michigan and New Mexico to collect "return" ballots from voters who feel betrayed by their representatives who refused to pursue legislation to create jobs. During the August recess, Working America's protests will focus on Representatives Daniel Webster (FL), Michele Bachmann (MN), Tim Walberg (MI), Mike Coffman (CO) and Governor Susana Martinez (NM). At a time when job creation is the top issue on the public agenda, these lawmakers have ignored the wishes of the people and pursued an extreme ideological agenda while creating few, if any, jobs.
These Republicans all campaigned on promises to focus on job creation, but have failed to live up to their promises. Many of the policies they have pursued have made the jobs crisis in the country worse, not better.
“Working-class families feel duped by broken election-year promises,” said Karen Nussbaum, Executive Director of Working America. “Elected officials must be held accountable for failing to even attempt to create jobs and strengthen the economy.”
Thousands of return ballots have already been gathered in these states and through Working America's website. Details on each event are in the events section of Working America's Facebook page. Events can be followed on Twitter with the hashtag #buyersremorse.
Working America is an affiliate organization of the AFL-CIO that organizes workers where unions don't exist. Their goal is to give workers the tools they need to fight for their own economic interests.Here's a strange coincidence. On Wednesday, the Daily Mail ran a piece headlined Electronic devices may cause plane crashes - and older aircraft are especially vulnerable.
Two days before, the New York Times carried a story headlined Interfering with flight?
There were uncanny similarities between the two. Note, for instance, these paragraphs:
NYT: "Many of these devices transmit a signal, and all of them emit electromagnetic waves, which, in theory, could interfere with the plane's electronics. At the same time, older planes might not have the best shielding against the latest generation of devices, some engineers said.
Mail: "Most personal devices transmit a signal and all of them emit electromagnetic waves which, in theory, could interfere with the plane's electronics. At the same time, older planes might not have the best protection against the latest generation of devices."
The Mail even managed to carry the same quotes as the Times's writer, Christine Negroni:
NYT: "It's a good news-bad news thing," said David Carson, an engineer with Boeing. Electronic devices do not cause problems in every case, he said. |
decreased actomyosin ATPase activity in AIA muscles is likely to be caused by redox modifications of actin.
Mn-Salen compounds, including EUK-134, have been proposed to possess distinct advantages over nonspecific antioxidant scavengers, such as combined SOD/catalase mimetic functions [12] and high translational value as the EUK series is developed for oral administration [36]. In addition to counteracting oxidative stress, Mn-Salen catalyzes the removal of ONOO− and ameliorates nitrosative stress [13]. In a previous report, administration of EUK-134 reduced markers of oxidative stress and partially rescued a reduction in specific force production in the diaphragm from mdx mice [15]. We report here that daily intraperitoneal injection of EUK-134 prevented the AIA-induced 3-NT formation, aggregation of actin, and force depression. These results strongly support our notion that the oxidative/nitrosative modifications of actin result in contractile dysfunction in AIA muscles.
Previous studies provide evidence for a role of redox stress in the pathogenesis of RA [37]. Thus, we expected that treatment with EUK-134 would prevent the development of both arthritis and muscle weakness. However, the increase in knee diameter in AIA rats was not prevented by EUK-134 treatment (see Fig. 2e). The reason for this is unclear but could be due to the tissue-dependent differences in the levels of oxidative stress and/or concentration of EUK-134. AIA was induced in the knees by direct intraarticular injection of Freund’s complete adjuvant, and the oxidative stress might then be higher in these joints than in adjacent skeletal muscles. In contrast, EUK-134 was not specifically targeted to the afflicted joints since it was administered by intraperitoneal injections. Thus, it is conceivable that the concentration of EUK-134 in the knee joints did not reach high enough levels to prevent the development of arthritis.
In addition to decreased actomyosin ATPase activity, we also show decreased SERCA activity in the AIA muscle, which was not accompanied by any change in SERCA protein expression. This finding is consistent with the previous work by Strosova et al. [38] showing a redox-induced decrease in SERCA activity in the AIA skeletal muscle, which was not accompanied by decreased SERCA protein expression. Moreover, exposure to ONOO− has been shown to depress SERCA activity [39]. Thus, increased ONOO− production may have a central role in the decrease of both actomyosin ATPase and SERCA activities in AIA muscles. These alterations may account for the compromised contractility of AIA muscles; for instance, a decreased rate of cross-bridge cycling and SR Ca2+ uptake may directly explain the slowed twitch kinetics and a left-ward shift of force-frequency relationship in AIA muscles (see Fig. 2a–d).NEW YORK -- With so much wheeling and dealing, maybe the NFL draft should move to Wall Street.
Minutes before Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III went 1-2 to the Colts and Redskins on Thursday night, the draft at Radio City Music Hall turned into a deal-a-thon.
Through the first seven picks, only Indianapolis kept its original draft spot, and a total of eight trades were made in the first round.
The Browns, Jaguars, Cowboys and Eagles all traded up to get players they coveted. The Vikings dropped a spot and still came away with the guy they wanted.
Credit the rookie wage scale for so much buying and selling so early, with general managers making last-minute moves knowing that extravagant salaries for top picks have been replaced by a compensation plan.
Before NFL commissioner Roger Goodell opened the draft, Minnesota swapped its No. 3 choice for Cleveland's No. 4 pick, with the Vikings also getting fourth, fifth and seventh rounders.
After the Browns went for Alabama running back Trent Richardson, and before the Vikings took tackle Matt Kalil, Florida neighbors Tampa Bay and Jacksonville swung a deal.
Cleveland coach Pat Shurmur said the Browns were convinced a team would leapfrog them to take Richardson, so they pulled the trigger on the 4-for-1 trade.
"Unfortunately, we had to make a little trade to secure the pick," Shurmur said. "We knew as we went through the process that he was our guy and so we did what we had to do to secure it. We had pretty good knowledge that there were teams behind that wanted him as well, so we gave up a couple of picks to make sure we got him. We're thrilled a bunch about Trent."
The Jaguars moved up to No. 5 from No. 7 and grabbed wide receiver Justin Blackmon.
The Buccaneers, at No. 7, chose Alabama safety Mark Barron, and also acquired the Jaguars' fourth-round choice.
"It just goes to show you that anything can happen," Blackmon said, referring to the Jaguars going after him.The National Rifle Association is scheduled to hold a news conference on Friday where it says it plans to provide details about its promise of “meaningful contributions” to prevent another a massacre like the one in Newtown, Conn.
We would like to believe that the N.R.A., the most influential opponent of sensible gun-control policies, will do as it says, but we have little faith that it will offer any substantial reforms. The association presents itself as a grass-roots organization, but it has become increasingly clear in recent years that it represents gun makers. Its chief aim has been to help their businesses by increasing the spread of firearms throughout American society.
In recent years, the N.R.A. has aggressively lobbied federal and state governments to dilute or eliminate numerous regulations on gun ownership. And the clearest beneficiary has been the gun industry — sales of firearms and ammunition have grown 5.7 percent a year since 2007, to nearly $12 billion this year, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm. Despite the recession, arms sales have been growing so fast that domestic manufacturers haven’t been able to keep up. Imports of arms have grown 3.6 percent a year in the last five years.
The industry has, in turn, been a big supporter of the N.R.A. It has contributed between $14.7 million and $38.9 million to an N.R.A.-corporate-giving campaign since 2005, according to a report published last year by the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit group that advocates greater gun control. The estimate is based on a study of the N.R.A.’s “Ring of Freedom” program and very likely understates the industry’s total financial support for the association, which does not publicly disclose a comprehensive list of its donors and how much they have given.
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Officials from the N.R.A. have repeatedly said their main goal is to protect the Second Amendment rights of rank-and-file members who like to hunt or want guns for protection. But that claim is at odds with surveys that show a majority of N.R.A. members and a majority of American gun owners often support restrictions on gun sales and ownership that the N.R.A. has bitterly fought.
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For instance, a 2009 poll commissioned by Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that 69 percent of N.R.A. members would support requiring all sellers at gun shows to conduct background checks of prospective buyers, which they do not have to do now and which the N.R.A. has steadfastly argued against. If lawful gun owners are willing to subject themselves to background checks, why is the association resisting? Its position appears only to serve the interest of gun makers and dealers who want to increase sales even if it means having dangerous weapons fall into the hands of criminals and violent individuals.CBS’s Mark Knoller, covering a town hall on the economy with the president this morning, reports: “President Obama blames high unemployment rate on ‘huge layoffs of government workers’ at federal, state and local levels.”
This is completely wrong. Extremely and mind-bogglingly wrong. Epically wrong.
First, let’s look at the numbers for private-sector employment. All figures come from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Recent peak of private-sector employment, June 2007: 116,603,000.
Total private-sector employment in the month Obama became president, January 2009: 109,084,000.
Recent low of private-sector employment, January 2010: 104,933,000.
Total private-sector employment, April 2011: 108,494,000 (Seasonally adjusted: 108,862,000).
So note, we are about 8 million away from the most recent peak in private-sector employment.
Now, let’s look at total government employment (at all levels) for those four months:
June 2007: 22,176,000.
January 2009: 22,471,000.
January 2010: 22,376,000.
April 2011: 22,594,000 (preliminary).
As you can see, in terms of total number of Americans employed in government, there has been no real discernible recession. In fact, the number has increased slightly.
Now let’s look at the number of people employed in state government during these months:
June 2007: 4,918,000.
January 2009: 5,116,000.
January 2010: 5,053,000.
April 2011: 5,253,000 (preliminary).
Again, not only pretty stable, but slowly climbing.
Now let’s look at employment in local government:
June 2007: 14,514,000.
January 2009: 14,583,000.
January 2010: 14,478,000.
April 2011: 14,492,000 (preliminary).
Again, the numbers are stable, and even indicate that local government employment is increasing, not decreasing.
Obama is not even a little bit right. Will anyone call him out on this?
UPDATE: The full quote is here:
“The reason the unemployment rate is still as high as it is, in part, is because there have been huge layoffs of government workers at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level,” he said. “Teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers– they have really taken it in the chin over the last several months. And so, what we’re trying to do is to see if we can stabilize the budget.”
Again, completely false. There has not been a significant reduction — or even variation, really — in the size of the government workforce at the federal, state, and local level.
ANOTHER UPDATE: In the comments, Reno Dave notes that in one case I used seasonally-adjusted numbers instead of non-seasonally adjusted numbers. I have added the non-seasonally-adjusted number for consistency. He notes that using the seasonally adjusted numbers, the total government workforce has varied slightly differently in the selected months:
June 2007: 22,218,000.
January 2009: 22,582,000.
January 2010: 22,488,000.
April 2011: 22,166,000 (preliminary).
You end up with 300,000 or so fewer government workers in the past 16 months. (Notice that the Census hiring effects these numbers a bit; the number of Census employees went from 24,000 in January 2010 to 564,000 in May 2010 all the way down to 1,000 in October 2010. More details here.)
However, that’s a fraction of the 12.3 million unemployed Americans above age 20 in the most recent BLS report. In other words, if we presume that none of those 300,000 laid off government workers have been rehired anywhere, they make up about 2.4 percent of the currently unemployed.The U.S. government’s ethics watchdog urged the White House to investigate and possibly discipline President Donald Trump‘s counsellor Kellyanne Conway for comments she made about Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, according to a letter made public Tuesday.
The Office of Government Ethics wrote to White House attorneys that there was reason to believe that Conway violated the standards of ethical conduct for executive employees by endorsing the president’s daughter’s products during a television interview last week.
The government ethics office’s recommendation was the latest in a series of complications for Conway.
Just Monday, Conway said in a television appearance that National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had Trump’s full confidence, hours before Trump fired him. Over the past few weeks, Conway has also referred to a “Bowling Green Massacre” that never occurred, and she was caught up in a public feud with news network CNN, which said it decided not to have her on a Sunday show.
Asked about Conway’s remarks on Flynn, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Tuesday that Trump’s decision to ask for Flynn’s resignation unfolded over time. “It was an evolving and eroding process,” Spicer said. “Once (President Trump) has determined he has made the decision on any subject, that’s when he informs the staff. So, going into the day, it was an evolving situation.”
Conway has said she misspoke about the massacre and disputed CNN’s characterization of why she didn’t appear on their show, saying she was unavailable. In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show on Tuesday, Conway denied that her comments about Flynn’s future were inconsistent with his standing with Trump, saying “both were true.”
The comments that got Conway in hot water with ethics officials came during a Feb. 9 interview on Fox News.
Appearing from the White House briefing room, Conway urged viewers to “go buy Ivanka’s stuff” before adding that she was going to “give a free commercial here. Go buy it today everybody, you can find it online.”
The comments came a day after Trump tweeted that he believed his daughter had been treated “unfairly” by the department store Nordstrom, which had recently dropped the fashion line. The company has said the decision was not political, but was based on declining sales.
READ MORE: Kellyanne Conway’s endorsement of Ivanka trump’s fashion line ‘flippant’: Trump aide
In the letter to the White House, Walter Shaub, the director of the government ethics office, wrote that Conway’s comments appear to be a “clear violation of the prohibition against misuse of position.”
Spicer, the White House spokesman, said last week that Conway has been “counselled” about her comments, but the government ethics office said it has yet to receive any guidance on what if anything happened as a corrective action. The White House didn’t immediately respond to questions sent via email Tuesday.
The letter notes lawyers for the White House and the government ethics office spoke on Feb. 9, the day of Conway’s interview, and that Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, and Rep. Elijah Cummings, the committee’s ranking Democratic member from Maryland, asked OGE to follow up. Chaffetz has said that Conway’s comments were “wrong, wrong, wrong” and “clearly over the line.”
The government ethics office is requesting that White House lawyers tell them in writing by Feb. 28 what they’ve done about Conway’s comments. The office advises executive branch officials on abiding by ethics laws and rules but doesn’t have investigative or enforcement authority.If you listen to Warner Bros’ version of the back story behind The Hangover, this weekend’s #1 film and the third highest R-rated comedy opening, it sounds so very simple like a class in Hit Moviemaking 101. (And I’m assured the total pay of all three lead actors doesn’t even add up to the perk package that Will Ferrell had on Land of The Lost.) So Hangover spec script is penned by the screenwriting team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore and gets to director Todd Phillips, who reads the screenplay and loves it and has a deal at the studio. BenderSpink’s Chris Bender then approaches Warner Bros SVP of production Greg Silverman with the script and director already in place. Jeff Robinov, who has been/is a fan of Phillips, makes the deal. “It was one of those things that simply came together — a script, a director, and all the ducks were in a row,” a WB source tells me.
Oh really? Well, here’s what I first thought was the full and complete story of how The Hangover got made. (And why wasn’t any of the following mentioned in Sunday’s New York Times story about New Line and Warner Bros?? Now people are coming out of the woodwork to tell me there’s still more missing info. I’ll keep updating. But, for now, here’s what I know:
It all started with Chris Bender who heard the story of how his Hollywood friend went mysteriously missing from his bachelor party in Las Vegas. The pal (photo, right) was film producer Tripp Vinson (The Guardian, The Number 23, and now the Red Dawn remake) who in 2002 was engaged to marry Endeavor motion picture lit agent Adriana Alberghetti. Like always happens, the real facts don’t quite match up with the movie. There was no wedding scheduled that same weekend. Instead, the bachelor party was held months earlier. It consisted of 30 guys booked into the Hard Rock Hotel for a wild night of partying at a succession of Vegas restaurants, clubs and strip joints.
“I remember being a drunken fool, as you’re supposed to do at your bachelor party, and having a really good time with all my friends,” Vinson told me. “But then I remember being a mess. And when people are fucked up, crazy shit happens.” That’s when Tripp went missing from his bash. Even now, all Vinson knows is, “I got separated from my friends, and I blacked out. And when I was revived, I was in a strip club being threatened with a very, very large bill I was supposed to pay. It was not a fun experience at the time, but it made for a funny story.”
Bender thought it would make a great movie. So he kicked the idea around with the Four Christmases writing team of Lucas and Moore who had a good working relationship with New Line. So did Bender who produced both New Line pics Monster-In-Law and Just Friends, on which the writing pair did some uncredited work. It turned out that New Line really wanted a Bachelor Party-set-in-Las Vegas movie, and SVP/COO Richard Brener wanted to buy the pitch for $750,000. Everyone was excited — but then New Line boss Bob Shaye threw up a roadblock: he said he’d only buy it if the movie could be called, What Happens In Vegas. But the phrase that relaunched Sin City proved a nightmare to purchase since so many people claimed to have come up with it. When New Line couldn’t clear the title, Shaye didn’t buy the film. (In 2008, 20th Century Fox used that title. Clearly, it had better lawyers.)
The writers went off and wrote. But by then they wanted a huge raise for the project. New Line passed at that price (as did every other studio) — especially with 2 other bachelor party movies being fast-tracked at Universal. So then the writers and BenderSpink decided to spec it out with the understanding that New Line would get first crack. But when the spec was finished, CAA agent Gregory McKnight attached Old School director Todd Phillips to the project and slipped it to Warner Bros because Phillips had a first-look deal there. At the time, Phillips’ star wasn’t very high: he’d stumbled with Starsky & Hutch at Warner Bros, and been replaced as the director of Borat. But Warner Bros nonetheless bought the spec script pre-emptively. (My sources claim McKnight sold the script without Bender. And it was only after Bender showed WB lawyers his email exchanges with Lucas-Moore that the studio finally agreed he’d helped develop the concept.)
Then again, back in 2003, the same Greg Silverman bought a pitch from Mark Perez for The Afterparty, in which a young man enjoys his Las Vegas bachelor party so much he can’t remember anything about it. Then, as he and his fiancee make last-minute preparations for their big day, the strange characters he befriended during his lost weekend — including a chicken and a tiger — begin to make surprise appearances. Silverman was to oversee the project. Jamie Kennedy was attached.
Meanwhile, under Silverman’s supervision, Phillips and Jeremy Gerelick (The Break Up) did a rewrite described to me as vast of The Hangover inserting the the baby, the tiger, Mike Tyson, the gangster, the cop car, and more. (Some say the duo was “robbed” of a credit by the WGA arbitration.) Bender after his armtwisting got a fee and an executive producer credit as a “make-good”. New Line was left holding its dick. And now Phillips has the sequel underway.
As for Tripp Vinson, he wasn’t involved with the movie at all. “I wasn’t even aware of it. Once the spec went out, I became aware of it. I know they embellished the story.” Nor did Warner Bros buy his life rights: he laughed when I told him a good lawyer could secure a trust fund for his kid. As for Chris Bender, this is the 3rd time he’s taken a real-life Hollywood producer’s life story and put it on the big screen. You may already know this, but Chris Bender claims American Pie is based on his own high school experiences (Jason Biggs plays Bender), and that’s why Bender received a co-producer credit on the pic. (However, others maintain that American Pie was based on the life of Adam Herz, the writer. The original title was East Great Falls High, which was the high school Herz went to. Bender helped Herz develop it.) And Just Friends also was supposedly based on Bender’s life and he got a producer credit on that, too.
Meanwhile, Warner Bros studio chairman Alan Horn is still trying to claim to the Los Angeles Times that all the credit for this movie goes to his studio, and to his little-liked No. 2, Warner Bros. Pictures Group President Jeff Robinov. “It was Jeff and his troops who got Todd Phillips involved [No, that was CAA], allowed the movie to be R-rated [It was always R-rated], and let Todd make the movie he wanted to make [Because Robinov can’t do comedy to save his life, and at best it was exec Greg Silverman.] He clearly knew what he was doing.” Statements like this prove the old adage that you always know a mogul’s lying because his lips are moving.Nuclear issues are so complicated that the public is easily misled and frightened by nuclear demagoguery. That is why the new International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran’s nuclear program will be hyped endlessly.
Iran is a theocracy in which the Supreme Leader has said that nuclear weapons are forbidden in Islamic law. In the medieval Muslim law of war, killing innocent non-combatants is forbidden. The same people who jump up and down about Iran being “medieval” in this regard suddenly dismiss Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s injunctions against nuclear warheads as irrelevant when the latter subject comes up. But if he gave such a fatwa and at the same time undermined it, he would risk a fatal blow to his authority and legitimacy.
The way you tell if a country like Iran is actively working on a nuclear bomb is that it diverts uranium to weapons purposes. Iran has not done that, as the IAEA repeatedly affirms. Almost certainly, if Iran were seriously working on a bomb, it would kick international inspectors out altogether. Yousaf Butt explains the red lines.
It is likely that Iran wants “nuclear latency,” or the “Japan option.” That would involve knowing how to construct a bomb in short order if the country was ever directly menaced with an invasion and regime change a la Iraq. From Bush’s announcement of the coming war in September 2002 at the UNGA until there were American boots on the ground in Iraq was about seven months. If Iraq had had “latency” or a “break-out” capability, it could just have made a bomb and blown it up, and there would have been no US invasion. Iran wants to be in that position. It is not the same as constructing an actual bomb. Everything we know about Iran’s nuclear enrichment program points to it mainly being for civilian purposes. There is no known nuclear weapons program as such. Whatever computer simulations or other measures Iran has taken would be consistent with seeking nuclear latency as a deterrent against an invasion.
But the propaganda will say otherwise. Just so we remember what propaganda looks like, here is a compilation of the Bush administration’s out and out lies about Iraq’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction” (itself a propaganda term meant to sweep old canisters of mustard gas up with nuclear warheads).
I lexised Congress after Bush gave the speech in October, 2002, in which he said Iraq was working on nukes, and the members of congress who spoke afterward said that that assertion was what persuaded them to authorize and Iraq War.
Iraq had no nuclear program at all in 2002, much less a weapons program. There was no real evidence for any such thing, just black propaganda such as the fraudulent document on alleged Niger uranium purchases.
We’ve seen this picture before. Let’s not fall for it again, this time with regard to Iran.While investigating an unrelated threat I ran into a rather interesting njRat campaign.
It started with a website that was compromised and being abused as a 3rd layer C2 communication proxy. It seems those guys weren’t the only ones using it.
When visiting the websites’ main page I was greeted with an alert pop-up:
Looking at the page title and message content I was expecting some kind of fake support or fake antivirus page; I was correct (for this part):
Waiting the result of the scan I was prompted by the usual ‘you need help click here’ messages:
When clicking one of the buttons (or the X close button, basically anything on the page) your browser was presented with a download of ‘Antivirus 2015’:
Analysis
When running the 'Antivirus 2015’ payload the user is presented with a popup:
The message (although in broken english) tells us we’re clear of any infections. If we check the startup entries via msconfig we can see something new was added running from our %temp% directory:
We can see its there to stay, implementing persistance using startup keys a (very) old trick.
While you might think the popup is due to the virtual machine setup or debugger being detected it actually isn’t. The 'Antivirus 2015’ payload is in fact a stage 1 dropper of something more interesting, the payload in the %temp% directory is a stage2 dropper with embedded stage 3.
If you throw the 'Antivirus 2015’, stage 1, payload in a decompiler you will see its a small obfuscated loader written in C#. Its most important function shown here:
The'main’ function of this loader does the following:
Display the popup with the message
Make sure the application (and its icon) aren’t shown in the taskbar
Decode a string of text (under Label_004D) which contains a link to a pastebin post
Download whatever is at this pastebin link
Use the content of the pastebin post as another URL and download data from it
The data obtained from the link inside the pastebin post is written to ’%temp%/notepad.exe’
Execute the ’%temp%/notepad.exe’ payload
The content of the pastebin post is a link to a file on ge.tt which is another PE file:
This payload is stage 2 of our infection and seems to be another loader in fact. If you decompile this one you will find its another C# written loader with similar 'obfuscation’ techniques for the main program flow:
The thing is that instead of downloading another payload it in fact has an embedded Windows PE. The flow of this loader is:
Hide itself from the taskbar
Reverse and base64 decode an embedded text string (The expression variable under Label_003C starting with a lot of A’s)
Take this buffer and feed it to a function called ’ss’
The ’ss’ function is a classic way of executing a PE file from within C# code:
If we take out the 3rd layer of this attack (the embedded PE inside stage 2) we find its another C# application. This time it doesn’t hold anything like we’ve seen with the other loaders, its actually a (semi) large program with lots of functionality. Its structure and implemented functions made me think of a RAT. After running it in a sandbox with inetsim enabled to catch DNS requests and send them to a fake server I had a positive hit for njRAT. The traffic showed the classic njRAT checkin pattern:
We can even confirm it by using the config decoder made by Kevin, you can get it here: RATDecoders / njRat.py
The output from the tool tells us enough, its njRAT for sure:
We can triple confirm it if we grab the startup entries we saw earlier and compare them to the configuration:
C2 origin
From the config we can see the C2 DNS it will resolve is ’supportoffice.likescandy.com’. This currently resolves to 188.55.84.43 which is an IP located in the consumer ADSL range in Saudi Arabia:
If we follow this C2 domain we can find a related sample on VirusTotal from 2014-10-15, a bit more than 7 months ago jpck22sj.exe. It connects to the following two C2 domains:
supportoffice.likescandy.com (188.51.198.199)
svchost.homelinux.com (188.51.198.199)
This IP is also located in a Saudi Arabia consumer ADSL IP pool:
If we follow this rabit hole further down we find another sample submitted a week after the previous one on 2014-10-22 By Hat_Mast3r.exe. With this sample the IPs had already been changed, ’supportoffice.likescandy.com’ was pointing to an IP in Iraq 37.238.165.11:
While ’svchost.homelinux.com’, a secondary backup domain, pointed to again an IP in a Saudi Arabia consumer IP pool:
Conclusion
This campaign seems to be old but still running (although my infection wasn’t being manually controlled at the time). The first sample found was submitted 7 months ago.
The operation seems to originate from Saudi Arabia mostly; seeing its C2 IP is a home IP address and njRat does not support proxying C2 communciations over infectees. It means this was most likely the actual operator. I have no clue on the exact targets; the website I found was a Dutch website for a hobby group not a really high-ranked target. The spreading method of a fake antivirus website was also quite confusing, normally I see these things dropping FakeAV’s as I’ve written on in the past.
Overal an unusual but interesting campaign to keep an eye on, at least I will ;)
IOCs and Samples
I’ve gathered the following DNS entries being resolved related to infections of this campaign:
supportoffice.likescandy.com
svchost.homelinux.com
The following IP addresses were seen as being used for C2 communication:
37.238.165.11
90.148.243.180
188.51.198.199
188.55.84.43
I’ve gathered the following samples:The subject of campus sexual assault received new national prominence five years ago when the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights highlighted the applicability of Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equity in higher education, to sexual violence. Some of the national discourse since then has focused attention on whether athletes in prominent sports receive more lenient treatment.
As the complaint noted, the conversation on campus sexual assault has been particularly contentious at Yale. Last year, a study by the Association of American Universities found that nearly one in four undergraduate women at a large group of leading universities said they had been sexually assaulted — and pegged Yale’s rates as higher than the average found at the 27 colleges.
In part, the lawsuit reiterated a statement from Montague’s lawyer in March, when he asserted that Montague and his accuser, a woman whose name has not been made public, had had a prior sexual relationship that included one instance of consensual intercourse, and that she later returned to Montague’s bedroom with him on the evening in October 2014 when she said the assault had occurred.
The accuser said that she did not consent to sexual intercourse, tried to communicate this verbally and, according to an impartial fact-finder, “pushed him, but not very forcefully,” the complaint said.
Montague, who had several drinks that night, was not aware that the woman did not consent, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit also cited several instances in which it said Yale undergraduates had been found responsible of sexual misconduct by the university’s committee but had not been expelled.
It also laid out a narrative in which the accuser had been pressured to cooperate with a formal complaint — filed on her behalf by one of the Title IX coordinators also being sued — after being misled, according to Montague’s lawyers, into believing that she had not been the first student to accuse Montague of sexual assault.A top-ranking GOP lawmaker warns President Trump to "double down" on U.S friendships and "be careful" in phone conversations with allies.
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"We have allies like Australia who go to war with us, go to war with us, when we ask.... Conversations we have with the Australian Prime Minister might be quite different than one we might have with President Putin... the President has to be careful with those kinds of conversations with our friends," Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Penn.) says in an interview with The Hill's Molly K. Hooper.
In responding to reports of a confrontational phone call between Trump and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Dent adds "this is time to double down on our friendships and alliances, especially now given threats to world order."
Watch the video above to hear Dent in his own words.If you haven't heard of Star Citizen, it might be time to take a look. While everyone's heading out to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, gamers are looking to this PC space adventure for the one thing both properties have in common: Mark Hamill.
The Star Wars star appears alongside other celebrities (Gillian Anderson and Gary Oldman, namely) as Lieutenant Commander Steve "Old Man" Colton in the game's Squadron 42 single-player campaign, which is in many ways a nod to the Wing Commander series that Hamill starred in back in the '90s.
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The latest trailer for the mammoth title, which has raised a whopping $100 million over three years of campaigning on Kickstarter, shows off some extremely impressive tech, which is supposed to be "100 percent in-engine footage, rendered in real-time."
While the game is still a work in progress, it's still absolutely something you'll want to keep on your radar, especially if you're a sci-fi fan.
ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit WebsiteFederal Reserve Board Chairwoman Janet Yellen speaks during a news conference after the Fed releases its monetary policy decisions in Washington, U.S., June 14, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts Federal Reserve officials are pretty proud of their plan to reduce their balance sheet following a sharp expansion during and after the Great Recession.
Policymakers are especially excited they were able to announce the plan's contours without having markets totally freak out, like they did in 2013 when then-Chairman Ben Bernanke gave the first hint that the Fed would be ceasing its bond-buying program. Bond yields spiked sharply higher at the time in an event that became known as the taper-tantrum.
Seeking to avoid a repeat of that debacle, officials have gone out of their way to give traders clarity, well ahead of time, into their expectations for balance sheet reduction. There's just one problem: the central bank's outline is more a wish list than a blueprint, and investors are starting to catch on.
In particular, two very big questions remain unresolved: First, when will the Fed begin the process of unwinding the balance sheet by halting its practice of reinvesting the proceeds from maturing bonds back into the Treasury or mortgage-backed securities markets? And second, what is policymakers' target for the eventual end-size of the balance sheet?
The timing issue is more relevant to short-term traders. "One crucial detail the Fed did not provide: when it will commence that process of balance sheet normalization," wrote Richard Clarida, a managing director at PIMCO, in a research note.
But the size of the balance sheet, at least according to the Fed's own monetary theory, is what really matters in gauging the amount of overall stimulus being provided to the economy.
Economists at UBS say they were "disappointed not to see some explanation for the convoluted system of 'caps' the Fed has put in place to run off its balance sheet."
UBS "As it stands, the caps will limit the balance sheet runoff only for the first year of the runoff," they wrote in a note to clients. "After that point, the caps will generally be nonbinding, so essentially assets will roll off the balance sheet with no constraints, and in a very variable way."
This means the Fed will be tightening monetary policy with two different tools simultaneously, something it has never done before, making policy errors more likely.
But shouldn't the Fed take comfort at the market's non-reaction to its announcement? That may be premature, argues Bank of America-Merrill Lynch's global economist Ethan Harris.
"Despite firming plans for balance sheet shrinkage, bond term premia have actually declined," he argued in a note to clients. "This suggests the markets don't entirely believe the Fed's hawkish message. If the Fed follows through on its plans, our rates team sees the potential for a tightening in financial conditions."
Bank of America-Merrill Lynch The Fed more than quintupled its asset base in response to the deepest recession in generations, buying up Treasury and mortgage bonds by the hundreds of billions in order to keep long-term interest rates low and support the economic recovery.
Many naysayers at the time, including within the Fed, worried the bond purchases, also known as quantitative easing or QE, would spark runaway inflation. Today, the Fed's policies are credited with helping the economy avoid a second Great Depression, although |
were in a car crash. However if they aren’t up to par, it becomes one guy gingerly catching another and laying down. I only had one tackle that really seemed bone crunching, and that was off a play where I attempted to hurdle the defender.
The physics really shine with option plays specifically. Reacting to a lineman’s read and tossing the ball off to the half back at the last second, then seeing him juke out of a linebacker’s range was extremely rewarding. Having that bit of extra weight and more control in your movement really makes it feel like a viable tactic as opposed to a trick to throw in every so often to keep the defense honest. NCAA Football 14 also highlights defenders who will be keying in on your option so you can react better, something I’m not sure if I fully appreciate. It’s great to start off on, but it feels more like a crutch than a training wheel at times.
One of the best additions to the series is the Nike Skills Trainer. It’s a perfect launching point for newcomers to learn the controls and get a grasp on how to play the game, and as a more advanced football gamer I still found them to offer a bit of a challenge as I was adapting to the speed and new engine. Sure, it’s gaudy as hell and is really nothing more than a tutorial sponsored by Nike, but it does its job well enough. I’d recommend checking it out, especially if you’re a fan of Ultimate Team mode since this should net you a few more coins early on.
NCAA Football 14 also introduces RPG elements into Dynasty mode, something that may be a bit polarizing to players. As you progress through your games, you’ll unlock more and more XP that allows you to buy little bonuses to help you out on everything from getting some extra recruiting points to making your players a bit more resilient during tough road games. It’s easy to think that this is EA’s way of trying to breathe some life into a part of the franchise that may be going a bit stale, but I thought it was a welcome addition and added something new for me to sink my teeth into. Being able to groom my system with a playstyle more my own made me feel like I had a bit more control, even if it was done in a non-realistic way.
Recruiting has been simplified to the point where some really hardcore fans are sure to be alienated. Gone are the phone calls and days where you send out assistant coaches to meet with potential players. Now you simply have a pool of points to spend every week on players in hopes of wooing them enough that they will enroll at your university. It’s not perfect, and it removes the human elements of attracting players, but it does allow players who are less inclined to spend hours recruiting to still build a powerhouse.
The overall presentation is a bit lackluster. The game itself looked fine, but the crowds still fall a bit short of what many sports fans were hoping to see by now. The commentary has shown very little improvement over the past years, and that’s really a shame. Kirk Herbstreit continues to yammer on for too long, often still talking when the next play has started. Rece Davis’ studio introductions are pretty cool, but with so little variety in actual content, they felt played out really quickly. Had they been saved for rivalry and bowl games, they probably wouldn’t have become grating quite as quickly. There’s nothing bad here per say, but there really doesn’t feel like there was a true step forward here.
In the end NCAA Football 14 falls short of the Dean’s List. The on-field product is solid, but with the simplification of some of the more engaging modes as well as showing off the same visual and audio flaws we’ve seen for a few seasons now, there’s not a whole lot surrounding the gameplay that really stands out. I worry that hardcore fans will feel alienated by the streamlining of their favorite mechanics and that newcomers won’t really see the how great the new engine is without having something to base it on.
This review is based on the Xbox 360 version of the game, which we were provided with.Summary: Germany’s elections might force a change in Germany’s so-far rock solid political system. Its elites are determined to radically re-shape its society. This shift in the balance of power might signal the rise of German opposition to this project. See what the key party leaders say; it is more revealing than any analysis. With some surprises, things Americans will find shocking. AfD appears last on this list, as it is the most important.
“Germany’s election campaign is a snooze—just the way Merkel likes it.”
— Jill Petzinger at Quartz, 24 August. The ending was an unpleasant wake-up call for Merkel.
Germany’s two largest parties agree that Germany should stand against many of the policies pursued by President Trump, especially on trade and immigration. Representing the center-right and center-left, their coalition ran Germany from 2005-2009 and from 2013 until now. Today voters repudiated both major parties. It was the worst election results for CDU since 1949 and the worst for the SPD since 1945. The AfD, founded in 2013, became the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since 1961, projected to get of 13% of the seats in the Bundestag, according to polls by FORSA for the German public broadcaster ZDF {per CNN}.
The Left Party is the remnant of the former East German Communist Party, an outcast on the Left much like the AfD on the Right.
As with campaign 2016 in America, the issues were somewhat hidden. Like us, the non-weakness of the economy diarmed the opposition of its strongest weapon. There was some debate about the best response to Brexit and a resurgent Russia. The biggest issue was muted. After opening the borders to allow in over a million migrants, only one party spoke out against the determination of Germany’s elites to keep the borders open. That made them outcasts. So their large gains at the ballot box were an unwelcome shock. See Germany’s leaders share their reactions and plans for the next round of the great game.
“The German election is boring – and that’s fine.”
— Nick Ottens at the EU Observer, 11 September.
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany and Chairperson of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
“I am the chancellor of Germany, and therefore I am always responsible, and I am not trying to escape this responsibility to any degree. …In recent weeks we have recapitulated what took place in Autumn 2015 and I will stick to my positions that were discussed – having water cannons on the German border was just not right. It is also however also right that we haven’t managed to fully get rid of the concerns that people have. There are concerns that people have about integration, illicit migration. These are things we need to sort out. External border protection isn’t where it needs to be and we cannot say that we’ve managed to combat all of the cause that lead to people fleeing their homes.
“And as I have said, there is still much that needs to be done. However all of the decisions made in September 2015, went through the European Court of Justice and conformed with all of the law, and the Supreme Constitutional Court has also looked at all of these decisions – so these accusations that we did not conform with the law are simply wrong.” {The Express.}
“Of course we had hoped for a slightly better result. But we mustn’t forget that we have just completed an extraordinarily challenging legislative period, so I am happy that we reached the strategic goals of our election campaign. …We are the strongest party, we have the mandate to build the next government – and there cannot be a coalition government built against us.” {Per Reuters.}
Horst Seehofer, President of Bavaria, President of the CSU (Christian Social Union in Bavaria, the CDU’s partner).
“We had a vacuum on the right side that we need to close now. The best way to do that is with policies that ensure that Germany remains Germany and that we have the immigration and security questions under control.” {Interview with broadcaster ARD, per Reuters.}
“Stunning Plot Twist in Germany’s Big Election: Wow, It’s Boring.”
— By Bertrand Benoit in the WSJ. “It was expected to be the most contentious chancellor race since reunification, but Angela Merkel’s 15-point lead and tepid speeches have drained the drama.”
“Comrades good evening. Friends of social democracy, thank you for the courage, the strength that you have expressed just now. Today is a bitter day, a difficult day for social democracy. I don’t want to mince my words here, we did not achieve our electoral victory. But I want to thank you for the wonderful campaign that we’ve led here. There were so many who supported us and those who voted for us are less than we had hoped. Rest assured that we will use the votes that we have had to fight for our principles, to fight for our values, tolerance and respect. …
“Mrs Merkel will make any concession to stay in power. …Somebody called her a ‘hoover of ideas’. She just sucks up the people’s ideas. …I believe that our job in Germany is to ensure that there is that confrontation that this country needs desperately. Those on the right and on the left of democracy need to give citizens a plan for the future. …Mrs Merkel hasn’t done it. We have a plan. …
“We are a strong bastion against the enemies of democracy who now sit in the Bundestag, and I believe that Mrs Merkel ran an election that was scandalous – refusing to enter a confrontation with the democratic left party and right parties. This refusal to make a clear statement about her policies created a vacuum which was filled by the AfD. I believe that they’ve paid the price. They’re going to go away and think about what kind of future is possible.” {The Express.}
“Especially depressing for all of us is the strength of the AfD, which for the first time brings a right-wing party into German parliament in such a strong position. This is a turning point. …The fact that we took in more than 1 million refugees in our country is still dividing in our country. What for some has been an act of humanity and charity is to others menacing, strange and filled with fear. We did not manage to persuade all of our voters that Germany is strong enough not to leave anyone behind. {Speech to supporters, per Reuters.}
“We cannot have an extreme right-wing party leading the opposition in Germany, therefore … we will go into opposition. …Our role is quite clear: we are the opposition party.” {Interview with ZDF, per Reuters.}
Schulz told ARD broadcaster: “I have the full backing of the party leadership to lead and renew the party… But I will not aim for (parliamentary) floor leadership but fully concentrate on the renewal of the party.” {Interview with ARD, per Reuters.}
Ms. Manuela Schwesig, deputy leader of the SPD, President of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
“That is a really bad result for the SPD. That is a heavy defeat… For us, the grand coalition ends today. For us it’s clear that we’ll go into opposition as demanded by voters.” {Interview with ZDF, per Reuters.}
Christian Lindner, Chairman of the Free Democrat Party (FDP, center-right — pro-business liberals in American terms)
“We want to reverse the trend for our country and if it becomes apparent in talks that these goals can be achieved then of course we will be available (for a coalition) but if not, then it would be our task to go into opposition. …It’s about stability now, all parties have to take responsibility. We will not be pushed into a coalition just because the SPD makes a unilateral retreat into the opposition.” {Interview with ZDF, per Reuters.}
Wolfgang Kubicki, Vice chairman of the FDP.
“You cannot force the Greens and us into a coalition just because the SPD bows out.” {Interview with ARD, per Reuters.}
Cem Özdemir, co-chairman of The Green Party.
He said the party would not take part in “anti-European populism” in a possible coalition with the conservatives and the FDP, and that climate change and social justice policies were requirements for the Greens to form a government. {Per Reuters.}
Founded as an anti-euro party opposed to financial bailouts for Greece and other southern European nations, the AfD has re-focused on slowing the massive flood of immigrants into Germany.
“We really got the election results tonight. Now the voters have given us a mandate and we intend to use it with all due humility. …We are going to initiate an investigation committee for Angela Merkel, which will look into the legal crimes of this woman. …Millions of voters have given us their trust for constructive opposition in the Bundestag and we will deliver.” Prepare for a “change of government for 2021” and that the CDU had “lost drastically, but not enough when looking at the disastrously wrongly control of this country”. {The Express.}
Note: Under her leadership AfD has grown powerful. Today she announced she would be taking her seat in the Bundestag as an independent — not a member of AfD. Perhaps growing pains in the AfD?
Jörg Meuthen, co-chair of the AfD, member of the Bundestag, Professor of Economics at the Academy of Kehl.
“What is happening in our country is a gradual dissolution of our nation. Let us talk about that in a democratic discourse. I accept that some people have a different opinion.” {Per Reuters.}
Alexander Gauland, co-founder of the AFD.
“The government, whatever it will look like, should get ready for tough times. We’ll chase them. We’ll take back our country and our people.” {Per Reuters.}
Note: Afd is not like an American conservative party
As in America, conservative leaders are often not “conservative” in their domestic arrangements. Gauland’s “domestic partner” (aka life companion”) is Carola Hein, editor of the Märkische Allgemeine.
The other co-chair of AfD is Alice Weidel. Yesterday’s profile of her has the headline: “Meet the Lesbian Goldman Sachs Economist Who Just Led Germany’s Far Right to Victory” in Foreign Policy — “How Alice Weidel manages to be a globalist and nativist at the same time.” The conservative populist leader is neither socially conservative nor very populist — in American terms. Also — this shows how Goldman exercises power: its people are everywhere, on all sides (as with the KGB, “there is no such thing as an ex-Goldman partner.)
What comes next?
“Why Does Germany Have Boring Politics? Good Institutions Thwart Radicalism.”
— By Claire Greenstein and Brandon Tensley at Foreign Affairs, 17 May 2017.
This is the most fragmented Bundestag in Germany’s post-WWII history. Without the SPD, Ms Merkel’s only straightforward path to a majority in Parliament would be a three-way tie-up with the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and the Greens. A ‘Jamaica’ coalition — the black, yellow and green colours of the three parties match those of the Jamaican flag. It is would be a new probably inherently unstable team. The FDP and Greens hate each other, and have contradictory policy goals (see details here).
As seen in the quotes above, the CDU might find that forming a coalition to be long and difficult. The SPD has refused. The FDP seems unenthusiastic. The Greens are unlikely and somewhat incompatible partners. The CDU refuses to ally with The Left and the AfD. I’ll bet the CDU will find a solution. Whether it works for long is another question.
The big lesson: the German people should expect no changes. Much like America and Weimar Germany, its elites remain determined to flood Germany with low-skill immigrants from radically different cultures. We can only guess why, but breaking the strong position of German workers seems the most likely goal. Job security, good wages and benefits — these are an anathema to the global 1%. The 2002 Hartz Reforms succeeded in rolling these back slightly. But their transcendent power encourages bolder goals — such as breaking and remaking German society into a more pleasing form.
These elections how rising resistance to their project. I doubt German’s 1% is worried, especially with their victories in the UK, US, and France. They are on a roll.
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Useful reading to understand the effects of immigration.
See We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative by George J. Borjas (Professor of Economics at Harvard). From the publisher…
“To many modern economists, immigrants are a trove of much-needed workers who can fill predetermined slots along the proverbial assembly line. But this view of immigration’s impact is overly simplified, explains George J. Borjas, a Cuban-American, Harvard labor economist. Immigrants are more than just workers ― they’re people who have lives outside of the factory gates and who may or may not fit the ideal of the country to which they’ve come to live and work. Like the rest of us, they’re protected by social insurance programs, and the choices they make are affected by their social environments.
“In We Wanted Workers, Borjas pulls back the curtain of political bluster to show that, in the grand scheme, immigration has not affected the average American all that much. But it has created winners and losers. The losers tend to be nonmigrant workers who compete for the same jobs as immigrants. And somebody’s lower wage is somebody else’s higher profit, so those who employ immigrants benefit handsomely. In the end, immigration is mainly just another government redistribution program.
“’I am an immigrant,’ writes Borjas, ‘and yet I do not buy into the notion that immigration is universally beneficial. …But I still feel that it is a good thing to give some of the poor and huddled masses, people who face so many hardships, a chance to experience the incredible opportunities that our exceptional country has to offer.’ Whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, We Wanted Workers is essential reading for anyone interested in the issue of immigration in America today.”The baby was born completely unaided (Picture: Instagram)
A doctor has recorded the amazing moment a baby is born via a so-called natural C-section.
The footage was recorded by doctor Frank Lugo who works at the Cenfer Clinic in Venezuela where he oversaw the procedure.
Detective facing the sack for farting on duty and repeatedly saying 'c**t'
Unlike a typical C-section, where medical professionals remove an infant, in a ‘gentle C-Section’, doctors guide as baby to make its own way out of the womb.
The procedure is supposed to make the procedure more emotional for the parents and as close to the experience of vaginal birth as possible.
In the video from the Centro de Fertilidad Clínica Lugo the baby can be seen pushing its head out of its mothers womb completely unaided.
Warning: Graphic content
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The procedure aims to mimic birth as closely as possible (Picture: instagram)
MORE: Man denies murdering wealthy family with axe and blames ‘laughing attacker’
MORE: French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen temporarily stepping down as party leaderYesterday, I noted some research into the possibility of halting the spread of MRSA in hospitals by using copper. If that works, it would be an important step in halting the spread of the deadly, antibiotic resistant bacteria, which is responsible for more deaths than AIDS.
Now it appears that IBM, working in conjunction with the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology may have cooked up another weapon in the fight -- nanoparticles which polymerize into structures that are able to attack MRSA bacteria without harming the healthy tissue around it.
Once these polymers come into contact with water in or on the body, they self assemble into a new polymer structure that is designed to target bacteria membranes based on electrostatic interaction and break through their cell membranes and walls. The physical nature of this action prevents bacteria from developing resistance to these nanoparticles. The electric charge naturally found in cells is important because the new polymer structures are attracted only to the infected areas while preserving the healthy red blood cells the body needs to transport oxygen throughout the body and combat bacteria. Unlike most antimicrobial materials, these are biodegradable, which enhances their potential application because they are naturally eliminated from the body (rather than remaining behind and accumulating in organs).
Conceptually, this seems like a very promising approach, and I'm interested to see what the results of clinical trials are. If this works, it's not just a breakthrough in treating a horrible disease -- it's a potential alternative to antibiotics, period. That's a valuable thing, because already, the medical community has been bracing for the post-antibiotic era, where major diseases have adapted to every antibiotic in our arsenal. If technology similar to this is able to be used to treat a variety of bacterial infections, a lot of pain and suffering might be averted.
Thanks to Next Big Future for the links.Man charged in drunk fracas at Melt; threatened to eat officer's face
An intoxicated man harassed customers Sunday at Melt in Upper Saucon Township, assaulted a restaurant employee and threatened to eat a policeman's face, according to court records.
Michael A. Delaney, 29, later urinated out of an Upper Saucon holding cell, police said.
Delaney, of Kent, Wash., faces three counts each of disorderly conduct and harassment and one count each of institutional vandalism, simple assault and public drunkenness. He is free after posting $10,000 bail.
According to a criminal complaint:
Upper Saucon police were dispatched at 5:24 p.m. Sunday on a report of a disturbance at Melt, 2888 Center Valley Parkway in The Promenade Shops at Saucon Valley.
Police were told a man, later identified as Delaney, was extremely drunk when he entered the restaurant and sat down at the bar. Bartenders refused to serve him.
Delaney walked up to a Bethlehem couple and harassed them, forcing the manager to ask him to leave. After Delaney refused to go, employee Jason Spesak was called to assist the manager, but Delaney pushed him down. Spesak and the manager then forcibly escorted Delaney out of the restaurant.
Delaney tried to force his way back inside, but Spesak pushed him out. Delaney punched Spesak, cutting his mouth.
Police found Delaney a short distance away near a Starbucks coffee shop. Delaney was uncooperative and threatened to kill the officers and "eat Cpl. [Raymond] Schrampf's face off." Delaney refused to be handcuffed, so police used force to arrest him.
At the police station, he urinated out of a holding cell and repeatedly spit on walls and the floor.
Police said Delaney, who was born in Ireland, has four aliases and two other dates of birth. He is listed as a registered alien, police said.
— Manuel Gamiz Jr.In last week'swe ruminated briefly on the subject of the perfect PH Shed. This week we have another strong contender for the title.
JDM kudos without too much of the 'yo' JDM kudos without too much of the 'yo'
Fast estates always get the red-blooded PHer's 'buy it now' fingers twitching, and they don't come much faster than the Subaru Legacy GTB, a five-seat estate produced between 1993 and 2002 with four-wheel drive, a characterful twin-turbo boxer engine, and (in this top-rated GTB model, which weighed as little as 1390kg in its older iterations) 280hp and the potential to rip through the 0 to 60 dash in under six seconds.
Even if you're not testing the manufacturer's performance claims you'll find it hard to resist the allure of sequential turbos in everyday motoring. This setup gives you the best of both worlds, with serious grunt right through the rev range. Our Shed is a manual too, getting you nicely around the dread prospect of trans rebuilds that Subaru autos have been known to demand at this sort of mileage.
Even so, you wouldn't want to buy this as an economical little runabout. Subaru boxers like a drink at the best of times, and a twin-turbo 280hp lump isn't really going to improve matters. Achieving the 35mpg mentioned in the spec would be worthy of a celebratory beer; mid 20s will be nearer the mark in PH-type mixed use. Use all the performance and you'll burn through rubber faster than a modern-day Casanova. Subarus generally are expensive to run if you stick to the dealership network.
Double turbo, double trouble? Hopefully not... Double turbo, double trouble? Hopefully not...
In the course of creating his ad, the owner has been tripped up by the dreaded spellcheck, which has given the Legacy an eclectic pack. Eclectic could so easily describe this type of JDM car, bedevilled as they so often are by a random mish-mash of add-ons and motley servicings, but that's certainly not the case here. The spec is borderline awesome, mixing proper names like Tommy Kaira and Zero Sports with first-tier Euro brands like BBS and those OE Bilsteins. Even as a scrapper you'd most likely get your money back.
But what a shame it would be if it met that fate. With less than 100K miles up, some sensible parts fitted, the belts just done and a near-full MoT it's surely worth gambling the mendability of a vacuum system issue against the possibility of a year's worth of fast 4WD fun. The handling on these cars belies their size, with light but somehow solid steering and that planted feel that comes with the boxer format's low c of g. Plus you get the Impreza buzz without the 'council' image.
OK, so that wheel is a bit grisly OK, so that wheel is a bit grisly
What about that vacuum thing though? And what else could poop on your parade? Well, Shed got 18 per cent in his last physics exam, but even he knows that really successful vacuum systems depend on the absence of air, so it might be something as simple as a leaky or dislodged pipe. Having said that, it's quite a complex system on the Leg. Code 66 on your friendly diagnostic machine could indicate incorrectly refitted turbo piping or only one of the turbos working. There might be a problem with the intake or exhaust air control valves. One of the vacuum lines off the boost solenoid has a restrictor 'pill' or bead in it which will affect power delivery if it gets out of position. Or it could be perished actuator lines. Or simply a winky sensor.
Our Shed has a new MAF sensor, ruling out another potentially expensive Legacy problem. You don't need to be Hercule Poirot to link front bumper damage to some sort of traffic incident, so a crash damage inquiry would be a sensible investment.
Overall a quirky and appealing Shed Overall a quirky and appealing Shed
These flat-four engines are picky about oil and filters. Skimp on these and you might find yourself staring at a big bill for bottom end failure. Main crank bearing number three is known to be weak on some models. 99RON juice is good for peace of mind too. Check the coolant for signs of head gasket failure and the Bilsteins for leakage. Windows and calipers stick, and headlight bulbs blow a lot.
The great news with this Shed though is that previous owners seem to have spared little expense on maintenance, and the vendor - who appears to have a genuine reason for the sale - has kept that going. Having the original Japanese service book with it is a rare and pleasing bonus.
Interior wise, they're nowt special, and this one doesn't have cow, but the seats grip well enough and someone has tried to lighten things up a bit by throwing on an aftermarket wheel. A Momo or Nardi would have been nicer but hey, we're talking a grand here. It's all about the management of expectation.
Here's the ad
The car had a bit of damage to the front bumper I was quoted 100 to repair and the bumpers would also need painted. The car has also developed a intermittent problem with the vacuum system. I have spent 1100 last month on the timing belt and service. This car will be a bargain for someone as the bbs alloys are worth a bit on their own. Please no stupid offers as I do need the car gone due to my health but I will not let it go cheaper.
Sadly due to an on-going medical condition my Subaru Legacy GTB is up for sale it has 11 months MOT and no tax due to new law. The car was owned by a local Subaru Specialist for the past 4 years till it was sold to the last owner who used it till his new car arrived and I purchased the car at this time.
The car has just had its timing belt and water pump done as well as a set of coil packs and spark plugs and an oil filter change using genuine Subaru parts. The car also benefits from a brand new genuine Subaru MAF sensor.
The timing belt and service was carried out by a local Subaru specialist and I have all the paper work to prove this. In my ownership the car has been maintained well but with me now unable to travel for work the car has to go and this is a genuine reason for the sale.
The car also has a roof rail and twin sun roofs as well as automatic climate control. The car is specked really well for a car of its age and it benefits from the sports interior and full eclectic pack which includes retractable and heated wing mirrors as well as a cd player which is iPod compatible. Fitted with a Thatcham approved cat 1 alarm with installation certificate.
The only performance modification on the car is a Cat back Stainless steel exhaust.
Being a GTB model it also comes from the factory with Bilstein suspension. The car also has the original service book from Japan with it. The car still reads in KM/H this can easily be converted to miles but this has never bothered me and has guaranteed that the mileage is correct and not a mix of miles and KM/H.
Body Work modifications
Zero sports Front Bumper.
Genuine Tommi Kaira rear bumper and spoiler.
Genuine BBS LM Split rims with good tyres all round.
Privacy glass.
The Bad bits now as most cars have them. There is a crack in the top of the back bumper. The bumpers will be an easy fix but this has never bugged me. The BBS alloys could do with a good clean. There is a small bit of rust on the front left wing which can easily be changed. Both back wings have no rust on them and are in good condition. This car is in good condition for a 19 year old car so please keep this in mind.
Please feel free to contact me at any time by email or phone and I will do my best to help with any questions.
Cheers MikeEvery Monday we publish the most unbelievable stories of climbing stupidity submitted by our readers. See something unbelayvable? Tell us in the comments and your story could be featured in a future edition, online or in print. For more Unbelayvable, check out the Unbelayvable Archives.
>>A toprope anchor I found in Carderock, Maryland. No, this was not staged.—Courtesy John Gregory of Dumb Anchors. Check out Dumb Anchors for many, many more cringe-inducing climbing anchors.
LESSON: Before reading on, I recommend clicking the photo above to see the full size version. You really need to see it large to appreciate what's going on here. This anchor is ridiculous. Let's start by looking at what was done right. That tree is a solid piece of natural protection. It's greater than 6 inches in diameter, it's alive, and it appears to be firmly rooted in the ground (from what I can tell). The tree has been attached to the system with a girth hitched sling. The rope is running through a locking carabiner that's extended over the edge of the cliff. And the whole system is backed up with that big rock. This anchor could be bomber, but it has some massive issues.
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Metal on metal connections—Look closely at the quickdraws in this anchor. They're all connected to other quickdraws from carabiner to carabiner. The problem here is that carabiner to carabiner connections can move, twist, and unclip themselves. Since that's every quickdraw in this anchor, that means there are six different points at which the anchor could fail. Not exactly ideal. The safe way to connect two quickdraws is by removing one carabiner, and attaching the loose dog bone to the free end of the carabiner you want in the middle. Basically, it should go: carabiner->dogbone->carabiner->dogbone->carabiner.
Redundancy—This anchor has some redundant elements, but not in any real meaningful way. There are two quickdraws attaching the tree sling to the locking carabiner. Those quickdraws are really only backing up each other. If the tree sling catches a sharp piece of bark that whole side of the anchor will fail. Same goes for the quickdraw chain. The legs of this anchor back up each other, but neither leg has its own redundancy.
Simplicity—Depending on which anchor acronym you subscribe to, an anchor should be efficient or timely. This anchor is neither. I count 27 (!) pieces of gear in this anchor. Every single piece of gear is a potential point of failure. Even beyond that, a convoluted anchor like this becomes difficult to assess and inspect. The same anchor could be accomplished more simply and safely with four long slings and two lockers. Two slings around the tree and two around the rock (or something better) would provide two redundant sides, with all slings running to the two lockers over the edge.
While those are the most major faults, we're not out of the woods. The blue sling looks ready to pop off that rock. The rock itself is questionable. The anchor isn't equalized. And the non-locking biner on the rope is hanging over the edge of the cliff. It could break if loaded. It's safe to say that I would not climb on this anchor,
>>Seen in Joshua Tree. Not comfortable with a trad anchor, the climber traversed 10-15 feet and ran the rope through the rappel rings. Notice how the rope runs over the rock in several places. The couple then proceeded to toprope off this setup.—Derek Pickell, via email
LESSON: That single piece of trad gear on the top left of the photo makes this anchor much more dangerous than it needs to be. First, there's a pretty big angle between the trad pro and the rappel rings. This will multiply the force on all the gear involved, which brings us to the other problem: extension. If the gear on the left fails, it will introduce a lot of slack into the system. 10-15 feet of additional rope could be enough to send a falling climber onto a ledge or the ground. Then there's the belayer. If the belayer is working from the rope on the right, she should be fine (though the climber may take a huge swing). If she's belaying from the rope on the left and the trad pro fails, the force of a fall could yank her that 10-15 feet across the ground, potentially injuring her, and adding even more slack into the system. The options here are to either clean the trad gear and belay only from the fixed hardware, or to not use the fixed hardware and build a bomber trad anchor. The best answer depends on if they're climbing the route on the right or left.
Another issue here is that the couple is toproping from rappel rings. While not dangerous (unless the rings are worn to a sharp edge), this does wear out the fixed hardware and it will need to be replaced sooner. Do your local route developers a favor and clip two quickdraws to the bolt hangers for your toprope, or check out this option for a bolted toprope anchor.
See something unbelayvable? Tell us in the comments and your story could be featured in a future edition online or in print. Got an unbelayvable photo? Send it to unbelayvable@climbing.com.New research shows a recent three-year surge in methane levels in northeastern Pennsylvania, a hub of the state's natural gas production.
After sampling the region's air in 2012 and again in 2015, researchers found that methane levels had increased from 1,960 parts per billion in 2012 up to 2,060 in 2015, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene.
During that span, the region's drilling boom slowed and natural gas production ramped up. The researchers said this shift in gas activity is possibly to blame for the spike in methane levels.
"The rapid increase in methane is likely due to the increased production of natural gas from the region which has increased significantly over the 2012 to 2015 period," Peter DeCarlo, an assistant professor at Drexel University and a study author, said in a statement. "With the increased background levels of methane, the relative climate benefit of natural gas over coal for power production is reduced."
Methane is a potent short-lived climate pollutant. Its emissions have been hard for regulators to quantify, with the EPA only last year beginning to target reductions from oil and gas production.
Also last year, the Obama administration released new rules to reduce methane leakage, but the Trump administration has targeted many such rules for repeal.
Some states are also starting to find ways to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas activities. Colorado was the first state to adopt rules to control drilling-related methane emissions. Pennsylvania, the second-ranked state for natural gas production, is following suit. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf last year launched a strategy to reduce the emissions from natural gas wells, compressor stations and pipelines.
DeCarlo and his colleagues drove around northeastern Pennsylvania in a van equipped with air monitoring equipment. They measured what's called background concentrations of methane and other chemicals in August 2012. Researchers used a different van, and took a different driving route, for their monitoring expedition in August 2015.
"Every single background measurement in 2015 is higher than every single measurement in 2012," DeCarlo told InsideClimate News. "It's pretty statistically significant that this increase is happening."
While most of the air samples were collected in different locations during the two research |
Rangers and Saints, reaching the second round of Europa League qualifying with victory over Icelanders Stjarnan.
Rovers are, however, already 21 games into the domestic season. Asked if Scottish football should consider an earlier start, Rodgers said: 'It is difficult. If your season finishes on May 27 and you start on June 19, how early can you start? Rangers had a month, didn't they, and they still went out.
'We'll be three weeks and we're into a Champions League qualifier. I don't think you can start any earlier. To give the boys the recovery - and also the mental recovery - they need to have some sort of time.'Migdal (TPS) – An ancient bronze shovel and jug tied to the religious rituals of the Second Temple were discovered in archaeological excavations at Magdala – an important Jewish town dating back to the period of Roman antiquity, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced on Tuesday.
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During an ongoing excavation project, a group of volunteers from Chile discovered an ornate bronze incense shovel and a matching bronze jug believed to have stored incense or coals for ritual use.
“The incense shovel that was found is one of ten others that are known in the country from the Second Temple period. From early research it's thought that the incense shovel was only used for ritual purposes, for the embers and incense that were burnt in ritual ceremonies,” Dina Avshalom-Gorni, the Chief archaeologist on behalf of the IAA, said.
According to Avshalom-Gorni, incense shovels are known worldwide as ritualistic and religious implements in ancient religions, and their use has permeated into Judaism. The book of Exodus states: “You shall make the altar…you shall make pots for it to receive its ashes, and shovels and basins and forks and firepans; all its utensils you shall make of bronze,” a quote which ties these artifacts to the rituals of the Jewish Temple, at least symbolically.
Archaeological finds (Photo: Jonny Monroe)
“We know that these are certainly sacred tools, perhaps pertaining to the local synagogue discovered on this site, a synagogue which was quite grand and rich and important in the region,” Avshalom-Gorni explained. “It’s a rare and exciting find.”
The site is located near the town of Migdal along the western shore of Sea of Galilee. Migdal, or Magdala as it was known by its Latin name, was a large Jewish fishing and trade town in the Early Roman period. It is mentioned in Jewish sources, and at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple it served as a main military base for the ancient Jewish historian and general Josephus.
Another famous denizen of the city, according to the Christian tradition, was the penitent prostitute Mary Magdalene—named for her birthplace Migdal.
In recent years the IAA has been leading extensive excavations at the site, overseen by the archaeologists Dina Avshalom-Gorni and Arfan Najar, in partnership with the Anahuac University of Mexico’s Dr. Marcela Zapata-Meza and with the help of volunteers from Mexico, Chile, Spain and Italy.
“It is a very impressive site and is open to the general public. The land actually belongs to a private developer from the Catholic Church, who planned to build a hotel for pilgrims on that plot,” Avshalom-Gorni explained.
According to Israeli law, before approving construction on any building project in the country IAA experts must first survey the plot to assure it will not damage an archeological site.
“We began exploratory digs in 2009 and little by little it became evident to us and to the Catholic Church that we have discovered a major site which was dated to the exact time of the ministry of Jesus in the Galilee, and the home of Mary Magdalene,” she added.
The landowner then decided to turn the location into an open-air museum alongside the ongoing excavations, which continue to produce thrilling archaeological finds.BAD HAT HARRY AND GEEK & SUNDRY ANNOUNCE FIRST DETAILS OF ITS ORIGINAL PARANORMAL COMEDY SERIES “SPOOKED” PREMIERING ON HULU, HULU PLUS AND YOUTUBE
West Hollywood, CA (Thursday, March 20, 2014) – Bad Hat Harry and Geek & Sundry are pleased to announce the launch details of its highly anticipated paranormal digital series “Spooked.” Executive produced by Bryan Singer (X-Men: Days of Future Past) and Felicia Day (The Guild), “Spooked” will debut on Wednesday, April 16th 2014 (10am PT / 1pm ET) on the free, ad-supported Hulu, Hulu Plus subscription service and YouTube. The premiere will be the first of four weekly 22-minute episodes planned for Season One directed by Richard Martin (Light Years) and written by Michael Gene Conti (Devil’s Trade).
Starring Julian Curtis (Captured), Ashley Johnson (The Killing), Neil Grayston (Eureka), Derek Mio (Greek) and Shyloh Oostwald (In Time), “Spooked” follows the ‘Paranormal Investigation Team’ (P.I.T.) as they investigate phenomena at haunted locations across the country. It features the unpredictable, horrific and often comedic world of P.I.T. as they find themselves dealing with ghosts, aliens and other unexplainable happenings.
The pilot finds our ghost hunters investigating an inexorable poltergeist determined to ruin his daughter’s marriage to her wife. Among the acclaimed guest stars are Dichen Lachman (Dollhouse) and Alison Haislip (Shameless) for the pilot episode, as well as Tom Lenk (The Cabin In The Woods), Constance Wu (Covert Affairs) and Nancy Linehan Charles (The Stepfather) later in the series.
“It’s been a thrill to expand our digital portfolio with ‘Spooked’ on Hulu and collaborate with Felicia and her team,” commented Bryan Singer. “With ‘Spooked’ we developed an irreverent, character-driven series in the paranormal genre that we think fans will enjoy and connect with online.”
Felicia Day added, “Geek & Sundry is very proud to focus on a few key high-quality scripted shows this year. Our community really responds to smart, out-of-the-box content like this. Teaming up with Bryan and Bad Hat Harry has been a blast, ‘Spooked’ has been one of our most ambitious and fun productions to date.”
-ends-
About Bad Hat Harry:
Bad Hat Harry is the production company of acclaimed filmmaker Bryan Singer, established in 1994. Up next for the company is X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, which Singer also produced and directed, set for a May 23, 2014 release by Fox. Previous Bad Hat Harry films include: JACK THE GIANT SLAYER, UWANTME2KILLHIM?, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, VALKYRIE, SUPERMAN RETURNS, X-2, X-MEN, APT PUPIL and THE USUAL SUSPECTS. In television, Bad Hat Harry produced the Emmy® and Golden Globe® winning House MD, which ran for 8 seasons on Fox, and the acclaimed series Dirty Sexy Money on ABC. Additionally, the company produced the documentary Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of Superman, the Sy-Fy miniseries The Triangle, the genre film festival favorite Trick ‘r Treat, and the popular sci-fi web series H+ for Warner Brothers, which is currently in production on its second season. Upcoming for Bad Hat Harry in television is The Black Box, a straight to series order at ABC, which will premiere in 2014, the reboot / revival of the beloved show The Twilight Zone with CBS TV studios, and the highly anticipated Battle Creek, the straight to series project for CBS from David Shore and Vince Gilligan; Singer will executive produce and is currently directing the pilot.
About Geek & Sundry:
Geek & Sundry is a digital entertainment company recognized for bringing the best in award-winning internet television content that features leading voices in geek culture and lifestyle. Founded in late 2011 by the producers of the pioneering hit series The Guild, the company offers a diverse lineup of compelling content and events that have cultivated a thriving community and social media presence for fans of comedy, gaming, comics, vlogs, music, and literature around the world. Geek & Sundry is spearheaded by prominent geek figureheads including Felicia Day (The Guild, Supernatural, Dr. Horrible) and Wil Wheaton (Star Trek, The Big Bang Theory), and has launched fan-favorite shows such as TableTop, Co-Optitude, Written By A Kid, Spellslingers and Caper which have earned them over 1.2 million subscribers and 100+ million views. The network has also launched a vlog channel dedicated to the line-up of 20 vloggers, which was developed with the view of nurturing new voices for the next wave of geek talent. Geek & Sundry has won multiple accolades and nomination votes from the Annual Streamys, IAWTV, Diana Jones and Producers Guild awards since launch. The office is headquartered in West Hollywood. For more information, visit www.geekandsundry.com and watch us on YouTube at www.YouTube.com/GeekandSundry and Hulu http://www.hulu.com/companies/geek-and-sundry
For Further Information please contact:
Spooked and Geek & Sundry, Jennie Kong: [email protected]
Bad Hat Harry, Katherine Rowe: [email protected]
For the people asking why don't YouTubers just move to a different site: they really can't.
YouTube does a lot of dumb stuff. In the 6-7 years I've been active on YouTube, it's hard to count how many times they've pissed off their content creators. Whether it be monitization changes, content ID system changes, or whatever, Google has been aggravating the people that keep content flowing since they bought it.
"Why don't people just go to another site?"
While YouTube does a lot of stuff bad for content creators, it still has one thing that other sites don't have: viewership. Every time PewDiePie uploads a video, millions watch it, and he makes money off of it. No other site can really offer the level of pay that YouTube can provide.
I cross-syndicate my videos on Twitch and YouTube. On YouTube, I have a video with 73k views, and another with 15k views. Twitch? 177 and 78 views, respectively. Mine is drastic, because I'm small, but the effect is still there on larger channels.
Why can't these sites offer that viewership? Because they don't have content creators that pull people in. People go to YouTube to watch their favorite people. They can't do that on other sites, so they don't go to them. Why aren't they there? They don't have the same following as they do on YouTube. For people that live off of views, that's a deal breaker.
So really, these YouTube competitors get caught into a catch-22. People don't upload on them, because they'll get less views. YouTubers don't move to other sites, because they'll get less views. Those sites get less traffic, because there's nobody to watch on them.
Every couple months, there's a new site that's going to kill YouTube. YouTube does something stupid, people threaten to move to a new site, and then everyone forgets about them and the sites die off.
It's like clockwork at this point.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
The weather didn't bother Liverpool FC as Brendan Rodgers put his men through their paces ahead of their Premier League clash with West Ham.
The Reds return to league action after the agonising loss to Chelsea in the Capital One Cup - and they look set to have Daniel Sturridge back in the squad after he returned to full training this week.
Mamadou Sakho is also hoping to be fit despite sitting out today's game with a back problem. The Frenchman has been in excellent form in Liverpool's back three.
Check out our great gallery of Liverpool training in the snow and make sure you follow our live blog for all the latest injury news and updates ahead of the weekend.This is the Stephen King novel I tried to write when I was six.
by
While sorting through old boxes in Reed City, buried beneath my Pinewood Derby trophies and novelty spoon collection, I found the first story I’d ever written.
I had no memory of writing this, so I sat back and let six-year old me spin this thrilling yarn:
“There we were all standing looking for selter all 20 of us and then we saw a creepey old house it looked good for selter. Suddenly we heard a scream it was fred he was runing from a huge master-”
Oh no! Me and 19 others (kids? people? Shetland Ponies?) were just standing around looking for “selter” when we saw a creepy old house and thought, “we gonna selter all up in there,” and then fucking Fred had to go and get attacked by a huge “master.”
Fucking Fred.
What will happen to Fred? Will we ever find selter? Let’s turn to page 45 to find out-
“-it killed him we ran as fast as we could but 10 other kids were goton by a big blob and they were kiled to soon me and my best friend Joe were alive Joe sliped falling strate down into a hole he was dead. I ran home as fast as I coeud.” THE END?
Fred’s dead, baby. And ten other kids? Blobbed. But Joe was still alive! Thank God for Joe my best friend. And… he dead. No time to mourn you Joe! Gotta run home as fast as I coeud.
But is this really over? What happened to the other 7 kids? Will they ever find selter?
I also drew a handy illustration of the situation to paint a vivid picture in my reader’s mind of the terror’s at hand-
The tree’s been shot.
Also bleeding.
Giant crab monster?
The smoke has fucking teeth.
My eye-balls are popping out with terror.
My four strands of hair are on end.
The garage door looks grumpy-as-fuck
Dracula is here and he has a flag.
That ghost is really enjoying his one-line.
There’s a… baseball glove in the attic?
Green slime monster shyly hiding in the back.
Just a bunch of mouths crawling on the roof.
Front door looks like a mentally-challanged Thomas the Tank Engine character.
If you know any six-year olds with a affinity for cursive and a loose phonetical grasp on spelling, let me know. I would love to turn this into a trilogy and sell the rights to Miramax.
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AdvertisementsLa Tomatina is a festival that is held in the Valencian town of Bunol, located inland from the Mediterranean Sea, that brings together thousands of people for one big tomato fight â purely for fun! It is held on the last Wednesday of August, during the week of festivities of Bunol. One theory â the most popular of many theories - about the origins of the âfightâ dates back to 1945, when (during a parade) young men staged a brawl in the townâs main square, the Plaza del Pueblo. There was a vegetable stand nearby, so they picked up tomatoes and used them as weapons. The police had to intervene to break up the fight and forced those responsible to pay the damages incurred. -- Paula Nelson ( 26 photos totalBy Amadou Sidibe: Bamako, Mali
It takes a farmer to grow grapes, but it takes an architect to grow grapes in the desert.
That’s what I discovered here in Mali, a landlocked country that reaches deep into the Sahara.
I don’t live in the desert, and neither do most of my fellow Malians, who number nearly 20 million. We live in a more tropical region to the south. Yet we all find ourselves living on the frontier of climate change, trying to make crops grow in a region that seems to become harsher and drier every year.
The vast majority of Malians work in agriculture, raising cotton and grains. I wanted to grow something that nobody had tried to grow before in my country: table grapes.
Behind it all is a story of international relationships—and a lesson about the importance of trade and technology for farmers everywhere.
The tale begins with my training at the Moscow Institute of Architecture—an odd background for a farmer, but one that helped me see an important connection that would pay off as I became an agro-entrepreneur back home in Mali.
African agriculture lags the world in food production, and for this reason I’ve always thought that it could be done much better. We have a large amount of cultivable land, plus abundant sunshine and, in many places, lots of water. With the right kind of knowledge and tools, we could start to enjoy the food security that people in the developed world take for granted.
My travels to North Africa, especially Morocco and Tunisia, convinced me that grapes can thrive in southern latitudes. So in 2008, I imported table grapes from Italy and raised them on a hectare of land. After a year, we harvested a grape with exceptional taste. We proved that it could be done.
Yet we faced big challenges. Grapes in Mali don’t behave as they do in Italy, and we had to learn this through trial and error. The extreme heat can wither them and the rainy season brings swarms of pests. Yet we persevered, taking our inspiration from farmers who had succeeded with grapes in Florida, Australia, and India.
Then came a key piece of technology from Israel and Netafim, a world leader in tropical greenhouses. Here at last was a way to bring together my education in architecture and my passion for agriculture.
Greenhouses come in all shapes and sizes, from sheds to massive factory-like complexes. The essential elements include a transparent covering that lets the sunlight shine through as well as a climate-controlled interior. They are expensive, but in the right hands they make it possible for the Dutch to grow flowers in the winter—and for a Malian like me to harvest grapes in a place where they’re not supposed to grow.
In 2012, I bought a small greenhouse from an Israeli company—a metal structure covered with plastic and surrounded by an insect net. Measuring 320 square meters, it had a successful track record with tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. I liked the results and expanded the next year with a greenhouse of 5,000 square meters. In 2016, I grew again, with a greenhouse of 10,000 square meters and advanced technologies, including better climate control, irrigation, and water recycling.
Access to credit remains a problem for African farmers who have no guarantees to offer commercial banks. For my greenhouse, the loan was secured by the USAID-funded development credit authority (DCA) and Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) which uses risk-sharing agreements to mobilize local private capital to fill a financial gap.
Today, I employ 40 workers to maintain and harvest our grapes and also tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers, sweet melons, lettuce and strawberries. More than 80 percent of them are women. They’re good at what they do and they earn a wage that allows them to support their families. In terms of yield per square meter, we’re now inching closer to the productivity of farmers in developed countries.
I’m convinced that soon we’ll catch up entirely. That’s why I’m now planning to build a 15-hectare facility near Mali’s capital city of Bamako.
Not only will this help us fight the urgent problem of hunger in Africa, but also create business opportunities for other agro-entrepreneurs.
The grapes of Mali are an African success story. Because we relied on trade, technology, and farmers willing to share their expertise and firsthand experience from around the world, they’re also a global achievement.
Amadou Sidibe is a trained architect and innovative farmer who grows table grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers, sweet melons, lettuce and strawberries utilizing greenhouse technology in Mali. Amadou is a member of the Global Farmer Network (www.globalfarmernetwork.org) where this column originates.
Follow us on Facebook | @GlobalFarmerNet & @World_Farmers on Twitter | Instagram | LinkedInBUENO AIRES – A former Spanish government official has accused Israel and Argentine Jewry of being behind the untimely death of Spain’s attorney general while on a working trip to Argentina.
Spanish Attorney General José Manuel Maza, 66, died Nov. 19 after being taken to a hospital in Buenos Aires, where he was attending an international law conference, with a kidney infection.
Maza has prosecuted 20 Catalonian politicians in the wake of the recent Catalonian independence referendum, leading Spanish national policy against the approval of the vote.
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Ramiro Grau, a predecessor of Maza, said in an interview with the Spanish-language Alerta Digital news website that “If we join the interest of some states for Catalonia to be constituted as a new country, for example Israel — as much as its president has said otherwise — and the existence of a large colony of Jews in Argentina, there are those who claim that the real controllers are the Jews, it would not be a bad idea to do an autopsy to check and verify the real causes of his death.”
On Thursday, Ariel Gelblung, the Latin American representative of Wiesenthal Center raised the matter with the Argentine congressional delegation at the Latin American Parliament, or PARLATINO, being held in Panama, arguing that “Grau has endangered the country´s Jewish community and thereby maligned Argentina.”
Gelblung told JTA that he called for Buenos Aires “to protest vigorously to Spain and we will be monitoring this slander and will take further measures accordingly.”
Wiesenthal Center director for international relations Shimon Samuels said Grau’s statement was “an extreme example of obsessive anti-Semitism.”In order to mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT), eight Croydon churches will united with a message of ‘One Love’.
The One Love event, organised by the Croydon Area Gay Society hopes to allow several churches to express their joint opposition to homophobia and transphobia.
Press Officer Peter Blackburn said: “We believe that it is important to demonstrate that not all churches are homophobic. On 17 May, on North End, Croydon’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, eight local churches and eight LGBT groups will have stands, with many more having expressed their support.”
Art Lester, Minister at the Croydon Unitarian Church added: “Unitarians have long welcomed people of the LGBT community into our churches and our professional ministry. This is more than mere tolerance. Our common life has been enriched by the gifts of many who have found themselves outside the supposed mainstream of human sexuality, just as we live outside the mainstream of popular religion.”
The Unitarians are among faith groups such as the Quakers and Liberal Judaism who are happy to provide marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples.
Alison Meaton, a member of the Society of Friends in Purley, also expressed support for the said, “Quakers were one of the first churches to talk openly about sexuality. We feel that the quality and depth of feeling between two people is the most important part of a loving relationship, not their gender or sexual orientation,” while Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain adds, “Quakers see the light of God in everyone and so we respect the inherent worth of each individual and each loving relationship.”
Further support comes from Father Geoffrey Thompson, vicar of St. Stephen’s Church, Thornton Heath, who said: “St Stephen’s stands for the love of God who embraces all people. We are committed to serve and support all who come to us in sincerity regardless of sexuality, gender, age or race.”By Wayne Elise
Drive through Los Angeles and you may spot me. I'm the guy running the streets of Los Feliz with my bare feet. People point fingers. Dogs turn mid-pee to stare. I get mocked in Spanish by the guys standing along the street in front of Home Depot. "Mira, a ese wey no le alcanzo para zapatos?"
Erika rolled her eyes when I announced my new fitness routine. "You're going to get hepatitis."
I shrugged my shoulders. "If I do and I die, I want you to remember I love you. I also want to be cremated, and my ashes made into a cake and fed to celebrities."
"No," she said. "I'm going to feed you to homeless people."
I ran out the door and down the street in my bare feet. I began smiling as I ran. I hummed the Willie Nelson song On The Road Again. I enjoyed my run so much that when I returned home I threw my running shoes in the trash. But then I had second thoughts. I pulled them out and tossed them to the neighbor's Pitbull for good measure. "Rip 'em up boy," I said. He looked down at the shoes and rolled his eyes.
Running shoes are well intended. They offer padding and stabilization to ostensibly protect a runner's feet. But running shoes remove a runner from their natural interaction with the running surface. They permit and encourage runners to run in a manner that damages their bodies. By trying to protect feet, they hurt people.
Sit on a park bench and watch the feet of passing runners. Pay attention to the moment their feet land on the running surface. The leg is extended and nearly straight as the heel lands first.
"I'm sorry. Did you say the heel?"
"Yeah, the heel. The freaking heel!"
Landing on your heel is like dropping a wooden pole endwise onto concrete. With each stride the ligaments and joints of the knees, hips and back are crunched under impact shock from the runner's body weight. Virtually every runner is injured and has to stop or take a break from running due to the culmination of impact shock.
Trust nature. Back in the Paleolithic Age, eons before shoes were invented, human legs reached their evolutionary zenith. Back then runners landed on their forefoot then soaked up downward momentum using the strength of their calf muscles and elasticity of their Achilles Tendon before springing forward again into the next stride. Anyone landing on their heel was washed out of the gene pool.
"Hey what happened to Grok?"
"Broke his feet with that stupid stride he used. We had to leave him behind. Pretty sure he got eaten by a sabertooth."
"He was funny."
"Yeah he was. Remember that time he pushed a rock down a hill with a stick?"
"Ha. Good times. Did he have any last words?"
"He called out, 'This wouldn't have happened if I had shoes.'"
"What are shoes?"
"No idea."
I'm hooked on barefoot running. My knees and back no longer ache while I run. Running barefoot has helped me become more engaged with running. I don't feel compelled to carry my iPod to escape boredom. I scan for pebbles, glass and organic debris. I look ahead for the smoothest concrete. I pay attention to the feel of the running surface under my feet. And I run with a smile on my face.
I made Erika walk outside the other day so I could show off my barefoot stride on the sidewalk. Her reaction surprised me. She clasped her hands together. "Aww, that's so cute."
I stopped running and looked around thinking there must be a mom pushing a stroller behind me. "What? What's so cute."
"You," she said. "The way you run looks as if you're sneaking up on someone. It's cute."
Here I was thinking my running looked hardcore. I imagined myself carrying a spear and hunting Wooly Mammoths on the African plains 200 thousand years ago. "No. I'm a caveman."
But she was right. Turns out barefoot running looks cute - like we're sneaking up on someone. Indeed the goal of barefoot running for me is neither speed nor distance, but rather to run as lightly as possible. It's a Zen thing. I try to feel at peace with being passed by a 'banger' wearing running shoes while I focus on my soft as pillow landing.
I didn't make any of this up of course. Barefoot running has become a global movement since the release of the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. If anything I'm late to the party. A few years ago, my friend Jay, whom many of you know, bought those Vibram FiveFinger running shoes. At the time, I laughed at him as we ran around Central Park together.
"Those shoes are way too geeky. I rename them Jay's no-hot-girls-going-to-talk-to-him shoes."
Jay took my teasing well. "These shoes are all about getting close to barefoot," he said. "I'm strengthening my feet this way and running more how nature intended."
"Yeah, whatever Jay. Just don't be too close to me when we run by those French girls up there. Nature intended us to look good to French girls."
"How do you know they're French?"
"I saw them being rude to people earlier."
Ha. Look who's laughing now Jay? Um, you are of course.
Anyhow, if you're interested, there are a lot of resources out there on the topic. Just Google barefoot running.
It's a metaphor.
The question you're wondering is what this has to do with the things you come to Charisma Arts to learn. Okay, here's the connection. I'd like you to think of running barefoot as a metaphor for interacting with people.
What ARE you talking about Wayne?
I'll explain. But first relax, sit down, find your slippers and PJs. This may take awhile.
Scientists point to findings that demonstrate happiness is linked to experiencing new things.
"Welcome to the lab," says a guy wearing a lab coat and chewing gum while he talks. "Here's what we did in our experiment. We presented our test subject chimpanzee with a physically fit female to whom he had no previous exposure. We then observed significant increases in electrochemical activity in the brain region associated with happiness."
"Yes but so what? She's an attractive mate. Of course he's happy."
"You're not a scientist are you?"
"Um no."
"I didn't think so. It's NOT just an attractive female that creates this response. It's a NEW attractive female. The test subject had limited happiness response when exposed to the many other attractive females with whom he had previously been exposed. Arousal, maybe. But happiness, no. It's newness that creates happiness."
"But why did you have to dress them in lingerie?"
"Um. That's just for us."
"Gotcha. And the lipstick?"
"Ditto."
I think this guy's onto something with his 'new equating to happiness' thing. But we don't need science to tell us that. We can look inside ourselves and feel it. Just as our bodies want exercise, so too our brains want to interact with new ideas, new people and new social configurations. We want new challenges. We want to deepen our relationships and expand our social horizon.
All that is within our reach. Evolution or God or whatever you want to call it made us social animals.
But to reach our social potential we have to create honest and vulnerable conversation with people. Unfortunately we don't do that anymore. Not since we were eight years old.
Erika and I were standing at the DMV office yesterday waiting to transfer title on a car when a boy waiting with his mother struck up a conversation. He held out his mother's iPhone. "Guess how many games I have?" he asked.
I studied him for a moment. "I don't know. Let's see. I guess a hundred."
"Ptthhh." He rolled his eyes and began counting. "I've got thirty two," he announced.
I smiled. "That's way more than I have. You should give me a few."
He laughed and showed me one of his games. "I like this one," he said.
"How old are you kid?" I asked.
"Eight."
"That's a good age. And what do you do for a living?"
He just stared at me.
"You know… a job, occupation, career?"
"I like playing games." he said.
"Nice. Your preoccupation is your occupation. You live life on your own terms."
But I'd lost him to staring at Erika's cleavage.
You remember the open and vulnerable way you talked as a child I'm sure. It's natural that we lose some of that as we age. But the most charismatic adults I've met are able to tap into child-like openness and vulnerability. They play and express their emotions and move to the music and share their imagination. They're eager to take the initiative and smile and tell you what they would like to see happen.
Too bad most people have become conversationally fearful. Before we leave home we tie our conversation shoes on over our personalities to protect ourselves from conversational dings.
"Where's that coffee from?"
"A roaster in New York."
"New York is for rich people."
"Yeah it is. What do you do?"
"I work in entertainment. I work with the director who made The Last Picture Show."
"Isn't he dead?"
"No. He's just on sabbatical."
Blah Blah Blah. We've encased our conversations in neoprene-cushioned, stability-controlled, rubber-soled conversation shoes. We never let our real selves out to play and interact. We ask questions we don't care about. We espouse opinions disguised as facts. We buy into a need to demonstrate value. We tuck our vulnerabilities away behind a sheen of artificiality.
All that stuff protects us from awkward moments but it isolates our senses and blocks our intuition about people. We're left to guess or ignore how our conversational partner is feeling. It's no surprise then that we often make the wrong moves. We insult when we should compliment. We annoy when we should intrigue. We hang back when we should move forward. We move forward when we should hang back. We stop trusting our instincts and instead buy into multi-step interaction methods.
Get naked.
The first step toward reclaiming our innate interaction skills is to remove the layers of things we stick in our conversations to protect us from the inevitable, natural conversational dings. Once we can stand in front of each other naked we can begin to accurately read our conversational partners and make the appropriate moves. Here are a few suggestions to get naked.
Stop asking questions to perpetuate conversation. Asking questions out of personal curiosity is wonderful. But we so often misuse questions. We use them to perpetuate conversation. I catch myself making this mistake sometimes. I hear it like an orchestra conductor hears a wrong note blown from the tuba section.
"What do you do?" I ask.
This sounds like an F-flat when the score calls for a B minor.
"Well..." she says.
I wave her off. "Oh no. Don't answer that question. It's a ritualized question. We can talk about that later. Let's talk about something we both feel more excited to talk about at this point so early in the conversation."
"No it's okay. I'm an art history major. But I also have a job at the Moma."
"Oh dang. I really wish you wouldn't have told me that."
"Why?"
"Because I was just trying to make a point with the readers. Look, I didn't what to tell you this but you're just a conversational straw girl."
"A what?"
"A figment of my imagination. You don't really exist."
"This is horrible."
"I know. I imagined you with all sorts of wonderful assets."
"Fuck."
"Yeah. Now I'm imagining you out of existence."
"Noooooo...."
We often resort to asking questions when we're afraid of silence. Which is understandable. In the fragile beginnings of a conversation, silence can indicate an end to the conversation. But asking questions to push away silence only creates more silence. After our conversational partner answers our question we're in a worse position than before we asked the question. After we get an answer its even harder to improv a good statement. So we have to ask another question. It's a Ponzi scheme.
"Where did you get that phone?"
"At the T-Mobile store."
"Do you like it?"
"Yes."
"You do? You like it?"
"Yes. You have a hearing problem or something cowboy?"
The gambit runs out and we're revealed as a person who doesn't seem to have anything unique or personal to share.
"No. I guess I just have nothing to say."
"Yep. Dang Ponzi scheme. I get them all the time. Why can't I meet a man with something to say? Anyway, you better get outta here little doggie. Giddyup!"
"Well you don't have to be so mean about it."
"Sure I do. It's in the script. Page three, scene five, paragraph six."
"Wait. I just read ahead. In chapter eight we have sex. Alright!"
"No. That's a misprint."
"Drat."
The solution to silence is to make peace with the fact that some silence is natural and inevitable in conversation. Indeed silence is also when many conversations take a breath before running deeper toward a more personal connection.
It's okay to temporarily run out of words. Stay calm. Resist the temptation to ask a question. Keep eye-contact with your conversational partner. Breath deeply. Stretch. Smile. Be at peace with the silence. DO NOT CHECK OUT and start inspecting the floor for fairy tale creatures. There's no such thing. STAY WITH YOUR CONVERSATIONAL PARTNER. Keep eyes and face turned toward your conversational partner. DO NOT CHECK OUT! DO NOT CHECK OUT!!
Okay, good.
You may find it helpful to let your conversational partner know you want the conversation to continue but can't think of anything to say. That'll often cue the other person to share more to fill the gap.
"I'm into origami."
Silence.
"Or-i-gam-i. Okay, cool. I've never known anyone who's folded paper like that. I'm not sure how to relate to it. But I'd love to hear more."
"No worries. I'll show you some origami now. I can fold a bank note into the likeness of Pippa Middleton's bum."
"Oh, you're English. I didn't' realize that. Tally-ho then."
"Ahem. Yes. Tally-ho. It would also be brilliant if we sat for tea and crumpets. They're just smashing I say."
If we freak out over silence our convers |
busy Thursday afternoon, there was no obvious decline in shoppers.
The I Love MCR campaign is growing with thousands of people liking its Facebook page as council leaders urge shops to cut prices as part of the drive to boost the city's economy.
There will be a show of solidarity on Sunday afternoon, as shoppers on Market Street - where a Miss Selfridges shop was looted and set on fire - hold up placards. It is hoped hundreds of people will join in.
Officials are urging shoppers to visit the city centre this weekend to show their support. Sir Howard Bernstein, chief executive of the council, has proposed a series of post-Bank Holiday sales in shops across the city to boost trade.
Sir Howard said he also wants restaurants and bars to begin special offers as part of the plan. And he said businesses should consider letting their staff go home early for one day – so they could spend time and money in Manchester.
The number of shoppers in the city centre fell by 20 per cent last Saturday – at a time when many businesses were already struggling as a result of the economic downturn.
It is the latest response to the I Love MCR campaign that has united the Greater Manchester region against the rioters and produced a package of measures to boost the local economy.
In a message to businesses, Sir Howard said: "If you can put on a special offer in your stories, bars and restaurants, it helps get the message out that we are open for business, and will hopefully get people in and get people spending.
"As people say in their thousands that they 'love MCR', we also want Manchester to show that the city loves them."
He praised 1,000 people who turned up to clean up following the looting.
Parking charges for on-street bays during Sundays and evenings will be put on hold until the city gets back on its feet.
The charges – due to be imposed on September 5 – would have extended the charging period from 8am-8pm, seven days a week.
The entire Metrolink network will be made free this Sunday, and parking charges waived at key periods over the next three weeks, in support of the campaign.
A series of events are also planned in the city centre – starting with free dance, street theatre and comedy as part of Platform 4 festival this weekend.
Greater Manchester has seen an upsurge in civic pride over the past week with the I Love MCR campaign attracting more than 4,500 supporters on Facebook and a host of celebrity backers including sportsmen, music legends and the cast of Coronation Street.
Businesses in the Northern Quarter are also in talks to hold a huge street party in coming weeks, following the success of a royal wedding party in the trendy neighbourhood.
All on-street parking in the city centre will be free for the next two Thursdays after 4pm. Car park companies will be waiving charges at multi-storeys in the city centre at various points.Barkevious Levon "Keke" Mingo (; born October 4, 1990) is an American football outside linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League (NFL). He played college football at Louisiana State (LSU) and was drafted by the Cleveland Browns sixth overall in the 2013 NFL Draft. He won Super Bowl LI with the New England Patriots over the Atlanta Falcons.
Early years [ edit ]
Mingo was born in Belle Glade, Florida. He attended West Monroe High School in West Monroe, Louisiana, where he was a letterman in football and track. He played football for the West Monroe Rebels team under head coach Don Shows. As a junior, he tallied 55 tackles to go with six sacks and 12 tackles for loss, leading this to be named All-State in Class 5A. As a senior in 2008, he was a 5A first-team All-state selection, after recording 59 tackles to go with seven tackles for loss and four sacks in helping lead West Monroe High School to the state championship game. He also added four forced fumbles and recovered seven fumbles. He played in the 2009 U.S. Army All-American Bowl.
Also a standout track & field athlete, Mingo was a state qualifier as a sprinter. At the 2008 Region I-5A Meet, he took gold in the 400-meter dash, with a PR of 48.92, and ran the lead leg on the West Monroe 4 × 200m and 4 × 400m squads, helping them capture the state title in both events.[1] At the 2009 LHSAA Outdoor State T&F Championships, he took 5th in the 200-meter dash, recording a career-best time of 21.85 seconds, and finished 6th in the 400-meter dash, with a time of 49.54 seconds.[2]
According to Rivals.com and Scout.com, Mingo was four-star college recruiting prospect.[3] He was rated as the No. 6 strong side linebacker by Scout.com and the No. 9 by Rivals.com. He was a member of the Rivals 250 and Scout 300. He was rated as the No. 5 best athlete among linebackers by Rivals.com. He was rated as the No. 3 player in the state of Louisiana by SuperPrep and the No. 8 by Rivals.com.
College career [ edit ]
Mingo attended Louisiana State University, and played for coach Les Miles's LSU Tigers football team from 2009 to 2012. He was redshirted in 2009. As a redshirt freshman in 2010, he started one of 13 games, recording 35 tackles and 3.5 sacks. As a sophomore in 2011, Mingo was a Second Team All-SEC selection after recording 47 tackles and 8 sacks.[4] In 2011, he contributed to LSU's successful SEC Championship season. As a junior in 2012, he played in all 13 games with 10 starts, and earned Second Team All-SEC honors after recording 38 tackles, 8.5 tackles for a loss, 4.5 quarterback sacks, and a team-high 12 quarterback hurries.
On January 7, 2013, Mingo announced he would forego his senior season and enter the 2013 NFL Draft.[5] He was one of 10 LSU Tiger underclassmen to declare for the draft that year.[6]
Professional career [ edit ]
External video Barkevious Mingo’s NFL Combine Workout
Pre-draft measurables Ht Wt Arm length Hand size 40-yard dash 10-yd split 20-yd split 20-ss 3-cone Vert jump Broad 6 ft 4 1⁄ 4 in
(1.94 m) 241 lb
(109 kg) 33 3⁄ 4 in
(0.86 m) 9 5⁄ 8 in
(0.24 m) 4.58 s 1.57 s 2.63 s 4.39 s 6.84 s 37 in
(0.94 m) 10 ft 8 in
(3.25 m) All values from NFL Combine[7][8]
Cleveland Browns [ edit ]
Mingo was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in the first round with the sixth overall pick in the 2013 NFL Draft. He was the third defensive end to be selected in the draft, after Dion Jordan and Ezekiel Ansah.
External video Browns draft Barkevious Mingo sixth overall
2013 [ edit ]
On July 21, 2013, the Cleveland Browns signed Mingo to a four-year, $16.34 million contract that includes a signing bonus of $10.26 million.[9][10]
Mingo was immediately moved to outside linebacker by defensive coordinator Ray Horton and competed against Jabaal Sheard for a starting role throughout training camp.[11] On August 15, 2013, Mingo suffered a bruised lung during the Browns’ 24-6 win against the Detroit Lions during their second preseason game. Mingo was hospitalized and missed the last two games of the preseason.[12] Head coach Rob Chudzinski named Mingo a backup outside linebacker, behind Jabaal Sheard and Paul Kruger, to begin the regular season.[13]
On September 15, 2013, Mingo made his professional regular season debut after missing the season-opener due to a bruised lung and recorded two solo tackles, one pass deflection, and made his first career sack during their 14-6 loss at the Baltimore Ravens in Week 2. Mingo made his first career sack on Ravens’ quarterback Joe Flacco for a nine-yard loss during the first quarter.[14] On September 29, 2013, Mingo earned his first career start in place of Jabaal Sheard who was inactive due to a knee injury.[15] In Week 13, he collected a season-high five combined tackles during a 32-28 loss against the Jacksonville Jaguars.[16] On December 30, 2013, the Cleveland Browns fired head coach Rob Chudzinski after they finished the season with a 4-12 record.[17] He finished his rookie season in 2013 with 42 combined tackles (39 solo), a career-high five sacks, and four pass deflections in 15 games and three starts.[18]
2014 [ edit ]
Mingo entered training camp as a backup outside linebacker in his first season under defensive coordinator Jim O’Neil.[19] Head coach Mike Pettine named Mingo and Paul Kruger the starting outside linebackers to begin the regular season. They started alongside inside linebackers Craig Robertson and Karlos Dansby.[20] Mingo was inactive for the Browns’ Week 2 victory against the New Orleans Saints due to a shoulder injury.[21] Mingo’s shoulder injury was discovered to be a torn labrum, but he opted to wear a harness and play through the injury. On December 14, 2014, Mingo collected a season-high eight combined tackles during a 30-0 loss against the Cincinnati Bengals in Week 15.[22] He finished the season with 42 combined tackles (26 solo), three pass deflections, and two sacks in 15 games and 11 starts.[18]
2015 [ edit ]
Mingo entered training camp slated as the starting strongside linebacker after Jabaal Sheard departed during free agency. On August 6, 2015, Mingo underwent arthroscopic surgery on a torn meniscus and was expected to miss 2-4 weeks.[23] Head coach Mike Pettine retained Mingo and Paul Kruger as the starting outside linebackers to begin the regular season.[24] Mingo was demoted to being a backup outside linebacker after Armonty Bryant was given his starting role. In Week 3, he collected a season-high four combined tackles during a 27-20 loss against the Oakland Raiders. On October 18, 2015, Mingo made one tackle, broke up one pass deflection, and made his first career interception during a 26-23 loss against the Denver Broncos in Week 6. Mingo intercepted a pass by Broncos’ quarterback Peyton Manning, that was initially intended for wide receiver Demaryius Thomas, and returned it for a seven-yard return in overtime.[25] He finished the 2015 NFL season with 24 combined tackles (15 solo), four pass deflections, and one interception in 16 games and two starts.[18]
2016 [ edit ]
On January 4, 2016, the Cleveland Browns fired head coach Mike Pettine and general manager Ray Farmer after they finished the season with a 3-13 record.[26] On May 2, 2016, the Cleveland Browns decided not to pick up his fifth year option.[27] Defensive coordinator Ray Horton retained the 3-4 base defense and held a competition to name starting outside linebackers between Mingo, Paul Kruger. Nate Orchard, Joe Schobert, and Emmanuel Ogbah.[28]
New England Patriots [ edit ]
On August 25, 2016, the Cleveland Browns traded Mingo to the New England Patriots and received a fifth-round pick (175th overall) in the a 2017 NFL Draft in exchange.[29] Head coach Bill Belichick named Mingo the fourth outside linebacker on the Patriots’ depth chart to start the regular season. He was listed behind Jamie Collins, Jonathan Freeny, and Shea McClellin.[30][31]
In Week 6, Mingo collected a season-high two solo tackles during a 35-17 victory against the Cincinnati Bengals. Mingo was limited to 11 combined tackles (nine solo) in his only season with the Patriots, but appeared in all 16 games with zero starts.[18] The New England Patriots finished first in the AFC East with a 14–2 record and earned a first round bye. On January 14, 2017, Mingo appeared in his first career playoff game as the Patriots defeated the Houston Texans 34–16 in the AFC Divisional Round. The following week, they defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers 36–17 in the AFC Championship Game. On February 5, 2017, Mingo appeared in Super Bowl LI and recorded two solo tackles as the Patriots defeated the Atlanta Falcons 34–28. Mingo appeared exclusively on special teams during the game and recorded both his tackles while covering punt returns.[32]
Indianapolis Colts [ edit ]
2017 [ edit ]
On March 9, 2017, the Indianapolis Colts signed Mingo to a one-year, $2 million contract that includes a signing bonus of $500,000.[10][33][34] Mingo reunited with teammate Jabaal Sheard for the third time. They were teammates on the New England Patriots and Cleveland Browns.
Mingo competed against John Simon and Jabaal Sheard to be the starting strongside linebacker.[35][36] Head coach Chuck Pagano named Mingo the backup strongside linebacker, behind John Simon, to begin the regular season.[37] In Week 16, he collected a season-high eight solo tackles and made one sack during a 23-16 loss at the Baltimore Ravens.[38] On December 31, 2017, the Indianapolis Colts fired head coach Chuck Pagano after finishing the season with a 4-12 record.[39] Mingo finished his lone season with the Indianapolis Colts with 47 combined tackles (35 solo), two pass deflections, and two sacks in 16 games and six starts.[40]
Seattle Seahawks [ edit ]
2018 [ edit ]
On March 16, 2018, the Seattle Seahawks signed Mingo to a two-year, $6.80 million contract that includes $3.20 million guaranteed and a signing bonus of $2.20 million.[10][41][42]
Throughout training camp, Mingo competed against D. J. Alexander to be a starting outside linebacker.[43] Head coach Pete Carroll named Mingo and K. J. Wright the starting outside linebackers to begin the regular season. They started alongside middle linebacker Bobby Wagner.[44] In Week 6, Mingo collected a season-high seven solo tackles during a 27-3 victory at the Oakland Raiders.[45] He finished the season with a career-high 48 combined tackles (37 solo), two forced fumbles, a pass deflection, and one sack in 16 games and 14 starts.[18]
Personal life [ edit ]
Mingo is the son of Hugh Mingo and Barbara Johnson. He has two older brothers, Hugh III and Hughtavious Mingo, and two younger brothers, Malik and LaDarian Johnson. His unusual first name was created by his mother, adding the first three letters of her first name to a name she liked, Kevious.[46]MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - Matthew Strome is reaping the benefits his older brothers' experience.
The 16-year-old Hamilton Bulldogs rookie is the younger brother of Arizona Coyotes prospect Dylan Strome and New York Islanders draft pick Ryan Strome. Matthew is still in constant contact with his siblings, who are both graduates of the Ontario Hockey League.
"I try to talk to them as much as I can. If it's not everyday, it's every other day so it's good to have them to talk to," Matthew Strome said.
Their advice?
"Just wait till you get your chance, and when you get your chance, you just have to capitalize," Strome said. "That's probably one of the biggest things they told me was just, if you're not having a good game or not having a good practice, just get in the gym (and) try to get in the extra work."
The siblings' impact on the youngest Strome is evident to Bulldogs head coach and general manager George Burnett.
Burnett, 53, has spent 26 years as a coach in a variety of capacities and believes Strome is a key building block for his franchise.
"I think he has a maturity beyond his years," Burnett said. "He captained the best team in the province last year with the (Toronto Marlboros) and there are a lot of the things that we liked about him??? that he did understand the game and what he might lack.
"He's a winner and we need more of them like that."
Strome has two goals and two assists through the first 17 games of the season with the Bulldogs (8-14-1), who relocated from Belleville in the off-season.
He also represented Hockey Canada at the 2015 World Under-17 Hockey Challenge earlier this month in Dawson Creek, B.C. The six-foot-three, 187-pound winger saw limited action due to injury, but called the opportunity a learning experience.
"Playing against the best players in the world was a great time and a great opportunity," Strome said. "It's a lot faster. It was just good to see how all the other kids throughout the world play and how different they are in style."
Strome, Hamilton's first ever pick (eighth overall) at the OHL priority selection draft,(The Canadian Press) scored 23 goals and 60 points in 64 games with the Marlboros last season while leading his team to an OHL Cup minor midget title.
The two-way forward still needs to put on size and improve his skating if he hopes to follow the footsteps of his brothers as a first-round NHL draft pick, but the Bulldogs feel those aspects of Strome's game will come with maturity and added responsibility.
"We're really excited about Matthew's prospects and the way he's played for us this year," said Burnett. "He's earning himself more and more of an opportunity as we go along.
"Over the next four years, he's going to take on a bigger and bigger role each and every year."South Carolina’s ‘Wando Warrior’ under fire
A group of students at Wando High School in South Carolina recently started a petition calling for their campus to scrap its mascot, the “Wando Warrior,” saying it’s racist because white people killed and raped Native Americans.
Native Americans “are people that white people stole from, raped and murdered for their own benefit years ago and pushed to reservations and manipulated today,” the petition states.
It goes on to argue the Wando mascot is not only racist “in and of itself,” it also normalizes racism in the eyes of children: “Young kids go to these football games or see the mascot and think it’s normal, or that it’s okay. It’s not. It’s racism. It’s normalized. And it needs to come to an end.”
Currently with nearly 500 signatures, the petition has created mixed reactions among students and alumni from the Mt. Pleasant public school.
Alex Schwarz, a member of the Wando community and supporter of the petition, contributed her view on the controversy by sharing a photo on Facebook of students dressed up as “Wando Warriors” and claiming they were engaged in “cultural appropriation.” She added “ too many of these students have no respect for other cultures.”
Schwarz’s post achieved a good deal of attention in the petition comments section, and added fuel to an already fiery debate.
A commenter named Wayne McCoy responded to Schwarz with a 2016 poll from The Washington Post which found that 9 in 10 Native Americans were not offended by the NFL’s Washington Redskins mascot and logo. “I personally don’t see it as a huge issue that we should be fighting,” he added.
Schwarz responded to a College Fix request for comment by saying “Standing up for what I believe in has always been really important to me, regardless of the controversy.”
“Seeing students my age playing dress up with beads and face paint for school spirit was unsettling,” she added. “My opinion was initially dismissed, so I made an effort to get my point across.”
The petition and the attention surrounding it has led to a good deal of pushback from Wando students and alumni, notably student Sam Overman’s counter-petition to keep the mascot. It currently stands at about 5,250 signatures, more than ten times that of the original petition.
Overman’s petition quotes the back of the agenda given to every Wando student at the beginning of the year: “The Warrior is tough in loyalty, intensity, determination, bearing, initiative, endurance, courage and strength of will. The Warrior is frequently called upon to step forward when most gladly step back. Warriors exist on the battlefield and in daily life.”
Supporters of Wando Warrior say the mascot is not a symbol of racism, but one of virtue and pride for students and the school. As such, it also serves to pay tribute to Native American culture.
Wando High School alumna and mascot proponent Lauren Karinshak pointed out that administrators and teachers at Wando constantly tell students to “Walk like a Warrior.” She wrote in a Facebook post that “A Warrior is a warrior, it’s a symbol of honor if anything … our mascot is glorified and is a representative of how we act on a daily basis …”
The College Fix reached out to Wando High School principal Sherry Eppelsheimer but has yet to receive a response.
MORE: School to students, staff: Sorry, you can’t wear any Washington Redskins gear
MORE: Students say spear-wielding Aztec mascot offensive, demand its decommission
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Today's sharply divided Supreme Court decision striking down a 100-year old law in Montana prohibiting corporate contributions to campaigns was disappointing, but entirely expected. As long as the composition of the Court includes ideologues like Scalia and Roberts, there won't be any movement on that front.
That leaves most of us with a bitter taste, especially unions, who just saw their ability to challenge corporate voices left partly mute with the also-divided decision in Knox vs. SEIU.
Meanwhile, Mitt Romney hunkered down with his treasured billionaires, including Bain Capital buddies, at a resort in Utah, while the Koch clan plotted their strategies near San Diego. It's a fact: Democrats will be outspent 3-1 in 2012, and the only option we have is to neutralize the ad campaigns with activism and information.
To that end, I appreciate the campaign speeches President Obama is giving where he ridicules the "scary voice" ads and reminds everyone that with unlimited corporate spending, the money behind the voice shouldn't be taken lightly. It's a way to neutralize the onslaught, but really I think people should just turn off the TV until November 7th. Maybe turn off their phones, too, since robocalls are part of the overall strategy.
Citizens United may have unleashed the demons of unlimited corporate spending, but it didn't slam the door on disclosure, which is where states may be able to trump the secret, if not the spending.
The Nation reports on a movement afoot in the states to fight back against corporate personhood.
Legislators have clearly reached their own conclusion that there is an “appearance of corruption.” Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have joined Montana in asking the Supreme Court to uphold the state’s ban on corporate expenditures. This coalition is a mix of red, blue, and purple states, including New York, Arkansas, California, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Utah, Vermont and West Virginia. Senators John McCain and Sheldon Whitehouse also filed an amicus brief in support of Montana,writing, “Evidence from the 2010 and 2012 electoral cycles has demonstrated that so-called independent expenditures create a strong potential for corruption and the perception thereof.”
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court quashed all of their requests when it summarily reversed the Montana law without even hearing arguments, but that doesn't change the fundamental objection: Money corrupts politics.
However, there is a tiny peephole through which some sunlight can be seen, assuming states have the will to force the issue. While Citizens United threw open the door to corporate ownership of elections, it didn't slam it on disclosure of those campaign contributions. Unfortunately, our disclosure system right now is a combination of old and older technology, and very little of it in real time. Further, many of the billionaires are giving to tax-exempt organizations that don't disclose for as much as 18-20 months after they've given (and the organizations have spent) the money.
The only answer I see to the dilemma is to push for full, real-time disclosure of political contributions in amounts over $1,000.00 or so, and to do it on a state level, given the current gridlock in the US Congress. If we have to put up with the barrage of negativity, we should at least know who is paying for it and what they want as the quid pro quo.
Barring that, the Obama campaign's decision to aggressively challenge Crossroads GPS' standing as a 501(c)(4) organization is the only other strategy left. The video at the top outlines their challenge. If it were to stand, it wouldn't preclude corporations from giving to Crossroads' 501(c)(4) organization, but it would shine a light on who is doing the giving.
Ultimately, the money game is intended to suppress enthusiasm for voting, which is part of the multipronged voter suppression strategy Republicans are deploying in this cycle. Given that they have a weak candidate and an unenthusiastic base, the best they can hope for is to try and control the narrative by throwing down as much money as possible in an effort to send the message that it's really hopeless to counter them. It's a power play, pure and simple.
As I wrote in my post on education reform last week, these people do not give from the goodness of their hearts. As they confirmed in their published minutes of a brainstorming meeting, they give for the sole purpose of the quid pro quo. They give to get, and no one gives more and expects to get more than Sheldon Adelson. Via the New York Times:
One man cannot spend enough to ensure the election of an unpopular candidate, as Mr. Gingrich’s collapse showed, but he can buy enough ads to help push a candidate over the top in a close race like this year’s. Given that Mr. Romney was not his first choice, why is Mr. Adelson writing these huge checks?
Stay tuned for Adelson's quid pro quo expectation:
The first answer is clearly his disgust for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supported by President Obama and most Israelis. He considers a Palestinian state “a steppingstone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people,” and has called the Palestinian prime minister a terrorist. He is even further to the right than the main pro-Israeli lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which he broke with in 2007 when it supported economic aid to the Palestinians. Mr. Romney is only slightly better, saying the Israelis want a two-state solution but the Palestinians do not, accusing them of wanting to eliminate Israel. The eight-figure checks are not paying for a more enlightened answer. Mr. Adelson’s other overriding interest is his own wallet. He rails against the president’s “socialist-style economy” and redistribution of wealth, but what he really fears is Mr. Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on companies like his that make a huge amount of money overseas. Ninety percent of the earnings of his company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, come from hotel and casino properties in Singapore and Macau. (The latter is located, by the way, in China, a socialist country the last time we checked.)
This is Mr. Adelson's wish list. We could go down a list of Romney's major donors and identify theirs as well, but ultimately what will decide whether we allow money to buy elections will be what we do to counter it, and the only way to counter it is to get outside, talk to neighbors, volunteer to register voters, and change the conversation from the "scary voices" to a resolve for change.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Reuters) - A tiny county in the northern Florida Panhandle, facing the prospect of court-ordered gay marriage going into effect next month, filed an emergency motion on Tuesday asking a federal judge to clarify whether it must marry all gay couples.
The request follows statewide confusion over a U.S. Supreme Court order last week declining to extend a stay on a ruling that found the state’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. The order cleared the way for gay marriages to begin on Jan. 6.
The state association of court clerks interpreted the order to apply only to Washington County, which was cited in the case. Accordingly, the group asked officials in the county to seek clarification in federal court on behalf of the state’s 66 other counties.
Instead, Washington’s county attorney filed a motion asking whether the order applies only to the two men involved in the case, or to all couples who may seek licenses there.
That could mean thousands of couples flocking to the small town of Chipley, a rural crossroads in the far Panhandle.
“We’re kind of the guinea pigs walking through it, but we will issue a marriage license on Jan. 6,” said Jeff Goodman, the attorney for Washington County. “The question is whether it’s going to be one or going to be multiples.”
He said it was in the county’s best interests to file a narrow appeal to U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle of Florida’s Northern District in Tallahassee, who in August became the first federal judge to strike down the state’s same-sex marriage ban, passed in 2008.
The high court’s order would make gay marriage legal in 36 states, including Florida.
Gay activists have threatened to sue any counties that do not grant licenses once the stay runs out.
“Clerks who refuse to issue marriage licenses are violating the constitutional rights of Floridians,” said Nadine Smith, chief executive officer of the advocacy group Equality Florida.
“They will face costly litigation and the enduring shame of history,” she added in a statement.Red footed booby in flight over Half Moon Caye, Belize
Juvenile red-footed booby poking his head out of his nest on Half Moon Caye, Belize
The red-footed booby (Sula sula) is a large seabird of the booby family, Sulidae. As suggested by the name, adults always have red feet, but the colour of the plumage varies. They are powerful and agile fliers, but they are clumsy in takeoffs and landings. They are found widely in the tropics, and breed colonially in coastal regions, especially islands.
Taxonomy [ edit ]
The first formal description of the red-footed booby was by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1766 in the twelfth edition of his Systema Naturae. He introduced the binomial name Pelecanus sula.[2] The type locality is Barbados in the West Indies.[3] The present genus Sula was introduced by the French scientist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760.[4] The word Sula is Norwegian for a gannet.[5]
There are three subspecies:[6]
S. s. sula (Linnaeus, 1766) – Caribbean and southwest Atlantic islands
(Linnaeus, 1766) – Caribbean and southwest Atlantic islands S. s. rubripes Gould, 1838 – tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans
Gould, 1838 – tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans S. s. websteri Rothschild, 1898 – eastern central Pacific
Description [ edit ]
The red-footed booby is the smallest member of the booby and gannet family at about 70 cm (28 in) in length and with a wingspan of up to 1 m (3 ft 3 in). The average weight of 490 adults from Christmas Island was 837 g (1.845 lb).[7] It has red legs, and its bill and throat pouch are coloured pink and blue. This species has several morphs. In the white morph the plumage is mostly white (the head often tinged yellowish) and the flight feathers are black. The black-tailed white morph is similar, but with a black tail, and can easily be confused with the Nazca and masked boobies. The brown morph is overall brown. The white-tailed brown morph is similar, but has a white belly, rump, and tail. The white-headed and white-tailed brown morph has a mostly white body, tail and head, and brown wings and back. The morphs commonly breed together, but in most regions one or two morphs predominates; e.g. at the Galápagos Islands, most belong to the brown morph, though the white morph also occurs.
The sexes are similar, and juveniles are brownish with darker wings, and pale pinkish legs, while chicks are covered in dense white down.
The species has been recorded three times from Sri Lanka.[8]
In September 2016, a male red-footed booby was inexplicably found washed up on a beach in East Sussex, UK, 5,000 miles from its nearest usual habitat. It was the first of its species ever recorded in the UK. The bird, later named Norman, was said by some to be exhausted and malnourished, though it flew onto the beach freely and was of normal weight when checked.[9] He was brought back to health before being transported by plane to an environmental center in the Cayman Islands in December 2016, where it subsequently died before ever being released into the wild.[10]
In January 2017, a red-footed booby was sighted on the New Zealand mainland for the first time.[11]
A red-footed booby was observed to be preyed upon by a large coconut crab on the Chagos Archipelago in 2016.[12]
Breeding [ edit ]
Red-footed booby
This species breeds on islands in most tropical oceans. When not breeding it spends most of the time at sea, and is therefore rarely seen away from breeding colonies. It nests in large colonies, laying one chalky blue egg in a stick nest, which is incubated by both adults for 44–46 days. The nest is usually placed in a tree or bush, but rarely it may nest on the ground. It may be three months before the young first fly, and five months before they make extensive flights.
Red-footed booby pairs may remain together over several seasons. They perform elaborate greeting rituals, including harsh squawks and the male's display of his blue throat, also including short dances.
Diet [ edit ]
Red-footed boobies are spectacular divers, plunging into the ocean at high speeds to catch prey. They mainly eat small fish or squid which gather in groups near the surface.
Gallery [ edit ]
Brown morph in the Galápagos
Brown morph, Genovesa Island, Galapagos
On Palmyra Atoll, Pacific Ocean
References [ edit ]Surgeons are using new, highly accurate 3D printers to guide face transplantation operations, making the procedures faster and improving outcomes, according to a new report.
The face replicas made on these printers take into account bone grafts, metal plates and the underlying bone structure of the skull. They improve surgical planning, which ultimately makes the surgery much shorter, the report authors said.
The new technique has already been used in several patients, including two high-profile face transplant patients — Carmen Tarleton, who was maimed by her husband and received a face transplant in 2013, and Dallas Wiens, who was the first person in the U.S. to receive a full face transplant, in 2011.
The surgeries have dramatically improved the lives of the patients, the researchers said.
"They went from having no face and no features at all, to being able to talk and eat and breathe properly," said Dr. Frank Rybicki, a radiologist and the director of the Applied Imaging Science Laboratory at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who presented the findings today (Dec. 1) at the meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.
Custom fit
For the patients, face transplantation is often the end of a long journey.
"Typically, by the time they come to us, they've had 20 or 30 surgeries already, just to save their lives," Rybicki told Live Science. [15 Odd Things That Can Be 3D Printed]
That means that patients may have plates, screws, bone grafts and dozens of other small modifications in their faces, and the new face has to fit perfectly around these. 3D printing allows the team to see exactly where these elements are, making the surgery — which can take up to 25 hours — go more quickly and smoothly, Rybicki said.
Soft tissue
The team printed out the soft tissue for Tarleton, whose estranged husband threw industrial-strength lye (a strong chemical used in soap making) on her face, according to the report.
The lye "literally burned off all the skin and all the squishy stuff in the face, and just left the bone," which was covered by a paper-thin flap of tissue, Rybicki said.
Printing soft tissue requires a sophisticated technique, but it was tremendously helpful because, without 3D printing, it's very difficult to visualize that tissue, Rybicki said.
Since her face transplantation procedure in 2011, Tarleton has done amazingly well, and her facial features have truly become her own, Rybicki said. The tissue has undergone dramatic remodeling, and the face no longer resembles neither her original face nor the donor's face. Now, three years after her operation, it is hard to tell that she was the recipient of a face transplant, Rybicki said.
Images of Tarleton's face will be revealed at the meeting later today.
The team also created 3D-printed versions of the new soft-tissue structure at Tarleton's follow-up appointments. As a result, they can document some of the facial remodeling that Tarleton has undergone, Rybicki said.
New innovations
Having a better understanding of the facial anatomy can also improve outcomes in less dramatic types of facial reconstruction, said Dr. Edward Cat |
study
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581 º¦ [h¨¤i] harmful; º¦³æ h¨¤ich¨®ng destructive insect; À÷º¦ l¨¬hai fierce
582 Ôö [z¨¥ng] (=Ôö¼Ó z¨¥ngji¨¡, =Ôö³¤ z¨¥ngzh¨£ng) increase
583 Ñî (F î ) [y¨¢ng] poplar tree; Èý½ÇÒ¶Ñî s¨¡nji¨£oy¨¨y¨¢ng cottonwood
584 ÁÏ [li¨¤o] (=²ÄÁÏ c¨¢ili¨¤o) material, expect, anticipate; ×ÊÁÏ z¨©li¨¤o means, data, material
585 ÖÝ [zh¨u] prefecture; ¹ãÖÝ Gu¨£ngzh¨u Canton
586 ½Ú (F ¹ ) [ji¨¦] joint, section, festival, holiday, (=½ÚÈÕ ji¨¦r¨¬) holiday
[ji¨¥] knot, link; ½Ú×Ó ji¨¥zi gnarl, knot (in wood)
587 ×ó [zu¨¯] left; ×ó±ß zu¨¯bi¨¡n left side
588 ×° (F Ñb ) [zhu¨¡ng] dress up, load, install, (=¼Ù×° ji¨£zhu¨¡ng) pretend
589 Ò× [y¨¬] (=ÈÝÒ× r¨®ngy¨¬) easy, change; Ò×¾ Y¨¬j¨©ng Book of Changes
590 Öø [zh¨´] write, book
[zhe] (S×Å)
[zh¨¢o] (S×Å)
[zhu¨®] (S×Å)
[zh¨¡o] (S×Å)
591 ¼± [j¨ª] urgent; ׿± zh¨¢oj¨ª anxious; ¼±Ã¦ j¨ªm¨¢ng in a hurry
592 ¾Ã [ji¨³] (for a) long time
593 µÍ [d¨©] low; ½µµÍ ji¨¤ngd¨© reduce; µÍ¼¶ d¨©j¨ª elementary; ¸ßµÍ g¨¡od¨© height
594 Ëê (F q ) [su¨¬] years old; ËêÊý su¨¬shu age; ÍòËê w¨¤nsu¨¬ long life, Your/His Majesty, "Banzai"
595 Ðè [x¨±] (=ÐèÒª x¨±y¨¤o) need; ±ØÐè b¨¬x¨± essential
596 ¾Æ [ji¨³] wine; Æ¡¾Æ p¨ªji¨³ beer; ºÈ¾Æ h¨¥ji¨³ drink wine
597 ºÓ [h¨¦] river; ºÓÄÏÊ¡ H¨¦n¨¢n sh¨§ng Henan Province; ÔËºÓ y¨´nh¨¦ canal
598 ³õ [ch¨±] beginning, first (in order); ³õ²½ ch¨±b¨´ preliminary; Æð³õ q¨«ch¨± at first
599 ÓÎ [y¨®u] (=ÓÎÓ¾ y¨®uy¨¯ng) swim, (=ÂÃÓÎ l¨·y¨®u) travel
600 ÑÏ (F À ) [y¨¢n] severe, stern
601 Ìú (F èF ) [ti¨§] iron; µØÌú d¨¬ti¨§ underground, subway
602 ×å [z¨²] (=Ãñ×å m¨ªnz¨²) people, nationality, (=ÖÖ×å zh¨¯ngz¨²) race
603 ³ý [ch¨²] get rid of, divide, (=³ýÁË ch¨²le) except
604 ·Ý [f¨¨n] portion, share, copy, <classifier for portion, share, copies of newspapers etc.>, college degree
605 ¸Ò [g¨£n] dare; ÓÂ¸Ò y¨¯ngg¨£n brave
606 ºú [h¨²] recklessly; ºú˵ nonsense (FôE) (=ºú×Ó h¨²zi) beard (FÐk) ºúͬ h¨²t¨°ng lane
607 Ѫ [xu¨¨] blood
[xi¨§] blood
608 Æó [q¨«] stand on tiptoe, hope for, look forward to; ÆóÒµ q¨«y¨¨ enterprise; Æóͼ q¨«t¨² attempt; Æó¶ì penguin
609 ÈÔ [r¨¦ng] (=ÈÔÈ» r¨¦ngr¨¢n, =ÈÔ¾É r¨¦ngji¨´) still, yet, as before
610 Ͷ [t¨®u] throw; ͶƱ t¨®upi¨¤o vote
611 ÎÅ (F  ) [w¨¦n] smell, hear; ÐÂÎÅ x¨©nw¨¦n news
612 ¶· [d¨¯u] 10 liters; Ñ̶· y¨¡nd¨¯u tobacco/opium pipe; ±±¶·ÐÇ B¨§id¨¯ux¨©ng The Big Dipper, The Plow
[d¨°u] (FôY) fight
613 ¼Í (F ¼o ) [j¨¬] ÊÀ¼Í sh¨¬j¨¬ century; ¼ÍÄî j¨¬ni¨¤n memento; ¼ÍÂÉ j¨¬l¨¸ discipline
[J¨«] <family name>
614 ½Å (F Ä_ ) [ji¨£o] foot; ³à½Å ch¨¬ji¨£o barefoot; ½ÅÖº ji¨£ozh¨« toe
[ju¨¦] (=½Ç ji¨£o) role, part, character, actor, actress
615 ÓÒ [y¨°u] right; ÓÒ±ß y¨°ubi¨¡n right side; ×óÓÒ zu¨¯y¨°u around, nearby, more or less
{Compare with ʯ sh¨ª stone}
616 ËÕ (F ÌK ) [s¨±] ËÕÐÑ s¨±x¨«ng revive; ËÕÖÝ S¨±zh¨u; ËÕÁª S¨±li¨¢n USSR
617 ±ê (F Ë ) [bi¨¡o] mark; ±ê×¼ bi¨¡ozh¨³n standard
618 ·¹ (F ï ) [f¨¤n] rice, food
619 ÔÆ [y¨²n] say, (Fë ) (=ÔÆ²Ê y¨²ncai) cloud
620 ²¡ [b¨¬ng] sick; 벡 m¨¢obing malfunction
621 Ò½ (F át ) [y¨©] (=ҽѧ y¨©xu¨¦) medical science; Ò½Éú y¨©sh¨¥ng doctor; Ò½Ôº y¨©yu¨¤n hospital
622 °¢ [¨¡] °¢À²® ¨¡l¨¡b¨® Arab
[¨¥] °¢ÃÖÍÓ·ð¨¥m¨ªtu¨®g¨® Amitabha = Buddha preserve us
623 ´ð [d¨¢] (=»Ø´ð hu¨ªd¨¢) answer
[d¨¡] ´ðÓ¦ d¨¡ying respond, promise
624 ÍÁ [t¨³] earth, (=ÍÁµØ t¨³d¨¬) land, (=ÍÁÈÀ t¨³r¨£ng) soil
{Compare with Ê¿ sh¨¬ scholar}
625 ¿ö (F r ) [ku¨¤ng] Çé¿ö q¨ªngku¨¤ng circumstances; ¿öÇÒ ku¨¤ngqi¨§ moreover
626 ¾³ [j¨¬ng] border, territory; »·¾³ hu¨¢nj¨¬ng environment
627 Èí (F Ü ) [ru¨£n] soft; Èí¼þ ru¨£nji¨¤n software
628 ¿¼ [k¨£o] (=¿¼ÂÇ k¨£ol¨¸) consider, (=¿¼ÊÔ k¨£osh¨¬) exam
629 Äï [ni¨¢ng] mother, aunt
[niang] ¹ÃÄï g¨±niang girl
630 ´å [c¨±n] village, rustic; Å©´å n¨®ngc¨±n countryside, village
631 µ¶ [d¨¡o] knife
632 »÷ (F ô ) [j¨©] beat, strike, knock; ´ò»÷ d¨£j¨© strike, hitt, attack, assault
633 ½ö (F H ) [j¨«n] (=½ö½ö j¨«nj¨«n) only, barely
634 ²é [ch¨¢] examine, investigate; ¼ì²é ji¨£nch¨¢ inspect
[Zh¨¡] <family name>
635 Òý [y¨«n] draw, stretch, (=ÒýÆð y¨«nq¨«) cause, (=ÎüÒý x¨©y¨«n) attract
636 ³¯ [ch¨¢o] towards, dynasty; ³¯ÏÊ Ch¨¢oxi¨¡n Korea
[zh¨¡o] (morning)
637 Óý [y¨´] raise, educate; ½ÌÓý ji¨¤oy¨´ education
[y¨] º¼Óý h¨¢ngy¨ heave-ho, yo-ho
638 Ðø (F Àm ) [x¨´] (=¼ÌÐø j¨¬x¨´) continue; Á¬Ðø li¨¢nx¨´ continuous
639 ¶À (F ª ) [d¨²] only, alone; ¶ÀÁ¢ d¨²l¨¬ independent
640 ÂÞ (F Á_ ) [lu¨®] (=ÂÞÍø lu¨®w¨£ng) birdnet; ÂÞÂí Lu¨®m¨£ Rome; ÂÞÅÌ lu¨®p¨¢n compass
[lu¨] ÂÞà lu¨suo wordy, troublesome; Á¨Á¨ÂÞÂÞ l¨©lilu¨lu¨ the sound of boiling/rumbling/etc.
641 Âò (F ÙI ) [m¨£i] buy
642 »§ (F ô ) [h¨´] door, household; ´°»§ chu¨¡ngh¨´ window
643 »¤ (F ×o ) [h¨´] (=±£»¤ b¨£oh¨´) guard, protect; »¤Ê¿ h¨´shi nurse
644 ºÈ [h¨¥] drink
[h¨¨] shout
645 Åó [p¨¦ng] ÅóÓÑ p¨¦ngy¨¯u friend
{Compare with Àö l¨¬ beautiul and ²á c¨¨ book}
646 ¹© [g¨ng] supply
[g¨°ng] confess
647 Ôð (F Ø ) [z¨¦] duty; ÔðÈÎ z¨¦r¨¨n responsibility
648 Ïî (F í ) [xi¨¤ng] (=ÏîÄ¿ xi¨¤ngm¨´) item
649 ±³ [b¨¨i] back
[b¨¥i] carry on the back
650 Óà [y¨²] I, me, (FðN) left-over, extra; ÆäÓà the rest; ÓàÏÒ cosine
651 Ï£ [x¨©] sparse, scattered, watery, this; Ï£Íû x¨©w¨¤ng hope; Ï£Ææ x¨©q¨ª rare, strange; Ï£À° X¨©l¨¤ Greece
652 ÎÀ (F Ðl ) [w¨¨i] ±£ÎÀ defend; ÎÀÉú sanitary; ÎÀÐÇ satellite
653 ÁÐ [li¨¨] column, line up; Áгµ li¨¨ch¨¥ train; ÅÅÁÐ p¨¢ili¨¨ arrange
654 ͼ (F D ) [t¨²] picture; µØͼ d¨¬t¨² map; ͼÊé¹Ý t¨²sh¨±gu¨£n library
655 ÊÒ [sh¨¬] room; ½ÌÊÒ ji¨¤osh¨¬ classroom; ÎÔÊÒ w¨°sh¨¬ bedroom; °ì¹«ÊÒ b¨¤ng¨ngsh¨¬ office
656 ÂÒ (F y ) [lu¨¤n] chaotic, disorderly, messy; »ìÂÒ h¨´nlu¨¤n chaos
657 Áõ (F ¢ ) [Li¨²] <family name>
658 Ò¯ (F ) [y¨¦] father; Ò¯Ò¯ y¨¦ye grandpa
659 Áú (F ý ) [l¨®ng] dragon; ¿ÖÁú k¨¯ngl¨®ng dinosaur
660 ÔÛ [z¨¢n] (=ÔÛÃÇ z¨¢nmen) we = you and I
[zan] (abbreviation for ÔçÍí z¨£ow¨£n) all the time, morning and evening, sooner or later
661 Õ [zh¨¡ng] chapter, seal, stamp, medal, badge, rules
662 ϯ [x¨ª] mat, seat, banquet; Ö÷ϯ zh¨³x¨ª chairperson
663 ´í (F åe ) [cu¨°] (=´íÎó cu¨°w¨´) mistake; ²»´í b¨²cu¨° not bad, pretty good; Ò»µã¶ù²»´í! y¨¬di¨£nr b¨²cu¨°! perfectly correct!
664 ÐÖ [xi¨ng] (elder) brother; ÐÖµÜ xi¨ngd¨¬ brothers
{Compare with ¶ù(FÐÖ) ¨¦r child and Ö» zh¨« only}
665 °µ [¨¤n] (=ºÚ°µ h¨¥i'¨¤n) dark; °µ°µ secretly; Òõ°µ gloomy; °µÊ¾ hint
666 ´´ (F ) [chu¨¤ng] ´´Ôì chu¨¤ngz¨¤o create
[chu¨¡ng] ´´ÉË chu¨¡ngsh¨¡ng trauma
667 ÅÅ [p¨¢i] arrange, row, line
[p¨£i] ÅÅ×Ó³µ p¨£iz¨¬ch¨¥ handcart
668 ´º [ch¨±n] (=´ºÌì ch¨±nti¨¡n, =´º¼¾ ch¨±nj¨¬) spring; ´º¾í ch¨±nju¨£n spring roll; ´ºÏÄÇﶬ ch¨±nxi¨¤qi¨±d¨ng the four seasons
669 Ðë [x¨±] (Fí) (=±ØÐë b¨¬x¨±) must, (FôP) (=ºúÐë h¨²x¨±) beard
670 ³Ð [ch¨¦ng] ³ÐÈÏ ch¨¦ngr¨¨n admit; ¼Ì³Ð j¨¬ch¨¦ng inherit
671 °¸ [¨¤n] desk, (law) case; ´ð°¸ d¨¢'¨¤n answer or solution to a problem
672 æ [m¨¢ng] hurry, busy; °ïæ help; Á¬Ã¦ right away
673 ºô [h¨±] shout, exhale; ºôÎü h¨±x¨© breathe; »¶ºô hu¨¡nh¨± cheer
674 Ê÷ (F ä ) [sh¨´] tree; Ê÷ÁÖ sh¨´l¨ªn woods; Ê÷ľ sh¨´m¨´ trees; Ê÷¸É sh¨´g¨¤n trunk
675 Í´ [t¨°ng] painful; Í´¿à t¨°ngk¨³ suffering; Í´¿ì t¨°ngkuai delighted
676 ³Á [ch¨¦n] to sink; ³ÁÖØ ch¨¦nzh¨°ng heavy
[ch¨¥n] ºÚ³Á³Á h¨¥ich¨¥nch¨¥n pitch-black
677 °¡ [a] (used as phrase suffix, indicating obviousness/impatience)
[¨¡] (indicating elation); °¡!ÎÒÓÖÓ®ÁË! ¨¡! W¨¯ y¨°u y¨ªngle! Ha! I've won again!
[¨¢] (indicating doubt or questioning), huh?; °¡?Äã˵ʲô??? N¨« shu¨ shenme? Huh? What are you saying?
[¨£] (indicating puzzled surprise)
[¨¤] (indicating agreement/approval); °¡,ºÃ°É!?, h¨£oba! Well, OK!
678 Áé (F ì` ) [l¨ªng] clever, spirit, soul, elf; Áé»î l¨ªnghu¨® nimble, easy
679 Ö° (F  ) [zh¨ª] duty; Ö°¹¤ zh¨ªg¨ng staff; Ö°Òµ zh¨ªy¨¨ occupation
680 Ïç (F àl ) [xi¨¡ng] countryside, home town
681 ϸ (F ¼ ) [x¨¬] thin; ×Ðϸ z¨«x¨¬ careful; ϸ°û x¨¬b¨¡o cell; Ïêϸ xi¨¢ngx¨¬ detailed
682 Ëß (F ÔV ) [s¨´] ¸æËß g¨¤osu tell; ËßËÏ s¨´s¨°ng lawsuit
683 ̬ (F B ) [t¨¤i] form; ̬¶È t¨¤idu manner; ״̬ zhu¨¤ngt¨¤i state
684 Í£ [t¨ªng] (=Í£Ö¹ t¨ªngzh¨«) stop; Í£³µ³¡ t¨ªngch¨¥ch¨£ng parking lot
685 Ó¡ [y¨¬n] (=Ó¡Ë¢ y¨¬nshu¨¡) print, (=Ó¡Õ y¨¬nzh¨¡ng) seal
686 ±Ê (F ¹P ) [b¨«] writing implement; ë±Ê brush; ¸Ö±Ê pen; Ǧ±Ê pencil
687 ÏÄ [xi¨¤] (=ÏÄÌì xi¨¤ti¨¡n) summer; ´ºÏÄÇﶬ ch¨±nxi¨¤qi¨±d¨ng the four seasons
688 Öú [zh¨´] (=°ïÖú b¨¡ngzh¨´) help
689 ¸£ [f¨²] blessing, good fortune, (=ÐÒ¸£ x¨¬ngf¨²) happiness, happy; ×£¸£ zh¨´f¨² invoke/wish a blessing; ¸£½¨ F¨²ji¨¤n
{It is common to hang calligraphy of this character up-side-down on doors, in order to get people to note that ¸£µ¹ÁË f¨² d¨¤ole = "The 'Fu' is up-side-down", which is pronounced just as ¸£µ½ÁË = "Fortune/happiness has come"}
690 ¿é (F K ) [ku¨¤i] piece, lump, chunk, (=Ôª yu¨¢n) Chinese dollar
691 Àä [l¨§ng] cold; Àä¾² l¨§ngj¨¬ng calm
692 Çò [qi¨²] ball; ×ãÇò z¨²qi¨² football (soccer); µØÇò d¨¬qi¨² the Earth
693 ¹Ã [g¨±] ¹ÃÄï g¨±niang girl
694 »® [hu¨¢] row (a boat) (F) scratch
[hu¨¤] (F) (=¼Æ»® j¨¬hu¨¤) plan (F®)
695 ¼È [j¨¬] since, already; ¼ÈÈ» j¨¬r¨¢n since, now that
696 ÖÊ (F Ù| ) [zh¨¬] (=ÎïÖÊ w¨´zh¨¬) matter, substance; ÖÊÁ¿ zh¨¬li¨¤ng quality, mass
697 °Í [b¨¡] β°Í w¨§iba tail; ×ì°Í zu¨«b¨¡ mouth; °ÍÎ÷ B¨¡x¨© Brazil
[b¨¤] ×ì°Í×Ó zu¨«b¨¤zi mouth, a slap in the face
698 Ö [zh¨¬] send, convey; Ò»Ö y¨ªzh¨¬ identical, (F¿@) ϸÖ x¨¬zh¨¬ careful
699 Íå (F ³ ) [w¨¡n] harbor; ̨Íå T¨¢iw¨¡n
700 ÑÝ [y¨£n] (=±íÑÝ bi¨£oy¨£n) perform, act, performance
701 ľ [m¨´] tree, (=ľͷ m¨´tou) wood;
{Compare with ±¾ b¨§n root and ´ó d¨¤ big}
702 Τ (F íf ) [w¨¦i] soft leather, <family name>
703 ¹Ö [gu¨¤i] blame, (=Ææ¹Ö q¨ªgu¨¤i) strange; ¹ÖÎï gu¨¤iwu monster
704 Χ (F ú ) [w¨¦i] surround; ΧÆå w¨¦iq¨ª Japanese "go"
705 ¾² (F ìo ) [j¨¬ng] still, quiet; ¾²µç j¨¬ngdi¨¤n static electricity
706 ÅÔ [p¨¢ng] (=Åﱧ p¨¢ngbi¨¡n) side
[b¨¤ng] (=°ø)
707 Ô° (F @ ) [yu¨¢n] (=»¨Ô° hu¨¡yu¨¢n) garden, (=¹«Ô° g¨ngyu¨¢n) park
708 ·ñ [f¨¯u] not; ÊÇ·ñ sh¨¬f¨¯u whether or not, is (it) or is (it) not?
[p¨«] bad, inferior; ê°·ñ z¨¡ngp¨« pass judgment (on people)
709 ¸± [f¨´] assist, vice-; ¸±´Ê f¨´c¨ª adverb
710 ¼ (F Ý ) [j¨ª] ±à¼ bi¨¡nj¨ª edit; Âß¼ lu¨®j¨ª <loan> logic
711 ²É [c¨£i] pick, gather (Fñ)
[c¨¤i] (FÆ) ²ÉµØ c¨¤id¨¬ fief
712 ʳ [sh¨ª] eat, (=ʳÎï sh¨ªw¨´, =ʳƷ sh¨ªp¨«n) food
[s¨¬] feed
713 µÇ [d¨¥ng] climb
714 ¹» (F ò ) [g¨°u] enough; Äܹ» n¨¦ngg¨°u be capable of
715 Èü (F Ù ) [s¨¤i] contest; ±ÈÈü match, race
716 Ã× [m¨«] (=Ã×·¹ m¨«f¨¤n) rice, meter; ÓñÃ× y¨´m¨« corn
717 ¼Ù [ji¨£] false
[ji¨¤] (=¼ÙÆÚ ji¨¤q¨©) vacation
718 ½Ï (F Ý^ ) [ji¨¤o] relatively, quite; ±È½Ï b¨«ji¨¤o compare, relatively
[ji¨£o] (b¨«ji¨£o = b¨«ji¨¤o)
719 ½ã [ji¨§] (=½ã½ã ji¨§jie) older sister; С½ã xi¨£ojie young lady
720 Â¥ (F Ç ) [l¨®u] story, building; ´óÂ¥ mansion; Â¥ÌÝ l¨®ut¨© stairs
721 »ñ [hu¨°] (F«@) (=»ñµÃ hu¨°d¨¦) get, obtain, (F·) ÊÕ»ñ sh¨uhu¨° harvest
722 Ëï (F O ) [s¨±n] grandchild; ×ÓËï z¨«s¨±n children and grandchildren, descendants; ËïÎò¿Õ S¨±n W¨´k¨ng monkey with supernatural powers in the nobel "Journey to the West"; ËïÖÐɽ S¨±n Zh¨ngsh¨¡n = ËïÒÝÏÉ S¨±n Yixi¨¡n = Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Republican Revolution and the KMT
723 Ðû [xu¨¡n] (=Ðû²¼ xu¨¡nb¨´) declare; Ðû´« propaganda
724 ´© [chu¨¡n] penetrate, wear
725 Ê« (F Ô ) [sh¨©] poem; Ê«ÈË sh¨©r¨¦n poet
726 ¸è [g¨¥] song; ³ª¸è ch¨¤ngg¨¥ to sing
727 ËÙ [s¨´] fast; ËÙ¶È s¨´d¨´ speed
728 ºö [h¨±] disregard, (=ºöÈ» h¨±r¨¢n) suddenly, (=ºö¶ø h¨±'¨¦r) now...
729 Ìà [t¨¢ng] hall; ʳÌà sh¨ªt¨¢ng dining hall, canteen; ¿ÎÌà k¨¨t¨¢ng classroom
[t¨¡ng] ÁÁÌÃÌà li¨¤ngt¨¡ngt¨¡ng brightly lit, brilliant
730 µÐ (F ³ ) [d¨ª] (µÐÈË d¨ªr¨¦n) enemy; µÐ¾ü enemy troops
731 ÊÔ (F Ô ) [sh¨¬] try, test; ¿¼ÊÔ k¨£osh¨¬ test, quiz
732 л (F Öx ) [xi¨¨] thank; лл xi¨¨xie thanks; ·Ç³£¸Ðл
733 Ñë [y¨¡ng] entreat, center; ÖÐÑë central; ÑëÇó beg, plead
734 »³ (F Ñ ) [hu¨¢i] bosom, cherish; »³ÒÉ hu¨¢iy¨ª suspect; »³Äî hu¨¢ini¨¤n cherish memory
735 ¹Ë (F î ) [g¨´] (=ÕÕ¹Ë zh¨¤ogu) look after; ¹Ë¿Í g¨´k¨¨ customer
736 Ñé (F ò ) [y¨¤n] (=¾Ñé j¨©ngy¨¤n) experience
737 Óª (F I ) [y¨ªng] camp; Óª»ð campfire; ÓªÒµ do business
738 Ö¹ [zh¨«] (=Í£Ö¹ t¨ªngzh¨«) stop
739 ÐÕ [x¨¬ng] family name; ÐÕÃû x¨¬ngm¨ªng full name (family name and personal name); Äú¹óÐÕ N¨ªn gu¨¬x¨¬ng? (May I ask for) your family name, Sir/Madame?
740 Ñø (F ðB ) [y¨£ng] raise, nourish; ÓªÑø y¨ªngy¨£ng nutrition
741 Àö (F û ) [l¨¬] ÃÀÀö m¨§il¨¬ beautiful; ׳Àö majestic
[L¨ª] Korea
{Compare with Åó p¨¦ng friend and ²á c¨¨ book}
742 Êô (F Ù ) [sh¨³] belong to, be subordinate to, born in a specific year acoording to the Chinese calendar
[zh¨³] enjoin
743 ¾° [j¨«ng] scene, scenery; ·ç¾° f¨¥ngj¨«ng scenery, landscape
744 ¹ù [gu¨] outer wall of city, <family name>
745 ÒÀ [y¨©] (=ÒÀ¿¿ y¨©k¨¤o) depend on, comply with, according to; ÒÀÈ» y¨©r¨¢n still
746 Íþ [w¨¥i] Íþв w¨¥ixi¨¦ threaten, imperil; ʾÍþ sh¨¬w¨¥i demonstrate; ŲÍþ Nu¨®w¨¥i Norway
747 °´ [¨¤n] press, (=°´ÕÕ ¨¤nzh¨¤o) according to; °´Ä¦ ¨¤nm¨® massage
748 ¶ñ (F º ) [¨¨] evil
[w¨´] (Ñá¶ñ) hate
[¨§] (¶ñÐÄ) nauseous
749 Âý [m¨¤n] slow
750 ×ù [zu¨°] (=×ùλ zu¨°w¨¨i) seat, place, stand, pedestal, base, <classifier for mountains, bridges etc.>
751 ×ï [zu¨¬] crime, guilt
752 ά (F ¾S ) [w¨¦i] ÏËά xi¨¡nw¨¦i fiber; ά»¤ w¨¦ih¨´ safeguard; ˼ά s¨ªw¨¦i think
753 ½¥ (F u ) [ji¨¤n] (=½¥½¥ ji¨¤nji¨¤n, =Öð½¥ zh¨²ji¨¤n) gradually
[ji¨¡n] dip/soak in liquid
754 ʤ (F Ù ) [sh¨¨ng] (=ʤÀû sh¨¨ngl¨¬) victory, triumph, win
755 ²Ø [c¨¢ng] store; conceal, hide
[z¨¤ng] (=Î÷²Ø X¨©z¨¤ng) Tibet
756 »Ê [hu¨¢ng] »ÊµÛ hu¨¢ngd¨¬ emperor; »Êºó hu¨¢ngh¨°u empress
757 ½Ö [ji¨¥] street; ½ÖµÀ street, neighborhood; ½ÖÍ· street-corner
758 ¼¤ [ |
1980, not counting wars.
–Advertising at $500 billion per year globally. $492 billion in 2011. Forecast to $629 by 2015.
-Agriculture damages from normal weather at $500 billion per year in the US alone. In the US alone we see $485 billion normal weather damages to agriculture every year. Lazo et al., US economic sensitivity to weather events, American Meteorological Society, June 2011. Press release.
–US health care costs in 2009 were five times the cost of global clean drinking water at $2.5 trillion per year.Researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) and the University of Washington suggest that life-producing phosphorus from asteroid impacts 3.5 billion years ago may have boosted early life on Earth.
Scientists have always been curious to solve the mystery behind how life on Earth can be linked to asteroids. Finally, researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) and the University of Washington may have found what scientists have been looking for all these years. According to them, life-producing phosphorus from asteroid impacts 3.5 billion years ago may have boosted early life on Earth.
The phosphorus may have incorporated themselves into prebiotic molecules when released in water. According to USF professor Matthew Pasek, this phosphorus is mostly found in asteroids and could have been brought to earth by meteoroids and comets and released the life-producing element on the planet after an impact.
Scientists of the study revealed that meteorites delivered phosphorus in minerals that are currently not seen on the surface of Earth. They focused on the early period of Earth and after examining core samples from Zimbabwe, Australia, Wyoming, West Virginia and Florida, they were able to determine the mineral's origin.
According to researchers, "the minerals likely corroded in water, releasing large amounts of phosphorus in a form only found during Earth's early formation. The phosphite would have likely resulted in an adjusting of the chemistry of Earth's early oceans, with its chemical signature later becoming trapped in marine carbonate where it was preserved."
Though there are a few natural sources of phosphite that are Earth-based, none of them are capable of producing the quantities of phosphite needed to be dissolved in early Earth oceans that gave rise to life
"The importance of this finding is that it provides the missing ingredient in the origin-of-life recipe: a form of phosphorus that can be readily incorporated into essential biological molecules," said Roger Buick, a co-author of the study.Every day throughout the month of October, the Humans Of New York-inspired Humans of Al Rashidiya page will feature one story from the Al Rashidiya Palestinian Camp south of Tyre, South Lebanon. Founded by Mary Mitchell, a British Media Arts PhD student at Royal Holloway University in London who first went to Al Rashidiya and Al Bass camps with the British charity UNIPAL, and Mohammad El-Assad, her student at the time and a student at the German Lebanese University in Tyre, the project intends to dispel the numerous myths and stereotypes plaguing Lebanon’s Palestinian society. It is done with support from Al Rashidiya’s Sawaaed youth group.
“The project is a framework through which people in Al Rashidiya can share their stories with the wider world, and one another,” Mitchell told Hummus For Thought. “The camp is very isolated with many preconceptions and stereotypes in Lebanon about Palestinian refugees, and so we hope to counter some of these by showing the common experiences of humanity. In the West, very few people know there are Palestinian refugees in Lebanon – they think only of the West Bank and Gaza – so we hope that this project will present new stories in an easily accessible way.”
Being a refugee in Lebanon is no easy matter, as I’m sure you all know. Besides the conditions within the camps themselves, which vary from camp to camp but never surpass the barely tolerable, discrimination within Lebanese society – the supposedly multicultural country par excellence – is still very prevalent. At least 20 major professions are denied to the 450,000 or so Palestinians living in 12 refugee camps across the country regardless of their educational background – one notable example is Iqbal Assad, the world’s youngest doctor, having to travel to the USA to practice medicine.
According to Visualizing Palestine and the International Labor Organization (ILO), only 2% of the 75,000 Palestinians who are part of Lebanon’s workforce have an official work permit, only 20% have a written contract, 66% are below the poverty line, 75% earn less than the minimal wage ($305 for Palestinian women, $369 for men) and 95% have no health insurance. Despite having contributed $14 million dollars to Lebanon’s National Social Security Fund, Palestinian workers are denied benefits of health coverage (unlike, say, French workers.) Discrimination against Palestinians will be the topic of an upcoming post.
“Lebanon is our second homeland and will remain forever in our hearts.”
Stereotypes that have lingered since the end of the civil war contribute greatly to the situation of Palestinians in Lebanon. Mohammad, a Palestinian refugee himself born and living in Al Rashidiya, co-launched this project in the hope of countering such stereotypes with real stories from real people.
“Many people think that our camps are security time bombs, while others haven’t even heard of us,” he said. “Stereotypes dating back to the Civil War haven’t really faded away and recent events such as the 2007 Nahr Al-Bared War [War between the Lebanese Army and Fatah Al Islam in Nothern Lebanon] haven’t exactly helped us, despite the fact that most of us have always opposed all forms of violence.”
Al Rashidiya is the most recent of the Palestinian camps built to accommodate the Palestinians who escaped the Nakba. According to the Electronic Intifada, “the older part of the camp was built by the French Government in 1936 to accommodate Armenian refugees. The “new camp” was built by UNRWA in 1963 for Palestine refugees evacuated from Gouraud camp in Baalbeck and who originally came from Deir al-Qassi, Alma an-Naher and other villages in northern Palestine.”
Despite the tough circumstances, the camps’ inhabitants are trying to make the best out of their situation. “We help each other out,” Mohammad said. “We were 28,000 in 2012, but since the Syrian crisis started, the number of Palestinian refugees from Syria increased our numbers.” But despite it all, the security situation remains stable, and in no small part thanks to the inhabitants themselves. “We’ve opened more classes in our schools (run by UNRWA) and have included a curriculum close to the Syrian one for some of our most recent students. Our literacy rates are far higher than our illiteracy ones and they’re increasing every year. We are opening more classes, especially for secondary school. The uneducated youths usually resort to immigration, most legally but some illegally. This is due to the unemployment crisis which not only affects our camps but Lebanon as a whole.”
“We have several awareness-raising programs run by the youth of our camps on the importance of the work of the army and its sovereignty. Lebanon is our second homeland and will remain forever in our hearts. It has welcomed us for the past 68 years.”
And finally, for those of you who want to contribute: “we are accepting submissions from anyone around the world who has had a relationship with the camp in some way, and also from other camps, and that they can submit them to humansofalrashidiya@gmail.com” You can visit their Facebook Page here, and their Website Here.Only the people living there will decide….
Update August 1st: More here on the cancellation of the opportunity for citizens to learn what refugee resettlement might mean for their towns.
Update July 29th: Public meeting cancelled—no surprise! Read all about it here. Keep this information below if your town becomes a target!
Forget what you hear about local communities having no say, whether tiny historic Dover or surrounding towns will become new resettlement sites for Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners will all depend on the turnout and the questions asked (and answers given!) at an upcoming public meeting scheduled for Dover city hall August 13th, 7 p.m.
The US State Department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (in HHS) (yes, the same agency moving the illegal alien children around the country) and their contractors and subcontractors are running into “pockets of resistance” in already overloaded communities around the country and are out scouting for new fresh territory (like Athens, GA as well).
The federal government likes to intimidate (bully!) communities with this notion that they decide (from Washington) where to move the literally over one hundred thousand “refugees” entering the US every year, but they won’t move them to new communities where its citizens demand answers to the all important questions: Who pays for all of this? Where will they work? Who is going to pay for all the children’s education? Do we have enough low-cost subsidized housing for our own people? What other social services will they require? How many foreign language interpreters are available in our criminal justice system? Can our health department handle a flood of mental health problems and communicable diseases? (HIV-AIDS and TB cases are admitted to the US in the refugee program) When will it stop?
In answer to that last question, it won’t! Once a seed community is established the contractors are paid by the head to bring in the family members. At that point, if some in your community raise a warning flag, they will be called racists, xenophobes and bigots—and just plain cruel to oppose reuniting the poor families.
If you don’t believe me about that–that it will never end—just ask the Mayors of Lewiston, Maine, Manchester, NH, Amarillo, Texas, Lynn, Massachusetts and Springfield, Massachusetts.
Before I go any further, here is the news I heard yesterday: First from The Granite Grok (3,000 to go to Dover!), a New Hampshire blog (hat tip: Richard) and then here in Foster’s Daily Democrat (hat tip: Joanne).
To prepare for this public meeting (you have 18 days!). This is what I would do (in no particular order):
* Call the mayors in those other New England towns where the community wants the flow stopped. Maybe one or two would even come to your public meeting! And, by the way, some elected officials in Dover or surrounding towns must have quietly suggested that the community would be open to this resettlement site. Find out if that is so, and identify them.
* Learn everything you can about the federal government’s refugee program (start with our fact sheet). Local taxpayers are definitely on the hook for most “services” needed by refugees after the first 8 months.
* Review the questions we wanted answered in Hagerstown, MD in 2007. We, in rural Maryland, were to be a new site, but the State Department killed the plan after the public meeting. As I said then, and still say, if the refugee plan for your community is a good one, they should be able to sell it to Dover by answering all the questions citizens have!
Blogger Skip Murphy has some questions to ask as well!
* In your research you will learn that the State Department is trying to resettle 50,000 Congolese (announced May 2013) 2,630 so far this fiscal year, but they won’t just resettle Congolese to Dover and surrounding towns. You will get a mix of Muslims and other religions/cultures among Iraqis, Somalis, Burmese and Bhutanese (just naming the top four right now) making the language problems even greater for your school system.
* Learn all you can about the supposed non-profit contractors. Know that there is a ‘pocket of resistance’ in Manchester and that since Dover is less than 100 miles from Manchester, it is now targeted for the overflow. (100 miles is a magic number for the State Department reuniting families).
By the way, the contractor identified in the Foster’s Daily Democrat article—Organization for Refugees and Immigrant Success—began in 2005 as the Somali Bantu Community Association funded by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. This is your typical George Soros strategy to spin off other small groups with new names both to confuse people and to make it look like there is a huge movement.
History of ORIS The Somali Bantu Community Association (SBCA) was a non-profit organization formed in 2005 by a group of Somali Bantu refugees living in the United States. The group, which was funded by the US Department of Refugee Resettlement, assisted refugees in integrating into American culture. In 2011, SBCA reformed as the Organization for Refugee and Immigrant Success (ORIS), expanding the original mission, as well as increasing and diversifying the staff and board members. Today, our ten-person staff represents six countries and speaks twenty languages. ORIS has no Form 990’s on file with guidestar, but here are their government grants (you have to type their name in the search window). Here are their other funders. I’m guessing they are also affiliated with one of the big federal contractors, but don’t have the time to do the research at the moment (but you do!).
* This is an important election year and you have some hot races in NH—make this an election-year issue for sure in the US Senate race!
* In advance! Learn about the format of the meeting and study the Delphi Technique! It is a public meeting strategy that government agencies (and the Left!) use to direct the outcome of a meeting to a goal they have predetermined. Be ready to defeat any meeting strategy you identify. And, film the meeting!!!
You need to make sure someone is there for the US government (preferably the US State Department) or you won’t get all your answers. And, this is really important, and I can’t emphasize it enough—do your research ahead of time so they can’t give you a snow-job!
* Set up a blog or facebook page (right now!) to share what you learn with your fellow citizens. The feds don’t like publicity! Letters to the editor help too!
And, I’m sure you can think of a few more things to do—but mostly stay calm and stick to the economic and social facts involved with importing poverty (from anywhere!) to your town.
You will have some hotheads, but don’t worry about them, you gotta have them in any political controversy.
The religious LEFT activists will show up with their hotheads too, to call anyone who questions them racists, ignore them.
Here is what fellow RRW writer Judy said in that 2007 post on the Delphi Technique:
…..those who raise questions like the ones on this blog — questions of health, culture, money, resources, policy, etc. — will be cast as the enemies of everything good and noble. But our questions are valid ones, and we want to make sure they are answered, no matter what is done to make us look bad.
Check out our categories, this post definitely falls in the “community destabilization” category because that is what is happening here and across the country—the open-borders (anti-borders!) Left and the federal bureaucracy are in the business of bringing instability to unsuspecting American towns and cities (ala Saul Alinsky, Cloward and Piven).First let us express how incredibly touched we are that you all decided to back our project! We never expected such a strong showing of support so quickly - thank you!! This project is just getting started though, and we are still in need of many things. So please, read on and spread the word.
Once again, thank you so, so much!
- Jeff and Drew
WHAT WE NEED NOW THAT WE'RE FUNDED:
Equipment: Our borrowing luck has yet to pan out so if you have a camera around the Canon 60D range that you've been dying to donate to a cause, now is the time. Same for the right lens-- something versatile like a 17-200mm. We also will need a couple 32 Gb SD cards, any 1Tb + external harddrives, a laptop that can work with the footage a little and as awesome portable tripod.
People with talents: Editors, web designers, those who can make some fancy graphics, logistical savants, and those with good travel contacts-- we need all of it as much as we need funding to make this project happen right.
People on the ground: We really need hand on help once we land and local knowledge and connections can’t be valued enough. This is immensely important. Beyond that, we need information from people who know the area. Even if you don’t live there now-- if you’ve spent time in Bolivia and can offer words of wisdom, advice or simple well wishes, please send them our way!
More funding! Our $4,800 goal is just the cut-rate minimum to get us to La Paz, Bolivia and documenting our mission of installing swings. Everything we make on top of that will only enhance the project and help us bring more swings to more towns across the country. We're ready to work as long as we have funding so please, please help us bring smiles to countless men, women and children by donating generously.
WHO WE ARE:
What started last year as a conversation about the simplistic pleasures of swings has launched into a multi-city experiment in unexpected joy and cerebral happiness. Via contact info we left on the wooden seats we've received notes from those that used them, talking about the surprising smiles that were left on their faces. They wrote how their days were made better and how the emotions that emerged from stumbling across and using a random swing permeated their afternoon and infected those they came into contact with. The joy felt and the urge to spread it was contagious.
We’ve installed swings in San Francisco, in the Marshall Islands, Panama and across Los Angeles, thanks to a grant from The Awesome Foundation. People from around the country have written to tell us how they were inspired to hang swings in their own city.
We’re here to raise enough funds to bring Swings to Bolivia this September and to document our progress via blogging, photographs, and ultimately a full length documentary about the dynamic connections that can be made via the deceptively simple act of slinging a rope over a branch.
It’s a universal message. An appeal to celebrate the passions of our youth, to give in to simplistic urges, but mostly, to remind people of the difference a smile can make in their day and the infectious effect that smile has on those they encounter.
WHY BOLIVIA?
There are a hundred states and cities that we'd love to bring some joy to, but Bolivia in particular has some very relevant statistics:
-Bolivia has the second highest poverty level in South America
-49% of the population is under 20
-40% of their Army is under the age of 18
-The age of consent is arbitrarily defined as "puberty"
-In every 1000 teenage girls, 88 are pregnant
-1 in 4 Bolivians are between the ages of 10 and 19
Essentially Bolivia is a country largely populated by children, few of whom ever get to enjoy that childhood. If ever there was a place in need of a return to innocence and a reminder of the distilled joys in life, this is it.
The goal is not only to connect with the local community but also with the travelers that pass through as they tour South America. Encouraging backpackers from a dozen countries to go out with us and do installations means that they take this experience and knowledge back to their homes and on their travels. It’s not just about spreading joy, but spreading the desire to create it.
WHERE YOUR MONEY IS GOING:
Materials cost to the swings themselves: There are two hardware stores in La Paz, neither of which carries lumber. We’ll be going down with enough rope for 75 swings but able to buy more of it once we land. It costs roughly $10 USD to hang a 15 foot tree swing and we're looking to create hundreds. The wooden seats we’ll need to locally source and cut by hand, or recycle man-made products that work for our uses. Oh yeah, we need a drill, bits and a hand saw, as well.
Travel expenses and living: We’re keeping them to a minimum, couch surfing where possible and counting on the fact that we can hook up with some people on the ground. A month of accommodations does add up, but don’t worry too much about the living cost. We eat little and only need to be watered once daily. As for travel, we’ll fly into and out of La Paz to keep the airfare down, but in our time there we plan to visit many outlying towns and cities via buses and (hopefully) some free rides.
Technical gear: We’re hoping to borrow most of the gear we need to film this, but we need to pick up one other DSLR, two 1Tb hard drives, two SD cards and some other pieces of equipment we wouldn’t get for free. The documentation of this is important because this project is about the dissemination of joy and love and propagating the idea that ANYONE can create and spread happiness. The pleasure felt from participating is as contagious as the swinging itself. You need media for that-- one swing only does so much.Wealthy native Brit Lawrence Jamieson, living in Beaumont-sur-Mer on the French Riviera, earns most of his money through big cons on wealthy unsuspecting women. With the help of his associates -- corrupt police Inspector Andre, who provides him most of his intel, and his butler Arthur -- he pulls scams such as pretending to be a foreign deposed prince who needs money to finance a secret war to liberate his people. Beaumont-sur-Mer, and thus his world, is invaded by brash American Freddy Benson, another con man whose targets are also wealthy unsuspecting women. Lawrence believes Freddy is the Jackal, a con man whose true identity is unknown but who is known to be working his way through Europe. While Lawrence works on thousands of dollars per scam, Freddy works only on tens or if he is lucky hundreds of dollars. Lawrence's efforts to get Freddy out of his territory are unsuccessful, so when Freddy figures out that Lawrence is a con man like he is, he decides to blackmail Lawrence to... Written by HuggoImage caption A sherry before bedtime may be advisable
Women who enjoy an alcoholic drink in the evening tend to be healthier as they move into old age, research shows.
This nightcap could be a pint of beer, a glass of wine or a single measure of spirit, PLoS Medicine journal reports.
A study of 14,000 women concluded that those who drink in moderation were far more likely to reach 70 in good health than heavier drinkers or abstainers.
Spreading consumption over the week is better than saving it for the weekend, the researchers say.
Women who drank little and often fared better than occasional drinkers.
Compared with non-drinkers, women in their mid-50s who drank 15-30g of alcohol (one to two drinks) a day had a 28% greater likelihood of achieving what the US researchers call "successful ageing", meaning good general health free of conditions like cancer, diabetes and heart disease in their 70s and beyond.
Moderate amounts of alcohol may offer some protection against heart disease, especially for women who have gone through the menopause, but it's very important not to go overboard Natasha Stewart of the British Heart Foundation
And women who drank on 5-7 days of the week had almost double the chance of good overall health in old age compared with complete abstainers.
Experts are not sure whether it is the alcohol itself that is conferring the benefit or whether it simply goes hand in hand with other things in the lives of the women that makes them healthier.
The Harvard School of Public Health researchers said they tried to control for factors like smoking that might have affected the results.
Other studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption - no more than the recommended two to three units a day for women in the UK - is linked with a lower risk of heart disease and some other health conditions.
And research has shown alcohol can have a positive impact in the body, reducing insulin resistance, inflammation, high cholesterol and other harmful processes.
However, drinking has been linked to other conditions, such as breast cancer.
Experts welcomed the findings, saying they supported current recommendations concerning alcohol limits.
Natasha Stewart of the British Heart Foundation said: "Moderate amounts of alcohol may offer some protection against heart disease, especially for women who have gone through the menopause, but it's very important not to go overboard.
"Drinking too much doesn't offer any heart health protection at all and may actually lead to heart muscle damage, stroke and high blood pressure. And if you don't already drink alcohol, there is certainly no need to start now.
"Clearly there are much better ways to look after your heart than drinking alcohol, like eating a healthy, balanced diet, getting active and by not smoking."A new report by the Office of Naval Intelligence highlights the growing capabilities of the Chinese Navy.
This week, the Pentagon’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) released an unclassified assessment of the Chinese navy’s new capabilities and missions in the years ahead.
Compared to ONI’s last unclassified analysis on the PLAN six years ago, the more than 300-ship strong Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has “made significant strides in operationalizing as well as modernizing its force,” notes the new 2015 report. Notably different from 2009 is Beijing’s current shipbuilding program, which is now focusing more on the construction of multi-mission vessels rather than anti-surface warfare combatants.
The most striking revelation of the 2015 ONI report is that the PLAN has apparently already equipped a class of guided missile destroyers with China’s most advanced supersonic anti-ship missile. “[T]he newest class, the LUYANG III destroyer is fitted with the new vertically-launched YJ-18 ASCM,” the report says.
Writing last week (see: “China’s ‘New’ Carrier Killer Subs”), I highlighted that this new weapon constitutes a major threat to U.S. and allied surface vessels deployed in Asian waters. As of now, only one Type 052D Luyang III-class destroyer is currently in service with the vertically launched YJ-18. However, the PLAN plans to commission ten more such vessels by 2017 and also plans to deploy the missile on Type-093G and Type-095 submarines.
“In 2013 and 2014, China launched more naval ships than any other country and is expected to continue this trend through 2015-16,” according to the study. In 2013, the PLAN either laid down, launched, or commissioned more than 60 ships, although the emphasis overall is on quality rather than size. Looking at just numbers, Beijing already fields a formidable naval force today:
As of this publishing, the PLA(N) consists of approximately 26 destroyers (21 of which are considered modern), 52 frigates (35 modern), 20 new corvettes, 85 modern missile armed patrol craft, 56 amphibious ships, 42 mine warfare ships (30 modern), more than 50 major auxiliary ships, and more than 400 minor auxiliary ships and service/support craft.
The PLAN’s submarine fleet currently deploys 66 boats — five nuclear-attack submarines, four nuclear ballistic-missile submarines, and 57 diesel attack submarines, although the report does not indicate how many of the vessels are, in fact, operational. Additionally, “by 2020 the submarine force will likely grow to more than 70 submarines,” ONI assesses.
Furthermore the paper notes that “[m]ajor qualitative improvements are occurring within naval aviation and the submarine force, which are increasingly capable of striking targets hundreds of miles from the Chinese mainland.”
The report also points out that China’s Coast Guard — its maritime law enforcement force — has undergone major modernization and is also increasing in size. Civilian maritime forces have “added approximately 100 new large patrol ships (WPS), patrol combatants/craft (WPG/WPC), and auxiliary/support ships, not including small harbor and riverine patrol boats. The current phase of the construction program, which began in 2012, will add over 30 large patrol ships and over 20 patrol combatants to the force by 2015.”
Other highlights of the report include the mentioning of hitherto little known Wonang-class inshore minesweepers and the confirmation that three Dalao-class submarine rescue ships are in service, as well as four Dongdiao-class intelligence collection ships.
Moreover, the Chinese Navy is rapidly developing ship-based drones. “The PLA(N) will probably emerge as one of China’s most prolific UAV users, employing UAVs to supplement manned ISR aircraft as well as to aid targeting for land-, ship-, and other air-launched weapons systems,” the report says. “UAVs will probably become one of the PLA(N)’s most valuable ISR assets.”
As expected, the ONI report points out that the PLAN is still suffering from lack of interoperability, making integrated jointed operations still a difficult proposition for the force:
Despite its considerable rhetorical emphasis on achieving this goal, the PLA’s record of achievement appears mixed during the past decade (…) PLA leaders and planners are committed to developing systems for conduct of joint operations, but they recognize the complexity of that task and are conscious of the fact that the PLA lacks real world experience.
Last, ONI believes that the commissioning of the Kuznetsov-class Liaoning aircraft carrier — despite “limited combat capability” — is a “milestone” signaling that the Chinese leadership has embraced the idea that fielding a large fleet is essential to achieving great power status.Baltimore State's Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein announced Thursday the launch of a new "Major Investigations Unit" devoted to dealing with violent repeat offenders — a criminal class that was key to his campaign last year.
"Research and data reveal that a relatively small number of violent, repeat offenders commit a disproportionately large amount of the violent crime," Bernstein said in a statement. "By strategically and aggressively pursuing, prosecuting and imprisoning these individuals, we will have a dramatic impact on the level of violence in the city, and as a result make Baltimore a safer place to live and work."
Bernstein won the top prosecutor position last year after hammering on the failures of his predecessor to consistently convict such criminals.
He selected Thiruvendran "Thiru" Vignarajah, a Baltimore native who left his position as Maryland assistant U.S. attorney in the violent crimes division, to head the new unit.
Vignarajah graduated from Baltimore County's Woodlawn High School, earned a bachelor's degree from Yale College in 1998, a master's degree from Kings College in London in 1999 and a juris doctorate from Harvard Law School in 2005.
He also teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law and the University of Maryland School of Law, where he was voted "outstanding adjunct professor of the year" by students for the past two years.
tricia.bishop@baltsun.comCourt Says Warrantless Mobile Phone Tracking Is Unconstitutional
from the well-that-could-make-things-interesting dept
When the government requests records from cellular services, data disclosing the location of the telephone at the time of particular calls may be acquired only by a warrant issued on probable cause. U.S. Const., amend. 4. The records show the date, time, called number, and location of the telephone when the call was made. These data are constitutionally protected from this intrusion. The standard under the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d), is below that required by the Constitution.
In an amazingly short and to the point ruling (embedded below), a judge in a district court in Southern Texas, Lynn Hughes, ruled that letting the government get mobile phone data without a warrant was unconstitutional Of course, there are a number of cases out there that have ruled on similar issues... and come to different conclusions. This is one of those issues that will continue to bounce around until the Supreme Court clarifies. Still, there's something nice about seeing a court ruling of this nature, where the judge doesn't waste any time at all, and basically just says, "Hey, 4th Amendment! Next!"
Filed Under: 4th amendment, privacy, texas, trackingIn addition, based on lobbying by certain drug companies, the FDA softened and even omitted some of the warning language on the risk of suicide in pediatric patients associated with some antidepressants. Bush even appointed David Hager, a physician with few credentials and a known penchant for trying to cure women's health issues with prayer and refusing to prescribe birth control to female patients, as head of the FDA's Reproductive Drugs Health Advisory Committee.
Food safety was also a concern, with a peanut-related salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds and killed several people and few foods imported from overseas receiving inspection.
Corruption was so pervasive that when Obama took office in January 2009, FDA scientists wrote to him essentially begging for help in overhauling the failing agency. In April 2009, nine staff members at the FDA wrote him again, asking that some long-time top-level employees be fired--or even prosecuted.
The staffers are ecstatic about new leadership at the FDA but want bad managers who still remain on the job to be run out of the agency, and in some cases, prosecuted as criminals. The staffers, whose names are redacted, call for an end to "the culture of wrongdoing and coverup."
In President Obama's first budget, he allotted $1 billion to the FDA to "increase and improve inspections, domestic surveillance, laboratory capacity and domestic response to prevent and control foodborne illness."
President Obama's 2010 budget requests an additional 19 percent budget increase over last year, to $3.2 billion. The agency is in the midst of a three-year plan to raise the number of inspectors from 1,200 to 1,700 by 2010.
In February 2009, he also called for a full review of all departments at the FDA.
In March, he appointed two esteemed professionals--Margaret Hamburg and Joshua Sharfstein--as commissioner and principal deputy commisioner of the FDA and announced establishment of the Food Safety Working Group to meet regularly with cabinet officials and help advise the president on food safety issues and needs of the department.
These were clearly steps in the right direction. Since taking over, Hamburg's FDA has conducted several raids of manufacturers of items like soaps and food products, closing the companies down for poor sanitation and, in some cases, prosecuting owners. A maker of tuna salad sandwiches was closed after
Recent FDA inspections found evidence of widespread and active rodent and insect infestation, filthy conditions, and poor employee practices, such as allowing food-processing utensils to lie on the floor near live insects.
In June, the President signed a law giving FDA oversight of tobacco products, something many people felt was long overdue. This is expected to reduce smoking rates significantly in the long term, particularly by discouraging teen smoking through strict advertising laws. A judge recently upheld nearly all of the legislation's provisions in a lawsuit filed by tobacco manufacturers that sought to overturn sections of it.
The Center for Drug Evaluation & Research (CDER) is responsible for approving new drugs. After the Vioxx and other scandals, and possibly due to funding cuts, the process of approvals slowed significantly under the Bush administration. This drew complaints not only from pharmaceutical companies but from patient advocacy groups, who said many patients were being denied potentially lifesaving drugs due to the slow approval process.
As of December 1, 2009, the FDA had approved 26 new drugs, which is only 1 more than approved in 2008. However, they completed reviews of 85% of drug applications on time, which is a significant improvement. One reason for the improvement in meeting deadlines, even though the number of approvals remained nearly stagnant, was the increase in hiring:
Over the last two years, CDER has seen a 34 percent increase in the number of full-time equivalents, or 760 new hires. The Office of New Drugs has swelled by 26 percent, or 193 full-time equivalents.
Most of these hires came in the last year; under Bush, the FDA had 700 vacancies that remained unfilled. The FDA plans to hire more than 1000 more employees agency-wide in the coming year and expects reviews by CDER to pick up as new employees get trained in.
The number of black box warnings added to drug labels dropped from 56 to 31, but the number of early warnings--those issued to consumers at the first indication that there might be a serious problem with a certain medication before causality has been established--more than doubled.
This might indicate that the FDA is invested in becoming more transparent, letting consumers know when it has information rather than keeping quiet about it until the problem has caused enough deaths or damage to establish causality.
Other FDA initiatives under President Obama:
January (2009)--FDA sets guidelines for drug and food importations.
March--Enters into collaboration with 8 academic/research institutions to explore nanotechnology initiatives for medical uses
April--Launches plan to review all medical devices approved before 1976
June--Establishes a transparency task force to identify ways for the agency to become more transparent, a major reversal from the secrecy of prior years.
August--Launches initiative with the European Medicines Agency to establish "good clinical practices"
September--Releases strategic plan for risk management
December--Launches widget to address pet health and safety, so pet owners can get rapid information on any concerns with tainted food or illnesses (Recommend all the Pootie and Woozle owners get this!)
December--Launches initiative to study the safety of medications during pregnancy
January (2010)--Unveils phase I of transparency initiative
In addition, the FDA has been doing its job, launching numerous raids on companies that fail to abide by safety standards and recalling numerous products for safety reasons or bogus health claims. Already this month, the FDA has shut down 3 manufacturers of food products with unsanitary conditions.
Also, this FDA approved the first cancer drug for dogs. This, the alert application, and the section on the site about pets and animals, suggests that this FDA recognizes that pets are an important part of many Americans' lives.
The one disappointment in the FDA is its recommendation against the reimportation of drugs from outside the US, which they say is for safety concerns. President Obama says his long-held support of drug reimportations remains firm. As a Senator, he proposed legislation to allow drug re-importation.
The proposed healthcare legislation also provides an avenue that would, for the first time, allow the FDA to establish a process for approving generic biopharmaceuticals. While there are quibbles about how long exclusivity should be maintained, it is still imperative to establish this process to ensure that American consumers will get access to generic biopharmaceuticals in the future.
With Pfizer now investing in the "generics" market and several other Big Pharma companies looking to do the same, we may see Big Pharma less engaged in the fight to keep a long timeline against patent expiration.
There is much more to be done, but this agency is |
question. So, you know, the von Neumann architecture, as you suggest, originally described in the paper in the mid 1940s on the heels of the success of systems like ENIAC and so on. And what John von Neumann says is if we store the program—you know, there are a number of aspects in the architecture—if we store the program in the same memory that we store data in, we gain enormous flexibility. Provides access to ideas like software compilers that allow us to describe software at a high level and have the computer itself write the code that it’s later going to run. It’s a, you know, pretty fundamental change in the nature of computing.
I don’t want to roll back that aspect of computing, but we have to understand that many of the vulnerabilities that we suffer today are a direct consequence of that design for computers. So I talked a moment ago about this idea of code injection attacks at the buffer overflow where I, as the attacker, can send you something that exploits a bug and injects code. This is a very powerful model for an attacker because, you know, suppose for a moment we couldn’t do that. I’d be looking for vulnerabilities that directly correspond to my goals as the attacker. So I have to find a logical bug that allows the leaking of information. You know, I could probably find one, perhaps. But it’s much more powerful for me to be able to send you new code that you’re going to run on the target machine directly, giving me complete flexibility.
So, yes, we want to revisit some of these ideas. I’d make the observation that the things that are really important to us, that we want to perform really well on computers, that have to scale extremely well, so there could be lots and lots of them, are the things that we put in low-level hardware. The reason we do that is that they often have aspects of their execution which perform best when they’re directly catered to by our processor design. A nice example of this is graphical processing. So, today, every computer, every mobile device, ships with something that just didn’t exist in computers 10 or 15 years ago, called a graphical processing unit, a graphics processing unit, a GPU. So today you don’t buy systems without them. They’re the thing that makes it possible to blend different images, you know, render animations at high speed and so on. Have the kind of snazzy, three-dimensional graphics we see on current systems. Hard to imagine life without it.
The reason that was sucked into our architecture design is that we could make it dramatically faster by supporting it directly in hardware. If we now think security is important to us, extremely important to us because of the costs and the consequences of getting it wrong, there’s a strong argument for pulling that into hardware if it provides us with dramatic improvement in scalability.
Steven Cherry: Well, Robert, it sounds like we’re still in the early days of computing. I guess in car terms we’re still in maybe the 1950s. I guess the MacBook Pro is maybe a Studebaker or Starliner, and the Air is a 1953 Corvette. And it’s up to folks like you to lay the groundwork for the safe Volvos and Subarus of tomorrow. In fact, also for making our cars safe from hackers, I guess, but that’s a whole other show. Thanks, and thanks for joining us today.
Robert Watson: Absolutely. No, I think your comparison is good, right. The computer world is still very much a fast-moving industry. We don’t know what systems will look like when we’re done. I think the only mistake we could make is to think that we are done, that we have to live with the status quo that we have. There is still the opportunity to revise fundamental thinking here while maintaining some of the compatibility we want. You know, we can still drive on the same roads, but we can change the vehicles that we drive on them. Thanks very much.
Steven Cherry: Very good. Thanks again.
We’ve been speaking with Robert Watson about finally making computers more secure, instead of less.
For IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations,” I’m Steven Cherry.
This interview was recorded 5 December 2012.
Segment producer: Barbara Finkelstein; audio engineer: Francesco Ferorelli
Read more “Techwise Conversations” or follow us on Twitter.
NOTE: Transcripts are created for the convenience of our readers and listeners and may not perfectly match their associated interviews and narratives. The authoritative record of IEEE Spectrum’s audio programming is the audio version.A foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump allegedly boasted about firing Jews from his government department and denied the Holocaust to a colleague.
Joseph Schmitz denies the allegations against him, which concern comments accusers say he made while he was the U.S. Defense Department’s Inspector General, the McClatchy news agency reported on Thursday. He called them “completely false and defamatory.”
Schmitz was the Pentagon’s inspector general from 2002-2005, and is one of five foreign policy advisers the Trump campaign announced in March. He says he helped write one of the Republican presidential nominee’s foreign policy speeches. Schmitz told the news agency that his wife’s maternal grandmother was Jewish.
The alleged comments are cited in a grievance by Danny Meyer, about discrimination he says he suffered as a gay man while he worked for successive inspectors general.
Meyer in his complaint quotes John Crane, a former assistant Defense Department Inspector General, as saying that Schmitz made the remarks. In one case, Crane alleged Schmitz said “I fired the Jews.” In another, he “allegedly lectured Mr. Crane on the details of concentration camps and how the ovens were too small to kill 6 million Jews,” Meyer wrote.
Crane, who resigned in 2013 after learning he was set to be fired, also has filed a grievance. According to McClatchy, the allegations against Schmitz are also cited in a letter to the current Defense Department inspector general by a lawyer for David Tenenbaum, an army engineer vindicated after suffering for years under a cloud of allegations that he spied for Israel. Tenenbaum wants the office to inspect an anti-Semitic environment at the Pentagon.
Schmitz’s father is the late Republican politician John Schmitz, notorious for his description in 1981 of a pro-reproductive rights panel that testified to the California senate as “a sea of hard, Jewish and (arguably) female faces.”
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When he died in 2001, the elder Schmitz, a onetime stalwart of the far-right wing John Birch Society, was eulogized by the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial group, as a “good friend” of the group. According to IHR, he intervened when the group was unable to find a venue for its conference in southern California after hotels received complaints.CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on Tuesday that an internal email sent to staff at its Agricultural Research Service unit this week calling for a suspension of “public-facing documents,” including news releases and photos, was flawed and that new guidance has been sent out to replace it.
The ARS focuses on scientific research into the main issues facing agriculture, including long-term climate change. President Donald Trump has cast doubt on whether man-made climate change is real and has railed against ex-President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat it.
“This internal email was released without Departmental direction, and prior to Departmental guidance being issued,” USDA said in a statement. “ARS will be providing updated direction to its staff.”
It said peer-reviewed scientific papers from the unit should not be blocked. “ARS values and is committed to maintaining the free flow of information between our scientists and the American public.”
The original email, sent Jan. 23, said: “Starting immediately and until further notice, ARS will not release any public-facing documents. This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content.”
USDA officials said that after the email was sent, acting USDA Deputy Secretary Michael L. Young sent out a three-page memo to USDA agency department heads and other key agency officials outlining the interim procedures staff should follow.
A copy of the interim procedures memo, dated Jan. 23 and seen by Reuters, shows many of the steps reflect either the same or similar measures taken by the previous administration. Reuters also saw a memo, dated Jan. 22, 2009, that was sent to agency officials by former Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
The 2017 memo, however, differs in two main areas.
It centralizes the agency’s media inquiries and social media presence through the Office of the Secretary. As part of that, the memo asks USDA agencies to “review their websites, blog posts and other social media and, consistent with direction you will receive from the Office of Communication, remove references to policy priorities and initiatives of the previous Administration.”
It also rescinds the ability of USDA agencies to close an office or notify local delegations of office closures.Eight months before Orlando was awarded an NBA franchise in April 1987, the city had already named its team.
When Orlando businessman Jim Hewitt and former Philadelphia 76ers general manager Pat Williams came together in an effort to bring an NBA team to Orlando, they decided it was best to give the franchise a name - even though a team had yet to be awarded to the city.
So a contest was held with the Orlando Sentinel for fans to submit their picks for the name of the future team. A total of 4,296 entries were submitted and after a committee was selected to review the entries, four names emerged as finalists - the "Heat", the "Tropics", the "Juice" and the "Magic".
While the group pondered which one of the finalists would be selected, Williams' 7-year-old daughter, Karen, paid a visit to her father from the family's home in Philadelphia. After spending some time together checking out Orlando's attractions, Pat took Karen to the airport for her flight home.
As she waited for her flight, Karen said something that would leave a lasting an impression on the city of Orlando.
"I really like this place. This place is like Magic."
Along with the influence from Karen's comment, the committee was able to whittle away at the other finalists. They thought the "Heat" left a negative connotation to the area, that the "Tropics" referred more to South Florida than Central Florida and that the "Juice" wouldn't be received too strongly after a terrible winter freeze had devastated the citrus industry.
The committee decided to go with the Magic, saying the name referred to the magic of Orlando - a tourist hotspot with lots to offer visitors and those who called the area home.
Four months after the Magic was publicly announced as the name of Orlando's future NBA franchise, the Miami franchise selected the name "Heat", which was also submitted in their naming contest.Cesc Fabregas has warned Real Madrid not to pay £100 million for Gareth Bale, insisting it would be 'foolish' for Barcelona's great rivals to spend that much on the Tottenham forward.
Bale has been heavily linked with a move to Real Madrid amidst rumours the Spanish giants would break the transfer world record to land the Welshman - speculation Madrid president Florentino Perez has hardly shied away from.
While Tottenham are trying to keep their star player away from the clutches of the likes of Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain, who are also believed to be interested, Fabregas says the idea of spending £100 million on one player is 'foolish'.
“For me, spending £100m on Gareth Bale is foolish. I don't know how any club could spend that amount of money in these circumstances," he said in an interview with Movistar.
"He is a great player with all the right attributes, but we will have to see if Madrid sign him and if he can perform there."
Fabregas himself has been linked with a move this summer, with Manchester United believed to be interested in securing his services.
The former Arsenal ace insists he has no plans to head to Old Trafford despite the interest of the Red Devils, and will be at the Nou Camp for the start of next season.
"People talk a lot but the truth is that no-one has spoken with me,” he explained.
"I want to triumph in Barcelona, that club is my home and I always dreamed of playing there, so I will try and succeed there as long as I can."These comparisons remain the same with the full fuel loads at present available (2 x 45 gall. long range tank Tempest, 1 x 90 gall. longe range tank Spitfire). Maximum Speed
25. From 0 - 10,000 feet the Tempest V is 20 mph. faster than the Spitfire XIV. There is then little to choose until 22,000 feet, when the Spitfire XIV becomes 30-40 mph. faster, the Tempest's operational ceiling being about 30,000 feet as opposed to the Spitfire XIV's 40,000 feet. Maximum Climb
26. The Tempest is not in the same class as the Spitfire XIV. The Tempest V however, has a considerably better zoom climb, holding a higher speed thoughout the manoeuvre. If the climb is prolonged until climbing speed is reached then, of course, the Spitfire XIV will begin to catch up and pull ahead. Dive
27. The Tempest V gains on the Spitfire XIV. Turning Circle
28. The Spitfire XIV easily out-turns the Tempest. Rate of Roll
29. The Spitfire XIV rolls faster at speeds below 300 mph., but definitely more slowly at speeds greater than 350 mph. Conclusions
30. The tactical attributes of the two aircraft being completely different, they require a separate handling techique in combat. For this reason Typhoon squadrons should convert to Tempests, and Spitfire squadrons to Spitfire XIVs, and definitely never vice-versa, or each aircraft's particular advantages would never be appreciated. Regarding performance, if correctly handled, the Tempest is the better below about 20,000 feet and the Spitfire XIV the better above that height. TACTICAL COMPARISON WITH MUSTANG III Radius of Action
31. Without a long range tank, the Spitfire XIV has no endurance. With a 90 gallon long-range tank it has about half the range of the Mustang III fitted with 2 x 62 1/2 gallon long range tanks. Maximum Speed
32. The maximum speed are practically identical. Maximum Climb
33. The Spitfire XIV is very much better. Dive
34. As for the Spitfire IX. The Mustang pulls away, but less markedly. Turning Circle
35. The Spitfire XIV is better. Rate of Roll
36. The advantage tends to be with the Spitfire XIV. Conclusion
37. With the exception of endurance no conclusions can be drawn, as these two aircraft should never be enemies. The choice is a matter of taste. COMBAT TRIAL AGAINST FW.190 (BMW.801D) Maximum Speeds
38. From 0 - 5,000 ft and 15,000 - 20,000 ft., the Spitfire XIV is only 20 m.p.h. faster; at all other heights it is up to 60 m.p.h. faster than the Fw 190 (BMW.801D). It is estimated to have about the same maximum speed as the new Fw 190 (DB.603) at all heights. Maximum Climb
39. The Spitfire XIV has a considerably greater rate of climb than the FW 190 (BMW.801D) or (estimated) the new Fw 190 (DB.603) at all heights. Dive
40. After the initial part of the dive, during which the FW 190 gains slightly, the Mk XIV has a slight advantage. Turning Circle
41. Spitfire XIV can easily turn inside the FW 190, though in the case of a right-hand turn, this difference is not so quite pronounced. Rate of Roll
42. The FW 190 is very much better. Conclusion
43. In defense, the Spitfire XIV should use its remarkable maximum climb and turning circle against any enemy aircraft. In the attack it can afford to "mix it" but should beware of the quick roll and dive. If this manoeuvre is used by the FW.190 and the Spitfire XIV follows, it will probably not be able to close the range until the FW.190 has pulled out of its dive. COMBAT TRIAL AGAINST Me. 109G Maximum speed
44. The Spitfire XIV is 40 m.p.h. faster at all heights except 16,000 ft. where it is only 10 mph faster. Maximum Climb
45. Same results. At 16,000 ft. indentical, otherwise the Spitfire XIV out-climbs the Me.109G. The zoom climb is practically identical when the climb is made without opening throttle. Climbing at full throttle, the Spitfire XIV draws away from the Me.109G quite easily. Dive
46. During the initial part of the dive, the Me.109G pulls away slightly, but when a speed of 380 m.p.h. is reached, the Spitfire XIV begins to gain on the Me.109G. Turning Circle
47. The Spitfire XIV easily out-turns the Me.109G in either direction. Rate of Roll
48. The Spitfire XIV rolls much more quickly. Conclusion
49. The Spitfire XIV is superior to the Me.109G in every respect. COMBAT PERFORMANCE WITH 90 GALLON LONG-RANGE TANKS 50. As the Spitfire XIV has a very short range it has been assumed that when a long-range tank is to be carried, it is most likely to be the 90 gallon tank rather than the 30 gallon or 45 gallon. Pending further instructions, no drops or trials have been carried out with the 30 gallon or 45 gallon tanks. The aircraft's performance with either can be estimated from the results given below of trials with the 90 gallon long-range tank. Drops
51. The aircraft was fitted with assistor springs as for the Spitfire IX. Two drops were made with empty tanks at 50 ft and 25,000 ft, A.S.I. 250 mph, with no trouble. Cine photographs were taken and show the tank dropping quite clear of the aircraft. Further trials would be necessary to check these results thoroughly. Speeds
52. About 20 m.p.h. is knocked off the maximum speed and correspondingly off the speed at intermediate throttle settings. The aircraft is still faster than the FW.190 (BMW.801D) and the Me.109G above 20,000 ft. Climb
53. Climb is most affected. With a half-full tank its maximum climb becomes identical with the Spitfire IX without the tank. Even with a full tank it can therefore climb as fast as the FW.190 or Me.109G. Its zoom climb is hardly affected. Dive
54. So long as the tank is more than 1/3 full, the dive acceleration is similar. Turning Circle
55. The Spitfire XIV now has a definitely wider turning circle than before, but is still within those of the FW.190 (BMW.801D) and Me.109G. Rate of Roll
56. Similar. Conclusions
57. Even with the 90 gallon tank, the Spitfire XIV can equal or outclass the FW.190 (BMW.801D) and the Me.109G in every respect. Its main advantages remain the tight turn and maximum climb. TECHNICAL Gun Harmonisation
58. As for the Spitfire IX. Gun Firing
59. Trials were carried out without any troubles or difficulties. Re-arming
60. As for the Spitfire XI. Cine-gun installation and harmonisation
61. There is no difference in installation, but in the Spitfire XIV the camera is fitted on the port side. Radio
62. One V.H.F. set is fitted as in the Spitfire IX. Oxygen
63. Normal Bristish type oxygen system, as in all Spitfires. Engine Temperatures
64. The glycol shutters are automatically controlled. There was no overheating at any time, except during sustained climbs at maximum boost and r.p.m. when the glycol temperature once exceeded 105 deg C. STARTING HINTS 65. The aircraft is generally more difficult to start than the Spitfire IX. Care should be taken not to over-dope it and one third of a pump full is usually quite sufficient when the engine is warm. SERVICING HINTS 66. Careful watch should be maintained on the Rolls-Royce Auxilary Gear Box oil contents level. The aircraft under test (RB.179) suffered with a bad oil leakage, all oil being consumed or lost in a 30 minute flight. This was cured by a careful check and tightening of all connections and plugs, when the consumption was decreased to approximately 1/2 pint per hour. 67. Touble has also been experienced with the Coffman Starter Breech sticking. A daily shot with a grease gun on the grease nipple provided helped to eliminate this stickiness. Normal Spitfire equipment was used throughout the trials. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 68. The Spitfire XIV is superior to the Spitfire IX in all respects. 69. It has the best all-round performance of any present-day fighter, apart from range. 70. Modification to the compass bracket, to enable the pilot to obtain an unresticted view of the compass, should be incorporated.
AFDU Wittering July 1943 Spitfire XIV JF317 SHORT TACTICAL TRIALS OF EXPERIMENTAL SPITFIRE XIV INTRODUCTION On instructions from Headquarters, Fighter Command, an experimental Spitfire XIV JF317 (Griffon 61) was made available by A&AEE for three days for short tactical trials. The trials took the form of a direct comparison with a Spitfire VIII (Merlin 63) JF664, and flying took place from 27 to 29 July 1943. BRIEF DESCPRIPTION The aircraft used is a conversion of the Spitfire VIII. The larger engine involves a much longer engine cowling and the extra weight forward has been balanced by ballast in the tail. The fin has been increased in area to help directional stability and a large rudder is fitted. This aircraft had the normal span wings of the Spitfire VIII with small span ailerons, but the extended wing tips had been replaced by the standard wing tips as on the MK IX. The engine is not representative of production as the FS gear is higher and the MS lower. A five blade propeller is fitted. The engine had a Bendix injection carberator and boost for combat is limited to plus 15 lbs. The Spitfire VIII weighed 7,760 lb, the XIV 8,376. Performance - Speeds near the ground are identical, at 10,000 and 15,000 feet the Spitfire VIII is faster, at 20/25,000 ft. similar, at 30,000 ft. and over the Spitfire XIV accelerated faster and was the superior aircraft. Climb - Zero to 30,000 feet the Spitfire VIII is the better aircraft, at 30,000 ft. and over the Spitfire XIV is by far the better. Manoeuvrablility - The elevator control of the Spitfire XIV was found to be much heavier than that of the Spitfire VIII, unpleasantlly so, and the other controls felt to be slightly heavier than on previous Spitfire Mks. In spite of heavier controls the Spitfire XIV is more manoeuvrable than the Spitfire VIII in turns at all heights. Spins were carried out in the Spitfire XIV at 25,000 feet. The aircraft did not spin voluntarily but had to be put into and held in the spin. Instead of spinning in the normal nose down attitude, the nose of the aircraft oscillated from an almost verticle position downwards to a position with the nose well above the horizon, so that the aircraft was tail down. It spent most of its time in this flat position from which, after four turns, recovery was fast by the normal method or slower if the controls were released. It never appears to become uncontrollable. Search view - Pilots view is superior on the Spitfire Mk XIV due to the lower engine cowling. Range and Endurance - Both aircraft carry the same amount of fuel (96 gallons in the main tank and 27 gallons in two wing tanks.) Refueling checks made to compare consumption showed than when the two aircraft stayed together throughtout the trials, the Griffon engine was using approximately 10-15 gallons more fuel per hour than the Merlin. Conclusions - Of the two aircraft the Spitfire VIII is preferable at all heights up to about 25,000 feet except for its turning capabilites. It is much lighter on the elevators and easier for the average pilot to fly. Its performance and fuel consumption are better. The Spitfire XIV is superior above 25,000 and with its better turning characteristics it is more than a match for the Spitfire VIII. The difficulties of trimming will probably be reduced as pilots gain familiarity.
Stall: Flaps up 87, Flaps down 75
Engines: Griffon 65 2,035 hp @ 7,000 feet, Griffon 85 2,750 hp @ 8,250 feet, Griffon 61 1,785 hp @ Take off (2,750 rpm)
Range: 460 normal, 860 max
Endurance: 1.9 hr
Service Ceiling: 43,000 feetKaren Gillan is following in the footsteps of fellow Doctor Who companion Billie Piper and sharing her support for the push to cast a woman as the 13th Doctor.
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Gillan, who played 11th Doctor Matt Smith’s companion Amy Pond, thinks a female Doctor would make a wonderful addition to the series, and prove an important point, too.
“A woman Doctor would be really cool because a lot of people are sceptical about having a woman play the role,” Gillan explains in an interview in this week’s Radio Times magazine, “but I think they probably were [sceptical] before Kathryn Janeway came along in Star Trek: Voyager, and she was amazing.”
She’s not alone in her thinking either. Piper, who played Rose Tyler, previously argued that not having a woman play the Doctor next would feel like a snub.
With the jury still out, and a new Doctor yet to be officially confirmed, could they get their wish? And could Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge be the woman to make it come true?
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Read the full interview with Karen Gillan in the new issue of Radio Times magazine, available in shops and on the Apple Newsstand from Tuesday 18 April 2017Australia’s No.1 Fashion Destination
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What you find is a mixed bag. There's some nuttiness and extremism in there, some banal stuff, and some unlikely-to-work populism. But there are also some excellent points about the fundamental architecture of European economic policy. Points that Europe's mainstream leaders have spent years avoiding, even as they've tried harder and harder to cope with the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and political movements. The focus on what's abhorrent about the Front and similar parties is understandable and important. But at some point, European leaders have to face up to the fact that it's not all nuttiness and racism. Voters are turning to extreme parties because the mainstream parties have blundered into a years-long economic fiasco and they have no plan to end it.
Far-right is an oversimplification
The National Front is typically short-handed as a "far-right" political party. This is fine as far as it goes. The party's founder — Marine Le Pen's still-living father — was a fascist street-brawler as a youth, managed Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour's Vichyite presidential campaign in 1965, and traffics in not-at-all-disguised racism.
In its current incarnation, the Front advances a genuinely extreme view on immigration (a 95 percent reduction in legal immigration levels), promotes anti-Muslim politics under the guise of secularism, and clearly practices dog whistle politics intended to appeal to a racist constituency (hardly a unique tactic).
In other respects, though, the party is not so extreme. They want to hike military spending (to 2 percent of GDP, leaving it below US levels and actually just reaching the threshold all NATO members are theoretically supposed to attain), build more prisons, discourage abortion, ban same-sex marriages, and ban affirmative action — fairly standard conservative ideas in the US.
On finance, Le Pen sounds like Elizabeth Warren, calling for a separation of investment and commercial banking (Glass-Steagall rules, in US terms) and a financial transactions tax. They bemoan the privatization of public services.
On the welfare state, they chart a third way. The (dubious) central premise seems to be that once you massively curtail legal and illegal immigration alike, affordability questions go out the window. Mothers of three or more children will secure earlier access to full social security benefits, family allowances will be raised, and more preschool funding provided. They claim (again, dubiously) that protectionist tariff policy will promote the re-industrialization of France.
A correct critique of Europe
But beyond this ideological grab-bag is a thoroughgoing and persuasive critique of European monetary arrangements (they also have a persuasive critique of the EU's deeply misguided directive on passenger railroad regulation). They cite Milton Friedman as an authority on the idea that the Eurozone is not an optimal currency area, and this is in fact the professional consensus. They rightly say that the inability of Eurozone member states to conduct independent monetary policy "condemns the people to austerity plans that do nothing but exacerbate the crisis." They say that "France should prepare, with its European partners, a return to national currencies that will permit a return to competitive devaluations" and this would, indeed, be a boon to the French (and Spanish and Italian and Belgian, etc.) economies.
Most radically in political terms — although really not so controversially in terms of macroeconomics — they call for the Bank of France to print money to cover French budget deficits. That's a step that could be dangerous in many scenarios, but given that France is currently experience negative inflation it seems well worth trying.
A challenge that deserves an answer
There's much to dislike in the National Front's policy gestalt. The mix of populist conservative nationalism on social policy and protectionist trade policy is politically plausible, but indefensible on the merits. The draconian immigration restrictionism at the core of the party's identity is inhumane and substantively ridiculous.
But the Europe stuff deserves an answer. LePen's view that the currency union can simply be undone amicably is rather utopian. But it's at least an idea. Europe is currently mired in a depression whose initial cause was the single currency, and mainstream European leaders have no solutions to offer. The Eurozone is fundamentally a political project rather than an economic one, but to succeed politically it needs to work economically. Right now it isn't, and Le Pen's brand of populist nationalism is a logical alternative. After all, the idea that France should have its own currency just the way Canada and Switzerland and Singapore do rather than trying to share one with Portugal and Finland isn't really all that radical.
So far, European leaders have mostly tried to answer the rise of the far-right's toxic immigration politics by talking immigration. Either with criticisms of xenophobia, cooptation of anti-immigrant politics, or both. But it's no secret that anti-immigrant views rise during times of economic distress — economic distress whose root cause is bungling in Brussels and Frankfurt, not anything to do with immigrants. Le Pen deserves to be confronted where she's making the most sense, not the least. Mainstream leaders need to either co-opt her European agenda, or else construct a viable alternative in which the European Central Bank creates growth-friendly conditions without disrupting the single currency.Wind whipped past the Broken Blade and its rafters groaned with a low, howling whistle. Khard rubbed his leg where it ended just below the knee. He’d lost it years ago now, torn to tatters in the talons of an enraged Skraev. He’d been cocky back then — new Embermaul in hand and so sure of his ability to fight frost with blaze. But the beast had pinned his leg against the hard ice, and he’d ended up leaving more than youthful optimism behind that day. When it got cold like this — like it only could during Frostfall — his missing leg still bothered him. It itched and burned and ached. All of him ached to rejoin the hunt. Khard scoffed at himself and knocked back the blaze-kissed libation a friendly Bosun had given him. It drove away the chill and any lingering bitterness with a smooth finish. He still had advice to offer Slayers, and there was no sense trading in self pity. The first of the snow was falling now. Soon, there would be new Slayers hunting the beasts he had stalked during one such Frostfall.
As the chill of Frostfall sets in, bold Slayers sharpen their blades and wits as they prepare for what the harsh cold will bring. Battling a Behemoth is one thing; Surviving the onslaught of a Pangar when you are knee deep in snow, eyes burning from the wind, and struggling to find that last ounce of stamina — this is true Frostfall grit and determination. The conditions may be dire, but adversity only brings the people of Ramsgate closer.
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The next Dauntless seasonal event takes over from Dec 19th 2017 to early January! Frostfall introduces new hunts and quests, exclusive rewards, expanded character creator options, and more. There’s much to explore in Frostfall, including a brief history of the event. To make sure you don’t miss out on any of the new content, we’ve put together this primer to help you survive the elements.
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Your journey begins in Ramsgate, where you might notice a chilly change in scenery. The cold has set in, but Slayer mentor Kat Sorrel has an interesting opportunity for those brave enough to endure the cold.
New hunts and modifiers, including fearsome dual Behemoth encounters have been reported on the frontier. Hunt modifiers are special changes that will test your skills by altering or introducing new mechanics in specific hunts.
Bosun Markus Boehr is offering 3 new consumables, including a portable campfire to stay warm on the hunt. These will be offered for a limited time only, but Slayers will be able to keep their supplies after Frostfall ends.
Illuminate the sky with two new Frostfall themed flares.
Slayers will also be able to further customize their banner with a new standard, fabrics, and sigil.
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Three new emotes are now available, including a new island arrival. For Slayers who acquire these emotes, they will remain available after Frostfall ends.
Slayers who survive Frostfall can show off their skills with 4 new in-game titles.
Celebrate the myth of the Frostfall Queen with a limited edition cosmetic helm.
Keep warm with new facial hair, eyebrow, and face paint options for your Slayer. To make sure everyone gets a chance to experience this feature, we’re granting all Slayers a one-time appearance reset token. To update your appearance, visit Gregario in Ramsgate.
Lastly, Slayers will be able to give the gift of Dauntless by purchasing Founder’s Packs for others! Visit the Dauntless website to purchase a code to give to a friend. Slayers that hunt together, survive together!
Frostfall brings with it a wealth of new items to collect. Many can be earned by completing Frostfall quests, while others will be available through the in-game store. Check out everything the new store has to offer while in Ramsgate via the pause menu.
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We’re excited to present the next in what will be many Dauntless events to come, with Frostfall. As with everything in Dauntless, we will listen to the community, learn together, and push ourselves to make the best experience possible for all Slayers.
From everyone here at Phoenix Labs, warm holidays and happy hunting!Burnaby Ministerial Panel on Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Roundtable, Tsleil-Waututh, Sto:lo, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, and Skxwu7mesh Territories. (Photo: Leadnow)
West Coast Staff Counsel Eugene Kung sat down with Senior Communications and Engagement Specialist Alexis Stoymenoff to discuss the recent report released by the Ministerial Panel on the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline and tankers project. Here’s what Eugene had to say about the report, and the six key questions it poses in advance of a decision from the federal Cabinet.
AS: Why don’t you start us off by explaining what’s happened with the Ministerial Panel report and where we’re at right now?
EK: Well, in early November, the Ministerial Panel on the Trans Mountain Expansion released their report, which was the summary of a series of engagements that they |
the Soviet experience, in a few lines! I shall only summarize my views in a few sentences. The authentic Russian socialist revolution produced a state socialism which was the only possible first step toward socialism; after Stalin that state socialism moved towards becoming state capitalism (explaining the difference between the two concepts is important but not the subject of this short paper). As of 1991 state capitalism was dismantled and replaced by “normal” capitalism based on private property, which, as in all countries of contemporary capitalism, is basically the property of financial monopolies, owned by the oligarchy (similar to, not different from, the oligarchies running capitalism in the Triad), many coming out of the former nomenklatura, and some newcomers.
The explosion of creative authentic democratic practices initiated by the Russian (October) revolution was subsequently tamed and replaced by an autocratic pattern of management of society, albeit granting social rights to the working classes. This system led to massive depoliticization and was not protected from despotic and even criminal deviations. The new pattern of savage capitalism is based on the continuation of depoliticization and the non-respect of democratic rights.
Such a system rules not only Russia, but all the other former Soviet republics. Differences relate to the practice of the so-called “Western” electoral democracy, more effective in Ukraine, for instance, than in Russia. Nonetheless this pattern of rule is not “democracy” but a farce compared to bourgeois democracy as it functioned at previous stages of capitalist development, including in the “traditional democracies” of the West, since real power is now restricted to the rule of monopolies and operates to their exclusive benefit.
A people-oriented policy implies therefore moving away, as much as possible, from the “liberal” recipe and the electoral masquerade associated with it, which claims to give legitimacy to regressive social policies. I would suggest setting up in its place a brand of new state capitalism with a social dimension (I say social, not socialist). That system would open the road to eventual advances toward a socialization of the management of the economy and therefore authentic new advances toward an invention of democracy responding to the challenges of a modern economy.
It is only if Russia moves along such lines that the current conflict between, on the one hand, the intended independent international policy of Moscow and, on the other hand, the pursuit of a reactionary social internal policy can be given a positive outcome. Such a move is needed and possible: fragments of the political ruling class could align on such a program if popular mobilization and action promote it. To the extent that similar advances are also carried out in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia, an authentic community of Eurasian nations can be established and become a powerful actor in the reconstruction of the world system.
5. Russian state power remaining within the strict limits of the neo-liberal recipe annihilates the chances of success of an independent foreign policy and the chances of Russia becoming a really emerging country acting as an important international actor.
Neo-liberalism can produce for Russia only a tragic economic and social regression, a pattern of “lumpen development” and a growing subordinate status in the global imperialist order. Russia would provide to the Triad oil, gas, and some other natural resources; its industries would be reduced to the status of sub-contracting for the benefit of Western financial monopolies.
In such a position, which is not very far from that of Russia today in the global system, attempts to act independently in the international area will remain extremely fragile, threatened by “sanctions” which will strengthen the disastrous alignment of the ruling economic oligarchy to the demands of dominant monopolies of the Triad. The current outflow of “Russian capital” associated with the Ukraine crisis illustrates the danger. Re-establishing state control over the movements of capital is the only effective response to that danger.
Further Readings
Amin, Samir. The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. London and NY: Pluto and Monthly Review Press, 2013.
Amin, Samir. “What ‘Radical’ Means in the 21st Century.” Review of Radical Political Economics 45.3 (September 2013).
Amin, Samir. “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative.” Monthly Review 63.5 (October 2011).
Amin, Samir. “Unity and Diversity in the Movement to Socialism.” Monthly Review (forthcoming in the June 2014 issue).
Amin, Samir. “Russia in the Global System.” Translated from Arabic into Russian by Said Gafourov.On Tuesday, 8 December 2015 at 18:18:29 UTC, default0 wrote: > Sweet! Glad you're back and working on this! > Was wanting to give it a shot, but typing } on my keyboard (german layout, right-alt + 0) did not actually insert the character into the opened document, so I gave up. What is a platform? Linux with SDL? How do I reproduce it? Could you please submit a bug on github? > Most of the UI stuff looks really neat (especially like the directory structure preview when creating a new project/workspace), but obviously still needs a lot of work (you cannot drag dialogs around, fe). Dialogs are currently displayed as popup widgets instead of separate windows due to issue with OpenGL contexts under Win32 when multiple windows are being used. > One of the things I did manage to try was putting a readln() into the standard hello-world-console-app preset. Turns out that it causes dlangide to hang up because it's not actually possible to have user input (or to configure dlangide to start the project separately so a regular console window appears). Killing the started process also was not possible since the respective option to stop debugging is still grayed out. Input hangs because running currently is just invoking of `dub run` - with input and output redirected. Output is shown in IDE message log, but for input just nothing is sent. I'm working on debugging, and as well will implement running apps w/o debugger with separate console. > From the looks of it, this is very promising though. I like the Workspace layout and the general feel of the IDE (very responsive, very clean) and it all kind of makes me wish it wouldn already have enough features (especially debugging!) to be a viable option. Debugging is high priority task now. > I still haven't written much D code and my time is somewhat limited, but if there are simple tasks you need to get done, I would be glad to offer help! It would be great. > Here's to hoping this IDE will keep going and turn out well :-) I think for programming language, it's big + to have native GUI library and IDE written in the same language. Adding Delphi style GUI builder could attract newbies.A man was found dead in his vehicle on Pine Avenue in Randburg this afternoon (23 October).
According to ER24‘s Russell Meiring, a local security company discovered the body of the unidentified man and contacted the emergency service.
“On arrival, paramedics found a man lying in the driver’s seat of the light motor vehicle. The man was found to have sustained numerous gunshot wounds and showed no signs of life.”
Unfortunately, the man succumbed to his injuries and was declared dead on the scene.
Police are investigating.
This is a developing story. More details to be published as they become available.
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To become a member of our WhatsApp community, send your name and surname to 079 439 5345.We teamed up with Hi-Rez Studios to give away 15,000 codes for the Chinese Starter Pack in their newest game in open beta, Hand of the Gods: SMITE Tactics on PC. Each code will unlock 3 cards that will help you build an awesome Chinese deck. Here's what you get:
Transfusion x1
Ne Zha x1
Projection x1
You can download the game for free here and enter to get your code below:
Hand of the Gods: SMITE Tactics is a turn-based, one-vs-one strategy game set in the same mythological universe as the hit MOBA, SMITE. Players build decks of cards that spawn units onto a fully rendered battlefield using Unreal Engine 4. Each pantheon has its own unique leader ability and pantheon specific cards that can be combined with neutral cards to support a variety of playstyles. Hand of the Gods is currently in open beta on PC. Download and play for free at www.handofthegods.comIn the online world saying something like “Cowboy Bebop makes Firefly look like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” could get you slapped in the face. But it’s the truth.
For those out of the know Cowboy Bebop is about a small group of bounty hunters who bungle most of their efforts. They’re poor, they have pasts that take precedence over getting money for food, and they seem to permanently be in a rut. Firefly and Cowboy Bebop are alike in a few ways. They both have crews that perform “shady” jobs to make a living, they both are a marriage of revolvers, cowboys and space travel, and both establish a rich history for their characters we want to explore. There aren’t a lot of TV series that make character history such a prominent feature. Typically characters define themselves through actions and we follow.
Both Cowboy Bebop and Firefly are playful about their misfortune. In Firefly the doctor lists of a series of things that are wrong with the ship and it’s crew. Captain Malcolm Reynolds replies, “Yea, but we’re still flying.” In Cowboy Bebop when we see Spike Spiegel flying towards a mission in his plane his stomach grumbles. He looks down towards it mournfully. His plane says “Low of fuel.” Spike gentley pats the panel and says “You too, huh?”
There’s a campy quality to Firefly. A kind of B-production feel. Director Shinichir? Watanabe’s vision for Cowboy Bebop is more profound. There’s a pizzazz to the movement of the characters, their fighting, their flying. Take a peek.
It helps that Cowboy Bebop‘s score was composed by Yoko Kanno (the John Williams of Anime – if John Williams was better). People might listen to the Firefly intro from time to time, but Cowboy Bebop‘s Green Bird? Forever.
What impacts me the most about Cowboy Bebop is what is unspoken. We never really learn why Spike and Jet started being bounty hunters together. Even less why Faye, Ein, and Edward join them or stay with them. When their pasts get involved each character is wholly engrossed in it. We see that it defines them. When they go to Jaynestown in Firefly we all have fun, but that place doesn’t define Jayne.
They’re both great shows. I’m drawing the comparison for effect. Trust. If you could conceive of something better than Firefly, but similar, Cowboy Bebop would be it.You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
— The Fayetteville man who shared a handshake and a hug with the man who punched him in the face during a Donald Trump rally is being criticized for his decision to forgive.
Rakeem Jones never expected people to respond the way they did to the video and still images of him shaking John McGraw’s hand.
McGraw, a former Golden Gloves boxer nicknamed "Quick Draw," pleaded no contest to assault and disorderly conduct charges on Wednesday and was given a suspended 30-day jail sentence and a year on unsupervised probation for punching Jones at a March rally.
Jones said he doesn’t agree with how everything played out in the judicial system, but as for his choice to forgive, he left court that day at peace.
“I slept like a baby that day. I didn’t care. I saw my phone blowing up. I put it on ‘do not disturb’ and went to sleep,” Jones said.
Jones and McGraw had found middle ground and embraced in court. It seemed harmless and perhaps even inspiring.
“The next thing you know, my phone is blowing up like ‘you’re all over’ and I’m like ‘for what? A handshake’,” Jones recalled.
The images of the hug and handshake sparked hundreds of shares and comments on social media. Many suggested black people, such as Jones, are often too quick to turn the other cheek. They said it wasn’t just a handshake, but an elderly white man getting a pass for taking a cheap shot at a young black man during a Trump rally.
“Yesterday I decided to look up YouTube and I put my name in and I’ve seen videos where people took 20 minutes of their day just to call me all kinds of names and I’m like you don’t even know me,” Jones said.
Jones said the handshake was not planned but he does not regret it because he’s setting an example for his young son.
"He actually saw when Mr. McGraw said 'we might have to kill him. Like, he seen it," Jones said. “It was just the thing of, you know, being a man and letting it go. Some things you just have to let go."
To the people who have made comments on social media suggesting Jones should have handled the encounter differently, he believes they should mind their own business.
“For those people, like nobody is going to come bail me out. Nobody is going to make sure my kid gets to the bus stop every morning, nobody is going to make sure my girl can do what she’s got to do. So, keep your opinion to yourself and that’s just me being nice,” he said. “Keep your opinion to yourself because, at the end of the day, it wasn’t you.”
Jones said not many people have seen the part of the video that takes place before the handshake, when he very clearly said he doesn't agree with McGraw's one year of unsupervised probation or the part where he asks McGraw to come and speak with him face to face, which is how the handshake happened in the first place.Media. The public doesn’t trust us.
Here’s what’s happening behind the headlines.
Most people believe the media have chosen sides. And they’re right.
Too many news organizations and journalists have violated the public trust. The flurry of leaked emails confirm what most people suspect.
The New York Times’ John Harwood was secretly advising Hillary Clinton. CNN pundit Donna Brazile sent Clinton a debate question.
Politico’s Glenn Thrush sent an article to the Clinton campaign to edit before publication. He even admitted he was a hack for doing so. Another Politico reporter was recently caught doing the same thing. And a third promised only positive coverage.
The Washington Post assigned an army of 20 reporters to go after Donald Trump. And that’s okay. Be thorough. But the Post has no such team scrutinizing on Clinton.
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos worked for the Clintons when their war room attempted to destroy every woman who reported Bill’s predatory behavior. Stephanopoulos is also a Clinton donor.
A CNN reporter tweeted a comment supportive of Clinton at a Clinton staffer’s request.
Journalists have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Hillary.
Sadly, the list goes on.
It’s embarrassing so many journalists lack integrity, honesty and ethics.
Follow Behind the Headlines on Twitter at @BehindTheHead.
Follow Mark on Twitter at @MarkHyman.
Join us on Facebook.Legion Focus: Night Lords
The Chaos Space Marines codex is nearly here, and with it, rules for seven Chaos Legions as well as Renegade Chaos Marines. We’ll be previewing these in detail in the coming week, as well as looking at some of the new Stratagems and the best units in the new codex for each Legion. We’ll be looking at the Emperor’s Children, Iron Warriors, Night Lords, World Eaters, Alpha Legion, Black Legion, Word Bearers and the Renegade Chapters. If you’re wondering where the Death Guard and Thousand Sons are, don’t panic! Both these armies are getting Codexes of their own.
The Night Lords are famous for two things – their use of fear as a tactic and their distinctive winged headgear. Thanks to their new Legion Trait, the Night Lords are one of the most interesting forces in the new Chaos Space Marines codex, able to maximise casualties in the Morale phase and devastate even the most stalwart of soldiers.
The Legion Trait
Terror Tactics means that a Night Lords assault army is going to be very dangerous in the Morale phase – with -3, even high-leadership models risk suffering additional casualties.
The Best Units
Raptors have always been popular among Night Lords players, and in the new codex they’re an incredibly strong pick – use yours right and even Grey Knights will be running. Three units of Raptors equipped with Icons of Despair can knock enemy leadership down by 5 whole points – enough to turn even small losses into devastating mass panics in the enemy army.
Night Lords Chaos Lords with Jump Packs are going to number among the deadliest combatants in the 41st Millennium. Take yours with the Claws of the Black Hunt, Night Haunter’s Curse and Diabolic Strength from a nearby Sorcerer and your lord will be dishing out six Strength 7 Attacks, each doing D3 Damage at AP -3 with rerolls to wound. With a reroll to a failed charge, this is a great assassin unit for killing key characters such as Primaris Apothecaries.
How to Use Them
If you’re playing Night Lords, you’ll want to take as many fast moving and morale-modifying units as you can. Throw in some Daemonic allies in the form of Be’lakor and you’ll be able to bring enemy Leadership down even further – focus on doing a small number of casualties to as many units as possible every turn, and let Morale tests handle the rest.
It’s worth noting one of the evilest strategies available to the Night Lords in the new codex: their Stratagem, In Midnight Clad.
Why is this so powerful? Psychological and shock value. You declare this Stratagem AFTER your opponent has already started firing – meaning if they’ve decided to overcharge plasma weapons, suddenly their own models will be getting slain on a 2 or less. You’ll be able to catch powerful shooting units unawares with this one, and just having a Command Point spare at all times will mean your opponent is less likely to risk overcharging their weapons. With Hellblasters arriving on tabletops very soon, you’ll need defence against plasma, and this is a great way to get it.
Of course, if you’d rather not sneak around and prefer engaging your enemies more directly, there’s a Legion for that – come back tomorrow for our preview of the World Eaters.HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - It’s not just computers and mobile phones that are vulnerable to cyber attack, according to software firm Trend Micro. As more devices are hooked up to the Internet, it could be anything from medical equipment to industrial machinery - and even sex toys.
Choi Jung-yoon shows a product at her sex toy shop in Seoul, South Korea, December 16, 2015. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
To illustrate the point, Trend Micro spokesman Udo Schneider surprised journalists at a news conference this week by placing a large, neon-pink vibrator on the desk in front of him and then bringing it to life by typing out a few lines of code on his laptop.
While the stunt provoked sheepish giggles, the message was sobering. As the number of smart, interactive devices connected to the Internet explodes, concern is mounting about insufficient safeguards and a lack of consumer and employee awareness.
“If I hack a vibrator it’s just fun,” Raimund Genes, Chief Technology Officer at Tokyo-listed Trend Micro, told reporters at the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover.
“But if I can get to the back-end, I can blackmail the manufacturer,” he added, referring to the programming system behind a device’s interface.
Germany, host of CeBIT and home to world champion manufacturers, offers rich pickings for hackers, and attacks on industrial production sites are rising, according to the government’s latest IT Security Report.
“MASSIVE DAMAGE”
In 2014, a German steel mill suffered “massive damage” following a cyber attack on the plant’s network. In recent weeks, several German hospitals have come under attack from Ransomware, a virus that encrypts data on infected machines and demands that users pay to get an electronic key to unlock it.
The German government got its own wake-up call last year, when hackers attacked the lower house of parliament’s computer network, forcing it to shut down the system for several days and compromising large amounts of data.
“If someone decided to start shooting with a pistol from the roof of the Reichstag (parliament), security guards would be all over them. But when data are siphoned off for months, no one bats an eyelid,” said Dirk Arendt, director of public affairs at Israeli cyber security firm Check Point Software Technologies (CHKP.O).
“There is a lack of awareness.”
Responding to the growing cyber threat, Germany approved an IT security law last July that orders 2,000 providers of critical infrastructure to implement minimum security standards and report serious breaches or face penalties.
Fifty-one percent of companies have been victims of digital espionage, data theft or sabotage in the past two years, according to IT lobby group Bitkom.
The threat is more acute among Germany’s small-to-medium-sized manufacturers, known as the Mittelstand, where two-thirds of firms registered attacks. As companies move to connect machinery to the Internet to enable it to collect and exchange data and make it easier to control remotely, 84 percent of managers expect the risks to rise, according to Deutsche Telekom’s Cyber Security Report.
While Germans are vigilant about data protection because of their experience of state surveillance by the Stasi secret police in East Germany and the Gestapo under the Nazis, Arendt said more attention needed to be paid to data security.
Employees need to be made aware of the dangers of opening suspicious-looking PDFs in the same way that motorists are warned by giant roadside signs not to speed, he added.
“We only wake up when the damage is done,” he said. “There are enough examples of successful hacking cases. Now the next steps need to be taken to get back into a secure area.”
($1 = 0.9002 euros)Introduction
The federal judge who ordered an end to an investigation into possible illegal campaign coordination between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and conservative groups during two recent recall elections regularly attended expenses-paid judicial conferences sponsored by conservative organizations including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation — groups that have funded efforts against campaign finance reform.
In a 26-page decision issued on May 6, Judge Rudolph Randa of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin ordered prosecutors to immediately halt its long-running investigation into the campaign spending and fundraising activities of Walker, the Wisconsin Club for Growth and other conservative groups. Prosecutors were trying to determine whether the Walker campaign and the conservative groups were illegally coordinating campaign strategies at the time of the 2011 and 2012 recall elections in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Club for Growth spent millions on ads during Wisconsin’s recall elections, supporting the governor’s collective-bargaining reforms. It requested that the federal court stop the investigation, claiming that the probe violated the group’s constitutional right to free speech.
Randa wrote in his decision that the Wisconsin Club for Growth had found a way to get around campaign finance laws. “That circumvention should not and cannot be condemned or restricted,” the decision said. “Instead, it should be recognized as promoting political speech.”
As the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy first reported, Randa has regularly attended expenses-paid judicial conferences hosted by George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center and funded by right-wing foundations like the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and large corporations like ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical and Pfizer.
A Center for Public Integrity investigation last year revealed that conservative foundations and corporate giants were the most frequent sponsors of George Mason judicial conferences, which often serve state and federal judges a steady dose of free-market, anti-regulation lectures.
Most recently, court records show, Randa reported attending an October 2013 judicial conference hosted by the university’s Law & Economics Center. The three-day conference, titled “Antitrust Law & Economics Institute for Judges,” was sponsored by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the John William Pope Foundation, among other conservative groups, corporations and individuals.
Previously, Randa attended George Mason judicial conferences in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.
The Wisconsin Club for Growth’s director, Eric O’Keefe, has connections to the Koch brothers. Michael Grebe, the Bradley Foundation’s president and CEO, chaired Gov. Walker’s 2010 and 2012 gubernatorial campaigns.
A woman who answered the phone in Randa’s chambers Tuesday said he would not comment on cases that are still pending.
In siding with the Wisconsin Club for Growth, Randa told prosecutors to return all of the property seized during their investigation and to destroy copies of documents they obtained during their searches.
A day after his ruling, however, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed Randa’s order ending the investigation, ruling that the judge overstepped his authority when he ordered that prosecutors destroy documents.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "I did fail the test and take full responsibility for it," said Sharapova at a news conference in Los Angeles
Sponsors have moved quickly to distance themselves from Maria Sharapova after the five-time Grand Slam tennis champion admitted failing a drug test.
Nike has suspended its relationship, while Tag Heuer has cut its ties.
Nike said it was "saddened and surprised" at her admission that she tested positive for a banned substance at the Australian Open in January.
Ms Sharapova said she had been taking meldonium since 2006, on the advice of her family doctor.
She is one of the highest paid female athletes with earnings of over $30m last year from winnings and endorsements.
In addition to the moves from Nike and Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer, German carmaker Porsche said it was "postponing planned activities" with Ms Sharapova until the situation became clearer.
Nigel Currie, an independent sports consultant, said brands would not have responded so quickly five years ago, but they now have to react faster in the modern, social media environment.
"They are paranoid about their image, and the slightest risk to their image, they run to the hills."
Are Sharapova and sponsors heading for break point?
Sharapova case: How athletes have fallen foul of the rules
Sharapova's drugs test announcement polarises opinions
How Sharapova's drugs admission sparked a race row
Nike'monitoring situation'
Maria Sharapova's relationship with Nike dates back to when she was 11 years old.
Nike said: "We have decided to suspend our relationship with Maria while the investigation continues.
"We will continue to monitor the situation."
In 2010, the 28-year-old Russian tennis player signed a new eight-year contract with the US sportswear giant worth $70m (£49m) as well as a cut on sales of her own branded clothes.
Image copyright Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Tag Heuer was in talks to extend its deal with Ms Sharapova, which ran out at the end of last year.
But the Swiss watchmaker said those talks had now been suspended and the company had decided not to renew the contract.
In 2014, Porsche named her as its first female ambassador and she signed a three-year deal with the car company.
That contract is due to end at the end of this year.
In a statement, the carmaker said: "We are saddened by the recent news announced by Maria Sharapova. Until further details are released and we can analyse the situation, we have chosen to postpone planned activities."
Ms Sharapova is also the face of Avon perfume, Luck, and the water company Evian. They have yet to comment on the matter.
Sponsors 'burned'
Paul Swangaurd, from the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon, said Nike's decision reflected a "new era" for the way sponsors deal with these issues.
Nike is taking a "very proactive approach", which resulted from "them being burned by a lot of athletes over the years, and growing impatient with putting so much investment behind athletes that potentially comes back to bite them in the court of public opinion".
Last month, Nike dropped Manny Pacquiao after the boxer said homosexual people were "worse than animals".
The company also severed ties with cyclist and drugs cheat Lance Armstrong as well as athlete Oscar Pistorius, who killed his girlfriend.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Maria Sharapova is a brand ambassador for Porsche
Failed test
Ms Sharapova tested positive for meldonium, a substance she said she had been taking since 2006 for health issues.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) said she would be provisionally suspended from 12 March.
Ms Sharapova said: "I did fail the test and take full responsibility for it."
She said she had taken meldonium after being given it by her family doctor and had known the drug by the name mildronate.
"A few days ago, after I received a letter from the ITF, I found out it also has another name of meldonium, which I did not know," she said.
What is meldonium?
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Professor John Brewer says the drug is usually used to treat heart conditions
It is meant for angina patients but athletes like it because it helps their endurance and ability to recover from intensive exercise.
It is on the banned list now because Wada started seeing it in lots of samples and found it does have performance-enhancing properties.
It was on Wada's 'watchlist' for over a year and added to the banned list on 1 January.
Made in Latvia, it is widely available - without prescription and at low cost - in many east European countries, but it is not licensed in most western countries, including the United States.
It is thought that hundreds of athletes have been using it and there are a lot more cases in the pipeline.“The Trump team’s attempts to call his business dealings ‘out of bounds’ for the Special Counsel’s investigation are laughable. Trump’s Russian business dealings are inextricably linked with this investigation. Donald Trump sought and did business with powerful Russians – including many closely associated with the Kremlin – for thirty years. Then, the Russian government interfered in our election to help him win, and some of those same business partners appear to have played a role in the Kremlin’s efforts. The President is clearly just frightened at the prospect of having these deals scrutinized by law enforcement.” – DNC deputy communications director Adrienne Watson
Mueller is reportedly expanding his probe into several of Trump’s major business transactions with Russians. Here’s how each of those transactions are relevant to the Russia probe:
Trump’s partnership to bring the 2013 Miss Universe pageant to Russia for millions of dollars.
Relevance to Russia Probe: Trump’s business partner in the 2013 Miss Universe deal was Aras Agalarov, who has close ties to Putin, and is at the center of Donald Jr., Manafort and Kushner’s meeting at Trump Tower last summer. According to the email chain released by Donald Jr., Aras Agalarov met with Russia’s chief prosecutor and was offered negative information about Hillary Clinton, and his son arranged the now infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower where that information was passed on.
Trump’s partnership to develop the Trump SoHo property.
Relevance to Russia Probe: Trump SoHo has been dogged with allegations of fraud and money laundering, including allegations that the property received mysterious cash infusions from Russia and investors favored by Vladimir Putin. Trump’s business partners in that deal included former Soviet officials, convicted felons with Russian mafia ties, and executives with ties to Putin who went on to organize a meeting between Trump and Aras Agalarov.
Trump’s 2008 sale of his Palm Beach mansion to a Russian oligarch for $54 million in profit.
Relevance to Russia Probe: Trump sold his mansion to a Russian oligarch for $50 million more than it cost when he purchased it, without ever stepping foot inside of it. In 2010, that same Russian oligarch purchased a 10 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus, which also figures prominently in the Special Counsel’s investigation because of its role in potential money laundering by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Moreover, this is just the largest of numerous real estate transactions that involve wealthy Russians putting money in Trump’s pockets. Donald Trump Jr. himself said that the Trump Organization sees “a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Whether it is Trump World Tower in New York City, or Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles, Trump relied on funding from the Russian elite for years leading up to the presidential campaign, which he funded with several large infusions of his own cash.By
The story goes that Scott Adams wanted to publish this as a one-page book, but he couldn’t find a publisher to do it. In fact, he is quoted as saying that “if God materialized on earth and wrote the secret of the universe on one page, he wouldn’t be able to find a publisher” either on CBS Marketwatch. Instead, he weaved it into a Dilbert cartoon-based book called Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels (368 pages).
Everything else you may want to do with your money is a bad idea compared to what’s on my one-page summary. You want an annuity? It’s worse. You want a whole life insurance policy? It’s worse. You want to invest in individual stocks? It’s worse. You want a managed mutual fund instead of an index fund? It’s worse. I could go on, but you get the point.
Overall, the book is pretty funny if you like Dilbert and understand the corporate hell that he lives in. Otherwise, without further ado, here is Dilbert’s One-Page Guide to Everything Financial:
Make a will. Pay off your credit cards. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support. Fund your 401k to the maximum. Fund your IRA to the maximum. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.
From Vanguard article:
Does Adams live by his financial rules? For the most part he does. Adams said he’s allergic to debt and makes a habit of saving half of his income. “I found that people who had massive credit card debt were asking me how they could invest in stocks, or how they could borrow money from their credit card to invest in stocks,” the cartoonist recalled. However, Adams said he no longer follows his rule to invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund. The best-selling author says he invests primarily in municipal bonds today, which are tax-exempt, and also owns land in his adopted home state of California.
If I had his amount of money, I’d probably be investing only in muni bonds as well!Today, I'm really excited to introduce to you three innovative community members: Nikolaj Ivancic, Charles Pockert and Jeroen Vinke. They've been working together to create native Aurelia components for the Kendo UI suite, as well as a number of other tools for "bridging" the gap between existing component libraries and Aurelia. I asked them to put together a blog post that we could share with you here, announcing and explaining their work. Read on to learn more about the Aurelia UI Toolkits project.
Introduction This article describes the motivation for, the work on and the structure of the project we named a bridge (Image 1 below) to indicate its primary purpose: to create the interface (an alternative word for a bridge in this context) for Aurelia application developers to KendoUI toolkit. This bridge is a structured, configurable collection of JavaScript classes that "wrap" KendoUI native controls, presenting them to the Aurelia developer in the form of Aurelia components. We started with the Aurelia standard plugin setup as the skeleton for our bridge application, carefully reviewed all KendoUI controls and decided to present KendoUI to Aurelia Developers in the form of the KendoUI Components Catalog. This catalog is an Aurelia application skilfully created to serve several important roles: During the bridge development process it allows the bridge developer to immediately verify the correct function of the "wrapper" code which presents the KendoUI native control as an Aurelia component.
It continuously shares the status of the project by providing rich navigation support demonstrating several different ways of using each component to render KendoUI controls (see image 2 below) By adding the extensive online help pages with installation instructions, several tutorials and samples, this catalog can be used as a teaching tool (Image 3 below): Offer a rich set of services that are used to simplify development of new bridges. See more at Informal definition of the bridge structure and development process and other articles referenced from there.
Why Aurelia? Aurelia is a next generation UI framework. Whether you're building apps for the browser, mobile or desktop, Aurelia can enable you to not only create amazing UI, but do it in a way that is maintainable, testable and extensible. Aurelia is just JavaScript. However, it's not yesterday's JavaScript, but the JavaScript of tomorrow. By using modern tooling we've been able to write Aurelia from the ground up in ECMAScript 2016. This means we have native modules, classes, decorators and more at our disposal...and you have them too. Not only is Aurelia written in modern and future JavaScript, but it also takes a modern approach to architecture. In the past, frameworks have been monolithic beasts. Not Aurelia though. It's built as a series of collaborating libraries. Taken together, they form a powerful and robust framework for building Single Page Apps (SPAs). However, Aurelia's libraries can often be used individually, in traditional web sites or even on the server-side through technologies like NodeJS. Aurelia is open source, but unlike much open source in the JavaScript space, Aurelia is an official product with commercial backing. If your business is going to spend significant money building software, you want to do it on a platform that's committed to you as a customer. You want to be able to form a relationship with your technology provider to ensure that you and your developers have a solid platform upon which to build your business now and in the years to come.
Why KendoUI? Kendo UI is an HTML5 user interface framework for building |
reinstated after his acquittal, Oquendo claims that he was wrongly reassigned from his post after the mess — and that he’s put in for his retirement because of the unfair switch.
“We will review the suit when we are served and respond accordingly,” said a city law department spokesman of Oquendo’s case.It was dusk and bats swooped the fields. The peshmerga bases glowed like bonfires along the front. The foreign fighters had climbed to the roof of the house to talk away from their peshmerga hosts.
“Scientists came up with this theory,” Jones said. “You can’t observe something without changing it.”
“Reality might change now,” Park agreed. “It’s like Schrödinger’s cat. You know we can’t ever see things for what they are because even to observe things changes them.”
Everyone agreed Park had gotten the name of the theory wrong, but no one knew which one was the right one.
“I’m talking about how you can’t see things in a pure way,” Jones said. “The fact is even when a journalist comes it’s almost impossible for them to actually see us. It’s almost like we are acting in an unnatural state.”
“That’s right. You being around changes things. This means we might not get to the front,” Cory said. “We’re out here, you’re out here. What the hell is everybody else doing? If the Holocaust had happened to the Jews in the time of Facebook, how many people would have sat back and let it happen? There is genocide going on. Why is it so hard to do good?”
“The naïveté,” Jones said, “comes from the belief that everything that happens in the world is happening on a television screen.”
“We are men of action,” Park said. “It hurts.”
Colonel Hamzo came up the stairs with a group of his soldiers and pointed flashlights in our eyes. One of the soldiers walked to the edge of the roof and searched the fields. The beam was thick and bright. Colonel Hamzo slipped his hands over Park’s shoulders. Choni, he said. Something was on the way. Two large armored vehicles on our side of the hills.
“What? Daesh is coming? This is great news,” Park said. “If it has wheels, we can shoot it. We can jack it.”
The colonel gave no commands.
At two in the morning, we were eating meat by a fire in the yard when Ahmed stopped by to announce that the militants were on their way. He wrapped a kaffiyeh around his head and tied a knot in the back so it hung down his neck like a ponytail.
“You look like Geronimo,” Cory said.
“We killed a big boss today,” Ahmed said.
The boss was Abu Alaa al-Afari, and he was second in command to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. They had caught him at the Martyrs Mosque in a village outside Tal Afar. The peshmerga slipped ammunition vests packed tight with magazine rounds over their heads. They retrieved their weapons, and piled into three trucks. The foreign fighters joined them.
Colonel Hamzo removed his vest and put it on me. He handed me an AK-47, took my photo, and retrieved his rifle. Then we left. I rode with Colonel Hamzo and three others in the back of his Land Cruiser. We drove for ten minutes. The grass was deep and the road dark. The foreigners were in the truck ahead of us.
The driver turned on his low beams. Stray dogs loped in and out of the lights. What sounded like a chant broke the silence. The colonel turned up the volume on the radio. It was Kurdish propaganda music, a bolster for death and patriotism. “Peshmerga. Peshmerga. Peshmerga,” the voice said. A video screen lit up the center dashboard, showing images of soldiers eating meat or marching. Colonel Hamzo moved his hands to the music. He lit a cigarette and flicked the ashes at the dogs.
The base was nothing but a single makeshift bunker, a lean-to of sorts fashioned out of sandbags and old blankets. Soldiers crowded beneath a yolk-colored light. The air was cold. Beyond the edge of the base there was nothing but blackness, the abyss of the Islamic State. Park ran off to man a PKM machine gun. Jones handed me a glow stick. “Wave this around if you disappear,” he said. The shelter was rimmed with floodlights and the peshmerga outside stood casually illuminated. One of the trucks attempted to turn around but got stuck. It kicked dust, and the wheels groaned.
Colonel Hamzo walked calmly into the shelter and sat on a cot with his legs crossed. I followed him inside. Jones and Cory sat across from each other. Cory had brought along a PSL Romanian Sniper Rifle and Jones an AK-47 assault rifle. The two sat on the edge of the cots with the gun between their legs and ping-ponged military jargon.
Cory said he had first two and then every other. Jones asked Cory if it was a nine or a six. Cory said it was a one. Jones said let’s crank it six because a six is zero plus five plus four. Jones wished for z-mags. Cory wanted infrared laser. “If we hit the IR-7s on the sevens with laser, we’d go far,” Cory said. Jones guaranteed infrared in the green beam. Cory swapped mag rounds. He said he’d keep one molly if Jones racked it. Jones said look for the red magnesium tag on the rear. Cory said he felt good with that dope, hold low for close or high for far. He’d roll.
So many days without a mission, without fighting. It seemed to have built up a pressure inside them, and we were beginning to see it fissure.
“I can’t wait to get out there,” Jones said. “You are lucky you get to see this.”
Cory clicked a magazine into place and stood up. The peshmerga were all staring open-jawed or laying on their backs smoking. “I feel like I am the center of attention right now,” Cory said.
A moment passed. The colonel spoke with Ahmed. A few soldiers went in and out. “What are we waiting for?” I asked.
“Something to happen,” Cory said.
Colonel Hamzo pressed his hands together. “Let’s have chai,” the Colonel said. I leaned over to Cory who sat to my right. “Why are we drinking tea?”
“Fuck if I know,” he said.
The peshmerga smoked. Cory sat back down and I continued writing. Colonel Hamzo asked if I was done yet. He nodded towards my notebook, and I had the distinct feeling that this was a set up, the whole thing was staged; the foreigners equally towed in.
The colonel put extra sugar in my tea, and then he ordered everyone back into the vehicles, and we returned to the base.
Back in the colonel’s quarters the foreign fighters lounged on the floor and ate plates of fruit. “It’s time to sing,” Colonel Hamzo said. There was an awkward pause: No one volunteered.
“Every night,” Park said. “Not a day gone by we don’t work in Top Gun.” He pulled out his iPhone and nodded his head to “Highway to the Danger Zone.”
“Hey, Boss,” Cory said to the colonel. “I don’t remember you singing.”
Colonel Hamzo shook his head and swatted the air with his hands. No one would sleep until the Americans sang.
“OK,” Park said. “Guys?” He sighed. “Star-Spangled Banner?”
Park unpacked an American flag that he had brought with him to Iraq from Georgia. “Got to get out the flag,” he said. They all sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” but didn’t make it to the end. They didn’t know the words. So they tried a tune from Team America: World Police.
“America,” they sang. “Fuck Yeah!”
The photo of Louis Park originally incorrectly stated that he was at a peshemerga base near Tal Afar.Richard The Lionheart Massacres
The Saracens, 1191
Printer Friendly Version >>> In the year 1187, the Muslim leader Saladin re-conquered the city of Jerusalem [see "The Crusaders Capture Jerusalem"] as well as most of the Crusader strongholds throughout the Holy Land. In response, the kings of Europe including Frederick Babarossa of Germany (who died on route), Phillip of France and Richard I of England (the Lionheart) mounted a campaign to rescue the city. The Third Crusade was underway. Key to the campaign's success was the capture of the port city of Acre. King Richard arrived on the scene in June 1191 to find the city under siege by a Christian army. In the distance, Saladin threatened - his army too weak to overwhelm the besiegers, but too strong to be dislodged.
Intensifying the bombardment of the city, Richard and the French King, Phillip, slowly broke the city's walls, weakening its defenses while simultaneously starving the occupiers into submission. Finally, on July 12, the Muslim defenders and Crusaders agreed to surrender terms. In exchange for sparing the lives of the defenders, Saladin would pay a ransom of 200,000 gold pieces, release some 1500 Christian prisoners and return the Holy Cross. These actions were to be accomplished within one month after the fall of the city. Richard would hold 2,700 Muslim prisoners as hostage until the terms were met. Saladin immediately ran into problems meeting his part of the bargain and the deadline came without payment of the terms. As a compromise, Saladin proposed that Richard release his prisoners in return for part of the ransom with the remainder to be paid at a later date. Saladin would provide hostages to Richard to assure payment. Alternatively, he proposed to give Richard what money he had and allow Richard to keep the prisoners in return for Christian hostages to be held until the remainder of the money was raised and the Muslim prisoners released. Richard countered that he would accept the partial payment but Saladin must accept his royal promise to release his prisoners when he received the remainder of the ransom. Neither ruler would accept his opponent's terms. Richard declared the lives of the Muslim defenders of Acre forfeit and set August 20 as the date for their execution. Slaughter In The Desert Beha-ed-Din was a member of Saladin's court and (along with much of the Saracen army who watched from a distance) witnessed the massacre of 2,700 of his comrades: "Then the king of England, seeing all the delays interposed by the Sultan to the execution of the treaty, acted perfidiously as regards his Musulinan prisoners. On their yielding the town he had engaged to grant their life, adding that if the Sultan carried out the bargain he would give them freedom and suffer them to carry off their children and wives; if the Sultan did not fulfill his engagements they were to be made slaves. Now the king broke his promises to them and made open display of what he had till now kept hidden in his heart, by carrying out what he had intended to do after he had received the money and the Frank prisoners. It is thus that people of his nation ultimately admitted. In the afternoon of Tuesday, 27 Rajab, [August 20] about four o'clock, he came out on horseback with all the Frankish army, knights, footmen, Turcoples, and advanced to the pits at the foot of the hill of Al 'Ayadiyeh, to which place be had already sent on his tents. The Franks, on reaching the middle of the plain that stretches between this hill and that of Keisan, close to which place the sultan's advanced guard had drawn back, ordered all the Musulman
prisoners, whose martyrdom God had decreed for this day, to be brought before him. They numbered more than three thousand and were all bound with ropes. The Franks then flung themselves upon them all at once and massacred them with sword and lance in cold blood. Our advanced guard had already told the Sultan of the enemy's movements and he sent it some reinforcements, but only after the massacre. The Musulmans, seeing what was being done to the prisoners, rushed against the Franks and in the combat, which lasted till nightfall, several were slain and wounded on either side. On the morrow morning our people gathered at the spot and found the Musulmans stretched out upon the ground as martyrs for the faith. They even recognised some of the dead, and the sight was a great affliction to them. The enemy had only spared the prisoners of note and such as were strong enough to work. The motives of this massacre are differently told; according to some, the captives were slain by way of reprisal for the death of those Christians whom the Musulmans had slain. Others again say that the king of England, on deciding to attempt the conquest of Ascalon, thought it unwise to leave so many prisoners in the town after his departure. God alone knows what the real reason was. " References:
Beha-ed-Din, his account appears in Archer, T.A., The Crusade of Richard I (1889); Gillingham, John, The Life and Times of Richard I (1973). How To Cite This Article:
"Richard The Lionheart Massacres The Saracens, 1191," EyeWitness to History, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com (2001).Tesla ’s Elon Musk transformed electric cars into objects of desire. Can Proterra do the same for the electric city bus?
Nope. It’s not even trying.
“Not sexy, for sure,” Josh Ensign, the electric bus start-up’s chief operating officer, said with a laugh.
But looks aren’t everything. The market for battery-powered electric buses seems ready to rocket. Orders in the U.S. are gaining traction.
On Wednesday, Proterra said it had raised $55 million in investment capital atop $290 million raised earlier. The new money comes from Al Gore’s investment fund and BMW’s venture capital arm. GM Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers had already chipped in.
Proterra Chief Executive Ryan Popple said an initial public stock offering might happen this year or next.
The Silicon Valley company is increasing its presence in California, with a new factory in the City of Industry, southeast of Los Angeles, to supplement an existing plant in Greeneville, S.C.
“There’s a level of interest in this field that there wasn’t five years ago,” said Popple, a former finance director at Tesla. (Ensign left Tesla last year as head of manufacturing.)
Before Proterra starting building buses here, Amazon used the space as a temporary holiday distribution center. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Climbing aboard the green economy
About 56,000 public transit system buses are operating in the U.S. Most burn diesel or gasoline fuel and spew nasty fumes from internal combustion engines into the atmosphere.
Urban transit districts are swapping those out for more environment-friendly diesel-electric hybrids and buses that run on compressed natural gas.
But only pure-electric buses emit no pollution from the tailpipe, and themselves contribute no greenhouse gases.
Battery costs have declined over the last few years. Electric bus makers claim they will cut the operating costs for public transit agencies, and agencies that have tested them agree.
“No doubt, electric buses are the future of bus transportation,” said Jerome Lutin, a consultant who spent 20 years as an executive with NJ Transit in New Jersey.
California is set to emerge as a center for electric bus engineering, design and manufacturing. And Proterra isn’t the only game in town.
A U.S. offshoot of Chinese battery and vehicle maker BYD (it stands for Build Your Dreams) manufactures electric buses in Lancaster. The company and its 600 employees also make trucks, battery packs, LED lighting systems and battery storage systems, and the operation is expanding.
Complete Coach Works retrofits buses with electric powertrains in Riverside. Ebus makes fast charging stations for electric buses in Downey.
Josh Ensign, Proterra chief operating officer, with Paul Mottram, plant manager. (Russ Mitchell / Los Angeles Times)
Traditional bus makers Gillig, based in Livermore, Calif., and New Flyer in Canada’s Manitoba province, offer electric models.
Electrics represent a tiny fraction of total bus sales. Fewer than 1% of transit system buses across the U.S. are pure battery powered.
Price is a big reason. The numbers vary with models and options, but a 40-foot diesel bus costs roughly $525,000, while the same size of pure electric goes for nearly $775,000. Natural gas and hybrid buses are somewhere in between.
But consider lifetime costs, not just the upfront cost, electric bus enthusiasts say. Electricity is cheaper than diesel fuel or gasoline, in most places, most of the time. An electric vehicle’s simpler powertrain means lower maintenance and repair costs.
New York City would save 12.5% over 12 years in purchase and operating costs if it bought an electric bus instead of a diesel, a 2016 study from Columbia University concluded – with bigger savings if the vehicle lasted longer, as most buses do.
Foothill Transit, which covers 22 cities from downtown L.A. to the east, tried out Proterra buses in 2010 and stuck with them. The agency operates 17 electric buses, all from Proterra, in its 382-bus fleet. It has ordered 13 more, and that’s only the start. The top of Foothill’s website trumpets: “We’re going all electric by 2030!”
"The technology is very robust," said Doran Barnes, Foothill’s executive director. "We've had very few problems."
Until recently, limited range was a high hurdle for electric buses. But that issue is fading as battery technology improves.
Proterra recently began selling its latest model, the Catalyst E2, with a 350-mile range. That’s enough to run a full day on most routes, Barnes said. BYD’s longest range is 275 miles, but the company said it will have a 350-mile model within a year.
Proterra worker Manny Almanza builds out a bus interior. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Electric buses delivered and on order, at about $775,000 each Proterra Delivered: 109
On order: 291 BYD Delivered: 112
On order: 338
A place for everything, everything in its place. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
Driving down costs
Whatever agencies might save in fleet operations, Proterra knows it needs to deal with sticker shock for the technology to be tenable in the long term. “Our goal is to get down to the same selling price as diesel,” Ensign said.
The battery is the biggest cost. The same is true in electric cars. Costs are coming down but not fast enough yet to compete, head to head, with combustion engines.
Proterra and BYD America are duking it out over batteries as well as buses. Proterra assembles its own battery packs. BYD started out as a battery company in China and boasts its own battery cell technology. Both are hard at work trying to boost battery performance while lowering costs.
Bus making remains an old fashioned business, relying more on human handiwork than robot automation. More efficient manufacturing could bring prices down.
Proterra has been building buses in its Greeneville, S.C., factory since 2011. The new City of Industry plant gives the company a chance to refine the building process.
The plant manager is Paul Mottram, 49, a native of Liverpool, England, whose accent is pure Ringo. An aerospace industry veteran, Mottram began his career with Toyota in the United Kingdom, where he was steeped in that company’s famed “lean” manufacturing system, which relies on bottom-up employee participation for continuous improvement.
Derik Stone and Manny Almanza play giant Jenga on their lunch break. Proterra gives them 45 minutes. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
He joined Proterra, he said, thrilled at the idea of a manufacturing operation built from scratch.
“We’re creating the culture today that we want to have in the future,” he said. “You don’t get many chances in your lifetime to be in a start-up company with this kind of greenfield opportunity.”
About 40 employees are at work inside the massive, windowless City of Industry warehouse, which is like every other building in eyesight. Except for some drilling, it’s more quiet than you’d expect. No cacaphonous clanging from metal stamping machines here. White carbon-fiberglass shells have been shipped in from a company that makes fiberglass bodies for the Chevy Corvette. Workers attach batteries, motors, suspension systems, window glass and passenger seats.
“Our first bus took a year to build,” said Brett Jorgensen, drill in hand. “Now we’re aiming at a bus a day, and we’re getting close to that.”
Jorgensen, 39, moved to L.A. from the South Carolina plant. He nodded with a wide smile when asked if he’s happy about that. Most workers are local.
Mottram said the L.A. area is rich in manufacturing talent, and “we’re only looking for rock stars and A-players.” At least as important as technical skill, he said, is “personal charm,” a taste for constant improvement, and eagerness to work on a team. The plant will hire at least 20 more workers this year, with more to come if the company continues to grow.
Workers line up cables under an electric bus. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
How much it can grow, and how fast, is a big question for Proterra employees, and for its venture capital investors.
Politics plays a big part in bus industry funding. Government, through taxes, pays the bulk of transit system costs, including new bus purchases.
Federal and state demonstration grants have kick-started the electric bus industry. Proterra’s City of Industry plant won a $3-million grant from the California Energy Commission. While California officials double down on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, continued support from the Trump administration and the Republican Congress is questionable, at best.
Diesel engines on mass-transit buses have few fans, but not all transit agencies are ready to give up on natural gas. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority plans to order 1,000 new buses soon: 200 electric, 800 natural gas. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti sent Metro a letter in May, pushing it to go 100% electric by 2030.
Whether it’s 200 or 1,000 electric buses, Proterra and BYD are fighting hard for those orders. Beyond their products, Proterra is pushing its American roots and BYD, its unionized workforce.
BYD’s senior vice president, Macy Neshati, also takes a dig at Proterra’s start-up status: “Proterra makes a lot of noise right now, but it would be unprecedented for a start-up company like that to survive in this market.”
If it thrives, Proterra will need to expand to other markets at some point to reach levels of growth that venture capitalists demand. Each year, transit agencies purchase about 5,000 buses, with order growth expected at a decent but unspectacular 8% rate, according to research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.
Proterra envisions itself moving into school buses, motor coaches, garbage trucks, delivery vans, even railroad yard switching engines.
First though, it has got to prove it can bring some sizzle to the unsexy transit bus.Though the Cloak and Dagger series obviously gets first billing, Freeform is cooking up another genre project that should pique the interest of British sci-fi fans.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the cable network (formerly known as ABC Family) is rebooting the cult hit British sci-fi series Misfits as part of a broader push into a new development direction. The report doesn’t note anything about carryover talent from the British version, and the reboot will be produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage (Chuck, The O.C.).
if you’ve never seen (or even heard of) the original series, you’re not alone. The British series ran for five short seasons from 2009-2013 on E4, but never really broke through to mainstream success (though it was a modest hit on Hulu for a hot second). It focused on a group of troubled youths who gain superpowers during a freak electrical storm, and just on paper, that sounds like a good fit for the teen-skewing audience at Freeform.
The series itself was a crazy, hilarious, sci-fi romp. It was also notorious for zooming through cast members, so if Freeform wanted to keep a revolving door of pretty young people, it’d fit with the franchise.
It’s worth noting: Between Misfits, and Cloak and Dagger, it feels like Freeform could be making a play for that supernatural/superhero sweet spot The CW has been enjoying the past few seasons.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)"Any so-called leader who doesn't take this issue seriously or treats it like a joke is not fit to lead."
The upcoming Paris United Nations climate change conference in November/December is looking more and more likely to be the defining global political moment on climate change that Copenhagen was supposed to be back in 2009. Major countries like China, Brazil and France have been falling over each other to try and make Paris a success, which has led to more than a few moments of national embarrassment for Australia.
At the Brisbane G20 summit last year America and China announced an historic agreement to work together on cutting their carbon emissions, despite Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s best efforts to keep climate change off the agenda altogether. Obama’s speech to Queensland uni students at the start of the summit, where he encouraged young people to “keep raising your voices” on climate change and declared “leaders must be held accountable” if they failed to act, was widely interpreted as a rebuke of nations like Australia who’ve been dragging their feet on the issue.
But those remarks are pretty mild compared to what he just came up with in Alaska, which he’s visiting as part of a ten-day “climate tour” to talk up the need for aggressive US climate policy.
“Let’s go to Alaska!” Go behind the scenes with @POTUS as he previews his trip to the frontlines of climate change. http://t.co/WJw0WUcocl — The White House (@WhiteHouse) September 1, 2015
Speaking to representatives of numerous governments at the GLACIER Conference of Arctic nations in Anchorage earlier today our time, Obama made some extremely blunt statements about how bad climate change is going to get if we don’t do something about it, and criticised the slowness of governments to act thus far.
“We’re not moving fast enough. None of the nations represented here are moving fast enough,” Obama said, sounding like your loving but constantly disappointed uncle in one of his rare moments of anger:
“This is within our power. This is a solvable problem if we start now. We’re starting to see that enough consensus is being built internationally, and within each of our own body politics, that we may have the political will — finally — to get moving.
“The time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is passed. The time to plead ignorance is surely passed. Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone. They are on their own shrinking island.
“If we were to abandon our course of action … we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair.
“Any leader willing to take a gamble on a future like that — any so-called leader who doesn’t take this issue seriously or treats it like a joke — is not fit to lead.”
Entirely unrelated, here is the current leader of Australia treating climate change like a joke.
In fairness to Abbott, that video is from 2008, and he’s since said he supports the science of climate change. On the other hand, he also made us the only country on Earth to repeal a nationwide carbon emissions reduction policy and is actively torching the renewable energy sector, so screw him.
“This year, in Paris, has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet we’ve got while we still can,” Obama said in that speech. Signs are increasingly pointing to the world’s largest and most powerful nations agreeing with him. If the G20 was bad for Abbott, Paris is going to be a bloodbath.GCC 4.3 Release Series
Porting to the New Tools
The GCC 4.3 release series differs from previous GCC releases in more than the usual list of new features. Some of these changes are a result of bug fixing, and some old behaviors have been intentionally changed in order to support new standards, or relaxed in standards-conforming ways to facilitate compilation or runtime performance. Some of these changes are not visible to the naked eye, and will not cause problems when updating from older GCC versions.
However, some of these changes are visible, and can cause grief to users porting to GCC 4.3. This document is an effort to identify major issues and provide clear solutions in a quick and easily-searched manner. Additions and suggestions for improvement are welcome.
C language issues
Semantic change of extern inline
When compiling with -std=c99 or -std=gnu99, the extern inline keywords changes meaning. GCC 4.3 conforms to the ISO C99 specification, where extern inline is very different thing than the GNU extern inline extension. For the following code compiled with -std=c99,
extern inline int foo() { return 5; }
Will result in a function definition for foo being emitted in the subsequent object file, whereas previously there was none. As a result, files that use this extension and compile in the C99 dialect will see many errors of the form:
multiple definition of `foo' first defined here
When linking together multiple object files.
If the old GNU extern inline behavior is desired, one can use extern inline __attribute__((__gnu_inline__)). The use of this attribute can be guarded by #ifdef __GNUC_STDC_INLINE__ which is a macro which is defined when inline has the ISO C99 behavior. Alternatively the code can be compiled with the -fgnu89-inline option.
The resulting, changed code looks like:
extern inline __attribute__((__gnu_inline__)) int foo() { return 5; }
New warnings
Significant changes were made to -Wconversion. In addition, improvements to the GCC infrastructure allow improvements in the ability of several existing warnings to spot problematic code. As such, new warnings may exist for previously warning-free code that uses -Wuninitialized, -Wstrict-aliasing, -Wunused-function, -Wunused-variable. Note that -Wall subsumes many of these warning flags.
Although these warnings will not result in compilation failure, often -Wall is used in conjunction with -Werror and as a result, new warnings are turned into new errors.
As a workaround, remove -Werror until the new warnings are fixed, or for conversion warnings add -Wno-conversion.
C++ language issues
Header dependency cleanup
As detailed here (Header dependency streamlining), many of the standard C++ library include files have been edited to only include the smallest possible number of additional files. As such, many C++ programs that used std::memcpy without including <cstring>, or used std::auto_ptr without including <memory> will no longer compile.
Usually, this error is of the form:
error:'strcmp' was not declared in this scope
The table below shows some of the missing items, and the header file that will have to be added as an #include for the compile to succeed.
If missing Then include this header find, for_each, sort <algorithm> ostream_iterator, istream_iterator <iterator> auto_ptr <memory> typeid <typeinfo> isalnum, toupper <cctype> INT_MIN, INT_MAX, RAND_MAX <climits> printf <cstdio> atoi, free, rand, exit <cstdlib> EXIT_FAILURE <cstdlib> strcmp, strdup, strcpy, memcpy <cstring>
Removal of Pre-ISO headers
Various backwards and deprecated headers have been removed.
If missing Then include this header <algobase.h> <algorithm> <algo.h> <algorithm> <alloc.h> <memory> <bvector.h> <vector> <complex.h> <complex> <defalloc.h> <memory> <deque.h> <deque> <fstream.h> <fstream> <function.h> <functional> <hash_map.h> <tr1/unordered_map> <hashtable.h> <tr1/unordered_map> or <tr1/unordered_set> <heap.h> <queue> <iomanip.h> <iomanip> <iostream.h> <iostream> <istream.h> <istream> <iterator.h> <iterator> <list.h> <list> <map.h> <map> <multimap.h> <map> <multiset.h> <set> <new.h> <new> <ostream.h> <ostream> <pair.h> <utility> <queue.h> <queue> <rope.h> <ext/rope> <set.h> <set> <slist.h> <ext/slist> <stack.h> <stack> <streambuf.h> <streambuf> <stream.h> <iostream> <tempbuf.h> <ext/memory> <tree.h> <ext/rb_tree> or <ext/pb_ds/assoc_container.hpp> <vector.h> <vector>
For future reference, available headers are listed in the libstdc++ manual.
An example.
#include <iostream.h> int main() { cout << "I'm too old" << endl; return 0; }
Compiling with previous compilers gives:
warning: #warning This file includes at least one deprecated or antiquated header. Please consider using one of the 32 headers found in section 17.4.1.2 of the C++ standard. Examples include substituting the <X> header for the <X.h> header for C++ includes, or <iostream> instead of the deprecated header <iostream.h>. To disable this warning use -Wno-deprecated.
But now says:
error: iostream.h: No such file or directory In function 'int main()': 6: error: 'cout' was not declared in this scope 6: error: 'endl' was not declared in this scope
Fixing this is easy, as demonstrated below.
#include <iostream> using namespace std; int main() { cout << "I work again" << endl; return 0; }
Note that explicitly qualifying cout as std::cout and likewise for endl instead of globally injecting the std namespace (ie, using namespace std ) will also work.
Name lookup changes
GCC by default no longer accepts code such as
template <class _Tp> class auto_ptr {}; template <class _Tp> struct counted_ptr { auto_ptr<_Tp> auto_ptr(); };
but will issue the diagnostic
error: declaration of 'auto_ptr<_Tp> counted_ptr<_Tp>::auto_ptr()' error: changes meaning of 'auto_ptr' from 'class auto_ptr<_Tp>'
The reference to struct auto_ptr needs to be qualified here, or the name of the member function changed to be unambiguous.
template <class _Tp> class auto_ptr {}; template <class _Tp> struct counted_ptr { ::auto_ptr<_Tp> auto_ptr(); };
In addition, -fpermissive can be used as a temporary workaround to convert the error into a warning until the code is fixed. Note that then in some case name lookup will not be standard conforming.
Duplicate function parameters
Duplicate function parameters are now treated uniformly as an error in C and C++.
void foo(int w, int w);
Now gives the following, re-worded error for both C and C++:
error: multiple parameters named 'w'
To fix, rename one of the parameters something unique.
void foo(int w, int w2);
Stricter requirements for function main signature
The two-argument signature for main has int as the first argument. GCC 4.3 rigorously enforces this.
int main(unsigned int m, char** c) { return 0; }
Gives:
error: first argument of 'int main(unsigned int, char**)' should be 'int'
Fixing this is straightforward: change the first argument to be of type int, not unsigned int. As transformed:
int main(int m, char** c) { return 0; }
Explicit template specialization cannot have a storage class
Specializations of templates cannot explicitly specify a storage class, and have the same storage as the primary template. This is a change from previous behavior, based on the feedback and commentary as part of the ISO C++ Core Defect Report 605.
template<typename T> static void foo(); template<> static void foo<void>();
Gives:
error: explicit template specialization cannot have a storage class
This also happens with the extern specifier. Fixing this is easy: just remove any storage specifier on the specialization. Like so:
template<typename T> static void foo(); template<> void foo<void>();
Java issues
Java 1.2 and earlier requires upgraded ant
The use of the Eclipse Java compiler in GCC 4.3 enables the use of all 1.5 language features, but use with older versions of the ant build tool are problematic. Typical errors of this sort look like:
[javac] source level should be comprised in between '1.3' and '1.6' (or '5', '5.0',..., '7' or '7.0'): 1.2
To successfuly use the earlier java dialects with GCC, please use this patch:
svn diff -r529854:529855 http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/ant/core/trunk/src/main/org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/compilers/DefaultCompilerAdapter.java
Links
Jakub Jelinek, Mass rebuild status with gcc-4.3.0-0.4 of rawhide-20071220
Brian M. Carlson, GCC 4.3: Declaration of...Changes Meaning of...
Simon Baldwin, [PATCH][RFC] C++ error for parameter redefinition in function prototypes
Simon Baldwin, [REVISED PATCH][RFC] Fix PR c++/31923: Storage class with explicit template specializationMedia playback is not supported on this device Danny Willett & caddie Jonathan Smart relive magical Masters win in 2016
Players Championship Venue: TPC Sawgrass, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida Dates: 11-14 May Coverage: Live text commentary on the BBC Sport website on Saturday and Sunday
Danny Willett has split with caddie Jonathan Smart just over a year after winning the Masters at Augusta.
The pair have been friends since their teens but had a disagreement during April's RBC Heritage event, with Willett eventually missing the cut.
Smart felt mistreated and left his role, "effectively sacking" Willett, 29, mid-tournament, according to BBC golf correspondent Iain Carter.
"Things are a bit stale and kind of fizzled out," Wil |
had hoped the new regulations might kick in before this year’s mid-term elections.
“I think it’s unfortunate that new rules will be delayed even further and that we’re going through another election cycle” without them, said Paul S. Ryan, senior counsel with the Campaign Legal Center.
Others called the delay a prudent step that would give the IRS an opportunity to get a crucial change right.
“They’re not going to put out some slapdash rule just to check it off their list,” said John Pomeranz, a Washington lawyer who works with nonprofits that spend money on politics. He doesn’t expect the agency to finish the rules any time soon. “I think we’ll be lucky if they’re in place for the 2016 election.”
Social welfare nonprofits have poured money into politics since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, which allowed corporations, unions and nonprofits to spend unlimited money on elections.
Social welfare nonprofits spent more than $256 million in the 2012 cycle alone, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Campaign finance watchdogs have viewed their rise with concern, fearing the influence of so-called “dark” money from secret donors, and had called for more oversight from the IRS.
Under IRS regulations, the groups can spend some of their resources on politics, but must devote themselves mostly to social welfare to keep their nonprofit status. But the rules defining what is and isn’t politics are murky.
Late last year, the IRS moved to clarify the issue, but its proposal came under fire from both the left and the right.
Conservatives complained that the rules would stifle political speech. The American Civil Liberties Union chafed at a provision in the proposed rules that would prevent nonprofits from backing ads that even mentioned politicians in the two months before a general election.
“We have no doubt that the Service is acting with the best of intentions, but the proposed rule threatens to discourage or sterilize an enormous amount of political discourse in America,” the ACLU said in its written response to the proposal.
The plan was also criticized for impeding nonpartisan election work such as voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts.
The IRS, still facing fallout from accusations that it singled out the applications of conservative nonprofits for special scrutiny in the run-up to the 2012 election, decided it would make revisions.
“Given the diversity of views expressed and the volume of substantive input, we have concluded that it would be more efficient and useful to hold a public hearing after we publish the revised proposed regulation,” the agency said in statement.Barrasso Discusses Obamacare on CNN’s “State of the Union”
“The President did not need to destroy a good health care system to try to make a better one but that’s what we have now.”
Click Here to Watch Sen. Barrasso.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” this morning to discuss Obamacare and how the President’s latest fake “fix” is not a permanent cure for Americans hurt by his health care law.
Key excerpts of the interview:
On Americans Losing Coverage Due to Obamacare
“I’m a lot less concerned about the President and his legacy than I am about the lives of the people in my state in Wyoming and around the country who are being hurt by the policy of this health care law. They’re losing their coverage, millions. They are being hit by sticker shock. They can’t keep their doctors. And what the President has proposed is basically a false fix. It’s a political band aid—but it’s not a permanent cure for the people that are being hurt by his policies. So it’s time to start over with trying to get people the health care that they wanted from the beginning which was affordable care from their doctor that they choose.
On the State Health Care Choice Act
“Well, you know, Candy this past week I introduced legislation, the State Health Care Choice Act so states could make decisions if they wanted to opt-out of the individual mandate or the employer mandate for the people in their states. I’m concerned about getting people health care that they need and want and can afford and we don’t have those happening with these policies.
On Americans Being Forced to Pay for Policies They Don’t Want, Need
“The website is just the tip of the iceberg, but for every one person that’s been able to sign up, 40 people have gotten cancellation letters and, you know, the President may call these junk policies or substandard policies but they’re policies that work for those people. I was with a rancher yesterday in Wyoming in Laramie, others in Lusk who have gotten these letters and it didn’t meet the President’s standards because the insurance policy didn’t include maternity coverage, but this is a woman that’s had a hysterectomy. She shouldn’t have to pay for that kind of coverage.
On Republican Health Care Solutions
“Republican solutions are there. We need to level the playing field so that people who buy insurance individually at the same tax breaks as those who buy it and get it through work. We need to be able to let people to shop across state lines for better deals with insurance that works for them and their family not something the government says they have to have.
“In terms of pre-existing conditions, my wife’s a breast cancer survivor. She’s been through three operations, chemotherapy twice. I know how critical it is to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions have affordable insurance and states are able to do that. What we’re seeing is this failed website that’s just the tip iceberg of lost coverage, losing your doctor, higher premiums and the fraud that is coming even on the Healthcare.Gov website has been remarkable and the fraudsters are out there in force trying to take advantage and steal identity of the American people.
On the Need to Start Over on Health Care Reform
“It’s time to start over. This health care law is terribly flawed. It is broken. It has failed the American people because they’re losing their insurance, they’re losing their doctor, their premiums are going up. I think there is going to be a massive taxpayer bailout needed just to deal with the impact of this health care law. This is not what the American people wanted. The President did not need to destroy a good health care system to try to make a better one but that’s what we have now.”
###At issue is managing what can be conflicting dynamics — the need to get essential work done quickly and the potential for it to be done at exorbitant prices. With roads and bridges wiped out, schools across the island damaged and health care needs expected to soar, the repair contracts are just two of many that are expected to easily cost billions of dollars.
“We don’t do so well with emergency funding in this country,” said Leslie Paige, with Citizens Against Government Waste, a watchdog group. “We often do not see the final bill for these kinds of mistakes until after the fact, and the money is already gone.”
Representative Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican who is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee that is investigating the contract, said Whitefish served as a red flag. “Based on Whitefish, all of the contracts need to be looked at, especially from the beginning until there is a process we are comfortable with,” he said.
The situation in Puerto Rico is dire: According to the research firm Rhodium Group, this is the largest blackout in United States history. After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, power was knocked out at every home and business. On Sunday, 54 days later, the grid was working at 47.8 percent of capacity.
The Whitefish case has already influenced Puerto Rico’s recovery: President Trump agreed to increase aid to the island — but only if the Puerto Rican government does a better job of estimating costs. “We have a lot of work to do when it comes to grant-monitoring at all levels of government,” Brock Long, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told Congress recently, vowing not to commit “one dollar” to the Whitefish deal.
The Whitefish contract has been particularly problematic.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing power restoration in Puerto Rico, did not hire Whitefish because its prices were more than double what the agency considered reasonable, according to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
“They are paying $3 million for hotels and $80 a day each for food,” said Johnny Rodríguez Ortiz, president of the organization of retired electrical workers in Puerto Rico. “I just had lunch with my wife, and it cost me $14.”For the next six weeks, Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh is likely to spend a considerable amount of time rummaging through pictures on packets of condoms, contraceptives and other sexual wellness products.
Advertising
On Tuesday, a bench headed by Chief Justice of India T S Thakur sought a report from Singh on whether explicit pictures on condom packs were “actionable” and breached laws against obscenity.
“You tell us whether action can be taken on these ads or not… Take a look at the advertisements available on record and also others and then tell us what is your stand,” the bench told the ASG.
It asked Singh to sift through case files containing “objectionable” pictures on packets of condoms and contraceptives and apprise the court whether the ads complied with advertising norms and the law against obscenity.
“Do you have any plan to regulate such advertisements? Is there a way you can check what is going to be printed on these packets or can you take action only after these packets with pictures are available in the market? You also have to tell us if such advertisements may constitute a penal offence,” the bench told Singh.
The bench was hearing a batch of appeals filed by Hindustan Latex and a few other manufacturers of condoms and contraceptives against a 2008 order of the Madras High Court.
The High Court, while deciding a PIL, had directed condom manufacturers to keep their packaging and ads free of “sexy” pictures on the ground that they were obscene and an affront to Indian culture. It had asked them to obtain permission from Advertising Standards Council of India for condom ads and packaging. In September 2008, the apex court had stayed the High Court order, thereby allowing manufacturers to continue using such pictures.
In February, the bench asked the government and the Central Board of Film Certification to clarify their stand regarding ads on packets of condoms and contraceptives.
On Tuesday, Singh sought to explain to the bench that the Censor Board certifies a film for theatrical exhibition while the ads on cable and private satellite TV channels are obligated to adhere to Advertising Codes under Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995. The rules, the government’s affidavit said, mandates that no ads shall be permitted if it projects a derogatory image of women or emphasises passive submissive qualities or encourages them to play a subordinate secondary role in the family and society. But for print ads, Singh said, there is “no pre-censorship” by the government and this is in accordance with the policy to uphold the freedom of press. “However, there are other provisions under which we can take action if the advertisements violate any law or regulation,” he said.
Advertising
It was after this submission by the ASG that the bench observed that since the government admittedly has no pre-censorship, it should now examine these ads and report back on their legality. The bench posted the matter after six weeks.L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti in his City Hall office. Paintings by L.A. artists Ed Moses and Ed Ruscha hang on the walls behind him. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)
It is an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that everything you need to know about Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti you can learn by looking around his office.
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Garcetti, 44, a trim, square-jawed Democrat with short dark hair who bears a passing resemblance to the actor Ty Burrell, the self-described “cool dad” on ABC’s Modern Family, peeled off his precisely tailored gray suit jacket and sat down to sign a stack of prewritten letters.
While he scribbled his name again and again, I wandered around Room 300, the grand, vaulted space on the third floor of L.A.’s City Hall where every mayor since 1928 has carried out his official duties. A longtime city councilman representing hip East Side enclaves such as Echo Park and Silver Lake — the L.A. equivalents of Brooklyn — Garcetti defeated his general-election opponent, Democratic City Controller Wendy Greuel, by nearly 10 percentage points in 2013. After taking office, the new mayor agreed to leave Room 300’s gilded art deco ceiling intact, but decided that everything else would have to go.
He soon set about redecorating. “I wanted to curate bits and pieces of me and, more importantly, of the city,” Garcetti told me later, “so when people come in here they’re like, ‘OK, I get it.’”
This is not an unusual impulse for new officeholders. But in Garcetti’s case, the makeover was especially literal, as if the mayor’s entire persona had been turned inside out and fastidiously apportioned throughout the room. It is a persona that has served him well. In 2013, there were barely any policy differences between Garcetti and Greuel; the reason Garcetti won had as much to do, analysts concluded, with how uncannily he seemed to embody L.A.’s idea of itself — cool, elite, tech-savvy, liberal, multicultural, and aesthetically pleasing — as anything else.
“You get the sense,” a longtime California politico recently told me, “that David Axelrod could have created this guy in a laboratory.”
Which brings us to Garcetti’s office. One whole wall is taken up by bookshelves, which in turn are filled with tchotchkes. Garcetti is not only L.A.’s first Jewish mayor; he is also Latino and speaks fluent Spanish. And so there is a coupling that commemorates his melting-pot ethnicity: a pair of Italian flag cufflinks by the Italian-Mexican jewelry designer Victor Sabido Basteris alongside a pair of colorful yarmulkes.
Imagine a particularly self-expressive magpie, and you begin to get the idea. Another vignette honors Garcetti’s prominent, and progressive, parentage: a stack of photography books (Paris and Women, Iron) by his dad, former L.A. District Attorney and O.J. Simpson prosecutor Gil Garcetti; a framed obituary of his mother’s father, Harry Roth, the legendary clothier who at the height of the Vietnam War famously took out a full-page ad in the New York Times urging his top client, Lyndon B. Johnson, to resign.
There is a still image from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. (In true Hollywood fashion, Garcetti played the mayor of Los Angeles on TNT’s The Closer years before he got the gig in real life.) There is a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal to indicate that Garcetti has served in the Navy Reserve since 2006. There is a signed photo of Garcetti boarding Marine One with his “mentor,” President Obama (“Eric: It’s great to have you along on this wild ride”). And in the corner, there is an upright piano on which the mayor, who idolizes Keith Jarrett and Bill Evans and wrote musicals in college, can tinker with his own jazz compositions whenever the mood strikes.
Garcetti greets President Obama at LAX on Oct. 10, prior to a Democratic fundraiser. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
Perhaps the most arresting aspect of Garcetti’s office, however, is the luxe decor, which represents a kind of greatest hits of Los Angeles modernism and postmodernism: a pair of molded plywood chairs by Charles and Ray Eames; a Face Off table by Frank Gehry; a Tracery rug by contemporary Hollywood designer Kelly Wearstler; and on the walls, one gigantic Ed Moses painting, two equally gigantic Ed Ruschas, and a photograph by Catherine Opie. As a result, Room 300 now looks more like a spread from Dwell magazine than a politician’s place of business — an appropriate distinction for perhaps the only elected official in America whose own home, a meticulously renovated 1950s post-and-beam with solar panels and walls of glass, has actually appeared in Dwell.
“OK,” Garcetti said as he dotted the last of his i’s. “Done. My most important duty!”
I sat down at the long conference table that doubles as his desk. Nearby was a copy of If Mayors Ruled the World, a book in which political scientist Benjamin Barber argues that cities, and the mayors who run them, are better equipped to tackle the challenges of the 21st century than our planet’s increasingly divided, dysfunctional nations.
I’d been pondering a similar idea lately, but from a different angle. Republican governors currently outnumber their Democratic counterparts 31 to 18. The party’s congressional presence is paltry as well. Seventy percent of state legislatures and 55 percent of attorney general and secretary of state positions are in GOP hands. The Democratic bench is thin. At the same time, Democrats are increasingly becoming the party of city dwellers. Mayors may or may not represent the future of global governance — but could they at least represent the future of the Democratic Party?
I asked Garcetti what he thought.
“Yes, absolutely. There will be a time in the not-too-distant future when recent mayors, people like Julian Castro, who used to be the mayor of San Antonio, are being looked to for national leadership more and more,” he said. “It’s a problem. There’s a real generation gap. I’m not an ageist at all. I don’t mind that Bernie Sanders is 74, that Hillary Clinton is however old she is. But Democrats do need to have somebody whose playlist” — the mayor chuckled and leaned forward — “is a little more updated.”
I hadn’t mentioned the 2016 vice-presidential sweepstakes, but Garcetti began to talk about it anyway.
“I went through this with a friend recently,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Who would you put on a shortlist of five Democrats — off the top of your head — who should be vice president, for Hillary or whomever?’ And there aren’t, like, two or three superstars who jump out right away.”
Garcetti shook his head. “I mean, I’ve been on a number of panels,” he said, “and people have been like, ‘They should vet you!’”
I couldn’t tell whether he considered the idea intriguing, or ridiculous, or both.
*****
The correct answer, at least for now, is both.
On one hand, Garcetti is almost a parody of what red-state residents picture when they hear the word “Democrat”: fancy degree, fancy shoes, fancy house, fancy paintings; electric car, jazz piano, Jewish, Latino, Hollywood. In junior high, Garcetti belonged to a breakdancing crew, and he still knows how to pop and lock. He doesn’t just maintain his own nonmayoral Instagram account, to which he obsessively posts artsy images of Southland sunsets and architecture (followers: 81,000); these images are also the subject of an ongoing solo exhibition, “#MAYOR_OF_INSTAGRAM,” at a gallery downtown. He is enough of a hipster to have to deny that he is a hipster. He once jammed with Moby.
“My wife and I grow almost all our own food,” Garcetti told Paper magazine in a profile that likened him to a character “straight out of an episode of Portlandia.” “Chickens are in our near future.”
SLIDESHOW – #MAYOR_OF_INSTAGRAM >>>
“On the trail in Griffith Park.” (Eric Garcetti via Instagram)
On the other hand, San Antonio’s Julian Castro, 41, isn’t such a natural fit for the heartland, either. He is also Latino, also cosmopolitan, and also Ivy League-educated — yet he is basically the only name people ever drop when discussing the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential prospects. “I am going to really look hard at him for anything,” Hillary Clinton said earlier this month at a rally with Castro in San Antonio. “Because that’s how good he is.”
What Clinton failed to mention is that she doesn’t have many other options. The first Democratic debate of the 2016 cycle, held Oct. 13 in Las Vegas, was widely hailed as a success, with substantive exchanges on important policy issues and strong performances from the only candidates, Sanders and Clinton, who have a real shot at the nomination. But the debate also highlighted two trends that should concern any Democrat interested in winning elections after 2016.
The first is that the party is moving steadily leftward, with a renewed emphasis on city-centric issues such as gun violence, institutional racism, drug sentencing, climate change and economic inequality. Slate’s Michelle Goldberg described this dynamic well: “Although Clinton won the overall debate, Sanders” — a self-declared democratic socialist — “set its terms. From the beginning, Clinton sought to appeal to his supporters rather than vice versa.”
The second trend, as Garcetti himself pointed out, is that every candidate with even the slightest chance of representing this increasingly progressive, increasingly metropolitan party in the White House is a senior citizen. (Only former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, the longest of long shots, is under the age of 60). For several reasons — Republican redistricting, low midterm turnout, eight years of Obama and Clinton sucking up all the oxygen — Democrats simply haven’t developed as robust a farm team as their Republican rivals, who entered the 2016 presidential race with several 40-somethings (Scott Walker, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal) to choose from.
“Democrats aren’t even talking about how to improve on their weak points, because by and large they don’t even admit that they exist,” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote earlier this month in a widely discussed essay about how Democrats are “actually in deep trouble.”
“Instead,” he continued, “the party is focused on a competition between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton over whether they should go a little bit to Obama’s left or a lot to his left, options that are unlikely to help Democrats down-ballot in the face of an unfriendly House map and a more conservative midterm electorate. The GOP might be in chaos, but Democrats are in a torpor.”
And yet Democrats aren’t in decline everywhere. They may be stymied on Capitol Hill, where the GOP now controls both houses of Congress. They may be locked out of statehouses and governor’s mansions. But they are dominating City Halls. Fifteen years ago, Republican mayors governed half of the country’s dozen most populous cities. Today, you have to go all the way down to San Diego — number eight on the list — to find just one Republican mayor. Democrats, meanwhile, run 28 of the 35 largest cities in America.
The explanation is simple, says political scientist Ruy Teixeira: Density equals Democrats. In 2012, Obama defeated Mitt Romney 52 percent to 46 percent in metro areas with more than a million residents, winning 56 percent of the vote in the emerging suburbs, 63 percent in the mature suburbs, and a staggering 77 percent in the urban core.
“We know that, over time, Democrats have been clustering in cities,” Teixeira explained. “Look across the country: The larger the metro area, the better the Dems do; the denser the part of that area, the better the Dems do.”
As a result, Democrats such as Bill de Blasio of New York, Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, Annise Parker of Houston and Michael Nutter of Philadelphia have become some of the party’s most prominent chief executives, with the power to address issues that Democrats on the state or federal level are too depleted to deal with.
Garcetti snaps a photo while members of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela perform selections from Beethoven in the rotunda of City Hall. (Photo: Andrew Romano/Yahoo News)
Whether any of these figures emerge as stars on the national stage remains to be seen. But Garcetti — who has not ruled out running to succeed Gov. Jerry Brown or Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 2018 — may be the most promising. This is due, in part, to the city he leads. With more than 10 million residents, Los Angeles County is bigger than all but seven states, and in many ways, the challenges it is confronting today — how to pivot toward Asia, how to modernize civic infrastructure, how to integrate immigrants into society, how to sustain a sharing economy, how to combat climate change, how to rebuild the middle class — are the challenges that the rest of America will be confronting tomorrow.
But it’s also about Garcetti himself. In 2013, many of L.A.’s Latino leaders endorsed Greuel, but Garcetti wound up winning 60 percent of rank-and-file Latino voters on Election Day. The combination of East Side Latinos and upscale West Side liberals, many of them Jewish, was enough to put him past Greuel and her classically Democratic base of union members and African-Americans.
“Obama has succeeded by creating a coalition of urban minorities and wealthy progressives, and that’s precisely the same combination of supporters that elected Garcetti,” said Dan Schnur, a former spokesman for Republicans Pete Wilson and John McCain who currently runs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. “For years, they used to talk about the tension in the Democratic Party between ‘beer drinkers’ and ‘wine drinkers.’ But now the wine drinkers are ascendant. You combine their support with backing from minority communities and you have a recipe for success.”
If this is the Democratic coalition of the future, Garcetti is perhaps its purest personification: an unapologetic “wine drinker” who also happens to be a member of America’s largest ethnic minority group. With that in mind, I recently spent a day shadowing the mayor, from Sony Pictures in Culver City to the streets of South L.A., the historically African-American area formerly known as South Central. It was one of the few times Garcetti’s careful staff has let a reporter come along for the ride. My goal was to see what life for the Democratic Party could look like after Obama and Clinton — and whether it would be a good thing for it to look like the Mayor of Instagram.
*****
It’s 9 a.m. on the Sony lot, and the black mayoral Cadillac Escalade has just pulled up to Stage 30. Several thousand employees are beginning to file into the cavernous hangar for the studio’s annual all-hands meeting, the first since it was hacked last November. Garcetti has been invited to give what he describes as a “pep talk,” but right now he has other business to attend to. Sliding out of the SUV, he sees the steel frame of a new studio building shining in the morning sun. He snaps a photo on his Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge. A few hours later it will appear on Instagram with the hashtags #building, #hollywood and #sonypictures. It will get 658 likes.
“#building #hollywood #sonypictures” (Eric Garcetti via Instagram)
Inside, the mayor makes a beeline for a gaggle of Sony executives gathered near the stage. They are talking about Porsches — or, more specifically, they are talking about how fond the U.S. president of Sony Pictures Television, Zack Van Amburg, is of Porsches.
“Zack came by my house and said he was going up to Monterey this weekend for the big Porsche thing,” says Steve Mosko, Van Amburg’s boss. “All the best Porsches in the world were going to be there.”
“He knows the difference,” Garcetti says. It turns out that he and Van Amburg have been friends since they were classmates at L.A.’s most prestigious private school, now known as Harvard-Westlake.
“The only thing,” Mosko continues, “is that Zack gets very jealous when you start talking about Seinfeld.” Everyone laughs. “I went to have breakfast with Seinfeld one morning —”
“He has an amazing collection,” Garcetti says, crossing his arms and nodding.
“And he pulls up the cover on one of his cars, just the nose, so I can look up and see it, right?”
“Right, right.”
“So I explain to Zack, ‘It’s, like, this light blue car, with black check seats…’ and Zack goes, ‘Holy s***.’ In 1975, you could have bought that car for $20,000. Today it’s worth over a million.”
“Wow,” Garcetti says. “Wow.”
“Jerry says it’s the best investment he ever made,” Mosko concludes. “He’s got 50 of them.”
Garcetti has no trouble keeping up with this kind of conversation. His mother, Sukey Roth, is a philanthropist who grew up in a big modernist house in Beverly Hills. His peers at Harvard-Westlake were the progeny of moguls and movie stars. He once salsa-danced with Salma Hayek at the North Pole. When he was a student at Columbia, Garcetti wasn’t just a member of St. Anthony Hall, an elite, semisecret literary society whose “smugness,” as Vanity Fair recently put it, “has earned the scornful envy that is the burden of the young rich everywhere.“ He was also its president.
Still, Garcetti looks relieved when Man Jit Singh, the head of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, changes the subject (perhaps because Garcetti was also kind the undergraduate who quit St. A’s when his fellow members refused to “diversify,” as he puts it.)
“So,” Singh interrupts. “How’s the Olympics?”
“I’ll give you guys the rundown!” Garcetti says. He sounds as if he’s about to pitch a new hourlong drama.
Garcetti speaks at a press conference with USOC CEO Scott Blackmun in Santa Monica, Calif., in September to launch L.A.’s 2024 bid for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. (Photo: Harry How/Getty Images)
During the first two years of his term, the knock on Garcetti was that he was too cautious, too calculating, too inconsequential. “I have no sense of what he is trying to do,” L.A. political commentator Joe Mathews told Governing magazine. “I don’t think there has been any vision or action toward a vision that I can ascertain.”
But the mayor insists this was all part of the plan. Garcetti’s flashy predecessor, Antonio Villaraigosa, swept into office promising to seize control of L.A.’s dysfunctional public school system. He eventually failed. Other lofty proposals were unveiled with great fanfare — a million new trees and a massive increase in solar power, among others — and soon forgotten. By the time Villaraigosa left office in 2013, many Angelenos had come to the conclusion that his inaugural vow to transform L.A. into “a city of purpose” was little more than hot air.
And so Garcetti — who acknowledges that the mayor of L.A. has less power than his counterparts in New York and Chicago — charted a more idiosyncratic course. Rather than picking one or two key priorities to champion early in his first term, when he would presumably have the most political capital to spend, Garcetti arrived at City Hall pledging to focus on what he called “back-to-basics” governing. Much of it involved the behind-the-scenes work of modernizing and rationalizing L.A.’s vast, tangled bureaucracy; the hope was that these changes would, in turn, improve the way the city served its residents. To measure the results, Garcetti asked his team to create an online performance dashboard — daily vehicle miles driven, street pavement condition, 311 wait time, and so on.
“Back to basics comes from the training that I got for 12 years on the council — from that understanding of how municipal government is supposed to work,” Garcetti says. “It’s not a spring cleaning; it’s a deep, deep cleaning. It’s fundamental to everything we do.”
Yet as Garcetti’s third year in office begins, the focus of his mayoralty is shifting. In January, the United States Olympic Committee chose Boston to bid for the 2024 Summer Games on America’s behalf; six months later, the city backed out over budgetary concerns — and runner-up L.A. took the baton. The decision seems to have crystallized Garcetti’s vision for the future of Los Angeles.
“I think we’re at a hinge point,” Garcetti says. “L.A. looks like what the world does today and what America will look like tomorrow. We awakened as a global city in the first half of the 20th century. We became a world-class global city in the second half of the 20th century. And now I think we understand the stakes are to be in the top five cities of the world — to be a critically important hub city that makes the world work and helps this country be prosperous.”
The official Olympic bid book calls this “the New L.A.”: a “showcase of diversity and inclusion of the people and cultures of the world,” it says, that also happens to be “a different city everywhere you look,” with “new neighborhoods, a new transit system, all new airport terminals, a revitalized river, new stadiums and arenas … [and] the biggest public works project in the country.”
If “the New L.A.” sounds like slick marketing-speak, that’s because it is. Garcetti often talks about “rebranding” Los Angeles, and he recently hired local firm 72andSunny, which he describes as “the best advertising company in the West,” to do just that.
But at the same time, L.A.’s Olympic spiel isn’t just P.R. It’s also grounded in a loose assortment of long-term projects that have recently begun to gel into something like a blueprint for the next phase of the city’s evolution.
There is, for example, the ongoing $88 billion expansion of the city’s 25-year-old Metro system, which over the next decade will transform light-rail transit — long an afterthought in car-centric Los Angeles — into an expansive 113-mile network of track that can transport residents from, say, downtown L.A. to the beaches of Santa Monica much faster than the region’s notoriously gridlocked freeways.
“#riverwalk @ciclavia – Los Angeles River” (Eric Garcetti via Instagram)
Same goes for the L.A. River. For years, urbanists have dreamed of turning the 51-mile concrete channel that cuts through the core of the city into a kind of long, winding Central Park, with bike paths, kayaking rapids, green spaces, wildlife habitats, and affordable riverside housing. Now, under Garcetti, these efforts are finally gaining momentum, with iconic architect Frank Gehry recently agreeing to develop a master plan that seeks to lessen L.A.’s reliance on imported water and steel the city for future droughts by using the river as a kind of giant storm-water retention device.
Sustainability is a common theme. In April, Garcetti released a 108-page Sustainable City “pLAn” — blame the branders — that outlines short-term goals (a bike-sharing system with at least 65 stations and 1,000 bikes; the installation of more than 1,000 electronic vehicle charging stations for public use) and long-term goals (obtaining half the city’s water from local sources; generating enough solar energy to power nearly 400,000 homes) designed to make Los Angeles the greenest city in the country. In September, the mayor convened a climate-change summit in L.A. with Gov. Jerry Brown, Vice President Joe Biden and officials from China at which he finalized new emissions and renewable energy pacts with Beijing and Shenzhen and demonstrated, as Brown put it, that “the mayors of the world have to be able to create … upward pressure on the nation states to get things done.”
Taken as a whole, Garcetti’s recent initiatives reflect a widespread sense among locals that Los Angeles is in the midst of a dramatic reinvention.
Many Angelenos welcome these changes; others are wary. Christopher Hawthorne, who writes about architecture for the Los Angeles Times, has characterized this new era as “the Third Los Angeles,” arguing that, having moved beyond the compact, civic-minded municipality of the first half of the 20th century and the familiar freeway sprawl of the postwar years, the metropolis is now becoming a collection of more integrated, livable, post-suburban villages—communities that retain their own character even as they’re connected by public spaces (like the L.A. River) and public transit (like the expanded Metro system).
Journalist Joe Mathews, meanwhile, has complained about what he calls the “downsizing” of Los Angeles. “Our most powerful aspirations are no longer about growing the city or its global footprint,” Mathews has written, “but about splitting it into pieces [and] shrinking it into smaller communities, self-contained and sustainable — on the scale of the sorts of places previous generations fled to come to the big city.”
Back at Sony, however, Garcetti is unbowed. After explaining to the executives why L.A. doesn’t have to worry about the perennial cost overruns that have plagued other Olympic host cities — “If you can’t run a two-and-a-half-week show on $5 to $6 billion…”; “We already have 80 percent of the facilities”; “We know how to do this as a city” — the mayor bounds onstage for his speech, debuting a new applause line that is likely to figure prominently in his budding 2017 reelection campaign.
“Great cities,” Garcetti says, “reach for great things.”
*****
On the ride back to City Hall, I ask the mayor if he sees his old community of Silver Lake — which gentrified so rapidly during his time on the council that Forbes magazine eventually dubbed it “America’s hippest hipster neighborhood” — as a model for the rest of the city.
A man runs up a long set of stairs on a hillside in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Photo: Jonathan Alcorn/ZUMA Wire)
“Absolutely,” he says. “It had its sweet charm, it was very mixed, and I liked it. But it was a little rough around the edges when we moved there in 1997. So we built a walk path around Silver Lake reservoir, in the heart of the community. We cleared the way for the condos across the street, the library, the wine store, the restaurant, and then the meadow [a small park alongside the lake]. I always use it as an example of the fact that all urban revitalization requires is a library, a good place to get alcohol, a good place to eat, a good place to hang out, and a good place to walk, and you’re done.”
“But what about the people who lived there before?” I ask. (Some progressives have accused Garcetti of being too cozy with local developers.)
“Look,” Garcetti says, glancing out the window. “Everybody loves what’s good about gentrification and dislikes what’s bad about gentrification. Everybody wants safer neighborhoods |
Explore
This brief look at CUDA 7 should give you a feeling for how powerful this new release is, but we’ve barely scratched the surface. To mention a few other features, CUDA 7 supports GPU Core Dumps for easier remote and cluster debugging; new CUDA Memcheck tools for detecting uninitialized data and improper synchronization; and multi-GPU support in the CUDA multi-process server; and support for new platforms and compilers.
So don’t wait, the CUDA Toolkit version 7 Release Candidate is available right now. It even has a great new network installer that only downloads and installs the CUDA Toolkit components that you need, saving time and bandwidth.
Download CUDA today at https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit
Want to learn more about accelerated computing on the Tesla Platform and about GPU computing with CUDA? Come to the GPU Technology Conference, the world’s largest and most important GPU developer conference.Don DeZarn, 48, has worked for Princeton University for 18 years. Before that, he worked for the U.S. Army and Navy, where he acquired Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for which medical marijuana is a recognized treatment. Last week, DeZarn was given an ultimatum by his employer: stop participating in NJ’s medical marijuana program or forfeit his job.
As of yesterday morning, DeZarn, a senior operations manager for the campus’ dining department, says he is suspended with pay. He informed his “supervisors, employee health and human resources representatives” about his marijuana usage. When he advised Public Safety, however, they informed him that there would need to be an investigation. DeZarn went into work on Monday as normal, but says Human Resources told him that he is suspended with pay and then escorted him to his vehicle.
“All I have ever asked for from the University is to be allowed to take my physician prescribed medication just like any other employee.” DeZarn told Marijuana.com Monday morning. “I am absolutely NOT interested in any way in seeking any type of legal damages from the University. I do not have an attorney and at this point do not intend to retain one. I just keep hoping this is a bad nightmare and I will wake up and everything will be OK.”
DeZarn comes prepared to fight for his marijuana rights. He’s a long-time marijuana activist, campaigning for office in New Jersey on a legalization platform and even being arrested twice for civil disobedience, though he sticks to the law with his medical use. When New Jersey approved his usage of marijuana under the state’s Compassionate Use Act, DeZarn had to ask a judge for further permission, since drug use would violate his probation. It turns out that Princeton is more restrictive than probation.
DeZarn says that when he was approved for the use of medical marijuana in May, he stopped taking his prescription medications in consultation with his physician. His physician prescribed the high-CBD strain and “assured me I would not be impaired while medicating.”
Even though the strain that DeZarn uses is low in THC, the main hallucinogenic in marijuana, Princeton’s Vice President for Human Resources, Lianne Sullivan-Crowley, has made the University’s position clear.
The law seems to support an employer’s right to maintain a drug-free workplace, including prohibiting the use of marijuana during work hours as well as working while under the influence of marijuana,” Sullivan-Crowley said. [NJ.com]
DeZarn got support from local media and activists over the weekend whom he thanked on his Facebook page. He also updated friends on his plan going forward as of last night.
After seeing the outpouring of support, I have decided that I will return to work at my regular position tomorrow morning and will conduct myself just like any other university employee. When it becomes necessary for me to medicate with a medicine prescribed to me by my licensed physician I will do just that. I will deal with the consequences, whatever they might be. All I have ever asked for is to be treated just like any other employee. We shall see what tomorrow brings.
It is unclear whether his post had anything to do with today’s suspension or if the suspension was already planned.
Unfortunately, this type of problem is likely to continue with only 8 of the 34 medical marijuana states including protections from discrimination not only in employment, but housing and child custody. A report published by Americans for Safe Access in July explains the employment discrimination issue:
An individual’s status as a medical cannabis patient or a positive test for cannabis metabolites should not be an employer’s sole basis for either a refusal to hire or dismissal of that person. Because of their regular cannabis use, most patients will test positive without being impaired. Medical cannabis use should be treated like any other prescription medication under state law. While some states have explicit protections, many laws are inadequate to provide the necessary safeguards against employment discrimination. [Medical Marijuana Access in the U.S.]
According to the report, if you want job security and medical marijuana at the same time, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New York and Rhode Island have you covered.
New Jersey? Not so much.Share. Following in the footsteps of Square Enix, Namco Bandai could be the next publisher to distribute on Ouya. Following in the footsteps of Square Enix, Namco Bandai could be the next publisher to distribute on Ouya.
Namco Bandai is apparently "in active discussions" to become the next major publisher to sign a distribution deal with Ouya.
“ Namco Bandai Games and Ouya are currently in active discussions to bring some of the world's biggest gaming properties to the exciting new open gaming platform.
Speaking with Develop, the Tekken and Ridge Racer developer revealed it was talking to the console's creators about bringing its franchises to the system.
Namco Marketing VP Carlson Choi explained, "Namco Bandai Games and Ouya are currently in active discussions to bring some of the world's biggest gaming properties to the exciting new open gaming platform.
"Namco Bandai brings with it a rich history of iconic gaming franchises, from classics like Pac-Man and Galaga, to seminal franchises like Tekken and Ridge Racer, and we're excited to explore how we can work with Ouya to bring some great titles to the forthcoming console."
We told you last week that Square Enix had thrown its weight behind the upcoming console, and would be releasing Final Fantasy III as an Ouya launch title. Predictably, it seems this has proved the catalyst for other developers to follow suit. The only question is, which company will be next to pitch its support?
Ouya is currently expected to release in March 2013.
Exit Theatre Mode
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.AMMAN (Reuters) - Syria’s main opposition body on Sunday approved a new delegation to take part in Geneva peace talks later this month, which include Russian-backed blocs that have been critical of the armed insurgency against President Bashar al-Assad.
The High Negotiation Committee, (HNC) the main umbrella group, said in a statement after two-days of meetings in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, that the new 21-member negotiating team included members of two dissident alliances with which it has previously been at odds.
Those two alliances — the so-called Moscow and Cairo groups — have long disavowed the armed rebellion and insisted that political change can only come through peaceful activism. Their members include a former Syrian government minister with close ties to Moscow.
Mohammad Sabra, who was appointed as chief negotiator, told Saudi-owned Al-Hadath news channel that the delegation brought together various groups. He also accused unnamed foreign powers of trying to impose their views on the composition of the delegation, an apparent reference to Russia.
The body also chose a new head of the negotiating team, Nasr al Hariri, a veteran opposition figure from southern Syria.
The next round of U.N.-sponsored talks on the conflict, now in its sixth year, have been scheduled for Feb. 20.
The HNC said in the statement the goal of the negotiations was a political transition under U.N. auspices in which Assad had no role in the future of the country. But it steered away from its previous insistence the Syrian president should leave at the start of a transitional phase.
The HNC also said foreign powers had no right to present a vision of Syria’s future political system without the consent of Syrians. Russian last month tabled the draft of a proposed new constitution for Syria, though it insisted the document had been circulated for the purposes of discussion only.
The HNC represented the opposition in Geneva talks last year. But it was not invited to recently convened talks in the Kazakh capital, Astana. The indirect talks between government and rebel delegates in Astana were held with the aim of shoring up a ceasefire brokered by Turkey and Russia.How to know if it's a nightmare
Unless your toddler can tell you in words that she had a nightmare, it's hard to know just what caused her nighttime distress.
There are many possible reasons a toddler might wake up at night and be upset. Some may need comforting because they've never learned to soothe themselves back to sleep on their own. Some children awaken because they're ill or uncomfortable.
But if your usual "good sleeper" suddenly wakes up crying, seems scared, is clingy, and has trouble getting back to sleep, she may have had a nightmare. Usually it happens during the second half of the night, when dreaming is most likely to occur.
Nightmares shouldn't be confused with night terrors, a less common sleep disturbance that normally strikes during the first third of the night and occurs frequently in toddlers and preschoolers. Children having a night-terror episode remain fast asleep in a deep, nondreaming state, yet they're extremely agitated and hard to console. Afterward they go back to snoozing soundly and don't remember the incident in the morning.
Why nightmares happen
Your toddler's nightmares are most likely linked to something that happened just before bed, like listening to a story that scared him or watching an upsetting show.
Stress can also lead to nightmares. Bedtime itself can be a cause of stress, especially for a toddler who has separation anxiety. Being sick or being away from a parent for a stretch of time can also be stressful for toddlers.
But try not to worry or blame yourself. Emotional problems aren't linked to nightmares, and an occasional bad dream is perfectly normal at this age. It probably has nothing to do with anything you said or did.
How to help your toddler after a nightmare
Go to your toddler when she cries out. Physical reassurance is important, so hold her or rub her back until she calms down. You may also want to make sure her favorite stuffed animal or toy is tucked in with her.
Double-check that the night-light is on, and keep her bedroom door open so she knows you're close by. If you bring your toddler into your bed to comfort her, be aware you could be creating a habit that's hard to reverse.
Talk to her about the nightmare if she's old enough to understand what you're saying. But keep in mind that telling her "it's only a dream" won't be much consolation – at this age she doesn't grasp the difference between reality and dreams.
Preventing nightmares
It's certainly not foolproof, but a peaceful bedtime routine – a warm bath, a calming story, and a quiet song – can help ward off nightmares. Try reading bedtime books that link sleep with cozy, happy situations, such as Margaret Wise Brown's classic Goodnight Moon.
To help your child get a good night's rest, keep his room at a comfortable temperature – not too hot and not too cold. The best temperature for restful sleep is on the slightly cool side (the National Sleep Foundation suggests around 65 degrees).
Too much light disrupts sleep. If your child is scared of the dark, find a night-light that's bright enough to keep monsters at bay, but not the sandman.
If the nightmares persist and your child is extremely afraid of going to bed, bring up the subject with his doctor – the bad dreams might signal there's something going on in his waking life that needs to be addressed.Philadelphia City Council President Darrell Clarke introduced a bill on Thursday that would prohibit local public employees from displaying symbols that could be perceived as promoting hate speech.
Clarke proposed the bill three weeks after BuzzFeed News published a story about a Philadelphia police officer who faced no discipline for displaying a tattoo on his arm that looks a lot like the emblem adopted by the Nazi party during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power — the only difference being that there’s no swastika inside the wreath hanging from the bird’s talons. After BuzzFeed News contacted police officials for comment in September, the department for the first time ordered Officer Ian Lichterman to cover it up while on duty.
“No employee, and certainly no citizen, should be made to feel offended or fearful because of what a public employee says, wears, or does,” Clarke said in a statement. “We have the right as an employer to set guidelines for conduct, and we have an obligation to earn the trust of the people we serve — particularly those belonging to groups targeted for discrimination.”
The bill authorizes the city’s commissioner of public property to set penalties for public employees caught on official city property knowingly displaying symbols, carrying objects, or using speech that “arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation.”
Lichterman, who declined interview requests, told BuzzFeed News that the tattoo represents his “German heritage" and strongly denied having any "swastika or Third Reich–related tattoos." The department’s internal affairs unit opened an investigation into the tattoo last year, clearing Lichterman of wrongdoing because, a police spokesperson explained, the tattoo did not violate any departmental policies.
“In terms of your brains or your thoughts or your ideology, is that something we want to police?” Captain Sekou Kinebrew said. “As long as you’re not violating public trust, it’s very difficult to police.”
The law proposed on Thursday does not specifically mention tattoos, but it would give the city greater power to determine what qualifies as prohibited speech among its employees.
“Council President Clarke has been working on legislation to address the ‘Nazi tattoo’ problem via public property ordinances — meaning, barring certain symbols from public spaces, which could strengthen administrative actions regarding body art and clothing in the Police Department, for example,” Jane Roh, a spokesperson for Clarke, told BuzzFeed News in an email last week.
Legal experts who spoke to BuzzFeed News said that government has wide latitude to protect its institutions, including barring speech and behavior that undermine public trust.
“If you are a public employee and your speech when you are not doing your job is going to affect how you do your job and how your employer functions, your employer may be able to fire you or limit that speech,” said Mary Catherine Roper, deputy legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told BuzzFeed News last month. “It’s really going to be a question of whether the public is going to associate that tattoo with his job as a public servant — whether it’s going to interfere with his ability to constructively interact with people in minority communities.”And, yes, the one cable. One cable cut, and a country's ability to communicate with its space infrastructure is severed, as well.
Severed but, apparently, not severe. The ultimate impact of the severed communication was negligible, insist Roscosmos officials. While "civilian satellites cannot be sent orders," Space Safety Magazine's Merryl Azriel noted during the incident, "they do continue to downlink to their usual ground stations. Military satellites are not controlled from the same location, and so were spared all effects." And NASA, for its part, was able to step in to aid Roscosmos. Moscow Mission Control simply routed its communications through Houston -- so while Roscosmos wasn't able to send commands to ISS hardware during the time of the silence, it was ultimately able to communicate with its ISS-bound crew even as its primary connection to them was compromised.
Which is a nice thing when it comes to international cooperation... but a less nice thing when it comes to Russia's space infrastructure. Though the U.S. space agency also downplayed the significance of the cable-severing -- a torn cable, NASA spokesman Josh Byerly told the AFP, "happens from time to time" -- it's hard not to see this as an embarrassment for Russia, which has recently seen several similar malfunctions in its space program. Already, bickering among Russia's telecom operators has commenced, with one operator (Akado) claiming that another (Rostelecom) had purposely tampered with the cable as a kind of extraterrestrial sabotage.
Whatever the cause of the accident, though, we know this: It was human in origin. And it's hard not to see this particular glitch as worrying for future ISS operations. On Monday, as the space station's Expedition 33 comes to a close, a Soyuz capsule will take three of the astronauts currently aboard the ISS -- the U.S.'s Sunita Williams, Japan's Akihiko Hoshide, and Russia's Yury Malenchenko -- back to Earth. (They'll land in Kazakhstan.) The homecoming will be, as so much is when it comes to the ISS, a international collaboration. One hopes that the infrastructure that will come together to make that homecoming possible will be fully functional.
Then again: hopes. More than anything, the severed cable is a reminder of the fragility of the machines we rely on to keep us and the things we care about safe when they are beyond our grasp. The slightest malfunction in a space vehicle, whether it's a suit lining or an oxygen tank or a piece of foam, can have disastrous -- and tragic -- consequences. We explore the world beyond our own armed with the best knowledge we have and the best tools we've fashioned to put it to use... but we explore it, too, with a measure of faith. Our connection to space is tenuous -- as thin and as fragile as the cables we use to connect us here on Earth. Just as a single ship's anchor can disrupt Internet access across several countries -- just as a 75-year-old woman can cut off Internet access to all of Armenia -- our link to the objects we've put into space can be severed in an instant.
Unless, of course, we build into our infrastructure redundancies and failsafes -- measures to ensure that human flaws cannot become technical ones. To ensure that road crews cannot, knowingly or otherwise, sever our link to space. "In Soviet times, we had reserve cables for these cases," an expert told RIA Novosti. "But in 1990s, they were eliminated. Now we don't have backups."
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.by Ben Lovegrove, inkids.com.au
While most educators and teachers are aware of the benefits that can arise in the classroom through the use of iPads and tablets, budgetary constraints can often limit the way that technology can be used to augment learning activities in smaller schools (or school districts).
In many cases, schools find that the money required to buy iPads for an entire class would be better spent on other equipment or products but this doesn’t mean that the classroom should be an iPad free zone. There are countless benefits to be gained from having one or two iPads in the classroom a single device can still be a useful asset for your classroom for lesson planning and supporting curriculum.
There are several ways that teachers can make effective use of a small number of iPads in a classroom here are some ideas to get you started.
6 Helpful Tips For The 1 iPad Classroom
1. Work With Small Groups
A good approach is to break a class down into smaller groups, have each group work on different projects (or on separate components of a lesson plan). For example, a group of 46 pupils could be working together using an iPad while the rest of the class works on a different task before rotating places.
Apps for 1st grade like Recession App’s Coin Math or Instant Interactive’s Math Drills Lite are extremely affordable and can be used in small groups to engage children with subject matter they might not normally be interested in students can work in teams to quiz one another to help reinforce basic skills. Friendly competition in groups is an excellent way to make use of apps that aren’t necessarily designed for group activities. Futaba Classroom Games is an app which has been designed especially with the 1 iPad Classroom in mind up to 4 player can compete at the same time which means an entire classroom can be occupied with only a few devices on hand. Futaba can be used to deliver a range of quiz content and teachers can even build their own quiz games to support any type of subject matter.
Group play like this will not only ensure that pupils get to learn in a fun manner, they will also benefit from sharing and working collaboratively with other students.
2. Make Use Of Interactive Whiteboards Or Apple TV
A simple converter cable will allow the iPad to be displayed on an existing VGA projector (meaning any monitor or interactive whiteboard can be used). An Apple TV device / with a TV can also be used to mirror content using Airplay (Apple TV is a great device for allowing students to show work they have completed on display viewable to everyone in the classroom).
Using a larger display means that If you only have a single device, a game can be displayed on a larger screen, and if you are using an app like Futaba Classroom Games, the rest of the class can be involved in the quiz while single group plays (with this app each game fits into 35 minutes so it’s possible to have new set of challengers for each new quiz).
3. Use The Built-in Camera & iMovie
Small groups of students can use the iMovie app to create exciting multimedia projects with their own media you can insert all type of resources, from photos (to make slideshows) to videos that they’ve shot in the classroom or school playground to text. With the onboard video editing software (which is a breeze to use), you can easily annotate or create a voiceover for any type of media project. The rest of the class will be equally excited to watch each group’s creations before having their own turn at becoming film producers.
Other apps like “Aurasma” can be used in a similar way to created augmented reality layers using movies or images that can be layered onto the real world. This is a fascinating process that will also engage groups of children working across all types of subject matter.
4. Think about BYOD
BYOD or Bring Your Own Device is a mobility trend which allows students to bring their own smartphones, tablet computers and other electronic devices to school. With limited budgets making it difficult for schools to purchase iOS devices, a BYOD policy can be a viable and effective option. Over the last year, Georgia, Texas, Minnesota and Ohio have all implemented pilot projects whereby students use their own mobile devices in the classroom.
Combing BYOD with a free app like Math Champ (suitable for grades 4 to 7), a teacher can serve a classroom math quiz to the entire class. If they have their own iPods or iPhones and they are allowed to use them, they use their devices as “eclickers” to compete against their other classmates in real time. This app also supports the use of leaderboard display on an external screen to make group play more compelling (refer to items 2 above).
Again, only 1 iPad is required.
5. Just for Fun
We know what all kids love using the iPad so why not make it a reward for the best students towards the end of each lesson? Marble Mixer is modern twist on a classic schoolyard game that also involves elements of strategy it’s also one of the best multiplayer games on the iPad.
There’s no need to replace stickers and stamps completely (game time can even be a part of an existing reward system you might have in place).
6. The iPad As The Teacher’s Pet
Teachers can also use the iPad as a standalone support tool (in fact, this might be its most valuable use in a 1 iPad classroom). Access to so many resources in one place means that the iPad can be used as a control pad for video content, as a way find online courses, free books and more.
Aside from providing additional content and support to students, having the iPad handy also allows a teacher to take notes, create reminders or even record behaviors. The iPad is not only an engaging device for group activities, but can be a valuable all-in-one pocketknife for teachers.
This is a contributed post from Ben Lovegrove from inkids.com.auWhen developing the original Ogg backend for Firefox we had to integrate and use a number of C libraries. Over the months after landing a number of bugs were raised for various issues in the backend. A fair number of these were the result of common coding errors. Things like not checking return values of the C API calls and not releasing resources correctly. This was internal to the third party libraries we used as well as in our own code. This has made me interested in looking at programming languges that make these sorts of errors easier to find.
I've previously written about ATS, a programming language with dependent and linear types. With ATS you can use C code directly and annotate the code with types to make some usage errors detectable at compile time. Some papers that cover this usage of ATS are:
In this post I look at ways of using a C library from ATS that shows dealing with static checking of return values and resource releasing. I start from a simple wrapper and then explore how I can use ATS to make usage of the API safer from common programmer errors. The library I'm using to do this is libcurl.
A simple usage of libcurl to retrieve the HTML from a URL and print it to stdout is (simple.c):
#include <curl/curl.h> int main(void) { CURL *curl; CURLcode res; curl = curl_easy_init(); curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "bluishcoder.co.nz"); res = curl_easy_perform(curl); curl_easy_cleanup(curl); return 0; }
This can be compiled and run with:
$ gcc -o simple simple.c `curl-config --libs` $./simple...
Ensuring release of resources
My first attempt at translating this into ATS is in simple1.dats (pretty-printed version):
%{^ #include <curl/curl.h> %} absviewtype CURLptr (l:addr) // CURL* abst@ype CURLoption = $extype "CURLoption" macdef CURLOPT_URL = $extval(CURLoption, "CURLOPT_URL") extern fun curl_easy_init {l:addr} () : CURLptr l = "#curl_easy_init" extern fun curl_easy_setopt {l:addr} {p:type} (handle:!CURLptr l, option: CURLoption, parameter: p) : int = "#curl_easy_setopt" extern fun curl_easy_perform {l:addr} (handle:!CURLptr l) : int = "#curl_easy_perform" extern fun curl_easy_cleanup {l:addr} (handle: CURLptr l) : void = "#curl_easy_cleanup" implement main() = let val curl = curl_easy_init(); val res = curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "www.bluishcoder.co.nz"); val res = curl_easy_perform(curl); val () = curl_easy_cleanup(curl); in () end;
The'main' function looks very much like the C code. The definitions before that make the libcurl C functions, types and enums available to ATS. To compile and run this code:
$ atscc -o simple1 simple1.dats `curl-config --libs` $./simple1..
The libcurl type CURLoption is a C enum. To wrap this in ATS I use $extype to refer to the C name directly:
abst@ype CURLoption = $extype "CURLoption"
I only reference one value of these types. That is CURLOPT_URL and again I reference the C value directly. Since this is a value rather than a type I use $extval:
macdef CURLOPT_URL = $extval(CURLoption, "CURLOPT_URL")
The CURL type is an abstract type in C - we don't care what it is actually composed of. A CURL object is always refered to via a pointer. This is modeled in ATS with:
absviewtype CURLptr (l:addr) // CURL*
Think of 'CURLptr' as being 'a reference to a CURL object'. It's basically a C 'CURL*'. The definition above states that a CURLptr is an object of type 'CURLptr' located at a memory address 'l'.
The C definition of curl_easy_init looks like:
CURL *curl_easy_init(void);
The ATS definition is:
extern fun curl_easy_init {l:addr} () : CURLptr l = "#curl_easy_init"
The 'extern' at the beginning and the '#curl_easy_init' at the end means that the implementation of this function is a C function called 'curl_easy_init' in an external library. The '{l:addr}' following the function name gives the type of the 'l' used in the return type - that being a pointer. The return type is 'CURLptr l' which I described previously. The function returns a CURLptr object located at pointer address 'l'.
The C definition of curl_easy_setopt looks like:
CURLcode curl_easy_setopt(CURL *curl, CURLoption option,...);
It is a C function that takes a variable number of arguments. For this example I'm only using one additional parameter so I cheat and declare it in ATS as accepting one. I'll cover how to do variable argument functions later. The ATS definition is:
extern fun curl_easy_setopt {l:addr} {p:type} (handle:!CURLptr l, option: CURLoption, parameter: p) : int = "#curl_easy_setopt"
The function takes three arguments and returns one. The arguments it takes are:
a '!CURLptr l'. As described before this is a CURLptr object located at address 'l'. The '!' means curl_easy_setopt does not consume the object - we can continue to use it later. The 'l' is declared to be of type 'addr' earlier in the definition using {l:addr}.
a 'CURLoption'
a parameter value of type 'p'. This is of type 'type' (from the {p:type} earlier in the definition). This is the type of all ATS objects that fit in a machine word (pointers, integers, etc).
The remaining two CURL functions used in the example are variants of these. The main difference is in the ATS definition of 'curl_easy_cleanup':
extern fun curl_easy_cleanup {l:addr} (handle: CURLptr l) : void = "#curl_easy_cleanup"
Here the 'handle' parameter is a 'CURLptr l'. There is no '!' before it. This means the function consumes the argument and it cannot be used after this call. The type 'CURLptr l' is a linear type. It must be destroyed at some point in the program and once destroyed it cannot be re-used.
By defining 'curl_easy_cleanup' in this way we enforce a contract which states that the programmer must call this function if they have a live 'CURLptr l' object. You can see this in practice if you remove the cleanup call and try to compile. A compile error will result. A compile error will also occur if you try to use the curl handle after the cleanup call.
Because of the usage of the linear type we're already safe from one class of common programmer error. That of not calling cleanup functions for allocated objects.
Handling NULL pointers
There is a bug lurking in this version (and the C program). 'curl_easy_init' can return NULL and if it does you should not call any other curl functions. Using ATS we can define things in such a way that it is a requirement to check for NULL to successfully compile.
A modified version of the example with the changes to support this is in simple2.dats (pretty-printed version).
In this version we expand on the type CURLptr by adding two typedefs. One for pointers which can be NULL (CURLptr0) and one for pointers which cannot be NULL (CURLptr1):
absviewtype CURLptr (l:addr) // CURL* viewtypedef CURLptr0 = [l:addr | l >= null] CURLptr l viewtypedef CURLptr1 = [l:addr | l > null] CURLptr l
The definitions of the Curl functions that are used are changed to use these types in the appropriate places:
extern fun curl_easy_init () : CURLptr0 = "#curl_easy_init" extern fun curl_easy_setopt {p:type} (handle:!CURLptr1, option: CURLoption, parameter: p) : int = "#curl_easy_setopt" extern fun curl_easy_perform ( handle:!CURLptr1) : int = "#curl_easy_perform" extern fun curl_easy_cleanup (handle: CURLptr1) : void = "#curl_easy_cleanup"
'curl_easy_init' is changed to return a CURLptr0 since it can return NULL. The other functions use CURLptr1 to signify they must not be NULL. Now if we keep the'main' function as before without checking the result of 'curl_easy_init' we get a compile time error saying the type of the 'curl' variable does not match that required by 'curl_easy_opt'.
The fix is to add a check for NULL:
implement main() = let val curl = curl_easy_init(); val () = assert_errmsg(CURLptr_isnot_null curl, "curl_easy_init failed"); val res = curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "www.bluishcoder.co.nz"); val res = curl_easy_perform(curl); val () = curl_easy_cleanup(curl); in () end;
The compiler knows that after the assert check that 'curl' must not be NULL. This allows the remaining parts of the program to typecheck.
Enforce checking of return values
Another common error is that of not checking the return values of C api calls for errors. This proved to be an issue in the first versions of the Firefox Ogg video backend where return values were not checked in some of the third party libraries we were using. Types can be defined in ATS to give compile time errors if return values are not checked for errors.
'curl_easy_setopt' and 'curl_easy_perform' both return a value indicating success or failure. A non-zero value indicates an error.
See simple3.dats (pretty-printed version) for the changes required to enforce checking of the values. The definition of 'curl_easy_setopt' has changed to:
extern fun curl_easy_setopt {p:type} (handle:!CURLptr1 >> opt(CURLptr1, err == 0), option: CURLoption, parameter: p) : #[err:int] int err = "#curl_easy_setopt"
The same change was made to 'curl_easy_perform'. The parameter 'handle' has changed to have a type of '!CURLptr1 >> opt(CURLptr1, err == 0)'. The type definition before the '>>' is what the function accepts as input. After the '>>' is the type of the parameter after the function returns.
This says that after the function returns the type of 'handle' is a 'CURLptr1' if 'err' is zero. 'err' is defined later in the definition as an integer. This forces calling code to check the return value to see if it is zero. That code can then continue to use the CURLptr1 type by extracting it from the 'opt'. This is the adjusted'main' function showing how this works:
implement main() = let val curl = curl_easy_init(); val () = assert_errmsg(CURLptr_isnot_null curl, "curl_easy_init failed"); val res = curl_easy_setopt(curl, CURLOPT_URL, "www.bluishcoder.co.nz"); val () = assert_errmsg(res = 0, "curl_easy_setopt failed"); prval () = opt_unsome(curl); val res = curl_easy_perform(curl); val () = assert_errmsg(res = 0, "curl_easy_perform failed"); prval () = opt_unsome(curl); val () = curl_easy_cleanup(curl); in () end;
Notice the assertion check for the return value of the functions. This is followed by an 'opt_unsome' call to 'un-opt' the type and continue using it as a 'CURLptr1'. If either the assert check, or the 'opt_unsome' is commented out the code won't compile. If the assert check is done for a value other than zero it won't compile. The code could also check the result using an 'if' statement - I use assert here for brevity.Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Neighbours smoking cannabis in their homes and annoying neighbours is a fairly common problem in most places.
The pungent smell the plant gives off means it can be hard to ignore even if they are using it in their own home.
Some may not be bothered what others get up to in their homes, but there's no denying others find the smell off putting.
But what can you do if you suspect neighbours of smoking or growing cannabis?
Can people smoke cannabis on their own property legally?
(Image: Getty)
The Gardai say: "If you believe that a crime has or is taking place we would urge you to call your local Garda station, the Garda confidential line on 1800-666-111 or any Garda station."
They also added that under the Misuse of Drugs Act, it is an offence to possess any controlled drugs.
(Image: PA)
The act states: "In this Act “controlled drug” means any substance, product or preparation (other than a substance, product or preparation specified in an order under subsection (3) of this section which is for the time being in force) which is either specified in the Schedule to this Act or is for the time being declared pursuant to subsection (2) of this section to be a controlled drug for the purposes of this Act."
And in relation to cannabis, the act adds: "“cannabis” (except in “cannabis resin”) means the flowering or fruiting tops of any plant of the genus Cannabis from which the resin has not been extracted, by whatever name they may be designated.
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"cannabis resin” means the separated resin, whether crude or purified, obtained from any plant of the genus Cannabis".
Meaning both the plant, and the substance that is smoked, are covered.
So if you suspect neighbours of growing or smoking the drug, it's against the law and you can call the Garda confidential line on 1800-666-111.The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has turned down a television station’s open records request by claiming that it is a law enforcement agency.
UNC Chapel Hill officials made their declaration that the taxpayer-funded, 29,000-student school is actually a very large crime-fighting force after Charlotte CBS affiliate WBTV requested public records from Jeffrey B. Welty, an associate professor within the UNC School of Government.
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” airs at 5 p.m. weekdays on NickelodeonCitizens of the United States Welcome to Animal Farm 2009
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” - George Orwell – Animal Farm
The United States has gradually degenerated from a Republic based on individual liberties to a socialized oligarchy run by an exclusive few. The country was founded upon the platform of individual rights. We declared our independence from Great Britain because of excessive regulation and taxation. Americans fought for the right to live their lives free from the subjugation of an overbearing governmental body. The Founding Fathers declared our independence with these immortal words:
We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States has gone from taking personal responsibility for our own lives to dependence on government to make all decisions in our lives. There are 306 million Americans and we have defaulted on our responsibility for governing this nation to 535 corrupt politicians, 10 “too big to fail” banks, a secretive Central Bank, 17,000 corporate lobbyists, and thousands of government bureaucrats. Essentially 306 million citizens are managed by a few thousand elitist rulers. George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm was inspired by the a scene he witnessed:
“I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”
Orwell wrote the novel during World War II and published it in 1945. It was a contemptuous indictment of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. He recognized that propaganda and abuse of language could smoothly control the opinions of enlightened intellectuals in democratic countries. He saw through the prism of Soviet propaganda to the true evil of Stalin and his KGB Dogs. Intellectuals in Great Britain’s Ministry of Information attempted to censor his right to publish the book because it would offend their supposed ally Joseph Stalin. He knew the truth, while intellectuals were horribly wrong. Stalin murdered 700,000 Russian citizens during the Great Purge of the 1930s.
The plot of Orwell’s Animal Farm is quite simple. It follows the Russian Revolution from 1917 through 1944. Three pigs—Snowball (Leon Trotsky), Napoleon (Joseph Stalin), and Squealer (Vyacheslav Molotov) formulate Old Major’s (Vladimir Lenon) principles into a philosophy called Animalism. The animals defeat the farmer Mr. Jones (Czar Nicholas II) in a battle, running him off the land. They rename the property Animal Farm (Soviet Union). The cart-horse Boxer (Russian working class) devotes himself to the cause with particular passion, committing his great strength to the prosperity of the farm and adopting as a personal axiom the affirmation “I will work harder.” Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky) increasingly argue over the future of the farm, and they begin to struggle with each other for power and influence among the other animals. After a speech, nine attack dogs (KGB) burst into the barn and chase Snowball (Trotsky) from the farm.
Napoleon (Stalin) assumes leadership of Animal Farm (Soviet Union) and declares that there will be no more meetings. From that point on, he stresses, the pigs alone will make all of the decisions for the good of every animal (Workers). Napoleon (Stalin) begins expanding his powers, rewriting history to make Snowball (Trotsky) a villain. Napoleon (Stalin) also begins to act more and more like a human being—sleeping in a bed, drinking whisky, and engaging in trade with neighboring farmers. The original Animalist principles strictly forbade such activities, but Squealer (Molotov), Napoleon's propagandist, justifies every action to the other animals, convincing them that Napoleon (Stalin) is a great leader and is making things better for everyone despite the fact that the common animals are cold, hungry, and overworked. Looking in at the party of Pigs and Farmers through the farmhouse window, the common animals can no longer tell which are the Pigs and which are the human beings.
The perversion of founding principles is not limited to communist countries. On the farm there were the Seven Original Commandments:
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes. No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal. All animals are created equal.
All of the Seven Commandments are eventually broken by the pigs for their own gain. Squealer (Molotov) constantly changes the Commandments to the pigs' benefit, taking advantage of the other animals. Through the manipulation of language, the Pigs accumulate more power and privileges:
No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets ;
No animal shall drink alcohol to excess
No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.
Ultimately, all the commandments are boiled down to one commandment:
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Could this degeneration of founding principles happen in the United States? The distressing answer is that it already has. It has accelerated at a breakneck pace since 2000. Orwell’s themes are as true today as they were in 1944.
Corruption
“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” - George Orwell
Our elected officials are supposed to represent the wishes of the citizens that elected them. They derive their just powers from the governed. In the early days of our Republic, citizens could freely enter the White House without hesitation. Federalist Papers 55 and 56 explicitly promised, without qualification, that there would be one Representative for every thirty-thousand inhabitants. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended that the total population of Congressional districts never exceed 50,000 to 60,000. Currently, the average population size of the districts is nearly 700,000 and, consequently, the principle of proportionally equitable representation has been abandoned. Our elected officials no longer represent the people. They represent the 17,000 corporate lobbyists who spend $3.3 billion per year to “persuade” them what is best for their special interests. This is why a Congressperson can receive 9 to 1 calls from their constituents against a $700 billion banker bailout bill and still vote for the bill. The ideals of our fledgling Republic have been corrupted by politicians who have sold their souls to corporate and banking interests.
The corruption became more insidious with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the institution of the Federal income tax in 1913. The levers of money printing and raising taxes gave the select few (Pigs) the wherewithal to control and manipulate the working class population. Debt and taxes are the friends of a corrupt politician. The Cabal of bankers who control the Federal Reserve has been printing money for 96 years to such an extent that the U.S. dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power versus gold. But, with Orwellian irony our government leaders proclaim a “strong dollar policy”. This is a lie. The only way out of the current colossal debt dilemma is by allowing our currency to depreciate even more so that the debt becomes less burdensome in dollar terms. The National Debt is now $11.6 trillion. The National Debt in 1913 was $2.9 billion. Therefore, the National Debt has gone up by 400,000% in 96 years. FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND PERCENT! I had to go back and check my calculation three times. The people we elected to Congress have spent $11.6 trillion more than the government has generated in revenues, with $10 trillion of it accumulated since 1981.
Despite this “investment” spending by our elected officials, the country’s infrastructure is crumbling, we import 66% of our energy supplies versus 28% in 1982, our public education system is on par with a Third World country, our healthcare system is bloated, expensive and corrupt, and we have racked up another $56 trillion of future liabilities for unfulfillable promises made by our myopic leaders. The Bills passed by Congress (written by lobbyists) exceed 1,000 pages, with payoffs and pork to constituents, corporate contributors and other influential allies. These Bills are not even read by our leaders before being passed. Hundreds of pages of amendments are added at 3:00 am. As the ruling pigs in Animal Farm are slowly corrupted, they take the spoils while the working class proletariat toil for nothing. Congress and the bankers are the ruling Pigs, we are the overworked common animals. Talk is cheap and lies are expensive.
Do as I say not as I do because
The shit so deep you can't run away
I beg to differ on the contrary
I agree with every word that you say
Talk is cheap and lies are expensive
My wallet's fat and so is my head
Hit and run and then I'll hit you again
I'm a smart ass but I'm playing dumb
Standards set and broken all the time
Control the chaos behind a gun
Call it as I see it even if
I was born deaf, blind and dumb
Losers winning big on the lottery
Rehab rejects still sniffing glue
Constant refutation with myself
I'm a victim of a catch 22
Green Day – Walking Contradiction
Class Oppression
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. - George Orwell
The American Revolution was fought for the ideals that “All men are created equal” and we had the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was based upon Karl Marx’ idealistic Communist Manifesto which pitted the oppressors against the oppressed. Communism was supposed to be a system in which goods were owned in common and available to all as needed. The ten conditions for a transition to Communism are:
Abolition of property in land application of all rents of land to public purposes. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. Abolition of all right of inheritance. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a National Bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equal distribution of the population over the country. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were biting condemnations of the Soviet Union, its perversion of the revolution’s ideals and class tyranny that ultimately widened in its society. The American Republic was constructed upon the individual and their freedom and liberty. After reading the above list of conditions, the United States is at least 50% of the way to a perverted form of communism as our leaders have instituted a progressive income tax, restricted the right of inheritance through taxes, centralized credit in the hands of the State, allowed corporate farms to dominate agriculture along with providing tax breaks and protective tariffs, gotten into bed with the Military Industrial Complex, banking industry, and auto industry, provide free public education to the working classes while they send their privileged children to private schools. By satiating the poor working classes with bread and circuses like welfare programs, easy credit, no income taxes, cable TV, fast food, cheap liquor, and drugs, the ruling classes are able to reap obscene riches through the systematic raping of the American public through the use of inflation and taxes on the middle class.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. - George Orwell
The success of any system of government is ultimately dependent upon the integrity, honesty and honor of its leaders. If they become corrupted by power and money, the system will ultimately collapse. It may be a natural progression in all societies that intellectuals with superior intelligence will take advantage of those who perform physical labor. The intelligentsia in Animal Farm is the Pigs, who learn to walk on two legs, wear clothes, sleep in beds, drink alcohol and consider animals that walk on four legs as their inferiors. They perverted the founding principles of the revolution. The intelligentsia of the United States has perverted the founding principles that all men are created equal and we are each entitled to our individual liberty. The ruling elite constitute the 1% richest Americans and the politicians they have bought. The top 1% own 35% of all the net worth in the country. They own as much as the bottom 90% of Americans. They “earn” 22% of the income and pay 40% of the taxes in the U.S. I would contend that the majority of the intelligentsia has utilized their private education, Washington and Wall Street connections and ability to manipulate the financial and political system to further enrich themselves at the expense of the average American.
Source: CNN Money
Gullible Working Class
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. - George Orwell
The definition of democracy is: government by the people. Today, the United States is democratic in name only. The political class, which supposedly represents the citizens, has perverted the original concept of a representative democracy. Our representatives were supposed to personally sacrifice by taking time off from their everyday professions to do what was best for the country. After performing this noble duty they would go back to their original vocations. Instead 40% of Congress is lawyers, their goal is to make a career in Washington DC and after leaving Congress they seek riches as lobbyists. Once elected, they utilize the power and money gained from the position to maintain that position permanently. This is why incumbents win elections 95% of the time. In 2004, incumbents spent $700 million to get re-elected, while challengers spent $200 million. These obscene sums of money have perverted the original intention of the Founders.
The combination of a permanent political class with an undereducated, uninterested, gullible, naïve electorate has permitted the few to wield immense power over the majority. In Animal Farm, the working class is represented by Boxer the workhorse. He is a hard working non-thinking animal that repeats over and over that “Napoleon (Stalin) is always right”. He is representative of those who believe everything that Barack Obama says is gospel. Ultimately, Boxer is sacrificed so that the Pigs can live more luxuriously. A highly educated involved electorate would be dangerous to those in power. An atrocious public education system is actually beneficial to the Pigs. There are 34 million Americans without a high school degree, constituting 15% of those over 18 years old. Another 112 million have graduated high school without progressing any further with their education. Many of these people are functionally illiterate, can’t add, can’t spell, don’t know when World War II happened, or who is the Vice President. Only 69% of entering 9th graders in the public school system graduate high school. The graduation rates and educational achievements of minorities are dramatically worse than these numbers. Only 26% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, with only 6% possessing a master’s degree.
Source: Wikipedia
The proliferation of drugs among the poor keeps them dazed and sedated. Various welfare programs and easy credit keep them from rioting as they can “purchase” luxury cars and electronic gadgets enjoyed by the upper classes. The bad debts are picked up by the taxpayers. As a further control, those in power have put 2.3 million people in prisons, most of whom are poor and 60% who are minorities. By distracting the majority of people in the country with cable TV entertainment, the internet, Twitter, cell phones, sports, movies, and shopping malls, the Pigs who run the show are able to oppress and control the masses. The highly educated use the idiocy and naïveté of the oppressed to their advantage by using the rigged financial system to generate ever more riches for themselves. The banker gods peddled fraudulent mortgage schemes throughout the world in order to enrich themselves. When it blew up in their faces, they turned to their government co-conspirators (Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and most of Congress) to keep their riches. Their Congressional benefactors have obliged by stealing trillions from the taxpaying classes and redistributed it to the Pigs running Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, and Bank of America.
Abuse of Language
George Orwell’s most pointed criticism of political leaders was their misuse of language to further their wicked agendas. He exposes the outrageous abuse of words in 1984 and Animal Farm. The ruling elite manipulate the language as an instrument of control over the masses.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” - George Orwell
The intelligentsia understands that the masses can be manipulated with convincing talking points and misleading slogans. Politicians never tell their constituents they are doing some pork barrel spending. Every dollar of new spending is spun as “investment spending”. We have evidently made $11.6 trillion of “investments” in our National Debt. Somehow we enacted “campaign finance reform” and still manage to spend $1.3 billion on political campaigns. Our beloved numbskull Vice President Joe Biden said last week, “We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt”. President Bush said, “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free market system”. President Obama insisted that the only way to save our country from catastrophe caused by excessive debt was to borrow $700 billion and spend it on infrastructure projects, of which only 3.5% was allocated to our crumbling infrastructure. During the Vietnam War a U.S. Major declared, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” In 1947 the government changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense, as we today have garrisons of 100,000 troops in 117 foreign countries. The Department of Homeland Security, Patriot Act, and War on Terror are all deceptive titles and slogans purposely meant to hoodwink Boobus Americanus.
“In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” - George Orwell
President Obama and his cronies hammer away that 47 million Americans are uninsured. It is a lie, but that does not deter them from continuing to make the claim. The latest Census report says that within the borders of the United States as of 2007 there were 45.65 million people without health insurance. But this number included 9.73 million foreigners, leaving only 35.92 Americans who were uninsured. Among the uninsured in the United States there were also 9.1 million people making more than $75,000 per year who did not choose to purchase health insurance. Therefore, we are imposing a trillion dollar solution for 28 million people who are poor and uninsured. That is $36,000 per person while imposing a huge invasive bureaucracy on the lives of the other 278 million Americans. The masses believe the lies.
Green Extremists have convinced children and dullards that global warming is destroying the planet. They state their position as fact, when their thesis does not meet the scientific method criteria as fact. Their contentions are based on computer models. Our financial system was also based on financial models that said that worthless mortgages were really gold. We know how that worked out. The facts are that the earth has warmed prior to the industrial revolution and has cooled. The sun, water vapor, earth's orbit, volcanoes, interstellar clouds, cosmic rays, tectonic plates, land use, CO2, sunspots, gravitational pulls, ocean currents and solar flares all impact earth. It is far too complex to declare that we know what is happening. Let’s get tomorrow’s weather forecast right first. Men plan and God laughs.
Must have been a lot of cows farting in the 1400s
The Orwellian language of Big Government turns people into pliable subjects. It lulls us into passively accepting ever-increasing taxes while encouraging our reliance on an embedded and mutating bureaucracy administered by corrupt career politicians and backed by corporate sugar daddies. Wall Street shysters have mastered the art or twisting and distorting reality to benefit themselves. Subprime loans, which triggered the worldwide financial crisis, were called “nonprime”. The billions of worthless toxic loans that still sit on the books of our biggest banks at original cost are now referred to as “legacy loans”. How quaint. The lowest rated bonds of the worst companies are referred to as “high yield debt”, not junk bonds. We describe our economy as “free market”. There is nothing further from the truth. Bailouts for corporate failures and rewarding the excess risk takers are not hallmarks of free market capitalism. Government takeovers of banks, insurance companies, and auto companies are not free market capitalism. It is a warped form of corporate fascism – the intermingling of the State and corporations for the benefit of a few. Kevin Depew from Minyanville.com described the Orwellian lies of Hank Paulson as he sat before Congress explaining his criminal actions last Fall.
“Paulson asserted throughout his testimony that he, almost single-handedly, averted an "economic collapse" and, moreover, that we should actually be thanking him for it. The ugly assemblage of half-truths, obfuscations, smarmy evasiveness and prickly showboating would have embarrassed Bernie Madoff. But it wasn't Bernie Madoff. It was a former United States Treasury Secretary.
Myopia
“Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.” - George Orwell
Animal Farm represents any human society whether it be capitalist, socialist, fascist, or communist. Leaders are capable of being corrupted by power within any form of government. The myopic thinking of the Pigs in Animal Farm will eventually destroy the farm. Orwell ends the novel with the animals watching the Pigs mingling with farmers through a window. They couldn’t tell the difference between the supposed revolutionaries and those they had fought against. If he had looked into the future he would have seen that the Soviet Union would decay from the inside as the corrupt few eventually came to believe their own lies and propaganda. It collapsed 44 years later as a corrupt, bankrupt, shell of a country. The combination of myopia, greed, wickedness, ignorance and indifference are a brew that are leading the United States down the same path. As the Pigs in our society have enriched themselves, the average American has seen their real standard of living stagnate over the last 40 years. The Pigs have manipulated government inflation statistics so the masses think they are getting ahead.
The myopia of our politicians has put the country into a predicament that we can’t escape without tremendous pain and suffering. In order to keep their positions of power they have passed bills for decades that promise trillions more in goodies than we can possibly pay for. They have paid no thought to the long-term consequences of their actions because they don’t care. Future generations are of no concern to gluttonous power hungry Pigs. During the eight years of the Bush presidency the ruling class used fear tactics and propaganda to ram through laws which allow Government to monitor the movements and communications of every American. Liberties have been stripped and freedoms have been restricted. Now President Obama is attempting to take control over the few aspects of our lives that remain relatively free. The Orwellian phrase “Cap & Trade” sounds much more innocuous than an energy tax of $1,500 on every household in America that will drive manufacturers out of the country, along with millions of jobs. “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act” is the Orwellian name for a bill that will create a massive new bureaucracy, cost at least $1 trillion, cost small businesses billions more in health costs, give government the final decision on whether you are worth saving, and provide more freebies to poor Americans. This will keep the poor sedated and less likely to cause trouble for the ruling class.
Bill of Frights
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances except when the Department of Homeland Security determines that you are a domestic terrorist who is a member of the Libertarian Party and attend Tax Day Tea Parties.
Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed except when the government fears you will use those arms against them.
Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized unless we suspect that you are a terrorist or anti-government activist.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation unless politicians decide that a shopping mall would be a better use for your private property.
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense unless we classify you as a non-combatant and put you in prison for two years without charging you or providing counsel.
Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law after you wait for two years for your speedy trial.
Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted unless approved by Dick Cheney.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people unless activist judges determine otherwise.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people except that all these powers have been usurped by the Federal government.
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” - George Orwell
As we look through the window at the raucous party between the Pigs and the farmers it is impossible to distinguish between the imperial monarchists who taxed the colonies to such an extreme that it caused a revolution and the revolutionaries that have adopted the same characteristics and traits of those they revolted against. The American people are like sheep being led to slaughter. Our Founding Fathers declared that the common people were in control. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. The time has come to abolish the corrupt system and institute a new Government.
Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.
You better watch out,
There may be dogs about
I’ve looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem.
What do you get for pretending the dangers not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.
Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home
And do as you’re told.
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.
Pink Floyd – Sheep
To join the discussion of how to take back our country from the banking cartel and government central planners, go to www.TheBurningPlatform.com.
By James Quinn
quinnadvisors@comcast.net
James Quinn is a senior director of strategic planning for a major university. James has held financial positions with a retailer, homebuilder and university in his 22-year career. Those positions included treasurer, controller, and head of strategic planning. He is married with three boys and is writing these articles because he cares about their future. He earned a BS in accounting from Drexel University and an MBA from Villanova University. He is a certified public accountant and a certified cash manager.
These articles reflect the personal views of James Quinn. They do not necessarily represent the views of his employer, and are not sponsored or endorsed by his employer.
© 2009 Copyright James Quinn - All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.
James Quinn Archive
© 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.
Comments
Laws
26 Jul 09, 12:51 Citizens of the United States Welcome to Animal Farm 2009
If he had looked into the future he would have seen that the Soviet Union would decay from the inside as the corrupt few eventually came to believe their own lies and propaganda. It collapsed 44 years later as a corrupt, bankrupt, shell of a country. The combination of myopia, greed, wickedness, ignorance and indifference are a brew that are leading the United States down the same path. All you wrote is true. The above is the most hopeful part of the piece. Once we're past the collapse, we can start again. It is the lifecycle of all empires and there seems to be no way to avoid the pain of this birth/death model.
30 Nov 10, 10:33 animal farm
this is very helpful for my essay.NASA hauled back loads of rocks and dust from the moon, but apparently hasn't kept good track of those samples on Earth.
The space agency has lost or misplaced more than 500 pieces of the lunar rocks and other space samples, NASA's inspector general reported Thursday, making the case for better inventory controls.
Astronauts on the Apollo moon landings from 1969 to 1972 returned 842 pounds of lunar rock and soil to Earth. The space agency now loans samples, along with meteorite and comet dust, to about 377 researchers worldwide.
The space agency now lists 517 moon rock samples as missing or stolen.
However, the inspector general audit suggests much more is missing, based on inquiries to a sample of 59 scholars loaned moon rocks, comet dust or meteorites. The audit found 19% could not locate all of their samples.
It isn't a new problem. NASA Administrator Thomas Paine threatened "waving heavy cudgels" at researchers who lost samples in a 1970 Congressional hearing.
The latest audit suggests professors remain absent-minded with moon rocks. "Records were inaccurate, researchers could not account for all samples loaned to them, and researchers held samples for extended periods without performing research," the report says. Among the problems:
• Hundreds of samples that had been destroyed show up in NASA records as existing. And samples loaned to 12 researchers "who had died, retired or relocated" were never returned.
• Only about 70% of researchers replied to the most recent moon rock inventory conducted in 2008.
• Asked when they last used the moon rock samples, researchers replied an average of 15 years. One researcher had kept a sample unused for 35 years.
"NASA is committed to the protection of our nation's space-related artifacts, and sharing these treasures with outside researchers and the general public," said NASA's Dwayne Brown, in a statement. The space agency concurred with all eight of the report's recommendations, such as requiring scholars to return unused moon rocks, and promised to have the new recommendations in place within nine months.
Overall the space agency lists 26,000 moon rocks and other "astromaterials" such as meteorites loaned to schools, museums and researchers. "To put this in perspective, losses of Apollo samples have amounted to less than one hundredth of 1 percent of the returned samples over 40 years of intense research," Brown said.© Getty Images Enlarge Wayne Rooney has scored three goals in his last two games
David Moyes has played down talk of offering Wayne Rooney a new contract, saying his priority is for the in-form striker to keep up his fine goalscoring form in Sunday's Manchester derby.
Rooney, 27, has scored three goals in his last two games and brought up a double century for Manchester United in Tuesday's 4-2 win over Bayer Leverkusen.
But his current deal expires in 2015 and United are likely to try and tie Rooney down for the long term, rather than risk losing him on a free transfer or being forced to sell him for less than his market value.
And having fought a campaign to keep Rooney in the summer, when Chelsea made two offers for him, Moyes is likely to be keen to keep the forward - but he is concentrating on the meeting with Manchester City.
He said: "I think we just do it step-by-step. Just to see him score another two goals at the weekend will be the next step, just to keep his form going. I think he's played well and we want him to maintain to it. If anything I am asking him to step up again and keep getting better."
Moyes believes Rooney deserves the credit for his fine form for his efforts to get himself fit after he suffered shoulder and hamstring injuries in pre-season and then missed the defeat to Liverpool with a gashed forehead.
He added: "We kept him working really hard. He kept himself working really hard I should say. He was in really good shape and I was impressed with the condition he was in and the way he worked in pre-season.
"I think he is getting the fruits of that. He has worked hard and shown everyone what he can do."
Moyes also challenged Antonio Valencia to become more prolific and has set the winger an eight-goal target.
Valencia scored his first goal of the season against Leverkusen to equal his tally for the whole of the last campaign. He has struck just 11 times in 105 Premier League games in four years since making the move from Wigan, where he only scored seven goals in 85 matches.
Moyes said: "I said to him, 'You should be able to getting yourself seven or eight goals a season regularly.' He looked at me and sort of squinted a little. Hopefully he knows what I mean.
"I don't know how many he scored last season but I think it was only one or two. He's got off to a good start and hopefully getting close to the target for this season."
Valencia was United's player of the year for the 2011-12 campaign but struggled last year after he was granted the No. 7 shirt - previously worn by Old Trafford greats George Best, Bryan Robson, Eric Cantona, David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo.
This season he has reverted to his previous number, 25, and Moyes added: "They kept telling me we need to change his number and we got that changed for him. Sometimes psychologically it can make a difference for a player. Overall I have been pleased. He's scored a great goal. He's done very well."
Download ESPN's new UK sport app, a fresh and powerful new way to follow your favourite UK sports news, scores and video.
© ESPN Sports Media LtdMEGADETH recently finished recording its fifteenth album in a Nashville studio for a tentative late 2015 or early 2016 release. The production duties on the follow-up to 2013's "Super Collider" were handled by MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine and Toby Wright (ALICE IN CHAINS, KORN). The CD is currently being mixed by Josh Wilbur, who has previously worked with LAMB OF GOD, ALL THAT REMAINS and GOJIRA.
In a July 27 online chat with members of MEGADETH's official fan club, the Cyber Army, Mustaine revealed the track listing for the band's forthcoming |
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Hades
The name of the Underworld and the god who ruled it. Brother of Zeus and Poseidon, Hades abducted Persephone, tricking her with a pomegranate, but was compelled to give her up for half the year. He may be represented holding a cornucopia - symbol of the life which comes from the soil - a staff, or riding a chariot pulled by black horses. Hades the place was not necessarily a place of suffering but conceived as the last resting place of the soul. However, very wicked people were taken by the Furies down to the lowest level - Tartarus - and there received eternal torments.
The moon goddess associated with witchcraft, magic, doorways, and creatures of the night - especially hounds and ghosts. Hesiod makes her daughter of Perses and Asteria. She is often depicted with three faces representing her role as guardian of crossroads.
Hector
The wise and noble son of the Trojan king Priam; he is the great hero of the city but falls at the hands of Achilles during the Trojan War. In vengeance for his killing of Patroclus, his body is dragged around the city walls behind the chariot of his slayer. Priam successfully appeals to Achilles for the restoration of his son's body whose funeral closes the Iliad.
The god of the sun who rode his golden chariot across the skies each day. Son of the titans Hyperion and Theia, he was famously represented by the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
Hephaistos
The genius blacksmith and god of fire, metallurgy, and crafts, he was lame after he was thrown from Mt. Olympus by either Zeus or his mother Hera, upset at his ugliness. Husband of Aphrodite under false pretences, from his workshop on Mt. Etna he created such wonders as the aegis of Zeus, the helmet of Hermes, the first woman Pandora, and the great shield of Achilles.
Hera
The famously jealous wife of Zeus, often with good reason, she was the goddess of marriage and family. Representing the ideal woman and fidelity, the daughter of Kronos and Rhea would take awful revenge on many of her husband's lovers and resulting offspring, especially Hercules. Patron of Argos, she was the mother of Ares, Hephaistos, and Hebe, amongst others.
Hercules
The semi-divine hero and son of Zeus and Alkmene, who performed such prodigious deeds that he won immortality and his place amongst the Olympian gods. His 12 mighty labours included slaying monsters like the Lernaean Hydra, the Stymphalian Birds, and the ferocious three-headed hound of Hades, Cerberus. He is usually portrayed in art carrying a huge club and wearing the skin he ripped from the Nemean Lion, another of his victims.
Hermes
The herald and messenger of the gods was himself the god of trade, wealth, luck, language, thieves, and travel. Son of Zeus and Maia (daughter of Atlas), he was an impish seeker of amusement but had a more serious role as leader of dead souls to the River Styx. Patron of the home, he is often depicted wearing winged sandals or hat and holding his herald's staff or kerykeion.
Hestia
The virgin goddess of the hearth, who is the daughter of Kronos and Rhea.
Horae (aka Hours)
The daughters of Zeus and Themis, who personified the seasons. They are Eunomia (Good Order), Dike (Justice) and Eirene (Peace) with their mother as the fourth and representing Divine Law. The three sisters guard the gates of Mt. Olympus.
Hypnos
The son of Nyx (Night) and personification of Sleep, he lives in the Underworld. Often depicted as a winged youth, he touches the head of the tired with a branch or pours a magic liquid on them to induce slumber.
Icarus
The son of the master craftsman Daedalus, who flew too close to the sun and so the wax melted on his artificial wings fashioned by his father in order to escape King Minos of Crete. Falling into the sea and drowning, the stretch of waters in that area became known as the Icarian Sea, and then, when Hercules dragged the washed up body to an island, he renamed that place Icaria in honour of the fallen youth.
The king of the Lapiths in Thessaly who, in order to avoid paying the handsome bridal gifts for his future wife Dia, prepared a trap for her father Eioneus. This was a concealed pit, at the bottom of which was a charcoal fire. Invited for absolution at Mt. Olympus following the murder of Eioneus, Ixion then attacked Hera. Zeus had fooled him, though, into thinking a cloud was actually Hera and then punished Ixion by having him tied to an ever-spinning wheel of fire in Hades.
Jason
The hero whose father Aison had been robbed of his kingdom by Pelias, and when Jason came to claim his rightful inheritance, Pelias sent him on the impossible task of finding the Golden Fleece. Happy to oblige, Jason assembled his crew - the Argonauts of the ship Argo - and, with help from Athena, brought back the Fleece to Thessaly along with his sweetheart Medea. Pelias refused to give up the throne, Medea killed him with a potion, and the couple settled, in any case, in Corinth.
Kronos (aka Cronus)
The Titan who was the son of Uranus and Gaia. He killed and castrated his father and then married his sister Rhea to produce the Olympian gods. Afraid he would be overthrown like his father, Kronos devoured all of his children, but Rhea saved Zeus, whom she hid on Crete, giving her husband a rock as a substitute. Gaia contrived for Kronos to cough up his children, who, led by Zeus, promptly did overthrow him. Kronos was then imprisoned in Tartarus. In other versions, he is king of a Golden Age and rules a land of paradise.
Leda was the queen of Sparta and mother of Clytemnestra. She was seduced by Zeus who took the form of a swan, and from this union was born Helen (from an egg) and the twins Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri. In some versions, it is Nemesis who is seduced and Leda only looks after the egg and resulting offspring.
Leto
Daughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, she is the mother (with Zeus) of Apollo and Artemis, giving birth to her offspring on the island of Delos, hence its important sanctuary to Apollo.
Maenads
The female followers of Dionysos who participated in frenzied rituals of dancing and music.
The satyr who was gifted at playing the aulos but, after foolishly challenging Apollo to a musical competition, lost and was flayed alive for his troubles.
Medea
The daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis and granddaughter of Helios, she was skilled in the arts of magic and potions. She helped Jason steal the Golden Fleece by charming the dragon which protected it. She then hampered the pursuit of the Argonauts by dismembering her young brother Apsyrtus. In another shocking episode, she tricked Pelias' daughters into chopping him up and boiling him in a big pot as a punishment from Hera. Medea fled to Corinth with Jason, but rebuffed by the hero, she killed his new love Glauke and then her own children in spite. Fleeing again, this time in a dragon-pulled chariot to Athens, she would later try to poison Theseus, thus fully completing her reputation as an all-round bad egg.
Medusa
The gorgon whose stare turned onlookers to stone. She had once been very beautiful but was transformed into a hideous gorgon by Athena after she had been raped by Poseidon in one of the goddess’ temples. Killed by the hero Perseus, from the blood of her decapitated torso sprang Chrysaor and the winged horse Pegasus.
Meleager
He was a hero who successfully led an all-star expedition to hunt and kill the Calydonian boar which had been terrorising central Greece. Known as an all-round good egg, he had also been one of the argonauts with Jason who found the Golden Fleece.
Melpomene
The Muse of tragedy plays, hence usually portrayed holding a tragedy theatre mask.
Menelaos
The younger brother of Agamemnon, and the king of Sparta whose wife Helen ran off with Paris sparking the Trojan War. He survived the conflict and eventually returned home via Egypt.
Metis
The first wife of Zeus and personification of Intelligence. Zeus swallowed her as he feared she was pregnant with a child who would overthrow him. From this action sprang Athena, born from the god's head.
The king of Phrygia who had the knack of changing anything he touched into gold, a skill he received from Dionysos in thanks for looking after the satyr Silenus. A less favourable trait were his donkey ears, given to him by Apollo after Midas had judged Pan the better musician of the two.
Minos
The king of Crete whose palace at Knossos contained the labyrinth and Minotaur. The terrible half-man, half-bull creature was the fruit of Minos' wife Pasiphae's amorous engagement with a bull sent by Poseidon to punish the king for not sacrificing a prize bull to the god as promised. Minos extracted yearly tribute from Athens in the form of young men and women who were sacrificed to the Minotaur, but the hero Theseus managed to slay the Minotaur and end the practice. Minos was the son of Zeus and Europa but was mortal as his sticky end reveals. Falling out with Daedalus, the architect of his labyrinth, the king pursued him to Camicus but was boiled in his bath by the king's daughters there. In the afterlife, he was made a judge of souls along with his brother Rhadamanthys.
Minotaur
The half-man, half-bull creature which was the fruit of Minos' wife Pasiphae's amorous involvement with a bull sent by Poseidon. Haunting the labyrinth of Knossos, he would be killed by the Athenian hero Theseus, keen to put an end to the yearly sacrificial offerings of young men and women.
Mnemosyne
The Titan who was the personification of Memory and mother of the nine Muses.
Muses
Nine masters of the arts. Daughters of Zeus and Memory (Mnemosyne), they gave the arts to mankind so that they might forget their troubles and to inspire artists of all kinds. They were: Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania.
The young hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia, he was the son of Cephissus and the nymph Liriope. The impossibly handsome youth one day fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water in the forest. Pining away from thirst and despair, and ignoring the attentions of Echo, he died but was transformed into a flower of the same name. Narcissus was especially popular in Roman art and appears in over 50 wall paintings at Pompeii.
Nemesis
Both a goddess and the personification of retribution. Daughter of Oceanus and Night, she is relentless and merciless, especially punishing hubris.
Nereid
The sea nymphs who are the daughters of Nereus. They can assist sailors and are often in the company of Poseidon.
Nessus
The centaur who unwisely picked a fight with Hercules and was struck by the hero's arrow for his troubles. In his revenge, though, Nessus tricked Hercules' wife Deianeira into using his blood which acted as a poison and killed his slayer when Deianeira coated her husband's cloak with it.
Night (aka Nyx)
Born from Chaos she personifies Night and is feared by both gods and men. Connected to oracles, she is also the mother of Sleep (Hypnos).
The winged personification of Victory, whose father was the Titan Pallas and mother Styx. She was a popular subject in art, often accompanying Athena and famously represented in the statue from Samothrace and on the hand of the giant statue of Zeus at Olympia, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
Niobe
The daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion of Thebes, she foolishly boasted that as she had so many children she was superior to Leto. The goddess promptly sent her children Apollo and Artemis to put Niobe in her place. Apollo killed all Niobe's sons with his bow, and Artemis did the same to the daughters. The distraught mother then became a rock on Mt. Sipylus which, washed continually with waters, mimicked Niobe's weeping forever.
Young females who hang around natural features such as rivers, springs, mountains, caves, and particular trees. They are often found in the company of Artemis and Pan, and they can help hunters and sailors but may be prone to abduction where handsome youths are concerned. If rebuffed, they could turn violent, as in the case of Echenais who blinded the Sicilian herdsman Daphnis.
Oceanus
The Titan son of Uranus and Gaia. His waters encircle the world and so is the source of all rivers. His wife is Tethys with whom he fathered the Oceanids and river-gods.
Odysseus
The wily king of Ithaca known for his quick wits, courage, and leadership. The son of Laertes and Antikleia, he was instrumental in the Trojan War by persuading Achilles to join the cause and coming up with the ruse of the Trojan Horse. The voyage back home from Troy turned into an epic adventure and subject of Homer's Odyssey. He encountered the Sirens, the Cylcops Polyphemos, visited Hades, and spent an age with the lovely Calypso, but eventually made it back to his faithful wife Penelope and son Telemachus.
The king of Thebes who tragically confused his family relations, killing his father and, after solving the riddle of the sphinx, marrying his mother Epicaste (later Iocasta), both by mistake. Following his mother's suicide, and blinding himself for his stupidity, their descendants were cursed to endure many miseries. He is the subject of the famous tragedy named after him by Sophocles.
Olympus
The home of the Olympian gods and Greece's highest mountain at 2,918 m.
Orion
The mighty hunter who was the son of Poseidon and Euryale, one of the Gorgons. He famously had 50 sons with 50 different nymphs, tried to woo Artemis, and famously pursued the Pleiades, but was shot by the huntress goddess and transformed into a constellation for his troubles. The appearance, rise and fall of his stars was used as a guide for when to perform certain agricultural tasks by ancient farmers.
Orpheus
Son of Apollo and the Muse Calliope, no wonder Orpheus was a virtuoso musician and poet. His lyre-playing calmed the Sirens on Jason's Argonaut expedition for the Golden Fleece and charmed Persephone to release from Hades his dead love Eurydice. He won his case but broke his promise not to look back on leaving the underworld and so his love was taken from him forever. Distraught, the great artist never played again, and he met a sticky end, ripped apart by the Maenads for being miserable.
Pan
The pastoral god who dwelt amongst the mountains, caves, and rivers of Greece. With the legs and horns of a goat, the patron of shepherds was the inventor and master of the syrinx or panpipes, which had been the nymph of the same name, but she panicked at Pan's attention and transformed herself into reeds, which the god then blew to create musical sounds.
The first woman, made by Hephaistos (or in other versions Prometheus) and beautified by the impressive team of Athena, Hermes, Aphrodite, and the Graces; she opened the jar she was expressly told not to and so let out all the ills of the world leaving inside, caught on the lip, only one consolation: hope.
Pegasus
The winged horse of Bellerophon, which was born from Zeus and the blood of Medusa. Pegasus helped the hero slay the Chimera and then enjoyed a semi-retirement on Mt. Olympus, where he brings Zeus' thunderbolt whenever required. The horse was a popular design on coins, especially those of Corinth.
Penelope
The faithful wife of Odysseus, who warded off many suitors while her husband was fighting during the Trojan War and then dallying on his long odyssey home. One of her delaying tactics was to tell her suitors she first had to finish weaving a shroud for Odysseus' father Laertes, but each night she pulled out what she had woven that day. She is the mother of Telemachus.
Penthesilea
The amazon daughter of Otrere and Ares, who accidentally killed her colleague Hippolyte. She later led an army to assist Priam during the Trojan War but was killed by Achilles.
Persephone (aka Kore)
She was the goddess of vegetation, especially grain. Abducted by Hades to live with him in the Underworld, the beautiful goddess was eventually released, but by a trick of a pomegranate seed, she was compelled to return to Hades for a portion of the year. This was symbolic of the agricultural cycle or the common practice of burying seeds underground. Like her mother Demeter, she was an important focus of the Eleusinian Mysteries and Thesmophoria festival.
Perseus
Helped by Athena and given the invisible-making cap of Hades and a giant sword and winged sandals from Hermes, the hero made good on his rash promise to king Polydectes and beheaded Medusa. On his way home, he won the hand of fair Andromeda, the Ethiopian princess who was tied to a rock and left to Poseidon's dreadful sea-monster in punishment for her mother Cassiopeia's boast she was prettier than the Nereids, the sea-gods children. Using the head of Medusa, the hero turned the monster to stone and rescued Andromeda.
Pleiades
The seven daughters of Atlas and the nymph Pleione, who, pursued by the hunter Orion, were immortalised by Zeus and became the constellation of that name. The rising of the stars in May and descent in October/November were used as guides by ancient farmers for when to harvest and plough.
Polyphemus
The one-eyed cyclops who captured Odysseus and his men in Homer's Odyssey. The giant was the son of Poseidon, and he ate two of his prize each morning and evening until Odysseus got him drunk and blinded him. In revenge, the cyclops cursed the hero to endure all manner of delays on his onward journey home.
Polymnia
The Muse of hymns to the gods and heroes.
Poseidon
The god of the sea and bringer of storms and earthquakes, he often meddled in the plans of his brother Zeus. Son of Kronos and Rhea, he had many children, including Theseus, was responsible for such monsters as the Minotaur, and had a temple at Sounion dedicated to him.
Priam
The king of Troy who was the son of Laomedon and father of Hector and Paris (along with 48 other sons and several daughters, including Cassandra). He persuaded Achilles to return Hector's body for proper burial with a moving speech in Homer's version of the Trojan War. The pious king was killed by Neoptolemus when his city was finally sacked.
The trickster Titan who stole fire from the workshop of Hephaistos and gave it to mankind. Zeus punished him for his interference by having an eagle eat his liver every day after he was taken to the far away east where he was chained to a rock. After many years of this terrible fate, Prometheus was finally relieved by a passing Hercules who shot the eagle with an arrow.
Rhea
The Titan who was both sister and wife of Kronos, with whom she bore the Olympian gods. She protected Zeus by giving her husband a rock wrapped in cloth to swallow as a substitute after he had a mind to eat all his offspring.
Satyr (aka Silens)
The lustful and wine-loving wild men of nature who had some animal features and followed Dionysos. Intelligent yet mischievous, the most famous of their number was Silenus, wise tutor of Dionysos.
The monster which lived in a cave and preyed on passing sailors and sea-life going through the straits between Sicily and the Italian mainland. She had twelve feet, six heads, three rows of teeth and the bark of a dog. She is the daughter of Hecate.
Selene
The moon goddess. She was the daughter of Hyperion (or Helios) and Theia, who fell in love with Endymion. Unfortunately, Zeus took a disliking to the handsome youth and set him to sleep forever in a cave on Mt. Latmus to be visited every now and then by the goddess (the dark phase of the Moon).
Silenus
The satyr who was father of all the other satyrs. He was the wise tutor of Dionysos.
Half-bird half-woman creatures who lured sailors to their doom with beautiful singing. Odysseus famously avoided their call by tying himself to the mast of his ship when he passed their home near Scylla and Charybdis. With his escape they were fated to commit suicide, hence their frequent portrayal in art diving into the sea.
The king of Corinth who cheated death twice by escaping Hades, the second time by arranging for his wife to forget the necessary funeral offerings to the gods. He lived to a ripe old age, but Zeus punished him for his impertinence by having him forever roll a stone up a hill when he reached the underworld for the third and last time.
Styx
The eldest daughter of Oceanus and the personification of a river in Arcadia. Thetis, in one version of the myth, dipped Achilles into Styx's waters to make her son immortal. Later, she became the river that runs through Tartarus in the deepest part of the Underworld.
Talos (aka Kalos)
The bronze automaton made by Hephaistos to protect Europa, who then switched guard duties to Crete. He saw off trespassers by throwing large stones or heating himself red-hot and then embracing his victims. In some traditions he is killed by his jealous uncle Daedalus, in others, he is killed by Medea who released his magic life-source liquid, stored in his foot.
Tantalus
The rich king of Sipylus who was granted the honour of dining with the gods but somehow disgraced himself, either by stealing the gods' ambrosia or tricking them into eating his son Pelops whom he had previously boiled. Zeus punished him for his wickedness in one of those delicious tortures he often dished out. Down in Hades, Tantalus had to stand in a pool of water which drained every time he tried to take a drink from it, and above him dangled fruit which withdrew from his reach each time he tried to grab one (hence the verb 'tantalise').
Tartarus
The son of Gaia and Aether (Sky), he was the father of Typhon. It is also the name of the deepest level of Hades, where particularly wicked people like Sisyphus and Tantalus were punished, and where the unruly Titans are imprisoned.
Terpsichore
The Muse of dance.
Tethys
The Titan daughter of Gaia and Uranus who represented rivers along with her brother and consort Oceanus. She was the mother of the Oceanids (sea nymphs).
Thalia
The Muse of comedy theatre, hence usually depicted holding a comic theatre mask.
Themis
The primordial goddess, daughter of Gaia and Uranus, who was associated with prophecies, laws, and justice. Hesiod makes her the second wife of Zeus with whom she bore the Hours and Fates.
Theseus
The hero king of Athens who battled Amazons, centaurs, various villains, and most impressive of all, the Minotaur that dwelt in King Minos' labyrinth on Crete. He slew the dreadful creature and escaped the maze by using a ball of twine given to him by Ariadne. Tragically, on the return home, the hero forgot to change his sail from black to white and so his father Aegeus thought him dead and threw himself into the sea, thereafter known as the Aegean in his honour.
Thetis
The sea nymph who was the daughter of Nereus, wife of Peleus, and mother of Achilles. She transformed herself into many forms while her husband-to-be courted her but their eventual wedding was attended by the gods. She famously dipped her son into the River Styx (or held him over a sacred flame) to make him invincible with only his heel where she held him being left mortal.
Titans
The 12 terrible and mighty Titans preceded the Olympian gods with whom they battled for control of the universe and lost. Zeus then imprisoned them in Tartarus, the deepest part of Hades. Amongst their number were Kronos, Hyperion, Oceanus, and Rhea.
Triton
The fish-tailed monster who was the son of Poseidon and Amphitrite. He fought with Hercules but also helped Theseus. In Greek art, he sometimes blows a conch shell and his offspring carry the same name.
Typhon
Born from Gaia and Tartarus, he is the monster with 100 fire-blowing snake heads which make all the sounds of the animal kingdom. Zeus struck him down with his thunderbolt and imprisoned him in Tartarus deep in Hades, but he still causes trouble such as the occasional typhoon.
Urania
The Muse of astronomy and so often depicting holding a sphere.
Uranus (aka Ouranos)
The sky god who was born from Gaia. The pair marry and together they produce many other gods. One of these, Kronos, castrates his father and takes over his role as master of the universe. The genitalia of Uranus, cast into the sea, produces the goddess Aphrodite.
Zeus
The king of the Olympian gods and son of Kronos and Rhea, he was raised on Mt. Dikte, Crete by Gaia. He overthrew his father and, defeating both the Titans and Giants, he ruled supreme. Wedded to Hera but famously bedding many goddesses and mortals, he had numerous offspring, including Athena, Ares, Apollo, Hercules, and Perseus. He had an oracle at Dodona, a statue at Olympia (one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world) and had the Olympic games held every four years in his honour. He is recognised in art by his thunderbolt.After last night's "Agent Orange" debacle at The Grammy's, it appears the music-erati are jealous of their Hollywood peers and ratched amplifier on hysteria up to '11' today. Having asked America "what the fuck is wrong with you" shortly after electing President Trump, veteran electronic music star Moby shared a Facebook post where he claims his "D.C. friends" confirmed the Trump dossier is "100% real"
By way of background, here is Moby expressing his dis-satisfaction at the deplorables' voting in November...
"As a life-long progressive i'm supposed to be diplomatic and understanding, but America, what the fuck is wrong with you?" he wrote in the open letter shared with Billboard. "But then I ask myself, very sadly, why am I surprised?" Moby continued: "This is the America who has now elected a dim-witted, racist, misogynist. A dim-witted, racist, misogynist who has ruined businesses and has no policy proposals other than 'build a wall.' I guess there will be some cold, bitter schadenfreude in spending the next 4 years watching middle america wake up to the fact that donald trump is an incompetent con-man. "The rust belt jobs won't come back. the wall won't get built. and Hillary won't get locked up. Donald Trump will be impeached, or end his presidency with single digit approval ratings; and hopefully, somehow, america will finally wake up the fact that republicans are, simply, terrible."
And today as Moby explains (seemingly incapable of using Capital letters)... (bolding added)
after spending the weekend talking to friends who work in dc i can safely(well, 'accurately'...) post the following things: 1-the russian dossier on trump is real. 100% real. he's being blackmailed by the russian government, not just for being peed on by russian hookers, but for much more nefarious things. 2-the trump administration is in collusion with the russian government, and has been since day one. 3-the trump administration needs a war, most likely with iran. at present they are putting u.s warships off the coast of iran in the hope that iran will attack one of the ships and give the u.s a pretense for invasion. 4-there are right wing plans to get rid of trump. he's a drain on their fundraising and their approval ratings, and the gop and koch brothers and other u.s right wing groups are planning to get rid of trump. 5-intelligence agencies around the world, and here in the u.s, are horrified by the incompetence of the trump administration, and are working to present information that will lead to high level firings and, ultimately, impeachment. i'm writing these things so that when/if these things happen there will be a public record beforehand. these are truly baffling and horrifying times, as we have an incompetent president who is essentially owned by a foreign power. -moby
"Baffling" indeed Mr. Moby (or is it just Moby?)
As you can imagine, Facebook 'friends' who followed Mody were a little quizzicial of his evidence...
Carlos Godinez - "Your friends who work in D.C." Let me guess, Starbucks? Soren Le Goff - Moby your so ignorant it hurts, stop posting propaganda. Frankie Lenaghan - You have lost the plot mate. Eddy G. Munoz - Moby, please get back to the lab and get to work. You are losing your mind. Now you are having delusions of being privy to information that would be considers confidential. Brady Spenrath - I know you mean well, and I agree with your intent, but just posting unverified rumors with no sources or evidence to back that up is as harmful as the White House staff making stuff up. What happened to "When they go low, we go high"?
The question we have for Mark Zuckerberg - is this 'fake news'? Should this kind of information be shared on your social network? What if a so-called self-identified, non-progressive celebrity allegedly claimed to have alleged proof that Nancy Pelosi was in fact the alleged Russian hooker pissing all over Trump in an alleged Moscow hotel? (Could be? We have alleged friends in D.C. who said it's possible).....................................................................................................................................................................................
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Screams of terror awakened several Albuquerque homeless people early Monday as a dark truck smashed through a makeshift campsite near a Downtown shelter, leaving one dead and three injured.
Police said it appeared a man intentionally drove over the sleeping campers at 2:20 a.m. on Iron between First and Second streets near the Albuquerque Rescue Mission. The vehicle fled after the crash and police were searching for the driver Monday.
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“He went for targets on the ground,” Lee Galvez, a 39-year-old homeless man who was sleeping on the south side of the Albuquerque Rescue Mission, said in an interview later Monday. “People screamed. You could hear the fear.”
Albuquerque Police Department officer Fred Duran said it appeared there were two men in a faded black truck that has front-end damage. He said the truck’s license plate may start with GJ or GZ and end in 278.
“Officers observed evidence that would suggest this was not an accident and could have possibly been more malicious,” officer Tanner Tixier said in a statement.
Police didn’t identify the person who was killed or any of those injured. Officers said the injured are expected to survive.
Debris at the site, including a crushed bicycle, could be seen later Monday.
Galvez said the truck was headed south on the sidewalk on Second Street when the driver turned east on Iron and drove into the group of people sleeping on the sidewalk. Galvez said a woman who was struck appeared to die immediately after the crash.
“I ran over after it was all over and she was very much in trouble. There was no helping her,” he said. “It was traumatizing, seeing an innocent lady go through that.”
Galvez said there weren’t more injuries because people were able to dart out of the truck’s path.
Rene Palacios, assistant executive director of Albuquerque Rescue Mission, said homeless people often camp on the streets surrounding the shelter and then eat breakfast there early in the morning. At this time of year, the shelter offers fewer than 10 beds.
“They feel safer staying here, next to the mission,” Palacios said. “There’s quite a few people who (sleep around the shelter). There’s not enough shelter beds for them all.”
Galvez said the female victim was frequently seen reading books around the Downtown area.
“I’m homeless because I made bad choices,” he said. “A woman like that shouldn’t be out here.”Two Arts Events that Are Worth Braving t
Two Winter Arts Events
Winter may make you think of polar vortexes and early sunsets, but Durham's active arts scene means that stimulating arts weekends should be top of mind as well. (It also doesn't hurt that Durham winters are generally quite mild.) December is the perfect opportunity to experience two arts events that show off the depth and breadth of Durham's art offerings.
The Nasher's Special Exhibits: Miró and Rauschenberg
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is home to two fascinating exhibits that will be open in December. It's a great way to spend a chilly Saturday or Sunday afternoon.
The first exhibit, Miró: The Experience of Seeing (open until February 22), collects the first ever presentation of works from the Spanish artist Joan Miró's last two decades. Miró was a contemporary of Picasso and an internationally acclaimed artist from the early 20th century known for the playful quality of his surrealist works, which were marked by abstract and minimalist forms and signs.
Those qualities are on display in the exhibit, which features paintings, sculptures, and prints. It is also the only east coast venue for The Experience of Seeing, which consists of works loaned by Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Atre Reina Sofia, providing visitors with a rare chance to see this modern master's work in person.
The Nasher is also currently hosting works of art from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in New York. Rauschenberg: Collecting & Connecting (open until January 11) pairs works that Robert Rauschenberg, one of the earliest postmodernist artists, held in his personal collection with works from the Nasher's permanent collection, including newly acquired works from Bruce Conner and Soviet works from around the end of the Cold War.
Featuring films, sculptures, installations, paintings, and more, the exhibit is designed to display Rauschenberg's idea that art is a stimulating and enlightening way to communicate. Visitors can easily draw connections between the different artists, provoking interesting insights into social and political developments of the time.
Explore Local Art with Third Friday Durham
Start the weekend with December's Third Friday (also known as December 19). This monthly event is a time when arts institutions throughout the community host special exhibits, openings, and other events. It's a chance to explore the creative works made by locals, as well as exhibits curated by local galleries – and a chance to buy unique gifts.
Dozens of organizations participate, and the full list of events will be posted at the Third Friday website the week before. But here are a few of the planned exhibits:
The Cameron Gallery at the Scrap Exchange is hosting Signed, Sealed, Delivered II, an international exhibit of mail art - that is, small-scale works mailed through the postal service.
, an international exhibit of mail art - that is, small-scale works mailed through the postal service. The Bull City Arts Collaborative will feature work for sale from their members – Horse & Buggy Press, the Groove Productions, and Trestles – as well as a functional pottery exhibit from Peter Dugan.
Pleaides will hold a reception for an exhibit titled Reflect, which showcases the work of Pleiades's artists – including two new members. Works are done in neon, paint, metal, and on reflective surfaces.
These two events are just the tip of Durham's arts scene. Check out the full listing of arts organizations at the visuals arts page. And you shouldn't forget to explore the many performing arts options either!The Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan, also known by its cryptonym GARDEN PLOT, was a general US Army and National Guard plan to respond to major domestic civil disturbances within the United States.[1] The plan was developed in response to the civil disorders of the 1960s and fell under the control of the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM). It provided Federal military and law enforcement assistance to local governments during times of major civil disturbances.
The Garden Plot plan—drafted after the Watts, Newark, and Detroit riots—captures the acrimonious times when the document was drawn up. The section outlining the Army's perception of the "situation" in America certainly insinuates existence of an establishment who fear the disenfranchised. The "Plot" warns against "racial unrest," as well as "anti-draft" and "anti-Vietnam" elements."[2]
The Pentagon activated Garden Plot to restore order during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.[3] Garden Plot was superseded by USNORTHCOM Concept Plan (CONPLAN) 2502 following |
number in the current year will be only 18,000 above the 2006-07 level:
And if we go by the 2007-08 level - and clearly the Liberal Party owns half of that year - the difference is only 9,159. Either way the growth of Australian government employees in each of the last three years of the ALP is below any seen in the last five years of the Howard government.
But this figure includes Defence, which has been ruled out of the 12,000 cut. So let's focus on strict public servant numbers - because the Liberal Party's "costings document" actually refers to reducing "the Public Service headcount". The Australia Public Service Commission counts public servants as those employed under the Public Service Act. Their latest numbers show that by December 2012 there were around 10,100 more working in the APS than in 2007:
Now that might be close to 12,000, but it is worth nothing that the average annual growth from 2008-2012 was 1.3 per cent, which is rather a bit lower than the 4.6 per cent average growth seen under the final seven years of the Howard government.
Also in the past 12-18 months there has been a pretty big drop in the hiring of public servants in Canberra. The Latest ABS figures show public sector job adverts in the ACT for the past 18 months are only marginally above where they were in 1996-97 when the Howard government slashed the APS by around 30,000 in three years. The gap from 2008 to 2009 is because of cut backs made by Kevin Rudd when he first came to power:
Similarly a look at the growth in employment of public administration and safety workers in the ACT shows that employment growth in that industry since November 2011 has been well below the average of 4.5 per cent seen in the last seven years of the Howard government, and even below the 3 per cent growth average seen since November 2007.
So it is a bit of a stretch to say the APS has become bloated under the ALP; almost as much of a stretch to say the 12,000 cuts in the APS will come from natural attrition.
The problem for the Government is that the ALP's final Economic Statement included an increase in the public service "efficiency dividend" from 1.25 per cent to 2.25 per cent. The Liberal Party then increased it to 2.5 per cent. The CPSU estimated together this would cut around 6,250 jobs. But that figure is not included in the Liberal Party's 12,000 job cut.
The Liberal Party's costings also included a "reduction of the former Department of Climate Change". The jobs losses from that also won't be included in the 12,000. Put all these together and you start getting pretty close to the ALP's claim that the LNP would cut 20,000 jobs from the public service (even if around 5,000 of them are due to the ALP).
But when job cuts like this start getting announced, natural attrition dries up. When employment is less secure, people hold on to the job they have - and this often leads to redundancies packages being offered. All of which makes the cuts to the public service less of a saving than expected (as Campbell Newman found out in Queensland).
As the Canberra Times' Markus Mannheim noted recently, one way for the Abbott Government to achieve the 12,000 job cuts is to transfer responsibilities to the states. Such a choice always sounds nice and easy, but losing responsibility means losing power, something federal governments are not huge fans of doing. And extra responsibility for the states means they will demand extra money, something federal governments are not huge fans of having to give.
And then there is the small matter of whether the cuts will actually improve efficiency. The Centre for Policy Development recently released a paper, Death by a Thousand Cuts, which argues that across the board cuts have little impact on productivity, and can even harm it through stifling innovation from the misguided belief that innovation is driven by financial constraints. What more often happens is services are cut back - such as the ABS stopping counting job vacancies.
Added to this is that such cuts are rather messy to calculate. Will any job losses from the decision to shift AusAid into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade be counted as part of the 12,000, or is it part of the efficiency dividend? Will the Government use the overall Australian Government number or the APSC Public Service Act number?
I suspect the Government will use whichever numbers most suit, but we await the release of the PBO's Post Election Report to finally find out (six weeks after the election) how they intend to do it.
Greg Jericho writes weekly for The Drum. His blog can be found here. View his full profile here.
Topics: public-sector, government-and-politics
First postedChildren are often told that ‘curiosity killed the cat’. That it’s inherently dangerous. But because of the way our brains are hardwired, exploring your curiosity is one of the best ways to enhance your creativity and develop new innovations.
I’ve always been a curious person, wanting to know as much as possible about how the world worked. In fact, while I was in school some of my teachers needed to put a limit on the number of questions I was allowed to ask (yes, I was one of those kids).
But it’s only been recently that scientists are beginning to understand the benefits of an inquisitive mind to its ability to generate valuable new ideas. But before I tell you exactly why, let me ask you some questions:
How much does a shadow weigh? How much money is love worth? Where do trees get their mass from? What is a candle flame made from? Why don’t animals have wheels? Is there a limit to the number of songs we can imagine?
These are just some of the questions raised by two Edutainers I’ve recently fallen in love with on Youtube: Derek Muller from Veritasium (playlist above) and Michael Stevens from Vsauce (playlist below).
If you watch their videos, one thing which will quickly strike you is that the topics being discussed have almost no practical application to your life. When most people have a question, what they are searching for is a specific solution or answer to a challenge they are facing (questions like: what mortgage rates can I get? How do I increase traffic to my website? How can I innovate like Apple?). Most of the videos here provide almost no practical solutions to any challenge you’re likely to face (unless you are trying to go faster than the speed of light). But rather than helping people find solutions, what they are in fact doing is appealing to the part of the brain which seeks to gain knowledge just for the joy of it.
What does curiosity have to do with creativity and innovation?
There are two predominant ways in which curiosity helps to breed creativity, so let’s look at each in turn:
Neuroscience: Curiosity brings more knowledge to build new idea connections
At a fundamental level, an idea is when your brain forms new connections between existing groups of memories and experiences. All ideas are therefore built up from previous knowledge and other ideas. The accepted process nowadays in neuroscience and psychology describing how ideas are generated is as follows:
Preparation: Your mind gathering all the information (knowledge, the challenge at hand, context, memories, previous ideas etc) which will ultimately build the idea Incubation: Your mind subconsciously trying out new connections between these pieces of information, until one combination could potentially lead to a solution to the challenge. Check out my previous interview for more detail on this stage. Illumination / Inspiration: The brain makes itself consciously aware of the idea (often known as the eureka moment when the idea comes out of nowhere) Verification: The brain doing a quick test on the idea to see if it will really solve the challenge
Someone with a curious mindset is more likely to seek out new knowledge, which not only provides more information for the preparation (stage 1), it also gives the brain the regular exercise in creating new connections which strengthens its ability to incubate (stage 2).
Just as importantly, they’re also more likely to be interested in gaining knowledge across a variety of domains, not just the one they specialise in. Gaining variety in knowledge is one of the most effective ways to strengthen your ability to generate new ideas, since it extends the ways in which the brain can form new connections. It’s also a way to cross-pollinate ideas with other different people, which often results in finding solutions to challenges in places you weren’t expecting.
Getting comfortable with ambiguity and questioning your own knowledge
One of the Veritasium videos which originally inspired me to write this article set people the following challenge: Look at the sequence of three numbers below:
Challenge: I am thinking of the rule that makes the above sequence work. Can you name another set of three numbers that also meet the rule in my head?
Go on, take a minute, and figure out as many as you can.
Ok, now here’s the question. Assuming all your answers were correct (because we’re all smart people here in the Improvides community), how do you know whether or not they fit the rule that I’m thinking of? Here’s the full video to see what I mean:Three men are under arrest and police are searching for a possible fourth suspect after both a Peel Regional Police officer and a civilian were shot in Brampton Friday night. According to police, an officer responded to a 911 call at an address on Stokes Rd., near Chinguacousy Rd. and Queen St., around 10:20 p.m. on Friday.
Paramedics arrive at Sunnybrook Hospital with a victim of a shooting that occurred on Stokes R. in Brampton late Friday night. A police officer was also shot in the incident. OCT/16/2015 - TORONTO, ON - Paramedics arrive at Sunnybrook Hospital with a victim of a shooting that occurred on Stokes Road in Brampton late Friday night. A police officer was also shot in the incident. Photo by John Hanley/FREELANCE ( John Hanley / Special to the Star )
Upon arrival, the officer made contact with a suspect “who immediately opened fire on police” and fired numerous bullets into the cruiser, police said. Peel police spokesman Const. Thomas Ruttan said the officer, who did not have an opportunity to return fire, was hit by a single shot. He was able to drive away from the scene but struck a stop sign while accelerating, ripping the back bumper off of his cruiser. He was taken to a local hospital with non life-threatening injuries.
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Police found a civilian on scene with gunshot wounds, who they say was shot before the officer arrived. The civilian was rushed to a trauma centre in critical condition. On Saturday morning, Ruttan said the officer is “in good shape” and that the civilian is in stable condition. A resident of Stokes Rd. who did not want to be named said she heard “so many (shots)... maybe about 20” ring out around 10:45 p.m. Friday. When she looked out her window, she saw a man limping down the street. All of Stokes Rd. was blocked off Saturday morning. As of Saturday afternoon, caution tape and two police cars remained at the end the street. “It looks like I don’t have to decorate for Halloween. All that (police) tape, it’s all over the street,” the resident said.
There was a heavy police presence in the neighbourhood following the shooting as police searched for the suspects with the aid of a York police helicopter. “I heard the chopper, I heard one big bang and then I saw 20 police cars,” said Jindi Sembi, another resident of the area who was home at the time of the shooting. He added that there are police on the street often to deal with drug crime.
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“There are a lot of fights here but I’ve never heard anybody get shot at,” he said. “This neighbourhood is not that great. That’s why a lot of people don’t let their kids go in certain areas,” said Chantal Pisani, who has lived on the street for six years. “There’s police in the street at least once a week. They do checkups. They just drive by,” she said. Two suspects were arrested overnight and a third on Saturday morning. Ruttan told media Saturday afternoon that one suspect was arrested after he was found hiding in a car near the scene and that a Peel bus was involved in the arrest of another. Police believe there may be a fourth suspect, who may be armed, based on eyewitness accounts, Ruttan said. Anyone with information is asked to contact police at (905) 453-2121, ext. 2233. Anonymous information may also be submitted to Peel Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477). With files from May WarrenI got to play Defiant Development’s Hand of Fate 2 during my time at PAX West, and found it one of my favourite experiences on the show floor. If you haven’t played the original Hand of Fate, which was a Games With Gold title earlier this year, I highly suggest picking it up, or at least watching a let’s play. The deck-building RPG is a bit of an uncommon concept, but it plays very well, despite a spike in difficulty. I’m happy to say that in the short amount of time I got to play it, the sequel looks even better, and I can’t wait to check it out once it fully releases (the game is currently in alpha).
The basic premise of the Hand of Fate series is a card game. At the start of the game cards are placed face-down on a table, and the player must navigate them to the end of a level, revealing traps, enemies, and shops along the way. Successfully completing certain actions rewards new and better cards that can be used later on to take down tougher enemies. If the player lands on an enemy card, they will be placed into a third-person battle with whatever items they have equipped, and must defend themselves with melee strikes, counters, and dodge rolls. The plot of the first game revolves around the unnamed player, who stumbles across the mysterious and sinister Dealer in a pub and sits down to play cards. After defeating the Jacks, Queens, and Kings of four Courts in combat, the player goes head-to-head with the Dealer himself, eventually defeating him. Hand of Fate 2 takes place a century after the first game, with the Dealer crawling back from the underworld to seek his revenge on the adventurer who defeated him. You are his protégé, and you will help him complete his task.
Through my brief gameplay, and more so the recently released trailer, Hand of Fate 2 feels like it has much more story than the original. The overworld and gameplay spaces are much more green and lush; a consequence of the Dealer’s defeat, perhaps? But the real story comes from the most recent trailer. We learn that in the hundred years since the first game, “the Empire” has taken control of the land, and purged the (visible) evil from its borders. You can clearly tell that a long time has passed, the world is full of infrastructure, and soldiers carry rifles while we only saw barrel-loaded muskets in the original. The full depth of the story itself remains to be seen, but the fact that the game actually has more of a premise than “play cards” is a good sign.
Gameplay has received a number of simple changes as well. You no longer choose levels from a cabinet, instead twenty-two challenges are laid out before you on an overworld. The challenges play out more-or-less like levels in the original, however instead of simply reaching the end of a level, you must acquire enough “fame” through gameplay to challenge that level’s boss. Once you have enough fame, the exit to your current section of the level turns into the boss room, allowing you to defeat them. Hand of Fate 2 also introduces mini-games, certain cards will provide a scenario that you must get through by playing one of three mini-games. Yatzee- and Wheel Of Fortune-style games have been shown so far, which a third appearing in the full game. The change I’m most interested in, however, is companions. Each companion is unique, they’ll fight alongside you with different combat styles, and give you bonus choices in certain scenarios dependent on whom you choose. I fought alongside Colbjorn, for example. A large, lumbering man, he hits hard and can knock enemies back with his attacks. Outside of combat, he provides an extra die roll in the Yatzee-style mini-game. As with all companions, he also gives the player choices that other companions don’t provide. During my playtime I came across a burning home with a child trapped inside. I asked him to go in an save the child, keeping myself out of harm’s way. Although he was successful, he could have failed had I drawn a failure card, injuring himself and causing me not to succeed in the encounter.
One of my least favourite new changes would have to be the revamped combat system. Is it bad? Not necessarily, I’ll need to reserve final judgement until I can play sitting down, and not at a noisy convention. And who knows, I might just need more practice with the changes. I thought I was stinking up the place because I hadn’t played the original Hand of Fate in a while, but after coming home and giving it a try I did about as well as I always do. So who knows. The combat is basically the same, although it has some changes that make it arguably better, even if I’m not used to it. You can swing your weapon, dodge, shield bash, and reflect projectiles. Although I didn’t get a chance to try either, Hand of Fate 2 allows you to forego the defence of a shield, and dual-wield or use a two-handed weapon. The combat has also been slowed down somewhat from the original, which is a breath of fresh air. The first Hand of Fate felt like a lot of rolling around, shield bashing enemies, and countering attacks until you got a chance to strike, rinse and repeat until all the bad guys are dead. The combat in Hand of Fate 2 is less button-mashy and more fluid, and less twitchy. The dodge, which is now a jump to the side rather than a roll, was enough to make me dislike it as a whole, but like I said I may just have to get used to it. Overall the combat is objectively better, even if I’m not a fan of it.
Aesthetically, Hand of Fate 2 is beautiful. The art is a lot more detailed than the simple style of the first game, which raised money through Kickstarter in early 2015. Battles are prettier, and items such as food are more colourful and less flat then the original. The heart, which shows your character’s health, was fairly detailed in the first game, looking like an actual heart with chambers and ventricles. However, the heart in Hand of Fate 2 no longer looks like just a drawing of a heart on a card, but a real, fleshy heart. The audio is great too. The composer from the first game returns, as does the outstanding voice actor of the Dealer, Anthony Skordi. Most games I’ll read a character’s subtitles and skip before they’ve actually finished talking, but in Hand of Fate I would put my controller down and listen to whatever the Dealer had to say, even if it was something inconsequential.
In the end, Hand of Fate 2 feels much more RPG-like than the original. Rather than just a card game, you play from an overworld, and must do certain tasks to gain fame and fight the boss. Fame also allows you to acquire “legendary weapons”, which as they sound, are more powerful than your garden-variety sword and have special abilities. Classes and companions make the game and your character feel deeper, you’re no longer a random warrior who decided to play cards with a mysterious cloaked man one night. Enemies are more robust, with special moves, strengths, and weaknesses that set them apart. Fame allows you much more control over your game, you won’t randomly stumble across the boss and miss doing something, because you know exactly where it is, or you might not even be able to challenge it. Bosses have a health bar, so it’s no longer a case of smack ’em until they die. You know how far you are from beating them, and can change your strategy accordingly. I believe enemies can have health bars as well, possibly through use of a specific item. I never encountered enemies with visible health during my playtime, but I noticed that the person ahead of me did. RPG-elements were present in the original Hand of Fate, but they feel more fleshed out and expanded upon in the sequel.
Before I finish, I’d like to remember that none of this is set in stone. Hand of Fate 2 is currently in the alpha stage, which means that anything could be added, removed, or altered. Some of the images in this article aren’t even up-to-date. During my playtime the Dealer wore a white cloak, rather than the red and blue one from the first game, and was more scarred than in the images I used. The table, too, looks different, and currently the game uses the more detailed heart/health bar during combat. That’s not to say not to be excited, of course, Hand of Fate 2 is setting itself up to be an excellent game. I’ve already seen some good aesthetic changes compared to earlier assets, and constructive feedback from the community may have Defiant adding more wanted changes. Hand of Fate 2 doesn’t have a concrete release date yet, but Defiant is shooting for the first quarter of next year, so fans won’t have to wait long to get their hands on the game. Hand of Fate 2 will be launching on PC and Xbox One.
Did you play the first Hand of Fate? Are you looking forward to the sequel?
Tell us in the comments below, or on our subreddit!Forty-nine percent of likely Iowa voters said they would reelect the veteran GOP senator, compared to 40 percent who said they would support Roxanne Conlin, a Democratic attorney running against the senator.
Eleven percent of Iowans said they were undecided in such a match-up. Grassley has won reelection with 66 percent of the vote or more in each of his bids since first being elected in 1980 with almost 54 percent of the vote.
The poll puts Grassley beneath the 50 percent threshold that is considered healthy for incumbents running for reelection, though Grassley's favorable rating is somewhat higher: 58 percent of Iowans say they have a favorable view of the five-term senator, while 37 percent have an unfavorable impression.
During his almost three decades in the Senate, Grassley has risen to become the top Republican on a number of committees, serving currently as ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, on which he spearheaded negotiations toward a bipartisan solution on healthcare.
But while some of Grassley's Senate GOP colleagues have faced an uprising in their Republican base back at home, 85 percent of Iowa Republicans say they'd support the incumbent senator over Conlin.
The Iowa Poll, conducted by Research 2000 from May 3-5, has a 4 percent margin of error.Near-empty protest sites across America means the anti-Trump Resistance’s so-called revolution will have to wait for another day.
ANTIFA FAIL
The millions of rabid Trump-haters that the George Soros-linked group Refuse Fascism hoped would show up Saturday in cities across America to drive the duly elected president and vice president of the United States from office must have had other plans. The so-called Resistance’s coordinated multi-city action failed despite oceans of favorable media coverage from the mainstream media and a full-page ad in the New York Times.
The plan was to occupy city centers and parks in around two dozen U.S. cities and not depart until President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were forced to flee the White House. The protests, Refuse Fascism boasted, would rage “day after day and night after night ─ not stopping ─ until our DEMAND is met.” So this means they left a little over three or seven years too early. And the turnout on the weekend for the launch of their revolution was so sparse, no one will care if a few stragglers have stayed behind to “occupy” various cities. The broader goal of Refuse Fascism is to overthrow the U.S. government through occupations and crippling strikes. Perry Hoberman, an associate research professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC and a member of Refuse Fascism’s national steering committee, had previously said Nov. 4 would be modeled on the Women’s March that took place the day after President Trump’s inauguration. But the “Antifa apocalypse,” as some had termed it, a series of disruptive protests planned in 20 cities, failed to materialize on Nov. 4. Apart from Los Angeles where there may have been 2,000 demonstrators, only in “leftist hotbeds like New York City and Philadelphia,” did protesters number in the hundreds, Breitbart News reports. “In many other locations targeted by Refuse Fascism, protesters could only muster a few dozen supporters.”
Refuse Fascism is part of the violent “Antifa” coalition “There were no reports of violent incidents, although a woman accused of deliberately splashing her drink on a Trump supporter was reportedly arrested at the Refuse Fascism march in New York City.” The event in San Francisco drew only 200 protesters. In Seattle maybe 50 protesters showed up. One Emerald City demonstrator waved a Soviet flag emblazoned with the usual Communist hammer and sickle logo. Now that the protests have fizzled out, the leftist whining and post-protest rationalizing have begun. Some left-wingers claim their own people were somehow victimized by adverse pre-event publicity. After the planned nationwide uprising collapsed, Newsweek hack Michael E. Hayden mocked patriotic Americans on Twitter, claiming “fake news” was pushed “to smear Antifa, the left[.]”
Hayden understates the threat posed by the determined activist Left at his peril. Refuse Fascism is part of the violent “Antifa” coalition of leftist groups that portray themselves as anti-fascist but embrace fascistic tactics like beating up political adversaries to intimidate them into silence. The activists and their tactics are examined in Antifa, the third leg of the documentary film series, America Under Siege, by Dangerous Documentaries and Cohesion Films. (I am one of two executive producers of the series. Dangerous Documentaries is a project of Capital Research Center.)
Refuse Fascism is a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party Refuse Fascism is a project of the Revolutionary Communist Party, according to KeyWiki, Trevor Loudon’s online encyclopedia of politics, that was formed earlier this year to remove President Trump from office. Among its founders are Cornel West and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. Refuse Fascism prefers Kim Jong-un over Donald Trump, siding with the gulag-filled Stalinist hermit state of North Korea that has threatened to incinerate the American homeland with nuclear weapons. The group has organized demonstrations against the Trump administration that have turned violent, including those around Inauguration Day. The group also spout pro-North Korean propaganda talking points. Leftist currency speculator George Soros funds the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ), which accepted donations on behalf of the ultra-violent Occupy Wall Street movement as a so-called fiscal sponsor. Fiscal sponsors take in donations on behalf of unincorporated or small groups so that donors can deduct the donations from their taxes, charging the group receiving the donation a processing fee. AfGJ now serves as a fiscal sponsor for Refuse Fascism. Communists never allow abject failure to get in the way of their plans. After the embarrassingly low turnout, Refuse Fascism is claiming victory in its propaganda.
Refuse Fascism isn’t finished with America yet The beginning momentum must now be built upon. Refuse Fascism has called for demonstrations next Saturday, November 11 focusing on both the threats of war and actual aggression being carried out, and then another demonstration on November 18, which again brings in the all-round threat posed by this regime to the many targeted groups and to humanity as a whole. Both these days must witness a growing momentum to this movement, unlocking the sentiment of literally tens of millions into a movement that can actually drive out this regime. But Refuse Fascism isn’t finished with America yet. The group’s website lists new actions planned for Nov. 11 and 18 in Austin, Texas, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Perhaps George Soros, who just injected $18 billion into his Open Society Foundations, will help the organizers out.
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Matthew Vadum, Bombthrowers, and matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter at a watchdog group in Washington, D.C.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.
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Why AJAX Isn't Enough
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AJAX calls have moved user interaction on the Web a huge step forward: We no longer need to reload the page in response to each user input. Using AJAX, we can call specific procedures on the server and update the page based on the returned values, giving our applications fast interactivity. What AJAX calls do not cover are updates from the server, which are needed for the modern real-time and collaborative web. This need for updates covers use cases ranging from a couple of users collaboratively editing a document to the notification of potentially millions of readers of a news website that a goal has been scored in a World Cup match. Another messaging pattern, in addition to the response request of AJAX, is needed — one that works at any scale. PubSub (as in “publish and subscribe”) is an established messaging pattern that achieves this.
AJAX calls have moved user interaction on the Web a huge step forward: We no longer need to reload the page in response to each user input. Using AJAX, we can call specific procedures on the server and update the page based on the returned values, giving our applications fast interactivity.
What AJAX calls do not cover are updates from the server, which are needed for the modern real-time and collaborative Web. This need for updates covers use cases ranging from a couple of users collaboratively editing a document to the notification of potentially millions of readers of a news website that a goal has been scored in a World Cup match. Another messaging pattern, in addition to the response request of AJAX, is needed — one that works at any scale. PubSub (as in “publish and subscribe”) is an established messaging pattern that achieves this.
Further Reading on SmashingMag:
In this article, we’ll look at precisely how PubSub solves the updating problem, and we’ll look at one particular solution (the WAMP protocol) that integrates both the calling of procedures on the server and PubSub into a single API.
Meet Smashing Book 6 — our brand new book focused on real challenges and real front-end solutions in the real world: from design systems and accessible single-page apps to CSS Custom Properties, CSS Grid, Service Workers, performance, AR/VR and responsive art direction. With Marcy Sutton, Yoav Weiss, Lyza D. Gardner, Laura Elizabeth and many others. Table of Contents →
What AJAX Solved
Before AJAX, interactivity on web pages was terribly clunky. Any user interaction required an updated version of the page to be generated on the server, sent to the browser and rendered there. In this model, the fundamental unit of interaction was the page. Whatever the browser sent to the server, no matter how small the required update, the result was always a full new page. This was wasteful of both wire traffic and server resources, and it was slow and painful for the user.
AJAX broke this up by granularizing things: You could now send data, receive just the result for the interaction triggered by it and then update the relevant parts of the page based on this response. With AJAX, we went from a single generalized call (“Give me a new page”) to multiple interaction-specific calls. With AJAX, we had remote procedure calls (RPC) on the server.
Consider the following simple example of a web app for voting made possible by this:
The user can vote for any one of the three ice cream flavors on offer.
Using AJAX, a clicked vote could lead to something like this:
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); xhr.open('get','send-vote-data.php'); xhr.onreadystatechange = function() { if(xhr.readyState === 4) { if(xhr.status === 200) { // Update vote count based on call result } else{ alert('Error: '+xhr.status); // An error occurred during the request } } }
We would then change just the vote count for the flavor voted for by the user, according to the return of the AJAX call. We’ve gone from rendering an entire page to updating a single DOM element.
This means a lot less for the server to do, and less traffic on the wire. We’re getting a vote count instead of a full page. Most importantly, it enables a speedy update of the interface, dramatically improving the user experience.
What Remains Unsolved
In a real-world use case, something like this sample app would have a lot of users voting, often in parallel. Vote counts would change according to users’ combined interactions. Because AJAX calls triggered by a user’s interaction would be the only connection to the server, the user would see the current voting numbers when first loading the app, but they would be unaware of back-end voting changes unless they refreshed the page.
This is because AJAX enables us to update pages only in response to user action on the page. It does not solve the problem of updates coming from the server. It does not offer a way to do what we really need here: to push information from the server to the browser. We need an additional messaging pattern that sends updates to the client without the user (or the client’s code) having to constantly request them.
In multi-user applications, distribution of updates is central to functionality. (Image: Tavendo) (View large version)
An established messaging pattern for handling updates to many clients is PubSub. Here, a client would declare an interest in a topic (“subscribe”) with a central broker. When the client sends an event for a topic to the broker (“publish”), the broker would distribute this event to all currently connected and subscribed clients.
One big advantage of the PubSub pattern is that publishers and subscribers are decoupled through the broker. A publisher does not need any knowledge of present subscribers to a topic, and subscribers similarly do not need any knowledge of publishers. This means that PubSub is easy to implement in both the publishers and subscribers and it scales well.
Numerous implementations of PubSub are available to choose from, depending on what back-end and front-end frameworks, libraries and languages you are using. For example, for Node.js or Ruby, you might use something like Faye. If you don’t want to run your own broker, web services such as Pusher will host the functionality for you.
Two Messaging Patterns, Two Technologies?
It isn’t difficult to find a PubSub technology that suits the needs of a particular app or website. But even for something as simple as our voting demo, we’ve seen that you need both RPC and PubSub — you need to send and request data as well as receive automatic updates. With any of the pure PubSub solutions, you have to use two different technologies for your application’s messaging: AJAX and PubSub.
This clearly has some disadvantages:
You need to set up two tech stacks, possibly including two servers, and keep these updated and running.
The app needs separate connections for the two messaging patterns, requiring more server resources. These two connections would also both require their own authentication and authorization, increasing implementation complexity and, with this, room for error.
On the server, you would need to integrate the two technology stacks into your single application, coordinating between the two.
For front-end developers, the concerns are similar: establishing and handling two connections and dealing with two separate APIs.
WAMP: RPC And PubSub
The Web Application Messaging Protocol (WAMP) solves the disadvantages above by integrating both RPC and PubSub into a single protocol. You have a single library, a single connection and a single API. It will handle all of your application’s messaging between the browser front end and the application back end.
WAMP is an open protocol, and it has an open-source JavaScript implementation (Autobahn|JS) that runs both in the browser and in Node.js, allowing you to do pure JavaScript-only applications. Open-source implementations exist for other languages, so you can use PHP, Java, Python or Erlang as well as JavaScript on the server (and the list of languages is expected to grow).
With WAMP, you can spread application functionality across multiple languages. (Image: Tavendo) (View large version)
These other languages are not limited to the back end — you can also use the WAMP libraries for native clients, enabling web and native clients to be mixed using the same protocol. The C++ library, for example, is well suited to running WAMP components on resource-limited embedded devices — think sensors in an Internet of Things application.
WAMP connections are established not from the browser to the back end, but with a WAMP router, which does the message distribution. It handles the role of broker for PubSub, so that your server just publishes to the router, and this handles distribution of the event to all subscribers. For RPCs, the front end issues the call for a remote procedure to the router, and this forwards it to a back end, which has registered the procedure. It then returns the result from the back end to the caller. This decouples front ends and back ends just like with PubSub. You can spread your functionality across several back-end instances without the front end needing to know of the existence of any of them.
There are additional protocol features on top of the basic routing, such as authentication of clients, authorization based on roles and publication topics, and restriction of publications to particular clients. WAMP routers offer different sets of this advanced functionality.
We will look at how to solve our voting app’s updating problem using WAMP, and we’ll see precisely how WAMP handles RPCs as well.
We will take a closer look at the messaging functionality required by the voting app and go over how to implement this in the browser and on the server. To keep things as |
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